Flesh Wounds (11 page)

‘Do you want to take the lead, boss?’ Laura asked.

‘No. I won’t be backseat driving either. I’m just going to watch.’

Beano held open the door and they filed in. Fallan glanced up briefly, taking in the personnel, then returned his focus to the Formica. Catherine noticed that she was the only one with whom he made even fleeting eye contact.

Beano and Laura took seats across the table from Fallan, while Catherine stood behind them, leaning against the wall with her arms folded.

In these confined quarters she was acutely conscious of his physical presence. She wondered how much damage he could inflict on the three of them, even with his hands cuffed, before back-up stormed in and wrestled him to the floor. It wasn’t merely his size, as he was roughly the same height as Beano, but something deeper that her instincts were responding to. He wore a loose dark green T-shirt, faded and sweat-stained. He was wiry in places, muscular in others, his skin tanned to a dirty, weathered-looking shade. He clearly belonged outdoors in a wide open space, and she realised that this was what was piquing her danger sensors. He was a creature out of his natural environment, the sense of power and threat he gave off inversely proportional to the size of the cage that was constraining him; a cage that she and two colleagues were currently sharing.

She studied his posture as Laura began the interview. Catherine liked to think herself a practised reader of suspects’ non-verbal communication, but in this respect Fallan was talking in riddles. There was a vigilance about him and yet a resignation too, like he knew he was in for the long haul but couldn’t drop his guard. He seemed sullenly resentful and yet anxious, determined but not defiant.

This was as much as anybody was going to learn, as body language was the only one in which he was prepared to communicate. Laura was firing out the questions, Beano occasionally chipping in with a follow-up, but Fallan’s lips remained completely still.

‘How long have you known Stevie Fullerton?’

Silence.

‘When did you last speak to him?’

Silence.

‘The way I heard it, Stevie tried to have you killed way back when. Left you for dead. Revenge is a powerful motive. One that, in my experience, juries don’t require a lot of imagination to get their heads around. Why did you decide to kill him after all these years? Could you just not quite let it go? Or did something change recently that made him a threat?’

Silence. Silence. Silence.

His expression remained impassive, never betraying any suggestion that they had laid a glove on him.

‘We found a handgun stashed in a specially welded niche underneath your vehicle.’

Nothing.

‘We’ve got three witnesses who saw the gunman drive into the car wash in a green Land Rover Defender, two of them quoting a licence plate registered to your name.’

Nothing.

‘Our witnesses also describe the vehicle as scraping a white-painted slab on the edge of a wall while driving away after the shooting. We observed a scrape and evidence of transferred white paint on the side of your vehicle at exactly the level of the slab.’

Nothing.

Fine, Catherine thought. Give us the Sitting Bull routine if you like, but there could only be one reason why none of this was coming as a surprise.

He glanced up every so often, occasionally making eye contact with one of them, but it was random, sporadic, never in direct response to a remark, far less indicating that any particular words had struck home.

The closest they came was when Laura showed him a drawing of the sign daubed on Fullerton’s head.

‘What does this symbol mean to you?’ she asked, turning it around and sliding it across the table towards him.

He stared at it for a moment and then looked up, but not at Laura. His eyes went instead to Catherine. She wasn’t sure what she saw in them: curiosity perhaps, and maybe nothing at all, just the projections of her imagination. Admittedly, she wasn’t at her most coldly analytical right then. Her heart was thumping and she could hear her own pulse thundering in her ears. If his gaze had been greater than fleeting he would have gleaned more from her in that moment than they had prised from him throughout the entire interview.

The only time Fallan registered a response was when Laura showed him the stills. Time-stamped frames of your own car approaching and leaving a murder scene would be a hand to test anybody’s poker face, but Fallan’s was as good as she’d seen. There was no dismay, no oh-shit realisation, but there
was
something. It wasn’t in his eyes, or even his expression, but in his body language. As he looked at those irrefutable images something resolved, something was implicitly understood.

‘So as you can see,’ Laura told him, ‘given what we’re holding, your silence isn’t doing you any favours. You’re covered from all sides. The sooner you surrender, the easier it will be on you.’

That was when Catherine belatedly deduced what was really going on here: why he was edgy but patient, impassive yet alert. It was like he was cornered, trapped behind enemy lines, but lying low, assessing his situation, getting the lie of the land. She realised that Fallan was the only one garnering any information right now, and that this interview was so far only benefiting him.

She suggested they all take a break. Laura didn’t need to be asked twice.

Beano went off to get everybody some tea. Fallan hadn’t responded to the offer, but Beano brought him one anyway, dropping a couple of sugar sachets and a swizzle stick next to the plastic cup.

Fallan reached for it as Catherine took a sip of her own, the fumes filling her nostrils as her eyes locked on to his fingers closing around the cup. There were marks on all of his knuckles, an ancient scarring that spoke silently and chillingly of brutality but that disturbed her in a manner far disproportionate even to this gruesomely suggestive spectacle.

It was the smell of the tea, the sense closest to memory working in combination with this sight to dredge up a recollection not merely of scent and vision, but of gut-wrenching feeling. She had experienced this recall two years previously, as he sat in front of her in a hotel dining room, having breakfast with the ingénue private investigator Jasmine Sharp. That had been when she realised who Fallan really was.

She felt her revulsion rising up, threatening to overwhelm her. She had to get out of the room.

‘Let’s leave our guest to drink his tea in peace,’ she said, ordering an adjournment to the hall. ‘His throat must be parched from all that talking.’

Catherine stepped out first, even the smell of whatever bogging gunk they used to mop the corridor a welcome breath after what the tea was making her feel inside the interview room.

‘So how are you liking the strong silent type now?’ she asked Laura. This was a dig at the fact that Laura developed a bit of a fascination with Fallan after they first met, having seen only the side he wanted her to: that of gallant protector of the young and vulnerable Ms Jasmine Sharp.

Laura wouldn’t speak openly about it, but Catherine knew she had suffered at the hands of an abusive partner, which was partly why she left Lothian & Borders and transferred to Strathclyde. She hadn’t been damaged enough to fall into the familiar trap of deluding herself that her own abuser would change, but Catherine suspected part of Laura desperately needed to believe in some noble masculine ideal, which Fallan had come to represent in her wounded mind.

Catherine surprised herself with the bitterness of her tone. She realised that she couldn’t stand the idea that Laura – that anyone – didn’t detest Fallan like she did. She wanted Laura to see what she saw when she looked at him and thus to share her hatred, but she couldn’t do that without exposing what lay buried at its foundations.

‘I don’t understand why he’s doing this,’ Laura confessed in frustration. ‘Denying nothing. Refuting nothing. What does it benefit him?’

‘He knows he’s fucked,’ said Beano. ‘Nothing he
can
say will help him, so he’s happy to let us do all the running.’

‘But we’re piling the bricks on top of him and it’s like he’s just lying down to be buried.’

If this was confusing Laura, it was making Catherine wary. She had sussed that Fallan wasn’t lying down to be buried. He was lying low, lying in wait, and she couldn’t help wondering what for.

‘Something about this feels off,’ Laura said. ‘Why does a guy like Fallan suddenly go rogue and reckless, after going to such efforts to put his past behind him?’

‘Maybe it was never behind him,’ Catherine suggested. ‘Maybe he just got better at covering it up.’

‘He was pretty good at covering it up back then,’ Laura replied. ‘He doesn’t have a sheet.’

Beano looked incredulous, then swapped it for mild surprise that Laura could have overlooked the explanation.

‘Ingrams or Fallan?’ he asked.

‘Neither,’ Catherine admitted. ‘But that says more about his resourcefulness than his morality. His father was the notorious Iain Fallan, a quite legendarily corrupt police officer. Glen Fallan grew up learning everything there is to know about how to stay off our radar.’

‘Which is exactly my point,’ Laura stressed. ‘Why would a guy so accomplished at avoiding detection drive up in his own car and shoot somebody in front of three witnesses?’

‘I couldn’t say,’ Catherine replied. ‘But here’s what I do know: you can be waiting twenty years for a guy like this to fuck up, so when he finally does you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. You’re letting your judgment be skewed by the fact that Fallan helped us out a couple of years back, maybe because he was going through some kind of midlife crisis and decided he needed a bit of redemption. It doesn’t work like that though, not for what this bastard’s done in his time. If he’s looking to pay his dues, there’s a publicly funded programme for it: it’s called the Scottish fucking Prison Service.’

Jasmine was putting some pasta on the boil when she heard her doorbell ring, jolting her into sudden self-consciousness as she sang along to Chvrches just a little too loud. She looked at the clock and noticed to her surprise that it was after nine, so this set her on guard a little. It hadn’t been the light and tentative, sorry-to-disturb-you ring of a neighbour come to ask a favour or hand over a misdelivered letter, but the firm, insistent press of somebody who expected an answer.

Part of her was pleased to see that it was so late. She had been to the range and lost track of the hours, which had largely been the purpose of the exercise. Work had started at just after six, a surveillance with an early start because they had to be outside the subject’s house in Pitlochry before the school run. She had clocked off at four and needed to occupy herself for the remainder of the day. A bout of her new favourite pastime had delivered.

She had first tried air-rifle shooting while investigating a missing person case, she and Fallan tracking down a former police marksman to his current job running the field sports centre attached to a big hotel in the Borders. Fallan and the instructor had remarked that she was a natural, and she assumed they were winding her up until she saw the paper targets they had retrieved. She had enjoyed the experience more than she could possibly have anticipated, and often found herself thinking back to it, remembering the feel of the weapon in her hands and the sensation of the kick against her shoulder. She was curious to know whether her results had merely been beginner’s luck, so when she overheard one of the Galt Linklater guys talking about a range of which he was a member out near East Kilbride, she had asked if she could come along as a guest.

Now she was a member herself, as well as the slightly self-conscious and enduringly dubious (as opposed to proud) owner of two different rifles. The gas gun was more accurate because there was no recoil and so she could maintain her stance between shots, but now and again she went back to the spring-powered rifle because it was the type she had first used, and because she enjoyed the rhythm and the ritual: break, prime, load and fire.

Shooting had become an invaluable source of peace, calm and relaxation. When she was on the range she could reduce her world to an impregnable little vortex. There was only the target, the crosshairs, her finger, her breathing, her pulse. Time became elastic in the moments before she squeezed the trigger; seconds stretched and minutes compressed. Sometimes she could reach for the next pellet and find the tin empty, discovering that two hours had just dissolved.

Jasmine put her front door on the chain, remembering, as she always did, Glen Fallan asking how likely it was that she’d be attacked by an angry Girl Guide: this being in his estimation the upper limit of the potential intruder this security measure was capable of stopping. She opened the door just a little and spied a female figure in trainers, three-quarter-length lycra running trousers and a T-shirt. Her flushed face was familiar but out of place, so it took Jasmine a moment to recognise her. The authoritative doorbell ring should have helped, she realised.

‘Hi, Jasmine. Sorry to trouble you so late. I’m Laura Geddes, remember? I work with Catherine McLeod. Do you mind if I come in?’

‘No, sure.’

Jasmine undid the chain and led Laura inside to the kitchen, doubly curious as to the nature of this visit given the hour and the dress code.

‘Can I get you something to drink?’

‘Just some tap water would be great.’

Good answer, Jasmine thought. Apart from milk for tea she was down to one can of Irn-Bru and in pressing need of a trip to the supermarket.

Laura gulped down half a pint and accepted a refill before taking a seat at the kitchen table. She had tiny beads of moisture on her forehead and arms, a fresh smell of the outdoors about her. It reminded Jasmine uncomfortably of how her mum used to smell when she came home on those occasions Jasmine was off school sick and had been indoors, laid up in bed all day.

Laura’s hair was different, which was another reason Jasmine had struggled to place her. It was shorter and she had dyed it, resulting in a blonde bob that was at odds with Jasmine’s residual mental image of her. It made her seem a little brighter, more open. Laura had often given Jasmine the impression she was hiding behind her hair when it fell across her face. She had seemed skittish rather than shy, and a little mirthless. For all that, she always seemed more approachable than her boss, but this wasn’t saying much.