Flesh Wounds (50 page)

‘If something happened to Jasmine,’ he replied.

And in that broken whisper Catherine saw the true depth of Fallan’s despair and the cruel enormity of McGill’s vengeance.

He was going to kill her either way, and nothing Fallan could do would make a difference.

She heard a buzz but felt no vibration. It was Fallan’s phone.

He glanced at the screen then put it to his ear with a slow dread, the movement automated, soulless.

He managed a low whispered word then listened to the response.

Even in the half light Catherine saw something in him die, then his eyes closed.

Ever since she’d been led into this bleak little room Jasmine had known deep down that it would come to this: to this vileness that she would be forced to commit. She climbed to her feet, and forgave herself on the grounds that she had no choice.

The short walk around the table was a long march to Golgotha, but on that march Jasmine steeled herself, preparing mind and body to overcome a revulsion a thousand generations older than she was.

McGill had her phone in his hand and his erect penis sticking through the open flies of his trousers.

Fallan hadn’t told her why she was doing it, just made her repeat the action over and over: coaching her to refine it, to channel more aggression, to speed it up, to deliver more thrust, to do it again and again and again and again until she could to it without thinking, until it was hardwired to a neural pathway.

Only then did he tell her what she had been learning.

She placed her left hand on the back of Tony McGill’s head. With her right she made a fist, stiffening her outstretched thumb. For just a second, his head was a pumpkin. His eye-socket was a pre-cut hole.

Just a second was all it took.

‘The quickest way of killing a man with your bare hands is to punch your thumb through his eye and into his brain,’ Fallan had explained to her. ‘Then rotate it around a hundred and eighty degrees before pulling it out again, taking as much grey matter with it as you can. But as human beings we have such an instinctive disgust of doing such a thing that it would never occur to most of us, even in a life-or-death situation.’

McGill bucked for a moment then fell from the chair with a thump.

Jasmine stood back from the body, feeling a rush that threatened to ping her off the walls. She was thrilling with elation, a dizzying euphoria born simply of relief that this dreaded task was over. It lasted only a few seconds, which was why she was grateful that there was a major hit of adrenaline still surging beneath it, because there was more work yet to be done.

Jasmine turned the table on its side and sat on the uppermost of its legs until the join was weakened enough to break off. It came away with a loud screech of complaint and a resounding snap.

She wasn’t sure whether it had sounded suspicious enough downstairs, so she started shouting.

‘HEY! HEEEEEY! YOU NEED TO GET UP HERE! I THINK HE’S HAVING A HEART ATTACK!’

She positioned herself against the wall as she heard the heavy, hurried thumps of footsteps charging up the stairs and along the hall.

Teej barrelled through the door and all but slid on his knees in his eagerness to tend the motionless figure on the bare wooden floor. He turned his head in response to the movement behind him, but wasn’t fast enough to raise an arm. Jasmine was already swinging the table leg with both hands, smashing it into the base of his skull. He sprawled forward on to his father’s corpse, arms flapping for purchase, which left his head wide open for Jasmine to swing at it a second time.

She hit him until he wasn’t moving any more. Then she made her way across to the wall where her phone had come to rest after McGill dropped it.

Fallan dropped to a crouch as he carried on the conversation, his voice quiet, calm, moderated, assuring. A father’s voice.

Catherine had watched with a hollow dread as all life appeared to drain from his face, but when his eyes closed she recognised that what was really draining was the tension that had rendered him so utterly wired since he showed up at her door. It was hard to get any detail from one whispered side of a phone call, but she could tell the picture had just changed dramatically.

Fallan disconnected, saying he’d call back in a few minutes. He gestured to Catherine to follow him, and began leading her quietly away from the Spooky, back out towards the hidden pathways they had taken to get here.

‘Jasmine’s okay?’ she asked. ‘Did she escape?’

‘She escaped. Okay is relative.’

‘Where is she? What about McGill?’

‘Let’s just say there’s one less person in this world who knows your dark secret.’

‘McGill’s dead?’

‘Yes. Tony Junior too.’

‘How?’ Catherine asked. ‘I mean, who…?’

Fallan turned and gave her a look that said she of all people shouldn’t have to ask.

‘She killed them,’ Catherine said.

‘What can I say?’ he replied grimly. ‘She’s a chip off the old block.’

Fallan was striding with speed and determination. With the threat to Jasmine no longer hanging over him, Catherine suspected he had plans for the two men standing back there next to the Hilux and the Defender, and she didn’t fancy her chances of restraining him.

She was wrong, though. Fallan didn’t care about them. They had dropped off his agenda the second he got that phone call.

She looked at her watch. It was coming up for ten.

‘What happens if you don’t show up like they’re expecting?’

‘Those guys won’t be going anywhere until they get word from their boss. That’s not going to happen unless one of those dicks has got a ouija board app for his iPhone. I suggest you get an ARU down here, as well as every other polisman you can spare. They’ll find the vehicle and quite possibly the murder weapon used in the hit on Stevie.’

‘I’m all over it,’ she replied, reaching for her phone.

Fallan placed a hand on her arm, stopping her from making the call.

‘Get somebody to deputise for you. We need to get up to Perthshire, right now. Jasmine texted me where she is.’

Catherine was about to tell him she would despatch emergency services to the location right away and have someone drive him wherever he needed to be, until she realised that he wasn’t just looking for a lift.

‘There’s two bodies in a room somewhere between Crieff and Comrie,’ he said. ‘The girl who walked into that room isn’t the same one who walked out. I don’t want some other polis making this any harder for her than it already has to be. I want you in charge.’

Catherine nodded. She knew what it felt like to be both of those girls.

To her surprise it belatedly occurred to her that so did Fallan.

In accordance with Fallan’s request they were first on the scene, though Catherine had ensured that police and an ambulance would be only minutes behind them.

They found Jasmine sitting in McGill’s Jaguar XKR outside the cottage. She hadn’t wanted to stay inside the house, but nor had she felt ready to drive anywhere. The engine was running though, just in case. Jasmine wasn’t sure whether Tony junior was dead, so she’d have put pedal to metal if she needed to.

She came sprinting from the Jag the second she saw Fallan emerge from Catherine’s car. She buried herself in him, her face in his chest, eyes closed. Fallan put one of those huge scarred hands on top of her head and an arm around her shoulders. Neither of them spoke. Jasmine looked beaten and bloody, but as Catherine discovered when she went up the stairs, never was the phrase ‘you should see the other guy’ more apposite.

Tony Junior was still alive, as it turned out, though his future prospects weren’t looking good. And as Fallan later put it, his father’s name wasn’t going to offer much protection inside, especially once it got around that the infamous Tony McGill, the mighty Gallowhaugh Godfather, had been killed by a seven-stone lassie using one finger.

Laura phoned while the paramedics were strapping Teej and his wobbling bulk on to a stretcher for getting him down the stairs. She was pleased to report that she had each of the two gunmen from the Spooky Hoose safely in custody, and that their astonishment at having half a dozen carbines pointed at them had been a joy to behold. Laura also mentioned that one of them had been carrying a .22 Ruger, precisely the calibre of weapon used at the car wash.

So it turned out Drummond was right: there had indeed been a neat and final resolution to the Fullerton case. As a result Catherine did not, as he had mooted, feel the need to ‘consider her position’.

She couldn’t say the same for the Deputy Chief Constable.

Catherine gave Beano a shout when she saw Cal O’Shea coming out of the lift at the end of the corridor, an A4-sized brown envelope in one hand and a clear plastic tub in the other. They converged on her office soon after, along with Adrienne, Cal getting there last because there was a vending machine between his point of entry and his destination.

Cal looked a little tired. There was a detectable slump to his body language as he took a seat, resting the envelope on his lap and the tub of chopped melon and kiwi fruit on the edge of Catherine’s desk.

‘Cal, how are you?’ she asked. ‘I gather you’ve been carrying on like an actual polis.’

‘I have indeed,’ he replied. ‘I’ve spent a good hour this morning bitching about work and I’m putting in for some stress-related sick leave before I go out and get pissed.’

‘Don’t forget the overtime,’ Beano suggested.

‘No, quite. I’ve earned it,’ Cal said, tapping the envelope.

‘So what’s the script?’

‘I tracked down Colin Morrison. I always had his mobile number, obviously, but what I mean is I tracked down somebody whose call he would pick up when he saw the number. He’s in Germany: Rostock, to be precise. He’s got some friends there, at the university. He’s prepared to give evidence in exchange for immunity.’

‘I can’t guarantee anything until I talk to Dom Wilson.’

‘I know. So at this stage everything is off the record. Bottom line is, he was strong-armed by Bob Cairns to finesse the autopsy on Julie Muir.’

‘Strong-armed how?’ Catherine asked.

‘There was an incident with a rent boy. Cairns had the goods on him. Kid was seventeen, so with the age of consent being twenty-one at the time, he could have made it all very nasty. Career-endingly so.’

‘What did this finessing entail?’ Catherine asked.

‘Amendment and suppression. Principally the estimated time of death. Corroborated witness statements had Julie getting off the train at seven forty. Morrison’s report had her dying at around eight o’clock. He told me it was more likely to have been at least two hours later.’

‘Cairns wanted to conceal where she’d been in the intervening time.’

‘That’s right. He told Morrison that there was a gangland connection, and that if the truth got out they’d have a bloodbath on their hands. Morrison never bought that, though. Gangland wars were meat and drink to a cop like Cairns. He knew there was something rotten at the heart of it, so he secured himself a little insurance policy.’

‘The ring,’ Catherine said. ‘Mrs Muir said it never came back to them.’

‘Correct. Morrison found blood and skin on it, consistent with it having scratched Julie’s attacker during a struggle. He sealed it up and kept it safe. He wanted something he could use as leverage against Cairns in the future if he came back asking for him to amend another report. He was also aware of the Ewart factor. He followed the whole case very closely, as you would expect, though he was never quite sure what the real story was.’

‘And can you still get DNA off dried blood and skin after twenty-five years?’

‘If it’s been stored properly, yes, and Morrison knew how to do that.’

‘So why did he finally take it out and ask you to analyse it now?’

‘He was skint,’ Beano interjected. ‘His neighbour said his retirement fund took a major bath in the big crash.’

Cal nodded.

‘He decided to turn his insurance policy into his pension plan. He sought out Stevie Fullerton because he knew about the Nokturn connection and he thought Fullerton would be considerably more capable than he was when it came to running a blackmail operation. Another reason he launched this now was that Bob Cairns was safely behind bars. He thought that was where the threat would come from. He was wrong.’

‘So who was he blackmailing?’ Beano asked. ‘Gordon Ewart?’

‘That was Morrison’s plan, but Fullerton spread the net wider. Philippa Ewart is independently wealthy, and so given that she and Campbell Ewart are divorced, Fullerton thought he could dip into two separate pots.’

‘He also knew this would give him leverage over Drummond,’ Catherine said. ‘Whether for money or just clout we don’t know, but certainly when you’re a drug dealer it doesn’t hurt to have a means of putting pressure on the Deputy Chief Constable.’

‘What did Fullerton actually blackmail them with?’ asked Adrienne.

‘He told them he had evidence that would prove Gordon Ewart killed Julie Muir, and that there was an establishment cover-up to frame Teddy Sheehan. He didn’t tell them what the evidence was.’

‘The fact that they didn’t call his bluff speaks volumes,’ Adrienne said.

‘No kidding,’ agreed Catherine. ‘If they’d nothing to hide then all he could have threatened them with was what Ewart claimed, regarding his wild years. Instead I got two dead people as testimony to the threat being taken very seriously indeed. But it still begs the question why Tony McGill would be involved.’

Cal held up the brown envelope.

‘I suspect the answer lies within,’ he said. ‘This is the DNA analysis Morrison requested. As yet officially unidentified, obviously.’

‘At least it shouldn’t be hard to get a comparison sample from Tony McGill,’ Catherine mused. ‘Just scrape the underside of Jasmine Sharp’s thumbnail. Getting a swab from Gordon Ewart might present more of a problem, though.’

Cal skewered a chunk of melon with a plastic fork and held it in front of his face.

‘We’ve already got Gordon Ewart’s DNA,’ he said. ‘He got done for drink driving two years ago, so he’s on the database. The sample from the ring isn’t his. And though the late Mr McGill
isn’t
on the database, I can tell you right now it’s not his either.’