Kill Me Twice: Rosie Gilmour 7 (17 page)

The
door back opened and Mitch was yanked out by the hair, the gorilla punching his face three or four times until he could feel himself passing out. Then he came to as they stood him up beside the car, punching him in the ribs.

‘Don’t make this hard for yourself, son. All you have to do is tell us where to find him, and we’ll stick a few quid in your pocket and that’s it all forgotten about. How hard can that be? It’s not as if you junkies are all best mates. Who gives a fuck about each other? Come on!’

Mitch felt his eye swell shut and he could barely make out the blond man’s face swimming in front of him. He tasted blood and suddenly sick rose up, and he vomited.

‘Fuck me!’ the blond man jumped back quickly. ‘Mind the fucking shoes, you cunt.’

‘Please, big man. Let me go.’

‘Where’s fucking Dan Mason?’

‘I don’t know. Honest. I don’t know.’

‘Tell us or you’re going to die. Where is he?’

Mitch felt another blow to the side of his cheek and something cracked, then a knee hit him between his legs and he buckled. ‘I . . . don’t know.’

‘You fucking liar. You’re a lying junkie bastard. Where is he?’

As Mitch slumped to the ground he was barely aware of them kicking him any longer. After the first couple on his stomach and the final boot on his chin, he thought his
head would come off. He opened one of his eyes briefly and could see the sky turning from grey to black.

*

Dan sat flicking through the TV channels, checking his phone constantly. Nothing from Mitch. It crossed his mind that his pal had decided it was getting too dodgy to be around him and maybe done a runner. He hoped not. He liked Mitch a lot, and he was all he had right now. But even though Dan was spaced out for much of the time, he knew how these things worked. Junkies came and went with each other, depending on who was the best chance to work with and score some smack. But Mitch had seemed different, like he really wanted to help him. He looked at his phone again. Nothing. He checked the time. It was gone nine and dark outside. He was shit-scared. Mitch wasn’t coming back. Dan was on his own. He punched in Rosie’s number.

Chapter Seventeen

Rosie’s
phone was blinking with two missed calls and a message from Dan by the time she got off the plane in Glasgow and into Matt’s car. There was also a text message from her Strathclyde Police detective contact, Don, asking to call. She’d ring him later.

‘Dan. It’s me,’ she said. ‘You okay?’

There were a couple of beats of silence, then his voice, weak. ‘I’m scared, Rosie. I don’t know where Mitch is. He went out this afternoon and hasn’t come back. I’ve heard nothing from him. I can’t believe he would run out on me. Something’s happened, I know it.’

‘He went out? I thought the two of you were supposed to be staying in the flat, Dan. What happened?’

‘He wanted to get some more kit.’

Rosie bit her tongue. Junkies didn’t work inside the same parameters as everyone else. She’d assumed they had enough gear to keep them going, but she didn’t even want
to enter into the discussion. She took a breath. ‘Okay. Don’t worry, Dan. We’ll see what we can do. I’ll be there shortly, just sit tight.’

‘I’ve no kit left. I’m rattling.’

Shit. This was not good. Rose had worked with heroin addicts often enough to know that withdrawals were not pretty and not something to do without professional help. The middle of an investigation was not the time to go cold turkey.

‘Try not to worry. I’ll see you shortly.’

Her next call was to her detective friend, Don. ‘Hey, Don. How’re you, pal? I’ve a message here to call you.’

‘Rosie! Long time no see? You’re obviously up to something.’

‘You really don’t want to know right now, Don. That I can promise you. So, what’s new?’

Silence. Rosie waited.

‘Can you talk?’

‘Sure.’

‘Listen. We’ve got a situation here where your phone number has come up on a victim’s mobile.’

Rosie’s stomach dropped. She said nothing. It could be one of various drug addicts, small-time crooks or random punters she’d dealt with over the years, but right at this moment she knew it could be only one person: Mitch.

‘A victim?’ Rosie asked. ‘Of what?’

‘Really brutal assault. Somebody beat the shit out of this
guy and it looks like they left him for dead. Down under the arches by the Clyde.’ He paused. ‘It seems you were one of the last people he talked to on his mobile. His name is Mitch Gilland.’

She heard the disappointment in Don’s voice that she hadn’t come clean with him straightaway. She cleared her throat. ‘Don. I’m working on something really big, and I know you understand that I can’t talk about what’s going on. But you know I’ll always mark your card or pass anything on to you when I can.’

‘You don’t have to apologize, Rosie,’ Don said. ‘I know the score. But the scrapes you get yourself into, I’m more worried about you than this junkie who’s fighting for his life right now up at the Royal.’

‘Is he really that bad?’

‘Pretty much. Internal bleeding. And these guys . . . I mean, their system is so low anyway, from all the drugs, that they have nothing to fight back with.’

Rosie swallowed the sudden lump in her throat. Poor Mitch. This was obviously someone looking for Dan. She felt awful. But the hard-bitten journalist in her wondered if he’d told his attackers anything. Sometimes she hated herself for that side of her.

‘Don, I can meet you a bit later at O’Brien’s, or for a coffee somewhere and tell you some things about this. You’re right. Mitch is someone who was helping me. He tracked somebody down for me who I needed to talk to and right now we’re
protecting him. I thought we had the two of them protected. But Mitch went out of the place they were staying.’

‘Yeah. Well, you can’t expect anything but chaos around junkies. And, right now, he’s part of a police investigation. It’s not my case. I overheard the boys talking in the office, and someone said it was your phone number. So you’ll be getting a call from the cops, no doubt. This is your friendly early-warning system kicking in.’

Rosie was relieved that he was so calm about it. ‘Thanks, pal, but I won’t be able to tell them anything. Honestly. Not a single thing.’ She looked at her watch as Matt pulled up outside the flat. ‘Look, I have to go but why don’t we meet later? I’ll call you.’

‘Sure.’ Don hung up.

Rosie’s mobile rang. It was McGuire.

‘Mick,’ Rosie said, ‘I’m back, but on my way up to see Dan.’

‘What’s going on, Gilmour? I’m choking to get my hands on this letter.’

‘I know. But there’s been a problem.’

‘What?’

‘It’s Mitch, Dan’s mate. He’s been beaten up really bad. He’s in the Royal.’

‘Christ almighty! What about Dan? I thought you had this pair under house arrest.’

‘Dan’s all right. He’s in the flat. But Mitch must have gone out for some reason.’

‘Aye.
For fucking drugs, most likely. Look at the bastard now. Honest to Christ. Bloody junkies. Rosie, go and talk to Dan and settle him down, then get right down here. I need to see the letter. Is it good? How was the woman? She’s not a loony, is she?’

‘No. Far from it. I’ll tell you when I see you. I have to go.’ She hung up.

Rosie let out a long sigh as Matt switched off the engine. ‘Don’t tell me I’m going to miss my dinner again,’ he said sarcastically.

Rosie shook her head and smiled, but her nerves were becoming more frayed by the minute.

*

Rosie had read the letter from Millie so many times on the plane from London that she had memorized every line. With each read, she became more intrigued. On any level this was the most incredible property for a newspaper to have in their hands, and she couldn’t wait to compare the signatures with the copy from Millie’s signed credit-card receipt from the hotel. The confession that a former cabinet minister’s wife was depressed enough to travel to Madrid to commit suicide was explosive enough, but the claim that she had witnessed a murder was mind-blowing. But it was the allegation she made about the child-sex-abuse ring that appealed to Rosie more than anything. Could it really be possible that police and the political hierarchy had been aware of the abuse and covered it up? It
seemed unbelievable, and would be desperately hard to prove. She took the stairs two at a time from the
Post
foyer to the editorial floor and didn’t stop to nod to anyone as she headed to McGuire’s office.

‘He’s waiting for you,’ Marion said. ‘He’s been like a cat on a hot tin roof all day.’

‘Why you working so late, Marion?’

‘So much to do, I decided to put in a couple of extra hours.’ She went back to her computer screen.

Rosie knocked on the editor’s half-open door and walked in.

‘Gilmour! Thank Christ!’ He stood up behind his desk. ‘First, how’s Danny Boy doing? Is he still with us? He’s not going to renege, is he?’

‘No. He’s okay. He’s sorted.’

McGuire gave her a stern look. ‘I sincerely hope you’ve not been out scoring heroin for him, Rosie. I mean, seriously.’

Rosie put her hands up in surprise.

‘Would I ever, Mick.’

She managed to keep her face straight, but when she’d seen the nick Dan was in when she’d got to the flat, she’d known she had to do something. He was seriously rattling, crying and sweating and shaking like a leaf. He needed something badly. He pleaded with her to take him to a house where he could get sorted, but she had to sit him down and explain what had happened to Mitch. He was even worse after that, sobbing, bordering on hysteria.
She knew it wasn’t safe to go to any of his usual haunts for smack, and she sure as hell didn’t want to go anywhere else.

There was only one thing for it. She’d phoned her GP friend, Simon. At first she hadn’t planned to tell McGuire but, given the way he was looking at her, and that she didn’t know how any of this would pan out, she decided it was better to come clean. ‘Listen, Mick—’

‘Christ! When you start a sentence, “Listen, Mick,” it’s usually trouble, Gilmour.’ He motioned her to sit down, then came out from behind his desk and sat on the leather seat opposite her. ‘Now, you listen to me, Rosie. I need you to be honest with me. No fucking about. Too many things have happened in the past that you kept me in the dark about. I’m not saying I want to know every cough, spit and fart of how you go about your job. In fact, some of it I’d rather not know. But right now we have a junkie unravelling in a flat I’m paying for, and another one about to pop his clogs in the hospital.
And
the wife of a fucking Tory ex-cabinet minister claiming she witnessed a murder. Honest to Christ! I feel as if I’m going to wake up sweating in a minute.’

Rosie put her head back and looked at the ceiling. ‘If I’m honest, I do too.’ She pushed out an exhausted sigh. ‘So. Here’s what I had to do. I got my GP pal to take Dan on as a patient. It wasn’t the usual protocol, but he did it for me as a favour. He’s already seen him anyway and recommended a
methadone programme at the time. So he’s started him on methadone.’

‘Christ almighty. I’m not even going to ask if the doc’s stepped over the line.’

‘He hasn’t. He’s just bent the rules a bit. He gave me a prescription for him. I took Dan to the chemist and got him sorted with that. He’s got some to take at the flat too.’

‘So he won’t need heroin?’

‘Well. He shouldn’t. That’s the whole point of it. It will take away the tremors and the horrors and give him much the same feeling as a heroin hit. But it’s even more addictive than heroin, and definitely not the answer in the long run.’

‘I don’t care what happens in the long run, or how he sorts himself out. Pardon my being a callous bastard of an editor, but I need this kid functioning on some kind of level, at least till we get this in the paper.’

‘You’re all heart, Mick. Don’t worry. He’ll be fine. He’s making sense and he won’t be as anxious. But I need to keep an eye on him.’

McGuire looked at her, indignant. ‘Well, you’re not moving in with him. That’s for sure.’

‘No, of course not. But I need to be around a lot, and if I’m not, then we need to get someone to babysit him a bit. I’m thinking Declan. He’s a good kid.’

‘Yeah. Okay. Whatever. Just sort it. Now where’s the letter?’

Rosie
took it out of her bag and handed it to him. He sat back and read it quickly, letting out a low whistle, his eyebrows dancing, knitting in concentration and disbelief. ‘Fucking hell! This is unbelievable!’

He stood up and went across to his desk, brought over the credit-card photocopy with the signature and placed the letter on the coffee table between him and Rosie. They both leaned over it, but could see straightaway that it was the same.

‘It’s exactly the same signature, Mick. Totally.’

McGuire folded his arms and sat back. ‘It is. It has to be the same person. I’ve spoken to Pettigrew down at Westminster but he’s not got a whole lot on her. She is a bit of a flaky type, as I told you, but these allegations are right off the scale. What’s this stuff about a child-abuse ring? Are we really supposed to believe that?’

Rosie gave him a sharp look. ‘We don’t have to go too far back, Mick, to see what happened here in Glasgow. And a certain High Court judge, who was allowed to slip away quietly because this newspaper had an attack of the shits when it came to telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’

McGuire looked guilty. ‘You know, Rosie. I hated myself for that, but the decision would have been taken out of my hands. I should have fucking resigned.’

‘No, you shouldn’t, Mick. It was one of those things. You win some, you lose some. You said as much to me at the
time when I was cracking up over it. I drew a line under it, but the last thing I’d have imagined was that it could possibly be more widespread. Do you think it’s possible?’

‘Who knows? But we really need to take it seriously. If this woman isn’t a complete head case, we have to pull out all sorts of stops to get to the heart of this.’ He paused. ‘What’s the nurse like? What’s she saying?’

‘She’s a good type. She knows her stuff, and has been a nurse for all of her professional life. She’s in her fifties. I’d say she’s a pretty good judge of character, and she completely believes Millie Chambers is telling the truth. More than that, she wants to help her.’