When The Devil Drives (22 page)

As she climbed out of the Civic she saw a man running towards her, his head covered by a hood, all but his eyes obscured by a black scarf. Something twinkled and shimmered in his right hand, a flickering pale blue light.

Jasmine ran for the building. She had enough of a start to know she’d get there first, but her keys were in a pouch in her bag and there were two locks to the main door. She tripped on the topmost of the front steps as she tried to delve and run at the same time, her eyes on the bag instead of on her footing. She stumbled for a pace and, unable to brake or recover her balance, slammed into a full-length double-glazed panel next to the door, throwing her arms up to cushion the impact. Her bag fell to the ground, scattering some its contents on the flagstones, but the office keys remained pinched between her thumb and fingers on her right hand. She steadied herself and stabbed the cylinder key into the lower of the locks. As she did so, she saw a flash of colour, a reflection in the glass of something arcing and spinning through the air. She heard a shuddering crash but kept her eyes on the locks and the keys, concentrating solely on getting that door open. She turned the second key, squeezed herself inside through the minimum width of an opening, then turned around and slammed the door shut again, the mortise lock clicking home to secure her inside.

Through the glass she saw that the small blue twinkling light had been transformed into a big, orange dancing glow.

The man hadn’t pursued her. He was standing a few yards behind her car, glass fragments sparkling on the concrete from where the driver’s side window had been shattered. He was unmoving, but from that distance, with his eyes beneath the hood, Jasmine couldn’t tell whether he was staring at her or at the Civic.

Inside the Honda the orange glow continued to dance, then there was a jolt, a pulse of greater ferocity, and she saw flames begin to lick around the interior. The hooded man took this as his cue to depart.
He began to run, charging flat out towards the street, ducking to the right at the junction and disappearing out of Jasmine’s sight. Then, a few moments later, she heard an engine gun and a vehicle sped past the car park entrance, headed for the main road.

It was a silver Volkswagen Passat.

Jasmine watched as the blaze inside the Civic intensified. She heard the side windows shatter and saw the smoke begin to vent from the openings, the flames burning all the fiercer for the sudden inrush of fresh oxygen.

She was losing another small piece of her mum. It wasn’t just a car, it was a little time capsule, a place where she could still smell her, still feel her. All those memories, the places they’d gone together, the journeys they’d shared, the conversations they’d had.

Other people went to gravesides to think about their lost loved ones. Not Jasmine. She’d only been back once since the funeral because there was nothing about that place that connected her with her living mother, only with the empty numbness and the hollow ache of a horrible morning in the drizzle. The headstone was meaningless. Her mum had many memorials that meant far more to Jasmine. The Civic had been the most immediate of them, the most direct, something that transcended life with her and life without her.

Now it was burning before Jasmine’s eyes.

She slumped down at the foot of the stairs and cried.

Jasmine wasn’t sure at which point she realised DI Gormley was insinuating that she may have torched her own car as an insurance fraud, but she was acutely aware of the precise moment when she understood that the situation was irretrievable.

It was nothing explicit, more a series of questions that seemed irritatingly tangential until she worked out what they were driving at.

It was rather an old model, was it not? Was it a second-hand purchase? Third-hand? A dealership or a private sale? How did it run? Did you have a lot of trouble with it lately?

She deduced that these were questions intended to knock you off your guard if you were pulling an insurance job, by subtly conveying that the polis knew you were at it. She didn’t know how an innocent
party was supposed to react according to the police’s playbook for these situations; whether they asked these questions every time or only when they had their suspicions.

She mentioned her connections with Galt Linklater and dropped a few names, hoping at least to put herself in a context other than fraudulent chancer or attention-seeking hysteric, and at most for that brightening of the features that came with the recognition of a common acquaintance.

‘I know who you are, Miss Sharp,’ Gormley said darkly.

That was the moment.

When a young uniformed PC first arrived on the scene he had begun taking details, then got a call on his radio and was evidently told to hang fire. He informed her that there was someone more senior on their way, someone who had heard about it over the radio and wanted to handle it personally. Jasmine had been pleased, thinking maybe this meant there was a connection to something they were already working on.

There was a connection all right, but not to anything new. Jasmine didn’t know what version he’d heard, or whether Gormley was one of those cops who would simply have preferred if she’d just let it lie. She hadn’t been an agent of mischief over the Ramsay case, really just the bearer of bad news, but he looked like he would have no problem shooting the messenger.

DI Gormley’s face was, Jasmine reflected, a development opportunity. He looked like he’d spent much of his life in a bad mood, the lines on his visage indicating a near-permanently sour expression.

Once he said he knew who she was, she grasped that there was no point in trying to convince him of the truth of her case, because whether he believed her or not was immaterial. He wasn’t going to help her.

‘This silver Passat, did you get a registration?’

‘No.’

‘So you couldn’t be sure if it was the same car as you think has been following you?’

‘No.’

‘And the man had his face covered, that’s right?’

‘Yes.’

He said they’d look into it, in a way that suggested it would be placed on the task list right behind investigating alien abductions and the hunt for Sawney Beane.

Then as a parting shot, almost as an afterthought, he asked:

‘Can you think of anybody you might have upset, Miss Sharp? Anyone who might wish you harm?’

It was part going through the procedural motions and part a reminder that though she might know a few ex-cops, she hadn’t made many friends on the force.

She imagined herself answering.

‘It could be Hamish Queen, the multi-millionaire West End producer; Murray Maxwell, the big TV star; Russell Darius, the horror-movie director; or maybe Julian Sanquhar, the former head of Arts Council Scotland.’ Why not chuck in Alex Salmond, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates and slap on a tin-foil headscarf for good measure. Gormley would lap it up.

‘No,’ she said, trying to hold back a new onset of tears as she watched him leave.

She felt all of a sudden very vulnerable and very much alone. Her car – her mum’s car – was gone, and the police weren’t going to do anything about it. She had nobody on her side. It put it into perspective that she was merely one girl confronting some powerful and, it would appear, dangerous people. As she said to Sanquhar, she was just asking some questions: that was all she had in her armoury. If they were responding with intimidation and violence, then what option did she have to return fire?

As Jasmine placed the handset back on its cradle she reflected on the unlikelihood of video-call technology ever becoming standard, rather than a novelty allowing people who actually liked each other to gawk into webcams. The inability to see each other’s faces was not something that the humble telephone was missing: it was in fact one of its greatest strengths.

It seemed to be the morning for awkward calls. So far she’d been involved in three, and it wasn’t yet eleven.

First Jasmine called Polly Seaton at Centre One, chasing up her request that Polly delve into the PAYE archives and dig out information on who else the Glass Shoe Company had paid a wage during its mayfly lifespan. Polly confirmed that Murray Maxwell, Russell Darius, Adam Nolan and Finlay Weir had been alongside Tessa Garrion on the payroll. Even more helpfully, she was also able to inform Jasmine that Finlay Weir was these days earning a salary from the Logie-Almond Academy Charitable Trust, thus saving her the bother of finding out where he taught. Logie-Almond Academy was a private school in rural Perthshire, and a quick browse of their website revealed that Finlay Weir was its headmaster.

The awkward part had come when Jasmine’s memory and conscience finally combined at the right time to prompt her to suggest she and Polly go out for a drink some time. There was a pause that endured just a little too long to represent Polly carrying out a quick check of her mental diary, followed by a response of ‘… eh, yeah, I suppose. Why not?’

Even before her unmistakably equivocal words, in those milliseconds of silence Jasmine realised first how stupid she’d been, then how pitiful she must look. Her unease at taking a loan of Polly, of cashing in on her goodwill despite their never being big pals,
combined with her reluctance to socialise with the girl had made Jasmine blind to the possibility that Polly might not much fancy socialising with her either. It was a gut-deadening moment as she suddenly realised how unconsciously arrogant she’d been in thinking she’d be doing Polly some kind of favour, but that particular discomfort was soon dispersed as she grasped that Polly’s more likely interpretation was that Jasmine was a sad act with no friends. It was no great consolation that it wasn’t entirely true. Jasmine did have friends, but where she and Polly undeniably differed was that when she clocked off Polly had a life.

Once more, with feeling: Jasmine screws up.

There was no way of getting this toothpaste back into the tube, so she had to endure several knuckle-biting minutes of arranging a time and venue for a date that neither of them particularly wanted to keep.

Jasmine had just about finished beating herself up about it when she got a call from Charlotte, who had recently returned from France and had just heard from her dad how his meeting with Jasmine went. It was safe to say she wasn’t best pleased. At a later date, once Charlotte had calmed down, Jasmine might be allowed to explain that she wasn’t working for Hamish Queen’s third (imminently ex) wife, and might even be able to outline how she hadn’t asked her father anything deceitful, sleazy or impertinent. But even if she managed both, she reckoned it was safe to assume that Fire Curtain wouldn’t be offering her a part any time between now and the heat-death of the universe.

Jasmine’s awkward call to Polly had at least yielded comparatively direct contact details for Finlay Weir, for what that was worth: a number she could call, ask to speak to the man and have some hope of being put through, however briefly.

She had left a message for Murray Maxwell at Scotia TV’s studios at Pacific Quay on the south bank of the Clyde, but she had no guarantees that the receptionist had forwarded it to the right department, far less that it would ever land on Murray Maxwell’s desk. And as for Russell Darius, that was only a couple of stages superior to a message in a bottle. So far the only route open to her was via
his representation at Agents United, where they probably had a special hopper for binning the thousands of inquiries they got, asking for messages to be passed on to their talent roster.

The content of her requests had been quite explicit: she identified herself as a private investigator wishing to ask questions about an actress by the name of Tessa Garrion who had worked with Mr Maxwell/Mr Darius/Mr Weir under the auspices of the short-lived Glass Shoe Company. She reasoned that, given Hamish Queen’s ring-around, there was no point in being coy or attempting to mislead them. If she was overt about what she was investigating and about what she already knew, it would be unambiguously overt on their part if they refused to speak to her. It was as much pressure as she could bring to bear for now. She’d keep the requests coming and, if she got nowhere, her next gambit would be to subtly imply that their refusal to respond wouldn’t look good when she went public. She didn’t actually have anything much to go public with at this stage, but they might not know that, and besides, it was early days.

When she called Logie-Almond Academy she was surprised to be told by the receptionist that she was being ‘put through to the headmaster’s office’, but that turned out not to mean the headmaster himself. Instead she spoke to ‘Mr Weir’s secretary’, to whom Jasmine dictated her carefully worded but explicit request. Her heart sank a little. She had been half hoping for a direct line, or at least to be told when Weir would be available to take a future call. Instead she had encountered another protective layer of bureaucracy for another subject to hide under, meaning there was no chance of her dialling the number one time and getting lucky with him simply picking it up.

She imagined him reading the message, like she had imagined Maxwell and Darius, if they ever got theirs: the stern expression and maybe even a little lurch somewhere in the stomach as Hamish Queen’s warning was confirmed to be valid. What then, for each of them? A quiet resolution to thwart all approaches. A vague and undramatic little lie to a secretary or PA to paint Jasmine as an undesirable. A block on calls, an instruction not to pass on any further messages. And perhaps for one of them something more: a sudden
hollow fear that a dark secret wasn’t buried quite so deeply as he’d believed.

Or they could just phone her back within the hour, as Finlay Weir did.

Jasmine travelled up to Perthshire in Jim’s old surveillance van, a clunky ancient diesel that still smelled of cigarettes and fish suppers nine months after Jim last drove it. It was Jim’s recommended practice only to drive a surveillance vehicle when you were actually on surveillance, as opposed to merely getting from A to B, in order to minimise the number of times you were seen getting in or out of it. Plus, if you drove it to meet somebody, you were pre-burned with regard to following them in future.