When The Devil Drives (27 page)

‘I’m not bleeding lying. It’s a law firm. I’m ex-Met. I do jobs for them, but I’m not going to hospital for them.’

Fallan gave Rees’s fingers another slight twist, causing his spine to arch and his head to rise in pained response.

‘You may have taken that out of your own hands when you started threatening young women in railway stations.’

‘I wasn’t gonna lay a finger on her, on my mother’s life. I don’t do anything illegal. Close to the line sometimes, but I stay inside of it. It’s a law firm, for Christ’s sake. Sometimes I find out information for them, sometimes I find people. Somebody’s making a nuisance of themselves, I let them know it’s in their best interests to back off. Make them think it’s more trouble than it’s worth. I’m not allowed to do anything that’s against the law. Course, the subjects don’t know that, but that’s how it works.’

Jasmine had found Hardwicke Chambers on her phone. They were a major legal outfit based in Holborn. Their official website wasn’t giving much away, but further down the screen she could see search results referring to libel cases and super-injunctions.

‘Nothing illegal?’ she asked. ‘I realise Scots law is different, but I’m pretty sure petrol-bombing cars is against the law in London too.’

A note of confusion found its way on to Rees’s face amid the sweat, strain and ruddy-cheeked agony.

‘I don’t know anything about that. I seriously don’t. I got sent here today with the instructions to find Jasmine Sharp, give her that message and let her know I meant business.’

‘Who are you working for?’ she demanded.

‘I told you: Hardwicke Chambers.’

‘I mean who are they representing: who is the client?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t even know what the message refers to. That’s how it works.’

‘Two hundred and six bones,’ Fallan reminded him, digging a heel into his spine.

‘They never tell me,’ he spluttered desperately. ‘I don’t get told the client’s names. It protects them, it protects me.’

‘Not tonight it doesn’t,’ Fallan growled.

‘He’s telling the truth,’ Jasmine said, to which Fallan responded by relaxing his grip a little. ‘You can let him go. I think I know who the client is.’

‘Who?’

A person who had the connections and the resources so that the normal rules didn’t apply. And when he did get into trouble, there was always somebody who came along and made his problems go away.

Except this time.

‘You fair chose your moment,’ Jasmine told him.

Fallan was sitting at the square pine table in her little kitchen, a stillness about him that was far from reassuring. It was like the surface of the deepest river, concealing a dozen deadly undertows. Once you had slipped beneath its waters there would be no trace of you ever found again.

He was seated precisely where he had sat almost a year ago, back when she had wondered at the mirror-world she found herself in, in which she was dodging the police and inviting a confessed murderer into her home. This time it was worse than that: he wasn’t just a confessed murderer, he was the man who had confessed specifically to murdering her father. It was bloody
Star Wars
in reverse. She had come to believe that Fallan actually was her father, only to be shattered by the revelation that he was the man who had killed him.

He had denied her the chance to know her father, to ever meet him; and even if he was so bad, the chance to change him.

Fallan had taken from her something irreplaceable, committed something unforgiveable. This latter was immaterial as he had not
sought forgiveness for this deed, nor shown any remorse. And yet he was the man she had turned to in her time of need.

That had been the third awkward phone call of a few mornings ago: a phone call she’d sworn she’d never make, back outside the refuge when he told her it was all she had to do if she was ever in trouble.

‘Fuck you,’ she’d told him. ‘When I leave here, you’ll never hear from me again.’

But even in her tears and anger, even as she cursed him to his face and made her vow, she’d kept the number.

As she’d watched the flames consume the inside of her beloved Honda, her mum’s beloved Honda, she had asked herself: if they were responding with intimidation and violence, then what option did she have to return fire?

Only one.

‘I got here earlier,’ he replied. ‘I wanted to get the lie of the land, and it’s easier to watch for who’s watching someone else if you observe from a wider perimeter. I clocked the guy well before he started following you. He was parked along the street from here, chose a spot with good sightlines to your front close. People on surveillance take great care to make sure they’re not seen by their subject, but they can sometimes forget about everybody else.’

‘Were you in the bar tonight?’ Jasmine asked, wondering how she could have failed to recognise him.

‘No. But I knew he was. I’m as patient as I am practised at stalking my prey from a distance. So, you want to tell me who you’ve been upsetting this time?’

Jasmine began to recount the events that had transpired since the morning Mrs Petrie walked through her office door. As she did so, she was surprised and a little dismayed to discover just how much at ease she felt in Fallan’s company, and how quickly so. Despite how she urged herself to detest him, how she tried to think of what he’d taken from her, she felt strangely comforted by his presence. Truth was, he had taken away a man she’d never met, so there was no face, no memory to fuel outrage or bitterness. But most of all, the reason she found herself relaxed enough to open up and confide
in this man was that, sitting close to him, she felt safe. Despite all she knew him capable of, and very possibly because of it, she felt more secure than she had since, well, since the last time he’d sat in this kitchen.

She had to admit that at some fundamental, instinctive level she trusted him; her instinct vindicated by the hard evidence of experience. In fact, appalling as it was to consider, given what she and Fallan had been through, she couldn’t name anybody else alive whom she trusted more.

Thus it was only in talking to him that she felt able to bring forth something that had been lurking in her mind for days, growing all the larger the longer she tried to pretend it wasn’t there.

‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ she said. ‘Hamish Queen killed her back in 1981, but he was to the manor born and it got covered up. Now I’ve threatened to unearth the story all these years later and he’s released the hounds. First somebody starts following me, then they petrol-bomb my car, and now I’ve got some ex-cop working for a major law firm being sent to put the frighteners on me.’

‘Who is this Hardwicke Chambers mob, then?’ Fallan asked.

Jasmine spun her laptop around on the table so that the screen was facing him.

‘They appear to be a firm that specialises in making rich people’s problems disappear. Libel cases, Mary Bell orders, privacy injunctions, anonymity super-injunctions …’

‘And we can assume that’s only for the cases that get as far as legal recourse,’ Fallan said. ‘I wonder how many problems are quietly resolved as a result of warnings from the likes of Mr Rees. Is there a list of their clients anywhere?’

‘Not that I’ve found,’ Jasmine replied. ‘And I can’t imagine there would be, as that would somewhat defeat the purpose of a super-injunction.’

‘True enough,’ Fallan conceded. ‘Which Premier League footballer has been caught shagging the nanny: the press can’t tell you because of a super-injunction issued by Hardwicke Chambers, whose clients include …’

‘The information will be out there, though,’ Jasmine insisted.
‘Google Hamish Queen’s divorces and throw in Hardwicke Chambers as a cross-reference.’

Jasmine watched the reflected glow of the screen play across Fallan’s face, his eyes narrowed in concentration as his fingers tapped the keyboard.

‘It would be nice to have confirmation,’ she said, ‘but even without it, I’m one hundred per cent certain he’s their client.’

Fallan’s fingers stopped tapping and his head moved backwards just a centimetre.

‘Not any more,’ he said, turning the laptop around so that Jasmine could see the screen.

It was showing the BBC website. The story was linked from the top search result, less than thirty minutes old.

Hamish Queen was dead.

Tessa was somewhere else, in a place outside her physical form, a spectator upon what was happening to her. So often she’d heard the term ‘out-of-body experience’ and thought it so much mumbo-jumbo. She knew what it meant now: a defence mechanism, detaching you from your present circumstances because you couldn’t bear the view from within.

She had been drugged, she was sure. Something in her tea, most likely. Everything was slightly out of focus, but this effect wasn’t merely chemical.

She wasn’t seeing herself, not her face, but she could see a woman there and she knew the woman was her. She could see what was being done to the woman. She knew the woman’s name was Tessa Garrion, but something inside wouldn’t let her connect Tessa Garrion to herself. It wasn’t happening to someone else, it was happening to someone she once was, and someone she would have to be again, but not someone she was right now.

She had been so many women. Lysistrata, Katherina, Miranda, Clytemnestra. She knew how to step in and out of all of them. Now she had stepped out of Tessa, because it was the only place to go to.

It wasn’t safe here, outside herself. It wasn’t comfortable. There was not sanctuary and there was not reassurance. There was only nothingness, but this state of oblivion was a temptation. It called to her, offered to soothe, to take away the pain.

Perhaps absenting herself was a form of resistance. It would be her body, but it would be a mere vessel, devoid of what made her Tessa, like she could void it of what made it all the characters she played. It would not be her. She would not be here.

She felt anger at herself for being so foolish as to have trusted him.

She had been seduced. What he was doing to her body was rape, but her trust had been seduced, and she’d been an easy mark. He had manipulated her, manoeuvring her to exactly where he needed her in order that he could do this. There had been others involved too; were they complicit or oblivious, willingly playing their parts or used and manipulated like she had been?

He had talked about his art, talked about his vision and the place he saw for her in it. It made her feel so foolish when she found out what he really saw in her, and that it was all he really saw.

He had been stronger than her; quicker too. She knew further resistance would only bring further violence, and that terrified her, as she had never experienced violence quite like the brutality with which he had subjugated her.

He was inside her already: there was no preventing that now, no undoing it. Why do anything that might prolong the act? She could float further and further away, deeper into this inviting state of delirium, hide there until this was over. Hide this whole event away inside her mind forever.

Except she knew she couldn’t do that. She’d always know where it was kept. She’d always know this happened, always know she had been beaten into submission and treated as meat. She’d always know how the worst of men saw her, and she’d love every man a little less because of it.

She had to act, and to act she had to become herself again: had to admit what was happening.

She let it pour in, felt it flood her soul: the fear, the horror; the rage.

It proved futile, though. She was too well restrained.

She had become herself, she had acted and she had failed. Worse, he had seen the fight in her eyes.

He relished it.

He savoured it like nectar.

And that was when she felt his knife.

It was the lead item on the news the next morning, but the story was still sketchy and contained little more detail than the earliest reports Jasmine had read on the web. Hamish Queen had been shot yesterday evening in the grounds of Cragruthes Castle in Argyll, where he was attending an outdoor performance of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
as the guest of the castle’s owner, Sir Angus McCready.

At this stage, according to a statement, the police were ‘not ruling anything out and not ruling anything in’. Among the theories currently enduring this indeterminate status was the possibility that Queen’s death had been an accident. The Cragruthes estate was apparently renowned for its hunting, with corporate clients paying exorbitant prices for exclusive access, but with such prized game to be had, the lands were also known to attract poachers. It had therefore been suggested that Queen may have been hit by a stray shot from someone trying to bag a deer under cover of darkness.

At the less innocent end of the scale, the BBC reporter mentioned that the majority of the audience at this moonlit spectacle had been top-level business executives, there on a corporate-hospitality junket as guests of their bank. It was hinted that the bullet may have been intended for one of them, or perhaps more likely their hosts, given that not everybody shared the banking sector’s belief that the time for contrition was over.

All of these possibilities appeared to be given credence because the more obvious framing of events – that somebody had wanted Hamish Queen dead – was seemingly unthinkable.

‘A popular and flamboyant figure,’ the reporter described him, ‘much-loved in the world of show business and greatly admired
beyond it for his charity work, Hamish Queen was not a man known to have enemies.’

‘He wasn’t known to have been questioned over the disappearance of a young woman either,’ Jasmine said to Fallan. ‘And as for enemies, Finlay Weir didn’t look too chuffed when I told him that there was no evidence of Tessa Garrion living happily ever after. They’ve a shooting range at that school. He mentioned the older kids get to use live ammunition.’

She recalled the image of the man carrying rifles, then the presence of Hamish Queen sitting opposite her in the bar upstairs at the Edinburgh Playhouse. She couldn’t only see him, she could remember his smell, his sing-song accent, the almost crackling sense of self-assurance and dynamism that had emanated from him.