Where the Bodies are Buried (20 page)

You always back up your colleagues. It’s the golden rule.

She was coached what to say, and assured she’d be in and out of there in no time. It was a formality, they told her.

They were right about none of this. The only part that took no time was for the defence solicitor to recognise not merely
that she was
the weak link, but precisely the tactical misjudgement the police had made, a recognition assisted by having been informed
by his clients that none of them had seen her there that night.

‘I was inside the van,’ she explained, as instructed, this issue having been to some extent anticipated. ‘In the front cab.
They were making so much noise that I couldn’t tell how many there were, and I was scared. PC Howard told me to stay in the
van, because he feared they might get violent.’

In support of the resisting-arrest charge, she told the court: ‘PC Howard and PC McLean got the defendants into the back of
the van, but not without a struggle. They were kicking at the doors, thrashing around, trying to prevent themselves being
forced inside. I’ve not been on the job very long and I found it terrifying.’

She got a subtle wee nod from Sergeant Morrison, who had come along for moral support. Good girl. She had done well. She was
pleased. But then the defence lawyer got up.

‘What kind of noise were they making?’ he asked. ‘Could you be a little more specific?’

It sounded like a curious little query, but she understood later that it was in fact his declaration that he knew she hadn’t
been there. The key word was ‘specific’: he knew she’d been put up to this, and specifics were where it would fall apart.

‘Shouting and singing,’ she replied, this much having been discussed between her and her colleagues. ‘All at the tops of their
voices, which can happen when you’re drunk. You forget how distressing that can be for everybody else – especially on a quiet
night in a residential area.’

‘But what were they shouting? Or singing? Can you give me some examples?’

‘I-I can’t really remember. I just remember how loud it seemed on a quiet night.’

‘Just one thing would suffice. Maybe a name they were shouting, a phrase that stuck in your mind? A sentiment, maybe?’

She caught herself looking at Howard and McLean, then at the Sarge in the public seats.

‘I can’t remember,’ she said pathetically. She wanted to pull her coat over her head and disappear.

‘Obviously it was such a traumatic experience that your subconscious has blanked it out rather than relive the nightmare,’
the lawyer said scornfully. ‘An effect that presumably did not extend to all of your
sensory recollections. Indeed your visual acuity seems to have been positively enhanced by your state of terror. You explained
how you were cowering in fear in the front cab, keeping yourself out of sight of these noisy and potentially violent young
men. This being so, could you explain how you managed to witness their titanic struggle to remain outside the van?’

It was a disaster. The case wasn’t just thrown out: the sheriff tore strips off them for wasting the court’s time and castigated
Catherine in particular for ‘having not a shred of credibility’. She felt her cheeks burning as he spoke, and it was only
by some miracle that she made it out of the courtroom before breaking down in tears of shame and humiliation.

Her colleagues’ responses were more measured, to say the least. Win some, lose some seemed to be the attitude, which told
her that this kind of thing was standard procedure, culturally ingrained. They went to the pub later and most of the station
turned up. Everybody bought her drinks, patted her on the back. Even officers who thought Howard and McLean were wankers.
They thought she’d done well. She’d stood up, proven her loyalty. That was more important than a bollocks wee breach-and-resist
case. Nobody regarded it as cause for embarrassment, just a hazard of the job.

They were acting like she had passed a final test and trying to make her feel accepted, but Catherine didn’t feel as though
what she was being accepted into was somewhere she wanted to belong. She felt used and she felt compromised. It wasn’t about
solidarity, it was about coercion, about being forced to submit your will. And once your integrity had been proven malleable,
you were in a weak position to ever rock the boat.

On the plus side, it did provide something of an immunising dose. She vowed that nobody was going to make her lie for them
again, no matter the consequences for her status among her peers. Maybe it was indeed a test, a rite of passage, and maybe
it was the vibes she thereafter gave off, but either way, as it turned out, nobody ever asked her to.

She wouldn’t have anybody lie for her either, which sounded an easy principle to enforce by mere omission, but was far more
complicated in practice. It was generally accepted that gilding the lily was the right thing to do if it meant a guilty man
didn’t wriggle free with the assistance of a smart lawyer. Catherine wouldn’t have it on her cases,
though. It was one thing losing a trumped-up charge because of lying in court, but losing a genuine, solid conviction because
some over-enthusiastic fib had undermined the whole case’s integrity was a possibility she simply could not tolerate.

There was an argument for playing the percentages, but Catherine was never a gambler. Besides, she didn’t want to be justifying
her conduct to herself on the grounds that she was better than the scum she put away. She wanted to know she was better than
the scum she put away because of the way she conducted herself.

Catherine made her way across the lobby to check the screens and confirm which court was hearing Crown versus Agnew that morning.
This was not one she expected to be on tenterhooks about, nor remotely fearful of fleeting caprice.

Sammy Agnew had been rescued from the chill waters of a canal back in April, having been discovered clinging on to a drainage
outlet by two early-morning joggers. He was suffering symptoms of hypothermia but was most likely unable to distinguish between
those and the symptoms of having been drinking for upwards of seventy-two hours prior to his plunge.

Catherine never ceased to marvel at how many murder cases involved what was described in court as ‘a three-day drinking binge’.
These days she could barely manage three hours. A couple of glasses of wine once the weans were in bed and she was pleasantly
on her way to unconsciousness.

On a recent visit to the pub, she had overheard one young reveller prevent his mate from ordering a burger and chips from
the bar on the grounds that ‘eatin’s cheatin’.’ Even twenty years younger, she could not have related to that mentality. For
guys like Agnew, however, ‘abuse’ seemed too ordinary a word to describe what they did with alcohol. It probably took less
time and commitment to condition the body for Olympic competition than to be able to endure that volume and longevity of drink.
Sammy wouldn’t be getting a medal, though.

Around about the time he was warming up in hospital, his nominal best friend and fellow bevvy-athlete Peter Leckie was being
fished out of the same canal. Peter hadn’t been so lucky, his chances of escaping the treacherous depths and the low temperatures
greatly reduced by having been dead for several hours before he ever hit the water.

Sammy’s defence was that he and Peter had been out for a late-night stroll when they were set upon by some local neds. They
had
chucked Sammy into the canal, but Peter had initially fought them off, his bravery earning him a severe kicking when the neds
eventually got the upper hand. This accounted for the multiple blunt-trauma wounds to Peter’s head, but there were a few pernickety
details outstanding. Such as Sammy being caught on CCTV taking a trolley from the nearby Morrisons supermarket, and being
seen by several witnesses later the same night pushing a lifeless body towards the canal, making ‘wheee’ noises in order to
give the impression that he and his companion were engaged in some harmless fun.

The bloodstains all over Sammy’s house were a puzzler too; presumably he had been intending to clean up when he got back.
His ingenious plan had evidently been to dump the body in the canal and make it look like an accident: two pals whose drunken
high jinks had ended in tragedy. The saddest thing was that at the time, it probably all made sense inside Sammy’s booze-pickled
mind. Unfortunately, aside from his failure to anticipate pretty much all modern forensic and criminal investigation techniques,
as he was still utterly blitzed, the stupid bastard had fallen in right behind his deceased ex-pal.

It was presumably a testimony to his resourcefulness in sourcing alcohol while in jail awaiting trial that he was still maintaining
a plea of not guilty. People would laugh when she told them about it later, but to be honest, it was pissing Catherine off.
She knew that due process had to be observed, but she wondered what it was costing the public in order to reach such a foregone
conclusion. More than this waster had cumulatively earned, she bet. The bugger knew fine he was guilty, knew he was going
down, but he was getting everyone else’s money’s worth.

There was a gaggle of people in front of her, checking the cases, the hanging monitors as always perversely reminding her
of departure boards. When Sammy’s flight was called, he’d be going for a very long holiday indeed. As she scanned the screens,
looking over a host of heads, she spotted a familiar figure walking hurriedly along the corridor, carrying a sheaf of files
under one arm. It was Dominic Wilson, the young anointed of the Procurator Fiscal’s office and scion of that same office’s
most formidable adversary, Ruaraidh Wilson QC. He was wearing a three-piece suit just the silvery side of charcoal, the effect
both a little flamboyant and at the same time prematurely ageing. It reminded her of something and she could have kicked herself
that it took a second or so to work out what. He was affecting his old man’s
style. Was he taking the piss, some kind of calculated insult, or was it indicative that he was a little closer to his father
than some people wanted to believe? Possibly a bit of both. Had there been a rapprochement? Or can you just not escape what’s
bred in the bone?

His head was down and he didn’t appear to have seen her; or just as likely his head was down because he had seen her first.
This would indicate he didn’t want to talk to her, and if that was the case, then it confirmed her suspicions that there was
something specific he didn’t want to talk about.

‘Good morning, Dominic,’ she said, stepping into his path to intercept him.

He pretended to act surprised.

‘Oh, hi, Catherine. How you doing? You here for the incredible floating jakey?’

‘Yes, I—’

‘Break a leg,’ he interrupted. ‘Sorry, I can’t stop. Got a case myself this morning.’

‘Aye, but the courts are that way,’ she reminded him, glancing back over his head. ‘You’re off outside for a last fag, and
that means you’ve got five minutes. Come on, I’ll keep you company.’

‘Bollocks,’ he said with a sigh, before resuming his progress towards the main doors with huffy bad grace.

She waited for him to light up and have a draw, conscious that she’d get nothing until the nicotine hit.

‘Know who I was talking to last night?’ she asked. ‘Gary Fleeting.’

He rolled his eyes, confirming that he knew this was coming.

‘And how was he?’ he said through gritted teeth.

‘Well, for a bloke who got lifted in possession of that much brown, I’d have expected him to look, I don’t know, a bit more
prisony. What happened, Dom?’

‘Scottish justice moves in mysterious ways,’ he said wearily. He closed his fist then opened it again, palm up, a gesture
of something disappearing or flying away. Catherine recognised the mannerism, having often seen Ruaraidh Wilson do it in court,
usually as he was making some key piece of evidence suddenly seem tangential or irrelevant. For a guy who was supposedly determined
to be unlike his father, he was helluva like his father. The apple clearly hadn’t fallen far, which rather made a nonsense
of the jokes and innuendo suggesting that his becoming a zealous prosecutor was proof that he was actually
the product of an affair. It was the kind of thing cops told each other to make themselves feel better about Wilson Senior’s
occult powers thwarting their best efforts.

Indeed, the same embittered cops peddling this stuff had previously been happy enough to identify Dominic as his father’s
son during more troubled times. In his teens and student years, he had threatened to go seriously off the rails, reputedly
due to his stormy relationship with Wilson
père.
There had been problems with drink and hard drugs, resulting in several arrests.

They might also have resulted in a few convictions and more than a few lurid headlines had it not been for surprising levels
of compassion and discretion on the part of certain senior police officers. At the time, Catherine was a shade resentful of
a poor little rich kid being indulged, wondering how often such understanding was extended to those from less esteemed backgrounds.
However, she would have had to concede that being the only child of a phenomenally successful but slightly strange and unquestionably
workaholic individual such as Ruaraidh Wilson QC must have brought its own difficulties.

In time, she came to respect her senior officers for it. They could easily have used his son’s difficulties to embarrass and
undermine Wilson, or even just for plain old payback, but they didn’t, and when Catherine thought about why, she came to understand
that, like it or not, they were all part of the same process.

People would ask how Ruaraidh Wilson could possibly defend certain individuals, and the methods by which he did so were often
so infuriating that they could start to comprise a strong argument for vigilantism. However, as a cop, he made you raise your
game. If you got a conviction against him after he had worked his voodoo, you were not going to lose one wink of sleep dwelling
on the possibility that you didn’t get the right man. Thus a lawyer like Wilson was crucial to ensuring that justice was done.
At least that was what Catherine kept telling herself: it was what sometimes stopped her getting out of bed, driving across
town and burning down his house in the middle of the night.