Where the Bodies are Buried (22 page)

As she pulled the Civic into the office car park, Jasmine could see a telltale shimmer of broken glass on the concrete.

‘That’s Jim’s surveillance van,’ she told Ingrams. ‘Looks like it’s been tanned.’

They had reached Glasgow around half-seven, Ingrams requesting her to take them straight to Sharp Investigations.

It had been close to five before they left the refuge. Ingrams had finished off what he was working on, then driven off again
to retrieve some things from home. He returned inside forty minutes with a black canvas bag slung over his shoulder, the contents
of which she did not wish to speculate upon. As it hadn’t taken him long to make this round trip, she wondered why they couldn’t
just have gone there en route, which was when she deduced that he hadn’t wanted her to know where he lived.

She had waited in the garden, on a wooden bench in the shade, watching Ingrams work. He was shredding the branches of an overgrown
hydrangea he had spent the morning taming with a hedge-trimmer. He gathered the chippings in a plastic bucket and transferred
them in batches to a hopper in preparation for mulching, his actions always briskly industrious but unhurried.

She saw Rita again only briefly, immediately upon their return.

Ingrams had parked the Land Rover around the back, where she wouldn’t see that it was damaged. Rita had heard the engine and
come out to meet them. It looked like a welcoming gesture until Jasmine discovered its true purpose, which was to tell her
to stay outside the building so that the women wouldn’t have to remain in their rooms. She was polite and almost apologetic,
but Jasmine heard the steel behind her quiet tones and recalled Ingrams’ caution that Jasmine had been wrong if she thought
she’d made an ally. Ingrams disappeared inside with Rita for several minutes, during which he presumably explained a few things
and eluded quite a few others.

Jasmine filled him in on the drive north, her blow-by-blow being a means of stretching the very little she actually knew over
the longest number of miles. After that she kept prattling about herself because she was so uncomfortable with the absence
of any conversation between them. She’d catch herself wittering on, wondering why she was telling him this stuff, some of
it personal bordering on inappropriate: all about her mum and how she came to be working for Jim.

Ingrams seemed considerably less unnerved by silence, but he didn’t seem to mind her talking, as he would ask her something
every so often and set her off again. He wasn’t going to oblige her by way of
reciprocity, though. Occasionally she’d chance her arm, hoping some kind of bond was being forged or even that she might just
catch him off guard.

‘You’re actually from Glasgow?’

‘Originally. A long time ago.’

‘Did you know this Glen Fallan guy? Know
of
him?’

‘No.’

Now Ingrams climbed awkwardly out of the Honda and stretched, his height emphasised by the low-slung vehicle. He ambled slowly
towards the van, twisting his neck and loosening his limbs, then bent over to peer through the broken window.

‘It’s a surveillance van, supposed to blend in and not be noticed,’ he said. ‘How did they know it’s his?’

‘Maybe they didn’t. But it’s been parked in the same spot night and day for the best part of a week.’

‘Anything leap out at you as missing?’

‘I don’t think Jim keeps anything in it. Never leaves the cameras inside if he’s not using them.’

‘Whatever they’re looking for, they’re being very thorough.’

Jasmine unlocked the building’s rear door and held it open for Ingrams. He proceeded inside with a cautious and surprisingly
light step, which prompted the upsetting understanding that whoever had broken into the van could still be inside the office.

They climbed the stairs in silence. Jasmine kept expecting Ingrams to take out a gun, then when he didn’t, admitted to herself
that she was actually wishing he would. Why had she asked him not to bring one? And why hadn’t he just overruled her and told
her not to be so bloody stupid?

To her great relief, they found the office door closed and locked. Jasmine was about to stick her key into it when Ingrams
restrained her hand. He crouched by the lock and examined it.

‘Scratch marks,’ he said. ‘Fresh ones. It’s been picked recently. They’ve been here.’

‘Why would they pick the lock? Why not just kick the door in, like they just smashed the van window?’

‘You’re supposed to be dead by now. A break-in at your place of work would be a big arrow for the Tyneside cops looking into
the shootings. A nondescript van getting tanned after being left unattended for several days would be less of a flag.’

‘Yes, but what else could they expect the cops to connect it to? Unless they thought that me getting shot in your car would
suggest I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. In which case, why would anyone think that a guy who keeps guns in
his car would make a more plausible target for a shooting, I wonder?’

‘No comment.’

Jasmine unlocked the door and reached inside to turn on the lights. There was no immediate indication of a break-in, and certainly
she felt no sense of someone having been there remotely comparable to the sense of
no one
having been there that had so spooked her on Monday. The place looked very much as she had left it, enough for her to wonder
how you distinguished between fresh scratch marks around a lock and innocent older ones from misdirected keys. Perhaps nobody
had broken in, and perhaps it had just been some chancer who’d tanned Jim’s van.

‘What have they taken?’ Ingrams asked, as Jasmine scanned her surroundings.

‘To be honest, I don’t know what’s normally here well enough to know what’s missing, never mind what they might be after.’

She looked at the desk, and the neat piles of folders she had stacked up. They were where she’d left them, but one thing did
strike her right away.

‘The Glen Fallan file is gone. It was at the top because I was copying down your contact details. Apart from that, I couldn’t
say.’

‘What about the computer?’ Ingrams asked.

Jasmine switched on the PC, surprised to feel a tingle of anticipation as she did so. She could list any files that had been
accessed since it was last booted up, and finally they’d have something solid to work on.

The machine beeped in a low-tech, unfamiliar manner. She looked at the screen, which was mostly black with a couple of lines
of white text, the lower of which said: ‘Please insert boot disk.’

‘Shit,’ said Ingrams.

‘What does that mean?’ she asked.

‘That they’ve formatted your hard drive. Erased everything. They don’t want anybody to be able to work out what this is about.’

‘It’s backed up, at least. We won’t know what they were looking at, but the information is retrievable.’

‘Well, that’s something. Have you got the FTP login?’

‘The what?’

‘Doesn’t matter. If you’ve got Jim’s email address and the host, we can …’

Jasmine looked at him apologetically. She had no idea what he was talking about.

‘Never mind,’ he said patiently. ‘What else were you planning to look into? You said on the way up that there was another
case that Jim had been working on separately.’

‘Anne Ramsay. But according to the cop who was here, it was a dead end. Poor woman whose parents and brother went missing
a quarter of a century ago. Definitely a dead end for us, though: we don’t have any contact details. I don’t have the folder
and the computer files have been wiped.’

‘You don’t have the folder? They took it, then?’

‘No, it wasn’t here before. I think Jim must have taken it. Oh, wait, though. I do have her number. It should be on the phone.
She called here looking for Jim. Said he had told her he expected to have some news early this week. McDade guessed he was
going to let her down gently. He told me Jim would have known it was wrong to take her money.’

‘Why would Jim have taken the case file with him if he was going to let her down gently? He must have thought there was something
he could find out. And if you’re going to let someone down gently, you don’t give them several days’ notice to get their hopes
up. This is where we should start.’

Jasmine looked at the screen again, the cursor blinking expectantly in the absence of a bootable disk.

Blink. Blink. Blink.

She thought of other blinking white dots on black screens, of monitors and alarms, and something inescapable finally ran her
to ground. She realised she had been trying to stay ahead of it for hours, keep her mind busy, hope to avert it with information
or just sheer activity, but she was out of road. Her eyes filled up and the tears began to spill.

‘What is it?’ Ingrams asked, his voice soft but not solicitous, like it wasn’t his place to enquire too deeply.

‘Jim,’ she said, struggling to keep her voice steady. ‘He’s not just my boss. He’s my uncle; well, my mum’s cousin. All of
this: the shooting, the break-in, wiping the hard drive. It means he’s dead, doesn’t it?’

She stared up at him from Jim’s chair, searching for what she might
read in his expression. Ingrams said nothing, because he had nothing to offer. In his face she could see that he had known
the truth of this way back, probably the moment that shotgun took out the windows.

She bent forward, her head resting in her hands, trying to disguise her sobbing from this comparative stranger but powerless
to prevent the grief from seizing her as she accepted the truth of it all. She felt so cold, so isolated. This should be news
she was receiving from a caring source, someone to hold her in these moments. Instead it was bereavement by way of deduction
and inference. Bereavement at a remove: the acceptance not merely that Jim was dead, but that he most likely had been for
days, and she was only now finding out.

Everything she had feared when she felt that instinctive disquiet in this office on Monday morning had been proven true. In
recent times, it seemed,
all
her worst fears came true. Yes, it’s cancer. Yes, it’s spreading. No, it’s not treatable. Yes, it will only be months.

Yes, it looks like tonight will be the end. Yes, she’s gone now.

Yes, Jim’s dead too.

Ingrams said nothing, remaining a few feet away. She didn’t know whether she hated him for standing there in indifferent silence
or was grateful to him for keeping his distance and not intruding.

‘Who are you?’Jasmine asked, her voice reduced to a rasping whisper.

‘We need to get you a place to stay,’ was his reply. ‘If they’ve been to where you work, they probably know where you live.
It won’t be safe there.’

Jasmine had a vertiginous sense of events threatening to overtake her, of becoming a piece of flotsam swept along by this
tide. She felt like she had nothing to cling on to, apart from Ingrams, and she barely knew who he was.

‘I need my phone charger,’ she said, a single practical thought bubbling up with undue prominence as her mind searched for
ways to give her back some degree of control.

‘We can pick up a new one in the morning. Meantime we’ll find a hotel.’

‘I don’t have any money,’ she said apologetically.

‘I do.’

‘Why would you help me?’

‘Rita would boot my balls if I didn’t,’ he replied.

She accepted that for now, as she was in no state to dig deeper, but they both knew it was bullshit.

They went first to a big twenty-four-hour supermarket where she picked up some toiletries and a change of clothes, then Ingrams
booked them two rooms in a hotel by the Clyde. It was big and corporate and faceless, a good place to blend in and not be
noticed.

Upon his advice, bordering on insistence, she ordered some room service. She didn’t think she was hungry, but ended up demolishing
a club sandwich, having remembered that she had barely eaten all day. As soon as she had finished the last of it, tiredness
struck like a net thrown over her, pulling her down to the bed.

Sleep didn’t come immediately, though. More tears came first. Finally, alone and unwitnessed, she could let go, let it all
go.

She was crying for Jim, and crying because his loss was making her feel such an echo of the death of her mum. But somewhere
within her pain and sadness there was a tiny seed of reassurance, because the loss of Jim wasn’t as bad. Nothing would ever
be as bad again.

Catherine and Laura found Bob Cairns in a café on Robertson Street, just off the Broomielaw on the banks of the Clyde. It
was an old-fashioned and unapologetic greasy spoon joint, the sort of establishment you increasingly only found tucked away
in the back streets, so that there was almost something illicit about it. Not that the consumption of saturated fats was in
any danger of going out of fashion in these parts; just that it had become more of a dirty little secret, something the city
didn’t want to wear on its sleeve.

Bob was sitting at a booth, his back to an expanse of PVC upholstery so riven with scratches, scars and stitching that it
resembled a Glasgow hard man’s face. As they walked in, Catherine thought she could smell cigarette smoke, but it was just
the immediacy of her mental association; either that or the years since the ban hadn’t been long enough to quite clear it
from the place. There was actually something reassuring about this kind of establishment still being here, just as there was
something reassuring about finding a polisman like Bob Cairns sitting in it. You knew that the men with faces resembling the
upholstery were still out there, so you needed cops of Bob’s ethos and generation to maintain a kind of equilibrium.

Not much for the skinny latte and blueberry muffin, our Bob. He wasn’t eating his way towards an infarct either, though: wholemeal
roll, no butter,
grilled
bacon, grilled tomato and brown sauce. He was still a fit man for close to sixty, though there was undeniably more of him
these days than there had once been. Catherine had heard he’d missed work yesterday too, which was virtually unheard of. Guys
his age, especially the super-dependable ones, you always feared that bit more for whenever you heard they were ill.