Where the Bodies are Buried (31 page)

As she did so, Catherine found herself suddenly staring with horror at Fallan, briefly helpless to disguise her reaction as
she realised that she had met him once before. She had seen his face and heard his voice this morning, but neither had piqued
more than the minimum search of her memory she habitually conducted whenever she met anyone with a connection to the world
of crime; a search that had turned up no results.

It was the smell of the tea that did it, the sense most closely connected to memory. His face, his voice and even his posture
were rapidly reassembled in a specific context: sitting at another table, a quarter of a century ago, drinking tea while she
watched him in fear and hatred.

She couldn’t reach for her cup because she was concerned her hand would tremble conspicuously.

Fallan eyed her briefly, aware of her previous stare. Had he recognised her too? Unlikely. He would barely have noticed her
at the time, just one more scared face, the kind he must have seen dozens of every day.

The memory came crashing over her like a wave. Fallan had been in her parents’ kitchen, along with that horrible little grey
man she still saw some nights in her unquiet dreams: a wispy-haired walking corpse who smelled like he lived in an ashtray.

Sitting at her parents’ table. Drinking her parents’ tea.

Taking her parents’ money.

Catherine fought to control herself. A reservoir of hatred had been breached, something she thought had been locked down and
secured long ago. She could do with a drink of tea, but she still couldn’t trust her hands; either to remain untrembling or
to refrain from throwing the scalding liquid into Fallan’s face.

‘What are you doing back in town,’ she asked, trying but failing to quite keep the venom from her voice. ‘Here to pick up
again where you left off?’

Fallan said nothing. The girl was less adept at waiting out an awkward silence, however.

‘My uncle’s gone missing. He’s also my boss. The police weren’t providing much assistance, so he’s been helping me.’

‘People disappearing? Yes, he’d certainly be an expert on that.’

Fallan calmly finished off the last of his breakfast and put down his cutlery, then looked Catherine in the eye.

‘Is there something we can help you with?’ he asked, his tone communicating that if there wasn’t, he would strongly prefer
to be left alone.

‘James McDiarmid. Frankie Callahan. Gary Fleeting. Tommy Miller. Any of those names familiar to you?’

Fallan took a sip of tea with affected gentility.

‘Nope.’

‘All four of them have two things in common. They all have connections to drug trafficking and organised crime, and they have
all died violently in the past few days. So in the same week that I get four dead criminals to play with, it turns out that
Glen Fallan is back from the grave. Dead gangsters, Glen Fallan. Glen Fallan, dead gangsters. From what I gather, they tend
to go together, like bacon and eggs, coffee and cream, guns and bullets. Can you understand why I might be inclined to connect
these two developments?’

‘When did they die?’ he asked.

‘McDiarmid Sunday, the others Thursday.’

‘I was in Northumberland on Sunday,’ he said. ‘Came up here on Wednesday.’

‘He’s been with me the whole time,’ said Jasmine.

‘Even during the night?’ Catherine asked. It was a distasteful thought, but she needed to know.

‘No,’ Jasmine insisted, looking equally appalled.

‘And you can’t vouch for him on Sunday either, because you hadn’t discovered your uncle missing yet. Do you have any idea
who this man is? What he’s done?’

‘I know he saved—’ Jasmine began, but cut herself off in response from a look from Fallan telling her not to go there.

‘If the detective superintendent has specific questions, feel free to respond, but otherwise don’t rise to the bait.’

Fallan spoke to Jasmine like Catherine wasn’t even there. She decided to respond by speaking like Jasmine wasn’t either.

‘Why are you really back in town, eh Fallan? If you’re not shagging the girl, then the altruistic behaviour has to be a cover
for something else. You here to settle old scores with Stevie Fullerton? Or maybe you and Stevie have had make-up sex and
now you’re helping him clear away some of the competition.’

‘I’ve not spoken to Stevie in twenty-one years and I’ve never heard of any of the people you just mentioned. Who were they?’

‘Frankie Callahan, one of Glasgow’s biggest heroin pushers. Gary Fleeting, his right-hand man. Tommy Miller, drug dealer,
thief, fence and tout. Jai McDiarmid, drug dealer and close associate of Paddy Steel, also a major peddler of smack. Jai was
beaten, possibly tortured, then shot in the head and his body dumped out the back of the tanning salon he owned. The other
three were all double-tapped, execution style, and left in a warehouse near Blantyre.’

‘I’m a wee bit out of touch when it comes to my Glasgow gangsters,’ Fallan replied with a blank shrug. ‘I’ll say this, though:
it doesn’t sound like Stevie’s style. He didn’t go starting wars. Stevie was always about the business, didn’t like unnecessary
aggro.’

‘So did it constitute necessary aggro when he tried to kill you? Oh no, hang on, that was more probably personal, wasn’t it.
What with you offing his cousin.’

It was the first time she felt like she’d landed a blow. Fallan looked distinctly uncomfortable, sending an anxious glance
towards the girl.

Catherine finally reached for her cup and took a sip of tea to celebrate. If her hand trembled, he didn’t seem to notice.

‘Of course, strictly speaking, that’s just speculation,’ she added, offering them both a cold smile. ‘Jazz Donnelly’s body
was never found. He just disappeared. That was
your
style, wasn’t it?’

Jasmine was looking at Fallan and he was suffering under the heat of her gaze.

‘Like you said,’ he replied in a low, quiet and conspicuously controlled tone, ‘it’s speculation. And it doesn’t fit with
you finding four bodies, does it?’

He seemed content to have batted this back to her, then something evidently occurred to him.

‘The MO does have a certain ring of familiarity,’ he said, and she instinctively knew a barb was coming: a sting in the tail
or a flat-out lie, but undeniably some kind of fuck-you. ‘We’d be talking a bigger gang than Stevie’s, though. We’d be talking
the biggest gang in Glasgow.’

‘And who is that then, according to a man who claims to be twenty years out of touch?’

‘Better ask somebody older, hen.’

They sat in silence for a long time after the policewoman left. It was one of those silences that you know is going to define
your relationship for ever after: depending on what broke it; depending on the next thing Ingrams finally said. And it had
to be something
he
said, had to be him that broke it. It was his choice now whether he wanted to close the door on what had just been discussed,
whether he thought she had any right to know.

They were starting to clear tables. Breakfast finished at ten, and it was five to. There was still tea in both their cups,
barely lukewarm now, undrinkable.

‘I didn’t recognise her,’ he said. ‘McLeod. The cop. I didn’t recognise her.’

‘Should you have?’

‘She recognised me.’

‘Well, she knew all about you, probably has a file.’

‘No. I saw it: the moment she recognised me. She wasn’t expecting to, and then flash, there it was. I couldn’t miss it. Pure
hate, a lifetime of hate.’

‘Why? Because she’s a cop?’

‘More personal than that. More specific. But I don’t know what, and that’s the thing. I hurt so many people. Far more than
I can remember; and far more than I could even notice.’

It took all of Jasmine’s courage to ask, but she knew she couldn’t not know.

‘You hurt … women?’

He looked her in the eye.

‘Yes,’ he said, not flinching from her gaze. ‘Not directly. But I hurt them, women and children, without a doubt. McLeod could
have been somebody hiding behind her crying mother while I threatened her father. One of the countless witnesses you don’t
even see because they’re never going to tell anybody.’

Jasmine swallowed. This was the hardest conversation of her life,
asking questions she didn’t want to ask, of a man who didn’t want to answer, but both of them understood that the chalice
couldn’t pass either of their lips.

‘And the other things she said …’ Jasmine began, but she could not put a name to those things. Could not ask him: ‘Did
you kill people?’

And yet she knew that in her stumbled few words, she had.

‘It’s a myth told about old-school criminals that they don’t hurt the innocent,’ he said. ‘We already know that’s not true.
But aside from what they might excuse as collateral damage, they like to tell themselves that the rule is you don’t hurt non-combatants.
You’re only
fair
game if you’re
in
the game. But the truth is that your definition of a combatant eventually becomes anybody who stands between you and what
you want.’

Ingrams looked away, his gaze towards the windows but his mind’s eye somewhere much further distant, somewhere Jasmine suspected
she’d never like to see.

He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and looked at her with that vulnerability she’d glimpsed in the car just
after they left Bain’s house.

‘I’m not an evil man, Jasmine. But I’m not a good one either. McLeod was right. You can leave a name behind, but you can’t
escape who you are. Coming back here, seeing the fear on Bain’s face, the hatred in that policewoman’s … it’s made me realise
I can’t separate one life from another. I need to put a name to my sins, and I need to wear that name.’

‘So you’re Glen Fallan again?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Tron’s a stupid name.’

Laura’s mobile rang as they walked back to their car, parked directly adjacent to the main entrance of the Bay Tree restaurant.
The Bay Tree sat at a T-junction on the main road through Thornton Bridge. During evenings and lunchtimes there were normally
cars trailed all along the secondary road parallel to the side of the building, the restaurant’s cottage origins denying it
the luxury of a dedicated car park. It was mid-afternoon, but they’d still have managed to find a space closer than their
previous visit no matter the hour. The place was closed for business today, and until further notice.

The staff had all been hanging around, looking a little lost. There was no work for them to do, but they evidently felt they
had to be there, perhaps as a show of willing, or maybe just to find out whether they would still have jobs.

Catherine and Laura’s inquiries found that neither Callahan nor Fleeting had turned up on Thursday at all. According to Callahan’s
wife – a peroxide moll from Central Casting who was fair chewing the scenery in playing the grieving widow, perhaps in case
anybody doubted her genuine sadness at being left with a two-million-pound mansion and God knows how much more in other saleable
assets – Frankie had left their house at eight o’clock on Thursday morning. He hadn’t said where he was going, but it was
the last time she ever saw him.

Eight o’clock struck Catherine as a purposefully early start, the start of a man with a busy day ahead of him. A big day,
perhaps. Heroin shipment day, even.

Fleeting was last seen in his favoured boozer, the Raven’s Crag, the night before. According to the landlord, he drank in
comparative moderation and jacked it in well before last orders. Once again, the behaviour of a man with important things
to do the next day.

‘It’s Anthony Thomson,’ Laura announced, glancing at the screen. ‘Why do they call him Beano, by the way?’

‘Because of his rank,’ Catherine explained. ‘He’s a detective constable.’

Laura’s screwed-up expression indicated that this hadn’t shone much light, but Catherine wasn’t spelling it out any further.

Catherine climbed into the passenger seat, Laura tarrying outside a few moments, muttering acknowledgements as she took the
call.

‘Preliminary Forensics are in on the Top Table vans,’ she reported, slipping behind the wheel. ‘They found traces of blood
in one of them: O neg. It’s a match for Jai McDiarmid.’

‘Supporting what we’ve said all along,’ said Catherine with a frustrated sigh, as the evidence flipped back on itself one
more time. ‘Maybe it’s not that we’re missing something; maybe just the opposite. Maybe this is precisely what we thought
it was, but there’s something else in here that doesn’t belong, and that’s why it doesn’t add up. Callahan and Fleeting were
definitely gearing up for something important, and now it’s all but established that Fleeting killed McDiarmid. So what if
this is just what it looks like: tit-for-tat drug killings?’

‘Except we now know the scene at the depot was staged,’ Laura reminded her, rather balefully.

‘But what, really, does that change? What if Steel’s people did it, and the reason they staged it to look like Callahan and
Fleeting were torturing Miller was that
they
were the ones torturing him? Or at least to disguise the fact that
they
killed Miller, and Callahan and Fleeting had nothing to do with it? Maybe Paddy Steel and Tommy Miller
both
knew something about that decoy heroin shipment. Because that, to me, is the key: that’s the rogue element that’s throwing
everything else off.’

Laura didn’t reply. She just stared out through the windscreen with a pained expression, as though none of what Catherine
was saying made any more sense than why people called Anthony Thomson Beano. She went to put her key in the ignition, then
just stopped and slumped back in the driver’s seat, like she had lost all will.

‘Are you all right?’ Catherine asked her. She had stopped herself doing so about half a dozen times already today, Laura having
been even more sullen and withdrawn than usual, but she couldn’t let this one go.

Laura looked across at her, concern and apology written across her face in equal measures.