When The Devil Drives (10 page)

‘You
killed
my father?’

But even as she said the words she couldn’t accept them.

‘That’s why you kept sending the money? That doesn’t add up.
This is Glasgow we’re talking about, not some remote valley in the Amazon. Why would you do that? And why would my mum want to see you before the end?’

Fallan took a breath, gathering his thoughts, choosing his words.

‘Your mum and I were very close. We were good friends in very bad times. We both knew what kind of a world we’d become mired in, and when she became pregnant it made it all the more stark that she had to get out. I wanted her to be able to escape, make a clean break, start a new life.’

‘So you killed the man she was involved with, my father?’

‘No, that’s not why I killed him. But his death made it easier for your mum to leave.’

‘That doesn’t answer why you would keep sending the money. She made that clean break, started up a new life in Edinburgh.’

‘It was the price of redemption. Or the price of believing in redemption. I needed to get out of that world too, but I couldn’t just physically leave without taking my past with me. I needed to pay for my sins. I needed to make amends, to help somebody in order to believe that I could be something better. It was important to me that something good came out of that time, and it did. The life you’ve had, compared to the lives you and your mum might have had … That’s why I kept sending the money.’

Jasmine could feel the tears streaming now. She didn’t know what to feel, what to think of Fallan. She just knew that it hurt.

Fallan reached into a pocket and offered her a tissue. Jasmine refused, wiping her eyes and her nose on her sleeve like a snottery little toddler. Then she swallowed, gathering her forces for a defiant charge.

‘What was his name?’

Fallan shook his head. She wanted to scream.

‘Please. What was his name?’

‘I can’t tell you. You were right: I did make certain promises to your mum. Two promises. She didn’t want you knowing about me: there’s nothing we can do about that now. But she seriously didn’t want you knowing about him, and that’s a promise I
can
keep.’

‘You don’t have to tell me anything else. Just his name would be enough.’

‘His name
would
be enough,’ he agreed. ‘That’s why I can’t tell you it. We both know you’ll do precisely what your mum was afraid of. You’ll try to find out who he was, and that would expose you to everything she spent her life protecting you from.’

‘Can’t you tell me anything? You can stay off specifics,’ she bargained. ‘Anything at all.’

‘There’s nothing I could tell you that would make you feel better.’

Fallan had a look about him that she had come to recognise: impermeable. This was not a man who could be prevailed upon. But she had spent enough time around him to recognise when he was being pulled apart. Maybe it was just desperation, but something inside her still wouldn’t accept that what he was saying was true.

‘I still don’t believe you. I believe you made only one promise to my mum: a promise never to tell me who my father was, because my father was you.’

Fallan looked away to the hills again, and when he looked back at Jasmine his face was etched once more with that mixture of pity and regret. He knew that what he had to say would hurt her, but he knew he had to say it.

‘Okay. I’ll tell you his name, just his first name, because that will be enough. That will make everything clear. His name was James.’

Jasmine stared back uncomprehendingly, wondering for a moment whether he was being facetious, to teach her a harsh lesson. James. What the hell would that make clear?

‘But James is not what anybody called him,’ Fallan went on. ‘He was known to your mum, as he was known to everybody else, as Jazz.’

It took her a moment, but then she heard it, and Fallan was right. It was enough. It rang true, devastatingly true.

‘She didn’t love him and she didn’t mourn him, but for whatever reason, she still named you for him.’

The next day, Jasmine didn’t get the opportunity to chase up any of her contacts as she was on the road for Galt Linklater: a possible insurance fraud up on the Black Isle. The request had come in at the last minute, another of their investigations having escalated in terms of manpower, leaving them short-handed. As the job was a good three hours’ drive from Glasgow it would require an overnight stay – and possibly two – up in Inverness. The upside of such trips was that they clocked up plenty of billable overtime, but the big variable was who she might be teamed with.

She had got to know most of Galt Linklater’s roster, enough to have composed a mental list of the best and worst men to be working with on any particular job. Some were friendlier than others, more patient, more tolerant, while there were those who scored poorly in the above categories but were nonetheless smart operators from whom she knew she could learn a lot.

Her great fear, the moment she told Harry Deacon she was available, was that he would then inform her she was going on this road trip with Johnny Gibson – known as Grumpy Gibby – the most miserable ex-cop in the world. Gibby was always friendly to Jasmine and scored high on patience and tolerance, never getting frustrated with her when she got into difficulties. The problem was that she was the only thing he didn’t complain about. He could moan for Scotland, but all of his minor grizzling was a mere support act to the main event, which was for him to go on about his divorce until you were toying with blowing the surveillance just so that you wouldn’t have to listen any more. It usually took him about half an hour to get on to the subject, then it was all divorce, all the time, we never close.

She lucked out, though. It transpired that she’d be with Rab Forrest, which indicated just how swamped Galt Linklater must be if old
Rab was getting into a car with an overnight bag. One of the firm’s elder statesmen, he mostly worked on the management side under Harry, but wasn’t daunted by the prospect of a bit of field work when it was required. He wasn’t daunted by anything, in fact, because in his decades as a cop and a PI there really wasn’t much he hadn’t seen before.

He was easy company, with the added benefit that she didn’t have to worry so much about uncomfortably flirty behaviour from a man in his seventies. That was always a nagging concern whenever she pulled an overnighter. All of Galt Linklater’s investigators were old enough to be her father, but there was no accounting for how deluded some men could become, especially if you were being pleasant to them and they’d had a few drinks. So far there had been nothing inappropriate, but her mental list contained a subsection for the guys she’d least like to be sharing a hotel with. Rab Forrest, being old enough to be her grandfather, wasn’t in it.

They had an early start, requiring eyes on the subject’s house and car for seven o’clock. His name was Roddy Harris, a former joiner recently relocated from Perth, and it was the veracity of the ‘former’ part that they were there to establish. He was receiving income-protection payouts from an insurance firm, having been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which had, he claimed, caused him to give up his work. Rab further informed Jasmine that Harris had sold up a four-bedroom house in Perth, he and his wife downsizing to a two-bedroom flat in Beauly now that their kids had grown up and left home.

As a self-employed joiner, he had taken out an income-protection policy with Steadfast Insurance twelve years back. This had followed a two-month lay-off from work due to a back injury, the resultant lack of income causing him to realise his vulnerability given that he had no employer to rely on for sick pay. His first claim on this policy was for something a bit more than a slipped disc, however. He was diagnosed with MS, which, among its other privations, at times could leave him incapable of gripping his tools. Unable to guarantee his ability to take on jobs, he was forced to close his business. Steadfast’s policy required that they pay him roughly thirty grand a year until
retirement age, which meant they were looking at a total dispensation of more than a quarter of a million pounds. However, the insurance firm had suspicions that Mr Harris was more capable than his diagnosis was making out, and hired Galt Linklater to gather evidence.

‘How do you get a fake diagnosis of MS?’ Jasmine asked Rab.

‘You don’t,’ was his stark answer.

They followed Harris from Beauly to Inverness, where they promisingly observed him going into B&Q. He emerged with some timber and a roll of chicken wire, which he put into the back of his Volvo estate.

He stopped off for some groceries at a supermarket, then headed back across the Kessock Bridge. However, instead of proceeding home to his flat in Beauly he stopped about a mile outside, at an isolated cottage in expansive but rather unkempt grounds.

They watched him take the timber and chicken wire from his car and approach the front door, which was answered by an elderly woman with white hair below a black headscarf. He disappeared inside the cottage, then emerged again a few minutes later, this time producing a toolbox and a saw from the rear of the Volvo.

On a hunch, Rab sent Jasmine out on foot, down a farm track that afforded a view of the land at the cottage’s rear. She took up position using the cover of a hedge and focused her video camera to capture Harris carrying out repairs on a chicken coop while the old woman hovered near by, and at one point brought him a cup of tea and a roll.

As she relayed quietly to Rab over the radio, it was painful to watch. Harris kept dropping his tools, dropping nails, dropping timber, and adopted a repertoire of awkward postures while sawing and hammering in order to compensate for his inability to grip properly. Crucially, however, he did ultimately get the job done, which pleased the old woman, but not as much as it would please Steadfast Insurance.

Jasmine kept her head down and her gait stooped as she made her way back along the farm track, but she felt that her posture could not be low enough to match her conduct. She got back in the car, then Rab drove a hundred yards back down the Inverness road and turned, pulling into a layby from where they could follow Harris upon his exit. Rab had mounted the video camera on the
dashboard again, so that they could resume recording their pursuit of Harris’s car.

She watched him put his tools into the Volvo, followed by the rotted boards and rusted wire he’d replaced. Rab watched too, all the while talking on the phone to Harry Deacon, recounting what they’d just seen and recorded. She didn’t follow all of what was being said; hearing one side of a conversation could be hard enough to follow, but much of this exchange seemed to be conducted in an arcane code. Further confusing her was Rab’s reference to Harris’s moonlighting as ‘an arson job’.

Rab terminated the call just as Harris was making his final exit, wiping his hands on a rag. The old woman appeared again, hurrying from the front door like she was afraid he’d already left. They watched her present him with a bottle of whisky, then the familiar pantomime of refusal and insistence. Jasmine remembered her mum telling her there was a grace to receiving that was hard to learn, and the memory briefly delayed her realisation that Harris hadn’t been looking to be paid. He was just helping out some old crofter woman who needed her chicken coop repaired.

‘Aye,’ Rab said with a sigh. ‘Puts me in mind of a pal of mine who was doing a favour for his upstairs neighbour in a tenement close. Old woman’s pulley was jiggered, so she couldnae dry her washing. He went up and fixed it. I think the cord had snapped, so he replaced it. When he was finished he says tae her: “Right Mrs McGlumphur, you can get your clothes up noo.” The wee woman says: “Aw, son, if it’s all right with you, I was just gaunny give you a bottle of whisky.”’

Jasmine didn’t feel like laughing, though.

‘What’s up?’ Rab asked. ‘You not like that one?’

‘No, it’s …’

‘Never mind. You’ll like this.’

And with that he pressed rewind on the camera, cueing the tape back to before she got out of the car. He then resumed filming, recording over Jasmine’s footage.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked, though it was staringly self-evident. She hoped she managed to sound professionally shocked rather than personally delighted.

She must have done. He told her not to worry, assuring her he’d cleared it with Harry, and reiterated his curious reference of before.

‘How is it arson?’ she asked. ‘Are you going to tell Steadfast the tape got burnt?’

Rab laughed.

‘Naw, not arson. Arsène. As in Wenger. It means “I did not see ze incident”,’ he explained, putting on a cod French accent.

‘See, screwing chancers is our bread and butter. Some fly-man claiming compo for his gammy leg then going out and playing five-a-sides, I’ll nail him seven days a week. But sometimes these insurance firms can be like the world’s worst bookie. They’re happy enough to rake in money on long-odds bets, but they cannae accept that the laws of probability dictate that sometimes they’ll be unlucky. So they cry foul and look for any way they might be able to invalidate the claim: welshing on the bet.’

‘So we’re going to report that we saw nothing untoward?’

‘No, we’re going to report exactly what we witnessed: that Mr Harris is so debilitated by multiple sclerosis that he couldn’t possibly make a living as a joiner.’

‘Roger that,’ said Jasmine.

‘He who pays the piper calls the tune, but this isn’t a job without its moral choices. I did not see ze incident,’ he repeated. ‘And we didn’t have this conversation either, you understand?’

‘What conversation?’

Jasmine got a call as they passed through Aviemore on the drive back down the A9. Her phone didn’t associate the number with any of her listed contacts, but Jasmine recognised it as the main switchboard at the tax office: outgoing calls from internal extensions weren’t identified. It was her contact, Polly Seaton, which meant progress on Mrs Petrie’s case. Polly had been in Jasmine’s class throughout secondary school, and now worked at Centre One in East Kilbride. Tax records were the most reliable means of tracing anybody, and though there were strict limits on what details Polly could divulge, it was usually enough.