When The Devil Drives (17 page)

Jasmine accelerated gently, staying under twenty, glancing in the rear-view mirror every few seconds. The near-side traffic heading southbound on Fenwick Road blocked her view of whether the Passat had kept going past the junction, but so far he definitely hadn’t turned into it.

Okay.

The other thing about irrational reactions, as Fallan had admitted, was that much of the time nothing precipitated from them and you’d seldom discover quite why you’d felt spooked. Nonetheless, these false alarms constituted a modest premium for such a vital insurance policy: when it paid out, the stakes could be very high indeed.

Jasmine hung a left at the end on to Langside Drive, figuring she could follow it all the way around Queen’s Park to where it met Victoria Road, not far from her flat. It occurred to her that this was actually a quite valuable alternative route to have in the bank, her Glasgow geography still very much a work in progress.

She glanced in her mirror as she approached the roundabout at Muirend Road, which was when she saw the silver Passat emerge from Merryburn Avenue two junctions behind her. He had taken a parallel road and reacquired her, waiting for her to pass and then pulling out with two cars’ cover.

Shit.

She was definitely being tailed and it did look like he knew what he was doing. Now she wasn’t merely a little spooked but genuinely rattled.

He had been waiting for her close to the office. That meant he knew where she worked. At this time of day, from his point of view, the greatest probability was that she was heading home, so that suggested he was trying to find out where she lived. This would double the number of pick-up points he could use for future surveillance, and that was only the most palatable of the reasons he might want to know this.

She had to lose him. She went through the roundabout and proceeded towards the junction with Merrylee Road, where she knew there were traffic lights. They were green as she came in sight. She
was willing them to turn amber so that she could slow down on the approach then speed through as they changed, with at least one of the two cars between them preventing the Passat from following her. The lights did change, but she was thwarted by the Nissan Micra in front, its white-haired driver braking well before the amber turned to red.

The Micra was just as cautious about getting under way again, showing no signs of movement until the signals were fully green. It was long enough to make most drivers consider a peep on the horn in case the old dear had failed to notice the lights had changed. In Jasmine’s experience, this was often counterproductive as the inevitable fright tended to result in the driver stalling their vehicle in a panicked hurry to get going.

With this thought, she devised a new stratagem for losing her tail. As the Micra finally began to move she allowed the Civic to stall, then feigned an authentically flapping response, turning the ignition with the car in gear to eat up a few more seconds.

She gave an apologetic wave to the driver behind, pretending she was having trouble re-starting the Honda, then when the lights turned amber again she zipped through at speed. The car immediately behind her followed across the junction, but its successor didn’t risk it, leaving the Passat stranded. She sped on, waiting until the junction was out of sight in her rear-view, then turned right on Newlands Road, followed by two lefts. This allowed her to double back along Earlspark Avenue and take a snaking route through a number of quiet residential streets.

As she reached Pollokshaws Road she took a long, careful look to her left before pulling out. There was no sign of the silver Passat, but her relief almost instantly gave way to a depressingly familiar feeling of failure.

She had panicked at the thought of being followed home and in her desperation to lose her tail urgency had triumphed over judgment. She should have pulled a reciprocal: gone all the way around the roundabout at Muirend Road and doubled back to eyeball the bastard. She’d have got his registration and maybe even a look at his face if he wasn’t sharp enough to suss what was going on and get his head
down. Either way, the tail would have ended then and there because he’d know he’d been burned.

Instead, she’d learned nothing about him, meaning she’d be looking over her shoulder from here on in, every glimpse of a silver car putting her on edge.

‘Jasmine screws up,’ she muttered to herself.

Not that Jasmine had any real doubt Hamish Queen was holding out on her, but two days later she received hard evidence that firmly resolved the issue, while at the same time posing a number of new questions concerning why he’d be so blatantly lying about this.

It came in the post, the black Companies House logo distinguishing the envelope from the usual pile of paperwork, junk mail and the occasional cheque. She had requested it almost a week ago, well before she’d firmed up a meeting with him, and she had been hoping to receive it before their interview, just in case he claimed to know nothing about the earlier company. At that point she had been reasonably expecting their meeting to yield at least a few more names, if nothing else. Instead, Hamish Queen was claiming that he couldn’t remember the names of anybody involved in the original Glass Shoe, other than the one she had given him – Tessa – and that of an actor who had died in 1993.

To be fair, thirty years was a very long time. How many people might such a successful theatrical producer have worked with over that period? Hundreds, from London to New York, Sydney to Moscow, Tokyo to Paris. It was perfectly conceivable that he couldn’t remember the names of some actors he hired and just as quickly fired without a single play making it to the stage. It was also understandable that this was not an episode he cared to revisit, which would further consign its details to some oubliette of the mind, locked away so as not to rise to the surface unbidden. If those actors had never subsequently made anything of themselves, then it was all the more plausible that their surnames would fade from his memory. Could Jasmine remember the surnames of all the kids she had worked with in youth theatre, or even those of the students she’d performed with at the SATD a mere three years back?

But by the same measure, could Hamish Queen
forget
the name of his partner in setting up his first company, especially when that man had gone on to become head of Arts Council Scotland?

There it was, staring up at her from the desk: the official memorandum and articles of association:

The Glass Shoe Company. Incorporated 18 May 1981.

Managing director: Hamish Queen

Company Secretary: Julian Sanquhar

Jasmine checked online to make sure the document was referring to the same man. There was, understandably, no reference to his being a partner in the short-lived Glass Shoe Company, but Jasmine quickly learned that Julian Sanquhar had enough in common with Hamish Queen to leave no ambiguity. They were born in the same year into wealthy rural land-owning Scottish families – Queen in the Highlands, Sanquhar in Roxburghshire – and had both been educated at Gordonstoun. Queen had gone on to Cambridge to study history, Sanquhar to Oxford to read law, but upon graduation both initially sought careers in theatre. Queen, being of the more extrovert nature, had successfully established himself as a repertory actor, but the reputedly introspective Sanquhar, despite acquitting himself quite capably on stage as an undergraduate, had proven more drawn to meeting administrative rather than thespian challenges.

On paper, and particularly in retrospect, it seemed an ideal pooling of talents: Hamish Queen, the man of grand vision and flamboyant audacity, augmented by Julian Sanquhar, the quietly ambitious facilitator. To Jasmine, this all the more keenly begged the question of what went wrong and, just as pertinently, why Queen was so determinedly lying about it.

Whatever had happened, they didn’t work together again and, in keeping with what Queen told Jasmine, their paths had so seldom crossed thereafter that nobody seemed aware they had once had a professional relationship. No journalist or blogger appeared to have picked up on their Gordonstoun link, but unless you were specifically looking for it you wouldn’t think there was a connection. While
Queen was raking in the millions putting on his glitzy musicals, Sanquhar was proving adept at making far smaller sums stretch as far as they’d go in a series of positions with regional theatres, arts funding bodies and charities.

He wasn’t always just the man behind the scenes, although he had more of a public voice than public face. Sanquhar was an accomplished radio broadcaster, contributing to coverage of the arts and humanities for both Radio Four and Radio Scotland, with his two documentary series from Afghanistan,
Voices of Camp Bastion
and
Voices Beyond Camp Bastion
, garnering particularly high accolades. He worked in television also, but didn’t present any of the programmes he had written or produced.

His stock was high at the BBC, and since standing down from his position as head of ACS it was widely believed he was imminently going to be appointed to the BBC Trust. This would be in addition to the various committees, boards and advisory bodies he sat on, all of which made Jasmine less than optimistic about the chances of being granted an audience.

Nonetheless, she left messages with several offices and organisations, requesting an interview. She kept the details vague: she didn’t lie outright and say she was a journalist, but she didn’t say that she was a private investigator either. She received responses spanning a wide spectrum of sincerity, assuring her that her request would be passed on, and made a note to follow up after a reasonable interval of three working days.

To her great surprise Sanquhar got in touch the following morning. No secretaries, no PAs, just the man himself, saying he could talk that afternoon if she could make it to Alloway Kirk, where he’d have some spare time while the crew were setting up shots for a new documentary he was making.

She said she’d be there, expressing her astonishment at both the swiftness of his response and the fact that he’d done so personally.

He laughed at this.

‘Someone once gave me this invaluable piece of advice,’ he said. ‘Never let a piece of paper touch your hand twice. You get a message, you act on it right then or you bin it, because otherwise you’ll waste
time before you end up making the same decision anyway. Plus, when you’re as busy as I like to be, you find that going through intermediaries constitutes an unnecessary doubling of effort.’

Jasmine looked at the pile of paperwork on her desk, wondering how much time she had wasted sifting through the same documents, humming and hawing about how to respond before deferring a decision and putting them back where they were. This was why Julian Sanquhar was head of this and on the board of that while she was struggling to run a one-woman operation.

Driving this point home, she remembered that she already had a job booked for that day, delivering a summons to a particularly elusive subject in Perth. What were the chances she could manage that in time to get down to Ayrshire before Sanquhar wrapped up filming?

It was a Galt Linklater gig; she couldn’t let them down. Not only that, but the big firm were running out of time themselves, which was why they’d brought her in. The subject was an ex-cop who had thus far proven extremely successful at spotting and evading their personnel, and refusing to acknowledge his own identity on the rare occasions they had managed to buttonhole him. He had returned all posted summons papers marked ‘gone away’, and if the client law firm’s papers weren’t served soon they would lose their slot in court.

It wasn’t exactly justice hanging by a thread: the ex-cop was being sued in Sheriff Court by his local council over some dispute Jasmine could barely follow regarding access rights to a disputed thoroughfare abutting his property. However, the details didn’t matter. Galt Linklater paid her a retainer to have first dibs on her services and right now they needed their ninja.

She drove to Perth, reaching the subject’s address just after eleven. Galt Linklater’s Martin Grady, parked further down the street in a surveillance van, had been watching the house since nine and confirmed over the radio that the subject, one Wilson Todd, was definitely home. This was good news: no hanging about waiting – and hoping – for him to show. Jasmine placed the papers under her clipboard and walked confidently up to the front door, ready to snare him with the junk-mail trap. This would be over
in moments, then she could get herself down to Alloway by the tail-end of lunchtime.

She tried the doorbell twice, to no avail. Not even a hint of footsteps in the hall or a twitch of curtains to suggest the subject was getting a look at her, which was the usual precursor to the door opening once they had seen harmless young Jasmine and not some burly ex-polis.

Bugger.

She made her way back to the Honda, inquiring of Martin over the radio whether he was definitely sure the guy was home. He just laughed, a welcome-to-my-nightmare cackle.

‘I hope you don’t have dinner plans,’ he added.

She drove around the corner and parked out of sight, then spent an excruciating age waiting for a development, all the time fighting the urge to go back and have a second go. He could have been in the toilet or the shower, she told herself, but these possibilities were being suggested by the part of her that desperately wanted to talk to Julian Sanquhar. The part of her that was on a retainer for Galt Linklater knew that a subject as fly as Todd had almost certainly watched her surreptitiously either as she approached the house or as she left it, and possibly both. At this stage, as far as he knew, she was just some canvasser he hadn’t answered the door to, but if she made a second appearance she was burning herself.

It was after one o’clock when he finally made a move, emerging from the house and very quickly getting into his Freelander. Martin relayed Todd’s position so that Jasmine could stay close, but she wasn’t to join the follow in case she or her vehicle got spotted.