Choosetheplot, p.11
#ChooseThePlot, page 11
Gilmore indicated, turned down a side street.
‘Where’re we going now? This another of your magic short cuts? Only the blues and twos would get us to Finnegan’s place quicker.’ Black braced herself against the door as they took the next corner faster than was perhaps wise. Gilmore’s face was still as impassive as it ever was, but the white of his knuckles on the steering wheel was perhaps an indication that she’d pushed him just a little too far. At least it was nice to get a rise out of him, even if they were both going to die in a horrible accident sometime soon.
‘Thought we’d go and pick up McFarland instead. Whatever clues we might find there aren’t going to go away any time soon. Not with a couple of detective constables watching the place.’ Gilmore slowed down, possibly because he was thinking, but more likely because the traffic had backed up even down the narrow side streets.
‘OK. But I’m telling you. He doesn’t fit the profile for either of these killings. Probably knows more than he’s saying, mind.’ Black looked out the window at the dirty street. ‘Stop, will you.’
‘What?’
‘Stop the car.’ They’d only just started moving forwards again, but it was obvious they weren’t going to get far. Gilmore pulled over slightly and Black clambered out.
‘Where are you going?’
‘To find McFarland. I’ll be quicker on foot. You head over to Finnegan’s. See what those useless constables are up to. And get onto control about that All Ports on him, too. I’d rather we find him alive than face down in a ditch somewhere.’
The other city. Ian mulled over the meaning of the old woman’s words as he walked back across town to his grubby little basement flat. He needed a shower badly, a change of clothes even more. His earlier panic was beginning to subside though. So far the police hadn’t come after him, hadn’t even called him. He pulled out his battered and cheap pay as you go mobile, peered at the cracked screen to see if he’d missed any calls. At least it still appeared to have power and signal.
The flat was exactly as he’d left it, which was to say cold and unwelcoming. What few clothes he had were past their best, but at least they were clean. A shower and a shave went some way towards making him feel a little more human. There was still a long journey ahead though. It was only as he was closing the door on his way out again that he noticed the envelope. The postman had obviously missed the letterbox in his hurry to get out of the building before it collapsed, or sucked out his soul. It was suspiciously thick and familiar looking, addressed to him. Sliding it open revealed a familiar credit card and covering letter. Well, this time he’d take it straight to the police, give them the proof they needed.
‘Glad to see you got the new card, Ian.’
He whirled around at the voice. It was dark in the hallway, what little light there was outside having to fight its way in through windows thick with dust and grime. Ian made out two figures in the gloom, but couldn’t see their faces. Not that he needed to. He knew that voice.
‘Not going to invite us in?’ Jake Finnegan emerged from the shadows, his pale face almost glowing. Behind him the cadaverous assassin stared silently from his mask. No escape that way.
‘Come in. Make yourselves at home.’ Ian unlocked the door and stepped inside. Finnegan followed, wrinkling his nose at the smell of mould. The assassin stepped through behind him, pulling the door closed.
‘You’ve lost the sword, I see. That was wise. Can’t have you running around the city with a murder weapon.’
‘Then why’d he give it me?’ Ian nodded at the assassin.
‘He has his reasons. Best not to press the point. Anyway, Ian – I may call you Ian?’ Finnegan didn’t wait for an answer. ‘We’re here about you, not about him. Very silly of you throwing that card in the river. But it’s easily enough replaced, see.’
‘What do you want with me?’
‘I’d have thought that was obvious. I want you to come and work for me.’
‘You want me to kill for you?’
Finnegan shrugged, then waggled his hand, fingers splayed. ‘Maybe. Mostly I have my friend here to do that sort of thing.’
‘So what do you want me to do?’
‘Same as you’re already doing. I want you to find your ex-wife’s exotic friend, Golden.’
‘And if I refuse?’
Unbidden, The silent, cadaverous assassin reached into his jacket, pulled out a slender pistol. From another pocket he produced a silencer and slowly screwed it onto the end of the barrel. Ian had seen many weapons during his time in the army, fired most of them, sometimes at other people. This one might have been small, but that didn’t mean it would be any less lethal.
Finnegan smiled like a jackal as the assassin stepped forward and pressed the gun to McFarland’s forehead. There was no expression in his eyes and his hand was as steady as a rock set in concrete.
‘Well now, Ian. There’s a question.’
DCI Black was a seasoned detective, trained to see details however small. As she turned into the terrace of scabby houses where Ian McFarland lived, she couldn’t help but notice the expensive car exiting the other end, the vapour from its exhausts hanging lightly in the air. Shiny black, with windows tinted to obscure whoever might be inside, it disappeared around the corner before she could get a registration number. It set her internal alarms ringing, nonetheless.
The front door to Ian McFarland’s basement flat was open, but there was no sign of any builders coming and going. A terrible silence hung upon the scene, as if the city had just taken in a deep breath.
She should have called for backup, Black knew. She also knew there was no way she was going to waste precious minutes waiting for them to arrive. And neither did she want to let anyone know she was here.
Fishing out her phone, she sent a quick text to Gilmore, hoping he’d be able to make it across town through the traffic. She paused just long enough to steady her nerves, then stepped quietly into the darkened hallway.
Three bodies. That was the first thing she noticed. Black recognised Jake Finnegan, could tell by the way his head was angled that he was dead. Someone had snapped his neck as if it were no more substantial than straw, left him crumpled in the corner like a discarded doll. The second man she didn’t know, but the silenced gun clasped in his left hand looked expensive and exclusive. He was thin beyond skeletal, and wore a narrow black mask over his eyes. The look of surprise on them was no less harrowing for his being dead. Judging by the angle of the gun and the blood oozing from his mouth and ear, he’d shot himself in the head. Black doubted he’d done it willingly, whoever he was.
A groan from the far side of the door. The third body lay propped against the wall. She’d assumed all three were dead, but as she watched, Ian McFarland’s eyes flickered under their lids. Blood matted his hair and ran down his cheek, a graze in the skin of his temple where the assassin’s bullet had just missed.
‘You’re a lucky idiot, you know that?’ Black took out her phone, dialled control to get an ambulance to the scene.
‘Lucky?’ McFarland fumbled with weak hands, pulling something out of his pocket. He reached out, handed it to Black. She took it from him, held it up to the light, a credit card with his name embossed in silver letters and above that the printed words:
The Elimination Bureau.
6
The Invisible Man
Jane Casey
It was stupid or ballsy or both, but DCI Black walked down the middle of the hallway, resisting the urge to hug the walls. If she acted scared, she would be scared, she reasoned. Act brave and maybe she’d feel the same way. Anyway, it was only pragmatic. No gunman was going to miss her, not with the light behind her and nowhere to hide. And Serena Black wasn’t the kind of woman to creep to her death. Or, indeed, to someone else’s. She wasn’t scared for herself – of course not – but she was dry-mouthed with anxiety for Ian McFarland. She was dreading what she was about to find.
What she found, however, was absolutely nothing. McFarland’s flat was dark, cold and empty. There was no sign of a struggle, but then there was no furniture to tip over – the room was bare apart from an ancient sofa and a low table. McFarland had almost nothing to call his own – no TV, no books. No life. It smelled overpoweringly of mould and mice, but there was something else there too. Serena sniffed the air again, concentrating. It was a chemical smell, very faint. The last time she’d smelt it was in the lobby of the Water House restaurant, just after Mandy McFarland had been shot. Fire a gun in a confined space and you can smell the chemicals in the gunpowder afterwards, for a short time. Serena wrinkled her nose. A fired gun was bad news, no matter who had been on the wrong end of it.
Serena used the end of her torch to switch on the single, shadeless ceiling light in the living room, then stood underneath it and turned slowly, scanning for clues. A brownish-red stain on the sofa made her heart pick up its pace until she sniffed it.
‘Barbecue sauce.’ It made her think of kebabs, of late-night burgers in grease-spotted paper, of battered sausages and deep-fried Mars Bars. Her stomach gave a tortured growl.
‘What are you doing?’
Serena straightened up fast, blinked away the spots that bloomed before her eyes – blood pressure needs checking, should have had a medical months ago, all this stress isn’t helping – and stared down the figure in the doorway with all the forbidding sternness she had learned as a street copper. It took her a second to judge the threat level posed by the newcomer and respond accordingly, which meant calming down. The woman was five foot nothing, grey-haired, fragile enough to blow away in a gust of wind. She was clutching a faded dressing gown around herself. If she managed to overpower Serena, it would be time for the Chief Inspector to retire.
‘Who are you?’ Serena demanded.
‘Iona Gordon.’ The little woman drew herself up to her full height – maybe half an inch over five feet. ‘Mrs Gordon. I am the owner of this building.’
Serena propped her hands on her hips. ‘So you’re the one I need to speak to about the conditions in this flat? This place is completely unsuitable for tenants. It’s unsafe.’ She tapped on the wall with her torch, loosening a small avalanche of plaster flakes. ‘Charging rent is literally a crime.’
‘Are you from the council?’
‘Worse than that, I’m afraid.’ Serena Black favoured her with a grim smile as she showed her the warrant card in her wallet.
‘Oh dear,’ Mrs Gordon said, shrinking. Her voice, which had been strong, acquired a quaver out of nowhere. ‘I don’t know about the conditions. My son runs the rented units for me.’
‘You mean there are more flats? More tenants?’
‘Not at the moment, with all the building work going on. My son evicted the others. Ian was my only tenant. I mean, my son’s. Silly me.’ Iona Gordon simpered, which Serena considered a slightly worse sight than Jake Finnegan’s severed head.
‘Do you know where Ian is?’
She shook her head. ‘I haven’t seen him for a while. I think he’s avoiding me. He hasn’t paid his rent this month.’ A pause, as the old witch saw a way out. ‘But of course I don’t mind. The rent is nominal. I let him stay here for free. He’s one of the family.’
‘Is that right?’ DCI Black wasn’t inclined to believe a word of it and the sarcasm in her voice made it certain Iona Gordon knew it. ‘So what brings you down here this evening? Family reunion?’
‘It was all the noise.’
Serena Black was a multi-tasker, capable of carrying on a conversation while thinking about six or seven other things. Presently her main concerns were the whereabouts of Ian McFarland, the whereabouts of DI Gilmore, the state of her career, the happiness or otherwise of her son, her prospects for lunch and whether or not she was actually heading for a stroke. But all of that went silent when she heard Iona Gordon’s comment. ‘What noise?’
‘Shouting. And then popping.’
‘Popping,’ the Chief Inspector repeated. ‘What kind of popping? Balloons?’
‘It sounded like champagne corks.’ Mrs Gordon looked wistful for a moment. ‘I didn’t think it could be.’
‘You said corks. More than one?’
‘Oh yes. Definitely. Two, at least.’ She frowned. ‘I had my music on. I might not have heard all of them. Then I thought it was the builders but of course they’re not here today.’
‘Were they supposed to be?’
‘Yes. They were here earlier. Then a tall, thin man came and spoke to them. I thought he was their boss – I mean, I’d never seen him before but he came in a big black car, an expensive thing, so I can’t imagine he’s a workman like them. They all cleared out in a rush. I asked where they were going but of course they couldn’t tell me. They’re Albanian. Or Lithuanian,’ she said, as if it was more or less the same thing. ‘They don’t speak English, anyway.’
A clatter in the hall and a volley of cursing announced Happy Gilmore’s arrival. He stumbled into the living room, panting. ‘What is it?’
‘Possible shots fired.’
‘McFarland?’
‘Gone.’
‘Alive?’
‘I don’t know. And I don’t know where he went, either, before you ask me.’
Gilmore looked around, his chest heaving. ‘So what do we do now? Is this a crime scene or not?’
‘I don’t know yet.’ Serena looked at Iona Gordon. ‘Thank you for your help, Mrs Gordon. We’ll take it from here.’
‘Oh. If you’d like, I could—’
‘No need.’ Serena nodded at Gilmore, who took the old woman’s elbow and steered her back out into the hallway. He came back in, wiping his hand on his jacket as if her dressing gown had been sticky to the touch.
‘So?’
‘Search the place. Carefully. Leave it as you find it.’
‘Looking for?’
‘Clues,’ Serena said. ‘You remember what they are, don’t you, Paul? Anything that might help us track down Ian McFarland.’
‘And what are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to look for two or possibly more bullet holes in the walls and furniture made by cartridges that don’t over-penetrate. And I’m going to hope I find them.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because,’ Serena said patiently, ‘if they’re not in the walls or the furniture, they’re in someone’s body. And that someone may or may not be Ian McFarland.’ She sighed. ‘And whoever they are, they’re probably dead. Which makes them my problem, and makes this a crime scene, and nudges up the murder statistics yet again.’
‘Oh,’ Gilmore said. ‘Right.’
‘That’s why I keep you around, Paul. The witty repartee.’
DCI Black and DI Gilmore walked into Barloch Street police station together, with matching strides and matching grim expressions. One bullet dug out of the hallway, near the front door – just one, when the old landlady had thought there were two or more. Then Gilmore had found a smudge of something that might have been blood on the door frame. The sniff test had proved it wasn’t barbecue sauce this time. Serena had vetoed a taste test on health and safety grounds. She’d called in the Scene Of Crime Officers and left them to it, after enduring another lecture from Wallace, the gun expert.
‘He was using a silencer, of course.’
‘Can we trust the witness, then? Could she have heard the shots?’ Serena was hoping for a no. Wallace smiled.
‘Silencer is a misnomer. It’s a sound suppressor. It changes the sound of a shot, but it doesn’t eliminate the sound altogether. That’s impossible. But if you hear a loud noise that doesn’t sound like a shot, you don’t look for a gunman, do you?’
‘No, if I hear a loud noise I assume Gilmore had beans for lunch.’
Wallace sniffed, unimpressed. ‘They say a suppressor doesn’t make a marksman silent, but it can make him invisible. Have you ever hunted the invisible man before?’
‘Nope,’ Serena said, faking cheerfulness. ‘But there’s a first time for everything.’
The invisible man. He might as well have been invisible for all she knew about him. No CCTV. No decent descriptions. No idea where to start looking for him. Serena gave a deep, heartfelt sigh.
‘DCI Black?’
Serena turned to see a beautiful young woman standing behind her. She had long dark hair scraped back into a pony tail, an oval face with high cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes and a beautiful mouth. She looked half Serena’s age and weight, fragile in faded jeans and a grey sweatshirt. The Chief Inspector was gruffer than she might have been when she answered. ‘Who wants to know?’
‘My name is Huynh.’ She pronounced it ‘Hwehn’ but spelt it out so Gilmore could write it down. Her English was fluent, with a pronounced Glasgow accent that gave away where she’d learned the language. ‘But you can call me Golden.’
Serena frowned. ‘How do you get that from Huynh?’
‘My name means “gold-coloured” in Vietnamese. No one here can say it properly so they all call me Golden. I’m a waitress at the Over Easy diner, where Ian McFarland used to work.’
‘What can we do for you, Miss?’ Serena asked.
‘May I speak with you? Please?’ All of a sudden Golden’s eyes were brimming with tears. Her lower lip quivered and she fiddled with her bag nervously. ‘I need help. And I think – I think Ian needs help too.’
‘Why? What’s wrong?’
‘This morning I found this on my doormat.’ She held it out, her hand shaking. A credit card, black and silver. ‘My limit is one million pounds, they say. All I have to do is call them. Why would they give me one million pounds?’
‘Did you call the number?’
‘Not yet.’
‘And that’s why you’re still alive. Come on.’ Serena put her arm around the girl’s narrow shoulders. ‘Let’s talk.’
The interview rooms at Barloch Street were the opposite of glamorous, with dingy cream walls and furniture that was functional at best. Golden sat down at the table in the middle of the room, looking around her. She pulled her sweatshirt sleeves down over her hands like a teenager. Serena noticed her staring at the camera that was mounted near the ceiling, and the second one on a stand in the corner. Two-way mirrors were a thing of the past. Closed-circuit cameras recorded a suspect’s every twitch and falsehood, and anyone who could crowd around the television in the room outside could see it all. And it was recording, because Serena Black hadn’t come down in the last shower. If Golden had something to tell them, she wanted it recorded on camera.
