The Blood of Crows Read online

  A lone figure sat at the bay window, hunched in his wheelchair, a rug over his bony shoulders to ward off any chill in the night air. Auld Archie O’Donnell always sat there. He had sat there for most of the last year, only moving for his breakfast, his dinner and his tea. He would be put to bed, then he would get up again, grab his Zimmer, get himself into his wheelchair and be off back to the window, back to his waiting, his watching. Put him in the day room, he’d be back at the window. They’d tried to talk to him, but he told them in no uncertain terms to go forth and multiply. And Archie was a man used to being obeyed.

  This evening, he wore his rug over his dark blue cardigan and a short-sleeved cotton shirt. He had on clean flannel trousers and his good leather shoes. He always put his shoes on, even though they’d tried to take them off him and put on the slippers supplied by the home. Shoes caused problems for the cleaners. Sometimes it was easier if they all wore the same slippers. It was certainly easier if they all wore the same clothes. In fact, it would be easier if they were all dead. But Auld Archie was having none of it. At best he ignored them, at worst he swore at them. He hadn’t actually hit any of the staff – at least, not anything they could prove was intentional.

  But tonight he had asked four times if Richie the care worker was coming on duty, and had been told four times that Richie hadn’t turned up for work yesterday or today. Young people today had no sense of responsibility, they said. The senior care worker scribbled on his notes that Archie was showing signs of Alzheimer’s.

  Archie wheeled himself back to the window, and watched and waited.

  11.59 P.M.

  Rosie MacFadyean stretched in her bed, as much as she could stretch with the bulk and folds of fat and flesh that padded her arms and legs. She hated this weather, and the sweat that ran from her, soaking the mattress. The sweat got into places she could not reach, places it was impossible for her to clean and difficult for Wullie to reach when he was cleaning her. She needed another sponge bath now. She could feel her sweat turning acrid, feel it eating away at her skin, causing festering hacks which would ooze pus and a crusty, flaking exudate. Wullie had spent the hour before he went out washing her, drying her, powdering her, lifting the folds and flaps of her flesh, propping them up with a pillow if necessary, as he cleaned and creamed and powdered the irritated skin beneath. But that had been hours ago.

  What was he doing, leaving her alone like this? Leaving her to use the sponge to urinate? In this weather, the urine turned sour really quickly. Wullie had left the windows wide open for fresh air, but it was a way in for the flies that were now buzzing to get out.

  She had finished with the newspaper and wished, not for the first time, that technology would find a way to get a mobile phone signal down the glen. The details in the paper were scant – three men in their early twenties, with ‘known drug connections’, had been shot dead in a hotel car park. The paper didn’t name them, but Rosie could. Smoutie, Hamster and Speedo. Three stooges and no loss to man nor beast. She read on, smiling at the tabloid jargon: Even seasoned police officers were shocked at the murders.

  Shocked! Rosie had snorted in derision.

  Police officers nowadays were made of chocolate.

  Not like they were in her day.

  Tuesday

  29 June 2010

  4.32 A.M.

  Colin Anderson pulled the sweat-sodden sheet from his shoulder. The wide-open window in the bedroom was letting in more heat than cool air. He turned over and fell into a confusing dream, in which he was burning and couldn’t get out of bed because his feet were tied. He could see the door but he had no chance of reaching it with the sheet wrapped round his feet. Who do I know who would kill me like this, he wondered. Why don’t I fight back?

  But all was well. He could hear the gentle ring of the fire engine on its way. He was nearly safe. The gentle ring of the fire engine …

  Then he felt a tap on his shoulder.

  ‘Your phone,’ Brenda said sleepily. She turned over, pulling the sheet with her.

  Anderson reached for the bedside light switch, knocking the phone to the floor.

  As he scrabbled on the carpet with sleepy fingers, swearing gently, the bedroom door swung open slightly, and Nesbitt wandered in, his wee Staffie face smiling, eager for a very late or very early walk. As he automatically answered with his name, Anderson looked out of the window. It was just getting light, a very early dawn, but definite daylight on the horizon.

  ‘Colin? Vik here. Something you might be interested in – a teenager took a dive off a bridge over the expressway, not far from the river. We have an eyewitness, who says he was dropped.’

  ‘Dropped … ?’ Something was trying to climb to the front of Anderson’s sleepy brain. ‘Signs of sexual assault?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m on my way.’ Then before he hung up he asked, ‘Were you called out on this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But not me?’

  ‘No, I’m calling you out. I’m not qualified to deal with this; I’m only a bloody DC, remember?’ Mulholland snapped. ‘And I have to get my stripes back, and you’re the best chance I have of getting a good case.’

  ‘Cheers,’ said Anderson with muted sarcasm. He turned and kissed Brenda’s exposed shoulder. ‘Something’s come up. I’ve been summoned.’

  ‘Let the dog out before you go,’ she said, and went straight back to sleep.

  5.03 A.M.

  ‘What the fuck’s been going on here?’ asked Anderson, getting out of his car. ‘There’s about a quarter of a mile of the bloody expressway coned off.’

  DS Lambie was talking on a radio and cut the call short, just saying, ‘Do what you have to, I’ll let the boss know.’ Then he said mildly to Anderson, ‘Well, the traffic boys want us off the road before rush hour. Just as well it happened at four in the morning, not in the middle of the day. But it wasn’t a suicide. And he’s not dead. Young lad, not more than sixteen, they reckon. And there’s evidence of violent sexual assault among other things, which is why we called you out, or why they called us out.’

  ‘Why not MacKellar?’

  Lambie didn’t answer.

  ‘You mean they did, but he didn’t want to get out of bed?’

  ‘That’s the DCI for you.’ Lambie opened the door of an unmarked police car. ‘It’ll be quicker if I drive you up there. They’re trying to figure out a way of getting him out the truck he fell into.’ Anderson climbed in beside him. The entire support service of Strathclyde police seemed to be parked the length of the inside lane. Lambie slowed the car just below an overhead bridge. ‘A van stopped up there. A white Transit, we think.’

  ‘Isn’t it always a white Transit?’

  ‘Two men pulled the lad out from the van and got him up on the rail, and he went over. We have a forensic team on the bridge right now.’

  ‘Christ! So, where’s the boy?’

  Less than a mile ahead, Anderson could see a quiet commotion of flashing blue lights, orange lights and headlights. The vehicles were all pulled in round an articulated lorry, like bees round a queen. Lambie indicated left and crawled along a narrow gap between the edge of the road and the cones where the sparse early morning traffic was being waved through by the traffic cops, every car slowing more than was necessary as the driver turned to look. As they neared, the HGV began to resemble Lemuel Gulliver, with ladders and ropes everywhere. Anderson could just see that a fire engine had pulled over in front of the lorry and reversed back right up to it. Even from here he could see a ladder being wound down over the back of the truck.

  Whatever was going on, it all looked under control.

  ‘OK, what happened exactly?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, the lad went straight through the fibreglass roof of the lorry and fell on to boxes of whisky stacked on palettes to within inches of the roof. So he didn’t really fall that far. The damage had all been done beforehand.’

  ‘Druggie? Dealer? Another one to add to the list of Biggart and t
he Balfron boys?’ asked Anderson.

  Lambie pulled the car in and got out, and Anderson followed suit. ‘It doesn’t seem so; no signs of popping or mainlining. But when he went through the roof he fell on to one of the metal crossbars, and they think it might have ruptured his liver, so they’re trying to get him out without causing any more damage. The paramedics are keeping him alive while the fire service try to cut him free. They have a line in and he’s stopped bleeding, so they’ve a wee bit of time to play with.’

  ‘Can you ask them to run some blood off?’ asked Anderson, thinking about R2, thinking about establishing a link.

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘Just do it.’

  ‘Will do. The driver of the truck’s probably still in that ambulance up there. He was in shock when I left to get you. He has no idea what happened.’ They both looked round as a loud metal clang rent the air, and a few voices shouted in warning.

  ‘There’s an “and” to all this, isn’t there?’

  ‘The paramedics say they reckon he’s been tortured – beaten, burned, fingernails torn out, stains on his jeans show he’s been bleeding from his back passage. And he’s only in his teens.’

  ‘Yes, I get you, Lambie. Let’s just hope he survives to tell us about it. And who’s in that?’ He gestured towards another ambulance a hundred yards further on, parked beside a light-coloured Corsa.

  ‘That’s Mrs Dorothy Elm. She was driving two cars behind the lorry, in the inside lane. She saw the whole thing. The lorry driver heard nothing and was still driving. So she pulled out, got up level with him and forced him to pull over. She’s a good witness, saw a lot.’

  They watched as a spinal board was passed from hand to hand up the side of the truck with much shouting, but they were too far away to make out anything in particular.

  ‘Dorothy is very definite that they didn’t drop him,’ Lambie said.

  ‘They threw him?’

  Lambie shook his head. ‘They had him by the ankles, dangling him over the bridge, then he kicked himself free. She saw him jerk just before he fell.’

  Anderson looked back at the bridge and nodded slowly. ‘If he kicked himself free, that explains why he landed on top of the truck rather than in front of it.’

  9.30 A.M.

  Due to the early call-out, Anderson was due some down time so he went home for breakfast on the pretence of thinking about the incident on the expressway, but he knew it was more about avoiding the eyes of his Partick colleagues. The late edition of the Daily Record lay on the kitchen table, neatly folded at one end, the other end having entered the shredder of Nesbitt’s canines. Being a dog of some discernment, he had chewed off Skelpie Fairbairn’s face.

  He had tried not to read it but it was there in its technicolour glory. Fairbairn, the evil predatory paedophile, was back on the street. That was the point that most of them seemed to be missing.

  Underneath photos of the three men shot at Balfron, a headline screamed Gang Murder! and the article leaned heavily on the threat of a full-scale gang war breaking out on the streets of Glasgow. The men had shaved heads, wary eyes, their faces carrying the scars of short lives lived swimming with sharks. The paper had printed their nicknames: the Hamster, Speedo and Smoutie. Anderson was tempted to rip out that bit as well and feed it to Nesbitt, who probably had a greater sense of self-preservation than all of them put together.

  The ‘Bridge Boy’ had made the headline on Radio Clyde’s nine o’clock news. Just the bare facts and an appeal for anyone who had seen a white Transit in the vicinity to come forward. It had been a disciplined operation; it had needed teamwork. It had a sense of organized crime about it, and he wondered what the Bridge Boy had done to deserve such a traumatic fate. Anderson glanced at his watch; he had time to call in to the hospital and see how the boy was doing before he was taken off that case as well. His phone had been quiet – no messages, no missed calls. No news was good news.

  Brenda was still in bed. She had come back late from her friend’s house and immediately gone online, contacting another old friend who had recently emigrated to Oz. They had been chit-chatting by email for a few weeks now, much friendlier since they were thousands of miles apart. Brenda wanted the family to go out to the Gold Coast for four weeks over the winter holidays, to get Australia ‘at its glorious best’.

  It’d be too bloody hot, he knew – hotter than here. God knows why she wanted to go. She always burned painfully in no time, having red hair and pale skin, and Anderson, being blond and fair-skinned, didn’t fare much better.

  All he did know was that she wanted to get away from Glasgow, wanted to get him away, and hoped moving might make it all better. He was still young enough to apply to emigrate, and he couldn’t deny the kids would have a better life in the sun. Brenda’s friend’s brother was a cop out there, and he said there was a lot of security consulting work going. A guy like Anderson would find it a doddle. He wondered how her dreams would pan out if he was made the official scapegoat in the appeal and the subsequent enquiry. Brenda had visions of swapping their three-bedroomed semi for a six-bedroomed house in the suburbs of Brisbane and there was no fault in her plan, no reason not to go.

  Except he didn’t want to.

  He liked his job, he liked sitting thinking about the next move on the case.

  He needed to get the Bridge Boy’s description into the evening papers and get some kind of appeal underway. Mulholland was the man for that. Hopefully that would bring them an ID. Like any big city, Glasgow swallowed its fair share of runaways and throwaways, easy prey for the sexual predators who hung about Buchanan Street coach station waiting for anyone who got off a bus and looked as if they had nowhere to go. But this boy was different; he’d been tortured. Torture wasn’t Glasgow’s way. A body dumped in a ditch with a bullet in the head, that was the usual.

  He opened the paper again, revealing a full-page feature with a picture of Simone Sangster, author of Little Boy Lost, the rehashed story of six-year-old Alessandro Marchetti who was mysteriously abducted in 1996 and never found. Nobody would ever write the story of the babysitter, who didn’t have the photogenic features or the rich parents of his young charge but had no doubt suffered the same fate. Alessandro would be a young man now, if he were still alive, Anderson reflected.

  10.05 A.M.

  Costello got up, as she wasn’t sleeping anyway. The black suit was still lying across the back of a chair, along with the fine silk headscarf to wind round her head to hide the scar that nobody else could see but she knew was there.

  She had no idea why she had been summoned to see ACC Howlett. Something to do with Skelpie Fairbairn, that was the only thing she could think of. But she didn’t believe there was anything she could add to that situation. And there was no way she was going to implicate Alan McAlpine in anything. Or Colin Anderson.

  The Partickhill team had been after Fairbairn for years. They knew he had a liking for young flesh. Very young flesh. He had a reputation for hanging around in parks watching young girls. Two had been assaulted, and had woken up having been molested, but unable to remember anything. Fairbairn was a tentative link between them, but there had been huge gaps in the chain of evidence. And both girls knew him, anyway – he was their bus driver. And, it transpired, he always walked through the park, so of course he’d be there. All the police had was uncorroborated evidence, circumstantial coincidence and rumour – but this time the ice cream man remembered Skelpie being with the wee girl … the wee girl who’d been so insistent that raspberry topping was what she wanted. DCI McAlpine knew that this time, they had him. And then a couple of statements from his friends appeared, saying he’d been back in the pub with them by the time the attack took place.

  The statements threatened to become inconvenient; nothing precise, but the timeline was thrown out just enough for any half-decent defence counsel to cause a jury reasonable doubt. Those statements had somehow – even Costello couldn’t be sure exactly how – never found their way into the fiscal�
�s file that went to the defence; they’d just been put in some other file. And now Fairbairn was out on ‘interim liberation pending appeal’, which was how it had been quoted in the paper. Evidence had not been disclosed – witnesses had made statements to give him an alibi, but those two statements had got lost. The witnesses had not been called by the defence and therefore the jury had not heard any alternative explanation of events. So, under the disclosure rule, Fairbairn was out. He would have his conviction overturned on appeal and he would be a free man.

  Costello knew she would be called to the enquiry. She didn’t know ACC Howlett personally or professionally so there was no other reason she could think of why he would want to speak to her. Could there be a damage limitation exercise going on? Did that mean McAlpine was going to be the fall guy? Four years dead, he couldn’t defend himself. But she was not going to say a word against the boss, or against any of them.

  Memories of Partickhill made her think again – what if this meeting was nothing to do with Fairbairn? What if they simply wanted her to leave? Partickhill was closed indefinitely, and Colin Anderson’s promotion seemed to be stalled. Was that what it was about – just getting rid of them all? They couldn’t sack her, of course; there was no operational reason why they should, as she’d done nothing wrong. But now that the occupational health team was saying that she would be fit for work in the near future, the problem of DS Costello was clearly not going to go away. Howlett was going to sweet-talk her and try to persuade her it was in her best interests to go. She had dictated a full statement from her hospital bed at the time of the enquiry following the incident that put her there, and there was nothing in it – nothing at all – that justified her walking away from her job or being told to go. And she had given another brief statement a fortnight ago outlining her minimal involvement in the Fairbairn case.