#ChooseThePlot Read online

  The bullet passed through Mandy’s brain and exited behind her left ear, smashing a crystal decanter presented by Ewan McGregor’s PR team after a memorable night at the restaurant last month. As she fell, her Lucy Choi high heels slipped on the floor tiles, ensuring that her split skull connected with the floor before they did.

  As the horrified waiting staff dropped to their knees around her, Mandy’s grand dreams flashed away into darkness and the hallway of the Water House was empty once more. The entrance door swung closed, so that even the sound of falling rain faded to a respectful silence.

  DCI Serena Black wasn’t happy about any of it. Less than a week after she’d been forced to hold a placatory press conference about Glasgow’s climbing gun crime rate, a shooting in its most ambitious new restaurant was not what she needed. She’d only seen its interior in magazines, all gilt columns and mosaics. Now, with the lights up and the punters gone, you could see it had once been a municipal swimming baths. It was very different from the trattoria where she and the rest of the unit carb-loaded on spag-bogs after a long shift. The inside of the Water House was ‘ironic’ apparently, so it had kept its changing booths and shower cubicles as a reminder of its origins. But from the covered body near the entrance it appeared that someone had high-dived without checking the water level.

  ‘Amanda McFarland,’ she repeated, checking her notes and looking around. ‘Are either of the owners on their way?’

  ‘Trying to get hold of them now,’ pointed out Paul Gilmore, her second in command, affectionately known as “Happy”, and a good man – even though he was the one officer on the force everyone thought should drink more, just because it might force a smile out of him occasionally.

  ‘The smarmy one who’s always in the photos, remind me of his name?’

  ‘Jake Finnegan,’ said Gilmore, ‘the deceased was living with him.’

  ‘I’ve got her down here as married. You, skinny lad, who’s the husband?’

  One of the waiters came forward. He was either a typically pale Scot or very badly shaken. As you would be, thought Serena, to find your boss gunned down at her reception desk. ‘Mrs McFarland is separated,’ he explained in a broad brogue that confirmed his local origins.

  Serena’s interest was piqued. ‘Ever seen the ex?’

  ‘He’s been around a few times making a nuisance of himself. Army type, been inside.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘She told me herself. She told everyone.’

  ‘Who left who?’

  ‘She left him. He wasn’t very happy when he came out.’

  ‘Of prison or the army?’ Serena looked around. ‘Big man, running with the A-listers, you’d think Finnegan would have been the one shot.’

  ‘You can’t just assume it was the ex,’ said Gilmore.

  ‘I’m not assuming anything. Bring him in, will you? Nice shoes.’ She looked down at Mandy McFarland’s feet, then up at her hands. ‘Good nails, too. You can’t blame her for trading up, although I imagine it came with a price.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Gilmore frowned, something he did a lot of around DCI Black.

  ‘Do you get out at all?’ She eyed her sidekick with measured incredulity. ‘Jake Finnegan’s business partner is Alessandro Ribisi. Ring a bell at all?’

  ‘The guy who owns the paper mill?’ Ribisi’s opponents had a mysterious way of dropping their objections when confronted. A couple of them had disappeared altogether.

  ‘I thought you came down from Inverness,’ said Serena drily. ‘You should know all about our friends in the Italian community. We won’t get anything more about her physical state until forensics have finished, but I’d stick my neck out and say it was professional.’

  ‘I don’t see how you can say that,’ said Gilmore unhappily.

  ‘Why don’t you take another look at the vic and see how the bullet’s placed? Right between the eyes. It would have been perfect if she hadn’t turned her head. Never mind. Go and see what we’ve got in the way of CCTV.’

  ‘I already looked,’ said Gilmore. ‘Not a lot, as you’ll see when you go outside.’

  The only camera in the street was hanging off the wall, looking as if it had been shot as well. ‘Bloody hell, what happened here?’ Serena asked, staring up in annoyance.

  ‘I don’t know – maybe one of the paps climbed up there trying to get some snaps. They had a couple of celebs in tonight.’

  ‘And maybe it was disabled before the attack.’ Serena looked around. ‘There’s another one over on that off-licence. Find me some decent footage, for God’s sake. You of all people must know your way around a camera.’ Gilmore’s wife had posted a nude picture of him on what she’d thought was a private site, not realising it was linked into his Facebook account, and had nearly lost him his job; they’d all had a good laugh about that one.

  Serena stepped out into the street, thinking. To walk into a restaurant with a gun took some nerve, even in a city that was still gallingly ranked as the most crime-ridden in the UK. The obvious choice was to go after the husband, but before calling him in she ran a check. ‘Wait,’ she called to Gilmore, ‘before you go galloping off, take a look at Mr McFarland’s charge sheet and find out what he was inside for.’

  While she was waiting she talked to Keith Wallace, the cadaverous forensics expert they drafted in for handgun incidents. Wallace was folded over the shattered decanter like a crane checking for fish.

  ‘Mrs B., always a pleasure,’ he said, glancing briefly at her before returning to the hole in the panelling where he had wedged his tweezers. ‘Get a good look at the body, did you?’

  ‘Enough to stay with me for a couple of nights, thanks. She turned her head.’

  ‘Oh, you noticed that? Yes, the bullet wouldn’t have exited if she’d stayed still.’

  ‘Maybe something distracted her at the last moment.’ Serena turned her own head to the right of the reception desk. There was only a vase of flowers on a pedestal, a squiggly painting of a man on a diving board and a long Japanese sword mounted on a red wooden wall bracket. ‘Or maybe she was already expecting something bad to happen.’

  ‘Well, this is one to write home about.’ Wallace grunted and twisted and pulled at the splintered wood, finally removing a squashed piece of metal, raising it before him with a sigh of contentment. ‘Feast your eyes on that – not many others will.’

  Serena couldn’t see anything to get excited about. ‘What’s so special?’

  Wallace dropped it into a clear bag and twirled it before her. ‘You get dressed up for a posh restaurant, don’t you?’ he asked.

  ‘I haven’t been to a posh restaurant since my old man died, and that didn’t seem like the right occasion for something low-cut,’ she said pointedly. ‘Why?’

  ‘This is fancy. A .45 ACP cartridge, one of the most successful cartridges ever, designed by John Browning. It doesn’t over-penetrate.’

  ‘Neither did my old man. What’s your point?’

  ‘That means if it enters head-on it’s unlikely to injure anyone standing behind the original target. But she moved and it came out from behind her right ear with enough force to smash that decanter. It’s one of the most powerful pistol calibers you can use with a suppressor. Subsonic, in fact. For that reason it’s associated with a very particular weapon.’ Wallace raised an eyebrow. ‘Would you care to hazard a guess?’

  ‘This isn’t the frigging Generation Game, Keith. Just tell me.’

  ‘The .45 ACP Luger, the queen of handguns. Of the originals, only one, marked serial number 2, is known to have survived. Serial number 1 was scrapped after the initial trial. At least three more .45 ACP Lugers were made, one a carbine bearing serial number 21.’

  Serena blew out a noisy breath. ‘It’s late, I’m knackered, just give me the—’

  Wallace would not be rushed. ‘The Luger is more correctly known as the Parabellum-Pistole, a semi-automatic patented in 1898. Originally designed for 7.65 × 22mm Parabellum cartridges, but the a
rmy wanted a larger caliber.’

  ‘Army.’

  ‘That’s right. It’s an expert’s field, this.’

  ‘So it’s rare, which makes it valuable.’

  ‘You’d be hard-pressed to find one for under £1 million,’ said Wallace. ‘Whoever shot Mrs McFarland was using the most expensive handgun in the world.’

  ‘This wasn’t somebody pissed off about being overcharged for the bread rolls, then.’

  ‘Not very likely.’

  ‘A bit over the top for the choice of target, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say,’ said Wallace, still admiring the turning bullet. ‘That’s your department.’

  Gilmore was hopping about outside in the rain, waiting to talk to her. Every time Serena looked at him now, she couldn’t help seeing him without his pants on.

  ‘McFarland has a couple of strikes against him, most recently serving eighteen months for a Section 18,’ he told her. ‘Wounding with intent. See if you can guess who he shanked up.’

  ‘To whom he took a knife,’ said Serena. ‘I thought you were a grammar school boy. It wouldn’t be a Mr Finnegan by any chance, would it?’

  ‘Got it in one.’

  ‘Okay, don’t bring him in, let’s go and get him out of bed. Got an address for me?’

  ‘Pollokshields,’ said Gilmore.

  ‘Ah, an area of intense ethnic diversity, as the social workers call it.’

  ‘That’s not what my grandad used to call it,’ said Gilmore.

  ‘I suppose we’ll have to take my car. I’d like to come back with a full set of tyres.’

  ‘Nearly half the area’s total population is under the age of thirty,’ Gilmore told her.

  ‘Have you been reading books again?’

  ‘It means one lot of lads grow up with gang affiliations and the rest don’t go out. I wonder which category McFarland falls into.’

  ‘Army. Prison. I guess he knows how to look after himself,’ said Serena. ‘I just can’t see him using the world’s most expensive gun.’ They set off toward the patrol vehicle.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ It was the kind of question Gilmore usually asked before going ahead and asking anyway. ‘I heard you were doing really well in London. What brought you back up?’

  ‘It was either here or Monte Carlo,’ said Serena. ‘I had better qualifications for Glasgow.’

  ‘What are those, then?’

  ‘A low sympathy threshold and an incredibly suspicious nature.’

  ‘I think it takes more than that,’ said Gilmore, dodging a sputtering down-pipe.

  ‘It’s a start. You can have a degree and still not be smart.’ This was a dig at his fine education. ‘If a bloke came up to me and said, “I was walking down Duke Street just after midnight and some fella came running up and snatched my phone”, my instinct would be to ask, “What were you doing in Duke Street after midnight?” Anyway, I wanted to see my son again.’

  Gilmore was surprised. She’d never mentioned a son before. ‘He lives in the city?’

  ‘He was living in the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Rehabilitation programme after a bike smash.’

  ‘Must have been serious.’

  ‘Actually I thought it would do him some good coming off the motorbike. The problem was coming off the drugs. Get in.’ She bipped the door of the Vauxhall Astra and slid behind the wheel.

  ‘You want to get back-up?’

  ‘What, for arrest on suspicion of murder? And let someone else get that glory?’ Serena put her foot down hard and made the tarmac shriek before Gilmore had a chance to buckle up his safety belt.

  Ian McFarland was having a nightmare. He was trapped on a fairground waltzer, and every time he tried to get off the damned thing sped up again, until he finally jumped. Moments later he was awake and standing at the bedroom window with sweat on his spine, looking down at the empty wet pavements, and right ahead of him was a patrol car with its lights turned off, creeping forward in silence to block itself across the entrance to the flats.

  He was naked. Grabbing a black T-shirt, his jeans and trainers, he tried to dress while hopping across the room, something no man has ever satisfactorily managed. With the car already outside, he knew there were only seconds to spare before they arrived at the first-floor door.

  Ian had one advantage over the polis. He knew about the new alleyway at the rear of the building; the builders had only opened it a couple of days ago as part of the block’s renovation. He legged it out into the corridor, avoiding the main stairwell, staying back in the shadows. He was still naked, his clothes and trainers wrapped in a bundle under his arm. He needed to put some distance between himself and the polis, to give him time to think.

  There was still rubble lying around on the darkened staircase. Darting between the scaffolding poles, he tried not to stub his toes or at least not cry out when he did, but on the way he dislodged a stack of tiles that crashed down the stairs, causing the footsteps behind him to suddenly change direction. As he fled into the narrow alleyway he found himself confronted by an overweight but not unattractive woman in her late thirties.

  ‘What, you think we didn’t know about the alley?’ she said, blocking the way. ‘You’ve a nice flat tummy on you, but pop your pants on before you get in my car. I don’t want the lads thinking I’ve booked a strippergram.’

  When DCI Serena Black arrived at Barloch Street station the next morning, she immediately went down to the holding cells and spent some more time with McFarland. When she had finished, she headed upstairs and found Gilmore eating muesli from a plastic pot on the ground-floor terrace.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ she said. ‘Put down the bird-seed.’

  Gilmore obediently followed her inside to the bank of computer terminals they were forced to share in management’s misguided attempt to switch the station staff to hot-desking. ‘We’re not going to keep him,’ she warned.

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘I never joke with you, there’s no point. We can keep an eye on him easily enough. He’s no money, no job – where’s he going to go?’

  ‘It’s a murder investigation and he’s the only –’

  ‘He’s not the only suspect and his story is solid.’

  ‘You don’t believe that guff about the concierge service, do you? Of all the rubbish I’ve heard talked in this city that has to be the most stupid.’

  ‘He was naked when we picked him up. What kind of guilty party is so confident that they sleep with no clothes on right after doing something like that?’

  ‘I’ve known a killer cook a pizza in his victim’s house before.’

  ‘So he shot his wife in the face, went home, stripped off and went to sleep, did he? Admittedly he might have done that if he thought there was residue on his clothes, but these are the clothes he was wearing earlier.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘There were no other bloody clothes in the flat. And who’d make up a story as mad as his? Have you ever heard the like? A friggin’ credit card? Why not come up with a normal alibi, or any alibi at all? At home, asleep?’

  ‘I know, but –’

  ‘He says they offered to kill his wife for him, so does he tell us he said Are you crazy, don’t do that? No, he asks how they know about his wife, gets no answer and then agrees with them that yes, he’d pretty much like to strangle her with his own bare hands. And they ring off before he can say anything else. Now, if you think he was lying in bed waiting for us to call – knowing that he’d be first in line to get picked up – plotting out that scenario as a fool proof alibi, then you’re as daft as he is. Then there’s the bullet. Keith Wallace reckons it was made for one of the most expensive guns in the world, which sort of fits with the concierge thing, don’t you think? A high-end operation?’

  ‘What, are you going to tell me there’s some kind of new company in town offering this as a regular service?’ asked Gilmore. ‘I must have missed that episode of Dragon’s Den.’

 
‘Did you just make a joke there? I’m saying it’s a set-up. You’re not very thorough. Did you not read his charge-sheet properly? Mr McFarland’s first conviction was for fraud. He was caught selling fake antiques in Barras Market, said he was trying to raise money for the kids of wounded soldiers.’

  ‘That just proves he’s an accomplished liar, doesn’t it?’

  ‘No, because he really was trying to raise money for them. What he didn’t do was bother to check where the antiques were coming from. I think somebody sent him the card because they heard he was a bit of a mug. And where could they have found that out?’

  ‘From the people he fenced the antiques for?’

  ‘From his wife,’ said Serena wearily. ‘He was out of the country for two tours of duty, and she hooked up with this fellow Finnegan.’

  ‘Then he had all the more reason to want her dead.’

  ‘Let me guess, when you were at school you were the one at the back of the class mucking around with his mates instead of paying attention, weren’t you?’

  ‘No, I was –’

  ‘It was a rhetorical question. Ian McFarland has a gullible nature. He didn’t realise he was being used to fence smuggled goods, he didn’t notice that his wife was having an affair and when he did find out, he was daft enough to walk into a pub and take a slice out of her lover’s arm.’

  ‘And that’s why you think it was a set-up?’ asked Gilmore, frowning.

  Serena rolled her eyes to the heavens. ‘What more do you need?’

  ‘The credit card,’ said Gilmore.

  ‘He says it freaked him out and he threw it away.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘I can see I’m going to have to play my ace,’ said Serena, grinning. Gilmore knew that grin and dreaded it. ‘I’ve got the phone call. It’s true that to the untutored ear – such as yours, for example – it might sound like an agreement to let someone kill his wife, but it proves he was talking to a third party.’

  ‘They traced it?’

  ‘To a throwaway.’

  ‘So what do we do now?’

  Serena peered out of the window and checked the sky. ‘We pay a visit to the boyfriend, Jake Finnegan. Do you consider yourself a good Scot?’