#ChooseThePlot Read online

  ‘Steady there, Chief. Don’t want you falling into old Jake Finnegan’s vitals now.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ Black shook the hand away, though in truth she was glad the dour detective had been there, and paying attention. Her momentary dizziness passed almost as quickly as it had come, and she looked around the room in search of the weapon. The three whisky glasses she’d noticed when they’d arrived were still there. They’d lift fingerprints off them, and if they were lucky some DNA too, but it would take time.

  ‘You see a sword the last time we were here?’ she asked Gilmore.

  ‘Aye, there were three of the things on a wee stand. Over there by the…’ He walked to the front desk and the seating area where diners wait for their tables to be ready. Black followed more slowly, noticing the stain where the late Mrs McFarland’s brains had been cleaned off the wooden floorboards. It would take something a bit more industrial to get rid of the reek of Finnegan. In a little alcove between two uncomfortable looking designer sofas, a black lacquered sword stand had been fixed to the wall. It held a short sword and a dagger, both in wooden sheaths. There was space below them for a third, but it was missing.

  ‘Thought so.’ Gilmore had latex gloves on and lifted the dagger almost reverentially from its resting place. He slid the blade slightly from the sheath, revealing polished, gleaming steel. He made to hand it over to DCI Black, then noticed that she’d taken her own gloves off. Horrible things made her palms itch.

  ‘Looks expensive,’ she said.

  ‘I’m no expert. Could be a cheap knock-off from China for all I’d know.’ Gilmore slid the blade back into its sheath and returned the dagger to the stand. ‘Don’t need to be an expert to see there’s one missing though.’

  Ian couldn’t really say how he’d managed to get out of the restaurant and away without being caught. He had little recollection of events beyond the imprinted image of Finnegan’s head parting company with his shoulders, the man who had stolen his wife toppling sideways to the floor in an arc of spraying red. He’d run from that vision almost blindly, instinct keeping him to the shadows and the back alleys he’d known all his life. Only the sinister words and the need to escape drove him on, put distance between him and the crime scene. He was so dazed that it was a long time before he even realised he was carrying something, whatever it was the cadaverous assassin had pressed into his hand. Longer still before he dared look to see what it was.

  He remembered Afghanistan, with its weird mix of intense, dry summer heat and bitter winter cold. The snow in the mountains where the Taliban hid out and the endless fields of opium poppies. He’d tried opium a couple of times, but drugs had never really been his thing. That’s why he’d joined up in the first place. Options weren’t all that many growing up in these parts. Run with a street gang and work your way up the hierarchy from runner to dealer to mover and shaker. Or more likely an enforcer and debt collector given his size and strength. That was what most of his childhood friends had done. It was either that or become the customers who kept the whole trade going. Few escaped, but he’d been one of them and the army had been his salvation.

  Ian slumped down in a darkened doorway several miles away from the restaurant. The police would be there in force by now, not just the nosey DCI and her grumpy-looking sidekick. They were coming, that’s what the man had said, and his words had put the fear of God into him like nothing since that time their patrol had stumbled on an IED two miles out from base camp.

  ‘Jesus!’ He shouted the word out loud, startling a seagull that had been tearing at someone’s discarded kebab on the other side of the street. Ian had been staring at nothing, absentmindedly tapping at the greasy cobbles when he had finally realised what it was he had been carrying all this time, what it was the assassin had pressed into his hand.

  The sword.

  ‘You got anything interesting for me, Tony?’

  DCI Black shivered slightly in the cold air of the mortuary examination theatre. Tony Flenser, the city pathologist was hunched over the naked body of Jake Finnegan, poking and prodding as he went through the post-mortem procedure.

  ‘Not much I can add from the crime scene.’ Doctor Flenser went from the body to a smaller trolley that had been wheeled alongside the main examination table, then picked up the severed head and stared it in the eye.

  ‘The killing strike was extraordinarily accurate. Either that or very, very lucky. Death would have been pretty much instantaneous, although I’ve heard tell that it takes a couple of minutes for consciousness to fully dissipate.’

  ‘You what?’ Black shivered even more. She wasn’t much of a fan of mortuaries at the best of times, but at least she attended PMs. Gilmore was off in the waiting area with a cup of horrible dispensed coffee. Lucky sod.

  ‘Well, the exact moment of death is a fascinating subject. Is it when the heart stops? Or when all electrical activity in the brain is gone?’ Doctor Flenser still held Finnegan’s head, but he seemed to have forgotten it as he turned to face DCI Black. ‘It’s a philosophical question as much as a scientific one, but in this instance it’s well worth considering.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘Oh yes. See, Finnegan’s head was cut off in one swift blow from a very sharp blade. His body wouldn’t have registered what happened to it until his blood pressure dropped…’ The pathologist remembered what he was carrying, held it up as if to illustrate the point.

  ‘So he’d have been conscious?’

  ‘For a minute or two. I suspect he’d have been confused for a while, then the realisation would have seeped in at much the same rate as oxygen starvation robbed him of reasoning. Mind you, the drugs wouldn’t have helped either.’

  ‘Drugs?’

  ‘Oh yes. He’d taken cocaine not long before he died. Quite a lot of it, if the residue in his nasal passage is anything to go by. Looks to be pretty pure, too.’

  It wasn’t exactly surprising news, Black realised. Finnegan had form for dealing in his misspent youth, after all. Even if he’d been smart enough to avoid being caught recently. They’d always suspected the restaurant was both a supply point for the city’s more well-heeled addicts and a means of laundering substantial amounts of drug money, but Finnegan was a slippery customer – his business partner even more so – making it all but impossible to pin anything on them. Of course, Finnegan had just lost his girlfriend to an assassin’s bullet, so that might have explained his need for self-medication.

  ‘Why the long face?’ Doctor Flenser tilted the head forward as he asked the question, which really didn’t help.

  ‘You know how it goes, Doc. Every answer brings a dozen more questions.’ And she was going to have to talk to Alessandro Ribisi, too. That was enough to make anyone gloomy.

  The Over Easy was closed. That was the first sign. Ian hadn’t worked there long, but in the few short months he’d held down the job, it had never really shut. And certainly not in the middle of the afternoon. Now a sign hung in the front window telling hungry patrons to come back later. He tried the handle, but it was locked. Peering through the glass showed only tables with chairs stacked upside down on top of them, the counter at the back of the room cleared. He went around the back, eyes always on the lookout for the police even though they were rarely to be seen in this part of town. The wheelie bins were overflowing with cardboard boxes, the reek of rotting meat and vegetable peelings filling the warm air with a sickening miasma.

  Ian hammered on the fire exit door, rattled the metal roll-up where the deliveries were made, but there was no answer. He leaned back against the dirty stone wall, slumping to the ground in despair. The sword was still in his hand, the shiny black lacquer made greasy by his fingerprints. Was that why the assassin had given it to him? Told him to run? He shivered at the memory of that voice as he slid the blade partially out. It was shiny where it wasn’t stained with blood. Jake Finnegan’s blood.

  ‘Cool. That yours then mister?’

  Ian started, snapped the blade back home and loo
ked up to see a young boy standing in the narrow alleyway astride a bike that was surely too small for him. He must have been about ten, though sometimes it was hard to tell. Scotland might have been one of the richest nations in the world according to the economists, politicians and bankers, but that didn’t mean those at the bottom of the pile had as much to eat as they needed. Malnutrition had always been a problem in parts of the city, and those parts seemed to be growing. Not helped by a culture that thought a deep fried Mars bar counted as one of your five a day.

  ‘You any idea why they’re closed?’ Ian nodded his head towards the Over Easy.

  ‘Polis came round this morning. Don’t know what they was lookin’ for.’

  Ian clenched tight on the sword at the mention of the police.

  ‘Here, they wasn’t looking for youse were they? Is there a reward?’ The kid’s eyes lit up at the thought of riches beyond his meagre imagination and he leapt onto his bike, pedalling away like mad. Ian could have caught up with him at a half run, but then what? He wasn’t a killer, quite the opposite. He’d seen quite enough death in Afghanistan, let alone at home. Let the kid run and tell the cops. He’d wait for them here. Hand himself in and accept whatever fate threw at him.

  A quiet of sorts descended on the alleyway. It was never silent in the city; there was always the background roar of the motorway, the dull susurrus of a half a million people just existing. A jet overhead whined out its contrail into the afternoon sky, headed for Paisley or Ayr or somewhere even more exotic, and he waited for the police to come.

  Ian couldn’t have said how long he waited. He stopped noticing the foul stench of garbage, forgot about the distant hubbub, even the sword held loosely in his hands. There was nothing but the memory of the past few hours, going round and round in his head. When had it all started to go wrong? When that Scouse git had kicked up a fuss? Maybe he should have given him more of a kicking. But it went back further than that. Further than the dead-end job, the stint in jail, Mandy leaving him. Further back even than the army days, maybe. It was the city itself that dragged him down, the city that had raised him to be nothing.

  ‘What the heck are you doing here?’

  Ian looked up, expecting to see police surrounding him. He had reached rock bottom and was ready to hand himself over. Prison hadn’t been that bad, really. Not once you worked out who to avoid, who to run errands for. It was a warm bed at night and three square meals a day, even if the boredom could kill. No, he could cope with going back inside. Not as if there was anything for him out here.

  So convinced was he that he’d been caught, he was almost offering up the sword before he realised that there was only one man standing in front of him, and a man he knew. A man who until very recently had been his boss.

  ‘Jesus wept, McFarland. You look awful.’

  Charlie Over ran the Over Easy, in as much as sitting in an office at the back of the building and counting the money was the same as running the business. It was the manager, his partner Clive, who did most of the heavy lifting and who had fired Ian just the day before.

  ‘Been a bit of a rough time.’

  ‘No kidding. We had the cops around earlier asking all sorts of questions. You’re trouble, you know that?’

  ‘Sorry.’ Ian levered himself back to his feet, using the sheathed sword as a stick. He felt like an old man. ‘Would you believe me if I said none of it was my fault?’

  Charlie looked at him, cocking his head to one side as he pulled a set of jangling keys from the pocket of his padded hoody. ‘Probably. Doesn’t much help me run a business though.’

  ‘Aye, well. Sorry about that.’

  ‘What are you doing here, anyway? I thought Clive sacked you.’ Ian stood to one side to let Charlie get to the door. He’d been so deep in his despair he’d forgotten why he’d come back to the Over Easy. Who he’d come to find. With the realisation came the memories.

  ‘I was looking for Golden, actually.’

  Charlie laughed. ‘Dream on lover-boy. She’s way out of your league. ‘’Specially looking like that.’

  ‘Actually I came here to warn her about something. Someone. They might be after her.’

  Charlie raised a quizzical eyebrow. ‘After her? How? As in…’ He ran a finger across his neck in a manner that made Ian wince at the recollection of Jake Finnegan’s end.

  ‘They killed Mandy. Last night. Shot her between the eyes because of something she knew.’

  ‘Jeez! Who did?’

  ‘I don’t know who they are. Alessandro Ribisi’s behind it, though.’

  Charlie flinched at the sound of the name, clicked the key in the lock and pushed open the door, all the while glancing from side to side as if they were being watched. ‘You’d better come inside.’

  It was strange to see the Over Easy so empty and silent. Ian only knew it as a hive of activity and a place of constant noise. With the lights off, and the only illumination filtering through the greasy windows at the front, it had the air of a long-abandoned house.

  ‘In here.’ Charlie indicated the door to his office. Ian had only ever been in there once before, at his so-called job interview. He’d found out about the job from his parole officer; he suspected she had an arrangement whereby she dumped the recently-released here on a regular basis. They either did OK for themselves and moved on to better pastures, or they sank back into their old ways and ended up back at the Bar-L. Ian had intended to be the former, but life seemed to have other plans for him.

  ‘Grab us a coffee, would you?’ Charlie wound his way around to the seat behind the desk and slumped down heavily. Ian looked around the office, saw no obvious coffee machine and headed back out to the kitchens. It wasn’t until he went to switch the boiler on that he realised his hands were filthy with dirt and blood. He could taste the bile in his mouth from throwing up earlier, and he still had the sword. As he set it down on the stainless steel worktop, it felt like a world of weight lifted off his shoulders. His hand relaxed and the sensation carried on up his arm. So much hatred, confusion, anger and madness tied up in that terrible, efficient weapon.

  Ian scrubbed at his hands and arms in the big sink where he’d normally wash the pots and pans. Then he took up the sword again, hesitant lest it cast its strange spell on him again. He washed the outside first, scrubbing at the black lacquer sheath until it gleamed. Then he slipped the blade free. Jake Finnegan’s blood swirled in the hot, soapy water, then rinsed away under the powerful hose. Cleaned and dried, he slid the blade back into its sheath and hid the whole thing behind the preparation benches, nestling amongst the mouse droppings, grease and dust that were never cleaned up, never seen. Finally he made two mugs of instant coffee and headed back to Charlie’s office.

  ‘Sorry I took so long. Was a bit grubby.’

  ‘Just a bit?’ Charlie too his mug, sipped from it, then leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk. ‘You’re in a spot of bother then, Ian.’

  ‘Like I said. They killed Mandy. Killed Jake Finnegan too. Reckon they’re trying to pin it all on me.’

  ‘Oh, I’m almost certain they are. Ribisi’s always been a clever one like that. Thorn in my bloomin’ side he is, too.’

  ‘This place?’ Ian looked around the grubby office. ‘Never really thought of it as being competition for the Water House.’

  ‘Ha ha! You really crack me up, Ian. Think that’s why I like you.’ Charlie pulled open a drawer in his desk, fished around in it and came up with a wodge of grubby ten and twenty pound notes. He counted out a pile that was comfortably more than Ian could earn in a month, pushed it across the desktop.

  ‘Take it.’

  ‘What for?’ Ian wanted to. Right now he didn’t have anything more than the loose change in his pockets, and that was so meagre it barely jingled.

  ‘Service rendered. Or maybe call it an upfront payment for services you will render.’

  ‘I’m not going to hurt anyone. Not for you.’

  ‘If I wanted someone hu
rt, Ian, there’s far more ruthless creatures out there I’d go to. No, I want you to go and speak to Golden. Find out what she knows about our mutual friend Alessandro.’

  ‘Can’t you speak to her? You’re her boss, after all.’

  Charlie laughed. ‘Christ, I can see why they picked you for a patsy. You really don’t have a clue what’s going on here, do you?’

  Ian shook his head.

  ‘Probably for the best. For now, at least. Go speak to Golden. She’s far more likely to talk to you than to me, anyway.’ Charlie nodded at the cash, still lying on his desk. ‘Go on. Take it. I won’t ask anything else of you for that.’

  Ian tried not to show his haste as he reached out and grabbed the notes, folded them into his back pocket. ‘There’s just the one problem,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where Golden lives.’

  Charlie scribbled an address onto a Post-it note and handed it over. ‘Doubt you’ll find her there, but it’s as good a place as any to start.’

  ‘What were you even doing there without backup?’

  DCI Black didn’t like her boss. It didn’t help that Superintendent Archie Goodison was younger than her, and not by a small margin. He’d shimmied up the greasy pole through a combination of sucking up, toadying and crushing anyone who might have got in his way. On the other hand he was a shrewd politician. Just a pity he was in the police and not making a name for himself over on the east coast at Holyrood.

  ‘I was revisiting a crime scene that had already been processed, sir. Didn’t think I’d need an armed response unit. I had Happy with me. He’s dangerous enough on his own.

  ‘Very funny. You know policing’s a team sport, Serena.’ It wasn’t voiced as a question.

  ‘Yes, I did read the manual.’ Black didn’t much like people using her first name – hadn’t since school days when the cool girls had called her ‘Serene’, leaving off the final A. If anyone was less serene than her, she’d not met them yet, and the jibe only made her angrier. Age had given her greater control over her temper, but nothing annoyed her more than an upstart like Goodison treating her like some kind of child. Except perhaps that he knew it annoyed her and that was why he did it.