Censored Details

Catherine stood up as Graham Sunderland walked in through the open door of her office. She knew he was coming, even before she saw his approach through the glass partition, because he’d phoned a couple of minutes ago to make sure she was at her desk before ‘popping over’. This made her curious, and a little uneasy. The Detective Chief Superintendent didn’t ‘pop’ anywhere. For a man of his status he was far from a self-important individual, but it had been a long time since he’d needed to tread lightly around these parts.

She guessed it was about the Fullerton case, but that was the source of her unease, as she had made sure he was thoroughly up to speed on how it was progressing.

He glanced quizzically down at her desk, his eye drawn immediately to the document that was open in front of her, due no doubt to the thick black bars defacing parts of it.

‘Looks pretty hardcore,’ he said. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s courtesy of the MoD, concerning a Royal Marines commando by the name of Tron Ingrams.’

Sunderland gazed back blankly.

‘Fallan,’ she clarified. ‘He had his name changed legally, got all his documents in order and then signed up to serve his country.’

‘A good way to disappear if you’re trying to reinvent yourself.’

‘I’m not sure how much reinvention there is when your job is still all about killing people.’

Sunderland looked a little shocked at her tone.

‘I know you’re a bit of a peacenik Catherine, but I think that’s a bit of a harsh generalisation regarding—’

‘I wasn’t generalising. He was a sniper. It’s one of the few details that hasn’t been redacted. Look at this: his actual service record looks like a Saudi newspaper, all these black bars.’

‘How long did he serve?’

‘Just shy of twelve years. Long enough for it to be widely assumed that he was dead, but apparently not long enough to let sleeping dogs lie.’

Sunderland grimaced a little, as though reeling from a regrettable truth. She knew that he had worked under Fallan’s father, back when Sunderland first joined CID, and deduced that whatever sympathy he felt was not at the fate of Fullerton.

‘I gather he’s been charged,’ he said.

‘Yes, sir. Dom Wilson at the PF’s office is handling the case.’

‘Too bad Wilson’s old man stepped back from the limelight. It would have been amusing to watch father and son cross swords as prosecution and defence.’

‘Well, technically . . .’ she reminded him.

‘I know,’ he acknowledged. ‘And did I hear right that Fallan still hasn’t asked for a lawyer?’

‘Strange but true.’

Sunderland took this in while looking away out of the window. Again that regret.

‘Were you aware of him?’ she asked. ‘When he was younger, I mean.’

He nodded gently.

‘Only through his father.’

‘Is there much that you know about him from back then? We’re still struggling to come up with a clear picture for the motive.’

‘I know we failed him,’ Sunderland said. ‘Nothing you’ve heard about Iain Fallan was exaggerated, and he was no gentler with his family than he was with anybody else. I was young and he was my boss. I tell myself I was powerless, that there was nothing I could do, but there were things I could have done . . .’

He looked for a moment like he might be about to elaborate, but no. Whatever he had come close to revealing was hastily covered up again like the black marks on the Ingrams file, as Sunderland’s face became all business once again.

‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said, producing a USB stick from his jacket pocket.

‘What’s this?’

‘You ran a subscriber check with Vodafone, regarding Fullerton’s mobile. Intelligence bureau passed it on to Abercorn by mistake.’

She took it from him, restraining an instinct to snatch. Abercorn’s name could do that.

‘By mistake . . .’ she began, but Sunderland held up a hand. Don’t go there.

And she wouldn’t. Not with Sunderland, at least.

Catherine took a last sip of the coffee she’d been drinking before Sunderland showed. It was tepid and bitter but his visit had left a worse taste, and now she was going to address it. She tossed the cup into her wastebasket and headed for Abercorn’s office.

His door was open and he was typing, his attention so fixed upon the keyboard and the screen that he remained oblivious to her standing in his doorway until she deliberately cleared her throat. She held up the flash drive but said nothing, leaving it entirely in his court so that she could analyse his response.

He stared at her hand and then at her, confusion on his face at being yanked from his immersion giving way to annoyance as he deduced the reason for the interruption.

‘What?’ He sounded genuinely irritated, but it was a good gambit if he didn’t want to give anything away.

‘No chatter,’ she quoted. ‘No rumblings. Our pants are round our ankles. So what are you doing intercepting my subscriber check on Fullerton’s mobile?’

‘I didn’t intercept it. It got sent to me by mistake.’

‘Just at random? What, of all the folk it could have been accidentally sent to, by sheer chance it turned out to be the one person with the biggest interest in Stevie Fullerton’s business?’

‘No, of course not at random: that’s the point. Somebody at Intell must have seen Fullerton’s name and assumed the check was for LOCUST. I was going to bring it to you, but I’m up to my eyes here, so when Sunderland came in . . .’ He held out his palms and sighed with exasperation. ‘Look, Catherine, not everything I do is a fucking conspiracy, okay?’

Catherine belatedly saw the logic in this and was bracing herself for a sheepish moment of apology, but it looked like Abercorn was beating her to it. He seemed aware that he had lost the rag and appeared to be climbing down.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Just a lot on my plate.’

‘It’s okay.’

‘No, look, I’ve got something for you here.’

He sounded more conciliatory than Catherine could ever remember, and began rummaging in the chaos of his desk.

‘I asked around about your symbol: you know, the thing on Fullerton’s head. A couple of older guys recognised it. Goes back to the late eighties, they said: perhaps significantly, the time when Fullerton and Fallan were partners in crime. It was, among Glasgow bampots, what might these days be called a meme.’

‘A meme?’

‘You know, an idea that replicates like a virus. It was associated with a brief spate of tit-for-tat gangland murders, and from there it kind of bled into the wider bam consciousness. Started off getting daubed on dead guys as a way of saying: “This is payback for the pal of ours that you killed and daubed this symbol on.” Before long it’s appearing as graffiti, daft wee neds putting it on folk’s walls as a way of saying: “You’re getting it.” They were copying it because they thought it carried some kind of heavy hard-man kudos.’

‘Tit-for-tat?’ she asked apprehensively. ‘So do they know where it started?’

‘Yes and no. And by that I mean they know whose was the first body it appeared on, but nobody has a clue what it signified, or whether it already had a precedent we don’t know about.’

‘Who was the first body?’

‘Low-level headcase named Paul Sweeney. He had links to Tony McGill.’

Abercorn handed her a brown paper wallet, inside which was a ten-by-eight crime-scene photo. She felt something inside her lurch in anticipation of what she might be about to see.

‘But more significantly,’ Abercorn went on, ‘the fourth and final one in the to-me, to-you cycle was Nico Fullerton, Stevie’s brother.’

Catherine opened the envelope and felt a modest flush of relief. The shot was taken from down low, probably a crouching position, looking up at the symbol spray-painted on a wall. She could make out the bare feet of Nico Fullerton’s corpse in the bottom right of the frame, but was spared any more gruesome details by the angle of the shot.

‘How did you dig this up?’ she asked. ‘Who were the officers you spoke to?’

‘I didn’t say they were officers,’ Abercorn replied, which was when she knew that was all she was getting.