Simon was booked on the 14.45 flight from Belfast City, which would get him into Edinburgh at just after four o’clock. Connor left Stirling after his meeting with Ford, toyed with the idea of stopping in to see his gran on the way past Bannockburn, decided against it.
He needed to drive. And think.
Connor had always found there was something calming about driving. Being behind the wheel was like entering a Zen state, the focus needed to steer the car, accelerate, brake, change gear and check mirrors freeing another part of his mind – the place where his subconscious pondered the problems he was facing, stripped them down to find an answer. And that was what he desperately needed: answers.
According to Ford, the post-mortem examination of Helen Russell had shown injuries consistent with those of the other two victims – severe trauma, especially pronounced around the joints. Connor remembered his time in Belfast, seeing men walking down the street, their stiff-legged hobble or palsied arms at odd angles marking them out. They had been knee-capped or fried. In the bad old days, paramilitaries on both sides had used those punishments as a way of exerting control through fear and intimidation. Since the end of the Troubles, the methods remained but the motivations changed as the paramilitaries turned their tactics to waging war on rival gangs. And the threat of having a kneecap or an elbow shattered with a bullet or a crowbar was a language everyone understood, which was probably why the volume of such attacks had risen instead of falling since the bombs and balaclavas had been put in storage.
The post-mortem had also thrown up another commonality: the presence of a tattoo or, at least, its ghostly after-image on Helen Russell’s body. It had been found just above her left hip, a small, angry cluster of healing blisters, the shape of the tattoo a tracing below the wounded skin.
Connor remembered the image Ford had shown him – what looked like a letter G surrounded by four As, their apexes pointing outward, like the points on a compass. ‘Took a little while to track it down,’ Ford told him, ‘but we found it eventually. It’s the mark of something called Alba Gheal Ann An Aonadh, 4AG as they liked to be called. Sprang up in 1978 or ’79, around the time of the first devolution referendum. Literally means “White Scotland in the Union”, and was mostly made up of bored skinheads looking for an excuse to cause trouble. But guess who they got some help from?’
Connor didn’t have to guess. The answer was obvious. Back then, it was common for paramilitary groups to look for allies and enemies across the water. And somehow, 4AG had forged links with the Red Hand Defenders.
So, Helen Russell had been a member of 4AG. But the work to remove the tattoo was recent, according to the pathologist, state-of-the-art laser work rather than the old techniques, which more or less boiled down to acid burns or sanding the tattooed area down to the muscle. Why had she waited until now to have it removed? What had triggered the decision? And how did it link her to Billy Griffin? The age difference precluded them knowing each other in the seventies: Billy would have been little more than a toddler in 1979, with Russell already into her mid-twenties. So how were they linked?
And why had they both had to die?
Whatever was going on, Billy Griffin was the key. According to what Ford had told Connor, he had disappeared without a trace following his release from Barlinnie after his little stunt in George Square. His last known address was a flat in the Govan area of Glasgow, but officers who had checked the place after his body had been identified had found only an empty strip of rubble-strewn land where the flats had been, another demolition of the past to make way for the regeneration of the area.
So where had Billy gone after he had been released from prison? What had he done to survive – and how had he ended up decapitated and dumped in Stirling? Whatever he had been doing was almost certainly illegal – there were no records of any National Insurance payments or even of benefits being claimed since his release. He was a ghost, working in the shadow industries where tax was a myth and employment rights meant the right to keep quiet about what you were doing.
The thought came to Connor as he was passing Grangemouth, the industrial heart of the town dominated by the apocalyptic sprawl of an old oil refinery, spewing white-grey smoke into the pale blue of the afternoon sky. He smiled, then tapped a button on the steering wheel, accessing the hands-free phone option. Told his phone to do a Google search, found the website, told it to dial the number.
The ring of a phone filled the car, followed by a dull clunk as it was answered.
‘MacKenzie Haulage,’ a voice that was no stranger to cigarettes said.
‘Hi, could I speak to Mr MacKenzie, please?’
Boredom slowed the voice at the end of the phone to a drawl. ‘Who’s calling?’
‘It’s Connor Fraser. He’ll remember me – we met at his daughter’s place yesterday. I think he’ll want to speak to me. I have a favour to ask.’