Brennan swayed on the balls of his feet, pinched the tip of his nose with thumb and forefinger. ‘They never saw anything on the road… car, punter, fucking milk-float?’
‘Not a thing, boss.’
‘Right, Brian… you’re up,’ said Brennan, he pointed to the DS, clapped hands together. ‘Come on, chop-chop, eh.’
Brian rose, ‘I just checked with Dr Pettigrew about an hour ago, the postmortem’s not been done yet.’
‘What?’
Brian shrugged, ‘He’s due in later on… I tried to tell him you wouldn’t be pleased.’
‘Fucking right I’m not… So, is that it?’
Brennan watched Jim Gallagher get up and walk back to the door, he was putting a cigarette in his mouth as he went, mouthed a silent ‘Catch you later’ to the DI. Brennan scanned the rest of the room, looking for a grain of information.
‘Un-fucking-believable. Right, who’s doing the door-to-door?’
McGuire looked in his file, ‘Smeeton’s heading it up. He’s out now. Still early days yet, boss.’
Brennan frowned, ‘Try telling that to the press office when the hacks start on us… Call Smeeton, tell him to update us on the hour, sooner if he turns anything up. And that goes for the rest of you as well, anything comes in I do not want to hear about it second hand. Got it?’
Together, ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good. Right, that’s it. Off you trot.’
Brennan walked towards the whiteboard at the other end of the room. Some pictures the SOCOs had taken had been stuck up there; he removed the photograph of Lindsey Sloan from the file McGuire held and stuck it beside the others. He was writing her name beside the picture when McGuire spoke.
‘Pretty girl?’
Brennan nodded, placed the cap back on the pen. ‘What was Jim Gallagher after?’
McGuire shrugged. ‘Search me.’
‘Let me know if he starts sniffing about, I don’t want him big-footing us.’
McGuire ran a thumb over his chin, ‘Is that likely?’
‘He’s a glory hunter isn’t he. Find out what he’s working on and let me know, eh.’
McGuire nodded. ‘Aye, sure.’
‘And whilst you’re at it I want you to get hold of a profiler.’
‘OK, we’re owed a favour by Northern, I’ll get them to send down McClymont.’
Brennan shook his head, ‘No I want Joe Lorrimer.’
‘Who?’
‘He’s Strathclyde. They might not owe us any favours, though.’
McGuire creased back the corners of his mouth. ‘Benny won’t like it coming out our budget.’
‘Fuck Benny,’ said Brennan. ‘I’ll deal with him in my own way.’
Chapter 8
DI Rob Brennan knew people didn’t like you when you were police. When they found out, they were over cautious around you. They’d hold back, make jokes about watching what they said; but they weren’t joking. The job followed you everywhere, and when someone knew what and who you were their attitude changed. It was always perceptible — pointed, blatant. There were some officers in the ranks who became different people out of uniform, off duty. They changed their personalities and became like class clowns, over eager to please, joking and affecting a false bonhomie. It never helped, thought Brennan, it worsened the situation. People were instinctively wary and raised their guards higher, they thought you were trying to inveigle some useful information out of them or, worse, catch them out.
This was something they never told you about at the training academy; they told you how to think, feel and react on the job, to get the end product they wanted, but the toll the job took on the individual didn’t concern them. Training was pointless, there were some aspects of the job you just couldn’t be taught. Brennan remembered a spell on traffic as a young uniform, he was with another new recruit, a young woman from Stirling called Elsie. They were supposed to be no more than a speeding deterrent, it was a confidence builder for the pair of them — out on their own without a senior officer, free of the buddy system for the first time.
An old Cortina had come haring over the brow of a hill.
‘Jesus, look at the speed of him,’ said Elsie.
Brennan had run to the side of the road instinctively, ‘He’s going to hit that truck if he doesn’t straighten up.’
There was a stationary row of traffic on the other side of the hill and the Cortina veered from side to side when the brakes were applied.
Elsie raised her voice, ‘Rob, he’s going to hit it!’
Brennan felt helpless, what could he do? Suddenly there was a loud thud, a dull noise, a dunt. Not what he had expected. The Cortina connected with the rear of the dump-truck which shuddered slightly but remained largely unmoved.
‘Oh, my God,’ said Elsie, her voice was a shrill wail.
The pair of them jogged to the site of the collision; the driver of the truck was getting out of his cab as Brennan arrived first.
‘Stay inside, sir.’
Brennan saw the two front wheels of the Cortina raised off the ground, the front end of the vehicle was wrapped round the axle of the dump-truck like tinfoil. About a quarter of the bonnet had survived, the windscreen had been destroyed; at least that’s what Brennan’s first thought was.
As he got closer to the car, he saw the driver was still in the front seat, but he could see now that the windscreen had not shattered, it had popped out and severed the driver’s head clear from his shoulders. The driver’s torso, though intact, was showered in bright blood. On the back seat his head had come to rest in a pool of crimson.
‘No. No.’ Elsie appeared behind him, became hysterical.
‘It’s OK.’ Brennan didn’t know what to say. She was in shock. He turned her away from the car. ‘Don’t look, don’t look.’
But she had looked, she had seen a severed head, doused in a profusion of blood, the arteries of the neck still pumping it out. Brennan remembered Elsie now, she was barely twenty at the time. She left the force soon after. As he recalled the accident he knew there were some things no one should have to see, and knew he had seen more than his fair share of them.
‘This is the worst part of the job,’ said McGuire.
Brennan turned in his seat; they were coming into Pilrig. ‘I can think of worse.’
McGuire flitted eyes towards the DI, seemed to be assessing him. He quickly returned his gaze to the road, negotiated a speed bump. ‘Well, what I mean is…’
Brennan cut in, ‘I know, Stevie, it’s not a favourite task of mine.’
‘There just never seem to be the right words.’
‘To tell a parent their child is dead… no, there never are the right words.’
It was one of those unseen aspects of the job, the kind of thing that Brennan had done a thousand times without blinking. There was no way of knowing how to conduct yourself in such situations, he had seen parents fold, crumple, dissolve before his eyes and he had seen others react with utter disbelief. Some had even laughed, thought it was a joke. No two were the same. They all required a different approach, it was about looking into their eyes and delivering the worst piece of news they had ever encountered and understanding that any reaction — even violence — was justified. There was no training manual that could teach you how to do it.
Brennan knew his world — life on the force — was tough, aggressive. It was the pressure of policing, it caused those on the job to change whatever they were before they joined up and become like the rest. It was the culture, but it was a self-defence mechanism too. You smoked, drank, cursed and talked crudely, acted aggressively
