“Someone been spiking your drinks, DI Gray?”
“I’m talking about
“It’s a bit late for all this, isn’t it?”
“Tomorrow morning . . . just you and me. So be here at sparrow-fart or you’ll miss all the fun!”
The phone went dead. Rebus stared at it, considered calling back . . . Gray and him in Glasgow: meaning what? Meaning Jazz had spoken to Gray, told him Rebus had something to offer? Why Glasgow? Why just the two of them? Was Jazz distancing himself from his old friend? Rebus’s thoughts turned again to the Weasel and Cafferty. Old ties could loosen. Old alliances and allegiances could crumble. There were always points of vulnerability; cracks in the carefully constructed wall. Rebus had been thinking of Allan Ward as the weakest link. . . now he was turning to Jazz McCullough. He went back through to the bathroom, gritted his teeth and plunged his hand into the superheated bathwater, letting the plug out. Then he turned on the cold tap to restore some balance. Back through to the kitchen for a mug of coffee and a couple of vitamin C tablets. Then into the living room. He’d hidden Strathern’s report under one of the sofa cushions.
His bathtime reading . . .
17
Bernie Johns had been a brute of a man, controlling a large chunk of the Scottish drug trade by means of contacts and ruthlessness, disposing of any and all contenders for his crown along the way. People had turned up tortured, maimed or dead — sometimes all three. A lot of people had simply disappeared. There had been talk that such a lengthy and successful reign of terror could be achieved only with the help of the police. In other words, Bernie Johns had been a protected species. This had never been proven, though the “report,” such as it was, made mention of some possible suspects, all based in and around Glasgow, but none of them Francis Gray.
Johns had lived for a large part of his life in an unassuming public housing unit in one of the city’s toughest projects. He’d been “a man of the people,” gifting money to local charities and benefiting everything from toddlers’ playgrounds to old people’s shelters. But the giver was also a tyrant, his munificence tempered by the knowledge that he was paying for power and invulnerability. Anyone came within a hundred yards of him on his home turf, he got to know about it. Police surveillance activities were scuppered within ten minutes of their outset. White vans were rumbled: flats were located and attacked. Nobody was going to get near Bernie Johns. There were plenty of pictures of him in the folder. He was tall, broad at the shoulders, but not physically massive. He wore fashionable suits, his wavy blond hair always carefully groomed. Rebus could imagine him as a child, playing the Angel Gabriel in his school’s Christmas show. The eyes had hardened in the interim, as had the jaw, but Johns had been a handsome man, his face sporting none of the nicks and slashes associated with longevity in a gangster.
And then Operation Clean-Cut had come along, involving several forces in a long-term surveillance and intelligence operation which had ended with a haul of several thousand tabs of Ecstasy and amphetamines, four kilos of heroin, and about the same weight of cannabis. The operation had been branded a success, and Bernie Johns had been put on trial. It wasn’t the first time he’d appeared in a dock. Three previous charges, all dropped due to admin cock-ups or by dint of witnesses changing their minds.
The case against him wasn’t watertight this time either — the Procurator Fiscal’s office had admitted as much in a letter Rebus found in the folder. It could go either way, but they would give it their best shot. Any police officer even rumored to have had links to Johns and his gang was sidelined throughout the investigation and trial. The team kept working even through the duration of the trial, ensuring evidence wasn’t changed or witnesses lost. It was only after Johns’s conviction that he started complaining that he’d been shaken down and ripped off. He wasn’t naming any names, but the story seemed to be that he’d been told that certain pieces of evidence could be “contaminated.” There was a price to pay, of course, and he’d been willing to pay it. One of his men had been dispatched to fetch the money from a secret stash. (Police had found little at Johns’s actual home: around five thousand in cash and a couple of unlicensed pistols.) The underling didn’t come back, and when he was tracked down, he told a story that he had been followed to the site and attacked by three men — almost certainly the same people who had done the deal in the first place. They had then cleaned Johns out. Precisely how much was involved was left to the rumor mill. The best estimate of Johns’s accumulated wealth was around the three million mark.
Three million pounds . . .
“Give us some names and we might start to believe you,” Johns had been told by an investigating officer. But Johns had refused. That wasn’t the way he worked; never had been, never would be. The underling, meantime, was found stabbed to death near his home after a night out: the price he’d had to pay for failure. Johns was adamant that this man could not by himself have tricked him, stolen from him. The man had done a runner only because he’d been terrified of the ramifications of the theft. Three million was not the sort of figure Bernie Johns was likely to shrug off as human error.
The stabbing was proof of that.
No doubt he’d had similar fates in mind for the cops — it was assumed they were cops — who’d double- crossed him, but he never got time to put any plan into effect. He’d been stabbed in the neck with a homemade shiv — the painstakingly sharpened end of a soup spoon — by one of the inmates while queueing for breakfast. This inmate, Alfie Frazer, known to all and sundry as “Soft Alfie,” had been one of Francis Gray’s snitches — which gave the investigators their first inkling of who might have been involved in ripping off Bernie Johns.
Gray had been questioned, but had denied everything. It was never made clear precisely why Soft Alfie — known to be academically challenged and never the world’s most perfect physical specimen — would commit a murder. All the investigators knew was that Gray had fought hard to keep Alfie out of prison and that it was believed Alfie owed him as a result. But Alfie had been in on a three-year stretch: was it possible he would have committed himself to a far lengthier term by murdering Johns at Gray’s behest?
The only other valuable piece of the jigsaw had come when it was discovered that on the day Johns’s hapless henchman had been sent to fetch the cash, three officers — Gray, McCullough and Ward — had headed out in Gray’s car. Their excuse when asked about it later: they’d gone out to celebrate the end of the investigation. They named pubs they’d been in, a restaurant where they’d eaten.
This was as much as the High Hiedyins had on the three men. They hadn’t proved profligate spenders, and didn’t appear to have money salted away in hidden bank accounts. The last page of the report detailed Francis Gray’s disciplinary record. The sheet was handwritten and unsigned. Rebus got the feeling it came from Gray’s own chief constable. Reading between the lines, the personal bitterness was all too evident: “this man has been a disgrace . . .”; “verbal abuse of senior officers . . .”; “drunken antics at a social occasion . . .” It was Gray they really wanted. Whatever Rebus’s own reputation, Gray had raised the crossbar. It struck Rebus that they could have turfed Gray out at any time, so why hadn’t they? His reasoning: they were hanging on to Gray, waiting for an opportunity to nail him for Bernie Johns. But with retirement in the offing, they were growing desperate. In their eyes, it was time for payback . . . at any price.
Rebus dried himself off and padded through to the living room. The Blue Nile on the hi-fi, and him on his chair. Stone-cold sober and thinking hard. The file was all conjecture, rumor, stories told by old lags. All the High Hiedyins had to go on was the coincidence of the trio’s day trip taking place on the same day as the supposed money pickup; that and the death of Johns at the hands of one of Gray’s snitches. All the same . . . three million . . . he could see why they wouldn’t want Gray and Co. getting away with it. A cool million apiece. Rebus had to admit, they didn’t look like millionaires, didn’t act like them either. Why not just resign and head off to spend the loot?
Because it would have been proof of a sort, and might have helped launch a full-scale inquiry. Soft Alfie had been questioned half a dozen times in the intervening years, but hadn’t said anything worthwhile. Maybe he wasn’t so soft after all . . .
Again, Rebus wondered if the whole thing was part of some elaborate setup, meant to distract him, maybe leading him to incriminate himself in the Rico Lomax case. He concentrated on the music, but the Blue Nile weren’t about to help him. They were too busy singing beautiful songs about Glasgow.
Glasgow: tomorrow’s destination.
He tapped his fingers in time to the music, tapped them on the cover of the folder Strathern had given
