Chapter 8
EDINBURGH
‘Are you not riding with me in the cramped prison van that shouldn’t be allowed to carry stray dogs, never mind human beings?
’ Gabriel Kane said as he shuffled out of the hospital, wearing a brightly coloured boiler suit as he was considered a flight risk, shackled in chains, flanked by two heavily built uniformed officers who weren’t armed.
No firearms to be next to Kane at any given time.
That was what the sharpshooters were for.
‘I’ve never been in the back of one of those things, and I don’t intend to start now,’ Brodie said.
‘I have to say, that young ginger-haired hooligan with the rifle over there looks like he might be having too much fun,’ Kane said, nodding in the direction of one of the snipers.
‘Make you nervous?’ Brodie asked. ‘Maybe you could talk to your therapist about your life choices.’
‘You may mock, Liam, but if he starts shooting then he might miss me and hit you.’
Brodie took a few steps back. ‘Let’s give him a better shot then, shall we?’
‘Laugh if you must, but you know how gingers can be. They’ve been known to go off their head. He might start cracking off a few just for fun. Not all lunatics are like me, you know. Just ask Ruth; some of them wear uniforms.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind next time I’m in Tesco.’
Kane was ushered into the van, and put into one of the single cells, while there were other armed officers in the other cells.
‘Toodle-pip,’ Kane said as the door was shut on him. Then the back door of the van was closed and locked. The engine was already running with two of the prison transporting crew in the cab, ready to follow the escort vehicles.
‘He’s a fascinating man,’ Catherine Wheeler said, walking up to Brodie. ‘I had a very nice chat with him. Maybe we could have a chat later? Over dinner?’
‘Sorry, I’m busy,’ Brodie said. He looked around to see if Ruth had heard and she was standing with raised eyebrows; maybe the woman she thought was a nice person wasn’t so nice after all.
‘Come on, Trudi,’ a man standing close by said to her. ‘We want to be following the convoy.’
‘I’m coming, Ricky,’ Catherine said, and Brodie could see the flash of anger as her TV persona slipped for a second. ‘Liam Brodie, this is Ricky Brent, my producer. The man with the camera is Travis.’
‘How you?’ Ricky said, staring at Brodie. It was obvious that – apart from not being able to string a full sentence together – he was holding out for being asked to dinner by Wheeler, and wasn’t pleased that this detective, who hadn’t even met Wheeler before, was being invited out tonight.
‘Busy,’ Brodie said. The press weren’t his favourite species of human being, and the TV crowd were one step above bottom feeders.
‘Let’s get the car started,’ he said to Ruth, who stepped around the TV crew and walked beside Brodie.
‘Hold up,’ Rob Cross said, rushing to catch up with Brodie and Ruth. ‘I’d like to cadge a lift with you. That nutbag has got me all wired up. I’m glad that we don’t carry guns. Sometimes I’d be tempted. You know he called me a fat bastard?’ Cross said, stepping in line with Brodie.
‘You? That’s ridiculous. What was he thinking?’
‘Sometimes I can’t tell if you’re taking the piss out of me or not,’ Cross said, opening the back door of Brodie’s car and plonking himself in as Ruth got in the front.
‘Should Ruth and I sit on the same side of the car to counterbalance you, sir?’ Brodie said with a straight face, bending to look in. ‘Wouldn’t want the car tipping over.’
‘You’re hilarious.’
Lucy jogged across the car park. ‘You mind if I join you all?’ she asked, poking her head in.
‘Not at all. Jump in the back,’ Brodie said.
‘I’d rather just sit,’ she said with a grin, getting in.
Ruth laughed as Brodie got behind the wheel.
‘I don’t know how you do it, Ruthie,’ Cross said, ‘talking to Kane all the time.’
‘I only have to do it once in a while. When he asks for me. Otherwise, he has his own psychiatrist.’ She smiled at Cross. ‘I’m sure you have to talk to a lot worse on a daily basis.’
‘And that’s just the high heid yins,’ Lucy said.
‘Belt up,’ Brodie said as he started the car.
‘Beg your pardon?’ Cross said.
Brodie grabbed his seat belt and stretched it out after clicking it in. ‘Seat belt.’
‘I knew that.’
They followed the convoy of police vehicles out of the hospital and a battery of flashes greeted them as press photographers snapped their photos, before jumping into their cars.
The route had been well planned, and police patrol vehicles were already blocking the roads to the north of Edinburgh. No press would get near Kane.
‘It’s inevitable that some of those paparazzi arseholes with lenses bigger than their dicks will get a shot of Kane,’ Cross said, tempted to give them the vickies as they passed, but he stopped himself. All he needed was a video of him mouthing ‘go fuck yourself’ to appear on the news.
‘You need to get tinted windows on this thing,’ Cross said.
‘I told him that,’ Ruth said, turning to look at him.
‘You also suggested a set of furry dice to hang from the rear-view mirror,’ Brodie reminded her.
‘I was pulling your leg,’ she said, looking back at Brodie again.
‘You know what gets me?’ Cross said. ‘He won’t tell us who she is until we find her,’ he said, answering his own question. ‘Same as last time and the time before that. Then he gloats.’
‘You have to understand that he’s playing a game and he wants us to know he’s in charge,’ Ruth said. ‘He’s in this game right now, and when he takes us to where she is, that game is over.’
‘And he gets his little perk, in accordance with the justice minister,’ Brodie said.
They made good time with the motorcycle outriders.
The cemetery was old, the place unkempt with an abandoned look. The council didn’t waste their money on keeping the weeds and overgrown grass at bay.
Brodie followed the van as Kane gave his instructions to the Uniform inside the back of the van. They drove down the driveway that had been overtaken by weeds.
‘I don’t like this,’ Cross said, looking out the windows.
‘The armed team are already here and they’ll be taking up positions when we stop,’ Brodie said.
When they got out of the car, he could hear the police helicopter overhead. A truck came in behind the convoy, pulling a trailer with a Bobcat: a small tracked digger with a bucket on the front.
‘Imagine coming in here after dark,’ Lucy said, looking around. They were in a smaller, older part of the cemetery, separated from the main part by a high stone wall that was covered in ivy.
‘No thanks,’ Cross said, pulling a face, like he’d just stepped in something.
They watched as Kane was brought through the archway. He was smiling despite being shackled.
‘She’s in here somewhere,’ he said, locking eyes with Brodie.
‘Your lawyer has possession of the papers with the agreement on them,’ Brodie said. ‘We can’t renege on the deal. You’ll get Netflix. And the other thing.’
‘Alright, then. Why are we standing around when there’s work to be done?
Oh, and I can tell you for a fact that you’re going to need the Bobcat.
I know you brought it along, just on the off chance that I wasn’t talking nonsense and was going to give you the runaround, but tell the driver to start it up. ’
Lucy nodded to Brodie and walked away, skirting Kane, not so much in case he lunged at her, but the other way round.
Brodie looked around, at the gravestone outlines in the wall. Many of the gravestones now lay on the ground where they had fallen or were pulled over. It was the council’s policy to have the groundskeepers knock over loose headstones, so it looked like a battlefield of fallen warriors.
The driver approached, gave Kane a look that suggested he might find a suitable orifice to ram a shovel if the older man should even think about having a go, then got on with measuring the width of the archway. He crouched down, his jeans slipping, giving the world a view of his arse crack.
The men turned while Lucy wasn’t quite as quick.
‘Look away, look away,’ Cross said to her. ‘You’ll go blind.’
‘Does nothing for me, sir,’ she said.
‘It’ll fit,’ the Bobcat driver said to nobody in particular, and walked back to the trailer to unhitch the piece of equipment.
Lucy came back through and they stood around, Brodie looking at the small machine with more admiration than was really called for, thinking that most of the men there would have admitted to wanting a go on it after the driver was finished.
The driver steered the Bobcat expertly through the archway and stopped, waiting to be told what gravestone to lift.
‘Well?’ Cross demanded. ‘What fucking gravestone?’
Kane tutted and shook his head the same way he would show his disapproval to a young boy. ‘There are ladies present,’ he said.
‘Just get a move on,’ Cross said.
Kane looked around as if he couldn’t remember which one, then looked over to his right, lifting an index finger within the constraints of the shackles and moving it up and down, as if counting.
‘The first one there. Big white one. Fell off the wall. With my help, of course. And a bloody big sledgehammer and a crowbar.’ He looked at Brodie. ‘See the ivy there? It’s—’
‘Right, we don’t need to listen to any more of your drivel,’ Cross said. ‘You heard the man; first one there. Tip it over sideways then pull back.’
The driver nodded, and turned the Bobcat to the right, churning up the overgrown driveway, flattening the tall grass and chewing up the ground whenever he had to move it from the straight and narrow.
The Bobcat driver angled the machine so he could get the bucket underneath the stone and then he gently lifted it.
It was made to look easy, something they couldn’t have managed manually, and Brodie imagined Kane on top of the wall, sheltered from view from the top floor of the flats opposite, whose view was ruined by tall trees inside the cemetery.
He could see in his mind’s eye the doctor banging away with the sledgehammer until there was enough room for the crowbar, then a resounding thud as it toppled over onto the ground.
‘Fuck me,’ Cross said, and Ruth let out a gasp as they all looked at what had been hidden for years under the gravestone.