DI Rob Brennan knew his problem: he wouldn’t play the game. He would never be one of those who faded into the background, became part of the office furniture. It was easy for them — the type that had no conscience or guilt attached to playing the game. Kissing the boss’s arse or denying their true thoughts and emotions were their primary responses. To Brennan, each time he succumbed was like a death in him. A part of what made him, gave him strength, simply collapsed; imploded with the defeat. He knew he had always fought back, but he wondered: with enough attacks on him — in quick succession — could he be felled? Just fold; never come back. Life was all about the blows, about the myriad knocks and how you took them. He knew it would be easier to be a wimp — a drone — but it wasn’t in him. Brennan couldn’t deny who he was and so the fear, the worry of the time-bomb going off inside him, remained. He carried it everywhere and lived in the constant presence of its slow tick, tick, tick.
Gallagher wasn’t the first to try and put one over on him; Brennan had been on the force long enough to have outmanoeuvred more than one like him. They didn’t know what they were taking on — it was no game to him. When the job is burned so deeply into a soul, it becomes more than the sum of its parts. It was more than an occupation, a vocation even, to Brennan. It was his life. He had sacrificed so much to the job that he no longer knew where the job began or ended. It was all the job. The job was everything.
He tried to put himself in Gallagher’s mindset, imagine what being on this murder squad meant to the DI. He hadn’t once heard him voice a sympathetic word for the victim, her family. Brennan knew that didn’t necessarily mean anything — there were others on the force, younger than Gallagher, who had learned to bury their emotions deep. But somehow, he had never found himself questioning anyone else’s compassion; it was assumed. With Gallagher there was a lack, a want. It wasn’t a clinical disengagement either, like he had seen the morgue workers adopt; it was as if the emotion was absent. The thought sat like a marker in Brennan’s mind; to him the job was inseparable from his emotions, instincts, feelings — he relied on them to make his way through every case. People were fickle, could spark up or alight on a completely new course at any moment — there was no predicting where they would lead you in an investigation and Brennan relied on his wits. It challenged his logic to watch Gallagher.
The DI had manoeuvred himself into the Chief Super’s ambit; that wasn’t such a big deal, thought Brennan. Benny was a typical careerist, he watched out for himself. He nurtured lackeys and brown-nosers, but only so long as they were not a threat. If they evinced any attempts to climb the greasy pole to his level, he quickly quashed such incursions. Gallagher was no such threat — he was nearing the end of his days in the job, he was in handover mode. So what was in it for Benny? It wasn’t the clean up, because Gallagher had little or no chance of attaining that on his own, his previous failings on the Fiona Gow case had proven that. And Benny was too proud, too pompous to be swayed by any old-school experience that Gallagher might pass on in an avuncular, back-slapping manner; Benny was an egotist, he’d be far more likely to see himself as teaching the old dog new tricks. There was only one possibility that Brennan could countenance: the Chief Super saw Gallagher as a way of keeping one errant DI in check. Benny was using Gallagher to teach Brennan a lesson. And the lesson was, Benny was the boss.
Brennan knew his next meeting with the Chief Super was likely to be an uncomfortable one. There would be some wrist slapping, dressed up as a retreat from the proper arse-caning that he should have delivered; then there would be a detailed account of what was expected of DIs on Benny’s watch; finally, there would be the ‘I’ve no choice in the circumstances’ speech that ended with the repositioning of Gallagher at the front of the murder squad. It was a subtle mix of management psychology and testosterone that Brennan had encountered more than once before. Wullie had said, ‘They’re all out to hack the billiards off you, Rob… It’s a miracle if you get out the force with a full set.’
Brennan had no intention of putting his knackers in a poke for Benny or Gallagher; he liked them where they were. There was only one way to avert that outcome, however, and that was wrapping up the murder of Lindsey Sloan sooner rather than later. He wondered if he’d get the chance.
At the foot of the stairs the desk sergeant stood with an arm resting on the banister; he eyed Brennan and ran a dry tongue over his lower lip as he indicated upwards with a nod. ‘He gone?’
‘Benny?… Aye, thanks for the bail out, mate.’
‘What’s got his goat?’
Brennan felt his chest expand as he took breath. ‘Does he need an excuse?’
Charlie lowered his arm from the banister, stepped closer. ‘Watch that bastard Gallagher, he’s sleekit.’
Brennan was glad that somebody shared his opinion, but Charlie was too much of a fount of gossip to confide in, much as he liked the man. He played possum, ‘Come on, Jim Gallagher… He’s old school.’
Charlie huffed. ‘Who told you that?’
‘You telling me different?’
‘The pair of us joined up around the same time; now, I’m not saying you can read too much into this but do you think he got to be a DI by being a better cop?’
Brennan lowered a consoling hand onto Charlie’s shoulder, joked, ‘Maybe he just had the marbles, mate.’
Charlie bit back. ‘If it was about marbles, mate, I’d be sitting in Benny’s chair now.’ He turned for the front desk, reeled. ‘Ask Wullie Stuart what he thinks of Gallagher, he’s not a fucking fan either.’
Brennan felt a smirk pass up the side of his face; he was glad to have Charlie confirm his suspicions, but people like Charlie were rare on the force, and getting rarer. It would take an army of supporters like him to ward off the Chief Super and Gallagher, and Brennan knew, in reality, he was on his own.
He set out for the interview room, trying to refocus his thoughts onto the more pressing matter of what he was going to say to the Sloans about the brutal murder of their daughter. Brennan felt a band begin to tighten around his chest as he walked; he knew it was stress — the job got you like that, took a grip of you when you least expected it and tried to warn you that something wasn’t right. Brennan didn’t need any reminders.
A few moments ago, he had been staring at the pictures of the Sloans’ daughter — pale-white against the dark of a field in night-time. They were pictures no one should have to look at; when he thought of the girl’s fate the trivia of his own life seemed to disperse, evaporate.
Brennan reached the door of the interview room and stalled, he felt his jaw clench and he forced himself to release it. He wanted to greet the couple with an open expression. As he walked in Mr Sloan was sitting tense with the heel of his shoe tapping on the chair leg; the man was lost in thought, staring out the window at the empty, sun-crossed street.
‘Hello again, thank you for coming in,’ said Brennan.
Mr Sloan stood up, his wiry grey hair sat flat on his head as he spoke. ‘Hello, Inspector, hello…’ He sat quickly, returned to a cigarette he had burning in the ashtray.
‘Can I get you something to drink, a coffee or a tea perhaps?’
Mr Sloan shook his head. ‘I think we’d sooner just get this over with as quickly as possible, if that’s all OK with you, Inspector.’
‘Of course.’ Brennan turned his gaze to Mrs Sloan. She was a slight, bunched-up woman with timid movements; her eyelids were dipped towards the tabletop. ‘You’ve been to see the pathologist, I believe.’
Mrs Sloan shut her eyes.
‘Yes, we have,’ said Mr Sloan.
‘Can I just say again, how very sorry I am.’
‘We know, thank you.’ He raised the cigarette to his lips, inhaled deeply.
Brennan sat down, hooked his feet beneath his chair as he leaned forward with his hands flat on the table. ‘I know it’s all happened so quickly for you both, and you probably haven’t had a chance to take any of this in, but I want you to know we’re doing all we can. There isn’t a soul on the force who isn’t determined to catch…’ He realised he’d blocked himself in with his choice of words, ‘What I’m saying is, we’re working as hard as we can.’
Mr Sloan nodded. ‘I know…’ He turned to his wife, ‘We both know that, don’t we, love?’
Mrs Sloan sat impassive.
‘Can I ask, are you ready to answer some questions about Lindsey?’ said Brennan.
‘I think so, yes.’
Brennan tapped delicately on the table surface, he felt his shoulders tighten at the prospect of addressing the victim’s demise. ‘Can you tell me a little about Lindsey… What kind of a girl was she?’
Mrs Sloan answered, her reedy voice came as a shock the first time Brennan heard it. ‘She was our daughter…’ she raised her eyes, ‘what do you want us to say? Everybody loves their daughter, adores her. Do you have a daughter, Inspector?’
Brennan nodded, ‘Yes. I do.’
Mr Sloan grabbed his wife’s hand, ‘Lindsey was just a lassie, she was working away and doing her thing… She would never have harmed a soul.’
‘Did she have a wide circle of friends?’
‘She was a popular girl at the school, but she’d been working and seeing a few boys lately; she never had that much time for her old friends I don’t think, except for maybe one or two she went out clubbing with.’
Brennan locked his feet under the front legs of the chair, sat back. ‘Any regular boyfriend?’
Mr Sloan rolled his eyes towards the ceiling, ‘There was a boy, think he was a trainee mechanic… He was a nice boy, we had him to the house, y’know, but that was months ago. No, I don’t think she had a steady boyfriend, Inspector.’
Mrs Sloan lowered her head, there were tears rolling down her cheeks; her husband turned towards her, started to rub at her hand.
‘Are you OK to continue, Mrs Sloan?’ said Brennan.
Mr Sloan answered, ‘We’d sooner get this by with.’
Brennan laced his fingers, he knew the questions he wanted to ask, he knew the information he wanted to draw from them, but he could see they were deep in their grief and it wasn’t the time to pry much further. He kept the tone of his voice low and flat, ‘You said Lindsey had some friends she went clubbing with… Where was that?’
‘Just the clubs, you know, up the town… I don’t know their names.’
‘Have you any idea what part of the city they went to?’
‘Aye, it was George Street and all that New Town bit.’ He looked to his wife, smiled. ‘She liked the trendy bars, our Lindsey.’
The DI made a mental note, asked if it would be all right to speak to some of her friends and then he changed subject. The picture he was getting of Lindsey Sloan was remarkably similar to that of Fiona Gow, but he had found nothing to link the pair, no commonality.
‘Can I ask, Mr Sloan, did Lindsey ever change schools?’
‘No, no. Always the one school… Edinburgh High.’
Brennan flinched, his mind reeled for a moment, then steadied itself as he recalled the case notes had said Fiona Gow had gone to Portobello Academy. ‘What about clubs, or games at school?’
‘No, I don’t think so. She wasn’t into that sort of thing.’
‘Gymnastics,’ Mrs Sloan’s voice had firmed. ‘She liked her gymnastics for a wee while there at the school but she gave it up.’
Brennan leaned in, ‘She gave it up?’
‘Said it wasn’t her thing. She took her notions, Lindsey, one minute it was all this, the next she wasn’t interested… A typical teenager,’ said Mrs Sloan, ‘How old is your daughter, Inspector?’
Brennan took a sharp intake of breath as the question came his way, ‘She’s sixteen… Sophie’s sixteen.’
‘What a lovely name.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You should cherish her, Inspector.’ Mrs Sloan looked out to the street, she had no more tears, but her hurt was so palpable it could almost be touched.
‘I think, Inspector, we should call it a day, for now,’ said Mr Sloan.
Brennan rose, his chair scraped noisily along the floor and he winced, but Mrs Sloan didn’t falter. ‘Thank you, you’ve been very helpful,’ he said.
The man put his arm around his wife and helped her from her chair, led her to the door. The pair looked frail, older than their years, as they shuffled slowly out of sight. As Brennan watched them go he felt a pinch in his throat; he had seen too many good people destroyed by the evil that was out there. He wanted to help them, wanted to right their wrongs, but he wondered what use he could possibly be to them now. Their daughter had been taken, there was nothing he could do to alter that; he couldn’t bring Lindsey back. The thought hacked into him, tugged out his pity and replaced it with a febrile anger.