When the Devil Drives Read online

  However, something quite unexpected beset Jasmine at Jim’s funeral, as it had also done at the commemorative services held in the wake of the Ramsay case. People were saying thank you to her. Grown-up people, people generations older than her, were taking her hands in theirs and offering often tearful gratitude in acknowledgment of what she had done for them. Since her mother’s death – and throughout the months preceding its inevitability – Jasmine had spent so much time feeling afraid, vulnerable, abandoned: a lost and scared little girl.

  When she was eight years old, one Saturday afternoon she came back from playing at a friend’s house to find her mum’s front door locked and no answer to the bell, no matter how many times she tried it in her growing, tear-streaked desperation. What she most recalled was the feeling of rising panic giving way to cold dread as she realised that she didn’t know where her mum had gone, it never having occurred to her that her mum could be anywhere other than at home in the flat waiting to welcome her inside. It didn’t – simply wouldn’t – cross her mind that Mum might have nipped out to the shops, nor did it strike her that Mum had been expecting her back at five as usual, when in fact Jasmine had returned closer to quarter-past four, cutting her visit short because Rachel’s annoying younger cousin had turned up and ruined their game.

  All she knew was that her mum wasn’t there, and it utterly terrified her. She had stood at the door in a tearful blur, feeling helpless. Theirs was a basement flat with its entrance down a short flight of steps beneath street level, so she was enclosed in her own isolated little courtyard of fear and misery, no neighbours noticing and coming down to offer help. Eventually she pulled herself together enough to come up with a plan of action, which was to return to Rachel’s house, where there were other trusted adults. She felt reluctant to implement this plan, however, as it seemed to cement the idea that her mum had gone away and left her; as though by embarking on the journey back to Rachel’s house she was taking her first steps into a world without her mum.

  After Mum’s death, that combination of rising panic and cold dread was something she felt almost every day, burned into her emotional memory and anchored to that specific incident. She became that terrified eight-year-old over and over again as she stared beyond the precipice into this world of isolation and responsibilities. At her best, at her most together and controlled, she felt like she was doing nothing more than walking back to Rachel’s house in search of other adults to look after her.

  At those services following the Ramsay case, she was made to feel that she had – without trying to, without even realising it – been the one doing the looking after; that she had given all of these people something that made them feel less scared and confused. She held outstretched hands and looked into earnest, solemn faces, and in their moist eyes glimpsed this young woman they were all looking at, someone very different to the lost and scared little girl she imagined herself to be. Perhaps for the first time in her life it gave her a genuine sense of what it felt like to be an autonomous, functioning grown-up.

  She could still feel like a lost child inside, but maybe everyone else did too, and it was in the reflection of her deeds that she got to see the person the rest of the world saw when they looked at her. So maybe, just maybe, against all instinct and expectation, this was something she could do, and do well; something that might make her feel she had a purpose, and therefore less abandoned, lost and afraid.

  What ultimately tipped the scales was the answering machine at the office, when she went back there after taking a couple of weeks to get her head straight. The phone rang when she was barely in the door so she let the machine take the call, at this point remaining unsure whether it was – or was at least going to be – her business. It was still Jim’s voice on the outgoing message, which was all the more unsettling for the time that had passed since his death. He sounded affable without being inappropriately breezy, encouraging without promising the Earth. But none of the messages – and there were plenty – were for him. Without exception, it was her name they asked for, because to each of the callers the Sharp in Sharp Investigations meant Jasmine.

  She was aware that the story had been all over the media, but although she gave a few quotes to reporters she had been too caught up in the aftermath to pay the coverage any heed. She didn’t want to read about it because she didn’t want to think about it. She just wanted to be past it. In her mind it had been a frightening and frequently traumatic few weeks, just something awful that had happened to her, and something far worse that had happened to Jim. She forgot that, to the outside world looking in, the story was about a multiple murder case that had remained a mystery for twenty-seven years until she became involved; and that as a result this little business that was hers to take or leave had recently enjoyed the publicity equivalent of a multi-million-pound national ad-spend.

  Jasmine discerned immediately that many of the callers were under the misapprehension that Sharp Investigations was something a great deal grander than a one-woman show, with enquiries covering a spectrum from missing moggies to private bodyguard hire. This was why the most significant call was not from someone who had never heard of Sharp Investigations until a fortnight before, but from someone who had been doing business with Jim for years: Harry Deacon at Galt Linklater.

  Harry had worked with Jim on the force, and when Jim first retired Harry had tried to recruit him for the big investigation firm. Jim preferred to go it alone, having felt compromised too often by the tangled and conflicting loyalties that complicated his police work.

  Their relationship did prove mutually beneficial, however, as from Sharp Investigations’ inception a great deal of Jim’s work comprised sub-contracts from Galt Linklater, often supplementing their manpower on major jobs or taking stand-alone cases the larger outfit couldn’t cover.

  Harry had introduced himself briefly at Jim’s funeral but had made no overtures towards talking shop. His message simply asked Jasmine to call back regarding ‘the resolution of outstanding contracts’. She had assumed this meant the formalities associated with whatever loose ends would be left hanging at Galt Linklater by Sharp Investigations ceasing to operate. Instead, Harry laid out an offer to keep the firm on a retainer, which would pay a minimum even on months that she wasn’t sub-contracted. He added that he expected this would prove moot, stating blankly that if Jasmine could clone herself he could keep both versions busy most months. This was for precisely the reasons Jim had laid out when he recruited her: they could always use somebody who didn’t look like an ex-cop, somebody their subjects would never see coming.

  Jasmine asked if it mattered whether this somebody actually knew what she was doing, a corrosive little voice in her head seizing upon a sense of déjà vu. She recalled her scepticism when she had heard the same rationalisation from Jim, whom she had believed simply to be acting out of duty towards a relative recently deceased.

  Harry had responded by acknowledging that he knew she still had plenty to learn, and that Galt Linklater’s guys would help her out, as Jim had, with on-the-job training. She was about to ask – with pronounced dubiety – whether Jim had ever mentioned how that on-the-job training had been going, when it hit her with some surprise that he must have, and that his accounts may not have comprised what she assumed.

  This guy owed Jasmine nothing, even if he had been close to Jim both personally and professionally. This offer wasn’t charity, and what was really a jolt was that it proved Jim’s hadn’t been either. It struck her that not only did Harry’s offer indicate that he believed she could do the job, but that Jim must indeed have spoken to him about how she was shaping up – and the implication was that Jim hadn’t been lying out of kindness all those times he’d reassured her she was doing better than she thought.

  Some of those times, undoubtedly, but not all.

  ‘Didn’t Jim tell you about my screw-ups?’ she asked uncertainly.

  ‘Aye. But you should hear other people’s screw-ups.’

  Jasmine forced h
erself to admit she’d never been handed so much on a plate before, between what Jim’s family and Galt Linklater were laying in front of her. Her discomfort at door-stepping people under false pretences, or covertly following them around, not to mention her discomfort at catastrophically screwing up the basic fundamentals of both, died hard in the memory, and she knew that, soon enough, she’d be tasting both flavours again if she signed up for more. However, she had to acknowledge that it also felt pretty good when she got something right, especially when bringing her acting abilities to bear had been beneficial. Actors talked about live performance being high-stakes, but for all it could feel like life and death when you were out on that stage, in reality the most they were risking was embarrassment. Jasmine knew what it felt like to be acting at gunpoint, and while she was in no hurry to play those odds again, it had all but erased her trepidation about ringing some personal-injury fraudster’s doorbell and pretending to be someone she was not.

  She told Angela her decision, which seemed to mean a lot more to Jim’s daughter than Jasmine could have anticipated. She said it was a comfort to know that an important part of her father’s life was enduring, acknowledging the irony that while he was alive his over-dedication to his work had been the cause of much hurt to all of them.

  Thus Sharp Investigations re-opened for business, under new management.

  Galt Linklater kept her in the back seat for the first couple of weeks, often literally, but when she was finally deployed into the field she quickly began to understand why Harry, like Jim before him, was prepared to be so patient and encouraging. With a little bit of confidence in her armoury, she really was the secret weapon. She was their ninja, the one operative that even the most hardbitten subjects never saw coming.

  Serving papers was a particular speciality. Jasmine was able to get an instant result with guys who wouldn’t answer their front door to a middle-aged male but were eager enough when a fresh-faced young woman came striding up their garden path.

  ‘It’s okay, I’m not selling anything, I promise,’ was her standard opening, accompanied by a friendly, slightly self-conscious and therefore all-the-more innocent smile. It was Harry’s suggestion, a cute little piece of misdirection because it made the subject think that the worst he ought to be worried about was being asked to make a donation or sign up for something.

  ‘Do you get a lot of junk mail?’ she’d ask, almost unvaryingly receiving a response in the affirmative. ‘We’re offering a free opt-out service that will get your details removed from mailing lists. It doesn’t cost anything: we’re funded by Royal Mail to try to cut down on unnecessary carriage. Would you be interested, or are you content to keep receiving mail shots?’

  That was when the mark was only too happy to give his name, which she would then ask him to confirm, whereupon she would flip over the top sheet on her clipboard and hand him the papers that had been tucked underneath.

  In the early days her nervousness accounted for a few dismally faltering performances at front doors, but even her worst efforts yielded results. It had long been a source of grief to Jasmine that she looked younger than her years, sufficiently so that she anticipated being carded in pubs and clubs until she was pushing thirty. On the job, however, it worked like a force-field, deflecting all suspicion.

  As well as donning a suit to look like a particularly earnest (and crucially guileless) young professional woman in order to serve papers, she could dress up or dress down according to the circumstances. She could play the student, the clubber, the jogger, the teenage daughter: just whatever it took to blend into the background for surveillance or allay suspicion when someone had to be made to identify themselves. Hell, she could pass for a schoolgirl if she needed to, though she had resisted doing so. She felt a little iffy about the ethics of it, but rather than rule it out completely she decided she’d keep it in her locker for just in case.

  And, of course, she could play a newly recruited clinical support worker when Galt Linklater needed someone to go undercover at St Mungo’s General. This was precisely the kind of job they’d have struggled with or even had to pass up altogether before Jasmine became an available resource.

  The South Glasgow NHS Hospitals Trust approached Galt Linklater with a view to gathering evidence against Liam O’Hara ahead of their planned sacking of him, reckoning that if they amassed enough damning material it would preclude an industrial tribunal. It wasn’t just theatre staff who referred to him as Eliot: hospital management were aware that he had worked long and resourcefully to make himself virtually unsackable. There was never any evidence against him other than individual testimony, which, as well as being uncorroborated, had a habit of being recanted the closer it came to a grievance hearing. Large institutions generally ended up simply having to tolerate individuals like Liam, having learned that attempting to get rid of them was more trouble than it was worth, particularly when it was doomed to failure.

  What forced the South Glasgow Trust’s hand was the impact on manpower. It wasn’t just the nurses who had made complaints against him who ended up going off on long-term sick leave. Those who had incurred his bullying and intimidation for whatever other reason often decided that the best way of avoiding further harassment was to get their GP to sign them off with stress. The Trust was shelling out a lot of sick pay to people who would be perfectly fit for work if Liam O’Hara could be removed from the equation.

  Without Jasmine, the most Galt Linklater could have done was place one of their middle-aged males in the hospital as a porter or orderly. He’d have been wired for sound and vision to observe and record Liam’s general conduct around his colleagues, in particular the way he used sexually inappropriate talk as a form of both intimidation and harassment.

  That had been Jasmine’s basic remit too, but they expected they’d get a lot more of the real Liam on tape when the new element was a shy-looking young girl. Had it been a burly middle-aged man Liam might well have been more circumspect, in case the new guy decided to clean his clock on behalf of an offended female colleague.

  In the event, Jasmine’s involvement went a lot further than observe-and-record, though she had been very careful to avoid possible entrapment. That was why her responses consisted of spelling out explicitly how she or her colleagues might be feeling, her words sometimes almost verbatim from the Trust’s written policies. However, by standing up to Liam at all she had made it imperative that he put her in her place, and that was how she ended up serving him to his bosses on a golden platter.

  It was almost worth getting her tit groped just to see the look on the sweaty creep’s face as he began to realise who was the predator and who was the prey.

  But though Jasmine and Galt Linklater were proving very good for each other, sub-contracting wasn’t Sharp Investigations’ only revenue stream. As well as Jim’s own long-standing roster of legal firms, there was a new sub-set of individual clients who came specifically to seek out Jasmine, and that was what she instantly understood she was dealing with on this particular May morning.

  She had no jobs booked that day, and Jasmine was anticipating – she wouldn’t use the phrase ‘looking forward to’ – a strictly office-bound shift, tackling a backlog of admin chores: from writing up surveillance reports to invoicing and, gulp, updating the company’s tax files. Harry Deacon kept telling her to hire an accountant, as she was too busy with practical work to be dealing with things like that. She was in complete agreement, and fully intended to do so, but the problem was that she was also too busy to have gotten around to finding one.

  She didn’t mind writing up case-work, and would often catch up with that side of the job at home of an evening. Among the many lessons she had learned from observing Jim’s practices was the importance of logging every minor detail, no matter how apparently insignificant, no matter how strong the temptation to skip to the highlights. When a trail went dead you had to be able to re-trace your steps, and the detail you were missing might well be found along the path less travelled.<
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  The accounts, however, she could neglect for weeks at a time, content to procrastinate in order to defer that horrible feeling she got whenever she opened up the books. It wasn’t that the accounts were particularly labyrinthine, or that she had no head for numbers; indeed, once she got going she was diligent and methodical about filling in every transaction. It was just that she spent the whole exercise worried that she was doing it all completely wrong, so that when the time finally came to submit a company tax return, none of what she had recorded would make any sense. Her resultant garbled filing would precipitate an HMRC investigation and she’d find herself in a Kafkaesque hell of endlessly resubmitting her figures until she went insane or to jail.

  Thus the distraction of an unexpected inquiry was most welcome, doubly so given what Jasmine had come to recognise this particular type of client as representing:

  Easy money.

  She felt guilty admitting it to herself, guiltier still taking the jobs given that invariably she was getting paid to deliver bad news to sad old punters, but as she had learned on the Ramsay case, the not knowing is worse.

  The woman looked late sixties or early seventies, her slim build but one aspect of a neat and precise appearance, from the tailored fit of her navy-blue three-piece suit to her beret above a full head of dark brown hair, not a strand of which was either astray or chromatically out of kilter with its neighbours. Her dress was neither that of a wee pensioner nor a woman in denial of her years, but soberly appropriate, the choices of someone who had always known what to wear – and been able to afford it. She was not merely slim, however, but noticeably drawn and rather gaunt, her face thickly made-up though certainly not gaudily so. A year ago Jasmine would have guessed she was looking at a chronic heavy-smoker’s face, and in fact if she’d met the woman anywhere else she’d have made the same deduction. But that she was standing inside Sharp Investigations, unannounced, offered a different perspective, and it wasn’t the office light that told Jasmine her full head of hair was not a full head of hair.