‘You’d better be, Livvie Cooper.’ He was driving. Jamie could make out the engine sounds. ‘I’ve some pals coming round, wanting a look at you. An’ you’d better come in smilin’ this time.’
Jamie was definitely out of his depth here. What kind of situation was this woman, Livvie, in if she was expected to extend her hospitality to a bunch of strange men she didn’t know in her own home? She was in dire need of refuge.
‘I’ll be there in a wee bit,’ she was saying shakily, pressing the phone to her ear again, turning away. Jamie read it as her not wanting him to hear any more of the man’s instructions. She was ashamed.
The voice on the line said something else that Jamie couldn’t catch and the call ended.
She checked and double checked it was hung up before she said anything else.
‘His name’s Francie Beaumont, and he’s just down the road there… in my flat. I don’t know how many others there are.’
Jamie stopped himself asking if there were often others. How many men were being brought in to ‘have a look at her’?
‘What’s the address?’ Jamie said, opening his phone up.
She hesitated, gulping hard.
‘It’s all right. We’re going to help you, tonight. I’m calling a car. We’ll pick up Shell and your mum on the way, and we’ll get you out of here before anything else goes down. OK?’
She was nodding, her eyes huge circles, her mouth set in a grimace.
‘He’s bigger than you think,’ she said, and Jamie knew she wasn’t talking about his stature.
‘Can’t be bigger than the police, no matter the network. We’ll sort it.’
Another car was rolling by. Jamie heard it pass along the next street down, the one with the playpark. Something uneasy and urgent was stirring in him, some instinct that something wasn’t right.
The car was turning at the end of the row and doubling back on itself, only on this street now.
He only had to look at Livvie to see she was making the same connections. She turned her phone in her hand, looking at it like it was a ticking bomb.
‘Livvie? Does Franc have a location app linking your phones?’
The car lights grew brighter, the slow roll of tyres telling them the driver was crawling the streets looking for her. Jamie took her phone from her hand and tossed it as hard as he could over the hedges and shrubs of the row of back gardens to his right. He heard it land with a knock against something hard about four gardens down. He pushed Livvie right into the bushes behind them, but it was too late. A black car blocked the footpath they’d turned up.
Jamie pressed the direct line number on his phone. It clicked through.
‘Ops,’ the woman said.
‘One officer, one civilian woman, this is a Zero Zero,’ he had time to say; the request for GPS tracking, immediate assistance, and comms silence, before he clamped his mouth closed and whipped his phone out of sight.
The car door opened and a wall of man, all in black, ascended from the driver’s seat.
‘It’s him,’ Livvie hissed.
Jamie had one second where he was still shrouded in the darkness, undiscovered, during which he could shove his phone, still connected to the muted call handler somewhere in Glasgow, into Livvie’s coat pocket, in the desperate hope that they were already working away at their computers, locating him on their maps, alerting the nearest units to attend an undisclosed, multi-service emergency. He’d need unbroken signal on his phone for them to find him. All he could do was pray for five bars of connectivity as the man lumbered towards them.
‘Who’s this wee gnaff?’ said Francie Beaumont, before deciding he didn’t really care who Jamie was, he was going to thump him anyway, and as he brought down a thick fist hard onto the top of his skull in a brutal caveman swipe, Jamie heard Livvie beg, ‘No! Franc!’ just before he felt the impact that compressed his neck painfully down between his collarbones.
Feeling, rather than thinking, how weird it was that the ground was coming up towards him, Jamie’s brain conjured an image of a woman with red hair standing in the glow of pink neon light. Then the tarmac flattened him and the night turned pitch black and deathly silent.
17
Friday the eighteenth of July at one-fifteen, and Ally was on time.
There’d been a last minute change of plan when Mhairi Sears finally appeared in the group chat to say she couldn’t make it to the Cairn Dhu Hotel restaurant, what with her husband having the car that day, so they’d rearranged everything to meet near her newbuild estate on the other side of the motorway. It had been fields until lately, and was now houses with a purpose-built health centre where they’d recently moved the community midwife’s office, physiotherapy, the health visitor, and the dental surgery. Plus there was a small co-op farm shop and a café at the centre of the complex.
Ally had borrowed her mum’s old Citroen to get there after her work was done for the morning and now she was the first one here.
