Lifting the Lid(66)

‘Cops were all over ‘em the minute they stepped through the fucking door,’ said Harry and sat back in his seat with a look of smug self-satisfaction.

‘Ye shopped him?’ MacFarland couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

Harry seemed to have little difficulty in reading the expression on his face. ‘And don’t give me that honour amongst thieves bollocks. That bastard ‘ad been crossin’ me for years. A bullet through the brain would’ve been far too quick.’

‘But wasnae that what happened?’

Before Harry could reply, a steward rattled her trolley to a halt in the aisle next to them and offered a choice of “complimentary hot and cold drinks”. Each of them ordered a coffee and then watched in silence as she poured the steaming black liquid into three cardboard beakers. She deposited half a dozen plastic pots of cream and milk on the table with a handful of sugar sachets and set off with her trolley to the next set of occupied seats.

‘I dunno ‘ow he managed it, but he got bail,’ said Harry as soon as she was out of earshot, ‘and while he was out, he topped ‘imself. Blew his own ‘ead off with a sawnoff apparently. Word was, not even his own mum could’ve identified ‘im. Dental records weren’t much use either, so they say. Daft prat didn’t open his gob properly and blasted the crap out of most of his teeth as well as his brains.’

‘Jeez,’ said MacFarland and produced a low soft whistle through his own relatively sound teeth. ‘Ye reckon he did the same as ye then? Faked his ain death, I mean.’

Harry slowly clapped his hands together in mock applause. ‘You ‘ear that, Delia? MacEinstein ‘ere thinks Bracewell might’ve faked it.’

Delia, who had continued to stare out of the carriage window throughout Harry’s story, now turned to him and gave him the grin of amusement he seemed to be expecting. ‘Could be,’ he said. ‘Could well be.’

‘Still, it seems like we’ve given him the slip for now,’ said MacFarland, ignoring Harry’s snide remark. ‘Anyways, him turning up like that might be just a… coincidence. Mebbe he’s nae after ye at all.’

The beaker of coffee was within a couple of inches of Harry’s mouth. He paused it and lowered it gradually back down onto the table, fixing MacFarland with an icy glare. ‘You know, ‘Aggis, if you ‘ad shit for brains, it’d be a major fuckin’ improvement.’

Perhaps he had been too busy laying into MacFarland to notice the steady increase in the volume of the train’s engines, but Harry chose exactly the wrong moment to raise the beaker to his mouth again. He was about to take a sip when the train suddenly lurched forward, jolting the carriage to one side and then the other.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he said as hot coffee spilt down his chin and over the back of his hand. He slammed the cup down on the table, spilling even more over his hand, and snatched a handkerchief from his trouser pocket.

MacFarland smiled to himself as he watched Harry start to clean himself up.



* * *



Julian Bracewell studied his face in the mirror for a few seconds before taking hold of one side of his beard where it began next to his right ear. Grasping it firmly between forefinger and thumb, his features contorted as he carefully peeled it from his skin, the glue setting up a stubborn and somewhat painful resistance.

Once he had completely removed the beard, he reached towards the moustache, but the movement was abruptly interrupted. He threw out his arm and slapped his palm against the wall of the toilet compartment to steady himself as the train lurched forward with a shuddering jolt to one side and then the other.





CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX



‘Bingo,’ said Maggie Swann as she breezed into the tiny office that had been allocated to them at the local police station.

DS Logan was half lying, half sitting on the thinnest of cord carpets, his shoulders against the peeling cream paint of the wall and his jacket rolled into a makeshift pillow behind his head. The servings of steak and kidney pie at the pub had been generous in the extreme, and he should probably have stuck to two pints of Pheasant Plucker, but they had slipped down so easily he hadn’t been able to resist a third. Besides, he’d only been halfway through the second pint when they’d heard that Hawkins had disappeared into the police surveillance equivalent of a black hole. Until they could pick up his trail again, there wasn’t much they could do except wait, so staying sober and alert had suddenly become less of a priority.

If the soporific effects of the food and the beer hadn’t been enough, the stuffy heat of their temporary office back at the station had made him even more desperate for sleep, although the hardness of the floor had rendered anything more than a fitful doze utterly out of the question. But he had no intention of letting Swann know that she hadn’t woken him from the deepest of slumbers.