Gone Cold (7 page)

The screen was lit with Kurt Ostermann’s mobile number.

“I’ve got good news and bad,” Ostermann said. “Which do you want first?”

“Give me the bad news.”

“Well, I’m in London and Becky’s a mess. I tried to explain to her why she hasn’t been contacted by anyone official yet, but she doesn’t want to listen to it, Simon. So don’t be surprised if she calls the Guards and spills the beans about the vic being her husband.”

“What’s the good news?” I said.

“Well, I haven’t quite finished giving you the bad yet. The really bad news, as far as I’m concerned, is that Becky has no idea who hired her husband, and the information isn’t in the thin files she allowed me a look at. She says Eli made his client’s privacy top priority. Maybe some good old-fashioned police work—tracking down phone numbers, pounding the pavement, knocking on doors—will help us figure it out, but it’s possible that the identity of his client is a secret he’ll take to his grave in a few days.”

I cursed under my breath. “And the good news?”

“Well, Becky wouldn’t consent to me having a look around his home office, so I sent her off on a walk, you know, to clear her head. Then I picked the lock and had a see for myself. No physical finds whatsoever; everything’s locked tight. Nothing on his hard drive either. But I scoured his recent e-mails and found a few photos he’d recently sent to himself.”

“What kinds of photos?”

“I’m forwarding them to you now. Have yourself a look, then call me back if you still have questions.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“I’m staying in London a few days, Simon. Just say the word if you need me up there for anything, anything whatsoever, you understand?”

“Perfectly. Where are you staying?”

“The Corinthia. I have a corporate client here; I figure it’s high time I started billing him what I’m worth.”

As soon as I disconnected, I let Ashdown in on the conversation. Meanwhile, I opened Ostermann’s e-mail, clicking on the attachments one by one.

It was the girl. The young woman in the photographs was the same woman caught on tape outside the Stalemate in Temple Bar following Eli Welker’s murder. She appeared in the photos with a guy, a big fellow in his early thirties, I guessed. His arms and neck were heavily inked, his head completely shaven. His ears were pierced—gauged, actually, the lobes stretched to accommodate half-inch plugs. From the looks of him, I doubted they were the only part of his body that contained man-made holes. From the images, it appeared that he and the girl were intimate; lovers certainly, perhaps even boyfriend and girlfriend.

“Clearly they didn’t know they were being photographed,” Ashdown said, his eyes locked on my BlackBerry.

“The backgrounds,” I said, “do you recognize any of them?”

Ashdown scrolled through the pictures, zoomed in on a few of them then nodded his head. “You can make out the street signs in a few of these. Balornock. Keppochhill. Edgefauld Road. No question; the photos were taken in Glasgow.”

“There are a number of pictures there that were shot in and around pubs,” I said. “Seems to me, we talk to a few barflies, there’s a good chance we get a lead on the guy, whoever he might be.”

“I’m inclined to agree.”

“Happen to have any contacts in the Police Service of Scotland?”

“I do,” Ashdown said, handing me back my phone. “But no one I trust near as much as Colleen MacAuliffe. Trouble in Scotland—and Glasgow in particular—is that it’s often difficult to tell the cops from the crooks.”

“Any suggestions?”

“Glasgow’s the most violent city in the UK. We can’t just run down there asking questions. We need to have a plan.”

“We?”

“You didn’t think I was going to let you go this alone, did you?”

I said nothing.

“Thing is, you and I, we’re going to stick out like sore thumbs down there. And the only folks they like less than the English are English law enforcement.”

“You’ve already helped me plenty,” I said. “I can take things from here.”

Ashdown shook his head. “You’ll get yourself stabbed or slashed first pub you enter, Simon. There aren’t many guns in Scotland, but Glasgow’s the knife capital of Europe.”

“You just said so yourself; you’re not going to fare much better than me. Not with that accent.”

“I might not,” he said, “but I know someone who’d be accepted in Glasgow straightaway, regardless of accent or creed or country of origin.”

“Did I hear somebody mention Glasgow?” Zoey said, entering the room in her underwear, a mismatched set of bra and panties.

“Simon and I are heading there now. Want to come along?”

“I’d like to see the two of you try to stop me.” She returned to the bedroom, muttering something about getting dressed.

I looked a question at Ashdown.

He shrugged. “I had a feeling she’d come aboard. Glasgow has the best bloody skag in all of Great Britain, she says.”

Part Two

THE BARONS OF GLASGOW

Chapter 13

Figuring we wouldn’t have much success finding the character in the photos during daylight hours, we decided to drive from Dublin to Glasgow rather than fly and arrived in Scotland’s largest city shortly before dusk.

Well-rested and well-fed—and charged with a fair amount of adrenaline—I felt stronger than I had in nearly a year. During the five-and-a-half-hour drive in Ashdown’s rented Nissan crossover, I’d stared at the photos on my BlackBerry until I’d etched every feature of the girl (and the man she was with) into my mind. Whether I’d been struck with a rare bout of optimism or a devastating case of wishful thinking, I didn’t know. But I was beginning to believe that the young woman in the photos could conceivably be Hailey Fisk.

Fortunately, all the photos Eli Welker had taken of the couple were set in the same area.
Unfortunately,
that area was Springburn, an inner city district in northern Glasgow, best known for its drug trade and abundance of violent crime.

“Well, there’s certainly no shortage of dive bars to choose from,” Ashdown muttered as we cruised north along one of Springburn’s desolate roads. “We may as well park and hoof it from here.”

“No shortage of spaces either,” I noted. Even on Springburn’s main drag, traffic was nearly nonexistent. The few cars that were on the road were early model sedans that had surely seen better days.

Ashdown pulled the Nissan to the curb. “That’s because two-thirds of Springburn’s population can’t afford a motor vehicle,” he said, yanking the parking brake and killing the ignition. “Poverty has plagued this area for decades.”

I turned and nudged Zoey, who’d spent the past couple of hours sprawled along the backseat, sleeping.

“Here already, are we?” she said, yawning as she gazed out the windshield. “
Shit.
It’s beginning to snow. Some holiday you boys are taking me on.”

“At least it’s not brutally cold,” I said as I stepped out of the vehicle. I’d opened the door expecting to shiver, but unlike my final night in D.C., there was no wind. Not so much as a breeze.

“Can’t last though,” Zoey cautioned.

I turned to her. “You know Springburn. Where should we start?”

“Bishop’s, Highland, Shevlanes,” she said with a shrug. “Makes no difference, really. They all attract the same sort.”

Along with dive bars, the road was littered with rundown churches. Black iron gates discouraged trespassers from trampling their overgrown lawns, defacing their cracked and crumbling tombstones, their statues of saints thick with bird shit.

In the distance stood a group of cement blocks, thirty-some stories tall.

“Projects?” I asked.

Ashdown said, “Here in the UK, we call them council houses. Sounds more sophisticated, doesn’t it?”

In the past couple of years I’d witnessed poverty in so many of its ugly forms, from the Podil district in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev to the La Carpio slums in the Costa Rican capital of San José. Watching needless human suffering in a world where so many have so much never got any easier.

“Let’s start there,” I said, pointing to a brown brick cube on the corner. A collapsing sign hanging against the side of the structure read
THE OLD SOAK
, which Ashdown explained was British slang used to refer to drunkards of long standing.

Zoey said, “I fancy it already.”

As I gazed across the street, I laid out the plan. “I’ll head in first, order a beer. Zoey, you come in after ten or fifteen minutes. Act like you don’t know me.”

“Shouldn’t be much of a challenge, should it, little brother?”

I ignored her comment for the moment but damn well meant to address it later.

“Detective,” I said, “you’ll keep an eye on the place in case we need backup. You all right for an hour or two?”

“Of course.”

As I turned and started toward the bar I heard Zoey asking Ashdown for money.

“Since when do
you
pay for your own drinks inside a pub?” Ashdown sneered.

“Oh, bugger off,” she shouted. “Maybe it’s not
drinks
I’m bent on paying for. Ever think of that?”

Once I stepped onto the curb on the opposite side of the street, I was mercifully out of earshot. I opened the metal door to the Old Soak and was immediately greeted by an odor I couldn’t define. That and a middle-age male bartender who eyed me up and down as though I’d just told him I meant to rob the place.

There were only two other patrons in the pub, both elderly gentlemen seated at the bar, staring into tall glasses of ale. I flashed on a street sign I’d seen just a few blocks back. Depicting a pair of stooped-over stick figures, it read:
WATCH FOR THE ELDERLY
. Implied in that warning, I now realized, was that Springburn’s elderly might well be drunk out of their gourds. At least the two old soaks seated at this bar clearly were.

As I took a barstool I motioned to the tap and said, “Pint of Tennent.”

The bartender didn’t say a word, didn’t crack half a smile, just grabbed a cloudy pint glass from the drain board behind him and started the pour.

I drank down half the pint in a swallow. What I really craved was a double espresso, something to sharpen the senses rather than dull them. But when in Rome, and all that. And from the looks of the place, had I ordered anything sans alcohol, the bartender would have swiftly tossed me out on my British-American ass.

Ashdown was right. Had I come to Glasgow alone I’d never have gotten answers. At least not without a gun. And a willingness to use it.

But now we had a far more effective weapon in our arsenal.

And several minutes after I finished my first pint, she stepped inside the pub with a disarming smile painted across her ruby-red lips.

“Shot of your cheapest whiskey,” Zoey called across the bar.

“Right away, lass.”

Was it me? Or had the bartender’s mood just vastly improved?

Chapter 14

As night fell, the pub began to fill. I’d tossed back about four pints and flushed another couple down the toilet so as not to arouse suspicion or draw the ire of the grizzled barkeep. As long as I kept tossing money on the bar, I figured he’d continue serving me. But I also had the distinct impression that the Old Soak strictly enforced at least one unwritten rule:
If you’re not drinking, you’re leaving—by force, if necessary.

Which wasn’t an issue for Zoey. By close of Happy Hour, my sister had consumed an almost unthinkable amount of liquor, and there seemed to be no stopping her. Not that anyone but myself was trying. The pub’s patrons, the great majority of whom were male, encouraged her like we were at a frat party. Not that she needed much encouragement either.

Best I could do was keep an eye on her, step in if some boozer began misbehaving.

But she didn’t make it easy, repeatedly parading outside for smokes with plastered teenagers. I clung to the hope that Ashdown could monitor her from his crossover, which conceivably remained parked on the opposite side of the street, though I hadn’t really instructed him to stay put. He, too, had the photos on his phone and could feasibly be touring the innumerable dive bars along the road, his English accent be damned.

One pub called Bishop’s was on this very block.

Shortly after my sister returned to the bar following a smoke with a trio of teenage boys, the door to the pub opened again, and the atmosphere suddenly transformed. Like a rowdy classroom suddenly gone silent. From my spot at the end of the bar, I craned my neck to make out our newest reveler. A kid, somewhere in his early twenties, sporting a goatee and a badly receding hairline. Skinny, scrawny even, yet with the strut of a professional footballer.

Dressed in a navy tracksuit straight off the set of
The Sopranos,
the kid sauntered through the throng, which parted in a way that would have made ambulance drivers jealous.

To some he offered a nod, others a look that made them instantly shy away, like mares from a rattlesnake.

The bartender stopped mid-pour, turned, and snatched an ice-cold rocks glass from the freezer. Then he reached for the top shelf, opened a fresh bottle of Dalmore, and decanted three fingers, neat.

Sliding it carefully across the bar to his latest guest, he said, “On the house, mate.”

The kid in the tracksuit swallowed the Scotch in a single go. Slapped the empty glass onto the bar, said, “Another, then,” and slid over a pile of cash half as tall as the pour.

The chatting, which had briefly ceased, rose again, and the mood for the most part returned to normal. Yet a palpable air of trepidation lingered, like tear gas over a peaceful assembly.

I raised my brows in Zoey’s direction. She replied with an inebriated shrug and a single finger that slurred,
I’m on it,
then she turned back to her current companion with a salacious grin and a question on her lips.

Several minutes later she strolled over to me, said in my ear, “The tracksuit’s name is Kinny Gilchrist. He’s the son of some local gangster known as The Chairman.”

I stole a glance over at the kid and his newly arrived entourage. They were seated in the back corner booth, which had been occupied by a different group of hooligans only a few minutes earlier.