Unmarked Graves

Book 6: Connor Fraser

by Neil Broadfoot

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Can a killer ever be on the side of justice?

In 1983, Professor Robert Balfour was found floating in Airthrey Loch at the heart of Stirling University's campus. His death was deemed a tragic accident but there were other, darker rumours. The death of a politics professor allegedly linked to the armed wing of the Scottish Liberation Brigade was always going to attract conspiracy theories.

But that's all they were. Theories. Until now.

To mark the 40th anniversary of his father's death, Jonathan Rodriguez has travelled back to Stirling - and he's brought a camera crew with him. Rodriguez is convinced his father's death was no accident - and that at least one of the killers wore a uniform. Desperate to make the problem go away, DCI Malcolm Ford turns to Connor Fraser for help. And then another body is found at nearby Bannockburn.

On the trail of a double killer, Connor is forced to confront dark truths about the meaning of justice. And those truths may just break his heart - or stop it, for good.

Praise for Neil Broadfoot:

'Tense, fast-moving and bloody. Broadfoot's best yet' Mason Cross

'A true rising star of crime fiction' Ian Rankin

'Beautifully crafted . . . There's no filler, no exposition, just action, dialogue and layering of tension that'll hold you breathless until the very end' Helen Fields

'Wonderfully grisly and grim, and a cracking pace' James Oswald

'A frantic, pacy read with a compelling hero' Steve Cavanagh

Release date: September 16, 2023

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 334

Sample

It burst out of him, a deep, rumbling belly laugh that forced his broken ribs to grind together and opened the crusted scabs of blood that had formed around the cuts on his face and cheeks. The two masked men in front of him flinched, lowered their guns for a moment, then exchanged a glance and a shrug of the shoulders.

Their movement made Simon McCartney laugh even harder, tears from the pain it caused him rolling down his cheeks even as his laughter bounced and ricocheted off the corrugated roof and cold concrete of the room he was in. His bare feet slipped across the plastic sheeting on which the chair he was tied to had been placed and he rocked back. If his hands had been free and not bound behind him, he would have slapped his thighs and shaken his head as he fought for breath.

He was going to die. But he was damned if he would lose his sense of humour over it.

Strong hands landed on his shoulders and he was pulled forward, the shock of the chair’s front legs hitting the hard stone floor stabbing fresh agony into his ribs. He dropped his head, still chuckling, only for the butt of a gun to be smashed into his face, throwing him back once more. He gasped for breath, but found it impossible as he was grabbed around the neck.

‘Shut it, you fuckin’ psycho,’ his attacker hissed, warm, sour breath leaking out from behind the balaclava he wore. ‘Now, are you gonna start telling us how much you and Connor Fraser know, or do we need to cut a few more scars into that pretty face of yours?’

The man’s eyes, framed in ragged eyeholes torn from the mask, told Simon he wanted the answer to be no. This was a man who enjoyed inflicting pain and suffering.

The problem was, as Simon had discovered, he was very, very good at it.

‘Go on then.’ He coughed as the pressure on his throat eased slightly. The words were hot, bitter with the tang of blood. ‘Think you missed a few spots first time round. Tell you what, you’ll never make it as a Turkish barber.’

With a grunt, the man released Simon’s throat, took a step back, reached into his pocket and produced a Stanley knife. The handle was spattered with Simon’s blood. He paused, took a moment to study the blade, turn it in the harsh strip-light overhead.

Simon knew the man was smiling under the mask.

He took a step forward, was stopped by the second man. ‘This is fucking pointless,’ he said. He was shorter than the first, less powerfully built, but there was something in his posture and voice that told Simon he was thinking three steps ahead. ‘He’s not going to tell us anything. We’ve wasted enough time on this. Come on, let’s just fucking end it and get out of here.’

A third figure stepped from the shadows. He was smaller than the other two, and walked with an uncertain gait, but there was no doubt he was the leader of the trio. The sudden dipping of the other two men’s heads and deferential shuffling backwards as the man walked forward told Simon all he needed to know.

‘Aye, you’re right,’ he said. ‘We can send the footage as soon as we’ve blown this pig’s head off.’

Simon took a deep breath, swallowed the pain in his chest and the terror that arced through him like electricity. Memories cascaded through his mind in a confused jumble. Paulie King, gun clamped in his hand, screaming at the world as he scorched the air with the smell of gunpowder and blood. And then there was Connor Fraser. His friend. His brother. Lying in a heap at Paulie’s feet. Was he alive or dead? Simon didn’t know, had been dragged away before he could find out. But, in his desperation, he had left a message, a message only Connor would understand.

He prayed his friend had survived and found it. It was too late for him, but if Connor was still alive, Simon’s killers would pay.

The thought caused fresh laughter to tickle the back of his throat. Laughter that died abruptly at the sound of a gun being chambered.

He looked up, saw the two armed masked men standing side by side, the shorter of the two now pointing a shotgun directly at his face. Behind him, the third man stood with a phone held up, the torch on as he recorded. That was why they were wearing masks, Simon thought, so no one who watched the footage would see their faces.

‘Night night,’ the man said, as he adjusted his feet slightly, readying himself for the gun to kick.

Simon closed his eyes. Thought of Donna Blake and all the things he hadn’t said when he’d had the chance. Waited.

Waited.

They worked just a little too hard at being casual.

They were good, Connor Fraser was forced to admit. Very good. Almost the best he had seen. They wore mid-range suits with off-the-peg tailoring that was crumpled in all the right places. Their conversation was slightly forced and awkward, the almost-mirrored body language marking them out as work colleagues who were eager to make the right impression while on a lunch break. Even their speech patterns were right: stilted, slightly deferential, the feigned interest and enthusiasm of two relative strangers on temporary release from the desk jobs they hated, the jobs that provided the only topic of conversation they had.

‘And did you hear about Erikson’s latest fuck-up in accounting?’

‘Oh, yeah, I did. Total idiot. If he spent as much time studying the accounts as he did Stacey’s arse, he’d maybe get somewhere.’

Polite laughter. Shy drops of the head and enthusiastic nodding. Limited eye contact. Good, Connor thought again, as he followed them at a distance through the crowds in the St James Quarter shopping centre. Very good. Almost perfect.

Almost.

It was their eyes that gave them away. The sweeping gazes that scanned the vicinity and the horizon, picking out potential targets and threats. The slightly defocused look as they concentrated on their peripheral vision, even when they were avoiding each other’s gaze. The way they locked on to security cameras or anyone who looked vaguely official as they wove through the crowds.

Eyes always give it away, Connor thought. And he should know. They were the same eyes that stared back at him every time he looked in a mirror.

The job had come in a week ago and, if he was being honest with himself, Connor was surprised it had taken so long. A gang had been making headlines by targeting jewellers in Edinburgh, raiding them at knifepoint at the end of the working day, when the staff were helpfully pulling all the four- and five-figure watches, necklaces and diamonds from their window displays and pooling them in the shop before they were locked in the safe overnight. Four shops, on Rose Street, Princes Street and George Street, had been hit, jewellery taken with an estimated value of £400,000. So it had been no surprise to Connor when his company, Sentinel Securities, received a call from Derek Maitland, owner of Maitland’s, an ‘exclusive jewellery and timepiece boutique’ at the heart of the St James Quarter shopping centre on Princes Street. Sitting on the site of a former seventies concrete and harling monstrosity called the St James Centre, the Quarter was locally named the Walnut Whip due to its circular design and twisting metal spire. To Connor, it looked more like the track of a forgotten rollercoaster than a sweet treat from the 1980s that his gran enjoyed. Maitland’s request to Connor, and Sentinel, had been simple: review the security at the Quarter and, specifically, his shop.

Connor had happily taken the assignment, partly as the case had caught his attention, and partly as an excuse to get away from the riot of cardboard boxes and bubble wrap that had taken over his flat in Stirling. Three months after buying a house in the city, the modifications to deal with Jen’s mobility issues were finally complete, and it was moving time. And while Connor loved the prospect of living with Jen, the chaos that surrounded the move was making his teeth grind.

A few favours called in from DCI Malcolm Ford had given Connor access to the CCTV footage from the jewellery stores that had already been hit, and it hadn’t taken him long to see the pattern. A man and a woman, dressed in mid-range suits, strolling past the store that was their target. Casual conversation, sometimes with coffee cups in hand, just two people out for a walk in the afternoon. Connor was forced to admit he was impressed – they almost blended in perfectly. But there was something in the way they moved, something that spoke to the savage, unevolved part of his brain, the part that still wanted to hunt his prey with a club, that Connor recognised. He began staking out Maitland’s, waiting for them to take a casual walk past to check out the security. And just to make sure that the shop was their next target, Connor had instructed Maitland to take out adverts in the local press and on social media, highlighting the arrival of some very shiny, very expensive Swiss watches, favoured by movie characters with a penchant for English sports cars and drinks that were shaken, not stirred.

Now they had taken the bait. Connor smiled as the couple strolled past Maitland’s with only one quick sideways glance. He would call Ford, tell him what he knew, let the police deal with it. Most likely they would come back tonight, tomorrow at latest. Now they had intel on what the security situation was, and were happy that there was nothing to stop them, they would want to strike quickly.

He was just reaching into his pocket for his phone when he froze.

They had turned, and were heading back for the shop. All pretence of casual strolling was gone, shed like a snakeskin. They were striding forward now, shoulders back, faces set, even as they slipped on facemasks. Nobody around them reacted – why would they? After the pandemic, slipping on a mask was just a routine part of life.

Connor’s pulse quickened as he saw the woman reach into her jacket as she approached Maitland’s. Her partner fell back, giving her a clear line of sight to the security guard, who had noticed them approaching and was readying himself to open the door for new customers. Connor got moving, covering the distance between himself and the shop as fast as he could. He saw the masked man look up at the disturbance Connor was making in the crowd of shoppers, saw his eyes widen in recognition of a threat. Beside him, his partner turned away from the door, the shopping centre erupting into a panicked scream of frantic movement as she pulled a machete from her jacket pocket. Without thinking, Connor hurled his phone at her as he broke into a sprint. The woman’s head snapped up and her legs buckled as the phone hit her nose. She staggered back, clawing for her mask, pulling it down to stop herself choking on the blood that was now pouring from her nose.

Connor closed on her, grabbed the arm holding the machete and twisted as hard as he could against her grip. He felt something give in her wrist, heard a gargled cry of pain as the machete clattered to the floor. Behind him, he was dimly aware of a bolt being slid home, cursed silently as he realised the security guard was locking down Maitland’s.

He was reaching for the machete when pain exploded in his ribs and he staggered to the side, his head slamming off the window of the jewellery shop.

‘Bastard!’ the masked man snarled at him, his voice carrying a level of vitriol only a Glasgow accent could fully articulate. ‘You broke her fucking nose! I’ll kill you for that!’ He was pulling out of his jacket a machete identical to the one Connor had just prised from the woman’s grip. His attacker held it over his head, ready to bring it down on Connor and split him in two. Connor braced himself against the window then lashed out, driving forward with everything he had and rugby-tackling his attacker. They landed on the cold stone floor in a heap, the man giving a frenzied cough of rage and surprise as the wind was driven from him. Connor dug his elbows into the man’s chest and drove up, putting all his weight into the move. The man cried out as he flailed wildly, and Connor felt the machete cut the air in front of his face as the blade flashed before his eyes. He grabbed the man’s knife arm, twisted, not stopping this time, finishing the job he had started with the woman and snapping his attacker’s wrist. The sound of the machete clattering to the floor was the sweetest Connor had ever heard.

He leaned back, the man in front of him curling into a foetal ball of pain around his broken wrist. Connor reached down for the machete, then, satisfied his attacker wasn’t a threat, turned to the woman. She was sitting propped against the jeweller’s window, her face a mask of red that somehow matched the hatred in her eyes. She was grasping for the machete that lay just out of reach, her eyes flicking between it and Connor.

‘Leave it,’ he said, his voice as sharp as the blade he now held. ‘You touch that thing, I’ll break both your arms, okay?’

She glared at him for a minute, then sagged, the fight leaving her as the first sound of sirens drifted into the centre. Connor nodded once, looked through the window of the jewellery shop, saw the security guard standing there, all wide eyes and flushed, sweat-studded skin.

‘Thanks for the help,’ Connor mouthed to him, as he ticked off a small salute. ‘Really, you were grand.’ A thought occurred to him, and he turned back to the woman with the broken nose. ‘Why change the pattern?’ he asked. ‘Why try your luck now instead of at the end of the day?’

She sneered at him, showing small bloodstained teeth. ‘Didn’t want to be predictable, did we?’ she hissed. ‘Get in one last hit, then off to Manchester, sell the gear there. Didn’t expect you, though, did we?’

Connor shrugged, smiled. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Got a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

He hated the place in the way only someone who was born there could.

Standing there, Stirling spread out below him, a patchwork of stone and concrete that petered out as the Ochil Hills rose on the horizon, the warm breeze carrying the sounds of the city up to him, he could see it all.

And he despised it.

Not that he really remembered Stirling, or that the city had shaped his childhood in any meaningful way. No, it was more that it reminded him of what might have been, of roads, both literal and otherwise, not taken. Of a life he was cheated out of.

A life that had died with his father.

Conversation made it worse: the flattened consonants and elongated vowels of the locals he spoke to reminded him of his mother, and the accent that had coloured her voice despite more than four decades away from the place. He wondered if his father’s had sounded similar, felt a sorrow-tinged fury at the realisation that he could not remember his voice. Oh, he could hear it: all he had to do was go online and find one of Dad’s speeches, but that was different, like watching a replay of a football match instead of experiencing the event live. It was sterile. Emotionless.

Empty.

‘Jonathan?’ a voice from behind him enquired, shy and hesitant, almost as though the speaker had read his thoughts and was unwilling to intrude on his sorrow with her American accent. But she would. After all, that was why they were here, wasn’t it? To intrude on his private grief, make it public, get answers to questions that had gone unanswered for too long.

He took one last sweeping look at the view, then turned his back on it. Amanda Lyons, his executive assistant, stood in the doorway to the observation deck, brushing back her long, dark hair as the wind tried to blind her with it. The warm tan of her skin suddenly made Jonathan yearn for California.

For home.

‘Yes, Amanda,’ he said. ‘I take it they’ve arrived?’

She glanced back over her shoulder, as though she could see down the stairwell to check on their ‘guests’.

They were in the Tolbooth, a large arts venue at the top of Stirling, close to the castle. The original meeting place of Stirling Burgh Council, the ornate baronial building had been renovated about twenty years ago and transformed into an arts and entertainment venue. Everything from music gigs to book festivals had been held in the building, and today, Jonathan Rodriguez was going to use it for another sort of entertainment, by bringing the media circus to town.

‘Best not keep them waiting, then,’ he said. They descended a narrow staircase, the sound of conversation, the hustle and bustle of cameras being set up and spotlights positioned rising to meet them. The room they had booked in the Tolbooth was a large, atrium-style space that could accommodate around forty journalists, all of whom would be plied with as much coffee and as many biscuits as they could endure. When planning this event, Amanda had suggested they hold it at the university, using Airthrey Loch at the heart of the campus as the backdrop. Jonathan had rejected the idea: it was too painful a place for him to visit.

Yet.

Amanda led him into a small anteroom behind the atrium where she had set up her laptop and printer. She crossed to the table, picked up a sheaf of papers, and handed them to him. ‘Your speech,’ she said. ‘It’ll run to eight minutes. Then we can open up to questions.’

He took the papers from her, then placed them back on the table. ‘I’ll do this one from memory,’ he said, even as he saw unease tighten her face.

‘You really think that’s a good idea?’

‘It’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘Been rehearsing this in my head for months. Just do me one favour. Make sure the first question is from that reporter we spoke about.’

Amanda nodded, a smile playing at the corners of her mouth. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I checked before I came up to the roof to get you. Donna Blake is here, and I’ve made sure she’s got a nice cosy seat in the front row. You won’t be able to miss her.’

Connor’s new phone started chirping the moment he slid the SIM card into it and powered it up. It wasn’t surprising. After breaking his old phone on the face of a would-be robber, he had spent the next two hours with the police, patiently answering their questions on how he had prevented an armed robbery in the middle of the day in one of Edinburgh’s busiest shopping malls. After finally agreeing a statement, he was released from Gayfield Square police station just off Leith Walk and headed back to the St James Quarter to retrieve his car. When he got to it, he pulled the SIM from his damaged phone and swapped it into a spare handset he kept in the Audi’s glove compartment.

Security work. It was murder on his phone bills.

He checked the screen, saw he had seven voicemails and about twice that number of text messages, mostly from Jen, which ranged from ‘Was that you in Edinburgh?’ and ‘Are you okay?’ to ‘Call me now. I’m worried. Love you.’

He winced at the last. Jen had been through enough in the last couple of years, from losing their unborn child to almost being killed in a hit-and-run accident that had left her with spinal injuries and mobility issues. The last thing she needed was him adding to her stress by going dark on her when he got into a dangerous situation. He was thumbing through his contacts list to her number when the phone rang. Connor cursed under his breath. The call was about as inevitable as it was unwelcome.

‘DCI Ford,’ he said, trying to keep his voice neutral. ‘How are you doing today?’

A heavy sigh. When Ford spoke, he sounded tired, old. Connor could almost see him at his desk, hunched over the phone, rubbing at his eyes.

‘I read the reports on your antics at the St James Quarter,’ Ford said. ‘Nice work. Though I do wonder when you’re going to get it through your thick head that you’re not a police officer any more and should leave the confronting of armed individuals to us.’

Connor closed his eyes, felt the machete blade cut the air in front of him. Shivered. How close had it come? Millimetres? How close had he been to serious injury? ‘Didn’t really have the time to call for back-up, sir,’ Connor replied, forcing the thoughts down. ‘Things just kind of got out of hand.’

‘Story of your bloody life that, isn’t it?’

Connor shifted in his seat. It was hard to argue. ‘Look, sir, if—’

Ford grunted. ‘Forget it. From what I’ve read and seen you did good work. Though I understand the Lothian area commander isn’t too happy that you bagged two armed robbers who’ve been leading him on a merry dance around the city for the last month.’

‘Just lucky,’ Connor said. ‘Anyway, sir, if there’s nothing else, I really should be getting on the road home.’

A moment’s silence on the line, just long enough to tell Connor that Ford was making some kind of decision.

‘You been watching the news?’ the policeman said eventually, sounding even more exhausted now.

Odd, Connor thought. It was unlikely Ford was talking about whatever headlines his antics at St James Quarter had generated, and since DCI Malcolm Ford wasn’t the type to follow the latest celebrity non-story gossip, that left …

‘You don’t mean all that stuff with the university professor, do you? The Robert Balfour case?’

‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ Ford said. ‘His son could make life very difficult for us, and I need you to do me a favour.’

‘Oh,’ Connor said, the first glimmers of unease flashing in the back of his mind. ‘And what would that be?’

Another pause, the sound of Ford drinking something. Connor would have laid even money on either coffee or whisky.

‘I need you to look at the case. Coldly. Dispassionately. And then I need you to tell me if Jonathan Rodriguez is right in claiming that Central Scotland Police were involved in a cover-up back in the eighties and his dad really was murdered.’

The unease Connor had felt hardened into dread. He knew the case, of course – anyone who had been online or near a TV in the last month would. And it didn’t make pleasant reading for anyone who wore a policeman’s uniform in Central Scotland.

Back in 1983, Robert Balfour had been a professor of history at Stirling University. He was found floating in Airthrey Loch at the heart of the university campus on 22 July. His death was initially dismissed as a tragic accident: Balfour was known to be a heavy drinker whose marriage was collapsing around his ears. Interviews with his colleagues had shown that he had taken to drinking himself into oblivion in his office and sleeping there overnight. The consensus was backed up by a post-mortem examination that showed he had nothing in his stomach other than what was almost a bottle of whisky, and a contusion over his left temple. In a drunken stupor, he had apparently staggered out onto the campus, slipped and hit his head as he fell into the loch, where he had drowned. Tributes were paid and the death of a ‘well-respected, talented and dedicated academic’ was mourned.

But then, two months after his death, another story emerged.

It broke in an interview with one of Balfour’s students that ran in the Sunday Gazette, one of Scotland’s main Sunday broadsheets back in the eighties. In it, the student, Jamie Leggatt, alleged that Balfour’s death wasn’t a tragic accident but rather a state-sponsored execution. Leggatt claimed Balfour had told him he was being monitored by Special Branch due to his support for Scottish independence and his work to prove that Scottish resources were being used to prop up the rest of the UK. And while the allegations were dismissed by the government at the time as the ranting of an over-politicised student, they were enough to get the attention of senior nationalist politicians, who lodged parliamentary questions on the matter and demanded ‘justice for Robert Balfour’. As the campaign gained momentum, it emerged that Balfour had been a key supporter of students who had protested against the Queen when she visited Stirling University in October 1978.

But while the story grabbed some immediate headlines, it struggled in the pre-social media, clickbait news landscape of the eighties and faded away, dismissed as just another conspiracy theory. Until last month, when Jonathan Rodriguez stepped onto centre stage.

Rodriguez had only been nine when his father had died and his mother, Elaine, had left Scotland to start a new life in America, where her sister had emigrated after marrying a US soldier. Rodriguez, who had taken the name of the man her mother had met and married in Los Angeles, had forged a career as a TV presenter and news anchor. He was a household name on the west coast of the US, where Americans welcomed him into their homes five mornings a week. And now, . . .