Archie lit two Benson & Hedges. He instinctively passed one to his new drinking buddy.
‘Ah, cheers but I’ve given up. Those things’ll kill you.’ It was an attempt at humour, but Archie didn’t laugh.
‘Fuck ye, then,’ said Archie, as if he had just sacrificed his last ever cigarette. They clinked glasses. ‘Cheers,’ he offered.
‘Your good health, sir,’ said the young woman. They finished their drinks in silence but mainly because the singing had started in their corner of the pub, making conversation virtually impossible.
Archie ushered the young woman outside. ‘Listen hen, ah appreciate the drink an’ that, but ah’m ah supposed tae know you?’
‘You were on The Heady Heights show … with those young guys, the punks.’ Archie was immediately on guard.
‘So, what … are ye after an autograph, like?’ asked Archie, trying to face it off.
‘No. That’s definitely not what I want…’
‘Look love, ah’m sorry. Just goin’ through a rough time at the minute, y’know? Ah need tae get goin’.’
‘Can you come round into the lane with me first?’ Archie was stunned. Prostitutes blatantly soliciting inside the pubs now? Buying punters drinks as enticement? Jesus Christ, trade must really be tough!
‘Ye jokin’?’ said Archie, barely able to believe such open entrapment.
‘There’s somebody who needs a word with you.’ The words were spoken with a directness, and a coldness, that rocked Archie on his heels. She didn’t look dangerous, or deadly, like she was here on Hillcock’s business. She looked kind, and compassionate. Then again, Mata Hari’s success was primarily down to seductive looks and evocative mascara. Archie weighed it up. She was slight in stature and while he would’ve struggled to fight his way out of a wet paper bag, he couldn’t conceive of mobsters hiring female hitmen … hitwomen. Nonetheless, his hands shook as he followed her along the street in the freezing fog.
Archie saw the car through the mist. It was jammed into a dark service access with no through exit. A moving outline was in the car. His knees buckled. He was going to die tonight, right here in a wet Glasgow city-centre lane. He would be gagged, knifed and dumped down behind the bins. He’d be classed as a casualty of the overexuberance. Perhaps even assumed to be the aggressor. No way out, this time.
His tense shoulders relaxed. His breathing was suddenly calm. He was so tired of being scared. Fuck it, he thought. He was ready to walk willingly onto the end of the cold sharp steel. There was nothing left to live for.
‘Don’t be worried, Archie,’ said the young woman as they headed towards the darkness.
He was exhausted. He couldn’t resist even if he wanted to. The car window wound down.
‘It’s you,’ he said, almost tearful now.
Barbara Sherman smiled and slid across the back seat, simultaneously opening the door for him to get in. He stood motionless. His knees had locked. The young woman took his arm and helped him get in. He couldn’t tell if he was being arrested.
‘Archie, Gail here needs the information you have. The files and the photographs. It’s the only way to bring Hendricks and Campbell and the rest of them down.’
‘Aw fuck, not this again,’ he muttered. Still no end in sight.
Gail Proctor got in the front. Archie sighed. The agony was being prolonged. This was worse than a quick death.
‘Jesus, hen, did you tell this wee lassie? Christ, ah thought ah told you tae keep this tae yerself. For your own good as much as mine.’
‘This is bigger than my status at the station,’ she said.
‘That bastard Hillcock’s got the papers sewn up. They’ll fucken bury you an’me. And her, if she ends up involved.’ said Archie.
‘I am involved,’ said Gail. ‘And far more than you!’
‘Seriously doubt that, hen,’ said Archie.
‘Archie, Gail’s been investigating Jamesie Campbell for nearly two years. She hasn’t been able to get a break … until now,’ said Barbara.
‘Listen, ah’m no’ her break. Ah’m done wi’ aw this, so ah am. Ah shouldnae have told you about the stuff. Ye caught me at a bad time.’
‘Is it any better now?’ asked Barbara.
‘That’s no’ the point.’ Archie wasn’t sure what the point was anymore.
‘Mr Blunt, two years ago, Jamesie Campbell had my uncle Alec murdered because he got too close to the truth on a story. The photographs Barbara said you had will send him down. It won’t be justice for my uncle Alec, but it’ll be what the bastard deserves.’
For what seemed to Archie like an hour, Gail and Barbara elaborated, filling in blanks and answering the questions forming in Archie’s head before he could ask them. Still, Archie seemed unconvinced by the young woman. He had seen the evidence of it, but it remained hard to believe that Hank Hendricks was involved with people so diabolical. He also couldn’t conceive that murderers would get away with an act so public and obvious that this young woman had worked it all out.
Just as he reached this conclusion, he understood how naïve he’d been. And not only about the pursuit of fame.
‘Someone got in touch. An editor at the Guardian,’ said Gail. ‘Barbara ran a check. Phoned him too. He’s legit. He’s researching a story on my uncle’s work and wanted to know if I had any information that might help him. He confirmed all the things I’d suspected about Big Jamesie Campbell’s involvement. When Barbara told me about the photos and files you had, I knew they would be the proof I’d need to be taken seriously. Pinning the murder on him would be difficult but this guy thinks those would seal his fate. Either way, Big Jamesie Campbell will be finished for good.’ She was sounding desperate. ‘You’re my only hope of getting any type of conclusion to all this. To make it all stop’
‘And for all those poor kids like Lachie Wylie that they’ve been abusing for decades,’ Barbara added.
Gail Proctor’s eyes were pleading. ‘I’m on a train down to Manchester to meet this editor tomorrow. Please, Archie.’
Archie sighed. Making it all stop was all he wanted too. If he handed over the material, there was a chance of that. It may not save him, ultimately, but at least he’d be free of the fucking things. If these two wouldn’t heed a warning, then what subsequently happened wouldn’t be on his conscience. He’d done his best to keep as many people as possible out of the developing madness, but according to Barbara, Gail was already in up to her eyebrows. It couldn’t get any worse for her.
‘How dae ye really know ye’se can trust this guy?’ said Archie, wearily, almost like a father enquiring about a new boyfriend.
‘I don’t. We don’t,’ Gail admitted. ‘But I’m just so tired chasing the dead-ends now. Almost every avenue gets closed off.’
‘Aye … they’re fucken good at coverin’ tracks, ah’ll give them that.’
‘Lachie Wylie was injected with a chemical substance … methylene blue. It makes people’s skin grey with a bluish tinge.’
Archie was confused. His brain ached like a hundred migraines had descended at once.
Barbara continued. ‘Anyone injected with it looks … dead. They had drugged Lachlan and then injected this stuff into him to make him look deceased. Then Jamesie Campbell sodomised him.’
‘Fuck sakes,’ said Archie. ‘How dae you two know this?’
‘I was at The Balgarth the night it happened. Outside. Lachlan broke away from them and got out of the building. Your friend Bobby Souness drove him to the hospital. He didn’t make it inside, though,’ said Gail, calmly.
‘His body was dumped in the Clyde,’ said Barbara. ‘Made to look like suicide.’
‘The same as my uncle,’ Gail added.
‘That’s the kind of people they are, Archie,’ said Barbara. ‘Senior police protect them, and Campbell’s thugs hoover up the mess. This is the only way.’
Archie directed the car to the road that skirted the Necropolis. All three got out and climbed the slopes guided only by the full moon shinin
g down on a city revelling and resolving to be better in the year ahead. It would fail, as it always did. But at least it made the effort, annually, to acknowledge its deficits.
Archie knelt by a small headstone. Its inscription didn’t seem to be ironic or relevant; just a simple name: ROBERT ROSS. BORN 1934. One that he would remember easily. He took out a penknife and scraped away at the soil to the left of the stone. Twenty minutes later, he had excavated enough to pull a polythene bag out. The photographs and incriminating papers were in it. He handed them to Gail.
‘Thank you, Archie. It means a lot that you trust me with these,’ she said. She finally had all the pieces in place; the roadmap that led to Manchester.
‘Aye, well … that’s some pretty fucken dangerous stuff in there. You watch yer back, hen!’
‘I will.’
‘You two go on, eh … ah’ll wait an’ clear up here! An’ good luck tae the two ae ye’se.’
‘You too, Archie,’ said Barbara.
‘I’m meeting the Guardian editor tomorrow, so the story should be out by Sunday. You won’t be named at all. It’ll all be over soon.’
‘Aye … maybe.’
Archie watched them all the way back down to the car. It drove off and he leaned back on Robert Ross’s gravestone and wept. He couldn’t stop. The pain. The loss. The release. The relief. All of it.
41
January 1977
She’d bought the Guardian every day for ten days straight. She knew it wouldn’t appear immediately. Facts would have to be checked and double-checked. A scandal that blew the lid off the UK’s political and light-entertainment fraternities would be agonised over by lawyers and newspaper owners. She knew this, but still the delays were concerning. The beat cops now called her Mrs Slocombe. Her paper had big words in it. There were no tits on page three, and its football coverage was virtually nonexistent. Another chasm that separated them.
Davy Dodd had been in closed-door conference with one of the bosses from upstairs for over an hour. Whispers circulated, but no one knew the reason for it. The door opened. The superintendent left, staring over at Barbara. The squad saw it, but she didn’t.
‘Sherman!’ She looked up.
‘Yes, sarge.’
‘Get in here.’ Davy Dodd wasn’t shouting. There were none of the usual histrionics from her colleagues. It was as if they all had knowledge of a secret that she wasn’t yet in on. ‘Close the door.’ That request was highly unusual. Two closed-door meetings in one morning. ‘You’re being transferred.’
Davy Dodd sat back and folded his arms. The body language said many things: that it was a done deal. That it wasn’t going to be reversed. And that it was a decision reached much higher than his level.
‘But I didn’t ask for a transfer,’ said Barbara. But she knew that, while on probation, the police reserved the right to move people around, particularly single people. Nevertheless, it wasn’t the army. Surely there were the formalities of interviews. Assessments. Some fucking interpersonal discussion about it.
‘Think of it as a promotion,’ said Dodd.
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re bein’ fucken promoted … tae a higher grade. Fuck sake, Sherman. Thought you were supposed tae be clever?’
‘Where am I being sent?’ she asked, with as much disdain as she could muster.
‘Ye’ve caught the eye ae the super. Christ knows how … but yer goin’ back home. Fucken Teuchterville.’
‘Where?’
‘The Hebrides. The Islands beat. Some auld duffer’s just copped his whack! You’re the new sergeant, God help them.’
Barbara didn’t know what to say. It was true that she’d had it with Glasgow, and Glaswegians. Only Don Braithwaite was tolerable among the apes that passed for her East End peers.
‘How long, sir?’
‘They need you up there end ae next week. That’ll no’ be a problem, will it?’
As rhetorical questions went, it was a doozy. She turned, opened the door and walked back out, glancing only at Don, who shrugged as if to indicate the futility of any protest his beat partner might be contemplating.
WPC Barbara Sherman stared at her desk. It remained in the same position that she initially found it. She’d learned to live with the gents’ lavatories. She’d become accustomed to its odours. She wouldn’t miss it, that would be going too far. But this was her personalised workplace. People looking for her knew to locate her here. They left notes, or instructions, or files. The missing persons detail – that was universally recognised as her job. Admittedly, it wasn’t the solving of these cases … more the organisation of them. But many’s the time a murder-squad detective requested her attendance on the floor above them. To quote details from an MP file that might rule out – or rule in – a possible lead. It wasn’t vital work in the wider scheme of things, but it made her feel significant. And that sense of belonging was important to her. Maybe she wouldn’t have that opportunity in a place where the regularity and pace of crime moved at a slower speed.
She lifted a new batch of files. A fresh set of misplaced lives all reduced to as many details as would fit on a single A4 sheet. Barbara placed the files in the box. They wouldn’t be her concern for much longer. The stories that she had concocted for the disappeared while sitting in her flat alone at nights would be someone else’s responsibility. She hoped it would be a woman. Someone who might nurture a maternal instinct towards them and care about their outcomes. Someone to pray for their lost souls.
She dropped a file. It was the last one to be added. She was sure it wasn’t there when she’d gone into her sergeant’s office ten minutes ago. She picked it up from the floor. Opened it.
Tears rolled instantly. Whoever spotted them first would claim the responsibility for it and claim the sweepstake money.
But they weren’t down to any man. A small, rectangular photograph of Gail Proctor, paper-clipped to the single-sheet report, stared back at her.
42
April 1977
‘Ye right, well?’
‘Aye. Roll her out.’ Geordie McCartney reversed the van backwards. The spring sunlight glinted off gleaming headlamps and chrome wheel arches.
‘Looks fucken magic, mate,’ said Archie. And it did. Jimmy Rowntree’s ramshackle van, transformed and refurbished into The Codfather II.
Just like the film, Archie had said, the sequel’s fucken much better than the original.
Geordie agreed. The van was a business, and ready to take its licence-approved place among the street vendors of Shettleston and beyond.
‘Jimmy’ll be chuffed as fuck when he gets out, eh?’
‘Aye, Archie. He will, mate!’
Geordie enjoyed these trips back to the East End to see his pals. He still had the Corporation pass so the trips cost him nothing beyond a few pints for old chums, which he was more than happy to stand. Cumbernauld had cleaner air but, by Christ, the people were as fucking dull and lifeless as the concrete everything was built out of.
‘’Mon we’ll take it out, eh? Ah’ve got aw the stuff. Let’s go an’ sell some chips!’
Jimmy Rowntree had another month left to serve. When he’d returned to Glasgow with The High Five plus one, he’d holed up in the roofspace of an old acquaintance. He’d been up there for six weeks when he finally thought, Fuck this … Barlinnie’s a better option.
Some of Geordie’s redundancy money paid for the van’s body work, and Archie acquired the business permits and the stock. It was to be a three-way partnership, but Geordie McCartney didn’t want the responsibility. He was just happy to help and be involved. Teresa had come back, and although what little grass there was in Cumbernauld wasn’t exactly greener, they were giving it another go. Like all of them, Geordie had learned his lesson; the quiet life was the one for him.
Their first circuits were temperamental. Archie was glad that they’d waited until after the Easter holidays, until the schools had returned. Coping with hundreds of tiny starving gannets, all yelli
ng and screaming for all sorts of bizarre battered fry-ups would have been a deep end he’d have drowned in. But by the end of the first week, he’d become adept at dealing with the boiling oil. He’d mastered the batter consistency and the preparation of the food prior to frying. A few complaints gradually gave way to more queues and longer hours. More money. Life was good. The radio blared: …we gotta get right back to where we started from.
Archie smiled. Not this time.
‘Haw, big yin…’
Archie looked up. A familiar voice.
‘Nice fucken hat, by the way.’
Archie laughed, and extended a hand through the window. He was genuinely pleased to see him; to see them all. Although the brief time they’d shared was surreal, he couldn’t say it didn’t make him laugh when he recalled it.
‘So, can we get a High Five supper, then?’
‘Aye, lads. On the house, boys!’ Archie prepared the double-fish and a pie special he’d named after them.
They looked like a band. A real band. But a cool one. Not one with daft white suits. Black leathers, ripped T-shirts. Dyed, spiky hair. Like they had a purpose. Archie reached down for a spare newspaper to wrap the food in. He retrieved one from a drawer. It was an old copy that he’d saved from a few weeks earlier. This felt like the right occasion to use it.
‘What’s the story, Arch?’ asked Sledge.
‘This fuckin’ disgrace.’ Archie held up the page. Above a series of adverts, there were two stories, unrelated in any way other than what Archie and Sledge knew to be true. The first story had a picture of Heady Hendricks leaving what was described as ‘a rehabilitation centre’. The text told of Heady having been cured of the personality disorder that cursed The Heady Heights All-Winners Show on Christmas Day, when the star had sworn at the show’s tearful winner, Little Amy, insisting on live television that he wasn’t Heady Hendricks, but Daryl W. Seberg, an American movie mogul, and not the fictional agent many associated with the name. Since then, Heady – or rather, Daryl – had been treated for nervous exhaustion, brought on by overwork and the stress of fulfilling his many charity obligations.
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