Random

by Craig Robertson

  CHAPTER 29

  Alec Kirkwood had changed tack. Ally McFarland told me so.

  Number five had changed his thinking on the whole issue. Seems he now accepted that the killing of Spud Tierney was not done to taunt him. Realized that Tierney’s finger wasn’t a great big Get it Right Up You to him.

  That was the good news.

  The bad was that Kirky was still hell-bent on finding out who murdered his dealer. Maybe more so than before. He had put the word out that he wanted Spud’s killer. Made sure everyone knew just how much. Kirky was used to getting what he wanted so was not a happy man when it didn’t deliver. And because he had made his wishes so public, it was left all over his face when he got nothing. That just made him angry.

  What bothered Kirkwood most was that people, the people that mattered, might see this as weakness. Being top dog in a world where one ate the other was always a precarious business. If they think you are on the slide then they boot you up the arse to help you on your way.

  One opening, that was all that they were looking for. Searching for a wound where they could stick a knife and twist until it was left wide and festering.

  Well Kirky wasn’t about to give them an opportunity. He’d fuck every one of them over before he let that happen. He needed to re-establish his authority. Smack some heads together, break some legs.

  That meant finding the cunt that had killed Spud and took the piss out of him and that was what he was going to do. Maybe it wasn’t all about him but that wasn’t going to stop him from finding whoever shanked Spud.

  This serial killer wasn’t the only one that had taken the piss. Mick Docherty, still blazing about Jimmy McIntyre, the bullet through his window and the torture of Billy Hutton, hadn’t missed his chance. He let it be known what a joke Kirkwood had become. How everyone was laughing at him for not being able to look after his own. How he had made all this big noise about making someone pay and then doing sweet fuck all about it.

  That would have been enough to make Kirkwood furious but Mick had also been getting a bit naughty. Two pubs in Cowcaddens had been turned over. Bottles, beer and cash taken and both places trashed. Two pubs in Alec Kirkwood’s pocket and under his protection. Penny stuff really but it was cheeky.

  Everyone knew that it was kids who worked for Docherty who had done it. They had been selling the booze cheap and knocking back a fair share of it too. Cheeky little bastards, Kirky had said.

  They were sorted without too much fuss. Three doors kicked in at the same early hour of the morning. Three disrespectful wee shits beaten about the knees with baseball bats. One of them would never walk unaided again but the other two would be back on their feet in a few months. Lesson learned.

  But the boys that had robbed the boozers weren’t the issue. Mick Docherty was. He might not have given them the word to plunder the pubs but he didn’t stop it or turn them over to Kirky once he knew the score. That was out of order. That was ripping the pish.

  Kirkwood said it was simple. His reputation. The serial killer. Mick Docherty. All three needed sorting. He figured that by doing one he could maybe do all three. It was all about coming up with a plan.

  He had advantages when it came to catching a killer. Kirkwood could send his guys to talk to people that the cops couldn’t. He could get answers where they would only get knock-backs or no comments. Kirky’s people played by different rules.

  Davie Stewart and Charlie Grant spoke to Jack Fyfe, a partner in Salter, Fyfe and Bryce. Jonathan Carr’s boss. Seems Fyfe had more than a few clients on his books that were known to Kirkwood. Criminals needed lawyers like anyone else – more than most – and there were always lawyers more than happy to take their coin. Jack Fyfe was one of those.

  Kirky’s boys leaned on him although there really wasn’t much need. Fyfe knew which side his bread was buttered on. He provided them with a list of Carr’s clients and a rundown on who might be worth talking to.

  He also gave them details of Carr’s extra-curricular activities. The lap-dancing clubs, the massage parlour and the redhead in Milngavie named Amanda. Jack Fyfe was the type who made sure he knew everything about his employees, particularly the potentially embarrassing ones like Carr. He survived by knowing about problems before they happened.

  Davie Stewart and Charlie Grant took a trip out to Woodlands Street in Milngavie and knocked on Amanda Kernaghan’s door. She wasn’t best pleased to see them.

  The way Ally McFarland heard it, she was much less pleased by the time they left.

  I had no idea if Rachel Narey, DC Dawson or any of their uniformed friends had been out to see Amanda but if they had I was pretty sure their approach would have been different. It’s doubtful they would have taken a crystal vase from a table and emptied flowers and water over an expensive carpet. Or smashed the vase against a wall. They almost certainly wouldn’t have rummaged through drawers to find address books and letters. They wouldn’t have stood over her and let her believe that they were about to rape her.

  They wouldn’t have forced her legs apart and dragged her skirt to her waist. Wouldn’t have leered and stared and scowled and drooled the way Davie Stewart did. Silently pawing at her, aroused and angry, while Grant demanded to know who else knew about her and Carr. Pushing at her to tell who would have been jealous enough to kill him.

  Amanda cried, tried to scream but Stewart’s hand stopped her from doing that. She told them that the killer had nothing to do with her, nothing to do with Jonathan. It was a random murder, the papers said so, the police said so.

  Stewart and Grant told her it wasn’t, that she was a stupid cow, that she had to tell them what she knew. She cried again. Stewart stroked her thighs and licked his lips. Grant asked for a name and in the end she gave one. Some guy that had been interested before Carr was on the scene and who she had been out for dinner with a couple of times. He didn’t take it too well when she said she didn’t want to see him again. The guy, a computer programmer from Bearsden, demanded to know if there was anyone else and she’d said yes.

  They didn’t leave a mark on her. No damage to the house except a broken vase, a clumsy accident. They eased her skirt back down and encouraged her not to speak to anyone. Grant suggested that Davie Stewart might be keen to come back and pay her another visit if there was even a whisper out of her. She wouldn’t say anything.

  The computer geek took a doing. He told them nothing because he had nothing to say.

  The cops were called but he could tell them little. Two guys in ski masks asked about the lawyer that had been murdered. Left him in a heap of badly bruised ribs when they realized all he knew was what was in the papers.

  Frankie Grant and a couple of thugs were tasked with having a quiet word with some of Billy Hutchison’s customers at the bookies in Maryhill. It was in the nature of things that there were punters there that owed Billy money and would have been quids in when he got a short, sharp shock and was found pan breid behind his own front door. Independent bookies like Billy strung regulars out on credit and were much more likely to let them run up a tab than the likes of Ladbrokes or Corals. Some of them could be into him for a bundle.

  Debts like that could end up in the hands of loan sharks and it took no more than a single phone call for Kirky to find out what he needed. Frankie and his boys had leverage. Not that they particularly needed it because they were quite happy to break fingers or burn cars. But the threat of those gambling debts being transferred to Alec Kirkwood turned out to be a very effective laxative. It loosened tongues as well as bowels. A name that was offered to them three times was Charlie Coyle, known as Glasvegas because of his heavy gambling.

  At the time Billy had popped his clogs, Coyle was into him for nine and a half grand. Glasvegas was a big up, big down punter, the kind who would sting Billy for a thousand here or there with a shrewd bet then give him fifteen hundred back with a crazy hunch. Billy would always take his dough because he was confident he’d finish up ahead. Glasvegas sold second-hand cars so made dec
ent money without exactly rolling in it. He needed Billy’s credit line and got it. But this time he’d got more of it than he could handle. Billy hadn’t handed the debt over to a shark but they were circling and smelling blood. The pressure was on but Glasvegas couldn’t buy a winner to get himself out of it.

  There were those who reckoned Glasvegas was mad and bad enough to have done Billy in. No one made him for a serial killer though. Didn’t figure him for that. Frankie Grant and his bully boys weren’t thinking that far ahead though. Don’t ignore the obvious was what Kirkwood had told them.

  Glasvegas was walking home half-canned from a session in Munns Vaults on Maryhill Road when he was pulled into a white van and knocked unconscious. He woke in a flat somewhere, blindfolded and his bare feet in a basin of water.

  Glasvegas was a gambler, a bluff merchant, a guy used to putting on a bold front. Confidence can only get you so far though. As the first tiny jolt of electricity shot through his body, Coyle would have torn up a betting slip with ‘Certainty’ written on it. He was a gambler not a fighter. And he fucking hated pain.

  The clamps on his fingers stayed put despite his shouts to take them off and his offers to tell them anything they wanted to know.

  So talk, they told him. The first words Frankie or the thugs had spoken.

  Glasvegas was the kind of guy with fingers in many pies, skeletons in many cupboards and debts in many places. He didn’t know where to start.

  ‘Is it about the Skodas I got from down south? I can sort that, no probs. If it’s Billy Hutchison’s dosh then you’re maybe family. Will pay that obviously. It’s only right. Terrible shame what happened to Billy. Great guy. Salt of the earth. Wait. Is it my maw’s hoose? Is it? Fuck, can’t tell you how bad I feel about that. Loved that wee hoose, she did too. The Cosworth that I sold to Malky Blackstock’s cousin? That it? I knew I should have got the boy to check those gears over.’

  Frankie raised a hand signalling his boys to keep quiet.

  ‘It’s about your maw’s hoose. Talk.’

  Glasvegas spilled his guts. He’d remortgaged his mother’s ex-council house and blew the thirty-five grand he got for it. Then he couldn’t keep up the mortgage payments and the bank had repossessed. His mother had gone to live with her sister in Bishopbriggs. The sister with three cats and a bad back. The smell and the inconvenience wasn’t the worst thing though. It was the shame. Lost that smashing wee two-bedroomed hoose. The one that she had loved showing off to her sister. The sister that was now lording it over her. Frankie Grant threw a big blast of electricity that had Glasvegas’s hair standing on end. Didn’t kill him, didn’t even knock him out but had him grinding his teeth together as if trying to bite his own molars off. Scorch marks on his skin where the clamps had fired into his hands.

  Eventually Coyle found a shaky voice.

  ‘Bastards. Said you wouldn’t do that if I told you what you wanted to know. Bastards.’

  ‘Aye, but that wasn’t what we wanted to know. That was for your maw, you fucker. And so’s this.’

  The charge of electricity wasn’t as much as the one before but it still had Glasvegas screaming and whimpering.

  ‘Billy Hutchison, you wee scrote. Tell us everything.’

  Wasn’t much to tell. Glasvegas had been into him for money for a while. Nothing too serious then a couple of big bets went wrong and suddenly he owed Billy five grand. He tried to bet his way out of the hole and one came good but then three went bad. Billy had warned him the last one was the last one until he started paying it off. Billy had told him he couldn’t run a line that big and might have to pass it on. That made Glasvegas ready to shit himself. That was why he ordered the cut and shut Skodas. And why he couldn’t pay for them just yet.

  ‘And why you bumped off Billy?’

  ‘What? No! No, no, no. Naw! What? No!’

  ‘Did you fucking well kill Billy Hutchison?’

  ‘No way. Not my style. Couldn’t hurt a fly.’

  Frankie frazzled Glasvegas for a fourth time to make sure but he was already convinced he was telling the truth.

  The gambler was crying now. ‘I’ve never killed anybody in my life. Never even won a fight since I was at school.’

  Frankie Grant nodded at the other two. It wasn’t him.

  ‘Who else owed Billy money? Give us another name.’

  Glasvegas eagerly coughed up two names. Two more dead ends to be chased down. In return, one last shot of electricity was pinged through his body. Just for the fun of it. Just for his mother.

  It was Davie Stewart and Kirkwood himself who went after contacts of Wallace Ogilvie at Glasgow Council. One of them was in the planning department and the other a Labour councillor. Men bought with fine wine, expensive meals and timeshare apartments. Brown envelopes stuffed with used notes were so 1980s.

  The planning officer, a senior guy there named McMartin, wasn’t for playing ball at all until Davie Stewart threw his cat out the window of his penthouse flat in Finnieston. Until the point that Stewart grabbed the thing by the scruff of its neck and opened the window, this McMartin still seemed to think he was used to playing with the big boys and had no need to worry. He knew people, he thought. Problem was he didn’t know people like Davie. The window was shut with the cat still learning how to fly. That was when McMartin got the message.

  He gave them the names of people who Wallace Ogilvie had business dealings with, including those that were off the books. He told them of people that had grudges against Ogilvie. A worrying development.

  The planning officer was patted on the head and told to give it ten minutes before he went looking to see if his cat had eight lives left.

  The councillor wasn’t named but he was old school, exunion official, and a friend of a friend of Kirkwood. This guy was not averse to talking to friends of gangsters. It was part of how he got where he was. That’s why Kirky was doing it himself. The councillor wasn’t going to respect common or garden crooks or be frightened by them. Top man or nothing for this job.

  He told them how contracts might be won and who might have lost them. He wasn’t naive enough to give them chapter and verse on the subject but they got what they wanted. He gave them names, individuals and companies, and pointed them in the direction of deals that didn’t turn out to be what they promised.

  The councillor also gave two names from Kirkwood’s inner city. Two men that Wallace Ogilvie didn’t deal with directly but who were associates of his associates. Nothing unusual in that. Do business in a city like Glasgow and you are no more than a couple of degrees of separation from a criminal, of either the organized or disorganized variety.

  It was the names that interested Kirkwood. One was Alan Devlin who ran one of the biggest security firms in the city and had recently guarded the building of new homes for three housing associations in the city in return for taxpayer’s cash. Kirkwood knew Devlin well and he wouldn’t have hesitated to kill Ogilvie if he had screwed him over in a deal or even if he had just looked at him the wrong way. But freezing the cunt to death was hardly his style. He’d have had him decapitated or buried under a block of flats. Or both.

  The other name was Mick Docherty. As well as dealing drugs and shooting off his flash mouth, Docherty had a line in providing cheap labour, all foreign and all off the books. The suggestion was that Ogilvie had his fingers in the building of a new school and a contact of his had been in charge of labour for tarmacking the driveways. The councillor said that the middle man was dodgy enough to have gone to Docherty to provide the workers. It wasn’t much to link mouthy Mick to Wallace Ogilvie but close enough for Kirkwood’s purposes. Just perfect, in fact.

  Kirky had already let it be known he would catch the man they were now calling ‘The Cutter’. Said he would do what the cops couldn’t. Said he would do their job for them. That was why he had made sure everyone knew he was chasing leads, letting slip bits about Glasvegas, council contracts and baseball-bat beatings.

  Everyone in Glasgow wanted this guy caught
. They were prepared to buy into anyone that could do it. Anyone. City was crying out for a hero.

  The councillor had given him the name of the middle man in the school building project, a guy called Archie Kepple. It wasn’t clear if Kepple knew Docherty’s labourers were wetbacks or if it suited him not to know. Either way, it was time for Kirky to pay Mr Kepple a visit.

  He had an office on the first floor of a building on Renfield Street, not far from the lawyer Carr’s. When Kepple’s secretary was told that Alec Kirkwood was there to see him regarding Wallace Ogilvie, she asked if he had an appointment. Kirkwood said he was confident that Mr Kepple would see him and he was right. He was to be shown right in.

  Archie Kepple was a nervous little man who kept playing with a glass paperweight on his desk. Kirky was used to people being nervous around him and didn’t take offence.

  To begin with Kepple was very evasive about Wallace Ogilvie. Made out he had to think about the name, which was pretty stupid given that he had been all over the papers as a victim of the serial killer. It’s the kind of thing you would remember.

  Then he tried to play down his business involvement with Ogilvie, said they had only had a couple of dealings. That’s when Kirky smiled and told him to cut the crap. They were both businessmen, men of the world, they could talk straight. The paperweight was going like a yo-yo.

  Kepple nodded at Kirkwood’s suggestion. Yes, businessmen.

  Sometimes need to cut corners to get deals done, said Kirky. Yes, sometimes, agreed Kepple. Need to deal with people that we normally wouldn’t, declared Kirky. Kepple blinked a lot but nodded.

  Kepple’s fiddling with the paperweight was starting to get on Kirkwood’s tits. He glared at it and Kepple promptly put it down and shoved it away from himself.

  ‘People like Mick Docherty.’

  Kepple opened his mouth and closed it again. Opened it again to say no more than ‘Em . . .’

  ‘It’s OK, we all do it. Docherty is a piece of scum and I’m sure you wouldn’t work with him if you didn’t have to. Hard times in the building trade. Needs must, eh?’