DEAD MONEY

by TERESA HUNTER

  I knew she would begin badgering me the minute she arrived.“Jules, how do we get the banks to agree to offer ex-cons banking services?” she would ask. Tricky one that, reconciling bank robbers and bank accounts.

  I was rehearsing the words with which I would try to explain the banks’ anathema to armed villains, when the phone rang again.

  “Julia speaking.”

  “Julia,” came a dark voice at the other end. “This is Andrew Ludgate. I am…”

  I knew perfectly well who Ludgate was; commissioning editor of the Square Mile Journal, one of Britain’s foremost daily financial publications. It was one title I hadn’t approached. I thought they wouldn’t touch me with my current baggage.

  “I’ve long been a fan of your writing and wondered if you might pop in for a chat.”

  He sounded friendly, not the ogre of repute.

  “Yes, it would be good to meet,” I tried to sound willing, but not desperate.

  “Good. I’ll be out of town for the next few days. Come and see me on Thursday. Let’s make it 2pm. You know where our offices are?”

  “Of course, near the Bank.”

  “Good, I’ll see you then.”

  The line went dead, as Marsha came crashing through the door.

  “Doll, don’t you look like the cat that’s got the cream,” she said.

  I couldn’t help it. I leapt to my feet and punched the air.

  “Yippeeeeeeeee,” I squealed, running to her and throwing my arms around her leather-clad, short-skirted little body. We awkwardly jigged a celebratory bop, before Marsha pushed me away.

  “Leave it out,” she said, wriggling the tight skirt back into place.

  “That was the Square Mile Journal. They want to offer me work.”

  “Jules, that’s triffic. What did I tell you?” Marsha was one of the few people, who never stopped believing in me.

  But I never made it to the interview.

  Chapter 3

  7.30am Thursday, October 4,

  Southwark London

  I rose on Thursday, hope riding high, convinced my luck was about to turn. I picked the newspaper off the door mat, glancing at the headlines above the fold. Nothing much. Political row over hospital waiting lists made it to the lead, with Israeli tank incursion into Gaza the main picture story.

  I tucked the newspaper under my arm, and shuffled into the kitchen to make that first coffee of the day. This ritual had underpinned my life for years. I liked to concentrate on the little tasks. It was always the small things, which mattered. It was the same with work. I had never gone looking for big scandals. I had learnt early on the job, if you chip away at small stories, more often than not, you find the one cracked brick that brings the whole house down.

  The kettle bubbled as I carefully measured the first spoon of coffee. Next, I filled the pot with boiling water, and waited three minutes precisely, before pushing the plunger.

  It tasted delicious. Keep to the rules and the coffee never disappoints. The morning was starting well. All the omens were good. I returned with coffee tray and paper to bed. This was my favourite time of the day. Tucked up between the sheets, I would peruse yesterday’s news, in anticipation of the new cycle about to begin.

  I was scanning the front page for anything that would give me smart one-liners for the interview, when a headline in the ‘News in Brief” column caught my eye. Blazoned in 12 point was ‘Union Leader shot - turn to page seven’

  Don’t ask me how I knew what these words foreshadowed, but my pulse started to race.

  “Jesus God….please God no,” I repeated, as I rapidly turned to page seven, dreading to find what I feared would be spread across the page; a picture of Jim Sugden. The man I had callously refused to help just a few days ago.

  But when I got to the story, there was no picture. I began to read, but the words didn’t make any sense. I couldn’t seem to grasp, what they were trying to say. This had nothing at all to do with Jim.

  Gradually, the mist began to clear and as it did so, a cold sinking feeling crept through me. I gasped, as the shock hit home, a hand lifting automatically to my mouth, to gag any further sound. It was starting to make sense, yet it made no sense at all. The picture, the headline, and the story were falling into place. I understood everything, and yet I understood nothing. How could I have been so blind?

  Shooting tragedy near Glasgow.

  The close-knit community of Bearsden was last night reeling with shock after a shooting at the home of trade unionist Ken Strachan.

  Four bodies were found at the house in Station Road. Strachan, was known to have been depressed because of the collapse of Kelly’s Brewery.

  Police are still investigating, but believe Mr Strachan may have shot his family before turning the gun on himself.

  Neighbours paid tribute to Strachan’s life- time service to workers in the distilling and brewing industries throughout the UK, but in particular to those working at the Glasgow plant.

  He had recently been campaigning for compensation for employees who...

  … and so the story went on, but I didn’t read any more.

  Chapter 4

  10am Tuesday, October 9, Glasgow

  Don't know what took me to the funeral. Guilt I suppose. I flew up the night before and booked into a city centre hotel. Couldn’t face walking to the graveyard alone, so I caught a taxi outside Queen Street Station.

  Almost a dry day for Glasgow; charcoal sky giving way to drizzle. People continued about their business unperturbed, no strangers to rain. I was forced to abandon the cab a few hundred yards from St Mungo’s Cathedral, where the service was to be held. His parish church was thought too small to accommodate the numbers wanting to pay their respects. They were right. The traffic was gridlocked with mourners, so I joined an army of silent marchers heading for the funeral on foot.

  They were coming in droves to respect the dead man; iron men with iron grey hair atop crisp black suits. Women came too, smaller in number, dressed with the chic austerity of Scotland in mourning. So many, the police cordoned off the arterials leading to the precinct. They had refused to listen to him in life. Now death had silenced him, they would come.

  The pageant of the Strachan family funeral wasn’t so much sad, as surreal. Multiple funerals, with the line up of different-sized coffins, are always a torture. Who can look on child-sized coffins, without wanting to rage at some higher being?

  So we didn’t look – only at ourselves. Few of the faces meant much to me, but the heavy police presence and road blocks said it all. The congregation was pitted with the great and the good, as well, no doubt, as a smattering of the not so good. Who many were, I could only guess at. Certainly union leaders, politicians, and top brass from some big local employers would be present.

  It seemed the eulogies would never end. Ken had plenty of enemies. In fighting for his members, he never hesitated to strike with a poisoned knife. Now, one by one, his former adversaries stood up and sang his praises.

  Ronnie Raeburn, national boss of the brewery workers union was the first to the altar, and spoke of a man who always put others first, a fearless fighter.

  “I’ve lost a dear friend and brother,” he said, but he left me cold, something was lacking.

  He was followed by the local MP David Ragland, also a senior cabinet minister. He had a ruthless reputation for assassination, which I had cause to know was justified. He spoke of his 30-year friendship with Ken, whom he described as one of the few people he could trust to tell him the truth.

  “He could never see a small man in trouble and walk by on the other side of the street,” he finished tamely.

  Not like your Government, I couldn’t help thinking.

  But what right did I have to criticise? I had been no better a friend.

  Next, a junior minister, Richard Crippledown, who had repeatedly stonewalled Ken’s letters, stood up to pay his respects.

  “He worked tirelessly for the common cause.”

  I didn
’t think I could take much more of this. So I let my thoughts wander to the day I spent on the phone last Thursday, after shoving the newspaper aside on the bed clothes. No one had been able to tell me what had happened; not the police; not the hospital; local hacks on the spot; not the union; none of his close colleagues or professional associates.

  A gun had gone off sometime late that day. The police found four bodies, when they entered the house. The news of the shooting had broken early enough to make it down to London for the next morning’s last edition.

  People were reluctant to pass comment, but the consensus seemed to be that strain had brought on some kind of psychotic break. He lost his mind and killed his family, before turning the gun on himself. They even have a technical term for it, these days. He was called a family annihilator.

  Next, the business community lined up to give thanks for Ken’s professionalism, pragmatism, and fair play in all their dealings across the negotiating table. They were followed by Stephen Russell, headmaster at Clydebank School, where Ken had coached football training. He spoke of Ken’s great love of children. There was even a short thank you from Sister Robert, who ran the drop-in centre for asylum seekers. He had helped her with language classes. From Kelly’s Brewery, though, there was silence.

  Finally, the arch-bishop, leading a team of four priests, spoke of the great love, the Strachan family had shared, and how they had gone to a better place, where they could be happy together. I wanted to scream at this cant and hypocrisy. Two children and an innocent woman lay dead in front of us. Yet, no one mentioned the M word. No one said, we are gathered here together to celebrate the murder of three innocent people, and the death of a fourth, also an innocent.

  I was not alone in these thoughts. A frail figure in the front pew raised a skeletal arm and began to gesticulate, stopping the cleric mid-sentence. An assistant priest descended the altar steps and walked towards her. It was an elderly woman, who looked as though she was collapsing in on herself. She wore a black mourning coat. White hair, like delicate silk threads, peeped out from below a shiny black hat, the sort Mexican bandits wear in westerns, but with a narrower brim. I had never seen anyone wear such a hat.

  The hat was respectable enough, though, which could not be said of what threatened to follow.

  Please dear God, don’t do this, I thought.

  God wasn’t listening. The figure in mourning wobbled on a walking stick towards the altar, climbed its steps unsteadily, and made her way to the lectern.

  But there was nothing frail about the way she turned to address the congregation, her eyes blazing with a look of deranged anger.

  “My son never killed naebody,” she whispered into the microphone. Then she raised her voice.

  “You killed them.” Her words echoed around the ancient columns. It was you,” she pointed straight into the body of the church, drawing a circle from left to right, shouting over and again, “All of you... all of you.”

  Ordinarily it would have taken a heart of stone not to laugh at such a spectacle. No one laughed. No one breathed. A chill crept through the pews. She lowered her arm, and walked back to her seat, as calmly and with all the dignity her frail figure could muster. She didn't shed a tear.

  It was a relief to hear the music strike up, and watch the bearers hoist the coffins on to their shoulders. I spotted some of Ken's union friends among those who carried the family to their graves. Jim Sugden was with them. The clergy led the procession. A union banner woven in black silks for such occasions was carried ahead of the coffins.

  The path to the top of the hill was slow and rocky, and the faces that marched upwards were frozen masks. The Victorian graveyard, overshadowing the cathedral, had been built by slave merchants.

  What would Ken have thought, I wondered, at spending eternity among such company?

  A Strachan ancestor had been a bishop, so it was decided, I don’t know by whom, that they should all be buried in the family vault.

  The climb to the top was tortuous. The steep path too narrow for the nigh on two-thousand mourners stumbling up it, many, like Mrs Strachan, hobbling with walking sticks. The numbers at least brought some comfort, along with the singing of the choir, as we marched in the grey drizzle, past hideous effigies of those long dead; monstrous symbols of egos, which still had power to haunt. Mausoleums, the size of small chapels, baroque statues, and carvings repellent in their extravagance. Row after row of monolithic obelisks, like stone needles, stretched towards the sky as if straining to pierce cloud storms or disperse evil spirits; a cruel reminder of how much those lying here had to fear from the afterlife.

  A mist was descending, as we made it to the summit. The column of mourners gathered into a crowd, as the coffins were laid outside the mausoleum, in preparation for internment. The singing stopped. The arch bishop mumbled the final prayers of farewell.

  Yet his words were drowned out by the cawing sound of four huge gulls, flying inland from the Clyde, escaping from a gathering storm.

  My eyes followed them, as they glided across the skyline, heading away from the sea and into the safety of the hills. And then I saw him. Jack Kelly. Standing in a black suit, and trilby, his face partly obscured by a dark shadow of cloud. So he had come afterall.

  Jack Kelly, the man who killed Ken.

  Chapter 5

  12.45pm Tuesday, October 9,

  Glasgow

  My attention was distracted by a police siren below. I looked down to see if I could distinguish whether it was a fire or car accident. But I couldn’t, not from that distance.

  When I raised my eyes again to the burial party, Jack Kelly had disappeared; vanished like a ghost into the mist. The praying stopped and mourners turned away from the grave to begin their descent home. For the Strachan family, the journey was over.

  We started in silence, but mourners soon began muttering among themselves the platitudes one exchanges as one walks away from death.

  There was time to kill before my flight home. I had a few good contacts in the city, who I knew would be happy to stand me lunch, but I couldn’t face company. Across the cathedral precinct, Glasgow’s famous Museum of Religious Art advertised an exhibition about women and war. I couldn’t face that either, but I had to do something, anything to keep busy. I had to block out the image of that tiny black figure, in that strange little hat, kneeling in front of the mausoleum, back, straight as ramrod, dry-eyed, weeping those silent tears of the utterly bereft. So dignified, yet so alone.

  I set off at a quick pace to beat the other mourners to a cab, when I felt a hand on my elbow, drawing me up sharply. I turned to see a strange-looking character, dressed in formal morning suit, complete with top hat. At first, I thought it was the lead undertaker, calling me back to the grave.

  “C..C..Carlton C..C..Crabb, solicitor for the deceased,” he stuttered. My heart went out to him. What an unfortunate name for someone so afflicted.

  He got my name in one, though. “Ms Lighthorn, I am here to invite you to attend my ch..ch..chambers. Matter of a bequest.”

  At that moment, a cawing gull swooped down towards us. We both ducked, sensing it was about to release its bowels. I got lucky. Mortar grey motion splattered Crabb’s top hat, and slid down the front of his frock coat.

  Crabb pulled out a monster white cotton handkerchief, and began scrubbing furiously at his coat. I strangled an urge to laugh.

  “Your hat,” I pointed to his topper.

  “My hat?”

  “Your hat,” I repeated.

  He took it off, and saw what I was getting at.

  “Dear me, what a mess,” he began rubbing furiously, mashing the sides in the process.

  “Perhaps he was a legal eagle?” I couldn’t resist.

  He gave me a dry look, and continued scrubbing, until, having removed most of the excrement, he replaced the stained and slightly battered hat back on his head and returned to business.

  “Mr Strachan’s bequest... 106, George Square. I have a luncheon appointme
nt but 3pm would be c..c…convenient.”

  “You want me to come to your office for three? What for?”

  “I am an agent of others. I c..c..carry out instructions. I am servant to my hourly fee. I will see you at three, then?”

  With these words, he turned on his heels. I watched him disappear across the precinct, his misshapen silk hat balancing precariously. I wondered if his hourly fee covered his funeral expenses, because that hat was ruined.

  Yet I was intrigued. He knew my name. If I interpreted correctly, he had something for me. It had to be worth half-an-hour of my life. I looked at my watch. A quick spot of lunch, and I’d still have an hour before I needed to set off for George Square. I looked again at the poster promoting the women at war exhibition. Maybe it was worth a twirl.

  Chapter 6

  3pm Tuesday, October 9,

  George Square Glasgow.

  In the 19th century, George Square had been the finest plaza, in the second richest city, of the greatest empire on earth. In today’s fashionable, edgy, Glasgow, it seemed unsure of itself, like an elderly uncle at a rave.

  Crabb’s offices had a foot in both worlds, new and old, conservative yet convincing, with a few delinquent floor boards, which creaked in all the right places. I arrived at the dot of three, and was led through modern high-tech offices. In Crabb’s office, though, there was no computer screen, no glass, no plastic, just a grandfather clock, ticking noisily beside the wooden coat stand. How Bill Gates would eat his heart out.

  Crabb was waiting for me behind a solid oak desk, the size of a dining-room table, and embossed with gold. He had changed out of morning suit and into a dark pinstriped outfit.