‘Up from London?’ the clerk said. The flesh of his neck bulged over the tightly buttoned collar. Paton wanted to reach over and flip the top button with his finger and thumb, let the pressure off those veins.
Paton nodded.
‘Long journey, sir.’ The clerk pursed his plump lips. ‘You’ll be tired.’
Paton nodded. He scooped his key from the desk and turned to go.
‘Could I arrange for something in the way of relaxation?’
Paton stopped. He bounced the key in his hand a couple of times. ‘What did you have in mind?’
The clerk saw that he’d made a mistake. His eyebrows dropped. A pink sliver of tongue came out and wetted his lips. ‘Something from the bar, perhaps. A wee reviver? Small whisky?’
Paton held the clerk’s wavering gaze. ‘I’ll take a rain check on that.’
His room was on the second floor. A bed, a desk, a spindly chair. A tiny etching on the wall showed the spire of the university through the trees of Kelvingrove Park. He crossed to close the curtains. He opened the wardrobe to the silvery jangle of coat-hangers and hung up his jacket and trousers and shirt and lay on the bed in his Y-fronts and vest. There were still two hours before Dazzle’s driver was due to pick him up. A walk in the park? A swift half in one of the teuchter pubs on Argyle Street? In the end, he dozed on the candlewick bedspread and studied the cornicing.
‘You’ll see changes, all right.’ They were driving through Anderston, heading west. The pillars of the new motorway bridge loomed up in the darkness. The driver had introduced himself as Bobby Stokes.
‘How do you know Dazzle, then, Bobby?’
Stokes frowned. ‘I don’t. Not really. I know him through Cursiter. Cursiter’s the muscle. You’ll meet him.’
They passed the Kelvin Hall on the left-hand side, the Art Gallery looming on the right.
‘So what’s the job?’
Stokes took his time overtaking a bus. Paton thought he hadn’t heard. Eventually Stokes said, ‘Better let Dazzle fill you in on that.’
‘I get it.’ Paton wound down the window to flick his cigarette-end. ‘You’re the driver.’
The driver took him to a tenement block in Scotstoun. Two flights up. Dazzle answered the door and showed them through to the living room where a great bear of a man in a brown leather jacket was squeezed into a chair at a round Formica-topped table. Paton and Stokes joined him. It looked like a card game without any cards.
‘You’ve met Bobby,’ Dazzle said to Paton. ‘This is Brian Cursiter.’
The big man put his hand out as if for an arm-wrestle. Paton shook it. There was a bottle of White Horse on the table and a stack of upturned tumblers. Paton reached for the bottle and filled out a measure of whisky.
Dazzle rose and went through to the kitchen, returning with a four pack of tinnies, McEwan’s Export. He passed them out.
Paton sipped his whisky, set his glass on the table.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Fill me in. What’s the mark?’
‘Glendinnings.’ Dazzle pulled the ring on his beer-can and the contents fizzed over: he clamped his mouth to the opening and slurped.
‘The auctioneer’s? They still on the go?’
‘What, you think the world stops because you’ve fucked off to London?’
The others laughed. Paton sipped his whisky and waited. Dazzle wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and started to explain the job. Glendinnings was an old-school auction house in the city centre. It was also, according to Dazzle, the agent for a forthcoming contents sale. Big house in Perthshire, one of the shooting estates. The owners had died; now the son in London was selling it off, lock, stock and barrel. There were some paintings that had the valuers excited – a Raeburn and an early Peploe – but the good stuff was the jewels. Diamonds, mainly. Pearls. Bit of gold. They had an insider, a girl in the office. Cursiter knew her. (At this point the big bloke tipped two fingers in a mock salute.) The plan was to hit the place a week from now, just after midnight on the night before the sale. The nightwatchman was sixty-something, ex-army, bad hip, walked with a limp. Sometimes the firm gave him a short-term deputy in the run-up to a big sale. The stones would be in the safe in the MD’s office.
‘What about access?’
Dazzle smiled and jerked his head towards Cursiter, who was slouching down in his seat and working his fingers into the ticket pocket of his jeans. In a minute he was holding up a Yale key between his thumb and forefinger. It looked like a pin in his massive hand. He snapped it down on the desk.
‘Basement door,’ he said, grinning. ‘We just walk in at midnight. No fuss. No drama. The night before the auction.’
Paton sipped his whisky.
‘Bath Street, right?’
‘Aye.’
‘So it’s central. Good chance of being spotted. Some busybody clocks a light.’
‘It’s all commercial, though,’ Dazzle said. ‘Round there. There’s nothing residential for five or six blocks.’
‘And the security’s just the two bodies – we’re sure about this?’
They all turned to Cursiter ‘That’s max. Could be just the old fella on his own.’
‘Do we have a plan of the building? Do we know the layout?’
‘Jenny’ll get one.’
Paton nodded. The others said nothing, they were waiting for the verdict. He twisted his whisky glass on the tabletop, turned back to Cursiter. ‘This your girlfriend?’
‘Who?’
‘Your insider. The secretary.’
‘She’s the cashier. No, she’s not my girlfriend.’
‘You’ve fucked her, though, right?’
‘Yeah. I mean, twice. Three times.’
Paton was nodding. ‘So they can link to you from her.’
‘Naw, that’s—’
‘And they can link to us from you.’
‘No! Look. It’s not like that. Nobody knows.’
‘Nobody knows what – that you fucked her?’
‘That’s what I’m saying.’
‘Explain it to me. What’s your name – Brian? Explain it to me, Brian. How did you meet her?’
Cursiter looked at Dazzle; Dazzle nodded. Cursiter planted his elbows on the table. ‘Jenny McIndoe she’s called. Nice lassie. She does the day-job at Glendinnings but works nights in a hotel out near Drymen. Used to have lock-ins. I took her upstairs a couple of times.’
‘When the bar was empty?’
‘What?’
‘You said nobody saw you. You took her upstairs when the bar was empty?’
‘Not empty. But nobody knew who I was. It was just mugs. Old guys from the village. Some hikers maybe. They didn’t know me from Adam.’
‘And you never met her outside the hotel?’
‘Never.’
‘Who said romance was dead? And how did she know you were in the market for information, Brian? Information about jewellery auctions. Since nobody knew who you were.’
Cursiter shrugged. ‘We got talking.’
‘Yeah.’ Paton drained his whisky. ‘That’s what I figured.’
The others were quiet. There was a scratching at the inner door, the high tragic whine of a lonely dog.
Paton smoked his cigarette. ‘She know what kind it is?’
‘What kind what is?’
‘The safe. What make.’
‘I don’t know. Does it matter?’
Paton looked round the table. ‘Well, you boys certainly know your business.’
‘Fuck you then.’ Cursiter reared back, one arm swinging loose behind his chair. ‘Mister Bigtime fucking London. You don’t want in? There’s the door.’
‘Hey, now. Come on.’ Dazzle was on his feet. Paton was grinning at the floor and shaking his head, stubbing his smoke out in the ashtray. He stood up, lifted his jacket.
‘Well, come on, Dazzle.’ Cursiter was pouring himself another shot. ‘We need this kind of attitude? We need this kind of shit?’
‘Nice meeting you fellows. Mr D
alziel: I’ll see you again.’
Paton was ruing it all. The trip from London, the hotel room, wasting time with these losers. Ice heist at an auctioneer’s? A sub-post office was more in their line. Screwing meters. Fucking bubble-gum machines. He shrugged into his jacket.
‘Hold on, Alex. Brian.’ Dazzle was pointing at Cursiter. ‘Number one: shut the fuck up. You’re not running this job: I am. Number two—’ he pointed at Paton – ‘Alex: hear the man out. You’ve come this far.’
Paton picked at something on the shoulder of his jacket. He shrugged, took his seat, reached for his smokes. ‘What’s the take, then?’
‘Big.’ Cursiter was still rankled, touchy. ‘Big. Don’t worry about that.’
‘They might be different things, friend. Your idea of big. My idea of big. You got a figure?’
‘Hundred grand. Minimum.’
They all looked at Paton.
Paton smoked.
‘We’d need another man.’
Dazzle frowned, looked around the others in turn. ‘It’s a four-man job, Alex. It’s all worked out.’
‘Is it?’ All the glasses were empty now and Paton stood up and moved them into the centre of the table. ‘Stokes is in the car, right?’ He moved one of the glasses to the edge of the table. ‘The rest of us go in through the basement door. We need a man on the door. In case someone decides to stick their nose in.’ He lifted another glass and smacked it down in the centre of the table. ‘We move down the corridor and deal with the watchman. Lover Boy here’ – Cursiter was the whisky bottle, and Paton slid it along the table a foot or so – ‘stays with the watchman. Or watchmen. That leaves Dazzle and me.’ Paton pinched the final two glasses between his finger and thumb and lifted them with a trilling click and placed them down at his side of the table. ‘We go on to the office. I do the safe. Dazzle’s spare, in case something comes up. Troubleshooter. But we need another man on the door.’
Dazzle looked at the other two with his eyebrows raised and Cursiter pouted and Stokes shrugged and Dazzle spread his arms. ‘Fine, Alex. Good. We get another man. Anything else?’
‘Aye.’ Paton moved the glasses back to their original positions. He sat down and reached for the bottle and filled his own glass. He pushed the bottle into the centre of the table. ‘The timing’s wrong.’
‘Timing’s not – there’s no leeway, Alex. Stuff only gets there the day before. It has to be the tenth.’
‘I don’t mean the date. I mean the time. We don’t go in at midnight. We do it in the morning. Before anyone arrives.’
Cursiter reached for the bottle and filled the glasses and waited for Paton to explain.
‘You don’t need all night to do a safe. Do it in half an hour if you can do it at all. We’re wearing boiler suits, toolbelts, we’re a crew of sparkies, plumbers, whatever. When it’s over we walk out the front door, to the van parked down the street. This way, we’re only over the railings on the way in, not the way out. Cuts down the risk.’
Stokes was playing with the zipper on his Harrington jacket, running it up and down. ‘So, you’re saying we wear masks? Is that the idea?’
‘No masks. We don’t need masks. We’re a crew of workies. We’re four guys in boiler suits. We’re invisible. We’re not trying to hide, we’re not skulking about looking dodgy, so no one’s paying attention. It’s like four cops: you remember the uniform, you don’t remember the faces or the hair or anything else.’
At this point the door handle clanged and the kitchen door swung open. The dog came skidding triumphantly into the room and stopped, its head raised, abruptly self-conscious, like a bull entering the bull-ring. It looked at the faces and trotted straight over to Paton and plumped its chin down on his thigh, twitching its brows. Paton drew his hand across the animal’s head, feeling the smooth curved cap of the skull under the fur, and flattened the ears. Then he scratched the loose skin under the dog’s jaw and the tail whacked against the carpet.
‘Looks like we’ve found the fifth man,’ Dazzle said.
Paton stroked the dog as he talked.
‘We need a van. We need walkie-talkies. We need boiler suits, workboots, toolbelts. Balaclavas. We need some sort of decal or paint job on the side of the van, Such-and-such Electricians or Plumbers.’
Dazzle was writing it down. He finished with a flourish and tossed the pen down on the table.
‘Right. Fine. We’ll get to it.’
‘Van’s the priority.’
‘Fine. We lift one on the night before the job. Easy.’
Stokes shook his head. ‘I like to know what I’m driving, Daz. How it handles. You don’t want surprises.’
‘So drive it around on the night. Get the feel of it. A van’s a van.’
Paton was still clapping the dog. He rubbed its belly and the creature emitted a high voluptuous whine. ‘Stokes is right,’ Paton said. ‘You don’t steal a van on the night before a job. Use your head, Daz. The owner gets up for a piss at 2 a.m., opens the curtains to check on his van. The van’s gone. He reports it stolen. Patrol car clocks it parked in Bath Street at six in the morning. We’re fucked before we start. You don’t do a job in a stolen van.’
‘What, then?’
‘We buy one. Now. Tomorrow. Give Stokes time to drive it, break it in.’
‘We buy it. We buy it?’ Cursiter was incredulous. ‘You’re that keen to go about buying vans, it comes out of your end.’
Paton looked at Dazzle. Dazzle shrugged.
‘You planning to walk home, are you?’ Paton turned to Cursiter. ‘After the job. Take a bus? Maybe wait for a taxi? We buy a van, it comes out of everyone’s slice. If the payoff’s what you say it is, it won’t make any difference.’
‘Aye but there’s other outlays, overheads.’
Paton waited. The other three exchanged a look. Dazzle spoke.
‘He means McGlashan.’
Paton had moved to London before John McGlashan took over from Eddie Lumsden. He knew who McGlashan was. He just didn’t see the relevance.
‘You’ve got your own arrangement there. That’s your business, you do what you like with your share. Dazzle: you call another meet in three days when you’ve got the gear ready, the plan of the building. Not here, though. We meet someplace else.’
Paton scooped his cigarettes from the table and stowed them in his jacket pocket.
‘Actually, hold on here.’ Cursiter’s big hand was raised. ‘We all kick in for the van but you don’t kick up to Glash?’
‘The van’s a necessity. It’s part of the job.’
‘McGlashan’s a necessity, mate. McGlashan’s a fucking necessity. Round here.’
‘I don’t live round here, Brian.’ Paton buttoned his jacket. ‘I live in London. Mr McGlashan will have to visit London if he wants to collect.’
‘He might do that,’ Cursiter said. ‘He might just do that. Everyone kicks up to McGlashan, fella. Sooner or later. Some way or other.’
Paton shrugged. The dog got up and trotted across the floor and lay down in front of the dead electric fire.
‘So you’re in?’ Dazzle’s chin lifted in challenge. Everyone looked at Paton.
Paton frowned. He’d been looking for a reason to say no and he couldn’t find one.
‘Kinda looks that way, doesn’t it?’
‘He-e-ey!’ Dazzle snatched up the whisky and twirled off the cap, but Paton clamped his palm across his glass.
‘One thing.’ He looked at each face in turn and then back to Dazzle. ‘Why’s McGlashan not moving on this himself? Why’s he leaving it to you boys?’
For a moment nobody spoke. Paton had the feeling they had discussed this question before he came, worked out how much to tell him.
‘He’s not been himself.’ It was Dazzle who spoke. ‘He thinks the polis are watching him. He’s been cagey. For months now. Everyone’s frightened to move. Do anything. Till this gets sorted out. This Jack the Ripper shit.’
‘But they’re not watching you?’
> ‘They’re not watching him, probably. He’s just paranoid. Anyway, who’d watch us, Swifty? We’re not a big enough deal. We’re the waifs and strays, mate. Slip through the cracks.’
Stokes turned to Paton. ‘The Quaker, they’re calling him.’
‘London, Bobby,’ Paton said. ‘I live in London. Not the moon. We get the papers down there.’
He removed his hand and Dazzle poured the shots and they all clinked glasses and drank.
Ten minutes later, he sat in the passenger seat of Stokes’s Zodiac, thinking it through. He liked to hole up after a job was done, get off the streets fast and go to ground for three or four days. The hotel was no good.
‘I’ll need a place,’ Paton said. ‘Somewhere quiet.’
Stokes nodded. ‘For afterwards, like? I know a guy can probably help. Want me to set it up?’
There was a black market in houses. Everyone knew this. Glasgow never had enough houses and the clearing of the slums had only made things worse. There was an underground trade in vacant flats in buildings slated for demolition. Families would scrape together a couple of hundred quid for the keys to a room-and-kitchen in a condemned tenement. They’d get a few months’ breathing space before the wrecking crews arrived, give them time to get something else sorted. That would be fine. A flat in a condemned block would be just the ticket.
He took Stokes’s number when they pulled up outside the hotel. ‘Set it up then, Bobby. I’ll be in touch.’
6
McCormack sat at his desk in the Murder Room, staring at a typewritten document. The document was two pages long, held together by a paper clip. It contained the witness statement of a man who had danced a single dance with Ann Ogilvie on the night of 2 November 1968, in the Barrowland Ballroom in the city’s East End. Ann Ogilvie, victim number two. Later that night, at some point between midnight and 3 a.m., Ann Ogilvie was strangled with her own American tan tights, having been raped, beaten and bitten by the killer known as the Quaker.
Every twenty-five seconds the pages of the witness statement rippled in the breeze from a circular fan on McCormack’s desk. But McCormack wasn’t reading the words. He was basking in hatred. The tension in the stuffy room was like a palpable force, a malevolent beast that crouched invisibly on top of the cabinets, stalked between the legs of desks, breathed its rank breath on McCormack’s neck. The tension amplified every sound. Typewriter keys sliced the air like cracking whips. A filing cabinet drawer rolled open with a rumble of thunder. People lunged at ringing telephones, desperate to silence their clamour.
The Quaker Page 5