He knew, of course, what was causing the problem. The problem was him. He was the rat. The tout. The grass. Resentment came at him in waves from the shirtsleeved ranks.
But what did you expect? It was Schrödinger’s cat: the observer affects the experiment.
Ten days ago Duncan McCormack had been the man of the hour. Ten days ago he’d been sipping from a tinnie in the squad room at St Andrew’s Street, watching his Flying Squad colleagues ineptly gyrating with a couple of more or less uniformed WPCs and some of the younger typists from Admin. It wasn’t yet noon but the party was hotting up. There were muffled whoops as someone upped the volume on the Dansette. All three shifts of detectives were present. Guys had left the golf course or the pub, or wherever they went on their days off. Brothel, maybe. Everywhere he looked people perched on desks or gathered in grinning groups with their plastic cups of whisky and vodka.
Flett was edging towards him through the throng. DCI Angus Flett, commander of the Flying Squad. Chins were tipped in greeting, cigarettes raised in two-fingered benedictions. Flett gripped elbows, punched shoulders, clapped backs, threw mock punches, twisted his hips in that drying-your-backside-with-a-towel move when he passed a dancing typist.
The squad room looked like Christmas. Strings of paper bunting were pinned above their heads. Two desks had been pushed together to form a makeshift bar. Bottles of spirits clustered in the centre: Red Label, Gordon’s, Smirnoff, Bacardi. Four-packs of beer in their plastic loops, green cans of Pale Ale, red cans of Export. Someone had gone out for fish suppers and the sharp tang of newsprint and vinegar and pickled onions mingled with the smoke and sweat and alcohol.
On an adjacent table stood a large birthday cake edged with blue piping, a ‘12’ standing proud of the icing on blue plastic numerals. Twelve was the tariff. Twelve years in Peterhead. They’d watched him cuffed and taken down to the cells, James Kane, one of McGlashan’s lieutenants. It took them over a year to build the case and now they’d got him. Attempted murder. Serious assault. Conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Guilty on all three counts. Au revoir, fuckface. Have a nice life.
McCormack raised his can of Sweetheart Stout to salute Angus Flett. He felt the beer sway inside the tinnie. He didn’t like beer. He’d drunk just enough so the can wouldn’t spill. He liked whisky well enough but he was playing shinty tomorrow, a grudge match against Glasgow Skye, and he wanted to stay fresh.
‘The hard stuff, Duncan?’
McCormack worked his shoulders, straightened up. ‘Got a game tomorrow, boss.’
‘A game? I’d say war would be nearer the mark. I watched a match once, up in Oban. Jesus. Tough game. They say ice hockey’s based on it.’
McCormack shrugged, sipped his tinnie.
‘Anyroads, need to talk to you, son. Won’t take long.’
In Flett’s office, McCormack closed the door behind him, muffling the noise of the party. Flett got straight to business.
‘Job’s come up, son. I’m putting you forward.’
McCormack nodded slowly. When Flett sat down with the sun at his back, McCormack noticed that he hadn’t shaved; little filaments of stubble caught the light.
‘What’s the job, sir?’
‘It involves a change of scene. You’ll be based in Partick. The old Marine.’
‘That’s the Quaker inquiry. They’ve got Crawford, already. They need another Squad guy?’
Flett held his hand out flat, palm down, swivelled his wrist.
‘It’s not a straightforward job, Detective. It’s not the operational side of things. I had Levein on earlier’ – he nodded at the phone on his desk. ‘The feeling is, it’s gone on too long, the whole circus. Guts is, he wants us to review the investigation. See where things went wrong. What can be learned. Make recommendations.’
Peter Levein. Head of Glasgow CID. Bad bastard. Due to retire at the end of the year, to no one’s regret.
‘Recommend what? What’s Cochrane saying about this?’
‘Nothing he can say. They haven’t caught him, have they? He’s not going to like it, but he’ll cooperate.’
McCormack was still frowning. ‘Make recommendations as in shut it down?’
Flett leaned forward. ‘Do you need it spelled out, son? This job? It’s not a popularity contest.’ Flett nodded at the door. ‘You think those fuckers out there like me? Think I want them to?’
‘It’s not that, sir.’
‘What, then?’
‘I’m a thief-taker, boss. That’s what I know.’
‘This still McGlashan? You’re still on about McGlashan?’
‘We’re close, sir. We’re gonnae get him.’ He jabbed his thumb at the door, at the sounds of beery triumph. ‘See that, sir? That’s nothing. That’s just the start. We’re building the case. We’ll bring it all down, the whole rotten empire.’
‘All right, McCormack.’
‘What – you think I’m making it up?’
‘No, Duncan.’ Flett spread his hands. ‘No, I’m sure you are close. Thing is. Nobody knows who McGlashan is. We know who he is. The poor bastards in Springboig and Barlanark and Cranhill: they know. But the punters out there? The ratepayers? They’ve no idea. They know about the Quaker, though. Jesus.’ He tapped the folded Tribune on his desk. ‘They know about him.’
‘So we tell them.’ McCormack shifted in his chair. ‘We’ve got people who deal with the papers, haven’t we? We fill them in. Give them the goods. Glasgow crime lord, reign of terror. Fear on the streets.’
‘Give them what, exactly? If we had solid on McGlashan we wouldn’t need the bloody papers, we’d just arrest him. It’s more complicated, son. They’ve got a hold of this Quaker thing and they’re not letting go. They want answers. They want to know why we’re still fannying about after all this time. It’s not McGlashan that’s making us look like— What: you got something to say, Detective?’
McCormack was shaking his head. ‘Naw, it’s just, I was under the impression that the guy who headed up the Flying Squad was the head of the Flying Squad. My mistake. Not the editor of the Glasgow Tribune.’
‘Oh for fuck sake, Duncan, catch yourself on. It’s always worked like this. Keep the papers off your back, you keep the councillors happy, the MPs. It buys you the space to do the real job.’
‘This isn’t the real job?’
Flett held his hands up. ‘I know. I know. Look. You do a job on this Quaker thing we’ll go after McGlashan. You head up the team. You pick your men. I’ll give you everything you need. But first it’s this. Son, you’re either ready or you’re not. I thought you were. Have I made a mistake?’
Had he? Maybe the whole thing was a mistake, McCormack thought. Maybe joining the police was a mistake. Leaving Ballachulish.
‘You want to be a fucking DI all your life. One of the lads—’
‘I’m not one of the lads.’
‘Good. I’m glad to hear it. I’ll bell Levein. Start on Monday. Now get out there and enjoy yourself.’
So now he was sitting in the Murder Room at the Marine. Enjoy yourself, indeed. The feeling is, it’s gone on too long? Jesus, tell me about it, McCormack thought. He’d been here barely a week, listening in on the morning briefings – eavesdropping, it felt like. Days that dragged like months. Absorbing the hatred of his colleagues. A spectator at the daily taskings, a nodding auditor of tactical discussions. He listened to the detectives talking about the case – Earl Street, Mackeith Street, Carmichael Lane – and it bothered him. The men were so sure there was a meaning, some mystical link connecting the victims or the places where they were killed. As if the murders were a language, a code. A work of bloody art.
There had to be a link, they thought, but the men in this room couldn’t find it. The three victims were unknown to each other, lived in different parts of the city. They had no mutual friends, no common bonds of church or political party. Two of them had husbands in the forces, but this fact – which seemed so promising at first – now looked like a coinciden
ce. The worst kind of coincidence, the kind that costs you a couple of hundred man-hours before you realize it means nothing. But now it seemed clear. The women were bound by nothing more than luck or fate, whatever word you hit on for the actions of the Quaker.
But still there was the feeling that the map might hold the key, the six Ordnance Survey sheets tacked to the Murder Room wall. Each locus was within a hundred yards of the victim’s house. The sites themselves formed no kind of pattern, so was it the Barrowland, then? Did the ballroom itself mean something to the killer?
McCormack knew there wasn’t much history to the building. The original ballroom above the ‘Barras’ market had burned down in the late fifties – an insurance job, supposedly. The new Barrowland, with its sprung hexagonal floor and its ceiling of shooting stars, was opened in 1960. Time enough for the killer to make his own history with the place. But then, if the killer had been a regular, wouldn’t somebody have known him? They’d have his name by now, he’d be in a remand cell at Barlinnie waiting for his trial.
Didn’t the map mean anything? What about the wider area: the Gallowgate, Glasgow Cross? At one point Cochrane had invited a lecturer from Strathclyde Uni to address the squad, an expert on the development of the city. McCormack had read the lecturer’s report. The Gallowgate was one of the oldest parts of Glasgow, Dr Mitchell told the Murder Room. The four streets forming Glasgow Cross – the Gallowgate, the Trongate, the High Street and the Saltmarket – were part of the original hamlet on the Clyde. But Glasgow was unusual: it grew up around two separate centres. There was the fishing village and trading settlement on the Clyde, but further up the hill was the religious community centred on the Cathedral and the Bishop’s Castle. In medieval times there was open countryside, maybe some farmland, between the two settlements.
In time, the trading settlement on the river grew to eclipse the upper town. The Gallowgate, where the Barrowland was located, stood at the heart of the growing town. And maybe you could see the Quaker – with his puritanism and his biblical imprecations, his rants about adultery and ‘dens of iniquity’ – as representing in some sense the revenge of the upper town upon the godless lower city.
McCormack pictured the detectives shifting in their chairs. They would see no mileage in this, but Cochrane would have warmed to the idea of a righteous visitation, a historical reprisal, murders somehow plotted by the streets.
McCormack yawned and stretched, returned the witness statement to its folder. Across the way a detective sat at a desk opening letters with a paperknife. McCormack watched him slit an envelope, tug out the folded sheet, flatten it out on the desk. After a pause his hands paddled at the typewriter keys. Then he put the letter back in its envelope, dropped it in a tray, reached for the next one.
‘More fan mail?’ McCormack had drifted over. The man looked up, grunted, waved a hand at the out-tray: be my guest.
McCormack drew up a chair. The letter on the top of the pile was written in a tight, crabbed hand. It came in an airmail envelope, sky blue with chevron edges, though the postmark was local.
To whom it concerns. The man you want is Christopher Bell. He resides at 23 Kirklands Crescent in Bothwell and drives a van for Blantyre Carriers. He is out in his van at all times of the day and night and frequently burns ‘rubbish’ in the back garden of this property though it is against the rules of his tenancy to do so. On two occasions in recent months he has been seen with deep scratches on his face. He has reddish fair hair, goes into Glasgow for the dancing. Everyone round here has suspicions of this character and even the wee boys in the street call him the Quaker.
There was no signature and no address. The detective nodded at the pile of letters and told McCormack that six months ago they’d get twice as many. Three times. He seemed pained by the city’s fickleness, its timewasters’ dwindling stamina.
‘Are you vetting them?’ McCormack asked. ‘Or do they all get checked out?’
The man looked up slowly, fixing McCormack in his gaze. ‘Now that would be good, wouldn’t it? Two years down the line he’s killed another four women. Someone finds out we’ve had a letter all along, naming the killer in so many words. Of course we check them.’
It was the hard calculus of police work. If you got your man then all the effort, all the statements taken, the knocking on doors, the ID parades, the hours of surveillance, the sifting of dental records, it was all worthwhile. If you didn’t get him then you might as well not have bothered. If you’d sat on your hands the result would be the same: the case still open, the killer still free.
You knew that was part of the deal. You knew that some crimes went unsolved, for all the hours and the sweat that got thrown at them. It was nobody’s fault and no one was handing out blame. But it was hard not to take it personally. There were men in this room who had worked all three. Jacquilyn Keevins. Ann Ogilvie. Marion Mercer. Three women who’d gone to the dancing and never come home. Mothers of young children. You were failing them all.
McCormack went back to his desk, rolling his shirtsleeves to the elbow. As he watched the day shift go about their tasks there grew in him a kind of despair at the very diligence of these men. They were only undefeated because they kept trying. Day after day they sat at their desks beneath the high windows in the late summer heat and worked their leads. Dark patches bloomed at their armpits, down the backs of their shirts. The smell of sweat and cheap nylon was pushed about by the table-fans along with the blue clouds of cigarette smoke.
They worked the telephones (‘Goldie, Marine Murder Room’), they typed up reports, collated statements, while McCormack sat at the end of the room like some kind of exam invigilator. He wanted to leave his chair and weave between the desks, placing his hands on the shoulders of these men, on their forearms, to calm their efforts, still their labour.
They were getting further away from it, he thought. Further away from the truth, not closer to it. They couldn’t understand why the methods that had worked in the past weren’t working now. They didn’t change tack. They didn’t try different things. They did the same things, only harder.
They needed some luck. No, McCormack thought: what they needed wasn’t luck. What they needed was another death. To redeem their time, give them a fresh start, another crack at the Quaker.
He looked up to see Goldie standing at the map, lost in the grid, the dainty streets, the spidery contour lines, the sweeping arcs of train-tracks and rivers, the square white blanks of the public parks, the solid black geometry of the public buildings – the railway stations and churches, the hospitals and schools, the post offices, the army barracks.
Everyone did it. When someone sat down after a spell at the map, ten minutes would pass and a chair would scrape and another shirtsleeved figure would be stood there, hitching his trousers and leaning into the grid. It was a rota, an unscripted vigil. The detectives stood in turn before the Ordnance Survey sheets, waited for the map to yield its secrets.
He was losing it, McCormack thought. They all were. They had thrown so much at this inquiry. Talking to reporters, feeding the papers till the whole city, the whole country could think of nothing but the Quaker, the Quaker, that clean-cut face on the posters. It came down to numbers. Fifteen months of work. A hundred cops in teams of twelve working fourteen-hour days. They’d taken 50,000 statements. They’d interviewed 5,000 suspects, visited 700 dentists, 450 hairdressers, 240 tailors. Scores of churches and golf clubs. How many man-hours did it come to – a million? Two? How could all these numbers add up to zero?
And how could you let it go? How could you stop now, admit it was over, you’d done as much as you could? You couldn’t. You couldn’t let go. You kept on, placed your faith in police work. Placed your faith in procedures. Luck. Magic. Santa Claus. Pieter Mertens. Mertens the clairvoyant. Mertens the paragnost. I see a room in an apartment. A river is close. Also a factory. A crane can be seen from the window …
McCormack watched the roll of fat bulging over Goldie’s collar. He heard Goldie ask a
sergeant called Ingram where Cochrane was.
‘DCI Cochrane?’ McCormack spoke up. ‘I saw him half an hour ago in the car park. He was getting his wife a lift home in a squad car. What?’
The look between Goldie and Ingram; Goldie grinning at the floor.
‘His wife.’ Goldie snorted. ‘Is that what they’re calling it?’
‘It’s not his wife.’ Ingram came over with two mugs of tea, set one down in front of McCormack. ‘It’s the witness, sir. Sister of Marion Mercer.’
‘The third victim.’
‘Yeah. Nancy Scullion. Shared a taxi with our man.’
They didn’t like saying The Quaker in the station, it smacked of the tabloids. It was always ‘our man’, ‘the killer’, ‘the perpetrator’. McCormack turned to Goldie.
‘The schoolgirl smirk, Detective: is there some point you’re trying to make here or is this how you normally look?’
Goldie’s face darkened, the lower lip curling. ‘It’s called a joke, sir. The chief and the victim’s sister. They’re pretty close.’
‘DCI Cochrane and Mrs Scullion, you mean?’
Goldie looked across at Ingram, back to McCormack. He opened his hand in a gesture of impatience. McCormack set his tea to one side, leaning his elbows on the desk. He felt an urge to let his head slide down to the desk, pillow it briefly in his folded arms.
‘Sorry, can I get this clear, Detective? You’re suggesting that DCI Cochrane is having improper sexual relations with a witness in a murder investigation? That’s your insinuation?’
Goldie smiled slowly and shook his head, not meeting McCormack’s eye. ‘That’s in your mind. You’re the one who thought she was his wife.’
The Quaker Page 6