He thought again about the madness of that number. You had fifty thousand statements and no suspect.
A shadow fell on his Evening Times. McCormack looked up. The angry one, Goldie, was stood there in front of him, pool cue in hand. He shook the cue like a spear. McCormack thought for a moment that he was being challenged to fight but it was only a game that the burly man wanted.
‘Ten bob a throw?’
‘Fine.’ McCormack eased out from behind the table, followed Goldie to the lighted baize. ‘Last of the big spenders.’ McCormack meant this as a joke but Goldie wheeled round.
‘Fine then, nicker a game.’ He tossed his cue on the table. ‘Rack them up, I’m away for a pish.’
McCormack took the plastic triangle down from the lampshade. He swept the balls together, lifted and dropped the stripes and spots until the pattern was right, the black nestling in the centre.
When Goldie came back McCormack broke off. They played the frame in silence. McCormack won, dropped the black with Goldie stuck on three. They racked up again and Goldie broke off viciously, the balls spreading in slow motion and something clunked home in a middle pocket and rumbled down.
‘Stripes?’ Goldie said. McCormack bent to check the ball as it slotted home, nodded. Goldie surveyed the table.
‘You know what bothers me about you?’ Goldie kept his eyes on the table, chalking his cue. ‘Don’t take this personal, but you know what gets me?’
‘My clearance rate? My impeccable taste in clothes?’
‘You sit there every day like you’re one of us. You listen to our conversations. You drink our coffee. And all the time you’re taking notes for your wee report, what we’re doing wrong. I’ve worked this inquiry fifteen months.’ He was watching the tip of his cue, tiny blue clouds rising as the chalk-cube scuffed it. ‘Fifteen months. You’re gonnae take a fortnight to tell me how I should’ve done it different.’
‘You think I should take fifteen months to write my report?’
‘Aye, very good. But that’s not even it.’ Goldie waited till McCormack had played his shot, a long five that rattled the mouth of the left baulk pocket, failed to drop. ‘You know what it is? You sit there – day in, day out – the fucking boy genius of the Flying Squad, the man with the answers. And have you made one suggestion? Have you made a single positive contribution to what we’re trying to do here?’
‘I’m writing the report, mate. That’s my brief. If I get involved in the investigation it just muddies the waters.’
‘Aye. Fair enough.’ Goldie lifted his pint from the windowsill and took a pull. ‘Or maybe you’re just as fucking lost as we are. Could that have something to do with it?’
‘Ah come on, now. Don’t sell yourself short. I’ve got some catching up to do to be as lost as you are.’
Goldie’s laugh was soft, he was nodding to himself. ‘We’re getting it now, are we? The big insight. This should be fucking good. How lost are we, DI McCormack? Where did we go wrong?’
It occurred to McCormack as he straightened up that a pool cue was a useful object, its fat end nicely weighted for connecting with someone’s mouth. He held the cue at arm’s length and leant it gingerly against the wall. He planted his palms on the pool-table’s edge and leaned down into the light.
‘All right then, DS Goldie. Listen to yourself. I’ve worked this inquiry fifteen months. You’re boasting about that? You should be embarrassed. Fifteen months and you’ve never had a sniff. What does that tell you?’
Goldie’s face was in shadow. He didn’t say anything. He was bouncing his cue on the floor, you could hear the rubberized end bumping on the lino. McCormack leaned down further into the light. ‘No thoughts? What about this then. How many parades have you held?’
‘How many what?’
‘ID parades. How many have you held? Do you even know?’
‘This is how you spend your time? Doing sums in your wee book?’
‘Three hundred and twelve, Detective. Three hundred and twelve. That’s a number, don’t you think?’ McCormack frowned. ‘What’s the plan, you bring the entire male population of Glasgow to the Marine one by one? Get Nancy Scullion to check them out?’ He spread his arms. ‘She’s seen three hundred guys, mate. She’s no idea what the Quaker looks like any more. Assuming she ever did. I could be the fucking Quaker. You could, for all she knows.’
‘Spent an evening with him,’ Goldie said. ‘She was in his company. Shared a taxi.’
‘Poured into the taxi. Pished, by all accounts. Hers included. You said it yourself, for fuck sake. You said it to Cochrane.’
‘She was there!’ Goldie threw an arm up and his cue caught the lampshade, sent it swinging. His face danced in and out of the yellow glare. ‘She saw him. She spoke to him. What – we just fucking ignore her?’
McCormack reached out to steady the shade. ‘I don’t think she’s feeling ignored, exactly. Anyway, at this stage it hardly matters.’
‘Because you’re shutting us down.’
‘Cause you’re not fucking catching him.’
‘And why’s that?’
‘Because he’s dead, Detective.’ McCormack swirled the last of the black in his glass, skulled it. ‘He’s dead or else he’s gone, he’s left the city. It’s seven months since the last one. You think he’s biding his time? It’s finished. You had your window, you never took it. We playing pool here or what?’
They finished the frame. It was scrappy play, with fluffed shots and fluked cannons, both of them potting the white. McCormack won again. Goldie paid out his two quid with an air of resignation, as if defeat was a foregone conclusion, as if people like McCormack always won. When McCormack looked back from the double doors, Goldie had his elbows on the bar, staring down at another pint.
It was time to head home, time to put the whole affair to bed for another day, but McCormack walked on past the Gardner Street junction and shaped his course for the West End. He was heading for Kelvin Way, the avenue that bisects the park. A wind had arisen. A big branch flapped against a yellow streetlight. He was sick of it all, sick of the Marine and its fruitless labours. He was sick of chasing shadows. There were places you could go. There were people who wanted to be caught.
9
His father sang Merle Travis numbers in the bath. ‘Sixteen Tons’. ‘Nine Pound Hammer’: You can make my tombstone / Outta number nine coal. It always made him think of the tombstones in St John’s churchyard in Ballachulish, out there on the lochside. They were beautiful things. Not the chunky upright slabs you saw in other kirkyards, but dark, slim wafers carved with elegant cursive script, all loops and spirals. Like everything else in Balla, they were made of slate. The men worked them during slack times at the quarry. That’s what you did when you found a free half-hour: you worked your own headstone, cutting the cross or the crown at the top, and then carving your name and birthdate under ‘Sacred to the Memory of’ and a bas-relief opened book, leaving only the final date to be carved by another hand.
McCormack used to walk there on Saturday mornings, out the loch road to St John’s. He liked to ramble on the lumpy turf, tramping down the bones of MacInneses and Stewarts and MacColls, tracing with his fingers the chiselled lines, the extravagant pattern of curves, the word ‘Sacred’ hedged about in scrolls and folderols.
They were works of art, he thought. This is what they had instead of an art gallery, these hard black portraits signed with laboured care by each artist. The slate didn’t weather like the other stones did. While the sandstone crumbled and blurred, the slate – even on the oldest stones – kept its edge. The morning sun above the Pap of Glencoe filled the chisel-strokes with shadow that was black and fresh as ink.
Now he stood in a different graveyard in the dark southern city with the slate roofs of tenements all around him and looked at the poor bare words on another stone:
MARION MERCER
BELOVED WIFE OF HENRY MERCER
DIED 25 JANUARY 1969
AGED 31 YEARS
&
nbsp; ‘IN MY FATHER’S HOUSE ARE MANY MANSIONS:
IF IT WERE NOT SO, I WOULD HAVE TOLD YOU.’
He lifted his eyes to the rooftops, where the slates shone and smoked in the wake of a sunshower. This was his third of the day. He’d been to two gravesides that morning – Jacquilyn Keevins’s and Ann Ogilvie’s – and now he’d completed the set. He wasn’t sure why. Paying his respects didn’t cover it. He hadn’t known these women in life. He had worked Jacqui Keevins’s murder, but not the other two. And he wasn’t Pieter Mertens, he wasn’t a ‘paragnost’: he didn’t expect to garner psychic data from his nearness to their rotting bones. It was more by way of introducing himself, he figured. Getting his bearings, in some basic way. They were his concern now, these three women. They were his responsibility, even if his task was to bring the investigation to a close.
The light in the Necropolis was failing.
He rubbed his thumb along the top of Marion Mercer’s stone. The face of the stone was polished and smooth – you could see your blurred face in the pink marbled shine – but the top edge was rough and grainy. Would he end up here himself, in a Glasgow cemetery, when his own time came? Or back in Ballachulish, in the lochside plot amid the slim dark stones? But the quarry had closed, there would be no black slate for him, wherever he wound up, just a stone like this one, thick as a doorstep, with his Sunday name in fat capitals.
He turned from the grave. Marion Mercer had been buried towards the northern end of the Necropolis and he climbed the little hill into the old section where the mausoleums of the merchants and tobacco lords studded the turf. Further up, near the crest of the brae, John Knox stood on top of his Doric column, wagging his fist at the city.
McCormack thought about the men at the Marine, the fatalistic gloom in which they laboured. Cops were superstitious. They believed a case could be hexed, jinxed, the guilty man uncatchable. Sometimes it was hard to disagree. The Quaker case had been dogged by ill luck. The third victim, Marion Mercer, was murdered on 25 January. Burns Night: a Saturday. On the Sunday morning, when Marion’s partially clothed body was discovered in a backcourt in Scotstoun, the city was gripped by a terrible storm. The rain drove down and the wind stripped slates from the rooftops. The gable end came off a tenement in Bowman Street, Govanhill. Chimneys collapsed in Abercromby Street in Bridgeton. The Levern flooded and the Cart burst its banks. Streets in different quarters of the city under three feet of water. Cars stranded, abandoned in the highway. Families evacuated to higher ground.
Just at the moment when the cops should have descended on Scotstoun, blitzing the tenements of Earl Street with the door-to-door, they were wanted elsewhere. By the time they got back to Earl Street they were playing catch-up. Another trail gone cold.
He had reached the Knox memorial now and he stopped for a breather, lit up a smoke. It was hard not to feel for the Quaker Squad, but the truth of the matter was simple. The brass had lost their heads. They’d thrown so much money at this, poured so many man-hours into a holey bucket, that they didn’t know how to stop. You stir the papers into a frenzy, keep the public in a lather with constant updates, appeals and public info posters. You couldn’t just turn the tap off now that you’d run out of ideas. You couldn’t scale it down and hope no one would notice. You needed a process, you needed a mechanism. You needed someone to do your dirty work for you.
You needed a sucker.
McCormack flicked his cigarette end into the dank grass. Turning to go, he looked up at the statue of Knox and saw to his surprise that he’d been wrong. It wasn’t a clenched fist at all: the great Reformer was holding out a book. He wasn’t damning the city to hell; he was preaching, though possibly it came to the same thing.
Streetlights were flicking on as McCormack came down the gravel paths. At one point he thought he saw movement in the gloom ahead of him, a flitting shape, someone ducking behind a stone.
The sky over the Infirmary had a cast of electric blue but the shadows were massing in the low ground and there were pockets of midnight round the headstones.
The warmth of the day still hung in the air. McCormack plunged his hands in the pockets of his jerkin, walking on the grass now, not the path. He was aware of the pink tip of a cigarette, then a man stepped out of the shadows ten yards ahead, his white jeans vivid in the gloaming.
McCormack slowed, let his hands slip from his pockets and hang loose by his sides, ready for whatever measure of tenderness or strife he might be offered.
A man with dark urges. Lawless drives.
‘Got a light, mate?’
The man had an unlit cigarette between two fingers, jiggling back and forth. As McCormack held his lighter the man cupped his hands around McCormack’s hands, held them there once the cigarette’s tip was glowing. In the light from the flame McCormack studied the eyes, the cheekbones, he was younger than McCormack, twenty, twenty-one.
McCormack drew his hand down the man’s sharp jaw, felt the boyish stubble catching on his palm. The man’s fist closed on McCormack’s wrist and pulled the hand away.
‘Not here,’ the man said. ‘This way.’
The man strode off without looking back. McCormack followed the white jeans up the slope. One of the old mausoleums had its iron door ajar. The man slipped into the stripe of black shadow, McCormack at his heels.
Ann Ogilvie
The funny thing is, I remember the posters. Not the posters of him – those came later. The posters of her: ‘MURDER: DID YOU SEE HER?’, with the Daily Record’s logo at the top and a smiling photo of Jacquilyn Keevins and the telephone numbers to call the police. She looked so happy and oblivious in the photo. On the plain side, too, God forgive me. Not a looker.
I remember thinking that she’d gotten herself into something she couldn’t get out of. And when it came out that she had a husband and a kid, your first thought was, Well, what is she doing at the dancing? Even though they were separated and the husband was living in Germany. That’s what you thought. If she hadn’t been out gallivanting in the first place, none of this would have happened. As if she was to blame. Not the man who raped and killed her, but the mum who went out for a dance.
So why did you go back? That’s the question, isn’t it? Why did you go to the Barrowland? Did you never think about the woman who died? Well, here’s the thing. You knew she’d been dancing at the Barrowland, you knew that she’d met her killer there. But the Barrowland was local. It was ‘our’ dance hall. It was where – don’t laugh – we felt safe. We weren’t about to trek all the way into town for the Albert or the Locarno. And we even felt that the Barrowland was safer now that this had happened. Well, he won’t try that again in the Barrowland, was the feeling. Like lightning wouldn’t strike twice.
Plus, if I’m honest, it gave a little thrill to the proceedings. We’d joke about it in the Ladies’, pretend that we’d spotted the Quaker, that the bloke who asked us up for the slow dance had a look of the poster about him, overlapping teeth, a stripy tie.
We’d even josh the blokes we danced with: Your grip’s a bit tight there, Jim, watch your hands, are you sure you’re not the Quaker? You’ll never know, they’d fire back with a flash of their teeth. You’ll never know until it’s too late …
I lay there all the next day, all the next night, a hundred yards from my kids, from my sister Deirdre. It was Deirdre who finally found me.
I heard her heels on the bare wood boards, footsteps coming towards me in fits and starts, as if she couldn’t make up her mind, knock … knock-knock-knock … knock knock. Then the gasp as she saw my legs and how she tiptoed over the last patch of floor and her scared face peeping into my dead eyes like someone peering into a well. The white plume of her breath in the cold room.
Thirty-six hours earlier I’d been getting ready to go out. The boys across the landing at Deirdre’s and Louise sitting on the bed, watching me put my face on.
‘Will there be shows?’ Louise was saying. ‘Down in Irvine.’
I could hear the kids playing in
the backcourt, lassies at their skipping games:
Eight o’clock is striking,
Mother may I go out?
My young man is waiting
To take me round about.
‘I suppose so,’ I said to Louise. ‘In the summertime, anyway.’ She always loved the shows. Her mouth a wide pink blur as the waltzer whipped her round; her high laugh rising past the blue electric crackle as the dodgems jolted her shoulders back. Candy floss. Toffee apples. A goldfish twitching in its plump clear bag. I think she associated the shows with her dad. Her dad used to take her, before he left. Day-trips to the Ayrshire coast. Fish and chips and double nougats and the sea breeze through open windows on the train home. Louise went and stood with her back to me, looking out the window:
He will buy me apples,
He will buy me pears.
He will buy me everything
And kiss me on the stairs.
‘What’s the uniform like? I bet it’s brown and yellow or something. I bet it’s boggin.’ Her new school was to be Irvine Royal Academy. It sounded posh, like some fee-paying high school in Edinburgh, but it was just the local academy. The boys would be starting at the primary in the scheme. Ravenspark.
‘What will you miss, Mum?’
She looked at me over her shoulder. I smiled at her in the mirror, raised my elbows and gave a little shimmy with my hips.
‘The dancing,’ I told her.
I would miss the Barrowland. I’d miss the dancing.
I loved the dancing. I loved the whole thing about it. The music and the lights. The silvery crash of cymbals and the clean hard snap of the snare. I loved the men in their shiny suits, the light catching their tie-clips and cufflinks, glinting on their polished toecaps. The whole dance floor getting into the rhythm, working so hard but enjoying it too.
The Quaker Page 8