They never found the cars and the Majestic was the wrong ballroom. McCormack studied the smiling face of Jacquilyn Keevins. A ‘Late News’ sidebar next to the Keevins piece reported that Sir Laurence Olivier had undergone a successful operation for appendicitis in a London hospital after an emergency flight from Scotland. He had been taken ill while playing the role of Edgar in Strindberg’s Dance of Death at the King’s Theatre in Edinburgh.
McCormack flicked on through the pages. Vietcong Keep Up Offensive Despite Losses. Warhol Shot in His New York Loft. Reports on the Keevins murder petered out after a couple of weeks. He let his eyes play over the headlines. Princess Margaret in Hospital for Tonsils Op. He read the local news and the international. Edinburgh Presbytery was urging the university authorities to ensure that the contraceptive pill would not be provided to unmarried students through the university health service. A fire in a nursing home killed nine elderly residents in Limoges, France. A seventeen-year-old Barrhead youth got two years in a young offenders institution for resetting 17,440 stolen cigarettes and striking a Paisley man with a pick shaft. Richard Nixon announced his candidature for the US Presidency. A twenty-four-year-old woman in the Calton was referred for alcohol counselling and had her four kids (five years down to seven months) taken into care after leaving them in a ‘squalid condition, without adequate clothing or bedding, and exposed to the danger of an open fire’.
It was hot in the newspaper room of the Mitchell Library and McCormack took his jacket off and slung it on the back of his chair. An old guy on the other side of the room was wearing a heavy overcoat in a herringbone tweed. His nose was around four or five inches from the desk: he was either reading the Tribune short-sightedly or had fallen asleep.
The big ledger made a satisfying soft detonation when McCormack closed it. He hefted it back to the shelf, slotting it into the gap between April and June 1968. Then he sidestepped through the late summer and autumn of 1968 and hooked November and December with his forefingers and drew both ledgers out together in his splayed hand and carried them over to the desk. He went back for January and February 1969.
A wintry breeze came off the pages as they turned. All the stories seemed to hinge on terrible weather. Three trawlers were lost off the coast of Iceland in a squall. Three naval apprentices were airlifted from the Cairngorms by a helicopter from RAF Leuchars after being trapped in a blizzard during a survival course. The football card was decimated, pitches unplayable. In the midst of all this wind and ice and snow Ann Ogilvie was raped and murdered on the streets of Bridgeton and Marion Mercer was raped and murdered on the streets of Scotstoun.
There was a story by Edgar Allan Poe that McCormack remembered reading on the train back from Oban High School to Ballachulish on the Christmas holidays one year. Auguste Dupin, Poe’s detective, is investigating the murder of a young woman called Marie Rogêt whose body has been dumped in the River Seine. All he has to go on are the reports carried in the press. He solves the crime not by narrowing his focus but by broadening it to encompass the unrelated incidents recorded elsewhere in these papers: experience has shown that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of truth, arises from the seemingly irrelevant. The report of an attack by a gang of ‘blackguards’ on a young girl in the country outside Paris is, Dupin realizes, what has sent the gendarmes off on a false trail. They assume that Marie Rogêt has been the victim of a criminal gang. Dupin, for his part, uses the newspaper report of an abandoned boat found drifting down the Seine to identify the killer in the person of a sailor.
But that was books. In real life, papers told you nothing. All you found in these yellowing Tribs was the whirling jetsam of events: celebrities cutting the ribbons on new supermarkets, ten-year-old boys drowning in canals, bombs dropping on Vietnam. He slotted the ledgers back in place and wickedly bumped the chair of the old loafer in the overcoat on his way out.
McCormack walked home through Anderston. There were kids playing in the street, lassies chanting their songs and rhymes, he remembered them from the Ballachulish playground:
Not last night but the night before,
Twenty-four robbers came to the door.
I went doon the stair to let them in,
They hit me on the head with a rolling pin.
It was kids who’d found the second one, Ann Ogilvie, in Mackeith Street. The papers said it was the victim’s sister who discovered the body – they liked the symmetry of that, the element of family drama – but it was local kids who found her. All that Sunday they’d been playing in and out of a derelict tenement, daring each other to run up the stairs and hide in the rooms. They found the woman in a bed-recess. Word of their find had filtered up to the adult world but no one paid any attention. A body in a building? It was just a game, the kind of stupid thing kids dreamed up. Or maybe a jakey was dossing in a vacant block, sleeping it off. Ann’s sister heard the rumours, but it wasn’t till Monday morning, spare with worry, that she crossed the street to number 27.
She picked her way through the empty rooms. On the first-floor landing she turned into a room and saw her sister’s white legs, the blackened soles of her feet. Ann Ogilvie was lying in the bed-recess with her tights around her throat and a sanitary napkin on the floorboards at her side.
Maybe they should be listening to the kids, McCormack thought, as he started up the long steep slope of Gardner Street. Maybe the weans held the secret. These killings betrayed a kind of fairytale horror, the logic of children’s skipping games. Playground rhymes encoding historical trauma. Mary Queen of Scots got her head chopped off on the fourteenth of No-VEM-ber. It wasn’t the newspaper reports that held the key. They didn’t need the Forensic Science Department and the Identification Bureau. They needed to think like kids, inhabit that world of poetry and violence: Down in the valley where the green grass grows / There sat Marion as sweet as a rose …
That night, McCormack watched the city, softened in the blue and yellow dusk, the high flats like strips of shadow. Down at the river the shipyard cranes looked oddly elegant against a yellow sky. He stood at the window till the sky deepened and the glass threw back his image, a shivery ghost with a tumbler of malt. He had a gammon steak cooking under the grill, tatties rattling in their pot.
Behind him on the table was his Underwood and a metal ashtray filched from a pub. His report was proving hard to write, though he wasn’t sure why. He’d had ten days at the Marine, long enough to get a handle on things, read the runes of the Murder Room. It shouldn’t take long to describe what he’d seen. A murder case that was busy going nowhere. Detectives doing what they’d done for the past six months, working their lists, eliminating the fighting-age population of Glasgow, man by fair-haired man.
Goldie, at least, was different. McCormack sat down at the table, set the whisky at his elbow. Goldie at least had a spark, a sense of where they were going wrong. It was frustration that made Goldie act as he had. He wasn’t a thug. He was a good cop turned reckless by a bad investigation. But it wasn’t McCormack’s job to rescue Derek Goldie.
When the food was ready he turned the telly on to catch the end of the news. He sat on the couch with a tray on his lap. A diamond tiara appeared on the screen, resting on a red velvet cushion. After a few seconds the image gave way to a brooch studded with red and green stones, then a solitaire diamond ring. A measured voice described each item as it appeared, pausing for a beat before the image gave way to the next. It had the feel of a memory game, like they’d be asking questions at the end of the show.
He cubed his gammon steak and watched the succession of jewels. It was the haul from an auction-house robbery. Thieves had broken into the premises of Glendinnings in Bath Street in the early hours of Tuesday morning. If you recognize any of these items, please call the number at the bottom of the screen.
The bulletin ended. The Kenneth McKellar Show was on next. McCormack took his plate through to the kitchenette. He filled the basin and squirted the liquid, waggling his hand to bring up the suds. He thought about
the robbery. You’d need a London connection, obviously. You couldn’t fence a haul like that in Glasgow. He rinsed the plate and stacked it in the rack. Maybe the peterman, the one who moved down south a few years back. What did they call him? Prentice? Provan?
When McCormack got back to the sofa, Kenneth McKellar was singing ‘The Northern Lights of Old Aberdeen’. He was wearing a lounge suit instead of his normal Highland outfit. McCormack lit a Regal. Glendinnings was on Bath Street. That was A Div – Bertie King’s boys. Who’d be working it? Halliday, probably. Adam Halliday as CIO. John Drennan and maybe the new DC, Yuill. And King would have been on the phone to Flett: Can we borrow your boy, can we borrow McCormack?
Or maybe not. Maybe Bertie King had no especial need of a back-stabbing Highland thief-taker.
McCormack stood and stretched. He moved across to the table and sat down in front of his Underwood. The sooner he finished his report the sooner he’d get back to St Andrew’s Street, back to catching thieves, back to McGlashan. He kept the television on, half-listening to Kenneth McKellar, as he turned the platen knob of the Underwood and aligned the sheet of triplicate. He would recommend that the investigation be wound down. That’s what the brass wanted anyway, what the whole charade had been about. They just needed someone to pull the plug.
He worked on the report and for an hour he was aware of nothing but the words snapping on to the page, shaping themselves into sentences. When he looked up from the keys the screen was showing the demolition of a sooty tenement. There was a long shot of the building, its chimneys black against the sky, and then the boom of an explosion as the building slumped in a spreading cloud of dust.
A city of a million souls, said the voiceover, is shrinking. Today Glasgow’s population stands at eight hundred and fifty thousand. Another hundred thousand Glaswegians are expected to leave in the next five years. The Glasgow of 1975 will be a very different city, with fewer people enjoying greater space. More parks and more green spaces.
The screen showed a gull wheeling away above a vista of high-rise blocks, with verdant parkland behind them. He thought of the men in the Murder Room, men in shirtsleeves, bent to their work. He understood what it was now, the fear that he’d smelled as the days wore on. It was the fear that they’d already missed him, that the Quaker was gone, part of the overspill, starting afresh in a seaside New Town or waving from the deck to the Broomielaw crowds.
They didn’t want him gone. They wanted him caught. They needed a name, a conviction, a man in cuffs with a blanket over his head, a vengeful crowd on the High Court steps. They needed a line drawn, a page turned. Otherwise he would always be there. Every time a woman was killed, or a girl went missing, the artist’s impression would be smirking out from the Record’s front page. Is he back? Is this another? Has the Quaker struck again?
The screen showed more half-demolished buildings, disfigured streets. It looked like the footage from Europe after the war. Bombed cities. Smoking ruins. Sometimes it felt like they were fighting a war. The enemy was one man but he could have been anyone. He struck at various points in the city and left his dead for some civilian to discover. You responded by flooding a district with uniforms, knocking a thousand doors, but you never got close.
When the programme finished, McCormack turned back to his report. He worked for another half-hour. Then he stopped to lift the cigarette smoking in the ashtray and caught his reflection in the window and the name of the peterman came to him: Paton.
12
Paton watched from the kitchen window, standing well back, high up on the fourth floor. Down in the backcourt the boy picked his way through the bricks and rubble, a slight figure, ten, eleven, aeroplaning his arms to keep his balance. Something in the boy’s demeanour told you he was a loner, off in a world of his own, lost in a dreamscape of rubbled dunnies and fever puddles. Paton felt a gush of sympathy, a kinship with this skinny kid. He’d been holed up in this flat for a matter of hours but already it felt like being back in the Digger at Polmont, the striplight slicking the greasy walls.
The noise of a jet plane filled the sky. The boy craned up, shielding his eyes, and Paton stepped back from the window. He reached his arms up in a stretch and fought the urge to light another smoke. With no carpets and not much furniture, the room seemed to sing with potential echoes, as if a single footstep might set it ringing like a plucked guitar string.
There was a flimsy-looking wooden chair in the corner. It had a circular seat and no arms, like something from a Greek Street bistro. Paton placed one hand on the back of the chair and another on the rim of the seat, as though preparing for some feat of acrobatics. He moved his shoulders: there was give in the legs but not too much: it would hold. He lifted the chair and set it down beneath the hatch in the ceiling and he climbed on to the seat with his arms out for balance. Then he stretched up and unhooked the latch and used both palms to lift the hatch lid and jiggle it free.
He still couldn’t see into the loft so he paddled his fingers lightly round the rim of the hatch, feeling for splinters. He lodged his fingertips on the faraway lip of the hatch and hauled himself up till his head was clear. The light inside was dim. He could see the lines of the rafters, long beams running in parallel, and a dark blockish shape. He let himself down to the wobbly chair.
He looked around the room. Aside from the bed and the chair the only other item of furniture was an old square-shouldered wardrobe. The wardrobe was empty. There was a key in the wardrobe door and Paton turned it. He canted the wardrobe on to its side and slid it across the floor to the hatch. He put the torch in the back pocket of his jeans and lifted the toolbox and stepped up on to the chair and then on to the wardrobe. He set the toolbox down on the loft floor and heaved himself up.
When the beam clicked into life something scraped and skittered in the shadows. Rats. Rats, lice and Scotsmen, that was the old saying: you’d find them everywhere. In Glasgow tenements they came as a package. The cone of light bounced around the attic and picked up droppings, dust-balls, a dead bird – biggish, a starling, maybe a thrush. The dark shape he’d seen was the chimney. He made his way towards it, keeping to the wooden beams, bent over, arms out once more, the torch in one hand, toolbox in the other. On the far side of the chimney he found a small space between the brickwork and the sloping roof and he slid the toolbox into it. Back at the hatch he played the torch over the bricks of the chimney and the beams of the roof. You couldn’t see the toolbox, just an angled patch of shadow. When he got the hatch lid jiggled back in place he hooked the latch and jumped down from the chair. He righted the wardrobe and slid it back to its original position. Then he took a T-shirt from his holdall and drew it across the floorboards to wipe off the trail that he’d left in the dust.
He fished the roll of banknotes from his jacket and sat on the bed and counted it out. He divvied the notes into four equal piles. One pile he folded and wedged in his shoe. Another he slipped down his sock. The third he stowed in the lining of his jacket and the last one he put in his wallet. Then he lay on the bed and smoked a cigarette. Clouds drifted past the window. He doused the cigarette in a soup can that stood on the floor by the bed. A bluebottle wobbled noisily into his vision and droned up to the ceiling, looping a figure-of-eight around the frayed cord of the light-fitting. He followed its arc for a moment before swinging up from the bed and snatching the folded Tribune. It took him four swipes – great shoulder-wrenching lunges – but he felt the hard ping that knocked the flight from the fly. It lay on the dirty floor, legs working. Paton flopped down on the bed.
He looked around the room: Stokes had done well. Mouse-shit by the skirting-board and dampness on the walls, a fur of mould on the mattress, but so what? He remembered the stewed-apple smell of the old box-bed in Hopehill Road. This was better. It was only four nights. You could thole anything for four nights.
He yawned and turned on his side. He was tired. He was always tired after a job. Tired, too, from the early start. At a quarter to five that morning they’d
stood in the dark outside Dazzle’s building, waiting for the van. Mild chill in the air. No one said much on the drive into town, Stokes at the wheel, Dazzle and Cursiter side by side on the passenger seat. Paton and Campbell on a bench-seat in the back. He was going into himself, getting prepared. The others sensed it, spoke softly among themselves. Wordlessly he took a cigarette when the pack was passed round.
When they parked in Bath Street it was almost dawn. They crossed to Glendinnings in a bluish swimming-pool light. They took off their donkey jackets and laid them on the spikes and eased themselves over the railings and dropped down on to the dank stone flags. The bars on the basement windows looked rusty and cold. Stokes passed down the metal toolbox to Paton, a heavy holdall to Cursiter, and a lighter one to Dazzle. Then Stokes crossed back to the van.
The basement door stood in the shadow cast by the steps. If you hadn’t known the door was there, you’d never have spotted it. When Dazzle took out the key that Jen McIndoe had provided he had to run his gloved fingers down the panels to find the raised disc of the Yale-lock. He let his forefinger rest in the slot, then fed the key in. It slotted home with a crisp slither. He turned the key and the door opened half an inch then stopped. Dazzle took out his torch: it played on the shaft of a bolt. Dazzle extracted a pair of tweezers from an inside pocket and started to ease the bolt along, moving it a fraction of an inch with every flick of his wrist. An incongruous gulp of birdsong sounded from somewhere close by and then the bolt slid free and they were filing through in their rubber-soled boots. Campbell took up his post by the basement door and the rest of them trooped down the corridor in the weak yellow glow of the night lights.
The Quaker Page 10