The nightwatchman’s cubbyhole was a converted storeroom at the end of the corridor. You could see the wedge of yellow light from the open door. Ten yards from the door they stopped and used their free hands to tug their balaclavas down over their faces. Dazzle produced a .38 Webley and they all moved forward again. Paton was at Dazzle’s shoulder when he stepped round the edge of the door with his gun-arm extended.
The room was empty. A calendar pinned to the wall. A desk standing crosswise to the room. A folded Evening Times and a paperback book beside a glass ashtray, a Golden Virginia tobacco tin, a plain white mug. A roll-up was smouldering in the ashtray and suddenly the watchman reared up from under the desk, his face flushed from bending down. When he saw the hooded figures and the pointed gun he rocked back in his seat and flailed his arms to keep from toppling over. One of his hands struck the white mug and it bounced on to the floor, throwing a dark stain on to the carpet.
The watchman was still trying to form a word when Cursiter stepped smartly across and hit him backhanded in the mouth. The watchman put the back of his own hand to his mouth and drew it away and looked at the blood.
Cursiter worked quickly. He knelt beside the watchman and unzipped the holdall. He seized the watchman’s wrist and removed a wristwatch with a brown leather strap. He laid the watch on the table. He lashed the man’s hands together behind his back, passing the rope between the metal struts of the chair-back and tugging it tight. Then he gagged him with a roll of silver gaffer-tape and taped the man’s ankles to the front legs of the chair. He pulled a canvas money-bag out of the holdall and tugged it down over the watchman’s head. He cut the telephone cable with pliers and unplugged the two-bar electric heater that the man had been adjusting when they all walked in. Then he stood and cleared the desk with a sweep of his arm and sat on the desk with a shotgun laid across his knees.
No one had uttered a word.
There was a clock the size of a dinner-plate mounted on one of the walls. Paton stood on a chair and lifted it down, dropping it to the floor where he smashed the face with the heel of his boot. Then he took the watchman’s wristwatch from the desk placed it on the carpet and ground the face under his heel.
Paton lifted Cursiter’s holdall and followed Dazzle into the corridor. On the first floor they found the main office. There was a push-button security lock on the door. They had the combination from Jenny MacIndoe but Dazzle used the sledge on it.
A desk. A green filing cabinet. An armchair in red buttoned leather. A bag of golf clubs propped in a corner. The safe, as Jen had said, was under the desk. They laid the framed photographs of the boss’s kids face down on the desktop, then they each took an end of the desk and carried it free. No security cameras, but Paton kept his balaclava in place as he knelt down before the safe. He dug in the toolbox for the headlamp with the elasticated strap, got to work.
Twenty minutes later they were back in the nightwatchman’s cubbyhole. Paton wondered fleetingly if the sharp, smoky smell was cordite; then he noticed the stain on the watchman’s trousers. Dazzle dumped the heavy holdall on the desk and the man jumped at the sound, wrenching at the ropes and bucking his torso so that he rocked forward on the chair. Cursiter held the shotgun like a kayaker’s paddle and jerked the butt-end and cracked the man on the temple and the chair keeled over and they left him slumped on the floor.
On the way out they stopped at the basement door. This was the risky part. Dazzle took the sledgehammer from the holdall and stepped outside. Campbell closed and bolted the door and stood well back. They heard the splinter and crack as Dazzle used the sledge. When the door burst open and Dazzle stumbled through they climbed the stairs to the front door.
They were grinning now, they couldn’t stop grinning as they rolled their balaclavas back into beanies. Nobody notices a squad of workies but they might notice a squad of workies in balaclavas. It was daylight now, you could hear the early traffic on Bath Street. They opened the front door and walked out between the Doric columns, down the front steps at an easy pace, joking and laughing, making plenty of noise. They crossed the street and climbed into the van and Stokes released the handbrake and pulled out from the kerb.
And that was that: as easy as you like. Paton walked down to Argyle Street and caught a bus to Bridgeton Cross. The others were heading south, planning to torch the van on a patch of waste ground in the Gorbals before switching to Dazzle’s Triumph, parked three streets away beside the Southern Necropolis. At Queen Mary Street, Paton climbed the stairs and used his key to the top-floor flat where he’d already stashed provisions to last him a week.
Not quite the Central Hotel but so what? A Primus stove and a saucepan. A jawbox sink to piss in. Beneath the sink was a stack of tins and chocolate bars, cans of ginger. In the bedroom there was a plastic bucket into which Paton had emptied a bottle of Dettol. Beside it a twin pack of toilet rolls, two bottles of water, a cube of carbolic soap and a small hand-towel.
On the mantelpiece above the torn-out fireplace was a loosely folded yellow rag. Inside the rag was a short-barrelled Browning.
Paton went back to the window and moved the net curtain an inch. The grassless backcourt. Banks of dark windows. It looked like anywhere in the city. He had to think for a moment where he was. The East End. Bridgeton. It was perfect. You didn’t want to hole up too close to the job; the cops might get lucky. But you didn’t want to leave the city either: maybe someone’s already stumbled on the scene. Cops could be watching the stations, throwing up blocks on the roads out of town. Best to get clear of the locus, get off the streets as fast as you can, hole up for four or five days, let the shitstorm blow over.
He’d followed this drill after every big job. He’d refined it to a point where he’d cut out everything that wasn’t needed. On previous jobs he’d taken a transistor radio for this part. Follow the news, get a jump on the cops. Lately, though, he’d stopped even that. You worried less with no connection to the outside world. Better not to know if Stokes or Dazzle or Cursiter had been picked up. If the nightwatchman had succumbed to his injuries.
He lit another cigarette – there was a whole carton in his holdall – and ran through his plan. On ice for four days and nights. Up sharp on the morning of day five, fetch the gear from the attic. Across Glasgow Green to the city centre. Down to Jamaica Street, catch the service bus to Kilmarnock. Train from Killie to Carlisle, then change for Oxford. Bus from Oxford to Reading, train into Paddington, one tube stop to Bayswater. He’d be in the back room of the Duke of Clarence by Friday closing-time, fencing the gear with Johnny Matrenza.
He nodded to himself. Down in the backcourt the boy was still messing around. He’d found an old plank of wood and propped it against the ruined wall of a midden to make a kind of ramp. He was climbing the ramp with his arms out like a tightrope-walker. Paton had the odd sensation that the boy was somehow him, that he was watching a movie of himself as a ten-year-old boy in the old Hopehill Road backcourt. But if the boy was him then Dazzle would have been somewhere in the vicinity and if this was Hopehill Road then the window he stood at would have been – what? – the Donnellys’ kitchen window, Mr Donnelly with the old black bicycle he carried up and down four flights of stairs and the black-haired fanciable teenage daughter who practised her majorettes moves in the backcourt, marching on the spot and tossing her baton up in the air, the sunlight flashing off its bright chrome shaft. As he watched the boy balancing on the ruined wall Paton leaned against the window frame and started working his way through the flats in his Hopehill Road close, the families on each landing, the surnames, the pets, the father’s job, the names of the kids. It would take some time, but time was not a problem.
13
In the showers, one of the Skyemen – a great, freckled walrus of a full back with a tuneless, honking voice – was murdering a ballad amidst the anguished hooting of his teammates. McCormack finished towelling his hair. He forced the wet towel into a plastic bag containing his shinty kit and pushed the whole damp wodge i
nto his sports bag. The taped end of his caman poked out from the bag.
He carried his dirty boots to the door of the clubhouse and whacked them together. The gravel around the clubhouse steps was dotted with little rosettes of mud, each with a perfect stud-hole at its centre. As he turned to go back inside, Tearlach Mor was coming out.
‘Heading over the road, Dochie?’ Tearlach jerked his head in the direction of Pollokshaws Road; a few of them were meeting for a pint in Heraghty’s Bar.
‘I’ll see you there,’ McCormack said, but when he shouldered his bag and clattered down the clubhouse steps, something struck him. They were in Queen’s Park on the city’s south side. Just over the hill, up there in Battlefield, was Carmichael Lane. It was five minutes’ walk: he should see it again.
Carmichael Lane. One of the three green pins on the Murder Room map. Where it all started. Scene of the first Quaker killing. Jacqui Keevins, the local girl who worked as a nurse at the Victoria Infirmary. ‘Angel Slain by Dance Hall Demon’ was the Record’s headline.
It wasn’t a happy memory for McCormack. The mix-up over the dance halls had wrong-footed the case from the start. It was wound up after two weeks. No leads, no suspect in the frame.
At the cross McCormack turned left and started to climb Langside Avenue. At the top of the hill he dodged between cars to the big roundabout where the monument to the Battle of Langside rose into the sky. At the other side of the roundabout he crossed again and cut down a side street into Langside Place. It was just before noon. Langside Place was a short, quiet street of low, well-kept tenements. The pink stone glowed in the midday sun. The street had a short parade of shops on one side and the Keevins’s two-bedroom flat was above the baker’s, next to the chemist and the newsagent. He thought about ringing the bell, but what could he bring them but more bad news? I’m winding down the Quaker investigation. Your daughter’s killer will never be found.
He walked down Millbrae Road and turned into Overdale Street. A narrow lane opened out on the right, twenty yards down. It was cobbled with sharp irregular stones and the grass grew up in the gaps. He walked a little distance into the lane, between the garden walls of Cathkin Road and Carmichael Place, and stopped in a recess beside a garage door.
This was where Jacquilyn Keevins was found, naked and stiff on a morning in May. The man who found her – the garage owner, a local joiner – was so shaken that he didn’t stop to make sure if it was a man or a woman. He stumbled off and phoned the police and told them a man was lying dead in Carmichael Lane.
McCormack hitched his sports bag and stood there for a minute on the jagged stones, not sure what he’d expected to find. A woman with shopping bags was labouring up the lane from the other direction and she gave a start when she spotted McCormack. She met his cheery ‘Fine day’ with a tight smile. He watched her go and then he walked back up the hill. He rested for a spell on the roundabout, sitting on the base of the Langside Monument. He looked down on the low homely tenements and neat sandstone villas of Battlefield.
Since she’d come back from Germany, Jacqui Keevins had stayed local. Six or seven streets marked the limits of her world. Her whole life had shrunk to this tiny corner of the South Side. Her parents’ flat in Langside Place, where her mum was always happy to babysit the boy. The hospital where she worked as an auxiliary nurse. The park where she took the wee fella on Saturday mornings.
It was perfect, her parents told the investigating officers. Ideal. Everything she needed right there on her doorstep. McCormack wasn’t so sure. What did you do when you got a lumber at the dancing and wanted to bring him home? McCormack remembered the file, the witness statements from Jacqui’s mum and dad. They were adamant that Jacqui and wee Alasdair were staying with them permanently, or at least long-term until Jacqui got back on her feet.
There was a friend, though, wasn’t there? McCormack remembered, a girl who worked beside Jacqui at the Victoria. She thought that Jacqui was planning to leave, she said Jacqui spoke about getting a flat for herself and the boy.
Would that have saved her? Would a place of her own have made any difference? Maybe it would. Maybe the killer would have thought twice about killing her in a flat. He might have worried about leaving prints, about waking the boy, about the neighbours hearing a scream. Jacqui’s parents had thought they were keeping her safe, wrapping her up in a tight wee corner of their tight wee world, but maybe that’s what helped kill her.
Anyway. He’d expected nothing to come of this and nothing had. McCormack slapped the base of the monument and was turning to go when the lettering caught his eye. He had passed this monument a dozen times but had never properly seen it. Now he craned back to take in the great fluted pillar and the foreshortened lion squatting on top before focusing on the plaque:
THE BATTLE OF LANGSIDE WAS FOUGHT ON THIS GROUND ON 13 MAY 1568 BETWEEN THE FORCES OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS AND THE REGENT MORAY, AND MARKED THE QUEEN’S FINAL DEFEAT IN SCOTLAND. THIS MONUMENT WAS ERECTED IN 1887.
Above the plaque, the date of the battle was carved into the soiled yellow stone in letters half a foot high: 13 MAY 1568. Something seemed to shift position in McCormack’s mind, like the arm of the jukebox slowly slapping a disc down on to the turntable.
He scribbled in his notebook and set off down Langside Avenue. The phone booth near Shawlands Cross was empty. He told the desk sergeant to put him through to Goldie.
‘Derek. It’s McCormack. Do us a favour. Can you get the Keevins file out? I need to check something.’
‘What you looking for?’
‘I want the date of Jacqui Keevins’s murder. Get the file, would you?’
‘Don’t need to get the file. It was my wedding anniversary. Believe that? The thirteenth of May. We’d booked a table at Etrusco’s. Took me a week to get out the dog-house.’
The thirteenth of May. McCormack wedged the handset under his chin, flicked the pages of his notebook: 13 May 1568. A girl from Langside Place, murdered in Battlefield on the 400th anniversary of the Battle of Langside. The young queen’s final defeat in Scotland.
‘Still with us?’
‘I’m here.’
‘What’s the score? What is it you’ve found?’
A woman had appeared outside the phone box – elderly, prim, in a purplish coat and hat despite the heat, handbag hooked on a rigid forearm. McCormack grimaced and shrugged, caught the handset as it slipped from its berth between his chin and shoulder.
‘I don’t know, Derek. Possibly nothing. I’ll talk to you later.’
He used two fingers to hook the unused coins from the steel dish and pushed against the heavy door. The old woman leaned forward from the waist to peer into the interior of the box, as if inspecting it for damage, before stepping forward and ducking smartly under McCormack’s outstretched arm as he held the door. He let the door swing shut, stooped to retrieve his sports bag from the pavement and turned to go. The old woman’s perfume stayed in his nose as he crossed the road to the bus stop.
Did it mean anything, he wondered, as he waited for a bus; was the date anything more than a coincidence? What could the murder of a young Glaswegian mother possibly have to do with a 400-year-old battle? Still, it was something. It was a line to pursue. It was worth a punt. You owed them that, at the very least. Jacquilyn Keevins. Ann Ogilvie. Marion Mercer. You owed it to the three of them.
Marion Mercer
‘I wouldn’t bet on it,’ he says to me. He’s standing at the window, a dishcloth over his shoulder. This is where it always starts, this is what I always come back to. I replay it all, from this point forward. Henry shakes his head. ‘If anything, it’s getting worse. Look at the puddles.’
I come and stand behind him. I put my arm round his waist and hook my chin over his right shoulder. It’s kind of sore and comfortable at the same time.
‘They’re like tiny seas.’ My voice sounds a little thick, coming up through my stretched throat.
They are like tiny seas. The wind is making these furrows a
nd waves on all the puddles down on Earl Street. The big branches of the trees are wagging up and down and the television aerials on the tenements opposite are shuddering. The wind is making whooshing sounds in the chimney. I feel like Dorothy at the start of The Wizard of Oz.
‘It’ll clear,’ I tell him. ‘Anyway, the tatties are ready.’
Henry likes to mash the potatoes. We’re having haggis, neeps and tatties (it’s Burns Night). I got the last haggis from MacSorley’s and it’s boiling away on the hob.
‘There’ll be slates down,’ Henry says, turning from the window. ‘Chimney stacks maybe.’
Last winter there was a big storm and the slates came down like purple guillotines, exploding on the roadway or embedding themselves in the narrow front lawn. In the morning the front lawn looked like a fairy cemetery, all these tiny headstones sticking up out of the grass.
The whole building is falling to bits. We’ve talked about moving away, out to one the New Towns or maybe the high flats on the Kingsway. But who’d want to be up there on a night like this, on the eighteenth or nineteenth floor, the whole tower tilting in the wind, bending like a reed?
Henry drains the tatties and clatters the pot back on to the hob. He takes the butter dish and slices off a corner of the block and draws the knife across the rim of the pot, so that the butter drops into the tatties. He takes a full pint of milk from the fridge, shakes it to disperse the cream, thumbs the silver top and tips a little into the pot with the earnest, comical concentration of a man watering whisky. Then he gets to work with the masher.
I go through to put on my face in the hallstand mirror and I hear the regular strokes of the masher – thump, thump, thump – and every few strokes the clang of metal on metal as he bangs the masher on the edge of the pot, clearing the tines and starting again.
The Quaker Page 11