Then the others were busy, laughter bubbling up as they hurried to fill their cups, and they stepped out in ones and twos, shouting their toasts, ragged arcs of piss hanging in the air, plastic cups tumbling after one another and bouncing on the floor. The man was hunkered down now, arms clasped on the back of his head, making himself small as the urine lashed his back in darkish stripes.
McCormack’s empty cup was crunched in his fist. He let it drop and turned to leave and his eye caught Goldie’s. The gaze held for a second or two. Whatever Goldie saw there made him grimace and drop his eyes and when McCormack stepped into the corridor he heard Goldie’s voice, matey, cajoling. ‘OK, fellas. He’s had enough. Show’s over. Let’s get back to work.’
That night, back in the flat, McCormack looked out over the river and the cranes, sloshing the malt in lazy circles round his tumbler. He thought about the man in the polo shirt with the stripes of piss on his back. He thought about the look in Goldie’s eyes. He thought about Flett. Not a popularity contest, son. Was it an unpopularity contest, though? Was that what it was? If so, close the book. We have a winner.
16
Paton woke to the sound of screaming. Muffled shouts and cries were ringing through the stairwell. For a second it crossed his mind that they were knocking down the building, that the cranes and the wrecking ball had swung into place while he was sleeping and the old condemned walls were being levelled where he lay.
Then he struggled up on his elbows and glanced at the window: daylight. Whatever was going on, he couldn’t be found here, he had to get out. He sprang to his feet, the sleeping bag bunching round his ankles. He was fully dressed – for the last four nights he had slept in his clothes – and he stooped to snatch his jacket from the floor, then grabbed the Browning from the top of the mantel. He pulled the door behind him as he left.
He clattered down the stairs, wrestling into his jerkin and wedging the pistol into the waistband of his jeans. As he rounded the final banister and daylight flooded the stairwell the clamour got louder.
A boy stood in the back close, framed in the doorway, a scrawny silhouette. Ten years old, eleven, a primary kid. The skinny kid from the backcourt. He was crying in a harsh rhythm, his cries bouncing off the whitewashed walls. For a reason he couldn’t explain, Paton knew that whatever was causing these cries was in the room that faced him now. He stopped on the threshold; his palms braced on the doorjamb, and leaned into the room.
In the light from a half-boarded window he saw the body on the floor, half-in and half-out of the bed recess. He saw the pulped smudge of the face, the black flow oozing from between the white legs, he saw the utter, stark deadness. He pushed himself off from the doorjamb and plunged towards the back close. The boy straightened up as Paton passed him, his wide white eyes locking on to Paton’s, holding the gaze till Paton wrenched away and scanned the backcourt.
A white sheet fluttered from a washing line. Wagging clumps of weeds. The ribbed, overturned drum of a dustbin, a dented tin can. A man coming towards him in a waddling rush across the rubble, a heavyset man in an undershirt and trousers, rolling his shoulders as he pulled on his braces. There were heads poking out of second- and third-storey windows. The rubble crunched as Paton turned on his heel, back through the close, the boy flinching as he passed, down the steps and into Queen Mary Street.
He turned south and set off at a sprint, turning into Hozier Street. Sunday silence, the blank, blind windows of the tenements. Slow down, man, he told himself: walk, look like someone walking to buy the Sunday paper. But his legs wouldn’t be told.
The barrel of the pistol jarred against his body as he ran and he reached back to check it wasn’t working loose.
At Old Dalmarnock Road he turned down Muslin Street and on to Tullis Street. The Green was just ahead and a last frantic spurt took him through the gates.
It was Sunday lunchtime when the phone rang. McCormack was fixing breakfast. Two eggs, three rashers and a mottled tattie scone were spitting in the pan; crisping under the grill was a disc of black pudding, one of fruit pudding and a slice of Lorne sausage. He had the radio tuned to Round the Horne: ‘Here are the answers to last week’s questions …’ It took him a moment to place the voice.
‘I hope to fuck you said your prayers at ten o’clock Mass, son.’
Cochrane.
Jesus, that was quick, McCormack thought: he’s seen it already. On Friday afternoon McCormack had finished his report, sent it in triplicate to St Andrew’s Street. Reading it over before he sealed the envelope he winced at the schoolmasterish tone, the idiom of the end-of-term report. He had praised the Marine detectives for their diligence and application, their attention to detail. The black marks were more specific. Too much store had been set on Nancy Scullion’s testimony. Other potential avenues of inquiry were neglected. The very perseverance of the Quaker Squad was in some ways counterproductive: faced with a brick wall, they kept on pushing.
The report ended as everyone knew it would, with a recommendation that the investigation be wound down, particularly in view of the significant lapse of time since the last killing. ‘On the balance of probabilities,’ McCormack wrote, ‘it would be logical to assume that the perpetrator is no longer at large in the Glasgow area.’
It was a fair report. Cochrane wouldn’t like it but he couldn’t paint it as a stitch-up. Still, you couldn’t grudge him a right of reply and here it came. McCormack wedged the phone under his chin and scooped his smokes from the kitchen table. He turned off the radio. Cochrane was saying something about a pen.
‘A pen?’
‘To take things down, Detective. A writing implement. Pen or pencil. That class of thing.’
McCormack scanned round the room. He didn’t have a pen. ‘I’ve got a pen,’ he said.
‘Forty-eight Queen Mary Street.’ Cochrane spoke with pedantic clarity, like the speaking clock. ‘That’s in Bridgeton, Detective.’ McCormack could see smoke curling out from under the grill. ‘Bridgeton’s in the East End of Glasgow.’
There was something under the heavy edge of Cochrane’s irony, a wrinkle of hilarity that McCormack couldn’t work out.
‘Sir, sorry: why are you telling me this?’
Somehow he could hear Cochrane smiling.
‘He’s back,’ Cochrane said. ‘The Quaker. He’s killed another woman. On the balance of probabilities, son, I’d say your report is a bag of shite.’
II
THE BLOODY FLESH
‘God’s refuted but the devil’s not.’
Charles Simic, ‘The Scarecrow’
17
McCormack sat in the Velox behind the dark green scene-of-crime trailer. He turned off the engine. The tick of cooling metal gave way to silence and then to the sound of his own breathing. He hadn’t eaten breakfast: he was grateful at least for that, the fry-up went straight in the bin. As always when he was nervous, tiredness seemed to flood him like adrenaline. He leaned his head against the head-rest.
Queen Mary Street: the Quaker was spelling it out for them now.
The trailer looked like a horse-box. Nothing snuffled and stamped its feet on dirty straw in there, though. Instead, as McCormack had learned on the sergeant’s course at Tulliallan and confirmed on a dozen investigations, the trailer contained a sinister assemblage of functional implements: Klieg lights, a folding ladder, a spade, a yardstick, a crowbar, wire-cutters, a hatchet, a saw, tarpaulins, two flashlights, four pairs of Wellington boots. More than anything else it was the boots; the boots were what got you. He took a quick puff of his inhaler, lifted his hat from the passenger seat and hauled himself out of the car.
Crossing the road he could feel the grit and stones through his shoes’ thin soles. His whole body felt preternaturally sensitive. He felt like he did when he walked out on to the shinty pitch at Balla, with the sun on his back and the green-brown bulk of Meall Mor lifting its peak to the heavens. He parted the sparse crowd with his warrant card and nodded to the constable at the closemouth.
‘Second on the left, sir.’
Another cop was stationed outside the flat, guarding the space where the door should have been.
The flat had two rooms. There was nothing at all in the first one and not much more in the second.
The fireplace had been removed. What was left was just a naked hole, a black slot at the foot of the wall. In the far corner some of the floorboards had been torn up for firewood. Tidemarks of damp lapped the walls. The room smelled strongly of piss and burnt rubber. In the centre of the room was a dirty mattress and the body of a woman. She lay sprawled there, head on the mattress, feet on the floor. The light from a partly boarded-up window splashed across her upper body. She wore a blindfold, some kind of scarf round her neck. A soiled, bloodstained slip was ruched, bunched above her waist. A tacky black pool spread over the boards to where the two detectives stood.
McCormack crossed to the body. As he squatted down beside it he noticed the dead woman’s feet. She had painted her nails a glittery green. The little toe on her right foot had the merest fleck of glitter on its tiny nail. He shuffled back, tugging the hem of his raincoat away from the blood.
She was naked, apart from the blindfold, the scarf and the cream-coloured slip. She lay on her back, the face purple and swollen, features bloated and squashed. The face looked like a balloon full of water. The body was boyish and thin, breasts almost flat above prominent ribs. There were purplish bruises on her upper chest and left shoulder. What looked like a smiling mouth had been carved into the flesh of her left breast. Like the others, she had been menstruating. The black pool on the floor had seeped from her vagina, whose black tuft stirred in the draught from the glassless window.
‘It’s our boy, all right.’ Goldie’s voice was dry and papery, as if from lack of use.
The woman’s hair had been hacked off and lay in clumps around her head. McCormack thought of the bulletins from Ulster, women with their heads clipped and shaved, chained to railings in Belfast or Derry.
He leaned closer. The blindfold was not a blindfold. The blindfold was a sanitary napkin. The scarf was not a scarf but a stocking. Its twin was gone, along with the shoes, the bra and pants, whatever dress she was wearing. She had been stripped and pillaged, like this flat, this building.
McCormack walked round to the other side of the mattress where the light was better. The woman’s left arm hung over the mattress, knuckles touching the floor. The fingernails were painted, same green as the toes, but two of them were chipped and split and the nails of the middle and index fingers held a crescent of black that might have been dirt but most likely was blood. She had fought her killer, raked his face. Left a mark. On the ring finger of her pale left hand was a still paler strip, the ghost of a wedding band.
‘Footprints.’ Goldie was over by the door now. He gestured at the floor, clicked his tongue. ‘Careless. Not like him.’
There were two separate prints on the bare wooden boards. A small ribbed sole that suggested a child’s sandshoe and the thick ridges of a man’s workboot.
A bluebottle swayed in the air, fat as a bee. McCormack felt it bump the back of his hand as he swatted it away.
There were footsteps in the close, the familiar booming tones of Cochrane’s voice. He strode into the room with Farren and Gemmell at his back. With his fedora tipped back on his head he looked tipsy, there was a Bank Holiday swagger to him. He smiled grimly at the body on the floor and then looked at McCormack, shaking his head as though McCormack was to blame.
‘“No longer at large in the Glasgow area”.’ He shook his head. McCormack shrugged.
Cochrane had his hands on his hips, surveying the room. ‘Who found her then?’ he said.
‘Wee boy playing in the backcourt,’ said Goldie. ‘He wandered in through the back close then ran out screaming blue murder and a neighbour came out to see what was happening. The neighbour phoned it in from a box on London Road.’
Cochrane nodded, breathed out slowly through his nose. He swung abruptly round and strode out. They could hear him giving orders in the close, his footsteps diminishing towards the backcourt.
Seawright came in, the police pathologist. The police photographer was right behind him. Seawright kneeled in front of his black case and sprung the fasteners and lifted the lid. The police photographer was already moving round the body, crouching and bending, the flashbulb detonations searing the shadows with bursts of white light. Seawright said something to the snapper and he squatted down to get close-ups of the face, the knife marks on the breast.
While the photographer was finishing up, Seawright scribbled in his notebook. McCormack turned to the snapper.
‘Get the wall.’
The snapper was fiddling with his gear, dismantling the big lens. He looked up. McCormack was pointing at the back wall, the mess of overlapping letters, the blizzard of slogans and acronyms. The snapper followed his finger.
‘You want me to take a picture of the wall?’
‘That’s the idea.’
The snapper’s lips tightened. He was all briskness and business now, rattling off the shots, winding on the film with flicks of his thumb.
‘Get some close-ups,’ McCormack said. The snapper nodded, didn’t turn round.
Seawright was fitting transparent plastic bags over the hands of the victim, tying them in place. He placed one over the victim’s head and secured it at the neck. Then he and his assistant unfolded a large plastic sheet and laid it on the floor. They lifted the body on to the sheet and wrapped the sheet around the body before zipping it into a body bag. The last thing McCormack saw was the short blond hair, some of it black with blood as if the roots were showing through.
Cochrane would be riding down to the Saltmarket with Seawright to watch the post-mortem. McCormack had seen enough. He swung through the back close and out into the sunlight, gulping lungfuls of air. A uniformed constable was stationed at the tenement’s back door. He refused McCormack’s offer of a cigarette with a quick shake of his head.
McCormack had seen his share of dissections. He’d stood at Seawright’s shoulder with the dab of Vicks on his upper lip, trying to fight the flutter in his stomach, taking it all in. The harsh mortuary light. The big crude ‘Y’ that they drew on the body: incisions running from behind each ear to meet at the breastbone and drop down together to the pubis. The skin peeled back like an orange. Internal organs scooped in double handfuls, weighed and bagged. The contents of the stomach spread like a divination on a brushed steel tray. Seawright reading the entrails, giving a running commentary in that flat keelie voice.
McCormack closed his eyes, felt the sun on his lids, let the smell of death, of that damp, bloody room, dissipate in the clear air, drew the clean harsh smoke deep into his lungs.
‘Detective.’ He turned to see Cochrane in the doorway. ‘Take him home, would you? Take the boy home. Talk to him there. Do some proper police work for a change.’
McCormack stepped on his smoke. ‘Sir.’
18
The door to the neighbour’s flat was ajar. He could hear the murmur of low voices, a clink of crockery. He knocked on the door, pushed it open.
Down the hall to the kitchen. There was an old woman in a tatty armchair and a boy on a kitchen chair with a WPC beside him at the table.
‘This is Detective Inspector McCormack, Andrew. He’s a policeman. He’s going to take you home.’
McCormack squatted down in front of the boy. He was nine or ten, slumped in the kitchen chair with his hands in the pockets of his grey school shorts. The toes of his sandshoes kept catching with a squeak on the scuffed white lino. There were marks on the lino, black streaks from the blood on his shoes.
‘You doing OK, wee man?’
The boy looked up at McCormack then back at the floor, nodded. His dark hair hung in lank strands.
‘What’s your name, son?’
The boy shrugged.
‘You’re not in trouble, all right? What’s your name?’
‘
Andrew Gilmour.’
‘Where do you live, Andrew?’
‘Birgidale Road.’
McCormack knew Bridgeton fairly well. He’d worked a payroll robbery here in ’67 and knocked a lot of doors. But he didn’t remember Birgidale Road.
He clapped a hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘Think you can show me where that is, pal?’
The boy looked up. He nodded. ‘Aye, mister. It’s in Castlemilk.’
McCormack looked at the WPC. ‘Castlemilk! You live in Castlemilk, Andrew?’ He was almost shouting. The boy flinched. He said it quieter, starting again: ‘You’re from Castlemilk?’
The boy’s fringe juddered.
‘Then what were you doing here?’
The boy looked at the floor. ‘Nothin’.’ Defensive, sullen. The shoulders lifted and fell. ‘Wasnae doin’ nothin’.’
Castlemilk was, what, five, six miles away, out on the edge of the city. The boy was clearly alone. No jacket. Just a brown V-neck pullover and the grey shorts. Castlemilk was another orbit, it might as well be Mars.
‘Who brought you here, Andrew?’ McCormack asked him. ‘How did you get here?’
‘Took the bus.’ The boy’s fringe screened his eyes. The toes of both sandshoes were touching the floor now, like a ballet dancer on points.
They drove to Castlemilk in silence, the boy only talking to give directions. Birgidale Road was like the coast of Britain approached from the south. Along one side a colossal row of white-harled four-storey tenements dropped the whole length of the street, a dirty-white unbroken cliff. They stopped halfway down it.
McCormack followed the boy’s sclaffing sandshoes up to the third-floor landing. The boy rattled the flap of the letter box. Nothing.
McCormack was crouching down to peer through the flap when the door yanked open.
‘Again?’ The woman was wearing slacks and a sleeveless blouse and an expression of tight-lipped belligerence.
‘Mrs Gilmour.’ McCormack had his warrant card in his hand. The hard eyes dropped to scan the card and two discs of green eyeshadow bulged out like second eyes. McCormack put his card away. ‘Your son is the witness to a very serious crime, Mrs Gilmour. He’s had a severe shock. I think it might be best if we all went inside.’
The Quaker Page 14