‘He’s been warned. He steals from the mantel for the bus fare. He’s been tellt. What “serious crime”?’
‘Let’s go inside.’
The house smelled of paint and dampness and the sour brown smell of neglected pet – a rabbit or guinea pig.
‘Mrs Gilmour. Why was your son in the vicinity of Queen Mary Street in Bridgeton this morning?’
The woman laughed. ‘Cause he’s soft in the head. He thinks if his da comes back he’ll go to Queen Mary Street. He won’t know to come here.’ She snorted. ‘He thinks his da’s coming back.’
McCormack took out his notebook. ‘You clearly don’t share his optimism.’
‘What’s that?’
McCormack looked up. ‘I said you don’t think Andrew’s father is coming back.’
‘He’ll be in Timbuktu by now, if he knows what’s good for him. Outer Mongolia.’
The boy looked across at her then, a look of narrow-eyed loathing, and then back to the floor.
‘We moved here when Eric left us,’ the woman said. ‘He doesnae have our address and I don’t want his. We’re well shot of him.’
The boy continued scowling.
‘A woman was killed, Mrs Gilmour. Last night or early this morning. Andrew found the body.’
Something gleamed in the hard green eyes. ‘A woman? Is it the Quaker?’
‘At this stage we can’t say for definite what—’
‘It’s the Quaker, isn’t it?’
‘Mrs Gilmour: we don’t know. Andrew disturbed the man we think may have killed the woman.’
‘He saw the Quaker?’ She turned to the boy. ‘You saw the Quaker?’
The boy said something then. McCormack had been focusing on the mother and had missed what the boy said. ‘Say it again, son?’
The boy cleared his throat. ‘He had birds on his hands.’
McCormack looked at the mother and the mother shrugged. ‘What do you mean, son, he had birds on his hands?’
‘There,’ the boy said, tapping the back of his right hand, where the thumb and forefinger joined, then tapping the same place on his left.
‘Tattoos? You mean his hands were tattooed?’
The boy nodded. McCormack knew what he meant. He’d seen it before, little swifts or swallows in the fleshy part between finger and thumb.
None of the other witnesses had mentioned tattoos. Not the boy and girl who gave the descriptions after the first murder. Not Nancy Scullion, who spent a whole evening in the Quaker’s company. The man Andrew Gilmour had seen wasn’t the Quaker. Unless the tats were new, unless he’d had them done precisely to muddy the trail, then the man he had witnessed was somebody else.
That afternoon, back at the Marine, McCormack was typing up his interview with the boy when Adam Farren and Doug Gemmell breezed in. Only Goldie and McCormack were in the Murder Room; everyone else was doing door-to-door in Bridgeton. Farren tossed his keys on to his desk and slung his jacket on the back of his chair. He didn’t sit down. He stretched and gave a false noisy yawn and when he spoke it was to no one in particular.
‘This is cosy. All boys together. Part of the squad now, is he? One of the gang. Quick as you like.’
McCormack kept his eyes on his work. Sour reek of beer. He could smell the beer from where he sat. Another murder, a world of fresh leads to be chased, and here were these pricks sinking buckshee pints.
‘Doesn’t let the grass grow under his feet, this boy. Gotta give him that.’
‘I was doing my job, Detective.’
‘Right. The excuse of rats and wankers through the ages. Doing my job.’
McCormack was reading over what he’d written so far. He kept his tone light, distracted. ‘Hm. That’s right. You might want to try it sometime.’
‘How’s that?’
McCormack gave the platen a couple of twists. ‘Doing your job. If you’d done your job properly I wouldn’t have to be here. Could’ve stayed doing what I’m good at. Putting thieves away. Stead of wiping your backsides.’
‘Hey hey hey.’ Gemmell was on his feet now, hitching his trousers. Farren moved clumsily, bumping his way through the empty chairs. McCormack stood abruptly, turned.
‘What, you’re going to start on me now? Run out of suspects. No human punchbag in the dunny? Tell you a secret, lads. There’s more to being a detective than a Slater’s suit and acting the hard man. Or nicking over to The Smiddy for a pint. You’re working a murder; start acting like it.’
Gemmell had Farren by the arm now, holding him back. Farren’s fringe had fallen across his eyes. Breathing seemed to be a problem.
‘Two weeks.’ Rage had compressed Farren’s voice to a bated rasp. ‘I’ll give you two weeks before someone fucking sorts you out.’
McCormack’s eyebrows climbed. ‘Two weeks? Well, if it’s gonnae be you, you better get into shape, fella. Start doing sit-ups or something. Because you couldnae beat a fat man to the bus.’ He grinned. ‘Look at the fucking cut of you. Even talking a fight’s got you knackered. You want to settle it now?’ He jerked his thumb at the doorway. ‘Plenty empty cells down there. I’m sure Angelo Dundee here would hold your jacket.’
There was a spell of thirty seconds when the only sounds were Farren’s troubled breathing and the whir of the fan on the desk. Then McCormack turned his back and sat down. He started typing. The keys snapped home in savage bursts, rattling the platen. He worked for twenty minutes. When he stood up to file the report, Goldie was watching him in silence.
‘What?’ he said.
19
‘Detective!’
The men around the front door swarmed him, tugging notebooks from their raincoat pockets. He pulled the fedora brim down another half-inch and braced his arms in front of him, breaking his way through the crowd.
‘Is this number four, Detective? Is this the Quaker? Will you catch him this time? Can you name the victim?’
In the light drizzle their upturned faces had a look of tragic intensity, of holy supplication.
McCormack shouldered through to the bright yellow glow of the station lobby.
The Murder Room was packed. Men were perched on desks, lining the walls, standing two deep at the back. Cochrane had his hands in the air, calling for order. McCormack found a space beneath the wall-clock, took off his hat, held it at his chest like someone standing for the national anthem.
Cochrane was standing on a chair now, clapping his hands. The voices subsided, the hubbub dropping an octave, then another, rumbling to a halt.
‘OK. All leave is cancelled as of now.’ Cochrane climbed down from the chair. ‘That’s the first thing. Those of you with wives and weans, I hope you spent some time with them at the weekend. Maybe leave a photograph out on the mantelpiece, cause they’re going to forget what you look like. This is seven-day weeks till further notice.’
The photos were up on the pinboard already. He slapped the board with the back of his hand. ‘This, gentlemen, is why we’re here. Body of a female, as yet unidentified, found in the ground-floor flat of a derelict tenement block at forty-eight Queen Mary Street, Bridgeton. The PM report will come in tomorrow but the circumstances tally with those of Jacquilyn Keevins, Ann Ogilvie and Marion Mercer. Victim was bludgeoned, raped, strangled with her tights. These are the details that will be made public.
‘The details that will not be made public also tally with the earlier murders. Victim was menstruating at the time of her death. A sanitary napkin was placed on the body – in this case across the eyes, as you can see. There are knife marks on her chest and the face has been beaten beyond recognition. Let me remind you, gentlemen, once and for all: these details do not leak. If they do leak, I will find the leak and I will personally ensure that his career with the City of Glasgow Police ends that same day. Fuck traffic duties: you’re out. Finished. Am I understood?
‘Let’s be clear then. This is our man. This is number four. He has killed again but he’s been careless. He was seen leaving the locus yesterday morning.
He left a footprint. He may have left fingerprints. We have two tasks. Number one: find this man. Number two: identify the victim. Uniforms will be tasked from the incident caravan at the locus. DI McCormack will now be part of the investigating team. You will make him welcome. And now’ – Cochrane glanced to his left as the door opened and a dark-suited figure blocked the doorway. ‘And now, gentlemen, we have a visitor.’
Detective Chief Superintendent Peter Levein, head of Glasgow CID, strode to the front of the room and turned to face the men. You didn’t see him too often in the normal run of things and the men straightened a bit in their seats. He stood for a moment, enjoying the scrutiny, leading with his big clean-shaven chin. He wore a bright white shirt whose thick twill was visible to the first three rows of men, red and gold diagonal stripes on his tie, a dark blue suit of the kind you might keep good for a wedding or a funeral.
‘Gentlemen.’ He liked the sound of his voice, its deep, chesty reverberation, and he said the word again. ‘Gentlemen. We will find this man.’ He looked round the room, meeting all the eyes he could. ‘Until we do, life will not be fun. Life will bear remarkably little resemblance to a bowl of fucking cherries. Having me on your back is the least of it. You’ll have Chief Constable Lennox. The Daily Express and the Daily fucking Record. It will get political. The Secretary of State will take an interest; there may be questions in the House. You want this shit to finish, you want to go back to your cosy wee lives, there’s a simple solution. We find this man.’
Then he turned to confabulate with Cochrane and the meeting broke up, the detectives rising in a buzz of talk with Levein’s words hanging in the air. We find this man.
But what they found first of all was the locket. A broken chain, glinting in a clump of weeds. One of the uniforms spotted it in the backcourt at Queen Mary Street. Next to the chain a fancy golden locket edged in pearls. There was no picture in the locket but it looked distinctive enough for a detective to be detailed to take it round the city’s jewellers.
Next day the City of Glasgow Police issued a new likeness of the Quaker. The artist – the same as for the first drawing, a teacher at the city’s School of Art – had spoken to the boy. He’d spent time with the other witnesses, the ones who watched the man flee the scene. The result was a harsher, more human face with distinctive, believable features: a long pinched nose; a sullen mouth with a deep hollow over the top lip; hazelnut eyes under hooded lids. The vacant expanses of the original sketch – those smooth beardless cheeks and the unlined brow – had been filled in with stubble and creases. The first drawing might have been anyone; the new one was a man you might recognize if you saw him at the bookies or passed him on a subway escalator.
The posters were everywhere. Shop windows, taxis, barber-shops, bus stops: the new face proliferated across the city. McCormack felt menaced by the updated posters, he sensed a shift in the balance of power. It had to do with the eyes, where the artist had captured an expression of hostile scrutiny. To McCormack it felt like the tables had turned. The cops had been seeking the Quaker. Now the Quaker was watching them.
20
Close up, it looked like a piece of abstract art. Purples and browns, navies and reds: deep tones laid on in splotchy blocks. Dirty streaks of yellow. Only when you stepped back a couple of feet and narrowed your eyes did the image resolve itself into a face. There were eyes amid those purples, a mouth without its teeth. Swollen and crushed, the face had lost its contours, become a child’s crayoned outline of a face.
McCormack turned from the headshots on the Murder Room wall and snatched his burning Regal from the ashtray. The victim’s face told them nothing. It was like one of those buildings out there, half-demolished. No way to reconstruct it. No way to tell how it used to look.
The other photos were useless too. The snapper’s close-ups of the wall had come back. McCormack had hoped for some dark revelation in the nest of graffiti but it was just the usual palimpsest of gang slogans, sexual boasting and sectarian slurs.
Their best hope now was the locket. Photos of the locket would appear on tomorrow’s front pages and the TV bulletins. Someone would point at the screen, punch their partner on the shoulder, reach for the phone.
McCormack was halfway through a pudding supper when Goldie came in with the pathologist’s report.
McCormack kept eating. He looked up and nodded at Goldie and turned his attention back to the pocked and cratered batter and the fat white chips. He knew what the pathologist’s report would say. The blood was menstrual blood. The victim had been choked by the ligature round her neck. Cause of death: strangulation.
‘No surprises?’
‘Surprises?’ Goldie tossed the report on the desk. ‘How’s this for surprises? She wasnae menstruating.’
McCormack looked up. ‘What you talking about? The blood—’
Goldie leaned over to steal a chip. ‘She’d been stabbed.’
‘Oh Jesus, naw.’ McCormack stayed a chip on its way to his mouth. ‘Stabbed? Fuck.’ He dropped the chip back in the wrapper.
Goldie shrugged out of his jacket. ‘Short serrated blade. Probably a chopping knife. Jeez, that smells good.’ He nabbed another chip. ‘Internal lacerations but no damage to internal organs.’
The others were gathering round now, eager to hear.
‘Cause of death?’ McCormack said.
Goldie chewed down his food, pointing at his mouth. ‘Aye. Get this: cerebral haemorrhage.’
‘What? Fuck off.’
McCormack wiped his fingers on the newspaper wrappings and fished the report from Goldie’s desk, started leafing through it. The medical terminology jumped out in Latinate gouts. Left parietal bone. Depressed fracture of the vault. Extensive abrasions. Ragged lacerations. The victim had been bludgeoned repeatedly with a blunt object, fracturing the skull in four places, shattering the orbit of the left eye, breaking the jaw and dislodging nine teeth. There was no evidence of strangulation. The internal organs showed no signs of asphyxia, the larynx was undamaged, no petechial haemorrhages in the eyes.
The ligature had left no mark around the neck. It had probably been applied posthumously. It played no part in the victim’s death. Cause of death was cerebral haemorrhage induced by multiple blows to the head.
‘For fuck sake.’ McCormack closed the report. ‘Is it even him?’
He felt his stomach heave. The half-digested supper rose in his gullet, burning. He swallowed it down. He looked for the limeade but the neck of the bottle was clouded with greasy fingerprints and the sharp stink of vinegar-sodden newsprint was suddenly overpowering.
McCormack clenched his hands on the arms of his chair. He closed his eyes. Please don’t be sick. Just don’t be sick. He opened his eyes. Something not right. ‘The sanitary towel. There was a sanitary towel on the body, over her eyes.’
‘I know.’
‘But she wasn’t menstruating.’
‘No.’
‘You mean he brought the thing with him?’
Goldie shrugged. ‘Tools of the trade. You going to finish that?’
McCormack looked at the remains of his pudding supper, the chips limp and shrivelled, the pudding like a severed dick, black bloodcrumb sheathed in yellow batter.
‘Be my guest.’
Goldie settled down in his chair, pulled the food towards him. McCormack drifted over to the map. He heard the voices behind him.
‘Bridgeton again.’
‘Uhuh.’
‘Eastern’ll want it.’
‘Eastern can want.’
He pulled a drawing-pin from the corner of a poster on the corkboard and ran his finger over the East End till he found Queen Mary Street. He stuck the pin on to the map and stood back to see how the pattern had changed. Now there were two close together – Mackeith Street and Queen Mary Street, barely an inch of Bridgeton between them – and another two further apart. Did the pattern make more or less sense than before? Who said it was a pattern?
21
Queen M
ary Street. Some of the locals had gathered near number 48, backing into the tenement walls to evade the whirling drizzle. They looked like a bus queue, McCormack thought, as a man turned the collar on his thin brown suit.
‘Monday morning,’ Goldie said. ‘These people don’t have jobs to go to?’
‘Can’t get to their jobs,’ McCormack said. ‘They’ve forgotten where the bus stop is.’
They were here to help with the door-to-door. Donkeywork. Climbing tenement stairs. Flapping letter boxes. There were uniforms for this but sometimes it was better to do it yourself, get whatever dope was going before they garbled it into witness statements. Plus they had the new artist’s impression, whatever that was worth.
The drizzle spritzed their cheeks as they wrestled into their mackintoshes, tamped the ludicrous CID fedoras into place and split up to knock on doors. For the next hour and a half McCormack held up his warrant card and said the same words, showed the picture, gave the same smile to the string of women and the odd workless man who answered his knock.
Apart from the two or three witnesses who’d already helped with the artist’s impression, no one had seen anything. You could see the faces harden when they saw it was the polis. You mentioned the Quaker and the faces lit up briefly but then the shutters crashed back down. Fuck the polis. Tell them nothing. A few old women had seen a man crossing the backcourt. A man in a dark suit. What kind of suit? What colour? What did he look like? A tall man, would you say? Taller than me? Was he fair-haired? How old was he? A dark suit, son, that’s all I know.
He was getting depressed. Again that morning he’d had to elbow through a shouting pack of reporters on the pavement outside the Marine. It was fever pitch all over again, the press screaming for results, the Secretary of State on the blower to Levein. Someone had sprayed graffiti on a wall across the street. QUAKER SCORES AGAIN. QUAKER ROOLZ YA TOOLZ. For weeks McCormack had gone into work to judge other men; now he went into work to be judged. By the press, by the boss, by the shirtsleeved men at the desks.
The Quaker Page 15