He caught up with Goldie outside number 48.
‘Any joy?’
‘Fuck all.’
‘Me neither. In here a minute.’
They flashed their cards to the constable at the closemouth. McCormack led the way down the hall and another uniform stood aside to let them into the flat. McCormack was briefly thrown by the room’s sunlit innocence. It crossed his mind that they had entered the wrong flat but the boards had been crowbarred off the window and the sun was flooding in. Here was the stain on the floor. A woman had been murdered here. You expected to find the place altered, charged, whatever the opposite of ‘hallowed’ was. But the walls stood stiffly erect and a rhombus of sunlight lay on the far wall and the black mess on the bare floor might have been oil or treacle. Profaned.
The mattress had gone, and with it some of the atmosphere of the previous day when the cops had stood round the body and the snapper took his shots. It was as if the flashbulbs had bleached the room of menace. There was nothing here to see.
Back in the hallway McCormack had a thought.
‘Constable. The woman across the hall – she’s the last remaining resident?’
‘That’s right, sir. Building’s condemned, she’s holding out to the end. A Mrs Lindsay. Building’s coming down next month.’
‘Not any more it’s not.’
Goldie had the details in his notebook. Sixty-five. Widow. Former cashier at a hosiery in Dennistoun. The push-bell sounded with a dull thunk and Goldie rapped on the door. Nothing. He dug a coin out of his trouser pocket and clacked its edge on the door’s glass panel.
They heard a heavy scraping sound, then the shunk of the mortice, the twist of the Yale. The door slid open on its chain.
‘Mrs Lindsay?’ Goldie had his card at the ready. ‘We’re the police, Mrs Lindsay. I’m DS Goldie, this is DI McCormack. Do you think we could come in?’
‘I told it all yesterday.’ You could see a glint of spectacles in the gloom, a coil of white hair. The line of the door-chain obscured her mouth. ‘You people don’t speak to each other?’
McCormack gave it his best smile, stretched his Highland vowels. ‘Well, I do apologize, Mrs Lindsay, for the inconvenience. I was here yesterday, if you remember. To talk to the boy. Do you think you could tell us again?’
The hallway smelled of wet dog and urine. She was the kind of old woman who would be found six weeks after her death, rotting among the knick-knacks and geegaws, fused to her own mattress.
In the living room they took their seats on a spongy sofa while Mrs Lindsay shifted her paper from the armchair. Immediately she leaned forward. McCormack looked down at the bony fingers that had clamped his knee.
‘There’s somebody here.’
‘Sorry?’
‘There’s someone here.’ She hissed this with such vehemence, baring a trim line of dentures, that McCormack flinched. The skin prickled on the backs of his arms. An intruder in the flat? Was the killer here now? The thought stunned McCormack and it was Goldie who spoke, in the suave, rational tone of a man talking somebody down from a ledge.
‘Where, Mrs Lindsay? There’s somebody where?’
She raised an index finger. McCormack waited for her to speak but then she nodded significantly and he saw that she was pointing at the ceiling.
‘You mean there’s someone in the building? Someone upstairs?’
That was all she meant. McCormack relaxed. There would be kids in and out of the flats all the time. Playing house in the empty rooms. She’d heard them clattering up and down the stairs. He gave what he hoped was a reassuring smile.
‘When did you hear them?’
She shook her head. ‘Don’t need to hear him. He makes no noise but he’s not fooling me.’
McCormack exchanged a glance with Goldie. ‘But if you haven’t heard him, Mrs Lindsay, how do you know he’s there?’
Mrs Lindsay shook her head, her teeth clicking with impatience. ‘I’m the last one, officer. Everyone else has gone. I’ve lived alone in this block for the past nine months. Do you think I don’t know when there’s someone else here? You think I can’t sense it?’
In the end they agreed to check it out. The briefing had said that Mrs Lindsay was the last inhabitant of the building, and the uniform on duty had confirmed it, but there was no harm in making sure.
Of the six flats on the first and second floors, four had no front door and the doors of the other two were lying open. All of the flats were empty. There were three flats on the top floor. The single-end in the middle was doorless and empty but the flats on either side had doors with knockers and Brasso’d nameplates. And someone had tried to clean off the ‘FLEET RULES’ sprayed beside one of the doors: you could see the halo round the letters where turps had clouded the pale green paint.
They took a door each: both locked. Banging and calling and rapping the door-knockers brought nothing but echoes in the stone stairwell. Goldie flapped a letter box. They looked at each other from opposite sides of the landing.
It was McCormack’s call. They had plenty of doors to be getting on with. Of the tenement blocks that shared a backcourt with this one most were still inhabited. Stop making a fuss, Goldie’s pursed mouth seemed to say. Let’s get on with the job in hand, let’s get back to chapping doors.
This was three flights up from Mrs Lindsay. She couldn’t have heard a thing from down there. A waste of time and resources to call this in. Still, there was the green door in front of him, flush to the jamb. He rested his fingertips on the wood, gave it a gentle press. If it wasn’t hiding something, why was it locked?
‘Fuck it. Call it in,’ he said. ‘Sledgehammer. The heavy mob.’
Goldie nodded, tight-lipped, went down to use the car radio. McCormack stepped down half a flight of stairs and stood at the landing window. The rain blew in sheets through the empty backcourt. Packed earth. Clumps of nettles and dockens in the ruined walls of the wash-house and middens. Clothes-poles dotted like crazy goalposts.
You’re in the game now, Dochie. That’s what Tearlach Mor used to say when he subbed you on at the shinty games, on the Jubilee pitch back in Balla.
He was in the game all right. With a killer to catch and a partner that hated his guts.
He sparked up a Regal and sucked in the smoke, felt it buffet his lungs. Up until now his brief had been clear: find a way to wind this down, bring a botched inquiry to a close. Now the brief was still clear but a little more daunting. Find the Quaker. Stop the Quaker before he kills again.
For a while it seemed that the Quaker had stopped. McCormack had never worked a multiple before, but he knew this much: the space between killings got shorter. That was the pattern. The Quaker had followed it till now: six months between the first and second murder; two between the second and the third. And now this. Seven months after Marion Mercer. It made no sense. The pattern was wrong.
The rasping steps of Goldie ruptured his train of thought and ten minutes later a patrol car from C Division pulled up in the street. Two uniforms clattered up the stairs. One of them held a sledgehammer crosswise on his chest. A crowbar swung from the other one’s grip.
The first flat held nothing. Stale air. Bare white walls looking blue in the gloom.
They crossed the landing in a group. The three of them formed a kind of huddle behind the taller cop as he hefted the sledge and swung it sideways. The door bounced and slammed back as if someone were pressing against it from the other side. The uniform staggered a little and flexed his shoulders and set his feet for the second shot. He grinned back at the watchers when a loud cracking sound met his second blow. Then the grin dropped and he set his shoulders once more. Another swing. The fourth one popped it.
They all craned in to look, Goldie’s gabardine back blocking McCormack’s line of vision. He knew, though. Even before Goldie stepped back, even before the uniforms exchanged a glance, he knew that this was good.
22
First thing was the smell. Cooking smells. The heavy fug of
meat. Fresh. And a human warmth in the air that had McCormack and Goldie drawing their truncheons. The taller constable clasped the sledge across his chest, fingers flexing on the shaft. The short one stepped smartly in with his own truncheon drawn and recce’d the room, ducked his head into the kitchen. He nodded all clear and the three of them stepped forward.
McCormack crossed to open the curtains. Everyone blinked a little in the light and then McCormack did his clockwise thing, working his way round the room, itemizing the objects. A milk crate filled with tin cans: Irish stew, Campbell’s cream of mushroom, Ambrosia creamed rice, Armour’s corned beef. A Primus stove. Six slabs of Bournville chocolate, eight cans of shandy. A tin-opener, knife and spoon set out on a handkerchief beside a packet of paper tissues. An opened tin of spaghetti hoops with a spoon or a fork poking out of it. A sleeping bag in the bed-recess. A short stack of paperbacks – Ambler, Greene, a Josephine Tey – on top of a pornographic magazine. A blue-and-white striped ceramic mug filled with cigarette butts. A bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label, two thirds gone. A Glasgow Tribune folded to the crossword, with the clues half-completed and a blue bookie’s biro lying slantwise on top. A carton of Rothmans King Size. An army kit-bag whose gaping neck – when McCormack peered into it – disclosed a stack of folded white T-shirts. Beside the kit-bag was a boxy torch with a head the size of a saucer. On the mantelpiece above a ripped-out fireplace was a candle held in place by its own melted grease and a soft-looking square of cloth scored with black oily marks.
Through an archway was the tiny kitchen with a view on to the backcourt. A wooden jawbox-sink held empty tins, their serrated lids jutting up like metal sunflowers. There were sodden cigarette ends. Crushed cans of shandy. Under the jawbox were two blue buckets, an empty bottle of disinfectant and a four-pack of Andrex toilet tissue with two rolls gone. The smell of the disinfectant failed to mask the other smells. Against the back wall was a plastic bag with Younger’s Tartan Special on the side. McCormack took a pen from his inside pocket and held the bag open: he saw striped cotton boxer shorts, a ribbed black sock.
This time McCormack went down to call it in. Within half an hour the room was thick with bodies. The uniforms had gone back to Tobago Street but the techs from the Identification Bureau were squatting and dusting and another snapper was busy. Someone had brought a surveyor’s wheel from the incident trailer and was measuring the distance between the various objects. Later all the movable objects would be placed in brown paper evidence bags and taken off to be stored. McCormack and Goldie were getting ready to leave when a shape blocked the doorway.
‘What did I tell you?’ Cochrane was all teeth, a leering victor’s grin. ‘I knew it was right putting you boys together. Look at this place, would you?’
They looked round once more at the lab boys bending to their tasks, dusting the surfaces – cans, cutlery, buckets, books – where a man might leave his prints.
Cochrane’s hands rested lightly on his hips. The shoulders of his light-coloured jacket were spattered with rain. He was hatless, too, McCormack noticed, his brown hair plastered to his head. ‘If this boy’s got a record, he’s already bagged.’
It was lunchtime when Goldie and McCormack left the flat. At Bridgeton Cross they turned down Main Street to the Blue Bird Café.
The waitress brought all-day breakfasts, side plates of buttered bread, mugs of tea.
‘You know, you’ll feel a lot better if you just say it.’
Goldie was salting his food. He scanned the table and then leaned back on tipped chair legs to snatch the ketchup bottle from the vacant table behind them. He smacked the base of the bottle till the sauce glugged out in a scarlet bolus. He screwed the top back on to the bottle and lifted his cutlery.
‘If I just say what?’
‘Get it off your chest, mate. Way to go, McCormack. Nice work. You won a watch.’
Goldie stopped chewing for a second. ‘Way to go, McCormack,’ he said, through a mouthful of black pudding.
They ate in silence, plugging their mouths with food, sluicing it down with sweet tea. Donovan’s ‘Season of the Witch’ was on the radio.
‘Way to go for what, by the way?’
McCormack smiled. ‘Well maybe you should ask Cochrane about that. He seemed pretty made up.’
‘Not the toughest crowd, though, is he? He’s going down in history as the guy who couldnae catch the Quaker. He’ll clutch at any straw you throw him.’ Goldie folded his last triangle of white bread and mopped up the red and yellow streaks on his plate. ‘You’re sure the guy on the top floor’s the killer?’
‘You think it’s a coincidence? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘See, that’s not an answer, is it?’
‘OK. Look. Derek. Can we put aside the fact that you hate my guts? That I was here to fuck you all over and drag your names through the shit and make myself look good in the process. I get all that. OK? You’ve worked more of these than I have: I get that too. Still. It’s not possible that we’re on to something here?’
‘No, you’re right.’ Goldie drained his tea, signalled the waitress for another pot. ‘Fair play. That was a good call. I was all in favour of letting it go and getting started on the door-to-door – which, by the way, we still haven’t done. But tell me this, Detective: if this is the Quaker, why’d he kill a woman in the same building where he’s holing up? You want one of these?’
Goldie was lighting a Mayfair. McCormack took one from the packet, shared the match.
‘Maybe that’s how he does it. He picks a location, recce’s it for a few days, watches the lay of the land. When he thinks it’s safe, he makes his move.’
‘And then, what, forgets to leave? He’s a criminal mastermind for murders one to three and he’s shit-for-brains at number four?’
He was right. McCormack flicked ash on to the ruins of his breakfast. Goldie was right. There was no supposition by which this made sense. Why would the Quaker kill a woman on the doorstep of his own bolthole? Why was he hanging around on the following morning, waiting to be spotted in broad daylight? And why leave the sleeping bag and stove and all his other bits and pieces for the Quaker Squad to find?
‘Maybe he was planning to leave but something stopped him.’ McCormack smoked to give himself time. ‘Maybe … maybe he was injured and had to treat himself. Maybe he fell asleep. Had a blackout.’
‘Aye.’ Goldie doused his cigarette in the yolk of a fried egg. ‘Or maybe he had nothing to do with it. Maybe he came down to see what the fuss was about and panicked when he saw the body.’
Back at the Marine the forensic reports had come in. As McCormack anticipated, the oily rag had held a firearm. The man in the top-floor flat had taken it with him. McCormack sat at his desk and thought about this. A blast of wind swept the rain against the window and the frame juddered. He’s out there now, McCormack thought. With a handgun. Skulking through the rubble like some jungle fighter, some apocalypse survivor.
23
Paton found the blade that served as a tin-opener and punched it into the top of the can. Then he shifted his grip and pumped his elbow, working the blade round the lid. The blade made a pleasant gnashing sound as it tore through the metal. Carefully he tipped the serrated lid back and held the tin over the saucepan. The contents slithered out in a solid, glistening tube. They would break up – it was chunky Irish stew – under the heat from the Primus.
He stirred the stew with a metal spoon and looked out over the darkening loch. He could see the wooded bulk of Inchcailloch and some of the smaller islands. As boys, they had paddled to Inchcailloch in a home-made canoe belonging to one of Dazzle’s uncles. Paton rose to his feet and a low ache ran down his thighs. He could feel the rhythm of the day’s walk in his legs, a tightness in the calves and hamstrings. He rose to his tiptoes in his stocking soles and stretched up with interlaced fingers. His heels chafed from walking in the new boots – the chunky Red Wings that stood side by side outside the tent – but his feet were free from blis
ters.
The walk that tired him had freshened him too. He wondered if he would fall asleep quickly, or maybe not at all. He remembered waking that morning, somewhere in the city, and not knowing for a moment where he was. He had opened his eyes and looked at the black slot where the door should have been. He’d put out his hand and felt bare, gritty floorboards. There was the heavy, clogging reek of urine, and the draught from a boarded window on his shin: he was in another tenement. South of the river. The Gorbals, probably. Indian country to a boy from Maryhill.
The bare floor was hard beneath the thin suit trousers and he shifted position, rolling his shoulders against the hard wall. His neck ached. The Browning lay on the floor within easy reach, a darker stain on the dark ground. Paton closed his fingers over the flat reliable shape. The cold metal felt like the one true fact in a world of supposition.
He’d snatched the gun up when he fled from the safe house, the flat in Bridgeton, when the boy’s screams had brought him clattering down the stairs, and the girl’s body had sent him out into the morning, running for his life. Before he knew it, he was sprinting through the gates of Glasgow Green. Dog walkers. Two boys on bikes. Distant shouts from a football match on one of the downhill pitches. The faces of people he passed were stretched in fear and alarm. He forced himself to walk. The effort it took not to break into a sprint made his limbs quiver.
The Green was bright and sharp in the sunlight. Everything new and strange. Templeton’s carpet factory was an exotic hallucination, rising in Venetian splendour with its battlements and towers, its glazed and coloured bricks. He passed the People’s Palace, the Doulton Fountain. At the far side of the Green he crossed the river by the Albert Bridge, the looming slabs of the Hutchie C blocks almost blotting the horizon.
The Quaker Page 16