26
‘Right. Hands off cocks, gentlemen. Let’s come to order. Thank you.’
Cochrane slamming in to the Murder Room, bringing the fresh air in on his clothes. The belt from his raincoat clanged against a filing cabinet as he threw it off and stood beside the maps with his feet planted a yard apart. He waited till the day shift settled down, turning their chairs to face him, or easing their backsides up on to the desks. He was holding a pile of Xerox’d sheets and running his tongue across his teeth to keep himself from grinning. He still had his hat on.
‘OK. This is it, men. Gangbusters. We’ve got an ident for our man. Take one of these, pass them on. He’s one Alexander Paton, P-A-T-O-N. DoB fourth December ’39. Formerly of Burnhouse Street in this parish, last known address in Scylla Road, S-C-Y-L-L-A, Peckham, London. Believed still to be living in the London area.’
Cochrane had waited a long time to put a name to the Quaker. He’d spent a lot of mornings with nothing to give these men except more streets to pound, more shitwork to divvy up among them. He broke off now to write the name on the board behind him.
McCormack scanned the sheet. Alexander James Paton, known as Alex. Born Maryhill, 4 December ’39. Father, also Alex, ex-serviceman (corporal in the Cameron Highlanders, MC at Monte Cassino), whose post-war career as a house-painter suffered a bit of a hiatus when he spent eight years in HMP Perth for the attempted murder of a part-time barman under the railway bridge beside the Laurieston Bar.
Alex Jnr attended St Roch’s in Maryhill, left with no qualifications. Following a stint in juvie he left Glasgow. Living in the Peckham area of London since ’64. The Met’s touts had linked Paton to a string of robberies in London and the south-east over the past five years but nothing had come to court.
‘Mr Paton’s a petty crook, housebreaker. We have prints from a ninety-day juvie stint he did for housebreaking in ’59. Met’s been alerted but so far – sorry: DI McCormack, you’ve got something to say?’
‘He’s not a housebreaker.’
Cochrane expelled a long slow breath. He took his hat off and set it on top of the filing cabinet. ‘OK. Yes. Well, we haven’t mounted the largest criminal investigation in this country’s history to find a guy who’s screwing hooses. He’s moved on to bigger things, Detective.’
Sniggers from the day shift.
‘No, I mean I know him, sir. He’s a peterman. Housebreaking’s just the last thing we got him for. He blows safes. He did the British Linen Bank on Kilmarnock Road in ’66 and probably the Clydesdale Bank out in Moodiesburn last year. He’s good. Careful. That’s why it’s not on your sheet, sir – we’ve never caught him.’
‘Well, OK then. Thank you for that bulletin, DI McCormack, that news update. Now. Whatever the precise extent of Mr Paton’s accomplishments as a robber, we now have a name. We have a photo. On your sheets is a list of Known Associates, maybe DI McCormack can add to it. Also family members in the Glasgow area. We work that list till every name’s been – what is it, Tam?’
DS Tam Ferguson held up the sheet. ‘He’ll have buggered off though, sir, won’t he? How do we know he’s still in Glasgow?’
‘We don’t. Met hit his last-known address this morning. Looks like he’s not been there in days, possibly weeks. For now, we’re assuming he’s still in Glasgow. Or else someone in Glasgow knows where he is. And that someone’s gonnae talk. Meantime we send a message to the neds and ne’er-do-weels of Maryhill. And anywhere else. Nobody gets a minute’s fucking peace in this city until Alex Paton’s in clink. This man is the Quaker. This man will be caught. Are we clear? DI McCormack: a minute.’
The sun was back out now, lighting the dirt and streaks on Cochrane’s window. Cochrane tugged the blind down and sat behind his desk.
‘You say you know this guy?’
‘Know of him, sir.’
‘So he’s a peterman? What about it?’
McCormack sat in the hard plastic chair, shifted his hams. ‘Supposed to be good. Reliable. He’s the go-to guy for anything big.’
‘Flying Squad take an interest?’
‘Like I said, sir, he’s careful. Got near him on the Linen Bank thing but, yeah, the witness had a change of heart.’
‘It happens. He one of McGlashan’s?’
‘We don’t think so. More of a lone operator. Picky. Just takes the jobs he fancies.’
‘He fancied our ones all right.’ Cochrane plucked his paper-knife from the wooden holder, tested the point. ‘No gen on current associates, then? Where he might hang out?’
‘Nah.’ McCormack smoothed out a crease in his tie. ‘Know where he was last Tuesday, though.’
Cochrane frowned. ‘That Bath Street thing? The auctioneer’s?’
‘It wasn’t him it was someone trying bloody hard to look like him.’
‘You get this from your mates in St Andrew’s Street?’
‘Well. Common sense, sir. But yeah, I spoke to the CIO. Halliday. Nice clean job, he says. Traces of Polar Ammon. In and out within the hour. It’s got Paton written all over it.’
‘Right.’ Cochrane nodded. ‘So he rips off eighty thou from the auctioneer’s on Tuesday. Beats, rapes, stabs and strangles a woman on the Saturday. Been a busy boy.’
McCormack frowned.
‘What?’
‘That’s your explanation, sir? He’s a busy boy?’ McCormack drummed his fingers on the underside of the plastic chair. ‘Paton’s got no prior here. Sex crime. Murder. What makes you sure this is him?’
The paper-knife stood upright in Cochrane’s desk, quivering. ‘Well who knows, Detective? Based on the fact that his prints are on the doorjamb of the flat where the woman was killed. He’s, what else, squatting in the same building. Identified leaving the scene. He’s got a sheet. He fits the profile of the man I’ve been chasing for fifteen months. I don’t know, Detective. I’d have him down as a person of interest. But that’s just me.’
McCormack nodded. He rose to go. As he reached the door, Cochrane’s voice stopped him, calmer now, the voice of reason.
‘Don’t make everything into a chess problem, son. Sometimes how it looks is how it is.’
‘Sometimes,’ McCormack said. ‘Sometimes it is.’
Later, heading through Whiteinch on the way to the Clyde Tunnel, McCormack lit a Regal, offered the pack. Goldie shook his head, wound down his window.
‘What?’
They were in the tunnel now, under the ribbed shell, fluorescent striplights ticking past overhead.
‘Take a day off, would you? Once in a while.’ Goldie reached out the window to adjust the wing mirror. ‘From being a prick.’
‘There’s four women dead,’ McCormack said. ‘Jesus. I sound like you. There’s four women dead. While we’re breaking open the bubbly. Putting up the fucking bunting.’
‘If they’re happy it’s because of those women. Because they’ve worked these murders for sixteen months. Fifteen more than you have. And they see an end in sight. They’ve got a collar. A man’s going away for those killings. Might even hang. You’d grudge them that?’
The car emerged into daylight. McCormack closed his eyes. A man might hang. They’d suspended capital punishment in ’65, for five years. Could Paton hang if they brought it back? Into his mind came the rough grey stone of the memorial on the hill above the bridge outside Ballachulish. Overgrown with trees and ferns but still commanding the highest spot above the crossing for the ferry. James Stewart hung there for eighteen months, James of the Glen; gibbeted, rotting, plucked at by crows, as punishment for murdering the king’s factor, till the Livingstone brothers defied the interdiction and cut him down.
Was he innocent, Seamus a’ Ghlinne? He’d been a captain in Charlie’s army, he collected rents for the exiled chief of Ardsheal, he was a ‘disaffected man’, a Jacobite, a rebel. But he was blameless of the crime for which he hung. He never shot Colin Roy Campbell. He never killed the Red Fox.
Goldie was talking.
‘What?’
> ‘I said, what were you so excited about anyway? Over in Battlefield. What did you find?’
‘Oh, nothing. I don’t know. Probably nothing. Doesn’t matter now anyway.’
But it did. That morning a call had come through to McCormack from one of the jewellers in Argyle Street. He recognized the locket on TV, Helen Thaney’s locket. It wasn’t one he stocked but he knew it because it was famous. It was a replica of a locket that was part of a set known as the Penicuik Jewels. The jewels were famous because of who they’d belonged to: Mary Queen of Scots.
The papers splashed with Paton for the next three days. Paton’s face – in a decade-old photo that made him look like a boy – was on every front page. For the rest of the week the detectives of the Marine division made themselves unpopular in Maryhill. A loan-shark leaving the Kelvin Dock pub was bundled into a patrol car, spent a night in the Marine on a charge of D & D. Card schools were knocked over by masked men with police-issue weapons. Uniforms used ‘the Powers’ on random neds on Garioch Road and Maryhill Road – stop and search, spot of harassment. The door-knock came for the unlicensed bookies, the after-hours lock-in. A brothel in Garrioch Road was raided, the johns yanked into the street with their shirts wrongly buttoned.
When darkness fell the CID’s short pocket truncheons were used on the headlights of cars registered to KAs of McGlashan’s lieutenants.
At the end of the week McCormack met his tout at a bench on the towpath of the Forth and Clyde.
‘It’s a fucking war youse have declared. Why no send in the fucking Paras and have done with it?’
‘Aye, well.’ McCormack was dusting the bench with flicks of a handkerchief before sitting down. ‘It’s easy stopped.’
‘How’s it easy stopped? You think anyone round here knows where he is? Cunt’s no lived here in eight or nine years. How we supposed to tell you where he is?’
‘C’mon, Billy. Alex Paton’s a local boy. Ran with the Fleet, didn’t he? Somebody knows where he is.’
Thomson gave him the side-eye. ‘I don’t know where he is but I know what he’s done. And it’s not killing women.’
McCormack fished the note from his pocket; Thomson’s fist closed around it.
‘He done the Glendinnings job.’
‘Who with?’
‘I don’t know. But he was the peterman. Aye. And I’ll tell you something else. You’ll walk a long way in the East End before you find someone who thinks he’s the Quaker.’
‘OK, Billy. You want more of that, you get me the names of the string. Who did Glendinnings with Alex Paton?’
McCormack left him on the bench, chucking pebbles at the ducks on the canal.
Paton wasn’t the Quaker. You could keep saying that till the Jags won the league but who would listen? No one had time for doubts and misgivings. The thing they’d prayed for had happened. The Quaker had a name. The man who had flitted through the city like a ghost, who seemed to loom above the districts like a vast distended phantom, now had a name. He was a twenty-nine-year-old peterman, formerly of Burnhouse Street in Maryhill. His name was Alex Paton, thought to be living in the London area. It was finished. Even if it took them a month or two to catch him, he would never chill the city as he’d done these past two years. You might say that the myth of the Quaker was his final victim. The Quaker was dead. Killed by Alex Paton.
27
Paton left his clothes in a folded pile with his boots on top and stepped down to the water. He was conscious of his stark whiteness, the sun-struck glare of his limbs. The water was cold. It clenched his ankles and edged up his shins as if pulling him down. The bank shelved steeply. His heel slipped on crumbling mud and suddenly he was out of his depth with his arms spread out on the surface to keep himself from going under.
He looked down at his kicking legs, his knees flashing white in the gloom. It took him a second or two to get his breathing under control but then he kicked off for the far bank. The shearing crash of that first stroke seemed to shatter the peace of the whole forest but the water came slopping back and he hit a steady rhythm. The pool was broad. It took him seven strokes to reach the other side where he turned and pushed back with his ungainly breaststroke. He swam a few more breadths and felt his temperature climb. It was nice to feel safe and alone, hidden in the pond inside the wood, with the sun flashing on the brown water. Long-tailed blue dragonflies zipped around the pool. They hovered six inches from the surface, right in front of your nose, then they vanished in a flash.
Paton turned on his back and floated, his head tipped back, the comforting slurp of water at his ears. The sun was strong through the pink membranes of his eyelids. He could feel the steady current of the pool, the thrum that slid towards the far side where the water spilled out in a glossy curve into the next stretch of river. He remembered there was a bar of soap in the rucksack and he kicked off for the bank and stepped out on to the grass.
There was something luxurious about a new bar of soap, its squared-off edges and shiny, compact bulk. He ran his thumb over the sharp stamp of the maker’s logo. The soap lathered up surprisingly well and Paton soaped his arms and torso while kicking to stay afloat. He worked up some suds and tossed the bar on to the bank and lathered his hair with both hands and ducked under to rinse it off. He reached for the bar once more and was feeling down to soap the sole of one foot when the bar squirted from his grasp. He watched it spin and dwindle out of sight. He dived a couple of times, scissoring down with his legs, but the pool was too deep and the water too murky.
Out on the bank he stood on a sun-warmed rock and let the sun dry his skin. He smoked a cigarette, holding it aloft between puffs so that the drops from his hair wouldn’t spot it. A cloud passed over the sun and the gooseflesh rose on his ribs and he hurried into his clothes.
The water looked deeper and darker in the altered light and he wondered if there were fish down there, big drifting pike or spiky tench. He wished he’d brought a rod. Maybe he could get one at the shop in Balmaha, and a permit in a false name from the sandstone hotel. He imagined hooking a big trout and gutting it, shucking the innards into the water and cooking the flesh on his wee Primus stove.
He was hungry, he suddenly realized. As he walked back through the forest he thought about food. There were sardines and Ritz crackers and he might open another can of stew. Tinned pears to follow and a bar of chocolate.
The sun came back out as he walked. It made the trees on his left look as though they were moving, strobing past like the spokes of a wheel, and he was slow to spot the other movement, the jogging gait of a man climbing the hill but then he caught it again, a flash of red through the trees.
Paton dropped down on his haunches. He felt the rucksack’s weight tugging him backwards and he silently eased himself free of the straps. He strained to see, parting a clump of green ferns. There it was: the red anorak: Gilchrist.
Without taking his eyes from the figure in red, Paton worked his right hand into the loosely tied mouth of the rucksack. He rummaged around for the bunched socks and drew them carefully out. Glancing swiftly down he worked the gun loose from the socks and snatched it up, flexing his fingers on the cross-hatched grip.
Gilchrist was at the clearing now. He squatted down to study the remains of the fire and now he was crawling forward to inspect the inside of Paton’s tent, his fat backside jutting comically from the tent flap. Then he was back on his feet, his head high as if sniffing the wind, scanning the horizon.
If he comes this way … Paton thought, and tightened his grip on the Browning. His palm was slick. He had never killed anyone, never fired a gun in anger, but he took the piece in both hands and held it in readiness. If I aim for the belly I can’t miss. Then one in the head when he’s down.
Paton’s hamstrings were starting to ache but he didn’t move. A twig might crack if he changed his position and the high bald head snap round. He lifted the gun to eye-level and sighted along the short barrel. He squeezed one eye shut and then flashed it open. Another figu
re had appeared in the clearing. He saw the dark blue tunic, a flash of checkered hatband.
The cop stood with his hands on his hips, getting his breath back after the climb. Gilchrist and the cop were talking. Gilchrist gestured towards the tent and the cop had a quick look inside. They stood around for a bit, nodding and pointing, then they started back down the hill. Paton watched them out of sight and then he toppled back till he lay on the ground with his back resting on the rucksack. He stretched his legs out in front of him. His arms flopped to his sides, the gun held loosely in his right hand.
He closed his eyes. The shadows of trees lay in bars across his eyelids. He felt he could sleep for the next twelve hours, right out in the open, but he forced himself to his feet and walked down to the clearing.
He had shifted camp the previous night, moving uphill a good way from his first night’s pitch. But Gilchrist had found him. And the cop would come back, more cops, they would fan out on the hillside, cutting him off. He felt the unfairness of it but it was funny too. They all thought he was the Quaker. You couldn’t tell them, It’s all right, boys, don’t worry, I’m just a robber. You couldn’t explain that you were holed up in that flat after the heist at Glendinnings. And maybe the cops wouldn’t find the flat. Maybe they’d miss his prints on the ground-floor jamb. There was no point in doing anything dramatic till he knew where he stood. The thing now was to keep on the move, keep yourself hidden.
It took him ten minutes to pack up his gear. He took time to snap a few branches and flatten the ferns on the path leading south-west out of the clearing, down to the village. Then he picked his way carefully north.
In a few minutes he was out of the trees. The sun was hot on his scalp and the nape of his neck. The bobble hat was no use. He wished he’d bought a cap, one of those French foreign legion affairs with the flap down the back. Finally he stopped. The pack hit the ground. He took off his shirt and his T-shirt. He put the shirt back on and knotted the sleeves of the T-shirt and fitted it on like some kind of headdress and lifted the pack and set off once again.
The Quaker Page 19