‘What the fuck?’ Stokes glanced back at the corner. ‘You’re all over the papers, man. They’re saying you’re the Quaker.’
‘Oh really? That’s what “they” are doing, is it? That’s what “they” are saying?’
‘It’s not true, though, Alex, is it? Alex, tell me it’s not true.’
‘You fucking lying piece of shit.’
Paton looked different, thinner, with a full blond beard. He reminded Stokes of a junkie Jesus, sunken-eyed, far gone.
‘Alex. You’re fucking scaring me, pal. I mean, Jesus.’ Stokes swallowed, seemed to think of something. ‘How’d you even get here? Papers saying you’re up Loch Lomond. Cops everywhere. Fucking manhunt.’
‘Let’s focus on the matter in hand, Bobby.’
In fact, getting back to Glasgow had been easier than Paton expected. He’d hidden out in the bracken above Ross Point for another day and then, in the late gloaming, he struck up the lochside, heading north. At Inversnaid he stole a rowing boat and slipped across to Inveruglas. Then he hiked across the Arrochar hills and came through the narrow glen to Arrochar in the blue dawn. He paid a scallop fisherman fifty quid to take him down Loch Long and up the Clyde in his Loch Fyne skiff. The fisherman dropped him just west of Dumbarton, and Paton caught the bus back to the city.
Now he stepped out of the doorway again. ‘A woman gets murdered, Bobby. Murdered in the building where I’m on ice? Forty-eight Queen Mary Street. In the ground-floor flat.’
‘Alex. Hold on a minute.’
‘Out of all the empty buildings in the city. Out of all the condemned blocks, he picks the one I’m holed up in.’ Paton had circled round so that he was on the outside of the pavement, edging Stokes towards the doorway. ‘That’s pretty shit luck, Bobby. Or wouldn’t you say?’
Stokes had his hands up. ‘Whoa, fuck, Alex. Hold on. You think I set you up?’
‘Who else knew?’
‘Alex. Come on.’
‘Who knew, Bobby? You’re the one who set it up. The safe house. So-called. Who else did you tell? Who knew I was staying there?’
‘Mate. Alex. Catch yourself on. Listen to yourself. Jesus.’
Stokes was shaking his head. He zipped his jerkin as far as it would go, plunged his hands in the pockets. When Paton pushed him two-handed in the chest he stumbled back and slammed against the door. Paton had one hand locked on Stokes’s throat, holding him stiff-armed against the door. With his other hand he mashed Stokes’s pockets, feeling for a chib. There was a lock-knife in Stokes’s back pocket and Paton tossed it behind him into the street.
‘I need the name, Bobby. Who did you talk to? Who set the house up?’
‘Mate. I don’t know. I fucking swear.’ Stokes had his hands on his head, rocking back and forward. ‘I don’t know anything any more. You’re the fucking Quaker. McGlashan wants his fifteen grand. Have you got the gear at least?’
‘What do you mean, he wants fifteen grand?’
‘It’s not a fucking joke, Paton. They think you’ve stiffed them. They’re putting the word out, they’re coming for you. You better hope the polis get you first. I told them you weren’t like that, but, you know.’
‘That was nice of you, Bobby. What’s McGlashan got to do with it? You’re fucking smiling now?’
‘Alex. Jesus. What’s Glash got to do with it? That’s what you’re asking? We rob an auction house on Glash’s patch—’
‘City centre’s nobody’s patch.’
‘Whole fucking city belongs to Glash. Is it London or fucking Mars you live in?’
‘He can’t expect an outsider, an independent operator—’
‘You’re dictating terms? I could turn you in right now, you’d never see the light of day. McGlashan can expect whatever the fuck he wants. That’s the point. His ball, his fucking rules. He wants his taste.’
Stokes had talked himself back on to the front foot. He rolled his shoulders, glaring at Paton.
Paton clicked his tongue. ‘Thought I’d explained this. I’m not kicking up to anyone, Bobby. All right? Not to McGlashan or anyone else.’
‘Well, good for you. Stick it to the man. Thing is, we live here. Glash is the fucking weather round here. OK? He’s given us a week. We need fifteen grand. Where’s the fucking money, Alex?’
Stokes glanced up the street, wiped a hand down over his mouth.
Paton stepped up to Stokes. In a single movement he brought his hand up and clamped it on Stokes’s throat. ‘It was McGlashan, wasn’t it? You told him, didn’t you? You told McGlashan?’
‘What?’
‘Did you do a deal? Cut the others out and share it between you. Get me out the way, tell the others I’d shot the crow, taken the gear with me.’
‘Alex. I swear to God. I never told him, I never told Glash. He doesn’t even know who I am.’
‘He wants fifteen grand from you but he doesn’t know who you are?’
‘He knows I’m with Dazzle. Fuck. I’ve never fucking met the guy. I never told him.’
‘You told someone, though.’
‘No!’
A car was coming down the street and Paton leant into Stokes, close as a lover. He could smell the beer on Stokes’s breath, the cheap stink of his aftershave.
‘Thing is, Bobby. They think it’s me. I was spotted leaving the building. Man in his late twenties. Shoulder-length fair hair, neatly trimmed beard. They found the flat. Call this number.’
Stokes tried to shake his head. Paton tightened his grip on Stokes’s throat. ‘This was your safe house. This was your baby.’
‘It’s the Quaker!’ Stokes’s voice cracked, straining through Paton’s grip. ‘Fuck’s sake, Alex. You cannae blame me for the Quaker.’
‘OK.’ Paton let go of Stokes’s throat and stepped back. ‘It’s bad luck. That’s your line, is it? Fine. Well, I think there might be more of it around. That’s just a hunch, like, but I think the bad luck might be getting shared around a bit. You might want to pass that on to your mate.’
‘OK. Right. Alex. Now let’s think about that.’
‘Done thinking, Bobby. You see McGlashan, tell him to watch his back. He’s not gonnae need to find me. I’m finding him.’
‘Fuck!’ Stokes had his hands clasped behind his neck, head bowed. ‘Fuck! What about the gear?’
‘The gear’s safe.’
The rain was coming on. Stokes stooped down and picked up his knife where it shone in the gutter.
‘What’ll I tell the others?’
‘I’ll be in touch.’
Paton was walking away.
‘Alex!’ Stokes slipped the knife into his back pocket. ‘How’ll you find me?’
He looked abandoned, distraught.
Paton half-turned. The tight lips, the hard cold glint in the hooded eyes. His hands came out of his jerkin pockets and gestured at the street, the blackened buildings, the pub with its red neon sign. ‘It’s not that fucking hard, is it?’
30
McCormack sat in the squad room, swinging on the chair’s back legs. The day was cooler after yesterday’s fierce heat, but the fan on his desk still traced its lethargic arc. He liked the soft whirr of the blades. He liked the air on his cheeks, how it lifted his fringe.
He was trying not to think too hard. It was something he did. Not meditation, exactly – just holding the facts in his head, paying them out like a hand at cards, the elements of the case. Watching for a pattern.
Victim number four. Twenty-nine years old. Queen Mary Street. Vaginal lacerations. No kids. Ground-floor flat.
A drunk was passing in the street, singing or shouting, it was hard to tell which. McCormack closed his eyes.
Cocktail waitress. Blindfolded. Gold locket. Knife marks on both breasts. Fractured skull.
The cool air passed and repassed his face. The air felt wet on his eyelids. He sat in the shadows, dealing out cards.
Ground-floor flat. Bridgeton. Fractured skull. Tights used as a ligature. Tan slingbacks. Cocktail Wai
tress. Queen Mary Street.
He opened his eyes. He was getting nowhere. A change of scene might help.
He signed out an unmarked car and drove up the Saltmarket in the sparse mid-afternoon traffic. At Glasgow Cross he turned right up the Gallowgate and felt the change in pressure as he crossed the invisible boundary between the city centre and the East End. The shops were smaller and meaner now, fruiterers and butchers, a dark little baker’s with the yellow cones of pineapple cakes glowing in the window. He passed the City Ham and Egg Stores, Top Form Shoes, Reets’ Fashions.
Outside the Saracen Head pub, with its window-grilles and hanging sign, a man in a bunnet was sitting on the pavement, slumped against the wall, legs straight out in front of him. His charcoal overcoat enveloped him like a one-man tent. Across the road was the shuttered, unlit bulk of the Barrowland.
He drove on, past Sydney Street and Melbourne Street, past the Royal Bank of Scotland and the Gallowgate Post Office (‘Robber’s Corner’, as the C Div boys called it), and hung a left up Bellgrove Street, crossing the junction with Duke Street and on up Westercraigs. The wind was westerly and he could smell the brown biscuity smell from the brewery.
The plan – so far as he had one – was to hit Alexandra Parade and make his way back down Castle Street in a big circuit of the Necropolis, but he craned up now to see a street sign and suddenly he was slowing as if the car had a puncture and his foot eased off the accelerator and he guided the car to the kerb. An angry blare of horn stretched past his window but already his eyes were closed and he was waiting for the memory to crystallize.
The street name he’d seen was Seton Terrace and now a vision of a fiddler’s slim fingers gripping a bow flashed into his mind, and a long-haired woman singing with closed eyes, spotlights glossing her straight brown hair. It was the Park Bar, the ceilidh band, and one of the songs they sang on a Saturday night, a song Granny Beag used to sing, and he wondered now how he’d managed to miss it:
Yestreen the Queen had four Maries.
This night she’ll hae but three,
There was Mary Beaton, and Mary Seton,
And Mary Carmichael and me.
Mary Carmichael. Carmichael Lane. The first victim: Jacquilyn Keevins. Four victims. The Queen’s Four Maries. The young waiting-women who went to France with the infant queen.
His hands were shaking as he started the car and headed west, past the construction site for the new M8, the Neolithic pillars of the half-built Kingston Bridge. He parked on Berkeley Street. Through the revolving door of the Mitchell Library, up to the Literature Section on the second floor where the librarian brought him a book: The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, edited by Francis James Child. ‘The Queen’s Four Maries’ was one of the ballads (Number 173), except it wasn’t called ‘The Queen’s Four Maries’, it was called ‘Mary Hamilton’. And there were two different versions (‘A’ and ‘B’), though neither was the one that Granny Beag used to sing. Never mind: that was the oral tradition, that’s how it worked, a song kept changing with every singer.
There was a short introductory note to the song. It stated that ‘This ballad purports to relate the tragic history of one of the Queen’s Maries. In some of the versions her lover is said to be the King (Darnley).’
Both versions of the song told the same basic story. A serving girl, Mary Hamilton, is pregnant. Her lover is ‘the hichest Stewart of a’ – presumably, thought McCormack, the king – and the scandal has broken: ‘Word’s gane to the kitchen, / And word’s gane to the ha’. Panicked, the girl drowns her baby, tying it in her apron (or putting it in an earthen pot in one version) and throwing it in the sea. When the queen asks her what has become of the baby whose cries the whole palace has heard, the girl denies all knowledge. She’s been ill, she tells the queen: the cries were her own cries of pain.
The queen, of course, sees through this story and Mary Hamilton is hanged in Edinburgh. On her way to the gallows she calls for wine, drinks a toast to the ‘jolly sailors’, and repents her own folly:
‘Ye needna weep for me,’ she says,
‘Ye needna weep for me;
For had I not slain mine own sweet babe,
This death I wadna dee.’
In the ‘A’ version, the ballad ends with the verse that McCormack remembered Granny Beag singing, the verse about four Maries becoming three. He hadn’t realized that the reason for this change ( ‘This night she’ll hae but three’) was that Mary Hamilton was hanged.
The librarian also brought him a copy of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine for 1895 containing an article by Andrew Lang on ‘The Mystery of “The Queen’s Marie”’. Lang argues that the ballad records an actual event from the reign of Queen Mary, but that the names have gotten confused. ‘Carmichael’ is wrong and so is ‘Hamilton’. There were no Maries of that name among the queen’s waiting-women. In the historical record, the queen’s Four Maries were Beaton, Seton, Livingstone and Fleming. One version of the ballad gives three of the names correctly, but Mary Hamilton (the ‘me’ in the line about ‘Mary Carmichael and me’) remains wrong.
‘Can I photocopy this, please?’
The librarian asked him to fill out a form and came back in five minutes with the Xerox’d sheets.
Driving back through the city centre the song ran through his head, sometimes in the voice of the long-haired woman from the Park Bar, sometimes in the harsher voice of Granny Beag. He thought of Helen Thaney coming over from Ireland to get herself murdered in a Bridgeton tenement:
Oh little did my mother think,
The day she cradled me,
What lands I was to travel through.
What death I was to dee.
He parked in Tobago Street, opposite C Div. Goldie was in the squad room, stabbing at his typewriter keys, a notebook propped open beside him when McCormack slapped the photocopied sheets on to his desk.
‘Carmichael Lane,’ McCormack said. ‘I knew the name meant something.’
Goldie looked at the sheets and then up at McCormack. Without a word he lifted the sheets and began to read. He straightened up as he read and when he finished he waved the sheets gently at McCormack.
‘You’re saying this is the pattern? The four victims represent these … Maries? The Queen’s Four Maries?’
‘It joins the pins, doesn’t it? Carmichael Lane, Mackeith Street, Earl Street, Queen Mary Street.’
‘So who were they?’ Goldie set the sheets on to the desk, tapped them with his fingers. ‘The Four Maries.’
‘They were the queen’s attendants. Ladies-in-waiting sort of thing. They were picked out to keep her company. When she went over to France to be brought up at court, the Four Maries went with her.’
‘And who’s “me”?’
‘Who’s what?’
‘In the poem.’ Goldie took the sheets up again. ‘“There was Mary Beaton and Mary Seton and Mary Carmichael and me.” Who’s “me”?’
‘It’s Mary Hamilton. The woman in the title. The name’s a mistake, apparently, there was no Mary Hamilton. But that doesn’t matter. Did you read the last verse? Read the last verse.’
Goldie spun the sheets towards him, cleared his throat:
‘Cast off, cast off my goun,’ she said,
‘But let my petticoat be,
And tye a napkin on my face,
For that gallows I downa see.’
He nodded at McCormack. They were both remembering the shabby room, Helen Thaney on her back on the soiled mattress, a white strip across her eyes, a sanitary napkin. And tye a napkin on my face.
‘He was what, reenacting the ballad?’
‘I don’t know. It looks like it.’
‘But what does it mean? If the victims are the Four Maries, what’s the message? What’s he trying to say?’
They were back to this, thought McCormack. Murder as a work of art. A species of code. Something needing construed. Like a reading comprehension. So what was the answer, smartarse? What did it mean? McCormack ran his ton
gue across his lips. Dry mouth. Some lubrication was in order. Swift half.
‘Let’s get a pint,’ he said to Goldie. ‘Fancy it?’
They adjourned to the pub across the street, a deceptively spacious lounge with booths along one wall and Glasgow Celtic paraphernalia pinned above the gantry. McCormack took a seat in a booth. Goldie walked towards him with two brimming pints.
They sipped the cold lager, enjoying the cool dark secrecy of the booth. They lit their cigarettes and smoked.
‘Mary Hamilton,’ McCormack said eventually. ‘The woman in the song. She kills her bastard child. They hang her for it. What’s that got to do with Helen Thaney?’
Goldie smoked. ‘Maybe she did something similar. Back in Ireland. Had a wean. Couldnae look after it.’
‘If she killed her kid, we’d know about it. What about the others?’
‘You’re the expert. What does the book say?’
‘About the Four Maries? I don’t know. As far as I remember they just get lumped in with the queen. They’re like mini versions of the queen.’
‘And the queen is …?’
‘Frivolous. Adulterous. Bit of a tart.’ He remembered the words of a pamphlet quoted in the biography: Marie Stewarde late Quene of Scotland hath defiled her own body with many adulteries.
‘And our women are the same?’
McCormack finished his drink. ‘Well. In his eyes, yeah, I think so. They’re married. OK, two of them are separated but they’re still married. They’ve got kids at home. They should be watching their weans, not out gallivanting at the jiggin.’
‘He’s punishing them, you mean? This Paton bloke’s John Knox?’
‘It’s not Paton. But, yeah, something like that.’
‘Are we any further forward, though?’ Goldie said. ‘Haven’t we just confirmed what we already know? He’s probably religious. He’s educated, knows a bit about history. He’s playing games, thinks he’s smarter than us. Probably is smarter than us.’
‘Speak for yourself.’
‘He’s spelling things out for us, mate. Your words. And there’s something else, isn’t there? I just thought of it.’ Goldie had a pinched little smile on his face.
The Quaker Page 21