‘What’s that?’
‘If it’s the Four Maries, then he’s finished. He’s completed the pattern. His work here is done.’
McCormack caught the barman’s eye, lifted two fingers in a victory sign. ‘He’ll never be done. He’ll start a new pattern. It’s not in his nature to stop now.’
He rose and crossed to pay for the drinks. While the barman worked the till, McCormack leaned his elbows on the bar. On a shelf beside the whisky bottles someone had propped a cardboard cutout of the European Cup, covered in tinfoil, the vase-shaped body, the jug-eared handles. He could picture Billy McNeill hoisting it in triumph, last year – no, the year before – at the Estádio Nacional in Lisbon. He’d watched the game in the rec room at St Andrew’s Street, the whole shift – even the diehard bluenoses – dancing round the room with their hands on each other’s shoulders when the final whistle blew. Champions of Europe.
It had seemed so incongruous. Eleven guys from Glasgow winning the biggest prize in football. Beating the tall, tanned aristocrats of Internazionale. And now the thought formed into words, the thought that had been nettling him for the past few days. It was too incongruous: what was a peterman, a petty crook from Maryhill doing with these allusions to Scottish history and Mary Queen of Scots? It can’t be Paton. He’s a peterman, for Christ’s sake. He’s not a historian. He’s not John Prebble.
He took his change and carried the pints to the booth.
31
Paton stood at the broken landing window. Another dead building. Another gutted flat. He was a troglodyte, skulking through the caves of the abandoned tenements. He watched the pigeons down in the backcourt, creeping through the rubble, pausing with a lifted foot, heads cocked, light sliding like oil down their blue-green necks.
There was a cold spot in Paton’s stomach and a warm one. The cold spot was the Quaker. People thought he was the Quaker. The police thought he was the Quaker. There was something irretrievable here. Something that couldn’t be dodged, that would have to be faced. He thought about the villa in Peckham, with its wooden gate, its white rose-bushes overflowing the shallow front garden. You couldn’t go back and pick up where you’d left off. Not after something like this.
The warm bit was the toolbox of jewels. Paton had gone back to Queen Mary Street the previous night. The flat had been secured; new door, new locks. But the single-end was still doorless, and Paton had wrestled a lidless dustbin up the stairs from the backcourt and stood on its upturned base to reach the hatch to the roofspace. The toolbox had been waiting there faithfully, in the shadow of the chimney, snug and patient and loyal with its scuffed tin sides, its sweat-blackened handle.
He toted it out to Moodiesburn on the bus. He broke into a garden shed and stole a shovel and buried the toolbox in a patch of forest south of Muirhead.
Then he walked back into Glasgow, wondering what to do.
Working it out.
What it all meant.
The Quaker. Was it a coincidence that the Quaker had murdered a woman in the building where you happened to be hiding?
Like fuck it was.
Was Bobby Stokes lying? Did Stokes set you up?
Unlikely.
Who then?
Whoever Stokes is working for. Whoever gave Stokes the keys.
Why aren’t you lighting out for the territory, now that the gear is safe?
Why are you walking back to the city?
Why do you fucking think?
On the landing behind him was the door to the gutted flat. He’d slept there for three nights. The dark, bare, hard, cold rooms took him back to borstal, to the months in Polmont with Dazzle.
Polmont wasn’t too bad, apart from the faceless crying. You heard it after Lights Out, the wailing boys, abandoned to their grief, abject on their narrow cots, shouting for their mammies. Paton never sank to that. He wasn’t hard but he had the respect of the hard men, thanks mainly to his reckless readiness to defy the screws. He would flout orders, backchat, curse them out, spit in their eyes.
He spent a lot of time in the Digger.
The Digger was the punishment cell. Down a narrow staircase, down to the windowless dark and damp. Paton’s secret was that the Digger never bothered him. There was a kindness in the dark. The dark could take you in, absorb you, make you part of it. What troubled the other boys – the absence of windows, the velvety black – never worried Paton. Through the black window of the Digger you could escape into a rich black nothingness. You could disappear.
It amused him to see the fear in the eyes of the screws who came thumping down the stairs to let him out. Paton would rise unhurried from the bare pallet, silent and serene, and climb up the stairs ahead of the screw like a child climbing upstairs to bed.
He climbed down the stairs now, his heels echoing in the empty building. He emerged from the back close, blinking, like a lag stepping out to the exercise yard. A clump of nettles, the wicked glint of a broken bottle. He walked a few yards, lit a cigarette.
A rat the size of his hand lay before him on the broken ground. He hadn’t seen a rat since he was a boy in Hopehill Road and a ludicrous nostalgia buoyed him up. He had a vision of an older boy stumping towards him across the backcourt, grinning, the point of a tail pinched between finger and thumb, and Paton having to dodge away as the boy swung his burden towards him.
This one lay on its side, legs rigid. Poisoned, clearly. It looked oddly healthy, with tawny fur and a slick, ringed, thickish tail. Its hairless feet looked clean and human.
The flies were already getting busy. Paton hacked a little hollow in the mud with the heel of his shoe, tipped the rat into it with his toe and settled a rust-edged triangle of corrugated iron on top, held in place by a crumbling half-brick.
He would have to face the facts. There was no going back to a world before his photo on the Record’s front page. There was no train that could carry you back to last week, never mind 1959. From here on out Alex Paton was either the Quaker or The Man They Wrongly Thought was the Quaker. If he wanted to be The Man They Wrongly Thought was the Quaker he had to be The Man Who Robbed Glendinnings. There was no other man to be.
32
The thing to do was to call it in. Even now, in this mess of ruined streets, there had to be a phone box. Call it in. Let Cochrane get the heavy mob together. Do the job properly. No heroics.
The thing to do was not to load a torch, a ball-peen hammer, a lock-knife and a truncheon into the pockets of an army surplus field jacket and drive east with the taste of fear in your mouth.
McCormack had taken the call at home, half-past ten, just as Horizon’s end-credits were running. The pips of a payphone, then Billy Thomson’s nasal whine. Paton was back. He was here in the city. He’d been spotted in Bridgeton, skulking around the closemouth of a condemned tenement block. McCormack took down the address and ten minutes later he was driving down the Gallowgate.
Everything was quiet. The shops were shuttered and dark and the pub lights glowed feebly in the misty air. He turned south on Abercromby Street and on to the London Road. It wasn’t raining now but the rain had slicked the streets with an oily sheen.
He was scared. This was a stupid thing to do, but the stupidity sat lightly with McCormack. It was stupid? Fine. It was also something. It was a contribution. You spent so long as an observer, an assessor, fiddling with your wee report. The spare prick, the wallflower. Even when they brought you on board as part of the squad, you couldn’t shake that status. Fine. How’s this for useless? Brace yourselves: I’m bringing him in. The man you think’s the Quaker. The man I’m certain isn’t.
It was wearing late when he parked in Baltic Street and started walking west. He dug his inhaler out of his pocket and took a couple of puffs. Ahead of him the tenements stood out blackly on a yellow sky; behind him all was shadowy and blue. Elsewhere in the city the streetlights would be flickering into life but here the only light was from the moon. It lit up the cracked pavements and the white painted slogans on the ground-floo
r walls.
He was in one of the Development Zones. The official talk – in the brochures and the public information films – was of progress, improvement, amenities, vistas. There were white balsa-wood models in the City Chambers showing how this district would look in five years’ time. For now, it was like walking through a newsreel of Dresden.
The tenements on one side of the street had come down and brown humps of rubble ran down the roadway like the spine of some half-submerged Leviathan. On McCormack’s right as he walked the windows rose in motley banks, boarded or gaping or smashed in jagged stars. Every few blocks the facade hung off a building and the moonlight splashed on a patch of wallpaper, a doll’s-house interior.
Alex Paton was armed. Forensics had identified traces of Hoppe’s gun-cleaning solvent on the rag that was left in the Queen Mary Street flat. So what, though? You don’t kill polis. Even the mentals knew that. Where’s the percentage in offing a copper?
You don’t kill polis, but a terracing chant was running in McCormack’s head, to the tune of ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’, something you’d hear on Match of the Day: ‘Harry Roberts is our friend, is our friend, is our friend, Harry Roberts is our friend, he kills coppers.’
Two years back. Down south. Three plainclothes coppers in Shepherd’s Bush got suspicious of a van near HMP Wormwood Scrubs. When they went to investigate, Harry Roberts – one of three armed robbers in the van – opened fire. All three coppers died at the scene. One of the killers was a Glasgow man: John Duddy. He fled back to Glasgow after the crime. Cochrane was part of the team that ran him down and brought him in.
You shoot polis if you have to. That was the truth of it. If a ten-stretch is stood there blocking your way with his fat belly in a bluebottle tunic you put a bullet in him. What else can you do?
McCormack gave the pockets of his army surplus jacket a pat, as though checking for his keys. In his khaki jacket and his black beanie hat he felt like a burglar, not a polis. There was nothing to hear but his own two feet. He hadn’t thought to change his shoes and his heels clacked and echoed in the empty street. His shoulders prickled under the eyes that might be watching from behind the broken glass. He replayed Billy’s phone-call in his head. It couldn’t be a set-up. No one could anticipate that a cop would be so stupid. Turning up on his own, gunless in a howling wilderness, to bring in an armed desperado.
Something flickered up ahead, a kind of wrinkle in the darkness and McCormack slowed his pace. He saw long legs, shoulders working in a leather jacket, a smudge of white face. The man was tall – you could see it as he passed one of the dead lamp-posts. Close to six feet. The thought struck McCormack that this could be the Quaker, sallying forth to repel the invader, and his fingers closed on the butt of the truncheon. As the two men came abreast they nodded hello as if they had been passing on a country lane.
What errand could have brought him out tonight, McCormack wondered; what shortcut led him through these shattered streets?
It was too dark now to read the numbers and McCormack thumbed the torch and the white beam danced up and down the walls. Could you still call this a street, when the houses were no longer houses? It was as if the ashlars and lintels had reverted to blocks of stone. He felt like he was skirting a coast, a black cliff screening an unknown interior.
And now he saw the tall man’s errand. Standing on a corner with her foot propped on the wall behind her, a white knee poking into the night. A whole district could die, its pubs and its tobacconists, its wash-houses and bookies could fall silent, but this would go on – would flourish, even, in the darkness of the empty flats. He dropped his eyes as he passed the girl and moved on up the road.
Finally, 356 jumped into the beam and he turned up the path. The closemouth swallowed him. He climbed slowly, walking on the balls of his feet to keep his heels from knocking on the stairs. The torchbeam played on banisters that were more or less intact but he kept to the inside edge. Strips of blacker darkness on the first-floor landing showed where doors had been removed from all three flats.
He was on the second flight of stairs when something brushed against his ankle and he fumbled his step. A cat? he thought. Please: not a rat. But when he shone the beam it was a dark bundle of cloth. The torch picked out a collar, an epaulette and the flash of a button: an old greatcoat. He kicked it to the side and rested a moment, leaning on the wall. He held his breath and strained to listen but he couldn’t hear a thing above the thumping in his chest and the pulsing in his temples.
At the left-hand flat on the third floor the torch played not on a gaping hole but on a door. It seemed a homely thing to encounter in this wilderness, with its panels and its cheerful red paint, its brass letter box and china door-knob. It even had a nameplate – KESSON, on a see-through Perspex oblong. But it wasn’t Mr or Mrs Kesson who waited beyond the ribbon of black that edged the door and showed where it stood ajar.
Again McCormack’s thumb traced the switch on his torch. You’d almost prefer to take your chances with the darkness than march through there in a blaze of light.
On the balance of probabilities … The fatuous phrase from his report came back to him. On the balance of probabilities, what? Was Alex Paton crouched in the hallway, pointing his piece at the gap in the door? Had Billy Thomson tipped him off? Was the whole thing a set-up, a fool’s errand? He felt the fear well up and he knew he had to act now or not act at all and he kicked the door and ducked back. Nothing. He shifted the torch to his left hand and eased the hammer from his inside pocket with his right. The dimpled grip was tacky in his fist. He clutched the hammer at the base of the shaft, feeling the head’s dull weight in the tendons of his forearm. Do it. Do it now. He took a breath and plunged into the darkness, slashing the torch in front of him, hammer held high, whooping like an Apache, making noise enough for half a dozen men.
The flat was empty: the light bounced and zig-zagged off the walls. He leaned against the jawbox in the little kitchenette and caught his breath. Then he walked back through the flat slowly, dividing the floor into segments with the torch beam, taking stock. Newspapers. A sleeping bag and a rumpled blanket. A rucksack wedged in the corner. Paton had been here all right.
Back at the Marine he parked behind the cell block and lunged up the stairs to the Murder Room.
Cochrane and Goldie and Ferguson were standing round a table. Other detectives were sitting on their desks or lolling on their chairs. It was near midnight, during the two hours when the late shift and the night shift overlapped and the room got crowded. Everyone turned as McCormack burst in.
He stood in his army surplus jacket, catching his breath.
‘Man on a mission there, Detective.’ Cochrane was smirking. ‘Where’s the fire?’
There were tins of beer on one of the desks, glasses, a bottle of Red Label with the cap off.
‘I know where he is.’ McCormack jerked his thumb at the doorway. ‘Where he’s been, anyway. I’ve got the address. I went there but he’d gone.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Aye. Look, maybe forensics can get something. We need to get the tech boys on to this.’
One or two of them smiled and looked at the floor. Cochrane crossed to the open door, closed it gently. He turned round with a smile that McCormack couldn’t read.
‘That’s good work, Detective. Thing is: we know where he is, too.’ He jabbed his index finger at the floor. ‘He’s down there.’
For a second, McCormack thought he was saying that Paton was dead and had gone to hell. Then he realized: he was down the corridor. He was down in the cells.
McCormack tugged his beanie off and dropped it on a desk. There was a scrape as he dragged a chair out and settled slowly into it.
‘Paton’s in the cells?’
Goldie spoke. ‘Turned himself in an hour ago. Just walked through the door and announced his name.’
Someone pressed a can of Export into McCormack’s hand. He tugged on the ring-pull and took a slug. ‘Has he confessed?’
‘Aye, to the Glendinnings job. Not to anything else. Not yet.’
‘Cheer up, fella.’ Goldie’s gums were bared in a fierce grin. He held his own beer can loosely between finger and thumb and swung it towards McCormack. ‘It’s finished, Dunc. We got him.’
McCormack reached up and bumped his can against Goldie’s. He tipped his head back and drank.
III
THE SEA IS ALL ABOUT US
‘Man is not truly one, but truly two.’
R. L. Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
33
Even now, with the suspect under lock and key, people feared the Quaker. As if bricks and mortar couldn’t hold him. As if he might pour himself through the locks of Barlinnie and wreak his will on the stricken city. When they brought the boy Gilmour in from Castlemilk, the boy who’d seen Paton in the backcourt at Queen Mary Street, the kid could hardly stand for fear. His leg kept trembling as he waited in the corridor.
Cochrane gave him a pep talk outside the identification room. The boy kept his eyes on the floor. A WPC had been detailed to escort him and he kept very close to her side.
‘The man’s in there, son. He’s one of the men in that room. Go on and pick him out for us like a good lad.’
‘Will he come and get me?’ The boy stood looking at the floor, gripping the policewoman’s hand.
‘We’ve caught him, son!’ Cochrane was almost shouting but he modified his tone, squatted down to meet the boy at eye level. ‘We’ve already caught him, Andrew. He’s going straight back to his cell after we do this. He’s not getting out.’
When he walked along the line of suspects, the boy flicked his glance at the faces, scared of what would happen if he caught the Quaker’s eye. He stopped in front of Paton, eyes on the ground. He still held the policewoman’s hand. He raised his free hand and pointed.
The Quaker Page 22