The Quaker

by Liam McIlvanney

  ‘I want to do my job, sir. I want to catch the Quaker.’

  ‘Aye? I thought you wanted McGlashan. You’d a hard-on for Glash, all these years. That not right? You’re head of the Flying Squad, Duncan, you can steam right ahead. Throw everything you want at the prick. You can take McGlashan. Leave this Quaker shite be, move on to the stuff that matters. Do the real job. Remember?’

  McCormack sipped his whisky, felt the lovely burn on his tongue. This was what you wanted. This was the prize for nailing the Quaker. Get a crack at McGlashan. He realized now that he could no longer picture McGlashan’s face. A mugshot of McGlashan had been tacked up on the wall beside his Flying Squad desk for close on two years but now he couldn’t summon the features. As though McGlashan was a former lover whose eyes you no longer recalled the colour of. His face had been displaced by the poster of the Quaker, the artist’s impression, the man who was still out there in the disintegrating city, the man who wasn’t Alex Paton.

  ‘What if he does it again, sir?’ McCormack drained his glass and set it down. ‘You thought of that? We’ve got Paton inside and the Quaker does another. What happens then? You’re playing golf in Maidens. We’re still here.’

  Flett stood abruptly and lifted the bottle, turned and stowed it in the cupboard, clanging the steel doors. He stacked one glass on top of the other and set them on the mantelpiece. He stayed standing.

  ‘Are we finished here, Detective? Cos I’m done trying to talk you off the ledge. You want to undo all the good that you’ve done, far be it from me. But you’re on your own. You get no help. You do it in your own time. Now. Can you fuck off out my road?’

  In the flat that evening, McCormack looked across the city at the cranes’ long necks dissolving in the bluing light. The living-room window threw back his ghost, the image of a man who might have been somebody else. DI Duncan McCormack, Head of the Flying Squad. He saw it all now. The corner office, his name in gold leaf on the ribbed glass, the view across to St Andrew’s in the Square and the trees of Glasgow Green. And McGlashan running scared. The combined might of the CID and Flying Squad crashing down on John McGlashan, punching through his empire like a wrecking ball. He had a vision of the gangster, hands cuffed in front of him, being taken down from the High Court dock to start his sentence, the dark suit and the thick black hair disappearing down the trapdoor stairs like Faustus trudging down to hell. But there was another trial to take place sooner, the trial of a man who might be hanged on the gallows of Barlinnie Prison if McCormack couldn’t catch the Quaker.

  35

  McCormack was in a tearoom on Sauchiehall Street, waiting for Nancy Scullion. It felt like an illicit thing, a secret assignation. He almost felt normal. An everyday adulterer. Somebody’s fancy man. Except Nancy Scullion was already divorced. He stirred his tea and watched his ghost in the window bring the cup to its lips.

  After his argument with Flett, McCormack had lain awake. Now he had Flett’s reluctant blessing. But where did he go with that? Back to the start, obviously. First principles. Do the basics. What were the basics again?

  What should he do? You couldn’t go back through the witness statements, even if you had time, and that was the wrong tack anyway. It wasn’t about working back through the case, looking for the uncrossed Ts. They had ransacked the city like a tenement flat. They had torn it to pieces, searched it inch by inch, sounded the drawers for false bottoms, run knitting needles down the bedposts and table-legs, shaken out every book, taken up the floorboards, slashed all the cushions, the linings of chairs.

  None of it worked. None of it yielded a plausible lead. A fresh start was needed.

  And when he thought about fresh starts his mind kept going back to Nancy Scullion. For fuck sake, why? Nancy Scullion was the whole problem. It was setting so much store by Scullion that kept the squad bogged down in pointless details. The whole inquiry had been like putting together an identikit. Let’s get the individual details right and see if we can conjure up a face. Life didn’t work like that. They’d been through all the details, everything Nancy Scullion could recall about the Quaker. The hair, the overlapping teeth, the brand of cigarettes, the hole in one, the regimental tie, the biblical quotations, the slim build, the cut of his suit, the desert boots, the ‘good’ Glasgow accent, the broad striped watchstrap. Every element of the description had been probed, poked, tested, scoured, stamped on, pulled apart. They had chased each of these details across the city, come up with nothing.

  So the description was wrong? No, but the description was worked out, dead, a waste of further time and effort. So what else could Nancy Scullion tell him? What fresh angle could she bring? Not what the Quaker looked like, maybe, but what he did, how he acted. How the Quaker carried himself.

  Carried himself. McCormack snorted into his tea. He was Mertens the paragnost now. What mystical bullshit was this?

  So now he waited in a tearoom on Sauchiehall Street for the woman who’d stymied the whole investigation. At first she’d been reluctant. When he phoned her at home she spoke very carefully and slowly, like someone reading from a script.

  ‘But you’ve got him, haven’t you? He’s in Barlinnie. He’s waiting trial.’

  ‘It’s not him.’

  ‘The papers said it’s him. They said the police are— Well, they’re not looking for anyone else. In connection with the killings.’

  ‘You know it’s not him, Nancy, don’t you? You’ve always known. It’s why you couldn’t pick him out in the parade.’

  ‘It was a long time ago. I’ve seen a lot of faces. You’ve got to be sure.’

  ‘Nancy.’

  The bell clanged on the tearoom door and here came Nancy, peering round with a tragic, anxious manner till she spotted McCormack’s half-raised hand. She half-smiled and put her head down and made her way towards his corner table. She ordered coffee when the waitress arrived and listened while McCormack tried to explain what he wanted. Not more details. Or at least, not the same details. More a sense of the Quaker as a man. In general. The sense of him. You might call it the overall impression. He could hear the conviction draining from his voice. He was floundering. He should stop talking. When he looked up Nancy Scullion was frowning. She wasn’t trying to be difficult, she said, but she couldn’t see what else she could tell him. She’d described the Quaker a hundred times, they had forced her to go back over every tiny detail. She was sick of telling it. Sick of her own voice. But his manner, McCormack insisted. Not what he looked like; what he was like.

  ‘That too. I’ve been over all that. He stood up when you came back to the table. Pulled your chair out for you. He was polite. But cold, too. And smug, watching you from behind his eyes. He knew things that you didn’t know. That’s what his eyes said. Well, they were right, weren’t they?’

  In the end there was one thing, only one, that was new to McCormack, that he didn’t recall from the witness statement. The man had left them for a spell, Nancy told him. Maybe ten minutes, maybe more. Longer than it took to use the toilet. The women joshed him when he returned – Was there a queue at the gents? Now you know how we feel – but he smiled his tight smile and said nothing.

  ‘He’d been at the bar, maybe?’

  ‘Nope, I don’t think so. He came back empty-handed.’

  Something stirred in the swaying weeds of McCormack’s mind, some dark shard floating upwards but he lost it and it sank away.

  ‘It’s as if she’s been murdered twice,’ Nancy was saying. She was toying with her empty cup and speaking down towards the tabletop.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘I’m saying it’s as if it happened twice.’ Nancy looked up at him, a bright sad smile. ‘He killed her, the Quaker did. But then the papers, it was like the papers brought her back to life, her face was always there in the Record, smiling out at you. And all the facts and stories, the wee details of her life. But then it petered out. Youse didn’t catch him and the papers stopped bothering. The stories stopped. And now it feels like she’s
gone again.’

  McCormack nodded. The big dark grandfather clock filled the silence, a homely sound, a deep warm ticking, like the slap of two fingers on double-bass strings.

  ‘But he isn’t gone.’ She held the sad smile. ‘He’s coming back, isn’t he? He’s coming for me.’

  ‘Nancy, come on. What do you—’

  She grabbed his wrist. ‘Cause I’m the one who can get him. It’s me that can identify him. He needs me gone.’

  ‘Nancy, if he wanted you dead, you’d be dead already.’

  He glanced quickly down at her hand on his wrist and she followed his gaze, grinning weakly as she released her grip and looked at her hand like it belonged to someone else.

  He paid for their drinks and thanked Nancy Scullion for her time.

  36

  McCormack went down to the newsagent’s on Dumbarton Road and bought some marker pens and a box of coloured drawing-pins. Back at the flat he rooted around in the hall cupboard and found an old roll of wallpaper. He laid the roll on the living-room table and took the scissors and cut a section maybe five feet long. He took three pictures down from the back wall of the living room and took the picture-hooks out with the end of a clawhammer. Then he found the bag of wallpaper paste and the old splayed paste brush in the hall cupboard. He mixed a little of the paste in a bucket in the sink and pasted the strip of wallpaper on to the living-room wall, longways and with the patterned side inmost. Then he cleared up and washed his hands and stood with his hands on his hips in front of the blank white strip.

  He took one of the marker pens and wrote SAFE HOUSE at the left-hand side of the strip. He underlined the words. Then he wrote and underlined HELEN THANEY in the middle of the strip and MQS at the right-hand side. Under SAFE HOUSE he pinned up a cutting from the Record’s report (‘Lair of the Quaker’) showing the interior of the flat where Paton had holed up. He also wrote the names that Billy Thomson had finally come through with, the supposed names of the Glendinnings string: Stephen Dalziel, Robert Stokes, Brian Cursiter. By rights he should have fed these names to Adam Halliday, who was heading up the Glendinnings investigation, but he was holding off for the time being, waiting to use them on Paton. Beneath HELEN THANEY he pinned a newspaper headshot of a laughing Helen Thaney and an illicitly photocopied image of Helen Thaney on the floor of the ground-floor flat at Queen Mary Street. The ink in this image had been blurred and smudged by the copier and Helen Thaney’s face was mostly black. Under MQS he pinned up the purple dust jacket of Antonia Fraser’s Mary Queen of Scots.

  There was a street map of the city in the bureau beside the window and McCormack took this and pinned it up next to the strip of wallpaper. He placed four drawing-pins on the map at Carmichael Lane, Mackeith Street, Earl Street and Queen Mary Street. He placed a different coloured drawing-pin at Bath Street to mark the site of Glendinnings Auction House.

  He was still contemplating his handiwork when the telephone rang.

  ‘Detective Inspector. Is this a good time?’

  The voice was sly, hearty, full of bogus mateyness. McCormack glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece, as if the question had been literal.

  ‘Who is this?’ he said.

  ‘I wanted to congratulate you, Duncan. Personally. You’ve done a great thing, Detective.’

  There was something in the laughing timbre of the voice that McCormack recognized, and as he dropped into the wooden-backed chair and reached his cigarettes from the table it came to him: Levein. But why was the chief calling him at home? They worked in the same building. If he’d wanted to see him, why not walk down the stairs, or else summon McCormack to his office?

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ he managed, warily. ‘I appreciate it.’

  ‘Thank you, Detective. We appreciate you. I’ve spoken to DCI Flett. The Police Board too. Flett’s moving upstairs when I leave. There’ll be a new name on his door. Yours.’

  McCormack looked out of the window. The black clouds above the river had finally burst and big cheerful raindrops were landing on the pane. He watched one dribble down the window – now slow, now fast – before spreading into nothing on the sill.

  ‘That’s if you want it,’ Levein was saying.

  Did he want it? Did he want to pretend that Alex Paton was the Quaker and that everything had turned out fine? Part of him did. Part of him did want that. But not the cop part.

  ‘I’ve got some things to take care of, sir,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s not my time.’

  The silence from Levein stretched out until it filled the room, the flat, the whole city. He could feel Levein’s hostility seeping down the phone line and trickling into his ear.

  ‘Well, I can’t say he didn’t warn me,’ Levein said finally. ‘Flett warned me about this. Pig-headed, was his phrase. Doesn’t take hints. Needs things spelled out for him. Words of one syllable. You listening then, Detective Inspector? This thing is done. Finished. We caught him. He’ll be tried, he’ll go to jail. You’re worried about timing?’ Levein’s voice rose tautly on the word. ‘What would be bad timing, son, is queering this Quaker result in time for my retirement. That would be bad timing. You’ve given me the gold watch. Don’t fucking try and take it back.’

  37

  They were playing a game called ‘Unless’. McCormack was playing the game. Goldie didn’t know he was playing. Goldie didn’t know the game existed.

  ‘But are they framing Paton?’ Goldie said. ‘Or is Paton just the guy in the frame?’

  It was too late in the day for riddles. McCormack drummed his feet on the wooden boards, clapped his arms around his torso to keep warm.

  ‘You want to translate that?’

  ‘I mean is it personal to Paton? Is it specific to him or is Paton the convenient – what would you call it? Fall guy. Patsy.’

  They thought about this. Music was playing tinnily through a loudspeaker system, Desmond Dekker and the Aces. It seemed too sunny and upbeat amid all this ice.

  ‘How long’s he been gone?’ Goldie asked.

  ‘You’re right. It’s ten years.’

  ‘That’s a long time to bear a grudge.’

  ‘It’s too long. You’re right. It can’t be personal. Paton’s just in the wrong place. Is that your daughter?’

  Goldie frowned. ‘The blonde one? No. She’s over there.’ His finger tracked a girl in a red coat, cinched at the waist, and a white woollen hat with hanging pom-poms. She saw Goldie pointing and raised a mittened hand as she glided past. They both waved back.

  ‘But why now?’ McCormack dragged on his Regal. You couldn’t tell what was smoke and what was your own breath. ‘He’s happy to take the credit for the first three. Wants to frame someone for the fourth. Makes no sense.’

  ‘Unless …’ and Goldie opens the scoring, thought McCormack; ‘unless he’s finished. He’s drawing a line. Plus, if it’s finished, then it’s not random. It’s a series. A sequence.’

  ‘The Four Maries,’ McCormack said. ‘But if it’s a sequence, if it means something, he’s going to want to claim the credit, isn’t he? That’s the whole point. Defeats the whole purpose if someone else gets the glory. What is she, fourteen?’

  ‘Twelve. Unless …’ two-nil to the big man; ‘maybe it’s not a multiple at all. I mean, this last one. Helen Thaney.’

  ‘You think it’s a copycat?’

  ‘Well, it wouldn’t be hard, would it?’ Goldie’s breath came out in billowing clouds. ‘Cochrane was always too tight with those Tribune pricks. All the details were in the papers.’

  ‘Were they, though? What would you have known from the papers?’

  ‘You’d know the whole m.o., wouldn’t you? He picks them up at the Barrowland, kills them within a hundred yards of their homes. Fucks them, chokes them with their tights, doesn’t try to conceal the bodies.’

  Goldie was still watching his daughter but his expression changed as he spoke. McCormack felt the old despair seeping in. Goldie was enjoying some time with his daughter and here you came to trample over it,
polluting the ice-rink with the smell of death.

  ‘So what wouldn’t you know? What did we keep back? The sanitary towels on the bodies, all the victims are menstruating? That was never in the papers, was it?’

  ‘And the escalating violence,’ said Goldie. ‘The beatings getting worse with each one. But fuck – the Marine leaks like a bastard, always has. How many cops worked the inquiry?’

  ‘I know. How many wives and girlfriends did they blab to?’

  McCormack thought about the secret details spreading by word of mouth, the crowds of people who might know. The whirling skaters seemed like a visual illustration of his thought.

  ‘Still, though. If the killer for number four is different, it could be someone who knows a cop.’

  ‘Could be a cop.’

  They thought about this.

  ‘Except it’s not number four, is it? It’s number one. It’s just been made to look like number four.’

  ‘So what was the big breakthrough with the Mary Queen of Scots stuff?’

  ‘I think it was rubbish, Derek. Wishful thinking. Whoever did number four had spotted a link: Battlefield; Bridgeton; Earl Street. But it wasn’t a link at all. It was just coincidence. It was only number four – Queen Mary Street, the blindfold, the planted locket – that made it hang together.’

  They sat in silence, watching the skaters. McCormack followed the red coat of Goldie’s daughter for a while and then lost it among the crowd and just watched the moving bodies. It was hard to equate Goldie the CID detective with the anorak-clad dad who sat in the spectators’ gallery waiting for his daughter. McCormack hadn’t known much – or anything really – about Goldie’s family. Had he known that Goldie had a daughter? Had he even bothered to ask?

  Speed skaters were cutting through the crowd, teenage boys jack-knifing forward with their hands behind their backs, their long legs slashing out to the sides. McCormack had visions of people slipping, bumping down on their backsides and putting a hand out instinctively to steady themselves as a speed skater sliced past. He saw the fingers rolling like sausages and the blood staining the ice, percolating down through the crystals.