‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘Maybe a pipe band would be better next time. A bit more subtle. Or a big neon sign: Tout Lives Here.’
‘Tout’s the least of your worries,’ McCormack said. ‘Be a step up for you, getting known as a tout.’
McCormack explained the task. Paton had named the man who set him up with the house in Queen Mary Street as Bobby Stokes, petty thief and bit player in the McGlashan outfit. Until two days ago, Stokes had been in Saughton, awaiting trial for the Glendinnings heist, but the charges against him had been suddenly, stupidly dropped. Someone had sprung him. McCormack had been warned off by the higher-ups: Stokes was someone’s tout, leave him alone. Kilgour’s job was to tail Stokes, dog him at all hours, find out who he’s touting for.
‘Set a tout to catch a tout,’ Kilgour said.
‘Set a tout to catch a cop,’ McCormack said. ‘I need to know who’s handling Stokes.’
‘This boy Stokes. You think his handler’s the key?’
‘At this stage just finding the lock would be good. I think whoever Stokes is helping is the man who set up Paton. And the man who set up Paton is the Quaker or maybe he’s working for the Quaker. He’s the man we need to find.’
41
Not everything’s a chess problem, son. Cochrane’s words came back to McCormack as he stared at the ceiling, waiting for the alarm to go off. It was a chess problem now. He’d made sure of that. Chess problem? It was a quadratic fucking equation. The whole force had been searching for a single killer; McCormack alone was now hunting three men: the two Quakers and whoever killed Helen Thaney.
The permutations seemed to swirl around the tiny bedroom, the manifold leads and clues, the scraps of data. He felt as though the room itself was spinning, as though he needed to grip the sides of the mattress to anchor himself to the earth.
The alarm clock’s heavy seconds thudded in his ear as he talked himself through it, setting out what he knew, paying out the cards. Helen Thaney, he told himself. OK then. Start with Helen Thaney.
That’s easy. Helen Thaney had been made to look like number four. She wasn’t. She was out on her own, a different thing altogether.
Meaning what, smartarse?
Meaning her killer wasn’t the Quaker.
But her killer had inside knowledge of the inquiry.
Which means maybe he’s a cop.
You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Ratting on cops. That’s up your street, isn’t it? What else?
It means Thaney isn’t random. She’s not another woman who danced with the wrong man. It’s personal. The key to Helen Thaney is Helen Thaney.
Oh, that’s good. And what about the Quaker? Remember him?
Which one?
Right. Of course. The Quaker’s two men now, isn’t he? The killer, the actual raper and strangler, is Kilgour’s Bridgeton hoodlum: big, bluff, stocky, shock of black hair. He depends on his fair-haired sidekick to set him up with women.
He does. But you’ve missed the key question: why can’t he do this himself?
Fuck knows. Too ugly? He’s disfigured, maybe.
But Kilgour didn’t mention a disfigurement.
He’d have noticed, would he, in the dark?
He got a good look.
If not a disfigurement, then what?
Maybe he’s famous. Or at least he’s someone who might be recognized.
Now that is a thought. What were the possibilities?
Footballer. Pop singer. Actor, politician. TV newsreader.
He was bulky, though, remember? Kilgour called him an ape, a real bruiser.
Not a winger, then. Probably not a pop star.
So what is he?
He could be a cop.
Oh give it a fucking rest, would you?
He could be a cop.
And the blond one, the fair-haired sidekick the whole city’s been looking for. How come he wasn’t picked up?
Maybe he was. Maybe he was being protected, maybe he was issued with one of the CC’s magic cards: The bearer is certified as not being the Quaker.
He’s a cop, too, is he? They’re all cops.
Well, he’s not a bricklayer. He’s not a navvy. Soft hands. Well spoken. Good standard of education, in all likelihood. Boss manner: accustomed to getting his way, giving orders. Acts like a gentleman.
But he picks up women at the Barrowland, the roughest hall in the city.
Ah, but does he? If he picked up women at the Barrowland he’d be a regular, he’d be hanging around, somebody would know him. He takes them to the Barrowland, but that’s like the final stage in the ritual. He’s gotten to know them elsewhere, long before he takes them up the Gallowgate to the shooting stars on the big neon sign.
So Cochrane was wrong?
Cochrane was wrong. There is something the victims have in common, beyond the obvious.
Yeah, Mary Queen of Scots, bright boy. They’ve got that in common, remember? How’s that stroke of genius playing out?
The alarm went off then, a heart-stopping clamour. McCormack’s arm flailed out to quash it and he swung out of bed, tugging the T-shirt away from his clammy chest, adjusting his balls in his boxers.
He filled a glass with water at the kitchen sink. He stood in front of the street map on his living-room wall, sipping the water, eyes tracking between the push-pins. They’d been through it all a thousand times. The Quaker’s victims came from opposite ends of the city: East End, West End, South Side. There was nothing to tie them together. They didn’t go to the same church: Jacqui Keevins was Catholic; Ann Ogilvie and Marion Mercer Protestant. None of them belonged to a political party. They had no hobbies in common, no sports or pastimes. They didn’t use the same hairdressers or the same doctor’s surgery. They didn’t swim at the same pool or take their washing to the same launderette. The thing that seemed to tie Keevins and Mercer together – both of them had married servicemen – was nothing more than a coincidence. And yet McCormack was certain that all three women had met the fair-haired man long before he squired them on to the Barrowland dance floor.
McCormack drained his glass of water and set it on the draining board in the kitchen. He lit the ring under the frying pan and tipped in some cooking oil. He rooted in the fridge for the package of greaseproof paper and peeled off three rashers in turn and dropped them in the pan. The fat flared up with a sound like rushing water. He cracked two eggs on the edge of the pan and watched the albumen whiten, tossing the shells in the sink and wiping eggy fingers down the front of his T-shirt.
Three women. Three women with jobs and kids who had somehow found time to start a relationship with the fair-haired, well-spoken man. And they’d kept it secret. None of the statements from the victims’ friends or relatives mentioned a boyfriend. McCormack pushed the food around with a spatula, keeping his distance from the spitting fat. But he’d known them somehow, the fair-haired man. He’d known them well enough to ask them to the dancing. To escort them home. To bring them into the path of the Quaker.
The food was ready. McCormack turned off the gas and shook the fry-up on to a plate. Milky cup of tea, two sugars. Pan bread, four slices, margarined. Brown sauce. He looked at the clock. Still an hour before the day shift came on at St Andrew’s Street. He shuffled his chair closer in to the table, splintered a rasher of bacon with a stab of his fork.
42
On the bus into town, McCormack had to stop himself from scoping the passing cars: white Ford Consul 375, dark Morris 1000 Traveller. It was a sickness, the Quaker obsession. You shared that space with these men for too long, you were bound to catch the virus.
He forced his gaze from the window. In front of him a wee boy, wedged between two talking women, was kneeling up, peering at McCormack over the back of the seat. McCormack lifted his hat from the seat beside him and settled it over his eyes as if he was taking a nap. Then he tipped his head right back and squinted at the boy from under the brim. The boy laughed.
‘Jamie, stop bothering the man.’
�
�He’s no bother.’
McCormack took his hat off and placed it on the boy’s head, tilted back so the boy could see. The boy reached up with two hands and took the hat from his head and looked at the inside and put it back on so that it dropped down and covered his eyes. He laughed delightedly.
‘Jamie! Give the man his hat back.’
The woman on the window side of the boy snatched the hat off his head and passed it back to McCormack, frowning.
‘And sit properly! Face the front, Jamie.’
McCormack winked and the boy scrambled round, his blond head disappearing below the seat-back.
The two women were talking about waiting lists. The one on McCormack’s left – the boy’s mother, evidently – had an appointment at Clive House, where the Corporation housing office was based.
‘It’s who you know, though, isn’t it?’ the other woman was saying. ‘Her through the wall, she got a three-bed semi in Knightswood. Her man works for the Cleansing Department, surprise surprise.’
‘Backhanders,’ the boy’s mother said. ‘That’s what it comes down to. That’s what you hear. Fifty pounds in a brown envelope and you take your pick.’
‘Sicken ye. Who’s got that kind of money?’
‘Give one of these wee Hitlers a clipboard and a pen and they think they’re God Almighty. Jamie, sit at peace.’
‘Where you trying for?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t turn down Knightswood. Anywhere really. I’m not bothered. Anywhere nice.’
The bus slowed for the construction works at Charing Cross, followed the detour into Garnethill.
‘You going to the Willow Tea Rooms after?’
‘Aye, maybe. We’ll see. If His Lordship behaves himself. Come on, you.’
The women rose to go, the wee boy looking shyly back at McCormack as his mother yanked him forward. They were stepping down from the bus when it struck McCormack like a push in the chest, a little jump in the blood. He was grinning like a wide-eyed madman, face pressed to the window, as the bus drew away. The two women on the pavement frowned fiercely up, the boy returning McCormack’s silly grin. The boy’s hand floated up in a tentative wave and McCormack saluted with a dramatic flourish and slapped the chrome bar on the seat in front of him four or five times. He almost punched the air. At Glasgow Cross he swung down from the bus and sprinted down the Saltmarket to St Andrew’s Street.
In the office he phoned Tobago Street. DS Goldie was on night shift, the desk clerk told him; he wouldn’t be on until eleven that night. McCormack said he would try him at home.
Goldie picked up on the seventh ring, a rumbling growl. ‘Aye.’
‘Get out your stinking kip, man!’
‘McCormack? Holy Christ.’ Goldie’s voice was in his boots. He cleared his throat. ‘It’s two in the afternoon. Did they not tell you I’m on nights?’
‘They told me, aye.’
‘Oh really? Better be fucking good, then.’
‘I know who he is.’
‘Who?’
‘At least I know where he works. I know what he does.’
‘The Quaker?’
‘The fair-haired one. The accomplice.’
‘Go on, then.’
‘Not over the phone. Meet me at Mitchell’s. Half an hour.’
Goldie was tearing into an iced bun as McCormack stirred cream into his coffee. Goldie slurped a big mouthful of tea, chewed down a hunk of dough.
‘A housing officer?’
‘Think about it.’ McCormack set his teaspoon down on his saucer. ‘What do they all have in common? They’re looking for a house. Jacquilyn Keevins was looking for a house. She was living with her parents in a two-bed flat. Ann Ogilvie had a daughter and two sons in a single end in Bridgeton. Marion Mercer lived in a damp flat in Scotstoun.’
‘So how does he set them up?’
‘It’s perfect. He knows where they live, marital status, number of kids. He knows everything about them.’
‘They’re gonnae shag this guy to get a hoose?’
‘Derek. What’s the most valuable commodity in this city? It’s not hoors or whisky. It’s a Corporation house in a decent district. This is the guy who gets to say yes or no. He’s god, basically, if you want a house.’
‘The boss manner,’ Goldie said. ‘The arrogant air.’
‘Plus it’s easy to keep it secret. His wee affairs. If the women grass him up, he loses his job.’
‘And then they lose their chance of a house.’
‘Exactly. You’re going to keep shtum, aren’t you?’
Goldie chewed down the last of his bun, wiped the raspberry icing from his chin.
‘We going over there now? Clive House?’
‘Not yet.’ McCormack looked at his watch. ‘I phoned the Director earlier. Asked him for a list of male employees, physical descriptions. Height, weight, hair-colour. Age. Distinguishing marks. Should be on my desk tomorrow. We’re getting there, Derek.’
Goldie was staring gloomily out of the window.
‘What?’
‘Naw, it’s just—’ Goldie shook his head. ‘The hours we put in. Dentists, tailors, soldiers. Barber shops. Golf clubs. No one thought of the housing office.’
‘Well. Let’s not hoist the flag just yet. Might turn out to be nothing.’
But he knew that it wasn’t. He knew in the bones of him that this was the breakthrough. This was the link that the others had missed.
43
McCormack studied the pictures on his living-room wall. The smiling face in one picture, the black smudge in the other. Helen Thaney. The glossy photo of her beaten, bloodied face reminded him of something. He closed his eyes but nothing came.
Helen Thaney. What did they know about Helen Thaney?
Almost nothing. Less than with any of the others. They had barely identified the Queen Mary Street corpse as Helen Thaney before forensics came back with a match for the prints and the hunt was on for Alex Paton. Helen Thaney – the woman with family and friends, a history, a job – got forgotten. Random victim. Background didn’t matter.
And now that Helen Thaney’s background did matter, they realized how little they knew.
They knew she’d had a boyfriend – at least that was what Denise Redburn, who worked beside Helen in the casino, had said. A secret boyfriend, whose name she never revealed, whose Prince of Wales checked jacket had hung on the back of a chair. They knew she’d had a troubled background, didn’t like nuns. And they knew she’d dyed her hair, about a month before her murder.
He’d had her file copied and sent to him at St Andrew’s Street and he looked at it now, on his own kitchen table, the meagre sheets. Helen Thaney was born in Waterford in the Irish Republic on 6 June 1940. Her only surviving kin appeared to be her father, William Thaney, deliveryman, who disclaimed all interest in his daughter when contacted by the City of Glasgow Police and point-blank refused to travel to Scotland to identify her body. When pressed further, he revealed that he had committed his daughter to some kind of church-run institution when she was fifteen years old and had not spoken to her since. Helen Thaney next turns up as an employee of the Singer sewing-machine factory in Clydebank in 1963, and, from 1966, a cocktail waitress at the Claremont casino. And that was it. There were copies of the statements given by witnesses who saw her dancing at the Barrowland, including the statement of Denise Redburn, and a brief, dispassionate note from the casino manager enclosing Helen’s employment records.
McCormack closed the file and looked up once more at the pictures. The smiling face, the bloody mask. What made a father turn his back on his daughter, so that even when she came to this, when her happy face was smudged to pulp, he made her a stranger? What could so twist the course of his love? He thought of the reformatory or the convent school or whatever they called it. A pregnancy, of course. That would be the cause, the big disaster. Some flustered fumbling with a local boy, maybe an older man, and her father bundles her off to hide her shame. His own shame. And now we’d done the same
, thought McCormack. None of us brave enough to look her in the face.
And it came to him now what the bloodied face recalled. It was the book he’d browsed last Saturday on the new arrivals table at John Smith’s bookshop in St Vincent Street. A book about Iron Age bodies dug up out of Danish bogs, victims of sacrifice, miraculously preserved after two thousand years, their skin tanned to a peaty black, the ropework halters still knotted round their necks. She looked like one of the bog-bodies, did Helen Thaney, her visage black with bruises and blood, her nose and cheeks staved in, her eyelids closed as if in sleep, the ligature tight at her throat.
The author of the book – McCormack had skimmed the first chapter standing in the shop – speculated on why the victims died. He didn’t seem to know if these were murders, executions, or ceremonial killings. McCormack wasn’t much further forward with his own twentieth-century corpse. At least the author of the book had an excuse: his corpses were older than Jesus Christ.
It was time to put this right, time to find out more about the late Ms Thaney. McCormack slid the employment records from the file. He thumbed the lever of his ballpoint pen, circled Helen Thaney’s home address.
44
‘Knock knock.’
The next one poked his head round the door and McCormack waved him in. They were using the manager’s office, McCormack and Goldie ensconced behind the desk, a bare plastic chair on the other side. McCormack did the talking.
‘Shut the door, please, Mr … Bickett, is it? I’m Detective Inspector McCormack; this is Detective Sergeant Goldie.’
The man shook McCormack’s hand; nodded at Goldie.
‘How long have you worked with the Housing Department, Mr Bickett?’
‘How long?’ He fingered the knot of his tie. ‘I’d say twelve years. Yeah. Twelve. Sheesh: it sounds a lot when you say it like that.’
‘Straight from school then?’
‘Pretty much. I had a couple of nothing jobs first. Barman. Worked in a garage for a bit.’
‘Do you own a car, Mr Bickett?’
‘Yes. Yes, I do.’ Bickett was easing himself into the chair and he half smiled, his eyes flicking from McCormack to Goldie. ‘Guilty as charged.’
The Quaker Page 27