She fiddled with the clasp on her handbag as she looked out on to the street. You could do three hundred parades and still have a knot in your stomach. At times like these she found herself talking to Marion. Is my make-up all right, Em? You always used to tell me when I’d drawn the eyebrows too high. Maybe this is the one, Em. Maybe this time we’ll get him.
A car turned into the street and Nancy’s hands bunched into fists, but it was a neutral blue Cortina and it sailed on up towards the junction. When the car passed she noticed a man standing across the street, smoking a cigarette. Something in his manner made her draw back a little from the window. He was a big man, burly, in a reefer jacket with the collar turned up. She could see the shine on his pointed shoes from where she stood. She watched him drop his cigarette to the pavement and put it out with a twist of his foot and the shiny shoe seemed to wink at her. The man plunged his hands in the pockets of his jacket and rolled his shoulders. She had the feeling that he was studiously avoiding looking her way.
She left her handbag on the windowsill and crossed to the living-room press where she took down a bottle of vodka. She gulped two shaky capfuls. When she got back to the window a squad car was turning leisurely into the street and when it drew up in front of her building she raised her head and caught the eye of the man opposite. He was looking straight at her with a look of half-amused malevolence and as she turned away from the window she saw him start to cross the street.
Normally she would have clipped down the stairs to meet the squad car at the closemouth but today she stayed in her hallway with her eye to the front door’s fisheye until one of the uniforms came stumping into view. As they crossed together to the squad car she raked the street with her eyes but the man in the reefer jacket was gone.
Twenty minutes later she was shown into an interview room at St Andrew’s Street, where four men in blue suits and two in brown stood in a line with their hands behind their backs.
She started down the line of men with her handbag over her arm, like the queen inspecting the troops. She peered with hopeless intensity into each impassive face. She had been through this routine so often that she doubted her ability to recognize the Quaker. All the faces that weren’t the Quaker’s, all the nearly noses and not-quite-right eyes and the lips that were too full or not quite full enough and the teeth too straight or too crooked had overlain her memory of the face. Now when she thought of the Quaker it was the artist’s impression she saw, the matinee-idol features, the smart side-parting, the curl of a smile on the lips. The original face had gone.
Except it hadn’t. For here, as the fourth man straightened up at her approach, as his jaw clenched under her gaze – here, like a ghost stepping out from her dreams of that endless January night, as time slowed and the scarred walls seemed to dissolve away – here was the Quaker. Here was William from the dance hall. The hair was longer and the goatee beard was new, but the arrogant eyes were the same and the thin, pitiless lips, and just the build of the man, how he carried himself. She was smiling now, smiling in recognition, and the man’s mouth flexed in a truculent frown. McCormack was at her elbow, breathless.
‘Do you recognize this man? Is this the man you are pointing out?’
Nancy nodded. She never took her eyes from Bickett’s face.
‘Hello, William,’ she said.
Flett was not impressed. ‘When I said you could work on this in your own time, McCormack, I meant as in get it out of your system. Not rip up the whole fucking case. Take us back to square one.’
‘Sir.’ McCormack was out his seat, his hand held high like a preacher in a rapture. ‘Sir, listen. You see this guy, you see his face just the once, you’ll know. It’s the face from the posters. Nancy Scullion’s already ID’d him. This is the Quaker.’
Flett was scowling. ‘First off, McCormack, sit down. Sit the fuck down!’ McCormack sat, collapsed with a sigh, hands flopping between his knees. Flett rapped his knuckles on the desk. ‘Now. What exactly is it you want, Detective?’
‘Two bodies, sir. Not even Flying Squad. Uniforms. Two bodies to go through the Housing Office records for ’67, ’68. They’ll tell us if the women had applied for a house. They’ll tell us who was handling their applications. Then we’ll know for sure.’
Flett tossed his glasses on the desk, drew his hands down his face, massaging his eyelids. He put his glasses back on and shook his head. ‘Jesus Christ, McCormack. Levein’s going to love this. It’s his bloody retirement do next week.’
‘Levein? The Record’ll love it, sir. The Daily Express. We knew Paton wasn’t the Quaker and we let him go down? Let him swing, maybe? Come off it, sir.’
‘You’ve got Goldie on this with you?’
‘Aye.’
‘Fuck. Fine. I’ll give you Walker and Kerr. Two shifts. Get the thing done.’
47
Bickett sat at the desk in the interview room, his hands pressed together between his knees. It had been five days since they quizzed him at Clive House. Not even a week, but he sat there in the cold light of the bare white room like a changeling. He’d taken sick leave from work. Face grey. The buoyant blond hair hung in waxy strands, darkened by grease. The tight goatee had blurred into the stubble of his unshaved cheeks. The smell that gusted from the neck of his grubby white polo-shirt, where a crucifix hung on a thin gold chain, was only partly the smell of unwashed skin. It was also the coppery rinse of despair, the smell of a life collapsing in on itself.
When Goldie asked him about the housing scam, Bickett seemed to slump with relief. He was grateful to be talking it out, putting the shape of a story to the chaos inside him. He confirmed the logistics of the thing, clawing all the while at a pink scurf of eczema in the crook of his elbow.
Walter Maitland was the go-between. People would approach Maitland to see if McGlashan could get them a house. Once they’d forked out their fifty quid, McGlashan would give the OK. Maitland would pass the name on to Bickett, who would bump them up the list, allocate them the next available house. Of the fifty quid, Maitland took ten; McGlashan and Bickett got twenty apiece. It had worked beautifully for the past three or four years. It got so that it didn’t seem like a scam at all, Bickett said. It was more like the money was a professional fee for services rendered, or a bonus for improved work rate. Kind of like a tithe, Bickett said.
He stopped then and asked for a cigarette, but the desire to talk was still bright in his eyes, in the plump shine of his lower lip, slick with spittle. They both knew, McCormack and Goldie, without exchanging so much as a look, as they fumbled for the cigarettes and matches, they both knew that the trick now was not to spook him. Just let it come.
Goldie lit Bickett’s cigarette with the solicitude of a lover and he waved the match out and set it gently in the ashtray and said softly, as if it was an afterthought, ‘Tell us about the women, William.’
Bickett smiled shyly and glanced up from under his lids. Nodding, as if somehow this was a shrewd and penetrating question, not the only and obvious gambit. Goldie had been taking it all down in a notebook and Bickett waited until Goldie had turned a new page and nodded that he was ready.
It started by accident, Bickett said. He’d been showing a new flat to a prospective tenant, a pretty dark-haired woman in her late twenties, and her desire for the flat was so strong and so naked that it struck him, as a kind of neutral observation, that she would do almost anything to get it. He didn’t even have to make much of a move. He just stood a little too close to her as she leaned into an airing cupboard and held his ground as she turned and put her startled palms on his chest and absorbed the heightened voltage of his gaze. Next thing they had collapsed like stepladders on to the bare mattress and were tugging at each other’s clothes.
Bickett stopped again. He was fiddling with the gold chain round his neck, lifting and dropping the glinting crucifix.
He was still William Bickett, McCormack thought. He was still William Bickett at this stage in the story. But how did he become the Quake
r, the face on the posters, the man we’ve been chasing for nearly two years?
‘So this became a regular thing?’ McCormack asked. ‘With other clients as well?’
Bickett nodded. Someone stamped past in the corridor, whistling loudly and tunelessly. They waited for the footsteps to recede.
‘But it didn’t just keep going,’ McCormack said, nodding. ‘It turned into something else, William. How did that happen?’
They had heard back that morning from Walker and Kerr, the uniforms who’d been working through the Housing Department’s records. Both Ann Ogilvie and Marion Mercer had been interviewed by William Bickett.
Bickett shrugged, balanced his goofy, stupid-me smile on his upturned palms. ‘I told him.’
‘You told who?’ McCormack was practically whispering now. ‘Who did you tell, William?’
‘I told McGlashan. He was into it. Man, he kept asking for details. He wanted to come along. The next time I met one of the women.’
McGlashan! McCormack tried to keep the excitement out of his voice. McGlashan was the killer. McGlashan was the Quaker. The real Quaker. The one who did the killing.
‘What did you tell him, William?’
‘I told him it was too risky. I told him I could lose my job.’
‘But he kept on at you.’
‘He said I could lose my job if I didn’t let him come. He meant – well, the thing we had going with the housing allocations. He could tell my boss.’
McCormack nodded. Telling your boss would be the least of it. Once you’d been stupid enough to let McGlashan get something on you, it was over. He would squeeze you like a lemon, suck you dry, shuck the rind.
‘So how did you do it?’
‘He worked out this scheme. I would take them out for the evening and then take them home. I knew their addresses, of course – we had them on file. I would phone him at some point in the night and tip him off, so that he’d be waiting. Usually there was somewhere nearby – a derelict building, a patch of waste ground – where I could bring the women. Then – well, I’d pretty much leave him to it.’
And now Goldie and McCormack did share a look. Bickett caught it and held up his hands.
‘But I didn’t; it wasn’t me who—’
His glance was bouncing between the two cops.
‘You didn’t know what would happen? To the women?’
‘No! Nothing did happen to the women – not at first. I think he maybe gave them money. After he’d done his business.’
‘After he’d raped them, you mean.’
‘They were Magdalenes, officer. Women of low morals. They wouldn’t have needed much persuasion. But, look: I didn’t know he was going to start killing them. I had no idea that would happen. But when he killed the first one – well, I was an accomplice. I couldn’t go to the polis now. I was as bad as he was.’
‘You’re talking to the polis now,’ Goldie said mildly.
‘Plus, once he’d killed the first one. I mean, if he killed the women, he would have no problem killing me. He’d have killed me if he had to. I’d have been next. You don’t know what he was like. He wasn’t right. In the head, I mean: he wasn’t right.’
‘You had no choice,’ McCormack said. He spoke the words in a flat tone, like a quotation, and they hung in the air for a moment.
‘Tell us about the women,’ Goldie said. ‘What kind of women did you go for?’
‘Good-looking women. He liked them dark. Youngish. Single mums, mostly. Needy.’ He spread his hands. ‘Desperate.’
‘And bleeding.’
Bickett slumped a little. The tip of his tongue was wearing a groove in the centre of his bottom lip.
‘How did that work, William?’
‘I don’t know. It was a thing. He had a thing about it. I told you: he wasn’t right. He wanted me to wait until, you know. I mean I knew because I was … Well.’
‘You were shagging them, William. Yes. We know.’
‘So as soon as I found out it was time, it was their bad week, that’s when he wanted me to set it up.’
‘And why the Barrowland?’
Bickett straightened up. ‘Easy. It was a place I never went. No one would recognize me. And after the first one, it was like, I don’t know, a kind of superstition. We didn’t get caught the first time. If I go to the same place, go through the same routine, maybe we won’t get caught now.’
The slight curl of his thin upper lip was the poster come to life.
‘And the earlier women. Where did you take them?’
‘Different places. Wherever they fancied.’
‘And you were never called in?’ Goldie was shaking his head. ‘You were never questioned till now?’
‘No, no. I was questioned. When the artist’s impression came out. I mean, it was pretty obvious it looked like me. People were pointing me out in the street, staring at me on buses. Two policemen came to my door one night. I told them I’d never been in the Barrowland in my life. Nothing else happened. I got a card – you know, from the Chief Constable.’
‘Oh, I know,’ McCormack said. ‘The holder is certified as not being the Quaker. Who got you that?’
‘I don’t know. McGlashan organized it, I think.’
Of course he did, thought McCormack. McGlashan’s handler would have taken care of everything.
‘How would McGlashan do a thing like that?’ McCormack asked quietly, as though wondering to himself. ‘He must know someone in the police. What was the name of the policeman?’
Bickett glanced up sharply, as though he’d said too much. ‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ he said. ‘I didn’t have anything to do with that.’
Goldie looked up from his writing. ‘So why did he stop?’
‘Sorry?’
‘McGlashan. If Marion Mercer was the last one, that’s nearly nine months. How come he stopped?’
Bickett looked from one to the other. ‘Well, I don’t think he did. I mean, he stopped here. It was getting too risky. But he took a lot of trips. Down to London, mainly, far as I know.’
McCormack nodded. McGlashan had contacts with some of the big London firms. That was well known. Now they would need to contact the Met, get them to look at unsolved rapes, murders. And look at their own unsolveds, from before Jacquilyn Keevins.
McCormack got to his feet, buttoning his jacket. They were finished here, for the time being at least. Goldie stowed the notebook in the inside pocket of his jacket.
‘Will it go in my favour?’ Bickett was saying. Goldie and McCormack were at the door now and they both turned, looking down at the grey face with its eyebrows hitched in anticipation, a tragic half-smile on the sinuous lips. ‘I mean, that I told you all this.’
McCormack walked back the four or five yards, leaned down over Bickett. ‘You set up three women to get killed, William. You’re an accomplice in three— Jesus Christ, man. Will it go in my favour?’
He spun on his heel and joined Goldie in the corridor. They walked down the hallway in silence.
48
McCormack stood at the mirror, looking at his shoulders in the dark blue suit, at the knot of his Paisley pattern tie, at the cleft in his freshly shaved chin. The face in the mirror stared back. He looked like death. He looked scarcely less dead than the faces on his living room wall. He tugged his lower eyelids down, exposing the livid red flesh, stuck out his green-coated tongue. He lifted a bottle of mouthwash and unscrewed the cap and tipped it back to gargle.
It was Peter Levein’s big night, the evening of his retirement do. The whole Flying Squad was invited, along with most of the city’s CID. A dinner dance in the ballroom of the Albany Hotel. Live band. Fifteen tables. A seating plan.
McCormack’s date for the night was Nancy Scullion. She was picking him up in a taxi. His buzzer rang and he frowned – Jesus, she’s early – but when he lifted the handset it was Robert Kilgour.
‘I’m going out,’ McCormack told him. ‘I’m on my way out the door.’
‘You�
�ll want to see this,’ Kilgour said. ‘Trust me.’
McCormack pressed the button.
Kilgour had an envelope of photographs, processed by a mate in the Partick Camera Club. Photographs that featured Bobby Stokes.
‘Yeah?’ McCormack felt his mouth drying up, lips sticking to his gums.
‘He’s meeting his handler,’ Kilgour said. ‘At least, I’m assuming it’s his handler. You’ll know better than I would.’
Kilgour took three glossies out of the envelope and set them down on the coffee table.
‘Hotel out past Newton Mearns. They met there last night. I got my mate to print these today.’
The photos showed two men coming out of a doorway on to what looked like a gravel drive. The doorway had a little upturned V of slated roof, like a church porch, and some kind of pot-plant to one side. The men were walking one behind the other, each holding a set of car keys. The one in front – slight and dark – was Bobby Stokes. Behind him, with his head down in the first photo and raised in the other two, where he seemed to stare straight at the camera, bouncing his keys, was Peter Levein.
‘You recognize him?’ Kilgour asked. ‘Do you know the guy?’
‘I think so.’ McCormack shuffled the photos together and thrust them back into the envelope.
Jesus Christ. Levein. Holy fucking Christ.
‘Did I come good then? Did I do well?’
‘What? Yeah, that’s brilliant, Robert. Here.’ McCormack dug his wallet out of his hip pocket, took out a ten.
‘Away ye go!’ Kilgour had his hands up. ‘I’m doing this for the pure love of it. The fucking hate of it. I want this bastard caught.’
McCormack shook the note. ‘Don’t be daft, Kilgour. You’ve earned it.’
Kilgour clicked his tongue; his fist closed round the money.
Kilgour was long gone when the taxi arrived. McCormack heard its horn in the street and clattered down the stairs with his raincoat over his arm.
Nancy’s head was poking out of the taxi’s side window, all teeth and eyelashes. She was still excited about Bickett. All the way into town she talked it out, how she couldn’t believe it was him, how she never thought she’d see him again, or recognize him if she did.
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