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The Quaker

Page 31

by Liam McIlvanney


  ‘When the body was found. And you went along with it.’

  ‘I didn’t have any choice. Don’t you see? It was the only way I could be safe.’

  McCormack nodded. The suitcase was poking out from beside the sofa.

  ‘How safe do you feel now?’

  She had her forehead in her palm at this point and she kept it there, shaking her head, saying nothing.

  ‘So what are you doing now?’ McCormack shifted in his chair. ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  ‘I think he’s going to kill me,’ she said simply, looking up. ‘Peter. He’s getting rid of everyone who knows what happened. Everyone who knows the truth. He killed John, didn’t he? I’m dead already, remember; no one’s about to miss me.’

  ‘Will you testify?’ McCormack said. It was the question they both knew was coming.

  ‘I’ll have to,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to, won’t I? If I want help. Look: can I use your bathroom?’

  ‘Surely.’ McCormack set his glass down. ‘I’ll show you where it is.’

  They both stood up. They were stranded in the middle of McCormack’s living-room floor when the buzzer went, a harsh, peremptory, scraping sound that drilled through everything and held them where they stood.

  ‘It’s them.’ Helen clutched at McCormack’s forearms. ‘They must have followed me.’

  ‘You’ve been here for over an hour. If they’d followed you, they’d have been here by now. We just ignore it.’

  They stood and waited. The buzzer came again, a long, rude, jeering ring. They clung to each other in the middle of the room, as if the sound was a strong wind. The ringing seemed to rise and fall in growling heaves, like a revving engine. When it finally stopped, McCormack found he could still hear it. But what he took to be the echo was the faint, hollow drill of the other buzzers being sounded in turn.

  The click of the door-release echoed up the stairwell.

  ‘Get through there.’ He pushed her towards the bedroom, tossing her raincoat in after her. ‘I’ll get rid of them.’

  He carried Helen’s glass through to the kitchen, left it in the sink. At the last minute he remembered the suitcase at the side of the sofa and kicked it into a closet.

  It was only one set of footsteps, so far as he could tell, coming up the stone stairs. He waited at the door, squinting through the spyhole. When the man came into view it was no one he recognized; big-shouldered, jowly, a ginger moustache. He rapped on McCormack’s door and then shot a glance over his shoulder at the stairway.

  ‘Were you on the job, for Christ’s sake. You didn’t hear your buzzer?’

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ McCormack’s hand came up to rest on the doorjamb, barring the way.

  ‘Joe Cathro.’ He held up his warrant card. ‘Merrylee. You gonnae let me in?’

  ‘Merrylee? You’re far from home, Joe. Did you cross a big bridge and couldnae find your way back? What the hell do you want?’

  ‘I’d sooner tell you inside.’

  His head was bobbing around, trying to peer over McCormack’s shoulder.

  ‘I’d sooner you told me here.’

  Joe Cathro touched a finger to his moustache, nodded. ‘You’re not making it easy, Detective.’

  McCormack stepped back and went to close the door. ‘You gonnae say your piece or what?’

  Cathro looked behind him again. ‘There’s a girl,’ he said. ‘A woman. We think she might come round here. She’s a bit unhinged. Making accusations. Just so you know.’

  ‘Come round here? Why would she come round here? Accusations about what?’

  ‘The Quaker stuff.’ Cathro waved a vague hand in the air. ‘She’s got some wrong ideas. We’re a bit concerned.’

  ‘“We”? Who the fuck’s “we”? I’m not “we” now?’

  ‘Look.’ Cathro shuffled his feet and set himself more squarely. ‘Calm down. This is just a friendly chat.’

  ‘Oh, I see that.’ McCormack frowned. ‘This is Nancy Scullion we’re talking about?’

  ‘No. Somebody else. A nutcase. She’s claiming to be someone she’s not. So, you know. Word to the wise.’

  ‘You’re not making much sense, Detective.’

  Cathro looked at the floor, shaking his head. He rubbed a thumb along his bottom lip. Then he reached out with both hands and grabbed two fistfuls of McCormack’s shirt.

  ‘Leave it the fuck alone, McCormack. That’s from right up there—’ he jerked his head towards the ceiling. ‘Let it fucking lie.’

  Then he was off, clattering down the stairwell and McCormack closed the door and leaned against it for a moment. This place wasn’t safe. It might not be safe for him but it sure as hell wasn’t safe for her. Nor was Derek Goldie’s. He flicked through the possibilities. Gregor Hislop? But Hislop had worked with Levein at C Div back in the day; who knew how tight they still were? In the end he settled on Kilgour. He would take Helen Thaney to Robert Kilgour’s. She’d be safer in the care of a convicted sex offender who kept being forced out of his home than she would be with a CID Inspector.

  51

  The next morning, McCormack climbed the St Andrew’s Street stairs in a mood that was oddly buoyant, even euphoric. He was doing this thing. Regardless of how it turned out, he was seeing it through. He wasn’t sure what exactly he expected Levein to do, or how he himself would play it, but it felt like he was holding most of the cards and he would take it from there. There was an element of fear, of course, but what was Levein going to do – shoot him with his service revolver on the third floor of Force HQ?

  Levein’s secretary showed McCormack through; he’d phoned that morning to make an appointment.

  ‘What brings you this high up, Detective?’

  Levein was squeezed behind a chipped Formica desk on which a typewriter sat with its cover still on. A black Bakelite telephone at his elbow. The Prince of Wales jacket and a navy fedora were hanging on a hat-rack in the corner behind him. It was a small office, bare and shabby. The only other furniture comprised a filing cabinet, a wastepaper bucket and a moulded plastic chair on the near side of the desk. McCormack sat in it without waiting to be asked.

  ‘Your wee message-boy came to see me last night. Joe Cathro. I thought I better check in with head office.’

  Levein smiled warmly. ‘Bit of a blunt instrument is our Joe. Means well, though. Do you want a cup of tea, McCormack? Coffee?’

  ‘I’m fine, sir.’

  Levein nodded, hands on the desk in front of him, fingers laced. Now that he was here, McCormack found it hard to get started. How did you tell your boss’s boss, the head of the City of Glasgow CID, that you knew he was a murderer? That he’d shielded the Quaker?

  ‘I had another visitor,’ he said eventually. ‘Last night.’

  ‘You’re a popular guy.’

  ‘Not especially. This one was interesting, though. Given that I’d read about her funeral in the Tribune.’

  Levein glanced at the door. You could see the blurred outline of his secretary through the ribbed glass, sitting at her desk in the outer office. He lowered his voice. ‘You’re so sure she is who she says she is?’

  ‘Oh come on, sir.’ McCormack scoffed. ‘I need to pull her colleagues in from the casino to identify her?’

  ‘Pull them in where?’ Levein said quickly.

  ‘Oh, no. There’s been enough of that. She’s safe, let’s put it that way. And she’s frightened. Frightened enough to talk. About how you knew McGlashan was the Quaker. How you let him kill those women because you were in too deep with him.’

  Levein leaned back, his hands behind his head. His lips split in a gap-toothed grin. ‘This is your star witness, Detective? A proven liar. Ex-hooker. A casino waitress. A woman from nowhere, no family, no history.’

  ‘I think she’s pretty credible, sir. I think her recent history’s pretty interesting. And William Bickett. He’s not a casino waitress or ex-hooker, from what I remember. You remember William Bickett? You got him a card from Lennox, one of these Q
uaker passes: The bearer of this card is certified etc. Remember him?’

  ‘You can’t prove that.’

  ‘I can’t. Not yet. But maybe someone else can. And then there’s this other bloke. What’s his name? Bobby something. Help me out here, sir. Bobby Stokes?’

  ‘Robert Stokes is a police informant,’ Levein said in an officious monotone. ‘Anything he says is automatically suspect.’

  ‘Really? I’ve got two people at least will swear he was part of the Glendinnings job. Two members of the string. You think Bobby Stokes will sit tight when he sees how things’re going? When he’s charged as an accessory to Queen Mary Street? When we tell him why he bought the extra boots, so you could use them to set up Paton? He’ll give you up as quick as look at you. Face it, sir. This is finished.’

  Levein was nodding, his bottom lip thrust out, deep creases either side of his nose. ‘Fair play, McCormack. Fair play. Right enough. I shouldn’t be surprised; they told me you were the business.’ He cocked his head. ‘I had you going, though, didn’t I? For a while there. I had you going, give me that.’

  ‘The Queen Mary stuff? You did. Where did that come from?’

  Levein shrugged. ‘I saw the opportunity. I noticed the date for the first one. And then the places. I’m in a local history group, McCormack. It’s a bit of a hobby. I knew Queen Mary had stopped in Bridgeton. And Carmichael Lane and Earl Street fit right in. All it took was another royal reference with this last one to bait the hook, make it look like part of a series. Not everyone would have got it, though.’ Levein pursed his lips and nodded. ‘Not everyone would have seen it even then.’

  Did he know how insulting he was being? Did he even know what he was saying? ‘Seeing through it was the thing, sir. Not seeing it.’

  ‘Right. Right. So what now? Let’s say you’re right, son. What happens now? I’m gone in a few weeks. I’m out of here anyway. What do you expect me to do?’

  ‘I don’t expect you to do anything, sir. I expect you to go to jail.’

  Levein made a show of looking around him. ‘I don’t see the cavalry, McCormack. Where’s the officers to take me down? Where’s Gus Flett, at least? You haven’t told anyone yet, have you?’

  ‘I wanted to give you a chance to explain. I wanted to hear you out.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Levein held a finger up, pointed it across the desk. ‘I don’t think you did, though, son. I think you wanted to know what else I knew. You wanted to make sure.’

  ‘Make sure of what?’

  Levein tugged on one of the desk-drawers. For a second McCormack thought he was going to produce a gun but what landed on the desk was a flat brown oblong. Levein rested his fingertips on the envelope and slid it across the desk.

  ‘Go ahead, son. That’s yours.’

  McCormack frowned. A bribe seemed beneath Levein, somehow; a foolish gesture, a misstep. They had gone beyond the stage of bribes. He lifted the card-backed envelope, let it wag between his finger and thumb to test the weight. He ran a forefinger under the lightly gummed flap and winkled his hand into the gap and felt his fingers connect with the cold, slippy surface. Were these the photos from earlier? How had he got his hands on Kilgour’s photos? And then he knew. And slowly, slowly, he drew them out, glossy six-by-eights, black and white, and leafed through them, a dozen exposures, himself, more than one partner, more than one act. There was a wastepaper basket on the floor beneath Levein’s desk and McCormack drew it to him and vomited smartly into it.

  Levein waited for McCormack to finish wiping his mouth with a handkerchief.

  ‘There was probably an easier way to do this. I’m sorry to be so, well, graphic. But I imagine I’ve made my point. I would observe, too, that regardless of the law down south, there is no Pansies’ Charter in Scotland. These photographs are evidence of a criminal act. Acts. We’re talking jail, Detective, basically. That’s the size of it. And though you might put your evident talents to good use in that context, you wouldn’t, I think, find it a very congenial experience.’

  McCormack was loosening his tie, he was finding it hard to get a breath. ‘How long?’ he said. ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘About two years,’ Levein said mildly. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘But you didn’t act?’

  ‘I’m acting now, Detective.’ He waved a hand at the pictures on the desk. ‘Let’s say I had an inkling. I had an idea these snaps would come in handy.’

  ‘So you knew when I got the Quaker gig? It was you who chose me, wasn’t it? Flett didn’t recommend me at all.’

  Levein spread his hands. ‘I made a suggestion.’

  ‘And if I found anything, if I got to the truth …’

  ‘But you did get the truth, McCormack. And you got what you wanted. You wanted John McGlashan? McGlashan’s dead. The Quaker’s dead. Bickett’s going to jail for a very long time. So’s our friend Paton, though not for as long as he thought.’

  ‘And Helen Thaney?’

  ‘Helen’s going away. That didn’t work out the way I’d hoped. But, hey, that’s how it falls sometimes. I’ll get over it.’ He smiled his doorman’s smile.

  ‘And the woman? I don’t even know her name. Do you even know her name?’

  Levein nodded sympathetically. ‘Mmm. And the Black Babies, McCormack – what about them? And the starving millions in Biafra? And the poor fried gooks in Vietnam. What’s your point?’

  There was a knock on the door and Levein’s secretary poked her head in.

  ‘That’s Ken McCabe here to see you, sir.’

  ‘Fine, Lizzie. We’re just about done here.’

  The door closed and Levein slid the envelope over to McCormack’s side of the desk. ‘You’re welcome to take these away with you. I have the negatives. As you’d expect.’

  ‘And that’s it?’ McCormack got slowly to his feet, he felt about a hundred years old. ‘You just sail off into the sunset?’

  Levein sat back in his chair, linked his hands across his belly. ‘Don’t get carried away, son. Look on the bright side. You get to keep your job. You get to stay out of jail. That’s a pretty fair day’s work, all things considered. Why don’t you leave it at that?’

  52

  You could do what everyone else did. You could put in your shift, catch the subway home and take a shower. Hang up your suit and hat, ball your shirt and toss it in the laundry. The psst! of a tin of Export; canned laughter, stocking soles. You could divorce yourself from the human dimension, the way doctors are supposed to. Stay detached, unmoved, professional. Keep reminding yourself that your business is not with a human being but a case, a thing of fibres and footprints, timeframes and motives. A puzzle to be solved. You could draw your wages and two-putt the short fourteenth and study the luminous lime-green filaments on the dial of your alarm clock in the watches of the night. You could play the game.

  A chime sounded and the No-Smoking sign and the Fasten Seatbelt sign clicked off together. McCormack flipped the lid of the ashtray in the armrest and lit a cigarette. The plane banked sharply to the left and a man in the row in front got up to use the toilet.

  You could do all that. Or else you could get involved, you could let yourself feel. You could think about the families, the orphaned kids, the cold stiff sheets of municipal institutions. You could reconstruct things from the victim’s perspective. You could make up little scenarios involving the women who died, and write them down for your own edification. You could take it personally, treat it as a priesthood, treat it as a calling, not just a job.

  Either way, it came down to the same thing. You failed. You let the women down. You let the men with the power do what they liked. You let the world go on in its crooked way.

  The stewardess came down the aisle with her clanking trolley and everyone in front of McCormack straightened in their seats.

  Or you could put it right. In your own small way, for once in your life. Give yourself something to celebrate.

  McCormack ordered a large whisky. The stewarde
ss set a paper doily on his tray, a cloudy plastic glass with two clunky ice-cubes. She put down two miniature whisky bottles, finger-thick, the square bottles with the slanted label. He cracked the seals, tipped them in with the delicacy of a Jekyll mixing his potion. The ice-cube numbed his top lip as the lovely burn slipped down.

  Glasgow was slipping away, out the little elliptical window, down beyond the wing’s tilting flap. A peripheral housing scheme, like rows and rows of dominoes; a patch of scrubby country. Already the wisps of white were overlying the view and now the fuselage was absorbed into the lovely cottony cloudstuff and McCormack pressed the button to tilt the seat and let his head fall back on the headrest. Behind his closed eyes he replayed it all, the last long reel of his life in Scotland.

  After meeting with Levein, McCormack had gone home to Partick and crawled into bed. Levein’s words had made him ill, had lain him out like flu. He put a bucket beside the bed in case he was sick again. Images flashed through his brain at random: Kilgour sitting in the trough urinal; the overcoat on the stairs at the Bridgeton flat; the three-coloured sweat-stained headband of his CID fedora; Nancy Scullion’s laughing face; two shinty sticks clacking together and the ball soaring high in a clear blue sky.

  But the images that he tried and failed to hold at bay, the images that flared and pulsed on his bedroom ceiling, on his curtains, behind his flickering lids, were the images that had lain on Levein’s desk. White flesh against foliage. A knot of limbs, a straining neck. He was fevered, he was sweating and cold, a prey to hallucinations, but one thing was clear. It was over. McCormack was over, his life as a polisman was over. Too many people knew. Kilgour, Levein, whoever Levein had told. A thing like this gets out; there’s no way to keep it dark.

  But if the job was finished, where was the threat? You get to keep your job, son. Fuck the job. You get to stay out of jail. Really? What about you? Do you anticipate enjoying the same privilege?

  After four hours’ fitful sleep he had phoned Greg Hislop. His father’s old mate. The man from Balla. Greg to the rescue, good old Greg Hislop, who had slit a priest’s throat – or maybe stabbed him in the heart – on his journey down occupied France.

 

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