Chapter 1
Sunday, 08.00–10.45 hours
Sunday morning in the city of Glasgow. Wide thoroughfares are empty, there is trash from the night before, empty cans, pizza wrappers, remnants of fish suppers, pools of dried vomit in the doorways. A van is driving; periodically it stops, the driver’s mate leaps from the cab and carries a bundle of newspapers which he leaves on the pavement in front of shops, or perhaps he hands them to a street vendor setting up his pitch. There are buses, a few, mostly empty. A milk-float rattles by. It is mid-March, at the end of what had been a particularly mild winter. The sky is still grey, but it will become blue. It is dry, a day for a pullover and jacket. A good walking day for a rambler. But this is the city, it is the grid system at the centre, angular buildings, solid Victorian and Georgian buildings standing on wide streets, streets which intersect each other at ninety degrees, streets with strong, solid names—St Vincent, Regent, Bath, Sauchiehall, Hope. A man is walking.
The man walked up Bath Street from Charing Cross. He walked with a slow, even pace, observing as he went, and allowing himself to savour the tranquillity of the morning. At the summit of Bath Street, he turned into Blythswood Square and enjoyed the spectacle of the rising sun shining on the stone-cleaned Georgian façades of the buildings on the north side of the square. He paused at the first corner of the square, he just stood for two or three minutes, allowing himself to be seen; reinforcing his presence.
The man’s name was Hamilton. He was twenty-four years old. He was a cop.
Hamilton was working the day shift. He wanted it to be quiet. Sundays mostly are. Mostly.
He walked round to southern and eastern sides of Blythswood Square, in front of the National Westminster Bank and the RAC Building, and down towards Sauchiehall Street. On impulse, he turned into the Sauchiehall Lane alley which ran behind Sauchiehall Street.
Sauchiehall Lane was deserted. It stretched in front of Hamilton, a narrow straight canyon, cobbled surface and high walls with steel doors set in them, heavy metal grilles over the windows, and barbed wire coiled round the drainpipes. The lane assumed a gentle incline to a summit some three hundred yards from the point that Hamilton entered, whereupon it fell in an equally gentle decline to West Nile Street. At intervals along the length of the alley were small ‘inshots’ in the lane at buildings where cars were parked during the day, many boldly labelled ‘private parking only’. As in the main streets, Sauchiehall Lane had collected indications of the revelry that is Glasgow town on a Saturday night; half-empty super-lager cans; half-eaten pizzas; fish supper wrappers screwed up and tossed aside; pools of dried vomit; a car in a private parking bay with the smashed side window and the hi-fi torn from the fascia; the corpse.
The corpse lay in the Lane close to its entrance at West Nile Street; it lay crumpled in a doorway. In life he had been a boy of perhaps nineteen years; he had been of medium stature, a small face of pointed and pinched features. He had thin hair which he wore long over his eyes and down to his shoulders. He was dressed in denim, patched and torn, a shirt, a pair of soiled and worn training shoes. All this Hamilton noted with a glance as he reached for his radio, as he spoke into the handset which was clipped to the collar of his uniform: ‘…assistance required, Sauchiehall Lane and West Nile Street. Apparent Code 41…’ Hamilton’s call was acknowledged by a crisply spoken female officer and he then switched off the handset. He looked at the body. It was his impression that the youth had not the deliberate designer slovenliness of a student; rather he had the desperate grinding one-day-at-a-time slovenliness of the chronically unemployed, or unemployable, or of the mentally ill or of the drug-abuser, the murders of whom always seem to outnumber the murders of those in the mainstream of life, and the murders of whom invariably seem to be cheap, grubby and impulsive. Just as this fatality appeared to be. He knelt. The body was cold. No pulse. Dead.
The body lay in a recessed doorway, hidden mostly from view and could well have lain undiscovered until much later in the day had not Hamilton decided to patrol the lane instead of the street.
Hamilton walked to the nearer end of Sauchiehall Lane, and stood on the pavement of West Nile Street, leaving the body undisturbed just as he had found it, fifteen feet behind him. He watched an orange bus go by, the only vehicle on the street at that time on that Sunday morning and empty save for one or two passengers downstairs. Hamilton thought: nineteen years, Sauchiehall Lane, in March, a grubby way to die, knifed to death, the black bloodstains on the shirt attested to that. He heard a klaxon pierce the silence; it grew closer and a police car, a white saloon ‘sandwich car’ turned into West Nile Street and drew to a halt beside Hamilton.
‘Just here,’ said Hamilton as the two officers got out of the car. ‘Behind, here in the Lane.’
The two mobile patrol officers moved with an efficiency which Hamilton had seen before, but which still impressed him. They quickly erected an orange tape across the entry of the alley and then drove the vehicle round to Renfield Street at the other side of the block to cordon off the other entrance to the alley. Hamilton remained with the corpse, at the locus of the offence. Within three minutes the car had returned to where Hamilton waited, with the driver as the only occupant. The driver left the vehicle, allowing the blue revolving light to remain switched on.
‘That’s the alley sealed off.’ The driver stood next to Hamilton. ‘Some way to start a Sunday!’
‘Some way to start any day,’ said Hamilton, glancing behind him at the crumpled youth; no money in life, no dignity in death. But at least his eyes were closed.
Tuesday Noon walked home. Staggering, swaying, too much wine in the night, stayed up through the night, walked home through the city. Saw a cop, walking up Bath Street, saw him turn into Blythswood Square; Tuesday Noon ducked into a doorway, didn’t want to be seen, not in this condition, drunk and disorderly, a walking target for any keen young cop wanting to boost his arrest rate. He waited until the police officer disappeared from view and then continued to walk on.
The blue car swept by, shooting red lights at seventy or eighty miles an hour.
Tuesday Noon watched the car intently, curiously. He recognized the vehicle. He recognized the driver.
Ray Sussock had drawn the day shift that weekend, the last weekend before Easter. Saturday had been hectic, burglaries, shoplifting, FAX inquiries from police forces south of the border concerning Scottish drug barons who were moving about the Home Counties with increasing degrees of suspiciousness. It had been a full day, but routine; a succession of small jobs, light work, handed over to Richard King who had drawn the back shift. Home, briefly, to a bedsitter in the West End, and then to Langside for a meal and the remainder of the night spent with her in her neat, warm room and kitchen. The Sunday morning had dawned dull, but dry, and he left her flat at 6.30 and drove to P Division police station at Charing Cross, stopping en route to buy the Sunday papers. He arrived at P Division at 7.0 a.m., signed in, checked his pigeonhole for messages, climbed the stairs to the CID corridor, sat with Montgomerie who had worked the night shift and had not, it seemed to Sussock, been at all overworked given the amount of work he handed over; really only a spate of car thefts and thefts from cars. In respect of the latter, it seemed that the thieves had stolen a red Fiesta from the car park of the Queen Mother’s Hospital and had worked their way from car park to car park all over the West End, moving it seemed to the police who followed the spoor, in a rough direction towards the city centre, whereupon the break-ins stopped being reported and the trail went cold.
‘Found the stolen vehicle half an hour ago,’ said Montgomerie, looking bleary-eyed and with a shadow of growth about his neat jaw. ‘But no trace of the twenty-odd stereos that have been stolen from cars, and those are j
ust the twenty that have been reported. I would guess another twenty will be reported in the course of the day. Also,’ continued Montgomerie, ‘you’ll see in the recording that one car belonged to a climber; his ice-pick was stolen, and another car belonged to someone who was a keen country dancer; he lost the ceremonial swords used in the sword dance.’
‘So there’s some handy weapons floating about,’ said Sussock, the much older of the two officers. He picked up the file and put it to one side.
‘Car is being dusted for prints right now,’ said Montgomerie as an afterthought, ‘but I dare say we’ll find that they wore gloves.’
‘So TV can teach something.’
‘More’s the pity.’ Montgomerie reached for the next file. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we finally caught her. Felt her pretty little collar just as she stepped off the train at Queen Street, just at the back of eleven last night.’
‘Who?’
‘Saracen Cynthia, otherwise known as Cynthia McGarvie of Stoneyhurst Street. She was spotted by a WPC who acted “on suspicion”, as is said.’
‘Bag full of goodies?’ asked Sussock.
‘Three bagloads full of goodies.’ Montgomerie lit a nail, dragged the smoke deep into his lungs. Sussock suddenly recalled the days when he could do that and indeed did so, heavily; now, years later, he felt the thin air of March gripping his chest and stabbing his lungs, being the legacy of years of smoking cigarettes. He no longer smoked but his chest still hurt in the winter months and he always knew when summer was waning, long before the leaves started to fall. The advert for the sports car which read ‘Grips like the Scottish winter, goes like the Scottish summer’ had special meaning for him.
‘Well, you know the story,’ said Montgomerie. ‘Cynthia got known so well in this town that she had to spread her net, and she hunted and gathered over greater distances. She spent all Saturday afternoon in Stirling, raiding the department stores; she delayed her return, hoping to sneak back up to the Saracen in the wee small hours. She was found to have three bags of shoplifted goods, five hundred quid’s worth when we tallied up the price labels. She could have sold it in Possilpark for about two hundred and fifty quid. I gather half the label price is the going rate for the sale of stolen goods in the scheme.’
‘Not a bad rate of pay for an afternoon’s work.’
‘Not bad at all.’ Montgomerie tapped ash into the ashtray. ‘Anyway, she’s in the cells, charged, squealing about the injustice of it all and full of her rights. She’ll appear before the Sheriff on Monday, tomorrow.’
‘Very good. Not bailed?’
Montgomerie shook his head. ‘Last time she jumped bail and fled south, remained submerged for months until she was picked up in London for shoplifting.’
‘She’ll never learn, and still only eighteen.’
‘Unreal. She says it’s safer than working the street and pays just as well.’ Montgomerie pulled on the cigarette. ‘There was a domestic burglary in Hyndland, one hell of a neat job. They had smashed a beautiful stained glass window to gain entry, but after that, it was neat. Stole the video recorder, cameras, watches, but didn’t vandalize the house. Some consolation for the home owner, but not much. That’s still to be visited by Forensic’
‘All right.’
‘And that’s about it.’ Montgomerie stood. ‘It was quiet for the CID. Uniform boys have been busy, cells are crowded with neds with hangovers.’
‘Just another Saturday.’
‘That’s it.’ Montgomerie put his coat on. ‘Have fun,’ he said, and left the room.
Sussock read over the files ‘on hold’, made coffee, opened the Sunday paper.
His phone rang. He picked it up.
‘Sussock.’
‘Controller, sir. Code 41. West Nile Street and Sauchiehall Lane. PC Hamilton and Tango Delta Foxtrot currently in attendance. CID presence requested.’
Sussock paused, absorbing the implications. ‘I’m on my way,’ he said, and replaced the handset.
‘Any ID?’ Sussock peered at the body; the pale, wasted look on the dead youth’s face was to stay with Sussock for some time. He had the immediate impression that death had made only the slightest alteration to the youth’s pallor.
Hamilton confessed that he had not checked for any ID.
‘Well, you could look in his jacket pockets without disturbing him too much, could you not?’
Hamilton did so, crouching as he did. He stood and shook his head. ‘Nothing at all, Sarge.’
‘It was worth a try,’ he said, as an orange bus whined down West Nile Street. The police activity was causing passengers’ heads to turn. ‘The rest of his pockets will have to wait until we get him to the mortuary. That will be a matter of minutes, I’d say. Dr Chan’s on his way. He’s apparently attending a sudden death in Springburn.’
Hamilton shuffled his feet. ‘Two sudden deaths and it’s still not nine a.m. And a Sunday, too.’
Sussock scowled at Hamilton. It was not, he thought, not at all like the young constable to be cynical. Behind him, Sussock heard a car door open and shut with a solid thud. The mobile patrol officer had taken a blanket out of the rear of the car.
‘It’s getting a wee bit public, Sarge,’ he said, as he passed Sussock and walked towards the corpse. ‘The city’s beginning to wake up.’ He unfolded the blanket and laid it over the body. The constable had done this before, most probably to victims 6{ road accidents, as is often the lot of mobile patrol officers. Sussock was angry with himself; the action of the officer was something he should have thought of and requested.
Sussock turned and walked to the far end of Sauchiehall Lane. He strolled more than walked, not really undertaking a painstaking inch by inch search of the cobbles and the doorways and the car-parking ‘inshots’ that he knew would be done later by a team of constables, walking side by side, crouching side by side if necessary, inching forward on their haunches. On this occasion Sussock wanted only to cover the ground from one end of the alley to the other, to conduct a preliminary sweep; he wanted to do something because he should not have had to wait for a uniformed constable to remember to cover the corpse with a blanket. He walked towards the far end of the alley, establishing for himself the nature of the terrain and topography of the locus of the offence, to undertake a brief but wide search, hoping to find something obvious, something relevant…
Like a knife.
It was an ordinary five-inch-bladed kitchen knife, with a silver blade and a wooden handle. There is one, or a rack of similar knives, in every home in the city, which fact goes a long way to explaining why the kitchen knife with the five-inch blade is Scotland’s number one murder weapon. As in the rest of the western world, murders in Scotland are most often grubby, spontaneous and domestic; an argument in the kitchen between husband and wife can and, in Sussock’s long experience, often did escalate until one or other partner reached for a weapon while in a state of uncontrollable anger; a frying-pan, a rolling-pin, a knife…
On this occasion the knife lay under the wall of the building on the left side of the alley that was Sussock’s left as he walked along with West Nile Street behind him. It lay on the same side of Sauchiehall Lane as did the corpse, by now properly covered by an orange blanket. The knife was stained from the tip of the blade to the hilt with dark, almost black, dried congealed blood. Sussock turned and shouted to Hamilton.
‘Productions bag from the car, please.’
Hamilton brought up the bag, a twelve-inch square bag of clear cellophane, self-sealing at the opening.
‘Anything, Sarge?’ he said, handing the bag to Sussock.
‘One knife, laddie.’ Sussock kneeled and, taking the knife gingerly between thumb and middle finger, picked it up and placed it in the bag. He folded down the seal and handed the bag to Hamilton. ‘Put it in the car, please,’ he said. ‘And label it, of course.’
‘Of course, Sarge,’ said Hamilton.
Sussock continued to stroll the length of Sauchiehall Lane, searching the ground f
rom side to side as he did so. He noted muck, empty cans, a dead pigeon torn and savaged probably not by a cat but more likely by a fox, which is not by any means an uncommon sight in Glasgow during the empty hours of the night. He noticed fish supper wrappers, pizza wrappers, used and discarded condoms, signs of attempted entry into buildings, signs of actual entry into a car somewhat recklessly left overnight in the Lane, but he noticed nothing else of obvious relevance or significance to the apparent Code 41 which was the orange mound some two hundred feet behind him. Sussock reached the summit and looked along the remainder of the Lane where he saw the second officer of the mobile patrol standing a lonely guard at the end of the Lane where it was intersected by Renfield Street. Sussock continued to stroll, seeing more clearly as the sky melted from grey to blue; he observed as he went, searching the cobbles, the window ledges, the doorways, but not actually venturing into the recesses off the Lane where cars were parked mid-week; these, he knew, would be thoroughly searched later in the morning.
Eventually he reached the end of the Lane and stood beside the second officer of the mobile patrol. In front of them Sauchiehall Lane cut a deep canyon, intersecting three more streets until it terminated at Elmbank Street. The entire length would probably be searched, thought Sussock; the position of the knife indicated to him that the murderer had stabbed his victim at the West Nile Street entrance of Sauchiehall Lane and had then run—Sussock presumed he had run—into the Lane rather than up or down West Nile Street, and had escaped into the grid system and into the city at any major road along Sauchiehall Lane from Renfield Street to Elmbank Street. The murderer would have made his way down Sauchiehall Lane at a hell for leather run, or by creeping softly from shadow to shadow to shadow. As he went, running or creeping, but a run Sussock thought would be more likely, he discarded the weapon in a panic. The knife had lain there as if flung away; a man moving stealthily does not do things in a panic. The murder itself seemed to be opportunistic and impulsive, probably as a result of an alcohol-induced frenzy, because anyone who would plan a murder carefully would dispose of the weapon carefully.
And Did Murder Him Page 1