And Did Murder Him

by Turnbull, Peter

  He survived in the old house largely because of the shift system which meant that he was able to sleep during the day when the house was at its quietest, but mainly he survived because he had to. At an age when most men are moving gracefully and with dignity and gratitude towards retirement, comfortably financially consolidated, he was fighting noise in a cramped room within a house which was populated by children. It was no place for a man of his years.

  He grew hungry. He rose from the chair and descended the vast staircase to the kitchen. Fortunately it was empty.

  Empty of people, empty of youths crushing and pushing and jostling. Beyond the kitchen, down steep steps and around a dark corner was the landlord’s lair. For the first few weeks of Sussock’s residence in the huge building, the landlord, a humpbacked, shuffling, sniffling Pole with a Belsen gaze in his eyes, had always seemed to creep up from nowhere, emerging out of the shadows and disappearing back into the gloom and recesses and would especially appear each Saturday morning, hand outstretched. Sussock had always assumed that the man let himself silently into the building, sliding a well-oiled key into a heavily oiled lock. Then, one day, Sussock had occasion to ask the shuffling Pole for a lightbulb and was coldly summoned to the kitchen and then summoned to follow the man down the steps and around the corner, and he thought he was being led to a storeroom. He had always assumed that the landlord lived in sumptuous elegance in Bearsden, among the ancient tribe of Volvo and Mercedes, but in the deep basement of the house he was astounded to find no store room but rather where the landlord and his fat wife lived, not unlike Jack Spratt and spouse. In the landlord’s room was a table and four upright chairs; a television stood on the draining-board of the sink unit. At the table sat the landlord’s wife and she blinked disapprovingly at Sussock from the gloom of this room in which they existed during the daytime. At night they evidently retired to the room beyond, in which Sussock could see a double bed and nothing else, there being little room for anything else. The landlord had handed Sussock a 60 watt lightbulb and nodded for him to go. So he went, round the dark corner and up the steep steps into the kitchen. He didn’t like them, they lived a dim, spartan existence and they had a cold, ungiving attitude, but their living conditions were no better than those of their tenants. No matter what their shortcomings, no one could level a charge of hypocrisy against them.

  That incident had taken place much earlier in his residence and now, in the blessedly empty kitchen, Sussock still on a voyage of discovery about the house, found that someone had pilfered his food. He had learned earlier that it was a fatal mistake to keep a large stock of food in a shared kitchen, but to take his last teabag, his last piece of cheese, his last can of beans, all of which had been present when he had last visited the kitchen less than twenty-four hours ago, was too bad.

  He went back up to his room. He pulled on his battered raincoat and equally battered old trilby. He glanced into his wardrobe; just subsistence clothing really, mostly winter clothing. Pretty soon he’d need summer clothing. He locked his door and went to Byres Road and bought a quarter-pounder with cheese, coffee and a Danish. Hardly substantial, but it filled a gap. He walked back up to the old house where it nestled behind the trees and got into his old Ford. He drove to the other side of the water, to Rutherglen, just as darkness came and a light drizzle fell diagonally across the yellow sodium street lamps.

  Monday night. Glasgow in the rain.

  Richard King drove to the squat on Belmont Street. He parked the battered police department heap in a wet gutter and once again smelled the dampness of the houses at the bottom end of the street. To his right as he approached the door of the squat were the bright lights of Great Western Road shimmering in the drizzle, the bars, the fish and chip shop, the kebab takeaway, the trendy shops selling knick-knacks, the charity shops selling second-hand clothing. He noticed a lot of young people about here, denim and long hair, many of whom carried the musty smell of bedsit land about with them. King walked up the short, greasy, slippery path and rapped on the door of the squat. It was opened, but only eventually, and even then with a leisureliness which King thought was just a spit short of contempt.

  ‘You going to feel my collar again?’ asked Sadie Kelly, aged seventeen, Irish, who still looked thirteen.

  ‘Not unless you give me a good reason to do so,’ said King. ‘Are you?’

  ‘Am I what?’

  ‘Going to give me a good reason to feel your collar?’

  ‘Hadn’t planned to,’ said the short Irish girl. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘I’d like to come in,’ King. said. ‘I’d like a chat about a few things.’

  Sadie Kelly hesitated. King looked behind her into the gloomy hallway. A figure scurried dimly in the dark. She was there to stall the law.

  ‘Do you have a warrant?’

  ‘I can get one.’ He pushed past her.

  Sadie Kelly let out a howl of protest. King turned.

  ‘Enough of your game-playing. Besides, it’s cold and wet outside. In here it’s only cold.’ The figure continued to scurry upstairs. ‘You!’ King snapped. ‘You! Down here!’

  The figure hesitated and then turned and stood on the stairway.

  ‘Lights on!’ King addressed Sadie Kelly.

  She hesitated.

  ‘Lights!’ King allowed an edge to creep into his voice. Sadie Kelly turned, extended an arm and switched on the light switch which King saw was loosely attached to the damp plaster. He thought that if the building did not fall down it would likely burn down, and if it didn’t burn down the occupants would eventually electrocute themselves. Some building. Even the floorboards felt spongy underfoot. He turned to the figure on the stair, who in the sudden flood of light was revealed as a boy of about nineteen or twenty. He had a thin and wasted appearance and King by now would not have been surprised if the boy was in fact a man of thirty. The boy was not a member of the household that King had previously encountered.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Nick,’ said the youth, blinking.

  ‘Nick who?’

  ‘McQueen. Nick McQueen.’

  ‘Where are you from, Nick McQueen?’

  ‘Clydebank.’

  ‘All right, come down and join us, Nick McQueen from Clydebank.’

  McQueen descended the stair and stood in the hallway underneath the dim naked lightbulb. Close up, he seemed to be about Sadie Kelly’s age, about seventeen.

  ‘Who else is in the house?’

  ‘No one,’ said Sadie Kelly.

  ‘Just us,’ said Nick McQueen.

  ‘Big house for just two people.’

  ‘Well, there was a bit more of us until a couple of days ago,’ said Sadie Kelly. ‘Besides, we can’t live in all of it. The top floor is like a no-go-area—the roof pretty well doesn’t exist—and the lower floors are overrun with mice.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nick McQueen. ‘It’s a bit empty now. There were five of us until a few days ago; now there’s two. There was Veronica, there was Eddie and there was Shane. Eddie’s dead, you’ve got Shane in the gaol, and Veronica has just disappeared. She just left. She came like that, just walked in off” the street with two plastic bags full of possessions wound round each wrist, saying she heard that there were rooms here. She took the only liveable room left, a small room on the first floor, at the back. Damp, I mean damp, but not as damp as other parts of the house. She slept on a mattress that was rotten underneath.’

  ‘When did she leave?’

  ‘About a week ago. Maybe less. She was kind of posh.’

  ‘She’d been at university,’ said Sadie Kelly. ‘She was a law student.’

  ‘She’d dropped out,’ said Nick McQueen. ‘Dropped out of the University, dropped in here and dropped out again. We never knew her second name.’

  ‘Was she a smack-head too?’

  Silence.

  ‘Come on, do you think I came up the Clyde on a banana boat? I know what’s going on here and I’m not bothered. I’m not
Drug Squad. Like I always say, we can talk here or we can talk at the station. So, was she a druggie like Eddie was, and like Shane who is presently strung out in a cell in Longriggend, and like you two are?’

  ‘Yes, she was,’ said Sadie Kelly.

  Nick McQueen remained silent and looked disappointedly at Sadie Kelly.

  ‘OK,’ said King. ‘I’m glad we’ve established that. So what was the connection between Eddie Wroe and Shane Dodemaide?’

  ‘They were mates,’ said Nick McQueen. ‘They were really good mates. Shane wouldn’t have stabbed Eddie.’

  ‘So who did?’

  Nick McQueen shrugged his shoulders. ‘Don’t know, but it wasn’t Shane.’

  ‘When did you last see Eddie?’

  ‘Saturday morning. He went out. Said he had to go and see someone and then he was going to look for Veronica.’

  ‘Why would he want to do that?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t he?’ said McQueen, somewhat to King’s annoyance.

  ‘Let’s get this clear. Are you telling me that there was something going on between Eddie Wroe and the mysterious Veronica, surname unknown?’

  ‘Yes.’ Sadie Kelly shuffled her feet. ‘See, Veronica was a classy chick. She came here strung out and Eddie gave her some horse. She just got into the habit of nipping him for it.’

  ‘Nipping him?’

  ‘Sleeping with him. If she slept with him, he gave her all the horse she needed—well, not all. He kept her strung out a wee bit, kept her hungry. She went along with it, otherwise she’d have had to work the street like I have to. She was a classier piece than ever he could pull, I mean wealthy background, nice way of speaking, good looks, tall, everything in proportion, black hair. She was a real dark-haired beauty with track marks running down her arms and legs, and wrists like Crew Junction. She’d tried to top herself at some point.’

  ‘So Eddie was a bit put out that Veronica had walked out on him,’ said King. ‘So he went looking for her?’

  ‘Most every day. Last time he went out looking for her was Saturday there. Next thing we knew, Shane got buckled last night for his murder. Doesn’t add up, sure it doesn’t.’

  ‘So, no bad blood between Eddie and Shane?’

  ‘No, not that I was aware of,’ said Sadie Kelly.

  ‘Nor me,’ said Nick McQueen.

  ‘What about Veronica and Eddie or Veronica and Shane? Anything there?’

  ‘Nothing to speak of. Rows like any couple, but nothing really serious. He never battered her, so he didn’t.’

  ‘I’d like to see their rooms.’

  King’s request was met with a stony and sullen silence. He looked hard at Sadie Kelly and raised his eyebrows. Sadie Kelly turned and went upstairs. King followed her. Nick McQueen followed King. Sadie Kelly opened a door on a gloomy landing.

  ‘This,’ she said, ‘is where Eddie lived.’ She stood aside and allowed King to enter the room. He switched the light on. He thought that the occupant of the room had lived an empty life. He had seen it all before. The inevitable mattress on the floor, the dirty, crumpled sheets and blankets and a blue sleeping-bag and cheap clothing strewn around the floor made the room look like a stall in Paddy’s market. He noticed that some of the clothing was female clothing.

  ‘Veronica didn’t take all her clothing?’ he said. ‘So she left in a bit of a hurry after all?’

  ‘I hadn’t noticed them,’ said Sadie, with a predatory gleam in her eye.

  King crossed the room to a chest of drawers and pulled the drawers open one by one, bottom to top. The first three drawers contained radios and hi-fis torn from the fascias of cars and attested to the method by which the late Eddie Wroe raised money to feed his habit. The top drawer contained the deceased’s ‘works’, hypodermic syringes with broken rusty needles and a series of packages of tightly wrapped tinfoil. He hesitantly and delicately began to sift through the papers at the bottom of the drawer, beyond the hypodermics. One sheet of paper was a pale yellow summons to appear before the Glasgow Sheriff Court to answer a charge of theft by opening lockfast premises. A second piece of paper clipped to the summons was a letter from a firm of solicitors, Bentley and Co., Bath Street, advising E. Wroe, Esq. of details of an appointment to discuss the forthcoming appearance before the Glasgow Sheriff. King shut the drawer.

  ‘I’ve clocked the radios in there,’ he said. ‘We’ll be round later to recover them as stolen property, as yet of unidentified ownership.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Sadie disinterestedly, still casting a keenly anticipatory eye over Veronica’s clothing.

  ‘We expect them still to be here when we return.’

  ‘They’ll be here,’ said McQueen with a voice of calm assurance.

  ‘Good. Where did Shane Dodemaide sleep?’

  ‘He’ll show you,’ said Sadie Kelly, advancing on Veronica’s abandoned clothing.

  Nick McQueen showed King to a second room further into the gloom of the long landing. King found the room to be a virtual carbon copy of Eddie Wroe’s room. Two empty lives living out of each other’s rooms. Again female clothing lay among the male clothing.

  ‘Veronica nip Shane Dodemaide as well?’ asked King.

  ‘Reckon she must have done,’ said Nick McQueen. ‘I mean, it was either that or the street. I reckon Sadie will clean up after her. She doesn’t have much in the way of clothing and it’s cold in here at nights. Sadie doesn’t get a lot of new clothing. She doesn’t get a lot of new anything.’

  King said, ‘Show me Veronica’s room.’

  McQueen said, ‘Why?’

  ‘Just do it.’

  ‘Veronica’s room was even more naked than the rooms of Eddie Wroe or Shane Dodemaide. Just a mattress on the floor and a torn and crumpled sleeping-bag. A cardboard box contained an old woollen jumper. Presumably, thought King, it was the one item of abandoned clothing that Sadie Kelly did not require. He crossed the soft bare floorboards and opened a cupboard door. Empty. He approached the window but didn’t go right up to it, being conscious of the rear wall of the property just two doors away which had collapsed in the night, hingeing from the bottom like a solid sheet of brickwork. He looked out on to the bridge that was Kelvinbridge, the Academy and the lights of Great Western Road. ‘So what happened to Veronica?’

  McQueen said, ‘Like I told you. She just left.’

  ‘Did you see her go?’

  ‘Well, no.’

  ‘Anybody see her go?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you know what her second name is, or was?’

  ‘No. She was just Veronica.’

  ‘Some help you are, Nick McQueen of Clydebank.’

  McQueen shrugged his shoulders.

  King opened his notebook and took out his ballpoint. ‘So her name is or was Veronica. Age?’

  ‘Twenties.’

  ‘Early or late? The twenties are a fast time of life.’

  ‘Early, I suppose.’

  ‘You suppose.’ King scribbled in the notebook. ‘When did she come to live here?’

  ‘Two months ago. In the middle of winter.’

  ‘And she left last week?’

  ‘Aye, sometime last week.’

  ‘And she was a smack-head?’

  ‘Aye, she shot up two, three times a day. She didn’t work the street, sort of too well born for that, but she was sliding that way, they all end up on the street sooner or later if they don’t have a supply from another source.’

  ‘But she did?’

  ‘Seemed like it: Eddie or Shane.’

  ‘Or both. But not from you?’

  ‘She didn’t want it from me,’ he said with a note of disappointment.

  ‘Tell me about her wrists.’

  ‘Like Sadie said, they were criss-crossed like Crew Junction. Fairly old scar tissue though, no sign of stitching. She must have tried to top herself a good few years ago. It wasn’t a recent attempt.’

  ‘You some kind of expert?’

  McQueen pulled up his right shirts
leeve and showed King his own wrist; it was criss-crossed with a series of linear scars. ‘It was a bit like that,’ he said.

  ‘Point taken,’ said King. ‘How old is that?’

  ‘Three years.’

  ‘OK. But she never did anything like that here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What else do you know about her?’

  ‘What else do you want to know?’

  King paused. He drew breath and exhaled it. ‘Where did she come from? She didn’t just walk in off the street.’

  ‘I think Shane brought her here, either Shane or Eddie, one or the other. Gave her the spare room, traded smack for her body.’

  Above them the roof leaked.

  King left the squat, thinking only of the warmth of his own home, of the warmth of Rosemary, his beloved wife, of Ian, their young son, of how his life and the quality therein contrasted with the ‘no light at the end of the tunnel’ meaningless and empty existence of the Sadie Kellys and the Nick McQueens of this world. He turned his collar up against the rain and walked to where he had parked the car. The car was a battered Ford and it was a pig to start in the damp. It fired on the fourth attempt. King gunned the engine and drove down through Kelvinbridge to Gibson Street and down Kelvin Way, passing the sad lonely boys hunching under umbrellas waiting for pick-up, each eyeing him hopefully as he swished past. It was at sudden, fleeting, times like this that he realized that he loved his wife, their child and their home very much indeed.

  He parked the car at the rear of P Division police station and walked into the building by the rear ‘Staff Only’ door. In the office that he shared with Montgomerie and the keen-as-mustard Abernethy, both at present out, he peeled off’ his raincoat, shaking the globules of moisture on to the carpet, and hung the dripping garment on a peg behind the door. He sat at his desk and read the notes that he had made before compiling his report. Only one point to bring out from his visit to Shane Dodemaide’s twilight and underprivileged background: the manner of Shane Dodemaide’s father’s death and, following that, his mother impressing upon her children how to hold a knife by the handle with the blade upright and beside and behind them as they walked until it became second nature to them. Something in that. King thought, something very possibly relevant. Unknown to him, he was beginning to hone to perfection the policeman’s facility that Fabian Donoghue privately referred to as his ‘inner voice’. Don’t ask where it comes from, don’t question it, just listen to it. All good cops have it.