Where the Dead Men Go

by Liam McIlvanney

  Where the Dead Men Go

  Liam McIlvanney

  For Andrew

  ‘Do you never listen to the news?

  You want to get down to something true,

  Something a little nearer home.’

  Paul Muldoon, ‘Lunch with Pancho Villa’

  Prologue

  You wake in the half-light, fleetingly lost, the strange room assembling itself, the extra bed, the smudgy big mirror, the pitch-dark desk and chair. From the strip of sky between the half-closed curtains you can tell that you’ve barely slept, a matter of minutes, the lightest doze. You are lying on top of the bed in your clothes, no sound except the breath in your nostrils. If you closed your eyes right now you would sleep.

  This is how it affects you. Some people get wired, jumpy, they can’t settle till it’s under way. With you it’s different, your heart-rate slows, your breathing shallows, your body seems to be shutting down in stages.

  You rise from the bed and draw the curtains.

  The room is on the fourteenth floor and looks out onto traffic, eight lanes of motorway in a deep concrete trench, a tangle of slipways and off-ramps and flyovers. You watch them shifting lanes, the cars and buses, the big boxy lorries, busy in both directions. Wherever they are headed they will hear it tonight, in their living rooms, on their kitchen radios, the thing you are about to do.

  Beyond the motorway is a school. The playground is bare. Light glints off the puddles on the sagging bitumen roof. Off to the right you see the spires of the West End, the snow-topped Campsie Fells. To the left is the river and the great shape of the crane, the vast hammerhead structure, a handgun trained on the city.

  You imagine how a tourist would see it, what a tourist would notice, watching from this window. After all this time away, your years of exile from these begrudging streets, you’re a tourist here too.

  In the shower you drag a razor up your shins, the smooth skin gleaming in the overhead spots. Then you stand for a while under the spray, let the water punish your bowed head, fall in runnels off your limbs.

  Afterwards, you dress in a thick white bathrobe and use its fluffy cuff to rub a porthole in the steamed-up mirror. Your things are laid out along a shelf of frosted glass and you use them in turn, ending with a dull red lipstick that you blot on a plucked square of tissue that floats down into the waste-paper basket.

  Your eyebrows are a mess but you lack the energy to fix them.

  Your clothes are laid out on the bed. As you smooth the ten-denier over your legs a hangnail catches but as the run is high up on the thigh, it won’t matter. You button the midnight blue wet-look blouse, slip the side-split black pencil skirt over your hips, fumble for the zip. With two hands you flip your hair over the fake-fur collar of the short wool jacket.

  You step into your heels, feel your skirt tighten against your buttocks, your calves stiffen as the tendons strain. Facing the full-length mirror you look at yourself as a stranger would, twisting your head, frowning, appraising. You have seen better, you have seen worse. It’s cold out there so you knot a silk scarf at your throat, lean forward to check your front teeth for lipstick.

  You are almost ready. Almost but not quite. You cross to the safe and key in the number, take the Model 36 from its folded rag. You set it on the desk where the light from the window traces the contours of the blued steel, the grooved cylinder, the fuzzy strip on the barrel where the serial number’s been filed away.

  The cylinder carries five rounds. You stand them up on the desk like little lipsticks, the gold tubes with the blunt-edged copper-coloured heads. Semi-wadcutter .38 Specials. You slot them home, snap the cylinder shut.

  You heft it by the wooden grip, watching your ghost in the mirror. The two-inch barrel makes it look like a toy. You need to get close, with a barrel this short, five yards or closer, point and shoot, no sighting, no headshots, aim for the torso. But not so close that the target can jump you, kick it loose, smack the gun from your hand.

  The revolver fits snugly in your handbag, the little square purse on its thin leather strap. You put it in now, slip the bag on your shoulder. It weighs a lot but looks normal.

  You cross to the window again. Parents are gathering at the gates, little clusters of mums, the dads standing sparely alone, busy with their mobiles. School will be out soon, the kids in winter jackets and hats, scattering, running, buoyed up by the early dark, the nearness of the holidays.

  You close the curtains, lie on the bed, your heels on the satiny coverlet, your hand on the bag at your side.

  Twenty minutes from now you will leave the hotel. There is a taxi-rank by the hotel entrance but you will walk the three hundred yards to Central Station. You will enter the station by the side entrance and exit by the main front doors, where another line of taxis waits. One of these will be yours.

  Inside the cab you will smooth your skirt, settle your handbag beside you on the seat. You will smile at the driver’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. You will give an address. You will sit well back and watch the streets spool past, the festive city, the Christmassy windows, the shoppers and partygoers, the women with buggies, the buskers, the bucket-rattling charity collectors in their Santa hats. There will be time to sort it out later, how you feel about this, a time to keep and a time to cast away.

  The address you will give is three blocks short of your destination.

  Chapter One

  ‘You think it’s deliberate? Do they time these things to fuck us up?’

  Driscoll was shaking his head. A dummy was up on the screen, tomorrow’s splash, my first front page in a month: Yes Camp Poll Boost. A YouGov survey pegged support for independence at forty per cent, up five points since June. The real poll – the one that mattered, the be-all-end-all referendum – was still two years off but the shadow war would keep us in headlines till then. Assuming the paper survived that long.

  On screen was a headshot of Malcolm Gordon, the Nationalist First Minister, with his schoolboy haircut and lopsided grin, looking like the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo. ‘Who’d bet against him?’ was the caption, a quote from an unnamed Westminster frontbencher. There was a sidebar giving analysis of the figures and a paragraph of comment from a rent-a-quote politics boffin at Strathclyde Uni. The page was toast anyway, if Driscoll got his way.

  ‘You’d start to take it personal. Jesus. Do they time it to fuck us up?’

  He ran a hand through his too-long hair, rubbed the back of his neck.

  ‘They timed it to coincide with a football match, Jimmy.’

  Driscoll scowled at me. My eyes were suddenly stinging: Maguire’s acrid perfume. She’d been upstairs for a meeting. Sixth floor. The suits.

  She held up her hand as Driscoll started to speak.

  ‘Gerry.’ She never even looked Driscoll’s way. ‘This shooting. What do you think?’

  Driscoll sagged. He looked away, shaking his head, and then back at me. Blank, bagged eyes. Slack jowls. Roll of belly over the waistband.

  ‘It’s an inside lead, Fiona.’ I spoke to Maguire but looked at Driscoll. ‘Page six. Four at best. What do we know at this stage anyway? A guy’s been shot on a football field. “Gang-related.” That’s it. Nothing’s coming out between now and deadline.’ I shrugged. ‘Lift it from the wire. Top and tail it. No one’s scooping us on this.’

  My eldest son had a piping competition that afternoon in Ayrshire. I’d promised him I would make it. Try to make it. Once I filed my copy I was finished for the day.

  ‘Six?’ Driscoll was shaking his head. ‘Fucking six? This is the splash, Fiona. The Mail will fucking bury us with this.’ He turned to me. ‘No one scooping us? It’s all over Twitter, photos from the locus.’

  Maguire frowned at the s
creen. Before she got the big chair, Maguire had been news editor. She’d done Driscoll’s job for seven years. But the game was different now. You couldn’t appeal to precedents. We were dropping five per cent, month on month, year on year. There were no precedents for where we were now.

  ‘Make the call, Fiona.’ Peter Davidson spoke, production editor, hovering at our shoulders. ‘We’re off-stone by eight. Make a fucking decision.’

  This was Glasgow. This was the Trib. We’d like to be quality, the paper of record. We’d like to cover the world from a West of Scotland perspective, reporting far-flung conflicts from every angle and on every front. Correspondents in five continents. But we didn’t have any money. And the readers we retained had other priorities. Celtic and Rangers. The Neils and the Walshes. The city’s tribal battles, on and off the pitch. That was our métier. Bigotry and violence. Football and crime. Maguire had been upstairs, talking numbers. The current figures had just come out. I didn’t know what they were but I knew they weren’t good.

  I sympathised with Maguire. The last editor I worked for at the Trib – the guy who fired me four years back – was Norman Rix, a cheerful brutal Cockney who did his stint among the Jocks and went back home to edit the Indy. Between Rix and Maguire the Trib had gone through three editors. Time was, Tribune eds reigned like monarchs – whole epochs passed by under one man’s dispensation. Now they were football managers, turn it round in eight or nine months or face the bullet. It made them nervous, made them prone to bad decisions.

  ‘It’s page one. Gerry, you’re on it.’

  Driscoll wheeled away, the smirk of glory pasted to his face.

  ‘Fiona.’

  Maguire was already walking, striding past the sportsdesk.

  ‘You’re on it, Gerry. Take a snapper.’

  ‘And the splash?’

  I was almost trotting beside her, the caustic perfume sizzling in my airways.

  ‘It’s not the splash any more,’ she said. ‘It’s page four. Subs’ll finish it.’

  ‘Fiona, come on.’ I glanced over at Moir’s empty chair. ‘This isn’t mine. At least let me try and get hold of him again.’

  ‘Gerry, you’re not listening.’ She nodded at the empty chair. ‘Your mate’s AWOL. Again. But Martin Moir’s whereabouts is my problem. Your problem – one of your problems, your most immediately pressing problem – is to get this story.’

  ‘Aye but, Fiona—’

  She stopped in her tracks, turned to face me, fists on hips. Here we go, I thought. I could see it in her eyes before she opened her mouth.

  ‘This is the gig, Gerry. If you didn’t want it, why’d you come back?’

  She stared in my face for a count of three and then bounced into her office.

  ‘I must have missed you,’ I said to her freshly slammed door.

  I slumped into my chair, took a pull of lukewarm Volvic. I looked around the floor. Neve McDonald was scowling at her screen, her burgundy lips primly twisted. Kev Carson at the sportsdesk was hunched over his keyboard, fingers stabbing, his nose six inches from the screen. I craned round in my seat. All across the newsroom, the heads were bent, the fingers busy. The insect tick of keyboards, the patient drone of Sky News. It must have been somebody’s birthday: a little string of balloons was pinned to a partition over by Accounts.

  Why did you come back? In various forms and inflections, this question had dogged me for the past year, since I threw up my life on the run at Bluestone Media and shuffled backwards along the escape tunnel to my cell at the Tribune on Sunday. Fiona Maguire posed it most weeks, in her snidely rhetorical fashion, but other people were genuinely stumped. The answer wasn’t obvious, to me or to anyone else. Like every Scottish title, the Trib was in freefall, bleeding readers with every quarter. Anyone with a chance to leave seized it. Mostly they went into PR. The world and his managing editor left to set up companies called Impact Media or the Cornerstone Group, each one promising to ‘manage’ a client’s reputation with ‘experience gained at the frontline of news and political reporting’ or ‘skills developed at the pinnacle of British journalism’. I had written some of this horseshit myself: A bespoke team will guide you through the media minefield. We will minimise the impact of negative stories.

  I’d been back six weeks when the paper was sold to an American media conglomerate. Lay-offs started soon after. Now the empty workstations dotted the newsroom like foreclosed houses.

  Often, when a workstation went suddenly bare, I could no longer picture its occupant. The colleague whose Blu-tacked snaps of ringletted twins or bounding black labs had clogged their monitor’s rim, whose summer suit jackets and winter coats had draped their chair-back, who offered tight little smiles and theatrical shows of professional briskness when you stood behind them in the queue for the fax machine or the copier; that person was now a ghost. I felt bad about this, but who could you ask? It was like the Disappeared in Chile or Argentina, people vanishing overnight, leaving oddly stark chairs and denuded blue partitions, and we carried on as if nothing had happened.

  There was one empty chair that stood out from the rest, a chair that marked a presence, not an absence. This was the chair of Martin Moir, the King of Crime, Investigations Editor for the Tribune on Sunday, Scottish Journalist of the Year in 2009 and 2010 and probably – the envelope would be opened at the Radisson Hotel in a fortnight’s time – 2011 as well. The chair was empty because he was out on the job, rooting out stories and standing them up, boosting the circ, saving our jobs. The chair was empty because he was out on the piss, lining up voddies and knocking them back, missing his deadlines, risking our jobs.

  I slugged some more water and watched the snow clouds settle on the Campsie Fells. Moir was a mate – the best mate I had. Stories, fights, five-a-side football triumphs, five-a-side football disasters, lost weekends: we’d shared a lot and went back a long way. When Moir first came to the paper I looked out for him, fed him stories, shared my contacts. For a couple of years we worked as a team. Four years ago in Belfast he saved my life. But people change, we both had, and we’d done barely more than pass the time of day since I’d started back at the Trib. Moir was rarely in the building. When he did show up he was curt, aloof; the backhand wave, the guarded nod. Moir was the talent: he didn’t want reminding of the days when he’d featured further down the bill. I didn’t want reminding of them either, truth be told.

  I looked sourly at his workstation. The blinded screen of his iMac. Autumnal foliage of notelets on his partition walls. Papers and books. A can of Diet Coke, open. It had been there since Thursday, the last time Moir’s cosseted arse had parked itself on his blue swivel chair. Beside the can of Coke was a framed photo. His girls; six and four. Perfect. Blonde. Sun in their hair. What did he need their photo for? He got to see them every night.

  I checked the PA wire. Standard shtick from a ‘police spokesperson’: We are investigating the fatal shooting of a 26-year-old man in the East End of Glasgow at 11.20 this morning. The man was pronounced dead at Glasgow Royal Infirmary. This shocking incident took place in broad daylight in a busy public park. We are appealing for anyone with information, no matter how irrelevant it may seem, to contact us.

  No point calling Pitt Street. What I needed was a proper cop, not a desk-clerk with a 2.1 in media relations from a former poly. A proper cop: A source close to the investigation revealed. What I needed was Moir’s tame cop. All the crime boys had them. You couldn’t write the stories Moir did without a cop in your pocket. Maguire, then? Maguire still had contacts. I could knock on her door and ask but I sensed, somehow, that this was a test, that she needed me to fail, prove to us both that my days at the sharp end were finished. I was on my own.

  Elaine answered on the second ring. The kitchen phone, I thought: she’ll be fixing lunch. She didn’t ask why I was phoning. She didn’t need to. She didn’t say anything, just a rasping sigh then she called his name. Roddy knew, too; the way he said ‘Dad?’ when he answered. I didn’t tell him I would make it u
p to him because you can’t. You don’t make it up with cinema tickets or a football strip or a new game for the Nintendo. You make it up with time. You put in the hours. It’s that or nothing.

  ‘Will I still see you tomorrow?’

  ‘Try and stop me. What are you playing?’

  ‘Today? Bloody Fields of Flanders.’

  ‘You got it down?’

  ‘I think so. Want to hear it on the chanter?’

  Driscoll was crossing the newsroom, hard eyes, set mouth. I swivelled my chair round to face the screen.

  ‘Not right now, son. That’s a good choice, though. Play an easy tune well not a hard tune badly, that’s the ticket. Watch the grace notes.’

  ‘Okay, Dad.’

  I opened my desk drawer, started raking through the debris, the old memory sticks and Post-its, bulldog clips and lidless biros, index cards and telemessage sheets, the paper hankies, strips of aspirin. Lewicki’s number was in here somewhere, this month’s number. I’d lost my phone the week before, the trusty Nokia, my contacts gone. Such as they were. A stack of business cards and two ancient address books stood on my desk. I was transferring the numbers in my spare time in batches of eight or ten, tapping them into the iPhone I bought in a fit of up-to-dateness.

  Driscoll appeared at my desk, breathing through his nose. I could see his belly out of the corner of my eye, resting on the desk. I kept looking for the scrap of paper, swept my hand through the drawer, made as much noise as I could. He spoke softly.

  ‘Want to tell me what that was about?’

  Nothing was easy with Driscoll. The prick bore grudges from previous papers, previous lives. He hated me. He hated me because I took the big stories straight to Maguire. It’s what everyone does but Driscoll took it as a personal slight.

  ‘It’s called a professional disagreement, Jimmy. Never had one?’

  ‘Telling me how to do my job?’