Where the Dead Men Go

by Liam McIlvanney

  I found the bit of paper I wanted, stuck it in my shirt pocket.

  ‘Nah, mate.’ I stood up, shouldered into my jacket. ‘Take too long. I’ve got a story to write.’

  As I waited for the lift I tapped the number into my contacts and then tapped to dial. It’s pronounced Levitski. He’s a second-generation Scottish Pole. When I first met him I was the Trib’s crime reporter and Lewicki was working out of Aikenhead Road. Now he was an Agency cop, part of Scotland’s FBI. He carried two mobiles – his Agency smartphone and a pre-paid Motorola for talking to people he shouldn’t have been talking to. He changed the Motorola every month.

  ‘Uh-huh?’ The voice was cagey, he wouldn’t recognise the number.

  ‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘It’s a new phone.’ I didn’t tell him I’d lost the old one: five or six of his former numbers were in the contacts list.

  ‘Okay, Geronimo. Do you and your new phone have a question?’

  ‘We do. This thing out east, Maxton Park: you hear anything?’

  ‘Since when are you back on crime?’

  ‘Since the Boy Wonder went AWOL.’

  ‘This is Moir we’re talking about, your mate Martin?’

  ‘Aye. Except he thinks he’s Dean Martin now. Three-day benders, drunk on the job. Been on the skite since Thursday.’

  ‘Tsk. What’s he got, “issues”?’

  The lift yanked to a halt then eased the final inch. The doors shushed open.

  ‘He’s got a very understanding boss, Jan. That’s what he’s got.’

  ‘Okay, Ger. See what I can do.’

  It was a measure of the city’s struggle with its tabloid image, its lurid heritage of razor kings and hard men, its hatchet fights and ice-cream wars, that a public act of violence struck you first as a piece of theatre. Well, of course, that’s exaggerated, was your reflex response; Glasgow’s not like that any more, it’s an outdated stereotype, it’s not realistic. You had to remind yourself that the crime had actually happened. That a man’s toe-tagged, traumatised frame was laid out on a brushed-steel tray at the City Morgue on the Saltmarket.

  William Swan’s corpse would be heading there now, but the focus for the moment was the scene of the crime: Maxton Park in the city’s East End.

  The duty snapper was next door in the coffee shop: McCann, a new guy, English. I rapped on the window, tapped my wrist. He nodded, rolled his eyes and drained his pail-sized carton of coffee.

  ‘East End,’ I told him. ‘Maxton Park. A shooting. One of Neil’s boys.’

  The sun had gone in and the sky was low as we headed up the Gallowgate in McCann’s Jeep Cherokee. Past the Saracen Head and the shabby cluster of Celtic pubs with their tricolours snapping in the wind. Purple clouds squatting on the Barrowland.

  ‘Christ, it looks like snow.’

  McCann craned out of the windscreen, grunted. Chatty bastard. When I tried to give him directions he cut me short. His ponytail shook when I offered a smoke. I sparked up a Café Crème and punched the button to drop the window. The wind blew the smoke back into the car. McCann shook his head, like he was the only man in the car with someplace he’d rather be. I should have been driving to Ayrshire now instead of playing fireman for Martin Moir.

  ‘It’s a piece of nonsense anyway.’ We were out on the Shettleston Road. ‘I’m supposed to be Politics.’

  McCann frowned out of the window, scanning for street signs.

  ‘This is Politics.’

  The fuck would you know about it, I thought, but he was right. They acted like feuding states, the Neils and the Walshes. Renaissance principalities, petty republics. Mostly it was border skirmishes. Beatings. Arson attacks. Street dealers robbed at knifepoint. But now and then there was a call for grander measures, grievous acts of revenge, the ghosts of 2005 out for a lick of blood.

  McCann was slowing, flicking the indicator.

  ‘Here we are.’

  An apron of grass opened out on our left. The little crowd, cops in yellow jackets, the Mobile Incident Unit like a stranded bus. The quivering ribbons of blue and white tape.

  A cop stepped into the roadway and waved us down. I had my press card out as the window dropped.

  ‘Gerry Conway, Tribune on Sunday.’

  The cop leaned down. Ginger moustache. Wedge of gold between his two front teeth. He looked past me at McCann, who smiled with his lips closed. McCann was wearing his snapper’s vest, all zips and buckles, D-rings and pockets. His camera case was on the floor between the seats.

  ‘OK, lads. Park at this side of the pitch. You know the drill: keep back from the locus.’

  They had taped off the grass, a patch of nothing, ten metres square. A canvas tent had gone up, white, tall, with a pointed roof, like something from a medieval tournament. SOCOs in their white moon-suits were traipsing in and out. An officer guarded each side of the square. Within the tape the detectives stood around with their hands in their pockets, poking at the turf with their dress shoes. They wore dark shirts, metallic ties, black overcoats. As we crossed the grass I spotted Bobby Ireland, a DI from Stewart Street; another guy from Baird Street who I knew but couldn’t name. They looked like Mafiosi at a funeral.

  Behind the far goal was the MIU, a big white trailer with a short row of steps to the door. Another yellow jacket by the steps.

  The chopper was churning the air as McCann strode ahead, appraising the scene, squinting at the sky, rummaging in his shoulder-bag. He was conscious of the onlookers, avoided their eyes. The professional at work. There was a zip to his movements, a military crispness. He fitted a lens. He shot the tent, the SOCOs, the cop in front of the MIU, the football pitch and the high flats.

  He shot the crowd, huddled like some faithful remnant. They seemed to expect this, looking incuriously at the lens or staring morosely into space. The killer liked to haunt such scenes, standing at the edge of the crowd, craning to witness his own absence. It paid to take a picture, just in case.

  And then he was off, sending a curt nod my way as he shouldered his bag of tricks and skedaddled across the park. I envied him his finite task: in, out, squeeze off some shots; the crisp, moist click of the shutter. They would use a frame of a lone cop on tomorrow’s front page, the visored eyes, the resolute jaw, the solitary watcher standing between us and the chaos that takes place on the other side of the incident tape. I would have to turn it into words. I turned up my collar, set off across the freezing grass.

  I spotted Gallacher from the News of the World chatting to one of the cops across the incident tape. In the shadow of the high flats was a news crew, Manda Levitt from Reporting Scotland, sexy-severe, talking to camera. I half-expected Moir to show up, his long dog face and floppy hair. He’d been following this feud so closely for so long he could sense where the next eruption would come. Moir was like a water-diviner for gangland violence. When the last victim – Jason ‘Jackie’ Stewart – was dispatched in an Asda car park, Moir was on the scene within minutes, interviewing witnesses, taking cellphone snaps of the shot-up Audi.

  I should have worn better shoes. I flexed my toes, they were turning numb in my thin-soled oxfords. What was I doing here? Let Moir talk them up, these neds and hard men. A city fixated with hoods and blades. Why add to it? This was terrible journalism, the worst type of pandering. It wasn’t hard, it didn’t take special talent to get murdered in Glasgow. We had the worst per capita homicide rate in Western Europe. You had to travel far – Vilnius, Detroit – for a city that could top us. Thirty killings a year. But the perps weren’t gangsters. They were friends and flatmates, fractious neighbours. They plunged their mates with bread knives at drunken house parties in flare-ups fuelled by supermarket booze. And the victims; what did we give them? A wing column, two pars on an inside page. I spat on the grass, pressed on towards the trailer.

  My plan was to chivvy a quote from the duty detective – it would be warmer in the trailer, at least – and then cab it back to base, but I didn’t make it that far. A teenage boy was coming towards m
e, baseball cap, scarf round the face, hands in the pockets of his snow-white track-top.

  ‘My maw saw it all,’ he said. ‘She saw the whole thing.’

  ‘Aye? Where is she?’

  He pointed at the high flats. ‘Fifth floor. Fucking grandstand view.’ He had his phone out, waved it at me. ‘Want me to see if she’ll talk to you?’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Fifty.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Twenty.’

  I nodded. I stamped the stiffening turf as the boy made his call. How the mighty have fallen. Foreign jollies. They sent me out to Hong Kong in ’97 to cover the handover. I remember the rain. The pipes playing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ as the Black Watch paraded past in their white dress jackets, their spats raising splashes from the flooded esplanade. The piece wrote itself. The massed umbrellas. Patten standing hatless to the rain. A kiltie with a folded Union flag, the pibroch slow and lonely as he stepped across the concourse.

  That’s what I wrote, but what I really remembered was waking the next morning in my tiny stylish hotel room, high above the streets. The rain had stopped. The day was dawning fine – it wasn’t yet six – and below me, ringed by skyscrapers, was a public garden, a little disc of green. It had trees and paths and a children’s playground with little pagoda roofs, and there were people, standing, raising legs and arms in slow, balletic arcs. Even from my window, hundreds of feet in the air, I could sense their composure, the figures in the canvas trousers, baggy shirts; they were self-possessed, indifferent to the rousing city, the new dawn, the fresh dispensation. In the centre of the garden was a pond, a deep green eye, where the tiniest orange smudges flashed and died.

  ‘Big man.’ The boy was loping towards me, waving his mobile. ‘It’s sorted. Come on.’ We set off across the grass to the high flats.

  The lifts were fucked. Rain started falling as we climbed the stairs, big windblown squalls that shook the landing windows. Stink of piss and cooking oil. The walls were finished in some hard metallic render and the slap of our palms on the black plastic handrail echoed round the stairwell.

  Fifth floor. SHEPHERD in yellow on a tiny Perspex nameplate. A short woman in a dark hallway, she grunted at the boy. The boy didn’t stay. I heard him clattering down the stairs as I followed his mum down the hall.

  The living room was cold but I was sweating from the climb. A big window gave onto the pitch. I sat on the sofa opposite her armchair. There was a print above the fireplace, something Highland and greenish, gloomy hills, a fringed cow.

  Her face was puffy and coarse. Lank orange hair. Late fifties. She was wearing a man’s fleece, zipped to the neck, its sleeves folded back into gauntlet cuffs.

  ‘Mrs Shepherd—’

  ‘My name’s Duncan,’ she said.

  ‘Mrs Duncan.’

  I could see my breath. There was a coal-effect electric fire in a fake-brick fireplace, its three bars dead and grey.

  ‘Mrs Duncan, your son tells me you saw the incident?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Suspicious, truculent. She looked too old to be the boy’s mother. Deep creases on her upper lip. Smoker’s face. Giving nothing away.

  ‘Could you describe what happened?’

  I set my Sony UX on the coffee table.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a kind of tape recorder. It saves me having to take notes. Is that alright?’

  She frowned at the black oblong with its glowing orange screen. Her fringe hung down like the cow in the painting.

  ‘Mrs Duncan, I’m not the police. You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to. I thought that was clear.’ I took out my wallet and found a twenty, laid it down beside the UX.

  She looked at the money and stood up, pushed at the too-long sleeves. ‘Come here.’ I followed her to the window. The detectives had gone, but the uniformed cops kept their guard beside the dwindling crowd. The rain had stopped but the droplets shone on the pane.

  ‘That was all in shadow.’ She wiped her hand across the foreground. ‘The sun was out this morning but this bit was in shadow. Most of the folk watching were on the far side, in the sunshine. There was nobody really on this side. Couple of wee boys, just. And the man.’

  ‘You noticed him? You got a good look?’

  ‘Aye. He was standing right there with his hood up. This pointy hood. Kind of scary-looking.’

  ‘You didn’t see his face?’

  The red fringe shook.

  ‘Naw. When the ball got kicked out just here he ran back to get it and the hood came down but he was wearing a hat, a baseball cap and I couldn’t see his face. He got the ball and I thought he would kick it back but he didn’t. He just stood there with his foot on the ball. And when the player came towards him he wanted it back, he was waving for the guy to kick him the ball and then bang, he’s down.’

  She shook her head, slower, seeing it again.

  ‘You see the gun?’

  ‘Naw. I didn’t even know he’d been shot. I heard the noise but I didn’t know what it was. I saw the guy running away and the football fella sat down. He didn’t seem that bothered. Then he’s on his back and the rest of them come running. And ten minutes later the ambulance comes right across the pitch, siren going. I didn’t know he’d been shot till I heard it on the wireless.’

  We stood looking out at the scene, the locus. Not yet four but the light was failing, shadows on the grass, yellow headlights on the Baillieston Road. From this height you could see the tracks in the grass, the ambulance’s treadmarks. The crowd had thinned by now and the yellow jackets stood impassive. The window was turning glassy, reflective. She jerked her chin at my reflection, pushed the hair out of her face.

  ‘That any use to you?’

  ‘Aye.’ We turned back to the room. ‘Tickety-boo.’ I lifted the UX, put a tenner down on top of the twenty.

  I left the flats at a clip. The boy peeled off from a wall and caught up with me, walking in step.

  ‘Go alright, big man? Get what you wanted?’

  I nodded, kept walking.

  ‘Square me up, then? Finder’s fee?’

  ‘Ask your grannie.’

  The mobile rang and I dug it out. Lewicki. He’d spoken to the CID at Baird Street. They were playing it close, Jan said. Wouldn’t tell him anything, just that there was footage, some camcorder shots of the gunman. ‘Watch the late news,’ he told me.

  The rain was coming on again, thickening into sleet. I flagged a cab on the Baillieston Road. I’d had enough of the celebrated Glasgow banter to see me through the winter but it wasn’t finished yet.

  ‘See that carry-on this morning? Guy shot dead on the fitba park?’

  The driver put his wipers up to double speed. The sleet had turned to snow, big flakes streaming at the windscreen, whipping past like stars, like passing galaxies. It gave me a feeling of vertigo, as if the cab was falling through space.

  ‘It was nothing-each when it happened.’ He caught my eye in the mirror and grinned. ‘First shots on target all day.’

  The cab kept falling through snow.

  Chapter Two

  I wrote it up and filed it. Fifty minutes’ work. ‘Man Shot Dead in City Park.’ I used a quote from the woman in the tower, the statement from the police. I wrote it flat and dry. No tricks, no gimmicks. Sent a four-par précis to tribune.com. We put the paper to bed at half past eight.

  In the Cope, I pushed through the crush and found a stool at the bar. Joe Gorman turned for the Lagavulin bottle.

  ‘Saw the splash’ – he nodded at the city edition on the bar-top, tipping a quarter-inch of smoky gold into a tumbler. ‘Been a while.’

  ‘Cheers, Joe. Yeah, for what it’s worth.’

  ‘Moir sick, is he?’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  Joe turned away, smirking. I added some water from the tap on the bar, scanned the crowd for Moir. He was usually here at this time. I took my phone out. There was a text from Roddy – 2nd place and a smiley face. I tapped out my answe
r: Go get em! Congrats + sorry. Work stuff. See you tomorrow. Since I’d bought him the phone, Rod was like a different boy. The silences, surly pre-teen huffs were gone. He texted me three or four times a day. ‘Sup.’ ‘Hey.’ ‘Later.’ Meaningless little tweets but I was glad to get them. I thought about my own dad, after the divorce. A week, ten days between calls. The pips. Cursing and fumbling as he fed the slot. The coins shunting home. He lived in a bedsit when he left us, a student place on Kelvin Drive. Shared toilet. No phone. I’ll have to go, he’d say; there’s a queue of people outside. I used to picture it. The red phone-box on the city pavement, a boxed oblong of yellow light. Dad holding the door for the next user, the little nod of acknowledgement.

  I texted Moir – Come in Number 3, your time’s up, I wasn’t angry any more – and put the phone away.

  The words ‘White Russian’ cut through the buzz. I recognised the order, then the voice. Neve McDonald was beside me, purse in hand. We’d had a thing, briefly, three weeks of fucking before they fired me for the Lyons piece. I broke it off but I can’t imagine she was heartbroken. That was four years ago. Since I’d come back to the paper we’d kept our distance.

  ‘Back in the old routine,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  She leaned across me, her left breast grazing my bicep, lifted the folded paper from the bar-top. She spread it out.

  ‘Gerry Conway, ace crime reporter.’

  I’d been on crime in my early days at the paper. Court reports, mostly.

  ‘Can’t keep a good man down.’

  My arm was tingling where her breast had touched it.

  ‘So I hear. You tweet it yet?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The story. Gallacher’s trending already. He’s got pics from the locus. Quotes. Do one now you’ll get some of his traffic.’

  ‘Traffic?’ I shook my head. ‘Jesus Christ, Neve, a man’s dead. Dead, okay? I boiled it down to six hundred words. You want me to tell it in 140 characters? To do what – steal “traffic” from that prick at the News of the World?’

  ‘Fine.’ Neve’s hand was up, shutting me off. ‘Do I give a fuck if you tweet it or not? Tell Driscoll. Tell Maguire. Jesus, sorry I spoke.’