‘Okay, Neve. Look, let’s – I’m sorry, alright? It’s rubbish, anyway – paper of record splashing on a city killing, local neds. It’s freesheet stuff. Never have happened under Rix.’
She breathed out slowly through her nose, took a swig of her drink, licked her milky moustache. ‘No one ever tell you you’re hard work, Gerry?’
I sipped my whisky. ‘Someone might’ve. Few years back. But I knew she was joking. The way she said it, I could tell she didn’t mean it.’
She paid for the drinks, slotted her change into the big charity whisky bottle on the bar. ‘Mari okay? The wee fella?’
‘Angus,’ I told her. ‘Brand new, thanks.’
‘Good.’ She collected her drinks in a little diamond formed by her fingers and thumbs. ‘We’re in the back booth.’ She jerked her head across the pub. I could see Maguire talking to Davidson, Driscoll lifting a pint to his lips.
‘I’ve got to get back.’
‘Aye. No doubt.’ She squeezed back into the crush, her drinks held high, hips swivelling.
I lifted the paper from the bar-top, tucked it under my arm. The night was cold and clear, the clouds gone, the pavements icy. I crossed the bridge, stars ablaze in the glossy Clyde. I looked up to see if the scattered pricks of light would resolve themselves into a constellation – a bear or a plough or one of the others – but they held their random stations. My heels rang on the walkway of the bridge as I crossed the river and set off into town.
In some ways the gloom was cheerful, the gloom that enveloped the trade, that pervaded our weeks from conference on Tuesday morning to the Cope on Saturday night. At least we had the benefit of foresight. We knew that our business was on its way out. We were the scattered remnants, the last of the clan. Okay, let’s go out with style, make the last days count. The past few weeks as I rode the subway to Ibrox I’d been happy, I relished my job more than ever. I was like a man recovering from a life-threatening illness; every day was a bonus.
The weather helped. I always think of winter as a hopeful time, a season of quiet graft and preparation, of groundwork and hidden diligence. Summer makes me nervous, fretful, I feel life passing me by. The sunny days are like an accusation. When the shortest day has passed I feel bereft, wrong-footed, like I’ve missed the boat again. But with the winter coming on, with November around the corner, with a hard blue sky in the mornings and a silver glint on the pavements and the cold air punching your lungs everything seems ahead of you. The future seems assured, even when it’s not.
I was glad I’d come back from PR. PR is where you go to die, or where you go when your paper does. I stuck it for three years before I staggered back like Lazarus, back to my old desk, my old beat, my old contacts and adversaries. Only everything was new. The title on my business cards – Scottish Political Editor, Tribune on Sunday – was the same, but now I was writing for the daily as well as the Sunday, writing for the website as well as the paper, writing news as well as Politics. And Politics wasn’t Politics any more.
I’d come back in time to cover the last election and I was still recovering. The losing party can go off and lick its wounds, regroup, elect a new leader. But the hacks who get it wrong? We have to sit down and write next week’s copy, pretend we know what we’re talking about. For months, it seemed, I’d been covering a different country. On 5 May the Scotland I described in my weekly column – that chippy, chary, toe-testing land, where the generations voted Labour from fear and from habit – turned out not to exist. It was a Narnia of my own invention. Maybe it was already passing into folklore in 2007, when the Nationalists won by a whisker. But now the old Scotland was finished, sunk like Atlantis. I kept a map of the constituency results on my partition wall. Except for some atolls of red around Glasgow and two spots of blue on the border with England, the whole bloody country was SNP yellow. Every seat in the Highlands, every seat in the North-East, every seat in Aberdeen and Dundee, four out of five in Edinburgh, five out of eight in Glasgow, all seats bar one in Ayrshire and Fife: the Nats had taken it all. Seats that had been Labour since 1945 had crashed like rotten redwoods. This was the map of a foreign country, one I knew nothing about.
There was solace in getting things utterly wrong. You had to start over, relearn whatever you thought you knew, start from the bottom, take your first steps like everyone else.
The night was getting colder and I flagged a cab. Both the fold-down seats bore the logo, the green ‘G’ in its coloured rings: ‘Glasgow 2014. XX Commonwealth Games.’
Because I missed it? Was that the answer? Because I got sick of PR? Because this was the only thing I was halfway good at? Because, despite the evidence of my senses and the actions of my colleagues, I still thought papers mattered?
The cab climbed Hope Street. Saturday night. Lassies’ legs in the headlights. The lads strutting up the roadway, cropped heads and rolling shoulders. Black-clad bouncers with earpieces, satin jackets shining in the lights. Maybe Maguire was right. When you go you should stay gone. Coming back was always an error.
We turned into Clouston Street, stopped halfway up. I signed the chit. Inside the flat I checked on Angus, listened for the breathing, tucked his left leg back under the blanket, tugging the cuff of his pyjama trousers over his plump calf, upped the heating a notch.
‘Here it is,’ Mari shouted.
I got a Sol from the fridge and plumped down beside her on the sofa.
They led with it. A man has been shot dead in a Glasgow park in what police suspect is a gangland execution. Shots of the park, the MIU, the yellow jackets guarding the incident tape, the murder squad standing round chatting. A shot of the chopper, filmed from below, an asterisk in the sky.
William Swan, known as ‘Blackie’, was killed by a lone gunman during a football match in the city’s Maxton Park. Headshot of Swan, cropped from a squad photograph, black-and-blue stripes at his shoulders. Grinning, tanned – the heedless victim.
They had no more details than we had. A cop was interviewed, mild, media-trained, hatless but in uniform, North of England accent. Want to reassure . . . obviously unusual . . . visible presence . . . everything we can.
Then they showed the footage. I sat forward, set the bottle on the floor between my feet. It was shaky, coarse-grained, dark. Hard to make it out at first. A jumbled crush of bodies and then a striped shirt blocking the lens. When the stripes move off the ball has squeezed out for a throw-in on the far side. At this point the camera swings round sharply to the touchline: a guy with a greying crewcut mugs a grimace, blows a kiss to the camera. You hear the shots just then – two flat cracks like someone snapping a desk with a ruler – and the camera jiggles nervously and fumbles for focus. Grass. Sky. A muddy blur then the camera steadies, finds it.
A figure on the grass. A dark shadow sprinting away. The camera tracks the runner, loping off towards the railings. As he reaches the park entrance he turns to look back. We get a still of this, the gunman caught in mid-stride, the torso twisted. Black parka slipping off his shoulders. Baseball cap with the bill pulled down. They’d tried to refine it, enhance it, bring out the features, but the face was still a blank. You’d recognise the gait, the stance, before you clocked the face.
Police are looking for anyone who saw a dark-coloured car parked on Baillieston Road between 11 and 11.25 a.m. Digits on the screen: the incident room at Baird Street; the Crimestoppers number. Please call.
Mari gathered her drawings, slipped them into the portfolio and zipped it. She slapped my thigh, leaned over to kiss my forehead.
‘Don’t be long.’
I waggled my beer-bottle, two-thirds empty.
‘Right behind you.’
A dark-coloured car. Good luck with that. I heard a noise above the news, a muffled crump as though a war report was encroaching on the previous item. I muted the telly and caught it again, the crackle of fireworks. Glitterburst of purple in the window. Guy Fawkes was two weeks off but they jumped the gun a little further each year, the local neds, terrorisi
ng the pets of Kelvinside. I necked the dregs of the Sol and fetched a final bottle from the fridge, thumbed a wedge of lemon down the neck.
I flicked through the channels and back to the news. Ground was broken today on a 36-hectare riverfront site that will house the Athletes’ Village for the Commonwealth Games in 2014. Camera flashes. A fat man in a hard hat, resting his foot on the lip of a spade. Close-up of his fleshy, grinning face, the green ‘G’ on his yellow hat: Gavin Haining, leader of Glasgow City Council. Cut to artist’s impression of Scandinavian-style houses in tasteful clusters, puffy green trees, pedestrians on walkways.
‘This will bring the East End back to life,’ Haining was saying. ‘Nearly eight hundred homes. Eco-friendly. State of the art.’
I knew Haining a little. I’d been to my share of civic receptions, shared his table at charity dinners. A big ebullient figure with a mooing laugh, a clapper of shoulders, a barer of teeth in bonhomous grins.
‘And what happens, Councillor Haining, when the Games are over; will these houses be sold as private homes?’
‘Some of them, yes. But four hundred of these homes will be reserved for rental accommodation, providing the kind of high-quality social housing this city so desperately needs.’
The reporter said that a grouping of construction firms – the Kentigern Consortium – would oversee the building of the village, but that contracts for sub-contractors would be awarded over the coming weeks and months. There were two more items – a fatal collision on the A9 and a missing Glasgow prostitute – before the anchor handed over to the sports reporter, a fizzy blonde in a tailored jacket, risky inch of cleavage.
The mobile rang, my new iPhone, the ringtone still unfamiliar.
‘You see it?’
Lewicki.
‘Not exactly Zapruder, is it? Missed the money shot.’
‘Yeah. Well.’ Lewicki’s voice had the belligerent edge. Drink taken. ‘We know who it was anyway.’
The football results were coming up on the screen. If you don’t want to know the scores, look away now. Could be the caption for my life over the past couple of years, I reflected: Look away now.
‘The shooter?’
‘Fuck the shooter. The shooter’s immaterial. We know who did it.’
We’d beaten Hearts two-nil. The Huns had drawn with Motherwell. Put us four points clear.
‘Everyone knows who did it, Jan. Maybe they should claim responsibility. Like they did in Ireland in the old days. Passwords and codenames. P. O’Neill. Still,’ I said. ‘Happy days on the South Side. Dancing in the streets of Pollok.’
‘Shitting their pants is more like it.’
‘Payback?’
‘You don’t shoot a guy playing football. Saturday morning. His old man watching from the sidelines.’
‘Swan’s dad was there?’
‘Aye.’ Little kisses came down the line as Lewicki got a cigar going. ‘Billy Senior. Hamish Neil’s first cousin. They’ll feel it down there. Jesus. Shitstorm that’s coming.’
*
I walked down to the twenty-four-hour garage for the other Sundays. Papers getting fatter as their readership thinned. Walking back across the bridge in the sharp cold air I checked my phone, scrolled down my Twitter feed:
Kevin Gallacher @kevinrjgallacher1h
Batten down the hatches. Hope I’m wrong but this cld be worse than 2005. Last thing Glw needs w Commie Games arnd corner. #gangwar
Hope I’m wrong. Like fuck you do, Gallo. I checked Moir, too, in case he’d mentioned the killing, but his last tweet was two days old.
Back at the flat I slapped the stack of newsprint onto the table and fetched a final beer. The English qualities had nothing. Not a wing, not a par. There was a page six lead in Scotland on Sunday (Killing Sparks Fears of Gangland Feud). But the redtops gave it a show. GANG WAR was Gallacher’s splash in the News of the World. He quoted a source close to ‘underworld kingpin Hamish Neil’ saying reprisals were certain: ‘The Walshes won’t know what’s hit them.’ Aye they will, I thought: Hamish Neil.
But Torcuil Bain in the Mail had pissed on us all. They’d splashed with a photo of Swan in a Rangers jersey: soccer starlet slain. Swan was twenty-six; hardly a ‘starlet’. But it turned out he’d trialled for Rangers. Bain had dug it up, Swan’s football career. Schoolboy international. The teenage trial with the ’Gers that didn’t work out. Signed for St Mirren: a leg-break crocked him for a year, cost him a yard. Free transfer to Morton. Dropped down to the Juniors. By this time he was an enforcer for Maitland, but he kept turning out, skippering the local team. On an inside page there was the squad photo of Blackhill United, Swan with the captain’s armband, a strip of suddenly sinister black, as if he was in mourning for himself.
A gangland execution with Old Firm overtones. Driscoll would be spitting. We’d led with Swan but the Mail would bury us anyway. I looked again at the front-page photo. The bleached-blond spikes. Silver sleeper catching the light. The royal-blue jersey with the lager logo splashed across the chest. He must have been useful, to try out for the Huns. He’d skippered Blackhill to last year’s Junior Cup Final. I thought of the weekly write-ups, the match reports in trundling soccerese, some good work down the left saw Swan release Cunningham. It wouldn’t be hard to target Billy Swan. No need to monitor his movements, study his habits, establish a pattern. All you needed was next week’s fixtures, there in black and white in the local paper.
Bain’s piece had another scoop: According to eyewitness reports, the killer was dark-complexioned, possibly of Eastern European origin. From the footage you could hardly tell a thing about the killer, but I knew what Bain was doing. You never lost sales by blaming the Roma. But a stopped clock’s right twice a day and according to Lewicki one of the Roma gangs in Govanhill was working with the Walshes. Frighteners. Disciplinaries. General enforcement. The Walshes farmed these tasks out to their Slovak buddies. Maybe hits were being subcontracted too.
I pushed the papers away. The TV was still running in the living room. The weather forecast. More snow. Snow in October. I thumbed the remote and killed the picture. There was an ominous rumble in the flat, low throbbing knocks like a rumour of battle. I snapped the box-room light on. The tumble-drier. The clothes flopped in drunken heaves, collapsing onto each other and chasing round again. I watched Angus’s vests, the days of the week in a tangled swirl, and padded through to bed.
Chapter Three
I woke up at seven and jumped in the shower. I don’t sleep in on Sundays, never need the alarm. Sunday’s my day with the boys and my body clock knows it. I’ve got two sons from my failed marriage. Roddy and James. Nine and six.
I kissed Mari’s temple and lifted my keys. Angus’s door stood slightly ajar and I eased it open. Little moon face, ghostly in the half-light. I dropped my hand into the cot, felt his breath on the backs of my fingers, laid my knuckles on his cheek: chilled. I slipped two fingers under the collar of his babygro; his back was warm. The baby thermometer on the wall had gone from ‘Just Right’ to ‘Cool’. I settled his blankets. The central heating would be clicking on soon.
White flakes were sifting down through the wasteground trees. My shoes left black dance-steps on the thin snow. The car started first time. Down Great Western Road, past the lighted minimarts, the headlines under lattice frames: GANGLAND SHOOTING, SOCCER STARLET SLAIN. I thought of people waking up, going out for the paper, fixing brunch with the radio on, chewing toast, reading my piece on the Swan murder.
Moir should have written it. Moir was the expert. He would know the whys of this killing. He knew the language, the precise level of insult offered by the corpse of Billy Swan. When he came back to work he would follow it up, chart the feud when it all kicked off. I bigfooted Moir in the old days; now he would bigfoot me. For the moment, though, it was my story and it wasn’t the worst feeling in the world to have ended Moir’s monopoly on the front page, if only for a week. As the car joined the motorway I put the foot down. Even in my prim, begrudging prose it
would boost us by four or five thousand.
The snow had lain on the Fenwick Moors and the whiteness rolled away on either side. I thought of my dad in his coffin, the white billowing satin lining, the tight yellow skin of his nose, the folds of his neck above the white tieless shirt. It was last winter, nearly a year since we travelled this road, the same road in the same weather. He died before I came back to the Trib so he never got the chance to ask me: Why did you come back? His own question was different. Though he never put it in words, the gaps in his conversation, his non-committal grunts and downcast eyes when I spoke of my new job, asked it for him: Why did you leave?
He was a high-school English teacher who dreamed of being a journalist. I was fulfilling his ambition when I signed on at the Trib. His hero was George Orwell. Not the novelist, not the visionary allegorist of Animal Farm and 1984, but the hack reporter, the jobbing columnist for the New Statesman, the Observer, the Manchester Evening News. He kept the four volumes of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters in an alcove shelf beside the fireplace and you counted it a lucky day when he didn’t say ‘Listen to this’ after tea and read a passage from ‘Revenge is Sour’ or ‘Books v. Cigarettes’ in his correct and earnest reading voice. When I was handed a photocopy of ‘Politics and the English Language’ on my first day at the Trib I was able to hand it straight back. I could probably have recited it from memory, and though I doubtless flouted them in everything I wrote, its rules – ‘Never use a long word where a short one will do’; ‘If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out’ – were as familiar to me as the lines on my brow.
My father’s paper was the Tribune. Every night after tea, before he started his marking, my father sat down with the Trib. He would vanish behind the big pages, the vast crackling sheets that only a grown man could manage. You didn’t interrupt him. I would watch him in the telly’s reflection, his arms spreading as he turned the pages, as though the paper were a set of chest expanders.
Where the Dead Men Go Page 3