Where the Dead Men Go

by Liam McIlvanney

  When he’d worked his way through to the sports pages he’d close the paper, fold it against the crease and fold it again, fish a biro from the jacket he’d slung on a kitchen chair-back and tackle the crossword.

  One night he opened the paper and gave a short laugh. ‘Come here,’ he told us, ‘come and see this.’ It was a letter he’d written. They’d printed it there on the letters page, a thin jaggy column of type. He’d written to complain about an editorial branding the striking miners ‘fifth columnists’. We looked over his shoulder, my mother, my sister and I, at the words my father was reading aloud. His name was printed beneath the letter, in darker type: Hugh Conway. Our address was there, too: 25 Ellis Street. For the next few days I looked at them both – my father, our house – with new eyes, as if their appearance in print had altered their nature, lent them, however faintly, the glamour of news. My first byline gave me the same sense of magic and even now, when papers mean little to anyone and I recognise my thrill for a childish superstition, I can’t suppress that fizz of pride when I see my name in print.

  My father died last year, on Christmas Eve. Three months later I was back at the Trib. If you think there’s a connection between these events, you’re probably right. It wasn’t quite a dead man’s wish, and I didn’t go back out of filial duty, but I had plenty of time to think in the small, sky-blue room in the Southern General where my dad’s corrupted lungs kept him pinned to the bed when he wasn’t dribbling into a cardboard sick-bowl. CONWAY, it said on the chart at the foot of the bed – as it says now on the pink marble stone I have visited twice – and it seemed like all the epitaph he’d want. The name mattered to my father. Though a second-generation Scot, he had the immigrant’s sense of the family narrative, the arc of the generations. As if this was America and not the Scottish lowlands. As if the name were bound to rise. Eamonn Conway scraped a living as a pedlar. Michael Conway howked coal in the Ayrshire pits. Hugh Conway stuck in at school and earned his teaching diploma. The logic of the story called for another ascent. Had three generations struggled and toiled in this black-hearted land so that I might frame elegant lies to boost the profits of Scottish Power or the Royal Mail? So I chucked PR and went back to papers. As if that was any better. In almost every way you could name, my action was pointless. The man I was trying to impress was dead. The paper I came back to was dying. The job I took up wasn’t the job I had left. It was too late. Everything was too late. But I still went back.

  The traffic was sparse, I was making good time. I passed the Covenanter’s memorial, the old Celtic cross. I was almost in Ayrshire and the snow had gone, green fields displacing the white moor. The boys would be out of bed now, spooning Sugar Puffs into their mouths, the glare of cartoons dancing in their eyes.

  It was nearly eight. I punched the button for the radio, news on the hour.

  Strathclyde Police have confirmed that a man killed in Glasgow yesterday had links with organised crime. William Swan, an enforcer for the Neil crime family, was shot dead yesterday morning as he played football at a public park in the city’s East End in what police are describing as a gangland execution. The gunman, described as of medium height and dark-complexioned, wearing dark clothes, a white baseball cap and a red tartan scarf, escaped in a waiting car. Commentators have warned that this killing could spark a gangland vendetta similar to the feud that claimed seven lives in the so-called ‘Sunbed Wars’ of 2005. David Ancram is a true-crime author with extensive contacts in Glasgow’s criminal underworld: ‘The worry is that this could escalate. The Neils will hit back, there’s nothing surer. It’s about saving face but it’s also good business. They’ve put a lot of effort into getting where they are and they’re not about to give that up without a fight.’

  New Scotland, I thought. The early days of a better nation. But Glasgow’s civil war ground on, a city like a failing state. The regime controlled the centre and the West End, the good suburbs, the arterial routes. East and north were the badlands, the rebel redoubts, where the tribal warlords held their courts and sacrificed to their vengeful gods. The M8 was the city wall, keeping out the barbarian hordes.

  Concerns have been raised that the Yes camp could outspend the No by a factor of two to one in the lead-up to the 2014 independence referendum. While tight spending limits will be imposed on both camps for the official campaigning period, there are no limits on what can be spent in the run-up to the poll, which is still more than two years away. The Nationalists have been buoyed by the recent donation of £1 million to the independence campaign by lottery winners Chris and Margo Chisholm of Saltcoats, which follows an earlier bequest of £1 million by Scotland’s late national poet, Cosmo Haldane. A Scottish Labour spokesman accused the Nationalists of attempting to ‘buy’ the poll. Meanwhile, a former Scottish Secretary has warned that the No campaign may be hampered less by finances than by the lack of a credible leader. Campbell Bain, who served as Scottish Secretary in John Major’s cabinet, told an audience at St Andrews University that Malcolm Gordon might carry all before him if no ‘big beast’ stepped up to lead the pro-Union cause.

  I punched the button, killed the radio. The sign for Ayrshire flashed past. Big beasts in the fields, black and white Friesians, not brown-and-white Ayrshires. You never saw Ayrshires any more, not even here. Mureton was coming up shortly, my home town. I thought of it in the past tense; it was the kind of place you left when you hit sixteen and never went back. But Moir lived there, now, the King of Crime. He moved out from the city a year or two back, when their second girl was born. I thought of looking in on him, getting off some gentle gloating over today’s front page, but I passed the Mureton turn-off and kept going.

  You could smell the sea now, even with the windows up, and when I crested the next rise the town lay before me, the blue roofs of Conwick and the brown sandstone spires, the green hills on one side and the bright dancing firth on the other. Every time I drove down here I felt it more keenly, that pang of regret for the life I had left. At some level – at most levels – I hoped we’d get back together, Elaine and I. Even when I met Mariella and she moved into the flat, even when Mari got pregnant and Angus was born, even then it was hard to envisage a future in which Elaine and Gerry and Roddy and James did not comprise a unit.

  She’d been with Adam for four years. They got married last June at Culzean Castle. Roddy and James were Adam’s groomsmen. Mari and I were at the second top table, seated with Adam’s cousins and Elaine’s strident aunt who kept assuring me, in a loud sherry voice, that I would always be her niece’s true love. Angus cried through the speeches so I took him out, but even in the bar, jiggling the boy on my shoulder as I stole sups of Stella, I could hear Adam gamely including Gerry and Mariella (‘for their marvellous help and friendship’) in his vote of thanks.

  I drove down the High Street. The billboards propped outside the Spar had the same headlines as the city. GERS STARLET MURDERED. GANGLAND SLAYING. But down here it was a feelgood story, the kind of thing that made you glad you lived in the boondocks, among the red pillar-boxes and crow-stepped gables, the spry retirees walking their terriers.

  Inside the Spar, the papers were stacked on their racks. Billy Swan’s face grinned up from the tabs as if he knew he had finally made it. The boy who pissed away his talent, who blew his chance at glory, had got himself shot and killed, an accomplishment that put him, being also a minor functionary in a criminal syndicate, on four front pages. Who else had died in Scotland yesterday? What useful lives were overlooked, what deaths unmarked, so that this little prick, this no-mark thug who had courted his death, could enjoy his redtop ovation?

  I bought a loaf and a carton of milk and drove up to the house, thinking about numbers. Seven. That was the figure to beat. Seven lives had been lost in the Sunbed Wars so this one would have to be bigger. The actual logic of the conflict didn’t matter, they couldn’t stop till the body count was up there, eight bodies, nine, any fewer would be a let-down.

  The bell on my old front door gave its u
sual sardonic clank: one of the chimes was broken. I stood on the doorstep and nudged the loose tile with my toe. I’d never got around to fixing it and Adam hadn’t either. This house meant a lot to me, our lives had been good here for a while, but I wished Elaine had bought a new place when she remarried. It’s about continuity, she told me. At a time like this the boys need stability, familiar surroundings. I could see her point, but it felt as though everyone’s lives had carried on the same, only I’d been replaced, like the male lead in a soap. Bewitched with Dick Sargent instead of Dick York.

  ‘Dad!’

  The door slammed back on its hinges as James launched himself at me. He buried his head in my belly, threw his arms round my back. Roddy hung back, his hand raised in greeting. ‘Hiya, Dad.’

  ‘Hey, guys.’

  ‘Is it snowing, Dad? Is it snowing in Glasgow?’

  ‘It is.’ The snow never lies in Conwick. It’s too near the sea. The Gulf Stream waters keep the temperatures up. There are palm trees in the gardens of the shorefront B & Bs. ‘Yeah, it’s lying.’

  ‘How deep?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I measured a couple of inches between my palms. ‘About that much.’

  ‘Can we bring the sledge?’

  ‘Of course you can. Bring your togs too, we’ll go the pool.’

  I made a coffee while the boys got ready. Elaine and Adam were still in bed. There was a new picture on the kitchen wall, a framed poster from the ‘Glasgow Boys’ exhibition at Kelvingrove: a wee girl in muddy boots herding a line of geese. I shouted through as we left and Elaine shouted to wait.

  She came through in her dressing-gown, took the boys’ heads in her hands, kissed them in turn. Her face had the soft, slept-in look and her hair was unbrushed but she still looked good.

  ‘Heavy night?’

  She shook her head. ‘Heavy week. Heavy life.’

  I didn’t ask.

  ‘Can you have them back by six? Roddy’s got pipes.’

  We spent the morning in Kelvingrove Park, sledging down the hills, rolling down bankings, lying on our backs making angels, starring the flanks of an equestrian statue with pelted volleys of snowballs. We warmed up and dried off in the museum, wandering round the Scottish Wildlife room, craning up at the Spitfire suspended in the entranceway. We ate lunch in the Silverburn mall, browsed in the games shop and then I drove us to the swimming baths.

  We spent the next hour on the flumes, slapping up the spiralling concrete ramp and hanging onto the overhead bar till the green light sent us plunging, one after another, down the gloomy, translucent tube. The boys laughed and started back up the ramp, moving lightly on the balls of their feet. I saw how little they needed me now, how much they’d grown, though it seemed to me to be no time at all since they’d clung to my neck as we entered the water, their legs gripping tight round my torso, their toenails scratching my sides.

  Before we left they dragged me across to the diving boards. I hate heights. Climbing the stairs I stamped to quell the tremor in my knees. The middle board was four metres high but it felt like the top of a building. The swimming-pool noise – all the echoey shouts and splashes and cries – seemed to rise from a fabulous distance. A yard from the edge my soles wouldn’t lift from the board so I slid the last few paces. The diving pool looked too dark, its water a deep marine blue, not the light sunny turquoise of the other pools. But my sons were stamping and shivering behind me so I closed my eyes and stepped off.

  The rush of bubbles seemed to go on forever but I finally reached the bottom of the plunge, that long silent interim when you’re not sinking or rising or floating but just suspended in water like a bubble in ice before the reverse gravity sucks you back to the surface. I kicked to the side and held on, watched my sons’ pale bodies drop through the air.

  We were driving back to Conwick, the car stinking pleasantly of chips and pickled onions, Muddy down low on the Bose – ‘Goodbye Newport Blues’ – and the white fields rolling away under a black sky.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Does Angus not like the swimming baths?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘He does. He goes with Mari sometimes. “Tadpoles.” It’s a mother-and-baby thing.’

  We drove for a bit.

  ‘You should take him,’ said Roddy. ‘Or bring him with us.’

  ‘I do take him. I take him sometimes. Anyway, this is your time. You don’t want to have a baby around all the time.’

  ‘He’s nearly two, Dad. He’s my brother.’

  I watched the road. Roddy craned round in his seat.

  ‘I just think you should spend more time with him, Dad.’

  I reached out a finger to the sound system, turned Muddy down even further.

  ‘Did Mariella ask you to say this?’

  ‘I’m eleven years old, Dad. I can think for myself.’

  ‘That’s not what I asked you.’

  ‘We spoke about it. Mari thinks you should spend more time with Angus. And I agree.’

  He popped a chip into his mouth with a rhetorical flourish.

  ‘Okay, Rod. Well. I appreciate your concern.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I’ll bring him next time.’

  ‘Good.’

  *

  Within the hour I was back up the motorway, back in the flat. Mari was Facebooking her Kiwi friends. I was giving Angus his bath. I had soaped his hair when I heard the phone, then Mari coming through. She knelt down beside Angus while I took the phone through to the living room.

  ‘Gerry.’ I couldn’t place the voice for a minute. I was still thinking about Angus, how I hadn’t rinsed his hair. ‘Gerry, it’s Fiona Maguire. I’ve got some bad news.’

  For a second I thought, she’s going to fire me again.

  ‘It’s Martin Moir,’ she said. ‘Gerry, he’s dead. Martin’s dead. They found his body in Auchengare Quarry.’

  Chapter Four

  A climber had called it in. The quarry’s a popular spot with local craggers. Early on Sunday a hospital administrator called Mark Alexander was scaling the main buttress. Low down, at ground level, you can’t see into the water. All you can see is the glare, or the surface shirred by the wind. But the higher you climb, the deeper you see. Halfway up the route the climber starts to notice something between his boots: a white shape, a milky cube in the bottle-green deep. He knows it’s recent; he’d climbed the same route the week before. When he gets to the top he calls the police. It’s the white roof of Moir’s CR-V. The frogmen find the body in the car.

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Maguire looked at me, a question in her eyes: did you know something about this? Are you holding out on me here?

  I shook my head. We were in Maguire’s office, the corner suite with its views across the river to the Finnieston crane, the Armadillo, the latticed façades of the north bank hotels.

  I turned to look out at the newsroom floor.

  Everyone knew. You could tell from how they carried themselves: something angular, a tightness of the limbs. Little knots of people at the desks, gathering to share the news. The furtive eyes, the rapt looks, greedy. How they touched each other when they spoke, hands resting on forearms. The office was buzzing with Martin’s death.

  Maguire sucked a breath between her teeth.

  ‘We’ll make an announcement.’

  I nodded. There was something else, too, I thought, looking out on the floor. Not just grief but professional embarrassment. How did we miss it? Moir’s death was pitiful, shocking, cruel. It was also a story. A story that every paper would carry tomorrow morning: it was here in this room and we missed it.

  ‘Ten o’clock,’ she said. ‘Niven’s coming down to the floor.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  Back at my desk I clicked through my bookmarked sites – the Beeb, Scottishwire, the Scottish and English dailies – but my eyes kept straying to Moir’s blue chair, his abandoned can, the smiling blonde heads of his daughters. When Maguire had phoned
me the previous night I’d gone out for a walk. It was cold – the snow had mostly gone but a freeze was starting, the puddles were chewy and creaked like floorboards – and I crossed the bridge and started up Great Western Road. I was trying to remember Moir’s age, thirty-four, thirty-five, he was younger than me by five or six years. I turned into Westbourne Gardens, passed the Struthers Memorial Church. The houses here had a rich honey hue, the stone glowing warm in the yellow streetlights. There were curtains undrawn, still-life living rooms with opulent blood-red walls, bright blurred Peploes and Cursiters, bookshelves of deep seasoned wood. There was nothing of Moir or myself in these rich framed rooms, just the mystery of unknown lives, the pathos of domestic space, but I had to pause for a spell on the pavement, beneath one of these bright yellow squares, leaning on the smooth iron railings.

  At ten o’clock we stood by our desks beneath the muted TVs as Niven emerged from the lift. Teddy Niven was the Tribune group’s Managing Editor. You rarely saw him in the newsroom. He was a distant figure, up there on the sixth floor, a short man with brittle hair and small pointed teeth that he bared in a strained smile. If you met him in the lift he just nodded and looked away; below the level of editor, he didn’t know anyone’s name.

  When he spoke to his staff it was always through his editors – Maguire at the Sunday, John Tulloch at the Daily. The fact that he was here, awkwardly by the vending machine, twisting his wedding ring, meant that it was serious. He stood in his shirtsleeves, a small dapper fellow in scarlet braces, like someone impersonating a newspaperman.

  As he waited for silence we shuffled back, making sure those behind us could see. An atmosphere of punctilious politeness had established itself in the newsroom. We knew what Niven would say, but we wanted to be equal to the moment, standing in our reverent circle like mourners round the grave.

  Finally Niven spread his arms, twisting his torso from left to right, surveying the heads, his dainty paunch nosing over his waistband.