Where the Dead Men Go

by Liam McIlvanney

  To call it a premonition would be wrong. But as I thumbed down through Maguire and Mari and the others, I knew it was coming. Moir almost never texted me, he preferred to phone. And yet here it was: ‘MM’. I checked the date: 9 October, 7.56 p.m. Fifteen hours before the climber found him.

  Ger I had 2 do it tell C Im sorry 4 it all MM

  I laid the phone down on the breakfast bar. I could hear the clock, the hollow knocks of the second-hand jerking round, and then the fridge thrummed loudly as the cycle changed. I stood in the dark for a few minutes longer. Then I turned off the phone.

  *

  In the morning I called DS Gunn and by nine o’clock she was thumbing the buzzer.

  Mari had just left for work and the nursery run. I was clearing away the breakfast dishes and half-listening to Sky News on the telly. I opened the door and heard them climbing the stairs, Gunn and the lumbering Lumsden.

  They trooped through to the living room. Nobody spoke. The cold came in on their outdoor clothes.

  I found the message and passed her the phone. She looked at me when she read it, no expression, passed the phone to Lumsden. Lumsden nodded and passed it back; he was sweating from the climb. Gunn held the phone in her palm as if weighing it. They looked at me.

  ‘He forgot,’ I said. ‘He’s a ten-year-old kid. I thought I had lost it.’

  Gunn looked away at the television and then back at me.

  ‘It could have been a murder enquiry,’ she said. ‘We hadn’t ruled it out. And you’re sitting on the crucial piece of evidence. A week goes by and now you produce it?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s not ideal. I understand that. I’m sorry.’

  She was shaking her head.

  ‘We’ll need this.’ She dropped the phone into a plastic wallet, slipped the wallet into a document case, got me to sign the production label. ‘And you weren’t close. He sends you his suicide note but you weren’t close.’ She shook her head. Orkney, I thought: the accent was Orkney. I pictured a garden-sized island, treeless turf, a whitewashed cottage in a raging gale.

  They turned to go. I followed them down the hall. Gunn paused on the threshold.

  ‘That’s everything is it?’

  Lumsden was already on the stairs but he stopped to hear my answer.

  ‘Everything what?’

  ‘No more surprises, no last-minute revelations?’

  ‘I’ve said I’m sorry, Sergeant. You think I did it on purpose?’

  She shook her head again, the ponytail twitching.

  ‘He’s a ten-year-old boy,’ I said to her back. ‘They forget things. It happens.’

  ‘We’ll be in touch.’

  They scliffed off down the stairs.

  And that was it. Moir had killed himself. His death no longer mattered. His death was now an annoyance, a waste of time. They had squandered a week on Moir, a week they could have spent on deaths that counted.

  I made a coffee and phoned Maguire.

  ‘There’s a note,’ I told her. ‘He left a message on my phone, the night he died. It was suicide, Fiona.’

  I told her the message. I could read the silence as if she was speaking. The big story was gone; Moir wasn’t murdered, that dramatic splash wouldn’t happen. But the message, that was a story in itself – tragic journo’s last words.

  ‘You want to write it?’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No, you’re right. I’ll get the Desk on to it.’

  *

  I stood at the window to finish my coffee. The wind was whipping through the wasteground across the street, lashing the long grasses, agitating the trees. There was a sad little patch of allotments at the far side, started by the local community group, the kind of upbeat, cargo-panted young parents who referred to the wasteground as ‘North Kelvin Meadow’. Kids from Maryhill hung out there at nights, built their fires, smoked blow, smashed Buckie bottles on the scout-hut walls. It was another dead space in the disintegrating city.

  Moir had reached out to me after all. Not for help – he was past the stage of helping – but to pass on the message. His final words. It was a scoop of sorts, a last sad exclusive, though the words didn’t sound like Moir’s. I couldn’t hear his voice, couldn’t place his Ulster vowels in the choppy text-speak: Ger I had 2 do it tell C Im sorry 4 it all. All what? Maybe at that stage ‘all’ is all there is. All or nothing, and nothing to choose between them.

  I was sorry, too. Sorry to learn that Moir had taken his life. Murder would have made more sense, would have measured the worth of what he did, a job so important it cost him his life. His stories might have survived him then – stood apart from his death, served as his memorial. But suicide changed all that. In killing himself Moir had killed his stories. They weren’t his legacy, they were just another feature of the world he threw away, they were part of the ‘all’ for which he was sorry.

  And if Moir’s were worth nothing then what about mine? Had I written a proper story since I came back to the Trib? Had I even tried? I tried to write well. I took as much time as my deadline allowed. I transcribed my interviews faithfully. My facts, such as they were, got checked. But the real job – the job of finding stories that needed to be told, of bringing truth to light, of telling people things they didn’t know: that was a job for somebody else.

  Martin Moir had been doing that job. At some level, it seemed to me, he’d been doing it for both of us. Back in the Nineties Moir had come to the Trib to work beside me. I brought him on, schooled him, taught him his trade. I felt responsible for Moir, as if his current work could be chalked up to my credit. And now that he was gone, that fiction was over. I was just me, Gerry Conway, no-mark jobbing journo.

  I finished my coffee and drove to the gym, spent a weary half-hour on the treadmill, another half-hour with the weights. After a shower I drove to the office. Monday was my day off but so what? We’d have days off in plenty when the paper went under, when the Tribune’s last issue hit the stands. Lately I’d been spending more of my Mondays at the Quay. I wasn’t trying to look keen or impress the Yanks – it was too late for that. I just liked to sit at my desk in the newsroom, staring at our ghostly reflections in the window. Being a journalist while I still could.

  I looked in at the Cope on the way home. Carson, the new Sports Ed, was stood at the bar, getting a round in.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Gerry.’

  ‘I know.’

  He was shaking his head.

  ‘You heard about—’; he held out his wrists, like a prisoner being cuffed.

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Jesus, eh? He wasn’t kidding on.’

  ‘It wasn’t a cry for help.’

  ‘That’s for fucking sure.’

  I ordered a pint of Deuchars, took a booth at the back, next to the dartboard. Professional jealousy? I’d lost count of the hours we’d spent in booths like this, bad-mouthing Martin Moir. At first, when people bitched about Moir, I took his part. Moir was the talent, he was shifting papers, he was keeping us all in a job. It wasn’t a million years since I’d been the golden boy and I felt a kind of nostalgic solidarity with the Ulsterman. But there’s limited fun in defending a man whom your peers have determined to hate, and I’d noticed that lately, when someone mouthed off about Moir, I busied myself with whatever I was doing and stayed silent.

  I was jealous. Not of Moir’s perks, I don’t think; not of the Lexus in the car park or the long lunches or even his arrogant freehold on the front page. I was jealous of Moir’s job. His brief, his beat. When I started at the paper I wrote crime. I sat in the High Court and the Sheriff Court and took my shorthand notes and I wrote up my stories of murder and mayhem. I met cops and liked them and they liked me. I was happy. Then the day came when John Fyfe called me into the office and gave me the news. I was moving up. Political Correspondent. In a few years’ time I could be Political Editor. I took his fat hand in mine and let him clap me on the back but even then, as I smelled his rank cologne, I knew it was a comedown. I’d left the pure realm of
story for the palace of lies.

  There were ghosts that evening when I got home from work. The first one rang the bell as we finished dinner. Angus held my legs while the ghost stood in our kitchen and took three attempts to complete a limerick. His friend was a vampire with a knock-knock joke. There were two more posses of neighbourhood kids – zombies and Hobbits, buccaneers and superheroes. We gave them lollies and chocolates, dropped fistfuls of monkey nuts in their supermarket carrier bags, and they trooped down the stairs with their swag, their voices ringing in the stairwell.

  Later that evening I sat at my desk, checking the PA, the Beeb, Slugger, Scottishwire, the reputable blogs, the disreputable blogs. Nothing on the Walshes: Hamish Neil wasn’t trick-or-treating down Govanhill way or out in Pollok. Nothing on the referendum. The Glasgow pro was still missing, six days and counting. A roadside bomb in Helmand province had killed two British soldiers.

  Chapter Six

  ‘That’s your idea of a story, Fiona? Nothing’s happened yet. “The news is there is no news.” How is that a story?’

  ‘A blog post, then. The mood on the streets. Climate of fear. A city holds its breath.’

  ‘It’s like we want it to happen. We’re egging them on. Gee the fuck up and start topping each other. We’ve got papers to sell.’

  Maguire was smiling. ‘Gerry. Thing is, I’m not pitching this. I’m not inviting a debate. I’m your editor. Now go and fucking write it.’

  At least it wasn’t snowing. I drove along Paisley Road West, down Eglinton Street, parked the Forester on Westmoreland Street. Maguire’s idea was to do a feature on the communities who would suffer the brunt of Neil’s revenge. What did it feel like in Govanhill, in Pollok, waiting for the sky to fall?

  It felt like anywhere else in the city as I left the car, took to the mid-morning southside streets. For years, now, Govanhill had been the city’s blackspot, the rancid backdrop to all the crime reports we couldn’t stop reading. In scores of exposés, some of them written by Moir, the name had acquired an aura, the tinge of stigma. The irony here was that Govanhill looked alright. A little shitty and shabby, but this wasn’t one of the Sixties misadventures, the no-go zones of broken lifts and gangland murals that pitted the city. Externally, at least, this was solid Victorian Glasgow, street upon street of bluff orange tenements.

  I turned the corner onto Allison Street. A gorgeous Pakistani woman was striding towards me in a sky-blue sari with silver tassels, silver-lamé high heels, stepping through the dogshit and burst cardboard boxes, the pigeons nipping at the spent kebabs.

  I walked on, past the bookies, the Jeddah Food Store, another bookies, a Western Union and the Queen’s Park Pawnbrokers. I stopped under the Guinness sign and the plastic Sky Sports banner of Neeson’s Bar.

  Years ago Govanhill was Irish. When the Pakistanis moved in, the Irish moved out – to Newlands and Shawlands – but they kept their pubs. When the Pakistanis traded up to Pollokshields they kept their shops and their buildings. The landlords here were mostly Pakistani and their tenants were the Pakistani poor and the white Scottish poor and the city’s most recent wave of poor migrants: A8s from the accession states, Czechs and Slovaks, mainly Roma.

  Neeson’s was quiet. Two old boys sat side by side at a scuffed table, long-nursed pints of lager before them, heads craned to watch the racing. I ordered a half of Guinness. The barman poured it and went back to his paperback. It would be fair to say that a climate of fear had yet to establish itself in Neeson’s Bar. Climate of fear about your pint not lasting till lunchtime. Climate of fear about losing your pound each way on the 3.15 from Goodwood. I sank the black and left them to it. Maybe Pollok would be more promising.

  I drove down Pollokshaws Road, took the Barrhead Road through the golf course and into Pollok. I hadn’t been in the scheme for eight or nine years. The old Pollok Centre had gone, replaced by the shiny new Silverburn Mall, but the streets round the Haugh Hill featured the same old white-harled four-in-a-blocks and three-storey flats. Pollok was the oldest of the big four peripheral schemes, built in the Fifties to house the families cleared from the central slums. The Walshes were the powers-that-be around here but you didn’t see them at weekly surgeries, you didn’t see them in constituency offices on the Crookston Road. What you saw, on a weekday lunchtime, was the usual outer-urban cast of moochers, mums and toddlers, shuffling old men. There was no story here, no danger of a story ever happening. I pulled over and phoned Lewicki.

  ‘A tout? I think you mean a CHIS, Gerry.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Covert Human Intelligence Source. All the best cops have them.’

  He explained it to me. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers (Scotland) Act 2000 brought a new set of rules to the handling of touts. A tout now had to be registered. And a tout was no longer a tout, but a Covert Human Intelligence Source. Only a registered CHIS could be tasked to go out and find specific information. Only an approved officer could handle a CHIS, and only a senior officer – Assistant Chief Constable or above – could sanction an op. You had to show forms, permission slips, operational reports: every time you used a tout you had to drop half a week on the paperwork.

  ‘And you do this?’

  ‘Are you stupid, Gerry? Do I fuck.’

  ‘So have you got one?’

  He was quiet for a bit. ‘Maybe. Call you back in ten.’

  Lewicki’s tout worked part-time as a janitor in the Community Centre on Langton Road. Within half an hour he was sitting in the passenger seat of the Forester, smelling strongly of turpentine (‘I was varnishing the sideboard’), his thirty-quid fee in his boiler-suit pocket. He was a bit put out when he heard what I wanted.

  ‘The mood of the place?’ He squished round to face me, shaking his head. ‘The fucking mood of the place?’

  I had hurt his professional pride. He was used to being asked for a name. A time. Some precise piece of data only he could divulge. Not something anyone could answer.

  I tried again. ‘I mean, what are they saying about it, the Walshes? Are they nervous, scared? Are they taking, you know, precautions?’

  Again the pitying look. ‘Well they’re not being silly about it. They’re keeping the head down. But that’s the wrong question, son.’

  ‘So what’s the right one?’

  ‘Who killed Billy Swan? Because I’ll tell you something, son. No one round here’s got a clue.’ He nodded importantly, tapped a finger on the dashboard. ‘No one’s got a clue. Maybe some of the young ones, or the gyppos up in Govanhill – maybe they did it on their own, make a name for themselves. But no one ordered it. No one green-lighted it here. Alright, son? We done?’

  I thanked him as he wrestled out of the car. This was as close to a vox pop as I was going to get. I watched him stroll down the hill, arms braced for action, the keelie roll. How did you make a mood piece out of this? A carnaptious old grass in a stained boiler-suit.

  I drove straight home from Pollok, back to the cold empty flat. I’d set the fire that morning and now I lit it, watched the blue flames play on the firelighter cubes, the twists of newspaper flare and blacken, the thin ribs of kindling quicken and blaze. I stuck two blocks of larch on top. I found an old fleece and pulled it on and lay on the couch watching the flames pouring round the yellow blocks, and wondered why I couldn’t get warm.

  ‘Daddy!’ The boy was slapping my shoulders, the crown of my head. ‘Daddy! Wake up!’ His grinning face, the bunched cheeks pink with cold. I could feel the outside on his anorak as I unzipped it and tugged it off. When I hoisted him onto my chest he buried his face in my neck, chilling my skin with his cheeks. His shoes bumped to the carpet as I pried them off in turn.

  He was twenty months old. For months he’d been in the point-and-tell phase, striding around the flat like a diapered Adam, imperiously designating the objects in his path, drunk with the joys of naming. Book! Car! Dada! Cup! Recently he’d discovered the two-word sentence and a plangent note, a thread of yearning, had entered his pronounc
ements. Doggy gone! All done! Want it! There was a haiku starkness to these bulletins that I found appealing and that made me think of the words we waste and of how we would fare if we were held to the two-word sentence. The gains would be striking. The lies, the excuses, the fudges and shams would all go. Job done. Enough bullshit.

  Over the boy’s head the day was fading in the window. I could hear Mari in the kitchen, putting the shopping away. Angus slithered down and skittered through to his mother. The fire was dying, the last logs blackened on top, still pulsing red underneath. I lifted the poker and opened the door in the latticework fireguard, keeping one hand free in case Angus came back. I turned the logs over and laid some kindling sticks crosswise over them. When I went to add a block of larch my hand jumped and the knuckle of my middle finger bumped the edge of the stove.

  In the kitchen I ran the cold tap and watched Mari stacking cans in the cupboard. She glanced over as if to check what was blocking her light.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  The water was cold now. I put my hand in the stream and let it play on the burn, a purple hyphen over the knuckle.

  ‘Fine. I burnt my finger. It’s OK.’

  ‘No, I mean how are you feeling?’

  I looked over my shoulder. She had paused with a can in her hand, as though weighing it for a missile.

  ‘I don’t know.’ The knuckle was numb. ‘I’m fine. I wish he had called, though. I wish he had let me know. I wish he’d done that.’

  I dried my hands on a dishtowel, stopped to look at them, the palms, the freckled backs, the pale strip where the ring had been. Could your hands do this, I wondered. Suddenly betray you? The little creatures that scampered to meet your every command, could they calmly tie the knots that lashed your wrists to a steering wheel, calmly tie and tighten them, send you to your death?

  Then Mari was in front of me, taking my hands in hers, placing my hands on her waist, pressing against me. She pulled my head down till her lips were touching my ear. ‘Give yourself a break, Gerry. It’s not a reflection on you.’