My knees shivered a little as we crossed the threshold but the whisky anchored me, burned in my gut like a glowing coal.
The door closed behind me. A man was rising from a chair, cut-glass tumbler in his hand.
He didn’t look like his photos. The one you always saw in the papers was an old one. He had lost weight since then, his features were finer. He was wearing a dark-red silk shirt and stone-coloured chinos, and the hand he held out was small and neat, like a surgeon’s. I shook it limply.
‘Get you a drink, Gerry? Lagavulin, is it?’
There were two shelves of bottles above the bar and it looked like all of them were single malts. I spotted a Laphroaig, the crimson label of a Cardhu.
‘I’m fine.’
‘Suit yourself.’
He came out from behind the bar with the glass in his hand.
‘Sit down at least.’
I sat across from him in a fat tan La-Z-Boy, its high padded arms hemming me in. I felt like a boy in his father’s chair.
‘Well it’s nice to finally meet you.’ Walsh sat down in a wing-chair, crossed his legs. ‘Though I hear you’ve been claiming my acquaintance already.’
I think I may have opened my mouth at that point but I had nothing to say so I shut it again.
‘Apparently I recommended an establishment in Govanhill to you.’ He had seen the card I left with Gina. ‘I don’t mind,’ he went on. ‘I just hope you enjoyed yourself.’ He sipped his whisky. ‘I saw your piece on Sunday.’
‘Yeah? Keep reading. We need all the help we can get.’
‘Normally I’d go straight to my lawyer. He enjoys sorting these things out. Making people repent their rashness. But I thought we’d have a chat first.’
‘Is that a euphemism?’
He laughed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No it’s not. If I wanted to hurt you, you think I’d bring you to my house?’
‘I don’t know what you’d do, Mr Walsh.’
Walsh smoothed his shirt-front with a dainty hand. ‘You’re upset,’ he said. ‘You’re hurting. Martin was your friend. I understand that. I liked Martin too. He did me a favour once. He was a good journalist.’ Better than you, his look said. ‘But he killed himself.’ Walsh tapped the arm of his chair. ‘That’s what DS Gunn thinks, isn’t it? The pathologists. You, on the other hand, have decided that I was involved. Why would you think that?’
He sipped his whisky, light catching the facets of the heavy crystal tumbler, a dark tint of scorn in his eyes.
‘Yeah, that’s a hard one.’ I was riled now, could feel my forehead tightening, should have taken a breath but didn’t. ‘Martin Moir’s on your case for the past two years. The last guy Moir went after was Walter Maitland. Now where’s Walter Maitland again?’ Walsh held my gaze. ‘But hey, you’re fine with that. You’re not scared at all.’
‘Why should I be scared?’ Walsh stood up. I gripped the padded arms of the chair, got ready to spring to my feet but he was only fixing another Macallan. He stoppered the decanter and lifted his glass. ‘He’d been after me for two years. What had he actually done?’ He spread his arms and looked around the room. ‘I’m still here. Watty Maitland’s up in Peterhead; I’m not. I’m nursing a twelve-year-old Speyside and enjoying our conversation. Martin wrote a lot of things, he made a lot of allegations, insinuations. How much of it stuck, Gerry? How much of it came to court?’
I wished I’d taken the whisky now, a finger or two of Lagavulin.
‘No but he’d found something, hadn’t he? Something that would stick. And you stopped him.’
‘Oh, I see. He was about to get it right. He was just on the verge of something big when he’s taken out of the picture.’ Walsh laughed. ‘He’d had a fair crack at it, Gerry. Two years. Maybe there was nothing to get. You ever think of that?’
‘Could be. Could be you’re a liar and you killed Martin Moir.’
‘Well you print that, Mr Conway, and see what happens.’
‘What, you’re gonnae put me in a quarry?’
No rage, no snarling eruption. Just the cold eyes, the sour mouth. He tipped his head back till it rested on the stiff padded leather of his claret wing-chair and let his eyelids droop. When he opened them he kept his head tilted back, watched me through weary slits.
‘What would you do if I told you I’d killed Martin Moir? I put out the word. I arranged to have him killed. Would you want that knowledge?’
I looked at the narrowed eyes. All the bravado seemed to have left me and I didn’t know the answer. Walsh sighed.
‘Out of your depth, son,’ he said. ‘Your taxi’s outside.’
I got to my feet and opened the door. The big guy in the puffa jacket detached himself from the wall and looked from me to Walsh.
‘By the way.’ Walsh was behind me, fixing another drink. ‘The guy who saw the lassie in the close. You remember his name?’
I stopped in the hallway. I didn’t turn round.
‘His name was McClymont.’
I could hear the ice-cubes rattling the glass, the stopper coming out of the bottle.
‘Aye. Grant McClymont. Ask your Polish mate about him.’
The fat bloke was leaning against his taxi, texting with one hand. He straightened as I came abreast but I walked on past him and down the gravel drive. The gate clicked and slid open. I zipped up my jacket and kept walking.
*
Next morning I logged into cuttings, called up Moir’s stories for the past three years, everything he’d written since the day I left the paper. I put a half a ream in the printer and watched the stories sift out, stacked them on the kitchen table.
Mari and Angus were out at the park. I looked at the clock: ten past eleven. So what? I took a Rolling Rock from the fridge, put some Muddy on the sound system, started working through the cuts. I sorted them into piles, according to subject-matter. A pile for stabbings. Smaller pile for rapes. Mari and Angus came back. Shootings. She put Angus down for a nap. Front companies; fraud. She appeared at the door in her running gear, hair up in a scrunchie, fixing the iPod earphones into place. Gang-related violence, the tallest of the piles. She raised her eyebrows at the three empty bottles and closed the front door with the softest of clicks.
It was geography. I spent two hours at the kitchen table and geography was the key, nothing else. Nothing connected Moir’s recent stories, nothing beyond the location. His hunting ground had shifted south. For twelve months he’d barely crossed the Clyde. So what were the stories he wasn’t writing? They were the stories about the northside and the East End. They were stories about Hamish Neil.
Chapter Twenty-four
‘Back to the scene of the crime.’
Lewicki spun the wheel, took us deeper into the dreary streets. The water tower loomed above the grey maisonettes.
‘What crime’s that?’
‘Take your pick. This whole estate’s a crime scene. You know what that was?’
We were passing a newish apartment building in yellow brick, already streaked brown where the rivets had rusted, bled down the frontage.
‘Surprise me.’
‘The Bellrock.’
He pulled in to the kerb to light a ciggie and I studied the building, the little pocket of wasteground beside it.
The Bellrock Bar was one of the fabled Glasgow pubs, like the Saracen Head or the Vulcan Bar. It was Walter Maitland’s shop. Two men had been murdered there in the late Nineties. They were picked up in another pub and brought to the Bell. The doors were locked, the shutters closed and the fun began. Teeth were pulled. Fingers smashed with hammers. Facial hair burnt off and noses scorched by cigarette lighters. The post-mortem revealed scalding to the head and upper body of both men in a pattern consistent with kettles having been emptied over them. Ligature marks on the elbows, wrists and ankles suggested each man had been tied to a chair. Both had been shot in the head.
‘You know what happened there?’
‘I covered it,’ I told him. ‘I wrote the story.’
I also knew what happened next. Maitland had friends on the force. Though the wasted bodies were dumped beside an exit on the M8, they were linked back to the Bellrock Bar. His police mole gave Maitland the heads-up. He called his men out at midnight, trucks and diggers and bulldozers. He flattened the Bell, not a stone left standing, and trucked the rubble into the night. When the cops showed up to do the forensics, a riot squad with a battering-ram and the SOCOs in their moon-suits, the pub was gone, vanished. Just a raw patch of earth, a low wall filmed in brick-dust.
Lewicki killed the engine. Turned the key again to bring the window down an inch then turned it off again.
‘You knew,’ I said. No petulance, no tone of accusation; just a statement of fact. ‘You knew about Moir.’
Lewicki looked out of his window, blew smoke though the gap. ‘I had an idea.’
‘How?’
‘It was one of his stories.’ He was still facing his window. I watched the back of his head. ‘The Café Verona shooting, end of last year.’
I remembered it. A man had been murdered in a pizzeria frequented by the Walshes. Two men with scarves round their faces walked in and shot him in the chest as he ate linguine with his girlfriend. Four bullets. A junior Walsh lieutenant.
‘What about it?’
‘Well, your friend’s report was commendably accurate. It was a little too accurate. He knew some things that we hadn’t made public.’
‘Like what?’
Lewicki turned to face me. ‘Like the number of shots.’
I zipped up my jerkin. With the engine off the heater had stopped. Cold air surged in through the open window.
‘But he spoke to the witnesses. Other diners.’
‘Witnesses.’ Lewicki grinned, shook his head. ‘What would they know about it? I could take a gun out right now and fire six shots at that wall and you wouldn’t be able to count them. A busy restaurant? The crowd, the panic, the echo. The shooter wouldn’t know himself until he checked his magazine. But Moir knew. Four bullets. He also knew that the killers escaped in an SUV.’ Lewicki nodded. ‘Well, again, that was news to us. News to the witnesses. They heard the killers drive off but they didn’t see them.’
A man had come onto a balcony, three floors up, gripping the railing as if he was planning to vault it.
‘You’re saying what, Jan? You’re saying he was in on it, the hit?’
‘I don’t know. He knew about it. If he didn’t know in advance he knew soon after.’
‘Why would they tell him?’
‘Make sure it gets a good show. And maybe a favour to Moir. Throw him a bone.’
The man on the balcony raised his arms in a stretch, locked his hands behind his head. He was wearing saggy black boxers and a V-necked dark green T-shirt.
‘You ask him about it?’
‘We pulled him in.’
‘And what?’
Lewicki shook his head. ‘Look at this eejit. T-shirt and drawers in the middle of winter. Prick. And nothing, Gerry. He denied it. Says he spoke to a witness at the scene, a wee boy in the street who saw two men leaving in an SUV. Says a witness in the restaurant told him the number of shots. He’s lying through his teeth but what can you do?’
Moir was dirty. Moir was bent, bought, crooked. The prince of the Tribune. The boy king of Pacific Quay. Doing a scumbag’s bidding.
‘Hey. Don’t take it so hard,’ Lewicki was saying. ‘They’ve got everything else. Lawyers, judges, cops, no shortage of cops. Why wouldn’t they have journos too?’
Was this why I’d done it? I thought I was vindicating Moir’s memory, tending the flame. But really what I wanted was to find him out, prove that Moir was just as shabby as the rest of us.
‘I’m not taking it hard, Jan, I’m just, I cannae see what – look, you’re going to have to explain this to me.’
‘Explain what?’
‘What he wants with a hack. A polis, yeah. A judge? All the better. Every home should have one. But buy a hack? We report things anyway. That’s the job.’
Lewicki was frowning, a sour grimace, it pained him how slow I was, how much he had to school me.
‘Think about it, Gerry.’
‘I am thinking. Who even reads us any more? The best we can do is leave him alone. And put the bloody window up, I’d rather die of secondary smoke than freeze to fucking death.’
‘It’s not about him.’ Lewicki chipped his smoke onto the pavement, shut the window. ‘It’s about the other guy.’
‘What other guy?’
‘Jesus, Ger, do you read your own paper? What was Martin writing for the past twelve months?’
‘Crime. Gangs. The usual.’
‘Crime where?’
I thought of the cuts on my kitchen table.
‘Southside. Govanhill.’
‘And who runs Govanhill?’
‘Packy Walsh runs Govanhill.’
The man on the balcony leant to spit over the railing. He watched it land and went back inside. I knew all the answers to Lewicki’s questions, I just didn’t know what they meant.
‘You see it now? He’s not writing stories about Govanhill. He’s writing stories about Packy Walsh. If the papers are all over Walsh, then the polis will follow. If the polis are tied up with Walsh, they can’t come after Neil.’
‘It’s a diversion.’
‘Pure and simple. Plus, if there’s too much heat on the South Side, they can’t trade. Where do the smackheads take their business?
‘Okay. I see it.’
‘The Neils are cute. They’ve got touts in the Walshes’ crew, always have done. They give Martin stories about Walsh. Most of what they feed him is true, but sometimes they’ll give him a ringer. See if he’ll run it.’
‘The girl. The child sex ring.’
‘Maybe there was a child sex ring. Maybe there wasn’t. Kids being abused, pimped out in Govanhill? Probably. But the guy McClymont fingered, Radislav Gombar – he wasn’t involved. And the story Martin wrote was a fairytale. Just a bullshit story to keep the heat on Walsh.’
*
I cabbed it back to the Quay. On the way there we passed the site of the athletes’ village. The signs on the hoardings had changed: I saw the outline of the lighthouse, the stylised beam of light – BELLROCK SECURITY. At the Trib building I paid the driver and trudged across to the revolving doors but I stopped in my tracks. I couldn’t face it, riding up in the lift to the fourth floor, sitting at my desk, tapping out my bullshit stories. I crossed the concourse to the river, gripped the chill railings, closed my eyes as the wind stirred my hair.
How could he have done it? How could Moir have kept it going? Sitting in conference every Tuesday, filing his copy on Friday, reading his byline on Sunday: By Martin Moir, Investigations Editor. And all of it fed to him by gangsters. All the splashes, all the page-four leads, just a ruse to keep the polis tied up with one hood and not another. I remembered Ramage’s words. Everyone thought Moir was the golden goose. Like fuck. He was the wee runty bird in the nest – left to himself he’d have starved to death.
I turned and leaned against the railings. He’d sold us out, betrayed us. All the things he believed. And Moir did believe them, despite what he’d done, I was sure of that. Moir believed them even if no one else did. Though, what, after all, had he betrayed? The building rose above me, six stark storeys of smoked glass, and the big neon eagle on the roof. A hollow boast of a building. A statement that no one believed any more.
Chapter Twenty-five
The sounds of the river, the song of the Clyde. That’s what comes back now, the river’s jostling slaps and slurps, two inches from my head where it lay against the hull. All that summer we lived on a boat, a Loch Fyne skiff, berthed at Renfrew. Elaine’s dad was a scallop diver but he’d cracked three ribs toppling from a bar stool on Paddy’s Day so the boat was idle. We gave up our uni flat and moved in. I was eighteen, Elaine twenty.
We slept in the bow, two curving bench-beds that met at a point. Every night, after a beggarly half-pint of Bass in the Harbour Bar, we would pick our way across the rubbled yard and climb down the rungs to the wooden pontoon. Stepping across a black half-yard of river I would pause with my foot on the gunwale. You could sense the boat’s heft through the sole of your shoe; one flex of your ankle could tilt the whole craft.
We took her out once – the Jessie Jane, she was called – when Elaine’s dad came to visit. Sailed her down to the Tail o’ the Bank. Past the big container cranes at Greenock, out to where the river widens. The day was fine. The Clyde shone in its bowl of green hills. We stood on the little deck and spun around to take it all in. The mouths of the Gareloch, Loch Long, the Holy Loch. The estuary towns – Helensburgh and Greenock – looked trig and grey in the sun. On the way back we left the channel, took a short cut and grounded on a sandbank. For miles around us the Clyde stretched away, flat and blue in the failing light, and the Jessie Jane in the middle, grounded. We weren’t stuck fast – the engine took us off and we motored back in the dusk with the cormorants flying low across our path – but I remember that moment, the sand grinding the hull, and the three of us on deck, on solid ground and out at sea.
I looked at it now, through the streaked windscreen. The grey firth, its skin shirred by wind. Dark hills dissolving in rain. I thought of what lay beneath, the ticking hulls, the warheads, the sleek black shapes that snagged the nets of trawlers. Why did he do it? I lit a Café Crème and turned the key to press the button, bring down the window an inch. Blade of wind in my ear, rain spotting the leg of my jeans. Was it money? Was that enough, was that all it took? Or was it the promise of all those stories, the thrill of his byline under the splash?
I knew that craving, knew what you’d do to feed it. I couldn’t feel superior to Moir, not even now. We were none of us journalists, not any more, not properly. But it had cheered me, it had solaced me to think about Moir. Still answering the bell. Still coming off the stool. Digging out stories and standing them up. Better than the rest of us. Better than me. Tell the truth and shame the devil: that was why Moir had been going after Walsh. Not just to gladden a scumbag like Neil.
Where the Dead Men Go Page 19