All the Colours of the Town

by McIlvanney, Liam

  ‘They’re fucking animals. All of them.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I sat back down. ‘Hey. What happened to Mary Whitehouse over here?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fuck this, fuck that. You’re worse than me.’

  He looked at me incredulously. ‘They’re only cuss words, mister. They don’t mean anything.’ He shook his head. ‘But that’s what it was like. Back then. That’s what could happen. You’re stood there with your pint and smoke and then, bingo, your brains are on the pavement. And it’s not even a brawl. You haven’t bumped somebody’s pint or looked the wrong way at their wife. There’s no reason. Or, there is a reason, but what’s it got to do with you? It’s like Death roaming the street, Death himself in a fucking cape and scythe, picking people out. Him, and not him. This guy, not that guy there.’ He looked at Rose and jerked his thumb at me: ‘And he thinks it takes a jail term to bring a man to God.’

  I walked them down to the street. They were heading for the cab rank at Queen Margaret Drive. We all shook hands.

  ‘How come you were never in jail?’

  ‘I kept a low profile. I was the driver. That’s all I did. I had a proper job too – I worked in a baker’s. There were Volunteers in my own street who thought I was a civilian.’

  I thought of Gordon Orchardton: you never knew who for sure was in it and who wasn’t. But if that was so, then how could Vincent Rose finger Lyons? How would he prove he’d been active?

  ‘Gerry.’ The pair of them were frowning. ‘What is it, Gerry? What’s wrong?’

  ‘No, it’s just. If you weren’t convicted, how do we know you were even involved? Who would believe you? You could be anybody.’

  We stood around for a bit and thought about this. Vincent took out his cigarettes and offered them round.

  ‘Look,’ I told them. ‘Thanks for coming over. It means a lot. But I haven’t got a story. I can’t stand it up.’

  Vincent looked off down the street. The sun was in his eyes and he lifted his hand to his brow and when the shadow crossed his face it stopped just short of the mouth. I looked at him.

  ‘Hold on,’ I told them. ‘Wait there.’

  I found it in the bureau. The Colour Party photo. There it was. One of the balaclavas: the brutal mouth-hole showed a twisted, puckered lip, raggedly partitioned by a scar, and the gapped front teeth beneath it. I clattered back downstairs and passed them the photo.

  ‘There he is,’ said Vincent. ‘The Frankenstein Kid. I didn’t need the balaclava, did I? I would frighten the weans without it.’

  ‘There you are then,’ John Rose said. ‘There’s your story.’

  I took the photo from Vincent.

  ‘What about you, though – you’ll go to jail too.’

  ‘Who’s going to jail?’ Vincent said. ‘Nobody’s going to jail.’

  John Rose said. ‘You don’t go to jail for anything prior to Good Friday.’

  ‘Of course.’ I remembered this. If the crime took place before 1998 and it’s a terrorist offence, you’re safe. You’ll stand trial and they’ll convict you, but you’re out on immediate licence.

  ‘Sometimes you do a few days,’ Vincent said. ‘A token gesture, but that’s it. The conviction stands – you’ve got that on your record – but you don’t do the time.’

  ‘And you’d take the conviction?’ I asked him.

  ‘To get at those bastards?’ He shrugged.

  *

  Ulster has its Disappeared. People who went astray, mislaid like a scarf or a pair of glasses. Lost, like a half-drunk glass of wine, set down on a shelf and forgotten. A troubling skelf in the back of the mind. But the Disappeared weren’t many. Mostly the dead turned up. The rhetorical power of a bloodied corpse – stricken, bested, conspicuously wrong – depended on the body being found. Dumped at a roadside, slumped in an alley, left where it fell on a cinderblock path. And this is how it mostly worked: for every killing a body, for every body a claim. If you were an ambitious police detective during the Troubles, this was your whole problem. From the standpoint of detection there was never much to do. Before you’d got the body to the morgue, the killers were ringing the press to claim the credit. A steady stream of self-solving murders. No suspense. No manhunt. No salacious details leaking out. Murders, not cases.

  The cops just aimed to tidy up, to prove what they already knew. Within hours of a killing, the police knew the story. Paramilitary organisation, relevant brigade, probable ASU, likely triggerman. It then was a question of forensics, of looking for the tell-tale spoor or snag, the fingerprint or fibre. Sometimes they got lucky. They got their match, the forensic click. They got it after Eamonn Walsh was shot. The triggerman was Davey Craig, a Woodvale volunteer who worked nights as a croupier at a riverfront casino. On the night of the murder he’s due to work the late shift. He meets with the others at a safe house in the Upper Shankill where a man they’ve never met is waiting to brief them. They learn who the ‘get’ is and where he lives, the layout of the house, the quickest escape routes. The weapons are handed over. They drive to the job for a dummy run. Then they do it for real. Afterwards they drive to another safe house where they strip and shower and their clothes are taken away and burnt. The car is dumped on waste ground, the guns returned to storage.

  This was the procedure, but on the night of Walsh’s murder Davey Craig didn’t follow procedure. He wore his work clothes – a burgundy shirt and tie, black formal trousers – under his painter’s overalls and he went straight to work from the job. When the RUC pinched him at the blackjack table they found carpet fibres from Walsh’s house in Craig’s turn-ups, a mist of Walsh’s blood on the cuffs of his blood-coloured shirt.

  Davey Craig got thirty years. He claimed he was working alone. He wasn’t interested in doing a deal and the cops didn’t care. They had their result. But now the driver had turned up out of nowhere and the old pentimento, the man in the hallway, was showing up too.

  *

  I checked on the boys. They were lying side by side, hands on their hearts like cadets in a passing-out parade.

  I sat down at my Vaio. I lit a Café Crème and booted up. I scrolled down my bookmarks to Scottishwire.com. It’s a site for hacks. It carries job ads and media goss and sometimes it breaks a story. The website listed an editorial telephone number with an Edinburgh code. It answered on the second ring.

  ‘Scottishwire.com.’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Kevin McCarthy.’

  ‘Kevin, it’s Gerry Conway.’

  ‘You still with us? I thought you’d dropped off the edge of the world.’

  ‘I thought so too.’

  ‘Are you looking for a job?’

  ‘Are you looking for a story?’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  There were three arraignments within the year. Lyons was tried in Belfast alongside Vincent Rose. And in the High Court of Glasgow Walter Maitland bore an air of benign abstraction through six laborious weeks of depositions. In blue pinstripes and silver tie, with a half-inch of snowy cuff that he pulled back to glance at his watch, he might have been a guest at a wedding, not a soon-to-be guest of the nation.

  The Maitland trial was a circus. I went along on the opening day, braving the scrum of white Lacoste tracksuits and black leather jackets. It was ten years since I’d reported court but nothing had changed. The first thing I saw, on pushing into the Press Room, was Lachlan MacCrimmon’s Harris tweed jacket: rough, grey, unyielding, its sleeves like rolls of carpet. Probably he didn’t hang it up at night, just propped it in a corner. Or maybe, since no one could remember seeing him free from its speckled custody, he slept in the thing, rolling himself in its smoky folds as his Hebridean forebears rolled themselves in plaids. Inside the jacket, when it turned from the coffee machine in the corner, was Lachlan himself and he gave a friendly little shout and plunged across the room.

  ‘Gerard Conway, all grown up. The big fixtures always bring them out.’

  Lachlan had been covering th
e city’s courts for twenty-five years, crossing the river from the High Court to the Sheriff Court and back again. His little office on Ballater Street housed the Clyde Court Agency and supplied copy to every paper in Scotland. He covered everything – murders, misdemeanours, claims for damages, rapes, traffic violations, breaches of the peace, fatal accident enquiries – in the same unflustered prose. There was an odd dichotomy between the disciplined crispness of Lachlan’s prose and the rumpled disorder of his person. His shaggy curls and beard were long, brown, and speckled in patches with grey, as if his hair were turning tweed. His tie – the job required a tie and so he wore one – it was a brown, soft, woolly, square-ended affair, folded not knotted, that seemed, when he fingered it, like an extension of his beard. The effect was less of a man in a suit of clothes than a creature in its mottled, moulting pelt. The grunts and snorts that accompanied Lachlan’s ferocious note-taking – he had the fastest, cleanest shorthand of anyone I knew – only buttressed this impression of an upright, friendly bear.

  ‘Lachlan MacCrimmon. Where you been hiding?’ It must have been close to ten years since I’d seen him.

  ‘Here and there, Gerry. Here and there.’

  In Lachie’s case, ‘here and there’ was a very precise specification. His whole life took place in the square mile bounded by Ballater Street and Clyde Street and the Victoria and Albert Bridges. This was his domain – a little rim of tarmac round a stretch of dirty river, with a courthouse at either end. If ‘here’ was the High Court on the Saltmarket, then ‘there’ was the Sheriff Court on Carlton Place.

  ‘Better motor, Gerry boy. We’ll never get a seat. Drink up–’ he had passed the coffee to me and fetched himself another. We both drained and crumpled our styrofoam cups. In the corridor Barbara Tennant came scurrying out of the advocate’s Common Room with one arm in her gown. The smiled she flashed at Lachlan as she wrestled with her sleeve darkened and fell as she spotted me. She clacked on up the corridor.

  The courtroom was raucous and full, the public gallery packed like Parkhead, like the old terraced Jungle. Ushers craned like meerkats, scouting for empty seats. Lachlan breenged forward to the press benches and pushed right in, the clamped knees collapsing like a line of dominoes as he passed. I hurried in his wake, excuse-me-ing and thank-you-ing, and dropped onto the six-inch of bench that his shuffling hams had cleared. Then the judge came in and we all stood up and squashed back down again. I couldn’t move my arms from my sides, but Lachlan had his elbows cocked, his notebook open and pencil poised.

  The big trials are the dullest. I’d forgotten this but it’s true. There is so much to get through, such a tiresome parade of truculent witnesses, sullen, dogged, sedulously reticent, rolling dully onwards like an overloaded cart. Within a day all the excitement and spice has been flattened under the creaking legal wheels.

  Maitland’s QC was Russell Spence. I knew Russell from the paper: he legalled the Toss on Saturday mornings, sitting at Maguire’s desk with a tall Starbucks suspected by the subs to be laced with single malt. I waited for the silent treatment – it was me and Moir, after all, who’d put his client in the dock – but he gave me a nod and mouthed the word ‘Gerry’ when he spotted me at Lachie’s side.

  Spence was good. All the QCs were good but Spence had that special, impermeable arrogance. Nothing a courtroom could throw at him, no blurted revelation or startling retraction, could ever discompose him. Whatever happened, something in his profile – the tilt of the jaw, the line of the mouth, the angle of an eyebrow – declared that this, precisely, was what he had looked for. I once watched him browsing a holiday brochure on the last day of a murder trial. I was sitting right behind him on the press benches. A blue, blocky legal tome was propped in his lap, but inside it were glossy shots of the Côte d’Azure. When the prosecution rested, Spence clapped shut the volume, rose to his feet, tugged on the points of his waistcoat and subjected to elegant ridicule each plank in the prosecution’s argument. The acquittal took barely an hour.

  This time there were no holiday brochures. This time even Spence was on the back foot, though he covered his tail with the usual aplomb. For nearly two weeks I sat beside Lachlan MacCrimmon and watched Russell Spence and tried to stay engaged. I didn’t succeed. When the verdict came in I was watching it on the evening news from a barstool in the Cope, the channel’s crime reporter wearing his hangdog face, his grey suit spotted with rain.

  QCs are indiscreet. They’re so much smarter than everyone else that they don’t see the need for circumspection. The night the verdict came in, Spence was in Babbity Bowster’s. He was drinking thirty-year-old Springbank at £12 a nip. I pretty much failed to mask my stupefaction when the barman rang it up, but I carried the drinks to his table and sat down.

  I sat there for most of the night. As the Springbank bottle dipped in twelve-quid increments, Spence gassed on about Maitland. In due course I was able to piece it all together, construct a serviceable version of events. Some of it I got from Spence, that drunken night in Babbity’s, some from Lachlan MacCrimmon, some from Moir and the Hey You, some from the trial itself, and some from the cuts of the Belfast trials. There are gaps, of course, and a necessary dependence on lies and suppositions, half- and quarter-truths. But this, as near as I can make it, flawed, skewed and half-cocked, is what I believe it comes down to.

  Walter Maitland was a gun-runner. He shipped weapons to the UVF from the early seventies right through the worst of the Troubles. Every three months a cattle truck rattled out of a Brigton yard, headed south for the ferry. Under the wooden boards, running with shit and piss, were yellow crates stamped ‘CORNED BEEF’. Inside them, under an innocent layer of tins, was a novelty race of firearms: World War Two Webleys; sporting shotguns with doctored stocks; converted starting pistols; ‘spitters’ knocked together by night-shift workers at light engineering firms. And maybe, too, there’d be some weeping sticks of gelly from the Ayrshire pits. These crates were unloaded in Antrim and the contents found their way to the back-rooms and cellars of drinking clubs in Donegall Pass and the Upper Shankill. Maitland wasn’t the only supplier: Toronto was the Loyalist’s Boston, and the Blacknecks had a supply line from Canada. TA depots were also popular for hit-and-run night-time raids. But the guns from Glasgow were regular and, for the most part, reliable. For twenty years they put the ginger into robberies, kneecappings and assassinations right across the Province.

  Maitland was now a key associate, someone to cultivate. There was a courier, a high-ranking Blackneck who made regular visits to Cranhill on the pretext of watching Rangers games. He slipped back and forth between Ireland and Scotland like the phantom ‘e’ in whisky, dropping off payments and making arrangements for the next consignment. There were drugs as well as guns, and sometimes drugs instead of guns, in the boxes under the slippery hooves.

  Naturally, Maitland was careful. There were no photo-calls with balaclava’d colour parties, no souvenir snapshots. But every few months he’d take the late-night crossing from Stranraer. He stayed on the Upper Shankill and drank in the kind of establishments where inquisitiveness is discouraged. It was in one of these shebeens that Maitland heard a voice from home. Peter Lyons was drinking with Isaac Hepburn. The two Glaswegians shared a drink and hit it off. They swapped numbers and kept in touch. When Lyons started the New Covenanters, Maitland weighed in with heavies and hardware. When Maitland strayed within reach of the law he had Lyons, fresh out of law school, to hold his hand. He even had Lyons represent him, in a libel suit in the early eighties. (A journalist had described Maitland as ‘Glasgow’s Godfather’, and Maitland promptly, primly and unsuccessfully sued him.)

  The Irish visits were quick and discreet, and nobody knew of Maitland’s Blackneck dealings but two of his closest lieutenants. Russell Spence himself, Maitland’s counsel for twenty years, had known nothing of this till the trial began. But the UVF was a leaky boat. There were touts at every level. When Special Branch learned who all was arming the Blacknecks they beelined for Cranhi
ll. It took them two days but they finished the job. They turned Walter Maitland. The deal was simple. Maitland would keep up his UVF contacts and feed what he knew to his Special Branch handler. In return, the Branch would keep the Provos in the dark about Maitland’s career as a UVF armourer, and Maitland would be free to ply his dubious trades – smack, crack, rackets and girls – without fear of interruption by the Procurator Fiscal.

  For a while it all worked out. Everybody’s happy. The Brits get their intelligence and Maitland stays alive and out of the Bar-L. There are minor arrests, just to make it look good, the odd overnighter in the cells, but nothing that might stick. Then the ceasefires come. And then the ceasefires hold. And when the peace beds down, the questions begin. Who needs a tout with nothing to sell? When does Walter Maitland’s Get Out of Jail card expire? Next thing the planes strike the towers. Now Maitland’s terrorists are not merely idle; they’re the wrong terrorists. No one’s interested in these guys any more. And here comes Martin Moir and the Hey You boys and suddenly Walter Maitland is the star of a weekly serial, an overwrought confection of knives and guns and girls and rackets that runs in instalments on the Toss’s front page. Now people are clamouring for action. And the man they expect to clean up the mess is Maitland’s old Shankill mucker, Peter William Lyons.

  But there’s nothing wrong with Maitland’s memory. He takes to phoning Peter Lyons to reminisce about old times, the Belfast days, the New Covenanters. The name Eamonn Walsh figures strongly in these telephone trips down memory lane. Naturally, Lyons gets the picture. He agrees to help Maitland however he can. He can’t stop the prosecution: Maitland accepts that. But maybe Lyons can take a direct interest in the case, find out what’s happening, and feed it back to his friends in Cranhill. The go-between here is DS William Torrins, the undercover cop who briefs Lyons on the case. There is some dubiety as to whether or not Torrins is alive to the true situation. In any case, the situation itself cannot survive the Scottishwire post on the decades-old murder of Eamonn Walsh.