Bloody January

by Alan Parks

  ‘That’s Tommy Malone,’ said Wattie, pointing at the picture.

  Malone was sitting at Gibbs’s feet. He was naked, big smile on his face, arm round a girl with a pentangle painted on her chest. Jimmy Gibbs standing behind them with a hard-on and a severed goat’s head in his hand. The blood was dripping from its neck, splashing down onto Malone and the girl.

  Next one was of an old man with nothing but a zipped leather hood on. He was bent over a thing that looked a bit like one of the pommel horses you got in a school gym, Howie Nairn fucking him from behind. There were more. More sex, more tied-up people, more beds, more rooms. And there was one that stopped him dead. Felt like the breath had been knocked out of him. He looked up. ‘You got anything to drink here?’ Bobby nodded, asked Wattie to help him take a couple of boxes off the top of a pile. McCoy slipped the bottom photo into his coat pocket while they were doing it, put the pile back on the table.

  ‘Who are all these people?’

  Bobby had found a bottle of whisky, was tipping a slug into each of their mugs. ‘Pros, runaways he found at the bus station, rich kids looking for kicks, people that worked on the estate, anyone. Gibbs picked them up everywhere.’

  ‘And Howie had a bright idea, wanted to use the pictures as blackmail.’ Was more of a statement than a question.

  Bobby nodded. ‘He came back full of it. He’d seen someone he knew there, some judge in a pair of frilly knickers getting walked on by a girl in stilettos. Wasn’t hard to see how it could work.’

  ‘So what went wrong?’

  ‘The judge didn’t play ball like he thought he would. He went straight to Gibbs, told him what was going on. Next thing Howie gets picked up with three shotguns in the boot of his car. You know Howie, he wasn’t stupid, he’d never carry anything like that in his car. They planted them. Got him sent back inside, teach him a lesson, cunts that they are.’

  McCoy looked at the photos again. ‘What’s all this black magic stuff about? That come from Gibbs?’

  Bobby nodded. ‘He was really serious about it, tried to talk Howie into coming along to one of his ceremonies, as he called it. Howie was having none of it. He’d seen enough of Gibbs and Broughton House. Gibbs had a bunch of kids hanging on him, following him about. All of them off their heads on acid. Thought he was a wizard or some shite. Thought he could do anything. And he wasn’t telling them anything different. Was loving it.’

  ‘Like that Charles Manson,’ said Wattie.

  Bobby nodded. ‘That’s what Howie said.’

  McCoy tapped one of the photos. ‘This boy, Tommy Malone. He one of them? One of his followers?’ Bobby nodded. ‘So let me get this straight. Howie gets me up to Barlinnie, tells me about the girl working in the restaurant. Thought that after Malone had killed the girl I’d get him and he’d lead back to the Dunlops? That was the plan?’

  ‘Think so, except he didn’t know the boy would kill himself. He thought you’d get him and he’d spill the whole thing. Gibbs, the parties at Broughton House, everything.’

  ‘Why’d he pick me? Hardly knew me from Adam. How’d he know I had history with them?’

  ‘Gibbs. Gibbs told him.’

  ‘Could Gibbs make Malone kill the girl then kill himself?’

  Bobby shrugged. ‘Maybe. Howie said they were like disciples, do anything he said. Gibbs told him he’d done it before. Some girl got pregnant, been sleeping with Teddy, the son. Killed herself. Said he made her do it.’

  McCoy looked at the photo again. Gibbs grinning, holding up the goat’s head, blood dripping from it, dripping onto Tommy Malone’s lonely stupid head. No parents, just out of Nazareth House, stuffed full of drugs, girls that would fuck him on Gibbs’ say-so. No wonder he fell for it. Fell deep.

  ‘How’d he know about it? How’d Howie know to get me into jail?’

  ‘He was in court the day before. The van that took them through town stopped at a set of lights. He saw Malone, said he looked mad, out of it. Knew something had to be up for him to be away from the estate. Lorna Skirving was his best guess.’

  ‘She wasn’t pregnant, though,’ said Wattie. ‘Why her?’

  ‘She couldn’t keep her mouth shut. Dunlop was already worried about it. She’d started blabbing, talking to some prostitute’s group or something. Money and a couple of bits of jewellery had gone missing from Broughton House. She was trouble. Could only see it getting worse.’

  McCoy picked up another picture. Teddy Dunlop kneeling on a bed, shoving his dick into a girl’s mouth, grasping her hair, forcing her towards him. The girl was Lorna Skirving.

  She was trying to look like she was enjoying it. Didn’t look like she was. Picture’d been taken through the two-way mirror, must have been taken just as some light seeped in, someone opening the door maybe. You could see a faint reflection of the faces in the room looking through the mirror. One was Gibbs, head thrown back laughing. The other was a man looking intently through the mirror, middle-aged, moustache, dinner suit on.

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ Wattie said under his breath. ‘Fuck me. Give us that picture.’

  Bobby handed it to him, a ‘please yourself’ expression on his face. Wattie took it, peered at it closely.

  ‘What?’ said McCoy, him and Bobby staring. Wattie put the picture down on the table in front of them. Pointed. ‘That’s Gibbs, yes?’ They nodded. ‘Do you know who the other bloke is?’

  They shook their heads.

  ‘My mum kept scrapbooks, pictures of the royal family. She was mental for them. Me and my sister used to look at them when we were wee. Kept them in the display cupboard. Had about fifty of the bloody—’

  ‘Fuck sake, Wattie!’ said McCoy, exasperated.

  ‘Sorry. That’ – he tapped the picture again – ‘if I’m not mistaken, is Lord Liddesdale.’

  The two of them looked blank.

  ‘The Duke of Cromarty.’

  Still blank.

  ‘He’s the Queen’s bloody cousin!’

  ‘What?’ said Bobby.

  ‘He’s the Queen’s cousin, an equerry or whatever you call it.’

  They all looked at the picture again. ‘I wouldnae know him from Adam,’ sniffed Bobby. ‘No bad looking, though.’

  McCoy put the pictures back in the envelope. Bobby held his hand out.

  ‘Don’t think so, Bobby. I need these. You fuck off to sunny Spain and I’ll take care of them. Anyone asks, I got them from Howie’s cell. Nothing to do with you. Okay?’

  ‘You promise?’

  ‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’ He stood up, felt the photo in his coat pocket digging into his side. ‘C’mon, Wattie, let’s leave Bobby to his packing.’

  The movers were outside, leaning against the van, reading the paper, waiting for the nod to start again.

  ‘What do we do with the pictures?’ asked Wattie.

  ‘Play it by the book. Show them to Murray, let him deal with it. They’re not going to let me anywhere near the Dunlops anyway.’ He sat down in the driver’s seat, padded his coat looking for his fags, pulled them out and realised he’d pulled out a wee jotter as well. Shite. It was Stevie Cooper’s tally book the two lads had given him. Been so doped up on painkillers the other night he’d forgotten to give him it.

  ‘Need to make a stop on the way back, something I’ve forgotten to do.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Drop something off, no take a minute.’

  THIRTY

  Took them about half an hour to get back across the city. Wattie checked in with the shop on the radio while McCoy looked out the window, watched Glasgow grinding to a halt in the snow, tried not to think about the photo in his back pocket.

  ‘You and Murray got a time to interview Teddy Dunlop?’ asked McCoy.

  Wattie grunted. ‘Joking, aren’t you? His lawyer’s Archie Lomax. From what I hear we’ll be lucky to get near him before next year. Murray’s got the high-ups at Central leaning on him, though.’

  Snow was coming down harder now, getting misty as wel
l. Wattie switched the headlights on. ‘About here, is it?’ he asked, rubbing at the windscreen with a dirty chamois cloth. ‘Cannae see a bloody thing.’

  McCoy pointed at the road running off to the right. ‘Drop me here.’ He could still feel the rolled-up picture in his pocket. Wasn’t quite sure why he’d hid it away, was a base reaction, didn’t even think about it. Didn’t want to think about it now.

  Wattie pulled over and suddenly realised where they were. Memen Road in Springburn. Even he’d heard of that. ‘You’re no going in there, are you? You’ll need a bloody armed guard. They’ll smell you a mile off.’

  McCoy opened the door, letting a blast of icy air into the car. ‘If I’m no back in twenty minutes, you can send in the the Heroes of Telemark.’

  Wattie was right to be worried. Memen Road was where angels and polis feared to tread. Was where the council had dumped all the problem tenants. The family gangs of villains, people with feral kids, the alkies, the wife beaters, the borderline insane. Council called it containment. Everyone else called it no-man’s-land.

  McCoy started walking, ignored the belligerent stares of two ten-year-olds sitting on a wall, anorak hoods up, crisp packet full of glue passing between them. The fences separating the gardens had long been pushed over or torn apart. Pavement and the gardens had become one long line of broken prams, overturned bins and the occasional dumped fridge. The grass, or what was left of it, already covered with a thin layer of the falling snow. McCoy had his head down as he walked, partly to stay out the wind and partly because he was looking out for dog shit or anything worse. Rumour was some copper had stood on an aborted foetus in a carrier bag last year.

  He was scanning the ground, didn’t see them until they were right on him. Three big lads. All long leather coats, sideburns and wide flared trousers flapping in the wind. One of them had lost an eye; scar tissue and a weeping slot all that was left. He stood squarely in front of him, put his thumbs in his belt. ‘Fuck you want?’ he asked. McCoy reached for his badge. ‘I know you’re fucking polis. I asked what you wanted.’

  ‘Cooper,’ he said. ‘Tell him McCoy’s here.’

  Stevie Cooper had gradually colonised all the flats in the last two closes of the street. A kind of fortress guarded by lads looking to get onto his team on one side, old thread works and about half a mile of industrial wasteland on the other. About as far from the long arm of the law as you could get and still be in Glasgow. The Cyclops whistled and a wee girl, seven or eight, appeared out of nowhere. McCoy shook his head. It was January, snow coming down in pelters and all she had on was a wee skirt and a hand-knitted cardigan over a filthy Mickey Mouse T-shirt. Sodden plimsolls completed the misery. Cyclops barked at her, ‘Tell Stevie McCoy’s here.’

  The wee girl nodded seriously and ran off towards the last tenement. The three keepers of the flame stood around trying to look hard. Pinched faces, hands in pockets, stomping their platform boots on the ground to keep warm.

  ‘You no trip over in those things?’ McCoy asked amiably. No response. The wee girl came running back.

  ‘He’s okay,’ she said, panting, breath clouding out in the cold air in front of her. ‘Let him through.’

  McCoy followed her across the gardens, picking his way between the broken bricks and the icy puddles. She stopped at the last close entrance. ‘Fourth floor,’ she said, holding out her hand.

  McCoy gave her ten pence and she looked at it disgusted.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said, handing over a new fifty pence. ‘Away and buy yourself some chips. You must be freezing.’

  Was as cold inside the block as out. Most of the flats seemed to be empty, doors either boarded over or kicked in. A pipe had burst somewhere, causing a dripping river of ice on the stairs. McCoy trudged up past a huge ‘FLEET COUNTRY’ spray-painted on a landing in bright red. Must be Stevie reliving his youth; he’d left those chancers in his wake a long time ago. The fourth-floor flat had a door. A thick wooden one with a brand-new deadlock on it. McCoy knocked, waited as the bolts were drawn and keys were turned. Eventually Billy Weir stuck his head round the door.

  ‘Sorry bout that, some coppers with a big baton thing tried to get in last week. Won’t try that again. How’s you?’ he said, holding out his hand.

  McCoy shook it. He liked Billy, he was smart; Cooper thought so too, he’d only come out Barlinnie a year or so ago and he was already being treated as his second-in-command. He held the door open.

  ‘He’ll no be a minute, come on through.’

  McCoy followed him into the warm kitchen, trying to ignore the screams and thumps coming from the room next door. Weir sat down at the Formica table, rolled up the sleeves of his Toulouse-Lautrec print shirt and went back to chopping and dividing the huge mound of speed on the table with a metal ruler. Pushing it back and forward, cutting the powder finer.

  ‘Cup of tea?’

  A girl of sixteen or so, skirt barely covering her arse, figure that would stop a clock, was standing by the sink, fag in red-lipsticked mouth. McCoy shook his head, sat down, and that’s when he saw him. There was a man handcuffed to the range, kneeling down, trying to make himself as inconspicuous as possible. He’d blood all over his face, nose was at a crazy angle. He tried to smile at McCoy, way a whipped dog would smile if it could. He’d a dark piss stain all down the front of his trousers; smell was coming off him in waves. McCoy nodded down at him.

  ‘What’s going on there then?’

  Weir looked at the man like he was part of the furniture. ‘He’s next. Thieving cunt that he is.’

  ‘I’m no, I’m no, it wasnae—’

  He only managed to get that much out before Weir leant over and booted him in the stomach. ‘Cooper should be done by now,’ he said, standing up and booting the man again for luck. ‘C’mon through.’

  No screams and grunts from behind the door any more, just whimpering. Weir knocked and pushed it open.

  ‘Boss? You okay?’

  Cooper was standing in the middle of the empty room. No furniture, just torn floral wallpaper and a stained wooden floor. His usual jeans and short-sleeved shirt were streaked in blood, tidy quiff all over the place. He’d a bottle of Irn-Bru up at his mouth, draining it in long slugs. The whimpering was coming from a man in the corner. He’d blue underpants on and one sock, nothing else. His eyes were swollen shut, scalp cut up, half his hair gone. The foot that didn’t have a sock was thick with dark blood, looked like he was missing a couple of toes.

  Cooper looked at McCoy over the bottle, eyes glassy and unfocused. McCoy had seen him like this before. Went like this before he ran straight into another gang with razors in each hand, after someone had said the wrong thing, said no when he wanted to hear yes. McCoy hadn’t wanted to be around him then, didn’t want to be around him now.

  ‘I’m busy,’ he said, looking away.

  McCoy reached into his coat and pulled out the tally book. ‘They owe you a tenner, other than that it’s all there.’

  Cooper nodded to Weir. He took the book off him and checked the money inside. Nodded. ‘Hundred and ninety quid and the tally book.’

  Cooper pulled out a couple of pills from his pocket and swallowed them over with the last of the Irn-Bru, then lobbed the bottle at the brick hole where the fireplace had been. It smashed, joined the dozen or so others that had been thrown there before. There was a wee battered coffee table in the corner, a pile of folded shirts and jeans with dry-cleaning tags sitting on it next to four or five different carving knives, a couple of pairs of pliers and a pistol. Cooper walked over, picked up one of the knives, judged the weight of it, picked up another.

  ‘Good wee doggy you are, McCoy, get things done no fuss.’

  He was absent-mindedly twisting the tip of the knife into his thigh, oblivious to the hole in his jeans he was making and to the blood running down his leg. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a roll of fifties. Peeled off five and held them out.

  ‘A tip.’

  McCoy shook hi
s head. ‘Was a favour, Stevie, don’t worry about it.’

  ‘C’mere, you cheeky cunt.’

  McCoy knew better than to argue with him in this state. He walked over and Cooper tucked the notes into his top pocket. Was a smell coming off him, something chemical, blood and pennies. Cooper smiled, pulled him close, whispered in his ear.

  ‘You and me, McCoy. You won’t let me down. You and me.’ He ran his knuckles across his head, pushed him away laughing. ‘Now beat it. I’ve got stuff to do here.’

  McCoy turned to go, anxious to get away.

  ‘By the way,’ said Weir. ‘Who was it?’

  McCoy shrugged. ‘Just two daft boys. A thin one and a fat one that wasn’t all there. Crapping themselves. Nobodies.’

  McCoy just managed to shut the door before the begging started. He stood there listening as it was silenced by what sounded like a kick. He realised the girl in the kitchen was watching him.

  ‘You all right?’ she asked. ‘Look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  He nodded. A scream came from behind the door, a thump then another scream.

  ‘How d’you stand it?’ he asked her.

  ‘Stand what?’ she said.

  THIRTY-ONE

  A fist rapped at the door.

  ‘What you doing in there, you dirty bastard?’

  ‘Fuck off,’ said McCoy.

  Thomson walked away laughing, shoes echoing on the tiles. Funny thing is, he wasn’t that far wrong. McCoy was sitting in a toilet cubicle looking at dirty pictures. Well, one picture, the one that he’d put in his coat. It was a picture of the swimming pool at Broughton House where they’d interviewed Gibbs. It was night-time, pool lit up. There was a rug down on the tiles, two girls on it, both nude, one of them Lorna Skirving.

  A crowd of men and a couple of women were looking on. Dunlop was there, silk dressing gown, polite smile on his face, hand in his pocket. Could have been judging the hydrangeas at the county show. Gibbs too, Super 8 camera in hand, even Tommy Malone. It was the figure at the side that was the problem. He’d a towel round his waist, podgy body leaning forward to making sure he could see what was going on. Alasdair Cowie.