The Less Dead

by Denise Mina

  The tipsy women are inviting the beer spilling men to join them at their table.

  ‘The Drag used to be down by the river but the docks closed and it moved uphill. Used to be older women. They knew how to take care of themselves. They met in the Waterloo pub at nine every night before they started, for a drink and so they’d know who was out each night, who to look out for. They knew what they were doing. One Christmas they even had a secret santa. If a woman looked too young they’d call the police. But that wasn’t just out of the goodness of their hearts, younger women would take all the trade, but it meant it was less wild on the Drag.’

  The two men are joining the women, dragging metal chairs around the stone floor and talking loudly.

  ‘There were rules. Not to romanticise the past, I’m sure it was just as shitty but it was safer. Then heroin arrived and addicts flocked down there desperate for money. Girls from ordinary backgrounds, girls you wouldn’t expect. Young kids, middle-class kids. Kelvingrove Park was where the guys went to prostitute themselves, all young, lots of them were straight out of childrens’ homes.’

  Robertson clears his throat and takes a drink of beer. He’s sad, affected by the memories of that time and his voice is lower.

  ‘Let me tell you,’ he says, ‘those heroin addicts were not sympathetic. They were scrappy and dirty. Blood everywhere, needles lying around. They’d spit at you to give you hep C or HIV. The numbers down there quadrupled over night. Girls were turning up in their school uniforms, nodding out in the street, fighting over pitches. Then violent sex offenders from all over the country started travelling up to Glasgow. Once the cops stopped a van of three men on the M74 outside Lockerbie. Three rapists who’d been in Belmarsh Prison together, coming up to Glasgow “for a weekend”.’

  ‘Where were the police?’

  He sighs heavily. ‘Well. The police…’ He looks as if he doesn’t know what to say and then catches the waiter’s eye, signalling for another beer. The women and the new men friends are pairing off. Bizarrely, one of the couples are tonguing each other like horny teenagers. Jack doesn’t seem to have noticed.

  ‘Initially, the police didn’t give a shit. There were too many of them to arrest. Women would be battered and left on the street and stepped over by uniformed cops, members of the public were no better. It wasn’t until Diane Gallagher came in that anything happened.’

  His beer arrives and Jack tries to smile a thank you at the waiter but his eyes are sad and tired. He waits until the waiter is gone before he continues.

  Jack says Gallagher would never accept that McPhail was responsible for the murders. It was a blind spot. She was determined to believe that all the murders were by different men, intimate partners or drug dealers. She may not be his favourite person but she was a hell of a police officer. Pragmatic. Respectful. Gallagher moved the boundaries of the Drag from six blocks to four so that they could monitor who was there. They were taking down licence-plate numbers and descriptions of violent punters. She listened to the women. He says Diane was well aware of the problem and what she did was radical.

  ‘Attacks were happening every night, it was horrific. At the height of it they hired a conference room in the Central Hotel and invited all the street sex workers to come to it. The room was full of women, some of them were falling off chairs, but they were all really angry. There must have been two hundred there. They were furious and wanted to know what the cops were going to do. Really bolshie. The police and the city council made a joint announcement: all of their funding would go into a single project–to supporting women leaving the life. They’d pay for rehab, give them new houses, move them, retrain them. An exit strategy from prostitution.’

  ‘Wow!’

  ‘Yeah, I know. Radical. Holistic. Thinking outside the box, all the buzz words. Problem is applying that. Messy people and messy lives. The people they were trying to help were a bit more complicated than anyone thought really. Getting off drugs isn’t just about help being available, is it? This was during the recession so what are they retraining them for? There weren’t any jobs.’

  ‘It was a mistake?’

  ‘Well, was it? Someone had to do something.’

  ‘You know, in medicine we take the Hypocratic Oath and it says “First do no harm”.’

  ‘Sometimes it’s just an excuse to do nothing, though, isn’t it? At least they did something.’

  ‘They must have had some successes?’

  ‘Well, the numbers of service users aren’t made public, so who knows, but the scheme hasn’t been replicated anywhere else. Not even Edinburgh. That’s very telling.’

  ‘It didn’t work, then?’

  ‘You’re not allowed to say that.’ He frowns, mock-angry. ‘Glasgow Social Work Newspeak. They just keep pouring money into it. Questioning it is one of the great unsayables of Glasgow public life.’

  ‘What was it that made you suspect McPhail?’

  ‘He worked CID down at the Drag. Seemed fairly straight for most of his eight years but something happened, don’t know if it was a bang on the head or drugs, I don’t know, but he went wild over a two-year period. He started using the drugs himself, they didn’t test cops for drugs then, the closest they came was smelling their breath at the start of a shift. He was giving the girls drugs that he confiscated, bribing them to have sex with him, letting them stay in his flat, misfiling charges. His colleagues made complaints about his erratic behaviour and he got a brief suspension and it was then that things got really dark. The girls were so vulnerable. He was a really nasty man. He knew them all down there and they knew him. Girls started going missing or turning up dead. Some from ODs, some from violent attacks. But McPhail was always there, always nearby. I was expecting a backlash from other cops when I named him in my book but no one had a good word to say about him.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean he was guilty of a series of murders. It means he was unpopular.’

  ‘True. McPhail was on suspension for some procedural offence, they already knew he was a liability, but he was still down the Drag every night. I saw him, I was a reporter at the time. Lots of people saw him. He was paying girls for sex with drugs he’d confiscated, paying them to let him piss on them. Then he started to get violent.’

  ‘What happened to Susan Brodie?’

  ‘That the one you’re interested in?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well, the poor thing was just nineteen. She’d been out working the streets for years. Went missing from her usual pitch in Wellington Lane about midnight on a Thursday night. Someone saw a white van and assumed she’d gone off in it with a punter but when she didn’t make it back they told her sister she was missing. Her sister was out there as well.’

  ‘Nikki Brodie. She was at court today.’

  ‘Oh? I didn’t see her.’

  ‘She probably looks different. She’s been clean for four years.’

  ‘That’s unusual. Anyway, Susan was missing for a day and a half and the sister kept trying to report her missing. Police wouldn’t listen. Then she was found on the Saturday morning, at a bus stop, naked, dead. She’d been stabbed ten times or something like that, body had been washed clean.’

  ‘Washed?’

  ‘Suggests access to a bath, to a house or something, doesn’t it? Also they found undigested toast in her stomach. They thought she’d been held in a domestic setting rather than as a hostage in the van. McPhail, supposedly, was in Hairmyres Hospital at the time, being treated for a collapsed lung. His wife was on holiday so he had the house to himself.’

  ‘But you don’t think he was in hospital?’

  ‘No one remembered him being there. None of the staff or patients.’

  ‘How long after did you ask?’

  ‘About six months, a year.’

  It’s quite a big margin of error: ‘About a year later then?’

  ‘Hmmm.’

  ‘Was Susan a drug addict too?’

  ‘Actually, I believe she was clean at the time of her
death. Cops lied about that to the public but I thought they were doing the right thing there, really.’

  ‘Why?’

  Jack sighs over Margo’s shoulder and bites his bottom lip as if he’s trying not to say something. He takes another deep breath before he speaks. ‘It was hard to make the public care. They hated those women and she was choosing to be out there. The police didn’t want her to seem less sympathetic. If people knew she was out there by choice they’d have given McPhail a tickertape parade down Buchanan Street.’

  ‘She wasn’t a sympathetic victim?’

  ‘No. She wasn’t passive. She was stabbed with a knife she always carried. They didn’t tell anyone that either. It was a little combat knife that fitted between her fingers. Tiny little blade.’ He holds up a fist. ‘McPhail knew she had that. All the street people did. He’d have asked to see it and then used it on her. He was a nasty man, you know? I was scared of him and I was a big beefy bloke.’ A shadow of fear crosses Robertson’s face and she thinks about him thirty years ago, how young he must have been. ‘We all knew it was him but we couldn’t say. Then he got done for an unrelated rape ten years later and I was made redundant from the Scotsman. I had all the materials so I sat down and wrote it in two months.’ He shrugs and looks a little smug. ‘When the book came out and named him other rape victims came forward. He got convicted of one of those as well.’

  ‘But not the murders?’

  ‘No. They never tried him for those.’

  ‘Still think he did them all?’

  ‘I must decline to answer that question for financial reasons,’ he says and they both laugh. ‘I don’t know but he did kill Susan Brodie, the one you’re interested in. Basically, the cops realised it was him, knew how bad that would look and they gave him an alibi.’

  ‘Were they angry when your book came out?’

  ‘Probably,’ says Jack. ‘I was pretty nervous when it came out but I heard nothing.’ He gets his phone out and swipes through some photographs.

  It’s an ID photo of Martin McPhail. His lips are collapsed into his gums–he doesn’t have his teeth in. He has shaved badly too, patchy tufts of grey beard over a grey prison pallor, silver-skinned and still bright ginger hair. Distinctive.

  ‘This is McPhail now. A release photo. Pals on the force texted me it as an FYI.’ An address is attached to the photo: 10a Nairn Drive, High Blantyre. Robertson puts his phone away. ‘Thought I’d see him at court today, looking for me, crowing about the guilty plea. I know the lawyer who’s representing him. I could lose my house, my car, everything.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought he could get that much. His reputation can’t be worth much.’

  ‘Not damages, it’s the costs. I’d have to pay his lawyers if I lose…’ He looks into the middle distance and pales when he thinks about it. ‘I mean, he won’t win. I can prove what I say in the book, he wasn’t in Hairmyres, his lung hadn’t collapsed, he had an empty house to take Susan to, he had access to a van and so on, but I still have to pay my costs. And obviously I’ve had to stop selling the book or giving talks.’

  Margo thinks he’s going to lose the case and suspects that he thinks so too. She’s sorry for him.

  They order coffee, macchiato for Robertson and a decaf Americano for Margo. Again, Margo pretends it’s the best coffee she’s ever had because she likes Jack now and doesn’t want to be mean about his favourite restaurant.

  ‘Delicious,’ she says to be nice. ‘There’s a photo of Susan Brodie’s dead body on the Internet. I came across it by accident. Pretty disturbing.’

  ‘No,’ Jack gasps, ‘that should not be there.’

  ‘I’m trying to get it taken down.’

  He’s looking at her hair. ‘What’s your connection to that family?’

  ‘Susan Brodie was my birth mother.’

  Jack is shocked. ‘Oh God, I am so sorry.’ He reaches across the table and crushes her hand. ‘You’re her family? So when you were saying about getting letters from the Ram, that was you? Have you got them?’

  ‘Who was “the Ram” supposed to be?’

  ‘I thought it was McPhail’s nickname.’

  It doesn’t sound like a nickname to Margo. It sounds like something a man would call himself. ‘Did you ever get threatening letters at that time?’

  ‘Not me. The paper got quite a lot of nasty letters. It’s not uncommon. People do that sort of thing… people are very odd.’

  ‘People? What sort of people?’

  ‘Really, really normal-looking people. You know, after school shootings in the States they advise parents of kids who’ve been killed not to open their mail for a while because they get such vicious letters from random strangers.’

  ‘About gun control or something?’

  ‘No. Just mean letters. Defies belief, doesn’t it? It’s not new either. Newspapers got hundreds of Jack the Ripper letters while that was going on. Hundreds. Different people writing as Jack the Ripper. In his voice.’

  ‘Prototype fanfic?’

  He smiles. ‘I suppose. Honestly, the public are a very strange lot.’

  ‘They might have meant well, they might be trying to draw the police’s attention to leads they think they’ve overlooked.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He’s not convinced. ‘Well, I’m not aware of letters specifically from someone called “the Ram” but it was a name that was associated with McPhail.’ He smirks. ‘Definitely remember that.’

  This is a lie. Robertson’s making this up to support his case and he’s doing it very badly. It’s insulting how poorly he’s lying.

  ‘So,’ he says, ‘you were telling me about these threatening letters from McPhail…’

  Margo shrugs. ‘If he’s the murderer.’

  ‘Did you bring them?’

  ‘Mostly they went to Susan’s sister.’

  ‘Can you put me in touch with her? I’d like to meet her.’

  It seems quite shabby that he hasn’t interviewed Nikki already, but she shows him her own letter. His face is suddenly very taut, as if he’s excited and bad at hiding it.

  ‘Gosh. Just this morning? D’you have CCTV on your house?’

  ‘No, there’s no CCTV.’

  ‘You must phone the police.’

  ‘I feel a bit silly, it’s just a letter. Nikki’s been getting them for years and she told the police but nothing came of it.’

  ‘This could be good for me, you know? For my case.’

  Jack asks if he can borrow Margo’s letter, to copy it. He says he’ll post it straight back to her. Might be really helpful.

  Margo suggests taking a photo on his phone but he says he’d like to ‘get it copied properly’ and looks shifty. She thinks he wants a high-res scanned copy in case he writes a follow-up book. They swap contact details and he puts the letter in his bag. She’s glad to get it off her hands.

  ‘You should tell the police though, tell them that you think it’s McPhail.’

  ‘But I don’t know if I do think that yet.’

  ‘Trust me,’ says Jack. ‘It was him. You’re just his type.’

  She looks at the picture of Susan, aware of the likeness between them, feeling slightly sick. Robertson didn’t need to phrase it like that. She’s being threatened, it’s not a Tinder date. She signals to the waiter for the bill.

  The restaurant is in full drunken roar now. Tables of pink-cheeked women are talking too loudly, interrupting each other, everything is exaggerated. The atmosphere is febrile.

  ‘Gets a bit wild in here sometimes,’ he mutters as they get their coats and scarves on.

  ‘Nice place,’ says Margo, thinking that Robertson is one of those people who is attracted to chaos and maybe doesn’t even know it himself.

  Outside they find the street and the road filled with people leaving the King’s Theatre across the road. The crowd are jolly and loud, dressed for the frosty weather, milling around at the lights and spilling into the road. The press of the crowd pushes Margo and Jack into the railings as t
hey say their goodbyes. They don’t know whether to shake hands or hug but settle on a handshake. Margo turns to leave.

  ‘I’m so sorry about Susan…’

  ‘Fine.’ Margo pats his hand away. ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘I’m taking a cab. Can I drop you somewhere?’

  ‘Thanks but my car is just round the corner.’ She’s glad because she suddenly realises that she doesn’t trust him at all.

  Jack steps back. A cheerful man slides between them, making his way to greet a friend (‘Georgie!!’) and Margo takes it as a chance to get away.

  ‘Thank you for taking the time,’ she calls back.

  ‘Thanks for dinner,’ says Jack and turns away. ‘I’ll post this letter back. Please get your aunt to phone me. Could be a great help.’

  ‘OK, bye.’ But Margo doesn’t know if she’ll even mention him to Nikki. She watches him weave his way through the crowd, tall, distinguished, handsome and feels somehow as if she’s just been a bit part in a cheap true crime TV biopic:

  Jack Robertson, Lady Saver.

  13

  JOE OPENS THE DOOR to her but keeps an arm out, barring Margo’s way. She’s suddenly terrified that he has another woman in there with him, someone nice and soft, who can see what a good guy he is, how funny and droll he is, who appreciates him and his cooking and his many, many opinions about everything. A woman who’ll usurp her.

  ‘I’m still paying rent here,’ she says, sounding like a bitch.

  Joe sucks his teeth and looks over the top of her head. ‘It’s ten thirty. I have to get up for work in the morning.’

  Margo chews a nail and checks herself. ‘Can I come in?’

  Joe sighs. He looks really sad. ‘What for?’

  Margo wants to be with him. That’s really all she’s here for. Just to be with him for this one moment, to see his face and be near the certainty of him, the smell of him, the sweetness of him.

  ‘Can I talk to you?’

  He doesn’t want to let her in but he does.

  She follows him through to the living room. It’s a nice flat in a bad area. The rooms are big and they’ve furnished it with second-hand finds and cheap Ikea essentials. Joe has no money and didn’t want expensive stuff, which was just as well because Margo spent most of her income on Janette’s care. They did splash out on two things though, two things they really loved: a huge television and the sofa.