Fair Friday

by Peter Turnbull

  ‘Tell me about the sighting?’ Montgomerie ducked Jaruduski’s question.

  ‘He came out of a close, further down from this close and he flew down the street. He kept near to the building.

  At the bridge he dropped something on the line and then disappeared into the night. It was a strong sighting. I have not had many so strong.’

  ‘You did not see the attack?’

  ‘No. I heard about it from the kind lady across the stair who brings me my food each morning before I go to my bed.’

  ‘Stay up all night, do you, Mr Jaruduski?’

  ‘All night, watching. I have many sightings but rarely as strong as the sighting on Wednesday night.’

  ‘You should turn your light on. They don’t go for lights.’

  ‘I couldn’t pay the bill and they took my meter away. That was ten years ago and I have used candles from then. Now you must go, there is still time before night comes.’

  Montgomerie located Donoghue in a close. He was pulling furiously on his pipe. ‘They’re getting immune,’ he said as Montgomerie approached.

  ‘Perhaps they’re flying underneath your smokescreen, sir.’

  ‘Whatever it is, they’re coming in thick and fast.’ He slapped the side of his neck.

  ‘They’re females,’ said Montgomerie. ‘They’re sucking your blood to nourish their eggs.’

  ‘I don’t wish to know that, Montgomerie.’

  ‘Speaking of which, sir, I’ve just met an odd-ball two closes away. I think he saw the attacker running away. There was no description worth taking down but he did indicate that something may have been chucked over the railway bridge.’

  ‘Well, what have you done?’

  ‘Nothing, I…’

  ‘Well, get on with it, man. Take Piper with you, you’ll need to corroborate the finding of any evidence. Piper!’ Donoghue summoned the constable and then sucked and blew on his pipe. Mosquitoes danced crazily in the smoke. ‘What do you mean by no description worth taking? What sort of investigation is this?’

  ‘How about leathery wings?’ said Montgomerie, moving his arms slowly up and down.

  ‘Get on with it!’ snapped Donoghue, and turned to watch the progress of the search.

  Constable Piper took a transparent Cellophane bag from the boot of the area car and followed Montgomerie towards the railway bridge. They stood at the parapet and looked down on to the rails.

  ‘What are we looking for?’ asked Piper.

  ‘Probably the murder weapon,’ replied Montgomerie, trying to scan the four tracks which seemed at that height in the fading light to be one wide band of varying shades of grey.

  “We’re not going to see it from up here.’ Piper stood back and looked at the embankment on either side of the bridge.

  They chose to scramble down the steep embankment on the left of the bridge, and Montgomerie walked the width of the tracks while Piper stood at the side keeping a lookout for trains. Five minutes after Montgomerie had started the search he stopped and knelt down between the rails. Then he looked up and beckoned to Piper. Piper glanced up and down the track and then joined Montgomerie.

  ‘Looks good enough,’ he said, and handed Montgomerie the Cellophane bag.

  Montgomerie had found a length of heavy metal pipe, about two feet long with matted hair and congealed blood stuck to one end.

  ‘This is one I’d like to see through to the end,’ said Piper as he joined Montgomerie at the top of the embankment.

  ‘Join the club,’ replied Montgomerie, brushing dry soil and parched blades of grass from his trousers. ‘There may be a big motive behind this attack.’

  ‘Besides that,’ said Piper, ‘I was there when they pulled the sheet over his head and sent for the concealment trolley. I’ve seen dead people before and I’ve put people in ambulances who didn’t last out the ride but I’ve never been there when the Grim Reaper arrived.’

  ‘Does that make a difference?’

  ‘Yes. Shouldn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ said Montgomerie, turning back towards the tenement block. ‘Don’t get involved. Let yourself get involved in this work and you’re finished. How old are you, Piper?’

  ‘Twenty-two, sir.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m twenty-six and I’m telling you it’s a job like any other and we can’t let our feelings get in the way of our doing it. We may find out there’s no motive after all and he was knocked over in an argument after a trip to the gin bin.’

  ‘No, I don’t feel that. I saw the guy, I saw his family and the get-well cards. Going into the back courts rat-arsed pissed at midnight wasn’t his style.’

  ‘How the hell do you know, Mr bloody twenty-two-year-old Police Constable Piper?’

  ‘I saw the guy, like I said,’ replied Piper calmly.

  ‘You don’t know what’s ahead of you, Piper. You can’t imagine the people you’ll find stacked up against walls in gin alley with puke dribbling out of the corners of their mouths. You name them, Piper, and I’ve seen them, company directors, doctors, teachers, solicitors and newspaper men. They all get bevvied and they all find a space on the wall or a vacant stretch in the gutter. Most of them have families and most receive get-well cards and we have to treat them all the same. Detachment, that’s the word. Stay detached or you’ll take it all home with you.’

  ‘There’s more than that here,’ persisted Piper. ‘I have this intuition.’

  ‘We’ll find out soon enough,’ said Montgomerie wearily, ‘but I’m telling you.’

  They reported to Donoghue, who they found had taken to pacing up and down the close to assist his pipe smoke in fending off the mosquitoes. He stopped walking as Montgomerie and Piper approached him and stared intently at the two officers.

  ‘Length of metal, sir,’ said Piper. ‘Accretions at one end which may be blood and human hair.’

  Donoghue continued to stare.

  ‘Found on the railway line, sir,’ stammered Piper. ‘By DC Montgomerie. I witnessed the find.’

  Donoghue grunted. ‘Take it straight down to Forensic, please, and ask them for an immediate report.’ Piper left the close, Donoghue and Montgomerie looked at each other. ‘Carry on,’ said Donoghue.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘The rest of the flats in the block, Montgomerie, carry on.’

  ‘There are six more closes, sir,’ Montgomerie protested. ‘Can I have assistance?’

  ‘No. Let me know when you’re finished. It’s only another sixty or seventy flats.’ He tapped the ash from his pipe against the wall and hurriedly refilled it. ‘And don’t forget to call back on any flats which are empty tonight. Everybody who lives in this block must be interviewed.’

  ‘Very good, sir,’ said Montgomerie, turning away.

  ‘Oh, and, Montgomerie…’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘I’d be pleased to see a little more gravity in your approach to your work. I like dignity and seriousness of mind in my officers, and I like a sense of humour in its proper place. This is a profession, you know.’

  Montgomerie started to reply but Donoghue’s face was suddenly hidden behind a flickering flame from a gold-plated lighter and a blast of blue smoke.

  Montgomerie, chastened, worked his way up each close, progressing along the block towards Rutherglen Main Street. As he worked he found that the frequency of blocked-up doors increased, the stench in the closes got stronger and the people on whose doors he rapped were increasingly drunk. In the hundred-plus years of its existence the block had developed a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ end. He stepped over remains of fires, tramps’ dosses, and piles of beer cans and spoke to punters who were too drunk to realize who he was but who insisted on shaking his hand before he left their door.

  But it was for this that he had quit the Law. He thought that you had to be here at this level; if you could take this, then you earned the luxuries in life simply because you could appreciate them. He believed deeply that if he couldn’t take one, then he shouldn’t accept the other. In Edinburgh th
e law students wanted to be advocates; they had starched white collars, learned quickly how to sniff wine and called their clients ‘the Jimmies’. He finished his degree and returned to Glasgow to plumb the depths of his native city, searching for his own level. If in the process he laughed, then he felt it wasn’t entirely out of flippancy.

  He walked out of the last close at ten-thirty. Donoghue and the other officers had long since left. In his notebook was a list of twenty-seven flats from which he had received no response to his knock and which would have to be revisited. It was a warm night, the air was still, the first few drunks were staggering out of the bars. Montgomerie glanced up at the block and saw the drawn skull of Timofei Jaruduski at his spy hole. Montgomerie raised a hand in greeting and the face recoiled into the gloom.

  CHAPTER 3

  By 9.00 a.m. on Fair Saturday the sun was hot and high, the sky was blue and cloudless, heat hazes hung over the roads, the girls in bikinis were stretched out on the grass in the Botanic Gardens, the kids sucked on ices and the oldies rolled up their sleeves. The city was hot and windless, baking, shimmering, glistening.

  Ray Sussock jerked on the handbrake as he stopped the car outside the Clarions multi-storey complex. The beads of sweat trickled off his brow, his stomach hung heavy, and his shirt stuck to the small of his back. He would normally have walked the few hundred yards from ‘P’ Division to the Clarions offices on the waterfront, but he was angry at losing the Fair weekend so he drove, gunning the engine. It would not be so bad if she had stayed, but last night after she had thrown the teacup at the wall she stated that she was not staying in Glasgow during the Fair weekend, no way, old Sussock, not even for you and Fabian bloody Donoghue. She’d be up there now in the holiday cottage, probably cycling to the beach with her blonde hair flowing behind her and her swimsuit under her T-shirt and jeans. She’d even managed to get him out of bed early to drive her in a car borrowed from the Department to Queen Street Station in good time for the 6.00 a.m. to Fort William.

  He slammed the car door and stormed up to the commissionaire’s desk in the foyer of the Clarion building, showed his ID and said, ‘Bill McGarrigle, I want to see his desk.’

  The Commissionaire was about sixty, with thin-lensed spectacles and greying hair. He turned Sussock’s ID over in his hand and slid it back across the desk top. He lifted the telephone and spoke into it, listened, replaced the receiver and said, ‘Floor five, sir.’ He nodded to the twin lift shafts beside his desk. On the fifth floor Sussock was met by a second commissionaire, younger and more rotund than the first. Sussock followed him down a brightly painted corridor with a parquet floor.

  ‘Some bad luck, eh?’ said the Commissionaire, holding a door open for Sussock.

  ‘About Bill McGarrigle?’

  ‘Working during Fair weekend,’ said the Commissionaire with a grin. Sussock noticed he had a brace on his lower teeth. ‘Still, someone’s got to do it. We take turn and turn about. I’ll get the September weekend off. It’s not so bad working holidays so long as you get plenty of notice. I suppose it’s the same in your job…’

  Sussock didn’t reply.

  ‘Mr McGarrigle you’re interested in, sir?’

  ‘His desk, specifically,’ replied Sussock as they entered a large room with big steel desks arranged in rows. Each desk had a telephone, some had two, and all had wire baskets containing assorted sheets of paper. There was a large calendar on one wall and on the other side of the room the window ran the length of the office, giving an impressive vista of the city’s central business district, the tall buildings of the finance houses, the banks, the insurance companies and the oil companies. All silent and empty.

  ‘This is Mr McGarrigle’s desk, sir,’ said the commissionaire stopping by a desk on the left-hand side of the room, about half way down. There were a few other people in the room who glanced up curiously at Sussock.

  ‘You’re not the only one to have to work, then,’ said Sussock.

  ‘That’s what I said,’ replied the commissionaire. ‘We keep a skeleton staff in case a big story breaks. You should see it on a weekday, messengers running, people shouting into phones, rush hour eight hours a day. How is Mr McGarrigle, sir?’

  ‘You haven’t heard?’

  ‘I haven’t, no, sir. I don’t think anybody has.’

  ‘I dare say you’ll find out soon enough,’ said Sussock quietly, pulling at the drawers of the desk and finding them locked. He felt for the key on the inside of the desk, and then began to rummage among the plants and pads and stationery. He lifted the blotter and finally looked at the commissionaire. ‘Key?’ he said.

  Key?’

  ‘Key.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the commissionaire.

  ‘You don’t have a spare key?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, sir.’ The commissionaire looked uncomfortable. ‘The Administrative Officer might have a spare, but…’

  ‘He’s away for the holiday and his office is locked.’

  ‘Yes, sir. How did you know?’

  ‘Happens all the time,’ said Sussock drily. ‘You object if I fiddle with the lock?’

  ‘Can you open it without a key, sir?’

  ‘With your permission, but I won’t be able to lock it again.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know, sir.’ The commissionaire stammered and looked round, keenly aware of the handful of people in the room. ‘I’ll have to take advice.’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ replied Sussock, already straightening a paperclip. ‘You can say the police pressurized you, and if there’s a diplomatic incident then it’s my head, not yours.’ Sussock leaned forward.

  ‘I don’t know, sir. Really…’ But the drawer was already open.

  ‘I’d like you to stay here,’ said Sussock, sitting in the chair. I may need a witness.’

  ‘What for?’

  “Well I don’t know until I find it. That’s the nature of my work, spending a lot of time and energy looking for something without knowing exactly what we’re looking for.’ Sussock was speaking more to himself than to the commissionaire. ‘You see, if we knew what we were looking for we’d not have to spend so much time looking for it.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Neither do I, my friend,’ said Sussock wearily. ‘Neither do I. Just stick around, please.’

  Bill McGarrigle’s desk had three drawers arranged in a tier on the right-hand side. Sussock opened them from bottom to top. The bottom drawer seemed to be the drawer in which Bill McGarrigle had kept his personal possessions, a paperback novel about the war in the desert, a book about walking the Highland Way, and a pair of slippers.

  ‘Bill McGarrigle have difficulty with his feet?’ asked Sussock, taking out the slippers and placing them on the floor.

  ‘I don’t think so, sir, most reporters keep a pair of casual shoes or slippers for walking about the building, especially the ladies.’

  Sussock grunted and continued to rummage. There were a couple of copies of Mayfair and, in contrast, a well-read copy of the poetry of T. S. Eliot; there was a mug, badly tea-stained, and a handkerchief with ‘B McG’ stitched to the corner, and a copy of the Caledonian MacBrayne summer timetable. Sussock opened the timetable and noticed that the sailings from Wemyss Bay to Rothesay had been underlined in red pen. He replaced the items and tugged open the middle drawer, which revealed itself to be Bill McGarrigle’s tool box, a dictionary, a thesaurus, a chipped mug full of ballpoint pens, a copy of the Guide to Simple English, a small directory of the phone numbers of other organizations and agencies and a list of people’s extension numbers within the Clarion building.

  In the top drawer Sussock found the two articles he had hoped to find, McGarrigle’s notebook and diary. His surge of delight was superseded by yet another disappointment in what was, for him, turning out to be a disappointing weekend. Bill McGarrigle used shorthand and so his notebook was meaningless to Sussock. Moreover McGarrigle, who already looked to Sussock to have been a bit of a slob, had entered his appointm
ents in his diary in code. On the day that he received a blow on the back of the head which was to cause his death some forty-eight hours later, Bill McGarrigle’s diary read:

  Wednesday July 15

  4. Mrs D

  7. SS. c. G. Rmst.

  ‘One diary and one notebook,’ said Sussock. ‘I’m taking these away with me.’

  ‘Very good, sir,’ said the commissionaire.

  ‘Could you keep this desk in quarantine, as it were, chief?’

  ‘Aye, no bother, sir.’ The commissionaire tore off a sheet of A4 from the pad on Bill McGarrigle’s desk and, taking a ballpoint pen, wrote: “Do not touch. Police investigation in progress—S Mc”.’

  ‘Everybody uses codes around here,’ said Sussock.

  ‘Don’t you, sir?’

  ‘Aye, but I can understand those. “S Mc”— is that you?’

  ‘It is. They call me Super Mac on account of my name being McMillan.’

  ‘Dates you a bit, doesn’t it?’ Even for Sussock, ‘Super Mac’ was going back into the dark ages.

  ‘It’s lost on the younger ones, but names stick, you know.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Anyway this should keep them away, sir. I’ll tape it down after you’ve gone.’

  At 9.00 a.m. Montgomerie returned to the tenement block in Rutherglen and began checking the twenty-seven flats from which he had received no answer the previous evening. The interviews went pretty much as they had gone on the Friday night, those that did answer their door had all heard about the attack but had either been out on the night in question or had been at home but seen nothing. Montgomerie was already of the impression that his was an assignment of stone-turning rather than investigation, and saw the end of the task as being the point when the last door closed on him. Then he rang the doorbell underneath the name ‘Laing’.

  ‘Yes, I saw him,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘You saw him!’

  ‘Yes.’ She was middle-aged, face heavy with make-up, lacquered hair, pearls, expensive dress.