The Quaker

What could matter more than this? Not revenge, certainly; not catching the man. People think the murdered dead are chewed up by hatred, lusting for vengeance, we can’t rest till our killer is caught. I couldn’t care less. If a man is hanged in Barlinnie Gaol or locked up in Peterhead for the next fifteen years will that help Alasdair sleep at night? Will it give me back my sense of smell?

For a while I thought I was different from the others. Better. Less to blame. I was the first. I had no way of knowing that he even existed. But the others, the second girl and the third: when they walked up those stairs to the noise and the lights and the shooting stars, they knew. They knew a man had picked up a woman on that dance floor and taken her home and killed her. But they went anyway.

And then I saw I was wrong, I was kidding myself. I knew he was out there too. I knew it all along. We all do.

1

DI Duncan McCormack sat at a desk in the empty Murder Room. It was the dead time between shifts. The night shift had knocked off at seven; the day shift wouldn’t start till eight.

McCormack was early, on a point of principle. You’re planning to sit in judgement on a group of your colleagues, you better be early. You better show them all the respect you can.

He lit a cigarette. This early, the Murder Room had a churchly peace. He hadn’t turned on the lights, and the morning sun threw a soft gloss on the hooded typewriters and the glass ashtrays and the grey metal bellies of the wastepaper baskets. It was the usual shabby office, with its jumble of scuffed desks and unmatched chairs and olive drab filing cabinets, but for McCormack such rooms could be magical places. Mysteries were solved here. Murders redeemed. Lives that had been turned upside down could sometimes – with work and skill and the needful visitation of luck – be righted.

Luck, though. Luck wasn’t a word you associated with the Quaker case. Nothing about this case had been lucky.

He rose and crossed to the one long wall that was free of shelving. There were maps here with coloured push-pins marking the murder scenes. There were photographs of three women, the familiar before-and-after shots. You couldn’t look from the oblivious smiles to the sprawled bodies without your stomach dropping. Without feeling personally guilty.

He stopped in front of one of the smiles to acknowledge his own share of guilt. He had worked this one, the first one. Jacquilyn Keevins. Down on the South Side. In the spring of last year. A botch job, a case that was jiggered from the first. Mistakes. Dud intel. Sloppy direction. They’d wound the thing up after only two weeks. Then came Ann Ogilvie over in Bridgeton, and Marion Mercer out west in Scotstoun. That’s when they knew for sure they were dealing with a multiple. That’s when the legend started to form, the dark tales and rumours – a whole city in thrall to the arrogant, Bible-quoting strangler that the papers dubbed the Quaker.

And that’s when the Quaker Squad set up shop in the old Marine, the nearest station to the Mercer locus. And this is where they’d been ever since, as the weeks turned into months and the man from the Barrowland Ballroom refused to be caught.

And now, just to add to the fun and games, they had Detective Inspector Duncan McCormack on their backs. On secondment from the Flying Squad, McCormack was tasked with reviewing the Quaker investigation, learning lessons, making recommendations. Everyone knew what this meant. Scale the thing down. Scale it down before we squander more money. Get us all out of the mess we’ve made.

McCormack was turning from the photos on the wall when the telephone rang. A shrill, tinny jangle in the silent room. He looked at the door as though someone might burst in to answer the phone and then gingerly, frowningly, reached for the receiver.

‘Murder Room. McCormack.’

He felt like a butler in a play. Someone playing a part. There was a soft rasping sound, a kind of shadow-laughter, then the moist, masticating clicks of a man preparing to speak. ‘No nearer, are you?’

‘Say it again?’

‘You’re no nearer catching him. After all this time.’

The voice was local, Glasgow. Nicely spoken. Fifties, McCormack decided. Possibly older.

‘Can you tell me your name, sir?’

‘A year you’ve had. More than a year. Some people might view that as careless. Wasteful, even.’

‘Sir, do you have information you’d like to impart?’

‘Impart?’ The soft laugh. ‘I’ll impart all right, son. I’ll impart the name of the man who did it. How’s that?’

‘On you go, then.’

‘Michael Ferris. Michael Ferris is the bastard you want. F-E-R-R-I-S, 12 Dollar Terrace, Maryhill. Are you writing this down?’

‘Thank you for your help.’

McCormack put the phone down and turned to see a shape in the doorway, broad shoulders blocking the light. Big shaggy head of blond hair. Goldie was the detective’s name. McCormack had pegged him early as a loudmouth. Blowhard. Also, he thought he knew the guy from somewhere.

‘Christ, mate. I never heard you come in.’

Goldie rocked on his heels. ‘Michael Ferris?’

‘How did you know?’

Goldie shrugged. ‘It’s the same nutjob. Phones every three or four days.’

‘Right.’ McCormack nodded. He smiled his crooked smile. ‘Look, I don’t think we’ve met properly. I’m Duncan McCormack.’

‘You think we don’t know your name?’ Goldie didn’t appear to see the proffered hand. ‘You think we don’t know who you are?’

‘Should I take that as a compliment?’

‘Well, it’s the closest you’re gonnae get in this room, buddy.’

‘Fair enough. It’s fucked up, this whole situation. I get it. But look, mate. We all want the same thing here.’

‘Really?’ Goldie chewed his lip. His fists were plunged in the pockets of his raincoat and he spread his arms. ‘You want to get on with catching bad guys? Like, you know, proper police work? Because I thought you wanted something else.’

You could rise to it, McCormack thought. Or you could take a breath, see the job through, write your report and be done with this shit. File this fucker’s face for future reference. Make sure he gets what’s coming at some point down the line.

‘I want what we all want.’

‘Right. My mistake,’ Goldie was saying. ‘I thought you were here to grass us up. Do your wee spy number.’

McCormack smiled tightly. Do you know James Kane? he wanted to ask. James Arthur Kane, the man who ran Dennistoun for John McGlashan? The man who just landed a twelve-stretch at Peterhead? That James Kane? I put him away. I did the police work that nailed him. He’s the fourth of McGlashan’s boys that I’ve nailed in the past year, while you’ve been shuffling your lardy arse in this shitty room. Filing papers. Sticking pins in a corkboard.

But he said nothing and now Goldie was smiling. ‘You don’t even know, do you?’

McCormack tried to keep the tightness out of his voice. ‘Don’t know what, Detective?’

‘Where you know me from? Jesus Christ. We worked the first one together. Jacquilyn Keevins.’

‘Right. Right. Of course.’

It was true. That’s where he’d seen him. How had he missed it? McCormack cursed his own stupidity. It was as if one lapse of memory proved Goldie’s point – there was only one detective present.

Goldie jabbed himself in the chest with a stubby finger. ‘And I’m still working it. Me and the others. What are you doing?’

‘I’m doing my job, Detective. Police work. Same as you are.’

‘Naw, Inspector. Naw.’ Goldie’s teeth were bared in a sneer, eyes bright with scorn above the bunched cheeks. ‘Naw. See, you cannae be the brass’s nark and do good police work. Know why? Because good police work doesnae get done on its own. You need your neighbours to help you. And who’s gonnae help you after this?’

He was using ‘neighbours’ in the special polis sense, meaning your partners, the guys you shared a station with. McCormack watched as Goldie tugged his cigarettes and lighter from his raincoat pocket, tossed them on the desk. Goldie was whistling under his breath and fuck this, McCormack decided, enough was enough.

‘You know a guy called James Kane?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Goldie was hanging his raincoat on the hat-rack. ‘You put one of Glash’s soldiers away. And that gets you a pass? Maybe in your book. In mine, you need to turn up every day. Be a polis. Earn it all again.’

McCormack shook his head. Be a polis. The fuck would you know about that? McCormack had his finger raised to jab it at Goldie when he heard the smart rap of heels in the corridor.

‘What’s the score here?’ The boss, DCI George Cochrane, was on the threshold, tall and thin and oddly boyish in his belted gabardine. He read the battle stance of Goldie and McCormack. ‘The hell’s going on, DS Goldie?’

‘Friendly discussion, sir.’ Goldie smiled, still looking at McCormack. ‘We’re all friends here.’

‘Fine. Let’s keep it that way.’ Cochrane bustled through to his own office, spreading the cherry scent of pipe tobacco. At the ribbed glass door he paused. ‘And Goldie? We’ll be doing some parades with Nancy Scullion over the coming week. Drop by her flat this evening, would you? Check what times she’ll be free.’

‘Sir.’

Goldie took his seat. McCormack crossed to one of the big sash windows, unsnibbed it, hooked his fingers in the metal lifts and tugged it open. The smell of the river came in on the breeze; the Clyde met the Kelvin just south of the office. He thought about Nancy Scullion. He’d heard the name a lot around the office. If the Murder Room was a cult, its High Priestess, the Delphic Oracle of the Marine Police Station, was Nancy Scullion. Sister of the third victim, she had spent the evening of 25 January in Barrowland Ballroom with her sister and the killer. He sat between them in the taxi on the way back to Scotstoun, where the sisters lived just a few streets apart. Nancy was drunk, blootered, smashed on gin and Babycham, but she’d heard him banging on about caravan holidays in Irvine, growing up in a foster home, getting verses of the Bible off by heart.

Nancy’s description was holy writ. It was the tablets of the law for the men at these desks. They parsed it and probed it, took apart its description of a well-dressed modern man, with his short fair hair and his neat raincoat, his gallantry and his hair-trigger temper. Good manners. Nice diction. A cut above the common ruck of East End hoodlums and toughs. A golfer, no less, whose cousin had recently scored a hole in one. Polite but masterful, a man of strong views, who called for the manager when the cigarette machine malfunctioned and forced him to refund Nancy’s money. A man who spoke darkly about sinful women in the taxi back to Scotstoun. Who professed to spend his New Year’s Eves in prayer while the rest of the world gave itself over to drink and hilarity.

McCormack knew it all. After barely a week he knew the details about as well as if he’d been here all along.

Brown chalkstripe suit, regimental tie. Thick watchstrap. Embassy Filter. Overlapping two front teeth. Suede boots. Dens of iniquity. Woman taken in adultery. Hole in one.

This was the litany and these men blitzed it. Every man on the squad had criss-crossed the city, chasing these leads. In a hundred barber-shops these detectives had traded nods in the mirror with gowned customers as the barber slipped his scissors into a breast pocket and took the artist’s impression in both hands. At specially convened meetings of city golf clubs they watched the blazer-buttons wink like coins as the members passed a laminated image along the rows. They took the picture to all the tailors on Renfield Street and Hope Street. They went to the churches, chapels, gospel halls of all denominations, spoke to priests, lay preachers, ministers. They visited dentists’ surgeries, asked permission to sift their records.

And nothing worked.

The man with the short hair and overlapping teeth, the smartly dressed dancer in the desert boots whose cousin scored a hole in one, the zealot who quoted scripture in the back seat of a taxi, the man who raped and killed Jacquilyn Keevins and Ann Ogilvie and Marion Mercer; that man remained a ghost.

Now, as the day shift straggled in, hooking their fedoras on the hat-rack, shucking out of their blue raincoats, McCormack felt something like pity. This was the prime gig, the career-making case, and it had all turned sour.

There was a smell in the room, a brassy tang beneath the sweat and cigarettes. The smell was embarrassment, McCormack decided. They’re sore at having their shortcomings and befuddlement exposed to an outsider, the brass’s nark from St Andrew’s Street. But it was more than that, too. They were flat out affronted. With the details they had. All the specifics. That litany of ties and teeth and Old Testament imprecations.

Every man in that squad had made arrests on not a tenth of what they had to go on here. So what had gone wrong this time? How had they failed so badly? These were the questions that hung in the air and DCI Cochrane seemed to sense them as he stubbed his Rothmans out in an ashtray and slapped his hand on the side of a filing cabinet to bring the room to order.

We haven’t been thorough enough, he told them. We haven’t been systematic. We missed something the first time round and we need to put it right.

There was a pile of buff folders on top of the filing cabinet, maybe twenty-five or thirty. Cochrane turned and gathered them awkwardly in his arms and leaned over to drop them on the nearest desk.

‘These are men we spoke to after one and two. After Keevins and Ogilvie. Men with records. Sexuals. We may have been too hasty to rule them out. I want you to roust out these individuals, bring them in. We’ll see what Nancy Scullion makes of them.’

McCormack looked along the line and caught Goldie’s eye. Goldie shook his head and looked away.

Cochrane clapped twice, chafed his hands together. ‘Right. Now let’s divvy these up and get cracking.’

The men shuffled forward and each lifted three or four folders, carried them back to their desks.

Ten minutes later Goldie went out for a piss and McCormack sidled over to his desk, started leafing through the folders. He pulled one out. A sorry-looking soul called Robert Kilgour, forty-two years of age, whose vulpine face seemed faintly familiar. Kilgour had been released from Peterhead in ’67 after serving two years for a sexual assault carried out in Mill Street in the East End of Glasgow, about a mile south-east of the Barrowland Ballroom. He’d been interviewed after the first killing, and it was McCormack himself – he remembered it now, and here was the sheet, rattled out on his own trusty Underwood – who’d grilled him in his Cowcaddens flat. Kilgour had a solid alibi – he’d been visiting friends in Ayrshire on the night of the killing and stayed overnight in Kilmarnock – and they’d ruled him out pretty quickly. There was nothing much more in the file, just a record of Kilgour’s flittings. He’d moved around a lot in the past eighteen months. His current address was in Shettleston – a tenement scheduled for demolition.

Goldie was back, standing by the desk, hands on his hips. McCormack looked up. ‘When you get round to this guy here’ – he tapped the Kilgour file – ‘let me know. I want to come along.’

Goldie glanced down at the file, back at McCormack. He dragged his chair out with a scrape, thudded down into it, jockeyed it closer to the desk. ‘Your funeral,’ he said.

2

The sky-blue Vauxhall Velox came nosing round the corner into the empty street. In the closemouth of a gutted tenement, Robert Kilgour watched it pass, gravel crackling under the tyres, the two men hunched on the front bench-seat, the slim passenger, heavyset driver.

Kilgour moved from the shadows towards the open air. He stood in the doorway, watched the pink taillights floating in the dusk. He pinched the bridge of his nose and his fingers came away wet, dripping, he shook the sweat from them. Framed in the back windscreen he could see the two heads in silhouette, twisting to look. They would know he couldn’t have got far. Another fifty yards, another hundred they would stop, turn and come back. He had to move now.

He tried to remember the layout of these streets. His own flat was only three or four streets away but he had run blindly when he spotted the parked Velox as he crossed to his building. As he ran he’d been aware of nothing but the sound of the car’s engine and now he was lost. It was barely three weeks since he’d moved to this district. They kept knocking bits of it down. Every time you went out there was another gap-site, another missing street, you never knew where you were.

Across the street was a block of empty tenements. It struck Kilgour that there was another dead street beyond this and then maybe the main road. Buses, bars, shops. People. Places to hide.

He took a breath, closed his eyes for a second, tugged his sweat-soaked shirt away from his chest. Then he left the closemouth at a sprint, running low with his hands up around his head, as though fearful of falling debris. Without looking he knew the car had stopped. There was a hollow crunch as the driver found reverse and a veering screech as the car swung round. Kilgour made it into the building across the street, feet slapping through the echoey close and he heard the engine’s angry rasp as the driver found first and ramped up through the gears.

Emerging into the dark backcourt Kilgour heard the car suddenly louder, the engine’s whine stretching as the car took the corner and gunned down the straight.

He’d been heading straight across the backcourt but now he sheered off to the left, nearly slamming into a metal clothes-pole. The hard-packed earth was strewn with bricks and rubble and his ankles flexed and buckled as he ran. He ran with his hands out in front of him, feeling for clotheslines and other impediments in the gathering dark and soon a black wall reared up in front of him. He scrambled on to the roof of a midden, hauled himself on to the wall and dropped down into the next backcourt.

He kept running, weaving from side to side like a man dodging bullets. He couldn’t hear the car, the only sound now was Kilgour’s own breathing and then his running foot kicked something, a tin can that sparked and rattled over the broken ground, splitting the night like a burst of gunfire. When he reached the next wall and struggled on to the midden he was losing heart, his legs were heavy, the fight was draining out of him.

Before him was a big patch of waste ground: bricks and rubble, puddles catching the last of the light. He raised his eyes and saw the squat low outline, a building shaped like a shoebox.

Kilgour slipped over the wall. He drew his sleeve across his brow and picked his way through the rubble. His knees almost gave way as he pushed through the double doors.

‘Did you win?’ The barman was smiling as he passed him his change.

Kilgour stared at the red stupid face.

‘What?’

‘The race you were in, did you win it?’

Sweat was dripping from Kilgour’s brow on to the bar-top, spotting a beermat. McEwan’s Export: the Laughing Cavalier, with his foaming tankard of ale. Kilgour shook his head and slipped the change into his pocket and tried to still the tremor in his leg.

He was sick of running. He’d been running – one way or another – for over two years, since he’d walked out of Peterhead on a wet spring morning with his worldly goods in a black BOAC flight bag. He was sick of moving, changing flat every couple of months. But what could you do? It followed a pattern. For a while things would go well in a new flat. Then someone would place him, make the connection. And then it would start. Dogshit through the letter box. Catcalls from the local kids. Crude words scrawled on his door. Rocks through the windows. Getting jostled in the street. That’s when he’d look for another place.

You could change your name, but why give them the satisfaction if you hadn’t done anything wrong?

He heard the pub doors rattle. He didn’t look round. He stared down at the bar-top and in the vertical black groove of a cigarette burn he saw the gable end of a building, a dark street. He saw a woman on the pavement, sitting up now, clutching her throat, choking, retching, her torn blouse hanging open, her skirt shucked up around her waist. Her face was pink and gorged, her eyes bulging and bloodshot, swimming in tears. A rope of snot and saliva swung from her upper lip. He remembered the burst of pain in his head and the ground swinging up to smack him, and a dead weight on his back, a man sitting astride him, forcing his arm up his back. He’d lain there, oddly placid, with his face pressed to the gritty street and the weight on his back until the siren drew closer and gulped to a stop and a pair of black boots filled his line of vision.

Now he watched in the whisky mirror as the burly man shooed the barman away and the thin man shook his head.

Kilgour wiped a hand down his face. The same hand reached for the whisky and then pulled back. He reached into his jacket pocket for his smokes and then changed his mind. The cops watched him. He could see his own face in the gantry mirror, sick and scared, the features obscured by the ‘FIN’ of ‘FINEST SCOTCH WHISKY’. He looked bad, he was sweating, the hair at his temples in damp little spikes.

Then his leg started again, his right leg shaking, the knee joint flexing. He reached out for a drink and his hand knocked the glass, whisky pooling on the sticky bar-top. When he bolted to the Gents he could sense them coming after.

‘Robert Kilgour?’

Piss and carbolic. The bare lightbulb flaring in the scuffed steel of the trough.

‘Kilgour,’ he said. The cop had pronounced it to rhyme with ‘power’: Kilgour rhymed it with ‘poor’.

‘Why did you run?’

The fat cop had backed him up to the trough.

‘Why did you run, Kilgour?’

Kilgour glanced at the other cop, the tall one. He was still looking at the tall one when the fat one kicked his legs from under him and Kilgour slammed on to the dark concrete, his elbow cracking on the floor, the back of his head catching the lip of the trough. Then the fat one reached down and hauled him up like a bag of chaff and dumped him into the trough. Kilgour waggled his arms for balance, his hands paddling in the piss and running water, he felt the cold wet soaking into the arse of his trousers. He struggled to his feet, wiping his hands on the front of his jacket.

‘How did you know it was you we were looking for?’ The tall one had a different voice, softer, not a city accent. Kilgour felt the old injustice welling up again and fought to keep the tremor from his voice.

‘It’s always me. Ever since that lassie on the south side. The Keevins lassie. It’s always me you’re looking for.’

Kilgour’s hand was in his pocket again. The fat one leaned forward and Kilgour flinched but the man gripped Kilgour’s wrist and yanked his hand from his pocket. The cigarette packet flipped out and landed on the tiled floor. The two-tone red stripe: Embassy Filter. The cops exchanged a look.

‘Smile.’

Kilgour looked up, uncertain. His eyes slid to the tall one, Who is this lunatic? and the fat one stepped forward and gripped Kilgour’s jaw in the V of his right hand, thumb and fingers compressing the flesh. ‘I told you to smile. You fucking nonce. Don’t you know how to smile?’

He released his grip. Kilgour’s lips drew back, exposing his teeth in a queasy sneer. They were ordinary teeth, nicotine-brown, averagely crooked.

‘Good enough.’ The fat one tugged the cuffs from his jacket pocket. ‘Turn round.’

The cuffs went on. As they frogmarched Kilgour through the pub they passed a table of four men, near the door. Dominoes. Boiler-makers. Metal ashtray needing emptied.

‘Hey!’ One of the men was on his feet, a stocky man in a grey suit jacket. Pocked face. Rangers scarf. ‘Hey! What’s the score here? Ah’m talking to you. Hi! Fuckin’ Zed Cars.’