The Quaker

The cops stopped. The fat one nodded for the other to take charge of Kilgour and rocked unhurriedly up to the table. He had two or three inches on the man with the scarf.

‘You’ve got something to say?’

‘The boy done nothin’,’ the man was saying. ‘Mindin’ his own fuckin’ business. You think we didnae see that?’

‘Just like you, eh? Mindin’ your business.’

The man snorted. ‘Fuckin’ police state youse are runnin’.’

The cop stepped back and pointed at Kilgour. ‘You know this guy? Is he a friend of yours?’

Rangers scarf kept his eyes locked on the cop’s. ‘I know he was minding his own fuckin’ business. Till you cunts started.’

‘Uh-huh. OK. The missus kick you out or something? Is that what this is about? You needing a bed for the night?’

The man glowered, said nothing.

There was a whisky and a half-pint of heavy on the table in front of the man with the scarf. The cop leaned forward and tipped the half-pint over, just pushed it with three fingers in an oddly camp gesture. ‘Tsk, would you look at that.’ The liquid spread across the tabletop, spilled over the edge in three ropy columns, spattering the lino. ‘I’ve gone and spilled your drink. That was clumsy.’

‘Bud, leave it.’ The man’s friends were grabbing his sleeves, pulling him back down into his chair. ‘Leave it, Bud. It’s not worth it.’

The cop took up the whisky glass and poured it on to the floor, raising the glass smartly as he poured so that the whisky formed a long golden string that hissed on the lino. He replaced the glass on the table, upside down, his fingertip resting on the base.

‘My advice? And I say this in a spirit of reconciliation and public service. Be like your friend over here. Mind your own fucking business.’

Outside on the pavement, Kilgour found his courage. ‘Youse huckled me for the last one. No remember? You’ve done me already. I’m in the clear.’

The night air was cool on their forehead and cheeks.

‘This time’s different.’ A big hand pushed Kilgour towards the car, the Velox parked on the waste ground. When the hand gripped his shoulder, Kilgour tried to shrug it loose.

‘How’s it different?’

The thin one had the door open and the heavy one bundled him into the car.

‘This time there’s a witness.’

3

‘Sandy’s what she said.’ DCI George Cochrane dragged a chair from a vacant desk and straddled it, crotch splayed. He rubbed two hands up and down his face. ‘Sandy. Fair. Light-coloured. I don’t know how else to say it.’

They were in the Murder Room at the Marine, maps on the wall, boxed statements on the shelves, the sun already burning in the high sash windows. Photos pinned to the board behind Cochrane’s head. The victims’ smiling faces. The victims’ naked bodies.

Jacquilyn Keevins. Ann Ogilvie. Marion Mercer.

‘Flaxen.’ Goldie couldn’t help himself. ‘Straw-coloured, sir. Pale blond.’

Cochrane twisted a finger into the corner of his eye. He gave no indication of having heard Goldie. ‘Jokes you can do.’ He nodded heavily. ‘Acting the clown. Catching killers? That’s the tricky part for you boys, right? The fucking hotshots.’ He stood up sharply and the chair scraped on the floor. ‘Scottish Crime Squad. Fucking Flying Squad. What’s the matter, they don’t teach you how to read witness statements?’ Goldie said nothing. Cochrane tugged his shirt away from his chest, blew down its front. ‘Sandy, she said.’

Goldie shifted in his chair. ‘She said.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘The doormen tell it different, sir. The manager, too. Mid-brown, maybe darker. And the boy and girl, the couple, who came forward after the first one; they had him mid-brown, too.’

‘We’ve been through this, Detective. She’s the witness.’

‘Plus the height. The doormen call it five-eight, nine. Not six foot.’

‘She’s the one shared the taxi with him. She’s the one was in his company for most of the night.’

Goldie cleared his throat. ‘She’s the one too pissed to know her own name. Her own colour of hair.’

Cochrane turned his back, stared at the wall, the map of the city. ‘He says you punched him,’ he said.

‘What’s that, sir?’

Cochrane kept his back to them. ‘Kilgour. Your suspect. The nonce. He says you assaulted him.’ Cochrane turned. ‘What’s Boy Wonder going to say about that, hmm? How’s that gonnae look in his report?’

Goldie shrugged. The question was put to Goldie but it was McCormack who had to answer it.

‘DS Goldie behaved professionally throughout the arrest.’

‘It’s not going into your wee report? When you tell the brass how we’re doing it wrong?’

McCormack said nothing. He figured Cochrane had a right to be aggrieved. He had watched his biggest case, the case that would define him, become a slow-motion nightmare. Three women murdered and still no one charged. Months slipping past, the task getting bigger, not smaller. There were thousands of fair-haired men in this city, tens of thousands, men between twenty-five and thirty-five, men with overlapping teeth. Men who matched the photofit, the artist’s impression. Men who smoked Embassy Filter. But the papers didn’t get any kinder as time went on and the pressure from the brass didn’t slacken. If Cochrane was sore he had every excuse.

The suspect, Kilgour, had been held in the cells overnight. There was a magistrate’s court attached to the Marine and the cells were often busy. They’d given Kilgour a mate, put him in with a fairy they’d lifted on Kelvin Way. Cold white tiles. A shitter with no seat.

They’d arranged a parade for the morning. Nancy Scullion, sister of the third victim, Marion Mercer. At 10 a.m. a squad car picked Nancy up from her work – she was a secretary at Harland and Wolff’s – and took her to the Marine. Ten minutes later she was being driven back to Govan. She’d walked down the line of men, looked at Cochrane and shaken her head. In the foyer, she told Cochrane, ‘You think it’s number four, don’t you? It’s not really like him.’ Kilgour was number four. Kilgour went home. Kilgour was a waste of everyone’s time.

Now Cochrane had his hands behind his head, fingers laced, his teeth bared in a bitter grin. ‘You know what they’re calling us? The fucking papers?’

The two men knew. Everyone knew. But Cochrane told them anyway.

‘The Marine Formation Dance Team.’ Cochrane smiled. ‘Cute, eh? Fucking clever.’

The Quaker Squad had been haunting the city’s dance halls for the past year, brushing up their dance skills, mingling with the punters, looking for the man with the overlapping teeth and the regimental tie, the short fair hair and the desert boots. It was easy to spot the cops: they were the ones watching the men, not the women.

‘I’d say we’ve never seen anything like it, but even that’s not true.’

The two detectives nodded. They knew what Cochrane was talking about. It was Manuel all over again. Another dapper killer. Peter Manuel. Another stain on the city’s name. Ten years back. Cochrane had worked it. Goldie too. McCormack was too young.

‘Happening again, sir, isn’t it?’ Goldie grimaced.

McCormack remembered. He’d been too young to work it but not too young to remember. The crowds outside the High Court during the trial, men and women in their good clothes, wee boys climbing on the High Court railings. He was working in C Div at the time, lodging with Granny Beag in Partick. Manuel was convicted of seven murders, confessed to eight more. They hanged him on 11 July. McCormack’s birthday. Waking up in Granny’s flat, coming through for breakfast, the present on the kitchen table, the radio on, Granny Beag sitting in her quilted dressing-gown and fur-lined slippers, a lit cigarette in the ashtray, they announced it on the radio. Sentence of execution was carried out on Peter Manuel in Barlinnie Prison at one minute past eight this morning. McCormack unwrapping the parcel. His body was buried in an unmarked grave in the prison grounds. A watch, a Rolex Tudor with a leather strap, the watch he still wore.

Cochrane stood up, dragged the chair over to the other desk, rested his hands on its back. ‘Sometimes I think it never stopped.’ He sighed out some smoke. ‘Him down in Manchester. Brady. He’s one of ours, too, God help us. Pollok boy. You got a minute, McCormack?’

‘Sir.’

McCormack followed Cochrane into the narrow office next to the Murder Room. He closed the door behind him.

‘Did he hit him?’

‘Like I said, sir, DS Goldie behaved professionally.’

‘Ah fuck it. Guy’s a nonce. Who gives a shit. Had your boss on the phone.’ Cochrane was stubbing his Rothmans in the ashtray, jabbing it into the scuffed red metal.

‘You’re my boss.’

‘Your real boss. DCI Flett. Wants to know how long we’re planning to keep you. When we might be able to spare you.’ McCormack rode the little punch of irony on the last two words. Cochrane had stopped jabbing the cigarette butt and now he folded it over on itself, pressing down hard with the ball of his thumb. ‘Told him you’re playing it close to your chest. Any thoughts, though? How long this might take?’

‘Few more days. Another week, maybe.’

‘Then we learn our fate.’

Cochrane moved round the desk to stand beside McCormack. McCormack could smell something carious under the older man’s tobacco breath, a rottenness that made him breathe in shallow sips. Above the height of four feet, the wall of Cochrane’s office was frosted glass through which the torsos of the day-shift detectives floated like clouds.

‘No slackers here.’ Cochrane nodded through the glass. ‘No shirkers, Detective.’

McCormack took this to mean that there were no Roman Catholics in the Murder Room. Thinks I’m a Prod, McCormack realized. Probably thinks all Highlanders are Wee Frees.

‘Busy bees.’ McCormack nodded. ‘Work rate’s not a problem, clearly.’

The word ‘problem’ tilted the atmosphere in Cochrane’s office. He felt Cochrane giving him the stare.

‘What do you suppose it might be then, Detective? The “problem”?’

‘You’d know that better than I would, sir.’

‘Uh-huh. Right. Well. You find out what it is, you let me know. First cab. Understood?’

McCormack watched the white shapes, avoided Cochrane’s gaze. ‘You’ll see the report, sir. It’ll come to you. In the normal course of things.’

‘Normal course of things?’ Cochrane kicked a wastepaper basket as he stepped right up close to McCormack. The clouds drifted in the Murder Room. ‘This isn’t the normal course of things. This is you parachuting into my station to stitch me fucking up. Me and those boys out there. Tell the CC how we fucked it up. How you’d have done it better.’

‘We’re all on the same side here, sir. We all want him caught.’

‘Is that right? You’ve been a polis how long, McCormack? How long you been on the force?’

‘Thirteen years, sir.’

‘Twenty-seven.’ Cochrane slapped his own chest. ‘Twenty-seven years. You make a lot of friends in that time.’

‘This a threat, sir?’

‘It’s a statement of fact, Detective. I’ve got three years to go. Three years till I’ve done my thirty and I’m out. You’re not gonnae fuck that up for me, son.’

Back in the Murder Room, McCormack tried to focus on the report he’d been reading, a press statement in Cochrane’s lurid prose: The man we are seeking is a man of dark urges and lawless drives. He may keep irregular hours. Anyone with inform—

‘That for my benefit?’

Goldie had appeared beside his desk.

‘What?’

‘The wee performance back there. Backing up a fellow officer. Look at me: I’m a good guy after all. One of the lads. That what that was about?’

McCormack shook his head. The whole Kilgour thing had been a stunt, he realized. It was Goldie declaring that McCormack and McCormack’s review could take a fuck to themselves. It was also a test. Goldie had known that Kilgour would complain. He’d known that Cochrane would want to know what happened. If McCormack backed up Kilgour, well, what do you want from a rat? If he backed up Goldie he was weak as piss.

‘Got one or two things on my plate just now, Detective. One or two concerns. Am I on Detective Sergeant Goldie’s Christmas card list? That’s not one of them.’

‘Well, that’s handy.’

Goldie had a smoke in his mouth, fumbling in his pockets for a light. The cigarette bobbed up and down under Goldie’s muffled curses. McCormack watched him for a few seconds then produced his Dunhill lighter, sparked it angrily.

‘Here.’

He lit Goldie’s then he lit one of his own. They stood smoking, watching the river, not talking. A minute ticked past.

‘Fucking cheek on him, but.’ Goldie was studying the end of his cigarette. ‘Moaning about the press.’

‘They’re not on his case?’

‘They’re on his case, aye. But maybe he should stop holding press conferences every five minutes.’

McCormack said nothing. Goldie was right. Cochrane had run to the media with every development, however slight. His line was that they should use it to their advantage, the media interest. Keep feeding the papers little tidbits. The Record and the Express were like a daily door-to-door to every household in the city.

But the papers needed something to write about between killings. They needed an excuse to put the artist’s impression on the front page, the half-smiling clean-cut killer, limned in pencil. They needed ‘QUAKER’ in a forty-point Tempo, stark black print on the off-white pulp. And when there was nothing else, when there were no ‘developments’, they wrote about the Murder Squad. Their failings, their wasted efforts. How Long Must We Live in Fear? Will the Dance Hall Butcher Never Be Caught?

‘Think we’ll get him?’

‘We?’

‘You. Us. Whatever.’

‘Will we fuck. We were beat from the start. The first one did it. The Magic Stick. That’s what screwed us. Should have got him then.’

McCormack felt the rebuke. Jacqui Keevins was the first victim. She’d been at the dancing, the Majestic Ballroom on Hope Street. The Magic Stick, everyone called it. The cops went there the following night, team-handed, put her photo up on a screen, asked for patrons who’d been there the night before to come out and talk to them in the foyer. A bloke recognized her, said he’d danced with her at the start of night but lost track of her later on.

The cops were stoked. This was the early break you always look for, the sign that you’re on the right track. Too bad the guy was making it up. Too bad he was a bullshit-merchant, attention-seeker. By the time he came clean it was too late. When the truth emerged – Jacqui Keevins had been at the Barrowland, not the Majestic – two weeks had passed. The trail was cold.

‘So. What you planning to do?’

McCormack flicked his cigarette end out of the open window. ‘I’m planning to keep my eyes open. I’m planning to review the evidence. Write an honest report.’

‘Right. Shut us down, you mean. Put us out of our misery.’

‘Not my decision, Detective.’

‘At least look us in the eyes when you shaft us, eh? Give us that much.’

4

McCormack woke with a weight on his chest, the blankets damp and tangled. He struggled up, the headboard clacking against the bedroom wall. His hand scrabbled in the drawer of his bedside cabinet, found the inhaler. Two deep puffs and the panic subsided. His hand reached blindly out, dropped the inhaler back in the drawer.

He banked the pillows behind him and lay back, tugging the covers away from his sweating legs. The sound of his breathing, normally no sound at all, rasped in his ears as though he was snorkelling. It’s OK, he told himself: the bad part is over. He craned round to see the luminous green hands on Granny Beag’s alarm clock: nearly ten past four.

The night air felt cold on his shins. He stripped his T-shirt, mopped his armpits and the hollow at his breastbone, balled the damp garment and tossed it into a corner.

With the panic over, a sense of shame rose in its place. There was no need for these theatrics, though he knew well enough where his panic came from. It came from the nights in Ballachulish, nights when he’d wake to the clamour in his parents’ bedroom, his father choking and hacking and the calm yellow tone of his mother’s voice talking his father through it. The sounds his father made were like those of a suffering beast – wild, rending cries and heaving snuffles that shuddered through the darkened house. Then McCormack would hear the bedsprings creak as his mother got up to come downstairs and boil the kettle. She would fill a bowl with hot water and Vicks, and McCormack’s father would hobble down to sit at the kitchen table with a tea-towel over his head, inhaling the vapours he hoped would flare his passages, bring some air to his crusted lungs.

McCormack’s own asthma was inherited, but from his mother, not his father. What destroyed his dad’s lungs and brought him to a hard, slow death with a basin on his lap was working at the British Aluminium Company’s plant in Kinlochleven. Willie McCormack worked in the furnace room, one of the big men – six-footers all of them – who spent their days crust-breaking, tapping, changing the anodes. You couldn’t see a yard in front of your face, the air soupy with dust and fumes, and a noise like Hades. They learned later that the fumes contained sulphur dioxide and something called ‘polyaromatic hydrocarbons’, but no one at the time had heard of such words. When his father died the cause of death was listed as ‘pulmonary obstruction’, but what really killed him was British Aluminium.

McCormack found a fresh T-shirt in the dresser. He filled a glass of water at the kitchen sink and then stood at the living-room window. Some folk thought being a policeman was dangerous work. The choice in Balla was the plant at Kinlochleven or the Balla quarries. McCormack’s grandfather – his seanair – worked in the slate quarries all his days. It was hard, dirty work – not as hazardous as the aluminium plant, and not a patch on the mines – but it was dangerous too. Dynamited rock could shoot out crowbars like javelins if they were carelessly left in. A guy standing next to McCormack’s seanair was killed that way.

The last quarry closed in 1955 but McCormack had already left for the city. Coming south to join the City of Glasgow Police was like coming up for air. McCormack left the Highlands to escape the dust and smog and grime, the sound of the hooter four times a day. Glasgow was the Dear Green Place, a city of parks and boating ponds, the Botanic Gardens, the bowling greens of Kelvingrove.

It was a city he knew fairly well, his mother’s city and – even more – his granny’s city. Granny Beag had grown up in Ballachulish, but she married a lowlander called Thomas Beggs, a welder in the shipyards, and flitted down to Glasgow, where McCormack’s mother grew up, meeting McCormack’s father at a dance at the Highlanders’ Institute. Granny Beag was a short woman, not much over five feet tall, though her sharp tongue and guardsman’s carriage gave her the presence her stature belied. When McCormack was young he misheard ‘Granny Beggs’ as ‘Granny Beag’ – that is, ‘little granny’ – and the name stuck. For Granny Beag, Glasgow was like the Highlands without the kirk ministers and the stink of fish. You could meet people from all over the Gaeltacht, not just from your own village, and you could hear the language spoken whenever you fancied, in the Highlanders’ Institute or the Park Bar. And you needn’t see a minister or a kirk elder from one year’s end to the next unless you sought them out.

When her daughter married a Ballachulish man and moved back to the village, Granny Beag was dismayed. The real Highlands – or as much as you wanted of them – were right here in Glasgow, in the tenements of Partick and Maryhill. She took her revenge by encouraging her grandson to come down to the city whenever he liked. McCormack spent whole summers at the flat in Caird Drive. The old woman was lonely – the welder had died shortly after the war – and it pleased her to have a young man in the house, a boy she could pamper and feed. She taught him Gaelic songs and told him stories of the village in the days of her youth and showed him off to the shopkeepers on Dumbarton Road. When his mother remarried and moved down to London with her new husband, McCormack spent more and more time at the flat.

Towards the end, when Granny Beag was dying of lung cancer, she told McCormack she was leaving the flat to him. Her daughter was well provided for, thanks to her new husband, and she wanted the place to go to McCormack. ‘It’ll be a base for you when you’re down in the city, and maybe you’ll end up working here. And it’ll be a place,’ she said, avoiding his eye, ‘a place where you can bring people back.’ People, she said, as if she’d known all along, as if she’d worked it out.

McCormack moved in straight away. When he finished training and started as a constable in C Div, he bussed it to work from the Caird Drive flat. He changed nothing, kept all of Granny Beag’s furniture, her old-fashioned copper pots and the cream-coloured crockery with the green trim. He drank in the Park Bar, went to concerts at the Institute, played shinty for Glasgow Mid-Argyll. He was becoming what she’d wanted him to be all along, the choicest specimen of Caledonian manhood, an urban Highlander.

Now, as he stood looking out at the city, he wondered if he’d come far enough. Maybe he should have followed his mother to London, a real city, a world city, where nobody bothered if you were a teuchter or a taig or anything else. Maybe there was still time. Maybe if he did a good job here he could think about getting away, apply to the Met, get off down to London or further afield. Half the population of Glasgow seemed to be clearing out; another Highlander more or less would never be missed. He rinsed his glass under the tap, turned it upside down on the draining board and padded back to bed.

5

The train rocked to a halt. Alex Paton looked up from his paper and wiped a little porthole in the window’s condensation. There was an advert painted on a gable at the far side of the platform – UNCLE JOE’S MINT BALLS KEEP YOU ALL AGLOW – and he knew at once where they were. This was Wigan. This was properly north, where you started to feel you were nearly home. He put aside his paper and leaned back against the headrest, closing his eyes. The station announcer’s voice was muffled by the glass. It was now, Paton reckoned, 1963 or 64. No man on the moon. His father still alive in the single end on Hopehill Road. Bloody England hadn’t yet won the World Cup. The doors slammed, the whistle blew, and the train hauled off on its journey north. By the time they rolled into Glasgow Central in three hours’ time it would be 1959.

It was always 1959 in Glasgow and Paton was always nineteen. The ten years since he’d left for London fell away and the old life came back. He was Swifty from the Fleet, even the way he walked came back. The train from Euston was a time machine. You knew, of course, that life carried on in your absence but it was hard somehow to credit it. Glasgow would always be Glasgow, the sooty city where time stood still. Although, three hours later, as he shook himself awake with the train approaching Central, it was clear that this was no longer true. They were passing the Gorbals. Or where the Gorbals once stood. Now the Gorbals was a great bald prairie of mud. A single gas-lamp stood like a stunted tree and behind it rose the high flats, storey on storey, towers crowding each other with their broad square shoulders. They seemed to block out the light. He had to press his cheek against the window and crane right up to see the hard flat top of the nearest tower.

He checked his watch: plenty of time. He was back in Glasgow to look at a job. He lived in London now and he did jobs mainly in commuter towns in the stockbroker belt. Kent. Essex. He was good at what he did and seldom short on offers. You had to be selective, though. Paton never worked with the same crew more than twice, and he never did more than three jobs a year. He preferred a small number of big jobs to a large number of small ones. He also preferred not to work in Glasgow. In fact, you could call that a rule – in so far as rules applied to his line of work. But big jobs had been thin on the ground just of late and this Glasgow thing had seemed worth a look.