The Quaker

‘Highland hospitality.’ Dazzle stood, yawned. ‘Are we working here or what?’

They all sat at the table. Stokes reported on the van. It was handling well. He’d driven it round Govan a few times. He was planning to stow a can of petrol in the back (‘That’s a little Dillinger trick’) in case they got involved in a prolonged chase. The van was off the road for the moment, getting a decal at one of McGlashan’s garages.

‘He know about it?’ Paton said.

‘McGlashan? Does he know about the job? No.’ Stokes spread his hands. ‘He knows there is a job, aye. But he doesn’t know what it is.’

‘He’s expecting his taste, though,’ Cursiter said.

This was why London was better, Paton thought. Nobody ran London. It was too big to run. You had the freedom to work how you liked. You were your own man.

‘Yeah. Well. We’ve been through that.’

They worked on the game-plan. They finalized times. They’d go in at 5.30, long before the staff started to arrive, before the buses started running on Bath Street.

They broke it into pieces, little blocks of narrative. The entry. The watchman. The safe. They went over each piece. The time before, the time after. They went over it again. Leaving the building. The getaway. The idea was that Paton would take the goods – the jewels and any cash – in a toolbox and stow them in the safe house. Only Stokes knew the address of Paton’s safe house; the others just knew it was in Bridgeton.

Paton’s plan was that the string would make off in the van while he strolled down the hill to Central Station and caught a low-level train to Bridgeton.

‘Or you could just use your time-machine,’ Dazzle said.

‘How’s that?’

‘They shut the station at Bridgeton,’ Stokes explained. ‘Few years back. You can’t get a train.’

Paton looked round the faces, nodded. ‘Buses still run?’

‘Last time I looked.’

‘I’ll take the bus, then.’

Cursiter set his bottle down with a thump. ‘You just walk down Hope Street with the gear in your hand and jump on a bus? Quite the thing?’

‘We’ve covered this,’ Paton said. ‘The best getaway is the one that isn’t. The one no one clocks as a getaway. I’m just a guy on his way to work.’

In another half-hour they had done all they could do until Jenny arrived with the plans. Dazzle produced a bottle of Grouse. The others started talking about stuff they would buy. Cars. John Stephen suits. Trips to New York. High-class hoors. Paton thought about time. How much time his share would buy him. How much time before he would have to do another job. Or the time he’d spend inside if they got caught.

Then they heard the hiss of wheels, a car door slam, high-heels mashing through gravel.

Dazzle opened the door.

The first thought Paton had was how far out of Cursiter’s league this woman was. You knew, as soon as you clapped eyes on her, that she had fucked Cursiter as a purely instrumental act, a means of getting her hands on a share of a hundred thousand pounds. She was wearing a red woollen coat, cinched at the waist, belted, black high-heels. Her hair was black, glossy, bobbed.

She stood there enjoying the impression she was making.

‘The age of chivalry is past,’ she said. No one knew what to say to that. Her shoulders slumped theatrically. ‘What’s a girl got to do to get a drink around here?’

‘Sorry!’ Dazzle was on his feet, scuttling over to the cupboard for another glass.

‘Did you bring the plans?’ Paton was put out by the woman’s appearance. He’d expected someone nervous and fretting, a dolly from the typing pool, out of her depth. The woman’s poise and beauty changed the balance in the room. Her beauty seemed to put her in charge.

‘I was about to ask who’s the gaffer here.’ She took the glass from Dazzle and held it high, in front of her face. Her nails were lacquered a vivid red. ‘Think we’ve answered that question.’

‘Our friend here put it together,’ Paton said, nodding at Dazzle. He didn’t know if it was a names thing, if she was supposed to know their names.

‘But now you’re in charge.’

‘I’ve had some experience.’

‘I’ll bet.’

She set her drink down on the table and started working the buttons on her red coat. Cursiter rose and went to stand behind her. As he drew the unbuttoned coat from her shoulders, he leaned in to kiss her on the neck. She flinched away, clapped a palm to her neck as if slapping a mosquito, wiped the fingers down the skin. ‘I think we’ve had enough of that, darling, haven’t we?’ She was wearing a short shift dress in a clingy black fabric.

Cursiter turned away. He tossed her coat on the back of a kitchen chair.

What she drew from her bag, rolled up in a tube and tied with string, were the blueprints from when the building was remodelled as an auctioneer’s. Previously the address had been a private house. The architect had partitioned some of the rooms for offices and knocked others together to form the showroom.

Paton spread the blueprints out on the kitchen table, on top of the map, and the others gathered round.

‘Somebody’s not going to miss these?’ Campbell asked.

‘What’s to miss? They go back where they came from tomorrow.’

The blueprints showed the basement door, the point of entry. The basement floor held storerooms and the nightwatchman’s cubbyhole, down a corridor on the right-hand side. On the ground floor were offices, toilets, a small staff tearoom. The first floor held the big showroom and the manager’s office, where the safe was housed.

‘This comes off,’ Paton said. ‘Even if it doesn’t come off, they’re going to come for you. You know that. They’ll know it’s an inside job.’

She was looking out the window and she raised her arms now in a long, slow stretch, fingers interlaced, her shoulder blades lifting in the clingy fabric. The window was turning glossy in the dusk. Paton could see the glass clouding where she blew out a sigh. She twisted her head to look coolly at Paton. ‘You think I’ll fall apart, break under questioning, blurt it all out?’

‘I think you should be prepared. I think these people can be very persistent.’

‘There’s seventeen people know about this sale. I imagine at least some of them have more interesting backgrounds than mine. Anyway,’ she flashed a smile at Paton; ‘if it comes off, there’s other things we need to decide. Like who’s getting what?’

‘Nothing to decide,’ Paton said brusquely. ‘Six-way split. Equal shares. End of discussion.’ Paton stood up. He could have argued for a larger share of the take – he was the skilled tradesman, after all; the rest were just manual labour – but he knew from experience the trouble this caused. An equal split was clean and straightforward. If the take was big enough you didn’t worry about trying to leverage a bigger share. Make the split, move on, everyone’s happy.

‘You’ll be taken care of,’ Dazzle told her. ‘Same as everyone else. No one’s stiffing anybody.’

She looked at Paton through her fringe. ‘Well, I hope that’s not the case.’

They drove back separately, leaving ten minutes between each car. Paton went last, in Dazzle’s Triumph, the smell of dog, dog hairs on the upholstery, he thought of the dog resting its chin on his thigh, the mobile eyebrows, the sad, wet, intelligent eyes.

‘That Jennifer,’ Dazzle said, shaking his head. He looked across at Paton then back to the road.

Paton cracked the window an inch, kept it open while they drove, the smells of the night mingling with his cigarette smoke.

‘I handle gelly for a living,’ Paton said. ‘Not for fun.’

8

‘That’s four bob, bud.’

McCormack put a ten-shilling note on the bar and took a pull at his pint, the brown sourness cutting through the milky head. After Work You Need a Guinness. The Smiddy was quiet, a trio of pensioners nursing their halves at one end of the bar, two guys in suits and ties playing pool. He thought he’d missed the rest of the day shift but then one of the pool players bent into the light to play a shot. It was Goldie, his features puffy and harsh in the overhead glare.

McCormack scooped his change from the bar and took his pint across to a table, opened the Evening Times at the sports section. He could see the TV, hear the click of the pool balls behind him. Ask the Family was finishing up and then it was the opening credits of Z-Cars, the patrol car’s flashing headlights and a dotted line across a map of the city. He thought of the maps in the Murder Room and the boxes above them, boxes that ran on shelves covering three sides of the room.

At first he’d thought it was some kind of storeroom. They’d set up their Murder Room in the station’s storage area and these boxes held the archives of all the old cases. Then it came to him that the boxes were current, the boxes were the Quaker files.

On his first afternoon he took down the first two boxes and leafed through them. Witness statements. He took a box from the middle and one from the end of the twenty-odd yards of shelving. Each was filled with the same buff folders of typed statements, the verbatim accounts of those who had some connection – however tenuous – with one of the victims. He tallied the boxes and made his calculation. There were fifty thousand witness statements on the Murder Room shelves.

He thought again about the madness of that number. You had fifty thousand statements and no suspect.

A shadow fell on his Evening Times. McCormack looked up. The angry one, Goldie, was stood there in front of him, pool cue in hand. He shook the cue like a spear. McCormack thought for a moment that he was being challenged to fight but it was only a game that the burly man wanted.

‘Ten bob a throw?’

‘Fine.’ McCormack eased out from behind the table, followed Goldie to the lighted baize. ‘Last of the big spenders.’ McCormack meant this as a joke but Goldie wheeled round.

‘Fine then, nicker a game.’ He tossed his cue on the table. ‘Rack them up, I’m away for a pish.’

McCormack took the plastic triangle down from the lampshade. He swept the balls together, lifted and dropped the stripes and spots until the pattern was right, the black nestling in the centre.

When Goldie came back McCormack broke off. They played the frame in silence. McCormack won, dropped the black with Goldie stuck on three. They racked up again and Goldie broke off viciously, the balls spreading in slow motion and something clunked home in a middle pocket and rumbled down.

‘Stripes?’ Goldie said. McCormack bent to check the ball as it slotted home, nodded. Goldie surveyed the table.

‘You know what bothers me about you?’ Goldie kept his eyes on the table, chalking his cue. ‘Don’t take this personal, but you know what gets me?’

‘My clearance rate? My impeccable taste in clothes?’

‘You sit there every day like you’re one of us. You listen to our conversations. You drink our coffee. And all the time you’re taking notes for your wee report, what we’re doing wrong. I’ve worked this inquiry fifteen months.’ He was watching the tip of his cue, tiny blue clouds rising as the chalk-cube scuffed it. ‘Fifteen months. You’re gonnae take a fortnight to tell me how I should’ve done it different.’

‘You think I should take fifteen months to write my report?’

‘Aye, very good. But that’s not even it.’ Goldie waited till McCormack had played his shot, a long five that rattled the mouth of the left baulk pocket, failed to drop. ‘You know what it is? You sit there – day in, day out – the fucking boy genius of the Flying Squad, the man with the answers. And have you made one suggestion? Have you made a single positive contribution to what we’re trying to do here?’

‘I’m writing the report, mate. That’s my brief. If I get involved in the investigation it just muddies the waters.’

‘Aye. Fair enough.’ Goldie lifted his pint from the windowsill and took a pull. ‘Or maybe you’re just as fucking lost as we are. Could that have something to do with it?’

‘Ah come on, now. Don’t sell yourself short. I’ve got some catching up to do to be as lost as you are.’

Goldie’s laugh was soft, he was nodding to himself. ‘We’re getting it now, are we? The big insight. This should be fucking good. How lost are we, DI McCormack? Where did we go wrong?’

It occurred to McCormack as he straightened up that a pool cue was a useful object, its fat end nicely weighted for connecting with someone’s mouth. He held the cue at arm’s length and leant it gingerly against the wall. He planted his palms on the pool-table’s edge and leaned down into the light.

‘All right then, DS Goldie. Listen to yourself. I’ve worked this inquiry fifteen months. You’re boasting about that? You should be embarrassed. Fifteen months and you’ve never had a sniff. What does that tell you?’

Goldie’s face was in shadow. He didn’t say anything. He was bouncing his cue on the floor, you could hear the rubberized end bumping on the lino. McCormack leaned down further into the light. ‘No thoughts? What about this then. How many parades have you held?’

‘How many what?’

‘ID parades. How many have you held? Do you even know?’

‘This is how you spend your time? Doing sums in your wee book?’

‘Three hundred and twelve, Detective. Three hundred and twelve. That’s a number, don’t you think?’ McCormack frowned. ‘What’s the plan, you bring the entire male population of Glasgow to the Marine one by one? Get Nancy Scullion to check them out?’ He spread his arms. ‘She’s seen three hundred guys, mate. She’s no idea what the Quaker looks like any more. Assuming she ever did. I could be the fucking Quaker. You could, for all she knows.’

‘Spent an evening with him,’ Goldie said. ‘She was in his company. Shared a taxi.’

‘Poured into the taxi. Pished, by all accounts. Hers included. You said it yourself, for fuck sake. You said it to Cochrane.’

‘She was there!’ Goldie threw an arm up and his cue caught the lampshade, sent it swinging. His face danced in and out of the yellow glare. ‘She saw him. She spoke to him. What – we just fucking ignore her?’

McCormack reached out to steady the shade. ‘I don’t think she’s feeling ignored, exactly. Anyway, at this stage it hardly matters.’

‘Because you’re shutting us down.’

‘Cause you’re not fucking catching him.’

‘And why’s that?’

‘Because he’s dead, Detective.’ McCormack swirled the last of the black in his glass, skulled it. ‘He’s dead or else he’s gone, he’s left the city. It’s seven months since the last one. You think he’s biding his time? It’s finished. You had your window, you never took it. We playing pool here or what?’

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