Lawless (2 page)

Not for the first time since returning to Dundee, McBride became aware of a feeling of melancholy creeping over him. The town had changed – almost beyond recognition in some parts. So had a lot of the people. Now there were bioscientists with English accents rubbing shoulders with the old-time trade unionists. Wine bars were opening up and the council couldn’t pull down some of the empty housing estates fast enough. Out in the suburbs, high-priced villas were springing up on every available plot of ground. There was a whiff of prosperity in the air. But nothing could alter the memories, the distant echoes that could still seep slyly into your head when your back was turned.

He wondered if Caroline had ever returned and tried to imagine where she would have gone if she’d found the strength to come back. Would she have revisited all the obvious places or would the recollections have overwhelmed her the way they were starting to do to him? The only thing left in Dundee for her – for them both – was the precious spot where they’d taken Simon’s ashes all those Decembers ago. That was probably the best reason to stay away.

He asked himself if he would make the journey to that peaceful place where she’d shed so many tears before he departed again for London but he still struggled for an answer. He’d never been there without her.

Caroline, sweet Caroline. He walked on every crack in the road – she read Annie Proulx and put the handbrake on when she stopped at traffic lights. But, magically, for ten years, it had worked. Then he went away and, when he came back, it was over. He still wasn’t sure why.

When the phone rang, McBride was on the floor of his hotel room. He was wearing purple shorts and battered Nike trainers and his body ran with sweat. For the previous ninety minutes, he had jogged through the rain in the awakening centre of town. He stopped trying to reach his toes and stretched out to pick his mobile from the bedside table. Janne from his Edinburgh publishers always had a smile in her voice and he pondered if all Danish women sounded that way, even on wet Monday mornings.

When McBride informed her he was in his hotel room, half naked and sweating, she queried why he was also breathless.

‘Not what you think or might like to think,’ he fired back. ‘Anyway, I thought it was the Swedes who thrived on all that sort of stuff.’

Janne giggled. ‘I bring news of “fan mail” – some of it from ladies, perhaps. Should I send it on or won’t you be able to contain yourself? I could open it up but maybe you won’t want me to see what colour the knickers are?’

‘I’ll risk it. They’d probably be too small for you anyway. Come to that, I was never that sure you Scandinavians actually wore such things.’

Janne sighed in mock indignation. ‘We’re not all bare-bottomed Scotsmen in kilts. Give me five minutes and I’ll get back to you.’

She rang off.

When she called again, exactly five minutes had passed and this time Janne was wearing her Miss Efficiency hat.

‘Right. Sorry – no knickers. There are nine letters in total. Six say, “Well done” – can’t imagine why – two are requests for you to speak – one of them a Rotary Club and the other, which I know you’ll like, is a young wives’ group who say they try to attract interesting men to entertain them. The last one is a bit more unusual. In fact, it’s not nice at all. Says, in effect, that you’re a bit of a tosser and you got one of the chapters all wrong. You’re accused of helping to keep an innocent man in prison and it says you’ve been hoodwinked, just like the police. Do I bin it and just post on the others or do you want it for your scrapbook?’

McBride knew the answer to the question he was about to ask but he asked anyway, his mood of light-heartedness dissipating. ‘Does it refer to the story about the bloke who strangled his girlfriend with his tie?’

‘Yes – Bryan Gilzean and Alison Brown. According to the letter, he’s doing life. By the by, did I say the note is beautifully punctuated, very neat and without a spelling mistake – unlike the work of some authors I know!’

It was McBride’s turn to be businesslike. ‘Never mind the rest of the stuff,’ he said, suddenly brusque, ‘I’ll pick it up next time I’m through. But let me have the complaining one. Can you get it off today?’ He rang off before he became aware of his rudeness. He knew he had work to do.

If he’d still been a staff man on one of the nationals, there wouldn’t have been much of a problem. The news desk would have him pencilled in for an assignment somewhere and the air tickets would have been booked in his name and awaiting his return. He would have caught the plane and stayed away until the final word of his ‘scintillating’ prose had been filed. Then he would have come home and waited for the next trip to the airport. Life didn’t present too many dilemmas. You followed the news and everything else fitted in round about – or sometimes it didn’t for the unlucky people who shared the ordinary, static parts of your nomadic existence.

But, now that he freelanced, McBride could make choices. The one facing him in his room in the Apex Hotel was straightforward. It should not have taken any time at all. He should have showered, dressed and checked out. He should have left his bags at reception and spent the afternoon catching up on the changing face of Dundee. Then he should have caught the early evening flight out of Riverside Airport back to London. He should not have returned to his native city for another ten years.

Instead, McBride called the airport and cancelled his seat on the plane. It made no sense but he did it because he couldn’t stop himself. The voice inside his head told him it was irrational and pointless to remain in the city but, down in the pit of his stomach, the other voice, the one he always obeyed, told him it had been inevitable from the moment the insistent stranger had walked quickly away from him in Waterstone’s.

McBride consoled himself with the thought that his seemingly illogical act had much to commend it. He was following his instincts and they rarely let him down – it was paying attention to these same instincts that had so often helped to put his byline on the front pages. There were also old contacts and new places in Dundee he could visit. Besides, the reality was that he was in no particular hurry to return to London after the way he’d left it.

Sarah had moved her stuff out of the flat but she continued to appear on the horizon at inopportune moments. The rows had begun to last longer than any of the highlights of their short existence together. The only redeeming feature of the increasingly hostile exchanges was that she had not taken the threatened hammer to his pride and joy – the midnight-blue, carbon-fibre Trek bike which was capable of carrying him almost as fast as the speed of sound. Her restraint had almost certainly not been prompted by any compassion, he reflected, but by self-preservation. It was one of the few sensible decisions of her life.

The more McBride considered his current state of affairs – romantic and otherwise – the more logical his decision to remain in Dundee became. Hell, it was even starting to look like a good idea.

There didn’t seem an obvious starting point for the mission he was about to embark upon so retracing his footsteps looked as good an option as any. It was also the only one he could think of. That afternoon he called again at Waterstone’s.

Gordon Dow was the kind of man any bookshop chain would want as its manager. He had conducted a love affair with books all his life and could put an affectionate hand on any one of the thousands of volumes on his shelves without having to wonder where it was. He was on first-name terms with every regular customer he had ever had and he received a nod from everyone worth knowing in the city – even those who didn’t read. But he did not know the man who had waited so patiently in McBride’s book-signing queue two days earlier. He had, however, spoken to him just an hour earlier.

That was another thing about the lean, sensible-eating manager – he never missed a bit of drama in his own shop, no matter how minor, and he had witnessed Saturday’s exchange.

‘What’s going on with you two?’ Dow wanted to know. ‘You’re in here asking about him and he’s just left after enquiring about you. Is there something I should know about this relationship? Anyway, he’s left you a love note. Said I should give it to you if I saw you again and, if not, to send it to your publishers for you to collect.’

He handed over a small brown envelope he retrieved from a drawer under the till. McBride tore it open and read the single sheet of paper inside, turning his back on the store manager who was unashamedly trying to read the contents over his shoulder.

The message was brief and to the point – much the same as the conversation its writer had had with McBride on the Saturday afternoon. It read:

Dear Mr McBride,

Please accept my apologies for my comments when I spoke to you at the book signing. My son is innocent but I am aware his incarceration in prison has nothing to do with you. My rudeness was prompted by a sense of frustration. Forgive me.

It was signed ‘Adam Gilzean’.

McBride passed it to Gordon Dow who could read the page of a book in ten seconds. He devoured the words at a single glance. ‘So, that was Adam Gilzean – it makes a bit of sense now. He wrote to the papers practically non-stop after his son was put away. It was always about how the lad was as pure as the driven snow and was doing time for another man’s crime. If I remember correctly, he even tried to rope in his MSP to take his side – fat lot of good that was going to do, even with a strong case. But, with all the evidence there was against his boy, it was just peeing in the wind.’

McBride stuffed the letter in a pocket. He patted the part of his jacket where it lay. ‘It’s well put together,’ he told the bookstore manager. ‘The man’s not an idiot. In his letters to the papers, did he have anything to say other than that he’d been with his son on the night Alison Brown was killed? If I remember correctly, when I went through the stuff when I was writing that chapter for the book, that was his main contribution at the trial.’

Dow had total recall. ‘Nope. That was it,’ he said. ‘His son couldn’t have done it because he’d been with him. He
would
say that, though, wouldn’t he? What father wouldn’t?’

McBride nodded in silent agreement. ‘What about the forensics? Do you remember if there was anything special that came out afterwards?’

Gordon Dow did his best to shake his head and shrug his shoulders at the same time. ‘Don’t ask me. It was an open-and-shutter as far as everybody was concerned. What are you getting so worked up about it for?’

McBride wished he knew the answer himself.

‘Have you any idea where Adam Gilzean lives?’ he asked although he was unclear what he would do with a positive answer.

‘No. I’d heard he moved to another house someplace but don’t ask me where.’

McBride was on the point of leaving when Gordon Dow took his arm and led him across the floor of the bookstore. ‘What do you think of that?’ He swept an arm towards the main window of the shop.

Two assistants were piling dozens of copies of McBride’s book on top of each other for a front-of-store display. Above them a large board proclaimed, ‘The No. 1 Bestseller’.

‘The figures just came in this morning. Bet that makes you feel good,’ Dow said expectantly.

McBride’s nod could have been more enthusiastic. ‘Yeah,’ he replied, ‘but not as good as you lot who are making most of the dough. You won’t mind if I reduce your profits a tad by taking one of these?’ He picked a copy of
The Law Town Killers
off the top of the stack. ‘I’ve got some reading to do,’ he said as he headed for the door.

It didn’t take him long to remind himself of all the details of the chapter entitled ‘A Final Romance’. It was an unspectacular tale of two people in their mid twenties who had loved with a passion and warred with just as much fervour. You could write a love song about their highs and horror story about their lows. When they quarrelled, everyone in the same sombre blocks of flats in Clepington Road where Alison Brown resided and where Bryan Gilzean spent most, but not all, of his time, heard about it. Sometimes you would think the folk two streets away were probably tuned in as well.

On Alison’s last night on earth, she had again shouted out in anger. Then she fell silent and the eavesdroppers imagined her rage had once more given way to sexual fulfilment – which was indeed an inevitable feature of their making-up scenario.

It wasn’t until they read
The Courier
the following day that they discovered her sudden loss for words had not been the result of any loving embrace but a consequence of having been throttled. She had been found that morning by a friendly neighbour who had called to enquire if Alison would be interested in a shopping expedition later in the day. There had been no response to her knock and the neighbour tried the door handle. Finding it unlocked, she entered and walked hesitantly into the living room.

Alison would not be going to the shops that day or any other. She lay, quite serene but very dead, on the floor beside the sofa she had saved up so hard for and which she had finally been able to afford a week or two earlier. Her pallor practically matched the colour of the soft white leather of the Italian-made settee but her make-up might have been applied just an hour earlier. Her clothing, in co-ordinated shades of terracotta and cream, was all neatly in place and she was still wearing her brown, strapless, high-heeled shoes. She could have been ready to welcome visitors – except she had long ago stopped breathing because of a tie which was knotted tightly round her windpipe.

Before expiring, it looked like she’d enjoyed a drink. A bottle of white wine, with only two inches left in it, sat on a low table beside two glasses, each with their contents unfinished.

Within an hour of the unfortunate neighbour’s grisly discovery, scene of crime officers in their white paper suits and masks were swarming all over the small flat that was meticulous in its neatness except for the corpse on the floor.

A post-mortem indicated that death had probably occurred around 11 p.m. on the previous evening – which was around the time her raised voice had been heard coming from the flat. Forensics were the clincher. Gilzean’s semen had been found inside Alison and a hair from his head was on the tie. The wine bottle had been wiped clean but his prints were on the glass.