Where the Dead Men Go (14 page)

McCallum and Stokes had their offices on Hope Street. Good address for a law firm, I thought, as I slogged up the communal stairs and took my seat in reception. Ian Ramage was running their in-house PR. I remembered him well from my first stint at the
Trib
. He was the one who got the biggest kick out of the Hey You’s ‘undercover’ look, the one who stayed in character, even in the office, scuffed Sambas up on the desk, swigging Coke, rubbing his five-day beard and talking out of the side of his mouth in that nasal Clydeside whine. I wondered if he kept it up at home. You pictured him scowling at the telly, dousing a fag in an empty tinnie, cuffing his kids on the back of the head.

Now, though, he was striding to the double doors, polished loafers winking in the striplights. Clean-shaven, black suit and a soft-touch open-necked shirt, cornflower blue. Thin and pinched. I wouldn’t have known him.

We stopped at Pret A Manger for takeout sandwiches and coffees and then walked on down, without discussing our destination, to George Square. A pale winter sun was squatting on top of the City Chambers. Despite the cold the benches were full, the office workers squashed together with their Greggs pasties and sandwich cartons on the little islands of grass. We sat side-by-side on the steps of one of the statues, an equestrian number, all hooves and helmet plumes.

Ramage sucked his iced latte with its straw, its see-through plastic dome. I shifted my hams on the cold marble step, stowed my turkey-and-cranberry wrap in the pocket of my Berghaus.

‘Missed you at the funeral.’

‘Right.’

He tore a bite off his sandwich, a shred of rocket hung from his lip and he pushed it back in with a twist of his thumb.

‘You couldn’t make it?’

He chewed down his bite of sandwich, sucked on the straw.

‘I worked with the guy. It doesn’t make me his friend.’

I nodded, took a slug of mocha.

‘Does it make you his enemy?’

Ramage looked away across the square. He turned right round to face me.

‘The fuck kind of question is that?’

‘I don’t know. You work with the guy for three years. Three-man team. You’re too busy to go to his funeral?’

‘And that’s your business how?’

‘I’m asking, that’s how. I was his mate and I’m asking.’

Ramage was shaking his head, bulge of muscle in his jaw.

‘I didn’t like him. It happens sometimes. In fact, I think it might be happening again.’

I didn’t say anything. We chewed our sandwiches together. Ramage looked at his watch.

‘How are things anyway?’ he said finally. ‘On the Quay.’

‘Fine. Apocalyptic gloom. Hysterical laughter. It’s like the last days in the Führerbunker.’ I shrugged. ‘Same old same old.’

Ramage laughed. ‘Didn’t you leave?’ He frowned round at me. ‘I thought you left.’

‘I came back,’ I said. ‘Couldn’t keep away.’

He took another bite of his sandwich. We chewed together in companionable silence.

‘Glutton for punishment.’ He stamped his foot at one of the red-legged pigeons that were encroaching on our space. ‘I was glad to get out of the
Trib
. Glad to see the back of it.’

I kept quiet. Ramage shuffled back against the plinth, sucked down some more latte.

‘I kept thinking I’d get my chance,’ he said. ‘Keep the head down, file your copy, the break would come.’

‘Fat chance.’

‘Yeah. Well. Slow learner, me. I wrote a piece about a year ago, a child-benefit scam.’

‘I remember it. Govanhill.’

I did remember it. A Roma gang was trafficking kids up from England, registering them at local schools and claiming child benefit. The kids never showed up in school; they disappeared, back to England, back to Slovakia, and the gang collected the benefits.

‘That’s it. The Leeds and Bradford connection. Anyway, it was a decent story. And I did the running. I found the story, stood it up. I wrote the copy. My first splash. I was stoked, you know? I stopped off on the way home, bought some bubbles at the offy. I get up on Sunday morning and they’ve swapped the first two pars and given the byline to Martin Moir.
With additional reporting by Ian Ramage
. I thought: fuck this for a game of soldiers. That’s when I knew: I’m never getting anywhere in this game.’

‘Been there,’ I told him. ‘You’re on a hiding to nothing. He’s the name reporter. It’s his byline that puts on readers.’

‘Oh Moir was the talent, no question. In some way I didn’t even mind. Moir could write. He had it all over me and Dom, as a writer. But getting stories? He didn’t have the nose. Stomach either, come to that.’

‘Yeah? I think he did alright, all the same.’

Ramage’s latte ran out, his straw rasped in the empty carton. He burped. ‘Think what you like. We fed him the stories – Dom Young and me. Everyone thought Moir was the golden goose. Like fuck. He was the wee runty bird in the nest – left to himself he’d have starved to death.’

Ramage’s lunch-break was over. We stood up to go.

‘Fuck is this guy anyway?’

He was craning up at the black prancing hooves, the bulging chest muscles, the plumed helmet.

‘I don’t know, Ian. Listen, there’s nothing you worked on together, nothing that might give us a clue, some idea of what happened, what kind of trouble he was in?’

Ramage crumpled his sandwich tray, wedged it in a bin with his coffee carton.

‘I’m happy to help. I actually am. But, Gerry: the guy wrote exposés of gangsters. That was his job. You want to know who’s happy Martin’s dead? There’s whole streets in this city, entire fucking postcodes.’

We walked back across the square.

‘So you came back?’ he said. He was smiling now, scornful and maybe a little bit jealous.

‘The bad penny,’ I said. ‘Dog to its vomit.’

It’s not a job. No one comes to papers for the job. It’s not a career. It’s Woodward and Bernstein. Your name on a byline. Your splash on the news-stand, the big black type in its lattice frame. It’s Welles in his black fedora atop a mountain of bundled
Inquirers
. It’s Redford’s corduroy suit in
All
the President’s Men
. Break the news. Expose the facts. Tell the truth and shame the devil. That’s why you started. The career, the mortgage, the school fees, the car; all that came later. And once you’re encumbered with kids and cars and monthly repayments, that’s when you weigh things up and that’s the time – if you’ve got any sense – that you look round for something else. Even then, though, you’d linger a bit on your way out the door.

We walked up St Vincent Street. Sun in the windows. Hard yellow sky. Traffic fumes. At the corner with Hope Street we shook hands and swapped business cards. I was halfway across the junction when he shouted.

‘Gerry.’

At the far kerb I turned. The green man was flashing, the traffic already pulling away. Ramage stood on his tiptoes and shouted something but it died below the engine noise.

‘What?’

He tried again, his voice pitching higher.

‘The stories he
wasn’t
writing,’ he shouted. ‘Think about them.’

He turned on his heel and a double-decker ground past. When its orange bulk had passed he was gone, lost among the bobbing heads.

When I got back to the flat that evening Mari was lying on the living-room carpet watching the Disney Junior channel. Angus was asleep on her chest again. I put a cushion under her head and turned down the telly.

‘Elaine rang.’

‘Yeah? What about?’

‘I don’t know. She wants you to call her back.’

I took a Sol from the fridge and punched the number. It was Adam who answered. His bonhomie sounded a little strained and when Elaine came on I understood why. He’d been offered a job, a big promotion. In Aberdeen. They hadn’t decided anything and they had a couple of weeks to make up their minds but they wanted to put me in the picture.

‘Aberdeen? You’re not serious, Lainie? You’ll be wearing thermal underwear for ten months of the year.’

‘It’s a good job, Gerry.’

‘But Aberdeen? Jesus. What does he do again?’

‘Gerry, for God’s sake. He’s a hydraulic engineer.’

‘Right, right. Not going to take it, though. Is he?’

‘We’re discussing it, Gerry. Like I said. I’ll keep you in the loop. You’ll be the first to know.’

Tuesday morning. The cold stung my eyeballs, pinched my ears, itched the dry split in my lip. I’d overslept, felt like shit – the boy woke up twice, needing changed, needing a bottle – and the tiredness ran in shivers down my arms, across my back. I was out in the street, engine running, heater on, chipping at the windscreen with the plastic scraper. Late for conference. No stories. No leads. Cursing it out with every stab of the scraper. Fucking weather. Fucking country. Fucking job. Fucking city. Muffled music, the opening bars of
White
Riot
. I shook one glove loose, and fumbled for the phone. Fingers stinging in the cold, get it before it goes to voicemail.

‘What!’

Nothing. Not nothing – silence, somebody there. I tried again.

‘Gerry Conway speaking. Who is this?’

‘Mr Conway?’ The voice sounded distant and thin. An accent. ‘Is Mr Conway?’

‘Who is this?’

‘Gina.’

Who’s Gina? I thought. Then she said her name again and it came to me. The red dress on the floor; goose-flesh under my palms. The smell of damp and the two-bar fire.

‘Gina from . . . before.’

‘I know who you are, Gina. Do you want to meet?’

We arranged to meet that afternoon at three, in a café on Kilmarnock Road. I’d just ended the call when the phone rang again. Driscoll.

‘Duty calls, Gerry. Pitt Street at two. Body found in the West End. Murder.’

‘Yeah, I’m actually onto something here, Jimmy. It’s a story. Could be big.’

‘Mmm!’ Driscoll’s mock enthusiasm. ‘A murder, is it? Murder in progress?’

‘No, it’s—’

‘Yeah. This is a murder, Gerry. You’re the crime reporter. So there might be a school of thought that argues this should take precedence. Over anything. Be there at two.’

I took the phone from my ear and looked at it, as though expecting an explanation for Driscoll’s rudeness. Then I stowed it in my pocket, pulled on the glove and started back with the scraper. Gina had withheld her number. If I didn’t show up at three, if I missed our meeting, she might not get back in touch. But if I didn’t show up at two to the Pitt Street press conference, I might not have a paper to write for.

Once the window was clear I drove Angus to nursery, signed him in, hung his jacket on his peg, watched him settle down at the puzzle table. As I hit the signal on my way out of the car park a man waved from an incoming car. It was the owner, fifties, shaved head, tight white goatee. He swung past in a black BMW X5, thirty grand’s worth of car. I’d have paid for that in full by the time Angus started primary school.

‘It’s official, then,’ he said. ‘You’re the new Martin Moir.’

I eased into a splay-legged lozenge of moulded tangerine plastic, nodding at the old hands behind me, MacCrimmon, Torchuil Bain.

‘Not the new anything, mate. I’m the old Gerry Conway.’

We were in the conference room at Pitt Street. I was sitting next to Pete Gallacher of the
News of the World
.

‘Yeah, speaking of Moir . . .’ he was saying.

‘I wasn’t.’

‘Aye, but speaking of Moir, I heard something.’ I knew what was coming. I knew by the pitch of his voice, the way he wasn’t looking at me. ‘They’re saying it might not have been suicide.’

‘Who’s saying?’

He shook his head. ‘I know you were close, Ger. It’s none of my business.’

He was checking his voice recorder, thumbing the buttons.

‘It’s rubbish,’ I told him. ‘He left a note. The Fiscal’s satisfied, the police. It’s rubbish, Gal.’

He nodded.

The pack shushed and shifted in their seats as a uniformed cop hustled into the room and took his seat at the table. A media-relations civvy was passing out copies of the press release. The cop took his hat off and set it on the table. His hair was white, the hat had left a ring around his head. He looked fat and ungainly in the new Strathclyde uniform, the black Lycra T-shirt, the zippered fleece. He stared morosely ahead while the handouts did the rounds.

‘Gentlemen. Ladies. I’ll keep it brief.’ You do that, I thought. He lifted a sheet of paper, the same sheet we held in our hands, and started to read.

‘A body was discovered in the early hours of this morning in a lane in the West End of Glasgow. A post-mortem examination has confirmed the cause of death as multiple stab wounds. The victim, who has not yet been identified, was male, white, aged between thirty and fifty, with mid-brown hair. Anyone who was in the vicinity of Great Western Terrace Lane between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m. this morning should contact Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111 or the incident room at Partick Police Station on 0141 641 7331.’

He looked up, suspicious, truculent, as if waiting to be contradicted. Gallacher raised a hand.

‘Was it sexual, inspector?’

The cop’s eyes widened, as if the very notion were outlandish. He stared at Gal for a moment and then back across the heads.

‘There is no evidence to suggest a motive of a sexual nature.’

‘Mugging?’ someone offered.

‘The victim’s belongings appear to be intact. We don’t suspect robbery as a motive.’ The cop put his hands on the desk, fingers linked. ‘There is, however, another element to this investigation, one that we don’t wish to over-emphasise at this stage, and I would ask you to resist unwarranted speculation in your reporting of this element.’ We all sat up a little, shuffled in our seats, gripped our pens a little tighter. ‘The victim was wearing a football scarf in the colours of Glasgow Rangers.’

The pack stirred.

‘It’s sectarian?’

We were picturing the headlines, the billboards, the spike in sales. The cop raised his hands, brought them down in a shushing motion.

‘We don’t know. We do not know. But, yes, at this stage we cannot rule out a sectarian motive.’

He looked around to check that we were finished, no further questions, gave a single nod.

‘Thank you.’

He lifted his hat. The chairs scraped back.

‘Was he tortured?’

The cop was halfway out of his seat, jamming his hat on his head. We all stopped where we were, frozen in postures of decrepitude, hunch-backed, knees bent.

Torchuil Bain of the
Mail
was still seated, finger in the air, conning his notes. He looked up brightly.

‘Was he tortured, inspector? Is that why you can’t tell the age?’

The cop settled his hat and zipped up his fleece. His face had coloured, darkened, stormy bulges purpling his jowls.

‘The pathologist’s report will clarify that. I have no further comment to make.’

The pack moved into a huddle, comparing notes, checking details. I pushed through and made it to the door. The inspector was halfway down the corridor, moving quickly.

‘Inspector.’

He kept walking, turned his head slightly as I caught up with him. ‘I have said all I plan to say, Mr—’

‘Conway. Gerry Conway from the
Tribune
.’ I held out a card. He didn’t take it. We had reached a set of security doors. He was punching in a number.

‘Inspector. How will this affect next Saturday?’

There was an Old Firm game in two weeks’ time. They were always trouble. But now? After this? The inspector frowned, held the door for a moment.

‘Well that rather depends on you fuckers, doesn’t it?’

The door crunched shut.

This was the story, this was tomorrow’s splash. Every paper in Scotland would put on readers tomorrow. Hightailing it back to the Quay and getting this down in a hurry should have been pretty far up my to-do list. Even phoning it in. But I didn’t have time.

The car was in West George Street on a thirty-minute meter that had expired ten minutes ago. I set off at a sprint, jacket flapping behind. Let them ticket me, just don’t let it be clamped. Don’t let it be towed.

It wasn’t. I threw myself into the Forester, hauled shut the door and gunned it down Pitt Street and onto the bridge. It was quarter to three, traffic filling all three lanes but moving briskly. I turned off at Junction 1, past the Burrell, the round tollhouse on Pollokshaws Road, and up into Shawlands.

When I reached Kilmarnock Road the schools were letting out and I couldn’t get parked. I got to the caff at ten past three, breathless, sweating. She was sitting at a window table, hands cupped round a steaming mug like a woman in a soup advert. A grey polo-neck sweater, jeans and brown boots. Brown leather flying-jacket over the chair.

I ordered camomile tea.

‘You look different,’ I said.

She smiled tightly. ‘With clothes on?’

‘No. I mean. Yeah. With your clothes on.’

She nodded.

‘You look different also.’

‘I look like shit.’

She laughed. ‘This is what I mean!’

The waitress came with the china pot, the smoked-glass tea cup, pot of extra water, set them down in turn. She looked at the table and nodded, drifted off with her empty tray. I smiled at Gina.

‘Is Helen,’ she said. I nodded, mind a blank. ‘Helen
Friel
.’ I smiled again. She was angry now, her hands in tight fists on the table top. ‘The girl who is killed.’

‘Right. I’m sorry.’ The prostitute. The body in the woods. I’d written the bloody story.

She sat back, sipped her hot chocolate. ‘I know who.’

‘You know who killed her?’

A workie came in, boiler suit tucked into his boots, looked around, stared at Gina as he clumped up to the takeaway counter. Our napkins fluttered when the door banged shut.

She gripped the mug tighter, nodded.

‘Have you gone to the police?’

She shook her head. I glanced at the counter where the workie was looking over, caught his eye, held it till he looked away.

‘Is it a punter? Do you know his name?’

‘Is no punter.’ The word in her mouth had a vicious, plosive sound, it took her accent to reveal the word’s true meaning. ‘No punter. Is Mr Walsh.’

‘Walsh? Which one?’

‘Thin one.’

The workie lifted a styrofoam cup from the counter, glanced neither right nor left, let the door swing back as he strode into the roadway. The waitress crossed to shut the door.

‘Packy Walsh killed the girl, strangled her?’

‘No. His friend. But Walsh is the guilty.’

I bought her another hot chocolate and she told me the story. She wouldn’t let me tape her but I took notes as she spoke, filling three pages of my Moleskine while she spoke in halting English and gripped her mug, tapping its rim with a crimson fingernail.

It was a Friday night, she told me. Walsh brought his friends round on Friday nights, business partners, key lieutenants, eight or nine of them. The girls had to service them for free. There was one they all dreaded, a skinny bloke with glasses and red hair. He liked to choke the girl he was screwing, grip her throat till she spluttered and gagged, her eyes rolling white in her head. He would pay for his pleasure, unlike the others, double the going rate, but the girls drew the line, turned him down. All except Helen Friel, pushing thirty, six years on the game. She hadn’t the looks of the other girls, she turned fewer tricks, she couldn’t be choosy. Helen had the full house – the habit, the kid, the wastrel husband who showed up pissed to steal from her purse. So she went with Walsh’s ginger mate on Fridays. She wore a silk scarf for the next three days but she went. And then one week she didn’t.

It was late October. A football match had been played that week – it was Borussia Dortmund at Parkhead, I later worked out – and the visiting fans had been celebrating. The girls made a fortnight’s wages in one night. Even Helen was flush. On the Friday, though, she’d caught a cold and her throat was sore. When Walsh and his cronies trooped in around midnight, she rose to go.
Where’s the fire?
says Packy Walsh;
the fun’s just starting
. But she picked up her cigarettes and lighter and stowed them in her handbag. Walsh was livid, raging. A hoor showing him up in front of his mates. Carol tried to intervene, the madam, but Walsh knocked her down before starting on Helen. He slapped her around, took his time, made it look good for his mates, for the other girls, until Helen picked herself up and stalked off down the hall with the red-haired man at her back.

Later they heard noises from the room, a man’s cries, some crashes and bumps. When they poked their heads out of their own rooms and gathered in the hallway in their robes and kimonos, a man was stationed in front of Helen’s door, barring the way. The girls were told to dress and go. Something had happened, something had gone badly wrong, but no one knew what till they saw Helen’s face on the Sunday-night news. Glasgow prostitute missing, hasn’t been home in two nights. The police came round but the girls didn’t talk: no one was keen to be the next Helen Friel. When they found the body in woods no one was surprised. Carol started a story that Helen Friel had gone home that Friday. She’d gone out alone on Saturday night, walking the streets, and someone had abducted her, taken her off and killed her. Nobody believed it but nobody denied it.

‘And you would testify to this?’

She nodded, knew the word. ‘Testify.’ She nodded firmly. ‘Testify, yes.’

‘And you’re not scared?’

She shrugged. She was going home, she told me. She wasn’t an illegal, she had paid her own way here. She owed no one anything. She wasn’t being held against her will. She had made some money and now she would go home, back to her family, her mother and father, her little boy in Brezno. But she would talk to the police and, if needed, she would come back to testify.

I nodded. I didn’t believe her. Good intentions. She might talk to the police before she left, but when she got back to her home town, to her little boy, would she want to come back to nail a Glasgow gangster? We needed to get it all now, everything she might remember.

‘What about the man with red hair?’ I asked her. ‘Did you see him again?’

She shook her head.

‘Glasses. Red hair. Skinny. Anything else?’

She pushed back the sleeve of her jumper, twisted a brown arm under the lights. Tracks? He was a junkie? No: she was clapping a cupped palm onto her upper arm. She repeated the gesture.

‘A tatt? He’s got a tattoo?’