Where the Dead Men Go (16 page)

‘We invite you all to join us after the service for a cup of tea in the Gathering Area, which is reached through the doors on your right as you leave the church.’

She blessed us, impressively, with one hand held high. Then we all stood up as a man in a black velvet robe carried the big black Bible down the aisle, followed by the minister and the choir.

The Gathering Area was a modern, glass extension to the church, a kind of see-through transept. There were chairs along both sides and a serving hatch at the far end, where a woman in a scarlet cardigan was tipping tea into mugs from a big tarnished pot. Glasses of pale diluting orange caught the sunlight. There were small round tables with plates of biscuits and buttered fruit loaf.

I was chatting to a man with a name-tag reading ‘Bertie’ when the minister floated into my field of vision. She had changed out of her robes and was now wearing a blue Adidas tracksuit and chunky white running shoes. I had a cup of tea in one hand and a slice of pineapple loaf in the other. I swallowed the last mouthful, rubbed my palm on my jeans and shook her hand.

‘Are you visiting the parish?’

A toddler with a custard cream held aloft careened between us.

‘No. Yes. I grew up around here but I live in Glasgow now. In fact, though—’ I fished a card from my breast pocket – ‘I’m here for another reason.’

She read the card. ‘Martin,’ she said.

‘I was Martin’s friend, as well as a colleague. Clare’s been trying to make sense of what happened and she’s asked me to help.’

‘Yes.’ The minister nodded, as if this made perfect sense.

‘I’m trying to, I don’t know. Gauge his state of mind. What might have driven him to do what he did. I wondered if you might have time to talk to me for a little while.’

She nodded. That would be fine. She had Session in half an hour, but was I free that afternoon?

We met in one of the cafés on Bank Street, ‘The First Edition’, scrubbed deal tables and leather couches. It was the minister’s suggestion.

‘I thought you might feel at home.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Newspapers. The First Edition?’

‘Right. Actually it’s not a newspaper reference.’

‘But what about—’ she jabbed a thumb at the window; the offices of the
Mureton Standard
across the street.

‘I know, but it’s not that. It’s Robert Burns. The poems. The first edition of his poems was published up the road.’

‘Right. I never thought.’

The waitress arrived to take our order.

‘About Martin,’ I said, when she was gone.

‘Of course.’ The minister frowned. ‘Look, this is – it’s a wee bit delicate.’

‘The seal of the confessional?’

She smiled. ‘Not exactly, no. As Presbyterians we like to go straight to head office. Cut out the middleman. But still. He spoke to me in confidence.’

‘I was his best man,’ I said. ‘I’m Esme’s godfather. I’m not out to cause any trouble. I’m just trying to find out what happened.’

She held my gaze for a second or two and then the espresso machine spluttered, an exasperated snort, and the minister sat forward in her chair.

‘He came to see me before he died,’ she said. ‘About two weeks before. He was upset. I thought it was his marriage, maybe he was having an affair, or maybe Clare was. That’s what it usually is. I sometimes feel I should give up the pretence and set up as a marriage counsellor. But that wasn’t it.’ She looked across at the
Standard
offices and then back to me. ‘His problem was God. He was having, I suppose you’d call it a crisis of faith.’

‘He’d stopped believing.’ My guess was right; Martin’s faith was as shallow as his Glasgow accent.

‘No,’ she shook her head. ‘No. Quite the opposite. He’d
started
believing. His problem was too much faith, not too little.’ She looked at me sharply. ‘You’re not a believer, Mr Conroy?’

‘Conway.’ I shrugged. ‘I’m not not a believer.’ I shrugged again. ‘Hedging my bets.’

 ‘Pascal’s wager. Can I tell you something? Most people who go to church don’t believe in God either. If you asked them straight out, “Do you believe in God?” then they’d likely say “Yes”, but that doesn’t mean anything. They believe in God the way you believe in helping old ladies across the road. Mostly what they believe in is being nice. The religion of being nice.’

The waitress arrived with the coffees and the minister smiled up at her.

‘I’m not knocking that,’ she said. ‘Nice is good. It’s nice to be nice. But Martin had gone beyond that. He said he’s seen things that made him know that good and evil were real. Heaven and hell were real. He’d seen evil things. He’d seen people who were going to hell for what they’d done. That’s what he told me.’ She shrugged. ‘A faith like that isn’t easy to live with.’

‘Did he tell you what it was? What he’d seen that made him think this way?’

‘He didn’t elaborate. I guessed it was something to do with his work, with the stories he was writing.’

‘What did you tell him?’

She stirred her coffee, frowned.

‘I told him to pray. I told him these people needed our prayers. I said that no one was beyond the reach of God’s mercy. That Jesus asks us to love our enemies. I told him it wasn’t his disciples who were crucified alongside Jesus; it was two criminals. But the truth is—’ she smiled and shook her head. ‘The truth is, I was jealous of him. I wanted Martin’s faith. I don’t know anyone who’s going to hell.’

There was a comeback to that but I let it lie.

We walked back to the church, along Bank Street. This was the nice part of town, the part they forgot to improve. Cobbled streets. Low-lintelled shops from the time of Burns. Lime trees on College Wynd. We climbed the steps to the Laigh Kirk. In the elevated churchyard she stopped at a headstone.

‘Have you seen this?’ she said.

It was a Covenanting grave. John Ross and John Shields were buried there. Not their bodies; just the heads. They had been executed in Edinburgh after the Pentland Rising. Their severed heads were sent to Mureton to hang on the tollbooth. Another stone commemorated a group of Covenanters who were banished to the American plantations. Their ship foundered off Orkney and two hundred prisoners drowned, five Mureton men among them. We’d done all this at school, local history. She showed me a third stone, under a bare black tree:
Here lies John Nisbet, who was taken by Major Balfour’s party and suffered at Mureton, on 14 April, 1683, for adhering to the Word of God and Scotland’s Covenanted Work of Reformation.

‘Suffered,’ I said.

‘It means executed,’ the minister said. ‘Hanged, usually.’

‘I know it does.’

‘Sometimes worse than hanged. Tortured. Mutilated. Sometimes they chopped off the hands of the Covenanters and mounted them on pikes. Carried them through the streets in an attitude of prayer.’

We looked at the pale blue stone, the black letters.

‘I’d say we’ve got a way to go,’ I said.

‘What’s that?’

‘Scotland’s Covenanted Work of Reformation.’

She zipped up her fleece as the wind stirred the branches.

‘I’d say so too.’

I spent the day in Conwick with Roddy and James, drove back late. The snow came on as I crossed the moors. I made it back to Glasgow by eleven. Mari had gone to bed. A bottle of Rolling Rock sat on the bookcase, a half-inch still to drink. Someone was kicking a can down the street, the smart repercussions oddly clear in the quiet night. Each kick produced a tumbling burst of sound, the sharp hollow rattle of a snare-drum. I thought of bright green turf under floodlights and the four shadows of each piper marching in formation through the centre circle. Midweek internationals at Hampden Park, the Strathclyde Police Pipe Band taking the field at half-time. The drums were what thrilled me, not the pipes, the gunfire bursts of the snares.

Ramage’s words floated into my head. The stories he wasn’t writing. What did that mean? It sounded like pure Zen bullshit. The sound of one hand clapping. How did you know what Moir wasn’t writing? The stories he wasn’t writing were all the stories in the world. I tipped the last of Mari’s beer down my neck and tiptoed through to check on Angus.

Next morning I rode the subway to St Enoch. A skinny kid in a Celtic top strap-hung in the half-empty carriage, glaring at the other passengers. He was cracking his gum, loud random snaps that detonated in the rattling carriage. I felt his gaze boring into my cheek but I lifted my eyes to the overhead ads.

The tabs had gone big on the West End killing.
Sectarian Slasher
.
The Hillhead Butcher
. The assumption was that the killing was random, that the victim had been chosen for his colours, picked off the street and driven to an unknown location. Slashed and stabbed. Teeth kicked from his mouth. Face smacked with iron bars, drubbed into paste. Dumped in the lane with his scarf still round his neck.

What would come first? That was the question the killing had posed. The second attack, or the reprisal? There are no Catholic areas in the city, no ghettos or enclaves. But there are churches and bars. Some of the Celtic pubs had fixed massive grilles across their windows. Two colossal bouncers stood like heraldic animals outside Molloys on the Gallowgate. Police had been drafted in from peripheral divisions for the Old Firm game. The Chief Constable had cancelled all holiday leave. It felt like Belfast after the Shankill bomb. That bilious lull. A city flinching, hunched for the blow.

And then, as quickly as it came, the trouble passed. I took the call from Lewicki.

‘They’ve identified him,’ he said. ‘The guy in the lane, the Rangers scarf.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Name of Declan Coyle.’

‘Not a Rangers fan, I’m guessing’.

‘That’s a safe bet.’

‘One of ours.’

‘I wouldn’t say that, Gerry. One of the Walshes. A first cousin. High up in the firm.’

‘Fuck.’

‘Fuck is right. Well he took his sweet time but the fun starts here.’

‘It was Neil?’

‘The scarf was a message. Payback for Billy Swan.’

The train rolled into St Enoch. Dirty light. The yellow bricks. On my way past the Celtic top I swung back and snapped ‘Boo!’ in his face, made the closing doors, lunged for the stairs.

On Argyle Street the crowds were thick. The street vendors were busy, guys in leather jackets and Santa hats, selling perfume and Christmas paper from trestle tables. The Christmas lights twinkled on a parade of long coats and smart leather boots, bulging carrier bags. ‘Seasonal’ glam rock boomed from the speakers above JJB Sports. The city had forgotten about the murder, the headlines, the body in the lane. Now that it was no longer ‘sectarian’, it was business as usual. Another ‘Ice-Cream War’, a ‘Tanning-Salon War’ might be just around the corner, but these were like the wars on the telly, they didn’t affect you.

I was wandering through the St Enoch’s Centre looking for Mari’s present when the phone rang again.

‘Gerry. It’s not sectarian.’

‘I know, Fiona. It’s Neil. I heard.’

‘You coming in?’

‘On my way.’

‘And Gerry?’

‘Yeah?’

‘The Walsh piece: I don’t like it. You’re sure about the source?’

‘Hundred per cent, Fiona. It’s solid.’

I was heading for the exit, Jamaica Street, I would flag a cab. She still hadn’t spoken. ‘What does Driscoll say?’

‘He thinks we should run it.’

‘There you are then.’

I woke that night with a start, there was someone in the room. It was Angus, standing at my bedside shouting ‘Max!’ and hitting the duvet with a book. 5.17:
Jesus
. I turned on the bedside lamp and struggled into a sitting position, wedged a pillow behind my back and hauled the boy onto the bed, where he burrowed back against the headboard and clapped his hands as I opened his book. He slapped the open page. I cleared my throat and read him the story about a boy called Max whose bedroom turns into a forest. For nearly a week now Angus had been materialising nightly at my bedside (
my
side, never Mari’s), the pink digits showing 4.37 or 5.12, tugging at the duvet and clamouring for ‘Max!’. It got so I could read it with my eyes shut, reciting from memory the cadenced prose about monsters roaring and gnashing their teeth‚ while Angus turned the pages.

Once Max had returned from the kingdom of the wild things to find his supper waiting on his bedside table‚ Angus fell asleep. Lucky him. I gave it twenty minutes before padding through to put the percolator on. The first bars of molten pink and crimson were streaking the sky, lights coming on in the Kelvinside tenements. I thought again about Ramage’s parting shot: ‘Look at the stories he
wasn’t
writing.’ How did you do that? Stories were everywhere. The city seethed with stories. That’s where Maguire was wrong: everything
is
a story, given half a chance. The stories Moir might have written? They were limitless, endless. Stories he
should
have written, stories we all should have written. It made me sick just to think about it. The stories we missed. The stories we never even glimpsed, because we didn’t have the time or the money or the basic skills any more to do our job. It was like a tap left running, the stories we were missing.

Joe was at my elbow, a ghost in the whisky mirror.

‘That’s your taxi, Gerry.’

A fat bloke in a patterned jumper was holding one of the swing doors, his car keys dangling from his pinkie. I held up a finger and drained my Lagavulin.

It was good to leave now. If I stayed any longer in the Cope I would say something stupid, something hard and wounding that would queer my future dealings with Maguire. Anyway, it’s only when you’re beaten that you need to say these things, and I’d won. The piece was out now, despite Maguire’s bad grace. Driscoll had convinced her. I’d put the link on Twitter and my hack followers – @KennyFarq, @StephenKhan, @TorchuilBain – were busy retweeting it. The cops would have to move now; the Agency, the CID. They’d have to investigate Walsh. If they didn’t move, I would call in my favours with the apparatchiks, get questions raised with the minister.

I was thinking all this as I weaved between the tables, nodding to the Saturday crew, Maguire and Driscoll in earnest cahoots at the other end of the bar, Neve McDonald queen-beeing in the sports boys’ booth, the scruffy subs clustered round the dartboard. The paper was finished, we put it to bed two hours ago, it was out of our hands. This was the one point of the week when none of it mattered, the numbers, the imminent cuts, severance deals, the perfidious Yanks, the one point when we felt like a team.

My hand was on the open door of the cab before I realised something was wrong. The driver should have been moving round to get behind the wheel but he was standing by the bonnet, making sure I got into the cab. And there was someone behind me. I knew this the way you know it on a football field, when you’re shielding the ball and you sense a challenge from behind. In the quarter-light of the cab I saw a blurry face looming at my shoulder and I spun, thrusting upwards with my elbow and felt it connect – there was a crackle of cartilage as his nose crumpled – and swung a left at the drooping head.

A rod of pain shot up my left forearm. The punch a poor one, a partial connect, but the man spun into the wall and sat abruptly down on the pavement, his head looping back and smacking the whitewashed brick of the Cope. The driver was moving now, a shape in my peripheral vision, but I stepped smartly back and bundled him into the bodywork – I could feel the powerful shoulders under the ribbed wool of the sweater – and saw him topple into the gutter as I turned.

The smart move now was to crash back through the Cope’s double doors shouting blue murder but I turned and sprinted off down the Govan Road. The scrubby wasteground of the Festival Park was on my right but I ploughed on, under the fluttering Union flag outside the Blue Star Social Club. When I reached the main road I turned left – another pub, another Butcher’s Apron on a pole above the door. I was sprinting past when it struck me that Cessnock underground wasn’t far in the other direction, so I pulled up short and wheeled around and saw the yellow hyphen of a taxi sign. I was out in the street, waving my arms and when I bent to check that the driver wasn’t the man I’d just encountered I hauled on the door and collapsed back onto the ribbed black seat as the door clunked shut.

‘West End,’ I told the guy. ‘Clouston Street.’

The reds and whites of the brakelights and headlights wavered in the rear window but nobody was chasing us, shouting in the street, flagging us down. I was safe. I had made it.

For the next sixty seconds I focused on my breathing, let the juices flood me, the joy, the relief. A laugh bubbled out. I wanted to whoop and holler. I stamped the floor of the cab in utter fuck-you glee. Then I realised we were heading south, not north. I looked out for a street sign, spotted the boarded-up shell of the Clachan Bar. He had doubled back, we were heading down Paisley Road West.

‘Hey!’

The driver ignored me.

‘
Hey!
’ I leaned forward, rapped the glass partition. ‘I said Clouston Street. You’re heading south!’

He glanced at me in the rear-view.

‘Wee detour, sir.’ He pulled out to pass a stopping bus. ‘Someone wants a word.’

I looked around me. The red ‘doors locked’ buttons glowed in the dark. The cab was picking up speed now, bowling down the outside lane. I could see the lights of Ibrox Park off to the right above the tenements.

‘What? Who does?’

The driver was nodding, he met my eyes in the rear-view. ‘I think you know, mate.’

This was it. I thought, irrelevantly, of where I might have been headed if I had listened to Mari, if I’d stuck to politics, stopped trying to act the big man, bought a house in a nice tree-lined street in a quiet seaside town. Right now this seemed like important stuff to want. I wanted it too. I wanted a garden strewn with discarded scooters and waterlogged basketballs, a clamshell sandpit weighted with a brick, a set of goals with fraying nets, a wilting disc of grass beneath the trampoline. I wanted out of this cab, this city. I wanted out of this life.

Fuck it. I sat back. Getting out of the cab wasn’t a challenge. You could try to kick the windows out or smash the partition, you could take out your mobile and phone the police, but what was the point? Packy Walsh wants to see you, he sees you. If not now, later.

On the fold-down seat in front of me, the big green ‘G’ in its nest of rings. I pulled it down, swung my boots up onto the padded leatherette. I felt like phoning Maguire just to hear her reaction. Not involved? How’s this for not involved? I took out my makings and rolled a smoke. The driver watched in the rear-view. I lit up.

‘You cannae smoke in here.’

‘Is that right?’

Walsh had been involved in Martin’s death. I hadn’t said that in the piece but it was there between the lines. It was standing up and waving between the lines, blowing a big fat trumpet. And if Walsh had done Martin he could do me. I tipped some ash carefully onto the upholstery, rubbed it in with the sleeve of my leather. But he wasn’t a mug. Packy Walsh wasn’t about to start picking off
Trib
reporters one by one. This was a frightener. A warning. Nothing worse.

I held to that thought as the cab turned onto Dumbreck Road and then left onto Nithsdale. The big villas of Pollokshields loomed above their hedges, security lights shining between the trees. We swung left and then right and then slowed at a pair of gateposts. Someone must have been watching because the big steel gate slid open and we crackled over frozen gravel to the big front door.

The house was huge, Victorian, some nabob or tobacco baron’s mansion. A row of floodlights was set into the path around its base and a greeny light splashed the pale sandstone walls. Two fat Doric columns buttressed the front porch, and a man stepped out from the shadows and tugged on the taxi door.

‘This way, Mr Conway.’

He wore a black puffa jacket and a beanie hat and his breath streamed out in the cold. I dropped my smoke on the taxi floor and dragged my shoe across it.

‘Your tip’s on the meter.’

A wide lawn rolled away on my right, each whited blade of grass casting a shadow. I followed the puffa jacket across the tight gravel and up the broad stone steps. A brass boot-scraper was set into the top step and I remember thinking that if I swept the legs from the big guy he might stove his head on the metal edge and I could make a run for it.

My knees shivered a little as we crossed the threshold but the whisky anchored me, burned in my gut like a glowing coal.

The door closed behind me. A man was rising from a chair, cut-glass tumbler in his hand.

He didn’t look like his photos. The one you always saw in the papers was an old one. He had lost weight since then, his features were finer. He was wearing a dark-red silk shirt and stone-coloured chinos, and the hand he held out was small and neat, like a surgeon’s. I shook it limply.

‘Get you a drink, Gerry? Lagavulin, is it?’

There were two shelves of bottles above the bar and it looked like all of them were single malts. I spotted a Laphroaig, the crimson label of a Cardhu.

‘I’m fine.’

‘Suit yourself.’

He came out from behind the bar with the glass in his hand.

‘Sit down at least.’

I sat across from him in a fat tan La-Z-Boy, its high padded arms hemming me in. I felt like a boy in his father’s chair.

‘Well it’s nice to finally meet you.’ Walsh sat down in a wing-chair, crossed his legs. ‘Though I hear you’ve been claiming my acquaintance already.’

I think I may have opened my mouth at that point but I had nothing to say so I shut it again.

‘Apparently I recommended an establishment in Govanhill to you.’ He had seen the card I left with Gina. ‘I don’t mind,’ he went on. ‘I just hope you enjoyed yourself.’ He sipped his whisky. ‘I saw your piece on Sunday.’

‘Yeah? Keep reading. We need all the help we can get.’

‘Normally I’d go straight to my lawyer. He enjoys sorting these things out. Making people repent their rashness. But I thought we’d have a chat first.’

‘Is that a euphemism?’

He laughed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No it’s not. If I wanted to hurt you, you think I’d bring you to my house?’

‘I don’t know what you’d do, Mr Walsh.’

Walsh smoothed his shirt-front with a dainty hand. ‘You’re upset,’ he said. ‘You’re hurting. Martin was your friend. I understand that. I liked Martin too. He did me a favour once. He was a good journalist.’
Better than you
, his look said. ‘But he killed himself.’ Walsh tapped the arm of his chair. ‘That’s what DS Gunn thinks, isn’t it? The pathologists. You, on the other hand, have decided that I was involved. Why would you think that?’

He sipped his whisky, light catching the facets of the heavy crystal tumbler, a dark tint of scorn in his eyes.

‘Yeah, that’s a hard one.’ I was riled now, could feel my forehead tightening, should have taken a breath but didn’t. ‘Martin Moir’s on your case for the past two years. The last guy Moir went after was Walter Maitland. Now where’s Walter Maitland again?’ Walsh held my gaze. ‘But hey, you’re fine with that. You’re not scared at all.’

‘Why should I be scared?’ Walsh stood up. I gripped the padded arms of the chair, got ready to spring to my feet but he was only fixing another Macallan. He stoppered the decanter and lifted his glass. ‘He’d been after me for two years. What had he actually done?’ He spread his arms and looked around the room. ‘I’m still here. Watty Maitland’s up in Peterhead; I’m not. I’m nursing a twelve-year-old Speyside and enjoying our conversation. Martin wrote a lot of things, he made a lot of allegations, insinuations. How much of it stuck, Gerry? How much of it came to court?’

I wished I’d taken the whisky now, a finger or two of Lagavulin.

‘No but he’d found something, hadn’t he? Something that would stick. And you stopped him.’

‘Oh, I see. He was
about
to get it right. He was just on the verge of something big when he’s taken out of the picture.’ Walsh laughed. ‘He’d had a fair crack at it, Gerry. Two years. Maybe there was nothing to get. You ever think of that?’

‘Could be. Could be you’re a liar and you killed Martin Moir.’

‘Well you print that, Mr Conway, and see what happens.’

‘What, you’re gonnae put me in a quarry?’

No rage, no snarling eruption. Just the cold eyes, the sour mouth. He tipped his head back till it rested on the stiff padded leather of his claret wing-chair and let his eyelids droop. When he opened them he kept his head tilted back, watched me through weary slits.

‘What would you do if I told you I’d killed Martin Moir? I put out the word. I arranged to have him killed. Would you want that knowledge?’

I looked at the narrowed eyes. All the bravado seemed to have left me and I didn’t know the answer. Walsh sighed.

‘Out of your depth, son,’ he said. ‘Your taxi’s outside.’

I got to my feet and opened the door. The big guy in the puffa jacket detached himself from the wall and looked from me to Walsh.

‘By the way.’ Walsh was behind me, fixing another drink. ‘The guy who saw the lassie in the close. You remember his name?’

I stopped in the hallway. I didn’t turn round.

‘His name was McClymont.’

I could hear the ice-cubes rattling the glass, the stopper coming out of the bottle.

‘Aye. Grant McClymont. Ask your Polish mate about him.’

The fat bloke was leaning against his taxi, texting with one hand. He straightened as I came abreast but I walked on past him and down the gravel drive. The gate clicked and slid open. I zipped up my jacket and kept walking.

Next morning I logged into cuttings, called up Moir’s stories for the past three years, everything he’d written since the day I left the paper. I put a half a ream in the printer and watched the stories sift out, stacked them on the kitchen table.

Mari and Angus were out at the park. I looked at the clock: ten past eleven. So what? I took a Rolling Rock from the fridge, put some Muddy on the sound system, started working through the cuts. I sorted them into piles, according to subject-matter. A pile for stabbings. Smaller pile for rapes. Mari and Angus came back. Shootings. She put Angus down for a nap. Front companies; fraud. She appeared at the door in her running gear, hair up in a scrunchie, fixing the iPod earphones into place. Gang-related violence, the tallest of the piles. She raised her eyebrows at the three empty bottles and closed the front door with the softest of clicks.

It was geography. I spent two hours at the kitchen table and geography was the key, nothing else. Nothing connected Moir’s recent stories, nothing beyond the location. His hunting ground had shifted south. For twelve months he’d barely crossed the Clyde. So what were the stories he wasn’t writing? They were the stories about the northside and the East End. They were stories about Hamish Neil.