Where the Dead Men Go (2 page)

William Swan’s corpse would be heading there now, but the focus for the moment was the scene of the crime: Maxton Park in the city’s East End.

The duty snapper was next door in the coffee shop: McCann, a new guy, English. I rapped on the window, tapped my wrist. He nodded, rolled his eyes and drained his pail-sized carton of coffee.

‘East End,’ I told him. ‘Maxton Park. A shooting. One of Neil’s boys.’

The sun had gone in and the sky was low as we headed up the Gallowgate in McCann’s Jeep Cherokee. Past the Saracen Head and the shabby cluster of Celtic pubs with their tricolours snapping in the wind. Purple clouds squatting on the Barrowland.

‘Christ, it looks like snow.’

McCann craned out of the windscreen, grunted. Chatty bastard. When I tried to give him directions he cut me short. His ponytail shook when I offered a smoke. I sparked up a Café Crème and punched the button to drop the window. The wind blew the smoke back into the car. McCann shook his head, like he was the only man in the car with someplace he’d rather be. I should have been driving to Ayrshire now instead of playing fireman for Martin Moir.

‘It’s a piece of nonsense anyway.’ We were out on the Shettleston Road. ‘I’m supposed to be Politics.’

McCann frowned out of the window, scanning for street signs.

‘This is Politics.’

The fuck would you know about it, I thought, but he was right. They acted like feuding states, the Neils and the Walshes. Renaissance principalities, petty republics. Mostly it was border skirmishes. Beatings. Arson attacks. Street dealers robbed at knifepoint. But now and then there was a call for grander measures, grievous acts of revenge, the ghosts of 2005 out for a lick of blood.

McCann was slowing, flicking the indicator.

‘Here we are.’

An apron of grass opened out on our left. The little crowd, cops in yellow jackets, the Mobile Incident Unit like a stranded bus. The quivering ribbons of blue and white tape.

A cop stepped into the roadway and waved us down. I had my press card out as the window dropped.

‘Gerry Conway,
Tribune on Sunday
.’

The cop leaned down. Ginger moustache. Wedge of gold between his two front teeth. He looked past me at McCann, who smiled with his lips closed. McCann was wearing his snapper’s vest, all zips and buckles, D-rings and pockets. His camera case was on the floor between the seats.

‘OK, lads. Park at this side of the pitch. You know the drill: keep back from the locus.’

They had taped off the grass, a patch of nothing, ten metres square. A canvas tent had gone up, white, tall, with a pointed roof, like something from a medieval tournament. SOCOs in their white moon-suits were traipsing in and out. An officer guarded each side of the square. Within the tape the detectives stood around with their hands in their pockets, poking at the turf with their dress shoes. They wore dark shirts, metallic ties, black overcoats. As we crossed the grass I spotted Bobby Ireland, a DI from Stewart Street; another guy from Baird Street who I knew but couldn’t name. They looked like Mafiosi at a funeral.

Behind the far goal was the MIU, a big white trailer with a short row of steps to the door. Another yellow jacket by the steps.

The chopper was churning the air as McCann strode ahead, appraising the scene, squinting at the sky, rummaging in his shoulder-bag. He was conscious of the onlookers, avoided their eyes. The professional at work. There was a zip to his movements, a military crispness. He fitted a lens. He shot the tent, the SOCOs, the cop in front of the MIU, the football pitch and the high flats.

He shot the crowd, huddled like some faithful remnant. They seemed to expect this, looking incuriously at the lens or staring morosely into space. The killer liked to haunt such scenes, standing at the edge of the crowd, craning to witness his own absence. It paid to take a picture, just in case.

And then he was off, sending a curt nod my way as he shouldered his bag of tricks and skedaddled across the park. I envied him his finite task: in, out, squeeze off some shots; the crisp, moist click of the shutter. They would use a frame of a lone cop on tomorrow’s front page, the visored eyes, the resolute jaw, the solitary watcher standing between us and the chaos that takes place on the other side of the incident tape. I would have to turn it into words. I turned up my collar, set off across the freezing grass.

I spotted Gallacher from the
News of the World
chatting to one of the cops across the incident tape. In the shadow of the high flats was a news crew, Manda Levitt from
Reporting Scotland
, sexy-severe, talking to camera. I half-expected Moir to show up, his long dog face and floppy hair. He’d been following this feud so closely for so long he could sense where the next eruption would come. Moir was like a water-diviner for gangland violence. When the last victim – Jason ‘Jackie’ Stewart – was dispatched in an Asda car park, Moir was on the scene within minutes, interviewing witnesses, taking cellphone snaps of the shot-up Audi.

I should have worn better shoes. I flexed my toes, they were turning numb in my thin-soled oxfords. What was I doing here? Let Moir talk them up, these neds and hard men. A city fixated with hoods and blades. Why add to it? This was terrible journalism, the worst type of pandering. It wasn’t hard, it didn’t take special talent to get murdered in Glasgow. We had the worst per capita homicide rate in Western Europe. You had to travel far – Vilnius, Detroit – for a city that could top us. Thirty killings a year. But the perps weren’t gangsters. They were friends and flatmates, fractious neighbours. They plunged their mates with bread knives at drunken house parties in flare-ups fuelled by supermarket booze. And the victims; what did we give them? A wing column, two pars on an inside page. I spat on the grass, pressed on towards the trailer.

My plan was to chivvy a quote from the duty detective – it would be warmer in the trailer, at least – and then cab it back to base, but I didn’t make it that far. A teenage boy was coming towards me, baseball cap, scarf round the face, hands in the pockets of his snow-white track-top.

‘My maw saw it all,’ he said. ‘She saw the whole thing.’

‘Aye? Where is she?’

He pointed at the high flats. ‘Fifth floor. Fucking grandstand view.’ He had his phone out, waved it at me. ‘Want me to see if she’ll talk to you?’

‘How much?’

‘Fifty.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Twenty.’

I nodded. I stamped the stiffening turf as the boy made his call. How the mighty have fallen. Foreign jollies. They sent me out to Hong Kong in ’97 to cover the handover. I remember the rain. The pipes playing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ as the Black Watch paraded past in their white dress jackets, their spats raising splashes from the flooded esplanade. The piece wrote itself. The massed umbrellas. Patten standing hatless to the rain. A kiltie with a folded Union flag, the pibroch slow and lonely as he stepped across the concourse.

That’s what I wrote, but what I really remembered was waking the next morning in my tiny stylish hotel room, high above the streets. The rain had stopped. The day was dawning fine – it wasn’t yet six – and below me, ringed by skyscrapers, was a public garden, a little disc of green. It had trees and paths and a children’s playground with little pagoda roofs, and there were people, standing, raising legs and arms in slow, balletic arcs. Even from my window, hundreds of feet in the air, I could sense their composure, the figures in the canvas trousers, baggy shirts; they were self-possessed, indifferent to the rousing city, the new dawn, the fresh dispensation. In the centre of the garden was a pond, a deep green eye, where the tiniest orange smudges flashed and died.

‘Big man.’ The boy was loping towards me, waving his mobile. ‘It’s sorted. Come on.’ We set off across the grass to the high flats.

The lifts were fucked. Rain started falling as we climbed the stairs, big windblown squalls that shook the landing windows. Stink of piss and cooking oil. The walls were finished in some hard metallic render and the slap of our palms on the black plastic handrail echoed round the stairwell.

Fifth floor.
SHEPHERD
in yellow on a tiny Perspex nameplate. A short woman in a dark hallway, she grunted at the boy. The boy didn’t stay. I heard him clattering down the stairs as I followed his mum down the hall.

The living room was cold but I was sweating from the climb. A big window gave onto the pitch. I sat on the sofa opposite her armchair. There was a print above the fireplace, something Highland and greenish, gloomy hills, a fringed cow.

Her face was puffy and coarse. Lank orange hair. Late fifties. She was wearing a man’s fleece, zipped to the neck, its sleeves folded back into gauntlet cuffs.

‘Mrs Shepherd—’

‘My name’s Duncan,’ she said.

‘Mrs Duncan.’

I could see my breath. There was a coal-effect electric fire in a fake-brick fireplace, its three bars dead and grey.

‘Mrs Duncan, your son tells me you saw the incident?’

 ‘Uh-huh.’ Suspicious, truculent. She looked too old to be the boy’s mother. Deep creases on her upper lip. Smoker’s face. Giving nothing away.

‘Could you describe what happened?’

I set my Sony UX on the coffee table.

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a kind of tape recorder. It saves me having to take notes. Is that alright?’

She frowned at the black oblong with its glowing orange screen. Her fringe hung down like the cow in the painting.

‘Mrs Duncan, I’m not the police. You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to. I thought that was clear.’ I took out my wallet and found a twenty, laid it down beside the UX.

She looked at the money and stood up, pushed at the too-long sleeves. ‘Come here.’ I followed her to the window. The detectives had gone, but the uniformed cops kept their guard beside the dwindling crowd. The rain had stopped but the droplets shone on the pane.

‘That was all in shadow.’ She wiped her hand across the foreground. ‘The sun was out this morning but this bit was in shadow. Most of the folk watching were on the far side, in the sunshine. There was nobody really on this side. Couple of wee boys, just. And the man.’

‘You noticed him? You got a good look?’

‘Aye. He was standing right there with his hood up. This pointy hood. Kind of scary-looking.’

‘You didn’t see his face?’

The red fringe shook.

‘Naw. When the ball got kicked out just here he ran back to get it and the hood came down but he was wearing a hat, a baseball cap and I couldn’t see his face. He got the ball and I thought he would kick it back but he didn’t. He just stood there with his foot on the ball. And when the player came towards him he wanted it back, he was waving for the guy to kick him the ball and then bang, he’s down.’

She shook her head, slower, seeing it again.

‘You see the gun?’

‘Naw. I didn’t even know he’d been shot. I heard the noise but I didn’t know what it was. I saw the guy running away and the football fella sat down. He didn’t seem that bothered. Then he’s on his back and the rest of them come running. And ten minutes later the ambulance comes right across the pitch, siren going. I didn’t know he’d been shot till I heard it on the wireless.’

We stood looking out at the scene, the locus. Not yet four but the light was failing, shadows on the grass, yellow headlights on the Baillieston Road. From this height you could see the tracks in the grass, the ambulance’s treadmarks. The crowd had thinned by now and the yellow jackets stood impassive. The window was turning glassy, reflective. She jerked her chin at my reflection, pushed the hair out of her face.

‘That any use to you?’

‘Aye.’ We turned back to the room. ‘Tickety-boo.’ I lifted the UX, put a tenner down on top of the twenty.

I left the flats at a clip. The boy peeled off from a wall and caught up with me, walking in step.

‘Go alright, big man? Get what you wanted?’

I nodded, kept walking.

‘Square me up, then? Finder’s fee?’

‘Ask your grannie.’

The mobile rang and I dug it out. Lewicki. He’d spoken to the CID at Baird Street. They were playing it close, Jan said. Wouldn’t tell him anything, just that there was footage, some camcorder shots of the gunman. ‘Watch the late news,’ he told me.

The rain was coming on again, thickening into sleet. I flagged a cab on the Baillieston Road. I’d had enough of the celebrated Glasgow banter to see me through the winter but it wasn’t finished yet.

‘See that carry-on this morning? Guy shot dead on the fitba park?’

The driver put his wipers up to double speed. The sleet had turned to snow, big flakes streaming at the windscreen, whipping past like stars, like passing galaxies. It gave me a feeling of vertigo, as if the cab was falling through space.

‘It was nothing-each when it happened.’ He caught my eye in the mirror and grinned. ‘First shots on target all day.’

The cab kept falling through snow.

I wrote it up and filed it. Fifty minutes’ work. ‘Man Shot Dead in City Park.’ I used a quote from the woman in the tower, the statement from the police. I wrote it flat and dry. No tricks, no gimmicks. Sent a four-par précis to tribune.com. We put the paper to bed at half past eight.

In the Cope, I pushed through the crush and found a stool at the bar. Joe Gorman turned for the Lagavulin bottle.

‘Saw the splash’ – he nodded at the city edition on the bar-top, tipping a quarter-inch of smoky gold into a tumbler. ‘Been a while.’

‘Cheers, Joe. Yeah, for what it’s worth.’

‘Moir sick, is he?’

‘Fuck you.’

Joe turned away, smirking. I added some water from the tap on the bar, scanned the crowd for Moir. He was usually here at this time. I took my phone out. There was a text from Roddy –
2nd place
and a smiley face. I tapped out my answer:
Go get em! Congrats + sorry. Work stuff. See you tomorrow
. Since I’d bought him the phone, Rod was like a different boy. The silences, surly pre-teen huffs were gone. He texted me three or four times a day. ‘Sup.’ ‘Hey.’ ‘Later.’ Meaningless little tweets but I was glad to get them. I thought about my own dad, after the divorce. A week, ten days between calls. The pips. Cursing and fumbling as he fed the slot. The coins shunting home. He lived in a bedsit when he left us, a student place on Kelvin Drive. Shared toilet. No phone.
I’ll have to go
, he’d say;
there’s a queue of people outside.
I used to picture it. The red phone-box on the city pavement, a boxed oblong of yellow light. Dad holding the door for the next user, the little nod of acknowledgement.

I texted Moir –
Come in Number 3, your time’s up
, I wasn’t angry any more – and put the phone away.

The words ‘White Russian’ cut through the buzz. I recognised the order, then the voice. Neve McDonald was beside me, purse in hand. We’d had a thing, briefly, three weeks of fucking before they fired me for the Lyons piece. I broke it off but I can’t imagine she was heartbroken. That was four years ago. Since I’d come back to the paper we’d kept our distance.

‘Back in the old routine,’ she said.

‘Sorry?’

She leaned across me, her left breast grazing my bicep, lifted the folded paper from the bar-top. She spread it out.

‘Gerry Conway, ace crime reporter.’

I’d been on crime in my early days at the paper. Court reports, mostly.

‘Can’t keep a good man down.’

My arm was tingling where her breast had touched it.

‘So I hear. You tweet it yet?’

‘What?’

‘The story. Gallacher’s trending already. He’s got pics from the locus. Quotes. Do one now you’ll get some of his traffic.’

‘Traffic?’ I shook my head. ‘Jesus Christ, Neve, a man’s dead. Dead, okay? I boiled it down to six hundred words. You want me to tell it in 140 characters? To do what – steal “traffic” from that prick at the
News of the World
?’

‘Fine.’ Neve’s hand was up, shutting me off. ‘Do I give a fuck if you tweet it or not? Tell Driscoll. Tell Maguire. Jesus, sorry I spoke.’

‘Okay, Neve. Look, let’s – I’m sorry, alright? It’s rubbish, anyway – paper of record splashing on a city killing, local neds. It’s freesheet stuff. Never have happened under Rix.’

She breathed out slowly through her nose, took a swig of her drink, licked her milky moustache. ‘No one ever tell you you’re hard work, Gerry?’

I sipped my whisky. ‘Someone might’ve. Few years back. But I knew she was joking. The way she said it, I could tell she didn’t mean it.’

She paid for the drinks, slotted her change into the big charity whisky bottle on the bar. ‘Mari okay? The wee fella?’

‘Angus,’ I told her. ‘Brand new, thanks.’

‘Good.’ She collected her drinks in a little diamond formed by her fingers and thumbs. ‘We’re in the back booth.’ She jerked her head across the pub. I could see Maguire talking to Davidson, Driscoll lifting a pint to his lips.

‘I’ve got to get back.’

‘Aye. No doubt.’ She squeezed back into the crush, her drinks held high, hips swivelling.

I lifted the paper from the bar-top, tucked it under my arm. The night was cold and clear, the clouds gone, the pavements icy. I crossed the bridge, stars ablaze in the glossy Clyde. I looked up to see if the scattered pricks of light would resolve themselves into a constellation – a bear or a plough or one of the others – but they held their random stations. My heels rang on the walkway of the bridge as I crossed the river and set off into town.

In some ways the gloom was cheerful, the gloom that enveloped the trade, that pervaded our weeks from conference on Tuesday morning to the Cope on Saturday night. At least we had the benefit of foresight. We knew that our business was on its way out. We were the scattered remnants, the last of the clan. Okay, let’s go out with style, make the last days count. The past few weeks as I rode the subway to Ibrox I’d been happy, I relished my job more than ever. I was like a man recovering from a life-threatening illness; every day was a bonus.

The weather helped. I always think of winter as a hopeful time, a season of quiet graft and preparation, of groundwork and hidden diligence. Summer makes me nervous, fretful, I feel life passing me by. The sunny days are like an accusation. When the shortest day has passed I feel bereft, wrong-footed, like I’ve missed the boat again. But with the winter coming on, with November around the corner, with a hard blue sky in the mornings and a silver glint on the pavements and the cold air punching your lungs everything seems ahead of you. The future seems assured, even when it’s not.

I was glad I’d come back from PR. PR is where you go to die, or where you go when your paper does. I stuck it for three years before I staggered back like Lazarus, back to my old desk, my old beat, my old contacts and adversaries. Only everything was new. The title on my business cards – Scottish Political Editor,
Tribune on Sunday
– was the same, but now I was writing for the daily as well as the Sunday, writing for the website as well as the paper, writing news as well as Politics. And Politics wasn’t Politics any more.

I’d come back in time to cover the last election and I was still recovering. The losing party can go off and lick its wounds, regroup, elect a new leader. But the hacks who get it wrong? We have to sit down and write next week’s copy, pretend we know what we’re talking about. For months, it seemed, I’d been covering a different country. On 5 May the Scotland I described in my weekly column – that chippy, chary, toe-testing land, where the generations voted Labour from fear and from habit – turned out not to exist. It was a Narnia of my own invention. Maybe it was already passing into folklore in 2007, when the Nationalists won by a whisker. But now the old Scotland was finished, sunk like Atlantis. I kept a map of the constituency results on my partition wall. Except for some atolls of red around Glasgow and two spots of blue on the border with England, the whole bloody country was SNP yellow. Every seat in the Highlands, every seat in the North-East, every seat in Aberdeen and Dundee, four out of five in Edinburgh, five out of eight in Glasgow, all seats bar one in Ayrshire and Fife: the Nats had taken it all. Seats that had been Labour since 1945 had crashed like rotten redwoods. This was the map of a foreign country, one I knew nothing about.

There was solace in getting things utterly wrong. You had to start over, relearn whatever you thought you knew, start from the bottom, take your first steps like everyone else.

The night was getting colder and I flagged a cab. Both the fold-down seats bore the logo, the green ‘G’ in its coloured rings: ‘Glasgow 2014. XX Commonwealth Games.’

Because I missed it? Was that the answer? Because I got sick of PR? Because this was the only thing I was halfway good at? Because, despite the evidence of my senses and the actions of my colleagues, I still thought papers mattered?

The cab climbed Hope Street. Saturday night. Lassies’ legs in the headlights. The lads strutting up the roadway, cropped heads and rolling shoulders. Black-clad bouncers with earpieces, satin jackets shining in the lights. Maybe Maguire was right. When you go you should stay gone. Coming back was always an error.

We turned into Clouston Street, stopped halfway up. I signed the chit. Inside the flat I checked on Angus, listened for the breathing, tucked his left leg back under the blanket, tugging the cuff of his pyjama trousers over his plump calf, upped the heating a notch.

‘Here it is,’ Mari shouted.

I got a Sol from the fridge and plumped down beside her on the sofa.

They led with it.
A man has been shot dead in a Glasgow park in what police suspect is a gangland execution.
Shots of the park, the MIU, the yellow jackets guarding the incident tape, the murder squad standing round chatting. A shot of the chopper, filmed from below, an asterisk in the sky.

William Swan, known as ‘Blackie’, was killed by a lone gunman during a football match in the city’s Maxton Park
. Headshot of Swan, cropped from a squad photograph, black-and-blue stripes at his shoulders. Grinning, tanned – the heedless victim.

They had no more details than we had. A cop was interviewed, mild, media-trained, hatless but in uniform, North of England accent.
Want to reassure . . . obviously unusual . . . visible presence . . . everything we can.

Then they showed the footage. I sat forward, set the bottle on the floor between my feet. It was shaky, coarse-grained, dark. Hard to make it out at first. A jumbled crush of bodies and then a striped shirt blocking the lens. When the stripes move off the ball has squeezed out for a throw-in on the far side. At this point the camera swings round sharply to the touchline: a guy with a greying crewcut mugs a grimace, blows a kiss to the camera. You hear the shots just then – two flat cracks like someone snapping a desk with a ruler – and the camera jiggles nervously and fumbles for focus. Grass. Sky. A muddy blur then the camera steadies, finds it.

A figure on the grass. A dark shadow sprinting away. The camera tracks the runner, loping off towards the railings. As he reaches the park entrance he turns to look back. We get a still of this, the gunman caught in mid-stride, the torso twisted. Black parka slipping off his shoulders. Baseball cap with the bill pulled down. They’d tried to refine it, enhance it, bring out the features, but the face was still a blank. You’d recognise the gait, the stance, before you clocked the face.

Police are looking for
anyone who saw a dark-coloured car parked on
Baillieston
Road between 11 and 11.25 a.m.
Digits on the screen: the incident room at Baird Street; the Crimestoppers number. Please call.

Mari gathered her drawings, slipped them into the portfolio and zipped it. She slapped my thigh, leaned over to kiss my forehead.

‘Don’t be long.’

I waggled my beer-bottle, two-thirds empty.

‘Right behind you.’

A dark-coloured car
. Good luck with that. I heard a noise above the news, a muffled crump as though a war report was encroaching on the previous item. I muted the telly and caught it again, the crackle of fireworks. Glitterburst of purple in the window. Guy Fawkes was two weeks off but they jumped the gun a little further each year, the local neds, terrorising the pets of Kelvinside. I necked the dregs of the Sol and fetched a final bottle from the fridge, thumbed a wedge of lemon down the neck.

I flicked through the channels and back to the news.
Ground was broken today on a 36-hectare riverfront site that will house the Athletes’ Village for the Commonwealth Games in 2014.
Camera flashes. A fat man in a hard hat, resting his foot on the lip of a spade. Close-up of his fleshy, grinning face, the green ‘G’ on his yellow hat: Gavin Haining, leader of Glasgow City Council. Cut to artist’s impression of Scandinavian-style houses in tasteful clusters, puffy green trees, pedestrians on walkways.

‘This will bring the East End back to life,’ Haining was saying. ‘Nearly eight hundred homes. Eco-friendly. State of the art.’

I knew Haining a little. I’d been to my share of civic receptions, shared his table at charity dinners. A big ebullient figure with a mooing laugh, a clapper of shoulders, a barer of teeth in bonhomous grins.

‘And what happens, Councillor Haining, when the Games are over; will these houses be sold as private homes?’

‘Some of them, yes. But four hundred of these homes will be reserved for rental accommodation, providing the kind of high-quality social housing this city so desperately needs.’

The reporter said that a grouping of construction firms – the Kentigern Consortium – would oversee the building of the village, but that contracts for sub-contractors would be awarded over the coming weeks and months. There were two more items – a fatal collision on the A9 and a missing Glasgow prostitute – before the anchor handed over to the sports reporter, a fizzy blonde in a tailored jacket, risky inch of cleavage.

The mobile rang, my new iPhone, the ringtone still unfamiliar.

‘You see it?’

Lewicki.

‘Not exactly Zapruder, is it? Missed the money shot.’

‘Yeah. Well.’ Lewicki’s voice had the belligerent edge. Drink taken. ‘We know who it was anyway.’

The football results were coming up on the screen.
If you don’t want to know the scores, look away now.
Could be the caption for my life over the past couple of years, I reflected:
Look away now
.

‘The shooter?’

‘Fuck the shooter. The shooter’s immaterial. We know who
did
it.’

We’d beaten Hearts two-nil. The Huns had drawn with Motherwell. Put us four points clear.

‘Everyone knows who did it, Jan. Maybe they should claim responsibility. Like they did in Ireland in the old days. Passwords and codenames. P. O’Neill. Still,’ I said. ‘Happy days on the South Side. Dancing in the streets of Pollok.’

‘Shitting their pants is more like it.’

‘Payback?’

‘You don’t shoot a guy playing football. Saturday morning. His old man watching from the sidelines.’

‘Swan’s dad was there?’