Where the Dead Men Go (20 page)

I came home early the next day. Flat empty. Stink of shit in the kitchen. I pulled the bag from the sleek metal bin, tried not to look at the blue translucent nappy-sacks, tied it and carted it down to the green. Back upstairs I ran the tap till steam was rising from the sink and then washed my hands with pink surgical scrub. I dug in the freezer for the silver package. I put a filter in the plastic cone and spooned it in, three dollops, watched the grains darken and liquefy as I tipped in the water, waited for the smell to fill the kitchen, masking the savour of shit. When I caught myself standing at the window, glooming out over the empty back court, I picked up the phone and sat down heavily at the kitchen table. I had her on speed-dial but I punched in the number.

‘Hello?’

‘It’s me.’

Silence. She never made things easy. I’d envisaged a brief bout of small talk, an opening skirmish, but Elaine always knew when something was wrong.

‘What is it?’

I took a sip of coffee and started. She didn’t interrupt. I told her about Moir, his involvement with Hamish Neil, the dossier on his pen drive, the nursing home in Bearsden, the phantom residents, the meeting with the cop on the canal towpath. I told her about the nursery, the chase, the fight, the sudden reappearance of Angus. I told her about Hamish Neil, the kind of things he’d done, the kind of man he was. When I caught my breath the silence was back. I winced into it, waiting for the crash. Her voice, when she spoke, was surprisingly calm.

‘But you’re in Politics,’ she said.

‘Yeah, but I got embroiled in this thing, this story and it got, I don’t know, out of hand. I’m sorry. I don’t think he’ll do anything.’

‘Embroiled? You mean your editor commissioned it?’

‘Aye. Well, no, it wasn’t—’

‘You did it yourself. You sought it out.’

I didn’t answer.

‘Oh, Gerry. Jesus wept. Gerry Conway saves the world.’ She snickered, a harsh snapping sound. ‘Try saving your sons next time. Your own flesh and blood. Try starting with them.’

She called back that evening. I was changing Angus’s nappy when the phone rang and I knew it would be her. She was careful to make clear that it had nothing to do with my phone call that afternoon, with the things I had told her.

‘Although, to be honest,’ she said, ‘it does rather vindicate our decision. Anyway, it’s a chance we can’t pass up, is what we feel.’

She was waiting for me to speak, give my blessing.

‘It sounds like a good job,’ I said. ‘A good move. I’m sure you’ll be happy.’

‘Thanks, Gerry. We will. And the boys, too. A new city. Good schools. And of course access won’t be a problem. We’re both very happy for you to come up at weekends, stay with us. Take the boys down to Glasgow. Whatever.’

 ‘That’s great, Lainie,’ I said. ‘It means a lot.’

Mari spent that evening packing. They left two days later. I drove them to the airport. Snow in blackened ridges at the kerbside. Cops with guns at the terminal building. I left them in Departures, saw them join the line for security, Mari with the passports in her free hand, the boy waving when she told him, his little fist flashing open and shut.

On the way back I punched the button for Radio Scotland.
Newsdrive
had started, Mhairi Stuart intoning the headlines.
Referendum . . . Commonwealth Games . . . Helmand Province.
I hit the button again, drove home in silence.

The next day I had barely sat down at my screen before Maguire called me through. I’d written up the Agency story, the fifty-odd companies that were fronts for Hamish Neil.

I knocked on the glass beside her open door.

‘Sit down, Gerry.’ She was frowning at her screen. She had the boss face on, the bad-news face.

‘Oh, Fiona. Tell me you’re kidding.’

‘Just sit down.’

I didn’t sit down. If I sat I was conceding a point, losing ground before we’d begun.

‘Don’t fucking start this, Fiona—’

‘Sit down, Gerry. We got it legalled last night. They’re not happy.’

‘They’re
lawyers
, Fiona. They’re meant to be not happy. That’s their job, stop us doing ours.’

‘You may remember the last time we took a flyer on a Conway story.’ She pushed her glasses onto her head, rubbed a hand up and down her face. ‘Reporter lost his job. Guy called Conway.’

‘We’re not naming all the companies. We’re not doing the full list.’ The cops had warned us that naming the companies could cause problems: the next time someone rejected a bid they could be open to reprisals. But I’d identified four firms with directors connected to Neil and we were naming all of those.

‘We’re naming four companies. We’re naming Neil. We’re identifying Hamish Neil as the gangster, the kingpin.’

‘Fiona, that’s the point. And it’s not us, it’s the police. We’re just reporting it. Hamish Neil is a gangster. Stop fucking press. The companies he’s involved in are fronts for organised crime. That’s not fair comment? What definition of fair comment does that not meet?’

A bottler. Maguire was a bottler. Rix, for all his failings, was never like this. Rix would have run it, Rix would have come through. What were we here for if not for this? She must have read this in my face, she was shaking her head, mouth pursed, pure rancour.

‘Say it then.’

‘What?’

‘Rix would have run it. Stormin Norman.’

‘You’re saying he wouldn’t have?’

‘Rix was three years ago, Gerry. Rix was when we had cash. When we had sixty thousand readers. When we could afford to make mistakes.’

‘It’s a mistake to tell the truth.’

‘When you’re going to get sued it is, yes. When you’re nearly out of business it
is
a mistake. You seen the numbers? Forty-one, Gerry. Forty-one thousand people are buying the paper.’

‘Making money for the Yanks. Is that what we’re here for? Well it better be more than that because we’re not making any fucking money. We can’t go after Hamish Neil we might as well give up now. You used to be a journalist, Fiona. What would you call yourself now?’

‘Are you finished?’

‘We’re all finished, Fiona. If this is the script, the whole thing’s finished.’

We published the piece in the next day’s paper. I tweeted the link, waited for the onslaught.

That evening the phone rang as I was making dinner, a tin of minestrone. Take the whole lid off; Elaine had drummed that into me. She’d seen it on the telly, a nature programme; when the tins end up on the dump, the little animals – the mice, the rats, the foxes – they push their heads in, trying to get the food. Then they’re stuck, necks against the serrated edge. Tear their heads off trying to get out.

I left the tin half-opened.

‘Conway.’

‘Gerry, it’s me.’

‘Hey!

It was Mari. She was voluble, lit up, eager to spill out her news. The flight had been fine – anyway, bearable. Angus slept in his bassinet for most of the first leg. Mari’s parents met them at Auckland and they were now ensconced in the big Mission Bay villa with the harbour view. They’d been to the beach that morning – it was summer there, of course – and a freak wave had knocked Angus flat as he paddled in ankle-deep water. She described her horror as the wave concealed him from view and the speed with which he scrambled up, too shocked to cry, shaking himself like a dog and glaring at the innocent Pacific. His grandad had bought him a ‘boogie board’ – a kid’s surfboard – and he held it on his lap all the way home. He’d made friends with a neighbour’s little boy and Mari’s sister was arriving in two days’ time from Oz, with her twin girls. A proper Kiwi Christmas, a sausage sizzle at the house and then out to Piha for beach cricket with the cousins. As she rattled on I felt a strange inertia grip me. It was all I could do to muster an interested grunt as each wave of talk withdrew.

‘Hold on,’ she said at one point; ‘here he is. Who’s this, Angus? It’s Daddy. Say “Hello Daddy”.’

The boy came on – I heard the delicate slurp of his breath – and when I finished my sing-song riff of greeting he pronounced ‘Dada!’ in his thick-tongued, definitive way. Mari prompted him with questions and he repeated the words he knew, like someone underlining a text. ‘Did we go to the beach?’ ‘Beach!’ ‘Did Angus ride in the car?’ ‘Car!’ Then she remembered something.

‘Oh, Gerry. He’s got a new word. Listen to this. Angus, what did we see at the shop?’ Then she whispered the word and he said it.

‘Raddit!’

He said it again, more forcefully: ‘Raddit! Raddit!’ They had stopped off at the pet shop on the way back from the beach and Angus had been allowed to handle one of the rabbits. I could picture his delight as he patted and prodded the creature, its tail-like ears, its trembling nose. As Mari related the anecdote I could hear Angus in the background, repeating his new word with proprietary glee.

I was playing five-a-sides that evening so it wasn’t until after nine that I was alone again and back in the flat. I switched the Christmas lights on, sat in the gloom with a mug of Rooibos, let the silence swamp me. The Rooibos was missing something. I rectified that, put the Lagavulin back on its shelf. I thought about the call from Mari, the boy’s voice. I thought about Hamish Neil, Hamish Neil opening the paper, Hamish Neil reading my words.

He would kill me. If it came to it, he wouldn’t think twice. If he didn’t kill me he would kill Angus or Mari. He had killed Moir and made it look like suicide. Would I be any harder? I wasn’t short on motive. Broken marriage. Girlfriend leaves him. Three sons he doesn’t see. Job in the shitter. Okay, I told myself; leave it at that. He had men who would do this, who would kill at his bidding. He had friends on the force who would cover his tracks.

That afternoon at work the messages had started. On the work email and then on my Twitter feed. I watched them come in:

And then the others:

Thank Christ Mari and Angus were away. I texted Lewicki –
More shit on Twitter. Posting my address now. Can you check it out?
– and logged out.

You had the idea of making a difference. You had the idea of standing alone against the villains. I thought of the brochure that Elaine had sent me for the school in Aberdeen:
The aim is for boys to leave this College as men of integrity and conviction. We want them to learn to have the courage to stand, alone if necessary, for what they believe is right.
But the people who stood against Hamish Neil weren’t left standing for long. Walter Maitland. Martin Moir. Packy Walsh. Declan Coyle.

And I wasn’t standing alone. I had Mari and Angus. I’d already lost one family. I couldn’t lose another. I had to fix this. One way or another, I had to finish things with Neil. I wanted them back, my partner and child. I wanted our life to pick up where it left off, the days to assume their familiar rhythm, but I knew, as I tipped another finger of whisky into my empty mug, that we’d already gone too far. Simply calling a halt wouldn’t do. I couldn’t just contact Neil and tell him it was over, I’d suffered a change of heart, I was backing off. A forfeit would be payable. Some penalty or levy. And I knew what the forfeit would be. I would have to get involved, come onside, work for Hamish Neil, as Moir had done or pretended to do. I would have to go over.

Would that be so bad, I wondered, if it meant getting Mari and Angus back? But it wouldn’t end there. Either it would never end or it would end as it ended for Moir. I’d started this thing and now I had to see it through. Not everyone could come out of this with their shoes shined and their premiums paid. Only one happy ending was on the table and I planned to make it mine.  

They’d been gone less than a week and already the flat was like a shantytown. Too big for the bin, the pizza boxes were stacked on the breakfast bar, grease marks blooming on the white cardboard. Used coffee filters sagged on the draining board, their insides spilling like fresh soil. A thin stink rose from the bin. Shirts and T-shirts were scattered on chairs, newspapers littered the table. The whole flat was a disgrace. Fuck it. I hauled to my feet, marched through the rooms snapping on lights. The least I could do was keep the place in order. What if Mari and Angus came back tomorrow? They couldn’t come home to a mess like this.

I would start with the kitchen.

Books and papers among the dirty cups and glasses. The folder from Callum Kidd, Lewicki’s Agency contact, was open on the kitchen table. The
dossier
, you would call it. A book was lying across the pages and its spine, when I went to lift it, was underlining a telephone number. My fingers froze in the air above the book. The number seemed to swim up from the page. It was a mobile number and the last four digits – 1969 – formed the year of my birth.

In the living room I yanked the drawer of my desk and rummaged. As I hurried back to the kitchen I was flicking through them, Martin Moir’s little pile of Post-its. I found the one I wanted and slapped it down on the table. Snap.

The number in the folder was the number on Moir’s Post-it, the number he’d been called from on the night before he died.

It took me half an hour, but I got through to Callum Kidd. I stood in the call-box on Queen Margaret Drive and used the alias we’d agreed on.

‘Mr Campbell,’ he said loudly. ‘How can I help?’

I suppose I was excited and it was a minute or two before I could make him understand what I wanted.

‘It’s a hand-written mobile number on the last page of the folder,’ I told him again. ‘Someone’s obviously scribbled it down and it’s been photocopied along with everything else. Have you got the folder there?’

There was a bit of rustling and banging, the booming of a filing-cabinet drawer.

‘Aye.’

‘There’s a number on the last page.’ I waited for him to find it. ‘Whose is it?’

The pause went on a little too long.

‘What is this? What have you found?’

‘Just tell me whose the number is.’

‘I’ve no idea,’ he said. ‘What’s the deal here?’

‘Look, I think I’ve found something but I want to be sure.’

‘Give me your number,’ he told me. ‘I’ll call you back in five.’

I stood outside the call-box in the chilly dusk, hands plunged in pockets, shuffling my feet on the sparkling ground. The schools were out and lassies in long tartan skirts and sensible shoes drifted past in twos and threes. Starlings had massed in the lee of the bridge, a great black cloud that swivelled and turned like a localised storm.

Though I knew it was coming the phone made me jump.

‘It’s to do with Hamish Neil,’ Kidd was saying. ‘It’s a number we had under surveillance. One of Neil’s guys. But it’s dead now, defunct.’

‘What was the name?’ I said.

‘The number’s defunct. The guy himself’s dead. We’re not even sure if this was his phone.’

‘The name.’

‘He was shot in October. Neil’s enforcer. It’s Billy Swan. Now what’s your interest?’

‘I’ll call you back.’

I didn’t go home. I walked on down Queen Margaret Drive, over the bridge, into the gardens. A man in green overalls was pushing a barrow of potted plants. ‘Gates shut in half an hour.’ He nodded at the little silver placard in the middle of the path:
Winter closing
. I gave him a thumbs-up, carried on into the Kibble Palace, the heat, the dripping ferns, little island of summer in the Glasgow cold.

Why had Swan phoned Moir? As I walked the stone-flagged aisles, past the greenery and the marble statues, I tried to make sense of it. I thought back to that Saturday in Maxton Park, the cops standing guard beside the incident tape, the little knot of watchers in the rain. No one questioned why Swan had been killed. The Walshes wanted to hit Hamish Neil. Swan was close to Neil, he was easy to get to. A click of the mouse would tell you where to find him at 2 o’clock each Saturday. Swan was the softest target. Nothing personal, as they liked to say in Belfast.

But maybe it
was
personal. Maybe Swan was killed for something he’d done, not just for his closeness to Neil. Something he’d done or was planning to do. I stopped beside a statue, a nude in white marble, a young man crouched on a rock, hiding his head in the crook of his arm. Cain, the placard told me: ‘My Punishment is Greater than I Can Bear.’

Had Swan been killed by one of his own? Was he helping Moir get the dope on Hamish Neil? Was he phoning Moir to warn him they’d been rumbled, that Neil had made them? I thought again of Swan’s photo in the paper, the bleached, tipped hair, the silver sleeper in the ear, the silly grin. A ned, I had thought. A grinning thug, a tool in the hands of a man like Hamish Neil. But maybe that was my own blindness. Maybe I should have looked harder.

Back at the flat I booted up and Googled Billy Swan. Apart from reports of the shooting – my own, gratifyingly, right at the top – there was little to go on. He’d been acquitted two years back on a charge of serious assault (there was a brief court notice in the online
Scotsman
), and was profiled as a ‘feared enforcer for northside kingpin Hamish Neil’ on a Glasgow gangland website. But mainly the results were match reports in which Swan frequently featured as matchwinner:
with the Ayrshire side pressing for a leveller, Billy Swan slotted home a late penalty to put the game beyond Kilbirnie’s reach
; or,
Billy Swan unleashed a trademark piledriver to sink ten-man Wishaw and bring the points back to Maxton Park
. Most of the reports had the same byline – Fraser Wylie – and appeared in
The Clydesider
, the city’s local freesheet.

When I sat across from him the following afternoon, Wylie looked as though he, too, had been a player. Forties, fit and balding, his hair shaved close to the skull, he wore black jeans and a checked Ben Sherman shirt. We were in the
Clydesider
offices in the East End, a cheerful, low-ceilinged oblong cobwebbed in Christmas bunting. A parcel stood on Wylie’s desk, a big square box with a red silk bow, a present, I assumed, for the Labrador-hugging girl of six or seven on his screensaver.

On the phone that morning when I set up the meeting I told him I was doing a piece on gangland killings. I understood that he was the only journalist on the scene when Billy Swan was shot.

‘I actually stood beside him for most of the game,’ Wylie told me now. ‘The shooter. Of course you don’t notice people at the time, but I remember his cap was pulled down really low and he didn’t seem to be shouting for either side. He must have drifted round to the other touchline at some point because he was there when Swan went across to get the ball.’

He stopped then, watching it happen once more through narrowed eyes. He frowned.

‘I told the cops all this, gave them a description. What is this, the
Trib
’s idea of a seasonal feature? Goodwill to all men?’

‘Just to some of them,’ I said. ‘Goodwill’s in short supply for these fuckers. When did it happen? I mean, what time in the game?’

‘Late on,’ Wylie said. ‘Maybe fifteen minutes to go.’

I nodded. ‘Good game, was it?’

‘Good game?’

If the question fazed him, Wylie didn’t show it. He pouted, hunched his shoulders. ‘Actually it was pretty poor, to tell you the truth. Scrappy. Not much shape. It had nothing-each written all over it.’

‘And how was Swan playing?’

He looked at me sharply. ‘Aye. Well, that was the thing. He was having a nightmare. A total stinker.’

‘And that was unusual?’

‘Unheard of,’ he said. ‘Swan was best player on the park every game I saw him play. Best player in the league, to be honest, but he had, well, other commitments that stopped him playing at a higher level. He tried out for Rangers, did you know that?’

‘I did, yeah.’

‘Well that gives you an idea. Touch, vision, the lot. Everything Blackhill did went through Billy Swan. Hard too, fought for every ball. Course it didn’t hurt that most of his opponents were shit-scared to put a tackle in, but still. A battler.’

‘But not that Saturday,’ I said.

‘He was shit.’ Wylie shook his head. ‘Yard off the pace. Wasnae interested. He was on the edge of everything, getting pushed off the ball. Looked like he’d never seen a ball till that afternoon.’

I nodded. Wylie spread his hands. ‘Nobody said anything, because, well, because of who he is. But you could see them shaking their heads, the Blackhill lot. They were getting ready to sub him. The coach was calling him over but he was out of earshot on the far touchline.’

‘Okay,’ I said. I wanted to be clear. ‘So Billy Swan had a bad game. It happens.’

Wylie shook his head. ‘Yeah, that’s how the cops took it.
We don’t want the match report, son.
Just give us the facts
. But this is the facts. I’ve watched Billy Swan for three seasons and I’ve never seen him play like that. He looked like a ghost, you know? He was playing like a man who wasnae there. Like he knew something was wrong.’

‘You think he knew what was coming?’

Wylie sat forward on his swivel chair. His eyes were far off again, flicking back and forth as if reading something in the empty air.

‘I was watching him at the time,’ he said. ‘Swan was that kind of player, you’d watch him walking to take a throw-in. He was standing with his back to me, waiting for the guy to kick the ball to him, and something happened. His shoulders slumped. I think he saw the gun and his shoulders just slumped. He wasn’t mad or desperate, he wasn’t scared. He was just resigned. He knew it was coming.’

Wylie’s eyes came into focus and he looked at me again. ‘I’m not stupid,’ he said. ‘I know that counts for nothing. But I know what I saw and I know what it means. Swanny’s number was up and he knew it.’