Where the Dead Men Go (3 page)

‘Aye.’ Little kisses came down the line as Lewicki got a cigar going. ‘Billy Senior. Hamish Neil’s first cousin. They’ll feel it down there. Jesus. Shitstorm that’s coming.’

I walked down to the twenty-four-hour garage for the other Sundays. Papers getting fatter as their readership thinned. Walking back across the bridge in the sharp cold air I checked my phone, scrolled down my Twitter feed:

Hope I’m wrong.
Like fuck you do, Gallo. I checked Moir, too, in case he’d mentioned the killing, but his last tweet was two days old.

Back at the flat I slapped the stack of newsprint onto the table and fetched a final beer. The English qualities had nothing. Not a wing, not a par. There was a page six lead in
Scotland on Sunday
(
Killing Sparks Fears of Gangland Feud
). But the redtops gave it a show.
GANG WAR
was Gallacher’s splash in the
News of the World
. He quoted a source close to ‘underworld kingpin Hamish Neil’ saying reprisals were certain: ‘The Walshes won’t know what’s hit them.’ Aye they will, I thought: Hamish Neil.

But Torcuil Bain in the
Mail
had pissed on us all. They’d splashed with a photo of Swan in a Rangers jersey: soccer starlet slain. Swan was twenty-six; hardly a ‘starlet’. But it turned out he’d trialled for Rangers. Bain had dug it up, Swan’s football career. Schoolboy international. The teenage trial with the ’Gers that didn’t work out. Signed for St Mirren: a leg-break crocked him for a year, cost him a yard. Free transfer to Morton. Dropped down to the Juniors. By this time he was an enforcer for Maitland, but he kept turning out, skippering the local team. On an inside page there was the squad photo of Blackhill United, Swan with the captain’s armband, a strip of suddenly sinister black, as if he was in mourning for himself.

A gangland execution with Old Firm overtones. Driscoll would be spitting. We’d led with Swan but the
Mail
would bury us anyway. I looked again at the front-page photo. The bleached-blond spikes. Silver sleeper catching the light. The royal-blue jersey with the lager logo splashed across the chest. He must have been useful, to try out for the Huns. He’d skippered Blackhill to last year’s Junior Cup Final. I thought of the weekly write-ups, the match reports in trundling soccerese,
some good work down the left saw Swan release Cunningham
. It wouldn’t be hard to target Billy Swan. No need to monitor his movements, study his habits, establish a pattern. All you needed was next week’s fixtures, there in black and white in the local paper.

Bain’s piece had another scoop:
According to eyewitness reports, the killer was dark-complexioned, possibly of Eastern European origin
. From the footage you could hardly tell a thing about the killer, but I knew what Bain was doing. You never lost sales by blaming the Roma. But a stopped clock’s right twice a day and according to Lewicki one of the Roma gangs in Govanhill was working with the Walshes. Frighteners. Disciplinaries. General enforcement. The Walshes farmed these tasks out to their Slovak buddies. Maybe hits were being subcontracted too.

I pushed the papers away. The TV was still running in the living room. The weather forecast. More snow. Snow in October. I thumbed the remote and killed the picture. There was an ominous rumble in the flat, low throbbing knocks like a rumour of battle. I snapped the box-room light on. The tumble-drier. The clothes flopped in drunken heaves, collapsing onto each other and chasing round again. I watched Angus’s vests, the days of the week in a tangled swirl, and padded through to bed.

I woke up at seven and jumped in the shower. I don’t sleep in on Sundays, never need the alarm. Sunday’s my day with the boys and my body clock knows it. I’ve got two sons from my failed marriage. Roddy and James. Nine and six.

I kissed Mari’s temple and lifted my keys. Angus’s door stood slightly ajar and I eased it open. Little moon face, ghostly in the half-light. I dropped my hand into the cot, felt his breath on the backs of my fingers, laid my knuckles on his cheek: chilled. I slipped two fingers under the collar of his babygro; his back was warm. The baby thermometer on the wall had gone from ‘Just Right’ to ‘Cool’. I settled his blankets. The central heating would be clicking on soon.

White flakes were sifting down through the wasteground trees. My shoes left black dance-steps on the thin snow. The car started first time. Down Great Western Road, past the lighted minimarts, the headlines under lattice frames:
GANGLAND SHOOTING
,
SOCCER STARLET SLAIN
. I thought of people waking up, going out for the paper, fixing brunch with the radio on, chewing toast, reading my piece on the Swan murder.

Moir should have written it. Moir was the expert. He would know the whys of this killing. He knew the language, the precise level of insult offered by the corpse of Billy Swan. When he came back to work he would follow it up, chart the feud when it all kicked off. I bigfooted Moir in the old days; now he would bigfoot me. For the moment, though, it was my story and it wasn’t the worst feeling in the world to have ended Moir’s monopoly on the front page, if only for a week. As the car joined the motorway I put the foot down. Even in my prim, begrudging prose it would boost us by four or five thousand.

The snow had lain on the Fenwick Moors and the whiteness rolled away on either side. I thought of my dad in his coffin, the white billowing satin lining, the tight yellow skin of his nose, the folds of his neck above the white tieless shirt. It was last winter, nearly a year since we travelled this road, the same road in the same weather. He died before I came back to the
Trib
so he never got the chance to ask me:
Why did you come back?
His own question was different. Though he never put it in words, the gaps in his conversation, his non-committal grunts and downcast eyes when I spoke of my new job, asked it for him:
Why did you leave?

He was a high-school English teacher who dreamed of being a journalist. I was fulfilling his ambition when I signed on at the
Trib
. His hero was George Orwell. Not the novelist, not the visionary allegorist of
Animal Farm
and
1984
, but the hack reporter, the jobbing columnist for the
New Statesman
, the
Observer
, the
Manchester Evening News
. He kept the four volumes of
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters
in an alcove shelf beside the fireplace and you counted it a lucky day when he didn’t say ‘Listen to this’ after tea and read a passage from ‘Revenge is Sour’ or ‘Books v. Cigarettes’ in his correct and earnest reading voice. When I was handed a photocopy of ‘Politics and the English Language’ on my first day at the
Trib
I was able to hand it straight back. I could probably have recited it from memory, and though I doubtless flouted them in everything I wrote, its rules – ‘Never use a long word where a short one will do’; ‘If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out’ – were as familiar to me as the lines on my brow.

My father’s paper was the
Tribune
. Every night after tea, before he started his marking, my father sat down with the
Trib
. He would vanish behind the big pages, the vast crackling sheets that only a grown man could manage. You didn’t interrupt him. I would watch him in the telly’s reflection, his arms spreading as he turned the pages, as though the paper were a set of chest expanders.

When he’d worked his way through to the sports pages he’d close the paper, fold it against the crease and fold it again, fish a biro from the jacket he’d slung on a kitchen chair-back and tackle the crossword.

One night he opened the paper and gave a short laugh. ‘Come here,’ he told us, ‘come and see this.’ It was a letter he’d written. They’d printed it there on the letters page, a thin jaggy column of type. He’d written to complain about an editorial branding the striking miners ‘fifth columnists’. We looked over his shoulder, my mother, my sister and I, at the words my father was reading aloud. His name was printed beneath the letter, in darker type: Hugh Conway. Our address was there, too: 25 Ellis Street. For the next few days I looked at them both – my father, our house – with new eyes, as if their appearance in print had altered their nature, lent them, however faintly, the glamour of news. My first byline gave me the same sense of magic and even now, when papers mean little to anyone and I recognise my thrill for a childish superstition, I can’t suppress that fizz of pride when I see my name in print.

My father died last year, on Christmas Eve. Three months later I was back at the
Trib
. If you think there’s a connection between these events, you’re probably right. It wasn’t quite a dead man’s wish, and I didn’t go back out of filial duty, but I had plenty of time to think in the small, sky-blue room in the Southern General where my dad’s corrupted lungs kept him pinned to the bed when he wasn’t dribbling into a cardboard sick-bowl.
CONWAY
, it said on the chart at the foot of the bed – as it says now on the pink marble stone I have visited twice – and it seemed like all the epitaph he’d want. The name mattered to my father. Though a second-generation Scot, he had the immigrant’s sense of the family narrative, the arc of the generations. As if this was America and not the Scottish lowlands. As if the name were bound to rise. Eamonn Conway scraped a living as a pedlar. Michael Conway howked coal in the Ayrshire pits. Hugh Conway stuck in at school and earned his teaching diploma. The logic of the story called for another ascent. Had three generations struggled and toiled in this black-hearted land so that I might frame elegant lies to boost the profits of Scottish Power or the Royal Mail? So I chucked PR and went back to papers. As if that was any better. In almost every way you could name, my action was pointless. The man I was trying to impress was dead. The paper I came back to was dying. The job I took up wasn’t the job I had left. It was too late. Everything was too late. But I still went back.

The traffic was sparse, I was making good time. I passed the Covenanter’s memorial, the old Celtic cross. I was almost in Ayrshire and the snow had gone, green fields displacing the white moor. The boys would be out of bed now, spooning Sugar Puffs into their mouths, the glare of cartoons dancing in their eyes.

It was nearly eight. I punched the button for the radio, news on the hour.

Strathclyde Police have confirmed that a man killed in Glasgow yesterday had links with organised crime. William Swan, an enforcer for the Neil crime family, was shot dead yesterday morning as he played football at a public park in the city’s East End in what police are describing as a gangland execution. The gunman, described as of medium height and dark-complexioned, wearing dark clothes, a white baseball cap and a red tartan scarf, escaped in a waiting car. Commentators have warned that this killing could spark a gangland vendetta similar to the feud that claimed seven lives in the so-called ‘Sunbed Wars’ of 2005. David Ancram is a true-crime author with extensive contacts in Glasgow’s criminal underworld: ‘The worry is that this could escalate. The Neils will hit back, there’s nothing surer. It’s about saving face but it’s also good business. They’ve put a lot of effort into getting where they are and
they’re not about to give that up without a fight.’

New Scotland, I thought. The early days of a better nation. But Glasgow’s civil war ground on, a city like a failing state. The regime controlled the centre and the West End, the good suburbs, the arterial routes. East and north were the badlands, the rebel redoubts, where the tribal warlords held their courts and sacrificed to their vengeful gods. The M8 was the city wall, keeping out the barbarian hordes.

Concerns have been raised that the Yes camp could outspend the No by a factor of two to one in the lead-up to the 2014 independence referendum. While tight spending limits will be imposed on both camps for the official campaigning period, there are no limits on what can be spent in the run-up to the poll, which is still more than two years away. The Nationalists have been buoyed by the recent donation of £1 million to the independence campaign by lottery winners Chris and Margo Chisholm of Saltcoats, which follows an earlier bequest of £1 million by Scotland’s late national poet, Cosmo Haldane. A Scottish Labour spokesman accused the Nationalists of attempting to ‘buy’ the poll. Meanwhile, a former Scottish Secretary has warned that the No campaign may be hampered less by finances than by the lack of a credible leader. Campbell Bain, who served as Scottish Secretary in John Major’s cabinet, told an audience at St Andrews University that Malcolm Gordon might carry all before him if no ‘big beast’ stepped up to lead the pro-Union cause.

I punched the button, killed the radio. The sign for Ayrshire flashed past. Big beasts in the fields, black and white Friesians, not brown-and-white Ayrshires. You never saw Ayrshires any more, not even here. Mureton was coming up shortly, my home town. I thought of it in the past tense; it was the kind of place you left when you hit sixteen and never went back. But Moir lived there, now, the King of Crime. He moved out from the city a year or two back, when their second girl was born. I thought of looking in on him, getting off some gentle gloating over today’s front page, but I passed the Mureton turn-off and kept going.

You could smell the sea now, even with the windows up, and when I crested the next rise the town lay before me, the blue roofs of Conwick and the brown sandstone spires, the green hills on one side and the bright dancing firth on the other. Every time I drove down here I felt it more keenly, that pang of regret for the life I had left. At some level – at most levels – I hoped we’d get back together, Elaine and I. Even when I met Mariella and she moved into the flat, even when Mari got pregnant and Angus was born, even then it was hard to envisage a future in which Elaine and Gerry and Roddy and James did not comprise a unit.

She’d been with Adam for four years. They got married last June at Culzean Castle. Roddy and James were Adam’s groomsmen. Mari and I were at the second top table, seated with Adam’s cousins and Elaine’s strident aunt who kept assuring me, in a loud sherry voice, that I would always be her niece’s true love. Angus cried through the speeches so I took him out, but even in the bar, jiggling the boy on my shoulder as I stole sups of Stella, I could hear Adam gamely including Gerry and Mariella (‘for their marvellous help and friendship’) in his vote of thanks.

I drove down the High Street. The billboards propped outside the Spar had the same headlines as the city.
GERS STARLET MURDERED
.
GANGLAND SLAYING
. But down here it was a feelgood story, the kind of thing that made you glad you lived in the boondocks, among the red pillar-boxes and crow-stepped gables, the spry retirees walking their terriers.

Inside the Spar, the papers were stacked on their racks. Billy Swan’s face grinned up from the tabs as if he knew he had finally made it. The boy who pissed away his talent, who blew his chance at glory, had got himself shot and killed, an accomplishment that put him, being also a minor functionary in a criminal syndicate, on four front pages. Who else had died in Scotland yesterday? What useful lives were overlooked, what deaths unmarked, so that this little prick, this no-mark thug who had courted his death, could enjoy his redtop ovation?

I bought a loaf and a carton of milk and drove up to the house, thinking about numbers. Seven. That was the figure to beat. Seven lives had been lost in the Sunbed Wars so this one would have to be bigger. The actual logic of the conflict didn’t matter, they couldn’t stop till the body count was up there, eight bodies, nine, any fewer would be a let-down.

The bell on my old front door gave its usual sardonic clank: one of the chimes was broken. I stood on the doorstep and nudged the loose tile with my toe. I’d never got around to fixing it and Adam hadn’t either. This house meant a lot to me, our lives had been good here for a while, but I wished Elaine had bought a new place when she remarried. It’s about continuity, she told me. At a time like this the boys need stability, familiar surroundings. I could see her point, but it felt as though everyone’s lives had carried on the same, only I’d been replaced, like the male lead in a soap.
Bewitched
with Dick Sargent instead of Dick York.

‘Dad!’

The door slammed back on its hinges as James launched himself at me. He buried his head in my belly, threw his arms round my back. Roddy hung back, his hand raised in greeting. ‘Hiya, Dad.’

‘Hey, guys.’

‘Is it snowing, Dad? Is it snowing in Glasgow?’

‘It is.’ The snow never lies in Conwick. It’s too near the sea. The Gulf Stream waters keep the temperatures up. There are palm trees in the gardens of the shorefront B & Bs. ‘Yeah, it’s lying.’

‘How deep?’

‘I don’t know.’ I measured a couple of inches between my palms. ‘About that much.’

‘Can we bring the sledge?’

‘Of course you can. Bring your togs too, we’ll go the pool.’

I made a coffee while the boys got ready. Elaine and Adam were still in bed. There was a new picture on the kitchen wall, a framed poster from the ‘Glasgow Boys’ exhibition at Kelvingrove: a wee girl in muddy boots herding a line of geese. I shouted through as we left and Elaine shouted to wait.

She came through in her dressing-gown, took the boys’ heads in her hands, kissed them in turn. Her face had the soft, slept-in look and her hair was unbrushed but she still looked good.

‘Heavy night?’

She shook her head. ‘Heavy week. Heavy life.’

I didn’t ask.

‘Can you have them back by six? Roddy’s got pipes.’