Lawless

by Alexander McGregor

  McBride consoled himself with the thought that his seemingly illogical act had much to commend it. He was following his instincts and they rarely let him down – it was paying attention to these same instincts that had so often helped to put his byline on the front pages. There were also old contacts and new places in Dundee he could visit. Besides, the reality was that he was in no particular hurry to return to London after the way he’d left it.

  Sarah had moved her stuff out of the flat but she continued to appear on the horizon at inopportune moments. The rows had begun to last longer than any of the highlights of their short existence together. The only redeeming feature of the increasingly hostile exchanges was that she had not taken the threatened hammer to his pride and joy – the midnight-blue, carbon-fibre Trek bike which was capable of carrying him almost as fast as the speed of sound. Her restraint had almost certainly not been prompted by any compassion, he reflected, but by self-preservation. It was one of the few sensible decisions of her life.

  The more McBride considered his current state of affairs – romantic and otherwise – the more logical his decision to remain in Dundee became. Hell, it was even starting to look like a good idea.

  There didn’t seem an obvious starting point for the mission he was about to embark upon so retracing his footsteps looked as good an option as any. It was also the only one he could think of. That afternoon he called again at Waterstone’s.

  Gordon Dow was the kind of man any bookshop chain would want as its manager. He had conducted a love affair with books all his life and could put an affectionate hand on any one of the thousands of volumes on his shelves without having to wonder where it was. He was on first-name terms with every regular customer he had ever had and he received a nod from everyone worth knowing in the city – even those who didn’t read. But he did not know the man who had waited so patiently in McBride’s book-signing queue two days earlier. He had, however, spoken to him just an hour earlier.

  That was another thing about the lean, sensible-eating manager – he never missed a bit of drama in his own shop, no matter how minor, and he had witnessed Saturday’s exchange.

  ‘What’s going on with you two?’ Dow wanted to know. ‘You’re in here asking about him and he’s just left after enquiring about you. Is there something I should know about this relationship? Anyway, he’s left you a love note. Said I should give it to you if I saw you again and, if not, to send it to your publishers for you to collect.’

  He handed over a small brown envelope he retrieved from a drawer under the till. McBride tore it open and read the single sheet of paper inside, turning his back on the store manager who was unashamedly trying to read the contents over his shoulder.

  The message was brief and to the point – much the same as the conversation its writer had had with McBride on the Saturday afternoon. It read:

  Dear Mr McBride,

  Please accept my apologies for my comments when I spoke to you at the book signing. My son is innocent but I am aware his incarceration in prison has nothing to do with you. My rudeness was prompted by a sense of frustration. Forgive me.

  It was signed ‘Adam Gilzean’.

  McBride passed it to Gordon Dow who could read the page of a book in ten seconds. He devoured the words at a single glance. ‘So, that was Adam Gilzean – it makes a bit of sense now. He wrote to the papers practically non-stop after his son was put away. It was always about how the lad was as pure as the driven snow and was doing time for another man’s crime. If I remember correctly, he even tried to rope in his MSP to take his side – fat lot of good that was going to do, even with a strong case. But, with all the evidence there was against his boy, it was just peeing in the wind.’

  McBride stuffed the letter in a pocket. He patted the part of his jacket where it lay. ‘It’s well put together,’ he told the bookstore manager. ‘The man’s not an idiot. In his letters to the papers, did he have anything to say other than that he’d been with his son on the night Alison Brown was killed? If I remember correctly, when I went through the stuff when I was writing that chapter for the book, that was his main contribution at the trial.’

  Dow had total recall. ‘Nope. That was it,’ he said. ‘His son couldn’t have done it because he’d been with him. He would say that, though, wouldn’t he? What father wouldn’t?’

  McBride nodded in silent agreement. ‘What about the forensics? Do you remember if there was anything special that came out afterwards?’

  Gordon Dow did his best to shake his head and shrug his shoulders at the same time. ‘Don’t ask me. It was an open-and-shutter as far as everybody was concerned. What are you getting so worked up about it for?’

  McBride wished he knew the answer himself.

  ‘Have you any idea where Adam Gilzean lives?’ he asked although he was unclear what he would do with a positive answer.

  ‘No. I’d heard he moved to another house someplace but don’t ask me where.’

  McBride was on the point of leaving when Gordon Dow took his arm and led him across the floor of the bookstore. ‘What do you think of that?’ He swept an arm towards the main window of the shop.

  Two assistants were piling dozens of copies of McBride’s book on top of each other for a front-of-store display. Above them a large board proclaimed, ‘The No. 1 Bestseller’.

  ‘The figures just came in this morning. Bet that makes you feel good,’ Dow said expectantly.

  McBride’s nod could have been more enthusiastic. ‘Yeah,’ he replied, ‘but not as good as you lot who are making most of the dough. You won’t mind if I reduce your profits a tad by taking one of these?’ He picked a copy of The Law Town Killers off the top of the stack. ‘I’ve got some reading to do,’ he said as he headed for the door.

  4

  It didn’t take him long to remind himself of all the details of the chapter entitled ‘A Final Romance’. It was an unspectacular tale of two people in their mid twenties who had loved with a passion and warred with just as much fervour. You could write a love song about their highs and horror story about their lows. When they quarrelled, everyone in the same sombre blocks of flats in Clepington Road where Alison Brown resided and where Bryan Gilzean spent most, but not all, of his time, heard about it. Sometimes you would think the folk two streets away were probably tuned in as well.

  On Alison’s last night on earth, she had again shouted out in anger. Then she fell silent and the eavesdroppers imagined her rage had once more given way to sexual fulfilment – which was indeed an inevitable feature of their making-up scenario.

  It wasn’t until they read The Courier the following day that they discovered her sudden loss for words had not been the result of any loving embrace but a consequence of having been throttled. She had been found that morning by a friendly neighbour who had called to enquire if Alison would be interested in a shopping expedition later in the day. There had been no response to her knock and the neighbour tried the door handle. Finding it unlocked, she entered and walked hesitantly into the living room.

  Alison would not be going to the shops that day or any other. She lay, quite serene but very dead, on the floor beside the sofa she had saved up so hard for and which she had finally been able to afford a week or two earlier. Her pallor practically matched the colour of the soft white leather of the Italian-made settee but her make-up might have been applied just an hour earlier. Her clothing, in co-ordinated shades of terracotta and cream, was all neatly in place and she was still wearing her brown, strapless, high-heeled shoes. She could have been ready to welcome visitors – except she had long ago stopped breathing because of a tie which was knotted tightly round her windpipe.

  Before expiring, it looked like she’d enjoyed a drink. A bottle of white wine, with only two inches left in it, sat on a low table beside two glasses, each with their contents unfinished.

  Within an hour of the unfortunate neighbour’s grisly discovery, scene of crime officers in their white paper suits and masks were swarming all over the small
flat that was meticulous in its neatness except for the corpse on the floor.

  A post-mortem indicated that death had probably occurred around 11 p.m. on the previous evening – which was around the time her raised voice had been heard coming from the flat. Forensics were the clincher. Gilzean’s semen had been found inside Alison and a hair from his head was on the tie. The wine bottle had been wiped clean but his prints were on the glass.

  McBride continued to reread the words he had written some twelve months previously and found the subsequent arrest, trial and conviction of Bryan Gilzean just as inevitable as he had when composing the chapter. It was a fairly simple conclusion based on the facts and a view that was obviously shared by the police who had arrested Gilzean within hours and the High Court jury who took only fifty minutes to unanimously find him guilty.

  Apart from an abundance of forensic evidence, he had no believable alibi, was known to be hot-headed and was liable to be quarrelsome with a drink in him. And, on top of this, there were enough witnesses to testify how frequently the couple could be heard arguing. As homicides went, it verged, just as he had remembered, on the mundane – it was as uncomplicated for the investigating officers as it was undemanding for those who sat in judgement on Bryan Gilzean.

  He had been given the mandatory sentence of life in prison, with a recommendation that he should serve a minimum of fifteen years before being considered for parole. It seemed a reasonable enough tariff in the circumstances.

  McBride fell asleep. It was just a few days before Christmas and he was in a hotel room in Dundee when, by rights, he should have been occupying a warm corner of his local in Maida Vale. For the first time that week, he slept well.

  5

  McBride woke at seven o’clock precisely the following morning, as he did every day. He never needed an alarm clock, a call from hotel receptionists or their automated equivalents. He just woke at seven o’clock, no matter what time he had gone to sleep, who lay beside him or where in the world he was. He nodded his head seven times on the pillow and followed this by tracing the number seven on his forehead before turning over to go to sleep and he believed this routine was what caused him to rouse with such exactness. But, when he was too drunk to remember the procedure or so wrapped in a pair of delicate arms that such behaviour would have prompted questions, he still started each new day at 7 a.m. which was frustrating on the days he didn’t want to.

  It had an upside. Unless he had company and the option of other forms of exercise, he invariably pulled on his jogging kit and put in a few miles before breakfast, which was never much of an occasion for him anyway. McBride had a schizophrenic relationship with running. Even after doing it for a dozen or so years, he could not make his mind up if he actually liked it. He knew with absolute certainty, however, that he could not function fully without it. It aided his body, of course, but it was what it did for his head that kept taking him out in every kind of climate. He had a simple formula – the more there was on his mind, the more miles he consumed. Usually he found his answers before exhaustion overtook him.

  That morning, he fought with the wind all the way through the harbour area and kept on going, with the river by his side, until he’d passed Broughty Castle. Then he turned and headed back. Altogether, he covered ten miles but there weren’t any answers because he didn’t even know the questions.

  When he plodded back into the Apex, a small package awaited him at reception. The Jiffy bag bore the frank mark of Black & White, his publishers, and the handwriting was unmistakeably Janne’s. Without pausing, he slid it open and pulled out the contents. The first item to appear was pair of knickers, black, lacy and extremely brief. Janne’s sense of humour, like her complexion, glowed. She would have experienced a moment of blissful triumph if she’d been present to see the look on the receptionist’s face.

  McBride contained himself until he was back in his room before poring over the letter. Janne’s description of the anonymous communication was accurate. It was word and punctuation perfect and the computer-produced message was quite unambiguous:

  Your book may be factual, Mr McBride, but that does not mean it contains ‘facts’. Bryan Gilzean most certainly did not kill Alison Brown. I know this beyond doubt.

  If you are the investigative journalist we are led to believe, you should investigate more and believe the idiots in the police less. They are easy to hoodwink.

  My message to you is that it could be productive for you to review the ‘evidence’ on which you based your words.

  Of course, there was no signature. McBride folded the single A4 page and slowly replaced it in its white, rectangular envelope, the front and rear of which he inspected three times though he knew before he did so that it would be a pointless exercise.

  He also knew that, in order to ‘review the “evidence”’, he should begin in the building where, many years earlier, he had devoted endless hours to absorbing the kind of facts any would-be investigative reporter would require if he wanted to flourish away from his home town.

  6

  The walk to the Central Library in Wellgate filled McBride with an unexpected sadness. It took him only four minutes but, in half that time, he experienced the kind of feelings that had made him want to leave the town in the first place.

  For half the population it was boom time. They earned good money in the new industries that had replaced the spinning and weaving of the jute that had once been imported from India and Bangladesh, occupied fine houses and holidayed abroad, sometimes twice in the same year. Their offspring attended either of the two expanding universities that were beginning to acquire international reputations.

  But, alongside the throng of students who strode through the city centre to lectures or coffee shops, knowing where they were going for the rest of their lives, there were other young people with less to fill their time, less to look forward to. Skimpily dressed girls with pinched faces pushed baby buggies when they should have been attending school. Instead they were adapting to motherhood at the age of fifteen. They wandered aimlessly with one hand on the buggy and spoke to their clones on mobiles held in the other – all of them contributing to the statistics that made Dundee the teenage pregnancy capital of Europe.

  The largely unidentified fathers of the tots gathered in groups in the shopping centres, their acne, tattoos and earrings making them indistinguishable from each other. The only time the mothers and fathers apparently got together was to share a needle or produce another occupant for the baby carrier. Few of them worked or ever would.

  Except for the phones, it had been the same kind of mind-numbing existence for their parents. Most of those in the prams were assured of an identical future. In anybody’s language, it wasn’t going to be much. So much change, yet so little.

  Dundee had a heart as big as a football pitch but it ticked the poverty and deprivation boxes every time. Nobody took the blame and only the brain-dead believed the adolescent baby-makers were truly responsible for their plight.

  When he walked among them through the shopping centre on his way to the library, McBride felt the sense of injustice he had forgotten he had for his fellow Dundonians. Maybe it was his conscience about the lopsided forms of life in his home town that was inexplicably coaxing him towards the belief that there might be a different kind of injustice taking place. He was beginning to feel like a missionary.

  Was this what all of this was about – trying to compensate for some kind of guilt trip at leaving them behind? he asked himself. He forced images into his mind of himself cycling alone along a hot Mediterranean coastline, an easy breeze at his back. It was his usual technique for dispelling uncomfortable thoughts.

  The local studies section of the library was almost empty, save for three student types earnestly making notes from a tower of books in front of them and a prematurely elderly woman who’d come in out of the cold.

  ‘How can we help you, Mr McBride?’ The female librarian was neither so pretty that you’d remember nor so plain you’d
forget but, because of the size of her breasts, no one was ever going to describe her as ordinary. Her name badge, sitting above the more than ample chest, said she was called Elaine.

  McBride was surprised by how she’d phrased her question. Even his old classmates would have had trouble recognising him after so long. Then he remembered that those who worked in libraries also read papers, especially when the news was about people who wrote books.

  ‘If it isn’t too much trouble, can you point me in the direction of the old, filed copies of The Courier?’ McBride replied, not sure if he should acknowledge the recognition or give her one of his practised lines. He decided to do neither and instead tried to smile modestly, an unfamiliar experience.

  When he pored over the files moments later, he resisted the temptation to begin reading the news that had happened more than three years earlier. People had been known to spend entire afternoons devouring column after column of historic events when all they had wanted was to confirm what the weather had been on a particular day.

  He leafed his way quickly through the dry, yellowing pages of the paper until he came to the issue chronicling the report of the High Court trial of Bryan Gilzean. It could not have been more ordinary and was exactly as he had remembered it when he had ploughed through a Courier of the same date many months earlier, in the Colindale branch of the British Library in London, when preparing the chapter about the killing of poor Alison Brown.

  He read the report of the first day of the proceedings three times to be sure he had not missed anything and repeated the process for the second day. Unless you counted an unexpectedly risqué photograph of the winner of the annual Forfar Young Farmers’ Club beauty princess competition on the opposite page, nothing jumped, or even crept, out at him. He wondered if there was much point scrutinising the happenings of the third and final day of the decidedly routine trial of Bryan Gilzean but turned the pages to it anyway.