It wasn’t difficult to recognise those who had also been previous visitors to a jail. Without being asked, they dumped their travelling paraphernalia into the lockers, walked through the metal detectors and raised their arms for the pat-down searches. The real pros opened their mouths and effortlessly rolled their tongues around to prove there was nothing there but spit.
Like Bryan Gilzean, McBride sat back but not to think about liberty – nobody does until it’s removed. Just as he had done each time he visited the institutions where you automatically stop at every door because you know it’s locked, he reflected on how wretched the existence was for those who entered the Gate Complex.
Apart from two neatly dressed males who he knew would be solicitors, the rest of those on the benches in the waiting room were women, most of whom had spent the previous half hour trying – but failing – to look glamorous. Those who had forgotten the visiting routine could have saved themselves the trouble of tying their hair up. It would just be shaken out under the scrutiny of an officer who knew a ponytail could conceal a wrap.
The ladies who had come to visit evidently shared the same brand of hair dye and bought their ubiquitous denims and flimsy crop-tops in identical budget shops. Poor diets and drug habits ensured that those waiting to greet them would not have much to cling to in their urgent embrace.
As always, McBride experienced a surge of sympathy. He knew that, without exception, these miserable souls would have been forced to use public transport to travel to the prison. Even for those who lived closest, an hour with their man meant an entire day of waiting on railway station platforms and at bus stops. No wonder they looked defeated. They were as much prisoners as their menfolk and the only crime they’d committed was hitching up with the wrong guy.
McBride was among the first to pass through the search tables and, at the last door into the visiting hall, he found his progress halted once more. ‘Hold out your left hand, please, palm down.’ An officer, who might just as easily have been sitting behind a post-office counter, stamped an invisible mark on the back of his proffered hand. It was a new one on McBride. He raised an eyebrow.
‘This way we know who we should be keeping in or letting out,’ the officer, who had said the words a thousand times before, explained.
McBride nodded but silently he thought it would have made better sense if you’d been able to see the stamp mark.
He took his place at the numbered table he’d been allocated and, as he waited for all the other visitors to be branded, he ran an eye round the long room. Times were changing. Nothing was ever going to make a prison visiting hall look like anything else but someone with imagination had tried. At one end, there was the usual raised dais with its table and chairs for some of the supervising officers while, incongruously, at the other end, a wall blazed with colour. Its bright Disney characters marked a play-area for children where there was a blackboard and more toys than most of the kids who would use it had ever seen.
Trying hard and nearly succeeding to disguise the heavy steel bars of the only outside wall were a dozen paintings completed by inmates. The most impressive – and depressing – of the bunch was a large canvas depicting a group of prisoners who gazed unsmiling and flat-eyed back at McBride.
After the last visitor was seated, the door at the far end opened and the occupants of The Tank filed in, every one of them eagerly scanning the row of faces seated at the tables.
When Bryan Gilzean walked uncertainly across the room, McBride did not recognise him at first. The photographs filling Adam Gilzean’s house showed a young man with a round face, eyes that danced and more rich, dark hair than any male deserved. Taking the seat opposite and extending a hesitant hand was a figure who might have been Adam Gilzean himself. His cheeks had the hollowness of a marathon runner and the close-cropped hair showed spikes of steel that mirrored the pallor of his skin.
For five minutes they spoke pointlessly about the miserable weather as McBride tried to put his companion at ease.
‘All I could think of on the way up here was the warm weather, the freedom of the open road and me on my bike,’ he said, with all the sensitivity of a charging rhino.
But the tactlessness of his remark was lost on Gilzean, whose thoughts were elsewhere. ‘I didn’t do it, Mr McBride,’ he said, polite conversation gone and emotion suddenly filling his face. ‘Honest to God, it wasn’t me. I’m rotting away and nobody believes me except my dad. You do believe me, don’t you?’ His eyes begged for reassurance.
McBride was uncertain how to respond. ‘It doesn’t really work that way, Bryan,’ he said, doing his best to sound reassuring. ‘I’m just interested. The only thing I’m sure about is that your dad believes you. He’s the one who got me here. Maybe you’re kidding him. Are you going to kid me?’
This brought an unexpected but encouraging flash of something approaching anger from the haunted man opposite. ‘Christ! Are you another one of them? I’ve spent more than three years listening to that bilge. I haven’t kidded anybody. They’re the ones you should be interrogating.’ He slapped the palm of a hand on the surface between them and his voice rose loudly above the quiet hum of conversation filling the visiting hall.
One of the half-dozen officers who strolled the room, apparently watching nothing but seeing everything, moved swiftly to the side of the table. ‘Take it easy, Bryan,’ he said. ‘You don’t want this cut short, do you?’
The rebuke was unnecessary. The grey-faced man in the blue sweatshirt had recovered his composure as rapidly as he had lost it. He pulled slowly on his nose with heavily stained nicotine fingers. ‘Sorry, boss, just got a wee bit excited – no problem.’
McBride nodded in affirmation and the officer retreated, speaking softly into the microphone on his left shoulder. McBride knew that, for the rest of the visit, the person monitoring the bank of screens in the concealed room adjoining the visiting room would fix one of the six ceiling cameras on their table.
He smiled reassuringly across at Gilzean. ‘Look, if I didn’t think there was at least a chance you’re telling the truth, I wouldn’t be here. For that matter, I wouldn’t even be in Scotland. Keep calm. All I’m saying is that I’ve been getting vibes about this since your dad buttonholed me in Waterstone’s bookstore. I don’t even know why I feel this way. Convince me this isn’t a waste of everybody’s time.’
McBride was aware of the absurdity of the remark. If Gilzean couldn’t convince a jury, he could hardly be expected to completely win over a hard-nosed journalist inside an hour. Besides, how do you prove a negative? McBride appreciated he wasn’t going to get anything to take to a court of appeal – all he wanted was something to keep his gut feeling happy.
‘Why don’t you start at the beginning?’ He rested back in his seat and glanced up at the black-eyed cameras in their cages, wondering which of them was trained on the table and curious if it would home in for a close-up on Gilzean as he started to recount his version of the night that had brought the meaningful part of his life to an end.
It was an uncomplicated story. He had not been there. In fact, he had not seen Alison for three days previously. On the day which had been her last, they had spoken on the phone and he had told her he would not see her that night either because he needed to visit his father. She had not been particularly happy but had indicated she would pass the evening at the gym they usually attended together.
When Gilzean had finished, McBride asked him the obvious questions. How was it possible that his semen had been found inside her? How did his fingerprints find their way on to a wine glass? And how could one of his hairs be on the tie used to murder her?
The man with the pale, strained face sitting opposite seemed helpless. He looked desperately at McBride. ‘I ask myself that every night,’ he said. ‘We’d had sex three days earlier. Maybe the traces stay that long?’
McBride raised an eyebrow. ‘Not unless she hadn’t got off her back. What about the wine, the tie?’
‘I never drink whit
e wine,’ Gilzean said sharply. ‘Can’t stand it. I’m a beer man and, if forced into wine, I’ll only take red. Besides, I’d never seen the glass in my life before.’
‘You’re about to tell me you never wear a tie either, right?’ McBride said.
‘Only for special occasions. I am – was – an architect, Mr McBride, working in a small practice. It was very informal. Nobody dressed up.’
‘What about all the rows the two of you had? Pretty frequent, by all accounts?’
Gilzean slowly nodded his head. ‘I know …’ He looked over McBride’s shoulder. Into the past – remembering. ‘They were never as bad as they might have sounded,’ he said quietly. ‘We were passionate about things … just about everything. We got over the arguments quickly – usually in a good way.’ He was speaking more to himself than his visitor.
McBride eyed him steadily, lifted his voice to bring him back to the present. ‘OK. Two last questions. Did you have any other girlfriends and did she have boyfriends?’
For the first time since they’d met, Bryan Gilzean could not meet McBride’s gaze. He hesitated. Stared at the floor. ‘No – don’t think that was her style.’
‘You?’
Gilzean paused again. ‘Not really.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Nothing serious. Nothing steady. Just the occasional one-nighter. You know how it is …’ He looked away, embarrassed.
McBride knew exactly how it was but saw no point in enlightening Gilzean about his own sexual habits. He said nothing, just shrugged his shoulders non-committally.
‘Right, finish up,’ an officer’s voice called out from the dais. It signalled the end of visiting hour. The mothers shouted their offspring back from beneath the pictures of Goofy and the Seven Dwarfs and, at the tables, the women reached thin-fingered hands out to grasp those opposite, the need to make physical contact even more desperate. Some of those on both sides of the table struggled with tears.
McBride rose slowly, unsure how to end the meeting. ‘I’m glad I came, Bryan,’ was the best he could do. ‘I’ll kick it all around and get back to you.’
The pleading face looked up at him, a mixture of eagerness and uncertainty.
McBride said the word first. ‘Promise.’
‘Thanks, Mr McBride, thanks.’
On the way towards the door, McBride noticed for the first time that behind the barred windows and disturbing paintings there was an open-air, triangle-shaped visitors’ section with picnic benches and a play-area whose centrepiece was a climbing frame. It was standard height but, even if it had been close enough to a wall, it wasn’t going to help anyone over. The cold stone surrounding the unexpected oasis rose for fifteen feet and there was another five feet of razor wire on top of that. As play parks went, you were never going to have to worry about your children wandering off.
McBride reached the end of the room and turned, knowing that Bryan Gilzean, who would be kept at his table until the last visitor had left the hall, would have watched his every step. From a distance, the twenty-seven-year-old looked even more like someone approaching middle age. Oddly, when he raised an arm, the wave that came from it resembled the kind you got when you left a child in the school playground for the first time. It reminded him of how Simon had once bade him anxious farewells.
McBride held out his left hand for the ultraviolet lamp to reassure an officer he wasn’t an escaping inmate and waved back with the other one. Instinctively, he put his thumb up.
All the way back to Dundee, he wondered how appropriate the gesture had been.
14
McBride had turned off the coastal path that led from the river and was running towards the series of rises that would test his stamina when an unseen hand flicked a switch. Floodlights flashed inside his head and with the light came the blinding certainty that he had been headed in the wrong direction – not in the route he had taken that morning but in the course of his mind ever since he had left the frozen file room of The Courier.
The riddle of the missing section of the Bryan Gilzean murder trial report that had taken him up a succession of mental blind alleys and culs-de-sac was finally making some sort of sense. The sentences that had been excised had not been removed by a warped souvenir hunter – they were making a statement. ‘The bastard!’ he suddenly spat out, oblivious to the astonished looks from a pair of dog walkers. ‘He didn’t take something away from the library – he left something behind.’
The realisation that he might have cracked the problem that had swirled almost ceaselessly round his head for days took McBride completely by surprise. He had not even been aware that he had been wrestling with it at that moment. With the dawning came physical release. He subconsciously lifted his pace, lengthened his stride and pushed hard up the first, and steepest, of the short hills, feeling the urgency to somehow make use of the new information.
As he ran, McBride inwardly repeated the words that had become etched into his brain, though this is not unique. These activities happen from time to time and can be confusing. Care has to be taken to ensure a dispassionate analysis and conclusion. It wouldn’t be the first time someone got it wrong and it won’t be the last. McBride became convinced that whoever had taken the passage away from the filed newspaper in the Central Library was giving out a message. The more he contemplated its meaning, the more he began to wonder if the most important part wasn’t the opening five words – the ones which did not even form a sentence. He cursed himself for not having come to that conclusion the second he laid eyes on them. Unless they had deep significance, why leave them standing alone, sentence-less and otherwise meaningless? ‘Christ,’ he muttered, ‘they should have been in capital letters!’
McBride covered the remaining four miles back to his new flat faster than he would have believed possible. By the time he arrived, the volume of sweat that usually only poured from his body on warm, heavy days was dripping on to the off-white carpet of his bedroom, leaving a trail of damp stains. Instead of following his usual routine of stretching then showering, he hurriedly towelled his face and armpits while simultaneously lifting his mobile with his free hand.
He rang the offices of The Courier but did not ask for Richard Richardson. Instead, he requested to be put through to Cuttings, the department that every newspaper office cannot exist without. As he waited to be connected, he offered a prayer that Gwen Kissock was on duty. Long before the paper had invested in an electronic retrieval system for recovering selected news items, she had performed the same function as fast as any computer, especially when the story being sought related to crime. She was a human encyclopaedia and could have enjoyed a prosperous existence if she had been interested in television quiz shows on the subject. At the very least, she should have become a police officer. Happily, she had done neither and had remained as one of the paper’s most valuable but underappreciated assets.
She answered the phone and recognised McBride’s voice instantly for she had also been born with a ‘photographic’ ear. It had been more than a year since they had spoken – back when he had called her from London for assistance with research for his book. ‘Hello, Campbell,’ she said confidently, before he had a chance to announce himself, ‘what do you want this time?’ She could also be direct.
‘I just wanted to hear your dulcet tones once again,’ he replied with what he hoped was humorous charm. ‘It’s been more than a year and I’ve been pining.’ McBride could almost visualise her raising her eyebrows in feigned exasperation.
She replied, ‘Me too but not for you – just for some of the cash you’ve made from the book I wrote for you.’
‘That’s part of the reason I’m calling – to arrange a dinner date in the near future. But, just while I’m on, can you do me a quick favour?’
‘Keep speaking.’
‘Can you dig into that unique mind of yours and tell me if you recall any murders in the area where someone was strangled?’
‘Oh, is that all?’ she retorted. ‘Be
more specific. Male or female victim? Solved or unsolved? Timescale?’ Gwen was already pressing her memory buttons.
‘Probably female. Maybe solved, maybe not. Say, in the last five or six years.’ It did not occur to him that what he was asking might just be a touch unreasonable.
‘Thanks for the assistance!’ She stopped speaking to McBride for more than two minutes but broke the silence with occasional brief discussions with herself. ‘Let me think … no … yes … right … OK.’
Suddenly she returned to share her deliberations. ‘Don’t know if this helps but off the top of my head I can think of a half a dozen, maybe eight. Nine if you count a hanging of sorts that was probably suicide.’
She ran through her list. ‘There were three in Dundee, one in Perth, one in St Andrews and another one in either Montrose or Brechin, can’t remember which but it was in Angus somewhere.’
McBride was grateful but not satisfied. ‘Great – but do you have any more details?’
Gwen sighed. ‘The best I can do is tell you that I think most of them, but not all, were solved. I’m fairly sure there was no one in the frame for the Fife one and at least one of the Dundee ones.’
‘You’re a marvel. Can I ask one more thing?’
Before he could expand, Gwen broke in. ‘Yes, I know. You want me to look them up and supply you with copies of the cuttings.’
‘Christ, Gwen, on top of everything else you’re a bloody clairvoyant. What a woman!’
‘Yes, and I also have total recall of every conversation we’ve ever had and I’ve heard all that crap before. But you can keep saying it. I’ll dig the stuff out later today and leave it down at reception for you, OK?’
‘Brilliant. You’re a gem. Oh, just one other thing – last one, promise – if you happen to bump into Richard Richardson, don’t tell him I rang or what I was after. Will you do that for me?’
Lawless Page 6
