I lit a Café Crème and rolled the chocolatey smoke round my mouth. We watched a hotel employee in a puffa jacket clearing snow from the driveway. The rasp of his shovel on the tarmac echoed crisply in the brittle air.
Lewicki had been ‘my’ cop since my days on the newsdesk. But the fact that he was standing in this car park meant that he’d been Moir’s cop too. Moir had inherited Lewicki along with my old job when I got fired for the Lyons piece. I felt another futile stab of jealousy.
‘Did you know?’ Lewicki was asking. ‘You have any idea that this was on the cards?’
I shook my head. ‘Hadn’t spoken to him in months. Not properly. He was drinking, but you don’t know that’s a sign at the time. You just think he’s drinking too much.’
‘Enjoying himself,’ Lewicki said.
We smoked for a while in silence. The chill wind stung our cheeks and the cars swept past on the Glasgow Road and the thought we didn’t speak, the question on both of our minds, took that moment to assert itself. It shouldered its way between us like an ill-bred dog. Lewicki looked away across the fields and his voice when it came was sly-like and quiet.
‘You think he did it?’
I took my time answering, nodded slowly though Lewicki was still turned away towards the frozen fields. ‘Looks that way.’
His head snapped round, there was spit in little bubbles on his bared teeth. ‘I know what it looks like for fuck’s sake. Do you think he did it? That’s what I’m asking. Did Martin Moir kill himself?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No. I cannae see it.’
‘That’s the thing.’ Lewicki’s anger was gone, his voice had sagged, his features with it. ‘I can’t either.’
He dropped his smoke on the ground and a blackbird hopped over, stabbing at the fag-end with its yellow beak. Lewicki glanced to see how much of my Café Crème was left and then took out his packet again.
‘I keep thinking how he would write things.’ I poked the snow with a polished toecap, exposing a black slash of tarmac. ‘When something happens, I keep thinking how he would write it. Like this missing girl.’
‘The prozzy?’ Lewicki said.
‘Aye.’
Lewicki nodded. ‘You’ll be thinking it a lot more, would be my guess. Jesus, he’s taking his time, though.’ He pursed his lips. He was talking about Hamish Neil. ‘When was the funeral?’
‘Swan? Yesterday.’
That was the favourite time for reprisals. Revenge killings. You timed them to coincide with the funeral of the victim. The man is laid to rest as his killers are found in a car. Trussed. Bludgeoned. Shot in the back of the head.
‘You imagine Maitland waiting this long?’ Lewicki clicked his tongue against his teeth. ‘Maitland would have hit them before the ambo came for Swan.’
This was Hamish Neil’s fate, to be judged at every turn against the man he replaced, the man he ousted. What would Maitland have done? How would the old man have acted? Maitland had a name for being fast, for moving quick and bloody when the need arose. But he hadn’t seen Neil – his top boy, his trusted offsider – setting him up for the fall.
‘Not always the key thing,’ I said. ‘Speed. Slow can work, too. Slow and careful. Maitland been a little bit slower he might still be in the game.’
Lewicki spat on the snow. ‘You’d been a little slower he might still be in the game.’
Four years ago, before I even knew who he was, Hamish Neil brought me a tip-off, a photograph of Peter Lyons, the Minister for Justice, in the company of Protestant paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. By the time I’d chased the story to Belfast and back, I’d placed Lyons at the scene of a sectarian killing and fingered Walter Maitland as the UVF’s chief armourer. The minister resigned and I got fired, but that was all collateral damage as far as Hamish Neil was concerned. The big prize – the thing he’d aimed at from the start – was that Maitland went to jail, Maitland’s sons fled the city and Neil took over as northside boss. He’d taken Maitland out with a minimum of fuss. As it turned out, fuss was required anyway – there were seven men dead before Neil came out on top – and the question now was why someone who could go to war to assert his control was taking so long to hit back over Swan.
‘I’ve a tout down there,’ Lewicki said. ‘Across the river. The guy you met. Word is, Packy Walsh has gone to ground. Hasn’t been over the door in a week. It’s the waiting that does it. Neil should have hit them by now. The longer he leaves it the jumpier everyone gets. The waiting’s worse than the actual hit.’
‘Not if you’re the one getting hit.’
‘There’s that.’
We smoked in silence.
‘I missed you at the church,’ I said.
He studied the end of his cigarette. ‘Not a great fan of churches.’
‘Yeah? I’d have pegged you as an altar boy at least.’
‘I was an altar boy.’ Lewicki was watching the traffic, the lorries and cars on the Glasgow Road. ‘That was the problem. Saw behind the scenes, mate. Spoiled the mystery.’
‘What, did the priest try to—?’
‘Father Nugent? Naw.’ He snorted. ‘Naw, he was a good old guy. I just, don’t know, took the hump with it. St Christopher was the last straw. When they bumped St Christopher, that finished it.’
He tapped the ash from his Regal, took another draw. ‘We had a medal in our car, the old Ford Consul, hanging from the rearview. St Christopher wading through the waves with his big wooden staff in his hand, the baby on his back. My mum prayed to him every time my dad drove down to see his brother in Carlisle.
‘I took it as my saint’s name. At confirmation, like. Got a St Christopher medal along with my rosary. Same as the one in the car. Then Father Nugent gave it out at mass: it was all a mistake, he never existed.’
He frowned, remembering. ‘No patron saint of travellers? Fuck. I mean if there’s a saint for anyone it should be them. And the prayers? My mum’s, all the others, they just vanished in the air? I thought, fuck you Father Nugent. You can keep God and Jesus, all the saints. Mary, the bastarding mass. I’m sticking with St Christopher.’
‘And did you?’
He stuck two fingers down his collar, fished it out, the silver disc on its flimsy chain. He grinned. ‘Figure he needs all the help he can get.’
‘Aye. Him and me both.’
Lewicki’s smile fell. ‘Fuck,’ he said, leaning forward. ‘Three o’clock. Talk of the devil.’
I turned in puzzlement, half expecting to see the bearded ex-saint wading across the hotel car park, parting the smokers with a wooden staff, a wean perched on his shoulders. A man had stepped down from the fire-door, patting his pockets. An unlit cigarette in his mouth. Another man followed, bigger, black crombie, and stationed himself at the door. The smaller man wandered over, the ciggie drooping from his lips, and mimed sparking a lighter. Lewicki passed him his cigarette and the man lit his own off it, passed it back.
‘Jan,’ he said. Lewicki nodded.
He turned to face me.
‘And how are things, Mr Conway?’
I looked at him. He took off his dark glasses and smiled. The broad nose, the coarse skin, the wiry, black, receding hair, with a scurf of white at the temples.
‘I’ve been better.’
He nodded, blowing smoke. Apart from that glimpse in Ferrante’s it was three years since I’d seen Hamish Neil. He looked well. Broader, fuller, a little shorter than I’d remembered. He wore a black shirt and black silk tie, three-button suit. No overcoat. He rocked on his heels, tapping the ash onto the snow. The muscle watched from the fire-door.
Lewicki was coughing, doubled up. Neil turned to me.
‘Enjoy your Moët?’
‘I prefer Veuve Cliquot,’ I said.
Neil nodded, smiled at his shoes. ‘Sad day,’ he said. ‘Like fucking buses, funerals. That’s two in two days.’
Lewicki finished coughing, spat on the snow. He straightened up.
‘Expecting any more?’
Neil looked at h
im neutrally, looked at the mess on the snow.
‘Kind of up to you, Jan, isn’t it?’ He looked off towards the white fields, the black ribbon of road. ‘With all the specialised criminal intelligence at your disposal, you might have an inkling of who was to blame. Might want to make a move, take him off the streets while the tally’s at two.’
Lewicki hunched his shoulders against the wind. ‘You planning to boost it, like? The tally?’
‘I’m planning to stay safe, keep my business safe.’
‘Yeah?’
‘You can’t keep a thing safe, you don’t deserve to keep it.’
He was looking at me as he said this. Lewicki dropped his smoke and I followed him inside.
Mari was talking to Clare. She had moved over to Clare’s table and now clasped Clare’s hands in her own, leaning in close and talking quietly in that low, steady way of hers. Clare was nodding, in short regular bursts, looking up at Mari and then back down at the table. I passed our own table and kept walking.
There were no Islays. The barman had the grace to feign embarrassment. His vowels were the broad, open vowels of Ayrshire, not the spindly whine of the city. I was pleased. After all, I thought, it still counts for something, that twenty miles of moor between Mureton and the city.
I plumped for a Macallan. A man appeared at my elbow, one of the cousins. We nodded at each other in the whisky mirror and then a big flat hand swum under my nose.
‘Davey Moir,’ he said. ‘Martin’s cousin.’
I shook the hand.
‘Gerry Conway. Martin’s colleague at the Tribune. Friend, too.’
‘Conway, aye. Ronnie spoke about you, Martin’s dad. You were over on a visit at some point, few years back? Across the water.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Aye.’ He hitched his trousers, braced his hands on the bar. He shook his head: ‘Bad business, this.’
I tilted my whisky. ‘Can’t argue with that.’
The barman’s raised eyebrows loomed before us. Davey Moir passed him a sheet of paper with a large order on it and the barman got to work, calling one of the waitresses over to help.
‘His old man,’ I said. ‘He did well at the church. Bearing up, is he?’
Davey Moir glanced round at the tables.
‘Ronnie? The whisky’s bearing him up. The Black Bush’s bearing him up.’
There was a hard, jaunty note in his voice.
‘Well,’ I twisted my glass on its mat. ‘It’s not every day you bury your son.’
‘That’s true.’ He nodded. ‘He’s got a grand excuse today. It’s the past twenty years you’d wonder about.’
I sipped my Macallan. I could see Neve MacDonald in the mirror at one of the tables, snuffling theatrically into a napkin. One White Russian too many.
Davey Moir grimaced, shook his head. ‘Ach, I shouldn’t speak ill of him. He’s a good man. But weak, a weak dog. Been hitting the sauce since that business in Larne.’
He looked round as he said that, eyes narrowed, checking that I knew what he was talking about.
‘Shit.’ He was digging into his pocket, passing two twenties to the barman. ‘Sorry, I thought you knew. Ach, there was a thing in the early Nineties, an incident, Ronnie was a DI up in Coleraine. I don’t know the right story, he did something he shouldn’t have done. Anyway, they bumped him down to sergeant, put him back in uniform.’
‘Jesus. Sore one.’
‘Yeah.’ He took his change. ‘Fucked his pension, too. Look, this crowd’ll be thinking I’ve absconded. Better get back. Nice talking to you – Gerry is it?’
‘Yeah. Likewise.’
I helped him load up the tin tray. Three pints of heavy, a lager and lime, two vodkas and Red Bull, a gin and bitter lemon and a Baileys on ice. He’d hoisted the lot and was turning to go when someone bumped him in the back and he buckled forward, raising the tray like a judge’s scorecard.
The noise was like a building coming down. There was a stunned lull in which the round tray wobbled off with a hollow silver whisper and clanged against the leg of a chair. I looked at the floor. All the pints had smashed. A dark pool was spreading on the Black Watch carpet, a paint splash of Baileys striping my shoes. We looked like we’d been fishing, Davey Moir and I, fly-casting in our best suits, wading in a river to the knees.
Before he could react I gripped Davey Moir by the sleeve. His teeth were bared and the back of his neck was bunched in bristled folds but I held his sleeve and clamped my hand on his shoulder till I felt him subside. This was his cousin’s funeral, you didn’t want fighting games at your cousin’s send-off. The man who bumped him – tall, hook nose, late twenties – was apologising, he had his hands up and his fingers spread like a goalkeeper facing a penalty. Then his wallet was out, he was leaning across to shout another round, scooping bar-towels off the polished bar. He had long fair hair that curtained his face when he squatted down to help the waitress pick up the shards, mopping the carpet with the balled-up towels.
It seemed like a good time to bail. I collected our coats and we said our goodbyes. Moir’s father was drunk, slurring the words ‘Good boy’ as he clapped my back, though whether it was Martin or myself who had earned this commendation I still don’t know. Across the room, Hamish Neil stood under the crossed swords, leaning on the fireplace with a whisky in hand, as if this was his living room and we were his guests. He tipped two fingers to his temple in a slick salute. I kept my hand on Mari’s shoulder and stared straight ahead.
Mari drove. It was too cold to keep the windows down so I put up the heating and angled the hot air onto to my legs. All the way back to Glasgow the smell of hops and juniper rose between my knees.
Chapter Eight
Nearly two weeks later I was driving down to Ayrshire again, low winter sun in my eyes, Warren Zevon on the sound system; ‘Empty-Hearted Town’. The motorway’s three lanes were almost empty – it was two o’clock in the afternoon – but I held it at a Presbyterian sixty-five. Beside me on the passenger seat was a slim, buff cardboard folder and on top of that was a cling-filmed plate of muffins. This was what you did in New Zealand, Mari told me, for illnesses, bereavements, any kind of mishap. No species of pain that a traybake couldn’t assuage. There’s a book she has at home called Ladies, A Plate, which is what it used to say on party invites in Fifties New Zealand: ‘Gentlemen, a bottle; Ladies, a plate.’ I should have brought a bottle, I reflected, as a truck shuddered past on the outside lane.
In the fortnight since Moir’s funeral it had snowed without a break. By the time it all thawed out and a thin white sun lit up the smoking streets, Moir’s death seemed like something from a previous era. You like to think that you’d leave a hole, that your talents would be missed, but it doesn’t always work like that. Like a river closing over a dead dog: that’s how a paper like the Tribune meets your absence.
I learned that four years ago when they fired me over the Peter Lyons story. The Trib came out on Sunday, people bought it just the same. No one complained that my byline was missing, or took their copy back to the shop: What happened to Gerry Conway?
For two days after Moir’s death the newsroom was muted. The little groups at the fax machine and photocopier barely spoke. People pausing at desks were murmurous and cowed. But on day three laughter no longer seemed out of place and when someone upped the volume for the sports report on the lunchtime news, and someone else made a noisy joke about the Celtic result, we were back to normal.
After all, we had a paper to write. The stories didn’t stop. Death went on. The missing pro turned up murdered in woodland near Duntocher. The dead squaddies turned out to be Jocks – a Black Watch sergeant from the East Neuk of Fife and a private from Dundee – so now they would merit six hundred words, with quotes from the parents, tributes from the Secretary of State. A fatal stabbing at a flat in Cumbernauld held the front page for a couple of days when it was mistakenly reported as sectarian.
I had my own distractions, too. Angus caught a vomitin
g bug – it was diagnosed as rotavirus – and spent a week in the Southern General. He wasn’t in danger but we took it in turns to sit beside his steel-barred cot, Mari and I, stroking his hair and soothing his cries when the nurses changing his IV drip struggled to find a vein.
It was two weeks after the funeral before I thought about visiting Clare. What prompted me were the tributes. In the days following Moir’s death, an impromptu shrine grew up around his workstation. Photos, snatches of poetry, handwritten notes. The foliage of mourning. It looked like a 9/11 wall in New York. On the morning we heard of the death, someone pinned Moir’s byline picture on his partition. Someone else added a snap of Moir at last year’s Christmas lunch. Soon the dark-blue felt was buried under photos: Moir at the Scottish Press Awards; Moir holing out at a charity fourball; Moir in the Cope on the night of Rix’s send-off; Moir at a City Council bash, his arm round Gavin Haining’s shoulders. There were clippings, too, and a smattering of Mass cards.
I took them all down and put them in a folder for Clare. It looked bare and somehow abandoned now, Moir’s workstation. The cops had taken his computer away and somebody had commandeered his chair. A key ring hung on a hook Velcroed onto Moir’s partition, a purple hunk of plastic in the shape of a fish. I took it as a keepsake. Among the photos and clippings was a white postcard with a typed line of text:
Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you.
Luke 6: 26
I pinned it up on my own partition. I liked the sentiment. It wasn’t the kind of admonition I was ever likely to need, but I liked it anyway. There was another postcard, an old Victorian photograph: two lines of men, barefoot and bearded, on either side of a dirty street with a big hill looming in the background. I took it too and pinned it next to the first one.
The Mureton turn-off appeared and I flicked the indicator. ‘Welcome to Mureton’: every time I came back the sign was closer to the city. By now there was a good three miles of crescents and cul-de-sacs, semis of cheese-coloured brick, strings of matchbox front gardens and security-lit double garages that I refused to recognise as Mureton, and it wasn’t until the squat grey bulk of the Goldberry Hotel loomed on my right that I counted myself home.
Where the Dead Men Go Page 8
