‘Woo! Put out the bunting. I’m heading over the road for a swift one. Fancy it?’
‘This is a drink we’re talking about, right?’
She hitched her shoulder-bag, raised her plucked brows in mock outrage.
‘They’ve got laws against that sort of thing now. Did nobody tell you?’
‘Laws against propositioning newspapermen? I’m glad to hear it. I won’t press charges if you buy me a drink.’
The Cope was empty. Couple of subs at the bar. Joe had switched off the gantry lights and seemed less than thrilled to see us.
‘My shout, then.’ Neve was reaching into her bag. ‘You find a seat.’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
Every seat in the place was free. I walked along the line of booths, slid without thinking into ‘our’ one, second from the end. We’d spent a few drunken evenings parked on this red leatherette. This booth was also – I belatedly remembered – where I’d finished things with Neve, though she’d taken the news disturbingly well. I was wondering whether to move somewhere else when Neve came up with a drink in each hand. She set them down on the table, a White Russian, a Lagavulin, went back to fetch the little water jug. When she slid in across from me she raised her drink in a silent toast, took a greedy gulp.
‘Better?’
She smacked her lips, breathed a long slow sigh through a bright red ‘O’. ‘Getting there.’
She unlooped her scarf and shrugged out of her jacket and I did my best not to notice her breasts in the mint-green sweater.
We sat there sipping our drinks, like we did this all the time, like this was just a normal week-night in the Cope. In fact, I hadn’t talked properly to Neve for three or four years. It was only now, half-listening to Sky News, Joe stacking glasses, that I started to wonder what this was about. I looked around the pub. One of the subs was zipping his jacket, patting his pockets. Cammy Bell, the other sub, was emerging from the gents. He winked and gave me the thumbs-up as he passed. Was that what this looked like? Were we two colleagues enjoying a drink after work, or did it look like something else?
I shifted in my seat. ‘How’s . . . Ronnie? Arnie? Shit, I can’t even remember his name.’
‘Ruaridh!’ Neve laughed. ‘Oh, Ruaridh’s finished. He was more of a friend, anyway. Don’t worry, Gerry. I’m not going to jump you! Not tonight, anyway.’
I sipped my whisky. ‘You never know your luck.’
‘No, but there was someone.’ The grin was gone now. She tilted her head, looked up through the shadow of her fringe. ‘For the past year or so.’
I felt the atmosphere shift, a tightening of the air pressure. I gripped my glass.
‘So what happened?’
‘You know what happened.’ She held my gaze. The answer was there in her eyes but I couldn’t read it. Then her eyes filled up and she was rooting in her bag for her paper tissues. I should have reached across and gripped her hand but her words had spooked me and I froze. She looked so unlike herself. The Neve McDonald I knew didn’t cry. The hardest of tickets, the patented nippy sweetie. I had never seen her cry, none of us had, except – I now remembered, watching her press a tissue to her upper lip – at the funeral.
‘Moir? It was Martin Moir?’
‘I miss him, Gerry. I miss him so much.’
Jesus. I caught Joe’s eye and waggled my finger: two more.
‘Did people know?’
She shook her head. ‘My pals, some of them. But no one at the paper.’
‘Clare?’
‘Jesus! No.’
I went to the bar to pay for the drinks. ‘That’s your lot,’ Joe told me. ‘Bar’s closed. I wish I was, ho-omeward bound,’ he crooned softly. I nodded. Was this another motive, another reason why Moir might have killed himself? His marriage was failing, he’d let them down, Clare, the girls?
I carried the drinks to our table, slid into the booth.
Neve was putting her compact away, snapping her bag. ‘Are you shocked, Gerry? Have I scandalised you?’
‘Ach I’m sorry, Neve. I’m sorry for your loss. It’s a hellish situation.’
‘Yeah.’ She gave a clenched little smile. ‘The other woman. The home-breaker. That fucking funeral. Jesus, you ever felt invisible?’
Joe was putting the chairs up on tables, making plenty of noise.
‘So why are you telling me now?’
She started on her second drink. ‘Can I ask you something, Gerry? You think he did it?’
Christ. Not her too. I glanced at the bar where Joe was bringing the shutters down. I put a hand on top of hers. ‘Neve, people do things.’ Mari’s line came back to me. ‘It’s not a reflection on you.’
She took her hand away. ‘See, I just don’t buy it. I know, I know. Times like this, people believe what they want to believe. That’s not me, Gerry. I was under no illusions. I knew he was never going to leave Clare, the kids. I accepted that. I’m not sure we even loved each other, if you come right down to it. But I liked him. And Jesus I miss him. And when I saw him on the Friday night, the night before it happened – I can’t explain it‚ Gerry. It’s just something you know. He wasn’t getting ready to kill himself.’
‘Okay. Say you’re right. Why are you telling me?’
She finished her drink, shook the ice against her teeth, let the last milky drops slide through.
‘I’ve got his laptop.’
‘The police have got his laptop, Neve. They came into the office and took it.’
‘I mean it’s my laptop. An old one. Martin used it when he came round. He’d upload stuff from a memory stick. I think there might be something on it.’
‘You haven’t looked?’
‘What can I do? I interview soap actors, Gerry. TV comedians. Dickheads. You’re the reporter. You have a look.’
The fresh-foul smell of the Clyde gusted up as we crossed the road to the Tribune car park. I followed Neve’s Mazda across the river, along the Clyde Expressway. She lived in Yoker – it was on my way home, or near enough. A new-build brick tenement with smart steel balconies, little tables with folded parasols. If an earthquake should ever pitch Glasgow up in the South of France she’d be sorted. I parked behind her MX-5, hung back when she opened the communal door.
‘Oh for Christ’s sake come up, Gerry. Nothing’s going to happen.’
Inside the flat she tossed her keys in a dish by the door.
‘Through here.’
The flat was spare and tasteful. Bare floors. Original art. A little workstation was set up in a corner of the living room, a lacquered black computer table and a three-shelf bookcase. A dartboard was mounted to the wall above the computer; she was using it as a corkboard. Photos and leaflets were pinned to the felt.
She unplugged the laptop. It was a fat old Toshiba, with keys like Scrabble letters. It weighed about as much as her MX-5 probably did.
‘These are his, too.’ There were six or seven Post-its round the dartboard’s edge. She plucked them off, passed them to me in a pastel-coloured wodge. ‘Might mean nothing, I don’t know.’
I nodded. I made no promises. I stuck the Post-its in my hip pocket, wedged the Toshiba under my arm, set off down the stairs.
Chapter Eleven
‘Nice work, Gerry. Tight, clean, sharp.’ Maguire was nodding. ‘It’s all coming back to you now. You’re back in the game.’ She handed back my copy. I had written up the prostitute, the dead woman, Helen Friel. I was back on crime.
I wasn’t happy with this but Maguire didn’t care. With Moir gone my chance to handball the crime brief to some likely newsdesk sap had passed. The Friel story was mine. The Billy Swan story and its bloody repercussions would be mine. This on top of my politics brief, the referendum, the march to independence. It was too much. It made a hard job impossible. I put this to Maguire and she shrugged her folded arms. Exceptional times, she said. We were under the cosh, the Yanks slashing budgets left and right, it was up to senior staff to come to the mark. I was the top reporter –
she didn’t add, ‘now that Martin’s gone’, but we both understood that rider – and my business now was to lead from the front. I would be covering politics and crime, the big stories in either field, though I could draw on the assistance – I detected a flicker of irony here – of the newsdesk’s unpaid interns.
‘You alright with this?’ Wide eyes, tight lips, Maguire had her game face on, she was spoiling for a fight. I glanced through the glass at the bent, hushed figures in the newsroom, the smatter of empty desks.
‘I’m your man.’
On my way out I paused in the doorway.
‘Something else?’
‘Actually, yeah.’
I told her my idea. I wanted to spend some time looking into Martin’s death, try to figure out what happened, follow up some of his stories. Maguire frowned.
‘We know what happened, Gerry.’
‘Do we?’
‘You’re saying it wasn’t suicide?’
‘No. I don’t know. I’m saying it’s a bloody shame, Fiona. And we should find out why he did it, if we can. We owe him that much.’
She looked at me sharply.
‘Everything isn’t a story. You don’t have enough on your plate? You’ve just said it. The job’s big enough. Don’t make it more than it is. We tell people what happened, we explain things as far as we can. That’s the job. There’s things you can’t explain in seven hundred words.’ She ran her tongue across her teeth. ‘Why a man kills himself. You want to explain that in seven hundred words?’
‘Explain it in two.’ I said. ‘If you get the right words.’
‘Oh for Christ’s sake.’ Maguire’s lips had tightened. ‘Bit late in the day, no?’
She kept one hand on her laptop, the red nails splayed on the keys. Her glasses were clutched in the other fist, one black shellac leg poking out like a blade.
‘For what?’ I was still hovering just inside the door, hoping that the sportsdesk wasn’t within earshot.
‘Turning back the clock. Reliving your hot youth. When’s the last time you broke a story?’
‘I don’t see what that . . .’
‘Proper story. Something you dug out and stood up. Five years ago? Six? And now you want to get back into the swing of things by establishing, what exactly? That our Investigations Editor didn’t kill himself, as the post-mortem indicated, as Strathclyde Police believe, but was murdered? By persons unknown?’
‘There was money,’ I said. ‘Twenty-six grand in an account Clare knew nothing about.’
Nothing changed in Maguire’s face. ‘Meaning what?’
‘Meaning who knows. Meaning I want to look into it.’
The red lips split in a scoffing grin.
‘We’re not the fucking civil service. You’re not the ombudsman. We don’t “look into things”. We find stories and stand them up.’
I could sense someone at my back.
‘Knock knock.’ Jimmy Driscoll was behind me in the doorway, nosing some conspiracy. He gave a gulped little laugh and his eyes bounced from Maguire to me and back. He wore his feckless half-smile, cocked his head like a dog, a happy spaniel.
Maguire held my gaze and then faced slowly round to Driscoll; waited. He shrugged one shoulder.
‘This a bad time?’
‘What do you want, Jimmy?’
The shoulder slumped. ‘It’s Donald Kerr,’ he said glumly. ‘He’s in the lobby.’
‘I’ll be right out.’
When Driscoll withdrew, sliding a querulous look my way, Maguire tossed her glasses on the desk.
‘Oh for Christ’s sake Gerry sit down.’
She motioned me to close the door, kicked a swivel chair towards me.
‘How is she anyway?’
‘Clare? She’s not good, Fiona. I took the cards to her yesterday, the stuff from Moir’s partition. She’s upset. She doesn’t think he killed himself.’
‘The text message.’
‘She told you?’
‘The police told me. The woman, Gunn.’ Maguire rubbed both hands down her face, put her glasses back on. ‘What did you say to her?’
‘I said I’d talk to you, I said we’d talk. Even if it was suicide, we need to know why he did it.’
She leaned back, folded her arms. She nodded slowly as if in reluctant agreement. ‘I get it, Gerry. You were his friend. You feel bad. We all do. But who does it help? You find the truth, it was drugs, it was another woman. Clare’s going to thank you for digging that up? His girls? This can only hurt them. The truth can’t help.’
‘Can’t help the paper, you mean.’
‘That too.’ She glared at me over her folded arms. ‘He’s on a roll.’ She jerked her chin at the ceiling. ‘Niven. Wants to start an award in Martin’s name. The Martin Moir Award for Investigative Reporting. An internship too. You start looking for dirt, it helps no one.’
‘Unless he was killed. It might help then. Just a little.’
‘Well that’s what I wonder. See, I’ve heard this song before. The Fiscal’s wrong. The pathologist’s wrong. The DI from Stewart Street; everyone’s wrong except Gerry Conway.’
‘DS.’
‘What?’
‘She’s a sergeant not an inspector. The giant’s fingers, Fiona. And it’s not just me. Neve doesn’t think it was suicide either.’
‘Neve McDonald? The fuck’s Neve got to do with this?’
So she didn’t know about Moir and Neve.
‘She’s a colleague, Fiona. She cares about Martin. She wants to know what happened. We all do.’
Maguire spoke slowly, as if to a child, young child, a slow learner. ‘A note, Gerry. An actual note. There’s a fucking suicide note.’
‘Not his, there isn’t. A suicide text, Fiona. A text. Using text language, which Moir fucking hated.’
‘You’re worried about the prose style? The prose style of a suicide note?’
‘What else is there? He was a writer, prose style’s his fucking DNA. You at least should appreciate that.’ The wind was up now, I got to my feet, the chair toppled, hit the carpet. ‘Anyway, fuck it. You’re probably right. It’s just bad timing. He was going after Packy Walsh and next thing he’s dead. Nothing to see here.’
‘Gerry!’ The light caught her talons as she raised her hands. ‘Gerry, he’d been writing crime for the past five years. He was going after half of Glasgow. You know how many people had a reason for wanting him dead?’
I let that question hang in the air.
Her phone rang and she snatched it up. Her eyes locked on mine as she spoke, five or six words, yes, yes, no, alright, put the phone down.
‘You’ve got a plan, I take it? If I say yes?’
I righted the chair, stood behind it, hands on the seatback, shrugged. ‘Look at his stories, follow them up. Dig around.’
‘OK, Gerry.’ She held her hands up, palms out. ‘Go for your life. But you do it in your spare time, once you’ve finished your real stories. Alright? You’re not on holiday. And I’m not subsidising this. You bring a splash within two weeks or you drop the whole thing. Agreed?’
A gust of sleet smashed against the window, a sound like a wrecking ball. Maguire didn’t flinch, didn’t turn her head.
‘Appreciate it, Fiona.’
She stretched her arms, took in the view across the Clyde, the darkening sky, the dirty river. ‘It’s handy anyway,’ she said.
‘What is?’
‘Govanhill.’
‘You want me to go to Govanhill?’
Govanhell. Square Mile of Murder. Martin Moir country.
She frowned. ‘You think it’s played out?’
‘Played out?’
‘I know what you mean.’ She nodded. ‘Still, should get another splash or two out of it. Do some follow-ups, Gerry. Find a story. But keep the head. No Deep Throats. No grassy knolls. Happy?’
She was frowning at the screen now, keyboard clicking. I stood up. She was right. Already the blogs and discussion threads were loud with lurid guesswork
. Everyone had a theory about Moir’s demise. Five different Glasgow gangsters had been named as the assassin. Some of the posters fingered a drugs mule. Others favoured the UVF – Loyalists from Moir’s Ulster past reappearing to settle old scores. The cybernats leaned towards MI5: Moir had uncovered some deadly secret that would rock the tottering bulwarks of Union. There was speculation on the stories Moir was working on when he died. He’d cracked a paedophile ring involving top cops and cabinet ministers. He’d found the real dope on the World’s End murders. Bible John. The Lockerbie bombing. The wilder the claim, the more boldly it was pressed. I agreed with Maguire. The last thing we needed was more of the same.
But still. The best way to end the speculation was to find the truth.
Back at my desk, I filed my copy to Driscoll. Sat back, fingers laced behind my head. Sleet-streaked windows, the blurred city streets. The clouds had closed in, obscuring the hills and their dark wooded flanks. I thought of the dead woman, dumped in the woods. The dead prostitute, the redtops called her, as if the way she earned a living engrossed her whole identity. I thought of how Moir would have tackled the story, his line of approach. If he hadn’t died he’d have written the piece – The body of missing Airdrie woman Helen Friel was discovered last night in Lanarkshire woods. I felt sorry for her then, as if she was lonely in death, as if she’d been denied some last important rite. As if her death was not yet finished. They were equal now. Martin Moir. Helen Friel. Waiting mutely for their stories to be told.
Chapter Twelve
For the next few days I played at being Moir. I wrote the stories Moir would have written. They were stark and shocking and violent and true. After years of commentary and cleverness, after half a million words of ‘expert analysis’ and worthless insider opinion, it was nice to tell a story. As a Sunday commentator you were last to the party, all your facts had been chewed over by the daily hacks, you were sucking old bones that had lost their savour. As a political journalist, the people you wrote about were chewed over, too, with their tweets and blogs and podcasts, their suits and corrected smiles, their approved colour-schemes. Gangsters were different. Gangsters were mythical figures, rarely sighted, known by word of mouth and half-legendary acts. The photos that appeared in the papers – always the same ones; grainy, fuzzy, out of date – had a doctored, unconvincing look, like the long-shots of Sasquatch or Yeti. Gangsters were figments, bedtime bogeymen. In bringing news of their crimes you were the messenger on horseback, riding into the marketplace, standing in your stirrups to address the eager crowd.
Where the Dead Men Go Page 10
