An honest tiredness buoyed me up each evening, hanging on the oily chrome rail in the rattling car, stamping onto the great meshing teeth of the escalator, emerging onto Christmassy Byres Road with its puddled lights, its shuddering buses, its scarved and hatted homegoing crowds. At Clouston Street we drank Rioja and speared pesto-coated penne, listening to Steve Lamacq on 6 Music, taking turns to spoon Angus’s food or stoop to retrieve his dropped or slingshot plastic forks and spoons, his overturned beakers. With Angus down we often finished the wine and turned in early ourselves.
But pretending to be Martin Moir didn’t get me any closer to the nature of his death. The phone rang one evening as I lolled on the couch with my stockinged feet in Mari’s lap, Angus asleep on my chest and a broad-bottomed glass of Montecillo in my grasp. It was Clare. She was crying, drunk. Couldn’t we press for an inquest into Martin’s death? I told her it was a waste of time. This wasn’t England. Down south, almost every unnatural death, every suicide and accident, triggered an inquest. We didn’t do that here. A Fatal Accident Inquiry was a rare beast, it was ordered for deaths that occasioned ‘serious public concern’. Other than Clare, me and – though Clare didn’t know it – Neve McDonald, was anyone seriously concerned about Martin’s death? If we wanted answers we’d have to find them ourselves.
Later that evening I sat before the screen. Can’t believe you’re gone, Big Man. Sleep tight, Marty. You’re in a better place. Taken too soon. I scrolled through a dozen of the eighty-seven comments on Moir’s last status update, every ‘friend’ giving their own maudlin twist on his demise. A better place? The minister at the funeral had spoken of Martin going ‘home’. A hole in the ground? Six sodden feet of Glasgow mud? Some fucking home. I resisted the temptation to add to the comments or to ‘like’ any of these Facebook aperçus but I did take Moir’s old Toshiba down from the airing cupboard where I’d stowed it, plugged it in and booted up, entered the password Neve had scribbled on one of my business cards.
I was looking for the final piece, the story Moir was working at the time of his death. For years I had envied the stories Moir told, the tales of mayhem and death that seemed to land in his lap. People would come to him with tip-offs, titbits, overheard snippets. Even gangsters would seek him out; being written up by Moir became a hoods’ badge of honour. I remember one story, shortly after I came back to the Trib. A rumour got out that Frank McGreevy, Packy Walsh’s right-hand man, had been assassinated. McGreevy’s big rival was Jamesie ‘Front Man’ Leonard, a Neil family associate who had once dated McGreevy’s sister. Leonard was fresh out of Saughton, having served four years for aggravated assault. All the reporters were getting texts saying the same thing: McGreevy’s been topped; Jamesie’s chibbed him. One of the junior reporters jumped in a cab and headed south to McGreevy’s house.
Then a call came through to the newsroom: it’s Francis Xavier McGreevy, sounding a little put out. He wants to speak to Martin Moir. As Moir takes the call we’re all gathered round his desk, but he just nods and uh-huhs and then he snatches his coat from the back of his chair. An hour later, he saunters back, Starbucks in hand, and plumps down at his desk. He starts tapping out the piece, an exclusive interview, quashing the rumours of Frankie’s demise.
That evening in the Cope we got the full story.
‘I get to the house,’ said Moir. A large Talisker was slopping up the sides of the tumbler as he waved it around. We’d been buying him drinks all night and his face was slick with whisky sweat. ‘I know it’s the right house because the Beeb van’s parked outside and a Strathclyde chopper’s nearly sitting on the roof. Jesus, the noise these things make – you’ve no conception. There’s two heavies at McGreevy’s gate and they huckle me into the house, past the hacks and the cameras. Frank’s in his living room, large as life, watching the snooker. “Right,” he says when he sees me. “Keep your fucking eyes open.” Then he stands up and whips off his T-shirt, and twirls right around with his arms above his head. Like a fucking ballet dancer. “Do I look like I’ve been fucking chibbed?” Then – I’m not making this up, it’s the God’s honest – he drops the trousers and touches his toes. “Okay?” he asks me, his head at his ankles. “Fine,” I tell him; “that’s great.” “Okay then.” He straightens up and fastens his belt: “Now go and fucking write it.”’
Moir called it the shortest interview he’d ever done but McGreevy had got his message across. The rumour was he’d been stabbed in the arse and McGreevy was having none of it. After the story appeared, a parcel was couriered to Moir’s desk: twenty-five Juan Lopez No. 2s. He handed them round in the Cope the following Saturday.
That was classic Moir, but the piece he was writing when he died was a squib, nothing, a piece of shit. According to Driscoll, Moir had been probing a spike in sectarian crimes. The copy was on his laptop, in a file labelled ‘Sectarian’. He’d written the first five pars. He gave the stats – Hate crimes defined as ‘sectarian’ jumped by ten per cent to almost 700 last year – and he marshalled the quotes. A spokesman for the Catholic Church expressed alarm at the increase and called on the government to do more to tackle the problem. A spokesman for the government welcomed the figures as evidence that victims were coming forward and that the police were doing their job. It was bromide stuff – page six or seven at best, a flimsy wing under ‘Home News’ – and not even Moir’s metallic prose style could redeem it.
But this wasn’t the story. Like most Sunday journos, Moir kept the real stories back, held them in check till the very last minute. He’d feed Driscoll a bullshit schedule – stories he was supposedly working on, stories he might even start to write but would ditch when the deadline loomed. The hate crimes piece would be one of those. Moir had been working on something else.
Probably he kept them on a memory stick, the real stories. His laptop – the old Toshiba he’d used at Neve McDonald’s – wasn’t much help. As far as I could see, Moir’s stuff was in two folders, one that carried a few files of notes and a dozen archived stories. The other folder, called ‘Streets of Stone’, contained a few drafted chapters of Moir’s book. Moir had been writing a history of the Glasgow street gangs. The Billy Boys and the Baltic Fleet. The Toi and the Cumbie. The Penny Mob. The Parlour Boys. True crime was the city’s favourite genre. The bookshops on Buchanan Street and Sauchiehall Street have designated sections on hardmen and neds, intimate histories of neighbourly mayhem with titles like Fly Boy and Tongland and Square Go. The books have a redtop feel, embossed titles in scarlet and black above coarse-grained, monochrome headshots of hoods. Most of the city’s crime corrs have tried their hand at the genre, but Moir was more ambitious than most. Streets of Stone would have taken the story back to the nineteenth century, to the immigrant Irish brotherhoods and oath-bound secret societies, the Tim Malloy, the Village Boys.
But the story he was writing, the one that may have got him killed – that story wasn’t here.
The next night I stood on the yellow tiles on the Outer Circle platform at Ibrox station, hot wind on my face as the train thudded in. I counted off the carriages, took the third, found a seat at the far end, placed my bag on the seat beside me. Across from me was a girl of twenty in a green suede jacket with tasselled sleeves, the strap of a satchel across her chest.
At Kelvinhall the doors shushed open and I moved my bag from the seat. Lewicki sat down.
‘Twenty-six grand,’ he said. ‘Lot of money for a man in Moir’s line of work. You got something similar, Gerry, nice nest-egg of twenty-six grand?’
‘I’ve got a 2002 Subaru and a lottery scratchcard.’
Lewicki hissed, the sound he made in lieu of laughter. ‘What was he writing? You looked at what he’d done before he died?’
‘Nothing. Two-bob stories. Nothing to get you killed, let’s put it like that.’
‘What were they?’
I blew out some air. ‘From memory? Incidence of sectarian crimes, alarming rise thereof. Firebomb attack on the athletes’ village. I’m starting to wonde
r what the fuss was about, why we all thought Moir was the talent.’
‘That’s not a two-bob story.’
I caught the girl’s eyes, flicked up to the ads above her head.
‘The firebomb? It’s an act of vandalism, Jan. Zero-tolerance policing, very commendable, but this is not a front-page lead. They knocked the wheels off an earth-moving vehicle.’
Lewicki tugged at the knees of his trousers, fixing the creases. ‘Hard to move earth without wheels. Hard to prepare a site for construction.’
‘Knock-on effects, Jan, yes. Big news: no.’
We swayed in silence for a minute, bumping shoulders as the train took the corners and then the light of a station filled the carriage, Hillhead, the students packed together on the platform. When we moved off a row of straphangers stood in front of us, their backpacks and satchels swinging back and forward with the movement of the train. Lewicki leaned back, spoke out of the side of his mouth.
‘You heard of Bellrock?’
‘The lighthouse?’
‘The security firm.’
A hoarding came to mind, picture of a lighthouse, blue on a white background, lettering along the beam of light, the big ‘B’ tapering down to the ‘K’: Bellrock.
‘I’ve seen it,’ I said. ‘On signs. Hoardings.’
‘It’s one of Neil’s. It’s a Neil front.’
Neil had any number of fronts. So did the Walshes. Places they could rinse the dirty money, the drug money. Security was a favourite. Likewise construction.
‘There’s some buildings coming down on the athletes’ village site. They came to see us, the demolition firm. Manchester company. They hired an Edinburgh outfit to do the security. First day on the job, six guys in Bellrock vests march onto the site: We do the security here. Site manager comes out his office: Actually, no, you don’t. We gave the contract to this other firm. Bellrock guy shakes his head. Missing the point, he tells him: we do the security here – meaning here, in this part of the city, like it’s a hereditary right, passed down through the generations. Site manager’s a busy man, tells them to fuck off, he’s calling the police.’
Kelvinbridge. More students. The straphangers shuffled closer, squeezing together like the pleats of an accordion.
‘So they firebomb the digger,’ I said.
‘That’s the first night. Second night they waylay one of the guards on his way to work. Persuade him not to report for duty. Someone sets off a distress flare beside the site office. On it goes. The local cops pay a visit to Bellrock, warn them off. Next night it’s kids, wee boys of nine or ten. Climbing the fence, stoning the guards, lobbing bricks onto Portakabin roofs.’
‘But the contract’s been signed. They’re not going to tear it up and give it to Bellrock.’
‘This contract’s been signed. But this is just the demolition phase. There’s clearing and then construction to come. More contracts up for grabs.’
‘They’ll go to Bellrock?’
‘What do you think?’
The girl in the tasselled jacket caught my eye again as she stood up to leave.
‘But there’s no gangland angle in Moir’s piece.’
‘Gangland angle to everything, Gerry. It just hadn’t developed yet.’
We sat in silence for the next few stops. The train rattled into the station: the yellow walls of Ibrox. We’d come full circle. I shouldered my holdall.
Chapter Thirteen
I sat at my desk staring at my screensaver, a snap of Rod and James in Arran, milk-teeth grins, dunes in the background. Beyond the monitor’s rim I could see upriver to the Kingston Bridge, cars and buses zipping across it. I was waiting for Lewicki’s comments to make sense. If the athletes’ village story had a gangland angle, how had Moir missed it? Or if he knew about the Neil connection, why had he suppressed it? There were all sorts of questions to ask but they all seemed to circle round the big one, the question I’d been asking since Maguire called me to break the news. Asking and not asking.
Did Moir kill himself? Could he have done it?
I remembered something he told me more than a decade ago, not long after he started at the Trib. He was talking about growing up in Ulster, his dad a sergeant in the RUC. Every morning his dad lay down on the pavement to check beneath the car. He drove Moir to school along a different route each day. The threat of violent death was always with them, like the colour of the living-room wallpaper or the smell of his mother’s cooking. There were people who would kill his father for the job he did, the church he attended, for who he was. You might react to that experience in various ways, but I thought I knew how Moir would react. Moir would live, he would walk tall in the world, he would perform a useful job to the best of his abilities. That would be his rebuke to the would-be killers, the cowards in the shadows with their bombs and their guns. To take his own life would have been, for Moir, an act of ingratitude, an act of civic dereliction. He could no more have killed himself than he could have failed to exercise his vote at an election.
I roused myself and clicked on Google Maps. The USA filled the screen, green and brown and sectioned into clear-edged boxes. I pulled back, scrolled across the Atlantic and dropped down onto Scotland, homing in on Glasgow. Now the screen was a soiled, slushy grey, split by the black gash of the Clyde. I pulled back till some green appeared and then pushed north and east. It took a few attempts, swooping in and out, but here it was. A black hole, fringed with trees. Cars in the car park, paths round the edge. I zoomed in, closer and closer, as if I might drop straight through the glinting surface and root around in the murky depths but the screen came to rest on a square of inky blue. At this level, the glints of sunlight on the water looked like swirls of stars, an undiscovered galaxy. Moir had been down there in the blackness, in the interstellar cold.
I moved the focus out again and something struck me. Lewicki answered after eight or nine rings.
‘The locus,’ I said, ‘tracks? Footprints? What did they find?’
‘Nothing. It snowed overnight. Three inches. When the uniforms arrived there were no tracks at all, just their own and the climber’s. Blanket of white over everything else.’
‘They couldn’t wait till it melted?’
‘It didn’t melt, it rained. Pissed down all afternoon, churned it to mush. No way to tell if it was one car or three, how many sets of footprints round the car. Nothing. Fuck all. A blank page.’
I thanked him and went back to staring at the screen, the shirred surface of the water. What did this mean? Assume it wasn’t suicide. Assume someone – two or three someones – held a gun to Moir’s head and lashed him to the wheel? They couldn’t have counted on snow. They couldn’t have known that the snow would lie, that enough snow would fall to cover the tracks, that the rain would turn it to slush before it could melt. So was it suicide after all? Or were the killers just careless and lucky?
I opened my drawer and took out the wad of Post-its from Neve’s corkboard, the ones Moir had left. I unstuck them from each other and laid them out on my desk. There were six of them. The first three were lists of figures – they might have been prices or times – but there were two yellow squares with telephone numbers. Neither number meant anything to me. On the final Post-it was the single letter ‘S’ and an exclamation mark, and then ‘FC, 7.30’ underlined twice.
I put the two telephone numbers side by side and dialled the first one. Disconnected number. The second number didn’t even ring before a voice answered, foreign.
‘Speak.’
Just the one word. Blunt, dark, guttural. A thickness to the syllable, a suggestion of phlegm.
‘This is Martin.’
A pause.
‘Who is this?’
Not foreign, exactly. Not Scottish, but close.
‘This is Martin Moir. From the Tribune’.
‘You fuck yourself.’
End of call.
Fock. The voice was Ulster, maybe Belfast.
I phoned Lewicki, asked him to trace the number
. I had just replaced the handset when the phone rang. I snatched it up.
‘I’ve got the President for you.’
Kathy from Reception. Then the lull: who speaks first?
‘Hello?’
‘Gerry. It’s Gavin Haining.’ The voice like its owner: hearty, overbearing, smooth. Now dropping to a sympathetic bass: ‘I was sorry to hear about Martin. I truly was. I know you were close. Just a terrible waste.’
Was he in his office, I wondered? Standing at his desk in the chalk-stripe suit, looking out on the twin stone lions?
‘Yeah. Thanks, Councillor.’
‘I’d been meaning to call, Gerry. Partly to tell you how glad I am you’re back.’
‘Well that’s nice of you to say so, Councillor.’
‘No, I always looked out for your stuff. The city needs good journalists. Top professionals. Sunday’s piece on the Homecoming? Excellent. I said to myself: I should know this guy better. How’re you fixed for Friday?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Are you free for lunch? I meet up with some guys on a Friday. Good clean fun. You’ll like it. You know the Jarvie Club.’
‘By reputation.’
‘There’s an upstairs function suite: the Glasgow Room. I’ll look for you around one o’clock. You’ll enjoy it.’
Haining was ambitious. Fat man in a hurry, as Driscoll unkindly put it. Big things in the offing. The National Stage – only in his case, this meant Edinburgh, not London. Even a decade back, Haining would have aimed for the green-ribbed benches and the posh rhubarb-rhubarb of PMQs. Now, though, the up-and-comers saw Holyrood as the big gig. Haining was bound for glory, Labour-style. He would win the party leadership next year. The following year he would stand for parliament, hammer the Nats and take his place as Scotland’s First Minister.
Where the Dead Men Go Page 11
