Where the Dead Men Go

by Liam McIlvanney

  *

  Haining’s Friday Club. It was a city institution, a kind of weekly freemasonry of the great and good, a bun-fight for Haining’s favourites. The Trib’s diary pages often ran items on the quantities of claret or Loch Fyne oysters or Carradale lobsters shifted at each of these sessions. Moir had been part of it. Now with Moir dead there was a vacancy, a berth for a tame hack, and I was the beneficiary.

  Cui bono. Who else would benefit from Martin Moir’s death? Moir’s enemies – or at least the people who wanted him stopped – were everywhere. The people he exposed were the hoods and gangsters, but in some people’s eyes he exposed us all. They were lining up to complain: the councillors, the CEOs, the tourist chiefs. Moir was letting the side down, blackening the city’s name. Every other Sunday some civic patriot would be shaking his head in our letters page, dismayed that the efforts of so many dedicated, hard-working people to restore the city’s image were being thwarted by the antics of slipshod hacks. The implication was always that the Tribune – venerable, staid, the journal of record – needn’t stoop to such tactics, though the truth was that Moir was the paper’s last chance.

  For a time the letters had a certain plausibility. You couldn’t live in Glasgow through the Nineties and not feel that the place had changed, that the city had shed its skin of soot and been born anew in a blaze of yellow sandstone. The glassy towers round Charing Cross, the Concert Hall on Buchanan Street, the Versace store in the Italian Centre: they hoisted us clear of the past. Riding upwards on the escalator in Princes Square you could feel that you had left it all behind, the gangs and the grime, the ice-cream wars, the maudlin squalor.

  Then Walter Maitland went to jail. The papers had half-forgotten his existence, but Maitland controlled the supply and distribution of heroin and coke to the city’s northside and the East End. The gangs hadn’t disappeared; it just looked that way because Walter Maitland’s grip was so tight. But with Maitland gone, it fell apart. His weak sons floundered. His successor, Hamish Neil, couldn’t boss his troops. The bested rivals, the skulking outfits on the edge of Maitland’s empire saw their chance. The Walshes came out swinging. It was a free-for-all. There were shootings in pub car parks. Bodies dumped in the Forth-and-Clyde, firebombs in tanning salons. Over a single summer seven murders landed on the desks of the Strathclyde CID, all of them involving persons of interest to the Scottish Crime and Drugs Enforcement Agency.

  The chaos didn’t last. Once Neil found his grip, purging his dissidents and crossing the river to hit at the Walshes, then the city settled down to a simmering feud. And while no one mistook this for peace, the boosters and the image-makers, the tourist chiefs and city councilors crawled out from their holes to have a go at Moir. Still, it was hard to envisage the Hoteliers’ Association or the City of Glasgow Marketing Bureau putting a contract out on Martin Moir. If Moir was killed, there was a shopping list of hoods who might have done the deed. If he was killed.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘Legs. I never understood that expression. “It’s got great legs.” You hear it on the food shows. But this one does. Look, you can see it.’ He swirled the glass, held it to the light: viscous drips in a string round the rim. ‘Beautiful.’

  ‘The French call it tears,’ I said. ‘The tears of the wine.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  He took a healthy pull and set down his glass. He smiled. I had my notebook on the table, my Sony UX.

  ‘Thanks for meeting me.’

  ‘Thanks for buying me lunch.’

  We were in the courtyard restaurant at the Ubiquitous Chip. Cobbled floors and foliage; vines and tendrils trailing from the latticework. Behind Drew Cruickshank was a roughstone water-feature, swathed in ferns and verdure, great waxy leaves. It looked like he’d just stepped out of the rainforest in a Jaeger sports jacket, toting a glass of Australian red.

  Drew Cruickshank was a forensic pathologist, recently retired from the Scottish Police Services Authority. I got his number from Lewicki. I’d told him some of the details on the phone, and of course he’d read the papers. But now, amid the napery and marble-topped tables and hum of lunchtime gossip, with the waiter tipping another half-inch of shiraz into Cruickshank’s glass, the idea that a Glasgow Tribune journalist had been murdered by gangsters began to seem like a preposterous fantasy. I could feel my skin pinken at the prospect of having to talk this through and I was glad when our conversation meandered from Saturday’s football results to the likelihood of a ‘Yes’ vote in the referendum. But when the waiter collected the soup plates Cruickshank resettled his napkin and planted his elbows on the table.

  ‘There are easier ways to do it,’ he was saying. ‘Your faked suicide. A fall. A hanging. Much easier ways to fake a suicide.’

  I nodded. He was right. It wasn’t faked, just a suicide, it was stupid to have thought otherwise. I sipped my wine. Cruickshank frowned.

  ‘Suicide’s the pathologist’s finding?’

  ‘It is,’ I said. ‘We haven’t seen the report yet but Clare – the widow – has requested a copy. The pathologist thinks it’s suicide. The Fiscal’s happy, cops are happy.’

  ‘But you’re not.’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think he was planning to kill himself.’

  He nodded, weighing this up. ‘Ask you something, Gerry?’ Cruickshank steepled his fingers, tapped them against his lips. ‘What does he look like, a man who is planning to kill himself?’

  I shrugged, took a sip, waited for enlightenment.

  ‘He looks like you. He looks like me.’ Cruickshank craned round, nodded at a white-shirted waiter squeezing between tables‚ ‘He looks like him.’

  The waiter caught the gesture, appeared at the table.

  ‘Yes, gents?’

  I pointed at Cruickshank. ‘He was saying you look like you’re about to kill yourself.’

  The waiter looked at Cruickshank, back at me, eyes narrowed, waiting for the joke.

  ‘Well,’ he said, nodding slowly, ‘could depend on your tip. You might want to factor that in. Man’s life in the balance.’

  ‘We’ll bear that in mind.’

  Cruickshank was smiling. He looked too spry and unlined to be retired, late fifties at most. Maybe carving up cadavers kept you young.

  ‘Had he spoken about suicide?’

  ‘Not to me.’

  ‘You’re a journalist, you know the suicide rate in Scotland. Young males. Twice what it is in England. Occam’s razor, Mr Conway. Are you making this more complex than it is? Oh, lovely.’

  The waiter was here with the mains. We both ordered the lamb and it came with lightly browned dauphinoise and waxy cabbage, a bright ring of redcurrant jus.

  ‘Humour me,’ I said.

  He sat up straight when the waiter leaned across to give the pepper-grinder three sharp twists then his elbows were back on the table. He shuffled in his seat.

  ‘Okay. You’re planning to murder someone,’ he said, ‘by tying them to their steering-wheel and submerging their vehicle. You want it to look like suicide. First question—’ he jabbed his knife at me: ‘how do you get them into the car, tie them to the wheel?’

  ‘You drug them?’

  ‘No you don’t. The drugs will show up in the post-mortem.’

  ‘You pull a gun on them.’

  ‘Better.’ He nodded, playing out the scenario. ‘You could force the victim into the car at gunpoint, then apply the ligatures. This car was manual?’

  ‘Automatic.’

  ‘OK, then you have the car in drive with the handbrake on. Once the victim is secured you release the handbrake and close the doors. Naturally the victim will apply the footbrake but even if he keeps switching feet he can’t do this forever. The muscle will eventually relax and then . . .’ He put down his knife, slid his hand across the tablecloth and over the edge.

  His glass was empty. I filled it.

  ‘How would you do it?’ I asked. ‘Supposing it was you.’

  ‘Hit th
em on the head,’ he said simply. ‘Stun them. If the post-mortem shows a head trauma, this could be explained by the impact when the car entered the water. No one knows if the victim died from the head-wound or drowned.’

  Cruickshank seemed unduly pleased by this. He cubed his lamb with dainty strokes of the knife, speared one of the pink squares, puddled it in the pooling blood.

  ‘But the seat-belt,’ I said. ‘You’d need to make sure he wasn’t wearing his seat-belt so his head could hit the windscreen when the car hit the water.’

  ‘Not so.’ Cruickshank jerked his head sharply to the side. ‘Not hard to smack your skull on the driver’s-side window in a sudden impact. Particularly if falling from a height.’

  ‘But the autopsy would tell you anyway, wouldn’t it? If he drowned or not?’

  He shook his head, held up his hand while he finished chewing.

  ‘The post-mortem. No.’ He swallowed with some difficulty and slugged some red. ‘Not necessarily. Not always easy to spot a drowning. You’ve got your body in the water. You’re trying to establish, was the victim alive when he entered the drink? Or did someone bash him on the head before he went in? The problem you’ve got is that the signs are exactly similar. In a drowning, you’d look for froth in the airways, froth round the nose and mouth.’ His finger-ends fluttered round his goatee beard. ‘But you get that with a blow to the head. Or you might look for fluid on the lungs; again, that’s a symptom of head trauma. Haemorrhage in the ears, it’s the same story: you get it in drownings, you get it in head injuries.’

  ‘So there’s no way to tell them apart?’

  Cruickshank frowned, tilted his glass in the light.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. It’s hard to be certain but you look for certain things. Like water in the stomach. Is there a large amount of water in the stomach? If so, they were alive when they hit the water. Very little water, then they’ve either drowned pretty quickly or, more likely, they were dead when they went in.’

  ‘What else?’

  He was chewing again. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Water in the stomach. What else would you look for?’

  He dabbed his beard with the napkin. ‘In your example? The deceased’s wrists are bound to the steering wheel?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Lacerations to the wrists where the cords bit in. Also, bruising around the shoulders, neck and chest. Ruptured muscles. He’s thrashing around, tearing these muscles, it means he was breathing when he hit the water.’

  ‘And if there’s no bruising in those areas?’

  ‘Then he’s either very Zen about his predicament, or else he’s unconscious when they put him in the car. This really is very good; you’re sure you won’t?’

  ‘I’m fine. Thanks. You’ve been very helpful.’

  I clicked off the UX, stowed it my pocket with the notebook. Cruickshank was leaning back, watching me with narrowed eyes, hint of a smile.

  ‘You wrote that story,’ he said. ‘Last month. The football field.’

  I nodded. He was waiting for the inside dope, the word on who might be next, where Neil would hit back. I drained my water, stood up to go.

  ‘Will there be any – any developments, do you think?’

  ‘Oh that story will run.’ I looked at the glass he was holding by the bowl, its contents astir. ‘That story’s got legs.’

  I left him nursing the last of the Bobbie Burns Shiraz. At the till, waiting to pay, I spotted the waiter standing at the serving hatch. He held his hand above his head, tugged on an invisible rope, dropped his chin onto his shoulder, tongue lolling. I took a twenty from my wallet, held it up, dropped it in the tips jar. The waiter patted his heart, smiled.

  Ashton Lane. Snow falling in lazy flakes, edging the cobbles in white. A boy being towed along by his mum had his tongue out trying to catch a snowflake. Round the corner a busker with a banjo segued from ‘Blue Christmas’ into ‘Fairytale of New York’. I texted Lewicki – Inner Circle, 20 mins? – and jouked into the Curler’s for a pint of IPA. The text chimed back in a minute: Done.

  At Hillhead station I bought a single, rode the escalator down to the platform, boarded the Inner Circle train. I texted Lewicki again: middle carriage. I wasn’t sure what I’d learned from Cruickshank. If Moir was dead – or even unconscious – before the car hit the water then he’d probably been murdered. The proof would be an absence of bruising round his upper body, and a shortage of water in the stomach. But would the post-mortem even show this? Would an examiner bother recording an absence? And even if Moir did drown, it didn’t mean he wasn’t murdered. Someone pulls a gun. They threaten to kill his family if he doesn’t get into the car. They stun him with a blow to the head. It wasn’t hard to imagine.

  Lewicki came on at Partick. I told him what Cruickshank had told me and then we got onto the police investigation.

  ‘You don’t think they dropped it a bit quick?’

  Lewicki leaned into me as the train took the curve before Govan. I felt him shrug.

  ‘What’s her name, the DS: Gunn?’

  ‘Gunn, yeah. The sidekick’s Lumsden. One minute it’s a murder investigation. Next thing it’s suicide. Done and dusted, no loose ends.’

  We straightened up as the train came out of the bend and slowed for the station.

  ‘It was never formally a murder investigation, Gerry.’ Lewicki spoke low now that the train had stopped. A woman with a guitar case got on and sat across from us. ‘Murder was one possibility. They couldn’t rule it out. Not at that stage.’

  ‘And a text is enough? They rule out murder on the basis of a single text message?’

  The warning beeps sounded and the door closed again and the train hauled off into the dark.

  ‘Well, what else do they go on? There’s no sign of a struggle. He’s got water in the lungs. There’s no other footprints at the locus, no tyre-tracks. There’s nothing to say that Moir wasn’t alone.’

  ‘But it snowed,’ I said. ‘Then it rained. You said it yourself.’

  ‘Yeah, okay. It snowed and rained. But you go with the evidence that’s there, Gerry. Not with the evidence that might have been there.’

  There was no answer to that. The blackness smacked past the carriage windows and the woman with the guitar case studied the adverts over our heads. Lewicki shook his head. ‘It happens, Gerry. It’s happened before. Ninety-seven, ninety-eight, up in the North-East. A guy tied his hands to the wheel, a solicitor. Drove into Fraserburgh harbour. Straightforward suicide.’

  ‘Straightforward? You drive a car into a fucking harbour?’

  Lewicki clicked his tongue. ‘You know what I mean. Clear-cut. Unambiguous. Plus Gunn’ll be under pressure to wrap it up, move on. There’s new priorities.’ He tugged at the cuff of one of his gloves, flexing the fingers. ‘This Swan thing.’

  ‘Billy Swan? Gangsters killing each other? I thought the principle there was let them get on with it.’

  ‘It is. By and large. But in a public park, civilians around? Come on, Gerry. Plus there’s other factors. Panorama’s doing a programme on Glasgow gangs. The scourge of the city, what are the cops doing about it? Network’s showing it later this month. Brass are shitting themselves.’

  ‘They want to look busy?’

  ‘Expect to see press conferences. Expect the word “taskforce” to figure prominently. “Crackdown.” “Taking the fight to the criminals.” All that shit. There’s the hoor, too, don’t forget. Out in Duntocher.’

  I turned to look at him. He held up a hand. ‘The hooker. The fucking sex professional. It’s still open’s what I’m saying.’

  The woman with the guitar stood up, moved to the exit.

  ‘So’s Moir,’ I said. ‘As far as I’m concerned.’

  We sat in silence for a couple of stops. As we pulled out of Bridge Street Lewicki shifted in his seat.

  ‘You’re saying what – they’ve been told to drop the case? It’s a conspiracy?’

  ‘He didn’t send the text, Jan.’

>   ‘It came from his phone.’

  ‘He ever text you? He ever send you any texts?’

  ‘Moir? Aye. Some.’

  ‘He use those abbreviations? L8r. M8?’ I drew the figure in the air. ‘Like a twelve-year-old boy?’

  ‘Not just twelve-year-olds.’

  I looked at him. He shrugged. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He didn’t.’

  ‘He never sent it, Jan. He never sent that text.’

  *

  That evening I read the first chunk of Moir’s book‚ from the nineteenth century up to the Thirties, the Billy Boys and the Norman Conks, running battles in Cumberland Street, faces slashed with open razors. I wondered what he saw in it all, what drew him to spend his leisure time with the shades of long-dead hoodlums. Perhaps it was the honest criminality. There were Protestant gangs and Catholic gangs in Glasgow, but it wasn’t like Belfast. Politics was kept to a minimum here. The gangs didn’t have a cause beyond the next attempt on a wages van or a sub-post office. And maybe, too, it was distance. Eighty years down the pike it all seemed innocent fun. Cops and robbers. You could fall in love with the extravagant nicknames. You didn’t have to think about the stink of shit in tenement rooms, the punched women, lice in the walls, the shilpit weans in their soiled box-beds.

  There was a soft crash behind me, then another. Angus was pulling books from the shelves, books with flaps and tabs, picture books, books with textured sections on their pages, the velvet of a horse’s nose, the pink sponge rubber of a pig’s snout, the tacky transparent gel of a beagle’s tongue. The ones he didn’t want were thudding onto the carpet. When he’d made his selection of five or six he carried them over one by one and slapped them down on the couch beside me. He hauled himself onto my knees and plunked himself down on my lap. I lifted a book.