The Man with No Face

by Peter Turnbull

  He continued up the stair, a simple plaster-covered close, painted maroon up to chest height then a solid black line above the maroon about two inches wide and then cream coloured above that. Both the cream and the maroon attracted graffiti, ‘Fenian Drummie’, ‘Screw the Pope’, as well as, Abernethy noted, the inevitable sexual obsessions, all written in black felt-tip. The doors on the close had two, three, occasionally four mortise locks and wired frosted glass set in the door. The names of the occupants were written on nameplates screwed to the door above the letter box—sometimes the name was written on paper and sellotaped to the door, sometimes it was written in pencil on the cream painted plaster beside the door and sometimes there was just no name at all. In Easterhouse, as in all schemes, there are stairs and there are stairs. Abernethy knew that. And he saw that 254, Balcurvie Street just was not a moneyed stair and he also sensed that the folk on this stair lived in a state of fear and siege behind their front doors. The Indian country, the shark-infested waters, the no man’s land, stopped and started at the front doors of this stair, and Abernethy knew just what sort of flat he was calling on. He wasn’t disappointed.

  The door was splintered about the locks, though reassuringly, the splintered wood had faded with age. If someone had tried to kick this door in then they had done so some time ago. They hadn’t done it the previous night and it was doubtful, thought Abernethy, that anyone would attempt to kick it in tonight. It was likely to be the battle scar of an old dispute. The fiery-tempered Scot may demonstrate a passion that can frighten an Englishman, but once disputes between Scots are over, it seemed to Abernethy, they remain over. Unlike the simmering grudges of Yorkshire people which can be passed from generation to generation, which Abernethy had once observed. Two men had fought in the main street of a pit village near Sheffield because the grandfather of one had supported the General Strike and the grandfather of the other had been a strike-breaker. Abernethy, passing through on his way back to Scotland, had witnessed the incident. The reason for the fight was explained to him by another onlooker in an accent Abernethy could barely understand and in a matter-of-fact manner which revealed no surprise at all in respect of the reason for the fight. This, Abernethy, as a Scot, had found to be as frightening in its way as was an Englishman’s fear of a Scotsman’s temper.

  The door, of a modest two locks, the least number of locks of any door on the stair so far as Abernethy could tell, boasted a nameplate: ‘Grenn’ in gold letters on a tartan background. The nameplate had holes for screws at each corner but was held in place by only two screws in the upper holes. The sickly sweet smell of alcohol and alcohol-laden breath could be detected on the landing, seeping from the house of Grenn. Abernethy knocked on the door, tapping his knuckles on the frosted reinforced pane of glass set in the door at head height.

  The door was opened. Eventually. It was opened slowly, apologetically, it seemed, without the often heard yell of, ‘Who is it?’ preceding it. The occupant of this house definitely had no enemies at present. The splintered door may even have been occasioned during the occupancy of the previous tenant. The face at the door was ghostly white, of a person who had been bled, veal-like, from the ankles. The hair was wild, straggly and white, the eyes were bloodshot. She wore only a thin nightdress which was transparent enough to reveal a skeleton-like body, and fully revealed stick-like legs bruised about the shin and bony, shoeless, slipperless feet with gnarled nails, cut or paired in a rough jagged fashion. ‘Aye, son?’ The woman peered at Abernethy as if trying to focus with bleary eyes. Her breath was searingly hot.

  ‘Mrs Grenn?’

  ‘Aye…I’m on a wee bender, son.’

  ‘I can see that. I’m the police.’ Abernethy flashed his ID but he fancied that for all the detail Mrs Grenn was able to observe, he may as well have flashed his library card.

  ‘Polis…aye…you’ve come about my Ronald?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘You’d better come in.’ The woman stepped aside and Abernethy entered the flat, the soles of his shoes sticking to the carpet as he walked down the corridor to the living room. Mrs Grenn shut the door and followed him unsteadily and paused to reach for a housecoat which was hanging on a coat rack on the wall, just inside the door. ‘Sit down, son,’ she called as she wound herself into the coat.

  Abernethy walked into the sitting room. It was cold. It had a chill about it and an atmosphere of dampness which gripped at his chest. Dampness in the schemes, Abernethy had noticed, most often comes up from the ground with the ground-floor flats being most affected. But he had detected no smell of damp in the close as he entered and concluded that unusually, dampness in 245, Balcurvie Street was coming down through the roof. The fire grate seemed to have become a collection point for combustibles, cigarette packets in the main—a pile of ash and cigarette stubs had overflowed from an ashtray on the hearth—empty bottles of Buckfast Abbey, inexpensive blended whisky and the inevitable Irn-Bru lay strewn about the floor along with a copy of the Daily Record, that day’s edition, with the headline ‘Slaughter in Kelvinside’ being the lead for the story of the murder of Ronald Grenn in whose mother’s house Abernethy now stood, looking for the safest seat from a health point of view, in which to sit. He chose a plastic-covered armchair which swivelled and had wide arms. It proved to be tacky with spilled alcohol and he instantly felt itchy and wished he had remained standing. Mrs Grenn was in no condition, he reasoned, to worry about niceties. But he remained seated and noticed a portrait of the Royal Family propped up on the mantelpiece against the wall and he reflected how often he had visited households of the direst, meanest poverty and seen such a portrait prominently displayed. And above the framed photograph of the Royal Family was yet another icon beloved of poverty-racked East End families, a print of a painting, all in varying shades of brown, of an angelic looking boy of about five years of age with a single tear running down his cheek and with an expression of wide-eyed helplessness. It had been Abernethy’s experience that families who had had to be visited in respect of Child Protection issues seemed to be overly fond of that particular print. It was as though the impact of real, noisy, demanding children not squaring with the silent, sentimental ideal, was often too much for immature parents who had many, many unmet needs of their own.

  Mrs Grenn tottered into the room swathed in a dark-blue housecoat, sat in an armchair by the fire and lit a cigarette with trembling hands. ‘Smoke, son?’

  ‘I don’t, thanks.’

  ‘You’ll take a wee drink?’

  ‘Can’t. But thanks.’

  ‘On duty, aye?’

  That’s it.’

  ‘Aye…only…see me…’ She put her hand in an upright position before her face with her palm at right angles to her eyes. ‘See…I’ve been on a wee bender…since yesterday. Since they two polis called and told me my Ron’s been killed. Murdered. But they wouldn’t let me see his body…my Ronnie…see, who’d want to do that to my wee Ronnie?’

  ‘That’s why I’m here, Mrs Grenn, to find out who would.’

  Mrs Grenn looked at a plastic container which stood on the mantelpiece. It was of a light-brown colour, almost bronze, with a screw top of darker brown and it sat easily, blending in with matching colour of the print of the naive painting above it. She raised her hand to the plastic container in a near-Nazi-style salute, and said, ‘See me, I swear on my man’s ashes that I don’t know of anyone who’d harm my Ronnie.’ Then she let her hand fall weakly to her lap.

  Abernethy continued to read the room and saw nothing which said anything but poverty, compounded by alcoholism. He further observed Mrs Grenn and suddenly realized that she was not as old as he had imagined her, or been led to believe from Montgomerie’s recording following his visit to Traquair Brae Open Prison. She was in fact a woman in her sixties, she would have been a young woman when she gave birth to Ronnie, and Ronald Grenn’s sickly appearance was not after all, he noted, the result of being born of too old a mother, but being born of a frail and most probably heav
y-drinking, if not outright alcoholic, mother. But, he reasoned, she could be taken for an elderly woman, age is relative, if people can be bitten deep and ravaged with arthritis in their forties, then alcohol and smoking and stressful living doesn’t help. And this is the East End, this is Easterhouse with its vast population and sparse services, here people age quickly and die sooner than in the well-set West End or in the smug suburban Glasgow south of the water.

  ‘When did you last see Ronald, Mrs Grenn?’

  ‘Yesterday, son.’

  ‘Yesterday?’

  ‘Aye…oh…couldn’t have been…’ Mrs Grenn closed her eyes and clenched her fists as if concentrating. Then, opening her eyes rapidly, she said, ‘Day before yesterday.’ She reached to the side of her and lifted a can of super lager from the floor, from a supply Abernethy had not realized was there, and tugged off the ring pull by hooking it underneath with a plastic bangle on her wrist. She raised the can to her lips and swallowed deeply. ‘See today, today’s Tuesday, it was yesterday that they two polis called and told me wee Ronnie was murdered…shot, they said…I said I wanted to see him for myself…they said I couldn’t…I can’t understand that…why’d they say that, son?’

  Abernethy searched for an answer. He pictured Ronald Grenn’s faceless exploded skull. He could only say that he didn’t know why. It was a meek answer. He knew it was a meek answer. It made him feel meek after he had said it but it was the best he could do.

  ‘But it was Ronnie, aye?’

  Abernethy nodded. ‘Yes. There’s no doubt. The fingerprints confirmed it was Ronnie. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Aye…I believe you are, son. They two polis that came yesterday didn’t seem too upset. Just doing a job. But you seem…aye…’

  ‘So you last saw him on Sunday?’

  ‘Aye…that’d be right. Sunday right enough.’

  Abernethy scribbled on his pad. ‘He was discharged from prison on Friday last?’

  ‘Aye. Came home on Friday and went out to the Centaur and came back with a good drink in him, so he did. But he’d never been inside the pokey for so long before so he needed a wee wet when he came out. Spent most of Saturday in his room, woke up with a rare sore head, so he did, just not used to it, see, and he’d taken a good bucket, so he had. Didn’t go out on Saturday…needed to rest…but left on Sunday.’

  ‘Sunday?’

  ‘In the afternoon. Slept late. See, son, it’s a way of saving on breakfast if you’re on the broo and no reason to get up.’

  ‘Did he say where he was going?’

  ‘He did not, but he looked happy. Like he was looking forward to seeing someone, or doing something. Then he gets himself killed.’ She took another deep slug of the lager. ‘See first there was me…then there was me and my man, Jack…God rest him…then there was me, Jack and wee Ronald, then there was me and Ronald and now there’s just me again.’ She glanced up at the container of bronze plastic. ‘See…I’ll put Ron up by his dad…’

  Abernethy felt deeply uncomfortable. Here, amid this grief in a life of limited horizons he had a job to do but wanted only to be far away…to leave Mrs Grenn to her emotions, to her memories. But he pressed on. ‘What do you know about his pals?’

  ‘Not a lot, son. I think he got involved with a bad crowd because he was never a bad lad. You know, he did do a few daft things but he was never that bad and I couldn’t believe it when he went down for a jewellery robbery…that wasn’t our Ronnie…I mean, it wasn’t our Ronnie’s way…I mean, a few breaches…a wee theft by OLP…all right, just till the wee man found a lassie and settled down, but jewellery…I just couldn’t see it…it just didn’t add up. See, wee Ronnie would take a jemmy and wrench off a padlock and hasp to open a shed or a lock-up, but breaking into an antique shop…a real posh one at that…getting past a burglar alarm…it just wasn’t Ronnie…but he put his hand up to it…he never got a penny out of it but he went down for seven years. Came out in four, half of which was in an open prison…never seemed to have money.’

  ‘Bit out of character for him, you’d say?’

  ‘Aye, son…aye…that’s a bonnie phrase…“out of character”. I like that, so I do…“out of character”.’

  ‘But he had friends?’

  ‘Only Kit Saffa.’

  ‘Kit Saffa,’ Abernethy repeated, that name he recalled had crept into Montgomerie’s recording. ‘That’s a name we’ve heard before.’

  ‘He’s a mate…Kit…met him once…he’s a nice lad, so he is, but he and Ronnie did daft things together but Kit stopped, so he did…stopped crookin’…Ronnie told me he was going to be like Kit. He said that when I visited him in prison, so he did. Said he was going to do what Kit’s done when he gets out. Go straight. He might have been going off to see Kit on Sunday…but Kit lives in Garthamlock…and Ronnie was murdered in the West End so he couldn’t…’ Mrs Grenn drained the can and crushed it in her hand, revealing what Abernethy thought to be a surprising amount of strength for one of such frail appearance. She tossed the crushed can on to the floor where it joined other empty cans and empty bottles. ‘Another dead marine,’ she said, as it bounced on the carpet and came to rest against an Irn-Bru bottle.

  ‘Mrs Grenn,’ Abernethy asked, ‘do you think I could have a look in Ronnie’s room?’

  ‘Aye, son. Through there. Back of the house.’ She reached for another can from beside the chair. ‘I’ll stay here.’

  Ronald Grenn’s room in his mother’s flat was small. It was little more than a boxroom. It had a divan bed, a wardrobe, it had bare floorboards. No curtains on the window, which looked out across the fields, the cattle, the woodland and the twin towers of Gartloch Hospital. The bed was unmade, the linen looked unclean. Abernethy thought it impossible for the linen to become so soiled in the few days that Ronald Grenn had been out of Traquair Brae, and could only surmise that Mrs Grenn had not changed the sheets when Ronnie was imprisoned four years ago, and Ronald, upon his release, had been quite happy to slump back into his old bedding. There were shoes under the bed and a few items of clothing in the wardrobe. This was Ronald Grenn’s world, what he had amounted to, aged forty-something. Abernethy had noticed this before, when he had had occasion to visit the homes of various people in his professional capacity, and had felt the poignancy when he saw just how empty had been the lives of some people, Ronald Grenn being but one example.

  In the wardrobe Abernethy found a shoebox.

  He took it out and placed it on the narrow windowsill. He opened it. It contained newspaper cuttings about a kidnap. Abernethy recalled the case. It had received prominent press coverage, on an Edinburgh heiress called Ann Oakley, nineteen when she was abducted. That was eight years earlier. Abernethy was still in uniform at the time, but it was one of those cases. Everybody, everybody talked about it. The kidnap of Ann ‘Annie’ Oakley. She was not released by her kidnappers when the ransom was paid and her body was never found. Abernethy felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. Many people collect press cuttings on a particular theme, but if anybody collects press cuttings about one news story and no other it means only one thing so far as Abernethy could see: that they had some connection with the story. And here in this shoebox in a spartan, threadbare bedroom in G34 were newspaper cuttings about one story and one story only. The kidnap of a young woman whose ransom demand of one million pounds had been paid and whose body had never been found. Also in the box was an Ordnance Survey map of the Kilsyth district. On the map an inch circle had been made in a remote-looking area.

  Abernethy replaced the lid and carried the shoebox back to the living room. He had intended to tell Mrs Grenn that he wished to take the box and its contents away with him, but he found Mrs Grenn slumped in the chair, snoring softly. He let himself out of the flat taking the shoebox and its contents with him, having left a handwritten receipt for it on the windowsill of the bedroom.

  It was 11.20 hours.

  14.30 hrs

  Against all expectations Richard King found that he liked
the man. He had been fighting a prejudice against ‘insurance smoothies’ as he walked from P Division Police Station across Charing Cross to India Street where, surrounded by glass and concrete buildings of local government departments’ headquarters, he located the modest frontage of the Glasgow and Trossachs Insurance Company. John Pulleyne was, King found, solid, businesslike, forthright, warm, good humoured; mid fifties, thought King, clean-shaven, keen, almost boyishly so, and the plum-coloured suit said liberal not staid. Somehow King could not see Mr Pulleyne in pinstripe. Behind Mr Pulleyne was a row of photographs of men in rugby strips posing for group photographs on a sports field. Insurance-law textbooks were relegated to the lower shelves beneath the sash window of Pulleyne’s office.

  ‘Confess I was relieved and excited to receive your call, Mr King.’ Pulleyne patted the file. ‘The Bath Street fire very nearly finished us.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Claim for three million pounds. That kind of strike tends to be felt, the smaller you are, the more you feel it. As you may note, I used to play rugby and we used to say, “the bigger they are, the harder they fall”, tended to work on the field but not in insurance. The bigger they are they don’t fall at all, unless they finish themselves by criminal irregularities, of course.’

  There’s been one or two of those in recent years. Taking the money but not paying out.’