The Man with No Face

by Peter Turnbull

  ‘We’re not a very busy library, as you can see, Mr King.’ The librarian was a small woman, warm, confident, she seemed to enjoy her job. She was a Mrs Smithkey by her name badge. ‘Most of our patrons like to come in for a wee warm and a look at the paper. You know, Scotland has a very literate public, that’s due to the thorough grounding in numeracy and literacy that Scottish primary education gives to children, but we don’t seem to lend many books. But that’s all right, a place to come for a wee warm, to read a newspaper, to read the notice board. A library is more than just a place to come and borrow books, so we are still providing a service. But that’s not why you’re here?’

  ‘No.’ King smiled. ‘Does the name Carberrie mean anything to you? Mary Carberrie?’

  The woman scowled and sighed and said, ‘That woman…’

  ‘I understand that she was sacked for theft?’

  ‘Yes, some years ago now. We keep a small cache of petty cash, library fines, fees for ordering books, change for the photocopier. Not much, because this isn’t a busy library, but it was money nonetheless. Our books just didn’t add up, it was obvious someone had their finger in the till so we kept watch and saw her do it. She was so used to doing it by then that she did it without thinking. Our branch manager reported her to the police. She got a wee fine in the Sheriff Court but she was out of a job, pension shot, the lot.’

  ‘I see.’ King waited until an elderly man who had shuffled up and laid a three-day-old copy of the Glasgow Herald on the counter had once again shuffled out of earshot. ‘You see, it may well be that this is not the same Mary Carberrie that we are now interested in, but she’s the right age. Some years ago, after she was sacked following the theft that you mention, she visited someone in prison, she was seen to be with a mane of red hair—’

  ‘Greying at the ends,’ Mrs Smithkey interrupted, ‘wears clothing a size too small because she won’t accept how she’s ballooned.’

  ‘That wasn’t mentioned.’ King paused. ‘I don’t wish to be unkind, but people have mentioned her teeth

  ‘Oh…I think you’ve got the right woman. I well recall her teeth, black and camel-like. It was remarked behind her back how she would spend money on clothing and other fashion accessories and not have her teeth seen to.’

  ‘She doesn’t sound like any librarian I ever met.’

  ‘She wasn’t. She was temperamentally unsuited to public service. That’s being kind. In fact, it’s hard to see what Mary was, or still is, suited to. But whatever she did when she left here, she did well. I saw her a year or two ago driving a flash motor in the town with a personalized numberplate ME 2, as I recall, and I thought, “Well, that’s you, Mary.”’

  King smiled. ‘It’s the same woman. I wonder, could we go somewhere a little more private? I’d like you to tell me about her. I can tell you that we want to talk to her in connection with one, perhaps two, very serious crimes. But we want to get the measure of the woman before we invite her for a chat about things.’

  ‘Certainly.’ Mrs Smithkey turned and addressed a slender young man of hippy appearance. Very non-Cadder. ‘Julian, I’ll be with this officer in my office if you need me.’

  Julian said, ‘Fine.’ King got the sense that the working relationship between Mrs Smithkey and Julian was strained.

  Mrs Smithkey left the ‘Returns’ desk and led King to a cramped office. Once they were both seated, she said, ‘What can I tell you?’

  ‘Well’—King raised his free hand palm upwards -‘whatever…’

  ‘I was asking myself, Mr King.’

  King opened his notepad, chastened.

  ‘An empty woman,’ Mrs Smithkey said after a pause. ‘Just empty, nothing there, really…we all knew when she was in the building, forced, deliberately loud laughter…’

  ‘In a library?’

  ‘Libraries when open to the public are solemn places, but for a few minutes before the doors open each morning, and for a half-hour period at the end of the opening hours, when only the staff are in the building, they can be a bit noisy, not deliberately so, but there is a sense of reaction to a restriction being lifted at the end of the day especially, staff calling to each other across the length and breadth of the floor area, that sort of thing.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘It was the beginning and the end of the working day, when she could make a noise, that we all knew Mary Carberrie was in the building, but yet there was no sense of loss when she left the building. We have staff who are quiet, never talk more loudly than they have to, and then only if they have to. Quiet, efficient, modest, yet when they leave the building at the end of a shift—libraries stay open for twelve hours a day, we have a shift system, morning and back, and a day shift for Saturdays.’

  ‘As we do, well, nearly the same

  ‘You see, when those members of staff are on duty, they make little fuss, but by their efficiency and by their strength of personality, they leave a sense of a gap behind them when they go off duty. They have a “presence”. Mary Carberrie let everybody know she was in the building by one means or another, yet when she signed off to go home she didn’t leave the sense of a gap, or a sense of loss behind her. She had no presence. She was like a fly buzzing about, you were always thankful when it found the open window.’

  Again Mrs Smithkey fell silent as if recalling incidents, as if sorting out memories. ‘You see,’ she said at length, ‘Mary Carberrie wanted, probably still wants, only three things in life: she wanted power, popularity and money, and I have to say it rankles with me that she achieved all three.’

  ‘She doesn’t sound like the sort of person who’d enjoy popularity or power.’

  ‘She didn’t, yet in another sense she did.’

  ‘I don’t follow?’

  ‘What I mean is that she achieved power within the staff group by enlisting herself as a lieutenant to the woman who worked here at the time and who held herself to be the top cat in the alley. If Mary had opposed this woman she would have been left in little pieces and she knew that so she offered herself as a subordinate ally. It really was quite pathetic. The powerful woman, who wasn’t really powerful at all, was disciplined by the library service for her attitude to customers; immediately that happened Mary Carberrie brought disciplinary action on herself. In her case it was for poor timekeeping, but by doing so she reinforced her lieutenantship to the first woman.’

  ‘So they could be two bad girls together?’

  ‘Exactly. Talk about juvenile behaviour. The other thing that Mary Carberrie did to enjoy power was to throw her weight about with the younger secretarial staff. I even heard her threatening to kick one secretary.’

  ‘Heavens.’

  ‘That’s Mary Carberrie. But she would never oppose anybody who was strong enough to stand up to her. So each working day she had a sense of power. And she was popular because she believed she was popular, just as some people believe the earth to be flat. Her self-assessment was way off…totally the opposite of what people felt about her, but did that matter? If she had an unshakeable faith of religious intensity in her own popularity, did it matter that she was in fact universally detested? I would say no. I would say that it didn’t matter to her, so she was powerful, and she was popular.’

  ‘The money?’

  ‘I would say that money, acquisition of same was, probably still is, her third motivation in life. I have this image of Mary Carberrie as a wee girl, standing in her bedroom having wrecked all her toys, yelling, “I want to be popular, and I want to be powerful and I want a lot of money and I’m going to scream and scream and scream until I get all three.”’

  ‘Funny you should say that.’

  ‘Oh, does the serious crime or two that you mentioned have money as its motivation?’

  ‘Yes, in a word. But beyond that I can’t tell you anything.’

  ‘Well, that’s Mary, any extra shift going and she wanted it, not out of dedication to the library service but because of the extra money, and any branch that phoned
round for staff because they were short-handed, Mary would want to go because she got a mileage allowance for the car journey between the two workstations. You have seen American cartoons on television where characters sometimes develop US dollar signs for eyes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That was Mary, except of course she had pound-note signs for eyes. I felt her greed would be her downfall one day. But anyway, she’s got the money she wanted, because that flash motor I saw her in, the one with the fancy registration, she didn’t get that out of any lucky bag. So she got her power, she got her popularity and she got her money. You see, we’ve been teaching our children all wrong. If you scream and shout long enough you can get what you want.’

  King chuckled. He enjoyed Mrs Smithkey’s incisiveness. ‘What do you know of her home circumstances?’

  ‘Lived alone, I think.’

  ‘Never married?’

  Mrs Smithkey raised an eyebrow as if to say, ‘Who in their right mind…?’ but she said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  The last address we have for her is Partick—Lawrence Street, Partick.’

  ‘That would be the address we would have. You, the police, know her because she stole from the library, at which point she was dismissed. I can’t help you with her present address, and, incidentally, all this is off the record. Dare say I feel eager to help because my son has just joined the police.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  ‘Yes, we’re very proud. He’s with the Met. He wanted to live in London for a year or two. He intends to return to Scotland if he can get a transfer to the Strathclyde Police, once he’s ready to settle down and get his feet on the housing ladder.’

  ‘We’ll be pleased to have him, I’m sure. But back to the matter in hand. What did Mary Carberrie do in her spare time?’

  ‘She had what in my opinion was a very unhealthy interest in guns. She would defend it by talking about the “sport” of shooting, the precision involved, the patience, the hand-eye coordination, the breathing techniques that need to be mastered. But at the end of the day a gun, especially a handgun, is a tool designed for taking human life and nothing else, and while there may very well be a place for guns in the modern police and obviously in the military, I have to say that we’re missing something if we identify them as having sporting potential. That’s just my view, you understand. I mean, would we have live hand-grenade throwing as an Olympic Games event? I think not. Then why allow handguns to be used for sport? I’m sorry, but I have a bit of a high horse on this matter, and if I’m honest it’s another reason why I found Mary Carberrie a difficult person to like. Her and her gun club. She belonged to one in Ayrshire.’

  That’s interesting. Tell me, does the name Westwater mean anything to you?’

  ‘It doesn’t.’

  ‘How about Mooney?’

  ‘Again, no. I’m sorry. She didn’t mention either of those names to me.’

  Ray Sussock steeled himself. He sat in his car and pondered Rutherglen at dusk. No stars yet in the sky, probably too much cloud cover tonight anyway, he thought. All houses burned lights, and the soft yellow streetlamps had been switched on, yet it was still light enough to see a man walking a black dog. He turned his attention to the bungalow, once a proud, well-appointed edifice set in neat gardens, now a building of peeling paint, of loose roof tiles, of overgrown shrubbery and rampant weeds which attracted discarded fish-supper wrapping paper, cigarette packets, empty cans, as overgrown, ill-tended areas of vegetation will. And there they were: him and her. Pulling back the curtain, leaning forward side by side, smiling, grinning as if they felt that they couldn’t be seen, as if light travels in one direction only. What was it, he tried to recall it, the term for a jointly shared insanity, folie a deux? Something like that.

  He turned away from the bungalow and looked ahead and watched the man and the black dog until they turned a corner and were lost from sight. He was saddened that he’d been seen because his hesitation would be seen as weakness, but he needed this space, he needed to work out the scene in his head.

  Eventually he got out of the car and walked up the driveway of the bungalow, feeling his trouser legs being tugged by the brambles. He went to the side door of the bungalow and banged on it three times with the palm of his hand. It was opened, but only after a pointedly long time. Samuel stood there, slicked-back hair, gold earring, smooth hairless hands courtesy of his mother’s hair-removing lotion, his black jersey pushed into the waist of his black trousers, his feet wrapped in lightweight black trainers.

  ‘Hello, Daddy.’ Samuel smiled, then turned and called out, ‘Mummy, Daddy’s come to visit us.’

  Sussock stormed up the steps and pushed past his son who made a pretence of falling against the refrigerator saying, ‘Ooh, Daddy, you hurt me.’

  Sussock paced down the narrow corridor as his wife screeched from deep in the front room, ‘Get him out, Sammy, get him out. He should be catching robbers, he was never any good to us, was he; was he?’

  ‘No, Mummy.’ Samuel sniggered as he lay on the kitchen floor. Sussock wrenched open the door of the boxroom at the bottom of the corridor and began to rummage in cardboard boxes, picking up woollen winter wear, socks, vests, a pullover, and putting them into a plastic bin liner he had brought with him. He walked back down the corridor. His wife yelled, ‘Has he gone yet, Samuel?’ And Samuel, still prostrate on the yellow lino on the kitchen floor said, ‘No, Mummy,’ upon which Sussock’s wife began to scream. Sussock left the house, left the sniggering and the wailing behind him. The thin October air hurt his lungs and he knew again that winter would be soon in arriving. He drove back to Langside. To Elka Willems’s flat, a room and kitchen, warm, loving, just sufficient space for her, and, occasionally, him. It was quite different from the room and kitchen in which he had grown up in the Gorbals of old, of global infamy, the sharing the bed with parents and siblings, the screams in the night, the blood on the common stair the following morning; black, congealing. He pressed the bell, she opened it and smiled warmly, stepping aside as he crossed the threshold. The smell of cooking assailed his nostrils. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Spag bol.’ She hipped the door shut. ‘Bad trip, Old Sussock?’ She walked behind him into the kitchen and stirred the spaghetti.

  ‘No worse than usual.’ He dropped the bin liner containing his clothing on to the floor and sank into a chair by the table. ‘The shrew was there, where else would she be? Sammy…oh my…did I do that to him?’

  She lay a mug of tea on the table in front of him. ‘I don’t think you’ve got anything to blame yourself for, Ray.’

  ‘It’s my investment as well, all my money’s in that building and she’s letting it go. If it gets any worse we won’t be able to give it away once we get the divorce

  ‘You’ll get enough, enough for a two room and kitchen in the South Side, that’s what you want, isn’t it? Something to see you out, something with a good roof and no subsidence, and far enough away from the Cart so you don’t get flooded. Meanwhile you’ve got a bedsit, and my bed from time to time, so long as you don’t move in.’

  He reached for her hand. ‘Elka She pulled her hand away. ‘No…Ray, don’t ask, you know what the answer is. I said “no” and I mean “no”. I’m thirty-three years younger than you, and anyway, I don’t want to get married, not yet…’ She kissed his head. ‘Look, it’s sweet of you, it’s a great compliment, but we are leaving things just as they are. And that is it. If you ask again, if you persist, I’ll end it, OK?’

  Sussock ran his fingers through his hair. ‘OK, OK…I won’t mention it again.’

  ‘Oh, I think you will, Old Sussock.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘But the answer will remain the same. Are you hungry?’

  ‘Ravenous.’

  Montgomerie returned to P Division Police Station. Peeling off his ski jacket as he entered the DCs’ room he was not a little surprised to see Abernethy at his desk. ‘Still here?’ He slung his jacket on to Richard King’s desk and strode with long, effor
tless strides across the room to the table on which stood the mugs, the kettle, the instant coffee underneath a blue-and-white Police Mutual calendar.

  ‘I had a long day at the coast.’ Abernethy leaned back in his chair and let his ballpoint fall on the pad. Tm not long back, to tell you the truth.’

  The coast? Coffee?’

  ‘No…no, thanks, I’m full of the stuff. Grangemouth, to be exact.’

  Montgomerie smiled—chemical works on the windswept Forth estuary was not the image that would come to the mind of most folk when the word coast was mentioned. He enjoyed Abernethy’s dry sense of humour.

  ‘Profitable trip?’ Montgomerie tipped coffee grounds into a mug.

  ‘Oh, I think so. I think so. Got an address.’

  ‘Useful.’

  ‘Yes, the factory turned out to have produced the carpet fibre, a small batch in flame red, and had made a few hundred square feet of carpet in eye-hurting, brilliant red. They’d sold it to an outlet in Glasgow.’

  ‘Dash here, dash there.’ Montgomerie poured boiling water into the mug and added milk.

  ‘With a little help from British Telecom, right enough.’ Abernethy leaned forward and picked up his ballpoint. ‘Phoned the outlet from the factory, they remembered the batch, said they’d look up their records and find out to whom it was sold. I drove from Grangemouth back to Glasgow and went to the outlet on Queen Street, near the station. The manager recalled the batch, couldn’t give it away, except to a soccer club who wanted red carpeting and red paint around their home-team changing and rest rooms. Apparently, they’d talked to a psychologist who said that bright red induces aggression, the theory being that if you expose your players to brilliant red and play stirring martial music to them through the loudspeakers before a match, they’ll want to go out and annihilate the opposition. The visiting-team rooms, by contrast, were being painted a soft shade of lilac and decorated with prints of the Impressionists and they were being treated to soft, soothing music before a match so once they got on to the pitch all they’d want to do was pick flowers.’