Murderabilia

by Craig Robertson

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Mrs McAlpine. My name is Tony Winter and I—’

  ‘I know you. You took the photograph. The one that went everywhere. The one of my Aiden.’

  Her Aiden. Not theirs.

  ‘Mrs McAlpine, I’m sorry that—’

  ‘No, no. I’m glad you took it. I’m glad the whole world saw it. They all know what happened to him. My husband doesn’t feel the same way, but there’s no change there.’

  That he didn’t expect.

  ‘I hope it helped in some way, Mrs McAlpine. Actually, it was that photograph I wanted to talk to you about. Would it be possible for me to come in so we can discuss it?’

  She looked highly sceptical and her hand weighed up the door, ready to close it.

  ‘Please. It’s important. I think it can help.’

  She blinked, maybe fighting back fresh tears, and nodded, turning away to let him follow her. They walked through a wide hallway and past a couple of closed doors before she led him into a large, white-walled room populated by two huge sofas and an armchair. She took the chair and left him to his choice of the couches.

  ‘What is it you think we need to talk about, Mr Winter?’

  ‘About the photograph and the clothes that were in it.’

  ‘Aiden’s clothes.’

  ‘Yes. His clothes that were photographed and the ones that, seemingly, weren’t there.’

  She stared back at him for a while and he wondered if she’d taken it all in. She had.

  ‘Let me stop you there. I won’t have you quote me. On anything. Is that clear? If you agree to that then I’ll talk to you. But I need your word on it.’

  ‘You have it. I won’t quote you. I’m looking for information rather than quotes.’

  ‘Okay. Go ahead.’

  ‘As the police may have said to you, not all of Aiden’s clothes were in the pile left at the scene. There was no underwear. That may or may not be significant but I believe it is. If I were to show you a photograph of items said to be Aiden’s do you think you might recognise them?’

  Her face crumpled slightly. ‘I might. I did wash them after all but . . . I don’t know. I’ll try.’

  Winter produced an enhanced copy of the image that Rachel had screen-grabbed from KillingTime and handed it to her. His own photo skills had produced something he hoped the mother could recognise.

  She stared at it intently, her eyes widening slightly. Recognition? He hoped so.

  ‘Maybe. I mean I can’t say they’re his but boxer shorts like those . . . Yes, I’m sure he had those. The socks, too.’

  ‘Could you check a drawer to see if the ones you remember are still there?’

  The moment the words were out he regretted them. He had no idea if this woman had even been able to bring herself to go through her son’s clothes. However she was tougher than he’d given her credit for.

  ‘I’ll look. Please stay here.’

  She was back minutes later, her eyes red. ‘The ones I remember aren’t there. They’re not in the wash, either.’

  ‘Was there someone in Aiden’s life. A girlfriend? Someone who might be able to give us a clue to what happened.’

  Barbara McAlpine smiled. Winter initially thought it was tinged with sadness but there was something else. He let it go.

  ‘There was no girlfriend, no.’

  ‘Did he have any close friends. Anyone at all that it might be worth me speaking to?’

  She considered it and decided to give up whatever she was mulling over. ‘He didn’t have many close friends. Not that he would confide in or turn to. There was a boy he was close to for a long time, a best friend if you like, but they fell out. Aiden took it quite badly and I wanted to tell him it was all part of the growing-up process and he’d get over it. No one wants to hear that, though, do they? He was as close a friend as Aiden had since he was little.’

  ‘Who was this boy, Mrs McAlpine?’

  She hesitated, reluctant to break a trust. But she wanted answers more than she did forgiveness.

  ‘His name is Calvin Brownlie. He lived in Battlefield somewhere. I dropped Aiden off there a couple of times. Cartvale Road.’

  CHAPTER 22

  Cartvale Road was long, straight and narrow, like a sniper’s alley. Red sandstones grew four storeys high from the pavement, making the street appear even tighter. Winter stood in its middle and saw it stretch a few hundred yards in each direction.

  Brownlie was listed in the phone book and Winter could have phoned ahead but he didn’t want the man to know he was coming. Instead, he pushed the door buzzers on all except flat six and waited for one to respond. The door popped and he pushed his way through and up the stairs.

  It was just after nine and he’d seen the curtains on Brownlie’s flat were still closed. Time for him to wake up. He rapped sharply on the door, trying not to sound like the cops he’d seen do the same thing so many times before.

  The door was opened a minute later by a tall, bleary-eyed and bearded young man scratching at long, dishevelled hair. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Calvin Brownlie?’

  His name woke the hipster more quickly than the door had and his eyes widened as if something sharp had been thrust into him. It was recognition.

  His mouth dropped and he desperately tried to shove the door closed but ran into the boot Winter had thrust a few inches across the threshold. Brownlie put both hands on the door and feverishly pushed at it as if a horde of zombies were on the other side. The guy was terrified.

  ‘Get out! Leave me alone. I didn’t mean it. I swear I didn’t.’

  Winter got his shoulder into the door and shoved all his weight against it. He sent the guy falling back into the flat’s hallway and walked through behind him. He wasn’t and had never been a fighter but Brownlie didn’t know it. He stood above him and glared.

  He scrambled back further into the hall, trying to get away from Winter.

  ‘Talk to me, Calvin. Tell me why you did it.’

  ‘I didn’t mean . . . Please, don’t hurt me. Please!’

  The voice. Higher but it was the same voice. He was sure of it.

  ‘Come on, Calvin, you know I know what you’ve done. So just tell me.’

  ‘I just . . . I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.’

  Winter got closer, bending over him, his eyes blazing. ‘Are you going to tell me?’

  ‘Yes! I will. Just don’t hit me.’

  ‘Get up. Get into the other room. Move.’

  Brownlie got nervously to his feet, his eyes never leaving Winter’s fists, and led them into a living room that didn’t quite match up to the McAlpine’s villa in St Andrew’s Drive.

  It was a mess. Ashtrays laden with roll-ups, cushions and empty beer cans on the floor. Shoes, magazines and glasses everywhere. ‘Take a seat, I suppose.’

  ‘Yeah? Where?’

  Brownlie waved a hand through a clutter of papers and clothes and produced a torn leather armchair from beneath them. ‘Sorry. There you go.’

  He was in his early twenties, wearing just shorts and a T-shirt, and his tousled sleepiness had been replaced with fear. He wrung his wrists and shook noticeably as she stared at the floor to avoid Winter’s eyes.

  ‘You are Shadow123, aren’t you?’

  He didn’t lift his head but he nodded.

  ‘Look at me. I want to hear you say it. Are you Shadow123?’

  Brownlie did as he was told and looked up. ‘Yes.’

  The voice was trembling and quiet, a range away from the one he affected at Hampden, but it was him. He was the seller of Aiden’s clothes. By his own words, the person who’d killed him.

  Winter was suddenly unsure where to go next. What to say to him. He could only manage one word.

  ‘Why?’

  There were tears. Brownlie’s eyes reddened and they ran slowly down his cheeks.

  ‘I needed the money. That was all.’

  ‘You killed your friend for money?’

  Brownlie’s eyes
grew large. ‘I didn’t kill him. I didn’t kill Aiden!’

  ‘No, of course you didn’t.’

  He tried to jump to his feet but Winter stepped forward and firmly pushed him back into the chair.

  ‘I swear. I didn’t kill anyone. You’ve got to believe me!’

  ‘You told me that you did. At Hampden you said you’d killed him.’

  ‘I lied.’ It sounded pathetic. Pathetic enough that Winter believed him.

  ‘Why would you say that?’

  ‘To make you believe I had his clothes. His real ones. The ones he was wearing when he was killed. I wanted the money.’

  ‘So what were you going to sell me?’

  ‘His underwear. Aiden’s. Just not the ones he’d worn when . . .’

  ‘When he was murdered. How did you get the ones you were going to sell?’

  ‘He left them here.’

  It took Winter moments longer than it ought to have done to join the dots. The amused smile on Barbara McAlpine’s face was the clincher.

  ‘You and Aiden were lovers.’

  ‘He was my boyfriend.’ Some defiance had returned to the voice.

  ‘That explains why he left them here but not why you’d try to sell them for cash. How could you do that?’

  The tears started again, uncontrolled now.

  ‘We fell out and broke up. I was mad at him because I hadn’t wanted to finish it. It was just a stupid argument but I was angry. And when he died I was even angrier. I saw the story in the paper about the clothes being taken and how the killer had them. I thought . . .’

  He broke down and Winter gave him the space to recover.

  ‘I thought I could get back at him. I wasn’t angry at him for the argument. I was angry at him for dying and leaving me. I knew I could get money for them and found a website to sell them on.’

  Jesus Christ! Winter didn’t know whether to hit him or hug him.

  ‘I got scared, though, and took the sale down again. And then you contacted me and said you’d pay three grand. It’s a lot of money. I’m pretty much skint. The only thing I’ve got of any value is this watch’ – he held his wrist up showing an expensive-looking piece – ‘but I got that from my parents and I never take it off. It was sell that or sell Aiden’s clothes.’

  ‘You could have got yourself killed.’

  Brownlie wiped away tears and nodded. ‘I thought you’d think I was the killer and be scared of me as long as I acted tough. But, when you told me to come and get the money, I panicked and had to run.’

  ‘Did you have a knife?’

  ‘No, just a metal ruler to hit against the wall and make it sound like one.’

  ‘You idiot! I’m a journalist.’ Brownlie’s head snapped up in fresh fear. ‘You know I could plaster your name all over the papers. Selling your murdered boyfriend’s clothes. It would be everywhere.’

  ‘No, no please! Please don’t.’

  ‘You’ll just have to wait and see. In the meantime you do not tell this to anyone else. You keep your mouth shut about it. Now get me the clothes, and any others of Aiden’s you have.’

  ‘I will. Please don’t . . .’

  Winter climbed back down the stairs of the close onto Cartvale Road and got into his car. He knew he wouldn’t run the story and wouldn’t tell Archie Cameron. Calvin was only guilty of being stupid and heartbroken. There was no point in breaking his heart any more.

  He’d never make a journalist. He had too much humanity in him.

  First, though, he’d check Calvin’s story. Shaking his head at himself, he called the mobile number she’d given him.

  ‘Mrs McAlpine. It’s Tony Winter.’

  ‘Yes? Do you have news?’

  ‘I do but I need to ask you a question first. Was Aiden gay, Mrs McAlpine?’

  ‘Yes. Of course he was. And I couldn’t have been prouder of him. I loved that boy from the day he was born till . . .’ She struggled to say it. ‘Till the day I die.’

  ‘Did your husband know Aiden was gay?’

  ‘He chose not to know.’

  The condemnation in those few words was fierce. Barbara McAlpine was nurturing an anger against her husband that Winter had to use.

  ‘I have found something but I’d rather it didn’t go to the police just yet. It won’t help find who killed Aiden but it might just hurt his friend Calvin. Mr McAlpine might like it go to the police, though, so it’s your choice.’

  The line went quiet for just a few moments. ‘My husband doesn’t always know best, whatever he tells the voters. Do what you think is right, Mr Winter.’

  ‘I will. And, it may be small consolation but I can bring some of Aiden’s clothes home.’

  ‘You’re right. It’s only small consolation, but it is some. Thank you.’

  CHAPTER 23

  There was a time when Martin Welsh was a household name, particularly in Scotland. Every newspaper, every news programme, every radio bulletin, every conversation in every pub or corner shop. Everyone had an opinion on what had happened to him.

  There were emotional appeals and police reconstructions. Rivers were trawled, woods searched and quarries dug up. Psychics were called in. Rewards were offered. Known paedophiles were taken in for questioning. Questions were even asked in Parliament.

  His face was instantly recognisable. The quiet smile, the summer-freckled face and the curly fair hair. He looked out of newspapers and shop windows and down from lampposts for the entire summer and autumn of 1973. Find me. Save me.

  His mother, and to a lesser extent his father, became familiar faces, too. Jean Welsh was the one whom the television cameras sought out. Attractive and distraught, wet eyes pleading, voice breaking. She tore at heartstrings across the nation. Martin’s dad, Alec, left her to do most of the appeals and interviews, although often he’d be standing at her shoulder, gruff and silent, not knowing how else to be.

  Martin and his family were just as visible on the first anniversary of his disappearance, and the second. Maybe slightly less so after five years and much less so after ten. Most people stopped talking about him, most stopped looking. The case remained open and unsolved. No one doubted that he’d been murdered, but he wasn’t news any more. He’d become, ‘Remember that boy, what was his name, the one from Calderrigg in Lanarkshire, the one that went for the bus and never came home?’

  Of course to Jean and Alec, to his young sister Alice, to his grandparents and aunt and uncle, it would forever be Wednesday the 2nd of May, 1973. The day Martin last went to school.

  The entire country knew the story. Or the first part of it at least.

  Martin got up at 7.30, wakened by his mother, his father already having left for his job at the dairy. The children had breakfast round the kitchen table, cereal and toast and standard sibling arguments. Jean Welsh walked Alice, then ten, to the local primary school, leaving fourteen-year-old Martin to get the bus from Calderrigg to his secondary school three miles away in Airdrie.

  Martin was dressed in school uniform with a blue Adidas backpack over his shoulder containing homework and lunch. He was five foot six and weighed nine stone. He’d had a bad cold a week earlier but was otherwise completely healthy.

  He arrived at school on time and began his day with an English class, followed by Geography. He ate his packed lunch – ham-and-coleslaw sandwiches, an apple, a Mars bar and a can of cola – with two of his pals, Gordon Tierney and Dylan Brown. They talked about football and having watched The Goodies on television the night before.

  The only hassle they faced was from an older boy, a fifth-year named Johnny Wallace. He claimed Martin owed him money, although all three other boys denied this, and was threatening to break his arm or kill him if it wasn’t paid quickly. Wallace was interviewed by the police and said he was just frightening Martin, he didn’t mean it. His parents said Johnny came straight home after school and didn’t go out again.

  After the bell for home, Martin said goodbye to Tierney and Brown as they went for their bus and he f
or his. It was the last time they ever saw him.

  From the moment she’d started searching, Narey had realised she knew much less about the details of the case than she thought she did. She knew he’d been taken, on his way from school, and knew the common consensus was he’d been murdered and . . . well, that was it. That and his face. Everyone had seen the photograph. It was part of the national consciousness.

  Shyly smiling. Freckles. That tousle of fair hair. Instantly likable. Instantly recognisable. The boy.

  She had to trawl the Internet for the detail. Martin had gone missing six years before she was born and the story had dropped off everyone’s desk. He was still referenced, his case still open, his family still grieving, but so much of it now went unsaid.

  Her search was hindered by the fact that there was no Internet when Martin disappeared, so there was little in the way of news stories from the time. She had to piece together what there was but it was superficial and sketchy. She wanted case files, investigating officers’ reports, witness statements, the stuff that newspapers might have known but couldn’t print, the things that cops knew but couldn’t prove.

  Her instincts had kicked in and she wanted to know everything. She grabbed a pad and pen from the living room and began to take notes on whatever she could find. She scribbled down names and dates, making four separate lists – police, family, witnesses and suspects – drew arrows from some to others, circled key points and questioned possible connections. It felt good and it felt right. She felt useful.

  Martin’s mother Jean was still alive. The woman would still just be in her seventies, no age at all considering how long ago it felt since her son disappeared. The father had been gone for twenty years now, dying from a heart attack at the age of fifty-five. A heart attack brought on by heavy drinking, going by the hints in the press.