Murderabilia

by Craig Robertson

  A member pointed the way?

  Yes.

  Tell me one thing.

  Polar bears aren’t all left-handed. It’s a myth.

  Okay. Fair enough. So what areas are you interested in Myra?

  Scotland. Peter Tobin and Archibald Atto. And the Martin Welsh case.

  Another wait.

  Okay. Tobin we can do. Atto too. Martin Welsh will be more difficult but you’re welcome to try and if you’ve got the funds then maybe it can happen.

  Well good.

  Have you got the funds?

  I’m here to spend.

  Not yet. You need to bring something to the table. This place isn’t just for buying and we need to know you can be a provider. Can you do that?

  I think so.

  Then do it. Then come back and talk.

  Okay.

  Good luck, Myra . . .

  The last line sounded as much like a warning as good wishes. You’ll need it. That was the subtext. Or else she was getting paranoid.

  She’d been deep in it, this world of murderabilia. And she was getting deeper.

  There was a guy her dad had arrested in the early eighties, an amateur boxer named Harry ‘Hurricane’ Donnelly. Harry was very useful by all accounts, just twenty-two but lined up for a shot at the Scottish heavyweight title. Until it all went wrong.

  He came home from a long training run to his house in Denny to find his manager in bed with his wife. Arthur Grant had been the one who suggested he should go for the run after work and sweet little Maureen had said it was a good idea. It might have been okay for everyone, except that Harry ran faster than they thought.

  Harry beat them both to death. He said later he might have been able to walk away from what he’d seen but Maureen had laughed at him and then Arthur joined in. He lost it and pummelled them until the walls were sprayed with blood.

  Harry went on the run for nearly two weeks and that was what really hit the headlines. He’d headed north, thinking he could hide out in the hills SAS-style. First he picked up supplies in the village shop in Plockton but a six-foot-four stranger built like a heavyweight gets recognised quite easily in a place like that. He moved on before the cops got there but then he was spotted in Applecross and again in Torridon. THE HURRICANE’S HIGHLAND HIDEWAY, the papers screamed. Sightings of the double murderer became a national pastime. The Sun put up a ten-thousand-pounds reward for information leading to his capture.

  After ten days on the run, a farmer named Jack Jamieson saw the Hurricane on the road near Kinlochewe and decided to claim the money for himself. Jamieson was a big guy and armed with a pitchfork but, after a tussle witnessed by a neighbouring farmer, Harry Donnelly took the pitchfork and drove it through the man’s heart.

  His running didn’t last long after that. The cops, led by her dad, arrived en masse and chased him to ground. He was photographed being dragged off the hills, stripped to the waist with a rucksack over his shoulders and looking like a bare-knuckle pin-up. He got twenty years and three proposals of marriage.

  The drive to Glasgow took three hours, her dad and handcuffed Harry in the back seat. They talked because there was nothing else to do and Harry told him everything. A big, soft lump was how her dad described him. Nice lad who went a bit crazy. They talked boxing and football and her dad made the driver stop at Fort William to get Harry some food.

  A few weeks later, Harry’s lawyer turned up at the station asking to see her dad. He said how the Hurricane had liked him and said he was fair and that was all he could have asked for. Then he gave him a plastic carrier bag with Harry’s boxing gloves in it. Well-used red leather, initialled ‘HD’ and made to fit the hands that beat two people to death. He’d signed them, too, as they were going to go into a charity auction, but now they were a present to say thanks for being the good cop.

  Her dad always kept the gloves, a story to tell people when they came round. Now she had them. And now she had a use for them.

  She scoured the surface murderabilia sites for anything relating to Harry Donnelly. There wasn’t a lot and the few things available weren’t cheap. However, after less than half an hour, she’d made three purchases and they’d already been dispatched.

  She bought a fight poster: Harry the Hurricane against Bobby Dow for the western district heavyweight title, signed by Harry himself. It set her back a hundred pounds but she thought it was worth it. For just seventy-five quid, she also got hold of a handwritten letter he sent from HM Prison Peterhead to one of the women who wanted to marry him. And, finally, she splashed out two hundred pounds for a cassette recording of Harry singing ‘Flower of Scotland’ down the phone to another of the wannabe fiancées, the one he finally married in the prison chapel.

  Now she had a bundle. A proper portfolio of murderabilia with the boxing gloves being the highlight. She had something she could take to Abbadon and hopefully be her ticket in. It wasn’t maybe the level of gore that they’d expect but, short of digging up Harry’s victims, it was all she had.

  And it’s genuine? All of it?

  Yes.

  Where did you get the gloves?

  I’m not saying. But they’re Donnelly’s. I’ve got a photograph of him wearing them and you can also check the signature.

  We will. Post a photograph of them.

  Okay.

  Why are you selling them on here and not on a surface site? If they’re what you say they are then they’re good items but nothing that couldn’t be sold in a regular marketplace.

  I’m proving that I can lay my hands on things. That I have contacts. I can be a provider.

  We’ll be the judge of that.

  They were sceptical and challenging. They had her photographic proof for an age before they came back and accepted it was what she said. They asked again about its provenance, but she stonewalled them. She was sure it was part of the test. Say where you got it, say who sent you here, and we’ll slam the door in your face.

  She said nothing, said she would continue to say nothing. Okay, finally, they said yes. She was in.

  Welcome to Abbadon.

  CHAPTER 40

  THE LANDSCAPE GARDENER

  He collected his first piece of murderabilia when he was just eight years old.

  Not that he knew that was what it was called or would have been able to spell it if he had. But, looking back, there was no doubting that was when it all began. And maybe there had been no stopping it.

  There was a house just a few hundred yards from his parents’, a white-painted cottage with a low wooden door that stood on its own at a crossroads on the outside of the village. The old woman who lived there was said to be a witch. Maybe it was because of the cottage or maybe because she had long grey hair and a pointed nose. Or maybe it was because she was a witch. She was in her seventies, the kids guessed, but that could easily have been ten years out either way.

  Her name was Miss Astill and she lived on her own – apart, of course, from her three cats. They were hairy, wary beasts who denied any and all attempts to play with them, feed or stroke them. They’d be seen slipping in and out of the cottage or looking cautiously from behind clumps of grass. Go near them and they’d disappear.

  The old lady wouldn’t be in the village much, just the occasional sighting in the shop or maybe in church a couple of times a year, Christmas and Easter, and even then she didn’t seem to talk to anyone. There was talk of a man who’d died in the war and of a son who either died in childbirth or had been kidnapped. All probably nonsense. No one really knew anything about her.

  Then she was murdered.

  It turned out she wasn’t a witch at all, or at least not one with any powers or spells that could have saved her. She was just a lonely old lady with some money hidden under her bed.

  The first anyone knew was when the door to the cottage was seen lying open to the wind. A friend of his dad had driven past about seven and seen it that way but didn’t think it was any of his business to do anything about it. A bus half full of
passengers had done the same less than an hour later. It was only when the postman came with two letters around 8.30 that someone actually went to the open door.

  He called out for Miss Astill but, when he got no reply, he just slipped the letters into the hallway and turned back down the path. Something made him stop – he told the newspapers he didn’t know what – and he went back to the cottage and called again. When there was still no reply, he went inside and found the old lady sprawled out on the living room floor with her head bashed in.

  It was before the days of mobile phones and he had to run to the phone box in the village to call the police and an ambulance. The nearest police station was five miles away and, by the time they dragged the only copper from his breakfast, word of the woman’s death had spread and half the village were camped outside the house.

  His dad had taken up guard of sorts on the door, stopping anyone from going in. He was ex-army and knew enough to know there would be fingerprints and the like that the police wouldn’t want messed with. He’d also seen dead bodies and didn’t think anyone else needed to do the same.

  He’d gone up to his dad and asked what was going on, even though he’d already been told, just trying for an excuse to see inside. He was told it wasn’t anything he needed to be bothered about. Better that he just go on to school as he was supposed to. He’d nodded, said yes dad. Gary Elford’s father had come up at that point, asking if it was true and was told it was. It’s bad, his dad had said, blood everywhere. Everywhere. He’d always remembered that.

  When the policeman eventually got there, his dad was relieved of his duty and told detectives were on their way. Everyone was cleared off, pushed back as far from the house as the copper could get them. Few of the kids had actually gone in to school and teachers had to come round to the cottage and drag them away.

  They could talk of nothing but Miss Astill and her murder for weeks. It was her son, some reckoned, back from the dead or the kidnapping, who’d killed for his inheritance. It was the postman, others said – he’d just pretended to find the body. It was their teacher or Gary Elford’s dad or gypsies or a crazed killer escaped from the nearest prison. The talk of blood grew until the floor was covered and the walls.

  About a month later, two men from a town twelve miles away were arrested. One of them cracked and ratted out the other, said how they’d gone there to rob the old woman and his accomplice had brained her with a hammer when she started to shout. They both got put away. Two years for the one who talked and ten years for the one who didn’t.

  Their arrest came as a big relief for the postman, who really had been interesting the police. They were suspicious of his arriving first at the scene and wanted proof that he really had business being there. He’d insisted that he’d delivered two letters for Miss Astill, left them in the hallway next to the umbrella stand, as the door had been open. Trouble was, there was no sign of the letters anywhere. The cops were sure he was lying and were pressing him hard before the other pair started spending money they shouldn’t have had and talking too loud when they were drunk.

  Those letters had been just too tempting. At the time, if anyone had asked, he couldn’t maybe have told why he took them, reaching behind his dad’s legs while he talked to Mr Elford, hiding them inside his school jacket while no one was looking. He just knew he wanted them.

  It didn’t hurt anybody: the postman was cleared and Miss Astill had no use for them any more.

  He read them hundreds of times. Always careful to make sure no one was around, no one to see. He would read them under the covers of his bed and then hide them again. He’d fold them back carefully in their envelopes and make sure not to tear or mark them. They were special.

  One was from a cousin, another woman, named Elizabeth. She didn’t say much, just told Miss Astill not to worry and thanked her for her birthday gift. She told her everything would be okay.

  The other letter was from the son. He’d really existed all along and was writing to his mother from London just to tell her he was doing fine and that he had a job. He hoped she was well and that she was thinking of him. He said he’d met a girl and was hoping to marry her. He said if they had kids he’d never let them go.

  He never told anyone about those letters. Not even when his dad seemed suspicious and asked him directly about them. He was sure his dad had searched the house for them at the time but he’d never have found them where they were.

  They were now safely locked away in a drawer in his own house, away from his own children, away from his wife. Those letters were his. His start. His beginning. From them, a collection grew as he did. He became the Landscape Gardener, he became one of the Four.

  He still took those letters out regularly and read them, sensing Miss Astill on the paper even though she’d never held it. He sensed the innocent postman and the things that happened in that cottage.

  Murderabilia. He knew what it was now. And it was his.

  CHAPTER 41

  Jean Welsh was a small, slight woman but she gave the impression that a hurricane couldn’t blow her over. She was the sort of woman the west of Scotland specialised in. Tougher than any coalminer or gangster or heavy-handed husband. The world had thrown everything it had in her face and she’d wiped her mouth and started again.

  She sat on one side of her kitchen table, a cigarette working nervously between fingers and lips, and Winter sat on the other. She’d made them both cups of tea and placed hers in front of her as a makeshift defensive barrier.

  The dresser behind her had a framed photograph of her son, smiling out at them, for ever in the 1970s, for ever in his early teens. Winter did his best not to stare at it but she caught him looking.

  ‘It’s different to any of the ones they used in the papers or on TV. I kept it just for us. I like to see his face. I know I’m just kidding myself on, but it’s like he’s still here.’

  She said it as much to herself as to him, but he got the impression she’d explained the photograph many times.

  The kitchen was small but tidy, plenty big enough for one but it must have been a squeeze when four of them lived here and sat around this table. He couldn’t help but picture Martin sitting there, eating breakfast before leaving for his last day at school. Jean Welsh was right: it was as if he were still there.

  They’d made small talk for a few minutes, polite and nervous diversions about the traffic and the weather that kept them away from Martin for a bit longer. When they did start talking about him, he noticed she kept switching between tenses. Martin is. Martin was. Even after all these years, part of her didn’t accept it.

  ‘This is for the Scottish Standard, you say? I don’t read newspapers any more. And they don’t bother coming to talk to me much these days, either.’

  There was a question inherent in it. Why now?

  Winter hadn’t wanted to jump straight into the issue of Martin and murderabilia, but it was the only real answer he had. She saved him from having to say it, though.

  ‘You know what always bothered me? The anniversaries. It was like everyone remembered him then. It was, “Oh poor wee Martin Welsh, let’s all cry and hold a march or another television appeal.” They all remembered him on the anniversaries but the anniversaries weren’t any different to me to any other day of the year. I cried my eyes out every single bloody day. But on the anniversaries they all came out the woodwork and I had to share him. I hated that.

  ‘And when he disappeared? Oh, the whole country was bloody heartbroken. “Poor Martin. His poor mother.” It was all so public. Martin dying ripped my heart out, but being made to share that with everybody else wasn’t fair. It was like everyone wanted a bit of it. And it wasn’t theirs. He wasn’t theirs. He was mine. He came out of me. Me.’

  Her eyes were reddening but her mouth was angry.

  ‘A year after he was taken, a year after he died’ – the word tasted like poison in her mouth – ‘the whole village walked from his school to here. Three miles. Three miles. Big bloody deal.
This village and the next one and most of the next. People came from Glasgow to walk. It was like they were so upset they had to show it. But it wasn’t their place to be upset because they didn’t know him. They didn’t love him. Maybe they were scared for their own weans and that’s why they did it, but it wasn’t right. Did they think I really wanted to see hundreds of folk carrying banners with my boy’s face on them? It was nothing to do with them. It was private.’

  A single tear ran unbidden down her cheek and he could see her twitching at it, trying to will it back into her eye. She was hating herself for showing that in front of him, but, if she thought she was showing weakness, then she couldn’t be more wrong.

  ‘Didn’t it help knowing that talking, keeping it all public like that, increased the chance of finding who’d taken Martin?’

  She laughed in his face. ‘It might have if it had actually helped. It didn’t, though, did it? Nothing helped. Nothing brought him back or found who killed him. Our lives were all over the papers and the telly. For nothing.’

  She stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray to her side and another was lit within seconds. She jabbed it at him accusingly.

  ‘The papers more or less came out and said my husband had done it. My Alec. Of course, everyone round here believed it. I could see the way they looked and knew what they were saying. The same bloody hypocrites who walked from the high school to the village were whispering away saying Alec had done for his own son. It was a disgrace saying that. Evil tongues on them, that’s what they had. Evil tongues.’

  Winter wanted to ask more but hesitated. He didn’t want his own evil tongue to ask the next question. Jean Welsh had heard it before, though, and could see it sitting silently on his lips.

  ‘You’re wondering about my Alec, too, aren’t you? I can see it in your face. Well, ask me. Ask me if he lifted his hand to me. Ask me if he would get so full of whisky that he couldn’t keep his temper.’