Fair Friday

by Peter Turnbull

  ‘Never used,’ said King.

  ‘Gathering dust and cobwebs, and in this city of all places.’ Ralston drained his glass. ‘In the end we stopped the investigation because the pattern of local government spending is so stupid that it was making the readers depressed. But the point is that when staff have got to go, who do you chop, the whizz kids or the Bill McGarrigles?’

  I see,’ said King. Then: ‘Let me get you one.’

  ‘Lovely, son. Double, s’il vous plait.’

  King edged into the bar and caught the barman’s attention quickly enough so as not to disgrace himself in front of Ralston.

  ‘Cheers, son,’ said Ralston, clutching the glass which King thrust at him. ‘No, it wasn’t the chop, not the straight chop. Bill’s put a lot of time into the paper and so I had a couple of words with him, but I didn’t pull any punches. I told him I needed hard news from him and on his own initiative. He had to produce, I told him, or we’d let him go.’

  ‘How did he take that?’

  ‘Much as you’d expect, or rather much as I would have expected: shaken not stirred, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Well, son, it came as a bit of a shock to him to learn that he was vulnerable. I think as the years had ticked off he had come to think that he was like one of these Local Authority eejits we discussed earlier. You know—high on a no-redundancy index-linked pension kick. He went home a bit white-faced that day but I can’t say we got any excess action from him after that.’

  ‘Still the same?’

  ‘As far as I could tell. Did once tell me he was on to something big, need a few days to work on it, Dave, calls me “Dave”, does Bill. Didn’t say what it was, wouldn’t say, pressed him but he wouldn’t give. All he said was that it was something big in the city, but he didn’t seem to be working harder, just the same Bill, plodding about watering the plants and sharpening pencils.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Last Friday. A week ago today and that was two weeks after I’d had that talk with him.’

  ‘And you had no idea what he was working on?’

  ‘Like I said, son, he wanted to give it to me gift-wrapped, fait accompli.’

  ‘No idea why he was in Rutherglen?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘The name Gilheaney mean anything to you?’

  ‘No, no, can’t say it does, son. You could check his papers, if he’ll let you go through his desk, and there’s also his diary and his notebook. If it’s OK by him it’s OK by us.’

  ‘I’ll ask him,’ said King. ‘When he comes round.’

  ‘Still out, is he?’

  ‘I was wondering if you were going to ask after him.’

  ‘Now, son, don’t spoil a good Fair Friday bevvy by getting nasty. I am interested in Bill, I gave to the collection we had for him today, but it’s been a hard day for me.’

  ‘Sure,’ said King.

  ‘I would’ve visited him tonight but it’s a family affair and anyway there’s a committee meeting at the golf club. Which reminds me, I’d better shoot. Take that for me, will you, son?’ He pushed his empty glass into Kings hand and forced his way through the crowd in the general direction of the door.

  King placed both glasses on the bar and weaved his way out of the pub. He walked the few hundred yards to where ‘P’ Division police station stood, on Sauchiehall Street, at Charing Cross, just west of the Motorway.

  It was a hot, close evening. King’s shirt stuck to his back with sweat. The doors and windows of the bars were flung wide and the punters spilled on to the street.

  It was Fair Friday, the eve of the day each year when Glaswegians quit the city for their holiday, flying to the Mediterranean resorts and latterly to Miami, or more traditionally to the northern English resorts which they hold like an army of occupation. The original fair had long since gone but the last two weeks in July retained a significance without which Glasgow just would not be Glasgow, and a stranger walking down Sauchiehall Street on Fair Friday night would be forgiven for thinking that the entire city was smashed.

  King entered the police station, nodded to the desk sergeant and signed in. He had signed on duty at 7.00 a.m. that morning and it was now 7.00 p.m. Pour hours of unavoidable overtime, but then that was no new experience, not for a policeman in this city. He walked up the stairs to the first floor and the CID rooms and hung his jacket on the stand next to his desk. Montgomerie was at his own desk, leaning back in his chair reading the Evening Times.

  ‘How,’ he said without lowering the paper.

  ‘How what?’ asked King, sinking into his chair and looking across his desk and reading the paper’s headline. FAIR HEATWAVE!

  ‘White man speaks with forked tongue,’ mumbled Montgomerie, turning the page of the newspaper.

  ‘Give me peace, Mai.’ King rested his head on his arms, folded across the desk. ‘I can’t take your sense of humour, not right now.’

  ‘Chief Medicine Man Fabian wishes to see white man in teepee for heap big Pow Wow.’

  ‘At least I’ll get some sense from him. When does he want to see me?’

  ‘Messenger say as soon as white man comes in from hunting ground.’

  King pulled himself to his feet, grabbed his jacket and walked along the corridor to Fabian Donoghue’s office. The door was shut. King slipped on his jacket, made sure his artificial knotted tie was clipped on properly and tapped the door, twice, just below the sign, ‘Inspector Donoghue’.

  ‘Come in,’ said Donoghue.

  King pushed the door open and entered Donoghue’s office. Donoghue sat forward resting his forearms on his desk, a tall man in his early forties. He wore a waistcoat with a gold hunter’s chain looped across the front and his University tie was pushed firmly up to his collar. His one concession to the heat was that he had taken off his jacket and it now hung neatly in the corner of his office. His pipe was in a large glass ashtray on the right of his desk, and in front of his hands was a sheet of paper. Ray Sussock sat in a chair in front of Donoghue’s desk.

  ‘Ah, King,’ said Donoghue as King stood just inside the doorway. ‘Excuse me, Ray.’

  Ray Sussock grunted.

  ‘The assault on Bill McGarrigle, you’re handling it, I understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said King.

  ‘We had a message from the Victoria Infirmary while you were out.’ Donoghue patted the sheet of paper on his desk with his palm. ‘He died at six-ten this evening. It’s a murder enquiry now.’

  ‘We haven’t…I haven’t dug up much to go on, sir. One name. Gilheaney. He said that while he was semiconscious so it may or may not be relevant. It has no significance to his family or place of work. Also, no one knows how he came to be in Rutherglen. What’s certain is that he was working on something but no one knows what.’

  ‘All right. We’ll meet in my office tomorrow at eight-thirty a.m. sharp. The trail’s still hot so it’ll mean weekend work for us all. That includes you, Ray.’

  ‘Fine by me, sir,’ said Sussock diplomatically, because nothing could be further from the truth. His suitcase was packed, the delectable Elka Willems was waiting for him in her small flat in Langside, they had rented a holiday cottage near Mallaig for Saturday, Sunday and Fair Monday. There was the possibility that Elka Willems, being a policewoman, might understand when Sussock arrived home and said, ‘I’m sorry, love, but…’ Sussock conceded that it was highly unlikely, but the remote possibility remained that she would agree to give up her break and spend the weekend in Glasgow. Fine, he said again.

  ‘Montgomerie in, is he? 1

  ‘Yes, sir.’ replied King. ‘He’s writing up in our office.’

  ‘Ask him to come along here, please. Then you’d better get home and get some rest, you look like you could use it. You too, Ray.’

  Ray Sussock left the police station with his jacket under his arm, his tie in his pocket and his shirt collar open. He wanted to look as unlike a policeman as possible because right then h
e didn’t want to be a cop. He was a Glaswegian by birth and spirit and at fifty-four he was old enough to feel the real significance of the Fair. He was old enough to remember the long queues at the railway stations and the boats taking the folk down the water to Dunoon and Rothesay. He could recall the signs chalked on the boards at the factory gates and the entrances to the shipyards: ‘Hooters to the Fair—3.’

  ‘Hooters to the Fair—2.’

  ‘Hooters to the Fair—1.’ And he liked to get away for the Fair, even if it was only for the Fair weekend. To get out of Glasgow, to be part of the great exodus was the thing. He walked up Sauchiehall Street and took the tube from Buchanan Street to Hillhead. He walked from Byres Road to his bedsitter looking as much like a slob as he could, because he wasn’t a slob, he was a cop who wasn’t to get away this Fair because some guy had got his skull smashed open in a back court in Rutherglen.

  CHAPTER 2

  The summers in west central Scotland are rich. They are rich in lush vegetation and rich in humidity, and the combination of both can, in the evenings, for a few weeks each year, suggest a sub-tropical climate. They are also rich in daylight, enjoying a midnight sun effect when, for a brief period at the solstice, the darkness is nothing more than a deep twilight, reaching its most dim at about 3.00 a.m., by which time it’s getting light again. By Fair Friday it was still warm enough in the evening for a group of men to work in their shirtsleeves, and it was still light enough for them to start a two-hour search. The men were police officers and they were searching a back court in Rutherglen. It was 7.30 p.m.

  The police officers swept the uneven surface of the back court, the coarse grass, the broken glass, and waste-bins. They were not slow to attract attention and shortly after the search commenced scores of faces peered down from the tenements into the backs. The other source of attention came from the mosquitoes, and the policemen spent as much time slapping forearms and scratching scalps as they did sifting through garbage and turning over stones. Fabian Donoghue stood in a closemouth, supervising the sweep while working hard at maintaining a strong smokescreen with his pipe to keep the insects at bay.

  While the backs were being searched Malcolm Montgomerie questioned the people who lived in the block. It was an old tenement, well over a hundred years old and most likely the original development on its site. None of the 120 flats had a bath, though some had a shower. The toilets stood where the stairs turned below each landing, one toilet for three flats. The frames on the stair windows were rotten and about to fall away from the wall. In some cases they had fallen, leaving great gaping holes through which Montgomerie could see the new school beyond the backs and the railway at the side of the tenement. Some flats had been abandoned and the doors sheeted over with corrugated iron. One or two of the iron sheets had been pulled away, revealing a black cavity, smelling of glue and cheap wine turned to vinegar. But it did seem a dry block. He was still suffering from shock at discovering this aspect of the city: until he put on a uniform his reality had been the smugness of Bearsden and the self-satisfaction of the Faculty of Law at Edinburgh University.

  He pressed the bell or rapped the knocker of each door he came to. Eight times out of ten the door was opened, usually by a woman since most of the men were in the bars. Montgomerie knew the content of most interviews before he rapped on the door:

  ‘Good evening. Police. We’re making enquiries about the attack which took place in the backs here on Wednesday night…’

  ‘I didn’t see nothing.’

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The attack took place about midnight, perhaps a little later.’

  ‘I was in my bed—bevvied out until three—night shift.’

  ‘You didn’t hear anything, a shout perhaps?’

  ‘No. Nothing.’

  ‘If you do hear anything will you let us know.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  Most times Montgomerie was right. Most times. In the fifth close, three up, was a solid, brown-painted door. It hadn’t got a name plate, but a foreign name which Montgomerie could not pronounce, Jaruduski, had been printed in large capitals on the plaster at the side of the door. There was a large arrow pointing from the name to the door, which had a heavy metal knocker. Montgomerie rapped it smartly.

  It was opened slowly and then only by six inches, being held on to the frame by three safety-chains, all heavy duty and, it seemed to Montgomerie, to be homemade adaptations rather than the delicate bronze apparatus which could be purchased in hardware shops. The face that peered out at him from a square formed by the door, the frame, and two of the chains, was a face Montgomerie had seen before. But not in the flesh. Thank God, not in the flesh, but in the newspapers, on the television, looking at him from behind barbed wire, or glancing at the camera as he ran from Soviet tanks. It was a long thin face with sunken cheeks, piercing eyes deep in their sockets, and a scalp shaved close to the skull.

  ‘Police,’ said Montgomerie.

  ‘Polizie, ha!’ The man started to push the door shut but Montgomerie held it open. ‘Polizie!’ said the man again. There was an unmistakable note of alarm in his voice.

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Montgomerie calmly, trying to assuage the terror he saw in the man’s eyes. ‘I just want to ask you some questions.’

  ‘Kestions!’ The man had a piercing voice. He kept his long bony fingers wrapped round the door, his fingernails were splintered and bitten down. ‘What kestions you have?’

  ‘About the attack in the back court, two nights ago.’

  ‘I seen it. Timofei see it.’

  ‘You see it!’ said Montgomerie, involuntarily slipping into the man’s broken English. ‘I mean, you saw it?’

  ‘Ja. Not good ha! You go polizie. Not good.’

  ‘What did you see, Mr Jar . .

  ‘Yaroodooski,’ said the man.

  ‘Mr Jaruduski,’ Montgomerie repeated. ‘What did you see?’

  ‘Ah, ah! Not good. Go, go. Night falls. I have to shut door. Go.’

  ‘No,’ said Montgomerie firmly. ‘You have to tell me. If you want to shut the door then let me in and shut it behind me.’

  The man stared intently at Montgomerie for a few seconds and then nodded. He shut the door, slipped off the chains and then opened the door again. The man’s flat was unlit and the curtains were drawn shut so that Montgomerie had difficulty in making out objects in the gloom. As he entered the flat he noticed a bunch of garlic hanging by the door frame. Timofei Jaruduski shut the door quickly behind Montgomerie and threw a heavy bolt across it. ‘Will do until you go,’ he said.

  Montgomerie thought it probably would do; the bolt sounded heavy enough to be of use in the Bank of Scotland.

  The living-room was sparsely furnished, the air was musty and stale but also suffered from an overpowering smell of garlic. Montgomerie went across the odd scraps of carpet and pulled the curtain back to glance down the street. He couldn’t see anything clearly because the glass was thick with grime. He noticed that garlic had been crushed and smeared on the inside window-sill and around the window-frames.

  ‘Expecting visitors?’ he asked, letting the curtain fall back.

  ‘They come. Each night they come.’

  ‘Each night?’

  ‘Oh yes. Believe me. When the night falls they come.’

  ‘Like last Wednesday?’

  ‘Yes. Last Wednesday. I saw him.’

  ‘You were outside?’

  ‘No. I never go out at night. It is not safe. I saw him from the window.’

  ‘How could you?’ Montgomerie said shortly. ‘You can hardly see the building across the street through those windows.’

  ‘Timofei can. Sit, sit, Polizie, sit.’

  Montgomerie peered into the gloom and made out the dim shape of a sofa. He fancied if it was a shade lighter he would be able to make out little things hopping from cushion to cushion. He said he’d prefer to stand an
d then asked again about Wednesday night.

  ‘I see him all right. Big, big.’

  ‘Where did you see him?’

  ‘Out there.’ The man indicated the front window.

  ‘No you didn’t,’ said Montgomerie. ‘It’s almost still broad bloody daylight and I can’t see a thing, so how is it you can see something at the dead of night?’

  ‘Timofei can. I show you.’ He grabbed Montgomerie’s arm and dragged him to the left-hand corner of the window. It was a bay-window which protruded from the side of the building with the side panes of glass at ninety degrees to the wall. Low down on the side window-pane was a small area of glass which was kept clean. The curtain was held away from this part of the window, which also attracted a larger than usual pile of garlic. ‘My spy hole,’ he said with pride.

  ‘You have one on the other side too?’ Montgomerie turned and came face to face with heavy and dusty curtains.

  ‘No need. Look out of my spy hole and tell me what you see.’

  Montgomerie obliged. ‘I see up the street,’ he said.

  ‘So. Now look at the windows opposite.’

  ‘My God, I see what you mean,’ said Montgomerie softly. In the bay-window side panes of the house opposite he could see the reflection of the street extending down towards the bridge across the railway.

  ‘At night it’s even clearer,’ said Jaruduski. ‘Here I keep watch.’

  ‘And you saw one on Wednesday night?’ Montgomerie stood and faced the man and noticed for the first time how tall and well built he was by comparison to Jaruduski.

  ‘Ja. So you are too a believer. There are so many who do not believe. Who cannot see.’