‘I reckon anybody would have done the same, Sarge, really.’
Montgomerie sipped his coffee, holding the big white mug with both hands. ‘I mean, the mighty Fabian didn’t start sniffing until a dying hack shoved Spicer’s scent under his nose.’
‘Aye,’ said Sussock distantly, an over-the-mountain voice.
‘It was found proven in the High Court and at Court of Criminal Appeal. You can’t get higher than that. Anyway the PF prosecuted, not us, so you convinced those eejits.’
‘Aye,’ said Sussock.
‘I didn’t do too well either.’ Montgomerie had the urge to tell about his visit to Tiny Jardine’s, to get it off his chest, to come clean. He balked. ‘I saw Jug and Steamroller dropped off by Phil Jardine—he drives a white Bentley. Anyway I went down into the street and was lamped straight away. Followed Jug, who took me on a ride on the inner circle. I was getting dizzy so I came here.’
‘You haven’t blown the surveillance?’
‘No,’ said Montgomery and felt a claw reach up from his gut and grab his heart. ‘No, they acted like they always do. Dick King’s been watching them for weeks so there’s no reason to assume that they know we’re on to the Tuesday job.’
No, he thought, no reason, there’s still no reason.
‘Hope you’re right. What are your movements for the rest of the day?’
‘I’m going to put a call through to Rothesay, grab a bite to eat and get back up the West End for the evening. What are you doing for feeding time, Sarge?’
‘Committing suicide,’ said Sussock.
King stood in front of the door and pressed the bell again He waited in the cool dark stairway and was about to turn away when he heard a noise from inside the flat. The door opened. The new widow had aged, she was pale, she had furrows on her brow, her cheeks were hollow. She clutched her house robe to her throat and looked up at King with thinly watered, pleading eyes.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Mrs McGarrigle. I need to take another look in your late husband’s study.’
She made a high-pitched croaking noise and moved aside. King stepped over the threshold, the air was musty, the flat was dim, the two suitcases still stood packed and waited to be taken to Rimini. King went into the study. Mrs McGarrigle shut the door and shuffled down the hall towards the sitting-room. King doubted that she recognized him.
He sat in the dead man’s chair. He was there out of personal curiosity as much as for professional purposes and began to sift delicately through the mass of papers. Finally he found what he was looking for. It was a photocopy of a letter Gilheaney had sent to the Clarion from the slammer. The letter was short and to the point; writing in a clumsy labouring hand, Gilheaney was protesting his innocence and was asking the newspaper for help to prove that his brief had set him up. King guessed that the Clarion probably received many similar letters each year, and most certainly after each sitting of the Court of Appeal, but it was the additions to the letter which interested King. On the copy paper in a round longhand someone had written;
Gilheaney: No Action cross reference Desk Fair Holiday Violent Crime Mr Justice Morningstar (career of) McNulty, Spicer and Watson Court of Appeal (famous cases)
It seemed to King that the Clarion had a sophisticated computerized data bank system which might well match anything possessed by the Police force. Either that or the newspaper had a well run conventional cross-indexing system. Bill McGarrigle had followed up a complaint about shady business practices of a city solicitor, had checked his paper’s records and had found that that same solicitor had once agreed to represent a man who later claimed that his solicitor had wilfully played a part in his malconviction. The home-loving, book-loving reporter had followed up the lead in order to save his job and in the process had discovered that he was no mean investigative reporter. But he was throwing himself in the deep end, he’d never developed a nose for trouble and it cost him his life.
King left Bill McGarrigle’s study and went to the front room. Mrs McGarrigle was sitting by the empty hearth, looking at nothing with an expression of nothing, nursing a glass of port and mumbling softly to herself. Or maybe, King thought, maybe there was an expression, the wide-eyed awe of a little girl who’d stayed on past her stop and was looking out of the bus window at a strange and fearsome territory.
King turned away and let himself out of the flat.
Montgomerie left Sussock in the canteen and went up to the CID rooms and put a call through to the Isle of Bute police at Rothesay.
‘Yet more service for the brave boys from the city,’ said the desk sergeant when Montgomerie had identified himself.
‘What’s that supposed to mean, hayseed?’ asked Montgomerie.
‘Don’t get touchy,’ said the voice. It sounded old and wise. A copper’s copper. ‘In the summertime we don’t do anything except collar neds and screwballs who descend upon us from the good city of Glasgow, all with felonious intent.’
‘You mean you nick them with felonious intent?’
‘What can I do for you?’ said the voice, suddenly drying up.
‘Re, one Spicer, local notable, resident of Bute, some old school house methinks, works as a mouthpiece in sinful city of G.’
‘I know him,’ said the desk sergeant, whose voice sounded like something big dragging itself across a drought-stricken riverbed. ‘What about him?’
‘He’s under suspicion of being a nasty.’
‘Oh?’ There was not a small hint of undisguised surprise.
‘Yes. Can you keep an eye on him and let us know when he leaves the island and what he’s driving when he leaves?’
‘Sure thing. How much of a nasty is he?’
‘A very nasty nasty.
Montgomerie put the phone down and lit a fag. Before he was half way to the filter his telephone rang.
‘Just confirming your identity,’ said the dried-up voice from Bute.
‘Oh, I’m the genuine article all right.’
‘I sent a Panda to drive past his house,’ said the desk sergeant. ‘Spicer’s on the island at the moment. He doesn’t look like he’s going anywhere tonight, he’s got less than an hour to catch the last ferry to the mainland and at the moment he’s dressed in boxer shorts hosing down his fleet of high-class motors. He could get the Tighnabruaich ferry later tonight but that would leave him with a one-hundred-mile drive to Glasgow.’
‘Thanks,’ said Montgomerie.
‘We’ll watch every ferry tomorrow.’
‘Thanks again.’
Montgomerie took a bleeper from the stores and went back up to the West End. He sat in a tough gin-bin protecting his bruised ribs by sitting against a wall. He felt awkward, clumsy, consumed with guilt, wondering how long before it all came out about his visit to Tiny Jardine’s. The one thing he was sure of was that he had to tell Donoghue before Donoghue found out by other means. He had to take control of the situation, rescue what he could; he couldn’t afford to let it all come out in the interview rooms.
It was an old style horseshoe bar with pillars here and there. There were some hard cases, some sad cases, mostly they were men with loud voices and big stomachs. There were one or two women, shiny black skirts, tights like sand sprinkled with gold dust.
‘You into business?’
‘Beat it, sister.’
Richard King was home in time to spend an hour with his children before they had to be in bed. They built a tower with coloured plastic bricks which squeaked when pressed. The most they could manage was seven in a column.
Later he sat talking with his Quaker wife and when she rose to percolate some coffee he watched her walk across the room.
He wondered what sort of man could murder a girl and then marry her sister. How could he find it in himself to lie with her at night? How could he free his conscience so much that he didn’t have to worry about talking in his sleep or half-sleep? How, how could he?
CHAPTER 10
Fair Monday
It was the heat tha
t awoke Donoghue as he lay naked under a single sheet. The heat and the birds and the light which streamed through a chink in the curtains and let Donoghue see that at 6.00 a.m. the sky was already blue and cloudless. He rolled out of bed, adjusted the sheet and pummelled the pillows. He poured a glass of orange juice and awoke properly in a lukewarm bath. He sat at the breakfast bar in the kitchen and ate muesli and fruit and drank a mug of coffee.
The post came on time, as did the newspaper: it wasn’t a public holiday in Edinburgh. He folded the Scotsman under his arm, left two official-looking envelopes on the hall table and walked back to the kitchen reading the reverse of a postcard from Scarborough. It said:
Dear Daddy,
We are having a very good time. We are sorry you could not come with us at the last minute. Mummy sends her love.
Timmy and Louisa
P.S. Louisa caught three crabs yesterday.
He drove to Glasgow. He enjoyed the drive, the visibility was good, the air seemed clean and fresh and the Fair holiday meant the traffic was light. He drove in the inside lane all the way listening to Radio Four. He turned off the motorway at Charing Cross and parked his car at the rear of ‘P’ Division police station, at 8.29 he was at his desk, he flicked his gold-plated cigarette lighter and started pulling on his first pipe of the day.
Montgomerie arose gingerly, well aware of the delectable Fiona smiling at his obvious discomfort. He washed, shaved and dressed as hurriedly as his physical condition would allow. In Fiona’s small kitchen he put some jam between two slices of bread and chewed into it while making a pot of tea. He drank half a cup of tea and then left the flat, going down the stair on tiptoe because walking too hard on his heels jarred his ribs. Behind the wheel of his car he suddenly felt light-headed and realized that he was still drunk from the bevvy he’d consumed the previous night. Then the memory of going to see Tiny Jardine came crashing into his mind and it was more than the previous night’s drink and his damaged ribs which caused him to stagger slightly as he entered ‘P’ Division at 8.32 a.m. He made a mug of black coffee in the canteen and carried it up to the CID rooms on the first floor.
Richard King awoke and found that in the night Iain had climbed on to their bed and had fallen asleep between him and Rosemary. He moved gently out of the bed and opened the windows wider to let out the smell of paint and paste which King knew gave Rosemary a headache and about which she never complained. He made a pot of tea and carried a mug through to the bedroom for his wife, and found that in his absence she had lifted the still sleeping Iain into bed with her. He breakfasted quickly but without bolting his food then drove into the city, arriving at ‘P’ Division within sixty seconds of Montgomerie.
Ray Sussock had had a hard time. He had stayed in the canteen long after Montgomerie had left, waiting for the time that the sun stopped slamming down and might begin to shine gently, benignly, with hopefully a little breeze to cool sweating brows. But it stayed up there well after 7.00 p.m., top dog. Without a car of his own and with only 53p in cash Sussock was forced to walk from ‘P’ Division to his bedsit in the West End, hopping from shade to shade, trying not to think about the pain in his stomach and the unnerving weakness in his wrists and legs.
In his flat he pulled open the top drawer of his dresser. It was the drawer where he kept his ‘odd’ important possessions: passport, health card, driving licence, insurance policy. He rummaged until he found a bronze ring with three keys threaded on it.
He had gone down to Highburgh Road and jumped a 59 bus to take him across the city. His 53p was just enough to get him to the south side, to Langside, to a room and kitchen with ‘Willems’ bolted to the door. Just a can of beans would do, maybe with a bit of bread, perhaps even an egg on top. He knew she kept a supply of cans since the incident when she was stranded in her flat in Stranraer one winter, laid up ill, no one called on her and she ran out of food.
Sussock had grappled with his set of keys to her flat, moving from top to bottom unlocking the three locks on her door, clumsy with desperation, and succeeded in opening the door two inches because that was as far as the anti-break-in chain would allow. It was a natty piece of ironmongery allowing the house-owner to apply it on leaving the house, and release it by unlocking it with a key which was poked round the side of the door frame to get out the lock.
Sussock didn’t have that key. That was the only one he didn’t have. That was the only key she didn’t have a spare of. That was one of the things she kept meaning to do, old Sussock, I really must get a spare chain key just in case. Ray Sussock had sat on the stair and for the first time in a long time felt like throwing a tantrum. He had felt that it was all against him. Him. For everybody else and their neat well-adjusted lives, and against him. God knows he didn’t want any favours, no preferential treatment, but the odd break in life wouldn’t have gone amiss. Why, he had wondered, was it only his journey that was uphill? Why had it all come to this, from the tough streets of the old Gorbals, to being a detective-sergeant (and that only because of length of service and nothing else), to living with the screwballs in bedsit land, a wife who was off her head and an only son who was a pansy, and now only a few inches of shiny brass chain between him and a can of beans.
It had occurred to him to break the door down and the more he thought about it, the more it had loomed as a big possibility. Just a gentle nudge with his shoulder and it would be feasting time. It wouldn’t take much, he was a big man, he would just need to lean on it, there would hardly be any damage, and she wouldn’t mind…
But it was breaking and entering and he was an officer of the law. That made it tough for him to get away with questionable activities in the grey area of the law, where actions may or may not be illegal, where discretion can be exercised. At all times he had to be above suspicion if he wanted to collect his pension, and at his age his pension was his meal ticket. He had no time for bent dicks but in his thirty-plus years’ service he’d seen too many good coppers lose everything because they had chewed into an apple while attending a break-in at a grocer’s. Above suspicion.
He had locked her door and walked homewards. On the way he met a beggar who asked him for money. ‘Why not, friend?’ said Sussock and gave him all he had, seven new pence. For the rest of his journey in a starry and balmy night he had experienced that strange sense of freedom which comes when you haven’t anything left to lose.
Sussock had slept on his stomach that night to reduce the hunger pains. He walked to the police station on Fair Monday arriving at 8.38 a.m. He asked to borrow some coffee and made it strong and heavy on the milk. He went upstairs to the CID rooms, raised a hand in greeting to King and Montgomerie and went down the corridor to his own office. He felt badly weakened but if he could avoid strenuous exercise he might be OK.
The review meeting in Donoghue’s office commenced at 8.45 a.m. sharp.
‘Developments?’ asked Donoghue, pulling on his pipe.
‘Jug and Steamroller Forbes were seen talking to Phil Jardine yesterday, later afternoon, on Byres Road,’ said Montgomerie, anxious to please, savouring each moment, feeling his days in the force were numbered.
‘Significance?’
‘Only that they were in the West End, confirms what Cleopatra McCusker told us.’
‘It doesn’t confirm anything. It ties in neatly with what she told DC King but it’s not a confirmation. Did they see you?’
‘Yes, sir. I followed Jug but he gave me the slip.’
Sussock grunted.
‘Well actually,’ confessed Montgomerie, ‘I let him go when I saw he was leading me a merry dance.
‘So they are alert to our interest in them?’
‘No more than usual, sir,’ said King. ‘I’ve been watching them for months now, and they know I’ve been watching them; in fact we’ve been circling each other like a couple of scorpions. I don’t think that they know we know about the planned bank raid on Tuesday morning, because from what DC Montgomerie has just said it sounds as though they were no
t too upset about being seen. I think that if they thought we had advance warning of a specific job they’d cancel everything and go into hibernation.’
‘But they seem to be going for launch.’ Donoghue leaned backwards.
‘Exactly, sir. They must be assuming that Cleopatra McCusker hasn’t coughed.’
‘Good. You’ll be back up in the West End today, Montgomerie?’
‘Yes, sir. I’ve contacted the police on the Isle of Bute to let us know if Spicer leaves the island. It occurred to me that if we could follow him in the city he might lead us to the safe house.’
‘Now that, Montgomerie,’ said Donoghue, ‘is the sort of initiative I like to see in my officers. Well done.’
Montgomerie shifted in his seat.
‘King?’
‘Well, sir.’ King cleared his throat. ‘I think I just need to feed back for DC Montgomerie’s benefit. It seems that Anne McDonald, who by this time was calling herself Forbes-McDonald, was blackmailing Spicer. He employed her as his secretary and she soon tumbled to his less than honest approach to his clients’ monies.’
‘So she angled for a cut?’
‘That’s right. Got it her way too, apparently. She seemed a wealthy lassie, she kidded on she had a rich old man. These are transcripts of her letters.’ King pressed them to Montgomerie and handed copies to Donoghue and Sussock. ‘Bill McGarrigle got on to the Gilheaney issue after following through the cross-indexing in the Clarions filing system. Gilheaney wrote to the Clarion from the nick and the filing system showed Spicer to have been his brief. Bill McGarrigle was already working on Spicer, and so followed up Gilheaney’s allegation.’
Fair Friday Page 14
