by Anna Smith
Now she heard it ringing again, the sound growing louder and louder as she felt herself being dragged out of the nightmare. She blinked in the darkness of her bedroom and heard the rain battering at the windows. She leaned across the bed and picked up the phone, checking the time on the radio alarm. It was ten past six. This could only be bad news.
‘Hallo?’ She cleared her throat.
‘Rosie?’ She recognised the voice of her cop contact Don. ‘Rosie, it’s me. Sorry, but it’s important.’
‘Don? What’s the matter?’
‘I thought you’d want to know. An early shout. There’s a prostitute been found with her throat cut, just off the Drag.’
Rosie’s heart jumped in her chest. Please don’t let it be Mags.
‘Any name? Do they know who she is?’ She was wide awake now and could hear her voice shaking. She tried to compose herself. Although she trusted Don, she didn’t want him to know just how much she knew. Not yet anyway.
‘Some bird called Mags.’ He was matter-of-fact. ‘Don’t know her second name. Oh, hold on . . .’ She could hear him rustling paper. ‘It’s Gillin, or Gillick, or something. I was out there with the night shift. She’s a wee skinny blonde thing. Poor wee bastard. Imagine some fucker cutting her throat.’
Rosie felt sick. Her head swam and she sank back onto the pillow.
‘You there, Rosie?’
‘Yeah.’ She managed to answer. She saw Mags in the cafe, laughing and coughing. She saw her stroking Gemma’s hair. Gemma. What about Gemma?
‘Do we know where she’s from, Don? Any relatives I can go see?’ She wanted to make sure it was Mags.
‘No,’ Don said. ‘But wait till you hear. Uniform went round to her address and there’s this wee lassie lying sleeping on the couch. She’s only about eight or something. Social work are round there now. The bird must have left her in there all night by herself. These fucking junkies. Honest to Christ.’
‘Can I go round and get an early look at the place?’ Rosie was already thinking of the story, and how she would put it together. Don wouldn’t be suspicious if she simply wanted to go to the house and the scene of the crime.
‘Yeah, suppose so. But just watch what you’re doing because you’ll be there even before the evening paper hacks. It’s not half six yet.’
‘I’ll be careful. Don’t worry, I just want some early colour. I mean, that’s the second hooker who ends up dead in a week. This story is getting bigger.’ She wondered if Don would take the bait.
‘Don’t know, Rosie, but what I can tell you is that there have been some pretty heavy calls made to the DI this morning. I was up at the crime scene and Jack Prentice turned up. I mean, what’s he doing there at this time of the morning? It’s not even his gaff.’
Rosie said nothing. She thought about Mags’ mobile and the last message from Tracy. It would be gone forever now.
‘You still there?’
‘Yeah. Sorry, Don, I’m just getting up. I’ll talk to you later.’
She walked into the bathroom in a daze and turned on the shower full blast. She stood watching as the steam filled the room, then stepped inside and let the warm water rush over her face and body. The tears came, slowly at first, spilling out of her eyes. And then she heard herself sobbing as she stood with the water beating onto her back. She thought of how scared Mags would have been in that single moment when she knew what was happening to her, what utter terror she must have felt. Then Rosie stopped crying and turned on the cold shower, wincing as it hit her warm body. They had done it. They must have. It was too much of a coincidence.
Suddenly she felt very, very scared.
CHAPTER TWELVE
A handful of locals had already gathered in the street outside Mags’s house. In the darkness they were like shadows, the blue light from the police car flashing momentarily on their faces. Now you see them, now you don’t. They wore the tired, grey faces of people who had seen it all before. Rosie walked towards three or four women standing together watching Mags’s front door. Tragedy in places like this always brought people out of their homes and onto the street, some to criticise and pontificate, others relieved that – this time – death had not come to their doorstep.
Behind the torn curtains of Mags’s ground floor flat, Rosie could see a stark bare bulb light up the living room. Inside, she could make out a policewoman and another woman looking downwards. They must be talking to Gemma, she thought.
One of the street women turned to Rosie. ‘Fuckin’ ridiculous. That wee thing left by herself and her mammy out whorin’ it. Fuckin’ scandalous.’ The other women, their arms folded against the cold, nodded in agreement.
One of them turned to Rosie and looked her up and down. ‘You fae the social?’ She lit a cigarette and sucked in the smoke.
‘No,’ Rosie said, knowing that wouldn’t be enough information for them.
‘Did you know Mags?’ asked another woman, eyeing her suspiciously.
Rosie looked all three of them in the eye in turn. They could easily turn on her if they knew she was a journalist. They needed somebody to blame at a time like this.
‘I was Mags’s friend. I met her some time ago and I liked her a lot. She was a good person. Just the drugs were the problem. I think she was trying to come off them.’
‘Aye. Usual shite.’ The first woman shook her head. ‘They’re all tryin’ to come off them, but they never do. If they’re not smacked up, they’re half-jaked on methadone. The end result’s always the same. They end up in a fuckin’ box and it’s the weans that are left.’
Across the street, the front door opened and a burly policeman emerged, carrying Gemma in his arms. She was wearing her red duffel coat over her pyjamas. One of her slippers fell off onto the path and a policewoman picked it up and pushed her foot back into it. Gemma’s chalk-white face looked smaller somehow, pinched and tired. No spark at all. She glanced around, confused, as though she was expecting to see her mum there. The policeman put her into the back of the panda car and she knelt up on the seat, looking out of the rear window. Just as the car was about to draw away, she spotted Rosie and her eyes lit up. She rapped the back window excitedly and Rosie gave her a discreet wave. Everyone turned around to look at her, including the two detectives standing by the car. The car pulled away and Rosie could see that now there were tears in Gemma’s eyes as she banged on the window. Rosie bit her lip because she understood how Gemma felt right now. She had been there. Alone, wondering where she was going, crying for her mother.
‘I suppose that’ll be her in care,’ one of the women said. ‘Just like half the weans around here. God help her.’
‘Where’ll they take her?’ Rosie asked.
‘Christ knows. They might get her foster parents or she might be kept in that Woodbank. Let’s just hope she gets fostered because, the way I hear it, some of the lassies from there are already out working the Drag and some of them aren’t even teenagers. Beasts. Men are beasts.’
The other women nodded, and Rosie knew she’d better say something.
‘Yeah. Terrible.’ She pulled up her collar. They were watching her to see if she was going to say anything more interesting, but she turned and walked away. She could feel their eyes on her back, but the longer she was there, the more chance the detectives would come sniffing around her.
By the time she arrived back at the newspaper office, Rosie had some idea in her head of the story she would write for tomorrow’s paper. She’d talk to McGuire about it. It would be out by now that Mags had been murdered – the second dead prostitute in a week. Even though the cops had not come out and confirmed the kid had worked the Drag, there were enough other people saying it for the newspapers to have already started dripping the line. There would be a press conference later in the afternoon. No doubt, the question on every reporter’s lips would be, is there a serial killer on the loose who is targeting street girls? The papers loved a serial killer. The cops would have the answers ready for that one. They would take
the opportunity to re-emphasise that there was nothing to suggest that the first girl was murdered, nor were the deaths connected. But Rosie knew better.
When she reached her desk she found a note telling her to see the editor.
‘You look like shit.’ Bob Reynolds, the crime reporter, who sat opposite her, watched as she took her notebook from her bag.
‘Thank you, Oscar Wilde,’ Rosie said. ‘At least I know I can look better. You’ll be an ugly bastard all your life.’
Terms of endearment on the editorial floor. The two of them actually got on well and had worked together on some major stories. But Bob was the crime reporter, and he always tried to pull rank if the major story Rosie was involved in had a criminal connection. She usually let him lead the way, but then had to rewrite the copy because McGuire always said that Reynolds couldn’t write home for money, especially after the pub doors had opened.
Rosie liked Reynolds, but she trusted him about as far as she could throw his six-foot frame. He was like a caricature from an old black and white movie: furtive, dark, talking out of the side of his mouth like he was always giving you some inside track. But he was very close to the cops, and Rosie knew that he would protect them at all times. She knew she couldn’t even let him get so much as a faint whiff of the story she was working on.
‘Another bird dead,’ Reynolds said. ‘You were out at the house. How come? One of my copper mates saw you.’
Rosie was caught off guard. She would have to have some kind of story as to why she was out on a murder story before the crime man had been there.
‘Oh, a contact of mine.’ She recovered quickly. ‘From the prostitutes’ rights group. One of them phoned me saying that they knew the girl and that she had been found dead. Murdered.’
‘How did they get to know so early?’ Reynolds persisted. Rosie knew he didn’t believe her.
‘Don’t know. I suppose the cops must have phoned to see if they knew anything about her. She used to go to the Drop-In Centre, for condoms and stuff. Somebody connected to there phoned me really early this morning, so I thought I would go out and have a quick recce. There might be some colour piece to be done.’
Rosie was relieved when her phone rang. It was McGuire’s secretary.
‘You’ve to come through,’ she said.
She didn’t even bother to tell Reynolds where she was going, but she could feel him watching her as she walked across the vast editorial floor, which was beginning to fill up with reporters now that it was after nine. In a couple of hours every desk would be occupied, and the whole place would be alive and bustling, phones ringing and banter between the journalists growing, as the newspaper marched towards its deadline.
Rosie headed through the open door of the glass partition in the far corner where Marion sat at her desk outside McGuire’s office, guarding him from disgruntled executives or meddling bean counters from the finance department. Rosie nodded to Marion and walked into the office.
‘Well!’ McGuire took off his reading glasses as Rosie came in. ‘Shut the door and sit down.’
She sat on the red leather sofa and opened her notebook.
‘Fuckin’ hell, Gilmour.’ He was excited. He rubbed his hands. ‘This is beginning to warm up. Two stiffs in a week. Christ!’
‘I’m sure the families of the prostitutes don’t see it that way, but I take your point.’ Her voice was sarcastic. She knew McGuire would expect her to say that. He liked to wind her up, always telling her she was just a bleeding heart and would never be hard enough to be an editor like him. Not that she ever wanted to be. She liked to lie straight in her bed.
He grinned. ‘So. What now?’ He put his feet up on the desk. ‘Speak to me. I want to work out how I’m going to handle this before Lamont and the rest troop in for conference at eleven.’
Rosie told him that, first and foremost, she felt Reynolds had to be allowed to write the main story. She would go to the press conference with him and do all the atmosphere and colour of the day. They had already agreed earlier that he should be nowhere near the big picture. McGuire also knew that Reynolds was too close for comfort to the cops.
They would run the story straight as a murder and see what came out at the press conference. Rosie was to do a separate piece on prostitutes and, now that three had been murdered in a year, questioning what police were doing – if anything – to protect them. The woolly-headed liberals would love that, McGuire told her. The story of Tracy’s death and the prostitute connection would be separate, but Rosie would pursue the social work department with questions, asking why they had not done their job and protected her.
When they had finished the discussion, McGuire wanted to talk about the real story. Rosie told him how she had been phoned at six by her cop mate.
‘The contact who phoned me this morning said that Jack Prentice was up at the murder scene very early on,’ Rosie told him. ‘That’s not normal. It’s not his patch. I think there’s more to it.’
‘What like?’ He sat forward. ‘You don’t think they bumped her off? Fuck me, Gilmour!’
Rosie got up from the sofa. ‘I’m absolutely certain they bumped her off.’
She paced around in front of his desk. ‘Listen, Mick. I got a call from Mags two nights ago. I told you that yesterday. She got duffed up by Prentice and she gave him a blow-job. She was worried that something was going to happen to her, really worried.’
‘So what do you think? Are you saying they hired someone to cut her throat?’
‘You can hire anybody in this city to cut anybody’s throat if the money’s right. You know that,’ Rosie said. ‘Yes. I think they got somebody to get rid of her. Problem is, I don’t know if they did this because of Tracy, or because they knew she talked to me.’ She spread her hands. ‘Well, actually nobody did know she talked to me – apart from you.’
‘Well I sure as fuck didn’t tell anyone!’
‘I know. Christ!’ Rosie shook her head. ‘I know you didn’t. But I think somehow they found out. What about Reynolds? Does he know anything?’
‘No, for Christ’s sake, he knows fuck all. Sometimes he doesn’t even know what fucking day it is. Drunken fucker.’
‘Well.’ Rosie took a deep breath. ‘The only thing I can think of is that Mags blabbed to another hooker when she was smacked up, and she’s passed the information back to the cops. Some of them would do anything for a few quid. It wouldn’t have mattered that it was the garbled ramblings of a junked-up hooker. All it would need to reach the top ears is that Mags had blabbed to a reporter.’
McGuire took his feet from the desk and stood up. ‘Shit, Gilmour,’ he said. ‘That puts you in a bit of danger, does it not?’
‘No. They might not know it’s me.’ Then she remembered being seen by the detectives out at Mags’s house this morning. She told McGuire. He looked concerned.
‘Tell you what. Why don’t we move you out of your flat for a couple of weeks. You know, just in case.’
‘Where to?’ She didn’t want to move. ‘I hate hotels.’
McGuire was already moving to buzz Marion. ‘We’ll rent you a flat. And we’ll get you a minder. I don’t want you getting a bullet in your back, it would ruin my chance of becoming chairman.’ He laughed and Rosie laughed with him. But it was nervy laughter, and they both knew it.
McGuire called Marion in and told her to find Rosie a flat in town for the next month. Somewhere nice, but not too expensive. He knew he didn’t have to tell her to keep it quiet. She was the very soul of discretion. That was how he had managed to keep two women on the go for the past five years.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Foxy pushed his chair back and sat with his feet on the window sill, his hands clasped behind his head. When Patsy brought his coffee in, he looked a picture of power and confidence.
‘You know, you should relax more,’ she said to him.
He smiled. She was one of the few people who got away with talking to him like that. But Patsy had been with him all through the
ranks and he took more snash from her than anybody. She knew about his women. She also knew that his trips on the boat at the weekends had as much to do with sailing as a bunch of guys on a so-called golfing holiday to Magaluf.
‘How can I relax when my quest in life is to make this city safe?’ He smiled, and sipped his coffee.
When Patsy closed the door, Foxy took a deep breath and ran his hand over his chin.
‘What a fucking mess,’ he whispered. ‘What a right fucking mess.’
As he waited for the arrival of Jack and Bill, he went over in his mind the conversation he had just had on the telephone. He had called Jake Cox, the thug boss of Glasgow’s underworld, known and feared across the city and beyond, as the Big Man. For the best part of twenty-five years, Jake and Foxy had been what you could call mates – a kind of working relationship as Jake built up his empire. It was a perfect arrangement. They didn’t step on each other’s toes and both of them reaped the rewards. Often, in return for being allowed plenty of leeway, Big Jake delivered for Foxy, be it a murder inquiry or a robbery. If some little toerag in his regime had stepped out line, they were delivered to the cops and they were fitted up. Simple as that. Or if that didn’t suit Foxy’s wishes, they turned up dead.
One of the biggest turns Jake had done for Foxy was when the police instituted a high-profile gun amnesty, announcing in the press that anyone who handed in a weapon would not be prosecuted. When it kicked off, Foxy had gone on television, waxing lyrical about how this would take guns out of the community, make the streets safer. Only a trickle of weapons had been handed in at first, but after the meet with Big Jake, suddenly there were guns being found everywhere, by police acting on anonymous tip-offs. Foxy was Wyatt Earp and this was Dodge City. Shotguns, rifles and handguns started turning up in graveyards, behind shops, in derelict warehouses. Foxy was making a breakthrough. Another civic lunch celebrated his success, another promotion followed.
