Random (10 page)

Jimmy screamed for a long time. Blood and tissue spurted from his eyes and he opened his lungs and roared.

Davie hadn’t thrust the screwdriver all the way home of course. Too high a chance that would have killed him. He just forced it in enough to burst the eyeball and let Jimmy Mac know that he was serious. It was a message. Kirkwood’s message to the other city.

They let Jimmy scream for a bit then sob for a bit. Then Davie grabbed his hair and yanked it back hard on his head. He asked him what he knew about Spud Tierney’s death.

Jimmy Mac found a voice and burbled that he didn’t know nothing. If the Tierney killing had anything to do with Mick Docherty then he knew nothing about it.

They knew he was telling the truth then. He was too shit-scared to do otherwise.

All of that was bad enough and all down to me, but it got worse.

Before they bundled Jimmy Mac into the white van and before they drove him back to the Victory and before they threw him out of the van’s back door onto the street in front of the pub. Before they did all that, Alec Kirkwood told Davie Stewart to bring out a pair of pliers and clip off Jimmy Mac’s pinkie.

Shit.

They talked about Spud Tierney from the back seat of my taxi. It was all over the papers, talk of turf wars, tit-for-tat violence, contract killings and gangsters. Mostly it was shit.

Sometimes they talked to me, sometimes they were on mobile phones. Acting tough, talking gallus, playing the big man, playing the big so what. Nobody in Glasgow was scared of a bit of organized criminal bloodshed.

They might have been outraged or shocked, disgusted or interested but not frightened. Most of them were way too cool and street smart for that. Scared was for Edinburgh or teuchters. They lived in Glasgow, therefore they were duty-bound to be hard about such things. Curious indifference was the most they were allowed to muster.

‘Aye, stabbed. That’s right. A dealer. Know Alec Kirkwood? Aye, one of his guys. Bodies going to be piling up, way I got told. See the game last night? Terrible, wasn’t it? Ref was hopeless.’

Or else they were on their high horse about it. A disgrace. Police should be doing something about that kind of thing. More bobbies on the beat. If those people had proper jobs then they wouldn’t have the time to go round stabbing each other.

Others relished it because if they were killing each other then they were leaving normal folk alone. Let the fuckers stab each other all they want. Every one deid is one less bampot on the streets. Give them more fucking knives and guns and let them get on with it.

They still didn’t talk about me because they didn’t know I existed. If anything I had slipped further into the shadows because they thought Thomas Tierney was a gangland killing. Glasgow had no idea who I was. Outside the ranks of Strathclyde Police I was nothing. They knew me, they wanted me but no one else gave a damn.

A cop got into the back of the cab just days after Tierney. Saw him for polis right off. The clothes, the hair, the way he carried himself, all off-job casual but couldn’t have been anything else. Polite enough but no chat, which obviously suited me just fine. Gave me an address in Millerston, couple of streets back from Hogganfield Loch, and settled back in the seat. We had driven maybe five minutes when his mobile rang.

‘All right, Gavin? How you doing?’

Pause.

‘No, heard nothing. She’s keeping it all to herself. Asked around but no one knows what’s going on.’

Pause.

‘Aye, I know. Place is going mental.’

Pause and a narrowed glance at my eyes in the rear-view. I watched the road.

‘I don’t know how she expects to keep a lid on this for much longer. Three of them for fuck’s sake. One was bad enough but three? Shit’s going to hit the fan big time when this comes out.’

Long pause.

‘She doesn’t have a clue. Not a Scooby. Neither of them do. Miles out her depth. Fucking drowning in it she is. Serves the bitch right.’

Pause.

‘No, no way. Sorry but all she has to do is hold her hands up and admit she’s not up to it. Should have it taken off her. Fucking three of them. Fucking unbelievable.’

Pause.

‘No, I don’t.’

Pause.

‘That’s no the point. Nothing to do with it.’

Pause.

‘No, I don’t know either. No idea. Some sick joke. But it shouldn’t matter. Nothing to do with it, certainly no reason for her to run with this.’

Pause.

‘Aye well, we’ll see soon enough. Fuck knows what’s going to happen if there’s a fourth.’

Very short pause.

‘Well, you can hardly rule it out.’

Pause.

‘I’m just saying. This is out of hand already, Gav. Way out of hand. Three of the fuckers.’

Long pause.

‘Yeah, but he doesn’t know that, does he? So he’ll think what he wants, do what he wants.’

Pause.

‘Oh no. No chance. That’s her call. No one talks about it, she says. Her call.’

Pause.

‘Not our problem. Our problem is what happens when this comes out. We’ll all be right in it then. Way she’s going it’s her mess. Let her lie in it.’

A long pause then a laugh. A harsh, crude laugh.

‘Aye, course I would. Am no denying that. So would you. Not the point though. Like I said, it’s way out of hand already. Fuck knows how this is going to pan out but I can’t see how it’s going to be good.’

Short pause.

‘Aye. Too right. A fucking nightmare. Shit! We should be all over this. Blasting it from the rooftops, not this softly, softly pish.’

He breathed out hard.

‘No, nor me, mate. All right. Speak to you tomorrow. Cheers.’

He snapped his phone shut with an angry click. At the sound of it shutting, I looked in the mirror and caught him glancing at me. He glared back, challenging me. My eyes went back to the road. Nothing to do with me, guv.

Maybe it
was
nothing to do with me. Maybe I was paranoid but it didn’t seem likely. I made him for a cop and was sure that every cop in Glasgow was talking about me. As much as no one else knew I existed, I must have been number one topic of conversation for the police.

I knew I was gripping the steering wheel a bit harder than I should have been the whole way through his chat. The chat that might have had nothing to do with me. I was cool. I was detached. I was compartmentalizing. But I knew it was having an effect. My heart was beating just a bit faster. My blood was hotter. The he and the she of his talk with the Gavin guy were reverberating round my head. I was thinking, calculating, considering. I think I might even have been sweating just a bit more than I should. I was aware of my pulse.

Suddenly I was aware of traffic lights changing above me as I drove along Cumbernauld Road into Stepps. Fuck, fuck fuck. I slammed on my brakes just after amber had become red. Fuck. Streets and windows and signs jolted into my head and it was like my ears had popped on an aeroplane. I slid to a halt a few feet beyond the line and realized I hadn’t noticed much except his voice since some time back when we were on the bypass.

He shot forward a bit in his seat and swore.

‘Fuck’s sake.’

‘Sorry. Sorry about that. Changed on me.’

‘Aye. So I saw.’

He glared at me again in the rear-view.

I tore my eyes from his before I could glare back at him. So tempting but that would have achieved nothing and might have done a whole lot of harm. Heart beating fast. Pulse throbbing. I had a long game to play.

I breathed and I waited. Tried to make a point of not holding the steering wheel too hard. Long game. Big move still to come. Cool your blood.

The red ticked away like a stopped clock. Tick, tick, tick. Changed. Red. Red and amber. Green. Took my time. Eased away.

He glared at me again. I looked back blankly.

‘Fuck’s sake.’

Like it was all my fault.

He was just one cop. One polis man among eight thousand. One man among a million in Greater Glasgow. What the fuck did his opinion matter? He obviously didn’t know what he was talking about. Didn’t know anything about anything.

I was on edge. Didn’t realize it until then. Had wanted people to talk about me, about it, about them, but as soon as one did I got edgy. Not good. There were big things about to happen. The most important thing. Not the time to get anxious.

I didn’t look in the rear-view mirror again. Eyes front. Didn’t look at him again, didn’t breathe until we had gone onto Royston Road and it was time for the turn onto Mossbank Drive.

‘This one?’

‘Aye. Then first left.’

I turned right. I turned left. He said twenty yards. I stopped. He got out. He left a shit tip. Closed the door behind him without a word.

He was nothing. I breathed. Big city, small village. He knocked on the door of a house which opened and closed behind him.

I breathed and drove off. I drove on.

His conversation might have had nothing to do with me. I didn’t care. I knew what I had to do. I knew what was going to happen.

I’d read about serial killers. I would look in bookshops and in the local library. Never bought a book, never borrowed one. I’ve a very good memory. Some I read on the Internet but kept that to an absolute minimum. I knew everything was logged, everything monitored, everything watched.

I watched documentaries. Bought satellite television just for that. Read magazines, paid for in cash, bought in different places.

Ted Bundy. John Wayne Gacy. Fred West. Jeffrey Dahmer. Dennis Nilsen. Albert DeSalvo. David Berkowitz. Alexander Pichushkin. Pedro Alonso López. I knew them all.

Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole, Charles Ng, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. Albert Fish. Leopold and Loeb. Aileen Wuornos. Harold Shipman. Andrei Chikatilo. John George Haigh. John Christie. Peter Sutcliffe. Josef Fritzl.

Then there was Jack.

Some said the Ripper was overrated. I always remembered someone saying that to me: ‘Jack the Ripper is overrated.’ Just like that.

In purely numerical terms he was probably right. But what he forgot, what they all forget, is that Jack got away with it. The single most famous serial killer in history yet still unknown. Outstanding.

Some people think they know who Jack was but they don’t. They can’t know.

They call themselves Ripperologists, those who study Jack. Those that are into him in a big way. Ask ten Ripperologists who killed those women and you will get eleven different answers.

We know the women’s names.

Polly Nichols.

Annie Chapman.

Liz Stride.

Kate Eddowes.

Mary Kelly.

Five prostitutes of Whitechapel. Victims of life. Victims of Jack. Jack killed them, ripped them. But we don’t know why and we don’t know who.

They say he was Queen Victoria’s whoring grandson Eddy, the Duke of Clarence, driven mad by syphilis. They say it was the Queen’s physician William Gull. They say it was her obstetrician John Williams.

He was the painter Walter Sickert. He was Carl Feigenbaum, a German sailor. He was an insane Polish Jew, Aaron Kosminski.

It was the Ripper diary confessor James Maybrick or the bogus doctor Francis Tumblety. It was barrister Montague John Druitt, the abortionist Dr Thomas Neill Cream, the Polish poisoner George Chapman or Mary Kelly’s lover Joseph Barnett.

It was them and it was a hundred others but it was none of them. It was Jack. No one knows who he was.

Jack did what Jack had to do then he stopped. Disappeared. Slipped back into the London fog. Untouched.

Know what though? Jack’s biggest secret is that maybe he didn’t even exist. There is a theory that says there was no psychopath stalking the streets of Whitechapel, no madman hunting down prostitutes to kill and dissect them. Those women died all right but this theory says that there was no Jack.

It goes that three men worked together to do the murders. Their plan, if you believe it, was to cover their true intentions by creating the myth of the Ripper. These men were high establishment, variously connected to the Royal Household and were set on protecting its interests. Whether it was mad Prince Albert Victor that needed protecting or Gull or Williams, you can take your pick.

The bottom line is that one of the five whores, Mary Kelly, knew too much and was prepared to tell. She had to be silenced. But the killing of Mary alone would have left a trail back to the palace. Maybe the police would not have bothered their arses too much about a murdered prostitute but if they had looked into it seriously then motive could eventually have led them to the truth.

So the plan was devised. A story spun. A play performed
.

Mary Kelly and her friends were slaughtered and the murders made to look the work of a complete monster. The silencing of Mary Kelly was hidden amidst the other four. She was the needle. They were the haystack.