Where the Dead Men Go (18 page)

The first thing I saw when the lift doors parted on the newsroom next morning was Niven and Maguire, choppers bared in rictus grins, a snapper crouching in front of them, angling for the shot. They each had a grip of an ugly, angular object, a kind of jagged plastic shield. The snapper stood up as I passed them and Maguire’s smile slumped.

‘Gerry.’ I turned. Niven was already heading for the lift. ‘Gerry, a word.’

Maguire was wearing a new suit, fitted, black, a skirt instead of trousers. Her hair was different. The object she was holding looked like some kind of trophy.

‘Greater Glasgow tag-team champs? Scottish press corps mixed doubles?’

The curled lip, the hooded eyes. ‘I thought you’d like to see this, Gerry.’

She passed me the thing, a jagged hunk of Perspex. It was shaped like the silhouette of Scotland. In frosted white, floating in the plastic ice, was the stylised nib of a fountain pen above a line of smart italics:
Martin Moir Award for Investigative Reporting, 2011
. I turned it over in my hands. She was waiting for my verdict. I passed it back.

‘We need to talk.’

‘What’s stopping you?’

‘Not here.’

She sighed, hefted the trophy in a scarlet-taloned hand and marched off towards her office. I watched her unaccustomed calves above the glossy black heels. In the office she turned and leant against her desk, arms braced. She raised her eyebrows at me. I closed the door and leant against it.

‘He was working for Neil.’

There was no way to break it gently so I didn’t try.

‘Who was?’

I nodded at the trophy. ‘Wonderboy.’

‘
Martin?
’

‘He was on a retainer. He was writing stories for Neil, bringing heat on the Walshes. Screw them over for the Commie Games contracts.’

She pushed away from the desk, lowered herself into a seat, rested her arms on the little round table, slumped down. I drew out a chair and sat down opposite.

‘That’s where he got the money, the twenty-six grand. The Linn hi-fi, the Lexus. He was bent, Fiona. I got it from a cop, drug enforcement, an Agency guy. They’d marked his card. A piece he wrote last year about the pizzeria shooting, he knew things the cops hadn’t revealed. Details. The number of shots, that kind of thing.’

‘What does that prove?’ She raised her head.

‘It proves he was bent. I’ll sit on this for the moment, Fi, but if you’re stupid enough to go through with this—’ I jerked a thumb at the trophy.

The head drooped again, the arms sliding out till the crimson nails clicked against the base of the trophy. A clang like a bell as it dropped into the metal bucket.

‘Do yourself a favour,’ she said. ‘If you see Niven in the lift over the next few days, take the stairs.’

‘I’m sorry, Fiona.’

‘Merry fucking Christmas, Gerry.’

At the flat that evening I was re-reading
The Sportswriter
and waiting for my coffee to brew. Three heaped tablespoons of Blue Mountain were swirling around in the pot and the sharp dark smell was filling the kitchen. In some ways I should have been happy. Packy Walsh had been arrested and charged as an accessory in the murder of Helen Friel. DNA recovered from the forest where the body was dumped had placed one of Walsh’s charmers at the scene: Radislav Gombar, the Slovak enforcer whose name had been linked with the phantom child sex case in Govanhill. The search was on for Mister Quis Separabit. Gombar had fled – presumably back to Slovakia – and Walsh was safely banged up in Barlinnie. But Walsh hadn’t killed Martin Moir and I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d been scammed. When I thought I was fighting for justice I was doing Hamish Neil’s dirty work again.

I put my palm on the ball-shaped top of the plunger and pressed. It hadn’t been the smoothest of days and I hoped that things would look a bit brighter after a hit of high-country Jamaican. At forty quid a bag, it was dearer – and probably purer – than most of the coke in the city.

I looked at my watch: not yet eight. Still early enough to call James.

‘Hey, Killer.’

‘Hello, Dad.’

‘How many?’

One of the many shitty things about working Saturdays was that I always missed his games. Adam took him instead. There was a whole cohort of teammates and touchline fathers who thought that James’s dad was a skinny bald guy with a beard.

‘Two.’

‘You or the team?’

‘Me. We won five-two. I got two.’

I fetched a still-warm mug from the dishwasher.

‘The old left peg?’

‘Yeah, one of them. And one with the head.’

‘Brilliant. Who got man of the match?’

‘It’s “Player of the Day”, Dad. Morgan got it.’

‘The greedy one?’

‘He scored three goals.’

‘Yeah, he’s greedy. Bet you made most of his.’

‘I made one.’

‘There you are. I’m proud of you, son. Is your mum around?’

I poured the coffee, black, bright, oily, the scent of bitter oranges. Elaine was calling to someone, her heels clacking on the kitchen floor.

‘Gerry, yes. What is it?’

In the old days, when our separation was fresh, we spent hours on the phone. We talked more when we’d just split up than we’d done in the last few years of our marriage. Elaine was diligent, solicitous, took my calls at all hours, soothed me, lulled me, talked me down. Not now.

‘Hello to you, too.’

‘I’m busy, Gerry, People here. What do you want?’

‘Aye, OK. This Aberdeen thing. Where are we?’

‘We?’

‘I mean is he taking the job?’

She breathed through her nose. I knew the sound, not a good one.

‘When we reach a decision,’ she said, ‘we’ll let you know.’

‘I don’t get a say?’

‘In what job Adam does?’

‘In where my children live.’

In the silence I could hear voices, laughter, knives on plates, the sounds of civilisation. I could picture the dining room with its yellow walls, the blue vase in the alcove, the placemats with the phoenix motif.

‘You get good access, Gerry. You see them every weekend. It’s pretty bloody generous, actually.’

‘Is that a threat?’

‘What?’

‘It might not be so generous if I don’t toe the line?’

‘No! No, Gerry. Your access is good, that’s all. Whether we go to Aberdeen or not, that won’t change. Look, I’m in the middle of a dinner party. I can’t do this now.’

She rang off. No, access wouldn’t change. Everything would stay the same. Just add a round trip of three hundred miles whenever you want to see the boys. I had little enough time with them as it was. Now every Sunday I’d be up at the crack of dawn, hauling the Forester up the A fucking 90.

I yanked a carton of milk from the fridge: empty, a pissy dribble at the bottom.

‘Ah, did you not get milk?’ There was a girlish quiver in my voice. I put down the book, marched to the living room, shaking the empty carton.

‘What’s that, sweetie?’

‘I said there’s no bloody milk.’

She looked up from her drawings. ‘Well you better go and bloody get some then.’

I would have slammed the door if Angus hadn’t been in bed. I grabbed my old leather and clattered down the stairs. I hadn’t worn my leather in weeks and when I zipped it against the evening chill and plunged my hands in the pockets I felt a small object nestling under a packet of tissues. I traced it with the ball of my thumb, the surface ridged, scaly, it was Moir’s fish, the little key-ring charm that used to hang above his desk. I brought it out, bounced it on my palm as I crossed Kelvin Drive, when something struck me. I stopped on the bridge, under a streetlight. I hooked my finger into the key-ring and pulled on the fish’s tail. It came apart with a click. Glinting in the yellow glare as I held it to the light was a slim metal tab, a half-inch blunted blade.

Back at the flat, Mari glanced up from her work as I booted up the Mac, plugged the stick in the slot.

‘Where’s the milk?’

‘What? I’ll get it later.’

NO NAME: the device appeared on my desktop. I double-clicked and waited. A little box came up on the screen, framing a string of jpegs and Word docs and pdfs. I clicked on one of the jpegs. A man leaving a shop. He had the smug, furtive look of the illicitly photographed. Curly hair, broad nose, the shadowed frown-lines; it was Hamish Neil, in a white T-shirt and dark jerkin, a chunky watch catching the light. Through the plate-glass windows on either side, where the sun’s reflection didn’t blind them, were wreaths and bouquets. A street number – 137 – was visible at the top of the photo. Next photo: Neil again, leaving the florist’s, this time in a V-neck Lyle and Scott sweater (you could see the yellow eagle at the chest), shoulders hunched against the rain. In neither shot was he carrying flowers.

For the next twenty minutes I clicked through the photos. Most of them were Neil. Leaving the florist’s, leaving what looked like a hotel, leaving a tenement building. In some of the shots, a fit-looking woman – thirties, dark bobbed hair, sunglasses – was leaving the same buildings. Were these photos from the cops? Had Moir been doing his own surveillance?

The pdfs were scans of documents – bills, receipts. There were invoices from Laurelbank Retirement Home in Bearsden, the monthly accounts for Mrs Margaret Strain, Mrs Joy Glendinning, Mrs Norma Ross, from March of last year to October of this.

‘Shit.’

‘What’s this?’ Mari was at my shoulder. She squatted down on her haunches, arm on the back of my chair.

‘It’s Martin’s,’ I said. ‘I think he might have been clean after all.’

It was a dossier. Moir was building a dossier on Neil. Was that what this was? Had Moir been playing a double game, courting Neil to uncover his secrets, getting close enough to hurt him?

Lewicki answered on the fourth or fifth ring.

‘You never hear of a home life, Conway? It’s nine o’clock on Saturday night.’

‘That’s the weekly jubilee, is it? Set the clock by you?’

‘You’ve got a dirty mind, Conway. We’re watching a movie. Beer, tattie crisps. Homey things. Normal things.’

‘Aye. Well it’s homey, normal crims I’m calling about. Hamish Neil. Moir was keeping a dossier on him. I think Moir was clean after all.’

He picked me up within the hour. I was walking up Great Western Road when the Saab pulled in ahead, no signal. I’d copied the files onto my MacBook and I passed Lewicki the pen-drive.

‘And you got this how?’

‘Had it all along, Jan. Took it as a keepsake when I cleared his desk. Thought it was just a key-ring.’

We drove right out Great Western Road, through Anniesland and Knightswood, clean out to Clydebank. Parked in an empty business-centre car park. Lewicki fetched a laptop from the back seat. He worked through the files and photos, grunting now and then. I lit a Café Crème and watched the lights of Inchinnan across the river.

A grin kept stretching my lips so I could hardly smoke my cigar. I felt absurdly pleased that Moir was clean. I’d been wrong. We’d all been certain that Moir was gunning for Walsh and that Packy held the key to Martin’s death. We’d been facing the wrong direction, stuck on the Clyde’s wrong side. We should have been looking north, not south – to Cranhill not to Pollok. But I’d been right, too: Moir had kept the real stories hidden. Hid them so well that we nearly missed them. His real target was Hamish Neil but he never got the chance to see it through. I felt bad for doubting him. The only thing now – not for my sake or for Clare’s or the girls’ or Neve McDonald’s but for Martin Moir himself – was to finish the job. Starting with the cleanskins – this florist, this retirement home.

‘It’s good.’ Lewicki shifted in his seat, frowning at the screen. ‘The florist’s a front, we know that. The nursing home too. But the bills are new, the invoices. They’ll turn out to be ghosts, would be my guess. If we can tie Neil to these dockets we might have a crack at this. Sit tight for the minute, I’ll check with the tech boys tomorrow. Fucking Moir.’ He shook his head. ‘Should have known he’d never have done it, break the ninth commandment.’  

‘Chrysanths are always nice.’ The woman waved a vague hand at some buckets by the till. ‘Or—’ She peered around the shop, distracted, forlorn, a hand poised in the air, like someone who’s just come into a room and forgotten what she came for. ‘Or orchids?’ Her fingers tapped the tissue-paper backing of a window display where three vulgar blossoms hung in waxy, drooping folds.

‘I hate orchids,’ I said. ‘The smell.’

‘Not everyone’s taste,’ she said brightly. ‘What’s the occasion?’

She was fair, late forties, a heavy-set sensual woman with a smoker’s crimped lips. She moved among the displays with a buoyant grace. She wasn’t the woman in Moir’s photos.

‘I’m visiting my aunt,’ I said. ‘She’s in a nursing home in Bearsden.’

‘Bearsden’s nice.’

‘Laurelbank Retirement Home.’ I lifted a Mackintosh vase, checked the price on the base. ‘Do you know it?’

She had her back to me, scanning the arrangements along the back wall. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘What about a plant? They last longer.’

She smiled at me over her shoulder.

I bought some yellow carnations.

Laurelbank was a whitewashed villa with red tiled roofs in the sleepy streets behind Roman Road. A smiling teenage girl in a white nurse’s tunic answered the door.

‘I’m here to see my aunt.’ I brandished the carnations. ‘Mrs Glendinning.’

‘Come in.’

She slipped behind the reception desk and smiled afresh, as if greeting me for the first time.

I waited.

‘The name again, sir?’

‘Glendinning.’

Her manicured fingers rattled the keys. The name on her name badge was ‘Katya’. She grimaced at the screen.

‘I’m sorry, we don’t appear to have a resident of that name. Are you sure you have the correct . . . facility?’

I nodded. ‘This is the place.’

‘Well, I can’t see it.’ The smile was back. ‘Why don’t I get Mrs Cole? I haven’t been here long. Mrs Cole will have a better idea.’

She disappeared through a swing door and I leaned across the counter to steal a glance at the screen but it was back at the homepage and I moved smartly across to stand beneath the bucolic landscape that hung above the empty fireplace: a man in grey on a hillside casting a fly, a chill-looking dawn mirrored pink in the river.

‘You’re looking for Mrs Glendinning?’

The woman who stepped out from behind the counter and strode towards me was wearing a smart dark-blue two-piece. The suit had a mature, even matronly cut, but the body underneath it was good, and the woman’s eyes and the two-inch heels on her court shoes suggested she knew it.

‘That’s right.’

‘I’m very sorry, but Mrs Glendinning left us in August.’ The woman’s hands were clasped beneath her chest and she was nodding slowly.

‘She died?’

‘Oh no!’ The lips twisted in a waspish smile. 'No, the family took her away.’

‘Do you have an address?’ The address on Moir’s invoice was a PO box in Edinburgh.

‘For the family? I’m afraid not. They were moving away. Down south; Cornwall as I understand it. They were taking Mrs Glendinning with them. What did you say your connection was, Mr— ?’

‘Moir. Martin Moir. I’m the nephew.’

I watched the eyes for a reaction.

‘Martin
Moir
?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And do you have an address where we can reach you, Mr Moir, if something, if something turns up?’

‘I’m afraid not.’ I put out my hand and she grasped it lightly, absent-mindedly. ‘I think I may be moving soon too. Thanks for your help.’

The receptionist was still rattling the keys as I pushed back through the doors and into the street.

I drove round the block and parked a little farther down the street on the opposite side. I smoked two roll-ups, enjoying the weak, low sun on my half-closed eyes. In twenty minutes a white Porsche Cayenne pulled up outside Laurelbank and a slim brunette in jogging gear – three-quarter-length black leggings and a fitted, waterproof vest with fuchsia panels – slipped down from the driver’s side and bounced across the gravel on her spotless white Mizunos. When she tossed her hair on the top step I was ready with the iPhone and snapped two shots before the door closed. The short bobbed hair, the Jackie O sunspecs: it was the woman in Moir’s photos. I tossed the iPhone onto the passenger’s seat and headed back to town.

Lewicki phoned that evening. He had a colleague, Callum Kidd, who wanted to meet me, pass on some data. There were front companies the Agency knew about, even if they couldn’t yet prove them to be fronts. As of now they’d decided to share their intelligence with public bodies – local councils, health trusts, licensing boards – to prevent them awarding contracts to firms with criminal links. Kidd was prepared to show me the list.

The next afternoon I drove to Lock 27, picked my spot in the empty car park. The pub had yet to open but the chef stood smoking by an open fire-door, the wind rippling his thin checked trousers. There was no one else around. I thought it might be more conspicuous to ignore him so I jerked my chin as I headed for the towpath and he raised two fingers of his smoking hand, blessed me with his cigarette.

I was heading east. Low sun. The frozen grass sparkling, like something sprayed with silver paint. A jogger was powering towards me, the sun at her back, a silhouette of legs in black Lycra. I stepped onto the grass and she rasped past, jiggle of blonde ponytail, a swivelled eye.

The second bench was empty. I wiped a glove across the perforated metal, wiped the glove on my leather jacket. I was five minutes early. The Forth & Clyde was freezing over, two wavy lines of ice jutting out from either bank, a stripe of standing water in the middle. I could feel the bench through my jeans, the frozen metal, a dull itchy chill on the backs of my thighs. But the sun on my face had some heat and I closed my eyes to savour it. When I opened them a dog was rooting in the weeds at my feet, a boxer, its dainty waist twisting back and forward as the scents drew its nose. The man attached to it stood uncertainly, a pained half-smile on his long face. He wore a short jacket of houndstooth tweed, a scarlet scarf. He held the leash in a brown gloved hand.

‘Conway? Gerry Conway?’

‘Aye.’

I gave my hand to the dog, let it snuffle and lick, the blunt snout bumping my fingers, then took it away as the tailless rump shuffled up to the bench, the leg lifting. The man looked on with pursed lips. He didn’t look like a dog person. Was the dog even his? Was he a cutout, I wondered? Was this the cop?

‘I’ve got something for you.’

He took off his gloves, hunched his shoulders to reach into his inside pocket. I took a folded paper from his hand, stowed it in my own breast pocket.

‘Alright?’

I nodded. He was nodding too. A swan slid into view behind him on the black strip of water, like something on a rail. We needed a form of words to finish this, to bring the transaction to a close.

‘Be careful, alright?’

I tapped my pocket.

‘Won’t let it out of my sight.’

He shook his head.

‘No, I mean
you
. You be careful.’

‘Okay, I will.’

He looked off up the towpath and back at me. He was deciding whether to tell me something. A cop, I thought. He’s the cop, not the cutout.

‘Hamish Neil finds out we gave you that?’ He shook his head, tugging at the gloves, flexing the fingers. The dog watched his hands. There was something else, something behind his words. He turned to leave and I grabbed his forearm, the wiry tweed.

‘Hold on. How would Hamish Neil find out?’

He held my gaze. ‘Hamish Neil’s got a habit of finding things out.’

‘A rat?’

I thought he hadn’t heard me at first.

‘It could be.’ He studied the towpath. ‘Aye. We think so.’

I looked across the frozen water, the solitary swan slow-moed back into view. Did swans not come in pairs?

‘You mean he’ll know about this? Our meeting? Hamish Neil?’

‘Just be careful,’ he said again. He tugged hard on the animal’s leash and crunched off up the frozen path. The dog’s cropped tail wagged like a finger.

‘Hey!’

He stopped. The dog turned at my voice and they both stood and waited.

‘Why the canal?’

He shrugged.

‘I live near here. It’s where I walk the dog.’

He strode off, the dog trotting beside him in the frozen grass, rooting for smells. I tugged the paper from my pocket, two sheets of A4, stapled, folded in quarters. A printed list of company names and their registered addresses.
Citywide Cabs, Skyline Scaffolding, Greene Group, Judd Construction.
The usual fronts – cabs, builders, demolition. Then the others.
Sunset Boulevard Tanning Salon
,
Flowers By Genevieve
‚
MacKay’s Coaches
. Two hairdressing salons. Cash businesses, Lewicki had told me. Any place you can fabricate clients, phantom customers. Laurelbank Retirement Home was there, and a fitness club in Bothwell.

Would Maguire publish the list? I wasn’t sure. But she would publish the fact that the list existed, that we had it in our possession. That in itself should get the Justice Committee excited, spook Neil’s cleanskins.

Then I turned the page and the words swam up,
Abacus Nursery, 15 Jeffrey Street, G12
. I closed my eyes, flinched as from a blow, opened them, read it again. I was breathing through my nose, I could hear the snorkeling of air as if I was under water.