Where the Dead Men Go (6 page)

‘That’s your idea of a story, Fiona? Nothing’s happened yet. “The news is there is no news.” How is that a story?’

‘A blog post, then. The mood on the streets. Climate of fear. A city holds its breath.’

‘It’s like we want it to happen. We’re egging them on.
Gee the fuck up and start topping each other. We’ve got papers to sell
.’

Maguire was smiling. ‘Gerry. Thing is, I’m not pitching this. I’m not inviting a debate. I’m your editor. Now go and fucking write it.’

At least it wasn’t snowing. I drove along Paisley Road West, down Eglinton Street, parked the Forester on Westmoreland Street. Maguire’s idea was to do a feature on the communities who would suffer the brunt of Neil’s revenge. What did it feel like in Govanhill, in Pollok, waiting for the sky to fall?

It felt like anywhere else in the city as I left the car, took to the mid-morning southside streets. For years, now, Govanhill had been the city’s blackspot, the rancid backdrop to all the crime reports we couldn’t stop reading. In scores of exposés, some of them written by Moir, the name had acquired an aura, the tinge of stigma. The irony here was that Govanhill looked alright. A little shitty and shabby, but this wasn’t one of the Sixties misadventures, the no-go zones of broken lifts and gangland murals that pitted the city. Externally, at least, this was solid Victorian Glasgow, street upon street of bluff orange tenements.

I turned the corner onto Allison Street. A gorgeous Pakistani woman was striding towards me in a sky-blue sari with silver tassels, silver-lamé high heels, stepping through the dogshit and burst cardboard boxes, the pigeons nipping at the spent kebabs.

I walked on, past the bookies, the Jeddah Food Store, another bookies, a Western Union and the Queen’s Park Pawnbrokers. I stopped under the Guinness sign and the plastic Sky Sports banner of Neeson’s Bar.

Years ago Govanhill was Irish. When the Pakistanis moved in, the Irish moved out – to Newlands and Shawlands – but they kept their pubs. When the Pakistanis traded up to Pollokshields they kept their shops and their buildings. The landlords here were mostly Pakistani and their tenants were the Pakistani poor and the white Scottish poor and the city’s most recent wave of poor migrants: A8s from the accession states, Czechs and Slovaks, mainly Roma.

Neeson’s was quiet. Two old boys sat side by side at a scuffed table, long-nursed pints of lager before them, heads craned to watch the racing. I ordered a half of Guinness. The barman poured it and went back to his paperback. It would be fair to say that a climate of fear had yet to establish itself in Neeson’s Bar. Climate of fear about your pint not lasting till lunchtime. Climate of fear about losing your pound each way on the 3.15 from Goodwood. I sank the black and left them to it. Maybe Pollok would be more promising.

I drove down Pollokshaws Road, took the Barrhead Road through the golf course and into Pollok. I hadn’t been in the scheme for eight or nine years. The old Pollok Centre had gone, replaced by the shiny new Silverburn Mall, but the streets round the Haugh Hill featured the same old white-harled four-in-a-blocks and three-storey flats. Pollok was the oldest of the big four peripheral schemes, built in the Fifties to house the families cleared from the central slums. The Walshes were the powers-that-be around here but you didn’t see them at weekly surgeries, you didn’t see them in constituency offices on the Crookston Road. What you saw, on a weekday lunchtime, was the usual outer-urban cast of moochers, mums and toddlers, shuffling old men. There was no story here, no danger of a story ever happening. I pulled over and phoned Lewicki.

‘A tout? I think you mean a CHIS, Gerry.’

‘A what?’

‘Covert Human Intelligence Source. All the best cops have them.’

He explained it to me. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers (Scotland) Act 2000 brought a new set of rules to the handling of touts. A tout now had to be registered. And a tout was no longer a tout, but a Covert Human Intelligence Source. Only a registered CHIS could be tasked to go out and find specific information. Only an approved officer could handle a CHIS, and only a senior officer – Assistant Chief Constable or above – could sanction an op. You had to show forms, permission slips, operational reports: every time you used a tout you had to drop half a week on the paperwork.

‘And you do this?’

‘Are you stupid, Gerry? Do I fuck.’

‘So have you got one?’

He was quiet for a bit. ‘Maybe. Call you back in ten.’

Lewicki’s tout worked part-time as a janitor in the Community Centre on Langton Road. Within half an hour he was sitting in the passenger seat of the Forester, smelling strongly of turpentine (‘I was varnishing the sideboard’), his thirty-quid fee in his boiler-suit pocket. He was a bit put out when he heard what I wanted.

‘The
mood
of the place?’ He squished round to face me, shaking his head. ‘The fucking
mood
of the place?’

I had hurt his professional pride. He was used to being asked for a name. A time. Some precise piece of data only he could divulge. Not something anyone could answer.

I tried again. ‘I mean, what are they saying about it, the Walshes? Are they nervous, scared? Are they taking, you know, precautions?’

Again the pitying look. ‘Well they’re not being silly about it. They’re keeping the head down. But that’s the wrong question, son.’

‘So what’s the right one?’

‘Who killed Billy Swan? Because I’ll tell you something, son. No one round here’s got a clue.’ He nodded importantly, tapped a finger on the dashboard. ‘No one’s got a clue. Maybe some of the young ones, or the gyppos up in Govanhill – maybe they did it on their own, make a name for themselves. But no one ordered it. No one green-lighted it here. Alright, son? We done?’

I thanked him as he wrestled out of the car. This was as close to a vox pop as I was going to get. I watched him stroll down the hill, arms braced for action, the keelie roll. How did you make a mood piece out of this? A carnaptious old grass in a stained boiler-suit.

I drove straight home from Pollok, back to the cold empty flat. I’d set the fire that morning and now I lit it, watched the blue flames play on the firelighter cubes, the twists of newspaper flare and blacken, the thin ribs of kindling quicken and blaze. I stuck two blocks of larch on top. I found an old fleece and pulled it on and lay on the couch watching the flames pouring round the yellow blocks, and wondered why I couldn’t get warm.

‘Daddy!’ The boy was slapping my shoulders, the crown of my head. ‘Daddy! Wake up!’ His grinning face, the bunched cheeks pink with cold. I could feel the outside on his anorak as I unzipped it and tugged it off. When I hoisted him onto my chest he buried his face in my neck, chilling my skin with his cheeks. His shoes bumped to the carpet as I pried them off in turn.

He was twenty months old. For months he’d been in the point-and-tell phase, striding around the flat like a diapered Adam, imperiously designating the objects in his path, drunk with the joys of naming.
Book! Car! Dada! Cup!
Recently he’d discovered the two-word sentence and a plangent note, a thread of yearning, had entered his pronouncements.
Doggy gone! All done! Want it!
There was a haiku starkness to these bulletins that I found appealing and that made me think of the words we waste and of how we would fare if we were held to the two-word sentence. The gains would be striking. The lies, the excuses, the fudges and shams would all go. Job done. Enough bullshit.

Over the boy’s head the day was fading in the window. I could hear Mari in the kitchen, putting the shopping away. Angus slithered down and skittered through to his mother. The fire was dying, the last logs blackened on top, still pulsing red underneath. I lifted the poker and opened the door in the latticework fireguard, keeping one hand free in case Angus came back. I turned the logs over and laid some kindling sticks crosswise over them. When I went to add a block of larch my hand jumped and the knuckle of my middle finger bumped the edge of the stove.

In the kitchen I ran the cold tap and watched Mari stacking cans in the cupboard. She glanced over as if to check what was blocking her light.

‘How are you feeling?’

The water was cold now. I put my hand in the stream and let it play on the burn, a purple hyphen over the knuckle.

‘Fine. I burnt my finger. It’s OK.’

‘No, I mean how are you feeling?’

I looked over my shoulder. She had paused with a can in her hand, as though weighing it for a missile.

‘I don’t know.’ The knuckle was numb. ‘I’m fine. I wish he had called, though. I wish he had let me know. I wish he’d done that.’

I dried my hands on a dishtowel, stopped to look at them, the palms, the freckled backs, the pale strip where the ring had been. Could your hands do this, I wondered. Suddenly betray you? The little creatures that scampered to meet your every command, could they calmly tie the knots that lashed your wrists to a steering wheel, calmly tie and tighten them, send you to your death?

Then Mari was in front of me, taking my hands in hers, placing my hands on her waist, pressing against me. She pulled my head down till her lips were touching my ear. ‘Give yourself a break, Gerry. It’s not a reflection on you.’

I nodded. That I needed to hear this didn’t mean that I believed it.

When we broke apart Mari clapped her hands, chafed them together. ‘Anyway!’ She was all brisk and business now: ‘Looks to me like someone could do with cheering up.’

‘Well it’s not you.’ She was struggling to stifle a grin. ‘So I guess that leaves me. I’m open to offers. What did you have in mind?’

‘Ah, I don’t know.’ She forced two fingers into her back jeans pocket and extracted a hinged strip of card. Two tickets. The Black Keys gig at the Barrowland.

‘And dinner,’ she said. ‘Beforehand. At Ferrante’s. That’s the place you like, isn’t it?’

‘Jesus. Aye. What’s the occasion?’

‘We got it.’ She shrugged. ‘We got the contract.’

‘The athletes’ village?’

‘The
velo
drome, Gerry.’

‘Aah, brilliant.’ I hugged her. ‘Brilliant. Well done.’ I paused. ‘What about his Lordship?’

She looked at her watch. ‘Sitter’s due in forty minutes. Get your arse in that shower.’

Ferrante’s was busy with the pre-theatre crowd but we landed a nice two-seater by the aquarium. We ordered Glendronach Parliaments to celebrate Mari’s news, and a bottle of Central Otago pinot to make her feel at home.

Though we always spoke about making time for ourselves we rarely did it. I’d forgotten how good it could be just to talk and drink and eat, enjoy the music of a conversation, be Mari and Gerry, not Mum and Dad. Mari was stoked about the bid, kept coming back to it. It wouldn’t be officially announced till the New Year but they’d been tipped the wink that their bid was the winner. I was enjoying her elation, the wine, the nearness of her bare arms across the table, until halfway through the entrees I noticed Mari staring at something over my shoulder. She did it three or four times over the next two minutes. When she did it again I knocked my napkin to the floor and bent to fetch it. Three tables away. Big, good-looking guy in a pink polo shirt, the Kappa logo on his chest, the two naked women sitting back to back.

I tried to focus on Mari’s words but the guy’s big square grinning face kept swimming up before me. When she looked at him again I stopped eating, set my knife and fork down on the plate.

‘Jesus.’ I finished chewing. ‘What the fuck, Mari – do you know this guy?’ I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. ‘Do you want me to get you an introduction?’

She was still watching him, though her head responded to the tether of my voice and then her eyes followed, focused on me, puzzled at my angry tone: ‘What? Yeah, I do know him. I was trying to work out where I’d seen him. It was with Bryan, he came to see Bryan last week.’ Bryan Hamill was Mari’s boss at the firm. She was smiling. ‘Oh, that’s sweet, Gerry. Were you jealous? A pink polo shirt? Really? The Magnum moustache? You’re worse than my old man.’

Mari’s father had once walked out of an amateur production of
Death of a Salesman
when he thought Mari’s mother was flirting with Willy Loman.

‘Listen, remind me to phone home when I get back,’ she said. ‘I need to talk to them. Mum and Dad.’ She looked up quickly. ‘It’s six years since Josh. Since – you know.’

Mari had an older brother, deceased. He got killed in Oz, some shitty outback town, murdered, a mugging gone wrong.

 ‘I never told you about him,’ she said. ‘Not properly.’

I knew Josh from the blurry snap of a blond, sardonic beach-bum in a wife-beater and yellow board shorts that occupied our living-room bookcase, and from the pious annual tribute that Mari’s mum paid him in the photocopied round-up of Somerville family news that accompanied our Christmas card.

‘No,’ I said. ‘You didn’t.’

She drained the dregs of her whisky, took a slug of pinot, leaned forward and started to talk about him. There were five years between them. Josh had been more like a cooler, younger father than a brother. He bought her little presents, taught her how to surf, throw a rugby ball. Taught her how to fight. Josh had been her best friend right through her childhood, walking her to school, vetting boyfriends – terrorising them, it sounded like – and generally looking out for Mari, in so far as a GP’s daughter in a high-decile harbourside Auckland suburb needs looking out for. Then he left home. Bright but lazy, he finished school at sixteen, worked in a Huntly coalmine, played league on the weekends. He liked the life but the wages were shit and pretty soon he followed his mates across the Tasman, the big Kalgoorlie gold mine out in Western Oz. Big money. Coming home at Christmas with presents for everyone, laptops, digital cameras.

Then one Boxing Day morning Mari saw Josh coming out of the bathroom with a towel round his waist and a new tatt splashed across his back, a snarling bulldog in a studded collar and a scroll with
MAD DOGS
in flashy Gothic script. He laughed it off but the family learned later that he’d gotten involved with a bikie gang, he might have been patched, was probably dealing for them. And then he’d fallen out with the top boys. The cops’ intel was that Josh had tried to stiff them on a hash deal but he might just as readily have said the wrong thing or looked the wrong way at someone’s missus.