Where the Dead Men Go (7 page)

The family told people that Josh had been mugged but really he was murdered by his buddies. His Mad Dog brothers. The Kalgoorlie cops found him round the back of a brick-veneer row-house in an Aborigine district. Beaten to death. His face stoved in. Choked by his own blood. Mari’s parents flew over to identify their boy, bring back the body.

‘Jesus. I had no idea. I’m sorry, Mari.’

‘Yeah.’ She poked at her salad. ‘So, anyway. It gives you an idea why they act like they do, why they’re keen for me to come back. They miss me, Gerry. They worry. Every time I phone they think something’s happened.’

‘Why would they worry when they know you’re with someone like me?’

‘Well, exactly.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘I can’t imagine.’

She smiled and I was reaching out to grip her hand when a clatter at my elbow stopped me short. The waitress had dumped an ice-bucket down on a tripod. The dull gold shaft of a champagne bottle poked at a slant from the slushy ice. A waiter leaned across, twice, landing champagne flutes on the table, aligning them with little sweeps of his palm on the tablecloth, two fingers clamped round the stem.

‘Sorry, no, we didn’t order—’

‘It’s compliments of another diner, sir.’ The waitress had stripped the sheath of gold foil from the neck of the bottle and was twisting the wire coil with sharp little flicks of her wrist. She nodded at the bar. ‘Gentleman in the leather jacket.’

The little gunshot of the loosened cork sounded as I turned to look. The guy in the pink Kappa polo shirt, the guy Mari recognised, was on his way out, but it wasn’t him. He was holding the door for a second man, the one who’d had his back to us at the table, a shorter, square-set fellow who pocketed his wallet, scooped a handful of mints from the bowl on the bar, tipped two fingers to his temple and aimed them at me on his way out the door.

‘Who was
that
?’

Mari held her glass of brimming fizz. The waiter had withdrawn. The waitress lodged the bottle in the bucket, wrapped a napkin round its neck, left us with a little bow.

It was Hamish Neil.

‘No one,’ I said. I lifted my own glass. ‘A guy from work. Owed me a favour. Cheers.’

‘
No one
?’ Mari frowned, held her glass as if she was proposing a toast. ‘No one? You look like you’ve just seen a dead man.’ 

The funerals fell on consecutive days, Swan’s on a Tuesday, Moir’s on Wednesday. The Calvinist in me – even the Catholics in Glasgow are Calvinist, and Calvinism never lapses, it bites too deep in the bone – relished the prospect. Black suit laid out on the bed two mornings running, black tie draped on the wardrobe door. Shave against the grain with a fresh blade; virtuous sting of aftershave. I stood before the mirror in my stocking soles, folding a tie I’d inherited from my father, a tie I first wore to his funeral.

Mari came through from the bedroom, fiddling with an earring. She nudged me out of the way with her hip and stood frowning at the mirror.

She drew her upper lip over her teeth, checking her lipstick. She smoothed the front of her dress, turned to check the back view over her shoulder. I felt an incongruous stab of desire as I settled my Windsor and turned down my collar, watching the light catch the folds of her dress, the sheer tights, the glossy heels with the tapering spikes, and my cock nudged the fly of my trousers, once, twice:
It’s not me who’s died
.

‘You okay?’ She pulled me round to face her, brushed the shoulders of my suit, fiddled with my tie.

‘I’m fine.’

‘This is the real one today.’

‘I know.’

The day before I’d stood outside the church with the other hacks, the crew from
Reporting Scotland
, the rubbernecking locals, and watched six gangsters shoulder Billy Swan down the steps to the hearse. I followed the convoy of cars to the cemetery and stood well back when the interment began, me and the snapper and the rest of the pack. They stood six-deep round the grave, it was a Neil show of strength. Plain-clothes men haunted the edge of the crowd and a pair of uniforms stood beside their squad car at the cemetery gates. But that was just work. Today was for real.

On the way down to Ayrshire we stopped for petrol. The cashier smiled, then she noticed my tie, passed me the receipt with a sympathetic grimace.

We parked at the railway station and walked down the hill to the church. Mari took my arm as we crossed the cobbles.

The Old High Kirk in Mureton is a squat grey box in the shadow of the viaduct. It looks like someone has fashioned a barn out of stone and then plumped a little clock-tower on top. I took an order of service from a teenage boy and we filed inside with the others.

The church was packed. The service wouldn’t start for another twenty minutes but already the pews were thronged. We squeezed down a side-aisle and into our seats. I thought of Moir as a lone wolf, Johnny-no-pals, so it surprised me, the tight rows of mourners, the old kirk groaning like an emigrant ship. I felt sorry for my dead self, for the Gerry Conway whose boxed carcass would one day rest on trestles in front of a crowd far sparser than this. It feels a little hollow to be jealous of a dead man.

Mari read the order of service and I looked round for people I knew. The daily and Sunday were out in force – we’d left a skeleton staff at Pacific Quay – and my colleagues, unfamiliar in black, with their unknown partners and spouses, were dotted round the church. Maguire and Niven were up the front, conferring like plotters. Further back I spotted the fire-truck lipstick and red-rimmed eyes of Neve McDonald and a haggard-looking Jimmy Driscoll. Russell Spence, the QC, was shuffling along to make space for Lachlan MacCrimmon, the court reporter. A couple of TV presenters whose names escaped me were tossing their heads in the gallery. Peter Hewlett the Rangers striker was there, and Mark Halliday, who won the Open Championship at Carnoustie in a three-way play-off with Woods and Westwood and never won anything again, and a red-haired character actor from
River
City
, tugging at the sleeper in his ear. Towards the back of the church was a restless clutch of thugs with squaddie buzzcuts: I took these to be villains, the career crims who found their chronicler in Moir. I clocked the meaty profile of Gavin Haining, his big square shoulders in the pinstripe suit, and the imperative cherry bob of Annabel Glaister, the Deputy First Minister. Lewicki was there – he tipped me a nod across the aisle – and Bobby Ireland, the DI from Baird Street. I looked for Gunn and Lumsden, the blonde ponytail, the hulking leather jacket, but Moir was no longer a case and I should have known better. Another batch of crop-haired men, some with moustaches, sat with their slight wives in the second and third rows and the consoling hands they planted on the shoulders of a man in the front pew – Martin’s father, the retired RUC man, his grey hair looking freshly trimmed – marked them out as the relatives from Ireland.

The reading was Ecclesiastes. Martin’s father rose from his place and stepped to the lectern. Before starting to read he rolled his shoulders and you sensed, in that readying gesture, all the funerals he’d attended down the years, all the send-offs for fallen colleagues, the knottings of the black tie. ‘To every thing there is a season,’ he told us, in a booming, theatrical bass. ‘And a time to every purpose under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal . . .’ There was no comfort in the words, no consolation. Just the tit for tat of his pendulum rhythm. A time for this and a time for that. His implacable Ulster vowels: ‘. . . a time to embrace and a time to refrain, a time to search and a time to give up . . .’

I could see Clare in the front pew, her curls bouncing lightly as her shoulders shook. I was glad the girls weren’t there. Their blonde oblivious heads might have set me off. Mari felt for my hand and squeezed it and I squeezed back.

The minister was a wiry, competent-looking woman with rimless glasses and a guilty smile. She looked like a distance runner. Her eulogy was nicely pitched. I’d been ready to resent it, to wince with scorn at her whitewashing of my friend’s memory but she seemed to know Moir better than I did. She didn’t hide from the fact – if fact it was – that Moir had killed himself. She spoke about his sometimes overbearing intensity and his ‘irritating frankness’ as well as his love for Clare and the girls and how stress can make us do unusual things. We sang a final hymn: ‘Will your anchor hold in the storms of life?’ Moir had been a sergeant in the Boys’ Brigade, the minister explained, and this was the BB anthem. It was a proper hymn, very Protestant, with a thumping tune and a strong, uplifting chorus, and I felt the better for having sung it.

At the close of the service I stepped forward with the others and shouldered my share of the burden. At first it seemed we might buckle under the weight and I staggered a bit as the edge of the coffin cut into my neck, but we set off gingerly up the aisle, the undertaker beside us, counting our steps, like the coach of the world’s slowest rowing crew. We carried Moir into thin yellow sunlight and laid him in the hearse. One of the undertakers slipped me a card with ‘Number 4’ printed on it. Later, at the graveside he called out the numbers and I stepped up: the end of a blue tasselled rope was placed in my palm.

The grave was black against the snow, and I thought again of my old man’s coffin. ‘Brace yourselves,’ the undertaker whispered, and the six of us gripped our ropes as he slid the wooden staves from under the box. The cords snapped tight and our forearms trembled. The coffin pitched and wavered over the grave, but we steadied it and held it true, and wobbled it into the slot. Wet smell of earth. Same smell as Dad’s. Same ache in my shoulders. It was delicate work, and the ropes seemed too slight for the job. The undertaker talked us through it in his low, steady undertone, tapping our forearms in turn when he wanted us to pay out more rope. The coffin jerked down in its narrow slot, tilting and righting, the head and now the feet pitching forward. Finally it bumped down onto hard earth. The undertaker bowed and we walked backwards to our places, hands clasped over our groins.

‘You going to the hotel?’

Lewicki at my shoulder. There was a reception in the Goldberry, Mureton’s only decent hotel. Halfway decent.

‘I’ll see you there.’

He clapped my shoulder, nodded at Mari, set off across the gravestones clutching his overcoat tight at the neck. At the car park I collected the flowers from the back seat. Mari stayed in the car.

At the reception Mari went off to the ladies and I joined the other suits at the bar. There were sombre nods, handshakes close in to the body, claps on the shoulder. It’s always like this. We stand around sipping pints of lager tops, talking in low voices, the bar staff alert and respectful. Then the first round of whiskies appears. Someone tells a joke. We all lean in for the punchline and lean back laughing. The mood lifts and the reception has begun.

It’s the camaraderie of the living. At the root of it lies the recognition that, try as we might to avoid it, death will find us out. But Moir hadn’t tried to avoid death. Moir had rushed forward to meet it, and that rather spoiled the occasion. Standing at the bar, we had no way to deal with this, no joke that wouldn’t have seemed tasteless, out of place. We nodded at each other and drifted off to the tables, to the little side-plates of sausage rolls and triangular sandwiches.

The Goldberry Hotel had changed. In the twenty years since I last crossed its doors the place had been tarted up. It was furnished in the tourist style, a tourist being someone who’s a little hazy about the trajectory of the Highland line. A targe and twin claymores were mounted on the wall above the fireplace and the waitresses – local girls whose tattooed lower backs and pierced navels were hidden under starched white shirts and sober tartan skirts – marched the dark acres of Black Watch carpet.

The function suite was busy. Haining was there, the big beast, clapping backs, clutching elbows, working the room. He bicep-punched a man with silver hair and leaned to kiss a thickset woman. He scoped the room, head high, predatory, caught my eye over the shot glass, nodded. A silver tray bumped my ribs. Little orange breadcrumbed balls. I looked at the girl.

‘Blue cheese and walnut truffles,’ she said. Her hair was scraped back and tied in a bow. A man’s shirt and tie under the apron. Tiny nick in the skin, just under her left eye.

‘I’ll take your word for it.’

When she moved off I spotted Lewicki, patting the pocket of his suit and heading for the fire-door.

The car park was full of smokers, gathered in little conclaves, refugee huddles. Flapping their arms, stamping in their thin-soled shoes. Breath and smoke in the frozen air. Lewicki had his head in his armpit, shielding the flame with his jacket.

‘Thought you’d given up,’ I said.

The head popped up. ‘Hey!’ He kept the ciggie in his mouth to shake my hand, clapped me on the back, our shoulders bumping.

I lit a Café Crème and rolled the chocolatey smoke round my mouth. We watched a hotel employee in a puffa jacket clearing snow from the driveway. The rasp of his shovel on the tarmac echoed crisply in the brittle air.

Lewicki had been ‘my’ cop since my days on the newsdesk. But the fact that he was standing in this car park meant that he’d been Moir’s cop too. Moir had inherited Lewicki along with my old job when I got fired for the Lyons piece. I felt another futile stab of jealousy.

‘Did you know?’ Lewicki was asking. ‘You have any idea that this was on the cards?’

I shook my head. ‘Hadn’t spoken to him in months. Not properly. He was drinking, but you don’t know that’s a sign at the time. You just think he’s drinking too much.’

‘Enjoying himself,’ Lewicki said.

We smoked for a while in silence. The chill wind stung our cheeks and the cars swept past on the Glasgow Road and the thought we didn’t speak, the question on both of our minds, took that moment to assert itself. It shouldered its way between us like an ill-bred dog. Lewicki looked away across the fields and his voice when it came was sly-like and quiet.

‘You think he did it?’

I took my time answering, nodded slowly though Lewicki was still turned away towards the frozen fields. ‘Looks that way.’

His head snapped round, there was spit in little bubbles on his bared teeth. ‘I know what it looks like for fuck’s sake. Do you think he
did
it? That’s what I’m asking. Did Martin Moir kill himself?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No. I cannae see it.’

‘That’s the thing.’ Lewicki’s anger was gone, his voice had sagged, his features with it. ‘I can’t either.’

He dropped his smoke on the ground and a blackbird hopped over, stabbing at the fag-end with its yellow beak. Lewicki glanced to see how much of my Café Crème was left and then took out his packet again.

‘I keep thinking how he would write things.’ I poked the snow with a polished toecap, exposing a black slash of tarmac. ‘When something happens, I keep thinking how he would write it. Like this missing girl.’

‘The prozzy?’ Lewicki said.

‘Aye.’

Lewicki nodded. ‘You’ll be thinking it a lot more, would be my guess. Jesus, he’s taking his time, though.’ He pursed his lips. He was talking about Hamish Neil. ‘When was the funeral?’

‘Swan? Yesterday.’

That was the favourite time for reprisals. Revenge killings. You timed them to coincide with the funeral of the victim. The man is laid to rest as his killers are found in a car. Trussed. Bludgeoned. Shot in the back of the head.

‘You imagine Maitland waiting this long?’ Lewicki clicked his tongue against his teeth. ‘Maitland would have hit them before the ambo came for Swan.’

This was Hamish Neil’s fate, to be judged at every turn against the man he replaced, the man he ousted. What would Maitland have done? How would the old man have acted? Maitland had a name for being fast, for moving quick and bloody when the need arose. But he hadn’t seen Neil – his top boy, his trusted offsider – setting him up for the fall.

‘Not always the key thing,’ I said. ‘Speed. Slow can work, too. Slow and careful. Maitland been a little bit slower he might still be in the game.’

Lewicki spat on the snow. ‘
You
’d
been a little slower he might still be in the game.’

Four years ago, before I even knew who he was, Hamish Neil brought me a tip-off, a photograph of Peter Lyons, the Minister for Justice, in the company of Protestant paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. By the time I’d chased the story to Belfast and back, I’d placed Lyons at the scene of a sectarian killing and fingered Walter Maitland as the UVF’s chief armourer. The minister resigned and I got fired, but that was all collateral damage as far as Hamish Neil was concerned. The big prize – the thing he’d aimed at from the start – was that Maitland went to jail, Maitland’s sons fled the city and Neil took over as northside boss. He’d taken Maitland out with a minimum of fuss. As it turned out, fuss was required anyway – there were seven men dead before Neil came out on top – and the question now was why someone who could go to war to assert his control was taking so long to hit back over Swan.