Liam McIlvanney - The Quaker

Nancy’s description was holy writ. It was the tablets of the law for the men at these desks. They parsed it and probed it, took apart its description of a well-dressed modern man, with his short fair hair and his neat raincoat, his gallantry and his hair-trigger temper. Good manners. Nice diction. A cut above the common ruck of East End hoodlums and toughs. A golfer, no less, whose cousin had recently scored a hole in one. Polite but masterful, a man of strong views, who called for the manager when the cigarette machine malfunctioned and forced him to refund Nancy’s money. A man who spoke darkly about sinful women in the taxi back to Scotstoun. Who professed to spend his New Year’s Eves in prayer while the rest of the world gave itself over to drink and hilarity.

McCormack knew it all. After barely a week he knew the details about as well as if he’d been here all along.

Brown chalkstripe suit, regimental tie. Thick watchstrap. Embassy Filter. Overlapping two front teeth. Suede boots. Dens of iniquity. Woman taken in adultery. Hole in one.

This was the litany and these men blitzed it. Every man on the squad had criss-crossed the city, chasing these leads. In a hundred barber-shops these detectives had traded nods in the mirror with gowned customers as the barber slipped his scissors into a breast pocket and took the artist’s impression in both hands. At specially convened meetings of city golf clubs they watched the blazer-buttons wink like coins as the members passed a laminated image along the rows. They took the picture to all the tailors on Renfield Street and Hope Street. They went to the churches, chapels, gospel halls of all denominations, spoke to priests, lay preachers, ministers. They visited dentists’ surgeries, asked permission to sift their records.

And nothing worked.

The man with the short hair and overlapping teeth, the smartly dressed dancer in the desert boots whose cousin scored a hole in one, the zealot who quoted scripture in the back seat of a taxi, the man who raped and killed Jacquilyn Keevins and Ann Ogilvie and Marion Mercer; that man remained a ghost.

Now, as the day shift straggled in, hooking their fedoras on the hat-rack, shucking out of their blue raincoats, McCormack felt something like pity. This was the prime gig, the career-making case, and it had all turned sour.

There was a smell in the room, a brassy tang beneath the sweat and cigarettes. The smell was embarrassment, McCormack decided. They’re sore at having their shortcomings and befuddlement exposed to an outsider, the brass’s nark from St Andrew’s Street. But it was more than that, too. They were flat out affronted. With the details they had. All the specifics. That litany of ties and teeth and Old Testament imprecations.

Every man in that squad had made arrests on not a tenth of what they had to go on here. So what had gone wrong this time? How had they failed so badly? These were the questions that hung in the air and DCI Cochrane seemed to sense them as he stubbed his Rothmans out in an ashtray and slapped his hand on the side of a filing cabinet to bring the room to order.

We haven’t been thorough enough, he told them. We haven’t been systematic. We missed something the first time round and we need to put it right.

There was a pile of buff folders on top of the filing cabinet, maybe twenty-five or thirty. Cochrane turned and gathered them awkwardly in his arms and leaned over to drop them on the nearest desk.

‘These are men we spoke to after one and two. After Keevins and Ogilvie. Men with records. Sexuals. We may have been too hasty to rule them out. I want you to roust out these individuals, bring them in. We’ll see what Nancy Scullion makes of them.’

McCormack looked along the line and caught Goldie’s eye. Goldie shook his head and looked away.

Cochrane clapped twice, chafed his hands together. ‘Right. Now let’s divvy these up and get cracking.’

The men shuffled forward and each lifted three or four folders, carried them back to their desks.

Ten minutes later Goldie went out for a piss and McCormack sidled over to his desk, started leafing through the folders. He pulled one out. A sorry-looking soul called Robert Kilgour, forty-two years of age, whose vulpine face seemed faintly familiar. Kilgour had been released from Peterhead in ’67 after serving two years for a sexual assault carried out in Mill Street in the East End of Glasgow, about a mile south-east of the Barrowland Ballroom. He’d been interviewed after the first killing, and it was McCormack himself – he remembered it now, and here was the sheet, rattled out on his own trusty Underwood – who’d grilled him in his Cowcaddens flat. Kilgour had a solid alibi – he’d been visiting friends in Ayrshire on the night of the killing and stayed overnight in Kilmarnock – and they’d ruled him out pretty quickly. There was nothing much more in the file, just a record of Kilgour’s flittings. He’d moved around a lot in the past eighteen months. His current address was in Shettleston – a tenement scheduled for demolition.

Goldie was back, standing by the desk, hands on his hips. McCormack looked up. ‘When you get round to this guy here’ – he tapped the Kilgour file – ‘let me know. I want to come along.’

Goldie glanced down at the file, back at McCormack. He dragged his chair out with a scrape, thudded down into it, jockeyed it closer to the desk. ‘Your funeral,’ he said.

The sky-blue Vauxhall Velox came nosing round the corner into the empty street. In the closemouth of a gutted tenement, Robert Kilgour watched it pass, gravel crackling under the tyres, the two men hunched on the front bench-seat, the slim passenger, heavyset driver.

Kilgour moved from the shadows towards the open air. He stood in the doorway, watched the pink taillights floating in the dusk. He pinched the bridge of his nose and his fingers came away wet, dripping, he shook the sweat from them. Framed in the back windscreen he could see the two heads in silhouette, twisting to look. They would know he couldn’t have got far. Another fifty yards, another hundred they would stop, turn and come back. He had to move now.

He tried to remember the layout of these streets. His own flat was only three or four streets away but he had run blindly when he spotted the parked Velox as he crossed to his building. As he ran he’d been aware of nothing but the sound of the car’s engine and now he was lost. It was barely three weeks since he’d moved to this district. They kept knocking bits of it down. Every time you went out there was another gap-site, another missing street, you never knew where you were.

Across the street was a block of empty tenements. It struck Kilgour that there was another dead street beyond this and then maybe the main road. Buses, bars, shops. People. Places to hide.

He took a breath, closed his eyes for a second, tugged his sweat-soaked shirt away from his chest. Then he left the closemouth at a sprint, running low with his hands up around his head, as though fearful of falling debris. Without looking he knew the car had stopped. There was a hollow crunch as the driver found reverse and a veering screech as the car swung round. Kilgour made it into the building across the street, feet slapping through the echoey close and he heard the engine’s angry rasp as the driver found first and ramped up through the gears.

Emerging into the dark backcourt Kilgour heard the car suddenly louder, the engine’s whine stretching as the car took the corner and gunned down the straight.

He’d been heading straight across the backcourt but now he sheered off to the left, nearly slamming into a metal clothes-pole. The hard-packed earth was strewn with bricks and rubble and his ankles flexed and buckled as he ran. He ran with his hands out in front of him, feeling for clotheslines and other impediments in the gathering dark and soon a black wall reared up in front of him. He scrambled on to the roof of a midden, hauled himself on to the wall and dropped down into the next backcourt.