Liam McIlvanney - The Quaker

‘No slackers here.’ Cochrane nodded through the glass. ‘No shirkers, Detective.’

McCormack took this to mean that there were no Roman Catholics in the Murder Room. Thinks I’m a Prod, McCormack realized. Probably thinks all Highlanders are Wee Frees.

‘Busy bees.’ McCormack nodded. ‘Work rate’s not a problem, clearly.’

The word ‘problem’ tilted the atmosphere in Cochrane’s office. He felt Cochrane giving him the stare.

‘What do you suppose it might be then, Detective? The “problem”?’

‘You’d know that better than I would, sir.’

‘Uh-huh. Right. Well. You find out what it is, you let me know. First cab. Understood?’

McCormack watched the white shapes, avoided Cochrane’s gaze. ‘You’ll see the report, sir. It’ll come to you. In the normal course of things.’

‘Normal course of things?’ Cochrane kicked a wastepaper basket as he stepped right up close to McCormack. The clouds drifted in the Murder Room. ‘This isn’t the normal course of things. This is you parachuting into my station to stitch me fucking up. Me and those boys out there. Tell the CC how we fucked it up. How you’d have done it better.’

‘We’re all on the same side here, sir. We all want him caught.’

‘Is that right? You’ve been a polis how long, McCormack? How long you been on the force?’

‘Thirteen years, sir.’

‘Twenty-seven.’ Cochrane slapped his own chest. ‘Twenty-seven years. You make a lot of friends in that time.’

‘This a threat, sir?’

‘It’s a statement of fact, Detective. I’ve got three years to go. Three years till I’ve done my thirty and I’m out. You’re not gonnae fuck that up for me, son.’

Back in the Murder Room, McCormack tried to focus on the report he’d been reading, a press statement in Cochrane’s lurid prose: The man we are seeking is a man of dark urges and lawless drives. He may keep irregular hours. Anyone with inform—

‘That for my benefit?’

Goldie had appeared beside his desk.

‘What?’

‘The wee performance back there. Backing up a fellow officer. Look at me: I’m a good guy after all. One of the lads. That what that was about?’

McCormack shook his head. The whole Kilgour thing had been a stunt, he realized. It was Goldie declaring that McCormack and McCormack’s review could take a fuck to themselves. It was also a test. Goldie had known that Kilgour would complain. He’d known that Cochrane would want to know what happened. If McCormack backed up Kilgour, well, what do you want from a rat? If he backed up Goldie he was weak as piss.

‘Got one or two things on my plate just now, Detective. One or two concerns. Am I on Detective Sergeant Goldie’s Christmas card list? That’s not one of them.’

‘Well, that’s handy.’

Goldie had a smoke in his mouth, fumbling in his pockets for a light. The cigarette bobbed up and down under Goldie’s muffled curses. McCormack watched him for a few seconds then produced his Dunhill lighter, sparked it angrily.

‘Here.’

He lit Goldie’s then he lit one of his own. They stood smoking, watching the river, not talking. A minute ticked past.

‘Fucking cheek on him, but.’ Goldie was studying the end of his cigarette. ‘Moaning about the press.’

‘They’re not on his case?’

‘They’re on his case, aye. But maybe he should stop holding press conferences every five minutes.’

McCormack said nothing. Goldie was right. Cochrane had run to the media with every development, however slight. His line was that they should use it to their advantage, the media interest. Keep feeding the papers little tidbits. The Record and the Express were like a daily door-to-door to every household in the city.

But the papers needed something to write about between killings. They needed an excuse to put the artist’s impression on the front page, the half-smiling clean-cut killer, limned in pencil. They needed ‘QUAKER’ in a forty-point Tempo, stark black print on the off-white pulp. And when there was nothing else, when there were no ‘developments’, they wrote about the Murder Squad. Their failings, their wasted efforts. How Long Must We Live in Fear? Will the Dance Hall Butcher Never Be Caught?

‘Think we’ll get him?’

‘We?’

‘You. Us. Whatever.’

‘Will we fuck. We were beat from the start. The first one did it. The Magic Stick. That’s what screwed us. Should have got him then.’

McCormack felt the rebuke. Jacqui Keevins was the first victim. She’d been at the dancing, the Majestic Ballroom on Hope Street. The Magic Stick, everyone called it. The cops went there the following night, team-handed, put her photo up on a screen, asked for patrons who’d been there the night before to come out and talk to them in the foyer. A bloke recognized her, said he’d danced with her at the start of night but lost track of her later on.

The cops were stoked. This was the early break you always look for, the sign that you’re on the right track. Too bad the guy was making it up. Too bad he was a bullshit-merchant, attention-seeker. By the time he came clean it was too late. When the truth emerged – Jacqui Keevins had been at the Barrowland, not the Majestic – two weeks had passed. The trail was cold.

‘So. What you planning to do?’

McCormack flicked his cigarette end out of the open window. ‘I’m planning to keep my eyes open. I’m planning to review the evidence. Write an honest report.’

‘Right. Shut us down, you mean. Put us out of our misery.’

‘Not my decision, Detective.’

‘At least look us in the eyes when you shaft us, eh? Give us that much.’

McCormack woke with a weight on his chest, the blankets damp and tangled. He struggled up, the headboard clacking against the bedroom wall. His hand scrabbled in the drawer of his bedside cabinet, found the inhaler. Two deep puffs and the panic subsided. His hand reached blindly out, dropped the inhaler back in the drawer.

He banked the pillows behind him and lay back, tugging the covers away from his sweating legs. The sound of his breathing, normally no sound at all, rasped in his ears as though he was snorkelling. It’s OK, he told himself: the bad part is over. He craned round to see the luminous green hands on Granny Beag’s alarm clock: nearly ten past four.

The night air felt cold on his shins. He stripped his T-shirt, mopped his armpits and the hollow at his breastbone, balled the damp garment and tossed it into a corner.

With the panic over, a sense of shame rose in its place. There was no need for these theatrics, though he knew well enough where his panic came from. It came from the nights in Ballachulish, nights when he’d wake to the clamour in his parents’ bedroom, his father choking and hacking and the calm yellow tone of his mother’s voice talking his father through it. The sounds his father made were like those of a suffering beast – wild, rending cries and heaving snuffles that shuddered through the darkened house. Then McCormack would hear the bedsprings creak as his mother got up to come downstairs and boil the kettle. She would fill a bowl with hot water and Vicks, and McCormack’s father would hobble down to sit at the kitchen table with a tea-towel over his head, inhaling the vapours he hoped would flare his passages, bring some air to his crusted lungs.

McCormack’s own asthma was inherited, but from his mother, not his father. What destroyed his dad’s lungs and brought him to a hard, slow death with a basin on his lap was working at the British Aluminium Company’s plant in Kinlochleven. Willie McCormack worked in the furnace room, one of the big men – six-footers all of them – who spent their days crust-breaking, tapping, changing the anodes. You couldn’t see a yard in front of your face, the air soupy with dust and fumes, and a noise like Hades. They learned later that the fumes contained sulphur dioxide and something called ‘polyaromatic hydrocarbons’, but no one at the time had heard of such words. When his father died the cause of death was listed as ‘pulmonary obstruction’, but what really killed him was British Aluminium.