Kitabı oku: «The Quaker», sayfa 4
They all turned to Cursiter ‘That’s max. Could be just the old fella on his own.’
‘Do we have a plan of the building? Do we know the layout?’
‘Jenny’ll get one.’
Paton nodded. The others said nothing, they were waiting for the verdict. He twisted his whisky glass on the tabletop, turned back to Cursiter. ‘This your girlfriend?’
‘Who?’
‘Your insider. The secretary.’
‘She’s the cashier. No, she’s not my girlfriend.’
‘You’ve fucked her, though, right?’
‘Yeah. I mean, twice. Three times.’
Paton was nodding. ‘So they can link to you from her.’
‘Naw, that’s—’
‘And they can link to us from you.’
‘No! Look. It’s not like that. Nobody knows.’
‘Nobody knows what – that you fucked her?’
‘That’s what I’m saying.’
‘Explain it to me. What’s your name – Brian? Explain it to me, Brian. How did you meet her?’
Cursiter looked at Dazzle; Dazzle nodded. Cursiter planted his elbows on the table. ‘Jenny McIndoe she’s called. Nice lassie. She does the day-job at Glendinnings but works nights in a hotel out near Drymen. Used to have lock-ins. I took her upstairs a couple of times.’
‘When the bar was empty?’
‘What?’
‘You said nobody saw you. You took her upstairs when the bar was empty?’
‘Not empty. But nobody knew who I was. It was just mugs. Old guys from the village. Some hikers maybe. They didn’t know me from Adam.’
‘And you never met her outside the hotel?’
‘Never.’
‘Who said romance was dead? And how did she know you were in the market for information, Brian? Information about jewellery auctions. Since nobody knew who you were.’
Cursiter shrugged. ‘We got talking.’
‘Yeah.’ Paton drained his whisky. ‘That’s what I figured.’
The others were quiet. There was a scratching at the inner door, the high tragic whine of a lonely dog.
Paton smoked his cigarette. ‘She know what kind it is?’
‘What kind what is?’
‘The safe. What make.’
‘I don’t know. Does it matter?’
Paton looked round the table. ‘Well, you boys certainly know your business.’
‘Fuck you then.’ Cursiter reared back, one arm swinging loose behind his chair. ‘Mister Bigtime fucking London. You don’t want in? There’s the door.’
‘Hey, now. Come on.’ Dazzle was on his feet. Paton was grinning at the floor and shaking his head, stubbing his smoke out in the ashtray. He stood up, lifted his jacket.
‘Well, come on, Dazzle.’ Cursiter was pouring himself another shot. ‘We need this kind of attitude? We need this kind of shit?’
‘Nice meeting you fellows. Mr Dalziel: I’ll see you again.’
Paton was ruing it all. The trip from London, the hotel room, wasting time with these losers. Ice heist at an auctioneer’s? A sub-post office was more in their line. Screwing meters. Fucking bubble-gum machines. He shrugged into his jacket.
‘Hold on, Alex. Brian.’ Dazzle was pointing at Cursiter. ‘Number one: shut the fuck up. You’re not running this job: I am. Number two—’ he pointed at Paton – ‘Alex: hear the man out. You’ve come this far.’
Paton picked at something on the shoulder of his jacket. He shrugged, took his seat, reached for his smokes. ‘What’s the take, then?’
‘Big.’ Cursiter was still rankled, touchy. ‘Big. Don’t worry about that.’
‘They might be different things, friend. Your idea of big. My idea of big. You got a figure?’
‘Hundred grand. Minimum.’
They all looked at Paton.
Paton smoked.
‘We’d need another man.’
Dazzle frowned, looked around the others in turn. ‘It’s a four-man job, Alex. It’s all worked out.’
‘Is it?’ All the glasses were empty now and Paton stood up and moved them into the centre of the table. ‘Stokes is in the car, right?’ He moved one of the glasses to the edge of the table. ‘The rest of us go in through the basement door. We need a man on the door. In case someone decides to stick their nose in.’ He lifted another glass and smacked it down in the centre of the table. ‘We move down the corridor and deal with the watchman. Lover Boy here’ – Cursiter was the whisky bottle, and Paton slid it along the table a foot or so – ‘stays with the watchman. Or watchmen. That leaves Dazzle and me.’ Paton pinched the final two glasses between his finger and thumb and lifted them with a trilling click and placed them down at his side of the table. ‘We go on to the office. I do the safe. Dazzle’s spare, in case something comes up. Troubleshooter. But we need another man on the door.’
Dazzle looked at the other two with his eyebrows raised and Cursiter pouted and Stokes shrugged and Dazzle spread his arms. ‘Fine, Alex. Good. We get another man. Anything else?’
‘Aye.’ Paton moved the glasses back to their original positions. He sat down and reached for the bottle and filled his own glass. He pushed the bottle into the centre of the table. ‘The timing’s wrong.’
‘Timing’s not – there’s no leeway, Alex. Stuff only gets there the day before. It has to be the tenth.’
‘I don’t mean the date. I mean the time. We don’t go in at midnight. We do it in the morning. Before anyone arrives.’
Cursiter reached for the bottle and filled the glasses and waited for Paton to explain.
‘You don’t need all night to do a safe. Do it in half an hour if you can do it at all. We’re wearing boiler suits, toolbelts, we’re a crew of sparkies, plumbers, whatever. When it’s over we walk out the front door, to the van parked down the street. This way, we’re only over the railings on the way in, not the way out. Cuts down the risk.’
Stokes was playing with the zipper on his Harrington jacket, running it up and down. ‘So, you’re saying we wear masks? Is that the idea?’
‘No masks. We don’t need masks. We’re a crew of workies. We’re four guys in boiler suits. We’re invisible. We’re not trying to hide, we’re not skulking about looking dodgy, so no one’s paying attention. It’s like four cops: you remember the uniform, you don’t remember the faces or the hair or anything else.’
At this point the door handle clanged and the kitchen door swung open. The dog came skidding triumphantly into the room and stopped, its head raised, abruptly self-conscious, like a bull entering the bull-ring. It looked at the faces and trotted straight over to Paton and plumped its chin down on his thigh, twitching its brows. Paton drew his hand across the animal’s head, feeling the smooth curved cap of the skull under the fur, and flattened the ears. Then he scratched the loose skin under the dog’s jaw and the tail whacked against the carpet.
‘Looks like we’ve found the fifth man,’ Dazzle said.
Paton stroked the dog as he talked.
‘We need a van. We need walkie-talkies. We need boiler suits, workboots, toolbelts. Balaclavas. We need some sort of decal or paint job on the side of the van, Such-and-such Electricians or Plumbers.’
Dazzle was writing it down. He finished with a flourish and tossed the pen down on the table.
‘Right. Fine. We’ll get to it.’
‘Van’s the priority.’
‘Fine. We lift one on the night before the job. Easy.’
Stokes shook his head. ‘I like to know what I’m driving, Daz. How it handles. You don’t want surprises.’
‘So drive it around on the night. Get the feel of it. A van’s a van.’
Paton was still clapping the dog. He rubbed its belly and the creature emitted a high voluptuous whine. ‘Stokes is right,’ Paton said. ‘You don’t steal a van on the night before a job. Use your head, Daz. The owner gets up for a piss at 2 a.m., opens the curtains to check on his van. The van’s gone. He reports it stolen. Patrol car clocks it parked in Bath Street at six in the morning. We’re fucked before we start. You don’t do a job in a stolen van.’
‘What, then?’
‘We buy one. Now. Tomorrow. Give Stokes time to drive it, break it in.’
‘We buy it. We buy it?’ Cursiter was incredulous. ‘You’re that keen to go about buying vans, it comes out of your end.’
Paton looked at Dazzle. Dazzle shrugged.
‘You planning to walk home, are you?’ Paton turned to Cursiter. ‘After the job. Take a bus? Maybe wait for a taxi? We buy a van, it comes out of everyone’s slice. If the payoff’s what you say it is, it won’t make any difference.’
‘Aye but there’s other outlays, overheads.’
Paton waited. The other three exchanged a look. Dazzle spoke.
‘He means McGlashan.’
Paton had moved to London before John McGlashan took over from Eddie Lumsden. He knew who McGlashan was. He just didn’t see the relevance.
‘You’ve got your own arrangement there. That’s your business, you do what you like with your share. Dazzle: you call another meet in three days when you’ve got the gear ready, the plan of the building. Not here, though. We meet someplace else.’
Paton scooped his cigarettes from the table and stowed them in his jacket pocket.
‘Actually, hold on here.’ Cursiter’s big hand was raised. ‘We all kick in for the van but you don’t kick up to Glash?’
‘The van’s a necessity. It’s part of the job.’
‘McGlashan’s a necessity, mate. McGlashan’s a fucking necessity. Round here.’
‘I don’t live round here, Brian.’ Paton buttoned his jacket. ‘I live in London. Mr McGlashan will have to visit London if he wants to collect.’
‘He might do that,’ Cursiter said. ‘He might just do that. Everyone kicks up to McGlashan, fella. Sooner or later. Some way or other.’
Paton shrugged. The dog got up and trotted across the floor and lay down in front of the dead electric fire.
‘So you’re in?’ Dazzle’s chin lifted in challenge. Everyone looked at Paton.
Paton frowned. He’d been looking for a reason to say no and he couldn’t find one.
‘Kinda looks that way, doesn’t it?’
‘He-e-ey!’ Dazzle snatched up the whisky and twirled off the cap, but Paton clamped his palm across his glass.
‘One thing.’ He looked at each face in turn and then back to Dazzle. ‘Why’s McGlashan not moving on this himself? Why’s he leaving it to you boys?’
For a moment nobody spoke. Paton had the feeling they had discussed this question before he came, worked out how much to tell him.
‘He’s not been himself.’ It was Dazzle who spoke. ‘He thinks the polis are watching him. He’s been cagey. For months now. Everyone’s frightened to move. Do anything. Till this gets sorted out. This Jack the Ripper shit.’
‘But they’re not watching you?’
‘They’re not watching him, probably. He’s just paranoid. Anyway, who’d watch us, Swifty? We’re not a big enough deal. We’re the waifs and strays, mate. Slip through the cracks.’
Stokes turned to Paton. ‘The Quaker, they’re calling him.’
‘London, Bobby,’ Paton said. ‘I live in London. Not the moon. We get the papers down there.’
He removed his hand and Dazzle poured the shots and they all clinked glasses and drank.
Ten minutes later, he sat in the passenger seat of Stokes’s Zodiac, thinking it through. He liked to hole up after a job was done, get off the streets fast and go to ground for three or four days. The hotel was no good.
‘I’ll need a place,’ Paton said. ‘Somewhere quiet.’
Stokes nodded. ‘For afterwards, like? I know a guy can probably help. Want me to set it up?’
There was a black market in houses. Everyone knew this. Glasgow never had enough houses and the clearing of the slums had only made things worse. There was an underground trade in vacant flats in buildings slated for demolition. Families would scrape together a couple of hundred quid for the keys to a room-and-kitchen in a condemned tenement. They’d get a few months’ breathing space before the wrecking crews arrived, give them time to get something else sorted. That would be fine. A flat in a condemned block would be just the ticket.
He took Stokes’s number when they pulled up outside the hotel. ‘Set it up then, Bobby. I’ll be in touch.’
6
McCormack sat at his desk in the Murder Room, staring at a typewritten document. The document was two pages long, held together by a paper clip. It contained the witness statement of a man who had danced a single dance with Ann Ogilvie on the night of 2 November 1968, in the Barrowland Ballroom in the city’s East End. Ann Ogilvie, victim number two. Later that night, at some point between midnight and 3 a.m., Ann Ogilvie was strangled with her own American tan tights, having been raped, beaten and bitten by the killer known as the Quaker.
Every twenty-five seconds the pages of the witness statement rippled in the breeze from a circular fan on McCormack’s desk. But McCormack wasn’t reading the words. He was basking in hatred. The tension in the stuffy room was like a palpable force, a malevolent beast that crouched invisibly on top of the cabinets, stalked between the legs of desks, breathed its rank breath on McCormack’s neck. The tension amplified every sound. Typewriter keys sliced the air like cracking whips. A filing cabinet drawer rolled open with a rumble of thunder. People lunged at ringing telephones, desperate to silence their clamour.
He knew, of course, what was causing the problem. The problem was him. He was the rat. The tout. The grass. Resentment came at him in waves from the shirtsleeved ranks.
But what did you expect? It was Schrödinger’s cat: the observer affects the experiment.
Ten days ago Duncan McCormack had been the man of the hour. Ten days ago he’d been sipping from a tinnie in the squad room at St Andrew’s Street, watching his Flying Squad colleagues ineptly gyrating with a couple of more or less uniformed WPCs and some of the younger typists from Admin. It wasn’t yet noon but the party was hotting up. There were muffled whoops as someone upped the volume on the Dansette. All three shifts of detectives were present. Guys had left the golf course or the pub, or wherever they went on their days off. Brothel, maybe. Everywhere he looked people perched on desks or gathered in grinning groups with their plastic cups of whisky and vodka.
Flett was edging towards him through the throng. DCI Angus Flett, commander of the Flying Squad. Chins were tipped in greeting, cigarettes raised in two-fingered benedictions. Flett gripped elbows, punched shoulders, clapped backs, threw mock punches, twisted his hips in that drying-your-backside-with-a-towel move when he passed a dancing typist.
The squad room looked like Christmas. Strings of paper bunting were pinned above their heads. Two desks had been pushed together to form a makeshift bar. Bottles of spirits clustered in the centre: Red Label, Gordon’s, Smirnoff, Bacardi. Four-packs of beer in their plastic loops, green cans of Pale Ale, red cans of Export. Someone had gone out for fish suppers and the sharp tang of newsprint and vinegar and pickled onions mingled with the smoke and sweat and alcohol.
On an adjacent table stood a large birthday cake edged with blue piping, a ‘12’ standing proud of the icing on blue plastic numerals. Twelve was the tariff. Twelve years in Peterhead. They’d watched him cuffed and taken down to the cells, James Kane, one of McGlashan’s lieutenants. It took them over a year to build the case and now they’d got him. Attempted murder. Serious assault. Conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Guilty on all three counts. Au revoir, fuckface. Have a nice life.
McCormack raised his can of Sweetheart Stout to salute Angus Flett. He felt the beer sway inside the tinnie. He didn’t like beer. He’d drunk just enough so the can wouldn’t spill. He liked whisky well enough but he was playing shinty tomorrow, a grudge match against Glasgow Skye, and he wanted to stay fresh.
‘The hard stuff, Duncan?’
McCormack worked his shoulders, straightened up. ‘Got a game tomorrow, boss.’
‘A game? I’d say war would be nearer the mark. I watched a match once, up in Oban. Jesus. Tough game. They say ice hockey’s based on it.’
McCormack shrugged, sipped his tinnie.
‘Anyroads, need to talk to you, son. Won’t take long.’
In Flett’s office, McCormack closed the door behind him, muffling the noise of the party. Flett got straight to business.
‘Job’s come up, son. I’m putting you forward.’
McCormack nodded slowly. When Flett sat down with the sun at his back, McCormack noticed that he hadn’t shaved; little filaments of stubble caught the light.
‘What’s the job, sir?’
‘It involves a change of scene. You’ll be based in Partick. The old Marine.’
‘That’s the Quaker inquiry. They’ve got Crawford, already. They need another Squad guy?’
Flett held his hand out flat, palm down, swivelled his wrist.
‘It’s not a straightforward job, Detective. It’s not the operational side of things. I had Levein on earlier’ – he nodded at the phone on his desk. ‘The feeling is, it’s gone on too long, the whole circus. Guts is, he wants us to review the investigation. See where things went wrong. What can be learned. Make recommendations.’
Peter Levein. Head of Glasgow CID. Bad bastard. Due to retire at the end of the year, to no one’s regret.
‘Recommend what? What’s Cochrane saying about this?’
‘Nothing he can say. They haven’t caught him, have they? He’s not going to like it, but he’ll cooperate.’
McCormack was still frowning. ‘Make recommendations as in shut it down?’
Flett leaned forward. ‘Do you need it spelled out, son? This job? It’s not a popularity contest.’ Flett nodded at the door. ‘You think those fuckers out there like me? Think I want them to?’
‘It’s not that, sir.’
‘What, then?’
‘I’m a thief-taker, boss. That’s what I know.’
‘This still McGlashan? You’re still on about McGlashan?’
‘We’re close, sir. We’re gonnae get him.’ He jabbed his thumb at the door, at the sounds of beery triumph. ‘See that, sir? That’s nothing. That’s just the start. We’re building the case. We’ll bring it all down, the whole rotten empire.’
‘All right, McCormack.’
‘What – you think I’m making it up?’
‘No, Duncan.’ Flett spread his hands. ‘No, I’m sure you are close. Thing is. Nobody knows who McGlashan is. We know who he is. The poor bastards in Springboig and Barlanark and Cranhill: they know. But the punters out there? The ratepayers? They’ve no idea. They know about the Quaker, though. Jesus.’ He tapped the folded Tribune on his desk. ‘They know about him.’
‘So we tell them.’ McCormack shifted in his chair. ‘We’ve got people who deal with the papers, haven’t we? We fill them in. Give them the goods. Glasgow crime lord, reign of terror. Fear on the streets.’
‘Give them what, exactly? If we had solid on McGlashan we wouldn’t need the bloody papers, we’d just arrest him. It’s more complicated, son. They’ve got a hold of this Quaker thing and they’re not letting go. They want answers. They want to know why we’re still fannying about after all this time. It’s not McGlashan that’s making us look like— What: you got something to say, Detective?’
McCormack was shaking his head. ‘Naw, it’s just, I was under the impression that the guy who headed up the Flying Squad was the head of the Flying Squad. My mistake. Not the editor of the Glasgow Tribune.’
‘Oh for fuck sake, Duncan, catch yourself on. It’s always worked like this. Keep the papers off your back, you keep the councillors happy, the MPs. It buys you the space to do the real job.’
‘This isn’t the real job?’
Flett held his hands up. ‘I know. I know. Look. You do a job on this Quaker thing we’ll go after McGlashan. You head up the team. You pick your men. I’ll give you everything you need. But first it’s this. Son, you’re either ready or you’re not. I thought you were. Have I made a mistake?’
Had he? Maybe the whole thing was a mistake, McCormack thought. Maybe joining the police was a mistake. Leaving Ballachulish.
‘You want to be a fucking DI all your life. One of the lads—’
‘I’m not one of the lads.’
‘Good. I’m glad to hear it. I’ll bell Levein. Start on Monday. Now get out there and enjoy yourself.’
So now he was sitting in the Murder Room at the Marine. Enjoy yourself, indeed. The feeling is, it’s gone on too long? Jesus, tell me about it, McCormack thought. He’d been here barely a week, listening in on the morning briefings – eavesdropping, it felt like. Days that dragged like months. Absorbing the hatred of his colleagues. A spectator at the daily taskings, a nodding auditor of tactical discussions. He listened to the detectives talking about the case – Earl Street, Mackeith Street, Carmichael Lane – and it bothered him. The men were so sure there was a meaning, some mystical link connecting the victims or the places where they were killed. As if the murders were a language, a code. A work of bloody art.
There had to be a link, they thought, but the men in this room couldn’t find it. The three victims were unknown to each other, lived in different parts of the city. They had no mutual friends, no common bonds of church or political party. Two of them had husbands in the forces, but this fact – which seemed so promising at first – now looked like a coincidence. The worst kind of coincidence, the kind that costs you a couple of hundred man-hours before you realize it means nothing. But now it seemed clear. The women were bound by nothing more than luck or fate, whatever word you hit on for the actions of the Quaker.
But still there was the feeling that the map might hold the key, the six Ordnance Survey sheets tacked to the Murder Room wall. Each locus was within a hundred yards of the victim’s house. The sites themselves formed no kind of pattern, so was it the Barrowland, then? Did the ballroom itself mean something to the killer?
McCormack knew there wasn’t much history to the building. The original ballroom above the ‘Barras’ market had burned down in the late fifties – an insurance job, supposedly. The new Barrowland, with its sprung hexagonal floor and its ceiling of shooting stars, was opened in 1960. Time enough for the killer to make his own history with the place. But then, if the killer had been a regular, wouldn’t somebody have known him? They’d have his name by now, he’d be in a remand cell at Barlinnie waiting for his trial.
Didn’t the map mean anything? What about the wider area: the Gallowgate, Glasgow Cross? At one point Cochrane had invited a lecturer from Strathclyde Uni to address the squad, an expert on the development of the city. McCormack had read the lecturer’s report. The Gallowgate was one of the oldest parts of Glasgow, Dr Mitchell told the Murder Room. The four streets forming Glasgow Cross – the Gallowgate, the Trongate, the High Street and the Saltmarket – were part of the original hamlet on the Clyde. But Glasgow was unusual: it grew up around two separate centres. There was the fishing village and trading settlement on the Clyde, but further up the hill was the religious community centred on the Cathedral and the Bishop’s Castle. In medieval times there was open countryside, maybe some farmland, between the two settlements.
In time, the trading settlement on the river grew to eclipse the upper town. The Gallowgate, where the Barrowland was located, stood at the heart of the growing town. And maybe you could see the Quaker – with his puritanism and his biblical imprecations, his rants about adultery and ‘dens of iniquity’ – as representing in some sense the revenge of the upper town upon the godless lower city.
McCormack pictured the detectives shifting in their chairs. They would see no mileage in this, but Cochrane would have warmed to the idea of a righteous visitation, a historical reprisal, murders somehow plotted by the streets.
McCormack yawned and stretched, returned the witness statement to its folder. Across the way a detective sat at a desk opening letters with a paperknife. McCormack watched him slit an envelope, tug out the folded sheet, flatten it out on the desk. After a pause his hands paddled at the typewriter keys. Then he put the letter back in its envelope, dropped it in a tray, reached for the next one.
‘More fan mail?’ McCormack had drifted over. The man looked up, grunted, waved a hand at the out-tray: be my guest.
McCormack drew up a chair. The letter on the top of the pile was written in a tight, crabbed hand. It came in an airmail envelope, sky blue with chevron edges, though the postmark was local.
To whom it concerns. The man you want is Christopher Bell. He resides at 23 Kirklands Crescent in Bothwell and drives a van for Blantyre Carriers. He is out in his van at all times of the day and night and frequently burns ‘rubbish’ in the back garden of this property though it is against the rules of his tenancy to do so. On two occasions in recent months he has been seen with deep scratches on his face. He has reddish fair hair, goes into Glasgow for the dancing. Everyone round here has suspicions of this character and even the wee boys in the street call him the Quaker.
There was no signature and no address. The detective nodded at the pile of letters and told McCormack that six months ago they’d get twice as many. Three times. He seemed pained by the city’s fickleness, its timewasters’ dwindling stamina.
‘Are you vetting them?’ McCormack asked. ‘Or do they all get checked out?’
The man looked up slowly, fixing McCormack in his gaze. ‘Now that would be good, wouldn’t it? Two years down the line he’s killed another four women. Someone finds out we’ve had a letter all along, naming the killer in so many words. Of course we check them.’
It was the hard calculus of police work. If you got your man then all the effort, all the statements taken, the knocking on doors, the ID parades, the hours of surveillance, the sifting of dental records, it was all worthwhile. If you didn’t get him then you might as well not have bothered. If you’d sat on your hands the result would be the same: the case still open, the killer still free.
You knew that was part of the deal. You knew that some crimes went unsolved, for all the hours and the sweat that got thrown at them. It was nobody’s fault and no one was handing out blame. But it was hard not to take it personally. There were men in this room who had worked all three. Jacquilyn Keevins. Ann Ogilvie. Marion Mercer. Three women who’d gone to the dancing and never come home. Mothers of young children. You were failing them all.
McCormack went back to his desk, rolling his shirtsleeves to the elbow. As he watched the day shift go about their tasks there grew in him a kind of despair at the very diligence of these men. They were only undefeated because they kept trying. Day after day they sat at their desks beneath the high windows in the late summer heat and worked their leads. Dark patches bloomed at their armpits, down the backs of their shirts. The smell of sweat and cheap nylon was pushed about by the table-fans along with the blue clouds of cigarette smoke.
They worked the telephones (‘Goldie, Marine Murder Room’), they typed up reports, collated statements, while McCormack sat at the end of the room like some kind of exam invigilator. He wanted to leave his chair and weave between the desks, placing his hands on the shoulders of these men, on their forearms, to calm their efforts, still their labour.
They were getting further away from it, he thought. Further away from the truth, not closer to it. They couldn’t understand why the methods that had worked in the past weren’t working now. They didn’t change tack. They didn’t try different things. They did the same things, only harder.
They needed some luck. No, McCormack thought: what they needed wasn’t luck. What they needed was another death. To redeem their time, give them a fresh start, another crack at the Quaker.
He looked up to see Goldie standing at the map, lost in the grid, the dainty streets, the spidery contour lines, the sweeping arcs of train-tracks and rivers, the square white blanks of the public parks, the solid black geometry of the public buildings – the railway stations and churches, the hospitals and schools, the post offices, the army barracks.
Everyone did it. When someone sat down after a spell at the map, ten minutes would pass and a chair would scrape and another shirtsleeved figure would be stood there, hitching his trousers and leaning into the grid. It was a rota, an unscripted vigil. The detectives stood in turn before the Ordnance Survey sheets, waited for the map to yield its secrets.
He was losing it, McCormack thought. They all were. They had thrown so much at this inquiry. Talking to reporters, feeding the papers till the whole city, the whole country could think of nothing but the Quaker, the Quaker, that clean-cut face on the posters. It came down to numbers. Fifteen months of work. A hundred cops in teams of twelve working fourteen-hour days. They’d taken 50,000 statements. They’d interviewed 5,000 suspects, visited 700 dentists, 450 hairdressers, 240 tailors. Scores of churches and golf clubs. How many man-hours did it come to – a million? Two? How could all these numbers add up to zero?
And how could you let it go? How could you stop now, admit it was over, you’d done as much as you could? You couldn’t. You couldn’t let go. You kept on, placed your faith in police work. Placed your faith in procedures. Luck. Magic. Santa Claus. Pieter Mertens. Mertens the clairvoyant. Mertens the paragnost. I see a room in an apartment. A river is close. Also a factory. A crane can be seen from the window …
McCormack watched the roll of fat bulging over Goldie’s collar. He heard Goldie ask a sergeant called Ingram where Cochrane was.
‘DCI Cochrane?’ McCormack spoke up. ‘I saw him half an hour ago in the car park. He was getting his wife a lift home in a squad car. What?’
The look between Goldie and Ingram; Goldie grinning at the floor.
‘His wife.’ Goldie snorted. ‘Is that what they’re calling it?’
‘It’s not his wife.’ Ingram came over with two mugs of tea, set one down in front of McCormack. ‘It’s the witness, sir. Sister of Marion Mercer.’
