Kitabı oku: «The Quaker», sayfa 6
9
His father sang Merle Travis numbers in the bath. ‘Sixteen Tons’. ‘Nine Pound Hammer’: You can make my tombstone / Outta number nine coal. It always made him think of the tombstones in St John’s churchyard in Ballachulish, out there on the lochside. They were beautiful things. Not the chunky upright slabs you saw in other kirkyards, but dark, slim wafers carved with elegant cursive script, all loops and spirals. Like everything else in Balla, they were made of slate. The men worked them during slack times at the quarry. That’s what you did when you found a free half-hour: you worked your own headstone, cutting the cross or the crown at the top, and then carving your name and birthdate under ‘Sacred to the Memory of’ and a bas-relief opened book, leaving only the final date to be carved by another hand.
McCormack used to walk there on Saturday mornings, out the loch road to St John’s. He liked to ramble on the lumpy turf, tramping down the bones of MacInneses and Stewarts and MacColls, tracing with his fingers the chiselled lines, the extravagant pattern of curves, the word ‘Sacred’ hedged about in scrolls and folderols.
They were works of art, he thought. This is what they had instead of an art gallery, these hard black portraits signed with laboured care by each artist. The slate didn’t weather like the other stones did. While the sandstone crumbled and blurred, the slate – even on the oldest stones – kept its edge. The morning sun above the Pap of Glencoe filled the chisel-strokes with shadow that was black and fresh as ink.
Now he stood in a different graveyard in the dark southern city with the slate roofs of tenements all around him and looked at the poor bare words on another stone:
MARION MERCER
BELOVED WIFE OF HENRY MERCER
DIED 25 JANUARY 1969
AGED 31 YEARS
‘IN MY FATHER’S HOUSE ARE MANY MANSIONS:
IF IT WERE NOT SO, I WOULD HAVE TOLD YOU.’
He lifted his eyes to the rooftops, where the slates shone and smoked in the wake of a sunshower. This was his third of the day. He’d been to two gravesides that morning – Jacquilyn Keevins’s and Ann Ogilvie’s – and now he’d completed the set. He wasn’t sure why. Paying his respects didn’t cover it. He hadn’t known these women in life. He had worked Jacqui Keevins’s murder, but not the other two. And he wasn’t Pieter Mertens, he wasn’t a ‘paragnost’: he didn’t expect to garner psychic data from his nearness to their rotting bones. It was more by way of introducing himself, he figured. Getting his bearings, in some basic way. They were his concern now, these three women. They were his responsibility, even if his task was to bring the investigation to a close.
The light in the Necropolis was failing.
He rubbed his thumb along the top of Marion Mercer’s stone. The face of the stone was polished and smooth – you could see your blurred face in the pink marbled shine – but the top edge was rough and grainy. Would he end up here himself, in a Glasgow cemetery, when his own time came? Or back in Ballachulish, in the lochside plot amid the slim dark stones? But the quarry had closed, there would be no black slate for him, wherever he wound up, just a stone like this one, thick as a doorstep, with his Sunday name in fat capitals.
He turned from the grave. Marion Mercer had been buried towards the northern end of the Necropolis and he climbed the little hill into the old section where the mausoleums of the merchants and tobacco lords studded the turf. Further up, near the crest of the brae, John Knox stood on top of his Doric column, wagging his fist at the city.
McCormack thought about the men at the Marine, the fatalistic gloom in which they laboured. Cops were superstitious. They believed a case could be hexed, jinxed, the guilty man uncatchable. Sometimes it was hard to disagree. The Quaker case had been dogged by ill luck. The third victim, Marion Mercer, was murdered on 25 January. Burns Night: a Saturday. On the Sunday morning, when Marion’s partially clothed body was discovered in a backcourt in Scotstoun, the city was gripped by a terrible storm. The rain drove down and the wind stripped slates from the rooftops. The gable end came off a tenement in Bowman Street, Govanhill. Chimneys collapsed in Abercromby Street in Bridgeton. The Levern flooded and the Cart burst its banks. Streets in different quarters of the city under three feet of water. Cars stranded, abandoned in the highway. Families evacuated to higher ground.
Just at the moment when the cops should have descended on Scotstoun, blitzing the tenements of Earl Street with the door-to-door, they were wanted elsewhere. By the time they got back to Earl Street they were playing catch-up. Another trail gone cold.
He had reached the Knox memorial now and he stopped for a breather, lit up a smoke. It was hard not to feel for the Quaker Squad, but the truth of the matter was simple. The brass had lost their heads. They’d thrown so much money at this, poured so many man-hours into a holey bucket, that they didn’t know how to stop. You stir the papers into a frenzy, keep the public in a lather with constant updates, appeals and public info posters. You couldn’t just turn the tap off now that you’d run out of ideas. You couldn’t scale it down and hope no one would notice. You needed a process, you needed a mechanism. You needed someone to do your dirty work for you.
You needed a sucker.
McCormack flicked his cigarette end into the dank grass. Turning to go, he looked up at the statue of Knox and saw to his surprise that he’d been wrong. It wasn’t a clenched fist at all: the great Reformer was holding out a book. He wasn’t damning the city to hell; he was preaching, though possibly it came to the same thing.
Streetlights were flicking on as McCormack came down the gravel paths. At one point he thought he saw movement in the gloom ahead of him, a flitting shape, someone ducking behind a stone.
The sky over the Infirmary had a cast of electric blue but the shadows were massing in the low ground and there were pockets of midnight round the headstones.
The warmth of the day still hung in the air. McCormack plunged his hands in the pockets of his jerkin, walking on the grass now, not the path. He was aware of the pink tip of a cigarette, then a man stepped out of the shadows ten yards ahead, his white jeans vivid in the gloaming.
McCormack slowed, let his hands slip from his pockets and hang loose by his sides, ready for whatever measure of tenderness or strife he might be offered.
A man with dark urges. Lawless drives.
‘Got a light, mate?’
The man had an unlit cigarette between two fingers, jiggling back and forth. As McCormack held his lighter the man cupped his hands around McCormack’s hands, held them there once the cigarette’s tip was glowing. In the light from the flame McCormack studied the eyes, the cheekbones, he was younger than McCormack, twenty, twenty-one.
McCormack drew his hand down the man’s sharp jaw, felt the boyish stubble catching on his palm. The man’s fist closed on McCormack’s wrist and pulled the hand away.
‘Not here,’ the man said. ‘This way.’
The man strode off without looking back. McCormack followed the white jeans up the slope. One of the old mausoleums had its iron door ajar. The man slipped into the stripe of black shadow, McCormack at his heels.
Ann Ogilvie
The funny thing is, I remember the posters. Not the posters of him – those came later. The posters of her: ‘MURDER: DID YOU SEE HER?’, with the Daily Record’s logo at the top and a smiling photo of Jacquilyn Keevins and the telephone numbers to call the police. She looked so happy and oblivious in the photo. On the plain side, too, God forgive me. Not a looker.
I remember thinking that she’d gotten herself into something she couldn’t get out of. And when it came out that she had a husband and a kid, your first thought was, Well, what is she doing at the dancing? Even though they were separated and the husband was living in Germany. That’s what you thought. If she hadn’t been out gallivanting in the first place, none of this would have happened. As if she was to blame. Not the man who raped and killed her, but the mum who went out for a dance.
So why did you go back? That’s the question, isn’t it? Why did you go to the Barrowland? Did you never think about the woman who died? Well, here’s the thing. You knew she’d been dancing at the Barrowland, you knew that she’d met her killer there. But the Barrowland was local. It was ‘our’ dance hall. It was where – don’t laugh – we felt safe. We weren’t about to trek all the way into town for the Albert or the Locarno. And we even felt that the Barrowland was safer now that this had happened. Well, he won’t try that again in the Barrowland, was the feeling. Like lightning wouldn’t strike twice.
Plus, if I’m honest, it gave a little thrill to the proceedings. We’d joke about it in the Ladies’, pretend that we’d spotted the Quaker, that the bloke who asked us up for the slow dance had a look of the poster about him, overlapping teeth, a stripy tie.
We’d even josh the blokes we danced with: Your grip’s a bit tight there, Jim, watch your hands, are you sure you’re not the Quaker? You’ll never know, they’d fire back with a flash of their teeth. You’ll never know until it’s too late …
I lay there all the next day, all the next night, a hundred yards from my kids, from my sister Deirdre. It was Deirdre who finally found me.
I heard her heels on the bare wood boards, footsteps coming towards me in fits and starts, as if she couldn’t make up her mind, knock … knock-knock-knock … knock knock. Then the gasp as she saw my legs and how she tiptoed over the last patch of floor and her scared face peeping into my dead eyes like someone peering into a well. The white plume of her breath in the cold room.
Thirty-six hours earlier I’d been getting ready to go out. The boys across the landing at Deirdre’s and Louise sitting on the bed, watching me put my face on.
‘Will there be shows?’ Louise was saying. ‘Down in Irvine.’
I could hear the kids playing in the backcourt, lassies at their skipping games:
Eight o’clock is striking,
Mother may I go out?
My young man is waiting
To take me round about.
‘I suppose so,’ I said to Louise. ‘In the summertime, anyway.’ She always loved the shows. Her mouth a wide pink blur as the waltzer whipped her round; her high laugh rising past the blue electric crackle as the dodgems jolted her shoulders back. Candy floss. Toffee apples. A goldfish twitching in its plump clear bag. I think she associated the shows with her dad. Her dad used to take her, before he left. Day-trips to the Ayrshire coast. Fish and chips and double nougats and the sea breeze through open windows on the train home. Louise went and stood with her back to me, looking out the window:
He will buy me apples,
He will buy me pears.
He will buy me everything
And kiss me on the stairs.
‘What’s the uniform like? I bet it’s brown and yellow or something. I bet it’s boggin.’ Her new school was to be Irvine Royal Academy. It sounded posh, like some fee-paying high school in Edinburgh, but it was just the local academy. The boys would be starting at the primary in the scheme. Ravenspark.
‘What will you miss, Mum?’
She looked at me over her shoulder. I smiled at her in the mirror, raised my elbows and gave a little shimmy with my hips.
‘The dancing,’ I told her.
I would miss the Barrowland. I’d miss the dancing.
I loved the dancing. I loved the whole thing about it. The music and the lights. The silvery crash of cymbals and the clean hard snap of the snare. I loved the men in their shiny suits, the light catching their tie-clips and cufflinks, glinting on their polished toecaps. The whole dance floor getting into the rhythm, working so hard but enjoying it too.
My click that night was a good mover. Not a talker, a bit aloof, but smart as paint in his lightweight suit, navy with a sky-blue check. I’d known him for a few weeks but we’d never been to the Barrowland before. The band segued from ‘Time is Tight’ straight into ‘Street Fighting Man’ and the crowd surged a bit and started jiving like mad and I spun away from him with my arms crossed over my chest, spun like a top and finished my spin with the glitterball right overhead and the dancers whirling around me, the music whirling and the swirl of stars overhead, I was the still centre of everything, poised between movements, everything balanced within me, the past and the future, and it seemed in that instant I had everything still before me, I was young and alive and anything might happen.
Then he stepped from the shadows and gripped my wrist and yanked me back into the dark.
We’d been scheduled to flit the following week. I’d been down to the Housing Department in Clive House to see pictures of the scheme, a new-build on the outskirts of Irvine New Town. Pebbledash semis. Indoor toilets. Private gardens with privet hedges. Five minutes’ walk to the shore. I pictured Louise and the boys running wild on the beach, chasing each other up through the dunes to the path that wound back to our scheme. A rim of sand round the plughole when I washed the boys’ hair at the sink.
In a drawer of the sideboard I had the new rent book with my name printed on the first page, from a time when my name was still my name, Ann Ogilvie, a name like anyone else’s, not the name on a poster, not the name in a news report, not the name beneath a smiling, tragic photo.
He wanted to get us a taxi. No need, I told him; we can walk it. He waited while I queued for my coat in the cloakroom, helped me on with it. Soft hands. Hands that rested on my shoulders for a second as I fastened my coat.
The kids still come to the derelict flat. They file down the darkened close with their hands on each other’s backs and dare each other to cross the threshold. They stand on the bare boards with their eyes squeezed almost shut and their arms and legs held rigid until one of them finally breaks and runs and the lot of them scatter, charging and whooping out to the backcourt.
They will keep coming back till the building comes down. The bare room exerts a pull, a dark fascination. This is the hub of it all, the heart of the crumbling city. The place where the lady lay naked and dead. The place where a story ended.
10
‘The story, son. Start it again.’ Greg Hislop was cutting up his Scotch pie, two vertical strokes of the knife, two horizontal. The smell of spiced mutton gusted up from the table. ‘This bible basher, this – what do they call him? – “demon of the dance halls”. Talk us through it. What does he do?’
McCormack shuffled back in his chair. He leaned forward, focusing on the tabletop, sliding the ashtray out of his line of vision. ‘He kills women. He rapes them and chokes them. Hacks their hair off with a knife. He leaves them in a place where they’ll be found – not right out in the open but not hidden. And he’s careful. He takes their clothes with him and he doesn’t leave prints.’
‘OK.’ Greg held his hand up, chewing down a mouthful of food. ‘That’s from your end. That’s what you see as a polis.’ He jabbed the table with his finger. ‘What’s it mean to him, though? What does he think he’s doing?’
McCormack pictured the glossies on the Murder Room wall, the sprawled white limbs, the close-ups of bruises and bite-marks. The blood. ‘Punishing women. Women who would go off for sex with a man they’ve just met, when they’ve got kids and maybe a husband at home.’
Greg speared a chunk of pie, used his knife to smear some beans on to the fork. ‘OK. Good. He’s a zealot. An instrument of vengeance. A wee Glasgow John Knox. Punishing how? What is the punishment he gives them?’
‘He kills them.’ McCormack shrugged, his hands jumped off his lap. ‘Death sentence. The ultimate punishment.’
‘Tsk, Dochie. No, no, no.’ Greg set his knife and fork down on his plate, spread like the legs of a compass. He wiped the sauce from his lips with a paper napkin, took a sip from his half-pint of heavy. He was a retired chief inspector with the CID and the boss manner never left him. ‘You’re all off there, Dochie. Killing’s incidental. Killing’s a by-product. He humiliates them. He exposes them.’
McCormack was feeling stupid. The long day in the hot room, thumbing through files, the ache in his left bicep from hauling open the filing-cabinet drawers and lugging box files, the throb in his head from the fluorescent lights. They were sitting in the Park Bar, at the corner table, and the buzz of post-work conversation and the evening sun streaming through the window and warming his scalp were making him sleepy. ‘Their nakedness? Their sex?’
‘Their blood, Detective.’ Greg tapped four fingers on the varnished tabletop. ‘Their menstrual blood. He takes the thing that every woman hides, that you can’t even speak about except in code-words and euphemisms and he brings it into the open. He puts it in the public street.’
‘You’re saying it’s not just coincidence? All three on the rag?’
Greg shook his head. ‘Blood, Duncan. Blood is the key. Temptation here is to think you’re dealing with an animal, a tabloid maniac. Crazed sex-killer. He’s planning to rape these women and even when he sees they’ve got their rag on it doesn’t stop him, he just ploughs on. That’s all wrong. It’s not that he keeps going in spite of the blood. Blood’s the whole point.’
Greg finished his meal, mopping up the tomato sauce with the last shard of pie-crust. ‘Glè mhath. That filled a hole.’
McCormack lit a Regal. The old man sitting across from him, rolling a handmade cigarette in his huge gnarled hands, the skinny old guy with the fleshy big ears, had fought crime on the streets of Glasgow for three decades. He was a Ballachulish man, like McCormack. Brought up in West Laroch, a Son of the Manse. Though he hadn’t lived there for forty-odd years, he was famous in the village, not for his police work but his wartime adventures. He was one of four Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders – all Balla boys – who’d been stranded at Dunkirk, left behind by the British flotilla. They decided to set off down occupied France, aiming for neutral Spain. All four spoke Gaelic and they passed themselves off as Russians on the long trek south. They made it across the Pyrenees and into legendary status back in Balla. Drank out on the tale for the rest of their days.
The others settled back in the village but Hislop returned to his pre-war job with the City of Glasgow Police. McCormack worked under him briefly, as a rookie constable in C Div on Tobago Street, but it wasn’t till later, drinking in the Park Bar and the Highlanders Institute, that McCormack got to know the older man, started to meet him for after-work drinks on a Friday. Hislop had played shinty with McCormack’s old man back home and he treated McCormack like a slightly wayward son. It was on Hislop’s recommendation that McCormack applied for the Flying Squad.
Everywhere he went, Greg Hislop was feted for his great escape, pints and whiskies landing in front of him. The stories of his journey through France were legion. Usually they involved dastardly Nazis and nubile blond Resistance fighters. People loved the fact that it was the language that had saved the Balla men, the Gaelic they’d passed off as Russian, bamboozling the Nazis. The stories were all derring-do and hairsbreadth feats. But sometimes, too, you’d hear a rumour, a whispered tale that had a darker edge. At some point on their journey south the Ballachulish men were supposed to have killed a man, a priest they suspected was planning to betray them. Sometimes you’d hear that it was Sandy ‘Blood’ MacDonald who’d done the killing. Sometimes it was ‘Ginger’ Wilson. Sometimes it was Peter Kemp, who strangled the priest with his bare hands. But sometimes, in the story, it was Gregor Hislop who’d dispatched the padre, plunging him with a knife.
McCormack looked at him now, an old man wiping tomato sauce from his lips with a folded napkin, nursing his dram and his pony of beer, glancing up at the clock above the bar. You couldn’t tell from looking at a man what he’d done, whether he’d killed another man, what he might be capable of. Thirteen years on the Force taught you that if nothing else. McCormack noticed the old man’s lips working as he balled the napkin. Greg was asking him something.
‘I’m saying who did you piss off this time? Getting sent to work this Quaker gig.’
‘No, Greg. I’m not working it. They’ve got me doing a “review”. I’ve to write a report for Levein. What it is, they need an excuse to wind it down. My job’s to come up with the excuse.’
‘But you think there’s something more?’
‘You think I’m wrong?’
Greg smiled. ‘Not at all, son. There’s always something more. They’ll want it scaled down, aye. It’s gone on too long, they’re throwing good money after bad. But maybe they think you’re the best shot at solving the thing. Last throw of the dice. If you solve it, dandy. If you don’t, what have they lost?’
McCormack reached for his glass, found it empty. ‘Great. They bring the psychic in. And Plan B is me.’
Hislop laughed. A few months back a Dutch clairvoyant had offered his services to the Quaker inquiry. Pieter Mertens, a ‘paragnost’, had apparently solved a couple of missing persons cases on the continent and had the testimonials from the gendarmerie to prove it. The Daily Record had stumped up the money to bring him across, in return for exclusive access to the venture. In a moment of desperation Cochrane had agreed and a smiling, sixty-year-old Rotterdamer with a gauzy cloud of Albert Einstein hair pitched up at the Marine with a Record hack and snapper at his side. They put him in a room with a scarf belonging to the third victim, Marion Mercer, and he closed his eyes for five minutes, fingering the scarf. Then he started to talk. He saw a room, he said, an empty room with a ripped-out fireplace. The river was close by and also a crane, he could see a tall crane against the sky. And that was it. It wasn’t much to go on. Uniforms made a desultory search of derelict tenements in Govan and some of the waterfront warehouses. Nothing was found. Mertens was thanked and sent smilingly home with his paranormal hair and the Quaker inquiry was back to square one.
‘Who put you up to it?’ Hislop was asking now. ‘Flett? Sell it as a big opportunity, your shot at the big time? Right? Well, who knows, son, maybe he’s right.’
Greg downed his whisky, shook the last drops of it into his beer. The sauce-streaks on his plate had stiffened into ridges. McCormack twisted his empty glass on the tabletop. A woman at a nearby table had started singing in Gaelic, a high slow air: Gura mise tha fo éislean, / Moch sa mhadainn is mi ’g éirigh …
‘Some opportunity,’ McCormack said. ‘Opportunity to go down with a sinking ship. Ach, fuck it. I’m on a hiding to nothing here, Greg. I’ll get the report done, move on. Quaker’s gone anyway. Dead or fucked off.’
Hislop’s silence had the weight of reproof. They listened to the Gaelic song, the smatter of claps when it finished. Finally Hislop leaned forward, planted his elbows on the table. ‘Why you doing the job, Dochie? Is it just to get you out the house, put some siller in your pocket? Because there’s easier ways. What age are you, son?’
‘Thirty-five.’
‘Christ, you feel like this at thirty-five you’re as well jacking it. Do something else while you’ve still got the time. It’s not like other jobs, son. If you’re not making a difference, you’re just in the road. Write your report. But give it a go at least, give it a shot. You find a new angle, follow it up. All right?’
‘All right.’
McCormack got to his feet. ‘Same?’ He pointed at the empty whisky glass. The old man nodded. The barman was wiping the taps as McCormack approached, holding up two fingers.
‘Té bheag?’
McCormack nodded. As he watched the barman, McCormack told himself he kept up these meetings with Greg out of respect for the old man and the Ballachulish connection, but now he wondered if there wasn’t a different reason. Maybe he met Greg to remind himself what a real cop looked like and how far he was from being one.
They had a good night, listening to the music and drinking. It wasn’t till they were standing outside at closing time with the usual Argyllshire crowd that Hislop brought it up again.
‘What are they like anyway?’ he said. ‘Cochrane’s boys.’
‘Meadhanach math. About what you’d expect.’
From what he could tell, the Marine guys were all right. For cops. McCormack had never warmed to his colleagues on the Force. The older ones all had that regimental air – if you weren’t ex-service then you weren’t quite up to scratch. The young ones were all about shinning up the pole. The lot at the Marine seemed OK. It was hard to get an accurate picture when most of them hated you on sight.
McCormack didn’t blame them. You could see their point of view. But even the ones who did give you the time of day could be a pain in the neck with their cracks about sheep-dip and single-track roads.
The city cops thought the whole of the Highlands was Brigadoon. You couldn’t tell them that growing up in Ballachulish was like living in a pit village. The men worked in the slate quarries, clocked on and off like factory bodies. The hooter sounding four times a day, men coming home as black as pitmen. Tin baths in front of the fire.
‘You not a Brother yet?’ Hislop asked him. ‘That couldn’t hurt.’
McCormack shook his head. He’d been approached more than once, but decided against it. There was the Catholic angle – the Church frowned on it – but mainly it was a question of taste. He didn’t like clubs. He didn’t like the kind of men who joined clubs. And he saw quite enough of his colleagues on the job without jogging their elbows in the Lodge.
They lit their cigarettes. The moon was full and McCormack glanced up at the tenements opposite, the neat slate roofs in the moonshine. Glasgow people knew that their water came from Loch Katrine. They didn’t know that what kept the rain out was Ballachulish slate. Every roof in this city was covered with slates from the Balla quarries, slates McCormack’s seanair and his muckers had blasted, cut and dressed.
‘Can’t expect them to like you,’ Hislop was saying. ‘But do a good job of work and they’ve got to respect you. There’s still some good men on the Force, despite everything. You know Seamus MacInnes?’
McCormack nodded. James MacInnes was the Detective Superintendent, second-in-command to Peter Levein in the Glasgow CID. Rumour was that MacInnes should have got the top job but his religion – he was Roman Catholic – kept him out.
‘You know he’s Argyll? Dunbeg boy. James of the Glen, we used to call him. I did a couple of favours for him.’
‘Aye?’
‘If Cochrane gets on your case, give Seamus a shout. Tell him I sent you.’
‘I’ll do that, Greg. Thanks.’
The singing had started again, party songs this time, football chants, Celtic and Rangers. The Oban lot were Rangers fans and the Balla boys were Celtic. Time to go.
‘Oidhche mhath, Greg.’
‘Don’t be a stranger.’
The next evening, in the Mitchell Library, McCormack read books on primitive cultures, the taboo surrounding menstruation. He read of the ‘deeply ingrained dread which primitive man universally entertains of menstruous blood’. How women were isolated from the tribe during their confinement, set apart in outlying huts. It was forbidden to cross their path. The pots and vessels they used during their ‘unclean’ time had to be smashed and discarded. The touch of a menstruating woman could wither crops, turn milk, spoil beer. She would rust metal, render milk-cows barren, make livestock miscarry. Trees would drop their fruit. Boys who caught sight of menstrual blood would find their hair turning grey. A menstruating woman could not go near water, for fear of fouling the fishermen’s luck. Wherever she walked, the plants would die under her feet.
In certain tribal societies, garments touched by a menstruating woman would be taken off and burnt. He thought of the naked limbs on the Murder Room photos. The missing clothes of all three victims. He read the words from Leviticus: And if a woman have an issue, and her issue in her flesh be blood, she shall be put apart seven days: and whoever toucheth her shall be unclean until the even. And every thing that she lieth upon on her separation shall be unclean. These were the bits of the Bible you never heard at St Muns or St Peter’s, the crazy, superstitious bits with their frothing anathemas and interdictions, wild-eyed, random, weirdly specific. And if any man lie with her at all, and her flowers be upon him, he shall be unclean seven days; and all the bed whereon he lieth shall be unclean.
McCormack stacked the books and took them over to the desk. On the walk home along Dumbarton Road he watched the taxis swish past and thought it all out. Greg Hislop was just an old guy in a pub who liked to watch the horses and drink Bowmore. He also had thirty years on the job. He’d worked the Peter Manuel case with Cochrane, you had to figure he knew a few things. But this wasn’t biblical Palestine or some lost African tribe. This was Scotland’s biggest city in 1969. This was Battlefield and Scotstoun and Bridgeton, the names on the front of buses and trams. What did tribal superstitions have to do with these murders? The man who placed soiled sanitary towels beside his victims wasn’t enacting a primitive ritual. He was laughing at them all, the victim, the cops, or he was showing his disgust at the world and all its works. They’d had over a year to find the Quaker. They’d come up with nothing. And now Duncan McCormack, the Boy from Ballachulish, would set them right, do what the longest, most expensive investigation in the history of Scottish policing couldn’t? Aye. That would be right.
Ücretsiz ön izlemeyi tamamladınız.
