The Quaker. Liam McIlvanney

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.’

      ‘The third victim.’

      ‘Yeah. Nancy Scullion. Shared a taxi with our man.’

      They didn’t like saying The Quaker in the station, it smacked of the tabloids. It was always ‘our man’, ‘the killer’, ‘the perpetrator’. McCormack turned to Goldie.

      ‘The schoolgirl smirk, Detective: is there some point you’re trying to make here or is this how you normally look?’

      Goldie’s face darkened, the lower lip curling. ‘It’s called a joke, sir. The chief and the victim’s sister. They’re pretty close.’

      ‘DCI Cochrane and Mrs Scullion, you mean?’

      Goldie looked across at Ingram, back to McCormack. He opened his hand in a gesture of impatience. McCormack set his tea to one side, leaning his elbows on the desk. He felt an urge to let his head slide down to the desk, pillow it briefly in his folded arms.

      ‘Sorry, can I get this clear, Detective? You’re suggesting that DCI Cochrane is having improper sexual relations with a witness in a murder investigation? That’s your insinuation?’

      Goldie smiled slowly and shook his head, not meeting McCormack’s eye. ‘That’s in your mind. You’re the one who thought she was his wife.’

      McCormack took a pull on his mug, grimaced. The tea was scalding but he swallowed it down, savoured the pain. He was vexed with himself. It was his own innocent error that had opened the door for Goldie. He thought back to the scene in the car park, Cochrane helping a woman into the passenger seat of a squad car, closing the door solicitously and tapping the roof for the car to move off. It was the air of intimacy, the gentlemanly stoop of Cochrane’s shoulders. He ought to have known that she wasn’t his wife.

      McCormack looked round the office. The heads were all bent to their work but he felt that they were silently chalking this up, another facer for the turncoat, another round to Derek Goldie. He sat at his desk, spotting the files with sweat and watching the men ignore him, lean in close to mutter to one another. They were like a surly class with a strap-happy teacher.

      The canteen was worse. Even the uniforms knew to avoid him. When he took his tray to a table the others would finish up, drain their glasses, scrape to their feet. Three days of this and McCormack gave up. He took to lunching out, up Dumbarton Road to a small Italian place popular with university lecturers and doctors from the Western. On the third day of this he sat in his window seat and thought: I’m becoming a ghost. I’m fading away. The best I can hope is that they ignore me altogether, start acting as if I’m not there. They’re never going to connect with me unless I force them to.

      That was why he’d gone out on a tasking with Derek Goldie. It was time to act, try to break down the squad’s reserve. He’d seen enough of the Murder Room operations; now he needed to come out on a job. He chose Goldie, the malcontent, the troublemaker. Big, sneering, blond, cocksure Derek Goldie. The roster told him Goldie was on late shift, 6 p.m. till 2 a.m., tasked with chasing up known sex offenders, bringing them in for identity parades.

      And then Goldie had spent the whole shift winding him up, driving too fast, abusing suspects. It ended up with the beating he handed to the poor sap in the toilets of that shithole pub in Shettleston.

      McCormack winced at the memory. He’d made his choice, lied for Goldie, covered his back. He wasn’t stupid enough to think that this would make him Goldie’s best pal but shouldn’t it buy him a bit of goodwill? Fat chance. If anything, Goldie’s hostility rose. Goldie had taken his backing as a personal affront, as if McCormack lacked the courage to stand his ground, couldn’t even scab with proper conviction.

       7

      ‘It’s Jeff Arnold, Rider of the Range!’

      ‘Fuck off.’ Dazzle was laughing, he couldn’t keep the pistol straight. He dropped his arm and composed himself and raised it again, fired.

      Nothing. СКАЧАТЬ