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
