Chapter 51
‘We are suffering from a plethora of surmise, conjecture, and hypothesis.’
Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘Silver Blaze’
That winter, posters of a smart, fair-haired young man smirked out from bus stops and newsagents’ doors across the city. The same face looked down from the corkboards of doctors’ waiting rooms and the glass display cases in the public libraries. Everyone had their own ideas about the owner of the face. Rumours buzzed like static. The Quaker worked as a storeman at Bilsland’s Bakery. He was a fitter with the Gas Board, a welder at Fairfield’s. The Quaker waited tables at the old Bay Horse.
Some said he was a Yank from the submarines at the Holy Loch. Others said he was a Russian from off the Klondykers. He was a city councillor. The leader-aff of the Milton Tongs. A parish priest. He had worked with multiple murderer Peter Manuel on the railways. He was Manuel’s half-brother, Manuel’s cellmate, he’d helped Manuel abscond from Borstal in Coventry or Southport or Beverley or Hull. There were Quaker jokes, told in low voices in work-break card-schools and the snugs of pubs. The word was magic-markered on bus shelters, sprayed on the walls of derelict tenements. It rippled through the swaying crowds on the slopes of Ibrox and Celtic Park. QUAKER 3, POLIS 0. His name crept into the street-rhymes of children, the chanted stanzas of lassies skipping ropes or bouncing tennis balls on tenement gables.
And always there was the poster: IF YOU SEE HIM PHONE THE POLICE. The poster looked like someone you knew, like a word on the tip of your tongue. If you looked long enough, if you half-closed your eyes, then the artist’s impression with the slick side-parting would resolve itself into the face of your milkman, your sister’s ex-boyfriend, the man who wrapped your fish supper in the Blue Bird Café.
The face was clean-cut, the features delicate, almost pretty. To some of the city’s older residents he looked like a throwback to a stricter, more disciplined age. A well-turned-out young man. Not like the layabouts and cornerboys who lounged on the back seats of buses, flicking their hair like daft lassies, tugging at their goatee beards.
Jacquilyn Keevins, the first victim, was killed on 13 May 1968. Strangled with her tights. Left in a back lane in Battlefield.
The Ballroom Butcher. The Dance Hall Don Juan with a Taste for Murder. The Quaker was something to talk about when you got tired of talking about football or the weather. That year of 1968, the worst winter in memory set in just after Halloween. On the first day of November a storm battered the city, shouldering down through the banks of tenements, scattering slates and smacking down chimney stacks.
On 2 November, Ann Ogilvie went out to the dancing at the Barrowland Ballroom and failed to come home. She was found two days later in a derelict tenement in Bridgeton.
On through Bonfire Night and St Andrew’s Day the weather stayed bad. The football card was clogged with postponements, unplayed fixtures piling up. The posters on gable ends, where the Quaker’s face had been pasted in threes as though he were a candidate for office, were pulped and defaced by the pelting sleet.
All winter, people wrote to DCI George Cochrane and the Quaker Squad at the Marine Police Station in Anderson Street. The letters waited on Cochrane’s desk each morning. People wrote to denounce their friends and neighbours, relatives, enemies. The Quaker’s names were Highland, Lowland, Irish, Italian. Sometimes the writer was anonymous, sometimes the letters were signed. As December wore on, the missives came in the form of Christmas cards, festive scenes of horse-drawn carriages and starlit stables bearing the names of evildoers in righteous capitals. A team of detectives followed these up, chasing the names across the map of the city.
The city itself was changing, its map revised by the wrecking balls. Slum clearance. Redevelopment. Whole neighbourhoods lost as the buildings came down. Streets cleared. Families dispersed. Some went to the big new schemes on the edge of the city but most of them left. They lit out for the coastal new towns or further afield, to Canada, the States, they took ship as Ten Pound Poms for Adelaide and Wellington. New lives in sunny elsewheres, the grime of the tenements left behind.
For those who stayed, it was the winter of the Quaker. There was no escape from the blond side-parting and the crooked smile. Like a slew of frozen mirrors, the posters threw back to the city its half-familiar face. Men with short fair hair, men with overlapping teeth, men with the thin slightly sensuous lips of the artist’s impression would find themselves scrutinized in pubs and restaurants, underground carriages. Glancing up from the Evening Times as the bus took a bump they’d catch the fierce, unguarded stares of their fellow citizens. Whispers rasped around them, neighbours monitored their movements. Cards were issued by the Chief Constable to men who matched the wanted man’s description: The holder of this card is certified as not being the Quaker.
Another big storm hit the city on 25 January. Burns Night. The morning after the storm was when number three was found, torn and sprawled in a Scotstoun backcourt, like something ransacked by the wind. Marion Mercer’s unwitting smile joined those of Jacquilyn Keevins and Ann Ogilvie on the splashes of the Record, the Tribune, the Daily Express.
Jacquilyn Keevins. Ann Ogilvie. Marion Mercer.
And then, in the weeks since Marion Mercer, nothing. The murders that had gripped a city stopped. The days ticked past, the weeks turned into months. With the warmer weather it was hard to keep the killings in mind, that wintry horror. The frenzy ebbed. The air began to clear. Suddenly it was six months since the Quaker’s last killing. The prospect that he might strike again was like the memory of last year’s snow: you couldn’t picture it. There were queues once more outside the dance halls. Bouncers rocked on their heels outside the Plaza and the Albert. Women stood in line for the coat-check in the Barrowland and the Majestic. Blue-tuxedo’d band-leaders cracked jokes about the Quaker before leaning in to the mic for the next slow ballad. The university cancelled its night-bus service for female students. The city was moving on, looking out. News items from the wider world – riots in Belfast, the Kennedy bother at Chappaquiddick, One Small Step for Man – displaced the local stories in the Tribune and the Record. A new decade was coming, new money, new buildings going
