somewhere else, the Quaker was fading from the city’s sense of itself, dwindling to a whisper, a half-forgotten melody.
Only the shirtsleeved men in the Murder Room at the Marine Police Station in Partick kept at their task. In a fourteen-by-ten upstairs room, they stalked the Quaker through box files of witness statements. For months these men had been trying to piece it together, searching for motive and meaning in rubbled backcourts. Three endings. Three bodies. Crumpled and sprawled, dumped like rubbish. I thought it was a mannequin, a tailor’s dummy. It looked like a bundle of rags. An old coat or blanket. No one ever thinks that it’s a body. A woman. Someone with a book half-read, a favourite song, bitter secrets, a patch of eczema behind her ear.
Then the newspapers started to turn. Detectives who had been the subject of reverent profiles – George Cochrane pictured in his mackintosh and trilby, gripping his pipe like a Clydeside Sherlock; Chief Constable Arthur Lennox in his pristine blues, flanked by a portrait of the queen – found themselves discussed with scoffing brusqueness. An element of black humour crept into the coverage. The papers had fun with the notion of CID men brushing up their dance moves as they mingled with the punters at the Barrowland Ballroom. In July, the Tribune ran an old photo of the Quaker Squad detectives at the scene of Jacquilyn Keevins’s murder, walking three-abreast down Carmichael Lane, looking for clues. The picture had a caption: Romeo, Foxtrot, Tango: The Marine Formation Dance Team.
Everyone thinks that I changed my mind and that was what got me killed. Shaking their heads at my folly or at the capriciousness of fate. As though changing your mind was so terrible. As though I should have known better. But I didn’t change my mind. I told Mum and Dad that I was going to the Majestic – they were right about that – but that was never the plan. I was going to the Barrowland all along.
I was going to the Barrowland because I was meeting a man.
The shoes that I’d bought in Frasers the previous Saturday were pinching my toes as I walked down the hill to the bus. I was wearing an emerald green crepe dress I’d just re-hemmed. The dress was sleeveless and my arms felt cool against the satin lining of my coat. I was conscious of my perfume – Rive Gauche – filling the lower deck of the bus and I remember noticing that the conductress had a ladder in her tights, all the way down the inside of her left leg, and thinking that she ought to have a spare pair in her bag.
Why did I lie to my parents? I’m not sure. I think it was to make it more complete. The secret, I mean. The man I was meeting was called William. He was tall, with good hair he was forever running a hand through, and strong slim forearms under folded sleeves. I hadn’t known him long. There was something distant about him, something reserved. I wondered if maybe he’d turn out to be married but I didn’t care. It had been a long time since someone had asked me out. The boy was the problem. Wee Alasdair. Just turned six. It puts them off, a kid does.
I got off the bus at Glasgow Cross and walked up the Gallowgate to the Barrowland and joined the queue under the green-and-red neon. Once I’d checked my coat in the foyer I climbed the stairs to the ballroom. That’s the bit I loved, climbing towards everything, the music suddenly loud and the dancers whirling into view. I hurried the last few steps and the ballroom gulped me in. I felt safe there, secret, in the darkness and the lights.
I bought a bitter lemon at the bar and took a seat at a table so that people knew I was waiting for someone.
I lit a cigarette and looked at my watch. William was already fifteen minutes late. Benny Hamlin and the Hi-Hats played ‘Boom Bang-a-Bang’ and I was cross because I always liked to dance to that. I lit another cigarette, watched the smoke drift up towards the shooting stars on the ceiling.
By half-past nine I knew he wasn’t coming. My bitter lemon was finished and I’d smoked all but two of my cigarettes. I remember how angry I felt, close to tears, not because he’d stood me up but because everything was spoiled, the night and the dress and the music and everything. I was sorting my lipstick and getting ready to leave when a shadow fell on my handbag and stayed there. When I turned and looked up, there he was. The lights from the stage were behind him and I couldn’t really see his face. I’d forgotten how tall he was, how well-spoken.
‘I’m so sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘May I still join you?’
That’s how he spoke. He offered me a cigarette and lit it with a nice gold lighter but he didn’t take one himself. He didn’t smoke, just carried a pack for occasions like this.
He bought me another bitter lemon and got another pack of Embassy Filter from the vending machine and draped his raincoat over a vacant chair. He had a nice woollen scarf that he folded and placed on the chair beside him. He was really good looking with his sharp jaw and his straight nose and his short fair hair in a neat side shed. He wore a regimental tie and a brown chalkstripe suit. Stylish. I couldn’t stop grinning, leaning in to get my cigarette lit, resting my hand on his hand as he held the flame.
The music was loud so it was a struggle to talk but he asked me about my day and he spoke about his job. I wasn’t really listening so much as just enjoying his voice, Glasgow but sort of refined, not like your typical city neds, whining out of the sides of their mouths like someone letting air out of a balloon. He was different altogether. A lot of the guys you’d see in the Barrowland were hard men, or thought they were, always spoiling for a fight. I’d see them in the Vickie on my night shift, carting their sore faces into A&E. I want to say that they didn’t look so clever right then, with their faces gaping open, but the truth is they looked every bit as clever – or every bit as dumb – sitting there with their shirts drenched in blood, pleased as punch, already working out how they’d tell it to their mates. William was different, he seemed older, more sophisticated, somebody who knew things. Good dancer, too.
We left at half-eleven and walked down the Gallowgate to where he’d parked his car. Outside in the streetlights he looked younger than he had in the ballroom. He was twenty-five, maybe twenty-six, though he acted a little older than he was. Even so, I was older by five or six years and I liked it, it made me feel more in control.
His car was a sleek white affair, quite new-looking. He held the passenger door for me while I settled myself in the red leather seat, then he closed the door before walking round to the driver’s side. I leaned against him when the car turned a corner and looked up into his face but he stared straight ahead and kept his hands to himself. He was talking away about decimalization with this earnest look on his face and when the car stopped at a red light I started poking him in the ribs, trying to get him to laugh if nothing else. It was nice he was such a gentleman but he needed to relax a bit. Nothing was going to happen anyway – it was my time of the month – but you’d want some fun from a night at the jiggin.
We got out of the car and he walked me to the closemouth. And now, when we stepped into the darkened close, it all seemed to change, like a switch had flicked. He caught me by the shoulders and pressed his mouth against mine, hard, so that my head bumped against the wall of the close. About time, I thought. Then his hands were busy and his breathing got loud.
‘Not here,’ I told him. ‘Come on.’
I took him down the hill to the lane behind Carmichael Place. I was laughing to myself, because it was like I was fifteen again. This was where you would come with boys,
