been down here in fifteen years, but it was still just the same, the garages and the garden gates.
It was dark in the lane, away from the lights. The ground is all grassy with stones jutting out – not cobbles but ordinary stones, sharp and uneven, and my heel caught on one of the stones and I clutched at his arm, fell against him, really, and I remember I was laughing, I couldn’t stop laughing, it all seemed so funny and my mouth was locked open in this soundless laugh and that’s when he hit me in the mouth.
At first I didn’t know what happened. I thought maybe I’d slipped and bumped his shoulder or maybe someone had come running out of the lane and burst right between us and knocked me out of the way. I staggered backwards and clattered into the double doors of a garage, they rattled and shook. I raised my fingers to my mouth and took them away with something dark and glistening on them. That’s when I looked up and saw him stumping across the lane with his fist raised high. I screamed then but I needed to swallow first and the scream was kind of thin and half-hearted and he stopped it with another punch and there was a kind of judder like you were bumping downstairs and then the ground was scraping my face and I looked up with the eye that could still open and he was standing over me, tugging loose his tie and sawing his head back and forth as he did it.
That was all. Now my father looks like he will never smile again, like he’s forgotten the language of smiling and he’s suddenly old, old, old, he’s a wee small leprechaun, The Incredible Shrinking Man, his collars gaping, his jacket sleeves hanging down past his knuckles, and my mother walks around in a Valium trance. They try to put on happiness for Alasdair’s sake but you can’t fake it, a child isn’t fooled. The boy knows that something’s wrong and of course he thinks it’s his fault.
They worried, when I was out in Germany, Mum and Dad. Anything could happen in a country like that. They were so pleased when I came home, back to the flat in Langside Place, to the numbered buses and the local shops, the streets where nothing bad could happen. It’s hard for them to face the truth: I would have been safer in Germany, in that cramped Army house in Bad Godesberg, tramping through the rain to the NAAFI store.
There are things we need to remember. I tell them to Alasdair, lying weightlessly beside him on the narrow single bed, wishing I could smell his skin. I pour them into his ears while he sleeps and I tell myself that when his eyelids flicker – his transparent eyelids with the red veins down them and the long blond lashes – then the words are getting through. I tell my boy about himself. How he used to be scared of the coalman with his leather apron and his grimy face. How, when I leaned over to say goodnight, he would play with my hair, twist it in his fingers. He did that whenever he was tired. Sitting on my lap, leaning back against my chest, he would throw his wee arm up and clutch at my hair. Now he’ll forget. There’ll be no one to remind him that he did that. Or that he liked the Monkees. Or that he shouted ‘Lollo!’ when a lorry went past or called a helicopter ‘Uppatuptup’. My folks won’t remember. They love him, but they won’t remember those things and it seems hard to think that they’ll be lost.
What could matter more than this? Not revenge, certainly; not catching the man. People think the murdered dead are chewed up by hatred, lusting for vengeance, we can’t rest till our killer is caught. I couldn’t care less. If a man is hanged in Barlinnie Gaol or locked up in Peterhead for the next fifteen years will that help Alasdair sleep at night? Will it give me back my sense of smell?
For a while I thought I was different from the others. Better. Less to blame. I was the first. I had no way of knowing that he even existed. But the others, the second girl and the third: when they walked up those stairs to the noise and the lights and the shooting stars, they knew. They knew a man had picked up a woman on that dance floor and taken her home and killed her. But they went anyway.
And then I saw I was wrong, I was kidding myself. I knew he was out there too. I knew it all along. We all do.
DI Duncan McCormack sat at a desk in the empty Murder Room. It was the dead time between shifts. The night shift had knocked off at seven; the day shift wouldn’t start till eight.
McCormack was early, on a point of principle. You’re planning to sit in judgement on a group of your colleagues, you better be early. You better show them all the respect you can.
He lit a cigarette. This early, the Murder Room had a churchly peace. He hadn’t turned on the lights, and the morning sun threw a soft gloss on the hooded typewriters and the glass ashtrays and the grey metal bellies of the wastepaper baskets. It was the usual shabby office, with its jumble of scuffed desks and unmatched chairs and olive drab filing cabinets, but for McCormack such rooms could be magical places. Mysteries were solved here. Murders redeemed. Lives that had been turned upside down could sometimes – with work and skill and the needful visitation of luck – be righted.
Luck, though. Luck wasn’t a word you associated with the Quaker case. Nothing about this case had been lucky.
He rose and crossed to the one long wall that was free of shelving. There were maps here with coloured push-pins marking the murder scenes. There were photographs of three women, the familiar before-and-after shots. You couldn’t look from the oblivious smiles to the sprawled bodies without your stomach dropping. Without feeling personally guilty.
He stopped in front of one of the smiles to acknowledge his own share of guilt. He had worked this one, the first one. Jacquilyn Keevins. Down on the South Side. In the spring of last year. A botch job, a case that was jiggered from the first. Mistakes. Dud intel. Sloppy direction. They’d wound the thing up after only two weeks. Then came Ann Ogilvie over in Bridgeton, and Marion Mercer out west in Scotstoun. That’s when they knew for sure they were dealing with a multiple. That’s when the legend started to form, the dark tales and rumours – a whole city in thrall to the arrogant, Bible-quoting strangler that the papers dubbed the Quaker.
And that’s when the Quaker Squad set up shop in the old Marine, the nearest station to the Mercer locus. And this is where they’d been ever since, as the weeks turned into months and the man from the Barrowland Ballroom refused to be caught.
And now, just to add to the fun and games, they had Detective Inspector Duncan McCormack on their backs. On secondment from the Flying Squad, McCormack was tasked with reviewing the Quaker investigation, learning lessons, making recommendations. Everyone knew what this meant. Scale the thing down. Scale it down before we squander more money. Get us all out of the mess we’ve made.
McCormack was turning from the photos on the wall when the telephone rang. A shrill, tinny jangle in the silent room. He looked at the door as though someone might burst in to answer the phone and then gingerly, frowningly, reached for the receiver.
‘Murder Room. McCormack.’
He felt like a butler in a play. Someone playing a part. There was a soft rasping sound, a kind of shadow-laughter, then the moist, masticating clicks of a man preparing to speak. ‘No nearer, are you?’
‘Say it again?’
‘You’re no nearer catching him. After all this time.’
The voice was local, Glasgow. Nicely spoken. Fifties, McCormack decided. Possibly older.
‘Can you tell me your name, sir?’
‘A year you’ve had. More than a year. Some people might view that as careless.
