Where the Dead Men Go (10 page)

‘Nice work, Gerry. Tight, clean, sharp.’ Maguire was nodding. ‘It’s all coming back to you now. You’re back in the game.’ She handed back my copy. I had written up the prostitute, the dead woman, Helen Friel. I was back on crime.

I wasn’t happy with this but Maguire didn’t care. With Moir gone my chance to handball the crime brief to some likely newsdesk sap had passed. The Friel story was mine. The Billy Swan story and its bloody repercussions would be mine. This on top of my politics brief, the referendum, the march to independence. It was too much. It made a hard job impossible. I put this to Maguire and she shrugged her folded arms. Exceptional times, she said. We were under the cosh, the Yanks slashing budgets left and right, it was up to senior staff to come to the mark. I was the top reporter – she didn’t add, ‘now that Martin’s gone’, but we both understood that rider – and my business now was to lead from the front. I would be covering politics and crime, the big stories in either field, though I could draw on the assistance – I detected a flicker of irony here – of the newsdesk’s unpaid interns.

‘You alright with this?’ Wide eyes, tight lips, Maguire had her game face on, she was spoiling for a fight. I glanced through the glass at the bent, hushed figures in the newsroom, the smatter of empty desks.

‘I’m your man.’

On my way out I paused in the doorway.

‘Something else?’

‘Actually, yeah.’

I told her my idea. I wanted to spend some time looking into Martin’s death, try to figure out what happened, follow up some of his stories. Maguire frowned.

‘We know what happened, Gerry.’

‘Do we?’

‘You’re saying it wasn’t suicide?’

‘No. I don’t know. I’m saying it’s a bloody shame, Fiona. And we should find out why he did it, if we can. We owe him that much.’

She looked at me sharply.

‘Everything isn’t a story. You don’t have enough on your plate? You’ve just said it. The job’s big enough. Don’t make it more than it is. We tell people what happened, we explain things as far as we can. That’s the job. There’s things you can’t explain in seven hundred words.’ She ran her tongue across her teeth. ‘Why a man kills himself. You want to explain that in seven hundred words?’

‘Explain it in two.’ I said. ‘If you get the right words.’

‘Oh for Christ’s sake.’ Maguire’s lips had tightened. ‘Bit late in the day, no?’

She kept one hand on her laptop, the red nails splayed on the keys. Her glasses were clutched in the other fist, one black shellac leg poking out like a blade.

‘For what?’ I was still hovering just inside the door, hoping that the sportsdesk wasn’t within earshot.

‘Turning back the clock. Reliving your hot youth. When’s the last time you broke a story?’

‘I don’t see what that . . .’

‘Proper story. Something you dug out and stood up. Five years ago? Six? And now you want to get back into the swing of things by establishing, what exactly? That our Investigations Editor didn’t kill himself, as the post-mortem indicated, as Strathclyde Police believe, but was murdered? By persons unknown?’

‘There was money,’ I said. ‘Twenty-six grand in an account Clare knew nothing about.’

Nothing changed in Maguire’s face. ‘Meaning what?’

‘Meaning who knows. Meaning I want to look into it.’

The red lips split in a scoffing grin.

‘We’re not the fucking civil service. You’re not the ombudsman. We don’t “look into things”. We find stories and stand them up.’

I could sense someone at my back.

‘Knock knock.’ Jimmy Driscoll was behind me in the doorway, nosing some conspiracy. He gave a gulped little laugh and his eyes bounced from Maguire to me and back. He wore his feckless half-smile, cocked his head like a dog, a happy spaniel.

Maguire held my gaze and then faced slowly round to Driscoll; waited. He shrugged one shoulder.

‘This a bad time?’

‘What do you want, Jimmy?’

The shoulder slumped. ‘It’s Donald Kerr,’ he said glumly. ‘He’s in the lobby.’

‘I’ll be right out.’

When Driscoll withdrew, sliding a querulous look my way, Maguire tossed her glasses on the desk.

‘Oh for Christ’s sake Gerry sit down.’

She motioned me to close the door, kicked a swivel chair towards me.

‘How is she anyway?’

‘Clare? She’s not good, Fiona. I took the cards to her yesterday, the stuff from Moir’s partition. She’s upset. She doesn’t think he killed himself.’

 ‘The text message.’

‘She told you?’

‘The police told me. The woman, Gunn.’ Maguire rubbed both hands down her face, put her glasses back on. ‘What did you say to her?’

‘I said I’d talk to you, I said we’d talk. Even if it was suicide, we need to know why he did it.’

 She leaned back, folded her arms. She nodded slowly as if in reluctant agreement. ‘I get it, Gerry. You were his friend. You feel bad. We all do. But who does it help? You find the truth, it was drugs, it was another woman. Clare’s going to thank you for digging that up? His girls? This can only hurt them. The truth can’t help.’

‘Can’t help the paper, you mean.’

‘That too.’ She glared at me over her folded arms. ‘He’s on a roll.’ She jerked her chin at the ceiling. ‘Niven. Wants to start an award in Martin’s name. The Martin Moir Award for Investigative Reporting. An internship too. You start looking for dirt, it helps no one.’

‘Unless he was killed. It might help then. Just a little.’

‘Well that’s what I wonder. See, I’ve heard this song before. The Fiscal’s wrong. The pathologist’s wrong. The DI from Stewart Street; everyone’s wrong except Gerry Conway.’

‘DS.’

‘What?’

‘She’s a sergeant not an inspector. The giant’s fingers, Fiona. And it’s not just me. Neve doesn’t think it was suicide either.’

‘Neve McDonald? The fuck’s Neve got to do with this?’

So she didn’t know about Moir and Neve.

‘She’s a colleague, Fiona. She cares about Martin. She wants to know what happened. We all do.’

Maguire spoke slowly, as if to a child, young child, a slow learner. ‘A note, Gerry. An actual note. There’s a fucking suicide note.’

‘Not his, there isn’t. A suicide
text
, Fiona. A text. Using text language, which Moir fucking hated.’

‘You’re worried about the prose style? The prose style of a suicide note?’

‘What else is there? He was a writer, prose style’s his fucking DNA. You at least should appreciate that.’ The wind was up now, I got to my feet, the chair toppled, hit the carpet. ‘Anyway, fuck it. You’re probably right. It’s just bad timing. He was going after Packy Walsh and next thing he’s dead. Nothing to see here.’

‘Gerry!’ The light caught her talons as she raised her hands. ‘Gerry, he’d been writing crime for the past five years. He was going after half of Glasgow. You know how many people had a reason for wanting him dead?’

I let that question hang in the air.

Her phone rang and she snatched it up. Her eyes locked on mine as she spoke, five or six words, yes, yes, no, alright, put the phone down.

‘You’ve got a plan, I take it? If I say yes?’

I righted the chair, stood behind it, hands on the seatback, shrugged. ‘Look at his stories, follow them up. Dig around.’

‘OK, Gerry.’ She held her hands up, palms out. ‘Go for your life. But you do it in your spare time, once you’ve finished your real stories. Alright? You’re not on holiday. And I’m not subsidising this. You bring a splash within two weeks or you drop the whole thing. Agreed?’

A gust of sleet smashed against the window, a sound like a wrecking ball. Maguire didn’t flinch, didn’t turn her head.

‘Appreciate it, Fiona.’

She stretched her arms, took in the view across the Clyde, the darkening sky, the dirty river. ‘It’s handy anyway,’ she said.

‘What is?’

‘Govanhill.’

‘You want me to go to Govanhill?’

Govanhell. Square Mile of Murder. Martin Moir country.

She frowned. ‘You think it’s played out?’

‘Played out?’

‘I know what you mean.’ She nodded. ‘Still, should get another splash or two out of it. Do some follow-ups, Gerry. Find a story. But keep the head. No Deep Throats. No grassy knolls. Happy?’

She was frowning at the screen now, keyboard clicking. I stood up. She was right. Already the blogs and discussion threads were loud with lurid guesswork. Everyone had a theory about Moir’s demise. Five different Glasgow gangsters had been named as the assassin. Some of the posters fingered a drugs mule. Others favoured the UVF – Loyalists from Moir’s Ulster past reappearing to settle old scores. The cybernats leaned towards MI5: Moir had uncovered some deadly secret that would rock the tottering bulwarks of Union. There was speculation on the stories Moir was working on when he died. He’d cracked a paedophile ring involving top cops and cabinet ministers. He’d found the real dope on the World’s End murders. Bible John. The Lockerbie bombing. The wilder the claim, the more boldly it was pressed. I agreed with Maguire. The last thing we needed was more of the same.

But still. The best way to end the speculation was to find the truth.

Back at my desk, I filed my copy to Driscoll. Sat back, fingers laced behind my head. Sleet-streaked windows, the blurred city streets. The clouds had closed in, obscuring the hills and their dark wooded flanks. I thought of the dead woman, dumped in the woods. The dead prostitute, the redtops called her, as if the way she earned a living engrossed her whole identity. I thought of how Moir would have tackled the story, his line of approach. If he hadn’t died he’d have written the piece –
The body of missing Airdrie woman Helen Friel was discovered last night in Lanarkshire woods
. I felt sorry for her then, as if she was lonely in death, as if she’d been denied some last important rite. As if her death was not yet finished. They were equal now. Martin Moir. Helen Friel. Waiting mutely for their stories to be told.  

For the next few days I played at being Moir. I wrote the stories Moir would have written. They were stark and shocking and violent and true. After years of commentary and cleverness, after half a million words of ‘expert analysis’ and worthless insider opinion, it was nice to tell a story. As a Sunday commentator you were last to the party, all your facts had been chewed over by the daily hacks, you were sucking old bones that had lost their savour. As a political journalist, the people you wrote about were chewed over, too, with their tweets and blogs and podcasts, their suits and corrected smiles, their approved colour-schemes. Gangsters were different. Gangsters were mythical figures, rarely sighted, known by word of mouth and half-legendary acts. The photos that appeared in the papers – always the same ones; grainy, fuzzy, out of date – had a doctored, unconvincing look, like the long-shots of Sasquatch or Yeti. Gangsters were figments, bedtime bogeymen. In bringing news of their crimes you were the messenger on horseback, riding into the marketplace, standing in your stirrups to address the eager crowd.

An honest tiredness buoyed me up each evening, hanging on the oily chrome rail in the rattling car, stamping onto the great meshing teeth of the escalator, emerging onto Christmassy Byres Road with its puddled lights, its shuddering buses, its scarved and hatted homegoing crowds. At Clouston Street we drank Rioja and speared pesto-coated penne, listening to Steve Lamacq on 6 Music, taking turns to spoon Angus’s food or stoop to retrieve his dropped or slingshot plastic forks and spoons, his overturned beakers. With Angus down we often finished the wine and turned in early ourselves.

But pretending to be Martin Moir didn’t get me any closer to the nature of his death. The phone rang one evening as I lolled on the couch with my stockinged feet in Mari’s lap, Angus asleep on my chest and a broad-bottomed glass of Montecillo in my grasp. It was Clare. She was crying, drunk. Couldn’t we press for an inquest into Martin’s death? I told her it was a waste of time. This wasn’t England. Down south, almost every unnatural death, every suicide and accident, triggered an inquest. We didn’t do that here. A Fatal Accident Inquiry was a rare beast, it was ordered for deaths that occasioned ‘serious public concern’. Other than Clare, me and – though Clare didn’t know it – Neve McDonald, was anyone seriously concerned about Martin’s death? If we wanted answers we’d have to find them ourselves.

Later that evening I sat before the screen.
Can’t believe you’re gone, Big Man. Sleep tight, Marty. You’re in a better place. Taken too soon
. I scrolled through a dozen of the eighty-seven comments on Moir’s last status update, every ‘friend’ giving their own maudlin twist on his demise. A better place? The minister at the funeral had spoken of Martin going ‘home’. A hole in the ground? Six sodden feet of Glasgow mud? Some fucking home. I resisted the temptation to add to the comments or to ‘like’ any of these Facebook aperçus but I did take Moir’s old Toshiba down from the airing cupboard where I’d stowed it, plugged it in and booted up, entered the password Neve had scribbled on one of my business cards.

I was looking for the final piece, the story Moir was working at the time of his death. For years I had envied the stories Moir told, the tales of mayhem and death that seemed to land in his lap. People would come to him with tip-offs, titbits, overheard snippets. Even gangsters would seek him out; being written up by Moir became a hoods’ badge of honour. I remember one story, shortly after I came back to the
Trib
. A rumour got out that Frank McGreevy, Packy Walsh’s right-hand man, had been assassinated. McGreevy’s big rival was Jamesie ‘Front Man’ Leonard, a Neil family associate who had once dated McGreevy’s sister. Leonard was fresh out of Saughton, having served four years for aggravated assault. All the reporters were getting texts saying the same thing: McGreevy’s been topped; Jamesie’s chibbed him. One of the junior reporters jumped in a cab and headed south to McGreevy’s house.

Then a call came through to the newsroom: it’s Francis Xavier McGreevy, sounding a little put out. He wants to speak to Martin Moir. As Moir takes the call we’re all gathered round his desk, but he just nods and uh-huhs and then he snatches his coat from the back of his chair. An hour later, he saunters back, Starbucks in hand, and plumps down at his desk. He starts tapping out the piece, an exclusive interview, quashing the rumours of Frankie’s demise.

That evening in the Cope we got the full story.

‘I get to the house,’ said Moir. A large Talisker was slopping up the sides of the tumbler as he waved it around. We’d been buying him drinks all night and his face was slick with whisky sweat. ‘I know it’s the right house because the Beeb van’s parked outside and a Strathclyde chopper’s nearly sitting on the roof. Jesus, the noise these things make – you’ve no conception. There’s two heavies at McGreevy’s gate and they huckle me into the house, past the hacks and the cameras. Frank’s in his living room, large as life, watching the snooker. “Right,” he says when he sees me. “Keep your fucking eyes open.” Then he stands up and whips off his T-shirt, and twirls right around with his arms above his head. Like a fucking ballet dancer. “Do I look like I’ve been fucking chibbed?”
Then
– I’m not making this up, it’s the God’s honest – he drops the trousers and touches his toes. “Okay?” he asks me, his head at his ankles. “Fine,” I tell him; “that’s great.” “Okay then.” He straightens up and fastens his belt: “Now go and fucking write it.”’

Moir called it the shortest interview he’d ever done but McGreevy had got his message across. The rumour was he’d been stabbed in the arse and McGreevy was having none of it. After the story appeared, a parcel was couriered to Moir’s desk: twenty-five Juan Lopez No. 2s. He handed them round in the Cope the following Saturday.

That was classic Moir, but the piece he was writing when he died was a squib, nothing, a piece of shit. According to Driscoll, Moir had been probing a spike in sectarian crimes. The copy was on his laptop, in a file labelled ‘Sectarian’. He’d written the first five pars. He gave the stats –
Hate crimes defined as ‘sectarian’ jumped by ten per cent to almost 700 last year
– and he marshalled the quotes. A spokesman for the Catholic Church expressed alarm at the increase and called on the government to do more to tackle the problem. A spokesman for the government welcomed the figures as evidence that victims were coming forward and that the police were doing their job. It was bromide stuff – page six or seven at best, a flimsy wing under ‘Home News’ – and not even Moir’s metallic prose style could redeem it.

But this wasn’t the story. Like most Sunday journos, Moir kept the real stories back, held them in check till the very last minute. He’d feed Driscoll a bullshit schedule – stories he was supposedly working on, stories he might even start to write but would ditch when the deadline loomed. The hate crimes piece would be one of those. Moir had been working on something else.

Probably he kept them on a memory stick, the real stories. His laptop – the old Toshiba he’d used at Neve McDonald’s – wasn’t much help. As far as I could see, Moir’s stuff was in two folders, one that carried a few files of notes and a dozen archived stories. The other folder, called ‘Streets of Stone’, contained a few drafted chapters of Moir’s book. Moir had been writing a history of the Glasgow street gangs. The Billy Boys and the Baltic Fleet. The Toi and the Cumbie. The Penny Mob. The Parlour Boys. True crime was the city’s favourite genre. The bookshops on Buchanan Street and Sauchiehall Street have designated sections on hardmen and neds, intimate histories of neighbourly mayhem with titles like
Fly Boy
and
Tongland
and
Square Go
. The books have a redtop feel, embossed titles in scarlet and black above coarse-grained, monochrome headshots of hoods. Most of the city’s crime corrs have tried their hand at the genre, but Moir was more ambitious than most.
Streets of Stone
would have taken the story back to the nineteenth century, to the immigrant Irish brotherhoods and oath-bound secret societies, the Tim Malloy, the Village Boys.

But the story he was writing, the one that may have got him killed – that story wasn’t here.

The next night I stood on the yellow tiles on the Outer Circle platform at Ibrox station, hot wind on my face as the train thudded in. I counted off the carriages, took the third, found a seat at the far end, placed my bag on the seat beside me. Across from me was a girl of twenty in a green suede jacket with tasselled sleeves, the strap of a satchel across her chest.

At Kelvinhall the doors shushed open and I moved my bag from the seat. Lewicki sat down.

‘Twenty-six grand,’ he said. ‘Lot of money for a man in Moir’s line of work. You got something similar, Gerry, nice nest-egg of twenty-six grand?’

‘I’ve got a 2002 Subaru and a lottery scratchcard.’

Lewicki hissed, the sound he made in lieu of laughter. ‘What was he writing? You looked at what he’d done before he died?’

‘Nothing. Two-bob stories. Nothing to get you killed, let’s put it like that.’

‘What were they?’

I blew out some air. ‘From memory? Incidence of sectarian crimes, alarming rise thereof. Firebomb attack on the athletes’ village. I’m starting to wonder what the fuss was about, why we all thought Moir was the talent.’

‘That’s not a two-bob story.’

I caught the girl’s eyes, flicked up to the ads above her head.

‘The firebomb? It’s an act of vandalism, Jan. Zero-tolerance policing, very commendable, but this is not a front-page lead. They knocked the wheels off an earth-moving vehicle.’

Lewicki tugged at the knees of his trousers, fixing the creases. ‘Hard to move earth without wheels. Hard to prepare a site for construction.’

‘Knock-on effects, Jan, yes. Big news: no.’

We swayed in silence for a minute, bumping shoulders as the train took the corners and then the light of a station filled the carriage, Hillhead, the students packed together on the platform. When we moved off a row of straphangers stood in front of us, their backpacks and satchels swinging back and forward with the movement of the train. Lewicki leaned back, spoke out of the side of his mouth.

‘You heard of Bellrock?’

‘The lighthouse?’

‘The security firm.’

A hoarding came to mind, picture of a lighthouse, blue on a white background, lettering along the beam of light, the big ‘B’ tapering down to the ‘K’: Bellrock.

‘I’ve seen it,’ I said. ‘On signs. Hoardings.’

‘It’s one of Neil’s. It’s a Neil front.’

Neil had any number of fronts. So did the Walshes. Places they could rinse the dirty money, the drug money. Security was a favourite. Likewise construction.

‘There’s some buildings coming down on the athletes’ village site. They came to see us, the demolition firm. Manchester company. They hired an Edinburgh outfit to do the security. First day on the job, six guys in Bellrock vests march onto the site:
We do the security here
. Site manager comes out his office:
Actually, no, you don’t
.
We gave the contract to this other firm
. Bellrock guy shakes his head.
Missing the point
, he tells him:
we do the security here –
meaning here, in this part of the city, like it’s a hereditary right, passed down through the generations. Site manager’s a busy man, tells them to fuck off, he’s calling the police.’

Kelvinbridge. More students. The straphangers shuffled closer, squeezing together like the pleats of an accordion.

‘So they firebomb the digger,’ I said.

‘That’s the first night. Second night they waylay one of the guards on his way to work. Persuade him not to report for duty. Someone sets off a distress flare beside the site office. On it goes. The local cops pay a visit to Bellrock, warn them off. Next night it’s kids, wee boys of nine or ten. Climbing the fence, stoning the guards, lobbing bricks onto Portakabin roofs.’

‘But the contract’s been signed. They’re not going to tear it up and give it to Bellrock.’

‘
This
contract’s been signed. But this is just the demolition phase. There’s clearing and then construction to come. More contracts up for grabs.’

‘They’ll go to Bellrock?’

‘What do you think?’

The girl in the tasselled jacket caught my eye again as she stood up to leave.

‘But there’s no gangland angle in Moir’s piece.’

‘Gangland angle to everything, Gerry. It just hadn’t developed yet.’

We sat in silence for the next few stops. The train rattled into the station: the yellow walls of Ibrox. We’d come full circle. I shouldered my holdall.