The Quaker. Liam McIlvanney

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 shirtsleeves to the elbow. As he watched the day shift go about their tasks there grew in him a kind of despair at the very diligence of these men. They were only undefeated because they kept trying. Day after day they sat at their desks beneath the high windows in the late summer heat and worked their leads. Dark patches bloomed at their armpits, down the backs of their shirts. The smell of sweat and cheap nylon was pushed about by the table-fans along with the blue clouds of cigarette smoke.

      They worked the telephones (‘Goldie, Marine Murder Room’), they typed up reports, collated statements, while McCormack sat at the end of the room like some kind of exam invigilator. He wanted to leave his chair and weave between the desks, placing his hands on the shoulders of these men, on their forearms, to calm their efforts, still their labour.

      They were getting further away from it, he thought. Further away from the truth, not closer to it. They couldn’t understand why the methods that had worked in the past weren’t working now. They didn’t change tack. They didn’t try different things. They did the same things, only harder.

      They needed some luck. No, McCormack thought: what they needed wasn’t luck. What they needed was another death. To redeem their time, give them a fresh start, another crack at the Quaker.

      He looked up to see Goldie standing at the map, lost in the grid, the dainty streets, the spidery contour lines, the sweeping arcs of train-tracks and rivers, the square white blanks of the public parks, the solid black geometry of the public buildings – the railway stations and churches, the hospitals and schools, the post offices, the army barracks.

      Everyone did it. When someone sat down after a spell at the map, ten minutes would pass and a chair would scrape and another shirtsleeved figure would be stood there, hitching his trousers and leaning into the grid. It was a rota, an unscripted vigil. The detectives stood in turn before the Ordnance Survey sheets, waited for the map to yield its secrets.

      He was losing it, McCormack thought. They all were. They had thrown so much at this inquiry. Talking to reporters, feeding the papers till the whole city, the whole country could think of nothing but the Quaker, the Quaker, that clean-cut face on the posters. It came down to numbers. Fifteen months of work. A hundred cops in teams of twelve working fourteen-hour days. They’d taken 50,000 statements. They’d interviewed 5,000 suspects, visited 700 dentists, 450 hairdressers, 240 tailors. Scores of churches and golf clubs. How many man-hours did it come to – a million? Two? How could all these numbers add up to zero?

      And how could you let it go? How could you stop now, admit it was over, you’d done as much as you could? You couldn’t. You couldn’t let go. You kept on, placed your faith in police work. Placed your faith in procedures. Luck. Magic. Santa Claus. Pieter Mertens. Mertens the clairvoyant. Mertens the paragnost. I see a room in an apartment. A river is close. Also a factory. A crane can be seen from the window …

      McCormack watched the roll of fat bulging over Goldie’s collar. He heard Goldie ask a sergeant called Ingram where Cochrane was.

      ‘DCI Cochrane?’ McCormack spoke up. ‘I saw him half an hour ago in the car park. He was getting his wife a lift home in a squad car. What?’

      The look between Goldie and Ingram; Goldie grinning at the floor.

      ‘His wife.’ Goldie snorted. ‘Is that what they’re calling it?’

      ‘It’s not his wife.’ Ingram came over with two mugs of tea, set one down in front of McCormack. ‘It’s the witness, sir. Sister of Marion Mercer.’

      ‘The third victim.’

      ‘Yeah. Nancy