The Quaker. Liam McIlvanney

Goldie’s teeth were bared in a sneer, eyes bright with scorn above the bunched cheeks. ‘Naw. See, you cannae be the brass’s nark and do good police work. Know why? Because good police work doesnae get done on its own. You need your neighbours to help you. And who’s gonnae help you after this?’

      He was using ‘neighbours’ in the special polis sense, meaning your partners, the guys you shared a station with. McCormack watched as Goldie tugged his cigarettes and lighter from his raincoat pocket, tossed them on the desk. Goldie was whistling under his breath and fuck this, McCormack decided, enough was enough.

      ‘You know a guy called James Kane?’ he asked.

      ‘Yeah, yeah.’ Goldie was hanging his raincoat on the hat-rack. ‘You put one of Glash’s soldiers away. And that gets you a pass? Maybe in your book. In mine, you need to turn up every day. Be a polis. Earn it all again.’

      McCormack shook his head. Be a polis. The fuck would you know about that? McCormack had his finger raised to jab it at Goldie when he heard the smart rap of heels in the corridor.

      ‘What’s the score here?’ The boss, DCI George Cochrane, was on the threshold, tall and thin and oddly boyish in his belted gabardine. He read the battle stance of Goldie and McCormack. ‘The hell’s going on, DS Goldie?’

      ‘Friendly discussion, sir.’ Goldie smiled, still looking at McCormack. ‘We’re all friends here.’

      ‘Fine. Let’s keep it that way.’ Cochrane bustled through to his own office, spreading the cherry scent of pipe tobacco. At the ribbed glass door he paused. ‘And Goldie? We’ll be doing some parades with Nancy Scullion over the coming week. Drop by her flat this evening, would you? Check what times she’ll be free.’

      ‘Sir.’

      Goldie took his seat. McCormack crossed to one of the big sash windows, unsnibbed it, hooked his fingers in the metal lifts and tugged it open. The smell of the river came in on the breeze; the Clyde met the Kelvin just south of the office. He thought about Nancy Scullion. He’d heard the name a lot around the office. If the Murder Room was a cult, its High Priestess, the Delphic Oracle of the Marine Police Station, was Nancy Scullion. Sister of the third victim, she had spent the evening of 25 January in Barrowland Ballroom with her sister and the killer. He sat between them in the taxi on the way back to Scotstoun, where the sisters lived just a few streets apart. Nancy was drunk, blootered, smashed on gin and Babycham, but she’d heard him banging on about caravan holidays in Irvine, growing up in a foster home, getting verses of the Bible off by heart.

      Nancy’s description was holy writ. It was the tablets of the law for the men at these desks. They parsed it and probed it, took apart its description of a well-dressed modern man, with his short fair hair and his neat raincoat, his gallantry and his hair-trigger temper. Good manners. Nice diction. A cut above the common ruck of East End hoodlums and toughs. A golfer, no less, whose cousin had recently scored a hole in one. Polite but masterful, a man of strong views, who called for the manager when the cigarette machine malfunctioned and forced him to refund Nancy’s money. A man who spoke darkly about sinful women in the taxi back to Scotstoun. Who professed to spend his New Year’s Eves in prayer while the rest of the world gave itself over to drink and hilarity.

      McCormack knew it all. After barely a week he knew the details about as well as if he’d been here all along.

      Brown chalkstripe suit, regimental tie. Thick watchstrap. Embassy Filter. Overlapping two front teeth. Suede boots. Dens of iniquity. Woman taken in adultery. Hole in one.

      This was the litany and these men blitzed it. Every man on the squad had criss-crossed the city, chasing these leads. In a hundred barber-shops these detectives had traded nods in the mirror with gowned customers as the barber slipped his scissors into a breast pocket and took the artist’s impression in both hands. At specially convened meetings of city golf clubs they watched the blazer-buttons wink like coins as the members passed a laminated image along the rows. They took the picture to all the tailors on Renfield Street and Hope Street. They went to the churches, chapels, gospel halls of all denominations, spoke to priests, lay preachers, ministers. They visited dentists’ surgeries, asked permission to sift their records.

      And nothing worked.

      The man with the short hair and overlapping teeth, the smartly dressed dancer in the desert boots whose cousin scored a hole in one, the zealot who quoted scripture in the back seat of a taxi, the man who raped and killed Jacquilyn Keevins and Ann Ogilvie and Marion Mercer; that man remained a ghost.

      Now, as the day shift straggled in, hooking their fedoras on the hat-rack, shucking out of their blue raincoats, McCormack felt something like pity. This was the prime gig, the career-making case, and it had all turned sour.

      There was a smell in the room, a brassy tang beneath the sweat and cigarettes. The smell was embarrassment, McCormack decided. They’re sore at having their shortcomings and befuddlement exposed to an outsider, the brass’s nark from St Andrew’s Street. But it was more than that, too. They were flat out affronted. With the details they had. All the specifics. That litany of ties and teeth and Old Testament imprecations.

      Every man in that squad had made arrests on not a tenth of what they had to go on here. So what had gone wrong this time? How had they failed so badly? These were the questions that hung in the air and DCI Cochrane seemed to sense them as he stubbed his Rothmans out in an ashtray and slapped his hand on the side of a filing cabinet to bring the room to order.

      We haven’t been thorough enough, he told them. We haven’t been systematic. We missed something the first time round and we need to put it right.

      There was a pile of buff folders on top of the filing cabinet, maybe twenty-five or thirty. Cochrane turned and gathered them awkwardly in his arms and leaned over to drop them on the nearest desk.

      ‘These are men we spoke to after one and two. After Keevins and Ogilvie. Men with records. Sexuals. We may have been too hasty to rule them out. I want you to roust out these individuals, bring them in. We’ll see what Nancy Scullion makes of them.’

      McCormack looked along the line and caught Goldie’s eye. Goldie shook his head and looked away.

      Cochrane clapped twice, chafed his hands together. ‘Right. Now let’s divvy these up and get cracking.’

      The men shuffled forward and each lifted three or four folders, carried them back to their desks.

      Ten minutes later Goldie went out for a piss and McCormack sidled over to his desk, started leafing through the folders. He pulled one out. A sorry-looking soul called Robert Kilgour, forty-two years of age, whose vulpine face seemed faintly familiar. Kilgour had been released from Peterhead in ’67 after serving two years for a sexual assault carried out in Mill Street in the East End of Glasgow, about a mile south-east of the Barrowland Ballroom. He’d been interviewed after the first killing, and it was McCormack himself – he remembered it now, and here was the sheet, rattled out on his own trusty Underwood – who’d grilled him in his Cowcaddens flat. Kilgour had a solid alibi – he’d been visiting friends in Ayrshire on the night of the killing and stayed overnight in Kilmarnock – and they’d ruled him out pretty quickly. There was nothing much more in the file, just a record of Kilgour’s flittings. He’d moved around a lot in the past eighteen months. His current address was in Shettleston – a tenement scheduled for demolition.

      Goldie was back, standing by the desk, hands on his hips. McCormack looked up. ‘When you get round to this guy here’ – he tapped the Kilgour file – ‘let me know. I want to come along.’

      Goldie glanced down at the file, back at McCormack. He dragged his chair out with a scrape, thudded down into it, jockeyed it closer to the desk. ‘Your funeral,’ he said.

       2

      The sky-blue Vauxhall Velox came nosing round the corner into the empty street. In the closemouth of a gutted tenement, Robert Kilgour watched it pass, gravel