All the Colours of the Town (25 page)

The cops just aimed to tidy up, to prove what they already knew. Within hours of a killing, the police knew the story. Paramilitary organisation, relevant brigade, probable ASU, likely triggerman. It then was a question of forensics, of looking for the tell-tale spoor or snag, the fingerprint or fibre. Sometimes they got lucky. They got their match, the forensic click. They got it after Eamonn Walsh was shot. The triggerman was Davey Craig, a Woodvale volunteer who worked nights as a croupier at a riverfront casino. On the night of the murder he’s due to work the late shift. He meets with the others at a safe house in the Upper Shankill where a man they’ve never met is waiting to brief them. They learn who the ‘get’ is and where he lives, the layout of the house, the quickest escape routes. The weapons are handed over. They drive to the job for a dummy run. Then they do it for real. Afterwards they drive to another safe house where they strip and shower and their clothes are taken away and burnt. The car is dumped on waste ground, the guns returned to storage.

This was the procedure, but on the night of Walsh’s murder Davey Craig didn’t follow procedure. He wore his work clothes – a burgundy shirt and tie, black formal trousers – under his painter’s overalls and he went straight to work from the job. When the RUC pinched him at the blackjack table they found carpet fibres from Walsh’s house in Craig’s turn-ups, a mist of Walsh’s blood on the cuffs of his blood-coloured shirt.

Davey Craig got thirty years. He claimed he was
working
alone. He wasn’t interested in doing a deal and the cops didn’t care. They had their result. But now the
driver
had turned up out of nowhere and the old pentimento, the man in the hallway, was showing up too.

*

I checked on the boys. They were lying side by side, hands on their hearts like cadets in a passing-out parade.

I sat down at my Vaio. I lit a Café Crème and booted up. I scrolled down my bookmarks to Scottishwire.com. It’s a site for hacks. It carries job ads and media goss and sometimes it breaks a story. The website listed an
editorial
telephone number with an Edinburgh code. It answered on the second ring.

‘Scottishwire.com.’

‘Who is this?’

‘Kevin McCarthy.’

‘Kevin, it’s Gerry Conway.’

‘You still with us? I thought you’d dropped off the edge of the world.’

‘I thought so too.’

‘Are you looking for a job?’

‘Are you looking for a story?’

There were three arraignments within the year. Lyons was tried in Belfast alongside Vincent Rose. And in the High Court of Glasgow Walter Maitland bore an air of benign abstraction through six laborious weeks of
depositions
. In blue pinstripes and silver tie, with a half-inch of snowy cuff that he pulled back to glance at his watch, he might have been a guest at a wedding, not a
soon-to-be
guest of the nation.

The Maitland trial was a circus. I went along on the opening day, braving the scrum of white Lacoste
tracksuits
and black leather jackets. It was ten years since I’d reported court but nothing had changed. The first thing I saw, on pushing into the Press Room, was Lachlan MacCrimmon’s Harris tweed jacket: rough, grey, unyielding, its sleeves like rolls of carpet. Probably he didn’t hang it up at night, just propped it in a corner. Or maybe, since no one could remember seeing him free from its speckled custody, he slept in the thing, rolling himself in its smoky folds as his Hebridean forebears rolled themselves in plaids. Inside the jacket, when it turned from the coffee machine in the corner, was Lachlan himself and he gave a friendly little shout and plunged across the room.

‘Gerard Conway, all grown up. The big fixtures always bring them out.’

Lachlan had been covering the city’s courts for
twenty-five
years, crossing the river from the High Court to the Sheriff Court and back again. His little office on Ballater Street housed the Clyde Court Agency and supplied copy to every paper in Scotland. He covered everything –
murders
, misdemeanours, claims for damages, rapes, traffic violations, breaches of the peace, fatal accident enquiries – in the same unflustered prose. There was an odd
dichotomy
between the disciplined crispness of Lachlan’s prose and the rumpled disorder of his person. His shaggy curls and beard were long, brown, and speckled in patches with grey, as if his hair were turning tweed. His tie – the job required a tie and so he wore one – it was a brown, soft, woolly, square-ended affair, folded not knotted, that seemed, when he fingered it, like an extension of his beard. The effect was less of a man in a suit of clothes than a creature in its mottled, moulting pelt. The grunts and snorts that accompanied Lachlan’s ferocious
note-taking
– he had the fastest, cleanest shorthand of anyone I knew – only buttressed this impression of an upright, friendly bear.

‘Lachlan MacCrimmon. Where you been hiding?’ It must have been close to ten years since I’d seen him.

‘Here and there, Gerry. Here and there.’

In Lachie’s case, ‘here and there’ was a very precise specification. His whole life took place in the square mile bounded by Ballater Street and Clyde Street and the Victoria and Albert Bridges. This was his domain – a
little
rim of tarmac round a stretch of dirty river, with a courthouse at either end. If ‘here’ was the High Court on the Saltmarket, then ‘there’ was the Sheriff Court on Carlton Place.

‘Better motor, Gerry boy. We’ll never get a seat. Drink up–’ he had passed the coffee to me and fetched himself another. We both drained and crumpled our styrofoam cups. In the corridor Barbara Tennant came scurrying out of the advocate’s Common Room with one arm in her gown. The smiled she flashed at Lachlan as she wrestled with her sleeve darkened and fell as she spotted me. She clacked on up the corridor.

The courtroom was raucous and full, the public gallery packed like Parkhead, like the old terraced Jungle. Ushers craned like meerkats, scouting for empty seats. Lachlan breenged forward to the press benches and pushed right in, the clamped knees collapsing like a line of dominoes as he passed. I hurried in his wake, excuse-me-ing and
thank-you-ing
, and dropped onto the six-inch of bench that his shuffling hams had cleared. Then the judge came in and we all stood up and squashed back down again. I couldn’t move my arms from my sides, but Lachlan had his elbows cocked, his notebook open and pencil poised.

The big trials are the dullest. I’d forgotten this but it’s true. There is so much to get through, such a tiresome parade of truculent witnesses, sullen, dogged, sedulously reticent, rolling dully onwards like an overloaded cart. Within a day all the excitement and spice has been
flattened
under the creaking legal wheels.

Maitland’s QC was Russell Spence. I knew Russell from the paper: he legalled the Toss on Saturday mornings,
sitting
at Maguire’s desk with a tall Starbucks suspected by the subs to be laced with single malt. I waited for the silent treatment – it was me and Moir, after all, who’d put his client in the dock – but he gave me a nod and mouthed the word ‘Gerry’ when he spotted me at Lachie’s side.

Spence was good. All the QCs were good but Spence had that special, impermeable arrogance. Nothing a courtroom could throw at him, no blurted revelation or startling retraction, could ever discompose him. Whatever happened, something in his profile – the tilt of the jaw, the line of the mouth, the angle of an eyebrow – declared that this, precisely, was what he had looked for. I once watched him browsing a holiday brochure on the last day of a
murder
trial. I was sitting right behind him on the press
benches
. A blue, blocky legal tome was propped in his lap, but inside it were glossy shots of the Côte d’Azure. When the prosecution rested, Spence clapped shut the volume, rose to his feet, tugged on the points of his waistcoat and
subjected
to elegant ridicule each plank in the prosecution’s argument. The acquittal took barely an hour.

This time there were no holiday brochures. This time even Spence was on the back foot, though he covered his tail with the usual aplomb. For nearly two weeks I sat beside Lachlan MacCrimmon and watched Russell Spence and tried to stay engaged. I didn’t succeed. When the
verdict
came in I was watching it on the evening news from a barstool in the Cope, the channel’s crime reporter wearing his hangdog face, his grey suit spotted with rain.

QCs are indiscreet. They’re so much smarter than
everyone
else that they don’t see the need for circumspection. The night the verdict came in, Spence was in Babbity Bowster’s. He was drinking thirty-year-old Springbank at
£
12 a nip. I pretty much failed to mask my stupefaction when the barman rang it up, but I carried the drinks to his table and sat down.

I sat there for most of the night. As the Springbank
bottle
dipped in twelve-quid increments, Spence gassed on about Maitland. In due course I was able to piece it all together, construct a serviceable version of events. Some of it I got from Spence, that drunken night in Babbity’s, some from Lachlan MacCrimmon, some from Moir and the Hey You, some from the trial itself, and some from the cuts of the Belfast trials. There are gaps, of course, and a necessary dependence on lies and suppositions, half- and quarter-truths. But this, as near as I can make it, flawed, skewed and half-cocked, is what I believe it comes down to.

Walter Maitland was a gun-runner. He shipped weapons to the UVF from the early seventies right through the worst of the Troubles. Every three months a cattle truck rattled out of a Brigton yard, headed south for the ferry. Under the wooden boards, running with shit and piss, were yellow crates stamped ‘CORNED BEEF’. Inside them, under an innocent layer of tins, was a
novelty
race of firearms: World War Two Webleys; sporting shotguns with doctored stocks; converted starting pistols; ‘spitters’ knocked together by night-shift workers at light engineering firms. And maybe, too, there’d be some
weeping
sticks of gelly from the Ayrshire pits. These crates were unloaded in Antrim and the contents found their way to the back-rooms and cellars of drinking clubs in Donegall Pass and the Upper Shankill. Maitland wasn’t the only supplier: Toronto was the Loyalist’s Boston, and the Blacknecks had a supply line from Canada. TA depots were also popular for hit-and-run night-time raids. But the guns from Glasgow were regular and, for the most part, reliable. For twenty years they put the ginger into robberies, kneecappings and assassinations right across the Province.

Maitland was now a key associate, someone to
cultivate
. There was a courier, a high-ranking Blackneck who made regular visits to Cranhill on the pretext of watching Rangers games. He slipped back and forth between Ireland and Scotland like the phantom ‘e’ in whisky, dropping off payments and making arrangements for the next consignment. There were drugs as well as guns, and sometimes drugs instead of guns, in the boxes under the slippery hooves.

Naturally, Maitland was careful. There were no
photo-calls
with balaclava’d colour parties, no souvenir
snapshots
. But every few months he’d take the late-night crossing from Stranraer. He stayed on the Upper Shankill and drank in the kind of establishments where
inquisitiveness
is discouraged. It was in one of these shebeens that Maitland heard a voice from home. Peter Lyons was drinking with Isaac Hepburn. The two Glaswegians shared a drink and hit it off. They swapped numbers and kept in touch. When Lyons started the New Covenanters, Maitland weighed in with heavies and hardware. When Maitland strayed within reach of the law he had Lyons, fresh out of law school, to hold his hand. He even had Lyons represent him, in a libel suit in the early eighties. (A journalist had described Maitland as ‘Glasgow’s Godfather’, and Maitland promptly, primly and
unsuccessfully
sued him.)

The Irish visits were quick and discreet, and nobody knew of Maitland’s Blackneck dealings but two of his closest lieutenants. Russell Spence himself, Maitland’s counsel for twenty years, had known nothing of this till the trial began. But the UVF was a leaky boat. There were touts at every level. When Special Branch learned who all was arming the Blacknecks they beelined for Cranhill. It took them two days but they finished the job. They turned Walter Maitland. The deal was simple. Maitland would keep up his UVF contacts and feed what he knew to his Special Branch handler. In return, the Branch would keep the Provos in the dark about Maitland’s career as a UVF armourer, and Maitland would be free to ply his dubious trades – smack, crack, rackets and girls – without fear of interruption by the Procurator Fiscal.

For a while it all worked out. Everybody’s happy. The Brits get their intelligence and Maitland stays alive and out of the Bar-L. There are minor arrests, just to make it look good, the odd overnighter in the cells, but nothing that might stick. Then the ceasefires come. And then the ceasefires hold. And when the peace beds down, the
questions
begin. Who needs a tout with nothing to sell? When does Walter Maitland’s Get Out of Jail card expire? Next thing the planes strike the towers. Now Maitland’s
terrorists
are not merely idle; they’re the wrong terrorists. No one’s interested in these guys any more. And here comes Martin Moir and the Hey You boys and suddenly Walter Maitland is the star of a weekly serial, an
overwrought
confection of knives and guns and girls and rackets that runs in instalments on the Toss’s front page. Now people are clamouring for action. And the man they expect to clean up the mess is Maitland’s old Shankill mucker, Peter William Lyons.

But there’s nothing wrong with Maitland’s memory. He takes to phoning Peter Lyons to reminisce about old times, the Belfast days, the New Covenanters. The name Eamonn Walsh figures strongly in these telephone trips down memory lane. Naturally, Lyons gets the picture. He agrees to help Maitland however he can. He can’t stop the prosecution: Maitland accepts that. But maybe Lyons can take a direct interest in the case, find out what’s
happening
, and feed it back to his friends in Cranhill. The
go-between
here is DS William Torrins, the undercover cop who briefs Lyons on the case. There is some dubiety as to whether or not Torrins is alive to the true situation. In any case, the situation itself cannot survive the Scottishwire post on the decades-old murder of Eamonn Walsh.

I had my answer. I had known it all along but I was happy to have it confirmed. Properly framed and
presented
, a fact could indeed change – if not the world at large, then at least our little West of Scotland corner. Walter Maitland got twenty years. He’ll be seventy-two when he’s up for parole. His goons pegged similar scores:
seventeen
, sixteen, eighteen years. There were no victory speeches on the High Court steps, no raucous bands of cheering supporters, no private parties in East End pubs.

Peter Lyons got life, convicted in Belfast alongside Vincent Rose, as accessory to the murder of Eamonn Walsh. Lyons and Rose were released on immediate licence. Lyons was disbarred from practising law and expelled by the Party. He’d already resigned his
ministerial
office and his parliamentary seat.

The Hey You got a special commendation at the Scottish Press Awards. They all filed up in their Mafia suits and Martin made his little Oscars speech. We were sitting at his table, myself and Mariella, the girl from Auckland. I raised my champagne flute when he thanked ‘the incomparable Gerry Conway, who I’m proud to call my friend and mentor’. Two weeks later Martin filled my old berth as Scottish Political Editor. I took them to Ferrante’s, Martin and Clare, to celebrate his
appointment
, and we drank Sancerre and laughed and I tried not to count the number of calls they made to the sitter to check on baby Esmé.

What did I get? I got plaudits and pints at the Cope. I got to look my shaving mirror squarely in the face. But before all that I got a holiday. In the last days of August I took the boys up the West Coast. Five nights in Argyll, at the Carradale Hotel.

The boys were still young enough to enjoy Carradale for what it was, which, admittedly – two hotels, a village shop, a nine-hole golf course, a working harbour and a white mile of beach with foreshortened views of Arran – wasn’t much. But for me, principally, it was deep-green reveries of fernie hillsides, following my dad’s rhythmic back along pellet-strewn paths, wading through
waist-high
bracken, and a ram’s skull white in the grass, the great knitted seam down its brow and the fossilised whorls of the horns.