Crow Bait (2 page)

‘For God’s sake, will someone turn off that bloody fire,’ Frank Donovan said. The heat was making him feel sick. A Scene of Crime technician reached out with a gloved hand to comply.

Donovan looked at the body and sighed. The wounds were so ferocious that it was difficult to tell how old the victim was. They already knew she didn’t live here – the flat had been rented to a man called John Keen one month before. Neighbours had never seen him and they had no idea who the woman was. Donovan would have someone check with the letting agent, see if they could pull a description of the guy who signed the lease.

A Detective Constable named Johnstone rifled through a handbag found beside the bed and removed a purse stuffed with five £10 notes and a Strathclyde University student matriculation card dated 1988 in the name of Virginia McTaggart.
DC
Johnstone handed the plastic card to Donovan, who studied the girl’s face. She’d be twenty-three now, he calculated, dark-haired, pretty in an unassuming way. She wasn’t pretty now, though. The bastard with the poker had seen to that.

He looked up from the card, back to the body, then scanned the room again. Something about this crime scene bothered him, as if a memory had been prodded but had not come fully to life.

‘Frank.’ Donovan looked up to Johnstone, who was holding out a handful of condoms. ‘What do you think – working girl maybe?’

‘Maybe,’ said Donovan, looking back at the card. ‘Get someone to check this card out with Strathclyde Uni. See what we can find out about her.’

Johnstone nodded and took the card back from Donovan. As the
DC
turned to the door he almost collided with Detective Superintendent Jack Bannatyne who, as ever, looked immaculate. Dark coat over a grey suit, crisp white shirt, muted red tie. Donovan, as usual, felt underdressed in his crumpled blue suit, lighter blue shirt and dark tie, all courtesy of messrs Marks and Spencer. Donovan was surprised to see his old boss here. He headed up Serious Crime now and a solitary murder up a close in Springburn wasn’t usually something that blipped on their radar.

‘Detective Sergeant Donovan,’ said Bannatyne, formal as ever in front of the foot soldiers, as he studied the corpse at their feet. ‘Bad one, this.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Battered with the poker?’

‘That’s what we think, at this stage. The
PM
will confirm.’

Bannatyne nodded, his eyes flicking around the room. ‘Need a quick word. Can we step outside, away from this heat?’ Donovan hesitated, unwilling to refuse a request from a superior but just as unhappy about leaving a crime scene. Bannatyne caught his hesitation. ‘It’s alright, Sergeant, I checked with your
DI
downstairs. He’s happy to spare you for a minute.’

‘Of course, sir,’ said Donovan, wondering what brought him to this murder scene. He followed Bannatyne down the winding staircase to Keppochill Road. Blue lights flashed in the night from the variety of police vehicles angled at the kerb while technicians and officers, both plainclothes and uniformed, moved between them and the closemouth. Bannatyne led Donovan a few feet away from the hubbub for some semblance of privacy.

‘Frank,’ he said, keeping his voice low, formality dropped now that they couldn’t be overheard. ‘You’ll’ve heard that Davie McCall is getting out in a couple of days?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I need a favour.’

‘Okay, sir.’ Donovan hoped he didn’t sound guarded.

‘I need you to make contact with him, once he’s out.’

‘With McCall, sir?’

‘Yes. I think you have a…’ Bannatyne searched for the correct word, ‘connection with him.’

‘Don’t know about that, sir.’

‘You saved his girlfriend from being shot that night. If you hadn’t pulled her out of the way, Clem Boyle would’ve done her for sure. And you caught the bullet. He might think he owes you.’

Donovan resisted the impulse to touch the scar on his chest. ‘Or he might think we’re even because he chased Boyle and helped bring him down.’

‘Maybe, but I’d like you to try anyway.’

Doubts aside, there was no way Donovan could refuse. They both knew it. ‘What is it you need, sir?’

‘You were involved in the Joe Klein investigation. You know there were questions.’

Joe Klein, the gangster they called Joe the Tailor, shot in his own home ten years before. The case was officially unsolved. ‘Yes, sir. But no evidence. As far as we know, it was Jazz Sinclair.’

‘He wasn’t capable of doing an old hand like Joe.’

Donovan shrugged. ‘Everybody gets lucky sometimes.’

‘Frank, someone else was there. I know it. I need you to find out what McCall thinks, what he knows. What he’s going to do about it. Joe was like a father to him and I don’t need him coming out like some lone avenger.’

‘That the only reason, sir?’

Bannatyne looked away briefly, then gave Donovan a long stare. ‘I feel responsible.’

Donovan frowned. ‘For Joe’s death?’

‘Yes. I told Johnny Jones that it was Joe who had put us on to him – remember we visited Jones in his flat that night?’ Donovan nodded. Jones had been credited with kick-starting the big time heroin market in Glasgow, back in 1980. He was shot later that year. Another unsolved killing. There was a lot of that about that year, Donovan recalled. Bannatyne went on, ‘I thought I was being clever but I think all it did was piss Jones off. He sent Jazz in that night but the boy wasn’t up to it. Someone else finished the job, I feel it in my water. I owe it to Joe to find out who.’

Donovan shifted from one foot to the other. He felt he was out of line in saying what he was about to say, but he was going to say it anyway. ‘Joe was a crook, sir. What do you care about him?’

Bannatyne gave him another of his long, hard looks then nodded, as if giving Donovan retrospective permission to ask the question. ‘He wasn’t a bad guy, not compared to what we have now – drug dealers, scumbags, thugs in shellsuits attacking innocent people. He had rules, he had standards. God help me for saying this, but he even had morals, of a sort. We’ll never see his like again.’

Donovan nodded, understanding now. Bannatyne was old-fashioned, too. Tough, sometimes pulled strokes, but always basically honest and with a distinct lack of respect for desk-bound authority figures who had forgotten what police work was all about. There would have been mutual respect between him and Joe the Tailor, even though they were on opposite sides of the fence.

‘I’ll see McCall as soon as I can, sir. I’ll let you know what he says, if anything. But if I remember rightly, he doesn’t say much.’

Bannatyne nodded. ‘All we can do is try, Frank. I appreciate it.’ The
DCI
inclined his head towards the second floor window of the flat they’d just left. ‘You got a victim
ID
?’

‘Virginia McTaggart. Could be a tart, we’re not sure. It’s not her flat, so maybe her customer brought her back here. Flat’s rented out to a John Keen.’

Bannatyne thought about this. ‘Want me to ask Jimmy Knight to speak to his touts? He’s got a few who work The Drag – maybe they know this lassie?’

Donovan knew that Jimmy Knight had a number of informers among the prostitutes who worked ‘The Drag’, the grid of streets between Anderston Cross and Sauchiehall Street. He had often walked the rain-swept area with Knight in search of information. Donovan knew that Knight extracted more than intelligence from some of the girls, the big cop being physically unable to keep it in his pants. Normally he wouldn’t want Knight anywhere near an investigation, good and intuitive detective though he was, but as Bannatyne had asked, it would be churlish to refuse.

‘That’d be a good idea, sir, thanks.’

Bannatyne patted him on the arm and walked to his car. Donovan made his way back to the murder room, his mind on Davie McCall. He had thought about the young man often over the past ten years, each memory accompanied by the dull ache in his chest where the bullet had caught him.

Davie McCall.

He was eighteen when he went in. He’d be a man now. He’d had a difficult time in prison, Donovan had heard, though jail was never easy. Donovan wondered how much it had changed him.

2

AROUND HIM THE
night sounds of the prison continued. He had grown used to the coughs and the murmurs and the footsteps. He had even found comfort in them, just as he had in the routines of prison life.

When the judge sentenced Davie McCall, he showed no emotion. It stung that he had been sent away on perjured evidence, even if he’d actually committed the warehouse robbery, but four years inside didn’t worry him. He could handle it. He had never been jailed before, never been to Borstal. Earlier that year he had spent his first night in a police cell following a square-go in Duke Street, but that hadn’t exactly prepared him for life in the Big House. His mind, though, was filled with thoughts of his father’s sudden reappearance, and he wandered through the induction process in a fog. He was aware of orders being barked by stern-faced prison officers, providing his personal details, being given a prison number as well as a striped shirt and jeans, showering then a quick medical –
bend over
,
cough
, head raked for lice, and questions designed to assess if he was a suicide risk.

There was no question of non-compliance, he and the rest of the prisoners were herded from one point to the next, making Davie think of the cattle in the slaughterhouse on Duke Street he used to pass on his night-time walks. He was a meat eater, but he always dreaded coming so close to that grey building with its sharp angles and its sense of death. None of the men here were destined for death, no matter how heinous their crime, but they were little more than cattle all the same. That was how prison worked – routine, order, discipline.

Then he was put in one of the dog boxes.

The tiny compartments, little more than a cupboard with a single bench at the back, were a way-station for prisoners while paperwork was being processed. It was only a few square feet and would have been claustrophobic enough if he was the only one in it, but there were two other guys already waiting when the prison officer ordered Davie inside and slammed the door shut. He pressed himself against the door and looked at his new companions wedged side by side on a narrow bench, their shoulders pressed hard against the walls on either side. He had never felt this before, this sensation of the walls closing in on him, and it was a tense two hour wait until they were taken out. Davie had never felt relief like it.

Barlinnie had five wings, each called a hall. Davie’s new home was in ‘B’ Hall and the cell he shared on the second gallery with one other inmate – a petty thief called Tom from East Kilbride – was larger than the dog box at least. However, it was still no suite at the Waldorf, with two slop buckets in the corner that reeked continually of stale urine and shit and a single, slatted window so high up the wall that all he could see through it were ribbons of cold, grey Glasgow sky. His cellmate, his co-pilot as they called them in the jail, was an okay guy, if a bit dodgy, and Davie resolved to keep a close eye on whatever he had, but he generally kept himself to himself, which suited Davie.

Davie resolved to get through his sentence as easily as he could. He would give the screws no trouble, he would be a model prisoner and get out to resume his life. To get back to Audrey.

They had met on a night out in the West End when he had stepped in on her attempted rape by the same young guy who would later kill Joe the Tailor. Davie had taken a beating that night, but it had been worth it. He met Audrey. Audrey, who had almost died because of him but who still cared for him. Gorgeous Audrey, the straight arrow who didn’t give a toss about his past and who saw something in him that he didn’t know was there. Although he didn’t like her seeing him in prison clothes and being ordered around by the screws, she insisted on visiting him as often as she could. She believed he could change and because she believed it, so did he. All he had to do was get through his sentence.

Rab visited two or three times in the early months, but Davie could tell the big fellow was uncomfortable. Rab knew he could leave the visitors room and do what he wanted on the outside, but still Davie could see a thin line of sweat beading on his permanent five o’clock shadow and, even though he tried to hide it, his nervousness was palpable. Eventually, the big guy stopped coming altogether, though he wrote now and again and sent messages via Bobby Newman. One year into his sentence, it was Bobby who told him that Rab was getting married, to a girl from Northern Ireland called Bernadette. She had been staying with relatives in Ruchazie and Rab met her at a party.

‘Shoulda seen him, Davie, arse over tip he went, love at first sight,’ Bobby said, his voice low so that others in the visiting room couldn’t overhear them talking about Big Rab McClymont’s personal business. Rab was a major player in The Life now, thanks to working with Luca Vizzini, Joe’s old friend and business partner.

Davie smiled, ‘Can’t imagine Rab being married.’ He was not as successful with women as Bobby, who merely had to look in a girl’s direction to have her tumbling into bed, but Rab did all right. Now he was about to be married and, Bobby assured him, strictly a one gal guy. Whatever this girl Bernadette had, it was potent.