Lawless (3 page)

McBride continued to reread the words he had written some twelve months previously and found the subsequent arrest, trial and conviction of Bryan Gilzean just as inevitable as he had when composing the chapter. It was a fairly simple conclusion based on the facts and a view that was obviously shared by the police who had arrested Gilzean within hours and the High Court jury who took only fifty minutes to unanimously find him guilty.

Apart from an abundance of forensic evidence, he had no believable alibi, was known to be hot-headed and was liable to be quarrelsome with a drink in him. And, on top of this, there were enough witnesses to testify how frequently the couple could be heard arguing. As homicides went, it verged, just as he had remembered, on the mundane – it was as uncomplicated for the investigating officers as it was undemanding for those who sat in judgement on Bryan Gilzean.

He had been given the mandatory sentence of life in prison, with a recommendation that he should serve a minimum of fifteen years before being considered for parole. It seemed a reasonable enough tariff in the circumstances.

McBride fell asleep. It was just a few days before Christmas and he was in a hotel room in Dundee when, by rights, he should have been occupying a warm corner of his local in Maida Vale. For the first time that week, he slept well.

McBride woke at seven o’clock precisely the following morning, as he did every day. He never needed an alarm clock, a call from hotel receptionists or their automated equivalents. He just woke at seven o’clock, no matter what time he had gone to sleep, who lay beside him or where in the world he was. He nodded his head seven times on the pillow and followed this by tracing the number seven on his forehead before turning over to go to sleep and he believed this routine was what caused him to rouse with such exactness. But, when he was too drunk to remember the procedure or so wrapped in a pair of delicate arms that such behaviour would have prompted questions, he still started each new day at 7 a.m. which was frustrating on the days he didn’t want to.

It had an upside. Unless he had company and the option of other forms of exercise, he invariably pulled on his jogging kit and put in a few miles before breakfast, which was never much of an occasion for him anyway. McBride had a schizophrenic relationship with running. Even after doing it for a dozen or so years, he could not make his mind up if he actually liked it. He knew with absolute certainty, however, that he could not function fully without it. It aided his body, of course, but it was what it did for his head that kept taking him out in every kind of climate. He had a simple formula – the more there was on his mind, the more miles he consumed. Usually he found his answers before exhaustion overtook him.

That morning, he fought with the wind all the way through the harbour area and kept on going, with the river by his side, until he’d passed Broughty Castle. Then he turned and headed back. Altogether, he covered ten miles but there weren’t any answers because he didn’t even know the questions.

When he plodded back into the Apex, a small package awaited him at reception. The Jiffy bag bore the frank mark of Black & White, his publishers, and the handwriting was unmistakeably Janne’s. Without pausing, he slid it open and pulled out the contents. The first item to appear was pair of knickers, black, lacy and extremely brief. Janne’s sense of humour, like her complexion, glowed. She would have experienced a moment of blissful triumph if she’d been present to see the look on the receptionist’s face.

McBride contained himself until he was back in his room before poring over the letter. Janne’s description of the anonymous communication was accurate. It was word and punctuation perfect and the computer-produced message was quite unambiguous:

Your book may be factual, Mr McBride, but that does not mean it contains ‘facts’. Bryan Gilzean most certainly did not kill Alison Brown. I know this beyond doubt.

If you are the investigative journalist we are led to believe, you should investigate more and believe the idiots in the police less. They are easy to hoodwink.

My message to you is that it could be productive for you to review the ‘evidence’ on which you based your words.

Of course, there was no signature. McBride folded the single A4 page and slowly replaced it in its white, rectangular envelope, the front and rear of which he inspected three times though he knew before he did so that it would be a pointless exercise.

He also knew that, in order to ‘review the “evidence”’, he should begin in the building where, many years earlier, he had devoted endless hours to absorbing the kind of facts any would-be investigative reporter would require if he wanted to flourish away from his home town.

The walk to the Central Library in Wellgate filled McBride with an unexpected sadness. It took him only four minutes but, in half that time, he experienced the kind of feelings that had made him want to leave the town in the first place.

For half the population it was boom time. They earned good money in the new industries that had replaced the spinning and weaving of the jute that had once been imported from India and Bangladesh, occupied fine houses and holidayed abroad, sometimes twice in the same year. Their offspring attended either of the two expanding universities that were beginning to acquire international reputations.

But, alongside the throng of students who strode through the city centre to lectures or coffee shops, knowing where they were going for the rest of their lives, there were other young people with less to fill their time, less to look forward to. Skimpily dressed girls with pinched faces pushed baby buggies when they should have been attending school. Instead they were adapting to motherhood at the age of fifteen. They wandered aimlessly with one hand on the buggy and spoke to their clones on mobiles held in the other – all of them contributing to the statistics that made Dundee the teenage pregnancy capital of Europe.

The largely unidentified fathers of the tots gathered in groups in the shopping centres, their acne, tattoos and earrings making them indistinguishable from each other. The only time the mothers and fathers apparently got together was to share a needle or produce another occupant for the baby carrier. Few of them worked or ever would.

Except for the phones, it had been the same kind of mind-numbing existence for their parents. Most of those in the prams were assured of an identical future. In anybody’s language, it wasn’t going to be much. So much change, yet so little.

Dundee had a heart as big as a football pitch but it ticked the poverty and deprivation boxes every time. Nobody took the blame and only the brain-dead believed the adolescent baby-makers were truly responsible for their plight.

When he walked among them through the shopping centre on his way to the library, McBride felt the sense of injustice he had forgotten he had for his fellow Dundonians. Maybe it was his conscience about the lopsided forms of life in his home town that was inexplicably coaxing him towards the belief that there might be a different kind of injustice taking place. He was beginning to feel like a missionary.

Was this what all of this was about – trying to compensate for some kind of guilt trip at leaving them behind
? he asked himself. He forced images into his mind of himself cycling alone along a hot Mediterranean coastline, an easy breeze at his back. It was his usual technique for dispelling uncomfortable thoughts.

The local studies section of the library was almost empty, save for three student types earnestly making notes from a tower of books in front of them and a prematurely elderly woman who’d come in out of the cold.

‘How can we help you, Mr McBride?’ The female librarian was neither so pretty that you’d remember nor so plain you’d forget but, because of the size of her breasts, no one was ever going to describe her as ordinary. Her name badge, sitting above the more than ample chest, said she was called Elaine.

McBride was surprised by how she’d phrased her question. Even his old classmates would have had trouble recognising him after so long. Then he remembered that those who worked in libraries also read papers, especially when the news was about people who wrote books.

‘If it isn’t too much trouble, can you point me in the direction of the old, filed copies of
The Courier
?’ McBride replied, not sure if he should acknowledge the recognition or give her one of his practised lines. He decided to do neither and instead tried to smile modestly, an unfamiliar experience.

When he pored over the files moments later, he resisted the temptation to begin reading the news that had happened more than three years earlier. People had been known to spend entire afternoons devouring column after column of historic events when all they had wanted was to confirm what the weather had been on a particular day.

He leafed his way quickly through the dry, yellowing pages of the paper until he came to the issue chronicling the report of the High Court trial of Bryan Gilzean. It could not have been more ordinary and was exactly as he had remembered it when he had ploughed through a
Courier
of the same date many months earlier, in the Colindale branch of the British Library in London, when preparing the chapter about the killing of poor Alison Brown.

He read the report of the first day of the proceedings three times to be sure he had not missed anything and repeated the process for the second day. Unless you counted an unexpectedly risqué photograph of the winner of the annual Forfar Young Farmers’ Club beauty princess competition on the opposite page, nothing jumped, or even crept, out at him. He wondered if there was much point scrutinising the happenings of the third and final day of the decidedly routine trial of Bryan Gilzean but turned the pages to it anyway.

He was quite correct. There was nothing particularly enlightening to read there either. He was riveted, however, by what was absent. Removed from the report, which recounted in detail the finding of guilt and subsequent sentence of life imprisonment, was what he presumed from the layout had been a photograph of someone involved. Of much greater interest was another extraction. Cut from the body of the main text were several sentences from the middle of a long-winded testimony by a forensic scientist witness.

Both removals had been carried out with surgical precision and almost certainly by someone using a razor. There was no indiscriminate butchery or lack of regard for the rest of the article. Whoever had carried out the meticulous operation had gone well prepared for the task in hand. It was deliberate to the point of fastidious. The same result could have been more easily achieved simply by ripping the paper at the relevant section. That was what someone with less precise habits would have done.

McBride stared blankly at the page for a full five minutes, trying to make some kind of sense of what he had stumbled upon. Then, aware that his lack of movement was beginning to attract the attention of the now-bored students, he quickly flicked over a handful of pages, afraid his discovery might be shared by others.

Back at the reception desk, Elaine was also eyeing him suspiciously. In spite of his innocence, he experienced pangs of guilt and knew that, if the file was examined after his departure, he would inevitably be blamed for its defacement. It only made him feel more furtive and anxious to hoard his find.

He tried to appear casual. ‘Hi again. Thanks for that. Fascinating things, old newspapers – I could spend weeks here,’ he said with another attempt at a coy smile. He avoided adding the obvious ‘especially if you were here’. Instead, he tossed in what he hoped sounded like a conversation-making afterthought. ‘Do you get many folk in digging about in your files?’

She smiled back, trying to make the old joke sound original. ‘Nostalgia isn’t just a thing of the past, you know. It’s an endless procession, especially after your book with all the would-be Rebuses who have read it coming in to look up the facts for themselves. Some right dodgy types too. Did you get everything you wanted?’

McBride lied, ignoring another chat-up opportunity: ‘Absolutely.’ He wasn’t about to disclose the existence of the treasure trove he had unearthed, even if he hadn’t the faintest idea if it had any value at all.

Outside, sleet was swirling along the freezing corridor of Murraygate. The buskers had disappeared and the buggy-pushers without money hurried to God-knows-where.

McBride also moved quickly. He had urgent business in his old newspaper office.

Richard Richardson never knew whether he liked his name. All his life, folk had joked about it. At school they called him Double Dick and pubescent girls sniggered at the thought of what that could mean. He pretended to be offended but inwardly hoped they would believe he had been blessed.

As he grew older, he realised there were other benefits to having had such unimaginative parents. Few forgot his name though some occasionally got it wrong and referred to him as Dick Dickson.

When he decided to become a journalist, he faced a dilemma. Should he use his own name on articles and risk further ridicule or change it to something more mundane? He decided that unforgettable was best and every story he ever wrote in
The Courier
carried the exact words his birth certificate bore.

It would not have mattered what he called himself. Richard Richardson was a legend in local journalistic circles and not just for his odd handle. He received Christmas cards from half the police force, most of the publicans and every dignitary. His appetite for fine food was surpassed only by his taste for cigarettes and outlandish neckties. It was a constant source of irritation that ash from the former frequently dropped into his food or, worse, on to his tie.

He also wrote magnificently. When Richard Richardson was of a mind, only a handful of reporters in the country could match his insight. Even fewer had his elegance with words.

Campbell McBride and Richard Richardson had started on
The Courier
within days of each other and had rapidly become ferocious rivals and bosom friends. They fought dishonourably for the best stories and worst women and mocked each other’s work. When they wanted to drink, which was often, they did it together. After they returned to their respective flats, they reread the articles each had in that day’s paper. Sometimes, they scrutinised them three times. There was no greater tribute they could pay each other. Of course, they never spoke of such things.