Where the Dead Men Go (21 page)

The next day I drove through to Holyrood for First Minister’s Questions. It was the last FMQ before the recess and a skittish, end-of-term ambience had established itself in the legislative chamber. The air of pantomime, never far from the proceedings, was stronger than ever and a knowing tone pervaded the scripted exchanges, the Presiding Officer’s stern remonstrations, the jeers of the hooting backbenchers. There were questions about the referendum – the date, the wording of the question, who would be eligible to vote. And behind these were the bigger questions. Would the Union survive? Would an ancient nation recover its freedom? Would three centuries of British history be put out to pasture?

I couldn’t care less. I had questions of my own. Why had Swan phoned Martin Moir on the day they both died? How were the two deaths connected? What would Haining’s letter reveal about Hamish Neil’s fronts? And behind these questions were bigger ones. Would Mari and Angus come back? Would the trace of apple-blossom shampoo on my pillow fade away or be replenished by a sleeping ash-blonde head? Would my son grip shyly to his mother’s legs when he saw me in the airport, or would he tear across the concourse to where I knelt, down on one knee with my arms spread wide like a lover bursting into song?

In less than an hour it was over and the MSPs were streaming out like schoolkids. There were no headlines here, nothing worth writing up. I should have stayed in Glasgow and watched the podcast. I packed up my stuff and headed out, down the broad stairs to the Garden Lobby. Some of the stalwarts were massing at the tables – Torcuil Bain from the
Mail
, the
Scotsman
’s Kirsty Mitchell, Gallacher from the
News
of the World
. They’d be off to Jinglin’ Geordie’s shortly, get the beers in, make a day of it. I waved across and kept walking. I’d parked the car at Dynamic Earth and I walked up the hill to fetch it, headed for the bypass and the M8.

I had almost reached Moodiesburn when my phone chimed once, a text, a jolting buzz beneath my heart. Then it chimed again, and another, two more in quick succession. It was like raindrops before a downpour. At the fifth or sixth I reached down, punching the button for Radio Scotland.

 . . . have given no reason for the shock decision, beyond citing the ‘stress of running a city with a budget larger than many third-world countries’. Mr Haining, who only last week hosted a party fundraising event attended by celebrity donors, was seen by many commentators as a future Scottish First Minister. He was also expected to lead the ‘No’ campaign in the referendum on independence. It is understood that Mr Haining has resigned as a councillor as well as from his post as Leader of Glasgow City Council.

Fuck. My eyes flickered shut for a second or two. When I opened them I saw the city skyline, the silhouette of John Knox lording it over the East End dead.

Maybe it wasn’t so bad, I told myself. Maybe he put it in the post before he resigned. And maybe Mari and Angus will come home and Elaine won’t move to Aberdeen and Celtic will win the Champions League and we’ll all have hot muffins and cocoa for tea.

In the
Trib
car park I made some calls. Haining himself had gone to ground; Bluestone Media – my old bolthole – was handling the fallout but they weren’t in the mood to give exclusives to former colleagues.

I bumped into Neve McDonald as I left the lift. ‘Maguire wants you,’ she said as the doors slid shut.

‘Hold me back.’

Maguire and Driscoll were in Maguire’s office. I closed the door behind me. Maguire held up a hand and nodded at the screen. There was a special bulletin. A council spokesman read a statement, fielded questions from the shouting pack. There was footage of councillors arriving for an emergency session, brushing past the camera crews with frowns and brusque no-comments. A shot of the pack encamped outside Haining’s flat, a stony-faced reporter doing his piece to camera. I think until I saw this footage I somehow assumed it was all a mistake. For so long Haining had been the coming man, the dauphin, the leader-in-waiting, his future assured. You forgot at times that his future had still to happen, that things could still go wrong.

‘OK.’ Maguire aimed the remote, killed the sound. ‘Where are we? What are they saying at George Square?’

‘Not a lot. Bluestone’s handling it.’

Maguire frowned. ‘That was your mob?’

‘Bluestone? Aye.’

‘Speak to them?’

‘Yeah.’ I shrugged. ‘No favours. Party line. Strains of office, intolerable stress. They know it’s bullshit, they know I know it.’

Maguire nodded. ‘Can’t reach him direct?'

‘Fiona, I had lunch with the guy a couple of times. Three, I think. Me and about thirty other people. I’m not his buddy.’

Haining’s silence was deafening. It resounded through the newsrooms of Glasgow and Edinburgh, where his big meaty voice had always held forth at the end of a phone, dispensing soundbites and sometimes sherrickings to the nation’s hacks. It boomed through the studios of Baird and the Beeb, where Haining had breezed through pre-records and live links and sandbagged fellow panellists guesting on
Crossfire
or
Spectrum
. Haining had always been close to the media. He cultivated journalists, confided in them, sought their advice. He made you feel special, brought you into the panelled office in the City Chambers, with its framed eight-by-tens: Haining and Blair, Haining and Brown, Haining and Clinton. You felt like his friend. And now it was payback. For all his shrewdness and guile, it turned out Haining was a desperate innocent. He thought we would play along. We would all keep quiet and sit on our hands and let him recover in peace.

What was stress? That was the question we pondered, in the newsroom, in the Cope, over the next two days. A euphemism, certainly, but for what? Women? Money? Horses? Drugs? Or did stress take the form of Hamish Neil? Had the contracts been given to Neil’s fronts and was Haining too frightened to tell us? We were running a book in the office, and on day three the drugs crew were cheering. A council spokesman revealed that Haining was in rehab. The phrase ‘chemical dependency’ was used. It emerged that Haining had been visited by two Agency cops who warned him that city criminals possessed mobile-phone footage of the council leader snorting coke.

Never forget where you come from
. That was one of the dreary by-laws of Scottish politics, Scottish life. For Haining it meant bunkering down in his little East End shtetl, chumming round with the boys he’d known since primary, nodding to the players on the street, the old faces, the hard kid from Bellrock Street who’d made a name for himself. They were exact contemporaries, Haining and Neil. They’d gone to different schools – Neil to Cranhill Secondary and Haining to St Gregory’s – but the scheme wasn’t large and they’d grown up together. As kids they played on the Sugarolly Mountains – the brown heaps of chemical tailings dumped beside the Monkland Canal – and battled with rival young teams from Springboig and Ruchazie. They rose in their different spheres, watched each other’s progress, kept tabs. Two lads who outgrew the district but never moved.

The cares of office. The head that wears the crown. They had that in common, the two Cranhill boys, but only one had the antidote, the stress-buster, the wee bags of happy dust. Among friends. Old pals act. Except one of them’s thumbing ‘record’ on his phone while the other one’s filling his nose.

Over the next few days, the story exploded. The big boys from London arrived, turned their overcoat collars to the George Square squalls, delivered their lantern-jawed pieces to camera. The word ‘disgraced’ had crept into the reports.
Disgraced former council leader
,
the
disgraced politician
. . . And the stories kept coming. Strathclyde Police had interviewed another of Haining’s colleagues. An ex-con had been given three-quarters of a million to run a drop-in centre for troubled kids in Shettleston. A twenty-four-year-old man from Cranhill had been questioned about the supply of drugs to Mr Haining.

Opposition parties were demanding an audit of all the city contracts awarded under Haining’s stewardship.
Commonwealth Games contracts will be a priority, said Nationalist group leader Colin McDaid. We must safeguard the legacy of the Games; we cannot afford for an event like this to be tarnished.
Haining’s style of governance – the forthright ‘presidential’ manner so often saluted in sympathetic profiles – was coming under fire. Councillors who’d happily basked in Haining’s charismatic glow were suddenly restive, stung, rehearsing their outrage. Haining was arrogant, they complained, high-handed and unaccountable. He governed by cabal. No one knew what he was doing. He was out of control, he had to be stopped.

I’m not his buddy.
My words to Maguire came back to me. I knew what they’d be saying, Driscoll and the others, in the canteen, in the Cope. Conway knew: that would be the rumour. Conway must have known. He knew about the coke habit, the connection to Neil. He had the story and he let it go. Too busy doing white lines at the Jarvie to do his fucking job.

At the flat one night I was sat at the kitchen table with Moir’s little pile of Post-its spread out in front of me. The first three were lists of figures: times or prices, I still didn’t know. Three of them were telephone numbers, one of them Swan’s mobile. Finally there was the luminous pink square with the letter ‘S’ in ballpoint and then ‘FC 7.30.’ I set the pink Post-it beside Swan’s telephone number. ‘S’ could be Swan. Maybe Moir had arranged to meet Swan at 7.30 some day, not long before he died. Maybe the same night he ended up in the quarry. But what was ‘FC’? Another man’s initials? Football Club? Was Moir meeting Swan at the footie ground, the clubhouse at Maxton Park? Did he even attend the match, was he standing on the touchline when Swan was shot? But that was mid-morning, ten or half past, not 7.30.

I put the Post-its back in a pile and thought again of the quarry’s black water, the car park with the split-log buttress, the sad little pub on the banks of the canal and that was when it flashed on my brain.
Forth & Clyde
. ‘FC’ was the canal. Moir was meeting Swan at the canal, in the hotel on the Forth & Clyde. But Neil had found out. Neil had confronted Swanny that morning, or the night before, and Swan had told him everything. That was why Swan was out of sorts on the Maxton Park turf. And that was why Swan had tried to call Moir on the night of his death. With Swan shot and Moir in the quarry, everyone who’d been out to get Neil and wasn’t a cop was dead. Everyone except me.

For the next few days I tried to lie low. It was quiet in the flat. I came home in the blue afternoons, in the failing day, reluctant to switch on the lights or close the curtains. I moved through the rooms, white walls shining blue in the gloaming. The flat was a museum of failure, each room a separate exhibit. The Angus Room. The Big Boys’ Room. The Mari and Gerry Room. Lost civilisations. Their artefacts and tools. A broken toy. An empty cot, the stripped mattress propped against the radiator. The bed my son’s mother no longer slept in. A guitar going mutely out of tune, a plectrum wedged in its slackening strings. Recreation of a typical family home. I passed through the rooms like a tourist.

The kids would build a fire some nights, over on the wasteland. You’d hear the whoops and drunken laughter, the battle cries and shrieks. A ruddy glow amid the trees, dark shapes aflicker. Something primal in the scene, a berserker frisson. On those nights I sat in the dark and waited for the hiss of leather on the stone stairs, the knuckle on the door.

But when it came, the day was bright, a sunny Monday morning. I was crossing the hall when I heard it, a slap more than a knock, a palm blattering, bouncing the door on its hinges. I hadn’t heard the buzzer, but I knew that this wasn’t a neighbour. I padded up to the spyhole. Even through the coiled glass I could sense it. Something in the stance, in the set of the shoulders. One of Neil’s men. Retribution. I thought about phoning the police, pushing a wardrobe against the door, but what was the point?

I turned the mortice. The man straightened up as I opened the door. Slim, not tall, his hands hanging loose at his sides. Black army-surplus jacket, frayed jeans and white tennis shoes. A satchel-style bag worn crosswise on his chest. There were flakes of snow in his short dark hair.

‘You Gerry Conway?’

I was almost grateful. I drew the door wide and ushered him in, led him down the short hall. What did I think – that actions have no consequences? That you could go after Hamish Neil without Neil coming after you? This was what it came down to. This was how it was slated to end, in my own living room, a man looping a strap over his head and dumping the bag on the hardwood floor. He bent his knees slightly, mimed sitting on the couch.

‘Go ahead.’

‘You don’t know me,’ he said, moving a cushion from behind him. ‘But you’ll know my old man.’

Did Neil have a son? Was this how they did it, the young blood avenging the father? But the age didn’t fit; this guy was early thirties, too old for Neil’s son, and too finely featured: that nose, that pointed chin could never belong to a scion of Neil’s.

 ‘I’m Walter Maitland,’ he said. He half-stood and stuck out a hand and I bent to grasp it.

Maitland’s son. Walter Junior. Relief shunted home like a steroid, flaring the airways, dilating the veins. He wasn’t from Neil: I wasn’t the mark. He hadn’t come to kill me. He was the one who fled to Ireland when his father went to jail. Although ‘fled’, it now struck me, was not the locution one would naturally apply to the man who sat on my couch like a fight-ready flyweight, his hard tight body completely at rest, my head mirrored twice in his unblinking eyes.

He ran a hand through the snow-damp hair, wiped it on his jeans.

‘You got five minutes?’ he said.

I’d heard of him, of course, Walter Jr, the gangster’s brat. I’d seen old photos in the
Record
, a pudgy sneering kid on the High Court steps, acquitted on a charge of possession. And I knew the narrative that attached to his name, the city’s collective wisdom about Maitland’s boy. How he’d been a nothing all his life, dwelt in the shadow, tried to live up to the name. The only kid in the playground who’d never been in a fight. The kid they all hated and feared but never rated. The new bike, the first car, the riverside apartment: all of it laid on by dad. First screw, too, you’d imagine, some hand-picked call-girl in a honeymoon suite, high above the traffic. Everywhere he went, in the pub, in the scheme, guys vying to stand him a round, slip him a booster, the wrap, the baggie, one on the house, mate. The gold card, the red rope, the compliments of the manager.