Where the Dead Men Go (5 page)

‘Yeah. He was Investigations Editor. He went after the big players.’ I paused. ‘Did a better job than your lot.’

‘Yeah, well.’ She smiled again. ‘Knowing who did it’s generally the easy bit, Mr Conway. Hard bit’s proving it in court. So Moir got results?’

‘Now and again.’

‘Piss people off?’

I shrugged. ‘It’s in the job spec.’

‘Someone in particular?’

‘What?’

‘He piss off any players? Southside? East End? The Walshes, Neils?’

There was something wrong here. I looked across at Lumsden.

‘Hold on. This was suicide, right?’

The cops exchanged glances.

‘We don’t know, Mr Conway.’ Gunn was looking at her papers again. ‘We haven’t determined that yet.’

‘But it might be murder?’

She nodded. I looked across at Lumsden again and back at Gunn.

‘What makes you think it was murder?’

‘We don’t think it was murder.’

‘But you think it might be.’

Gunn exchanged another glance with Lumsden. It was Lumsden who spoke.

‘He was tied to the wheel.’

‘What?’

Lumsden’s pen skittered onto the table. He held up his hands with the wrists turned out, like a man wearing handcuffs.

‘Ligatures round his wrists. His wrists were lashed to the steering wheel.’

‘Jesus Christ.’

The image came unbidden. The car smacking the surface, water surging in, the body thrashing and bucking, trying to wrench free.

‘Someone tied him to the wheel?’

‘We don’t know. He might have done it himself.’ Gunn stood up from the table. ‘It’s not uncommon. You keep the hands close together, tie the knots loosely. Pull them tight with your teeth.’

‘Oh Christ.’

She gathered her papers, slipped them in a folder. Lumsden stood up too and tucked his notebook into his inside pocket. In his bulky, shapeless jacket he looked like an upright bear.

‘Thank you for your time, Mr Conway.’ Gunn put a business card on the table and slid it across. ‘If anything comes to you.’

‘Of course. Aye.’

The two of them left and I sat there for a minute, my hands flat on the table. Could Moir have been murdered? Could a
Tribune
reporter of fourteen years’ standing, the current Scottish Journalist of the Year, could a man like this have been taken out? I thought of the offices of the
Sunday Citizen
in Belfast, a narrow room down an alley in the Cathedral Quarter, a building with security doors and bullet-proof glass. Four years back I stood in an alcoholic haze while the editor – who’d been standing me drinks for most of the afternoon in the Duke of York – showed me the polished brass plaque on the wall. It bore the name of the
Citz
’s Special Reporter, Brendan O’Dowd, a guy with three kiddies. He was shot in the head by Loyalist paramilitaries, murdered for writing the truth. That’s what happened in Belfast. Not here. Not on the mainland, things were different here.

I heard Maguire come in, close the door behind her.

‘You hear this?’ I said. ‘They’re saying it could be murder.’

‘I know.’

A look passed between us:
Could be a bigger story than we thought.
I looked down at the table. Maguire turned to the window, fiddled with the roller blind.

‘Let’s sit on this for the moment, Gerry. Let’s not get carried away.’

Back in my chair, I added Gunn’s card to the pile on my desk.

At dinner that evening I cut Angus’s gammon into tiny cubes and quartered his potatoes, quartered them again, pretended to salt his food when I salted my own, trailed a bootlace of ketchup over the lot. He set to work cheerily with his blue plastic spoon. Mari talked about work, how busy she was, how challenged, how she loved being back. Six months ago she’d started back part-time at an architects’ firm on St Vincent St. The firm had been great. When she took the job she got pregnant three months later. That was three years ago but they kept her job open, they were glad she was back. The Commie Games was in the offing and the bids had begun – they were working flat out on plans and costings and could use all the help they could get. Mari’s main client was a firm bidding for the velodrome contract, parts of the athletes’ village.

I tried to stay focused, nodding and grunting, chewing my food, but I kept thinking back to Niven’s talk. Wait till we know the facts. That used to be our job, didn’t it – finding the facts? What facts would the cops find out? What facts did we miss, what facts might have shown us that Moir was in trouble, edging towards that hole in the ground? And how come his friend and closest colleague, his daughter’s godfather, failed to spot them?

After dinner I scraped the plates, ran them under the hot tap, stacked the dishwasher. I sprayed the worktops and wiped then down. I ran a bath for Angus, washed his hair without getting water in his eyes, let the mirror steam up while he dunked and emptied his plastic cups, puddling the bathroom floor. I dried him in front of the living-room fire, read his little stack of picture books, put him to bed. I dug the Blue Mountain out of the freezer, made a pot of coffee, took a cup to Mari. Eventually, you run out of things to do, ways to put it off. You tip some Islay into your coffee and sit down at the table, punch the numbers.

A woman answered. Posh voice, Scottish, touch of English: the sister up from Manchester. Clare was sleeping. She’d been sedated, she couldn’t come to the phone. I wasn’t sorry. How do you talk to a woman whose husband has done what Moir had done? I’d done enough death knocks to know how it worked: grief, bereavement, the hunger for blame. Blame themselves, blame the victim, blame you. I asked the sister to pass on my condolences, tell Clare I’ll call in a couple of days.

Sunday evening. A back-to-school feeling pervaded the flat. The boys had been with us all day. It was time to take them back, to drive Rod and James down to Conwick. James was playing on the carpet with Angus, building little towers of coloured bricks that Angus would joyfully smack to pieces. Some kids were riding a motorbike on the wasteground across the street, the engine’s whine rising and receding.

‘There’s your phone, Dad.’

Rod was slumped on the couch, the black hyphen of his Nintendo DS barring his eyes.

‘What?’

‘Over there.’ He pointed with his stockinged foot, the game still fixed before his face. ‘I left it on the bookcase. It’s needing charged.’

‘You had my phone?’

‘Yeah.’ He sat up a little from his horizontal slouch, worked himself up with his shoulders. He glanced up blankly. ‘I must have put it in my pocket when I used it last weekend. Remember I was out of credit and I phoned Mum?’

‘Jesus, Rod.’ I turned the phone over in my hands, as if inspecting it for damage. ‘I’ve just spent four hundred quid on a new one. You couldn’t have let me know?’

‘Sorry, Dad.’

I shook my head. There was more to say but I bit it back. We’d be leaving for Conwick in half an hour, there was no point in picking a fight.

I drove them down to Ayrshire after tea. When I got back to the flat, Angus was down and Mari was making inroads on a bottle of Merlot.

‘There’s a glass on the breakfast bar.’

We watched
Newsnight
and
Newsnight Scotland
. Mari went to bed and I found Season 5 of
The Wire
, put it on while I tanned a couple of beers. It was one o’clock when I drained the last Sol. As I turned off the kitchen light I saw the phone, the bright square of its display window, on the breakfast bar. I had plugged it in before taking Rod and James back to Conwick. It would be charged by now. I flipped it open and turned it on and stood there in the dark. I would do the voicemails later; for now I scrolled down the messages.

To call it a premonition would be wrong. But as I thumbed down through Maguire and Mari and the others, I knew it was coming. Moir almost never texted me, he preferred to phone. And yet here it was: ‘MM’. I checked the date: 9 October, 7.56 p.m. Fifteen hours before the climber found him.

I laid the phone down on the breakfast bar. I could hear the clock, the hollow knocks of the second-hand jerking round, and then the fridge thrummed loudly as the cycle changed. I stood in the dark for a few minutes longer. Then I turned off the phone.

In the morning I called DS Gunn and by nine o’clock she was thumbing the buzzer.

Mari had just left for work and the nursery run. I was clearing away the breakfast dishes and half-listening to Sky News on the telly. I opened the door and heard them climbing the stairs, Gunn and the lumbering Lumsden.

They trooped through to the living room. Nobody spoke. The cold came in on their outdoor clothes.

I found the message and passed her the phone. She looked at me when she read it, no expression, passed the phone to Lumsden. Lumsden nodded and passed it back; he was sweating from the climb. Gunn held the phone in her palm as if weighing it. They looked at me.

‘He forgot,’ I said. ‘He’s a ten-year-old kid. I thought I had lost it.’

Gunn looked away at the television and then back at me.

‘It could have been a murder enquiry,’ she said. ‘We hadn’t ruled it out. And you’re sitting on the crucial piece of evidence. A week goes by and now you produce it?’

‘Yeah, it’s not ideal. I understand that. I’m sorry.’

She was shaking her head.

‘We’ll need this.’ She dropped the phone into a plastic wallet, slipped the wallet into a document case, got me to sign the production label. ‘And you weren’t close. He sends you his suicide note but you weren’t close.’ She shook her head.
Orkney
, I thought: the accent was Orkney. I pictured a garden-sized island, treeless turf, a whitewashed cottage in a raging gale.

They turned to go. I followed them down the hall. Gunn paused on the threshold.

‘That’s everything is it?’

Lumsden was already on the stairs but he stopped to hear my answer.

‘Everything what?’

‘No more surprises, no last-minute revelations?’

‘I’ve said I’m sorry, Sergeant. You think I did it on purpose?’

She shook her head again, the ponytail twitching.

‘He’s a ten-year-old boy,’ I said to her back. ‘They forget things. It happens.’

‘We’ll be in touch.’

They scliffed off down the stairs.

And that was it. Moir had killed himself. His death no longer mattered. His death was now an annoyance, a waste of time. They had squandered a week on Moir, a week they could have spent on deaths that counted.

I made a coffee and phoned Maguire.

‘There’s a note,’ I told her. ‘He left a message on my phone, the night he died. It was suicide, Fiona.’

I told her the message. I could read the silence as if she was speaking. The big story was gone; Moir wasn’t murdered, that dramatic splash wouldn’t happen. But the message, that was a story in itself – tragic journo’s last words.

‘You want to write it?’ she said.

‘No.’

‘No, you’re right. I’ll get the Desk on to it.’

I stood at the window to finish my coffee. The wind was whipping through the wasteground across the street, lashing the long grasses, agitating the trees. There was a sad little patch of allotments at the far side, started by the local community group, the kind of upbeat, cargo-panted young parents who referred to the wasteground as ‘North Kelvin Meadow’. Kids from Maryhill hung out there at nights, built their fires, smoked blow, smashed Buckie bottles on the scout-hut walls. It was another dead space in the disintegrating city.

Moir had reached out to me after all. Not for help – he was past the stage of helping – but to pass on the message. His final words. It was a scoop of sorts, a last sad exclusive, though the words didn’t sound like Moir’s. I couldn’t hear his voice, couldn’t place his Ulster vowels in the choppy text-speak:
Ger
I had 2 do it tell C Im sorry 4 it all.
All what? Maybe at that stage ‘all’ is all there is. All or nothing, and nothing to choose between them.

I was sorry, too. Sorry to learn that Moir had taken his life. Murder would have made more sense, would have measured the worth of what he did, a job so important it cost him his life. His stories might have survived him then – stood apart from his death, served as his memorial. But suicide changed all that. In killing himself Moir had killed his stories. They weren’t his legacy, they were just another feature of the world he threw away, they were part of the ‘all’ for which he was sorry.

And if Moir’s were worth nothing then what about mine? Had I written a proper story since I came back to the
Trib
? Had I even tried? I tried to write well. I took as much time as my deadline allowed. I transcribed my interviews faithfully. My facts, such as they were, got checked. But the real job – the job of finding stories that needed to be told, of bringing truth to light, of telling people things they didn’t know: that was a job for somebody else.

Martin Moir had been doing that job. At some level, it seemed to me, he’d been doing it for both of us. Back in the Nineties Moir had come to the
Trib
to work beside me. I brought him on, schooled him, taught him his trade. I felt responsible for Moir, as if his current work could be chalked up to my credit. And now that he was gone, that fiction was over. I was just me, Gerry Conway, no-mark jobbing journo.

I finished my coffee and drove to the gym, spent a weary half-hour on the treadmill, another half-hour with the weights. After a shower I drove to the office. Monday was my day off but so what? We’d have days off in plenty when the paper went under, when the
Tribune
’s last issue hit the stands. Lately I’d been spending more of my Mondays at the Quay. I wasn’t trying to look keen or impress the Yanks – it was too late for that. I just liked to sit at my desk in the newsroom, staring at our ghostly reflections in the window. Being a journalist while I still could.

I looked in at the Cope on the way home. Carson, the new Sports Ed, was stood at the bar, getting a round in.

‘Jesus Christ, Gerry.’

‘I know.’

He was shaking his head.

‘You heard about—’; he held out his wrists, like a prisoner being cuffed.

‘Aye.’

‘Jesus, eh? He wasn’t kidding on.’

‘It wasn’t a cry for help.’

‘That’s for fucking sure.’

I ordered a pint of Deuchars, took a booth at the back, next to the dartboard. Professional jealousy? I’d lost count of the hours we’d spent in booths like this, bad-mouthing Martin Moir. At first, when people bitched about Moir, I took his part. Moir was the talent, he was shifting papers, he was keeping us all in a job. It wasn’t a million years since I’d been the golden boy and I felt a kind of nostalgic solidarity with the Ulsterman. But there’s limited fun in defending a man whom your peers have determined to hate, and I’d noticed that lately, when someone mouthed off about Moir, I busied myself with whatever I was doing and stayed silent.

I was jealous. Not of Moir’s perks, I don’t think; not of the Lexus in the car park or the long lunches or even his arrogant freehold on the front page. I was jealous of Moir’s job. His brief, his beat. When I started at the paper I wrote crime. I sat in the High Court and the Sheriff Court and took my shorthand notes and I wrote up my stories of murder and mayhem. I met cops and liked them and they liked me. I was happy. Then the day came when John Fyfe called me into the office and gave me the news. I was moving up. Political Correspondent. In a few years’ time I could be Political Editor. I took his fat hand in mine and let him clap me on the back but even then, as I smelled his rank cologne, I knew it was a comedown. I’d left the pure realm of story for the palace of lies.

There were ghosts that evening when I got home from work. The first one rang the bell as we finished dinner. Angus held my legs while the ghost stood in our kitchen and took three attempts to complete a limerick. His friend was a vampire with a knock-knock joke. There were two more posses of neighbourhood kids – zombies and Hobbits, buccaneers and superheroes. We gave them lollies and chocolates, dropped fistfuls of monkey nuts in their supermarket carrier bags, and they trooped down the stairs with their swag, their voices ringing in the stairwell.

Later that evening I sat at my desk, checking the PA, the Beeb, Slugger, Scottishwire, the reputable blogs, the disreputable blogs. Nothing on the Walshes: Hamish Neil wasn’t trick-or-treating down Govanhill way or out in Pollok. Nothing on the referendum. The Glasgow pro was still missing, six days and counting. A roadside bomb in Helmand province had killed two British soldiers.