Where the Dead Men Go (8 page)

‘I’ve a tout down there,’ Lewicki said. ‘Across the river. The guy you met. Word is, Packy Walsh has gone to ground. Hasn’t been over the door in a week. It’s the waiting that does it. Neil should have hit them by now. The longer he leaves it the jumpier everyone gets. The waiting’s worse than the actual hit.’

‘Not if you’re the one getting hit.’

‘There’s that.’

We smoked in silence.

‘I missed you at the church,’ I said.

He studied the end of his cigarette. ‘Not a great fan of churches.’

‘Yeah? I’d have pegged you as an altar boy at least.’

‘I
was
an altar boy.’ Lewicki was watching the traffic, the lorries and cars on the Glasgow Road. ‘That was the problem. Saw behind the scenes, mate. Spoiled the mystery.’

‘What, did the priest try to—?’

‘Father Nugent? Naw.’ He snorted. ‘Naw, he was a good old guy. I just, don’t know, took the hump with it. St Christopher was the last straw. When they bumped St Christopher, that finished it.’

He tapped the ash from his Regal, took another draw. ‘We had a medal in our car, the old Ford Consul, hanging from the rearview. St Christopher wading through the waves with his big wooden staff in his hand, the baby on his back. My mum prayed to him every time my dad drove down to see his brother in Carlisle.

‘I took it as my saint’s name. At confirmation, like. Got a St Christopher medal along with my rosary. Same as the one in the car. Then Father Nugent gave it out at mass: it was all a mistake, he never existed.’

He frowned, remembering. ‘No patron saint of travellers? Fuck. I mean if there’s a saint for anyone it should be them. And the prayers? My mum’s, all the others, they just vanished in the air? I thought, fuck you Father Nugent. You can keep God and Jesus, all the saints. Mary, the bastarding mass. I’m sticking with St Christopher.’

‘And did you?’

He stuck two fingers down his collar, fished it out, the silver disc on its flimsy chain. He grinned. ‘Figure he needs all the help he can get.’

‘Aye. Him and me both.’

Lewicki’s smile fell. ‘Fuck,’ he said, leaning forward. ‘Three o’clock. Talk of the devil.’

I turned in puzzlement, half expecting to see the bearded ex-saint wading across the hotel car park, parting the smokers with a wooden staff, a wean perched on his shoulders. A man had stepped down from the fire-door, patting his pockets. An unlit cigarette in his mouth. Another man followed, bigger, black crombie, and stationed himself at the door. The smaller man wandered over, the ciggie drooping from his lips, and mimed sparking a lighter. Lewicki passed him his cigarette and the man lit his own off it, passed it back.

‘Jan,’ he said. Lewicki nodded.

He turned to face me.

‘And how are things, Mr Conway?’

I looked at him. He took off his dark glasses and smiled. The broad nose, the coarse skin, the wiry, black, receding hair, with a scurf of white at the temples.

‘I’ve been better.’

He nodded, blowing smoke. Apart from that glimpse in Ferrante’s it was three years since I’d seen Hamish Neil. He looked well. Broader, fuller, a little shorter than I’d remembered. He wore a black shirt and black silk tie, three-button suit. No overcoat. He rocked on his heels, tapping the ash onto the snow. The muscle watched from the fire-door.

Lewicki was coughing, doubled up. Neil turned to me.

‘Enjoy your Moët?’

‘I prefer Veuve Cliquot,’ I said.

Neil nodded, smiled at his shoes. ‘Sad day,’ he said. ‘Like fucking buses, funerals. That’s two in two days.’

Lewicki finished coughing, spat on the snow. He straightened up.

‘Expecting any more?’

Neil looked at him neutrally, looked at the mess on the snow.

‘Kind of up to you, Jan, isn’t it?’ He looked off towards the white fields, the black ribbon of road. ‘With all the specialised criminal intelligence at your disposal, you might have an inkling of who was to blame. Might want to make a move, take him off the streets while the tally’s at two.’

Lewicki hunched his shoulders against the wind. ‘You planning to boost it, like? The tally?’

 ‘I’m planning to stay safe, keep my business safe.’

‘Yeah?’

‘You can’t keep a thing safe, you don’t deserve to keep it.’

He was looking at me as he said this. Lewicki dropped his smoke and I followed him inside.

Mari was talking to Clare. She had moved over to Clare’s table and now clasped Clare’s hands in her own, leaning in close and talking quietly in that low, steady way of hers. Clare was nodding, in short regular bursts, looking up at Mari and then back down at the table. I passed our own table and kept walking.

There were no Islays. The barman had the grace to feign embarrassment. His vowels were the broad, open vowels of Ayrshire, not the spindly whine of the city. I was pleased. After all, I thought, it still counts for something, that twenty miles of moor between Mureton and the city.

 I plumped for a Macallan. A man appeared at my elbow, one of the cousins. We nodded at each other in the whisky mirror and then a big flat hand swum under my nose.

‘Davey Moir,’ he said. ‘Martin’s cousin.’

I shook the hand.

‘Gerry Conway. Martin’s colleague at the
Tribune
. Friend, too.’

‘Conway, aye. Ronnie spoke about you, Martin’s dad. You were over on a visit at some point, few years back? Across the water.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Aye.’ He hitched his trousers, braced his hands on the bar. He shook his head: ‘Bad business, this.’

I tilted my whisky. ‘Can’t argue with that.’

The barman’s raised eyebrows loomed before us. Davey Moir passed him a sheet of paper with a large order on it and the barman got to work, calling one of the waitresses over to help.

‘His old man,’ I said. ‘He did well at the church. Bearing up, is he?’

Davey Moir glanced round at the tables.

‘Ronnie? The whisky’s bearing him up. The Black Bush’s bearing him up.’

There was a hard, jaunty note in his voice.

‘Well,’ I twisted my glass on its mat. ‘It’s not every day you bury your son.’

‘That’s true.’ He nodded. ‘He’s got a grand excuse today. It’s the past twenty years you’d wonder about.’

I sipped my Macallan. I could see Neve MacDonald in the mirror at one of the tables, snuffling theatrically into a napkin. One White Russian too many.

Davey Moir grimaced, shook his head. ‘Ach, I shouldn’t speak ill of him. He’s a good man. But weak, a weak dog. Been hitting the sauce since that business in Larne.’

He looked round as he said that, eyes narrowed, checking that I knew what he was talking about.

‘Shit.’ He was digging into his pocket, passing two twenties to the barman. ‘Sorry, I thought you knew. Ach, there was a thing in the early Nineties, an incident, Ronnie was a DI up in Coleraine. I don’t know the right story, he did something he shouldn’t have done. Anyway, they bumped him down to sergeant, put him back in uniform.’

‘Jesus. Sore one.’

‘Yeah.’ He took his change. ‘Fucked his pension, too. Look, this crowd’ll be thinking I’ve absconded. Better get back. Nice talking to you – Gerry is it?’

‘Yeah. Likewise.’

I helped him load up the tin tray. Three pints of heavy, a lager and lime, two vodkas and Red Bull, a gin and bitter lemon and a Baileys on ice. He’d hoisted the lot and was turning to go when someone bumped him in the back and he buckled forward, raising the tray like a judge’s scorecard.

The noise was like a building coming down. There was a stunned lull in which the round tray wobbled off with a hollow silver whisper and clanged against the leg of a chair. I looked at the floor. All the pints had smashed. A dark pool was spreading on the Black Watch carpet, a paint splash of Baileys striping my shoes. We looked like we’d been fishing, Davey Moir and I, fly-casting in our best suits, wading in a river to the knees.

Before he could react I gripped Davey Moir by the sleeve. His teeth were bared and the back of his neck was bunched in bristled folds but I held his sleeve and clamped my hand on his shoulder till I felt him subside. This was his cousin’s funeral, you didn’t want fighting games at your cousin’s send-off. The man who bumped him – tall, hook nose, late twenties – was apologising, he had his hands up and his fingers spread like a goalkeeper facing a penalty. Then his wallet was out, he was leaning across to shout another round, scooping bar-towels off the polished bar. He had long fair hair that curtained his face when he squatted down to help the waitress pick up the shards, mopping the carpet with the balled-up towels.

It seemed like a good time to bail. I collected our coats and we said our goodbyes. Moir’s father was drunk, slurring the words ‘Good boy’ as he clapped my back, though whether it was Martin or myself who had earned this commendation I still don’t know. Across the room, Hamish Neil stood under the crossed swords, leaning on the fireplace with a whisky in hand, as if this was his living room and we were his guests. He tipped two fingers to his temple in a slick salute. I kept my hand on Mari’s shoulder and stared straight ahead.

Mari drove. It was too cold to keep the windows down so I put up the heating and angled the hot air onto to my legs. All the way back to Glasgow the smell of hops and juniper rose between my knees.

Nearly two weeks later I was driving down to Ayrshire again, low winter sun in my eyes, Warren Zevon on the sound system; ‘Empty-Hearted Town’. The motorway’s three lanes were almost empty – it was two o’clock in the afternoon – but I held it at a Presbyterian sixty-five. Beside me on the passenger seat was a slim, buff cardboard folder and on top of that was a cling-filmed plate of muffins. This was what you did in New Zealand, Mari told me, for illnesses, bereavements, any kind of mishap. No species of pain that a traybake couldn’t assuage. There’s a book she has at home called
Ladies, A Plate
, which is what it used to say on party invites in Fifties New Zealand: ‘Gentlemen, a bottle; Ladies, a plate.’ I should have brought a bottle, I reflected, as a truck shuddered past on the outside lane.

In the fortnight since Moir’s funeral it had snowed without a break. By the time it all thawed out and a thin white sun lit up the smoking streets, Moir’s death seemed like something from a previous era. You like to think that you’d leave a hole, that your talents would be missed, but it doesn’t always work like that. Like a river closing over a dead dog: that’s how a paper like the
Tribune
meets your absence.

I learned that four years ago when they fired me over the Peter Lyons story. The
Trib
came out on Sunday, people bought it just the same. No one complained that my byline was missing, or took their copy back to the shop:
What happened to Gerry Conway?

For two days after Moir’s death the newsroom was muted. The little groups at the fax machine and photocopier barely spoke. People pausing at desks were murmurous and cowed. But on day three laughter no longer seemed out of place and when someone upped the volume for the sports report on the lunchtime news, and someone else made a noisy joke about the Celtic result, we were back to normal.

After all, we had a paper to write. The stories didn’t stop. Death went on. The missing pro turned up murdered in woodland near Duntocher. The dead squaddies turned out to be Jocks – a Black Watch sergeant from the East Neuk of Fife and a private from Dundee – so now they would merit six hundred words, with quotes from the parents, tributes from the Secretary of State. A fatal stabbing at a flat in Cumbernauld held the front page for a couple of days when it was mistakenly reported as sectarian.

I had my own distractions, too. Angus caught a vomiting bug – it was diagnosed as rotavirus – and spent a week in the Southern General. He wasn’t in danger but we took it in turns to sit beside his steel-barred cot, Mari and I, stroking his hair and soothing his cries when the nurses changing his IV drip struggled to find a vein.

It was two weeks after the funeral before I thought about visiting Clare. What prompted me were the tributes. In the days following Moir’s death, an impromptu shrine grew up around his workstation. Photos, snatches of poetry, handwritten notes. The foliage of mourning. It looked like a 9/11 wall in New York. On the morning we heard of the death, someone pinned Moir’s byline picture on his partition. Someone else added a snap of Moir at last year’s Christmas lunch. Soon the dark-blue felt was buried under photos: Moir at the Scottish Press Awards; Moir holing out at a charity fourball; Moir in the Cope on the night of Rix’s send-off; Moir at a City Council bash, his arm round Gavin Haining’s shoulders. There were clippings, too, and a smattering of Mass cards.

I took them all down and put them in a folder for Clare. It looked bare and somehow abandoned now, Moir’s workstation. The cops had taken his computer away and somebody had commandeered his chair. A key ring hung on a hook Velcroed onto Moir’s partition, a purple hunk of plastic in the shape of a fish. I took it as a keepsake. Among the photos and clippings was a white postcard with a typed line of text:

Luke 6: 26

I pinned it up on my own partition. I liked the sentiment. It wasn’t the kind of admonition I was ever likely to need, but I liked it anyway. There was another postcard, an old Victorian photograph: two lines of men, barefoot and bearded, on either side of a dirty street with a big hill looming in the background. I took it too and pinned it next to the first one.

The Mureton turn-off appeared and I flicked the indicator. ‘Welcome to Mureton’: every time I came back the sign was closer to the city. By now there was a good three miles of crescents and cul-de-sacs, semis of cheese-coloured brick, strings of matchbox front gardens and security-lit double garages that I refused to recognise as Mureton, and it wasn’t until the squat grey bulk of the Goldberry Hotel loomed on my right that I counted myself home.

I was early – the new motorway had shaved ten minutes off the journey – so I drove on down to the town centre and turned into my old street. A short terrace of red sandstone villas confronted a short terrace of blonde sandstone villas. When I lived here each house had a square plot of flinty sandstone chips or small white quartzy pebbles out front. As boys we chased each other through these gardens, the chips shelving and mashing under our plunging feet. We sounded like the sea pounding a shingle beach. But now all the gardens were gone. The low retaining walls we tightroped along were gone and where the pebbles had been there were slick black flats of tarmac where angled cars were beached like boats.

I stopped in front of our old house, garden gone. The paint on the windows and eaves was wrong – it was white now, not blue. But there was my bedroom window, thin as a sentry box above the glass front door. I thought of walking up the path and ringing the bell, asking to see round the place, but what was the point? A tortoiseshell cat padded out from somewhere and wound in and out of my legs.

By the time I pulled up at Clare’s front door I was late. The Moirs lived in one of the new estates and I lost my way in the yellowbrick crescents. I parked in the driveway behind a muddy silver Lexus, two years old. The house was detached – you could have ridden a bike between it and the house next door, if you tucked your elbows in and didn’t waver – and not much older than the car in the drive.

No one was home. I thumbed the bell a third time and was bending to lay the muffins on top of the folder when the snib clicked.

‘Gerry Conway.’

I gathered the stuff and rose from the step, knee cracking. When I went to hug her with my free arm Clare turned aside and I kissed her cheek instead.

That morning on the phone she had sounded woozy. Tranquillisers, I thought, but now I could smell it, the rank tang of whisky and something else behind the booze, a stale, sweetly sexual reek.

I followed her down the hall. The living room was humid and dark and here they were, shining in the gloom, white orchids, their horns jutting out from a vase on the table. That fleshy smell, like something’s crawled into the floor space and died. I started at a movement in the gloom, something stirring on the room’s far side, but it was only us, our awkward shapes in the streaky mirror.

She didn’t offer a seat. Her hand rose vaguely, pushed the hair from her eyes. We stood there for a moment as if listening out for something, straining to hear. When I mentioned coffee she waved her hand distractedly and drifted off to stage a decorous riot, yanking drawers and banging cupboard doors like somebody rifling the kitchen for drugs.

I threw back the curtains. Two white sofas faced each other across a coffee table and a slippy strip of laminate flooring. There were toys and clothes on the floor, a bunched yellow towel. I gathered the towel and a stripy kid’s T-shirt and a pink cloth that became, as I lifted it into the light, a pair of women’s knickers. I bunched the lot together and pushed them under the sofa.

The mantelpiece was crowded: sympathy cards with swirly golden copperplate, the smaller Mass cards like holy football stickers with their robed, androgynous saints. The room was too hot. I shrugged out of my jacket and dropped it on a couch, drifted over to the bookcase. Major, Blair, Mandela, Clinton: a sheaf of political bios, none of which I had read. That was the difference: Moir believed in politics. The things that were just words to the rest of us – democracy, the rule of law, the parliamentary process – meant something to him. He’d seen the alternative, I suppose; what happened when you swept those off the table and went to work with guns and bombs. But we laughed at him a little, around the office, down the Cope, teacher’s pet, the Ulster anorak, the boy who said his prayers.

The riot in the kitchen had stopped. Brittle plinking sounds were coming from behind me, guitar strings at a barely audible volume. The hi-fi in the corner. Between the tall, thin speakers was a flat slab of silver, its surface flawed by sticky rings of red. I ran my finger along the dusty edge and bent to read the tiny lettering: LINN KLIMAX DS. The CD case was open on one of the speakers: Andrés Segovia, Picasso’s
Still Life with Guitar
on the cover.

‘Here you go.’ She passed me an over-full mug, scalding, I practically dropped it onto the coffee table.

We sat on opposite sofas. I could feel the heat at my back and my palm leaped like a cat when I slipped it behind the sofa to check the radiator. I sipped my scalding coffee, shallow-breathing to mask the scent of the orchids. The ball of my thumb was throbbing from the radiator. Clare looked at a spot on the floor just in front of my shoes. She was waiting it out. I was just another well-meaning, irrelevant distraction.

‘Anyway, there it is,’ I said. I had laid the slim folder of tributes on the smeared glass top of the coffee table, beside the muffins. She barely glanced at it, sat with her hands between her knees. The stink of the orchids was making me heave. Say something. The girls.

‘How are the girls?’

She shrugged. ‘They’re at my sister’s just now.’

I nodded.

‘Just till I get things together,’ she said.

‘No, that’s good. That makes sense.’

There was a pinkish smear on the rim of my cup, a lipstick trace.

‘They still don’t know.’ She was staring at the floor again. ‘I’ve told them more than once but they don’t take it in. They think he’s coming back. They bring his shoes through from the porch and walk around the house in them.’ She shrugged, put her hand to her face, I could see the features crumple.

There was nothing to say. I rubbed the pink smear with my thumb but it wouldn’t shift. I wanted to cross and comfort her but the slope of her shoulders, the jut of her elbows, the tight quivering ball of fist pressed to her mouth made me pause.

‘I’m here for you Clare.’

‘Yeah.’ She spoke to her mug. ‘You’re here now.’

Suddenly it was chillier, even in that hothouse. Okay, I thought. Let’s hear it.

‘He used to admire you,’ she said. She was looking at me now and I winced at the raw blue eyes in their reddened rims. ‘Gerry Conway. He wanted to
be
you. The big reporter.’

‘He was twice the journalist I’ll ever be.’

‘He was, though, wasn’t he? And do you know why? Because he meant it.’ Her ponytail tossed as she shook her head. ‘The stupid fucker. He meant it. He believed all the shit you’re supposed to believe.’

It was true. I set my cup down on the table. ‘You’re right. Clare. I’m sorry.’ I stood up. My keys hissed as I lifted my jacket. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come. I’ll get out your road.’

She seemed to see me then for the first time, reached out as I passed, gripped the hem of my jacket.

‘Don’t go, Gerry.’ She tugged on my jacket. ‘I’m sorry. It’s not you. Stay, for God’s sake. Finish your coffee.’

‘Is that what you call it?’

She looked up. ‘What?’

‘Coffee? Jesus, I’ve tasted nicer engine oil.’ I sat back down. ‘I was trying to make my escape before I had to drink the stuff. Or find a pot plant to pour it into.’

She was laughing now, it might have been a laugh, wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand. ‘Cheeky bugger. Hey, you want me to fix it? Wait here.’

She came back from the kitchen with a half-bottle of White Horse. It wasn’t the best whisky but it could hardly make the coffee any worse. She tipped a good half-inch into each of the mugs.

‘It’s good to see you, Gerry.’ She tucked her legs underneath her, raised the mug in a silent toast.

‘And you.’

‘I must look fantastic.’ She dabbed at her eyes, choked out a laugh. Her eyes and the tip of her nose had turned pink and her lipstick was smeary.

‘You look fine.’

‘Jesus, that’s your idea of a compliment? No wonder you turned me down.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Gerry, I don’t know why I said that.’

‘Don’t apologise, Clare. It’s fine. You’ve had a shock.’

‘It isn’t that.’

She looked away across the room and her lips tightened and her eyes filmed over again.

‘What, then?’

‘It’s something else. Money.’

She nodded meaningfully.

‘You mean they won’t pay?’

‘Pay what? Who won’t?’

‘The insurance company. They won’t pay out for, you know, how Martin died.’

‘No, they won’t. But that doesn’t matter.’ She rose from her chair. ‘That’s not what I meant.’

The little drawer in the sideboard rattled as she yanked it open. She sorted noisily through some papers and when she found the one she wanted she flourished it fiercely and thrust it at my chest.

A woman,
I thought;
Moir had a woman. She wants money. She’s written a letter.

But it wasn’t a letter. It was an official document, on thin A5 paper. A building-society statement.

She stood over me as I read.

The account holder was Martin Ronald Moir. The current balance, in bold black numbers in the bottom right-hand corner, was £26,420.