Witness the Dead (51 page)

‘She was mine. It’s mine! You had no right to go through my things. No right at all.’

Danny shuffled closer so that his feet were by Atto’s face, his boots just an inch or two from the snarling contortion of hate that disfigured the man’s bland features. The temptation to swing his boot back and then violently forward was enormous, and he had no doubt how satisfying it would be. Instead, he crouched down as well as the wound in his stomach would allow, holding the brooch between gloved fingers and sliding it past Atto’s nose.

‘Christine’s brooch. Not yours. Hers. And we will find her DNA on it.’

‘It’s mine, you fucking bastard. Mine. I earned it. It’s mine. Give me it!’

‘Earned it? Jesus Christ. Your brain being wired wrongly would only explain half of it. And, yes, we heard every word. All recorded too, thanks to the nice governor here.’

Atto squealed and flapped, a fish out of water and knowing it was out of time.

Danny inched closer. ‘We met once before, didn’t we? Before Tony and I ever came to Blackridge. You were in Klass on the night of the Red Silk for a Night contest. And you took it way too far.’

Atto recovered a sliver of his bravado, sneering up and looking more deranged than ever before.’

‘That’s right. You spilled my drink, ex-Sergeant Neilson. Spilled my drink and couldn’t do your job.’

‘I’ve done my job now, though, Atto. Maybe it’s forty years too late but I’ve still done it. You will be arrested and charged with the murder of Christine Cormack in July 1972.’

Atto laughed, manic but hollow. ‘You think I care about that?’

‘Maybe not but I do. The law does. Christine Cormack’s family does. Oh, and I know you care that people think you were Red Silk. You get off on that like the sick bastard you are. But you weren’t Red Silk, were you? You were a pretender. You were only Red Silk for a night.’

‘You can’t prove that I didn’t kill those first three girls.’

Danny threw his head back and laughed loud and long, causing pain to rip through his stomach wound but not caring in the slightest. When he’d finished, his sight settled on Atto, a huge grin on his face.

‘You pathetic little prick. Are you really that stupid? We don’t have to prove that you didn’t kill them. We only have to know that you didn’t. If you want to claim them as more notches on your bedpost then you are the one that has to prove you killed them. And you can’t, can you? You can’t prove it because you didn’t kill them. You’re a fraud, Atto. Red Silk? Red face more like. You’re nothing.’

Atto put his face to the floor so that Danny couldn’t see it, hiding from him and the truth. But he could do nothing to stop his ears from being filled with Danny’s laughter as he left the interview room, the sound of the last laugh echoing even after the door slid closed behind him.

Winter waited till the door was fully in its lock before he walked over and took Danny’s place crouching beside Atto’s head, a knowing look up at the prison governor as he did so.

‘It’s not nice, is it, Archibald? The humiliation. The loss of face. The loss of legend. All those sordid little trophies will have to be handed back.’

Atto squirmed, his face still firmly to the floor. Winter hesitated.

‘Okay, Archibald. Maybe there is another way. I’ve got a proposition for you.’

Chapter 62

Epilogue

Friday night, Saturday morning. It all rolled into one in Glasgow. Just as you couldn’t tell where the gloom of the night met the darkness of a city street, you couldn’t always tell where the night before became the morning after. No one could see the joins and no one had seen the horizon in a long time.

This night the rain was stoating off the slick, grey surface of Gordon Street in front of Central Station and blurring the distinctions even further. A sodden conga of the barely dressed and the fretful waited in boisterous turn for the taxis that would ferry them out of the city centre towards home. The rain dampened only their clothes and hair; their spirits, whether good or bad, were protected by an umbrella of booze.

It was ever thus and would ever be so. Danny Neilson had spent more time than he cared to remember on this damp bit of pavement. Long after he was gone, there would still be different versions of the same angry little men and daughters of the same leggy teenagers, singing party tunes and eating chips and cheese, waiting on a black hack to Cardonald or Anniesland.

Taxi o’clock, Chloe had called it, but it was time that stood still. On Friday and Saturday nights, he and the other marshals were on until five in the morning when the last of the clubs shook the stragglers out of the doors and onto the streets. Weary, beery and occasionally cheery, they still wanted to be driven home to their mammies or their jammies. It was his job to make sure they got there.

The hi-vis yellow tunic that was pulled over his jacket said, Look at me and listen to me. I’m the man who will get you home. I can’t sleep until you do. Can’t sleep until I know you’re in safe.

They all demanded that of him. Even the arseholes. Daft boys with a bigger thirst for beer than they had a head for sense. One of them tried his luck, edging in from the side of the queue with the gallus bravado of the unashamedly blootered. He was met with the flat palm of Danny’s hand in his chest, looking from the hand to the man behind it and doing a quick bit of mental maths and coming up with the wrong answer.

‘C’mon, granddad.’ He glared. ‘It’s late and I want to get hame. Get oot my way and there’ll be no bother.’

Danny shook his head wearily. Here we go again.

‘Don’t worry, son, there won’t be any bother. Listen, if you’re really in a hurry then the ambulances are pretty quick at this time of the night. You want to get in one of those?’

The guy focused and took a closer look at Danny. ‘Um, nah.’

‘Didn’t think so. Get to the back of the queue and wait your turn like everyone else.’

The boy gave a skew-whiff grin. ‘Worth a try, big man. Eh?’

‘Sure, son. Now away out my road.’

These nights in the rain were seeping into his bones, washing away at the marrow of him. He wouldn’t, couldn’t, do it any other way, though. It was him.

Just as he couldn’t stop watching the news coverage of the digs near Ipswich and Coventry. It seemed that every minute he wasn’t on the street was spent in front of the television. The cameras were kept at a discreet distance but they still spent long hours showing shots of large white tents, the comings and goings of grim-faced coppers and forensics and endless shots of presenters talking into the screen.

Eleanor Holt did most of the TV interviews, telling of her feelings as the digs proceeded. Marjorie Shillington consented to one or two but she remained, outwardly at least, much more frail than her friend and shied away from the spotlight. The TV stations couldn’t get enough of them – the first two parents finally, after years of heartbreak and not knowing, to discover the potential for some peace. The story was that Archibald Atto had found a conscience and had given police the locations of the two shallow graves where Melanie and Louise were buried. He had also promised that, once they had been recovered and given proper and long overdue funerals, he would divulge the sites where his other victims could be found.

It stung Danny’s soul to hear presenters give credit to a serial killer for finally doing the right thing. To be fair, the acknowledgement was made grudgingly and each time couched with a reminder of his atrocities, beginning they always said, with the four infamous Red Silk murders in Glasgow in the early 1970s.

Mrs Holt and Mrs Shillington had both sent him expensive bouquets of flowers as thanks for the little he had done. Even if he was fond of flowers, which he wasn’t, his conscience wouldn’t have been able to bide the sight of them. Instead, they were being watered from the heavens, propped up on Jean’s grave in Sighthill Cemetery.

He did appreciate the gesture, though, and the display of emotion behind it. But, more than that, he’d appreciated the sight of tears of happiness on the faces of the two women. The recovery of the bodies meant confirmation of something they hoped would never be but that they desperately wanted. Their babies were home again.

There is a price to be paid for everything and the ticket for the women’s peace of mind was that Atto got to glory in murder. Including murders that he didn’t commit. Then there was the tax on top of it: that the real killer of the three girls from Klass had never been caught and now probably never would be because the world thought it was Atto. Death and taxes are the two certain things, so they say.

He knew he would have to carry around with him the knowledge that Foster and Stark hunted victims because of the red connection, Foster thinking her father had killed those four girls. Kirsty McAndrew, Hannah Healey, Ashleigh Fleming and finally a student named Beth Owen who had been on her way to a party in a new red dress: all died because of that. He would be haunted by the irony that they killed Kirsty just because she wore red shoes and had no idea that she had had a tattoo done by Stark’s boss. What he couldn’t be sure of was how much of that would be put right by the fact that Atto had finally been charged with Christine Cormack’s murder. It was a selfish little victory, a sticking plaster on a torn conscience, and he struggled to take any pleasure in it.

Barbara was talking to him, though, and that was something he could be satisfied with. It was a talking of sorts, a start of something rather than an end. She still couldn’t make up her mind whether to blame him for Chloe being at risk or thank him for saving her life. He’d have settled for either as an alternative to distance and silence. She was his own lost girl. The others were finally going home to their parents, and maybe she would too.

And then there was Tony. Tony and his deal with the Devil. Even the suggestion of it had been enough to turn Danny’s stomach. A means to an end that was against everything he’d tried to do for forty years. Atto would give up the sites of nine graves, starting with Melanie and Louise. The drip of information would be spaced out in order that the finds got maximum and prolonged television exposure. And so, of course, would Atto.

In return, Tony wouldn’t tell the world that Atto was not and never had been Red Silk. He was to be allowed to continue in his twisted charade, luxuriating in a renewed status as multiple killer with a social conscience, the peace of mind of others within his gift.

Atto revelled in it every bit as much as it sickened Danny to watch him do so. He tried to call Tony every day from prison, anxious to discuss the latest developments and share his memories of the locations that appeared on television.

Sometimes Tony would take the call and sometimes he wouldn’t. According to prison staff, this would alternately enrage Atto or amuse him as he declared that Tony couldn’t handle having him burrow into his mind.

However, Atto was wrong.

No matter how much he had tried to get inside Tony’s head, he had failed to learn enough about him.

It wasn’t until the police had confirmed that the two shallow graves in England did indeed contain the remains of Louise and Melanie that Tony shared the truth of his plan with Danny. He would play along, he’d let Atto talk and boast. He would indulge the killer’s vile need to share. Then, as soon as the last of those lost girls was returned to her parents, he would contact every news station, every newspaper and every website in the country and tell them that Atto was a liar.

Atto had entered into the agreement blindly, bound by the need to trust Tony to maintain the façade he had carefully cultivated for so long. Ultimately, he would be undone by his own arrogance. He wasn’t the Devil: the Devil was in the detail of Winter’s deal.

Atto would surely rage and he would threaten all manner of revenge that he couldn’t deliver. He would sulk and lie but he couldn’t prove he was something he wasn’t. The certainty of death and the tax on Danny’s conscience could be reduced by one.

The real killer of the three girls from Klass would never be known only if everyone stopped looking for him. Brenda MacFarlane, Isobel Jardine and Mary Gillespie didn’t deserve that, and Danny would keep looking, even if no one else did.

He surveyed the girls among the late-night, early-morning revellers in the lashing rain outside Central Station, thinking them a world away from the young women in the summer heat of Klass, yet knowing they were exactly the same.

Danny knew he couldn’t save them all, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t try. He stretched a restraining arm in front of two tall mid-twenties wide boys whose eyes were looking west but seeing east as they were about to get into the front taxi. Instead, he beckoned forward a teary-looking teenage girl from further down the queue whose tottering heels were barely holding her up. ‘In you go, hen. Make sure she gets in her front door, Sammy? Good man.’

There, he’d saved one.

Acknowledgements

I owe a vote of thanks to everyone at Simon & Schuster, in particular my editor Maxine Hitchcock for her unstinting support and enthusiasm but also to Emma Lowth, Florence Partridge and a host of others.

To my agent Mark “Stan” Stanton” I offer my apologies that this book is not named Necropolis and also my gratitude for his grey-bearded wisdom.

While much of this story comes simply from the dark recesses of my own imagination, I needed the technical know-how of reality to stitch those thoughts together. To that end, I am grateful to the following.

To Professor Jim Fraser, director of the Centre for Forensic Science at the University of Strathclyde for helping me out of the DNA hole that I’d dug for myself. To retired Detective Inspector Bryan McLaughlin, former head of Criminal Intelligence at Strathclyde Police, for his invaluable knowledge of 1972 policing methods.

To David Hamilton of the Scottish Government for his insight into the formation of the new Police Service of Scotland. To staff at the Scottish Prison Service for their help in the creation of the entirely fictional Blackridge Prison.

And finally, to my stunt-double and fellow crime writer Michael J. Malone for the story of the boy that saved the starfish.