EVERY STONE
A STORY
John Callaghan
Every stone a story, like a rosary
St Teresa – Joan Osborne
About the author
John Callaghan was born and raised in Glasgow.
He left the city but it never left him.
St Teresa
by Joan Osborne, copyright © 1995
Quoted by kind permission of Joan Osborne and DAS Communications
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All characters in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Copyright John Callaghan© 2011
Smashwords edition
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, by any form or any means without the express written consent of the author and publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchasers.
ISBN
978-1-4478-2623-1
www.glasgownoirfiction.com
For Jamie and Kirsty
All the events in this book are fictitious
and the characters are completely fabricated.
The city, though, is real.
Prologue – Later, much later
Here I am, lying in a spreading crescent of blood.
Not mine. At least, I don’t think most of the blood is mine……well, some of it must be, I know that somewhere at the back of my mind.
Some of it.
But the stain that is inching across the mockingly clean and polished floor belongs to the woman I’m holding in my arms, slumping and lifeless now, the carmine pulse running from her and pooling like mercury.
So much blood, so much.
We lie on the ground together, crumpled in a tangle of limbs, exhausted now that there are no steps left in our dance of blood.
And so it ends as it began.
As it always had to.
Death on death, blood on blood.
Chapter 1 – Kind of a Girlfriend
It was very seldom that I had a member of the aristocracy in my office (much though I loved my abode, it wasn’t the grandest in my street, never mind Glasgow, never mind anywhere else) and the Earl of Auchenmyres wasn’t making me yearn for that to become any more regular. The strange thing was that I had not the least nodding acquaintance with the earl of anywhere, but something about this one seemed unsettlingly familiar.
“You must understand that this is a very serious business. This girl could be in very bad trouble.”
“Well, Earl – sorry about the protocol, should I call you Earl? I’m worried it’s making you sound like a bandleader, not a lord.”
“Calling me Alastair is what you should do. And that kind of remark doesn’t tell me you’re taking this any more seriously.”
“Oh, rest assured, Alastair. A young woman has disappeared here, and that’s something I take about as seriously as I can do anything.”
“And the police are treating Rosemary’s disappearance as suspicious, they say.”
“For sure. And, actually, that’s where I start to struggle. I’m just a private detective, and nowadays I’m also a one-man show, what you see sitting here is all there is. A missing person, okay, somebody that skipped on a wheen of debts, somebody that nobody else notices is missing, okay, but from the way you’ve described it, this might become a murder investigation – sorry to be blunt – and that’s not something I’m set up to handle. ”
“Is it a question of money?”
“Nothing like that. It’s resources. One man can’t do anything like tackle a murder enquiry – only the police can. Anyway, that’s what they’re there for - it’s their job. And, since the missing woman is the daughter of a police officer, you can absolutely bet they’re all over it. They’ll all be pulling double overtime until they get a hit.”
What you need to know at this point is that there was a third person in the room, not just myself and Alastair the Earl. The two of them had come in together and the other man, much younger, maybe in his early 20s set against the Earl’s late 40s, introduced himself as Andy, no second name. And that was the last and only thing he had said so far.
By now, his porridge-faced silence was starting to irritate me as much as it intrigued. He didn’t look worried or anxious; he just looked bored. I glanced blandly in his direction, giving him permission to speak, but he remained an absence. Instead, it was my new noble acquaintance that answered my unspoken question.
“You’re wondering why Andrew is here? It’s simple. Rosemary Kilmartin was a friend of his.”
“My girlfriend, kind of,” said Andy in person, doing himself no favours in my mind. At least he could speak.
“Kind of? Why do you say kind of? Why not just ‘my girlfriend’?”
“It wasn’t such a serious thing, you know? We, um, we knew each other for quite a while, and we went out before, years ago. And every so often, we’d go somewhere or do something, just pretty casual. Kind of a weekend thing, just. But she didn’t have a boyfriend, not really, so I guess that means I was the title-holder.”
“So you didn’t have any other girlfriends of your own?”
“No. Just Rosie.”
“Well, Andy, I’m awful sorry that this should happen to your girlfriend. It’s a worrying thing.”
“Aye, thanks….It’s just like you read about, you know? I’m just numb. Something tells me I should be feeling some different way, but I don’t. It’s just kinda a blank, I’m just sitting and waiting for some time when it’ll change. Maybe it will. Or maybe I should just move on?”
Hold that bus…..maybe he thought he should ‘just move on’? Not what I was expecting him to say, not at all. Either way, I knew that was the last we’d be hearing from Andy for a while, but I still needed to say another empty condolence to him. See? I’m no better than the next guy at these things. Half my mind was still on why I thought I knew the Earl from somewhere.
“Sometimes these things sort themselves out. Like I say, I’m awful sorry for your troubles….but as I said to Alastair, I’m not the man you want to help with all this. Maybe it’ll work out all right in the end.”
“Well, Mr McCabe, it could be when Andy and I explain the whole background to you, you might see it differently. You see, we’re not asking you to solve a murder, we’re asking you to eliminate a suspect.”
“Eliminate? How, eliminate?”
“Oh, wait – I don’t mean…..no, just rule him out. Not do anything to him.”
“Uh-huh. Who’s the suspect?”
“Andrew is. He was the last one known to have seen Rosie and he doesn’t have any alibi.”
“Well, so what?”
“They were seen to argue, in public, that last time. It was in a pub, a bar. It was the night she disappeared.”
“OK, Andy, she was enough of a girlfriend to argue with…and what’s an argument, when it’s in a pub? Was it just verbal, a few ‘get it up ye’s’? Flipping tables over, what? A raging barney? How’d it end up? And – where were you? When she disappeared?”
Andy looked at the Earl, and it was the Earl who answered.
“Blows were struck – one blow, actually. Rosie struck Andrew in the face. Then she left the bar they were in, while he stayed. Afterwards, he was with me, all night until the next morning.”
“You say ‘afterwards’, how soon afterwards? Right from the time she left the pub?”
“Andrew was still in the bar when I went to collect him from there. She was long gone, but he never left.”
“So there’s your alibi, that accounts for all the time, if she went missing that night. Where’s the problem?”
“Mr McCabe, that will be Andrew’s alibi, if it has to be, in the end. But right now, he’s not talking to the police, so they don’t know where he was, if anywhere.”
“If you’re declining to talk to the coppers, that’s going to put you right in the frame, alibi or no. You’ve told me that Rosie Kilmartin is a chief inspector’s daughter.”
“Of course, we know that. Andrew tells me he has good reason not to trust police, leave it at that.”
“And what about you? Why doesn’t the bold Earl step forward and sort it out? Is there some reason you don’t want to tell the police Andy spent the night at your house? Not a one-bed place, is it?”
“Somebody in my position has to be aware of how things look to outsiders. And no, it’s a large house.”
“I still don’t understand. You can deal with this now, and it’s done. If you don’t speak up now, and change your story later, nobody will believe Andy was with you when you say he was. And what position is ‘somebody in your position’ actually in? Who cares if the Earl of Auchenmyres is gay? So long as Andy’s of age, it’s a nothing story. Tell the police and everything’s sweet.”
“I understand what you’re saying but nonetheless, this is how we have to play it. I want you to establish enough evidence to show that Rose Kilmartin’s disappearance had nothing to do with Andrew. Are you going to accept the job, or am I wasting my time here? You came highly recommended by our solicitor, but if it’s not to your taste….”
“Well, I’m sure you know how hard…..impossible…..it is to prove a negative. But, as it happens, you don’t actually have to prove anything at all, that’s the other side’s job. But I have to repeat my advice – just tell them where Andy actually was and that’s the job done.”
“As I said, if we have to, we will, but that’s a last resort. Do what you can until then. We have arranged to speak with an investigating officer at Stewart Street police station tomorrow morning. It’s voluntary and without prejudice – we thought it was best to agree when they asked. Can you attend?”
“If they’ll let me. We’ll need to meet between ourselves first, though, before we go there to get Andy’s answers sounding right. Because the missing…..because Rosie was a senior police officer’s daughter, they’re going to come heavy. ”
“Fine. We’ll be here at 9am, if you like; Stewart Street is 10.30.”
“OK, I’m on board. Before you go……can I ask a silly question – your title? The Earl of Auchenmyres? Where is Auchenmyres anyway?”
“It’s an old name, it isn’t anywhere really nowadays.”
“OK, where was it, when it was somewhere?”
“It was between Glasgow and Paisley. Follow the line of the river out past Govan and stop when you’ve gone past the Clyde Tunnel. That area around there.”
“On the south bank? Where the Southern General is?”
“That’s it. The hospital was built on land the family used to own, until the Fifth Earl lost it, to pay the debts he ran up in supporting the Darien expedition. It was Scotland’s -”
“- only colony, I know. In Panama. That must have been around 1700 – well, your family does go back a long way.”
“Doesn’t everybody’s? But yes, after Darien failed, the last thing the family had left was a small castle on the banks of the Clyde there.”
“’Small castle’ – that’s not a phrase you get to hear often.”
“Well, maybe ‘a big house’ is a better description. And that went, too, when Victoria was queen. The Twelfth Earl sold it to buy shares in the East India company, just before the Sepoy Mutiny. A year later, the company was all but bust and all he got was a boatload of tea.”
“They didn’t have great business heads, your family, did they? Pissed away a fortune, so nowadays I guess you’ve all got to find yourselves a job.”
“Well, I still have some assets, but you’re right. Now, all that’s left is the name, the title. Doesn’t do me a whole lot of good in my line of work.”
What neither of us said, but both of us knew fine well, was that the place where the ‘small castle’ had once stood on the banks of the Clyde was now the site of a huge sewage plant, chewing and cleansing the waste of half the city, spreading its suffocating odour far and wide, choking the patients in the hospital across the road on hot days when their windows were helpfully left open for the “fresh air”. The Earl might have fallen a long way, but at least he wasn’t shovelling shite.
And as the Earl of Auchenmyres and Andy left the office, I still couldn’t pin down the fluttering butterfly of ignorance, that nagging feeling I had that I should know the earl from somewhere other than Debrett’s. I hadn’t even asked him what his “line of work” was.
*** *** ***
I called Bernadette Feeney on her direct line and got her first time. “Ah, Stevie, I was hoping you would call. Listen, we need bread for tonight cuz I’m going to be stuck here gone 6. Could you get something? That place on Dumbarton Road is good, you know La Crolla? Get some Italian bread, anything would be fine.”
“What’s wrong with Morrison’s?”
“Whatever, I don’t really care, but if you could get a Morrison’s loaf in a La Crolla bag, that would be perfect.”
“Is your sister that much of a snob? Or is it you?”
“I’m ignoring what you just said, and assuming that you didn’t voluntarily call me up just to take my ciabatta order.”
“Ah, no, it was business – I just took on a job from the Earl of Auchenmyres, Alastair of the same name, his card says.”
“Auchenmyres? Where’s that?”
“Govan, it seems. Or it was. Thing is, somebody at your firm recommended me to him. You do work for him. Do you know who he is?”
“Never heard of him…..let me check with the database….just hold on while I do that…..here he is, Alastair Auchenmyres.…OK, click. Oh, shit, yes, I know who that is, didn’t know that was his family name. We do a lot of work for them, for the diocese.”
“What? Diocese?”
“Yes, Alastair Auchenmyres is the Catholic Bishop of Strathduie.”
*** *** ***
The Bishop answered his mobile on the first ring. “Something you forgot to ask, Mr McCabe?”
“Yes, I forget to ask what you did for a living, your line of work, you called it. I knew you from somewhere, I knew your face….and that face was sitting across the desk from me saying you didn’t think I was much of a detective because I couldn’t remember who you were.”
“No, it wasn’t that at all, Stevie. Maybe my face was saying I don’t think you’re much of a Catholic. But that’s not a sin, not as such.”
“So now I know – you’re the Bishop of Strathduie.”
“And now you also know why I’m not going to go to the police to tell them Andrew spent all night with me at Strathduie House, not unless I absolutely have to.”
Chapter 2 – Ciabatta By Any Other Name
I couldn’t get anywhere near that Italian deli Bernie had mentioned, because the police had blocked off Dumbarton Road, yellow tape across the street, but not for anything to do with a traffic accident. Worse, the buses were all being diverted back through god knew where to loop around the scene, which was right in the main road. I could still have walked to La Crolla, but it would have four long blocks, round and round and round again, to reach a shop I could see eighty feet away behind the tape.
“Excuse me,” I said to the big sergeant who was the loosely-appointed proprietor of the tape “can I just nip through for a second? I just need to get to La Crolla, see, just there?”
“Sorry, nobody can get across the scene, we’re sealing the area. But we’ll open the perimeter soon enough, it’s really just up the close we need to have secure.”
“What’s happened?”
“Crime scene, like the tape says, that’s all I can tell you. Listen, if you want to get to your shop, you can just go round the block…”
“I know, thanks. Maybe I’ll just wait in the Towers anyway.”
It wasn’t just the lure of the Three Towers, in itself, it was the knowledge that the buses were buggered, so as a consequence there would be an immediate drought of taxis in the heart of Glasgow’s west end, and the subway went nowhere near Bernie’s place, since those affluent avenues weren’t where anybody wanted to travel in 1896, the last time the subway was extended. Which is to say, never.
So what else could I do but rest a while with a pint of Lomond Gold, until the disruption subsided? I couldn’t get back in any case. I called Bernie and told her the news, but promised I would collect the ciabatta anyway.
“Some fuckin’ fuss up the road there,” muttered one the old guys who sat around the Towers making remarks like that one. I didn’t know his name.
“Aye, sure is – what’s the score, do you know?”
“Sumdy said they found a lassie’s body up the close there, just by the carpet shop, know? Real mess, that’s how come they’ve closed off the whole road. Probly a junkie, they said. Bad news, all of that.”
An hour later, when I left the Towers, the crime scene tape had indeed retreated to the point where the cordoned area had been reduced to the immediate pavement on either side of the tenement close-mouth where the body had apparently been found. The traffic was flowing freely and La Crolla’s enticing window display was now notable for the sign that read “closed”.
So, I was rolling back to Bernie’s house with my Morrison’s bag, complete with two Mediterranean-style loaves. After an hour or so in the Three Towers, buying an extra loaf seemed natural, if completely unnecessary. On the way home, the bus was delayed even further as it stutter-stepped round yet another police incident scene, this one in the city centre at West George Street. This time, only one lane was lost to the intrusion of police cars into the traffic flow, because the focus of attention was not on the street but on one of the wide alleys that led off it. Behind the lines of police tape, cars and officers, a white crime scene tent had been erected. Among the scatter of concerned faces padding around, I could make out the features of my old buddy, Detective Sergeant Paddy Haldane…oh, excuse me, nowadays that should be Detective Inspector…
West George Street ran into Blythswood Square, traditional centre of Glasgow’s red light district. William Hill’s would be offering short odds on the specific type of incident that had drawn what looked like a police murder enquiry team to that particular spot.
Jesus, mayhem was afoot in the old town tonight, and here was me, worried about having bread in the wrong bag and a little more of a personal cargo on board than was reasonable for so early in the evening. That was a perspective I wasn’t planning for – and it was a surprise, as it usually was.
*** *** ***
Bernie’s sister Angela was charming and she was also on time, unlike either Bernie or me. Still, we compensated with a quite reasonable saffron seafood linguini which I had made, although I don’t like seafood. That, and the fact that I also let Bernie take credit for cooking it made up, I felt, for the ciabatta-branding disaster.
Angela had brought the dessert, death by chocolate, although I have to report that no fatalities resulted.
Chapter 3 – Nothing Serious
I wondered whether I had time to clean up the office before I interviewed Andy Kyle again.
The office was no more of a mess than when the bishop/earl had left it the day before, but still much more of a mess than it had been, back in the misty-rimmed past, when Mrs Mac ran it. She ran it very effectively with minimum effort from me, kept it tidy, clean, well-organised and fully stocked.
The problem with my “minimum effort” was that she had also ransacked the petty cash for – I don’t know – probably years, and I never noticed. Nothing too stupid, nor too ambitious, just enough to keep her in Smirnoff and JPS Blacks, with enough over to boost the Christmas dividends of Joe Coral shareholders. The old besom had robbed me blind and I had been too dull-witted to notice.
“Oh, well,” I said when my new accountant, Manny Singh, eventually got me to investigate my own petty cash account, a money pit that my recently-retired former accountant had never noticed.
“Dear me, Mrs Mac”, I said when I confronted her, “you are a thieving old shitehawk. You’re bagged.”
Which – briefly and flatly – is why my former office administrator was taking me to an employment tribunal, claiming unfair dismissal. She claimed that her “extra payments” were implied conditions of her contract of employment, to which I had been a willing party. If this was not so, why did I not report her theft to the police? Mrs Mac, of course, was quite savvy enough to know exactly why a private investigator is never going to limp along to the pros, busted balance-sheet in hand, to complain that the pensioner who ran his office had thieved the kitty.
And, in turn, this was why my office was a mess and also why the morning’s post contained a letter from Mrs Mac’s legal representatives, Matzdorf-Gourlay-Allan, offering to settle for a year’s salary, plus their costs, generously offering not to press for punitive damages. My own legal counsel had so far proved a little less aggressive in pursuing my interests, despite the fact that I was sleeping with one of the company partners. And I couldn’t even complain to her about it, she told me, (although I did) because that was confusing the personal and professional. Which confusion, she further pointed out, I was very much in the habit of achieving.
I wish Bernie had told me that before I engaged her firm to represent me.
Thank Christ, I was now thinking, that the old witch had never managed to get a tune out of a computer. If she had been able to do that, I would be standing in the street in my Ys, wondering how I could have been defrauded by one of the grannies from the adverts in People’s Friend.
Nor, come to that, had she ever mastered a coffee pot, but at least I was able offer something more than tea to Andy and the Bishop when they arrived, promptly at 9, as I knew they would.
I wondered if Andy had spent last night at Strathduie House again. Either way, it looked like he still hadn’t engaged his brain any better than he had yesterday. He needed preparation, no question. If his habits of long silences interrupted by inappropriate remarks sounded strange to me, they would clang a lot louder to police detectives investigating the disappearance of a chief inspector’s daughter.
“Now, Andy, you won’t be under arrest, so it’s all going to be low key. You’ll be ‘helping them with their enquiries’, that’s all.”
“Like they say on TV.”
“Er, yeah, exactly, but this isn’t TV. Now, there’ll be one, probably two, coppers there, there will be me – if they wear that – and your solicitor from Hutchison Barclay Skivington – who is that, by the way?”
“Eh.…Alastair, who’s my lawyer?”
“Vincent Connarty. I know him from other work he’s done. Of course, it was his company who recommended we come to you for help, Stephen.”
“What does he do? He’s not some kind of property lawyer, is he? You need a criminal brief for this.”
“We’ll be fine. As you say, Stephen, Andrew is not under arrest.”
“OK – Andy, what we’re trying to do is establish how you should react to the things they are likely to ask, so just imagine I’m them…….what is your full name, address and age?”
“Andrew Alexander Kyle, 286B West Princes Street. I’m 22.”
“What do you do for a living?”
“I’m a postgraduate student, and I do some translation work, as well, freelance.”
“You live alone?”
“Yes, since my mum died. I inherited the flat from her, it’s all paid for. I like living there because -”
“Wait, hold on – no need to go telling them too much…..it’s not going to do you any good. You never know how something can spin off in the wrong direction. Now……what was your relationship to Rosemary Kilmartin?”
“Friends.”
“For how long?”
“Must have met her about a year ago, in the pub.
“Whoa, hold on, now. Stepping to one side, Andy, you said to me yesterday that you’d known Rosie before, years ago, I think you said. You went out then. Now you met her a year ago?”
“Same thing, really. Friend of a friend and that, you know?”
“Okay. Well, you need to say the same thing, be consistent. Who was the friend that you were a friend of?”
“Don’t really remember, it was more a kind of, you know, people milling about in the pub, late, we were both there. Nothing special, no reason to remember why we were there. We just were.”
“Do you remember which pub?”
“Probably The Oracle, we both go there a lot.”
“Would you say you were a couple?”
“No.”
“Just ‘no’? In the last year, did you out together, just the two of you? Frequently? Were you lovers?”
“We went out more and more, I s’pose. At first it was just ‘let’s have a drink sometime’ and then we went to a gig or two, then, you know…..”
“You were lovers?”
“Yeah, sometimes, but it was casual. She had to spend a lot of time in Edinburgh, because that’s where she was a student. She was only in Glasgow to do her research, so I only saw here when she was here.”
“You didn’t go to Edinburgh then?”
“Once. That was it. Her mother was kinda…..weird.”
“Travelling forty-four miles to meet somebody’s mother, most people would call that being a couple. I suggest you do the same. So, did you see other people when she wasn’t around?”
Andy Kyle was silent but not because he was being evasive; he’d just switched off and was looking out of the window.
“Andrew? You need to focus. Did you see other people when Rosie wasn’t around?”
“A bit. But that’s personal, I don’t see what it has to do with this.”
“Well, it’s the kind of thing that -”
“No. I don’t have anything else to say about that.”
“I’m not talking about Alastair, now, that’s not what I meant. OK, move on……how would you characterise your relationship with Rosemary – did you get on well?”
“We must’ve.”
“Well, did you fight, argue?”
“Everybody does, don’t they? But nothing serious. I mean, the whole thing wasn’t that serious in the first place, so we had nothing serious to argue about, do you see?”
“So why did she hit you the night she disappeared?”
“What? I….didn’t know she was going to disappear, did I? I don’t know. That’s nothing to do with anything.”
“You don’t know why she hit you? It must have been something pretty serious, she hit you in the face, in front of a load of people in The Oracle bar. I don’t think Rosie would do that for no reason, would she?”
“No, I know why she hit me, I meant about her disappearing. You were making it sound as if the two things were connected.”
“Well, are they?”
“I don’t know…..no, they’re not. She left The Oracle right afterwards and I haven’t seen her since.”
“You didn’t follow her out the door?”
“No, all the people who saw her hit me will also tell you that I sat down in the pub and had a laugh about it.”
“And later? Did you go to Rosemary’s flat, or somewhere else she might have been? To try and see her again?”
“No, I went somewhere else and spent the night. I can’t say where, that’s private, but it was somewhere else…..this is what I’m saying to the police, right? You know that I was actually at Strathduie House.”
“Yes, yes – is there anybody who can confirm where you were afterwards, where you spent the night?”
“Yes, but it’s private for them, too. They won’t come forward, not unless they absolutely have to. So that’s it.”
“Andy, what was the argument about? Why did Rosie Kilmartin hit you?”
“She said I was getting too interested in her research and it was starting to creep her out. I said, I said…….. I had been drinking, you know? So I said maybe that stuff actually was a wee bit more interesting than her own fucking life. Why was she doing that stuff for a PhD anyway?”
“What was her research about, Andy?”
“Prostitutes. Particularly why people murder them.”
*** *** *** ***
There had just been a train crash in my head. For a while now, there had been a muted buzz, growing in some media, about the number of women working the streets of Glasgow who were “missing”. I didn’t pay it that much attention – unless a family member came to me and asked me to find the missing woman, it was not of professional interest and, as a citizen, well……for the rest of us, life just goes on. And the buzz was muted, y’know?
And yesterday, a female junkie had been found dead on a stairwell, I knew that for a fact because I had seen the police tape with my own eyes. Was she more than just a junkie? And if the incident that had drawn Paddy Haldane’s scene-of-crime people to an alleyway in the guts of the city’s red-light district was anything other than an assault, or worse, on a working girl, then rain would be falling upwards.
Now, Andy Kyle had just told me that his kind-of girlfriend had just gone kind-of missing in the middle of her research into why sex workers are murdered – no kind-of about the last bit.
And he had said it as casually as if he was ordering a Big Mac.
“Andy, we need to talk about that some more. This could be a real complication. We have to get down to Stewart Street now, but how about I come round to your place this afternoon?”
“Sure, we can do that later, but first we have to play dumb to the busies, eh?”
Andy Kyle was grinning broadly as he said that and there was real amusement in his eyes. Not good, not good at all.
Chapter 4 – Indoor Sanitation
Detective Inspector Paddy Haldane was not being helpful this wet Wednesday morning. Several people were looming around in an interview suite at Stewart Street, location of what I still thought of as Strathclyde Police’s C division, but what nowadays bore a more user-friendly name like Castle Cuddly. One of the miller-abouters was me, one was Andy Kyle and the rest, I assumed, were police officers. Paddy Haldane certainly was and he was letting us all know about it.
“I don’t think we’ll be needing Mr McCabe’s presence today. This is just an informal interview, more a chat kinna thing, really.”
“Oh, go on, DI Haldane, let me hang around…think of it as a wee concession. If it’s just a wee chat, after all...and anyway Paddy, I saw your face last night in West George Street, up some alley. What’s the score on that?”
“You’re wandering well over the line, Mister McCabe……and I think Mr Kyle will be fine with just his solicitor riding shotgun. Is he here yet? We don’t need any other detectives here, certainly not you, Stevie.”
“If I could introduce myself, DI Haldane? My name is Vincent Connarty and I actually am Mr Kyle’s solicitor, so I can speak on his behalf to attest that, if this interview is all that informal, well…..we can either have whoever we wish present, or we can elect not to bother with it at all, and come back at such a time as you wish to make proceedings more…..formal. It’s up to you, Detective Inspector, but either Stephen McCabe gets to sit in, or we take our bats home.”
That, from a huge side of beef that I naturally assumed had to be the proverbial “big sergeant” that every interview room has fitted en-suite.
“Fair enough, Mr Connarty. I see your point, if that’s how you want it to go. I think we can err on the casual side for now. Can we get started?”
Haldane made a show of sending for an extra chair, after having sat down himself first, so I was still standing upright as he switched on the recording equipment, dating the interview and introducing himself and his police colleague, a gentleman named Sergeant Gary Wallace, who – as it happened - was about half the size of Andy Kyle’s lawyer. A new breakthrough in modern police personnel and tactics – the “wee sergeant”.
You can’t hold back progress.
Connarty, Andy and myself had barely spoken our names into the interview microphone before the door edged open and a uniformed police woman signalled to Paddy Haldane with a twitch of the eyebrows.
He scuffed his chair back and went to the door. In the silence, suddenly starting to hum with possibility, I could hear Haldane grunt interrogatively, the police woman answer with a statement that included the phrase “another body”, Haldane ask “what?” and the police woman repeat “they’ve found another body”. Haldane shut the door and returned to the table.
“We believe we have found the body of Rosemary Kilmartin,” he said.
“Interview terminated at 10.34am”.
And everybody piled out in an inconclusive shambles.
I made a note to dig up Paddy about the laboured pantomime he had just performed when I saw him later that night, but in the short-term, the theatrics let me get back to the office to deal with the quotidian joys of not having an office assistant. Andrew Kyle and the bishop, who had been waiting outside, went away with Vincent Connarty, because for some reason the solicitor felt that professional legal advice might do them more good than my sketches of the law on a beermat.
*** *** ***
Today’s post consisted entirely of junk mail, not even a bill to get my attention. My email bing-bong told me that my old friend Barrister Turaki Bello was again reporting a lottery win – had to be around my 200th –- from the sun-dappled shores of Cote d’Ivoire, while Diplomat Henry Mfengwe was keen that I shouldn’t tell anybody about the $30,000,000 US dollars he had discovered in the account of his country’s former president. Nobody had noticed this sum of money lying around (seemingly, it was in big bundles of cash) and Henry was going to fire half of it my way, so long as I kept the transaction confidential. So I haven’t told a soul, until now.
The other emails were unremarkable, as they always were, professionally speaking. My business still works through phone calls and knocks on the door – people were never going to want to dash off a quick email to a detective – “excuse me, would you mind having a quick swatch to see whether my husband is nipping that wee cow from the bookies?”
No, personal stuff still remained….personal.
I called the answering service that had replaced Mrs Mac – I had a mobile, sure, that existing clients could use, but new callers got the switchboard at a business centre, with a wee sticker on each tiny panel, emblazoned with the names of dozens of companies, to tell the telephone receptionist which company they were being in that instant. That worked better for me than my office voice-mail, sounding like I was being strangled inside a crisp-poke.
“McCabe Investigations, can I help you?”
“’morning Joanna, this is Stevie McCabe, access code G-5-2. Any messages for me?”
“Hello, Mr McCabe, let me see…..four. An Elspeth Anderson at Hutchison Barclay Skivington, about a tribunal?….”
“That’s my lawyer, what did she say? Did she say the other side were offering to settle for a year’s wages?”
“Yes, plus legal costs, she said, and can you call her back?”
“Thank you, I’ll call her – next?”
“Safeguard Insurance….”
“Bin that.”
“Fiona Sutherland, she said you would know what that was about and could you call her with any updates.”
“OK, thanks, will do….and have you saved the best for last?”
“I wish I knew – Iris Keenan? Would that be the best?”
“Never heard of her – did she leave a number?”
“Just a landline – 427-4997. Sounded like a hard ticket. That’s everything.”
I thanked Joanne and looked at the thin harvest. Iris Keenan had a Govan number, just like I would have had as a kid, if we had a phone, but we didn’t. But there isn’t a Hovis commercial coming up next – we didn’t have a phone because Mrs Spencer across the landing had one, and that was plenty for our close, and who would have been phoning us anyway? It wasn’t that we couldn’t have afforded one. We had an indoor toilet and everything.
Still, I didn’t think that either this unknown “hard ticket” or the eccentric Ms Sutherland demanded my immediate, or even imminent, attention. Andrew Kyle was bothering me much more.
Chapter 5 – A Lesson in the Appropriate Use of Tense
It was walking an old road for me, going to see Andy Kyle in West Princes Street. Once upon a distant past, I lived in Park Road for a year, right at the end of that street, surrounded by beer and curry and liking those odds. Andy’s flat was only one block from Park Road and the temptations of The Doublet; walking that block made me feel younger and wiser at the same time. Nice combination.
He lived on the second floor, a peculiar location for a flat numbered B and it occurred to me that the street was an altogether strange place for his late mother to have been living. Not that I knew her, but she would have been the only person living in the block over 30 years of age, who wasn’t the gentlemanly dope supplier for the ones under 30. All very genteel, I’m sure; the neighbours were probably lab technicians in the university, just up the hill, in their day jobs, but still. I couldn’t see the former Mrs Kyle spending much time here.
Which – all of it – was why I wanted to meet Andy in his own habitat. Some – a lot – of what he was broadcasting rang wrong to me and I wanted see what else he would fetch up, given the chance.
I piled right in, just as soon as he had furnished me with a peely-wally mug of alleged tea.
“How did your mum like living here?”
“Oh, she didn’t live here, she just, you know, owned the flat and rented it out.”
“Right. Rented it to students?”
“That’s it. It’s just down the hill from the university…well, you know that. When, last year and that……. When she died, I just let the last lot of students run to the end of the tenancy and then I moved in.”
“So it’s handy for you, too? Your post-graduate work is at GU?”
“Aye, five minute walk and I’m there. Do you know the university well?”
“Well? I spent some time there, many years ago, so I know it well enough.”
“Really? – what were you studying? Something like law or criminology, I bet.”
“You’d lose – it was history and philosophy.”
“I’d never have guessed – still, wait a minute, thinking about it……..that’s what you do now, isn’t it? What’s right and wrong, that’s philosophy and looking at what’s happened - history?”
“I never thought about it that way, Andy. Because…well, because that’s a load of old shite. But thanks for the glamour. You said you did some part-time translation and I’m looking at the books on your shelves and I’m guessing that’s in Russian?”
“Slavonic Studies is my department, that’s mainly Russian, but I can get by in Czech and Polish, too.”
“Did Rosie ever ask you to translate?”
“What? Eh….”
“For her research? Some of the girls out on the street there, they must be from eastern Europe. People trafficking is big business. If Rosie’s doing research into prostitution, then she’s going to want to hear those stories, no?”
“Ah….no, she never did ask me. Never occurred to her, I suppose.”
“Huh. I’d’a thought that she was missin’ something there.”
“Missing a trick, ha? That’s a wee pun, there. I dunno, s’pose they can speak English anyway. Impression I got from Rosie was that the women on the street were locals, not foreigners.”
“Maybe….but anyway, what did you think about Rosie’s research?”
“Interesting enough, I s’pose. I mean, that’s what we had an argument about, but it’s not my field, it didn’t get my full attention. It was just…interesting.”
“Did you approve of it? Or did you think there was something weird about it?”
“It’s not a question of approving, it was just research, just a subject. It never occurred to me to have a ‘moral’ view of it – that’s more something for you philosophers. Like I say, it was just interesting.”
“OK. Now…….we have to try and show that you had nothing to do with her disappearance, and the best way to do that is to identify somebody else that might have been involved somehow. Is there anything she mentioned, any incidents, any people she met, anything that you think could be connected to her…gettin’ into some kind of trouble?”
“No, not specifically……but, look, in one way everybody she met was dangerous. It’s wild out there. Every time she went out doing interviews, she came back with tales…”
“Anybody in particular she mentioned? Places, events?”
“As I said, not particularly. It was all ‘this scary guy’, or ‘this really fucked-up girl’, that kind of stuff. Just background noise.”
“Did she always go out there alone?”
“No, er, I dunno. Maybe somebody from her department went sometimes? Don’t know….I’m thinking…..nobody that I can recall. She liked her research to belong to her, I think, nobody else. I never went with her, though, I mean I offered, to make her feel safer, but she always said no.”
“And her department would be Sociology, right? Is it Edinburgh University itself or one of the other ones there? Edinburgh? Okay…..now, on the last night you saw Rosie, did she contact you at all after she left the bar? Any calls, texts?”
“Nothing. I never saw her again….I mean, I haven’t seen her since. What does that mean, when I start talking about her in the past tense?”
“In a movie, it means you killed her. Big brass riff – dan-dan-dan!”
“What the fuck -”
“In real life, it just means that you’ve moved on, mentally. Everybody does it, at some point. It’s over-rated as a detective tool.”
“Oh, right. Well, anyway, after she walked out, that was it.”
“And how are you feeling about that?”
“Pretty neutral – ah, not neutral, really, more blank. ‘Neutral’ sounds like I’m OK with it, it’s not that, it’s just that I’m kind of empty. Or maybe I am OK with it. Dunno. How does that make me look?”
“It’s not great. But it’s pretty common, too. The police know that, so it’s not doing you any harm. They also know about the past tense thing.”
“I don’t want to seem cold…..it’s not that I don’t care…”
“I know. She wasn’t that much of a girlfriend in your mind. And on top of that, the police are investigating you for her disappearance. Why are they so keen to do that, Andy?”
“I’m the last one saw her, and we were having a fight at the time. People saw that, jump to conclusions. I suppose they don’t have anybody else yet, so I’m the best chance they’ve got for a result.”
“But the witnesses that saw the fight also saw you sit back down and stay in the pub. You said that to me. Is there some other reason the police like you for this?”
“None that I can think of…listen, I have to get up to the uni, is there anything else we should talk about now?”
There wasn’t, so I took my leave. But when I left his flat, I didn’t go any further than the next corner, where I sat on a low sandstone wall, thankful that the metal railings that had once made it an impossible seating prospect had been scythed down to nubbins, all to provide steel for the benefit of the war effort in 1940. The Luftwaffe – it’s an ill wind…..
From my relatively comfortable position, I could easily see that Andy Kyle did not leave his residence at any point in the next hour, so it was obvious that he actually had no need to “get up to the uni” at all.
And why was it that……how did the bishop put it, that “Andrew had reason not to trust the police”? And yet he blandly denied there was any reason the police might be rattling his cage over Rosie’s disappearance. He must even have known that anything truly hooky would sit up and wave to me in less than two minutes and then the bishop’s vapid excuse would evanesce into nowhere.
Didn’t it occur to him, or didn’t he care?
Oh, Andy, I’m starting to get a pain behind the eyes with all your wee tales and kiddy-ons.
Where is this heading?
Chapter 6 – Not Accommodating
Getting lazy, I phoned the Sociology department at Edinburgh University and asked for Rosie Kilmartin’s director of studies. They told me that they were making no comment.
I rang back and explained that I was actually investigating her disappearance and they told me they were not accommodating media requests.
I rang a third time, explaining that I was acting on behalf of her family and got put through to Professor something Wallace, whose first name I didn’t catch. The ‘Professor” was very clear, though. I guess spending your days addressing kids who were pining for their mammies gave you a certain clarity.
“I take it you’re not the police, because you didn’t give me a rank?”
“No, I’m private. I just wanted to -”
“Well, I’ll tell you what I would have told them anyway – that we’ve already given all the information to the investigating officer and we’ve nothing more to add. And if you’re media, then you can just -”
“Only need to ask one question – literally one.”
“Go ahead.”
“When Rosie went out on the streets gathering her research, did anyone go with her?”
“I’ve no idea. I’d have to speak to her supervisor of studies. They might know, they might not. It’s not really germane to the research, as such. Can I get you on this number, if there’s anything to tell you?”
I was about to ask the professor whether (surely) a research student’s methods were relevant to their work, but I never go to hear his rebuttal because he was gone. He had (maybe) noted my number and that was his top offer of the day.
I gave up on that one.
Chapter 7 – All Aboard the Offended Bus
“It was a fuckin’ cheap shot, Paddy.”
“My arse, and you can step right off the offended bus at the next stop. Nobody’s liking your act.”
“Seriously, Paddy. You’re at it. We’re just in the pub now, just you and me and your wee sergeant isn’t here to impress, so you can bag the attitude.”
“Right – how do you make out that I’m at it?”
“OK, it’s right at the start of the interview, you might have waited until the end for a bit more dramatic effect, but you got over-excited, so right at the start’s gonny do just as well for you. Your WPC walks in and wags her head like Noddy, you might have had her go “psssst”, as well, to put the tin hat on it….then you go and talk to her right at the door, you don’t even leave the room to go into the corridor and then, and then you get her to say it twice, just in case we missed it the first time, which by the way I nearly did…‘they’ve found another body’. Christ, Paddy, you might as well have done it in crayons right across the wall. Not subtle, my friend. You’re at it.”
“We wanted to see how Andrew Kyle would react when he heard the news.”
“When he heard the made-up shite, you mean.”
“We thought the body might have been Rosie Kilmartin’s.”
“But it wasn’t. And you never thought it was, for a minute, I guarantee you that and all. Same again, by the way, the JHB?”
“Aye, sure. Canny see by those Oakham beers this weather.”
“Aye, I’ve noticed – and what did it tell you, how Andy Kyle reacted?”
“Well, he hardly wobbled an eyelid, so that tells me we’ve either got somebody with no emotions at all, or somebody who knew it wasn’t her body, because he knows where the body really is, and he knew we weren’t going to find it this morning in the Clyde at Dalmarnock. Either way, I don’t fancy your job holding his hand. And you’ve not told me how come Stevie McCabe ever got roped in to this kind of caper in the first place.”
“A friend of the family is paying for me. He has a very good reason to think that Kyle had nothing to do with Rosie’s disappearance and I believe him. Kyle’s not somebody you’re going to invite to your next party, borderline weirdo, OK, but he didn’t harm Rosie.”
“That’s all I’m getting?”
“That’s all I can tell you, Paddy. Listen, I don’t think we’re necessarily on different sides in this thing, but right now I need to be thinkin’ about my client’s interests and they’re not best served by letting Glasgow’s finest dance over his private life in their size 12s.”
“Two-way street, a’course, Stevie”
“Aye, ’course it is.”
“You do know what Rosie Kilmartin was doing research into, don’t you?”
“More or less.”
“Well, the title of her dissertation was Causes and Effects of the Glasgow Prostitute Murders.”
“I don’t like the use of the ‘the’ there – what murders are these? When? It sounds like we’d all know what she meant, but I don’t.”
“Like I say, two way street.”
“Aw, Paddy, I saw you doing the whit-me shuffle up in West George Street last night, come to fuck…….What’s happenin’? Are bodies dropping?”
“Seriously, Stevie, until one of us tells the other one something we don’t know, this is goin’ nowhere. Pint?”
“Well, what you’re telling me….by not telling me….is that there’s more women gone missin’ than Rosie Kilmartin. And sure – I’ll try something different this time………there, Bitter & Twisted, #8.”
“I get the message, but what I don’t get is how you think I seem to owe you something.”
“Well, Paddy, would you not concede that I did contribute a wee something to you being Inspector Haldane these days?”
“My arse, again. You left a big fuckin’ mess and if I came along to hose it down with bleach, well good for me.”
“For real? You don’t think that your….what is it you get for being an inspector, is it stripes, pips, I can never remember….see, I never got beyond being a constable myself….you don’t think maybe one of your pips or stripes or something has got my prints on it? Not takin’ all the credit, just the one pip, is all I’m claiming.”
“See, Stevie, if you’d dealt us that Kurdish guy straight instead of just riding shotgun for the fucker, I might agree. Otherwise…”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about – and, aye, eh...did you ever get him, by the way, that guy?”
“Away and shite in a poke, Stevie.”
“OK, call it a draw….all I can tell you Paddy, is that the reason I think Andy Kyle had nothing to do with this is that I’ve met his alibi and I believe him.”
“That would be the same ‘friend of the family’? Why doesn’t he just bowl up and tell us the news? What’s his problem?”
“He’s gay and he spent the night with Kyle.”
“Naw, not havin’ that. That’s no reason, not today. Anything better for me?”
“He’s got reasons for keeping it quiet. He’ll go public if he has to, but he doesn’t think we’re anywhere near that yet. I think he’s right about that. It’s somethin’ he really doesn’t want to do and he doesn’t need to, so he won’t. But all I can comfort you with is that he will, if needs must. That shows you he’s trying to keep it clean. Shows you good will.”
“Whit? Is he somebody famous, for Christ’s sake? TV star? Plays for Rangers? A polis?...tell me he’s no’ a polis, Stevie. Tell me that much.”
“Why? I could name you plenty gay coppers, you could name me a lot more.”
“I don’t give a fuck about that. What I don’t like is the idea that polis are involved in this kind of crime. It makes us all feel sick….plus which, once you think the guy’s inside the tent, you have to start second-guessing everythin’. What if your gaffer’s the one? Like that. Tell me, tell me now, if this alibi is a police officer.”
“OK, I’ll give you that. I can tell you he’s definitely not a copper. Anything else, no comment. And quid pro quo, Paddy – why are you so interested in this disappearance? You’re all treatin’ it like a murder. Like, maybe, it’s not the only murder you have in mind, either.”
“Well, her father is a police chief inspector.”
“That it? Maybe it’s only natural, but that doesn’t sound like the best use of resources to me. And don’t forget, cuz I saw you last night…..”
“Keep your hat on. You must know that Rosemary never made it back to her flat, flatmate said she had stuff she was going to do the next day, out of character, blah-di-blah. This was all in the papers.”
“I know. What wasn’t in the papers?”
“Here’s your quid pro quo – she took a taxi from the Oracle Bar, she was seen gettin’ into it; we got the driver and his log confirms that he dropped her on the corner of Douglas Street and St Vincent Street.”
“Christ, right in the middle of the combat zone. On a Friday night. So the driver’s actually the last one to see her?…”
“No go on that. He picked up another fare on Argyle Street right after he dropped her off and he kept on going for another couple of hours. His logs are kosher, watertight.”
“What’s the chances somethin’ strange but non-lethal happened to Rosemary Kilmartin?”
“Stevie…….this is your last dunt – we’ve got her phone. It was dumped on the verge out by Duntocher, right by the main road. Somebody had fired it out of a moving vehicle, had to be. It’s dual carriageway there, no pedestrians. Eight miles from the last place she was seen, and Rosie Kilmartin’s own car’s in Edinburgh.”
“Shit. Let me guess: it was wiped clean and she hadn’t made any calls or sent any texts since she left the Oracle Bar.”
“Check.”
“And where the phone was found was nowhere near any CCTV cameras…you’re going through tapes from the nearest one but it’s a busy main road and there’s hundreds of cars on there and anyway you don’t really know what you’re lookin’ for.”
“Check again – it’s almost like you’ve done this kinna thing before.”
“Thanks for the heads-up, Paddy. And I hear what you’re not tellin’ me as well, but what I still don’t follow is why you like Andy Kyle for it.”
“No sale – you’ve had your full quota from me.”
“Aye, but….all you got is some stupid barney in a pub, and you know he sat on his arse right after, loads of folk saw him. He wasn’t even the last one to see her, now you tell me. Fucksake, Paddy, that’s thin. And he’s got no form.”
“Ho, is that what he told you? Well then, you can have this one for free – when he was 17 or so, Andy Kyle got lifted for flashing his tackle at passing women in the wee park around the banks of the Kelvin, up there by Queen Margaret Drive? Y’know, up past the botanic gardens there?”
“Embarrassing, is all.”
“Four times?”
“OK, very embarrassing then.”
“But there were other women, too, same area, same general offence. Some of them couldn’t identify the guy, because he took to wearing a ski-mask. He stabbed one of them, not a serious injury but, call me a liar, any fucker taking a blade to a woman while he’s got a ski-mask on is plenty serious enough, right? And you wonder why we’re lookin’ at him hard?”
“And the attacks stopped when?”
“We lifted him and he got bound over to keep the peace for the four offences he admitted. We never got anybody for the ski-mask stuff, or the stabbing, but the attacks stopped after we lifted him. Now, I’m wondering why your client never told you this at all – are you?”
“Well, you got my attention, and I’ll be asking him tomorrow, but right now, I’m thinkin’ I owe you one.”
“Fuckin’ right you do. And a beer as well.”
The beer would have to wait, because tonight I needed to be in a pub other than the Three Towers, and quickly, too.
Chapter 8 – There Were These Two Drumlins, Right?
Tommy McCafferty was an old friend and I suppose one of the things you expect from friends is, well, consistency. And Tommy had let me down.
After a lifetime of being a single man, Tommy had acquired a girlfriend and that was as unexpected as it was unwelcome. Or vice versa.
Now, I’m not a caveman. Maybe I’m not any kind of real man at all. I don’t subscribe to Traditional Gentleman’s Monthly Digest of Permissible Activities, I cook my food before I eat it, I change my clothes without a court order, I hate golf, I can tell a lapdance from a laptop, I’ll never ask you “what’re you’re driving these days?”, and I could even pick out the colour taupe from an identity parade. So, I won’t bemoan the loss of Tommy’s opinion on Tiger’s short game, or the occasional burst of leering about tits that was really surprising from a fully-subscribed member of the Labour party’s new man set – not for public consumption, that, is it, Tommy?….or should that be Councillor McCafferty?