The Quaker Read online

  Copyright

  This is entirely a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, real events, businesses, organizations and localities are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. All names, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.

  HarperCollinsPublishers

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

  1

  Copyright © Liam McIlvanney 2018

  Liam McIlvanney asserts the moral right to

  be identified as the author of this work

  Cover layout design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

  Cover photography © plainpicture / Johner / Pontus Johansson (front);

  Robin Vandenabeele / Arcangel Images (back); Alison Martin (front flap).

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

  Ebook Edition © JUNE 2018 ISBN: 9780008259938

  SOURCE ISBN: 9780008259914

  Version: 2018-05-21

  Dedication

  For Caleb

  Surely, he walks among us unrecognized:

  Some barber, store clerk, delivery man …

  Charles Simic, ‘Master of Disguises’

  The houses are all gone under the sea.

  The dancers are all gone under the hill.

  T. S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part I: Men and Bits of Paper

  Prologue

  Jacquilyn Keevins

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Ann Ogilvie

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Marion Mercer

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part II: The Bloody Flesh

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Part III: The Sea Is All About Us

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Part IV: The Door We Never Opened

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Liam McIlvanney

  About the Publisher

  I

  MEN AND BITS OF PAPER

  ‘We are suffering from a plethora of surmise, conjecture, and hypothesis.’

  Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘Silver Blaze’

  Prologue

  That winter, posters of a smart, fair-haired young man smirked out from bus stops and newsagents’ doors across the city. The same face looked down from the corkboards of doctors’ waiting rooms and the glass display cases in the public libraries. Everyone had their own ideas about the owner of the face. Rumours buzzed like static. The Quaker worked as a storeman at Bilsland’s Bakery. He was a fitter with the Gas Board, a welder at Fairfield’s. The Quaker waited tables at the old Bay Horse.

  Some said he was a Yank from the submarines at the Holy Loch. Others said he was a Russian from off the Klondykers. He was a city councillor. The leader-aff of the Milton Tongs. A parish priest. He had worked with multiple murderer Peter Manuel on the railways. He was Manuel’s half-brother, Manuel’s cellmate, he’d helped Manuel abscond from Borstal in Coventry or Southport or Beverley or Hull. There were Quaker jokes, told in low voices in work-break card-schools and the snugs of pubs. The word was magic-markered on bus shelters, sprayed on the walls of derelict tenements. It rippled through the swaying crowds on the slopes of Ibrox and Celtic Park. QUAKER 3, POLIS 0. His name crept into the street-rhymes of children, the chanted stanzas of lassies skipping ropes or bouncing tennis balls on tenement gables.

  And always there was the poster: IF YOU SEE HIM PHONE THE POLICE. The poster looked like someone you knew, like a word on the tip of your tongue. If you looked long enough, if you half-closed your eyes, then the artist’s impression with the slick side-parting would resolve itself into the face of your milkman, your sister’s ex-boyfriend, the man who wrapped your fish supper in the Blue Bird Café.

  The face was clean-cut, the features delicate, almost pretty. To some of the city’s older residents he looked like a throwback to a stricter, more disciplined age. A well-turned-out young man. Not like the layabouts and cornerboys who lounged on the back seats of buses, flicking their hair like daft lassies, tugging at their goatee beards.

  Jacquilyn Keevins, the first victim, was killed on 13 May 1968. Strangled with her tights. Left in a back lane in Battlefield.

  The Ballroom Butcher. The Dance Hall Don Juan with a Taste for Murder. The Quaker was something to talk about when you got tired of talking about football or the weather. That year of 1968, the worst winter in memory set in just after Halloween. On the first day of November a storm battered the city, shouldering down through the banks of tenements, scattering slates and smacking down chimney stacks.

  On 2 November, Ann Ogilvie went out to the dancing at the Barrowland Ballroom and failed to come home. She was found two days later in a derelict tenement in Bridgeton.

  On through Bonfire Night and St Andrew’s Day the weather stayed bad. The football card was clogged with postponements, unplayed fixtures piling up. The posters on gable ends, where the Quaker’s face had been pasted in threes as though he were a candidate for office, were pulped and defaced by the pelting sleet.

  All winter, people wrote to DCI George Cochrane and the Quaker Squad at the Marine Police Station in Anderson Street. The letters waited on Cochrane’s desk each morning. People wrote to denounce their friends and neighbours, relatives, enemies. The Quaker’s names were Highland, Lowland, Irish, Italian. Sometimes the writer was anonymous, sometimes the letters were signed. As December wore on, the missives came in the form of Christmas cards, festive scenes of horse-drawn carriages and starlit stables bearing the names of evildoers in righteous capitals. A team of detectives followed these up, chasing the names across the map of the city
.

  The city itself was changing, its map revised by the wrecking balls. Slum clearance. Redevelopment. Whole neighbourhoods lost as the buildings came down. Streets cleared. Families dispersed. Some went to the big new schemes on the edge of the city but most of them left. They lit out for the coastal new towns or further afield, to Canada, the States, they took ship as Ten Pound Poms for Adelaide and Wellington. New lives in sunny elsewheres, the grime of the tenements left behind.

  For those who stayed, it was the winter of the Quaker. There was no escape from the blond side-parting and the crooked smile. Like a slew of frozen mirrors, the posters threw back to the city its half-familiar face. Men with short fair hair, men with overlapping teeth, men with the thin slightly sensuous lips of the artist’s impression would find themselves scrutinized in pubs and restaurants, underground carriages. Glancing up from the Evening Times as the bus took a bump they’d catch the fierce, unguarded stares of their fellow citizens. Whispers rasped around them, neighbours monitored their movements. Cards were issued by the Chief Constable to men who matched the wanted man’s description: The holder of this card is certified as not being the Quaker.

  Another big storm hit the city on 25 January. Burns Night. The morning after the storm was when number three was found, torn and sprawled in a Scotstoun backcourt, like something ransacked by the wind. Marion Mercer’s unwitting smile joined those of Jacquilyn Keevins and Ann Ogilvie on the splashes of the Record, the Tribune, the Daily Express.

  Jacquilyn Keevins. Ann Ogilvie. Marion Mercer.

  And then, in the weeks since Marion Mercer, nothing. The murders that had gripped a city stopped. The days ticked past, the weeks turned into months. With the warmer weather it was hard to keep the killings in mind, that wintry horror. The frenzy ebbed. The air began to clear. Suddenly it was six months since the Quaker’s last killing. The prospect that he might strike again was like the memory of last year’s snow: you couldn’t picture it. There were queues once more outside the dance halls. Bouncers rocked on their heels outside the Plaza and the Albert. Women stood in line for the coat-check in the Barrowland and the Majestic. Blue-tuxedo’d band-leaders cracked jokes about the Quaker before leaning in to the mic for the next slow ballad. The university cancelled its night-bus service for female students. The city was moving on, looking out. News items from the wider world – riots in Belfast, the Kennedy bother at Chappaquiddick, One Small Step for Man – displaced the local stories in the Tribune and the Record. A new decade was coming, new money, new buildings going up along the central streets, citadels of glass and steel. Dead, imprisoned for another crime, or living somewhere else, the Quaker was fading from the city’s sense of itself, dwindling to a whisper, a half-forgotten melody.

  Only the shirtsleeved men in the Murder Room at the Marine Police Station in Partick kept at their task. In a fourteen-by-ten upstairs room, they stalked the Quaker through box files of witness statements. For months these men had been trying to piece it together, searching for motive and meaning in rubbled backcourts. Three endings. Three bodies. Crumpled and sprawled, dumped like rubbish. I thought it was a mannequin, a tailor’s dummy. It looked like a bundle of rags. An old coat or blanket. No one ever thinks that it’s a body. A woman. Someone with a book half-read, a favourite song, bitter secrets, a patch of eczema behind her ear.

  Then the newspapers started to turn. Detectives who had been the subject of reverent profiles – George Cochrane pictured in his mackintosh and trilby, gripping his pipe like a Clydeside Sherlock; Chief Constable Arthur Lennox in his pristine blues, flanked by a portrait of the queen – found themselves discussed with scoffing brusqueness. An element of black humour crept into the coverage. The papers had fun with the notion of CID men brushing up their dance moves as they mingled with the punters at the Barrowland Ballroom. In July, the Tribune ran an old photo of the Quaker Squad detectives at the scene of Jacquilyn Keevins’s murder, walking three-abreast down Carmichael Lane, looking for clues. The picture had a caption: Romeo, Foxtrot, Tango: The Marine Formation Dance Team.

  Jacquilyn Keevins

  Everyone thinks that I changed my mind and that was what got me killed. Shaking their heads at my folly or at the capriciousness of fate. As though changing your mind was so terrible. As though I should have known better. But I didn’t change my mind. I told Mum and Dad that I was going to the Majestic – they were right about that – but that was never the plan. I was going to the Barrowland all along.

  I was going to the Barrowland because I was meeting a man.

  The shoes that I’d bought in Frasers the previous Saturday were pinching my toes as I walked down the hill to the bus. I was wearing an emerald green crepe dress I’d just re-hemmed. The dress was sleeveless and my arms felt cool against the satin lining of my coat. I was conscious of my perfume – Rive Gauche – filling the lower deck of the bus and I remember noticing that the conductress had a ladder in her tights, all the way down the inside of her left leg, and thinking that she ought to have a spare pair in her bag.

  Why did I lie to my parents? I’m not sure. I think it was to make it more complete. The secret, I mean. The man I was meeting was called William. He was tall, with good hair he was forever running a hand through, and strong slim forearms under folded sleeves. I hadn’t known him long. There was something distant about him, something reserved. I wondered if maybe he’d turn out to be married but I didn’t care. It had been a long time since someone had asked me out. The boy was the problem. Wee Alasdair. Just turned six. It puts them off, a kid does.

  I got off the bus at Glasgow Cross and walked up the Gallowgate to the Barrowland and joined the queue under the green-and-red neon. Once I’d checked my coat in the foyer I climbed the stairs to the ballroom. That’s the bit I loved, climbing towards everything, the music suddenly loud and the dancers whirling into view. I hurried the last few steps and the ballroom gulped me in. I felt safe there, secret, in the darkness and the lights.

  I bought a bitter lemon at the bar and took a seat at a table so that people knew I was waiting for someone.

  I lit a cigarette and looked at my watch. William was already fifteen minutes late. Benny Hamlin and the Hi-Hats played ‘Boom Bang-a-Bang’ and I was cross because I always liked to dance to that. I lit another cigarette, watched the smoke drift up towards the shooting stars on the ceiling.

  By half-past nine I knew he wasn’t coming. My bitter lemon was finished and I’d smoked all but two of my cigarettes. I remember how angry I felt, close to tears, not because he’d stood me up but because everything was spoiled, the night and the dress and the music and everything. I was sorting my lipstick and getting ready to leave when a shadow fell on my handbag and stayed there. When I turned and looked up, there he was. The lights from the stage were behind him and I couldn’t really see his face. I’d forgotten how tall he was, how well-spoken.

  ‘I’m so sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘May I still join you?’

  That’s how he spoke. He offered me a cigarette and lit it with a nice gold lighter but he didn’t take one himself. He didn’t smoke, just carried a pack for occasions like this.

  He bought me another bitter lemon and got another pack of Embassy Filter from the vending machine and draped his raincoat over a vacant chair. He had a nice woollen scarf that he folded and placed on the chair beside him. He was really good looking with his sharp jaw and his straight nose and his short fair hair in a neat side shed. He wore a regimental tie and a brown chalkstripe suit. Stylish. I couldn’t stop grinning, leaning in to get my cigarette lit, resting my hand on his hand as he held the flame.

  The music was loud so it was a struggle to talk but he asked me about my day and he spoke about his job. I wasn’t really listening so much as just enjoying his voice, Glasgow but sort of refined, not like your typical city neds, whining out of the sides of their mouths like someone letting air out of a balloon. He was different altogether. A lot of the guys you’d see in the Barrowland were hard men, or thought they were, always spoi
ling for a fight. I’d see them in the Vickie on my night shift, carting their sore faces into A&E. I want to say that they didn’t look so clever right then, with their faces gaping open, but the truth is they looked every bit as clever – or every bit as dumb – sitting there with their shirts drenched in blood, pleased as punch, already working out how they’d tell it to their mates. William was different, he seemed older, more sophisticated, somebody who knew things. Good dancer, too.

  We left at half-eleven and walked down the Gallowgate to where he’d parked his car. Outside in the streetlights he looked younger than he had in the ballroom. He was twenty-five, maybe twenty-six, though he acted a little older than he was. Even so, I was older by five or six years and I liked it, it made me feel more in control.

  His car was a sleek white affair, quite new-looking. He held the passenger door for me while I settled myself in the red leather seat, then he closed the door before walking round to the driver’s side. I leaned against him when the car turned a corner and looked up into his face but he stared straight ahead and kept his hands to himself. He was talking away about decimalization with this earnest look on his face and when the car stopped at a red light I started poking him in the ribs, trying to get him to laugh if nothing else. It was nice he was such a gentleman but he needed to relax a bit. Nothing was going to happen anyway – it was my time of the month – but you’d want some fun from a night at the jiggin.