Flesh Wounds (17 page)

There was something else going on too, something deeper and more personal. The very calm he had remarked upon earlier had dissipated as soon as Fallan entered the equation.

Even before that, there was something unsettling about the boss’s coolness at the scene, her lack of any compassion for the deceased. Fair enough, nobody was going to be erecting a statue to this guy, but she seemed – if not overtly happy – certainly satisfied that he was dead; and if she had any regrets over Fullerton’s demise they were probably regarding how quick and sudden it must have been.

It was jarring. He liked working for McLeod because she
was
compassionate. There was an atmosphere under her command that he could relate to, that made him want to deliver for her. It was hard to define precisely what it was; easier to pin down what it was not. It wasn’t about putting on the mask of don’t-give-a-fuck, and ‘fighting the battle of who could care less’, as Ben Folds put it.

Obviously, on the downside he had to endure being called Beano, which he hated, but it was a small price to pay, and he never doubted there wasn’t a certain affection in it.

It was always awkward when somebody new used it though, as there was a presumption there if they hadn’t earned their Beano privileges. Other guys seemed to wear their nickname like a badge of pride, craving the group acceptance it conferred. He was not immune to this aspect of being Beano, and down the years there had been nicknames he accepted and enjoyed. As a kid he’d been Ants, and when older, Tico, a handle that endured on the football pitch even now.

Anthony was what his mum always called him. It was what Jennifer had called him, and she used to say it like she loved the feel of it on her tongue. He thought of himself as Anthony, and that was what he wanted McLeod to call him too. However, in a way he felt he hadn’t earned his Anthony privileges from her; he’d be Beano until he gave her reason to see him otherwise.

He made his way through the building to the reception desk opposite the café, where he gave his name and waited for the woman he had spoken to on the phone.

‘Have you got the card?’ she asked.

He dug it out of his pocket and she scanned it by sliding it along a reader connected to her computer.

‘As I explained over the phone, there’s more than one person of that name on the system, so I couldn’t just tell you what books this Mr Fullerton had been reading.’

‘I think with this guy it was probably more like colouring in, but I remain open to surprise.’

She grinned at the remark without taking her eyes from the screen.

‘Well, he’d have had a tough time colouring these in,’ she reported. ‘He’s been looking up newspapers using the microfiche archives. Old
Daily Record
s.’

‘When?’

‘Twenty-five years ago.’

‘No, I mean when was he in here?’

‘Four weeks back. Same day the card was issued.’

‘Can I see the editions he was looking up?’

‘Sure. Come on and I’ll set you up. You might want to grab a coffee though. You could be sitting there a while. I can’t tell you precisely which editions he was looking at, only the dates covered by each spool.’

She escorted him upstairs to a row of microfiche readers, stopping off to retrieve the appropriate spools en route. She showed him how to load the microfiche then gave him a quick tutorial on navigating and zooming in and out of the pages. Once she was satisfied that he had it sussed, she wished him good luck and left him to it. Fullerton had selected spools from two periods roughly six months apart, but as each spool covered one month, there was no deductive reasoning to be brought to bear in order to narrow the search. It was going to be a BFI job: brute force and ignorance.

He scanned the first few editions quite methodically, taking in the changes in design and typography, the graininess of the photographs and the absence of web and email addresses in the adverts. He tarried a little over the sports pages, the near-hysterical tone of the sensationalised coverage all the more ridiculous viewed through the prism of time.

He began scanning the news pages, parsing the headlines and trusting his judgment that the most plausible candidates would be recognisable at a glance. He reasoned that if he got through the month without any ideas, he’d go back again and focus on the obits and intimations.

There were a few possibilities on the first spool, but nothing leapt out at him. A bank robbery in Braeside; a drugs seizure in Balornock; the murder of a young woman in Capletmuir; the killing of a passer-by who had intervened in a street fight one fateful Saturday night.

These could be the news pages of today’s edition, Anthony reckoned. Same crimes, same places, and quite possibly some of the same polis, but he needed a tangible link to the here and now, to what the paper would call ‘a gangland slaying’ in Shawburn.

He could probably rule out the murdered woman. He had taken note of it because it was one of the biggest crime stories in that spool, but really it had only got so much play because it had started off as a mystery, the quintessential nightmare for every woman, every daughter’s parents. She didn’t come home one Saturday night, then was found strangled in woodland the next day, on a pathway close to the railway station where she had got off the train. Julie Muir, she had been called. Twenty-one years old.

Though he knew it wasn’t germane, he dwelt a moment upon her name because somehow it seemed wrong to gloss over it. It felt like a kind of prayer, a gesture of thought for someone who once had a life and a world, but who was now forgotten by history, erased by one man’s violence. By that token he did the same for thirty-four-year-old father of two Andrew Leiper, who had tried to save some young bloke from a kicking on Sauchiehall Street and been stabbed to death for his trouble.

A few editions on, the strangling story was updated and effectively ended with the arrest of a convicted sex offender. Poor girl had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Julie Muir. Anthony couldn’t help but think what age she would have been now, the life she should have led.

The street-fight story reached its conclusion even sooner, Andrew Leiper’s teenage killer found and named within forty-eight hours. Billy Fergus. Anthony wrote it down, intending to see where else the name might pop up, and whether he or even Leiper had any connections to Fullerton or Fallan.

Then he moved on to the second spool, which was when he hit the jackpot.

WILD WEST GEORGE STREET

Bloodbath as gang battle rages through city nightclub

REVELLERS
fled in horror as carnage erupted inside trendy city nightspot Nokturn last night. Terrified witnesses spoke of
SLASHINGS
, glass attacks and flying chairs amid pools of
BLOOD
as a fight at the bar escalated into a mass brawl.

‘It was like a scene from a
WILD WEST
movie,’ said one witness, who did not wish to be named. ‘One minute everybody’s dancing, and the next there’s about thirty people
BATTLING
it out, joining in from all sides. The violence was indiscriminate. I saw bystanders getting
BOTTLED
. These guys were just lashing out at anybody. Girls were in tears and
SCREAMING
. There were guys in there absolutely
SOAKED
in blood.’

Details were sketchy in this wild-eyed initial report. Given the time of night when it was likely to have kicked off, the story would have broken pretty close to deadline, real hold-the-front-page stuff. A reporter must have made it there in jig time, or maybe been lucky and been in a pub nearby. Anthony guessed the ‘witness who did not wish to be named’ didn’t actually exist; this would simply have been a front for whatever reports the hack had been able to cobble together on the pavement outside before phoning it in.

The next day’s coverage had more meat on it, and more personnel. As well as carrying genuine quotes from named witnesses, it also indicated that a reporter had been despatched to the Royal Infirmary to get verifiable detail on the injuries. These seemed to be listed in descending order according to the number of stitches, with top billing going to one James Donnelly, who received forty-eight after having his face opened from his temple to his chin.

The witness accounts were chaotic and contradictory: people reconstructing snapshots taken when their judgment was at its least reliable, reassembling fractured memories in the wrong order. It was something he was all too familiar with. Refracted through the lens of tabloid hysteria, it was even worse. Some things were gradually coming into focus, however.

NIGHTCLUB BOSS WEIGHED INTO HORROR BATTLE

THE MANAGER
of a city nightspot that was turned into a bloodbath two nights ago threw himself into the fray, according to eyewitness reports. Nokturn impresario Stephen Fullerton (24) was seen trading blows as chairs, bottles and glasses flew during the carnage that left more than twenty injured, but
DENIES
it had anything to do with a feud between rival gangs.

Fullerton, who describes himself as a legitimate businessman, admits that he became involved in the fighting but
INSISTS
he has no idea what provoked the mass brawl.

‘I have no clue who these people were, but they were
HELL-BENT
on making trouble. My cousin was
SLASHED
while just standing at the bar. There was no warning, no provocation. When it all kicked off I had to run down there to pull him clear so that we could get him medical attention.’

Twenty-four and he already ran a nightclub, Anthony thought. Bet he never got any shit about accelerated career development.

A couple of days further on, the story flashed up again, with an informed and sober perspective on the matter garnered by the paper’s chief crime reporter. This time, the ‘source who did not wish to be named’ was more plausibly anonymous, clearly somebody who had the inside gen, and perhaps his own agenda for leaking it.

‘It was Thomas Beattie who slashed James Donnelly,’ our source told the
Record
. ‘There were about thirty witnesses within ten feet but I doubt it will ever reach court. None of them will be daft enough to come forward.

‘There was already bad blood between Beattie and Donnelly, going back years, but the slashing was a pre-arranged signal for a major rammy to kick off, launched by crews from Gallowhaugh and Croftbank. They were teaming up to wreck Nokturn in order to take Fullerton down a peg or two, but the truth is, this kind of mayhem was all they had left. Stevie’s operating on a different level to these guys now, and they know it.’

Anthony noted the starchy, forced formality of the namings. Thomas Beattie was not referred to as Tommy or Tam; James Donnelly given not so much as a Jimmy. It was always possible that they were known as Thomas and James, but he doubted it. There was a detectable primness to the paper’s tone, as though by acknowledging their street names it would be condoning crime culture, yet all the while it was peddling vicarious thrills to a curtain-twitcher readership.

The paper squeezed every last drop out of the story, reheating it when they got any tangential new angle, such as the revelation that a couple of Old Firm footballers had been present, albeit they had remained safe upstairs in the VIP area of the gallery that overlooked the dance floor. They offered no comment other than to stress that they had got themselves out via the backstairs as soon as they saw what was going on. A ‘glamour model’ was more obliging, milking some exposure with accounts of what she had witnessed from the gallery in descriptions that read suspiciously like they had been cribbed from the existing reports.

Anthony wondered why a gang fight in a club got more play than a young woman’s murder, or than a killing on the street in the vicinity of half a dozen other nightspots. Glamour side by side with danger, perhaps: a curious symbiosis of aspiration and disapproval.

Coincidentally, coverage of the Julie Muir murder trial cropped up in the period covered by the second spool. The killer’s name was Teddy Sheehan, a mentally deficient oddity with a prior for exposing himself to school kids, whose move into the big league no doubt worsened the lot of every neighbourhood’s local weirdo. At the close, there was a quote from a senior detective – one who probably had bugger all to do with the actual investigation – saying he hoped Julie’s family would have some peace now.

Anthony doubted it. Everybody else could rest knowing the killer was behind bars, but not them.

Jasmine pulled up in front of Josie’s house with a mixture of anticipation and guilt. She was looking forward to seeing her great aunt for the first time in ages, but that gap was itself the source of discomfort, particularly in combination with her true motivation for finally picking up the phone and announcing her intention to visit.

Josie was the younger sister of Jasmine’s grandfather, Bruce, and of Jim’s mum, Isobel, both of whom were now dead. She had sounded frail on the phone, her voice weak and unsteady, which had made Jasmine feel all the worse about neglecting her promise to come and see her more often, made when they were both at a christening last year.

Growing up, Jasmine had enjoyed a special rapport with Josie: the favourite auntie who would take her on day trips, which always featured lovely cafés or posh tea rooms, and the one person who was allowed to take her to (gasp) Glasgow for the panto at Christmas. Sometimes Josie would turn up with her friend Fran, and sometimes it was just the two of them together, Jasmine’s ally in a cosy conspiracy against the rest of the grown-ups. She was flamboyant and energetic (‘exhausting’, quoth Aunt Isobel when she didn’t know Jasmine was in earshot), never at rest, and once described by Jasmine’s mum as being so skinny because she seldom stayed still long enough to eat.

Josie’s house was in fact a flat, forming the upper half of one side of a semi-detached ex-council house built between the wars. The building itself was grey and soot-blackened, but Jasmine remembered the flat always being bright and colourful inside. It was the one place she had ever been permitted to stay the night in Glasgow. The first time had been because Josie and Fran were taking Jasmine to Rothesay the next day and needed an early start to get the train to Dunoon for the ferry. That had been just before Jasmine started school. Then, when she was seven, she stayed with Josie and Fran for three whole nights because her mum was away on a course. In Jasmine’s mind, the word was associated entirely with an army training facility she had seen on
Blue Peter
, so she had imagined her mum was spending three days climbing scramble nets and crawling through tunnels.