Where the Dead Men Go (4 page)

We spent the morning in Kelvingrove Park, sledging down the hills, rolling down bankings, lying on our backs making angels, starring the flanks of an equestrian statue with pelted volleys of snowballs. We warmed up and dried off in the museum, wandering round the Scottish Wildlife room, craning up at the Spitfire suspended in the entranceway. We ate lunch in the Silverburn mall, browsed in the games shop and then I drove us to the swimming baths.

We spent the next hour on the flumes, slapping up the spiralling concrete ramp and hanging onto the overhead bar till the green light sent us plunging, one after another, down the gloomy, translucent tube. The boys laughed and started back up the ramp, moving lightly on the balls of their feet. I saw how little they needed me now, how much they’d grown, though it seemed to me to be no time at all since they’d clung to my neck as we entered the water, their legs gripping tight round my torso, their toenails scratching my sides.

Before we left they dragged me across to the diving boards. I hate heights. Climbing the stairs I stamped to quell the tremor in my knees. The middle board was four metres high but it felt like the top of a building. The swimming-pool noise – all the echoey shouts and splashes and cries – seemed to rise from a fabulous distance. A yard from the edge my soles wouldn’t lift from the board so I slid the last few paces. The diving pool looked too dark, its water a deep marine blue, not the light sunny turquoise of the other pools. But my sons were stamping and shivering behind me so I closed my eyes and stepped off.

The rush of bubbles seemed to go on forever but I finally reached the bottom of the plunge, that long silent interim when you’re not sinking or rising or floating but just suspended in water like a bubble in ice before the reverse gravity sucks you back to the surface. I kicked to the side and held on, watched my sons’ pale bodies drop through the air.

We were driving back to Conwick, the car stinking pleasantly of chips and pickled onions, Muddy down low on the Bose – ‘Goodbye Newport Blues’ – and the white fields rolling away under a black sky.

‘Dad?’

‘What?’

‘Does Angus not like the swimming baths?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘He does. He goes with Mari sometimes. “Tadpoles.” It’s a mother-and-baby thing.’

We drove for a bit.

‘
You
should take him,’ said Roddy. ‘Or bring him with us.’

‘I do take him. I take him sometimes. Anyway, this is your time. You don’t want to have a baby around all the time.’

‘He’s nearly two, Dad. He’s my brother.’

 I watched the road. Roddy craned round in his seat.

‘I just think you should spend more time with him, Dad.’

I reached out a finger to the sound system, turned Muddy down even further.

‘Did Mariella ask you to say this?’

‘I’m eleven years old, Dad. I can think for myself.’

‘That’s not what I asked you.’

‘We spoke about it. Mari thinks you should spend more time with Angus. And I agree.’

He popped a chip into his mouth with a rhetorical flourish.

‘Okay, Rod. Well. I appreciate your concern.’

‘Good.’

‘I’ll bring him next time.’

‘Good.’

Within the hour I was back up the motorway, back in the flat. Mari was Facebooking her Kiwi friends. I was giving Angus his bath. I had soaped his hair when I heard the phone, then Mari coming through. She knelt down beside Angus while I took the phone through to the living room.

‘Gerry.’ I couldn’t place the voice for a minute. I was still thinking about Angus, how I hadn’t rinsed his hair. ‘Gerry, it’s Fiona Maguire. I’ve got some bad news.’

For a second I thought,
she’s going to fire me again
.

‘It’s Martin Moir,’ she said. ‘Gerry, he’s dead. Martin’s dead. They found his body in Auchengare Quarry.’

A climber had called it in. The quarry’s a popular spot with local craggers. Early on Sunday a hospital administrator called Mark Alexander was scaling the main buttress. Low down, at ground level, you can’t see into the water. All you can see is the glare, or the surface shirred by the wind. But the higher you climb, the deeper you see. Halfway up the route the climber starts to notice something between his boots: a white shape, a milky cube in the bottle-green deep. He knows it’s recent; he’d climbed the same route the week before. When he gets to the top he calls the police. It’s the white roof of Moir’s CR-V. The frogmen find the body in the car.

‘Jesus.’

‘Yeah.’ Maguire looked at me, a question in her eyes: did you know something about this? Are you holding out on me here?

I shook my head. We were in Maguire’s office, the corner suite with its views across the river to the Finnieston crane, the Armadillo, the latticed façades of the north bank hotels.

I turned to look out at the newsroom floor.

Everyone knew. You could tell from how they carried themselves: something angular, a tightness of the limbs. Little knots of people at the desks, gathering to share the news. The furtive eyes, the rapt looks, greedy. How they touched each other when they spoke, hands resting on forearms. The office was buzzing with Martin’s death.

Maguire sucked a breath between her teeth.

‘We’ll make an announcement.’

I nodded. There was something else, too, I thought, looking out on the floor. Not just grief but professional embarrassment. How did we miss it? Moir’s death was pitiful, shocking, cruel. It was also a story. A story that every paper would carry tomorrow morning: it was here in this room and we missed it.

‘Ten o’clock,’ she said. ‘Niven’s coming down to the floor.’

‘That’s good.’

Back at my desk I clicked through my bookmarked sites – the Beeb, Scottishwire, the Scottish and English dailies – but my eyes kept straying to Moir’s blue chair, his abandoned can, the smiling blonde heads of his daughters. When Maguire had phoned me the previous night I’d gone out for a walk. It was cold – the snow had mostly gone but a freeze was starting, the puddles were chewy and creaked like floorboards – and I crossed the bridge and started up Great Western Road. I was trying to remember Moir’s age, thirty-four, thirty-five, he was younger than me by five or six years. I turned into Westbourne Gardens, passed the Struthers Memorial Church. The houses here had a rich honey hue, the stone glowing warm in the yellow streetlights. There were curtains undrawn, still-life living rooms with opulent blood-red walls, bright blurred Peploes and Cursiters, bookshelves of deep seasoned wood. There was nothing of Moir or myself in these rich framed rooms, just the mystery of unknown lives, the pathos of domestic space, but I had to pause for a spell on the pavement, beneath one of these bright yellow squares, leaning on the smooth iron railings.

At ten o’clock we stood by our desks beneath the muted TVs as Niven emerged from the lift. Teddy Niven was the
Tribune
group’s Managing Editor. You rarely saw him in the newsroom. He was a distant figure, up there on the sixth floor, a short man with brittle hair and small pointed teeth that he bared in a strained smile. If you met him in the lift he just nodded and looked away; below the level of editor, he didn’t know anyone’s name.

When he spoke to his staff it was always through his editors – Maguire at the Sunday, John Tulloch at the Daily. The fact that he was here, awkwardly by the vending machine, twisting his wedding ring, meant that it was serious. He stood in his shirtsleeves, a small dapper fellow in scarlet braces, like someone impersonating a newspaperman.

As he waited for silence we shuffled back, making sure those behind us could see. An atmosphere of punctilious politeness had established itself in the newsroom. We knew what Niven would say, but we wanted to be equal to the moment, standing in our reverent circle like mourners round the grave.

Finally Niven spread his arms, twisting his torso from left to right, surveying the heads, his dainty paunch nosing over his waistband.

‘You have all heard the news.’ He spoke low – or at least he didn’t raise his voice – so that we all craned forward to hear. ‘Martin Moir, Investigations Editor on our Sunday paper, was found dead at the weekend. His body was recovered from a car in Auchengare Quarry on Sunday morning.’

He paused then, looking down at his shoes. The gesture looked rehearsed, but Niven’s face, when he raised it, was blurry and flushed, aswim with emotion.

‘We do not yet know – and neither do the police – what happened to Martin. Whether this was suicide or—’ His raised hand waggled in the air for a second then dropped to his side. ‘Or not.

‘There will be rumours.’ He cleared his throat. ‘There will be speculation. In the canteen. In the Cope. From your colleagues on other papers. I ask you now, for the good of the paper, and out of respect for Martin, please do not add to this. Don’t gossip. Wait until we know the facts.’

The word
facts
he gave a peculiar, cushioned emphasis, almost breathing the word, as if facts were such fragile, furtive creatures that the smallest unruly sound might scatter them.

At his elbow, Maguire frowned fiercely, her specs flashing green in the overhead lights.

Niven kept twisting his wedding band.

‘Over the coming days, Strathclyde Police will visit the building. They may want to question some of those who worked closely with Martin. We will of course cooperate in every way we can with their investigation.’

He scanned the faces again. He smiled an odd tight smile.

‘For the next few days, this newspaper’ – he pointed at the floor beside his feet; ‘this newspaper is part of the news. It has happened before; it will happen again. We will not lose our heads. We will go about our business and we will do our jobs to our usual high standards. We will report Martin’s death in tomorrow’s paper. Sunday staff, you will wait to see how things develop. We will want a feature on Martin’s career and, of course, obituaries in both papers. John and Fiona’ – the cone of his belly turned on Maguire – ‘will fill you in at conference.’

He stood there glancing nervously round. We wondered if he was finished. A phone rang at a far desk and we had started to break up when he spoke again.

‘This is a difficult time,’ he said. We shuffled back into position. ‘A difficult time. For all of us. Martin Moir was – well, you don’t need me tell you what kind of journalist Martin Moir was. He was a great investigative reporter in the finest traditions of this newspaper.’ He looked round sharply at that point, as if he expected someone to contradict him. ‘But be that as it may’ – he wiped it all away with a languid hand; Martin’s death; his standing as a journalist; the words he’d just spoken: ‘Be that as it may, we have work to do. The best tribute we can pay to Martin is to keep making this paper as good as we can make it.’

This time he was finished. He gave a brief, military nod and clipped back to the lift. There were two or three disjointed claps but nobody took them up.

When Niven left it broke the spell, released the grief that had massed in the air. We hugged each other. We wandered the newsroom, patting shoulders and gripping elbows, clapping each other’s backs. It was like the HQ of the losing party on election night. But there was something else. A little flicker in the eyes. A charge of static in the air as we resumed our desks. This was a story. This was our story. What kind of a spike would it give to the sales? Even in death Moir would jockey us one last boost. The
Scotsman
would take a tanking tomorrow.

Two hours later I was writing the obit. Conference had been short. Maguire raced us through the schedule. The referendum, house prices, the new anti-sectarian bill: Driscoll, the News Editor, flagged up Sunday’s leads. Neve McDonald gave her curt, bored preview of the magazine. Carson, the new sports guy, ran through his roster of Old Firm transfers, manager profiles, flagged up a rumour about the taxman chasing Rangers for using EBTs.

‘EB whats?’ Maguire screwed her face up.

‘Employee Benefit Trusts.’ Carson consulted his notes. ‘It’s an offshore thing. You pay players without paying tax on top. It’s how you afford the big names.’

‘Cheating?’ Maguire said. ‘Financial doping?’

 ‘Well. Probably come to nothing. I’ll keep you posted.’

‘Do that then. Nothing else? Good. Let’s talk about Martin.’

We did. Seven days earlier he had been sitting at this table, eating Marks & Spencer sandwiches with the rest of us. Now he was the news.

As Niven had observed, we didn’t know the facts. We still didn’t know if it was suicide or a drunken accident. But whichever door opened, something nasty would come out. Secrets and sins. The old unforeseeable mess. The kind of stuff we dug up about bent councillors and access-peddling cabinet ministers.

We are the news
. I looked round the polished table, the troubled faces. They didn’t like it. The telescope was the wrong way round and it made them uneasy. Working at a paper, you think you’re bombproof. You visit chaos on other people. Chaos doesn’t visit you.

It didn’t bother me. I’d been there before. Four years back a gangster I exposed in a front-page lead turned out to be an undercover cop. I looked a little stupid for a couple of weeks as my failings were rehearsed in a dozen blogs and columns. Even at the time, though, it wasn’t that bad. Disgrace. Obloquy. It wasn’t so awful. What I mainly felt was relief. At not having to be right all the time, not having to pretend to know it all. Hands up.
Mea culpa
. I got it wrong.

‘If anyone knows anything,’ Maguire was saying, ‘now would be a good time.’

Her gaze rested on me for a moment and I stared her out. There was a general crossing of arms and sucking in of lips around the table. Maguire looked around the vacant faces.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘But no surprises, people. If Martin was in trouble, if he was involved in something, it’s better we break it than somebody else. If there
is
an issue and it turns out that one of you knew—’ She flicked her wrist to indicate some swingeing repercussion further down the line.

By four o’clock that afternoon I was proofing the obit. I had gathered Moir’s cuttings for the past six months. I had phoned his former editor at the
Belfast
Telegraph
and spoken to some of his colleagues there. I was trying to do him, I want to say ‘justice’, but where’s the justice in taking a man’s life and boiling it down into eight hundred words? I was on the final par when I raised my head to see a man pointing at me from Maguire’s office as Maguire and another woman followed the line of his finger. Then Maguire poked her head out and beckoned me over.

Jesus, that was quick
, was my thought as I crossed the floor. Maguire passed me on the way in. There were two cops, a woman and a man. They were using Maguire’s office for their interviews. The woman was in charge.

She nodded at the door and I closed it. I eased into the vacant chair.

‘We’re sorry to take you away from your work,’ the woman said. She was leafing through papers. She didn’t look sorry.

 ‘That’s alright,’ I said. ‘I could use a break.’

‘Good.’ She clasped her hands on the desk. ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Gunn and this is Detective Constable Lumsden.’

Lumsden and I nodded at each other. He was big, prematurely bald, with an ugly prop-forward’s mug. He wore a rumpled lilac shirt and leather jacket. His silver and purple tie was ugly too. Gunn was neat and pretty, fair hair back in a scrunchie.

‘You’re the Political Editor, right?’

‘Yeah. On the Sunday.’

‘What are you working on?’

‘You mean right now?’

‘Right now. What are you writing?’

Maguire would have told her.

‘I’m doing the obit, Martin’s obituary.’

She looked young to be a sergeant. Certainly she was younger than I was, younger, too, than the gloomy Lumsden.

‘You knew him well, then?’

Lumsden had his biro out, elbows spread on the desk.

‘I don’t know. I thought I did.’

Her accent was hard to place. It wasn’t Highland but the vowels had a lightness and bounce. It might have been Canadian but it wasn’t that, either.

 ‘Your editor says he was closest to you. Out of all the employees.’

I shrugged. ‘That’s not saying much.’

‘You mean he didn’t have many friends among the staff?’

‘I mean he wasn’t here much. He worked from home a lot, when he wasn’t out on a story.’

She nodded, looked down at her notes. ‘When did you see him last? Outside the office, I mean.’

DC Lumsden looked stolidly on, the point of his biro pressing his pad. He looked like a waiter taking an order.

‘Two weeks ago. I took a present down for his daughter’s birthday.’ I paused. ‘She’s my god-daughter.’

‘You’re godfather to Martin Moir’s daughter?’

I nodded.

‘That sounds pretty close.’

I shrugged. ‘Yeah. Well it wasn’t close enough, was it?’

She smiled at the desk and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. She enjoyed her job – you could see that. I don’t mean that she relished the power over others or that proximity to murder and calamity thrilled her – though that may have been true. She enjoyed the game, that’s all – the challenge, the pursuit. I almost wished I had something to hide, to give her the pleasure of teasing it out.

The face was composed again when she raised it.

‘He ever speak about problems? Debts? Marital issues? Depression?’

I snorted. ‘The guy was an Ulster Prod, officer, nobody tell you that? They’re not big on confession.’

‘Never sounded off? Not about anything?’

I frowned. ‘Piss and moan a bit in the pub. Like everyone else. He had it pretty good, though. He didn’t have too much to complain about.’

‘Special treatment,’ she said. ‘The star turn. Lot of professional jealousy?’

‘You mean me?’ I smiled. ‘Was I jealous? Yeah, probably. Might take a little more than that, though, to drive a man to suicide.’

‘Right.’ She was looking through her notes again. ‘What was his actual job here: he was chief crime reporter?’