obnoxious wanker, and everyone still made a fuss of him. — I’m lucky having you to tell me how Scotland would’ve been a free socialist utopian republic by now if I hadnae joined the polis.
Stuart raised his hands in mock surrender. — Okay, Ray, I apologise. I was out of order. I’m just a wee bit pissed off that I didn’t get this
— But you’ve been in
— Aye, Mum, but that was a different role.
But you weren’t going to let him take over this time. — And I’m glad you know my job well enough to tell me that I oppress the poor. Here was me hallucinating, thinking about the dead body of a sexually abused and tortured seven-year-old girl I’d pulled out of the sea. And it was all my fault. She came from a housing scheme: maybe I was oppressing her.
— Enough! John Lennox snapped. — A bit of respect from you two. C’mon!
A worn glance of truce flashed between you and Stuart as the waiter moved to the table to announce the desserts. As you recharged your glass, you heard the conversation drift to Hearts and the sacking of George Burley. You were about to chip in with some gusto when your mobile rang. It was Keith Goodwin. — Hey, Ray. What’s up? Where ye been?
— I’m sitting drinking champagne with my family, you said. — I’ve just got engaged.
— Congratulations, but, eh, the alcohol, is it wise? I mean to say—
— Call ye later, Keith, you said, snapping your mobile shut. A pub bore was a pub bore, with or without alcohol or drugs. You vowed that night to have a decent drink. It was what people did when they got engaged and put child killers behind bars.
It hit everybody in the face that Monday morning. The team were hung-over after their celebration and you were also feeling fuzzy after your engagement meal.
Ronnie Hamil couldn’t provide an alibi but the hospital records of the Western General’s Accident and Emergency Department could. A man had fished him out of the Union Canal after he’d stumbled in drunk following a session on heavily fortified wines the Tuesday night before Britney’s disappearance. They’d kept him in hospital till ten o’clock the next day, when he’d resumed his binge at a friend’s flat, drinking himself comatose, oblivious to being Scotland’s most wanted man. He’d been too inebriated to remember this incident but his rescuer, a passing jogger, very clearly could.
Following the grandad’s release, the first thing you did was phone George Marsden and tell him the situation. — Quite, George had crisply retorted.
Perhaps some of this smugness had transmitted to you. The scent of failure hung in the air that evening, as your Serious Crimes team trooped wearily into Bert’s Bar. You weren’t aware of an I-told-you-so look coming off your face, but couldn’t absolutely swear it wasn’t there. In the bar tension built like a bonfire all night until Ally Notman slurred, — He’s a fuckin nonce. He would’ve done.
— He’s a bag of shite but he’s no a child killer and it would have meant impunity for the real one, you’d sniped back. One or two heads around the table nodded. Most refused to make eye contact with you. You were isolated, and not for the first or the last time, for the crime of not taking part.
The following evening, as you were leaving Police HQ following another lonely night of searching through records, statements and video recordings, a silver-haired figure in a coat shuffled through the automatic doors and approached you. — You okay? your boss asked.
— I’m sorry, Bob. We’ve nothing. Zilch, you said. It was the first time you’d seen Bob Toal since the Ronnie Hamil connection had proved a dead end. Now your boss looked as worn out as you felt.
— Keep at it, Toal nodded, and his shoulder punch, the paternal blow of the football coach, was enough to relaunch you back into the thin darkness of a chilly Edinburgh night.
You felt utterly useless. The cop as Popperian philosopher: disproving every hypothesis your department came out with. As the next few days rolled by, you empathised with the boss. The pension was so close, and Toal wanted to get to the finishing line unscathed. A blaming culture always came to the fore in any police department in which a big case seemed to be going nowhere. Those were the rules. They were operating in a tight financial environment. Cost-cutting measures were already planned. There would be a disciplinary hearing. Charges of gross negligence made. Summary dismissal. The only issue was how far down the line the buck would be passed.
Dissenting voices were starting to be heard. A comprehensive investigation appeared on the
— There’s fuckin shite gaun oan here, she’s covering for some cunt, Toal had said, his Morningside accent thickening to Tollcross, showing you a different set of possibilities for your gaffer. Somebody who, perhaps in other circumstances, could have been a villain. — Ride her hard, Ray, he had said. — I’ve seen it before with weak women like that. They become mesmerised, dominated by some bad bastard. Find out who he is!
So like the rest of Serious Crimes, you became obsessed with Angela’s sex life. Openly scoffing at her in an incredulous manner when she said she ‘never brought men back to the house because of the bairns’. Knowing the woman would be too broken to challenge you. You hated her passivity, saw yourself – felt yourself – becoming a bully, perhaps like many of the other men in her life, but unable to stop. You wormed one name out of her, a Graham Cornell, who worked at the Scottish Office. He was described as ‘just a friend’.
A couple of days later you’d gone back to the office at Serious Crimes and studied the dreaded whiteboard again. After a while Ally Notman invited you for a drink. When you stepped into Bert’s Bar, they were all there. It was a set-up. Relaxed at first, then Gillman and Notman started the ball rolling. — It’s him. Cornell, they harmonised.
It was the cue for Harrower and McCaig to join the chorus. You’re our boy. Our leader. The boss. Don’t let us down. He’s making cunts of us all.
And part of it chimed with you. Because there was something about this man. But then you spoke to Cornell on Halloween evening. You caught him about to leave his flat, dressed in a red costume with horns and a forked tail. Even discounting this attire, Graham Cornell’s bearing announced him as transparently gay. To your mind it was ludicrous to think he’d snatch a female child. But for some of the boys, like Gillman, gay equalled pervert, equalled nonce. You could stick them on as many equal-ops training courses as you liked, but the algebra, long formed, couldn’t be totally encrypted, and was always waiting to return. It came back with a vengeance in the fatigued, desperate group, sweating under the strip lights in that small office, burning their eyes on computer screens, knocking on doors asking the same questions over and over again. You feared that you were the only one privy to the collective psychosis that had them all in its clenched fist. They would fall silent whenever Drummond, the lone female officer on the team, entered the room. Even Notman, who was living with her.
Your response to the voices jabbering at you was to engage with your own increasingly urgent naggings. One bleak early-November afternoon, a train took you over the border to Newcastle. Then, a short taxi ride and you were in a dilapidated tavern in that city’s West End, where, as a Scottish cop, you felt safe enough to score your first grams of cocaine in over four years.
And you needed it like the rest seemed to need Cornell. It couldn’t be admitted that a multiple child murderer was on the loose. The myriad legal and police careers that had been built on Robert Ellis’s arrest and prosecution would be for ever tarnished. And a hated figure would be living the rest of his life in the Bahamas at the taxpayer’s expense. The groupthink of the bureaucratic organisation went into destructive overdrive: Cornell was the man. And in your own way, you did the same.
DAY THREE
8 Everything But the Girl
