of it.
There were those who reckoned Glasvegas was mad and bad enough to have done Billy in. No one made him for a serial killer though. Didn’t figure him for that. Frankie Grant and his bully boys weren’t thinking that far ahead though. Don’t ignore the obvious was what Kirkwood had told them.
Glasvegas was walking home half-canned from a session in Munns Vaults on Maryhill Road when he was pulled into a white van and knocked unconscious. He woke in a flat somewhere, blindfolded and his bare feet in a basin of water.
Glasvegas was a gambler, a bluff merchant, a guy used to putting on a bold front. Confidence can only get you so far though. As the first tiny jolt of electricity shot through his body, Coyle would have torn up a betting slip with ‘Certainty’ written on it. He was a gambler not a fighter. And he fucking hated pain.
The clamps on his fingers stayed put despite his shouts to take them off and his offers to tell them anything they wanted to know.
So talk, they told him. The first words Frankie or the thugs had spoken.
Glasvegas was the kind of guy with fingers in many pies, skeletons in many cupboards and debts in many places. He didn’t know where to start.
‘Is it about the Skodas I got from down south? I can sort that, no probs. If it’s Billy Hutchison’s dosh then you’re maybe family. Will pay that obviously. It’s only right. Terrible shame what happened to Billy. Great guy. Salt of the earth. Wait. Is it my maw’s hoose? Is it? Fuck, can’t tell you how bad I feel about that. Loved that wee hoose, she did too. The Cosworth that I sold to Malky Blackstock’s cousin? That it? I knew I should have got the boy to check those gears over.’
Frankie raised a hand signalling his boys to keep quiet.
‘It’s about your maw’s hoose. Talk.’
Glasvegas spilled his guts. He’d remortgaged his mother’s ex-council house and blew the thirty-five grand he got for it. Then he couldn’t keep up the mortgage payments and the bank had repossessed. His mother had gone to live with her sister in Bishopbriggs. The sister with three cats and a bad back. The smell and the inconvenience wasn’t the worst thing though. It was the shame. Lost that smashing wee two-bedroomed hoose. The one that she had loved showing off to her sister. The sister that was now lording it over her. Frankie Grant threw a big blast of electricity that had Glasvegas’s hair standing on end. Didn’t kill him, didn’t even knock him out but had him grinding his teeth together as if trying to bite his own molars off. Scorch marks on his skin where the clamps had fired into his hands.
Eventually Coyle found a shaky voice.
‘Bastards. Said you wouldn’t do that if I told you what you wanted to know. Bastards.’
‘Aye, but that wasn’t what we wanted to know. That was for your maw, you fucker. And so’s this.’
The charge of electricity wasn’t as much as the one before but it still had Glasvegas screaming and whimpering.
‘Billy Hutchison, you wee scrote. Tell us everything.’
Wasn’t much to tell. Glasvegas had been into him for money for a while. Nothing too serious then a couple of big bets went wrong and suddenly he owed Billy five grand. He tried to bet his way out of the hole and one came good but then three went bad. Billy had warned him the last one was the last one until he started paying it off. Billy had told him he couldn’t run a line that big and might have to pass it on. That made Glasvegas ready to shit himself. That was why he ordered the cut and shut Skodas. And why he couldn’t pay for them just yet.
‘And why you bumped off Billy?’
‘What? No! No, no, no. Naw! What? No!’
‘Did you fucking well kill Billy Hutchison?’
‘No way. Not my style. Couldn’t hurt a fly.’
Frankie frazzled Glasvegas for a fourth time to make sure but he was already convinced he was telling the truth.
The gambler was crying now. ‘I’ve never killed anybody in my life. Never even won a fight since I was at school.’
Frankie Grant nodded at the other two. It wasn’t him.
‘Who else owed Billy money? Give us another name.’
Glasvegas eagerly coughed up two names. Two more dead ends to be chased down. In return, one last shot of electricity was pinged through his body. Just for the fun of it. Just for his mother.
It was Davie Stewart and Kirkwood himself who went after contacts of Wallace Ogilvie at Glasgow Council. One of them was in the planning department and the other a Labour councillor. Men bought with fine wine, expensive meals and timeshare apartments. Brown envelopes stuffed with used notes were so 1980s.
The planning officer, a senior guy there named McMartin, wasn’t for playing ball at all until Davie Stewart threw his cat out the window of his penthouse flat in Finnieston. Until the point that Stewart grabbed the thing by the scruff of its neck and opened the window, this McMartin still seemed to think he was used to playing with the big boys and had no need to worry. He knew people, he thought. Problem was he didn’t know people like Davie. The window was shut with the cat still learning how to fly. That was when McMartin got the message.
He gave them the names of people who Wallace Ogilvie had business dealings with, including those that were off the books. He told them of people that had grudges against Ogilvie. A worrying development.
The planning officer was patted on the head and told to give it ten minutes before he went looking to see if his cat had eight lives left.
The councillor wasn’t named but he was old school, exunion official, and a friend of a friend of Kirkwood. This guy was not averse to talking to friends of gangsters. It was part of how he got where he was. That’s why Kirky was doing it himself. The councillor wasn’t going to respect common or garden crooks or be frightened by them. Top man or nothing for this job.
He told them how contracts might be won and who might have lost them. He wasn’t naive enough to give them chapter and verse on the subject but they got what they wanted. He gave them names, individuals and companies, and pointed them in the direction of deals that didn’t turn out to be what they promised.
The councillor also gave two names from Kirkwood’s inner city. Two men that Wallace Ogilvie didn’t deal with directly but who were associates of his associates. Nothing unusual in that. Do business in a city like Glasgow and you are no more than a couple of degrees of separation from a criminal, of either the organized or disorganized variety.
It was the names that interested Kirkwood. One was Alan Devlin who ran one of the biggest security firms in the city and had recently guarded the building of new homes for three housing associations in the city in return for taxpayer’s cash. Kirkwood knew Devlin well and he wouldn’t have hesitated to kill Ogilvie if he had screwed him over in a deal or even if he had just looked at him the wrong way. But freezing the cunt to death was hardly his style. He’d have had him decapitated or buried under a block of flats. Or both.
The other name was Mick Docherty. As well as dealing drugs and shooting off his flash mouth, Docherty had a line in providing cheap labour, all foreign and all off the books. The suggestion was that Ogilvie had his fingers in the building of a new school and a contact of his had been in charge of labour for tarmacking the driveways. The councillor said that the middle man was dodgy enough to have gone to Docherty to provide the workers. It wasn’t much to link mouthy Mick to Wallace Ogilvie but close enough for Kirkwood’s purposes. Just perfect, in fact.
Kirky had already let it be known he would catch the man they were now calling ‘The Cutter’. Said he would do what the cops couldn’t. Said he would do their job for them. That was why he had made sure everyone knew he was chasing leads, letting slip bits about Glasvegas, council contracts and baseball-bat beatings.
Everyone in Glasgow wanted this guy caught. They were prepared to buy into anyone that could do it. Anyone. City was crying out for a hero.
The councillor had given him the name of the middle man in the school building project, a guy called Archie Kepple. It wasn’t clear if Kepple knew Docherty’s labourers were wetbacks or if it suited him not to know. Either way, it was time for Kirky to pay Mr Kepple a visit.
He had an office on the first floor of a building on Renfield Street, not far from the lawyer Carr’s. When Kepple’s secretary was told that Alec Kirkwood was there to see him regarding Wallace Ogilvie, she asked if he had an appointment. Kirkwood said he was confident that Mr Kepple would see him and he was right. He was to be shown right in.
Archie Kepple was a nervous little man who kept playing with a glass paperweight on his desk. Kirky was
