Cast a cold eye, p.1
Cast a Cold Eye, page 1
For Deborah, my love,
without whom these books may not exist.
And in memory of her mother Elizabeth/Betty (born 1923),
whom I sadly never met, but whose recollections have helped
to inform the Dreghorn novels.
‘Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!’
– W. B. Yeats, ‘Under Ben Bulben’
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
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
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
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
AUTHOR’S NOTE
GRATITUDE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PROLOGUE
At first it’s like a prison, an iron fist around my head, but as the horror goes on, it becomes a shield and I raise my hands, pulling it tighter.
There’s no escaping the sounds though. The heavier ones buffet me like a storm. The lighter ones scuttle over me, sinking in their claws. They echo inside the metal, writhe within my head.
A rat-tat-tat sharp enough to rend bodies.
A thump-thump-thump, followed by a sickening wet crunch as something gives way that isn’t meant to.
There’s a fearful whimper, a ‘No-no-no!’ and then a scream. The whimper is mine. I try not to think of where the scream comes from.
Squelch-squelch-squelch in the mud, coming desperately towards me. A bang, a splash; I jump, startled, as something spatters me, thicker than water.
I hear my name called, cut off by a slap and a curse. Crying, pleading, struggling, a barrage of blows being struck, a guttural mob of encouragement: ‘GETINTAETHEM!’
Finally it subsides. Footsteps tramp past. Figures bump me as if I’m not there. Shots ring out occasionally, almost casually. The voices become less monstrous, less bloodthirsty. Just another day’s work now.
Liquid sloshes past me in a heavy can.
Frenzied splashes.
Petrol fumes.
A brief, expectant silence.
The flare of a match.
A deafening whoosh. A blast of heat that almost knocks me over. A crackling like a hearth, but fiercer, louder.
Clang-clang! The impact surprises me. I heard no one approach.
‘Knock-knock,’ says an inhuman voice that I’ll never forget. I turn and stumble helplessly, not knowing which way is which. ‘Knock-knock,’ the voice repeats. ‘And you say, Who’s there?’
‘Who’s there?’ I stammer.
‘That’s right. Who’s there?’ Closer, alcohol on the breath. ‘I’m asking you now, who’s there?’
‘I . . . I don’t know . . .’
‘Who’s there?’ Shouted now.
‘I don’t know!’
‘That’s right. You don’t know. You didn’t see anything.’
Hands fall upon my shoulders, turn me away from the voice. A truck engine growls into life.
‘You don’t know,’ the voice says again. ‘You didn’t see anything.’
The hands free me from my prison, removing my shield.
I see everything.
Every smashed skull, every leaking wound, every twisted body in every muddy, bloody puddle. Every broken man and woman. Every burning house in a street of fire.
I stare into the flames until they dry my tears and burn my eyes.
I scream until my voice cracks and dies within me, ‘I see everything!’
CHAPTER 1
Glasgow, Wednesday, 29 March 1933
In the countryside, or far out at sea, the water was no doubt clean and fresh, but when it reached the city it was as dark as sin, punctuated occasionally by cheerful rainbow swirls of oil, leaked from the battered boats that plied their trade on the canal.
Inspector Jimmy Dreghorn stopped at the lock gates, glanced one way and then the other. A couple of weans were walking a dog on the opposite side of the canal. One of them threw a stick and the mutt followed fearlessly, launching itself into the water despite the icy temperature, springtime or not.
Dreghorn looked at Police Constable Ellen Duncan, who pointed west, in the direction of the Kelvin Aqueduct, where the canal crossed over the River Kelvin.
‘Just along there’s where everyone goes winching, sir,’ she said authoritatively. ‘Or at least, they used to.’
‘Notice I don’t ask how you know that, constable.’
She gave him a cheeky, knowing look. ‘Please, I wasn’t always a—’
‘Fine upstanding member of society?’ Dreghorn interrupted.
‘Police constable.’ She spoke over him. ‘And I do have a life off duty, you know.’
Dreghorn raised his hands. ‘Whoa, I’m scandalized enough already.’
The Forth and Clyde Canal cut across the Central Lowlands, joining the two Scottish coastlines, from the Firth of Forth at Grangemouth in the east to the Clyde at Bowling in the west, both rivers then leading out to open sea. When first opened in 1790, business was booming, with timber, oil and coal transported from one side of the country to the other. Barges and other working craft bobbed happily alongside yachts and pleasure boats, an unlikely camaraderie between the classes as they navigated the locks and sluice gates.
As the influence of the railways grew, transporting greater quantities of freight more swiftly, and the trend in shipbuilding veered towards vessels too large for canals, the Forth and Clyde had fallen into decline, not helped by the Depression, which had engulfed the country four years earlier.
A lumber boat was approaching the lock, heading west towards Bowling, and the lock-keeper emerged reluctantly from his cottage to assist at the gate, breath misting in annoyance as he buttoned up his overcoat. He saw the dog swimming towards the stick, right in front of the boat.
‘Get that dug oot my river,’ he yelled, ‘or I’ll chuck you in after it!’
He spotted Dreghorn and Ellen, straightened his cap and asked suspiciously if there was anything he could do for them.
‘Aye,’ Dreghorn growled, ‘don’t draw attention to us.’
They walked in the direction Ellen had indicated. Two barges were berthed on the same side of the canal as them, so decrepit they could have been mistaken for derelict, if it hadn’t been for the peelie-wallie-looking family glimpsed through the windows of one, and the skipper of the other half-heartedly scrubbing his deck. With a guilty air, he pretended not to notice them as they passed.
As legitimate trade had dwindled, so the smuggling of black-market goods had flourished along the canal, although that wasn’t why Dreghorn and Ellen were there; in piratical terms, it was hardly Treasure Island.
They walked a little further, scanning the long grass at the side of the path. The handlebars of a motorcycle came into view, the grass around them swaying and rocking, although there was little breeze. Dreghorn stopped, put his finger to his lips and pointed.
Two pairs of feet, one male, one female, protruded from the grass at the edge of the path; the woman’s on the bottom, splayed awkwardly, kicking and struggling, the man’s on top, toes down, scuffing the earth to gain purchase. The man rolled away suddenly, revealing the black-and-white sheen of his spats – completely inappropriate for Scottish weather, but easily identifiable as the shoes the suspect they were seeking was described as wearing.
Dixon ‘Dixie’ White: robbery, assault and battery and, looking increasingly likely, manslaughter, if not murder.
The case had dragged on with painfully slow progress for almost a year. It wasn’t an investigation Dreghorn was particularly keen on, but Chief Constable Sillitoe had insisted that he take charge, as it was an important test of the new Fingerprint Department, recently set up to replace the ink-spattered, index-free shambles of the previous regime.
The first robbery had been at the Kingsway Cinema in Cathcart Road, May 1932, with several nights’ takings swiftly and efficiently snatched at around 1 a.m., while the watchman enjoyed a supper break that ended up costing him his job. Sergeant Bertie Hammond had succeeded in lifting a full set of fingerprints from the safe, but there was no match with the paltry samples in the files. Hammond, whose eagle e yes Sillitoe had brought with him from Sheffield, dispatched copies of the prints to Scotland Yard in London. Again, no match.
Four more picture houses were robbed over the following months, before the bandit moved further afield with the same modus operandi – to Paisley, Greenock and Troon. At every crime scene, prints were discovered, sometimes fragmentary, but all matching.
The bandit had to be young, fit and something of a daredevil, due to the rooftop acrobatics many of the crimes demanded. He was likely to be a bachelor of no permanent abode, moving freely from district to district and spending time in each as he planned his heists. Beyond that, and the fact that he was a fan of the pictures, they had little to go on.
The case had become more serious on 25 March this year, when the night watchman of the King’s Cinema in Sauchiehall Street was found unconscious at the bottom of the stairs that led from the foyer to the auditorium, presumably after encountering the cinema bandit. The man’s skull was fractured; doctors feared the worst.
Two days later the manager of the Blythswood Hotel had contacted CID about one of his guests, a young man named White, resident in the hotel for over a week. On check-in, he had asked to be awoken each morning at eight sharp with a cup of tea, a service the hotel charged threepence for. Each day, along with some risqué flirting, White gave the waitress who served him the tea a half-crown tip.
This largesse aroused the suspicions of the spendthrift manager: White didn’t appear to work, but wasn’t short of money and, in the midst of the Depression, had just bought a new Matchless Silver Hawk motorcycle, the roar of which disturbed other residents.
Dreghorn’s informant Bosseye, a skelly-eyed bookie who boasted that he could see in opposite directions at once, asked around his punters and learned that White was originally from Partick, but had gone off to London in 1927 to make his fortune.
He had recently returned, sporting spats and fancy suits, and was often to be found standing his old pals drinks in the Windsor, the Hayburn Vaults or Tennent’s Bar. By all accounts, his newfound gallusness rubbed them up the wrong way, but drinks were hard to come by in the Depression, so if you had to suffer some shite patter to get one, so be it. Patience was wearing thin, though, because of White’s habit of tempting the local girls with a flash of his wallet and a ride on his motorcycle.
Dreghorn had recruited WPC Ellen Duncan to question the Blythswood waitresses, figuring they’d be more likely to open up to her than a hardened thirty-five-year-old detective. It hadn’t taken her long to establish that White was tipping all the female staff generously and was – unknown to each of the others – ‘stepping out’ with three of them. Where did they go on these romantic excursions? The pictures.
Hammond had been keen to get a sample of White’s prints, but without more substantial evidence, there was no legal means of forcing the suspected burglar to hand them over, although Dreghorn made a couple of illegal suggestions.
Sillitoe snapped testily, ‘I know you Scots have a reputation for being tight-fisted, but we can’t arrest a man simply because he’s a generous tipper.’
‘Agreed, sir.’ Hammond cocked his head conspiratorially. ‘But we can arrest the teacup.’
Ellen had collected the potentially incriminating china from the Blythswood’s manager that morning, but by the time identification was confirmed, the dapper White had left the hotel scooting off on his bike.
Dreghorn stationed a pair of uniformed officers at the hotel, in case White returned unexpectedly, then drove to Partick, taking Ellen along, somewhat against regulations, in gratitude for the good work she’d already carried out. They scoured the pubs and cafes White was known to frequent, but animosity towards the police won out over ambivalence to the motorcyclist and they met only a stony-faced silence.
Finally a little fellow slinked out of the Hayburn Vaults after them. Glancing over his shoulder, he whispered, ‘If I did know where he was, what’s in it for me?’
‘A sense of pride at doing your civic duty and helping us apprehend a dangerous criminal?’ Ellen suggested.
‘Dangerous?’ The man thought hard. ‘I’m no’ a grass, right, but he’s up the canal with Wilma Ford.’ He thumped his chest, which sounded disconcertingly hollow. ‘She was going with me before that prick turned up, swanning about on his fancy bike. She’s too good for him.’
‘All’s fair in love and war.’ Dreghorn said.
Dixie should’ve known he wasn’t going to get anywhere the moment she climbed daintily onto the motorcycle behind him and asked, ‘But what’s to stop me falling off?’
‘Hold on to this,’ he laughed and clamped her hand between his legs.
Wilma Ford squealed in horror and might well have jumped off, but he was already roaring up Byres Road, so she had to throw her arms around his waist or she’d have been bouncing along the cobbles in his wake. She was yelling in his ear – telling him how cheeky and wonderful and handsome he was, no doubt – but he couldn’t hear properly above the engine and the horns of other vehicles, honking their jealousy and admiration as he weaved in and around their cars, causing them to brake and swerve.
Dixie was lucky with the traffic lights, barely stopping all the way to Maryhill Road. He only slowed slightly as he came onto the canal path, politely allowing an old duffer with a walking stick to stumble out of his way. ‘Get yourself one of these, auld yin,’ he yelled as he revved past.
After a bit, he turned the Hawk into a small clearing, stopped and threw down the towel he’d sneaked out of the hotel. He lay down, careful not to rumple his suit, and looked expectantly at her.
‘Thought we were going to the Blythswood for our dinner?’ Wilma asked sourly.
It was a bloody good act, Dixie thought; her face really did look as though it was tripping her, but he knew she was just holding herself back.
‘Aye,’ he said, ‘but I thought we could get some fresh air first, work up an appetite.’
The Blythswood was the last place they’d be going. He’d already taken out three waitresses to cover his reconnaissance of his next cinema target, and there’d be a riot if they spotted him with Wilma. He patted the towel suggestively. ‘C’mon, it’s a braw day.’
Wilma looked at the grey skies, black smoke pumping from tenement and factory chimneys. She sighed and sat primly beside him, back straight.
I’m in there, he thought, smiling sweetly, giving her his puppy-dog eyes.
‘Fanny will be the death of you,’ his mates used to say. ‘Aye, but what a way to go,’ he’d tell them. Better than slogging yourself to death in the shipyards or down the pits – bunch of mugs, wearing away flesh and bone against steel hulls and coalfaces.
In London he’d got in with the Sabini gang, Eyeties with a penchant for protection racketeering rather than fish and chips and ice cream. They’d taken to the cheeky young ‘Jock’ when they learned he could shinny up a drainpipe faster than Tarzan and was just as deft at safe-cracking. Of course that business with Darby Sabini’s eldest niece had obliged him to step lively out of the Big Smoke and keep on the move when he was back in Scotland, in case any of them were sniffing around after him.
Snuggling up to Wilma, he teased her until she relaxed and consented to lie beside him, then he was all over her like a rash, unleashing the full force of his charm: ‘You’re a wee smasher, Wilma, so you are. You’ve got all the bits in all the right places.’
He nuzzled her neck, licked her ears, planted slavery kisses on her lips. He tried to slip his hand under her blouse, but she pushed it away. Fair enough, a wee bit more winching first then. He tried to manoeuvre his knee between her legs, angling for a dry hump at least.
She was wriggling a fair bit, thumping his back and bucking her body under his. Trying to shove him away? Surely not. He suddenly remembered struggling with the wee night watchman who had tackled him at the King’s, rolling around on the floor. First to his feet, Dixie had clouted the man with his torch, then watched in surprise as he tumbled head over heels down the stairs. At first he’d thought the darkness under the man’s head was the pattern on the carpet, until he realized it was spreading, oozing . . .
Dixie jumped to his feet now, gagging, swallowing bile. ‘Fuck this for a game of soldiers,’ he said. He swung his leg over the Hawk, pointed at Wilma as if it was all her fault. ‘You’re a dead loss, hen, so you are.’ He started the bike, the engine growl matching his mood, and reversed onto the path.
