Day: March 13, 2023

Sid Vicious is under the table, waiting to see if there’s any dropped food. I wait til Nana isn’t looking and I kick him. Right in the belly.

‘That poor dog must be bursting,’ Nana says. ‘Will you no take him out, Janey?’

She asks this every day but I can’t, not any more. It’s Sid’s fault that I found the dead body.

When I first went back to school, Nana had said nobody would know it was me that found Samantha Watson, and to tell them I was off with diarrhoea. I was just going to say sick. But they’d all heard and everybody crowded round.

‘Was it all blood and guts, Janey?

‘Did you shit yourself?’

‘Was the dead woman a nudie?’

I just stood there looking at the ground. Mrs Henderson came out and made them line up. She took my hand and we went in the teachers’ door and she was all nice and kind. But that made it worse and I wished she would just shout like normal.

Now, in the playground, nobody comes near me. Not even any of the Smelly Kellys. But this morning, Lorraine and Jackie run up to me.

‘Janey, look,’ Lorraine says, opening a packet of cheese and onion. There’s a bottle of nail polish in there, ‘It’s Boots No.7, Jackie nicked it off her sister.’

Lorraine used to be my best friend til I stopped talking. Now she’s hanging about with that Jackie. Don’t care.

‘Want us to do your nails?’ she says.

‘Look at mine,’ Jackie says, wiggling Frosted Pink in my face. Wiggling and wiggling til all I can see is Samantha’s nails, broken and filthy like she’d been scrabbling in the dirt to get away. Suddenly, I feel Samantha’s smashed-up hand in mine, cold and heavy.

‘Just, just get lost,’ I shout and push Jackie. Just a toaty shove, I didn’t mean her to fall.

When I get home, Gibby from the 18th floor is outside fixing a motor. He’s always messing with broken stuff. He wipes his filthy hands and walks me to the lifts. Rain leaks into our block, and Gibby has the top floor damp smell.

‘The polis are in with your granny,’ he says. ‘Don’t you let them hassle you, pal. Yous just give me a shout if they start any of their shite.’

Gibby’s OK, Nana used to think he was a bad devil, but then he fixed her radio and wouldn’t take any money.

Two police are here this time. The woman who tells me to call her Carol, and the baldie man who wears ordinary clothes. They’ve got tea but Nana’s not put it in the nice cups. And there’s no biscuits out.

‘Hey, Jane. Good day at school?’ Carol says, ‘You must be excited about going up to big school soon.’

“Big school” You’d think I was six or something, what a diddy.

‘It’s Janey,’ I tell her. Five weeks and still getting my name wrong. She makes out she’s writing it down on her hand with an invisible pencil. Stupid.

‘Love your wedges,’ she says, as if she’s my friend or something. I look at my feet and think about my old shoes crashing to the ground. It was giving me the shivers to wear them, so I chucked them over the balcony, with all the other clothes I was wearing that day. Even my new Wombles t-shirt. Nana picked them up but she missed the pants and some wee boys are still using them for scabby-touch. She wasn’t angry when I told her why I did it but she had to see Big Davie to borrow money for new stuff. He’s got her Family Allowance book.

‘Take your jacket off, sweetheart. They want another word.’ Nana is still in her work overall, a day’s worth of pie-making right down her front. She puts the big light on. It’s usually just for Christmas and looking for her glasses.

Baldie takes out his notebook. Nobody told me his real name but his head is shiny and huge. He probably thinks he’s Kojak or something.

‘Right, hen. One more time, just in case you’ve remembered something.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. The wean’s told you everything.’ Nana knows I’m not a wean, I’m nearly twelve, but I see what she’s doing.

‘Details can come back, often weeks later. And our Jane, sorry Janey, is a very clever girl,’ Carol says and gives me the smile again.

That day, at the police station, she had taken me to a wee cubicle to clean up cos I’d wet my pants. I heard her outside talking to a man who wanted to know if the witness was any use. “Doubt it,” Carol had said, “she’s from the Possil flats. Bloody lucky if she can write her own name.”

Baldie drinks his tea. I hear Sid scratching at the kitchen door, desperate to see the visitors and maybe bark to show what a good dog he is. I almost go to him.

‘Start at the point where you go to Martin Gallagher’s door.’ He’s clicking his pen, ready to go. On my knee there’s a scab exactly 37 days old. I pick it just enough for the wee drop of blood to come out. Now I’m ready too.

Martin opened his door. He was in his pyjamas, proper Star Wars ones, not fakes from the market. He gets nice clothes cos his ma works in Woolworths.

‘I can’t come, Janey. We’re going to the Botanics.’

I was really raging cos I got up early, ‘Well, you’re going to miss the Spitfire then.’

The firework was a belter, and we were going to let it off down the Dummy Railway. Martin looked pretty sad when we left, but he gave me some gammon for Sid.

You have to be really careful about going over the railings at the Dummy Railway. The jaggy nettles are murder. Sid gets excited off the lead and was going a bit mad, bouncing about in the weeds. There’s always a weird quietness when you get right down the embankment, like the air is too thick or something.

The plan was supposed to be to set the firework off in Blindman’s Hole. The echoes in that tunnel are loud enough to ache your teeth. A bend in the middle takes all the light away and even if you don’t believe the stuff about ghosts and skeleton bones, you still have to watch for glue sniffers and drunks. I was thinking I’d wait for Martin after all. But I had to get Sid. He’d run on ahead, and was making growly noises behind an itchy-coo bush. Maybe I would pick some to shove down stupid Martin’s stupid pyjamas.

But there was a stink.

‘You better not be rolling in keech again, Sid,’ I said out loud.

I wasn’t scared when I saw her, not at first. She was lying face up and her legs were apart but at weird angles. You could see right away that she was dead. There was a droning sound but I think that was just inside me. I knelt down beside her and a wee bit of broken glass went into my knee.

‘Why did you kneel down, Janey?’ The police always ask this.

‘I don’t know. I just thought…’ I thought she maybe wanted somebody with her, I thought she was maybe lonely. But I don’t say this because it makes me sound a bit mental.

‘This is the point that you touch Samantha’s dress.’

My face goes bright red. ‘There was blood all over her tummy. And–and down there. She had no pants on.’ I feel Nana’s hand on my shoulder. She reaches forward and wipes my knee with her hanky. I’ve gone too far with the scab.

‘And you don’t know how long you waited there?’ Baldie asks. I shrug. Long enough to see a big fat bluebottle crawl out of her mouth.

‘Have you remembered seeing anyone walking near the embankment?’

Again I shrug and Carol makes a sighing noise. I really don’t like Carol.

‘Right, that’s it,’ Nana shouts. ‘Yous already know about the taxi driver who called your mob. So there’s nothing more to be said.’ Nana’s wee and a bit fat but when she’s raging she looks proper hard.

‘Mrs Devine, please. About the taxi, Janey. You absolutely sure it was moving? Talk us through that bit again,’ Baldie says.

‘I don’t–I don’t really remember how I got to the main road.’ It’s like one of those dreams where bits are missing. ‘The taxi nearly hit me. That’s how I know it was moving. The driver got out and shouted at me to get off the effin road,’ – Nana doesn’t stand for swearing unless it’s about Orangemen – ‘but then he was staring at me, and he took my hand and sat me on the pavement. He pulled his taxi in and brought me one of those tartan blankets. He said he was Alex, Taxi Alex, and did something bad happen.’

‘Did he mention the body first? Think hard, hen.’

I close my eyes to remember better. Taxi Alex was chewing Juicy Fruit. He had very red hands and his voice was high, not like a man talking.

‘No,’ I say, ‘it was me that told him about, about…’

‘Did Alex leave you alone at all?’

‘Just for a wee minute. Then he came back and gave me a Wham.’

‘He gave you a what?’

‘It’s a sweetie,’ Nana says, and does a look cos taking sweets is not on.

‘It was for shock, Nana.’

‘This Alex character. Yous looking at him?’ Nana asks. I wonder what she’s meaning but guess it’s not good because her lips are that tight way.

‘We can’t discuss that, Mrs Devine.’ Baldie tugs at his trouser knees. ‘Right, hen, last question. We need to know if you did anything apart from touch the dress. Did you do anything else to Samantha’s body?’

He’s looking right into my face now.

‘No,’ I lie.

Later, Gibby comes to take Sid Vicious for a walk. Nana’s dead grateful and goes to get him a coffee. She hardly ever gives anybody her coffee.

I notice Gibby’s rubbishy tattoo, blue and smudged, near his wrist and I wonder if might be Rangers. He sees me looking.

‘Army,’ he says, holding his big arm out. ‘I seen bodies too, you know. Northern Ireland.’

I wish Nana would hurry up, I don’t want to be talking about this.

‘Do you see her in your dreams? The dead lassie?’ he asks.

I nod, ‘Every night.’

‘Aye, it’s rough right enough. Like having worms living in your belly. Bloody shame it had to be you that found her. All sliced up, that filthy word scrawled on her face.’

‘Take two, son,’ Nana says, passing a plate of biscuits over Sid’s head.

My mouth is filled with sick and I run to the toilet.

I wasn’t scared when I found Samantha, not at first.

‘You’re freezing, so you are,’ I said, patting her hand, ‘but I’m here now, you’ll be ok now.’

Then I saw a word on her forehead. I’d thought it was blood but it was the really bad swear written in red lipstick. I did a wee bit of spit on my hanky, like Nana used to do for sticky cheeks.

‘There, there, wee lamb,’ I said, rubbing and rubbing till only a bit of the C was left.

But then the bluebottle was on her teeth and I screamed. I was running and I was screaming, and I was in the tunnel with the skeleton bones and ghosts.

The police were raging when I said I’d touched her dress, so I never told them about cleaning the word on Samantha’s face. I never told anybody. Only the person who wrote it would know about it.

Only the murderer who is with my Nana, eating custard creams.

 

— Frances Crawford

Glasgow 1928

A bluebottle thuds against the pane. Reeling on the rebound, it staggers through the air searching for another exit. It exhausts the dull corners of the room, senses the light and tries the window again. Over and over, I watch it flying here and there and back again.

The buzz suddenly stops. It lands on the table inches from my hand, standing on the arc of an old tea stain. Its tiny body pulses and flexes, and black spiked legs turn it left and momentarily right.  I sit frozen, watching it, imagining its thoughts. I do that with people too, like that first one.

In a blur, I jerk my hand and swat it, clipping its side.  The mess of the insect glistens.  I lean in. One broken leg is still reaching, trying to get some purchase.  I breathe smoke over it and nudge the lit fag-end towards its one good eye, so I can listen to the sear.  It can’t escape. It’s stuck to the table with its own guts. Done, I flick it. It hits the wall and falls into the shadows. No one’s ever cleaned back there.

In fact, the whole room is dirty.  It’s deliberate — squalor helps un-nerve anyone who’s used to better. Not me, though. I quite like it.

Used to be white, but lots of fags have been smoked in here since.  Now it looks like old men’s teeth.  Smells too. Quiet though. Thick walls and there’s only that high window to let the street in.  That’s the clattering of trams, rolling along Saltmarket.  I like trams. Know them all. That’s the thirteen.  Stops right outside the station.  And there’s its bell. Goes over the Clyde and down towards Gorbals Cross.

No clock in here.  They don’t want you knowing how long it’s been. They like to leave folk stewing.  The longer the better. The not-knowing gets to them. But not me. I know their game. You just need to settle in.  It’s a seat. Got my fags. And there was that fly.

*

At the far end of the duty room, D.S. Fyfe was fixing a large photograph to the pinboard. He knew he was being watched and probably pitied.  However, he had no choice but to go along with what Chapman wanted.

It was only his fourth week working with the new senior officer. It was a recent promotion and before his time, some said. Chapman was certainly young. But worse than that, he was English.

On their first day, the new D.C.I. had made it clear how he worked. Now, as Fyfe stood at the board that Chapman had put up, he finished assembling all the evidence.  Only the D.C.I. used this approach. It was an attempt to consolidate everything, and red strings were used to join apparently disparate pieces of the story.

Most of Chapman’s colleagues thought it was an affectation. It had certainly been new to Fyfe. However, he was already seeing its value because it helped see the bigger picture.

Fyfe secured the latest crime scene photograph — the third murder in a month.  Three victims, all women, had each been attacked upstairs on a tram late at night. This photograph, like the others, showed a woman slumped and bloodied, her throat cut.

Unannounced, Chapman appeared at Fyfe’s side.

“Good, Sarge. Let’s go over this again.”

Chapman sat but expected Fyfe to stand, using the board to present the case clearly and logically.  All the while, Chapman’s eyes would be darting from photograph to note, following the connections and formulating new ones.

“Sir, the first was Elsie O’Grady, twenty-five, waitress going home after work.  Recently separated from her husband, she lived with relatives.  Conductor found her on the upper deck just after midnight.  The body position and blood splatter suggest she was attacked from behind while seated.  Her throat cut in a single slash. No witnesses and, although there was plenty of blood, no footprints.”

Chapman nodded, urging Fyfe on.

“With the others, it’s the same story.  Betty Devine, twenty-two, housemaid returning after a day off.  And the most recent one, Millie Pollok, twenty.  All killed upstairs on a late-night tram, throat cut from behind. The only difference with Pollok is there’s evidence of a struggle — skin under her fingernails. So, she must have managed a swipe at him.”

*

I’ll tell you one thing, this table’s seen better days. I don’t mind though.  Gives you time to think.

The thing that surprised me when I got started was how many young women travel alone at night. Wouldn’t do that if I was a woman.

But it was quick. Wasn’t trying to make them suffer. And it was easy — just had to wait.  I’d sit upstairs and when they came up, I’d crouch down.  Most women are too busy fussing with their purses to notice.  At night, the conductor usually takes their fares downstairs.  That helped.

After they settled, I just had to pull their heads back with one hand and take the razor hard across their throats with the other.  Their blood would splash the electric bulbs above them. They would be in a pool of pink light while they died. Lovely.  Couldn’t stay, though. I had to climb over seats to get out.

The first one felt nothing.  The next was harder. She scratched like a cat.   I won’t lie — I was nervous but excited. Like at the carnival when you want to go on the big ride.

Been in the papers too.  Well, not me, my work.  My night work, that is.  Nobody’s interested in what I do during the day. No pictures, though. Pity. But whatever way you look at it, it was their own fault for travelling alone at night.

*

Fyfe continued, while pointing at the board.

“In each case, the killer used a razor, slicing from right to left, so he was likely left-handed.”

“And the conductors saw nothing?”

“No, sir, no help there — can’t recall who went upstairs or down.”

Chapman rose and studied the three crime scenes in turn.  All showed young women slumped against the windows, their heads back and hanging awkwardly to one side, with a dark, gaping grin across their white necks. He took three pins and pierced one in each photograph. He then wound string around the first pin, stretched it across to the second and tied it off around the third.

“That’s what we need — the connection. That’ll give us a motive.”

Fyfe had been working on just that but, thus far, had drawn a blank. And without a motive it was nearly impossible to identify a suspect.  Any man had the means — everyone had a razor — so all that was left to work with was opportunity.  Suspicion had naturally fallen on the conductors but, again, there was no link.  Three murders and three different conductors.  Their photographs were on the board too and connected to the respective scenes.  Fyfe studied them, all wearing their uniforms, and was struck by how alike they were.

*

My job’s boring.  Like that even from the start. Always on the move, here and there. Up and down stairs all day long.

Taken for granted. Just a nobody doing his job day in, day out.  And for what?  A single end in Govan, a gas ring and a shared toilet.  Not much to show for a life. One moment you have your dreams, and the next they’re gone. Just like those women, I suppose.

*

When the pattern emerged, they started looking for a lone ripper. But now the D.C.I. was questioning that assumption.

“Could there be more than one?”

“A copy-cat killing, sir?”

“Surely a possibility.  The first is topped. For argument’s sake, let’s say by the ex-husband. A week later, once it’s been in the papers, some lunatic comes along and tries his hand. Perhaps another week later he kills again, or maybe someone else takes over.  Might explain things.”

Fyfe thought carefully before answering. Whatever he said had to be sensible, especially if it was a rebuttal.

“If so, the second killer must have known exactly what happened at the first scene.  These crimes are nigh on identical. None of the details were released.  No one could have known except the killer.”

“What about the first conductor? He must have seen it all when he found O’Grady. Maybe he talked.  What if he told other conductors?  What do we know about the other two?”

Fyfe checked his notes and shook his head.

“Nothing special, sir. Duncan McColl was on the night Devine was killed, and Eric Warder found Pollok. McColl’s a family man from Shettleston, and Warder lives in Govan. Not married — bit of a loner.  Seemed like ordinary blokes.”

Chapman was studying the conductors’ photographs, and, like Fyfe, he saw the similarity — except, that is, for one thing.

“When were these taken? After the murders?”

“When I interviewed them, sir. This week.”

“Why’s this one wearing a woolly scarf?  It’s August.  Was Warder wearing it when you interviewed him?”

Fyfe strained to recall but couldn’t be certain.

“Get him in.  Let’s see if he’s hiding anything under that muffler. Like scratches.”

*

I light another fag. It’s not a comfortable chair.  Hard.  But when you’re on your feet all day, any seat’s a godsend.

There’s the thirteen again outside. Like clockwork.  Good to have something reliable. Expect they’ll ask me why I did it. Thought I knew, but I’ll need to get that straight.  Need a good answer because it’ll probably end up in the papers.  Maybe they’ll print my picture too.

*

“Right, I need you in there with me, Sarge.  I’ll take the lead, but you can offer him a fag, maybe a kind word. I want Warder thinking you’re on his side. Right, you go down, and I’ll be close behind.”

*

Footsteps outside. Handle turns. Door opens. Wasn’t sure who to expect. It’s Fyfe who looks in and smiles. Good that it’s the Sergeant.  Dealt with him before and he’s much easier to talk to than that English one.

*

“What’s this? Sitting down on the job, Charlie?  What you doing in here?”

“Just taking five minutes, Sarge.  Didn’t think you needed it.  Warder’s in the other room.”

Fyfe nodded and told the cleaner to mind Chapman didn’t catch him taking a break.

*

I wait before I collect my bucket.  I linger in the corridor, listening, my ear pressed to the old wood.  Chapman’s shouting.  Likes the sound of his own voice, but he’s got it wrong.  They think they’re that clever.

Upstairs there’s a floor needs doing. The stairs aren’t getting any easier.  Never thought I’d still be here, mopping floors, swilling out lavatories. But there are perks. Pick up a mop here, and you’re invisible.

In the duty room, they don’t even look up. I start by the window and work my way over to that board.  I slow so I can study the pictures.

Never got to see them like that.  She wasn’t one of mine, though, that first one. But when I saw her on the board, it looked so thrilling. And it was all there, every detail.  Almost an instruction manual. So, I thought, Charlie, why not get your own handiwork on Chapman’s famous board?

But as I’m looking, it occurs to me — there’s still space for one more. I’m working late, and the stop’s just outside. That last tram to Gorbals Cross is always quiet, except for one or two upstairs.

Then I hear it. Another heavy blue bottle flies past and lands on the board. It crawls across Elsie’s face and meets the taut red string.  Forced along, it finds its way onto Betty’s corpse where it pauses, preening its bulbous eyes with its front legs.  It turns, tasting the glossy surface, before carrying on to the end of the line where Millie is half-lying, half-sitting ripped open at the neck.

It scents her blood, but I decide to let this one go.

— Allan Gaw