Yesterday's papers

Chapter Twenty-Five

The bewilderment on Jock’s face slowly gave way to fear. He half-rose to his feet, then seemed to think better of it and sank back into his chair. Harry could sense his desperate efforts to compose himself, saw his eyelids blinking as his mind whirled, trying to come to terms with the shock of discovery.

Harry looked again at the photograph on the album sleeve. Ray Brill stood with arms folded: he was acting mean and moody and not a flicker of emotion compromised his dark features. Ian Brill, born McCalliog, stood by his side, wearing a shy and boyish smile. In those days he had been as slim as a girl and his hair had been thick and wavy; his smooth chin might never once have seen a razor. But there was no mistaking him, all the same. The brown eyes had not changed and his two front teeth still overlapped.

‘A long time ago,’ said Jock when at last he found his voice. ‘And yet I remember it as if it were yesterday.’

Harry tossed the record to one side. ‘You’re not the first person to find we can’t escape our past.’

Jock cast a wry glance at the Ross Macdonald paperback next to his desk. ‘I should have learned that from reading Lew Archer novels. Tell you one thing. I’d sooner be the detective than the detected. So how much have you worked out, how much have you guessed?’

‘Enough to be sure, if not quite enough to satisfy my own inquisitive streak. Whether it will suffice for the police is a different matter. It’s for them to dot every ‘i’ and to cross each ‘t’. I doubt if you’ve managed to kill three people without yielding a single clue.’

‘Two,’ said Jock quickly. ‘There were only two murders. Miller died by accident. A lucky chance, as I thought at the time.’

Harry shook his head. ‘I wish you hadn’t told me so many lies.’

‘What do you expect? I’ve always been a survivor. Confession is for the weak.’

‘And the innocent?’ demanded Harry, bitterness rising for a moment to the surface. ‘People like Edwin Smith?’

Jock shrugged. His confidence seemed to be returning and he ventured a small smile. ‘Pity he didn’t cough to the murder of Warren Hull whilst he was at it. But you didn’t answer me. What put you on the track?’

‘Ray Brill made enemies easily, but in all his fifty years no-one had hated him enough to kill him. So I asked myself why he had been murdered now. I’d solved the Sefton Park case — ’

‘What?’ Jock was genuinely amazed.

‘Oh yes,’ said Harry. Despite his tension, he was unable to resist the temptation of a devastating throwaway line. ‘Carole’s own father strangled her. It’s a long story. Another time, perhaps.’

‘I doubt if there’ll be another time for you and me,’ said Jock.

‘You may be right. Anyway, I’d learned that Guy Jeffries did murder his own daughter and he was in his grave, safe from retribution in this world at least. The way I saw it, if Ray hadn’t murdered Carole, and had no cause to shield anyone else, there must be another reason for his death. Similarly, the motive for that mysterious visit to Miller on the day he died could not be connected with the Sefton Park case. Yet Miller did seem to have stumbled on some sort of secret. I remembered how he seemed almost to have lost interest in the identity of Carole’s killer when I met him in the park — which was immediately after he had talked to Ray Brill. I wondered what Ray might have told him.’

‘But Ray didn’t say anything to you about Warren Hull.’

‘No, because you had already warned him to keep his mouth shut. I knew a little about Hull’s death, though, and although everyone had written it off as a gay killing of no account which would never be solved, when I asked myself why someone might murder for the sake of self-preservation, it occurred to me that Hull’s death might hold the key. Miller had an obsession with perfect crimes. If Ray had spilled a few beans about Hull’s death, he might have found that more interesting even than his investigation into the Sefton Park case.’

Jock indicated the record sleeve. ‘When did you identify me as Ian?’

‘Within the past hour. I’d come round to the view that Ray knew who had killed Hull and had kept quiet for purposes of his own. Suppose the culprit was still around, who might it be? I was still groping in the dark until I saw the record sleeve. When I realised who you were…’

‘The pieces of the puzzle all fell into place?’ asked Jock with a wry grin.

Harry forced a smile. On the way over here, he had been dreading the prospect of a confrontation with a man he had liked, had been far from clear in his own mind what he hoped to achieve. At last he was beginning to relax a little. He wanted Jock to fill in the gaps of the story and thought he could persuade him to do so. ‘I don’t believe Ross Macdonald would ever have sunk so far as to use that hackneyed phrase, but you have the right idea.’

‘I told myself not to underestimate you, though — don’t take this the wrong way — it’s easily done.’

‘Once it dawned on me how careful you had been not to tell me you were Ian Brill, I found it hard to believe there wasn’t a guilty explanation. Most former stars I’ve ever met still hanker after the limelight and I couldn’t quite imagine you as a kind of subterranean Greta Garbo. Even assuming you genuinely wanted to forget about your days as a pop star, why not say something when we talked about the Brill Brothers?’

‘I toyed with the idea, but the last thing I wanted was for you to get too close to the truth.’

‘Which is why you took pains to keep tabs on my own nosing around.’

‘My interest wasn’t entirely spurious,’ said Jock. ‘I did find the Jeffries case intriguing. I agree with Miller: people who get away with murder have a special fascination.’

‘I guessed that when I told you I was going to see Ray, you tipped him off. Presumably you’d been in contact recently, as a result of Miller’s investigations.’

‘You’re right, though the night I murdered him was the first time we’d met face to face in over twenty years.’

‘Quite a way to renew an acquaintance. Anyway, Ray said something to me that seemed to clinch your involvement. I’d introduced myself simply as a solicitor called Devlin. I don’t flatter myself that I’m a household name in Southport. Frankly, I’m scarcely a household name in my own flat.’

‘You do yourself an injustice. I’ve heard other solicitors talk about you even down here, you have a reputation for never letting go. You intrigue me, though. What clue did Ray give?’

‘At one point, he called me Mister Harry Devlin. The significance of it didn’t strike me at once, but later on I asked myself: how did he know I was called Harry? Miller might have mentioned me to him, but you were a likelier candidate. I told you the previous day that I would be driving up to Southport to see Ray. The odds were that you had tipped him off. No wonder he didn’t seem too surprised to see me.’

‘Simple as that, eh? And I thought I’d been so careful.’

‘I decided to call on Ray to ask him how he knew my name, but of course, you beat me to it.’

‘So where do we go from here?’

‘Let’s talk about that in a little while. First, I’d like to satisfy my own curiosity. Obviously, there’s a good deal I don’t know.’

‘And you seem to be short of evidence, as well,’ said Jock, stroking his beard.

‘You know as well as I do that when the police take a close look at everything that has taken place, it’s a pound to a penny that they’ll be able to tie you in with Ray’s murder. I see it as a panic measure, am I right?’

‘I had no alternative. He’d kept his mouth shut about Warren for thirty years, but I couldn’t trust him any longer. He was down on his luck, he knew I had a few pennies put by. He saw me as his pension. I couldn’t have that, Harry, I’m sure you understand.’

‘How did he know you had killed Hull?’

‘I admitted it, of course.’ Jock shook his head. ‘I was only a boy, remember. A frightened wee boy.’

‘What happened?’

‘Warren fancied us, of course. He had a reputation for sleeping with his acts, though I didn’t know that when he signed us up. In the early days, he had his eyes on Ray, and Ray was crafty enough to hold him off whilst encouraging him to think that his defence might one day slip. To keep him interested in us, that’s all. No-one was straighter than Ray, in the sexual sense at least.’

‘But in the end Warren turned his attention to you?’

‘When we started to hit the big time — or the biggest time we ever hit, at any rate — Ray could afford to be brave and to tell Warren where to get off. The man was no fool, he knew he couldn’t risk exposure. So he started to spend more time with me.’

‘And you were glad of his attention?’

Jock gave him a sharp glance. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘I’ve never thought about it coherently until now, but I suppose I’ve sensed subconsciously that you may be gay. You’re not married, are you?’

‘So what?’

Jock had raised his voice and Harry guessed he had touched a nerve. Well, this was no time for tact. ‘And I guess you like the company of young boys like Adrian, your saxophonist friend.’

‘There’s been nothing between Adrian and me,’ said Jock fiercely.

‘But you wouldn’t have said no, had the opportunity arisen, would you?’ Harry’s tone softened. ‘I suppose society was different in the sixties. Gay sex was a vice. You were young and unsure of yourself, easy meat for an experienced predator like Warren Hull.’

‘He was a cruel man,’ said Jock. Suddenly the fight seemed to have gone out of him and he closed his eyes for a moment as he cast his mind back down the years. ‘Selfish and cruel. I was flattered by his overtures, yet frightened at the same time. One night he invited me back to his flat on a pretext. I think I knew what would happen, but I couldn’t find it in me to refuse.’

‘And?’

‘He raped me,’ said Jock flatly. ‘If I’d dared to hope for anything, it was for romance. I’d left my family behind in Glasgow, come down to Liverpool to make my fortune, changed my name. I found it a lonely place and, once I got to know him, I disliked Ray. You could say I was vulnerable.’

‘Not as vulnerable as Warren Hull when he was lying naked on his own bed.’

‘No,’ admitted Jock, ‘but he was a brutal man and my life was in ruins. Certainly, it was never the same again. While he was sleeping, I picked up a lampstand and just lashed out. God, I’ve never seen so much blood and mess. I watched as the life oozed out of him and laughed hysterically. It took me half an hour to come to my senses, but at last I did so. As I said, my survival instinct is well developed, it has had to be. So I cleaned myself up…’

‘I gather it was a frenzied attack,’ said Harry, watching carefully for the reaction.

‘So the papers said. I suppose it was a case of the famous red mist — another phrase you’ll never find in the pages of Ross Macdonald, eh? Afterwards I blotted the whole thing out of my mind. You have no choice, otherwise it’s simply too much to bear. I took care to remove any trace of my presence — fingerprints and all that stuff — and then I scurried off home. No-one saw me.’

‘Did you have an alibi?’

‘Thanks to Ray.’

Harry stared. ‘How come?’

‘As soon as the news came out and we had a chance to be alone together, he confronted me. He was no fool, he knew that Hull had been chasing me. I soon broke down under his questioning and told him the truth. I begged him for mercy and I’ll never forget the moment when he laughed in my face and promised that of course he would say we’d spent the evening together. He kept his word and the police were never any the wiser.’

‘Why was he willing to save your neck? You’ve admitted you were hardly bosom buddies.’

‘He pretended he was glad that I’d been a worm who turned. Warren Hull made his flesh creep, he never concealed that. The two of them were perfectly matched, I’ve often thought, they were both trying to screw each other for everything they could get.’

‘And the real reason?’

‘Simple. The publicity would have destroyed him. He realised that if I were charged with the murder, the bad press would have dragged him down with me. He reckoned we were successful enough to prosper without Warren, but much as he despised me, he knew that he couldn’t risk losing both his manager and me and still hope to keep the hits rolling. So for the sake of the Brill Brothers, he lied through his teeth and I was saved. Only trouble was, after we lost Warren, we soon stopped making the charts.’

‘The day you killed him was also the day the music died?’

‘You could say so — though Warren was no Buddy Holly.’

‘And in the end the Brill Brothers broke up anyway.’

‘Yes, I was sick of it all. The phoney glamour, the stupid screaming schoolgirls. And most of all I was sick of Ray. Never mind that he’d given me the alibi, it came to a point when we couldn’t stand the sight of each other. I’d done well at school in Scotland before I moved south, and now I had the chance of a job in the shipping business. We were never going to recapture the glory days, so I jumped at it. I found I enjoyed the book-keeping. When you’ve killed another human being, Harry, I suppose something dies inside you as well. It was enough for me to play around with figures in a ledger. In time I did well, earned promotion, moved to a better position with the Byzantium Line. Where I stayed until they made me redundant.’

‘So you finished up here?’

‘That’s right. And let me tell you, I’ve loved it. I’m my own boss in my own kingdom. No-one bothers me and I bother no-one. And I enjoy meeting the likes of you.’

‘A pity I’m even keener on playing the detective than you.’

‘Yes,’ said Jock sorrowfully, ‘it is.’

‘Tell me about Miller. How did he find you?’

‘He rang me at home out of the blue, said he thought a chat might be to our mutual advantage. From the moment I heard his voice, I knew he meant trouble. He’d met Ray and pestered him about Carole Jeffries. Ray was pissed and must have said something to suggest he knew someone who had got away with murder. Miller wormed enough information out of him to track me down. There aren’t many McCalliogs in the Merseyside phone book. I already knew from you that someone was sniffing round the Sefton Park case.’

‘You arranged to call on him?’

‘Yes. I rang Ray first to find out what he’d been saying. He was relatively sober and he admitted he’d been indiscreet. His attitude was devil-may-care, as if after all this time nobody would care what had happened to a man like Warren Hull. I felt I must meet Miller, find out what he wanted. I expected a straightforward blackmailer, but Miller was something else, one of the strangest men I ever met. You know, I don’t think he was interested in money. What intrigued him was simply the idea of committing a murder and then escaping detection. He seemed to gloat over his knowledge about what I had done, and he was more anxious to discover the details of the crime than to make anything from it.’

‘How did he die?’

Jock spoke rapidly, as if despite everything he was still anxious to exonerate himself from blame. ‘It was so stupid. My nerves were at breaking point. I’d kept my secret for so long and now this old fool had discovered it. I asked him bluntly what he wanted. He laughed and said he would settle for the pleasure of keeping me guessing about what he proposed to do. In a fury, I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and before I knew what was happening, he was having a fit, couldn’t breathe.’

‘He suffered badly from asthma.’

‘He broke free but was fighting for air. All at once he lost his balance and hit his head on the side of the fireplace. It was so stupid, I couldn’t believe it. For the second time in thirty years I was in another man’s home, watching him die.’

‘And you did nothing to help?’ asked Harry coldly.

Jock spread his arms. ‘What could I do? I was in a state of shock and in any event it was soon all over. Tell you the truth, after a couple of minutes I said a little prayer of thanks. Everything seemed to have worked out perfectly.’

‘Except for Miller.’

‘He was no good, Harry. Like Warren Hull and Ray, he was no loss to the world.’

‘I take it you were the one who burgled my office?’

‘Stupid, of course, but I panicked. The problem I had was that I just didn’t know what was in Cyril Tweats’ file. I’d never dreamed it would contain anything damaging to me — why else do you think I let you have it that time? But it began to prey on my mind. I started wondering whether it might contain information I would prefer you not to know. Above all, I didn’t know what Ray had said during the police enquiry. He hadn’t fingered me for Warren’s murder, but he still might have revealed more than I’d have liked. It was important to me that you shouldn’t realise that Ian Brill and I were one and the same. As you know, Jim stores spare copies of internal documents down here — including details of your burglar alarm system and how to disable it. When I couldn’t find the file in your room that night, I feared the worst. Then lo and behold, you handed it back to me for safekeeping! I needn’t have worried after all.’

‘And Ray? Another unlucky break?’

‘No need to take that tone, Harry. It was obvious I had a problem with Ray. I couldn’t be sure what he would say or do — especially if you turned up and started to sweet-talk him. I went to see him in Southport. He’d been drinking, as per usual. He was hostile, in fact he was downright offensive. Kept saying he owed me nothing. I pleaded, I cajoled, but he started to tease me by speculating aloud how much the tabloid press would pay for his story, doubting whether I could outbid them. I couldn’t take it any longer. I hit him hard a couple of times; the second blow knocked him unconscious. You wouldn’t think it to look at me today, but I boxed at school, won a schoolboy title. Ray may have been bigger than me, but I’ve downed better men than him.’

‘And then you set fire to the flat and tried to make it look as though the blaze had started by accident. Not easy to fool trained investigators, Jock. What were you thinking of?’

‘All I knew was that I had to do my best to cover my tracks. Ideally, the police would regard it as an accident. Failing that, I thought the fire would destroy any evidence of my presence in the flat.’

Harry sighed. ‘Three deaths in the victims’ homes. Your modus operandi never varied.’

Jock climbed to his feet and stood, hands on hips, looking round the Land of the Dead. The deedboxes, the old files, the detritus from cases long forgotten. ‘You’re accusing me of a lack of originality? Somehow I feel that’s the least of my problems.’

Harry looked him in the eye. ‘I’m sorry I’ve become the greatest of them.’

‘Me too,’ said Jock. ‘I liked you, Harry, I really did.’

A subtle change in his tone alerted Harry and he dodged to one side as the balled-up fist flew towards him. It caught him only a glancing blow, but it was enough to make him stagger. Before he could defend himself, Jock followed up with punches to the stomach and kidneys, sickening blows. He felt himself gagging and, although he flailed with his arms in a vain attempt to save himself, he could not help crumpling to the ground.

As his head hit the concrete floor, the pain made him shout aloud. For a few seconds he was too dazed to be capable of coherent thought. When he managed to raise his head a fraction and blink away the tears, he saw Jock had grasped the handle of the heavy-duty truck he kept parked at the corner of the room. He was lifting on to it an old six-foot filing cabinet.

‘Jock, don’t be stupid!’

The little clerk steadied his load. He was panting with the effort — and his tension. ‘I told you before — my survival instinct is well developed.’

The truck needed oiling. Its wheels screeched as Jock began to manoeuvre it towards where Harry lay. Harry tried to haul himself to his feet. Every bone in his body seemed to be hurting and all his strength had drained away. He scrabbled with his fingers in the dirt, but he could hardly lift his chin off the ground, let alone struggle to his feet. He could see Jock looking at him, concentrating intently on the task in hand. The filing cabinet was wobbling on the lip of the truck. It must be packed with suspensions full of thick old files ready to archive. Better not to think what would happen when Jock dropped it on him.

‘I’m sorry about this, Harry, I really am,’ gasped Jock.

‘Let’s talk about it,’ said Harry, barely able to make himself heard. ‘Surely…’

‘No, the time for talking has gone.’

The truck came nearer. Harry could see its vast load looming over him, ready to topple him into darkness.

‘Jock!’

The little man spun round. He took one hand off the handle of the trolley and the filing cabinet crashed down on to the ground, the sharp edge of its bottom end only inches from Harry’s nose. Dust blew into Harry’s face and he shut his eyes for a second, still half-expecting permanent oblivion. But he had recognised the voice and never had he been so glad to hear it.

Kim Lawrence was standing in the entrance to Jock’s domain. By her side was Adrian the saxophone enthusiast. Amazement was scrawled over their faces at the sight which greeted them.

With a roar of fury, like some wild animal, Jock ran past them and out of the door, into the maze of passages that made up the Land of the Dead. After a moment’s pause, Adrian thundered after him.

Harry found himself looking into Kim’s eyes. There were so many things he suddenly wanted to say, but his head and body were aching and words were beyond him.

But not beyond Kim. She strode towards him and stood with folded arms above his prostrate form.

‘So,’ she said, ‘another fine mess you’ve got yourself into.’