In the Devil's Name Page 21

  Me and the Devil Blues came slithering out of the high definition sound system, stark and chilling. The legendary bluesman’s anguished, howling voice, as expressive as a suicide note and twice as mournful, backed by the chugging, impossible sounding guitar chords played on a battered acoustic washed over the Sergeant and I as we sat in his living room, feeling the blues in a very real way. Johnson sang of the Devil knocking on his door that morning, and how he’d believed it was time to go.

  I didn’t say anything. I knew I’d still be alive at the end of that day, and I was the only person in the room who could say that. If Grace wanted to sit quietly, sipping Glenmorangie, smoking fags and listening to the man who legend tells us sold his soul to the devil in exchange for unearthly musical prowess, then I was cool with that.

  After the morning we’d had, a little quiet time with some tunes, a smoke and a nice single malt or two was just dandy.

  He waited till the song was done, then he began to speak.

  “Did you know your pal Dean’s grandfather?”

  “Grandpa Griff? Of course. Everyone knew the big guy,” I replied.

  “Did your pal ever tell you about the murder that happened around here back in the eighties, and how Alex Griffiths was involved?”

  This was news to me. I shook my head in surprise.

  “I don’t think even Griff knew about that,” I said. “He was always telling stories, same as his grandpa. No way he wouldn’t have told us about something like that.”

  “You lads were pretty close, eh?”

  I nodded. I’d never had any other real friends but Cairnsey, Sam and Griff, but I’d always known that the relationship between the four of us was special in some indefinable way. Pretty close didn’t come anywhere near to accurately describing the bond between us.

  Sergeant Grace continued.

  “Alex Griffiths was, for a time, the chief suspect in a murder case. This was in eighty two, just before my time working here. The case was handled by an old mate of mine, Andrew Swanney, and when he died, I took over his job, but the case, such as it was, was closed by then.”

  “This is news to me,” I said. “I didn’t know about any of this.”

  “Not many people do, son. It was all handled very quietly at the time, and when it was over, no one talked about it at all. There were a few reasons for that, and it was partly because Alex Griffiths’ money and businesses kept this town alive during the recession that was happening at the time. There would’ve been no sense driving him away with gossip after he was cleared and then watching the town die. Since then, just about everyone who lived here at the time has died or moved somewhere else, so there’s only one or two people still around who know about what happened.”

  Sergeant Grace refilled his whisky tumbler and lit a fresh cigarette, offering me another, which I took. As he leaned forward with the packet of smokes, he gasped in pain and clutched at his chest. He sat back in his armchair breathing heavily, trying to collect himself. He eventually got his breathing back under control.

  “Guess I’ll not have to worry about being hauled over the coals for breaking the Data Protection Act by telling you this, Phil,” he said.

  He smiled through his pain and began his tale.

  Within the hour, Stephen Grace would be dead, and I would be leaving Ballantrae for the last time, never to return.

  “Going from the case notes I inherited from Andy Swanney, and from what information I picked up from other coppers who worked here at the time before I arrived from Edinburgh, the office got a call one night in July of nineteen eighty two.

  “Craig Hamill was a local lad that had been fined for poaching a couple of times, and he called into the station one night saying he’d found a body out in the woods near Bennane Head. Said his dog sniffed it out and had started digging. He never did say what he was doing that far into the woods at night time, but word round town was that he was into badger baiting as well as poaching.

  “Anyway, he dragged the boy that was on duty that night away out into the forest, and right enough, they found a corpse in a shallow grave way back in the deepest part of the woods, partially decomposed.

  “Well, you can imagine this was a big thing to happen in a wee place like this, and it made the papers. The usual appeal for witnesses went out, and a few days later, a man by the name of Ray Vize called the station, saying he had some information.

  “Ray was a homeless guy who lived in Glasgow at the time, but he was originally from here. He’d owned a wee engineering outfit that took care of the local fishing fleet and such, but he hit the bottle when Alex Griffiths bought up a bunch of the local businesses, his included.”

  “So he was the original owner of Anderson's?” I asked, referring to the engineering company now currently run by Sam’s dad, but which was owned by Griff’s family.

  Grace nodded.

  “Vize, according to talk in the village, had always claimed that Alex swindled him in the deal for the shop, and tricked him somehow into parting with the place for a pittance. His wife left him and he ended up in Glasgow, living between a hostel and a park bench in Glasgow Green, tanning any drink he could get his hands on. By the time he called the station saying he had information about the murder, he’d been homeless in Glasgow for three years and was a hopeless jakey.

  “Anyway, he calls in and says he’d seen the victim, who was a seventeen year old lassie from Dundee. A runaway named Lisa McKeown. She’d been identified through dental records and her picture was in the paper with the story.

  “Vize said that he’s seen her in a nasty wee pub near the Barras in Glasgow where he would sometimes get a drink if he had a couple of pounds in his pocket. It was that sort of place that sold cheap bevvy, didn’t ask questions, and was popular with the tramps and strays that hung about that area of the town. According to him, he’d seen the lassie speaking to someone who he recognised, and the two of them had left the pub together. It was Alex Griffiths, he said.”

  “And Alex didn’t recognise this Ray Vize while he was in the pub?” I asked.

  Grace shook his head.

  “By this time remember, Vize had been living on the streets for a few years. If Griffiths had seen him, he’d have thought he was just another manky tramp with a beard and long hair. He’d have looked fuck all like the man Griffiths had known back in Ballantrae.

  “Anyway, when Andy Swanney found out that this Vize guy was naming the town’s financial saviour as a murder suspect, he got nervous. Alexander Griffiths, the Earl of Ayrshire, had bought up most of the town’s businesses during the recession, pumped in a shit load of cash and made them more profitable, and now Andy had to go and question him about a murder, all on the say so of a homeless drunk that was known to hold a grudge against him.

  “He was brought in of course, but he had an alibi. Said he’d been in Edinburgh on business the night Ray Vize claimed to have seen him in Glasgow. They checked the alibi, naturally, and a lad working in the bar of the hotel where Griffiths said he’d been staying confirmed he’d spent the whole evening there, from the start of the boy’s shift at six pm, till the bar closed at midnight. What’s more, Griffiths even had his receipt from the hotel. As alibi’s go, it was tighter than a duck’s arse."

  “So Vize was just talking shite to make trouble for Griff’s grandpa after all?” I asked.

  “Well, more than that as it turned out. That’s what Griffiths claimed as well, of course; that Vize was bitter about how his life had gone and blamed him for it. From the transcriptions of Vize’s first official interview though, he categorically stated that he didn’t blame Griffiths for the way he’d ended up. He still maintained that he’d been conned in the business deal, but he was big enough to admit it was his own fault that he’d hit the bottle and lost his wife and home.

  “Ray Vize was arrested and charged with the murder a week later.”

  Surprised, I said “Vize was the killer?”

  Grace shrugged.

  “That’s the way i
t went. Someone else, a ticket seller working at Glasgow Central came forward and was interviewed.

  “His name was Brian Bishop, and according to him, he’d been working in the ticket booth one night when a young, blonde lassie accompanied by a scruffy looking, older man with a beard and long hair came to his window and bought two tickets to Stranraer. He said he remembered thinking it was odd that a pretty girl like that was hanging about with a guy dressed in pish stained jeans and a jacket full of holes. Quite a pair they made, and they seemed to be an item, as the trampy looking guy was holding the girl close, with an arm round her shoulders. But he said that the lassie had looked and sounded nervous as she bought and paid for the tickets, and that as they were walking away from his booth, he thought he might have seen, just for a second, something that could maybe have been a knife in the guy’s hand, but he’d only seen it for a split second, and couldn’t say for sure.

  “Going on this, of course, they hauled Vize in for questioning again and searched him. He did have a blade, which he claimed was for protection. That would have been fair enough, with Glasgow being as rough as it is, especially back in those days, and even more so for somebody sleeping rough most of the time. When they searched the hostel where he stayed on and off though, the coppers found a pair of the dead girl’s bloodstained knickers. The lassie’s poor mother confirmed that they had belonged to her wee Lisa.”

  “Fuckin’ hell,” I said.

  “Aye,” Grace went on. “Griffiths was off the hook, and Vize went down for life, but he didn’t do much time in prison.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “’Cause some cunt stabbed him to death inside Barlinnie jail before he’d even done a month.”

  At this cold information, I briefly thought about my brother James. I’d heard that he’d been suspected of knifing someone during his stay at that same prison, years later.

  “Right up until the day he was murdered in his cell in the ‘Linnie,” Grace continued, “Ray Vize maintained that Griffiths had taken that wee lassie out of the bar that night and had then set him up to take the fall.”

  Grace abruptly succumbed to a coughing fit at this point, his whole body wracked with great, heaving spasms. I poured him another slug of Glenmorangie, which he took gratefully. Fresh blood now flecked the front of his shirt. He didn’t have long left.

  From his tale, I thought the evidence against Ray Vize was pretty damning, but I sensed there was more to the story.

  Grace valiantly got his breath under control again and resumed talking.

  “So, Griffiths was in the clear, and according to some of the people in the village, it was made crystal that he wouldn’t take kindly to any further defamation of his name. He might have been regarded as a bit of a character and a storyteller, but there was another side to Alex Griffiths. Some people, quietly of course, saw him as little more than a gangster with a title rather than as the jolly, rich local philanthropist. He was friendly to everyone, but he was definitely someone you didn’t fuck around with.

  “With Ray Vize locked up, it all died down, and for a few months everything was quiet. Then out of the blue, my mate Andy Swanney, the station Sergeant here at the time, turned up dead. They found him in his wee cottage down by the shore, just round the back of where the post office is now. There was a typed suicide note and an empty bottle of Valium. It was all… wrong.”

  “Wrong?” I asked, struck by the hesitant way in which he’d said it.

  “I was in the same year as Andy in school here in Ballantrae before we both went to the police college. We were good mates, just like you were with your pals. Really close, you know what I mean? Well, Andy’s suicide note said that he’d been in love with a woman in Ayr that owned and worked in a brothel, but who he didn’t name. It said he was heartbroken because she had refused to see him anymore after he confided in her that he was on the force. Not only that, but she’d also threatened to send an anonymous letter to headquarters letting them know that not only was one of their Sergeants a regular customer in an Ayrshire whorehouse, but he was also a heavy user of illegal substances.

  “Andy’s note confessed to it all, and ended with how he couldn’t handle the shame of losing his job. It was all bullshit. I hadn’t seen him in ten years, but I knew Andy, and that wasn’t him.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  I was actually thinking that as convinced as Grace had been that his friend hadn’t been the sort to indulge in hooker and coke orgies, he apparently hadn’t seen this Andy Swanney in ten years. A person can change a lot in a decade.

  I also reckoned that a policeman faced with the prospect of being publicly scandalized, losing their job and doing time inside might see a suicide note and a bottle of Valium as a tempting way out.

  This time, Grace read my thoughts.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Phil. That it makes sense that a head polis might take the easy road faced with that situation? That’s very true. If he’d been found guilty of drug charges, he’d have been sent down, and I’m sure you realise how unpopular coppers are in the jail. Thing is though, there was something that only I knew about Andy Swanney. He was gay.”

  He let that sink in for a second before going on.

  “He first told me back when we were still in school, and by that point we’d already been mates for years. He never tried anything with me, but I’d always wondered why he didn’t seem to be chasing the local lassies as much as the rest of the boys our age did. Like I said though, we were close, and it didn’t bother me. It was his business what he did and who he did it with and it didn’t change the fact that we were best pals.

  “We kept in contact over the years through letters and the occasional phone call when I was through in Edinburgh, and we’d meet up now and again for weekends where we’d knock about with the other lads we’d been mates with as kids, but I was the only person he ever told about his preferences. He kept it a secret, and he had to, otherwise he’d never have got on to the force. Things weren’t as liberal back then as they are now. That’s how I know the suicide note was faked. For fuck's sake, Andy even had a secret boyfriend that he told me about in his last letter to me before he died!”

  Grace was suddenly roaring with laughter, pounding the arm of his easy chair with tears running down his face. It eventually dissolved into another racking coughing fit that lasted longer than the previous attack. When he finished, there was blood on his chin.

  “The note was faked,” he went on. “I knew it, and not just because of what I knew about Andy. The thing had been typed, but in ten years of writing to me, not one of his letters had ever been done on a typewriter. And the suicide note wasn’t signed either. It just didn’t add up.”

  “Wasn’t there some sort of investigation?” I asked. “Surely a copper’s suicide would be looked at closely by the guys he worked with, especially if they thought something dodgy.”

  Grace shook his head.

  “The boys at the station here were cut out of it. They loved Andy to bits as he was the best guy you could ever meet, and a top notch Sergeant. They’d have moved heaven and earth to get to the bottom of it, but the official word was that as he was the ranking officer in town, an impartial team from another station in Ayr would look into his suicide, so as not to cloud the investigation with any emotion the local police may have felt.

  “Fucking bullshit if you ask me though. In all my years as a copper, I’ve known a few who’ve topped themselves, and I never heard of any rule that says the investigation has to be carried out by someone from another station.

  “When I heard he’d died, I’d already been looking for a new beat for a while as I’d been in Edinburgh for so long and wanted a change of scenery, so I applied for his job. I got it, and the first thing I did when I got back here was speak to the Ayr headquarters, requesting the case files on his suicide. I was told to forget about it and to let the man rest in peace. I kept at them though, and was eventually told, in not so many words, that to
keep asking wouldn’t be good for my career.”

  I tried to make sense of what he was telling me here. This was a lot of information to be taking in.

  “Hold on, Sergeant Grace,” I said. “If the suicide was faked, then you obviously think someone killed him. Why? I don’t see what it’s got to do with the murder either. The case was closed and Alex Griffiths was innocent, right?”

  “That was something I could never figure out,” he said. “Not completely anyway. Andy had no enemies. Everyone in town knew and liked him. There was no reason for anyone to kill him and fake his suicide. He had no family, obviously no wife or kids, and only a couple of close friends. Nothing was missing from his house when they found his body, so he hadn’t been robbed, and no one benefited in any way from his death. There was no motive for someone to kill him. Like I said, I’d been told to forget about it by my superiors, but Andy was my mate, and I wasn’t about to let it go.

  “When you’re a copper, Phil” he said to me, “you can get access to information that’s not normally available to the general public, and I decided to make a couple of phone calls, in a non official capacity of course, to see what I could find out. A quick call to another polis I knew in Glasgow that worked in the telecommunication information department gave me Andy’s phone records, incoming and outgoing, which I wanted to check out. The last call he ever got was listed as being received the night before he died. It was from a Glasgow number that was registered to someone called Brian Bishop.”

  The name had already cropped up in this story before, I realised. After a second, I had it.

  “The ticket office guy that saw Ray Vize with the murdered lassie?” I asked.

  “The very man,” Grace replied, nodding. “At the time though, to me it was just a name and a phone number. I didn’t know at that point that Bishop had been connected to the murder case. I only found that out later. Anyway, I tried calling the number, but it was a dead line.