Where the Dead Men Go Read Online Free PDF Page A

week’s copy, pretend we know what we’re talking about. For months, it seemed, I’d been covering a different country. On 5 May the Scotland I described in my weekly column – that chippy, chary, toe-testing land, where the generations voted Labour from fear and from habit – turned out not to exist. It was a Narnia of my own invention. Maybe it was already passing into folklore in 2007, when the Nationalists won by a whisker. But now the old Scotland was finished, sunk like Atlantis. I kept a map of the constituency results on my partition wall. Except for some atolls of red around Glasgow and two spots of blue on the border with England, the whole bloody country was SNP yellow. Every seat in the Highlands, every seat in the North-East, every seat in Aberdeen and Dundee, four out of five in Edinburgh, five out of eight in Glasgow, all seats bar one in Ayrshire and Fife: the Nats had taken it all. Seats that had been Labour since 1945 had crashed like rotten redwoods. This was the map of a foreign country, one I knew nothing about.
    There was solace in getting things utterly wrong. You had to start over, relearn whatever you thought you knew, start from the bottom, take your first steps like everyone else.
    The night was getting colder and I flagged a cab. Both the fold-down seats bore the logo, the green ‘G’ in its coloured rings: ‘Glasgow 2014. XX Commonwealth Games.’
    Because I missed it? Was that the answer? Because I got sick of PR? Because this was the only thing I was halfway good at? Because, despite the evidence of my senses and the actions of my colleagues, I still thought papers mattered?
    The cab climbed Hope Street. Saturday night. Lassies’ legs in the headlights. The lads strutting up the roadway, cropped heads and rolling shoulders. Black-clad bouncers with earpieces, satin jackets shining in the lights. Maybe Maguire was right. When you go you should stay gone. Coming back was always an error.
    We turned into Clouston Street, stopped halfway up. I signed the chit. Inside the flat I checked on Angus, listened for the breathing, tucked his left leg back under the blanket, tugging the cuff of his pyjama trousers over his plump calf, upped the heating a notch.
    ‘Here it is,’ Mari shouted.
    I got a Sol from the fridge and plumped down beside her on the sofa.
    They led with it. A man has been shot dead in a Glasgow park in what police suspect is a gangland execution. Shots of the park, the MIU, the yellow jackets guarding the incident tape, the murder squad standing round chatting. A shot of the chopper, filmed from below, an asterisk in the sky.
    William Swan, known as ‘Blackie’, was killed by a lone gunman during a football match in the city’s Maxton Park . Headshot of Swan, cropped from a squad photograph, black-and-blue stripes at his shoulders. Grinning, tanned – the heedless victim.
    They had no more details than we had. A cop was interviewed, mild, media-trained, hatless but in uniform, North of England accent. Want to reassure . . . obviously unusual . . . visible presence . . . everything we can.
    Then they showed the footage. I sat forward, set the bottle on the floor between my feet. It was shaky, coarse-grained, dark. Hard to make it out at first. A jumbled crush of bodies and then a striped shirt blocking the lens. When the stripes move off the ball has squeezed out for a throw-in on the far side. At this point the camera swings round sharply to the touchline: a guy with a greying crewcut mugs a grimace, blows a kiss to the camera. You hear the shots just then – two flat cracks like someone snapping a desk with a ruler – and the camera jiggles nervously and fumbles for focus. Grass. Sky. A muddy blur then the camera steadies, finds it.
    A figure on the grass. A dark shadow sprinting away. The camera tracks the runner, loping off towards the railings. As he reaches the park entrance he turns to look back. We get a still of this, the gunman caught in mid-stride, the torso