Free Where the Dead Men Go by Liam McIlvanney Page A

the accession states, Czechs and Slovaks, mainly Roma.
    Neeson’s was quiet. Two old boys sat side by side at a scuffed table, long-nursed pints of lager before them, heads craned to watch the racing. I ordered a half of Guinness. The barman poured it and went back to his paperback. It would be fair to say that a climate of fear had yet to establish itself in Neeson’s Bar. Climate of fear about your pint not lasting till lunchtime. Climate of fear about losing your pound each way on the 3.15 from Goodwood. I sank the black and left them to it. Maybe Pollok would be more promising.
    I drove down Pollokshaws Road, took the Barrhead Road through the golf course and into Pollok. I hadn’t been in the scheme for eight or nine years. The old Pollok Centre had gone, replaced by the shiny new Silverburn Mall, but the streets round the Haugh Hill featured the same old white-harled four-in-a-blocks and three-storey flats. Pollok was the oldest of the big four peripheral schemes, built in the Fifties to house the families cleared from the central slums. The Walshes were the powers-that-be around here but you didn’t see them at weekly surgeries, you didn’t see them in constituency offices on the Crookston Road. What you saw, on a weekday lunchtime, was the usual outer-urban cast of moochers, mums and toddlers, shuffling old men. There was no story here, no danger of a story ever happening. I pulled over and phoned Lewicki.
    ‘A tout? I think you mean a CHIS, Gerry.’
    ‘A what?’
    ‘Covert Human Intelligence Source. All the best cops have them.’
    He explained it to me. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers (Scotland) Act 2000 brought a new set of rules to the handling of touts. A tout now had to be registered. And a tout was no longer a tout, but a Covert Human Intelligence Source. Only a registered CHIS could be tasked to go out and find specific information. Only an approved officer could handle a CHIS, and only a senior officer – Assistant Chief Constable or above – could sanction an op. You had to show forms, permission slips, operational reports: every time you used a tout you had to drop half a week on the paperwork.
    ‘And you do this?’
    ‘Are you stupid, Gerry? Do I fuck.’
    ‘So have you got one?’
    He was quiet for a bit. ‘Maybe. Call you back in ten.’
    Lewicki’s tout worked part-time as a janitor in the Community Centre on Langton Road. Within half an hour he was sitting in the passenger seat of the Forester, smelling strongly of turpentine (‘I was varnishing the sideboard’), his thirty-quid fee in his boiler-suit pocket. He was a bit put out when he heard what I wanted.
    ‘The mood of the place?’ He squished round to face me, shaking his head. ‘The fucking mood of the place?’
    I had hurt his professional pride. He was used to being asked for a name. A time. Some precise piece of data only he could divulge. Not something anyone could answer.
    I tried again. ‘I mean, what are they saying about it, the Walshes? Are they nervous, scared? Are they taking, you know, precautions?’
    Again the pitying look. ‘Well they’re not being silly about it. They’re keeping the head down. But that’s the wrong question, son.’
    ‘So what’s the right one?’
    ‘Who killed Billy Swan? Because I’ll tell you something, son. No one round here’s got a clue.’ He nodded importantly, tapped a finger on the dashboard. ‘No one’s got a clue. Maybe some of the young ones, or the gyppos up in Govanhill – maybe they did it on their own, make a name for themselves. But no one ordered it. No one green-lighted it here. Alright, son? We done?’
    I thanked him as he wrestled out of the car. This was as close to a vox pop as I was going to get. I watched him stroll down the hill, arms braced for action, the keelie roll. How did you make a mood piece out of this? A carnaptious old grass in a stained boiler-suit.
    I drove straight home from Pollok, back to the cold empty flat. I’d set the fire