Where the Dead Men Go by Liam McIlvanney Page B

trousers, once, twice: It’s not me who’s died .
    ‘You okay?’ She pulled me round to face her, brushed the shoulders of my suit, fiddled with my tie.
    ‘I’m fine.’
    ‘This is the real one today.’
    ‘I know.’
    The day before I’d stood outside the church with the other hacks, the crew from Reporting Scotland , the rubbernecking locals, and watched six gangsters shoulder Billy Swan down the steps to the hearse. I followed the convoy of cars to the cemetery and stood well back when the interment began, me and the snapper and the rest of the pack. They stood six-deep round the grave, it was a Neil show of strength. Plain-clothes men haunted the edge of the crowd and a pair of uniforms stood beside their squad car at the cemetery gates. But that was just work. Today was for real.
    On the way down to Ayrshire we stopped for petrol. The cashier smiled, then she noticed my tie, passed me the receipt with a sympathetic grimace.
    We parked at the railway station and walked down the hill to the church. Mari took my arm as we crossed the cobbles.
    The Old High Kirk in Mureton is a squat grey box in the shadow of the viaduct. It looks like someone has fashioned a barn out of stone and then plumped a little clock-tower on top. I took an order of service from a teenage boy and we filed inside with the others.
    The church was packed. The service wouldn’t start for another twenty minutes but already the pews were thronged. We squeezed down a side-aisle and into our seats. I thought of Moir as a lone wolf, Johnny-no-pals, so it surprised me, the tight rows of mourners, the old kirk groaning like an emigrant ship. I felt sorry for my dead self, for the Gerry Conway whose boxed carcass would one day rest on trestles in front of a crowd far sparser than this. It feels a little hollow to be jealous of a dead man.
    Mari read the order of service and I looked round for people I knew. The daily and Sunday were out in force – we’d left a skeleton staff at Pacific Quay – and my colleagues, unfamiliar in black, with their unknown partners and spouses, were dotted round the church. Maguire and Niven were up the front, conferring like plotters. Further back I spotted the fire-truck lipstick and red-rimmed eyes of Neve McDonald and a haggard-looking Jimmy Driscoll. Russell Spence, the QC, was shuffling along to make space for Lachlan MacCrimmon, the court reporter. A couple of TV presenters whose names escaped me were tossing their heads in the gallery. Peter Hewlett the Rangers striker was there, and Mark Halliday, who won the Open Championship at Carnoustie in a three-way play-off with Woods and Westwood and never won anything again, and a red-haired character actor from River City , tugging at the sleeper in his ear. Towards the back of the church was a restless clutch of thugs with squaddie buzzcuts: I took these to be villains, the career crims who found their chronicler in Moir. I clocked the meaty profile of Gavin Haining, his big square shoulders in the pinstripe suit, and the imperative cherry bob of Annabel Glaister, the Deputy First Minister. Lewicki was there – he tipped me a nod across the aisle – and Bobby Ireland, the DI from Baird Street. I looked for Gunn and Lumsden, the blonde ponytail, the hulking leather jacket, but Moir was no longer a case and I should have known better. Another batch of crop-haired men, some with moustaches, sat with their slight wives in the second and third rows and the consoling hands they planted on the shoulders of a man in the front pew – Martin’s father, the retired RUC man, his grey hair looking freshly trimmed – marked them out as the relatives from Ireland.
    The reading was Ecclesiastes. Martin’s father rose from his place and stepped to the lectern. Before starting to read he rolled his shoulders and you sensed, in that readying gesture, all the funerals he’d attended down the years, all the send-offs for fallen colleagues, the knottings of the black tie. ‘To