The Quaker
The Quaker is watching you…In the chilling new crime novel from award-winning author Liam McIlvanney, a serial killer stalks the streets of Glasgow and DI McCormack follows a trail of secrets to uncover the truth…Winner of the 2018 McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Book of the YearA city torn apart.It is 1969 and Glasgow has been brought to its knees by a serial killer spreading fear throughout the city. The Quaker has taken three women from the same nightclub and brutally murdered them in the backstreets.A detective with everything to prove.Now, six months later, the police are left chasing a ghost, with no new leads and no hope of catching their prey. They call in DI McCormack, a talented young detective from the Highlands. But his arrival is met with anger from a group of officers on the brink of despair.A killer who hunts in the shadows.Soon another woman is found murdered in a run-down tenement flat. And McCormack follows a trail of secrets that will change the city – and his life – forever…
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This is entirely a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, real events, businesses, organizations and localities are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. All names, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers
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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
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Copyright © Liam McIlvanney 2018
Liam McIlvanney asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
Cover layout design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Cover photography © plainpicture / Johner / Pontus Johansson (front);
Robin Vandenabeele / Arcangel Images (back); Alison Martin (front flap).
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Ebook Edition © JUNE 2018 ISBN: 9780008259938
SOURCE ISBN: 9780008259914
Version: 2018-05-21
For Caleb
Surely, he walks among us unrecognized:
Some barber, store clerk, delivery man …
Charles Simic, ‘Master of Disguises’
The houses are all gone under the sea.
The dancers are all gone under the hill.
T. S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’
‘We are suffering from a plethora of surmise, conjecture, and hypothesis.’
Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘Silver Blaze’
That winter, posters of a smart, fair-haired young man smirked out from bus stops and newsagents’ doors across the city. The same face looked down from the corkboards of doctors’ waiting rooms and the glass display cases in the public libraries. Everyone had their own ideas about the owner of the face. Rumours buzzed like static. The Quaker worked as a storeman at Bilsland’s Bakery. He was a fitter with the Gas Board, a welder at Fairfield’s. The Quaker waited tables at the old Bay Horse.
Some said he was a Yank from the submarines at the Holy Loch. Others said he was a Russian from off the Klondykers. He was a city councillor. The leader-aff of the Milton Tongs. A parish priest. He had worked with multiple murderer Peter Manuel on the railways. He was Manuel’s half-brother, Manuel’s cellmate, he’d helped Manuel abscond from Borstal in Coventry or Southport or Beverley or Hull. There were Quaker jokes, told in low voices in work-break card-schools and the snugs of pubs. The word was magic-markered on bus shelters, sprayed on the walls of derelict tenements. It rippled through the swaying crowds on the slopes of Ibrox and Celtic Park. QUAKER 3, POLIS 0. His name crept into the street-rhymes of children, the chanted stanzas of lassies skipping ropes or bouncing tennis balls on tenement gables.
And always there was the poster: IF YOU SEE HIM PHONE THE POLICE. The poster looked like someone you knew, like a word on the tip of your tongue. If you looked long enough, if you half-closed your eyes, then the artist’s impression with the slick side-parting would resolve itself into the face of your milkman, your sister’s ex-boyfriend, the man who wrapped your fish supper in the Blue Bird Café.
The face was clean-cut, the features delicate, almost pretty. To some of the city’s older residents he looked like a throwback to a stricter, more disciplined age. A well-turned-out young man. Not like the layabouts and cornerboys who lounged on the back seats of buses, flicking their hair like daft lassies, tugging at their goatee beards.
Jacquilyn Keevins, the first victim, was killed on 13 May 1968. Strangled with her tights. Left in a back lane in Battlefield.
The Ballroom Butcher. The Dance Hall Don Juan with a Taste for Murder. The Quaker was something to talk about when you got tired of talking about football or the weather. That year of 1968, the worst winter in memory set in just after Halloween. On the first day of November a storm battered the city, shouldering down through the banks of tenements, scattering slates and smacking down chimney stacks.
