The Bullet Trick

'Fake dog poo.'

'Still your fastest seller?'

'From eight to eighty.' He laughed. 'It’s a classic gag.'

'Aye, a fucking hoot.'

Bruce raised his eyebrows.

'You’ll have to ditch that language if you’re going into kiddie conjuring.'

'Sorry, I’ll go and wash my mouth out with some of your special soap.'

Bruce laughed.

'Not as popular as it used to be, but still funny.'

'Not everything has the longevity of plaster of Paris poo.'

'No,' Bruce shook his head sadly. 'It’s a pity that.'

We sat drinking sweet tea and eating ginger biscuits, while Bruce filled me in on what had been happening in the Scottish magic scene. Genie McSweenie’s rabbit had been kidnapped at a rugby club social and held to ransom — it wasn’t funny, William, the poor beast was traumatised; Stevie Star had crashed his van on the way back from Perth; Peter Presto had moved to America to take a shot at the big time; and Manfred the Great had been exposed as a kiddie fiddler.

'I always thought there was something not right about him.'

Bruce dunked his gingernut into his tea and nodded then sat up straight. The tea-soaked end of the biscuit lost out to gravity and plopped into his mug.

'That reminds me …’ he shook his head. '… See, that’s what happens when you get to my age, bloody senility. There was a chap phoned a few weeks ago looking for you.'

'Yes?'

'English bloke, said he’d seen you somewhere and mislaid your number. I told him I didn’t have a contact for you, but he sounded keen.'

Bruce looked worried; concerned I might have missed a gig or even my big break.

'Pushy even?'

'A wee bit, typical cocky cockney, you know the kind. I met a lot of them in the forces.

Nice enough fellas once you get to know them but they think anything north of London’s outer space.'

'Did he leave a number?'

Bruce’s face brightened.

'He did indeed.' His mouth dropped again and he looked around the tiny backroom piled high with mysterious parcels. 'But where did I put it?'

I selected what I was going to need for Johnny’s show while Bruce rummaged through the drawers and boxes that constituted his filing system, cooing over odds and ends he thought he’d lost, until eventually he found the scrap of paper he’d scribbled my name onto and a mobile number below.

'Bingo! I knew I had it somewhere.' Bruce looked at the props I’d assembled. 'You want me to wrap that lot up for you?'

'If you want.'

He shook his head, lifted a fluffy toy rabbit from the top of my pile and looked at me from between its long ears.

'Changed days, William, changed days.' Bruce totted up my purchases and started to putting them into bags. He put on his best shopkeeper manner. 'Now, will Sir be requiring anything else?'

I told him and he shook his head.

'You always were a bloody pain in the arse, William, even when you were a kid.'

'A minute ago I was the best Saturday laddie you ever employed.' I grinned at him.

'Come on Bruce, it’s in a good cause, wee Down’s Syndrome kids. I’ll get you a mention in the programme. The place’ll be full of weans. Who knows how much fake dog shite you’ll sell on the back of this.'

'The word is poo, William, we don’t say shite in this shop.' His expression softened.

'Aye, go on then. But you can arrange the bloody transport yourself.'

I remembered an Internet café somewhere near George Square; I walked through the Saturday-afternoon shoppers until I found it, waited in the long queue to buy a coffee, keeping my head down, hoping I wouldn’t meet anyone I knew, then rented time on a computer.

The author of The Friday the Thirteenth Vanishing, the book devoted to Gloria’s disappearance, was a man called Drew Manson. He’d written three other books, all of them following the demise of unfortunate women, all of them out of print. I punched the title and author’s name into a search engine and let out a low Yes when the hits appeared on the screen. I smiled a silent apology at the studious girl on the next computer and clicked on Manson’s website. It had a clumsy homemade feel, but I was its thousand-and-fifth visitor.

The most recent postings wavered between hurt and outrage. All of them lamented the lack of new editions of Manson’s books, in the same faintly florid style. At the bottom of the page were an email address and an invitation to contact Manson with any new information relating to the crimes in his books. I might be a cynical bachelor who’d forfeited all hope of romance, but I was growing to love the Internet.

I set up a new email account, VeritableCrimePublishing@hotmail.com, and sent Manson an invitation to meet and discuss the possibility of a new edition of his book in the light of Bill Noon’s tragic death. Then I looked at the links from Manson’s site. There were reviews of his books, some long-past festivals Manson had read at and the address for the website of the National Missing Persons Helpline. I clicked on the link and started to scroll through the images of the disappeared.

They were random faces, more young than old, though the old were there too, looking out from their photographs or hiding behind the faces of their younger selves in pictures taken decades ago. Long hippy hair, seventies mullets, eighties flat-tops, photographs so dated they’d make you smile, if they’d not been turned tragic by circumstance. The same skewed aspect clung to all of the images. The lost mothers and brothers, sisters, aunts, daughters, sons and uncles generally had a carefree air, caught at a family celebration or a party or maybe just the last photograph in the spool.

There were two photographs of Gloria Noon. The familiar image I’d come to know from the newspaper reports and a second, digitally aged one. The page flashed from one to the other: young Gloria, aged Gloria, young Gloria, aged Gloria. The images were imperfectly aligned and her shoulders moved up and down between the two, making it look like Gloria was shrugging as she smiled out from the screen of lost faces. Her résumé summarised the time and known circumstances of her vanishing. It said nothing about possible murder.

Even at my lowest I’d never totally vanished. I wondered how many of the disappeared were dead, how many had been coerced into leaving. I wondered if they even knew that they were missing, that there were people who loved them, desperate to forgive whatever they had done. But then who was I to jump to conclusions? Maybe some of them had committed acts too awful to be absolved.

I clicked to the next page and a warning that the following images might disturb me; I clicked again and the screen threw forth photographs of some of the found. There were only three of them. A woman washed up in the Thames, a youth discovered dead in Petersham Woods and an elderly man who had lain in the bushes in Richmond Park for a very long time before his skeletal remains were uncovered. All of them had lost their features to decay and the images on this page showed reconstructions of how they might have looked in life. The technicians who rebuilt these faces were more magician than I’d ever be. They crafted an illusion of flesh onto bare bone, dragging back the lost features of the dead. The technicians’ skill was painstaking and exact, but the images were ghastly. The smiles of the missing people that had shone carelessly from the previous page were all gone. There was no glimmer of expression here, the skin was too smooth, the eyes too blank, the lips too set, no living face ever held such deathness. The missing may yet be alive, but one look at the remoulded faces of these three showed what their fate might be.

I closed the site. The dead and the missing weren’t going to tell me anything, my search had to be through the living. I logged onto yell.com and started to search for Gloria’s sister, Sheila Bowen.

There were several Bowens in the telephone listings but only one Bowen’s & Sons Gents Outfitters. I jotted down the number then checked my new Veritable Crime email account.