Adrift In The Cemetery

Martin Campbell

Martin Campbell, £9.99

The proceedings kick off with the kind of jokey headline attributed to local papers the world over: Dead Body Found in Cemetery. But this isn’t a joke to the unfortunate Scott Birrell, found deceased just inside the gates of Greenock Cemetery, or, despite their eventual Not Proven verdict, to the two men accused of hitting him with a rock. Nor is it a joke to Davie Perdue, the homeless man who has been secretly living on its grounds, in the basement of the derelict Gatekeeper’s House. Having been noticed there on several occasions, he has become a person of interest to the police, and he wants to avoid attention.

Perdue is clearly a traumatised man. Until recently a police officer in London, he has resigned and returned to the town of his birth. However, having sought familiar surroundings, he doesn’t want anyone there to recognise him.

Instead, he keeps his head down, hides behind a bushy beard and seeks refuge in the damp, dark basement of an abandoned house in one of the biggest cemeteries in Europe.

Adrift In The Cemetery by Martin CampbellAdrift In The Cemetery by Martin Campbell (Image: free)

When the local police start asking after him, he decamps to Glasgow for a while, sleeps in a hostel and sells The Big Issue, returning to Greenock to find that the authorities are now much more concerned with the disappearance of 69-year-old James Quigley. For all that he wants to stay under the radar, the copper in him can’t turn a blind eye to the mysterious goings-on in the cemetery.

Adrift in the Cemetery is an oddly structured book for one that has all the trappings of a thriller. After one death and one disappearance, you would expect the momentum to pick up, twists to be executed and the stakes to rise, but Campbell maintains a steady pace.

Rather than moving forward, he seems much more intent (appropriately, given the location) on digging down. We’re treated to a short history of Greenock Cemetery and the Gatekeeper’s House, in which Davie Perdue spends long hours casting his thoughts back to his grandfather, his favourite teachers and his ill-fated time in London. Campbell expounds on Greenock’s high suicide rate, as well as the town’s relationship with the Tate & Lyle company, which gave the area a dangerously sweet tooth, eventually superseded by other, more fatal, forms of addiction.

He introduces us to local characters, exploring their backgrounds and early lives. There are the Vale and Moore families, who between them have the Greenock drugs trade sewn up, the Vales making many of their transactions under the cover of funerals. Sam and Jamie, the gravediggers, who flick through the exposés of gangsters and bent coppers in the scurrilous magazine The Digger on their tea breaks.

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More incongruously, there’s the paunchy and ineffectual “street superhero” Ruairidh, who dons a costume and patrols the town’s streets under the name Alroy the Protector when he’s not working night shifts at Tesco.

As the mystery of the deaths and disappearances is left to bubble away in the background for most of the novel’s length, one can get the impression that the characters are killing time before being called on to play their parts in the final act. And the nagging sense that questions remain unanswered and matters unresolved in the story of Davie Perdue does rob it of a certain amount of closure.

But Adrift in the Cemetery is a good, absorbing read, and Campbell’s approach, though short on game-changing twists, does allow him to scatter a few red herrings while keeping Greenock, its people and its sprawling cemetery at the heart of the story.