Bitter Water (10 page)

‘Well, for my sake, Isaac, I hope that day is not soon.’

‘As God wills, Douglas. Come, tell me your news. We have – what is it? – six, seven? Seven long years to catch up. That will take at least two pots.’ He began to head for the back shop.

‘What about your customers?’

‘Ach, what customers?’

We sat sipping sugar-thickened black coffee in front of the tall window that looked out on the small back yard. The room could have been conjured from my memory apart from the absence of the smell of lavender and the wearer herself. Our words were cushioned and softened amidst the ceiling-high bales. He told me of his grown-up children, one in medicine and one in teaching, and of their move to the smarter parts of the city with their own expanding families. He told me why he still worked on, unable to leave the shop and the home that Hannah and he had set up. But how he enjoyed the ceremony of Friday nights at his daughter’s home and the grandchildren.

I told him my news. It wasn’t a fair trade: his domestic joys for my horrors. For I told him a little of my war and what I’d found in the summer of 1945 after the fighting was over. My knowledge of German earned me a transfer to mop-up duties interrogating the camp commandants and SS officers rounded up near Bremen. But what I told him wasn’t news to Isaac. He’d heard what they’d done to his people. He was following the Nuremberg trials. He’d lost family around Munich. Dachau was just up the road.

I tried to soften the imagery but he’d have none of it. He burned to know details. It was almost as though the tables had been turned, that I was the one being interrogated in gentle clipped German. It churned up the monstrous images that I kept firmly under lock and key. But at the end of it, as we stared into our cups, I knew it had been cathartic for him and me. There was no one else I could have told the tale to in the language of the nightmares that still rocked my sleep.

Finally we dragged ourselves back to the present.

‘So, I should call you Major Brodie now. I’m not surprised. And you’re a reporter. A wordsmith. Also not a surprise. It’s what you should have done. And I think there’s more in you to come, Douglas. Stories. Tales of love and action. Truths told within a story. Hannah always said so.’

‘I hope she was right. She usually was. But tell me, Isaac, what do you know of these rumours about people taking the law into their own hands? Of punishment squads?’

‘Yes, yes. It’s the talk of the community.’

‘It’s happening
within
your community?’

‘No. Not among us. But we have Gentile friends and customers. They have first-hand knowledge. I tell you this, Douglas, some of us are happy about it. If the police won’t deal with it, then the citizens must, is what some say.’

‘Where is the law then, Isaac? Where are the rules that we live by? Where is the city?’

‘Where was the law on
Kristallnacht
? Where was the law in Belsen? If a tyrant rises up and lays down new laws that give power to one group over another, is that a law to be followed? Or if the laws themselves are good and fair but are not enforced, then the powerful fill the vacuum for their own ends. So what should a citizen do?’

I had no answer, or none that I could support with good arguments. I left more troubled than when I arrived, though glad to pick up the links of an old friendship. Isaac promised to call me at the
Gazette
if he had solid news and firm sightings of the work of these self-appointed lawmen.

ELEVEN

I
had a restless sleep and it wasn’t just the hot night or the shouting match in the flat below. The tenement block where I rented digs looked solid enough from the outside but the builders had stinted on the walls and ceilings. I sat at my open window in the dark, nursing a cigarette and praying for some cool breeze to ruffle the air. Below me was a torn square of tarmac enclosed by the straggling backs of other tenements. Unsparing moonlight exposed our poverty.

It wasn’t the first sleepless night since demob last November but it was the first in a while when I was reluctant to close my eyes. I missed my command but it had left seeping sores in my mind. It wasn’t that I expected ghouls or incoming shells, though they often figured in my dreams. Sometimes it would be me running and getting nowhere, sometimes being pressed and surrounded by great boulders. Forces I could do nothing to surmount. One of the variations on helplessness that left me drained and depressed.

It didn’t take a student of Freud or a fairground gypsy stirring tea leaves to fathom out what it meant. Most of us get through our days, our lives, pretending we’re in control of events. Not far beneath this veneer we know it’s shit. Too many times in the past few years I’d had my nose rubbed in my own insignificance, my own non-mastery of my fate. For my sanity’s sake I usually managed to paper over it and convince myself and others that I’m a free man with a free spirit. I knew tonight I wasn’t going to fool anyone, especially not me. Whisky wouldn’t help.

To add to it, the rowing began down below. I lay on my clammy sheets and listened to the pattern of tears and anger. I wanted to tell them not to waste their breath, that whatever was eating them didn’t count for much. That what mattered was having someone else in your life to share a sunrise or a memory with. That what mattered was not being alone. But why would they listen to
me
?

I woke, groggy and hot, and wishing for a cool bath to soak away the sweat and fog in my brain. I made do with a flannel and cold water from the sink. I masked a pot of tea and looked round my domain in the harsh daylight. It didn’t take me long. One room with a hole-in-the-wall bed, the sheets perfectly folded for inspection. A metal grate and two gas rings, a sink, a coal hole and a rickety table and one wooden chair. Gas lights, one with a broken mantle. Two strips of lino that didn’t meet and were riddled with holes. A wardrobe surely salvaged from the Clydebank blitz topped by my empty suitcase.

This wouldn’t do. I was going to make a success of my job at the
Gazette
and get myself a decent place in the West End, that blessed land created in the last century by the mercantile class who wanted to be dishing out smog rather than receiving it from the prevailing westerlies. An
apartment
, as they were now calling them, maybe with two rooms, and even my own bathroom with a toilet and bath. A man must dream.

It was barely seven and already heating up outside. I left my hat and jacket behind and set out into the morning with a new determination to at least live for the day. I got to the newsroom and belted out five hundred words on the anecdotes I’d picked up on yesterday and spent the rest of the day renewing acquaintances or striking old ones off my list if they’d gone to ground. In whatever sense.

By the time I was in the evening queue outside the Curzon I was regretting suggesting the pictures. It was a pint I needed. Or two. Sam arrived on the dot of seven looking well scrubbed and remarkably cool. She wore a white blouse and grey skirt and a neat little grey cap at a jaunty perch on her short blonde hair. She looked thinner, and as she leaned close for a peck on the cheek, I saw the dark eyes under the make-up. I smelled peppermint on her warm breath, and the faint tang of the classy perfume she sometimes wore.

‘You look fine, Sam.’

‘Death warmed up. But you look worse, Brodie. Been burning the candle both ends? You won’t keep up with McAllister. Or is it some young thing you’re seeing? It can fair drain a man.’

‘I’m sure it’s the heat. Look, how much do you really want to see this flick? You know it’s going to drift along for a bit then end badly for everybody. The title says it all. Unrequited love.’

‘You sound like an expert.’

‘I need a drink.’

Her face tightened. I saw a flash of – what? Panic? – in her expression.

‘I really don’t. Do you mind? I hear it’s good.’

As she was talking she was digging out her specs from her bag. She popped them on and drew a halt to the discussion.

We watched it. Towards the end she dabbed her eyes. I blew my nose. We stood outside in the twilight.

‘Told you so,’ I said.

‘Och, I knew that’s how it’d end too.’

‘Not where I grew up.’

‘Oh?’

‘Too civilised. They never even got into bed.’

Sam coloured. ‘It’s about morals, standards. How people handle themselves when they’re torn between loyalty and desire.’

‘Among the middle classes, maybe. Not round here.’ The street was teeming with laughing shop girls and their beaus, teasing and tantalising in their unashamed celebration of being young and lusty.

‘At least they gave it a try. The important thing is having a go, Brodie.’

It had been a double feature and it was too late now for a drink. The pubs were shutting. It meant we didn’t talk about Johnson and I didn’t raise the small matters of Ishmael, revenge and the Glasgow Marshals. I hailed a cab and waved her off, wondering how and whether I should have a go. And at what.

So far, I’d had two clear signs of vigilantes at work: Docherty and Gibson’s punishments, both substantiated by letter. I’d also had hints of wider, targeted violence from Duncan Todd and Isaac. There were other potential examples in other newspapers. But I needed to bring it all together to see the extent, to understand the pattern. Like standing back from an Impressionist in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery.

Over the next couple of days I went to the Mitchell library and read back issues of our competitors covering the past couple of months before and since the Johnson trial: The
Glasgow Herald, The Scotsman, The Times,
the
Daily Record
. A story here, an anecdote there; taken separately, nothing unusual. Nobody connecting the incidents. No other paper reported receiving a warning letter. Maybe I was reading too much into it, like Gypsy Jean’s tea leaves.

I tuned my ears to conversations: old women passing the time of day in the post office queue, gossiping in the butcher’s or hanging out the tenement windows in the summer warmth; men making casual observations over a pint in between the more serious contemplation of Hibs’ chances in the Cup and the prospects of petrol coming off rationing any time this side of the last trump. Scatterings and eddies of something different happening, something possibly momentous.

I got hold of a sixpenny street map of Glasgow and put a number on places where incidents had been reported. Separately I kept descriptions of the incidents. In particular I noted down any criminal accusation made against the victim either from a newspaper or bit of street gossip. I began trying to trace the people. I started with the Glasgow Royal and the Western Infirmary. The ward matrons were quick to get over their qualms about revealing ward gossip.

‘We’ve had four now, to my knowledge. Three lost a finger as well as what else got done to them. More tea, Mr Brodie?’ She aimed her pot at me.

‘Thank you, Matron. It’s very good of you to take the time.’ I held out my cup for a second. I’d caught this tiny wee field marshal of the nursing profession just as she was going off duty at the Royal.

‘Ah’m no saying anything, mind, but every one of them deserved what they got. If you believe the stories.’ She began counting. ‘Number one was into drugs; selling them to weans, so he wis. We had to pump his stomach oot – filled with his ain medicine. Number two was a pimp always beating up his lassies. They carved out his trade on his forehead. The third one drowned his ain wife, they said, but they couldnae prove it. He got fished oot the Clyde wi’ weights tied round him. Only just in time. The last yin. Oh dear . . .’

‘Was it that bad, Matron?’

‘Naw. It was really funny. You shouldnae laugh, neither you should. This fella had been fiddling the wages of the workers down at the yards. They found him tied to a lamppost in his bare bum.’

I laughed. ‘Is there a photo?’

‘That wisnae it. They’d got hold of one o’ they rivets from the shipyards. A thing about nine inches long with a cap. A wide cap.’ Her face filled with proper matronly rectitude. ‘They had to—’

‘Don’t tell me!’

Where I uncovered a name and address I went and knocked on the door. The first was a double bus ride away in Partick. It was a leafy street of semi-detached villas. Why should that be an unlikely setting for a victim of vigilantes? I walked up to the door and pressed the bell. Finally a woman answered. Middle-aged, hair in curlers, wary-eyed.

‘Sorry to bother you, Mrs Stephens. My name is Brodie. I’m from the
Gazette
. Can I—’

‘No, you can’t!’ She slammed the door.

I waited a minute, then rang again.

She came back out. This time she was weeping. ‘We don’t want to talk about it. It’s all too, too horrible.’

A man appeared behind her. ‘I’m not running away. Is this what you wanted to see?’

He was a lank-haired man with a barrel chest. He pushed back his forelock. The weals and scar tissue stood out red against his pale skin. The letter T glowed in jagged letters across his forehead.

‘They called me a thief! But
they
robbed
me
!’

‘How much did they take?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Possibly.’

‘Five or six pounds. They were good enough to leave me the taxi fare to the infirmary.’ The sarcasm dripped from his lips.