Bitter Water (12 page)

‘You’re the snake in the garden, Brodie.’

‘You brought the apple.’

‘Don’t get at me.’

‘I need some fresh air.’

‘Fancy a swim?’

‘What? Where?’

‘The Western Baths Club. Just over the back of the park. Off the Byres Road. As a woman, I’m only an associate member but I can take a guest. The Bathsmaster is a Campbell. My folks got me in years ago. I should use it more often. More than once a year.’

Suddenly the thought of sliding into a cool body of water seemed exactly what my hot brain needed. To feel weightless. To float on my back and let all the cares drift away from me. To let the cool water soak into my skin and rehydrate my poor innards.

‘I don’t have a cossie.’

‘They provide them. Red for a boy. Black for us girls.’

‘Lead me to it.’

She did. It was bliss. I’d seen the building years ago and admired its Athenian red sandstone colonnades. We walked into an imposing tiled hall with a double-sided staircase winding away from the front door. Sam asked for the Bathsmaster, her namesake Robert Campbell. An upright man in his late years appeared with a smile.

‘Miss Campbell, how nice to see you. But it’s not ladies’ day.’

‘I know, Robert. But I’d like to introduce Major Douglas Brodie. The major would like to join the club. Do you have a vacancy for a war hero?’

‘I’m sure we do, Miss Campbell. Welcome to our club, Major.’

I nodded with all the dignity expected of a decorated veteran.

‘We’ll need another seconder, but I’m sure that’s no bother, and in the meantime, we can provide temporary membership for a month while we check out references and do all the paperwork.’

The Bathsmaster personally went off to get a pair of trunks and towel. I turned to Sam.

‘References?’

‘They just want to know if you’ve got a job, Brodie, and haven’t got a criminal record. You don’t, do you?’

‘Thanks for the unquestioning belief in me, Sam. Can I afford this?’

‘It’s only five guineas. Can you afford not to? You’re drinking too much.’

‘
I
am . . .!’

Robert appeared and I was left to stifle my protests. Besides, she was right.

Sam left me to it and I took my first glorious dip in the great vaulted chamber. The dangling trapezes and hoops over the pool were a bit too much
mens sana in corpore sano
for my liking, but the swimming itself was bliss.

That night I met Morag for a drink and a long walk by the river. I suddenly felt confused holding hands with this nubile wee lassie and stealing kisses like a spotty youth.

‘How old are you, Morag?’

‘Ah’m nineteen. Twenty next month.’

Oh, God. ‘Do you know how old I am?’

‘It disnae matter. You’re a nice bloke. An officer in the army. And you write great. A’ the girls fancy you. A’ that stuff about the Slattery gang . . .’

Just what my ego needed: hero worship by a teenager. We kissed and cuddled on a bench, but I could swear there were a pair of shrewd blue eyes watching every move. Appraising. Mocking.

The swimming club was closed on Sunday or I’d have gone back for more. Carving steady lengths gives a man time to think. Time to weigh the attractions of a bouncy wee redhead versus a hard-shelled blonde.

Instead I woke early in my hot bed and replayed in my head the image of a pool that was so far removed from the pea-green experience of my youth. No dive-bombing, towel-flicking hooligans. Just cool clear water and two other men swimming lanes and wishing me good morning. I had a month to sort out my priorities before facing the sharp financial choice: fags and booze versus watery bliss and exercise. I knew what I
needed
to do. What I ought to do. But whether or not a daily swim would clear my thoughts about women was another matter. Besides, I had the morning planned. I’d decided to skip my Sunday morning hospital round in favour of a duty visit to Kilmarnock. I’d promised my mother I’d go to the kirk with her. I caught an early train and met her outside the big wooden door of St Andrew’s. She was beaming and wanting to show me off. We did the rounds of her pals who all scrutinised me for signs of sin and degeneracy. That’s what Glasgow does for you. It’s in the water. I wished I still had my major’s uniform to give them something more positive to crow over. But at demob we’d had to hand back our khaki in exchange for a pinstripe from Burton’s. A poor trade.

Still, the columns of the church didn’t tremble as I entered, and the words of the hymns didn’t stick in my throat. It was a long hot service. All I was aware of was the dust drifting through the sunlit shafts from the stained-glass windows. I was a boy again in my Boys’ Brigade uniform, bowed over my bible, looking reverential, but in truth reading dirty bits from the Song of Solomon.

We walked home to Bonnyton and ate the potted herring and boiled tatties she’d saved. As a Sunday treat she fried up a slice of clootie dumpling. We had it with cream from the top of the bottle. While she was in the scullery I left her two ten-bob notes under the clock on her mantelpiece. I gave her a kiss and headed back to Glasgow on the late-afternoon train.

THIRTEEN

I
was outside the front door of the Western Baths Club as it opened first thing Monday morning. Two other men were hovering with rolled-up towels for an early-morning treat. We nodded to each other and wished each other a good morning in that focused way of men about to go over the top. An hour later I came out starving, but convinced that there were no problems that couldn’t be solved by thirty laps of a tiled pond.

The sense of well-being sustained me right up to the moment I found two blue uniforms waiting for me as I walked into the newsroom. They were in Eddie’s office and were surely suffocating from the smoke. I tried to sneak past but that’s why Eddie’s office is positioned where it is. His door bounced open and a gust of foul air blasted out, followed by Big Eddie himself.

‘
Mister
Brodie! Just the man. Come right in.’

I squeezed into the already jammed room. Eddie climbed back behind his paper fortifications and faced the two policemen sitting in cramped chairs opposite. They hadn’t got up as I entered. I stood with my back against the wall and weighed up the boys in blue. The last time we’d met had been over the injured body of Alec Morton. One was the baby-faced sergeant, clasping his old-style pointy helmet in his lap as though hiding an erection. A copper’s notebook lay open in front of him. The other was Chief Inspector Walter Sangster in full dress uniform. To impress me? His flat cap with the Sillitoe check round its circumference was perched on a wobbly pile of Eddie’s documents. He held both of the letters in his gloved hand.

I nodded at them. ‘Chief Inspector Sangster, nice to see you again.’

‘
Detective
Chief Inspector Sangster,
Mister
Brodie.’

‘
Mazel tov
. What can I do for you, gentlemen?’ I wondered if Duncan reported to him? And why hadn’t he brought Todd along?

Sangster eyed me up and down. ‘It seems you have a talent for attracting bother, Brodie.’

If anyone else told me that, I might start to believe it. I raised an eyebrow and waited.

‘What’s your connection with these vigilantes?’ he asked.

‘They commit crimes. I report them.’

His thin mouth tightened. ‘I mean why are they writing to you,
personally
, Brodie?’

I noted we’d dropped the
Mister
pretty fast. ‘I get fan mail. Maybe he likes my column.’ Out of the corner of my eye I noticed warning frowns from my boss. I ignored him. ‘What exactly are you insinuating, Sangster? That I’m somehow in cahoots with these characters?’

His sergeant – still unidentified apart from the number 71 on his shoulder – stuttered into life with a high voice. ‘They haven’t written to any other paper. Isn’t that a bit strange?’

‘Maybe they want the publicity? It was the
Gazette
that exploded the Donovan case. You’ll recall? The innocent man you got hanged?’

Sangster coloured and took a deep breath to release the apoplexy that was threatening to melt his handful of brain cells. He raised his hand to stop his sergeant saying any more.

‘An unfortunate business, Brodie, no doubt. Bad apples. But here’ – he waved the letters – ‘we’ve got a group of men on the rampage, taking the law into their own hands, and we need to know all we can about them.’

‘Everything we know, you know. It’s all in the paper.’ Except for the
nom de guerre
of the leader and reference to missing fingertips.

‘So you say, Brodie. But I can read between the lines.’ He waved the letters at me.

‘Ah, that would be the invisible ink.’

‘Don’t be funny, Brodie.’

‘And what are you finding between the lines?’

‘I’m finding that you’re in correspondence with men who claim to have carried out at least two major acts of grievous bodily harm. I even saw for myself the extent of the burns on this poor fellow . . .?’

‘Gibson, sir,’ said the sergeant.

‘Aye, him. This could make you an accessory after the fact, Brodie, if you’re holding anything back.’

‘Oh spare me, Sangster. I’m a reporter. I’m doing my job. Isn’t that right, Mr Paton?’

‘Eh? Oh, aye, right enough.’

‘Who’s this man Johnson then?’

‘You’ve a short memory. Just another innocent man hanged in Barlinnie. This time by his own hand. Remember the case of Sergeant Alan Johnson? Three weeks ago? Sent down for five for upsetting the Chief Constable’s sister?’

Sangster’s mouth screwed up. He let his bird-of-prey look flick between Eddie and me as if wondering which one to pounce on first. Suddenly he was on his feet. ‘I’m keeping these.’

‘Certainly, certainly,’ said Eddie, leaping to his own feet and knocking over the pile of papers with the chief inspector’s hat. Sangster’s minion grappled around on the floor to retrieve his boss’s headgear while Eddie spluttered apologies. I tried not to laugh. Sangster finally eased out of the door murmuring not very veiled threats about the consequences of failing to report crimes or withholding information about crimes about to be committed.

I turned to Eddie. ‘You were very cooperative.’

‘Fuck me, Brodie, what was I to do? I had to hand over the letters.’

‘They like throwing their weight about. We need to stand up to them.’

‘Oh aye, it’s OK for you to talk, Brodie. But it’s my ba’s that get kicked first. Besides, we have a useful relationship with the polis. Something we have to cultivate.’

He even winked at me.

FOURTEEN

S
am called me back on Tuesday morning and we met for a drink after work in Sloan’s off Argyll Street. It was her suggestion, and it was, by a long way, more salubrious than any of the bars I frequented with my partner in crime-reporting. Polished wood panelling and tiled floors, etched glass divides and glittering lighting. We met in the lounge bar below the smart restaurant. I promised myself a meal there when my pay packet caught up with my aspirations. Maybe I needed a second job? A paper round, perhaps.

I rose from my seat as she appeared. She looked every inch the professional lawyer. Hair sleek and trimmed, make-up accentuating her eyes behind the inquisitorial glasses. She wore a dark blue business ensemble that would have got nodding approval from the fustiest judge. My shiny secondhand suit felt dowdy by comparison. Under her arm she’d tucked a slim black briefcase. To an onlooker it could have been a meeting between a top lawyer and her down-at-heel client. The only giveaway was her nails; still near the quick but filed instead of savaged.

I smiled. ‘We should do this more often.’

‘Let’s see how this one goes,’ she said, smacking me into place. Coolness personified. I still didn’t know how it had come out this way between us. Not after what we’d been through together. Not after – well, not to put too modest a point on it – I’d saved her skinny backside. Within a few days of getting her back to her grand house in Kelvingrove, and making her endless cups of tea, she’d asked me to leave.
Need some time; it’s not about you, Brodie; just want some peace for a while; think things through; try to forget, etc. etc.
Admittedly Sam had been chloroformed, abducted, beaten up and generally badly treated by a psychopathic child abuser, but I thought our shared horrors would have brought us together. Women are unfathomable. But, still, she was here.

We bantered for a bit while drinks were brought. Sam had a sherry; I had a lemonade. She looked at me and my drink sceptically, then drew out a foolscap jotter from her briefcase. She laid it down between us, sideways to us both. It had a list of the names I’d given her. Against each, in her elegant writing, were three columns. She reached over and pointed with her fountain pen.

‘These are the dates in the last two months when these men came before the court. These are the offences they were accused of. These are the verdicts.’

All of the nineteen names had court dates and accusations against them. Sixteen were found not guilty. Three, not proven. The two I’d taken grapes to at Glasgow Infirmary had been found not guilty a month ago.