Bitter Water (29 page)

I shook my head. ‘I don’t see the point. I mean, why harm me? Other than not complying with their instructions about what to write? No, I think he’s worried. The odd broken limb is one thing, but three murders on the trot is another.’

‘He’s certainly in the frame.’

‘And not relishing getting hanged, whether or not he did it.’

‘Right, I’m coming with you.’

‘What? Don’t be daft. For one thing he said come alone. For another, well . . .’

‘Well what? I’m a woman? Some wee
burd
you need to keep out of harm’s way?’

‘What are you going to do? Hit him with your spirtle?’

Her answer was to stop stirring the porridge and brandish the weapon at me. Persuasive.

‘May I remind you that I’m an advocate and this . . . this loonie and his pals just might need a lawyer.’

I gazed at her, surprised as ever by her resilience. ‘It’s good of you to be above petty revenge.’

There was a gleam in her eye. ‘Depends on the result I get.’

We started up the Riley and sailed off down Sauchiehall Street towards the city centre. There were a few Sunday trams and hardly any other cars. I drove.

‘Next time we take the car out, let’s head west. Cool our feet at Largs. Eat ice cream at Nardini’s.’

She smiled. ‘Next time.’

We drove down the High Street and along Saltmarket. We parked outside the Justiciary Courts just before the Albert Bridge and walked into the Green. We’d decided to come at the arch through the park rather than head straight towards it from Charlotte Street. It gave us time to spot hooded gangs skulking round the arch. It was also just nice to walk across cool grass on a sunny day.

High noon on a Sunday on Glasgow Green. Great cumulus castles bubbling up but still the sun wouldn’t give up its iron grip. The grass was dotted with basking citizens in varying states of sunburn and nakedness. Sam in a pretty sleeveless frock. Me in shirtsleeves.

‘We should have brought a picnic,’ she said.

‘Or a gun.’

‘I thought you said there was no danger?’

‘I always find a gun’s more use in these sort of situations than a pan loaf.’

She laughed. I pressed her hand. We held it for a few steps then disengaged.

‘Do you think he’ll be mad?’

‘Because I didn’t come alone? Doubt it. I think as long as I don’t gallop up with a posse of mounted police, he’ll not mind too much. Besides, he was the one who wanted to talk.’

The McLennan Arch was a kind of cut-down Arc de Triomphe in soiled red sandstone, but no foreign army had ever marched through this one. Unless you were really parochial and counted an invasion by the Busy Bees from the Gorbals. Tackety boots, yes. Jackboots, no.

The McLennan had one grand central arch and two smaller rectangular passageways cut through the wings. It had survived the demolition of the old Assembly Rooms back in the 1890s, then a move to Monteith Row, before coming to its final resting place at the north-west entrance to the Green.

We were walking more slowly now as we got nearer. A couple walked through, then a pack of kids on bogeys handmade from old pram wheels and vegetable crates. Pigeons smashed into the air in panic as the wee hooligans yippeed their way past. There was no sign of vigilantes.

‘He could be on the other side,’ she said quite reasonably. We walked up to the arch and then through the centre. There was no one on the other side.

‘He could have gone round the side just as we—’

‘Sam! We’ll just walk back through and wait on the other side. It’s not quite twelve.’

There were some benches by the road leading up to the arch. We took one and lit up. And watched. And waited.

Exactly on midday a man walked through the arch. Short red hair, bony face, brown jumper, hands in pocket, trying to look as if he was out for a stroll, but instead looking shifty. His eyes flicked back and forth, seeing us and looking beyond us. He would have watched us from the road, sheltering behind the hedges and trees. He walked over. I got up and stood in front of Sam. He took gloved hands out his pockets and raised them as though he was surrendering.

‘I said alone, Brodie.’

‘Say what you like, pal. You’re already spoiling a nice Sunday. Can we get to the point?’

‘What’s she doing here?’

‘Something about you being rude to her. Breaking into her house and holding a gun on her. She’s expecting an apology.’ I waited.

‘It doesn’t matter, Douglas,’ said Sam.

‘It does. If he wants something, he starts with an apology.’

Red looked round me at Sam. He swallowed. ‘Sorry. I had to get a message through to your . . .’

‘Lodger?’

‘Aye, Brodie here.’

‘That wasn’t the most heartfelt apology, but it’s a start. And remember, she’s a lawyer too. In case you think you need one.’

We were now close enough that I could see the deepening lines of tiredness round his eyes. It must be hard work performing such a public service. I could also see the scab on the lip I’d split. There was something else in his demeanour this time. Or maybe it was the absence of it. The absence of certainty.

‘Do you have a name, or do we go on calling you Ishmael? Or how about Reverend?’

Anger tightened his jaw muscles. ‘You don’t remember me, do you,
Major
Brodie?’

I shook my head. ‘Other than your break-ins and the tour of inspection of your splendid offices the other day. Should I?’

He looked like someone who’d finally made up his mind about something. ‘I was in the 51
^st
Highland Division. With Sergeant Alan Johnson.’

I should have guessed. Ishmael and Johnson hadn’t just bumped into each other under the arches of Central Station.

‘Impossible. I would have met you.’

‘You did, Major Brodie. Though it was
Sergeant
Brodie then.’

THIRTY-EIGHT

T
he cogs meshed and my brain began working again.

‘You were taken? With Johnson?’ I asked him.

He nodded. ‘One of my men. We followed orders. The stupidest thing I’ve done in my life! I should have made a break for it. Like you! But I had a job to do.’

‘What do you mean, “a job to do”? What was your company?’

‘Provost Company. I’d joined as a subaltern in December ’39.’

‘You were an MP! You were ordered to keep us in line. Make the surrender work.’

‘I had no choice!’

‘Polis or Automobile Association?’

‘Inspector. Inverness.’

I nodded. Most of the Provost unit had been ex-policemen or AA scouts. Battlefield traffic police. Essential work when you had a million men and armour on the move.

‘The
Marshals
! I should have guessed. The
Provost
Marshals.’

He had the grace to look embarrassed.

‘Sorry to interrupt this cosy chat, but could one of you please interpret?’ Sam was standing alongside us with her arms crossed and using the look she reserved for hostile witnesses in the stand.

‘Look, let’s sit down,’ I suggested.

We sat awkwardly in a line on the bench, me in the middle, Sam to my right, the ex-MP to my left. It was beginning to add up. Some of it.

‘You still haven’t given me your real name.’

‘Drummond, Fergus Drummond.’

The name rang a bell, a small one. ‘There, that wasn’t so hard,’ I said. I turned to Sam. ‘Drummond here was a lieutenant in the Military Police. He and Johnson were in Provost Company of the 51
^st
Highland Division, my old division, at the start of the war. Part of the British Expeditionary Force. Some of the division made it to Dunkirk. Most of the 51
^st
, however, including my battalion of the Seaforths and Drummond’s Provost Company, were trapped in Saint-Valery.’

‘Trapped with the bloody French!’ Drummond cut in.

I nodded. ‘We were installed as part of the French army. When they surrendered, we had to.’

‘We had orders. Most of us obeyed them.’ Drummond said it through gritted teeth.

‘He’s right,’ I sighed. ‘I sloped off with a couple of my lads. We got out in a wee boat.’

‘While we spent the war in various Stalags.’

‘I was commissioned and sent back to fight in a newly constituted 51
^st
Highland. North Africa, then D-Day. I’m not sure who had the worse time of it.’

It was as though I’d lit a firework. Drummond jumped up and stood shaking in front of us, his face blazing with anger.

‘You think I had a bloody holiday, Brodie! You think I didn’t weep every bloody day I spent behind barbed wire? How do you think I got this?’

He wrenched at his right glove and ripped it off. He thrust out his fist at us. The index and middle finger were missing. He tore off the left with the help of his teeth. The fingertips were all stunted.

I said slowly, ‘I don’t know, Drummond. My mum used to warn me about biting my nails.’

His anger boiled over. ‘It was frostbite!’

I felt Sam’s hand grip my thigh. I replied quietly. ‘And you’ve been getting your own back ever since, eh, Drummond? An eye for an eye, a pinkie for a pinkie.’

His arm dropped, then his head. He pulled the glove back on, and I could see now that it was padded out with two false fingers.

‘Sit down, man, tell me why you wanted to meet me.’

We listened to his story and I almost began to feel some sympathy for the poor bastard. Until I thought about the sadistic punishments he’d been dishing out. And frightening my mum.

The four men in masks I’d met ten days ago were the remnants of his old platoon. Drummond had kept them going, kept them alive, by cajoling and leading them through five long years of captivity. The 51
^st
had been force-marched from Saint-Valery across France and into occupied Poland. Along the way any laggards were shot out of hand. You risked your life stopping for a pee. It seems Jerry was pissed off at letting so many get away at Dunkirk.

They were incarcerated near Thorn. Anyone below sergeant rank was used as forced labour, as per the skewed articles of the Geneva Convention, written presumably by members of the officer class. Drummond had torn off his pips and joined his men. He’d slaved on roads and farms around the fortress camps of Thorn until the threat of liberation by the advancing Russian army panicked the guards. Drummond and all the other British POWs were driven out of the camp in January 1945, in the middle of a blizzard. They were marched 450 miles westward to another Stalag. Hundreds perished of starvation and frostbite on the way. Drummond got off lightly. Many of them had been my own comrades in the Seaforths.

It’s why I hadn’t been to a regimental reunion since demob.

He stopped talking and we sat in silence digesting his story.

‘You win, Drummond. I prefer my war. Marginally. But how did it get to this? What the hell are you doing this for? You could have come home with honour, got your old job back. Instead you’re a renegade. And what’s worse –
Lieutenant
– you’ve led your men astray.’

‘You don’t understand, Brodie,’ he growled.

‘Try me. But just remember there’s a manhunt on. And recent experience tells me they won’t need much evidence – if any – to find you guilty. You and your men are likely to end up on the gallows. Did you know Barlinnie can take three at once? You and your pals can be dispatched in two sittings.’

‘Shut up, Brodie! Shut the hell up!’

‘Fine. You do the talking,’ I said.

He fidgeted with a fag packet until he’d opened it and got one out. I let him struggle. He sat back on the bench.

‘We got back in May last year. Bomber Command ferried us home. Back with honour, you say? We were treated like shit. We’re the Division that surrendered. We’re the ones who went on holiday for five years! While everybody else was earning medals or getting promoted,
Major
, we were stuck in limbo for five – bloody – years!’

I could see how that would rankle. It explained his preoccupation with me and my laurel leaves. If only he knew what a crown of thorns they could be. But it didn’t explain the missionary zeal of his punishment squad.

‘So your feelings were hurt. So what?’

He bent forward, resting his elbows on his knees. ‘It was more than that. I can thole other folk’s scorn. But not my own. I had the chance to prove myself on the battlefield. Instead I raised the white flag. And there is not one thing I can do that will change the past. I’ve missed my chance. Missed the tide.’

I exchanged looks with Sam. I wondered if we were sharing the memory of Hugh Donovan, my boyhood pal, her client. His war too had ended in pain and puzzlement. What for?

‘It still doesn’t explain your actions, here, in Glasgow. Johnson’s sentence and his suicide didn’t give you licence to maim.’

He stared at the ground through his knees. Was he hearing me?

‘We got back here and rented some digs together. I applied for jobs, first with the police force. Then anybody. This held me back.’ He waved his torn hands. ‘This and my war record.’ His voice sounded exhausted, as though it had been playing the same record for too long.