Bitter Water (6 page)

‘Look, pal, somebody has to do it. If you get a wee borrow, you have to pay it back. That’s how it goes. But Ah’m sayin’ nothin’ else. In case it incriminalises me.’ His face set in a stubborn scowl. ‘Look, pal, dae me a favour, will ye? See that hankie on the table?’ He pointed with his head. ‘Could you see your way to . . .?’

His pinched and battered face was grubby with tears of self-pity. I picked up the hankie and dabbed at his cheeks and round his eyes. I even let him blow into it before piling it delicately back on the table. The things I do for a story.

‘Would you recognise them again?’

‘Naw. Balaclavas.’

‘Local accents?’

‘One was, but the other was a Teuchter.’

I stared at Docherty, my mouth suddenly dry in apprehension.
Call me Ishmael
. Surely not? I added some last notes to my pad and left him cursing his fate and the loss of honour between thugs and hoodlums.

I needed to think. I jumped on a tram outside the infirmary. We rattled and swayed down the quiet streets through the empty city centre. Everywhere was closed except the kirks and they didn’t need my sceptical presence this morning. I got off at Jamaica Bridge and turned along by the river. It was bliss to walk in the sunshine down by the Clyde. Or it should have been. The path was deserted apart from a pair of old winos taking their own Sunday communion.

I searched my flexible conscience. I wasn’t too upset at such barbaric come-uppance to a loan-shark enforcer. Docherty was the sort of guy who had no qualms about breaking someone’s kneecap for missing a single payment of a debt at a scalding interest rate. He’d not be making any collection visits any time soon. Not unless he was wheeled round in a barrow.

But it might not have been the first such incident. There had been a late special from the
Daily Record
on Friday night which had some of the hallmarks of the attack on Docherty. It concerned a would-be razor king trying to emulate his prewar legends by inflicting a small reign of terror in the Calton. It sound like the putative razor boss had been run over by a combine harvester, so extensive were the gashes in his own head. The story mentioned two men, in balaclavas.

I pushed the thought down but in a way it wasn’t so strange. Summary justice was well understood and expected in the West of Scotland. There was an unwritten sliding scale for criminal offences which avoided paperwork and court time and all that pre-trial nail-biting for the accused. In the case of childhood misdemeanours these plenipotentiary powers were delegated to the nearest adult – family member or total stranger. Ring the door and run was a high-risk gamble if you were the fattest and slowest in a gang. Or pinching apples. A street urchin caught with his jumper stuffed with Granny Smiths in the vicinity of the mother tree could expect a cuff on the lug, especially from the owner of said apples. The urchin in question took it as a calculated risk in his line of business and made no objection other than to run greeting to his pals who’d evaded the fell and horny hand of justice. It would certainly not have crossed his or her mind to complain to his maw or paw, knowing with absolute certainty that it would simply earn him another skelp.

Glasgow constabulary had another level of powers altogether, which varied according to the individual polis and the criminal activity. The good citizens of Glasgow, and perhaps more crucially, the less good, had to take into account a particular officer’s innate fondness for violence as well as his state of mind at the time of the encounter. Knowing for example that PC McBride had just come from another bust-up with his wife, or that the hound on which PC Fraser had wagered his pay packet had succumbed on the home stretch to the packet of Woodbine fed to it by a bribed handler, was essential to gauging the potential degree of physical assault. Villains caught
in flagrante
with the takings from a chip-shop raid knew that the arrest would earn them a severe truncheoning as a sort of pre-trial warm-up.

But this assault on Docherty – with a crowbar, for pity’s sake – to discourage even the
intention
of criminal activity; well it just wisnae fitba’.

SIX

I
headed back through the deserted Sunday streets to the newspaper building. I pushed through the
Gazette
’s big doors and bounded up the three flights of stairs behind the splendidly tiled entrance hall. Outside the newsroom I stood for a moment to catch my breath and savour again the sweet notion that I’d at last found my place in the world. I heaved the door open and plunged into the smog, the clatter and ping of typewriters, the insistent phones and the shouted conversations. Even this half-shift was controlled bedlam, and I loved it. I’d been in the newsroom of the
London Bugle
a few times while I was freelancing down south after demob. But this was different. I belonged here. Not just as a full-time, salaried – though probationary – reporter, but in that ease and comfort that comes from operating in your natural habitat. Otters and brown water. Drunks and breweries.

The accent helped. The cut and thrust across the chaotic desks, the shouts and catcalls and patter, was in the tough nasalities of the West of Scotland. Entering the newsroom was like slipping into a hot bath: shocking at first but then utterly enveloping and cosy. In every sense they were speaking my language; or, to be truthful, the language of my boyhood. Though Big Eddie spoke a purple subset of it that would have brought a flush to the cheeks of a sergeant major. Not that Eddie had ever marched across a parade ground. He had enough health problems to get a regiment classed 4F. Between the fags, the booze and the stress it was a daily miracle to find him patrolling the newsroom spreading ash and anxiety in his path.

Assisting him was Sandy Logan, his whippet-thin subeditor. Seeing the pair of them together was like looking in a fairground mirror. Sandy was nearly six foot with limbs the thickness of his fearsome blue pencils. He didn’t say much. All his communicative energy poured out in a stream of corrections, admonitions and razor-sharp summations of some hack’s garbled story. Sandy’s editing eyes were all-seeing, all-knowing, pitiless. There were no split infinitives or dangling participles on Sandy’s watch.

Sandy and Eddie inhabited tiny glass-fronted offices on either side of the corridor that led into the newsroom. Scylla and Charybdis. Reporters running late with a submission or with a nagging conscience about the provenance of a story had to steer past these twin hazards. Invariably the hapless hack would fall foul of one. Often both.

This fine Sunday morning I found Eddie in his den biting his nails and hiding behind mounds of old clippings and discarded drafts. Eddie kept his office like a crime scene. Smoke rose from several smouldering fag ends in an overflowing ashtray.

The sub’s office was empty, and out in the newsroom Wullie McAllister’s desk was empty too. Either he’d already filed his copy from his morning meanderings or he was keeping it back for Monday. During the week Wullie would arrive mid morning, drink a cup or two of sugary tea and be back out the door in time for the pubs to open. Somehow – though it was still a mystery to me – a three-column article would appear in sharp prose that would hit the presses with scarcely a comma altered by Sandy. I could only aspire to such insouciance.

I scribbled out a rough draft of the story in pencil. I knew enough about Eddie’s preferences to spare my gentle readers none of the details. There was a liking for blood with the morning porridge among the fair-minded citizens of Glasgow. Reading of terrible things happening to other folk – especially
bad
folk – set them up for the day. It provided the juice in the conversation on the tram going to work; the spice in the gossip over the clothes line in the back close; the flavour in the first pint of heavy after work.

By midday I’d bashed out a fair copy of my article – in triplicate. I slid the top copy in through Eddie’s window and a copy for Sandy to peruse on Monday, though it should have gone out by then. Eddie was doubling up as sub-editor on Sunday. I knew my piece was well enough written, but it didn’t stop me feeling nervous. Eddie was almost as much a master of the blue pencil as Sandy, sometimes for the sake of it to show who was boss, but mostly because he’d edited more newspapers than got wrapped round fish suppers on a Saturday night across Scotland. Eddie had done Sandy’s job for years before being promoted to editor.

He was at my desk almost before I got back to it. He passed me the scarred copy covered in his blue annotations and arrows. I glanced down and saw immediately how I could change it and why. Seems he loved the bit about crunching bones and wanted more. Eddie knew his audience. He leaned over and tapped the sheet.

‘No’ bad, Brodie. But no description of the nutters?’

‘Balaclavas don’t let in much daylight.’

He nodded and left me to rework it. His question had unsettled me for different reasons. I hadn’t mentioned Ishmael and his vow. There was simply no proof. Glasgow was full of Highland accents. Docherty’s beating was almost certainly the work of a rival shark. A turf battle.

By one o’clock I’d produced a draft Eddie was happy with. The pressure was off for Monday’s edition. I had the rest of the day to myself and all of Monday morning to get something fresh on the stocks. For a reporter on the incident-strewn streets of Glasgow, surely a doddle.

The sight of girls in summer frocks distracted me and I found myself detouring via George Square to remind myself how easily the skin of Glasgow secretaries took on a glow. There would be a run on Calamine lotion in Boots tonight. I couldn’t get enough of the female form after years of being surrounded by shapeless males in khaki. Enforced abstinence gave every demobbed rake a licence to leer till we’d caught up on the lost time. I think the girls understood that. They might even have missed the attention.

I got back to the
Gazette
to cool off and eat my sandwich. But the room was like a furnace, even with all the windows open and a light breeze coming through. At least it dissipated the tobacco clouds. As I steered my way through the room I caught a hopeful look from wee Morag, the girl I’d taken out last weekend. I smiled and pressed on towards my sanctuary in the corner. I’d give her the nod later on for a drink after work.

I hung my sweat-damp jacket on my chair and slid in behind the desk. It was Spartan enough: front and centre an old Imperial with sticking keys; on the right a wooden tray with some draft articles and my early and as yet illegible efforts at shorthand. On the left sat an ashtray and a wood block with a spike skewering a small pile of letters. Underneath the desk was a single drawer with a few sheets of fresh foolscap, carbons, typewriter ribbons and a couple of chewed pencils left behind by a guy who never came back from the front. I hadn’t the heart to throw them out.

A white envelope perched on the typewriter. It was stamped locally and addressed succinctly to ‘Mr Brodie, Crime Column, The Glasgow Gazette’. Fan mail or barbs? I’d hardly been with the paper five minutes before the excitable readers of the back pages –
the voices of the people, by the people
– were unloading their views in a steady stream. Usually they were sounding off about the rise in violence and the fall in standards of civility. We were all away to hell in a hand basket and they needed to let me know they had no intention of going off gentle into that good night. There was even a sense that I was somehow to blame for delivering the message. Doubtless this envelope contained more such advice, but I was new and still keen, so I grabbed it, slid my knife under the join and sliced it open.

The message was in black ink in a fine sloping hand on lined paper. Here and there words were underlined or set in capitals. Sometimes both. Exclamation marks spluttered angrily across the page:

The
Glasgow Marshals
? Someone had been reading too much Zane Gray. And the clinching sign of an over-excited brain: a quote, presumably from the Bible. It certainly fitted with Docherty’s account of a punishment beating, and its thrust was consistent with Ishmael’s vow about dispensing justice. But I told myself I was adding one and one and making three. I slid the letter and envelope into my desk drawer and headed for the door. I still needed something for next day’s edition and a letter from a bampot wasn’t yet a story, as Big Eddie would have delighted in pointing out.