Crow Bait (3 page)

The match was further testament to the ecumenical nature of their training from Joe the Tailor, for Bernadette was Roman Catholic. Her family back home were far from pleased that she was marrying a Prod.

‘They’re pretty heavy back in Belfast,’ Bobby had said. ‘Don’t know if they’re
IRA
or anything like that, but they’re a tough bunch. But Bernadette, she’s not taken any shit from them. She just told them she was marrying Rab and if they didn’t like it, they could go take a flying fuck to themselves. Maybe no those exact words, mind you, but that was certainly the sentiment.’

Bobby also brought news of Abe, the plucky wee mongrel dog Davie had rescued from an abusive owner. Joe had always said they must never accept cruelty to women, children or animals, and Davie had taken it to heart. It brought him Audrey and it brought him Abe. When he was sent down, he asked Rab to take care of the wee dog, but in his heart he knew the big guy was not an animal person. To be fair to Rab, he tried, but eventually Abe was rehomed with a young couple in Easterhouse. Bobby Newman had checked them out and he knew the dog was going to a good life. The girl was pregnant and they believed a child should be brought up around animals, which was good. Bobby said he looked in every now and then and Abe was happy, which pleased Davie.

So the months passed and Davie’s release date grew closer as he settled into the routine of being locked down, slopping out, working making concrete slabs, in the cobblers or the laundry, lunch, exercise, work, teatime, lock-down, recreation, supper and lock down. Then the next day it all started again – slopping out, work, meal breaks, exercise, lock down. Every day the same. Every day being yelled at by grim-faced prison officers. Every day hearing the alarm bells go off somewhere and seeing the officers running to contain some trouble, for Barlinnie was full of violent men and the violence within them must boil over. Davie McCall had violence in him, he knew that, but he fought hard to keep it bottled up. And he succeeded.

Until Donald Harris came along.

3

AUDREY FRASER WATCHED
the illuminated numbers count down to the ground floor. She was alone in the lift of the
Daily Record
high rise at Anderston Quay, heading out to interview a drug addict. It was bog-standard stuff, the horrors of addiction laid bare as the sub-heading would no doubt have it, and she wasn’t particularly looking forward to it. There had been a time when she would have given her eye-teeth and one or two of her internal organs for a chance at doing such a piece, but she’d been green and hungry then. Now she was ripe and well-fed, thank you very much. But the interview was part of a larger series about the drug trade in Glasgow and the West of Scotland, and necessary, if she was to give the full picture.

The lift doors opened on the second floor and Audrey smiled as she saw the reed-thin frame of Barclay Forbes. She had known Barc since those green and hungry days as a young reporter on the
Evening Times
. Barc had proved to be a good friend over the years, teaching her everything he knew about crime reporting. And his knowledge was extensive.

Barc returned her smile and said, ‘Going down, hen?’

‘Buy me dinner first, big boy,’ she said.

He shook his head solemnly as he stepped into the lift and punched the button marked ‘G’, even though it was already lit. ‘Sex on the brain, you.’

Audrey’s smile broadened. ‘What brings you to the dark side?’

Barc had worked for years with the
Glasgow Herald
and
Evening Times,
a broadsheet and tabloid respectively owned by a rival publisher. ‘Retired man now,’ said Barc, his voice still bearing the roughness of decades of smoking, though he’d given up two years before. Audrey was glad of that, she had nagged him long enough, and in the end he had given in. ‘I can go anywhere I want. The
Sunday Mail
’s serialising the book, needed me in to do a wee bit of editing.’

In the year since he’d retired, Barc had been writing his memoirs, stories of Glasgow crime from the 1950s onwards. He said it looked like a trilogy as the first one only came up to the mid-’60s.

Audrey said, ‘Hope they’re paying mega bucks for the rights.’

‘Bloody right they are. No that I’ll see much of it, right enough, once the publisher takes their chunk.’

‘Shouldn’t have taken such a big advance then, greedy sod.’

The lift came to a halt and the doors slid open. Barc gave her a sideways glance as they walked out. ‘Who’s side you on?’

She laughed as they headed for the exit onto Anderston Quay, where Audrey knew a black cab was waiting. Even though she knew he’d given up, she still half-expected him to light up as soon as he was in the open. He didn’t look right without a fag hanging from his lips.

‘You want a lift?’ she asked.

‘Where you headed?’

‘Gorbals, interview with a junkie.’

He nodded. ‘Nice people you mix with.’

‘Present company excepted?’

A smile. ‘No necessarily.’

‘Anyway, you taught me everything I know.’

‘And don’t you forget it.’ His eyes flicked to the taxi idling at the kerb. ‘Nah, thanks for the offer, hen – I’m headed up the West End. I’m keeping company with a lady of independent means in Kelvingrove now.’

Audrey gave him a leer. ‘Keeping company? That what you young folks are calling it now?’

Barc shot her a stern look. ‘Behave yourself, hen, no everything’s about sex. You’re no seeing this junkie alone, are you?’

‘No, meeting a snapper there.’

‘Good,’ Barc nodded, satisfied. Audrey smiled again, glad that he was still looking out for her. He turned away and she was about to step down to the waiting taxi when he swung back and moved close to her again.

‘I hear that guy you used to see is getting out tomorrow,’ he said, quietly. She halted in her tracks.

‘Davie?’

‘You didn’t know?’

She shook her head. It was just like Barc to know something like that. That’s what made him the best, even now. ‘Well, I hope he behaves himself.’

‘Boys like him, they don’t know any better.’

‘I don’t know, Barc, I always told you Davie was different.’

‘That why a four year stretch turned into ten years then? ‘Cos he knew better, ‘cos he was different?’

She looked down at the ground. ‘I’m not sure what happened there.’

‘He reverted to type, that’s what happened. You know it, hen – that’s why you ended it.’

‘I know,’ she said, feeling guilty about the way she had handled things, but something in her voice made the old reporter’s nose twitch. Barc stared at her, his eyes narrowing as he tried to read her. ‘Stay away from him, Audrey.’
Audrey, not hen
. That meant he was serious.

‘Barc, don’t worry – I’m over all that, believe me.’ She kept her voice light and airy, holding up her left hand and wiggling her fingers. ‘Respectable married lady, remember?’

He looked at the ring on her finger and nodded. ‘Aye, married maybe. No sure about the respectable…’

He walked away and she watched him go.
Davie McCall
. She hadn’t thought of him for a long time. That hadn’t been an easy trick to pull off.

*  *  *

The man called the top flat of the high rise ‘The Crow’s Nest’, even though the tower block didn’t quite scrape the sky as much as others in the city. The Gorbals used to be known as Hell’s Hundred Acres, a tag Audrey always thought unfair. But then, she’d never seen the place when the dark tenement was king. Back in the ’60s, these flats had been hailed as the future, but now they were slated for demolition, though no-one knew when that would happen. From what she had seen, it was not before time. Audrey and Big George Gillan, the photographer, had passed a number of boarded up doorways as they walked to this one, the architect’s dream crumbling into a damp, crime-ridden hellhole.

If it hadn’t been for the man sprawled on the couch under the window, the flat would have looked derelict. There was no carpet on the floor and the ratty old armchair in which she sat was ripped and stained with who knew what. She knew she was going to have her trousers cleaned immediately. Or burned, which may be wiser. Big George leaned against a wall smoking a cigarette, refusing to sit on anything in the flat. His camera dangled around his neck, and he’d already snapped off a number of shots of the sallow-faced addict. Every now and then, she heard the click of the shutter as another angle appealed. He’d taken maybe twenty shots but only one would be used, the addict’s face blanked out. Big George could have left any time but he opted to stay, being old school, and there was no way he was leaving a lassie alone with a junkie crook.

Through the grime-encrusted windows overlooking Queen Elizabeth Square she could see the city lying under a sky that looked as if it had been smeared by an oily rag. A gas fire hissed in the wall but the flat still felt cold, thanks to damp walls. There was nothing else in the room apart from the armchair, its neighbour in the corner, and the couch. No coffee table, no telly, no pictures, ornaments or mementos, unless you counted the two or three brown-tinged cigarette filters that lay on the floorboards under the window. She stared at the red-haired man opposite her, unable to shake off the feeling she’d seen him before. He was smoking a thin roll-up, but it was unfiltered. He had other uses for the items on the floor. Even without the usual detritus of habitation, this place had an unlived feel about it. Audrey wondered if it was his home or if it was some kind of Giro drop used by a handful of people.

He told them they should call him ‘Jinky’. Used to be a footballer, he said, a good one. Could jink about with the ball. He’d been jinking about when they first arrived, always in movement and even when he sat, his leg bounced around. If it was nervous leg syndrome, Audrey thought, it was heading for a breakdown. They had talked for a while, but his needs grew too strong and eventually he excused himself and vanished into another room. Big George had raised his eyebrows at her. They both knew what he was doing. Tenner bag into a spoon, heated with a lighter, drawn into the syringe through the filter tip, then into a vein – probably his groin, given the years he’d been mainlining. The residue in the filter tip would be saved for a rainy day. He was more relaxed when he came back, but Audrey knew she was on the clock now. Pretty soon he’d be drifting into a deep sleep, and when he awoke he’d feel the need to jag up once more.

He spoke as if his jaw was stiff, like so many junkies, his voice coming from somewhere at the back of his throat. He spoke about his life, how he’d come from a good family here in the Gorbals but he’d joined a gang, drifted into crime, done time in the Bar-L, then Greenock, for assault with a deadly weapon. When he got out in 1984 he’d started using heroin, got hooked, and now here he was. Still saw his wee maw around the streets, down the shops, but she didn’t want to know him. Ashamed of him, so she was. Couldn’t blame her, he said.

‘Why don’t you kick it?’ Audrey asked, but she knew the answer before he shook his head sadly.

‘Naw, darlin, no easy, that. Tried once, went to one of they addiction service places, Alban House, then did a spell at a rehab unit over in Cardross. It was fuckin hard goin so it was, pardon my language. Almost made it, too, but as soon as I came back here I was right back on the stuff. It’s like bein in love, know what I mean? It’s all you can think of, all you want, and when you’re away from it you can’t wait to get back.’

Audrey scribbled this down. It was a good line and she wondered if he’d read it somewhere. ‘Where do you get your stuff?’

‘Ach, all over, darlin. Here, there. You cannae go nowhere in Glasgow, darlin, without trippin over a dealer. Used to be there was a polis on every corner, or a pub, now it’s a dealer. There’s a couple work the Gorbals here, just down at the shops, fuckin yards away from the polis station, pardon my language. It’s nuts, darlin, pure nuts. They’re there puntin tenner bags and jellies and that and the polis are sittin in their wee office drinkin coffee and eatin doughnuts, you know?’

She nodded. It was a tale told and retold across the city. Gorbals, Saracen, Possil, Blackhill. The police couldn’t stem the flow of drugs on the streets, so it often seemed they tried to ignore it. She had even heard that senior officers had long ago decided they couldn’t stop the trade, so they decided to control it by ‘licensing’ dealers to operate in return for information when it was needed. It was almost an urban legend, but Audrey had never found anyone to corroborate it. She wished she could – what a story that would make. Her husband wouldn’t be happy, though. He was seldom happy with what she wrote. But then, he wouldn’t, being a plainclothes cop.

‘Anyway, darlin,’ Jinky said, his voice sad, ‘I suppose it’s what I deserve. I’ve no been a good person, you know what I’m sayin? My maw would die if she knew all the things I’d done.’

‘Like what?’

His face crinkled. ‘Ach, robbin folk, hurtin folk. See my prison stretch? Was for usin a knife on a fella. Carved him up bad, so I did.’

‘Why’d you do it?’

He stopped and considered her question, his eyes dull and lifeless. ‘Fucked if I know, pardon my language, darlin. I think I was paid to do it. I did that back then, got paid to hurt folk. There was a Tally man around here who used to get me to scare folk who didn’t pay their debts on time. Known for it, so I was. Even in the jail.’