GUILT TRIPPER (3 page)
Authors: Geoff Small
Angie told Judith
all this in the three hours it took for a Detective Chief Inspector to arrive. He
introduced himself, but the women were too stressed by his accusatory stare to
comprehend his name. Once he’d confirmed that Angie did indeed want to talk
about the attempted murder of a Miss Carina Curran, he gestured for her to take
a seat alongside Judith, as if he owned the apartment. Once she got started
there was no holding her. In fact, on several occasions he had to ask her to
slow down. He wasn’t taking notes, just listening with blank inscrutability. This
caused Angie to keep repeating herself, in the futile hope he’d acknowledge
that what she was saying was being heard or, more importantly, believed.
Judith left Angie’s
shortly after the detective. Her travel schedule ruined, she thought she may as
well visit Danny, whom she’d been ringing to no avail ever since the party,
worried about his feelings in the wake of Ingrid’s appraisal on the landing. Having
driven back across town and into the more neglected side of Glasgow, she turned
onto the field of flattened earth, where she caught her first sight of thick
grey smoke, billowing from somewhere among the derelict tenements up ahead. Reaching
the junction for Danny’s street, her way was blocked by a police squad car,
parked across the road, blue light flashing. Kids on bikes were hurtling into
the street unobstructed, so she abandoned her vehicle and jogged behind,
towards the dark mist and deep buzzing sound of fire engines. Reaching the
outer ring of what must have been fifty onlookers — many dressed in black — she
heard an exasperated voice through a loud hailer, repeatedly imploring people
to move back. Standing on tip-toes, she caught her first glimpse of violent flames,
but it was impossible to tell from which part of the building they were coming exactly
because of the smoke, and so it took another whole minute before her worst
fears got confirmed. It was Danny’s apartment.
Judith barged to the
head of the crowd, but as she stumbled out from the throng, her way was barred
by several shirt-sleeved police officers. Beyond them, two crews fought the
fire, half a dozen hoses blasting the growling building in vain. Staring into
the flames, she found it difficult to comprehend that Danny and his mother
might be trapped in that diabolical heat. Just then, a warm breath tickled the
back of her ear.
“How’s that for a
leaving party then?”
Judith turned round
— it was Danny! In spite of the hot sunshine, he was wearing a baggy black
suit, which would have been fashionable sometime in the mid-eighties.
“Danny! Thank God
you’re safe. Where’s your mother? Is she Ok?”
“There’s nothing
that can harm her now. She died on Friday night while I was out at Bob and
Ingrid’s party…We’ve just come back from the cremation…wanted it over and done
with as soon as possible, as was the old girl’s wish.”
“I’m so sorry…what
happened to the apartment?” Judith asked, a little excitedly.
“Well, it was left
empty today for the first time in eight years and, coincidentally, it just
happened to go up in smoke, along with all the booze and pieces for the wake,”
Danny snorted sardonically. “The bastards got me out in the end eh!”
Judith, who
attributed this statement to Danny’s paranoia, was more inclined to point the
finger at kids bored on their summer holidays from school than at some
capitalist conspiracy. During her week driving around the city, she’d seen
quite a few burnt out apartments, usually in derelict tenements on the outlying
schemes, but sometimes in semi occupied blocks as well. Unfortunately, not only
was Glasgow the murder capital of Western Europe, but the house fire and arson
capital of Britain too.
Judith had intended
to get off as soon as possible, but she felt duty bound to make sure Danny was
going to be ok first and so ended up at the relocated wake. It was held at The
Brothers Bar on Saracen Street — a whitewashed, single floored, apartment
roofed, windowless place, welded onto the end of a red-stone tenement. After a
while, Danny started to tire of people’s sympathy and asked Judith to accompany
him outside, where they sat on the roadside of an adjacent service lane, in the
cool shadow of the pub. Her job, she knew, was to listen.
“Do you know how
much I resent that woman, my mother? I hate her for the rigid morality she’s
inflicted upon me.” He put his head between his knees for a moment before
looking up again and continuing. “No wonder my sisters got as far away from her
as possible, before they were drained of all joy as I have been. I can even
sympathize with Fin’s drug addiction, poor wee bugger. It must have been his
only escape from the evil world she portrayed to us, even as kids, when all we
wanted to do was play and be normal.” He turned to Judith. “I went looking for
him yesterday you know, but he’s been evicted from his apartment and now it’s
got an iron shutter over the front door. The guy across the landing told me the
former occupants had received Anti-Social Behaviour Orders for drug dealing. I
looked everywhere for him, but it was no good.” He put his head back between
his legs and spoke into the hole, so that his voice was slightly muffled. “Even
as bloody kids we’d been conditioned to view fun as a sin — something that
couldn’t be justified on such an ‘inequitable’ planet. We sneered at the
ignorance of the other children, yet were so jealous of their unaffected
happiness that we’d start fights with them.” Danny seemed ashamed at this
recollection, burying his head further between his legs and not speaking for at
least another minute. When he did eventually re-emerge and start talking again
he didn’t stop, and furnished Judith with a profile of his mother that he’d
obviously been rehearsing for years, until this moment, when he could finally
spew out the ambivalence he felt towards her.
The eldest of six children,
Annie Gilchrist had been brought up through the 1930s and 40s. Between her
mother’s strict religious beliefs and father’s Communism there’d certainly been
no room for light heartedness, and she’d spent most of her childhood helping
old grandmother Gilchrist with work before getting a job in a laundry. With
this background it was small wonder Danny ended up inhibited by an unlikely
fusion of Christianity and Marxism. However, he was starting to suspect that his
mother had only been a lip-syncer, for her actions hadn’t necessarily
complimented her virtuous ideals. It may simply have been a case of opposites
attracting, but her choice of husband seemed to be, at the very least, a
subliminal rejection of her upbringing.
Danny’s father,
Dougie was an atheist whose only ideology was football. He was a drunken, gambling,
fornicating, bar room brawler and bloody good laugh. There was certainly no
romanticising of the working man with him. As far as Dougie was concerned, if
you worked then you were a mug and any money that did filter into the White household
came from illicit sales of cigarettes and booze in the city’s pubs. In truth,
he was a counterforce to Annie’s parents, a living proof that she was looking
for something other than the sober outlook she’d inherited. But, ultimately,
she’d been unable to shed such a deeply ingrained sense of guilt at having fun
and so her kicks were experienced vicariously, through the legendry antics of
her husband.
Judith had assumed Danny’s
father was dead. In fact, nobody knew either way. During the summer of 1978 he’d
flown to Argentina to watch Scotland in the World Cup Finals and never
returned, along with many other fellow countrymen.
Although Danny
resented Annie for passing on her hang-ups, he appreciated that she’d tried to
break out of her oppressive mould by marrying Dougie, which ensured his
upbringing was at least only half as grim as her own.
“I swear to you
Judith, one way or another I’ve got to emancipate myself from her ideals,
otherwise what’s left of my life is gonna pass by without a single drop of
pleasure.”
They returned to The
Brothers Bar and both sipped orange juice, the bereaved being a paragon of
temperance, just like his mother. Sober, Judith found the drunken wake
physically draining, but didn’t leave until she was sure Danny would be in safe
hands. Thankfully, Katy volunteered to put him up with her parents and, as
regards the inconvenience caused by the fire, it had only been a matter of time
before the authorities had had him removed from the apartment anyway. Of
course, priceless objects such as family photographs had been lost but, Judith
thought, most of the fixtures and fittings probably belonged on a fire anyway. With
her mind at rest, she eventually left just before seven, without having
mentioned Herman’s prostitute beating, which she’d deemed an inappropriate
topic under the circumstances.
PART TWO
That October, Judith
started her sabbatical from work and moved to Glasgow, where she rented a one
bed-roomed, West End apartment. Situated on the top floor of a blonde-stone
tenement, her bow windowed living room was in the building’s conical roofed
corner turret, which reminded her of a French Chateau. These tenements where
broadly known as either blonde-stones or red-stones, but they were far more
varied than that, with six different types of ‘blonde’ and four types of ‘red’
across the city.
Judith’s apartment
was only a couple of blocks from the university: a neo-gothic palace in blonde
sandstone, which had a soaring bell tower with a sooty, skeletal steeple
resembling a shuttlecock. It was here, after the first of her tutorials, that
she ran into Angie beneath the vaulted cloisters that bisected the grass
quadrangle. Wearing a grey woollen roll neck with jeans, and cloaked to the
waist in red coiled hair, the youngster had just begun the final year of an
English degree. Spotting Judith, her sea green eyes conveyed genuine delight
and the pair of them walked together, emerging from the cloisters onto a
hilltop overlooking Kelvingrove Park, which was now approaching its full autumn
splendour. As Judith focused on the twin red-stone campaniles of the
Kelvingrove art gallery, towering above the golden trees down below, Angie
updated her on the Herman saga, which had taken a sensational twist. Apparently,
he’d admitted picking the prostitute up, but reckoned somebody else had
assaulted her. That somebody was Bob Fitzgerald.
“The trial’s going
on as we speak. I gave evidence last week and somehow managed to get through it
without any aspersions being cast against my character, either by the barristers
or the press — thank God.” Angie looked up at the pale blue sky momentarily,
holding both hands together as if praying. “When they asked why it had taken me
so long to go to the police, I said I probably never would have had it not been
for you.” She winced in an expression of regret. “I’m sorry, but I mentioned
your name in court…it just sort of happened before I realized.”
Judith rubbed
Angie’s shoulder. “That’s ok, don’t worry about it.”
The young student
puffed her cheeks out, trying to repress a smile of relief before continuing.
“The prosecution
reckoned that Herman was an obsessive Squeaky Kirk fan who stalked the band. Bob
exploited this by using him to procure prostitutes, so as not to run the risk
of being seen soliciting himself and ending up on the front page of the Daily
Record. On the occasion in question, Herman’s picked up this girl – Carina
Curran – and driven her to Bob’s secret shag-pad apartment over in Govan.” To
indicate where she meant, Angie nodded towards some dinosaurian looking, black
shipyard cranes, beyond the tenement rooftops on the opposite, south side of
the River Clyde. “Anyway, Herman’s been waiting in the kitchen there, ready to
transport her back to Calton, post coitus, when he hears a loud argument in the
bedroom. Carina — a classically trained cellist by the way — was taunting Bob,
saying that she knew who he was and that his music was crap. Herman reckons she
was going on and on and then, suddenly, she just stopped mid-sentence and there
was complete silence. The next thing, Bob emerged and asked him to come to the
room, where Carina’s lying in a pool of blood with a bronze paper weight on the
floor by her head. Bob was convinced she was dead and begged Herman to dispose
of the body, but he refused and left her at the side of Paisley Road instead,
after ringing an ambulance.” Judith was shaking her head, lower lip hanging. “Of
course, afterwards, Bob’s had no choice but to let Herman hang around with him
full time, fearing he’d spill the beans otherwise.”
“What’s Bob had to
say?”
Angie screwed her
face up in disappointment, “nothing. He said zilch in the police station and,
as yet, zilch in court. He’s being represented by a guy called Fergus Baxter,
who looks after all the gangsters…but even he couldn’t prevent him being
remanded in Barlinnie Prison.”
“So what happened to
Herman then?”
“He got remanded in
Barlinnie too, but after a week they transferred him to a mental hospital.” Judith
closed her eyes and exhaled, as if a safety valve had been activated in her
body, releasing some of the pressure induced by such hideous news. “Apparently,
he’s an obsessive. Once he gets his mind on something it completely overwhelms
his life, until the strain becomes too much and he has to be detained in
hospital. Giving evidence, his psychiatrist said he suffers from something akin
to Asperger’s syndrome…reckons that Bob and the Squeaky Kirk we’re most
probably the only thing in his brain these last few years, outside of normal
day to day activities.”
There was a brief
silence and Angie looked suddenly distressed, as if the possibility of a
miscarriage of justice had finally struck her.
“What did this girl
who got beaten look like? Was she pretty?” Judith enquired, hungrily.
Angie shook her
head. “She was fat — especially for a junkie. According to Herman’s evidence
that’s how Bob likes them. She had massive tits, long, shaggy dark hair, thigh
length leather boots and a short black skirt to show her big butt off.”
“She’s the opposite
of Ingrid in other words.”
“Ingrid’s a trophy,
to be exhibited alongside his flash car and designer clothes. It’s not what she
does for him sexually or emotionally that matters, so much as the impression
she makes upon his audience. Perhaps Carina’s indicative of the real Bob,
trapped somewhere beneath all that received snobbery…a Bob who secretly loves
baked beans, even though he’ll only eat caviar in public.”
Judith exhaled
again. “How’s Ingrid coping with all of this?”
“According to
gossip, she was spending a lot of time with her ex-boyfriend, that taxi driver
fellow who turned up at the party.”
“Really?”
“But then the
apartment got repossessed. She went back to England and the taxi driver had a
breakdown, apparently. Last I heard he was living over in the East End, where
he’s being looked after by a brother who’s trying to get off herione.”
Knowing how liberal
people could be with the term ‘breakdown’, Judith was anxious to see for herself
just how Danny was bearing up.
