The Good Provider (58 page)

‘Aye,’ Kirsty said.

She watched him lift her baby, heard the sweet little girning sounds and, as she sank back against the pillow, saw David settle beside her on the bed with the wee one tucked safe in the crook of his arm.

She did not know whether she had slept for minutes or hours. All sense of time’s passage had ceased. The whole of that day and evening had furled into a skein of moods and sensations and, in her present sleepy state, she could not separate one from the other. The mutter of voices in the room brought her awake. Once more she forced her eyes to open, saw not David and her baby beside her but only the rough texture of an ulster and the sombre plane of a police uniform at the bed’s end.

She had a raging thirst, her mouth so dry and sticky that she could hardly croak let alone cry out. She had a sly instinct, though, a moment in which she was convinced that they had lied to her, had conspired to deceive her, that she had not given birth at all, that the thing wrapped in towels was not her baby, that it was a monster deformed beyond hope and that David had put it away. She lay quite still, enduring the torment of thirst, lids fluttering, and listened to learn the truth.

To her surprise they were not talking of her or her child. They were arguing. Hearing the see-saw of familiar voices, male and female, she found that she could put a name to the speakers and identify the owner of the overcoat.

Hugh Affleck said, ‘I got here as fast as I could, Nessie.’

‘We could all have been murdered. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for David—’

‘Yes, yes. I admit it was fortuitous—’

‘Fortuitous is not the word for it. If it hadn’t been for him that brute would have slain us all. David acted like a hero, I’ll have you know. I think he was sent by Divine Providence.’

‘Be that as it may, Nessie, I’ll need to talk to the girl.’

‘Tell her, do you mean?’

‘Of course, tell her.’

A third voice, accented and distinct; Sergeant Drummond said, ‘Has she not been asking for him already, Mrs Frew?’

‘As a matter of fact, no, she hasn’t mentioned his name.’

‘Is she in delirium?’

‘What
do
you want, Hughie? Another “statement”? Can you not give her peace?’

Sergeant Drummond said, ‘Nicholson is her husband, Mrs Frew, and the father of the infant—’

‘Oh, you always stick together, you men. If Craig Nicholson’s concerned about his wife and child why is he not here with her?’

‘He can’t be,’ said Hugh Affleck.

‘
Shhh
! I think Kirsty’s awake.’

They turned, all three, and she saw their faces, pale and solemn, looking down at her, that strange upside-down ugliness in each of them. Mr Affleck loomed towards her, huge and menacing in the unbuttoned coat, his hair plastered flat, the deerstalker hat held in both hands, his fingers twisting the material.

Kirsty licked her parched lips.

‘I can hear you,’ she said.

Behind the man, out of sight, a door opened.

David said, ‘The ambulance is here at last. I’ve the baby all wrapped and ready. I would prefer not to delay, Aunt Nessie.’

‘Do you hear that, Hughie?’ Mrs Frew said. ‘No delay.’

Hugh Affleck said, ‘I’ll only be a moment.’

‘Ambulances cost money.’

‘Nessie, hold your damned tongue.’

Kirsty said, ‘Did you catch him?’

‘Yes, lass. Yes, we caught him.’

‘Craig?’

‘The man who hurt you has been caught.’

‘Craig?’

‘Daniel Malone will not trouble you again.’

‘Oh, tell her if you must, Hughie.’

‘Your husband – Craig – he caught Malone for us. Single-handed.’

‘Where is he?’

‘There was an accident.’

‘Where is he?’

‘Injuries sustained in the course of duty.’

‘David,’ Kirsty said. ‘Where’s the baby?’

He came immediately and knelt beside her. His face did not look at all ugly or warped. He took one of her hands in both of his hands. ‘The baby’s fine, Kirsty, all ready for his first journey. Your husband is fine too, really he is.’

‘You’re only sayin’—’

‘He can’t be here with you because he has a lot of cuts and a fracture – not serious, I’m told – of the wrist. I think he’ll be able to visit you tomorrow, once he’s properly patched up.’

‘Craig performed his duty with great courage and fortitude, lass,’ said Sergeant Drummond. ‘You should be proud of him.’

Her relief at the news was mild, almost casual.

‘We must go,’ David said.

The sheets were fresh and dry, the blanket as soft as moss, the big quilt silky as a cocoon. When David lifted her she felt light and weightless in his arms.

The faces receded, voices too.

‘Will you come with me, David?’ she whispered.

David answered, ‘Yes.’

The sun came up a little after four and all the signs were that it would be another beautiful day. The river lay flat as varnish and the only indication that the tide had turned came from the gulls that, for some reason nobody could explain, abandoned the Govan shore and flocked to the roofs of timber warehouses along the end of St John Street. Their cries were raucous and fretful, at odds with the tranquillity of the summer morning but, Craig thought, they made a fitting sort of chorus for dawn in the city.

He liked the night-shift best of all, though he longed for the time, not far hence, when he would be allocated a more lively beat and a more amiable companion than dour Peter Stewart. Even so, with the long cold months of spring behind him and the sun in the sky and hawthorn in bloom and laburnum and lilac colourful in the park, he felt that he had little to complain about, even although nothing seemed quite as satisfactory as he had expected it to be; not his marriage, not fatherhood, and certainly not the aftermath of his capture of Daniel Malone.

The fractured wrist and twisted knee joint healed quickly but he was left for a week or two with the nightmare in his mind, that dream of steam and steel and blackness, Danny Malone’s face, streaming blood, at the centre of it like the head on an old coin. It still seemed a miracle that the shunter and all its wagons had raggled over him, that it was Malone who had had his skull cracked by the link of the shunting-chain and had lain in his arms for what seemed an eternity while the wagons rolled and chuckled over them and the brakes squealed and finally brought the load to a halt. And bloody Daniel Malone had managed to escape justice after all, had not collected his just deserts by stepping on to the gallows with a hood over his head and a rope around his neck. Danny was still alive, after a fashion, locked away for ever in the depths of the Judgehead Asylum for the Criminally Insane. The big shunting-chain had done what society could not, had reformed him instantly, knocking all cunning and wickedness away even as it cracked his skull and addled his brains.

Malone would never be fit to stand trial for his crimes, Superintendent Affleck said; it was not in the nature of Scottish law to top a fellow who had lost not only his wits but even the power to stand unaided. Craig regretted it, would have preferred to have had Danny Malone go up those wooden steps like Satan’s bosom pal, unrepentant, unrecondite, puffing on a last cigar and tipping his hat to all his chums and the adoring females that would gather at the gallows’ foot to bid him farewell, to bow out in the grand manner as he would have been allowed to do in days of yore.

It was daft to think in such a manner. Malone had been evil, had tried to kill Kirsty, among his crimes, and Craig said not a word about his regrets or his nightmares to a living soul. He pondered them from time to time, however, as the weeks stole past and the new shift system came into operation and he trudged the quiet night streets with Peter Stewart one week in three; and slept better in daylight with bairns rampaging outside the window and his own child girning in the kitchen, though Kirsty did her best, now that she was well again, to keep the wee beggar quiet.

No great lasting fame had accrued from his ‘arrest’ of Daniel Malone. He had been summoned to the drill hall in Percy Street, marched out before the ranks of the Burgh Police Force and had a letter of commendation read over his head by Mr Organ who had then shaken his hand and had presented him with the letter, a sort of scroll with the Burgh Seal on it, in a cardboard tube. He had been promoted a full grade as reward, which meant more money in his pocket and a little more status in Ottawa Street. He found too, oddly, that many folk who had thought him a nark and a traitor now regarded him with no more than natural antipathy and would even give him a grudging nod when they passed him in the street. All the newspapers reported the incident but Danny had not been at large long enough to stir public imagination, had been nailed before he could become a menace to public safety, a bogeyman to haunt the Greenfield after dark.

Craig had had his name in print several times over, had been labelled ‘brave’ and duly praised for what he had done but there had been no outcome from all of that either, except that he clipped the pieces from the papers and sent them to Gordon in the care of Mr Sanderson at Bankhead Mains. Gordon had even managed to write a reply, a short, stilted, jocular note which had told him very little of what was happening at home and had contained no postscript from their mother.

Night-shift duty, even back-shift, suited Craig just fine. He had the bed in the front room and Kirsty had moved into a new bed in the hole-in-the-wall in the kitchen where she could be near the baby for feeding and changing, let Craig sleep undisturbed. She had her own routine, shaped around his shifts, of course, and seemed happy enough to tend the skinny wee thing and give him all the special attention that such an early arrival demanded for survival and growth and in which she had been instructed at the Samaritan before her discharge; bathing, changing, feeding, a whole smelly, skittery rigmarole that rapidly thinned Craig’s paternal feelings and drove him out of No. 154 to swim in the pond of the Cranstonhill Baths or exercise in the police gymnasium. Sometimes he would take a tram into the city centre and stroll the populous main streets or slip into The Heritage, a cosy public house at the western end of Argyle Street where off-duty coppers from several burghs congregated to drink and talk shop.

He had insisted on choosing his first-born’s name, however, had been adamant about it. It was his name and his father’s name: Robert Craig Nicholson. Kirsty shortened it immediately to Bobby and Craig was happy enough with the contraction which seemed well suited to such a spindly wee creature.

It was Kirsty who stamped her feet about kirk baptism, though the birth had been registered at once.

‘I thought you’d want him christened quick,’ Craig had said, ‘just in case – you know – anythin’ happens to him.’

‘Baptism’s not an insurance policy,’ Kirsty had said. ‘Besides, we have to join the church first.’

‘Both of us?’

‘Aye.’

‘Well, I suppose it’s not somethin’ to rush into.’

‘I have to find out somethin’ first,’ Kirsty had said.

‘Find out what?’

‘Whether or not you an’ me have to be church married.’

‘Church married? We’re not married at all.’

‘I don’t think we have to show marriage lines or anythin’ like that.’

‘Better find out,’ said Craig. ‘Look, if it comes to it, we can slip quietly off to the registry.’

‘I’ll enquire,’ Kirsty had said, ‘about baptism.’

‘Aye, you do that.’

It rankled him that she showed no eagerness to legitimise their ‘marriage’ but he was too stubborn to go down on one knee and beg her to do it. If it did not affect the baby and she was happy then it suited him well enough to let matters stand as they were.

She had not yet allowed him to sleep with her.

‘I’m not right yet,’ she would tell him.

He did not understand what ‘right’ meant but did not ask for an explanation which, he suspected, would involve a catalogue of messy disorders since that’s what birth and motherhood seemed to be all about. He did not understand much about Kirsty Barnes, really, and concerned himself less with surrender than with a gradual and subtle retreat.

Nothing much happened in the course of the summer night duty, no break-ins, no fires, no ‘suspicious characters’ to question and move along, no lost weans to be found, no ‘disturbances’ to be quieted. Routine inspections had unfolded step by step until the sun had come up in dabs of saffron and pink and the gulls made their mysterious migration from Govan to the Greenfield. Peter and he made a last circle of warehouses and, about five-thirty, started back for the corner of Banff Street where, under the optician’s sign, they would be met and relieved.

Peter said, ‘Aye, there he is again.’

‘Who?’ Craig glanced up from his beat book.

‘Your shadow.’

‘God Almighty, does the wee bugger never sleep?’

‘Will I chase him away?’ said Peter.

‘Naw, let him be. He’s doin’ no harm, I suppose.’

‘What does he want, though?’