Bitter Water (20 page)

I thought again about the woman named in the envelope handed in to Aldo. I
should
have confiscated it. There was still time.

‘Isaac, it’s what I fear too. Spread the word round your people. The police know about this. They will come down like a ton of bricks on anyone setting up someone else for punishment.’

‘I will, Douglas, I will. But they can do this anonymously . . .’

I phoned Aldo’s café. I was too late. A man had picked up the envelopes an hour ago. I grabbed my jacket and ran for the door with no clear idea of what I was going to do when I got to Lambert Street. Maybe just warn her. Maybe take her to hospital.

I jumped off the tram at the end of the street. It was a nondescript row of blackened terraces. Number 22 had three rows of windows, implying anywhere from two to three houses on each level. Maybe six to eight flats in all. I walked into the entry. It was cooler and dark. The smell of poverty stung my nostrils. There were two front doors facing each other in the entry and a spiral stair winding up from the end. The back green was framed at the end of the entry. Burnt grass and drooping grey sheets on the clothes line.

I peered at the names on each door. Anderson and Murray. No MacIntosh. I started up the concrete stairway. Behind me I heard a door open. It was the Anderson door.

‘If you’re looking for yon wee whore she’s on the tap flair!’

I turned and stepped down into the entry. A sour-faced old woman clung to her door. Her hair was matted and grey, her eyes cloudy and spiteful.

‘I’ve got a message for Mrs MacIntosh. That’s all.’

‘Oh, aye? A message, is it? You’ll have got some lassie in trouble and noo you’re trying to sort it, ur ye? Well, it’s a scandal so it is. The polis should be telt.’

‘Mrs Anderson, is it? We’ve never met but you’re quick to judge. In fact you’re wrong about me. I’m not – as you seem to think – some sort of customer. But I do have a message. Top floor, you say?’

My smart accent stilled her. She stood silently giving me the evil eye, sure I was lying. I turned and walked up to the third floor and found the door. I knocked. Eventually I heard locks going and the door swung open. It opened a crack, on a chain.

‘Who is it? Whit do ye want?’

‘Mrs MacIntosh? I need to warn you.’

‘Whit aboot? You the polis?’

‘No. Look, do you want Dracula’s auntie down the stairs to hear this?’

The door closed. The chain rattled and the door opened wider again. A soft-eyed granny stood there, looking as innocent as a buttercup.

‘Are you Mrs Jenny MacIntosh?’

She looked me over. ‘You’d better come in.’

The flat had two rooms, one a busy kitchen cum living room cum bedroom, the other closed. She led me to a seat by the dead fireplace. There was no sign of wealth. Whatever she did it wasn’t for the money, or maybe the mattress was lumpy.

‘Have you a lassie in trouble? It’s no’ like the man to come.’

‘No, Mrs MacIntosh. It’s not me or a lass that’s in trouble. It’s you.’

Her face buckled. ‘So you
are
the polis.’

‘No, I’m not. Look, let me spit it out. There’s been an accusation that you perform abortions.’ I raised my hand to stop her. ‘Don’t say anything. I don’t even need to know if it’s true or not. It’s just that someone has accused you—’

‘It’ll be that auld besom doon below. Jeannie Anderson.’

‘Well, whoever it is has given your name to someone else. There’s a strong chance that someone will come here and . . .’

‘And what? Wave a bible at me? Tell me I’m going to hell?’ A firmness had entered her voice. A wary intelligence focused her eyes. ‘I’ve heard it all, Mr . . .’

‘Brodie. I’m with the
Gazette
. But I’m not going to write this up. I’m not going to make you a story.’

‘Then why are you here, Mr Brodie? What do you care?’

I stared at the floor. It was a good question. ‘I’m not sure. There’re usually two sides. I’m not a judge. But there’s some out there who think they are.’

‘What am I to do? Hide in the coal hole?’ She nodded at the wooden box built into the side of the range.

‘I don’t know, Mrs MacIntosh. Can you stay with friends for a while? Family?’

‘It’s that bad, is it?’

‘The folk who’ve been given your name have been doling out pastings to folk they think have done something. I saw the message left for them.’

‘When? How long have I got?’ She said it calmly, as though she’d been expecting it.

‘I don’t know. This was yesterday. They move fast.’

She nodded. ‘I’ve nowhere to go. I’m no’ running. I’ll manage fine here.’ There was a defiance in her face that brooked no discussion.

She saw me to the door. I stopped and turned. ‘Could I ask something?’

The resignation was back in her face. ‘You want to know why.’

‘You’ve no reason to tell me.’

‘I ken. But you’ve done a decent thing. I had a dochter. She went to . . . somebody. She died through there.’ She indicated the door to the spare room. ‘It’s always the lasses, isn’t it? It’s always gontae happen. I used to be a nurse. It disnae take much to ease ma conscience.’

She closed the door and I went downstairs. The old harridan was waiting.

‘Did you get what ye were after? A’ fixed, are ye?’

I stopped and faced her. ‘Do you go to the kirk?’

She stepped back and folded her arms. ‘Of course!’

I nodded. ‘I thought so.’ I walked out of the entry.

‘Whit do ye mean by that? Whit do you mean, ya cheeky nyaff! Who do you think you are?’ she shouted after me, till I was well down the road.

TWENTY-FIVE

T
hroughout the last days of August, violence in the tarnished name of justice went up a gear. During the first full week of my mother’s stay in Sam’s house, there were daily examples of punishments: splintered shins for pimps, forced overdoses of their own wares for drug dealers. I was glad to have Mum safe under our roof, where I could see her. Especially when – as expected – the first fatality was announced in the form of a surprising phone call from McAllister. For a normally loquacious man, he could sometimes be too terse for comfort. But it wasn’t the demise of Davie Allardyce; Sam got word from his wife that he was out of the coma. Whether he ever got all his faculties back remained to be seen.

It happened at the beginning of September, in the second week of cosy family breakfasts; Sam, Agnes and me. It was taking some getting used to. I wondered how long this could go on. It seemed a bit unfair on Sam to have all these Brodie squatters in her nice home. Mother was looking well ensconced, as though she’d always lived in a four-storey, four-bedroom Georgian townhouse in the best part of Glasgow. But the pair seemed to have worked out a routine of sorts. Sam would sometimes work from home on a case, and have companionable breaks during the day with my mother. Or if Sam was in court, Mother would sit in the gallery absorbed in the machinations of justice. I asked her at least not to take her knitting. Too
tricoteuse
by far. Or if Sam went alone to her office she’d come home to find fireplace brasses burnished like the sun.

It was cramping my style, but it was saving me a fortune in whisky. There was even the strong suspicion that Sam was using my mother as a shield against our own negligible will power. Tea had displaced Teacher’s and I’m sure we were both the better for it. I was even bowing out after a mere couple of pints with McAllister, much to his scathing amusement. Somehow rolling home fu’ was not an option if you were going home to your mother.

I took refuge each morning before breakfast in the swimming pool under the high arched roof of the Western Baths Club. There was nothing fancy like the wave-making machine my mum told me about in the new Kilmarnock public baths. Only the dangling hoops and trapeze over the simple rectangle of water. The first impact seemed like diving into the North Sea. Then my skin adjusted and it felt like cool silk. The physical afterglow was worth the torture of a dawn start and a cold immersion. I had a good front crawl thanks to my father, and each day I added a couple more lengths to my routine.

My love life – such as it was – had hit the buffers. Morag had started going round in the huff once I told her I’d moved in with another woman. And then installed my mother as well.

‘It would be nice to meet your mum, Douglas.’

‘It’s all a bit delicate, Morag. And my landlady . . .’

‘Aye and what
about
this woman? Why did she want you to come and live wi’ her?’

It was a good question. Saying Sam was lonely was only going to add to the suspicions of a young woman brim full of lusty hormones and marriage inclinations.

‘We worked together on the Donovan case back in April. It’s a kind of professional arrangement.’

‘Oh aye, I ken what a professional arrangement looks like!’

I decided to give my mother till Friday. I’d check with the Kilmarnock police station and also the neighbours. If there were no menacing signs I’d take her back home. I didn’t want her to get above herself.

We were buttering toast together round the cosy kitchen table when the phone went.

‘I’ll get it.’ I went into the hall and picked up the phone. ‘Hello?’

I listened as the coins clanked into the phone box at the other end.

‘Brodie? It’s Wullie. They’ve killed a poof.’

‘What?’ I crammed the phone tighter to my ear, not sure I’d heard McAllister right.

‘A poof. We’ve found a body. It’s one of yours.’

‘Wait, wait. One of mine? What do you mean, one of mine? And how do you know it was a poof? I mean they don’t look any different.’

‘Naw, naw. I ken that. This was a
known
poofter. Besides . . .’

‘Besides what, Wullie?’

‘It’s what he’s wearing.’

‘Where is he?’

‘Do you ken the Monkey Club? A drinking den off Bath Street. Get here quick. Before the polis.’

I ducked the questions from the kitchen. How would I have explained it to my mother? I grabbed a piece of toast, my hat and coat, and was out splashing down the Great Western Road in a typical September monsoon before my brain began properly to sift what McAllister had told me: . . .
we’ve found a body . . . get here quick . . .before the polis. . . one of yours.

I grabbed the pole of a tram as it trundled away from the stop and sat upstairs shaking water from my hat.

Homosexuals live in a parallel universe to me, their lifestyle a puzzle. They confound the whole notion of Darwinian selection. I’d read enough Classics at Glasgow University to know it was a commonplace among toga-wearers. In Sparta it seemed compulsory but it didn’t make them a bunch of limp-wristed jessies in the gory pass of Thermopylae. Was it simply a personal choice, then? Did you wake up one day and think today’s the day I fancy a bit of sodomy? Surely not. Surely there would need to be some insistent need, an insatiable itch?

As an NCO and then an officer in a company of rough tough soldiers, you were well aware that one or two of the boys were, shall we say, a bit more aesthetically inclined than the others. The men knew it too. There was always talk among the troops in my unit about a particular bugger who was unsafe to share a foxhole with. But as long as the kilt-lifting wasn’t blatant or got in the way of the primary purpose of the regiment – killing the enemy – it wasn’t something we dwelt on.

I first became aware that there were different persuasions when I was a schoolboy. There was the odd flasher stationed in the public loos near the Cross in Kilmarnock, waving his sausage at giggling schoolboys. Then there was the Boys’ Brigade captain at summer camp who slipped his hand up my shorts. He was clearly disappointed by what he found there as he never tried it again. At university, among the
jeunesse dorée
there was the odd flamboyant creature, with fluttering scarf and eyelashes, but I always assumed it was just an act to get himself noticed.

And of course during my time with Eastern Division there were odd incidents reported of perverse acts and molestation in the Buchanan Street toilets and on Glasgow Green and Kelvingrove Park. They always struck me as triumphs of lust over the Scottish climate.

My attitude was of mild squeamishness if forced to contemplate the physical acts, but as long as the queer brigade left me alone, I was largely indifferent. On the whole, their twilight world passed me by.

The same couldn’t be said about one or two of my pals down the years. Their response to homosexuals ranged from fear to fury, as though it was catching as well as illegal. This attitude applied to some of the more dogmatic of the Glasgow gangs. The slightest hint of divergence from the narrow path of boy shags girl among, say, the Norman Conks, was summarily dealt with. Indeed, so violent was their rejection and ejection of wayward sexuality I sometimes wondered if they were protesting too much.

Which of course makes me wonder what was going on in the minds of the Nazi top brass with their propensity for lumping homosexuals in with Jews and Gypsies as fodder for their Final Solution. And when it came down to it, anything and anyone banned by the Third Reich had me on their side: books, Jews or poofs.