Welcome to the Heady Heights

by David F. Ross

  Barbara was certain most of those on duty today were intoxicated. Or still hungover. She could have made this observation any other day of the year; the difference now was the time. It wasn’t even 10 a.m. yet. An appeal to let the officers with families have Christmas Day off had, as it always did, fallen on deaf ears. Single female officers like Barbara – who only did the day shifts anyway – had absolutely no chance of being considered for leave. Not that she would’ve requested it anyway. Christmas always brought a pain and sadness that loneliness only made worse. Better to be here around colleagues, even the drunken, misogynistic ones.

  The Strathclyde Police East HQ in Tobago Street was the busiest in the city, and arguably in all of Scotland. So far, Barbara’s exposure to this tense new world of wanton criminality had extended no further than three missing pet inquiries, one of which was solved by looking under a bed; a series of reported break-ins at Visionhire and Radio Rentals – crimes which, in the run-up to Christmas, you could set your watch by; and the apparent theft of a Glasgow Corporation bus. The bus in question was soon found, parked on the centre circle of a blaes football pitch up at Dawsholm; the only viable witness, an intoxicated pensioner. It was hardly the life and times of Eliot Ness and the Untouchables. A tiny local radius around the police station was her beat; relatively speaking, it was the safest place in the entire East End.

  Despite everything, Barbara was excited to be here. She knew the challenges the position would bring, and already an amused fraternity had made various references to her ‘handbag-sized truncheon’. She had campaigned for the Sex Discrimination Act and now that it was law, it seemed to torment male colleagues. In the view of Davy Dodd, E-Division’s ebullient sergeant, the Women’s Department of the Police was there to do the softer things: dealing with difficult kids, families, and the boring administrative drudgery that the men hated doing. They were there to support the PCs, and to hold the hands of bereaved wives being informed that their husbands had died in a knife fight. The WPCs didn’t walk the beat alone, they didn’t do night shifts. Because they still had to be home in time to see to the family’s dinners, naturally.

  Barbara Sherman knew it would be difficult to make a positive impact in such an obdurate environment. She was an outsider; arguably always had been. Like all new WPCs, she was single. She lived alone, within walking distance of the station. She’d never been pretty; certainly not in comparison to those adorning the walls. The officers already had a nickname for her: The Tank. She was bulky in stature. It could’ve been worse, she supposed. She consoled herself that if pushed, she could hold her own with most of them in an arm-wrestling contest. On top of all this, they all spoke so fast – words came at her like rapid-fire jabs from Benny Lynch, pummelling her into uncomprehending submission. She’d learned to listen to the tone rather than the content.

  ‘Briefing room, now!’ Sergeant Davy Dodd’s throaty voice bellowed through the office. Loose ceiling tiles seemed to vibrate, and the dust-covered blinds appeared to shake as if a low-flying jet had just buzzed the building. Davy Dodd resembled an angry bull. He was a man perpetually dismayed at the hand life had dealt him in the form of the fucked-up band of misfits sharing his working environment. He had no neck that was visible. Just a large, square head that rose straight out of a shirt collar struggling with the blotchy girth it was attempting to contain.

  ‘Sherman, move yer fat arse an’ get in here!’

  The others woke from their slumber, wiped the slobber from their chins and laughed. The Tank would be getting dispatched to the pub when it opened to get a quarter bottle refill for Dodd or sent to find somewhere in the building with enough sugar, tea bags and milk for a round. Kept in her place.

  ‘Leave the door!’ Davy Dodd was apparently furious. Barbara genuinely didn’t know why. He was a volatile man, but when a bollocking from a superior was imminent, she’d usually been able to sense it coming. Not this time though.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘There’s been a complaint, Sherman.’

  ‘About me, sir?’

  ‘Aye, about you.’ Davy Dodd sat on the edge of his desk, one leg touching the ground, the other dangling, the wooden corner separating them. The position of his lower body was open, like an ape displaying its genitals. But his arms were crossed defensively. Barbara was good at reading people, their body language especially, but her sergeant’s was awkward and confused. She took a small pleasure in his obvious discomfort.

  ‘Jamesie Campbell, ye know him?’

  ‘The MP?’

  ‘Aye, that Jamesie Campbell.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I know who he is.’

  ‘He claims he asked that a police officer was present last week at a party meetin’ his wife was at. Nobody showed. Don Braithwaite out there said he told you tae sort it. That true, Sherman?’

  ‘Eh, no sir. No, it most definitely isn’t.’

  ‘Braithwaite!’ Davy Dodd’s voice roared past Barbara’s ears. It was like she was in a wind tunnel. A faint ‘He’s no’ in, sarge. He’s just nipped out on a wee message’ drifted back through to them.

  ‘Hmmph.’

  Sergeant Dodd was especially annoyed. He too had lost out on the Christmas Day shift pattern draw. He had contemplated a day on the sick, but Inspector Melrose had headed that one off at the pass. Like Davy Dodd, he wanted to see the afternoon Danny Kaye film.

  ‘We’ll pick this up later, but Campbell’s got a lot comin’ up. He’s pals wi’ the superintendent, an’ ah’m gettin’ it right square in the baws here because we’ve let him down. So, never mind Braithwaite, ah’m fucken’ tellin’ ye straight … when Jamesie Campbell shouts “jump”, you say “how high?” Now have ye got that Woman PC Sherman?’

  ‘Yes sarge.’

  ‘You’re tae be his personal pig, ye hear me?’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Now, away an’ get me some tea. Dae somethin’ fucken useful.’

  3

  January 1976

  Gail Proctor drove her battered green Mini up the slope. She sat forward in the seat, with her back almost vertical, and her shoulders tense. But it appeared that her surveillance was nearly over. The long black car containing Big Jamesie Campbell had turned in through the gates and up the long, tree-lined road leading to Daldowie Crematorium. She watched her target’s car disappear around a bend. She crunched the gears and followed.

  Gail pulled into a side space and watched Big Jamesie Campbell get out of his car. He appeared agitated. The pallbearers were waiting, apparently for him. He ambled over and held out his hand to each of them, like a Sicilian don; it was taken awkwardly. Gail made notes. There were four full notebooks in the back seat of her Mini.

  ‘Ye cannae park yer motor there, hen.’ The man startled her, approaching her from behind. ‘The next cortege’ll be comin’ up the road in about ten minutes.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I was just, em…’

  ‘Ye’ll need tae get a shift oan if yer gaun in. The doors’ll be gettin’ shut.’

  ‘I will. Thanks.’ She pulled out of the space and found another.

  She got to the heavy mahogany doors just as they were being closed. Giving the doorman a whispered apology, she moved over to a seat right at the back of the committal hall. Around half the available seats were occupied. Piped accordion music filled the vaulted space. She could see Big Jamesie Campbell – the back of his massive head. He was at the front, with a few people making a point of going to him to offer a hand. Gail wondered if it was a Campbell relative being mourned, such was the obvious deference towards him. She also briefly considered the possibility that the deceased was someone that Big Jamesie Campbell had had murdered. She already knew that he was capable of it. Proving it beyond all doubt was another thing altogether. But she would persist. She owed it to her uncle, if not her deluded mother, living on the other side of the country in a near-constant state of denial.

  The minister outlined the quiet life of Fred Calton, cut short as many of his genetic background had
been, by heart disease. Fred was fifty-six when he succumbed, Gail learned. ‘A man of principle, integrity; a decent, honest, dedicated family man,’ said the minister, clearly reading from a prepared text. It seemed to Gail that a life summed up by a man of God who had apparently never met Fred was the ultimate in hypocrisy. How could he possibly know the destination of Fred’s soul, yet he offered certainty to a front row of weeping adults who Gail presumed were Fred’s immediate family.

  Big Jamesie Campbell was invited to say a few words. Gail learned that Fred had been a central part of the Campbell campaign that, in the mid-fifties, saw the then councillor first elected to serve his local community. Campbell said that Fred had espoused the egalitarian qualities they both believed Labour represented. ‘Opportunities for all,’ said Big Jamesie. True to form, though, Big Jamesie then used the platform for his own ends, turning a family’s personal grief into a campaign pitch for his new party. Gail could scarcely believe it when he concluded his valediction by urging those present to sign up and join him in building a new political force; one that would follow the virtuous example of working-class people like Fred Calton. He went so far as to trail an upcoming press conference where all would be revealed.

  Big Jamesie Campbell’s arrogance dominated the room. His selfishness, a product of a stolen privilege that required no accountability. Gail Proctor left quietly before the final hymn and the minister’s empty blessing.

  Gail climbed the cold concrete stairs in complete darkness. Four weeks since being formally notified about it and the landlord still hadn’t fixed the tenement’s defective lighting. He would be holding out for the clocks going forward, no doubt. Despite having now had a lot of practice opening her door in the dark, she still had to use her free hand to locate the keyhole and guide the key into it. Once inside, the streetlighting made the search for a match more straightforward. Candles lit, she dropped her bag on the bare wooden floor of the front room before dragging the metal tub across the room and sitting it in front of the single-bar fire, which was slowly providing a little more localised illumination. It took half an hour to fill the tiny bath to a useful level. She used the time between kettle boils to read her newest notes, and to summarise them into something that might make sense to someone, someday. To make of these fragments some kind of route map. Currently it had a destination, but no identifiable points on the way – the roads to them hadn’t been built yet.

  The starting point of her journey, though, was always in her mind: a letter to her mother from her uncle Alec that ended with the sentence: I might not see you again. Take care of the wee one. I love you. Alec. Less than a month after the letter was sent, he was dead.

  Gail hadn’t seen her uncle Alec much when she lived in Edinburgh. She had seen more of him when she’d briefly worked in London, but still only sporadically. They were a distant family. Her dad had abandoned his wife and daughter when she was only two years old. Gail hadn’t heard from him in twenty-six years. Alec, though, was simply a loner, apparently in love with the solitude that the life of the investigative journalist – of writing and research – required. He had always smelled strongly of alcohol. It was the first thing she recalled when thinking about him. He was also socially awkward and would never meet the adult Gail anywhere other than a library. But for all this she had liked him. And she realised now that she shared many of his traits and binary attitudes. She hoped that she was conducting her quest to uncover the truth about his death with the same spirit and the same determination and drive that he had demonstrated as a journalist. This hope was often the only thing that kept her going.

  Gail had struggled with her English literature course at university. She found herself lacking the discipline and academic stamina it required. Nonetheless, she graduated, and, despite Alec’s warnings, drifted towards journalism. She picked up a few inconsequential, amateurish commissions, which were published in the Sundays. While the payments barely covered her rent, these jobs gave her a hint of the addictive excitement she thought Alec must have experienced. And now, even though she had a personal agenda driving her, Gail couldn’t deny the exhilarating, thrilling rush of pursuing someone like Big Jamesie Campbell; of stumbling upon some new piece of shocking information – information she could use to pave the road she was following. She was still mindful of her inexperience, though. She knew she would have to bide her time until a proper opening presented itself. Big Jamesie Campbell’s inappropriately loose tongue earlier that day might just provide one.

  Meantime she’d exist frugally in this freezing-cold structure with its damp, peeling wallpaper, temperamental water supply and no lights. She’d taken to cleaning the stairs and the flats of some of the elderly tenants, and this, combined with periodic shifts at the Press Bar in the Merchant City quarter, provided her with just enough money to survive. She ate like a small bird. She had no television and the lack of lighting meant her bills were small. Her one vice – a taste for Rémy Martin – was accommodated by her boss at the pub; he’d given her a bottle on her last birthday.

  Now, she drained the last of this bottle into a small, cracked china teacup, balancing it on top of her typewriter as she eased herself into the lukewarm water of her half-filled bath. Radio 4 played quietly on a pocket transistor radio. The glow from the single bar of the fire made her pale-white skin look healthier. She sipped the last of the cognac and relaxed as the warmth from it coursed through her. She put her preoccupations aside and thought of nicer, more feminine things: the nape of Bardot’s neck or the curve of Raquel Welsh’s breasts, the dramatic cheekbones of Faye Dunaway. As she did, her right hand slipped into the milky grey water and down between her thighs.

  4

  January 1976

  This had to be significant. For three consecutive nights, Big Jamesie Campbell had been dropped off at The Balgarth Inn near Provanmill just before midnight. Gail was reduced to observing him from what she considered to be a safe distance, concealed in the undergrowth of a tree belt running along the adjacent railway cutting. Campbell was always dressed in a dinner suit and accompanied by three similarly dressed males. They arrived in the same remarkable black car that had ferried him to Fred Calton’s funeral. Gail couldn’t see who the other men were – the lights from every lamppost in the street were out. The moon appeared every now and again from behind the fastmoving cloud cover, but the only other useful illumination was from occasional car headlights.

  The Balgarth had a deserved reputation as a dangerous den of various iniquities. A cabal of feared Glasgow gangsters had owned it, running it as an unlicensed casino and brothel. No one was entirely sure who owned it now, but it was one of the few buildings in Glasgow’s East End that ordinary people crossed the street to avoid walking past. The whole who the fuck ae you lookin’ at? exchange was not one you wanted to have right outside The Balgarth’s frightening lead-lined doors. With the council’s East End slum-clearance policy progressing apace, The Balgarth was now the only remaining structure in the street. The tenements it was once part of were gone. Gail imagined the difficult decisions about its future being deferred by local officials who were far too scared to take them.

  Tonight, Gail had left her car parked near the railway station, skirted the tracks, then clambered up the embankment and through a hole in the fence, coming out opposite The Balgarth. She’d gambled on Big Jamesie showing up for a third time, and he did. His car appeared an hour later than on the previous two evenings. Countless other vehicles had already deposited suited gentlemen outside the pub. If it had been a business dinner or a boxing event at The Albany in the city, nothing would’ve been out of place. But these smart men arriving at this bizarre lump of two-storey masonry in this bleak no-man’s land looked as out-of-place as Regency diners on an active battlefield.

  Gail watched Campbell enter the building. A shaft of light from the front doors, opening to grant him entry. No light spilled from anywhere else; she assumed the windows were boarded over or blacked out. A temporary clearing in the night sky; an
ugly, scarred moon shone on Big Jamesie’s driver moving the black car closer to the end of the street. It was likely to be a long night.

  She was dozing when a commotion woke her. A group of angry men – dressed in the black of controlled aggression, rather than that donned for a refined function – were chasing a staggering, semi-naked man along the street. He had a decent head start but it looked to Gail like he was injured and they would catch him. He slumped onto the bonnet of the car that had delivered Big Jamesie Campbell to the Balgarth. He clambered inside, and it sped off.

  The three bouncers briefly began arguing among themselves before stomping back to the building, where two other men had emerged. When they were within striking distance, four set about the smallest of the initial three. A punch took him down whereupon all kicked relentlessly at his head and torso, until he lay motionless in the road. They went inside and a few moments later another, slighter man, wearing a white overall, came out, picked up the unconscious victim awkwardly by his arms and proceeded to drag him inside. The door slammed shut. Quiet blackness returned. It was a strange scene all round, and Gail had twice wiped her eyes watching it unfold, as if unable to believe that it was happening.