It meant that the news about one man’s death in Barlinnie Prison barely registered. Had we known what it heralded we might have given it more attention. The grapevine in the form of Big Eddie coughed up the news on Wednesday morning. Eddie crept up on me at my desk. There was none of his normal bounce. By Eddie’s standards he was almost tentative.
‘That fella that got sent down? The one your girlfriend defended?’
‘She’s not my girlfriend. Johnson? What about him?’
‘Found dead in his cell this morning. Hanged.’
It shocked me like a cold shower. ‘Shit!’
‘Aye, it is. Suicide. Used a sheet from the top bunk.’
I shook my head. ‘I never thought he meant it.’
‘What?’
‘That he couldn’t face it. Couldn’t face another prison.’
Eddie was watching my face. ‘Do you want someone else to write it?’
‘No. I owe him that.’
I wrote the story of how Sergeant Alan Johnson, formerly of the Black Watch, hanged himself in Barlinnie Prison just five days into his sentence. And how society had failed the man. How we’d demanded too much of him and those like him. Was that a personal plea? Then I called Sam. She’d already heard. Her voice was dull.
‘I’m not covering myself in glory these days, am I, Brodie?’
‘Sam, if it wasn’t for you, he’d have got ten years! You were brilliant!’
‘Five, ten? What does it matter? He went down. Now he’s dead.’
We hung up, each in our way clinging to the rational argument that we’d done the best we could, but each troubled by guilt. We hadn’t imagined he was serious. It was a lesson I was slow to learn; I’d forgotten about Ishmael’s oath. The first hint came on the Sabbath.
It was work that got me up bright and early on this Sunday morning and out the door. Not for the kirk: God had mislaid me, or maybe it was the other way about. Anyway, we weren’t on speaking terms. I was off to the hospital, as was my habit these past three weeks. It was McAllister’s idea, a routine he’d followed for years and which had led to a number of roaring pieces in the Gazette on a Monday morning. Not that he was now having a lie-in. Wullie had his pick of hospitals and access to the sergeant’s desk of most of the central nicks. Spoiled for choice.
I didn’t mind on a morning like this. The day was crisp and sweetened by the westerly blowing up the Clyde. I left my digs in Dennistoun whistling ‘Stardust’. Tommy Dorsey had just been belting it out on the wireless. I decided to walk along Duke Street and then up the hill to the infirmary. I was in shirtsleeves and feeling virtuous, my head as clear as the sky. Instead of the usual pain between the eyes and churning stomach – no wonder we called the beer heavy – I’d gone to the pictures with Morag Duffy, a lassie from the typing pool. Nothing serious, just a pleasant evening with a bonnie smiling girl with red curls and a cheeky swing of the hips. I’d walked Morag home, stolen a kiss or three in her tenement close and fallen into my own cold bed, alone and sober as a Salvation Army major. It did me good. I should do it more often. Except for the cold lone bed. And except for the teensiest tug of guilt, as though I was being unfaithful. Which was ridiculous given how things stood with Samantha Campbell.
I strode up the now familiar hospital steps and headed down the shining brown lino floors towards the accident ward.
As I pushed at the ward door, the Sister slid out from under her stone.
‘Mister Brodie.’
‘Good morning, Sister. A fine morning it is.’
She lifted her bosoms up and aimed them at me. ‘And who are you visiting this morning, Mister Brodie?’
She’d made it clear last week that she didn’t like her sanctified ward being cluttered up with riffraff like journalists. Unless of course they’d earned bed and nursing by dint of an injury, preferably serious. At the same time she was a staunch reader of the Gazette and as glad as the next to see the sins of her more wayward patients exposed. Salutary reminders of what happens when you fall from grace.
‘Think of me as a church visitor, Sister. Bringing solace and comfort to the sick and injured.’
She crossed her beefy arms and gave me the look that said If ever you find yourself in my clutches, laddie, I’ll give you solace all right.
‘You might see what comfort you can bring to Mr Docherty. Bed three on the left. Though whether he deserves it, I’ll leave to you to decide,’ she said meaningfully and stood aside.
Jimmie Docherty wasn’t expecting a visitor. His dented face – duelling scars from a hundred pub fights – screwed up at the sight of me sitting down on the chair by his bed. He would have pushed me away if he could. Indeed, with his heavy physique, flung me across the ward. But the job is that much harder when both arms are in stookie up to the shoulder.
‘How’s it going, Jimmie?’
His eyes scuttled around the room. ‘Aye fine. As ye can see. Who’s askin’?’
‘Brodie. From the Gazette. I’m the crime reporter.’
‘Crime? Whit’s that to dae with me?’ he growled.
I wished I had a pound of butter to see what would happen if I shoved it into his innocent big gub. It wouldn’t so much melt as steam. From the look of him, Docherty had been inside Barlinnie more times than its governor.
‘Jimmie, it’s Sunday morning. After Saturday night. The big night out for hard men in Glasgow. They get drunk, they fight, they end up here, and I come along and get some material for the first edition of the Glasgow Gazette on Monday morning.’ I took my pencil out and pointed at his plastered hands and arms. There wasn’t an inch of skin showing from fingertip to shoulder. ‘What happened?’ I held the pencil poised above a clean page in my notebook.
‘Ah’m no’ a clype!’
‘I’m not asking you to tell me who did it. I just want to know how you managed to break both arms. In several places. That takes talent. Or extreme carelessness.’
‘Ah fell.’
‘Where from? Ben Nevis?’
Jimmie stared at me for a while, his cogs grinding away. Then he embarrassed himself and me by letting his piggy eyes fill.
‘There was two of the bastards. Ah admit Ah’d had a few. Saturday night as you say. And Ah was kinda stottin’ doon the road when they jumped me. Twa big fellas. Big as me. Wan grabbed ma heid. The other tied a rope roon ma wrists, then flung the rope up ower a lamppost. They strung me up, so they did. A drunk man. That’s no fair, neither it is.’ His eyes moistened again at this failure to play by the street rules.
I pointed at the arms, queasily reluctant now to know the details.
‘So how . . .?’
‘They had a crowbar, so they did. Ah was on ma tiptoes, ma airms up in the air. And then they started bashin’ them. Great big swings. Ah tell you they made me yelp. Ah was greetin’ Ah don’t mind telling you. Ah might have had a skinfu’ but they bastards fair sobered me up. Ah could hear the bones going, so help me God.’
There was a sucking in of teeth from the beds on either side. I felt my own arms wince in sympathy. I’ve seen bad things, heard terrible tales, but rarely such cold-blooded brutality. Except in the camps, of course.
‘Good God, Jimmie! What did you do? Forget to buy your round?’
Jimmie was quiet for a bit. ‘They kept saying this is what you get.’
‘For what? Get for what?’
He spat it out. ‘They said Ah was a collector. For a shark. And that this was to stop me collecting for a while. Anybody that can dae that to somebody else . . .’ He shook his head.
‘And were they right? You’re a – were – a collector, Jimmie?’
‘The judge didnae think so.’
‘But you were accused?’
‘There was nae proof. Naebody would talk.’ Said with all the pride and arrogance of the professional muscle-man.
‘You’re a scary guy, Jimmie.’
It was hard to preen flat on your back with your arms plastered and hauled above your head but Docherty managed it fin
e. He lowered his voice.
‘Look, pal, somebody has to do it. If you get a wee borrow, you have to pay it back. That’s how it goes. But Ah’m sayin’ nothin’ else. In case it incriminalises me.’ His face set in a stubborn scowl. ‘Look, pal, dae me a favour, will ye? See that hankie on the table?’ He pointed with his head. ‘Could you see your way to . . .?’
His pinched and battered face was grubby with tears of self-pity. I picked up the hankie and dabbed at his cheeks and round his eyes. I even let him blow into it before piling it delicately back on the table. The things I do for a story.
‘Would you recognise them again?’
‘Naw. Balaclavas.’
‘Local accents?’
‘One was, but the other was a Teuchter.’
I stared at Docherty, my mouth suddenly dry in apprehension. Call me Ishmael. Surely not? I added some last notes to my pad and left him cursing his fate and the loss of honour between thugs and hoodlums.
I needed to think. I jumped on a tram outside the infirmary. We rattled and swayed down the quiet streets through the empty city centre. Everywhere was closed except the kirks and they didn’t need my sceptical presence this morning. I got off at Jamaica Bridge and turned along by the river. It was bliss to walk in the sunshine down by the Clyde. Or it should have been. The path was deserted apart from a pair of old winos taking their own Sunday communion.
I searched my flexible conscience. I wasn’t too upset at such barbaric come-uppance to a loan-shark enforcer. Docherty was the sort of guy who had no qualms about breaking someone’s kneecap for missing a single payment of a debt at a scalding interest rate. He’d not be making any collection visits any time soon. Not unless he was wheeled round in a barrow.
But it might not have been the first such incident. There had been a late special from the Daily Record on Friday night which had some of the hallmarks of the attack on Docherty. It concerned a would-be razor king trying to emulate his prewar legends by inflicting a small reign of terror in the Calton. It sound like the putative razor boss had been run over by a combine harvester, so extensive were the gashes in his own head. The story mentioned two men, in balaclavas.
I pushed the thought down but in a way it wasn’t so strange. Summary justice was well understood and expected in the West of Scotland. There was an unwritten sliding scale for criminal offences which avoided paperwork and court time and all that pre-trial nail-biting for the accused. In the case of childhood misdemeanours these plenipotentiary powers were delegated to the nearest adult – family member or total stranger. Ring the door and run was a high-risk gamble if you were the fattest and slowest in a gang. Or pinching apples. A street urchin caught with his jumper stuffed with Granny Smiths in the vicinity of the mother tree could expect a cuff on the lug, especially from the owner of said apples. The urchin in question took it as a calculated risk in his line of business and made no objection other than to run greeting to his pals who’d evaded the fell and horny hand of justice. It would certainly not have crossed his or her mind to complain to his maw or paw, knowing with absolute certainty that it would simply earn him another skelp.
Glasgow constabulary had another level of powers altogether, which varied according to the individual polis and the criminal activity. The good citizens of Glasgow, and perhaps more crucially, the less good, had to take into account a particular officer’s innate fondness for violence as well as his state of mind at the time of the encounter. Knowing for example that PC McBride had just come from another bust-up with his wife, or that the hound on which PC Fraser had wagered his pay packet had succumbed on the home stretch to the packet of Woodbine fed to it by a bribed handler, was essential to gauging the potential degree of physical assault. Villains caught in flagrante with the takings from a chip-shop raid knew that the arrest would earn them a severe truncheoning as a sort of pre-trial warm-up.
But this assault on Docherty – with a crowbar, for pity’s sake – to discourage even the intention of criminal activity; well it just wisnae fitba’.
SIX
I headed back through the deserted Sunday streets to the newspaper building. I pushed through the Gazette’s big doors and bounded up the three flights of stairs behind the splendidly tiled entrance hall. Outside the newsroom I stood for a moment to catch my breath and savour again the sweet notion that I’d at last found my place in the world. I heaved the door open and plunged into the smog, the clatter and ping of typewriters, the insistent phones and the shouted conversations. Even this half-shift was controlled bedlam, and I loved it. I’d been in the newsroom of the London Bugle a few times while I was freelancing down south after demob. But this was different. I belonged here. Not just as a full-time, salaried – though probationary – reporter, but in that ease and comfort that comes from operating in your natural habitat. Otters and brown water. Drunks and breweries.
The accent helped. The cut and thrust across the chaotic desks, the shouts and catcalls and patter, was in the tough nasalities of the West of Scotland. Entering the newsroom was like slipping into a hot bath: shocking at first but then utterly enveloping and cosy. In every sense they were speaking my language; or, to be truthful, the language of my boyhood. Though Big Eddie spoke a purple subset of it that would have brought a flush to the cheeks of a sergeant major. Not that Eddie had ever marched across a parade ground. He had enough health problems to get a regiment classed 4F. Between the fags, the booze and the stress it was a daily miracle to find him patrolling the newsroom spreading ash and anxiety in his path.
Assisting him was Sandy Logan, his whippet-thin subeditor. Seeing the pair of them together was like looking in a fairground mirror. Sandy was nearly six foot with limbs the thickness of his fearsome blue pencils. He didn’t say much. All his communicative energy poured out in a stream of corrections, admonitions and razor-sharp summations of some hack’s garbled story. Sandy’s editing eyes were all-seeing, all-knowing, pitiless. There were no split infinitives or dangling participles on Sandy’s watch.
Sandy and Eddie inhabited tiny glass-fronted offices on either side of the corridor that led into the newsroom. Scylla and Charybdis. Reporters running late with a submission or with a nagging conscience about the provenance of a story had to steer past these twin hazards. Invariably the hapless hack would fall foul of one. Often both.
This fine Sunday morning I found Eddie in his den biting his nails and hiding behind mounds of old clippings and discarded drafts. Eddie kept his office like a crime scene. Smoke rose from several smouldering fag ends in an overflowing ashtray.
The sub’s office was empty, and out in the newsroom Wullie McAllister’s desk was empty too. Either he’d already filed his copy from his morning meanderings or he was keeping it back for Monday. During the week Wullie would arrive mid morning, drink a cup or two of sugary tea and be back out the door in time for the pubs to open. Somehow – though it was still a mystery to me – a three-column article would appear in sharp prose that would hit the presses with scarcely a comma altered by Sandy. I could only aspire to such insouciance.
I scribbled out a rough draft of the story in pencil. I knew enough about Eddie’s preferences to spare my gentle readers none of the details. There was a liking for blood with the morning porridge among the fair-minded citizens of Glasgow. Reading of terrible things happening to other folk – especially bad folk – set them up for the day. It provided the juice in the conversation on the tram going to work; the spice in the gossip over the clothes line in the back close; the flavour in the first pint of heavy after work.
By midday I’d bashed out a fair copy of my article – in triplicate. I slid the top copy in through Eddie’s window and a copy for Sandy to peruse on Monday, though it should have gone out by then. Eddie was doubling up as sub-editor on Sunday. I knew my piece was well enough written, but it didn’t stop me feeling nervous. Eddie was almost as much a master of the blue pencil as Sandy, sometimes for the sake of it to show who was boss, but mostly because he’d edited more newspapers than g
ot wrapped round fish suppers on a Saturday night across Scotland. Eddie had done Sandy’s job for years before being promoted to editor.
He was at my desk almost before I got back to it. He passed me the scarred copy covered in his blue annotations and arrows. I glanced down and saw immediately how I could change it and why. Seems he loved the bit about crunching bones and wanted more. Eddie knew his audience. He leaned over and tapped the sheet.
‘No’ bad, Brodie. But no description of the nutters?’
‘Balaclavas don’t let in much daylight.’
He nodded and left me to rework it. His question had unsettled me for different reasons. I hadn’t mentioned Ishmael and his vow. There was simply no proof. Glasgow was full of Highland accents. Docherty’s beating was almost certainly the work of a rival shark. A turf battle.
By one o’clock I’d produced a draft Eddie was happy with. The pressure was off for Monday’s edition. I had the rest of the day to myself and all of Monday morning to get something fresh on the stocks. For a reporter on the incident-strewn streets of Glasgow, surely a doddle.
The Docherty article went out on Monday and I had a pat on the back from Wullie McAllister himself over a pint or three that evening. I spent Tuesday and Wednesday stalking the parched pavements looking for trouble – though my aim was to report events, not provoke.
The sight of girls in summer frocks distracted me and I found myself detouring via George Square to remind myself how easily the skin of Glasgow secretaries took on a glow. There would be a run on Calamine lotion in Boots tonight. I couldn’t get enough of the female form after years of being surrounded by shapeless males in khaki. Enforced abstinence gave every demobbed rake a licence to leer till we’d caught up on the lost time. I think the girls understood that. They might even have missed the attention.
I got back to the Gazette to cool off and eat my sandwich. But the room was like a furnace, even with all the windows open and a light breeze coming through. At least it dissipated the tobacco clouds. As I steered my way through the room I caught a hopeful look from wee Morag, the girl I’d taken out last weekend. I smiled and pressed on towards my sanctuary in the corner. I’d give her the nod later on for a drink after work.
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