Bitter Water

by Ferris, Gordon

  I hung my sweat-damp jacket on my chair and slid in behind the desk. It was Spartan enough: front and centre an old Imperial with sticking keys; on the right a wooden tray with some draft articles and my early and as yet illegible efforts at shorthand. On the left sat an ashtray and a wood block with a spike skewering a small pile of letters. Underneath the desk was a single drawer with a few sheets of fresh foolscap, carbons, typewriter ribbons and a couple of chewed pencils left behind by a guy who never came back from the front. I hadn’t the heart to throw them out.

  A white envelope perched on the typewriter. It was stamped locally and addressed succinctly to ‘Mr Brodie, Crime Column, The Glasgow Gazette’. Fan mail or barbs? I’d hardly been with the paper five minutes before the excitable readers of the back pages – the voices of the people, by the people – were unloading their views in a steady stream. Usually they were sounding off about the rise in violence and the fall in standards of civility. We were all away to hell in a hand basket and they needed to let me know they had no intention of going off gentle into that good night. There was even a sense that I was somehow to blame for delivering the message. Doubtless this envelope contained more such advice, but I was new and still keen, so I grabbed it, slid my knife under the join and sliced it open.

  The message was in black ink in a fine sloping hand on lined paper. Here and there words were underlined or set in capitals. Sometimes both. Exclamation marks spluttered angrily across the page:

  Dear Brodie,

  Your story about Docherty was wrong. It wasn’t random. He was chosen. Like the Calton razor king. Can’t you see what’s going on around you?

  We are tired of ordinary folk being robbed and raped with impunity. We are sick of the rich getting away with murder. The POLICE are feckless and corrupt. Look at the ones you put on trial! The LAW protects the rich and hammers the poor!

  We have had enough!!! This is a declaration to the people of Glasgow.

  IT STOPS NOW!!!

  We are taking it into our own hands. Docherty wasn’t the first. He won’t be the last!!

  ‘. . . and they were judged every man according to their works.’

  The Glasgow Marshals

  The Glasgow Marshals? Someone had been reading too much Zane Gray. And the clinching sign of an over-excited brain: a quote, presumably from the Bible. It certainly fitted with Docherty’s account of a punishment beating, and its thrust was consistent with Ishmael’s vow about dispensing justice. But I told myself I was adding one and one and making three. I slid the letter and envelope into my desk drawer and headed for the door. I still needed something for next day’s edition and a letter from a bampot wasn’t yet a story, as Big Eddie would have delighted in pointing out.

  On Thursday we slid into August and I wondered where the year was going and whether it would continue to be punctuated by hangovers. Throughout the week, I kept my eye on the rival papers. The mentions were building up. More injuries to bad people. Balaclavas seemed all the rage. They were edging out the Morton story in the absence of any new facts or leads about the brutal murder. But no one seemed to be making the link. Maybe there was none?

  Friday morning found me gingerly picking my way over cobbles round the Gallowgate. The steaming piles of horse dung seemed as threatening as any minefield outside El Alamein. I was chasing a story about off-licence overpricing and the ensuing citizens’ revolt. It was a patchy story, sparse on evidence but heavy on emotion. People take the price of drink seriously in that neck of the woods, especially on hot summer days. Some of the work-shy fancied a day out fishing in the Kelvin and had their minds set on chilling a couple of bottles of stout in the river, but the landlord’s price hike had spoiled their wee picnic. A punch-up ensued. Windows got smashed. Heads got broken.

  I thought I could squeeze a column out of it for the Monday edition to save coming in on Sunday. In the absence of anything more thrilling before the closing bell I headed back to the news desk to type it up.

  This time Morag brought the envelope to my desk. She looked so big-eyed and smiling that it would have been churlish of me not to invite her to the dancing on Saturday. Our drink and cuddles on Wednesday had gone well. Maybe she was the one to fill those lonely nights? I hoped I could remember how to Lindy Hop – if that’s what they were still doing at the Locarno.

  I turned over the missive. I felt a chill run through me. This was no billet doux. Same envelope, same handwriting as the first one about Docherty. I opened it and read:

  Dear Brodie,

  I hope you’re keeping count. Some have been found wanting and paid the penalty. Tell the others what to expect. Now you see how we deliver justice. No escape for the evil-doers!!! No legal tricks!!!

  We bring justice by the people to the people who deserve it. Not like Johnson. You claim to be the voice of the people. Warn them that ‘I . . . have the keys of hell and of death.’ !!!

  Tell them what you see on Sunday. Same time. Same place. Same vermin!!!

  ‘. . . they also have erred through wine, and through strong drink are out of the way.’

  The Glasgow Marshals.

  Not like Johnson. The phrase reverberated across the page. Same foaming rage as the first letter and with a clear warning of impending violence of a tougher, scarier order altogether. They already had someone lined up for a pasting. It confirmed we had some evangelists on the loose with inflated ideas of their own rectitude and a taste for Old Testament justice. The sort of thing you’d expect from a son of Abraham.

  SEVEN

  I had the letter inside my jacket pocket on Sunday morning. Unlike a week ago, I was less jaunty climbing the hill to the infirmary. Morag and I had jived until my shirt was soaked and the very walls of the Locarno were running with the condensed breath of a thousand manic dancers. I’d known cooler nights in North Africa. She seemed to have inexhaustible energy: the transient gift of the young. The converse also being true: this morning my legs were feeling every one of their thirty-four years. I’d revived enough to see her home and participate in some sweaty entanglements in her close. But as well as finding myself too old for the jigging, it dawned on me that I was too old for close-quarter combat in a squalid entry. Next time I might just stick to the flicks. Hollywood has a job keeping up with demand in Glasgow. Or maybe take her to one of the comedy shows. I’d heard Alec Finlay was good.

  Sitting in my vest and pants at three in the morning, that cut-your-wrists time after jolting awake from troubled sleep, I had come to the melancholy realisation that I was getting past it. I needed a wife. Someone to come home to and listen to my rants about my working day. To share a laugh with, listening to Tommy Handley and his ITMA pals on the wireless. Someone I could hand my wage-packet to and get pocket money for a pint and fags in return. To calm me in the night with soothing hands when the mortar shells came crashing through my dreams. I don’t know what depressed me more: realising I’d reached the pipe-and-slippers stage, or wanting it.

  I limped along the dark brown corridors and pushed into the ward. The Sister just nodded. She looked weary too, sagging. Only her starched cap was stiff.

  ‘Bed seven on the right. Gibson. The polis have already been,’ she said and stood aside.

  Her mood chilled me. How bad could this be? I walked on and into the ward. There were eight beds either side. All filled. A busy night in the emergency room. But what was special about bed seven? Then I saw him. He could have been stolen from the Egyptian collection at the Kelvingrove Museum. Only a strip over his eyes and mouth was uncovered. His shoulders and arms were swathed in bandages. I felt the gaze of the rest of the patients follow me as if they knew what the attraction was and were curious to see how I’d react. I got to his bedside. His eyes were closed.

  ‘Hello? Mr Gibson?’ I tried. ‘Anybody in there?’

  At first nothing, then his eyelids flickered and snapped open. He looked terrified. As much as you could judge from just two brown pools.

  ‘Hello, Mr Gibson,’ again. ‘I’m from t
he Gazette. The name’s Brodie. Can you talk? Can you tell me what happened?’

  The man in the bandages turned his head away and then pulled back. I saw his eyes squint in pain. He flexed his lips and licked them.

  ‘Fuck. Off.’

  Which in the circumstances seemed fair comment.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry, pal. I can see you’re in a lot of pain. All I want is a couple of words about what happened last night. Did someone do this to you?’

  His eyes glared at me. His lips curled. He cleared his throat. ‘You might say that. You might well say that. Cunts!’

  I took out my pad and pencil. Folk always felt obliged to help me fill the blank page. ‘What did these – folk – do to you? Beat you up? You were on your way home after shutting time, I expect . . .’

  He was quiet for a bit, but then I could see him resolve something in his swaddled head.

  ‘Aye. Doon by the Saltmarket. They were waiting for me. On a bomb site. They had a fire going. An auld oil drum. They asked me if I wanted a warm. I should have said no. I mean it was a hot night. But we a’ like a fire. Like fucking moths. As it turns oot.’

  ‘What happened?’

  He paused. ‘I thought they were wearing caps. But as I got close they pulled them doon. Balaclavas. They grabbed me. Christ, they were strong buggers! They didnae look it, but airms like pythons.’

  ‘Then what?’ In truth I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear this.

  ‘They roped me like a fuckin’ steer. Like wan o’ they cowboy pictures. I couldnae get up. One of them stuck a dirty rag in my mouth to shut me up. The other went across to the fire.’

  I steeled myself and became aware that the ward was silent. The other fifteen beds were locked into this story.

  ‘They had a tin on the fire. The wan that lifted it had to use a bit o’ sacking. It was fu’ and steaming.’

  He was no longer looking at me. He was looking into the flames as someone brought a can of boiling . . .

  I swallowed. ‘What was in it? In the can?’

  ‘Tar. Boiling fucking tar. He timmed it ower ma heid and all ower ma face and shoulders and airms and hands. I couldnae shout or greet or anything. Just rolled around while it burned ma skin off.’

  The ward was squeezed dry with tension. He spoke again, quieter this time. ‘They had a poke. A broon paper poke. He opened the top and timmed it ower me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Feathers. They turned me ower and ower to make sure I was covered. Then they took the rope off and left me.’

  I felt the ward breathe out. A voice said, ‘Jesus Christ.’ There was a murmur of supporting oaths.

  ‘Are you saying they tarred and feathered you?’

  ‘Aye.’

  A voice cut in from across the ward. ‘Like the fucking Wild West!’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Did they say why?’

  Gibson was quiet for a while.

  ‘It’s a’ lies, so it is. Naw. I’m no’ saying.’

  He clammed up. I got up to go.

  ‘Hie, pal. There’s wan other thing.’

  ‘What’s that, Mr Gibson?’

  He looked down the bedclothes. He moved his right hand. The bandages went all the way down and swathed his hands.

  ‘They cut ma wee finger.’ He said it with incredulity.

  ‘Cut it?’

  ‘Cut it aff. They cut aff ma pinkie wi’ a cigar cutter. A momento they said.’

  ‘Memento.’

  ‘I just said that.’

  On my way out of the ward I stopped at the Sister’s desk.

  ‘He wouldn’t say why they attacked him. Did he tell you?’

  She looked at me, then looked round her, checking no one was in earshot. ‘He wouldnae say. But I heard one of the polis talking.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They’d got him for rape a couple of weeks back. In drink, as usual.’

  ‘He got off?’

  ‘Aye. The lassie wouldnae talk. She was in the women’s ward just the other side. In a terrible state.’

  ‘Do you know why she didn’t press charges? Was she scared?’

  The Sister’s face screwed up and I thought she was going to cry. ‘It was his dochter.’

  Sweet Jesus, where were you? You might be watching out for sparrows, but what about wee girls? I shook my head and walked away. Then I remembered something else.

  ‘Gibson said they cut off his finger, his pinkie. With a cigar cutter?’

  ‘Aye. The same as yon bruiser, last week.’

  ‘Docherty! The one who got his arms broken? He never said.’

  ‘He didnae know at first. What with all the pain and the stookie down to his fingers.’

  ‘God almighty!’

  ‘The good Lord had nothing to do with it, I hope, Mr Brodie.’

  EIGHT

  I’d already filed a piece on the great off-licence siege for the Monday edition. Tuesday too was covered; in the absence of any new leads on Alec Morton, Wullie had bashed out an article on the resurgence of the drug problem. It doesn’t take long for organised crime to spot a gap and fill it. A new supply route had been set up, or the old one reopened under new management. It meant I could sit on the two letters and the Gibson piece until I’d done more research. Not to mention talking things over with Wullie on Monday night.

  First, I put Elspeth Macpherson on the scent. Elspeth was the Gazette’s literary critic and by default the resident researcher and all-round fount of wisdom. Elspeth hid her first-class honours in Classics from Edinburgh behind a curtain of frizzy blonde hair, glasses and an aura of aloofness. Even Big Eddie was wary enough of her to avoid swearing in her presence. Mostly. Elspeth saw me as a kindred spirit. Though my own degree was a mere 2.1 in Modern Languages, it put us in a different educational league from just about everyone else on the Gazette. Reporters and editors came up the hard way from tea-making to typesetting. Sandy Logan was a self-taught master sub-editor. The basics of grammar had been hammered into him at primary school in Govan, but the rest came from thirty years of understudying his predecessor, and having for his pillow Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage.

  It had been a long while since I’d been able to discuss Camus or Kafka with anyone else without sounding like a pretentious swot. But at the same time I knew Elspeth had the edge on me with her well-hidden photographic memory. A rare bird was our Elspeth.

  It took her five minutes.

  ‘The first is easy: “and they were judged every man according to their works.” It’s from Revelations 20, verse 13. The second: “they also have erred through wine, and through strong drink are out of the way”, took a bit longer. It’s from Isaiah 28 verse 7.’

  ‘How did you find it, Elspeth? A concordance?’ I asked looking for the reference book.

  She swung her hair behind her neck. ‘Strong’s? He’s good, but I prefer my own research and cross-references. Besides, I knew straight away it was either in Leviticus or Isaiah. It has their style.’

  ‘Style?’

  ‘The original Greek. As different as Graham Greene and John Buchan. The English translations in the St James are good but they lose some of the tone.’

  ‘Right. Thanks.’ I backed away, feeling I’d just been with the Oracle of Delphi.

  I scribbled some notes for the Gibson attack, referring to the two letters and linking it with last week’s piece on Docherty. But I didn’t run it past Eddie, not till I’d seen McAllister. I finally left the office an hour after the pubs were open. I found oor Wullie in his usual place in the high-backed corner seat of Ross’s. He’d never formally annexed it with a personalised brass plaque, but he was as firmly in possession of it as any habitué of a kirk pew. It was in the order of things. Similarly, it was apparently my round. Cup-bearer indeed.

  I was standing at the bar waiting for the barrel to be changed. Two old boozers were clinging to the brass rail next to me, ruminating.

  ‘If the polis cannae catch them, then Ah don’t care wha gi’es them
a skelp.’

  ‘But you cannae have folk taking the law into their ain hands. Where will it a’ end?’

  ‘Why no’? It’s what Sillitoe’s Cossacks did afore the war. That sorted oot the Billy Boys. But things have slipped back. Ah don’t care wha does it, or how, if it gets thae scum aff the street . . .’

  It was as if they were heralds for the letter-writer, the self-styled Marshals. Things were moving fast. The old boys rabbited on in this vein for a while, intimating that there was a new sheriff in town, a hard man, a crazy man, a potential folk hero of our times. Somewhere between Rob Roy McGregor and a Texas Ranger. I almost leaned over and said I might have met the man in question, and he was not the full shilling. Finally their conversation returned to the well-worn speculation that Celtic’s new goalie was a Protestant plant.

  I looked across the fug-filled room to the table where my drinking pal was waiting, still thirsty after three pints of heavy and chasers. The belching roll-up jammed in the corner of his mouth scored a yellow streak in his grey moustache. McAllister was checking the racing pages of a rival, more sports-inclined rag. This was my king-maker, the man who was handing over his life’s work to me. As he kept telling me . . .

  ‘You’ve earned it, Brodie. I was gonna insist on them making a funeral pyre of my desk with a copy of every edition I featured in. Me laid out on top with a pint in one hand and a copy of the Gazette in the other as the flames licked my arse. But, what the hell. The show goes on. We are the voice of the people, the scourge of the villains. My work must continue.’

  He’d finish his rhetoric with the passing of an imaginary torch to me and a far-off look in his smoke-red eyes. This self-promoting funeral oratory happened when he was in his cups and feeling the weight of ages pressing on his furrowed forehead. In other words, most nights. The more he lauded me, the more I felt like handing back the torch and accompanying laurel leaf and catching the first train back to the anonymity of London. Did I want to end up like him? On the other hand there were enough attractions. The job itself. Being with my ‘ain folk’. Being able to keep an eye on my mother. The West of Scotland weather? Hardly; this spell was a freak. Or just Samantha Campbell. Sam . . .