Bitter Water

by Ferris, Gordon

  ‘Oh aye. Chauffeurs to who?’

  ‘Whom. They were driving Colin Maxwell and his son, Charlie.’

  ‘Sir Colin Maxwell? That’s no’ possible. A man like that involved with the Slattery scum?’ He shook his head. ‘No way. He’s a patron to this city. Charity work in the Gorbals.’

  ‘Oh, no doubt he’s an angel. But if so, he consorts with the devil.’

  ‘Wait, wait. I just don’t get it. Why would Sir Colin be involved in something like this?’

  I was thinking fast. Of our two suspects in the area – Rankin and Maxwell – only Maxwell had the vile entourage equipped to dole out death by chloroform. But if I started accusing Maxwell now, where would it get me? Where was the proof that this pillar of society would do anything, including murder, to win the huge contracts for rebuilding Glasgow? Where was the link between these poor drowned creatures and Sir Colin Maxwell? The man was in the top rank of Scottish society. Knighted for his efforts in industry. Fêted for his charitable work. Even I struggled to think of him involved in anything as shoddy. But his son, Charlie . . . now that was something, someone else. If I was any judge.

  ‘All I’m saying is that there are some links that you might want to bear in mind, Sangster.’ I counted them off on my fingers. ‘This is the second councillor who’s come to an unhappy end. Morton was the Finance Chairman. And now we’ve lost Jimmie Sheridan, chairman of Planning. Between them the councillors with key responsibility for Glasgow regeneration. Jimmie suddenly comes into the money and is seen hobnobbing with some big-name developers including Messrs Rankin and Maxwell. Now he’s lying at our feet, drowned in very suspicious circumstances. If he’s been chloroformed, then dumped in his car and pushed off the pier, we know at least a couple of lads who are handy with the technique. They work for Maxwell, senior or junior.’

  ‘And he lives just over there.’ Sam pointed across the bodies, over the loch at the low hills on the east side of the water. Sangster and Jamie Frew turned to look, and then turned back to me.

  ‘But no actual proof of anything, Brodie. Is that right?’

  ‘No proof. But you might just pay Maxwell a visit and see if Sheridan had popped in for tea and scones yesterday before taking a dip in Loch Lomond.’

  We drove home, the summer’s day darkened by the approaching storm and by what we’d seen and what we thought. Sam was silent beside me gazing out of the window. In twenty-four hours she’d run into her tormentors of the spring and found them working for an old family friend. Now we’d learned that the same pair were up to their old nasty tricks with knockout pads. But this time with deliberate, deadly effect. We’d begun the day with an encounter with the boss of the Marshals and found him a deranged preacher with vengeance in his heart. I was just surprised Sam wasn’t punching the dashboard or howling with anguish. It’s what I felt like doing.

  ‘You OK, Sam?’

  She turned her head. ‘No. But what am I supposed to do? Have a fit?’

  ‘It would be understandable.’

  ‘It wouldn’t help.’

  ‘You might feel better?’

  ‘The only thing that would make me feel better is to see Curly and Fitz standing on the gallows with ropes round their neck and me with the lever in my hand.’

  She said it with such cold certainty that I could find nothing to say for a long mile. ‘Let’s see what we can do, then. OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  When we got back to her house she disappeared to her bedroom. I was sure she had a bottle up there. But how could I stop her? How else could she handle all this? I felt useless, helpless.

  I phoned in to the Sunday news desk and briefed Wullie.

  ‘Can we mention the chloroform thing, Brodie?’

  ‘It’s not proven yet. I don’t want Jamie Frew to get into trouble. He’s a good man and I want to keep pals with him. Let’s just lead with the drowning and talk about mysterious or suspicious circumstances.’

  ‘Right. We’ll get another crack at it with the autopsy.’

  ‘One more thing, Wullie. What about Elsie? Has anyone told her? She might hate his guts but she’s still his wife. Or rather widow.’

  ‘I’ll give her a wee phone right now. It’ll help add colour.’

  ‘That wasn’t what I meant.’

  ‘I ken, I ken. See you the morn.’

  FORTY-TWO

  I woke to the sound of drumming. Rain was pounding the streets and the air was wet and cool. I listened to it in the dark for a long time. My watch said three. It felt like the end of things.

  I woke again in the dark. It was 6 a.m. I was alone. Sam hadn’t sneaked into my bed for comfort. There would be no unguarded smiles over breakfast. Hardly surprising after the weekend’s revelations that her abductors were on the loose and back at their old ways. It should have been a good reason for her seeking warmth and protection in the night. But, then, that was clearly a simple man’s view. She preferred solitude and had slid back into her carapace. Or, more prosaically, into a bottle. And I was worried sick for her. Since I’d moved back in, our drinking had moderated. A bit. Suddenly, she’d been thrown back down the greasy slope. I was a poor friend.

  I got up and washed and dressed and slipped out of the house. The faint light of dawn smeared the sky. The rain had stopped. The skies were clearing. There was still hope.

  I walked through the wet streets and down to the club, savouring the freshness. I’d been speaking to Robert Campbell the Bathsmaster and he’d agreed to let me in for a swim as early as I liked. A friend of Miss Campbell and a war hero . . .

  The water was icy. Just what I needed. I ploughed up and down until my body was tingling. By seven thirty I was strolling with damp hair and clear head towards the Gazette. It was now broad day and I was just in time to sidestep the first of the great lorries roaring out the bowels of the building with their piles of morning papers. I grabbed a free copy from the pile they leave in the entrance hall and studied the headlines above side-by-side photos of a smiling Jimmie Sheridan and the woman. No more smiles from him or her. Both looked ten years younger than the melting faces I’d seen at the pier. The article was good, simple prose, setting out the dark story and hinting at foul deeds and conspiracies without actually saying anything that could be construed as libellous. It took great skill from Wullie’s pen and Sandy’s blue pencil to tread the fine line between lurid speculation and hand-wringing tragedy. Gossip and pathos. The journalist’s nectar and ambrosia.

  I hurried past Eddie’s office but he hadn’t got in yet. Sunday evenings were tough on a family man and he liked to have breakfast with his kids on Monday mornings. I got to my desk and pulled out a sheet of paper and a pencil. I had thinking to do and needed to scribble out my thoughts. It always seemed easier to work through things if I wrote them down.

  I had a column to write about the meeting yesterday with Fergus Drummond, former military policeman and now leader of a vigilante gang being hunted by the police for a triple murder. He thought that if the Gazette printed an article that mentioned their unique and painful calling card and highlighted the fact that the dead homosexuals had lost a great deal but not their fingers, he’d be in the clear. It was almost certainly a futile throw. The Marshals had solicited naming and shaming slips and that was now seen to be their method of business. The homosexuals died with their ‘crimes’ on their tongues. Not proof of guilt, but it added more weight to that side of the scales.

  I only had Fergus Drummond’s word for his army record and what he’d done. I’d better put in some calls to my old regiment’s staff unit. See if they could corroborate his claims. They might even have a photo of the former subaltern. If so, we’d have a helluva scoop. Not just a name but ‘Face of the vigilante chief’!

  Why did that seem like a betrayal?

  I picked up today’s paper again. For the first time I took in the name of the poor dead woman: Sally Geddies. The name of an ordinary girl. The daughter of some ordinary mum and dad. A rotten ending. I hoped for her sake
that she’d been unconscious when they pushed the car into the loch. From Sheridan’s expression of horror, he’d been very much awake but unable to do anything about it.

  Wullie had also managed to get a phone call in to Elsie Sheridan. She’d been shocked rigid, I imagine, but through the prism of Wullie’s reported interview and her moderated language, it was pretty hard to interpret exactly how she’d taken it personally.

  ‘. . . I can’t imagine what he was doing up at Balloch. He loved that wee car and to think he died in it is just unbearable. He and I have had our difficulties, but he was still my husband. I will miss him.

  ‘I’m also sorry for his secretary Miss Geddies. She was so helpful to Jimmie. I can’t say any more at the moment. I’m too upset.’

  Jimmie’s secretary? Even now, if this was a true transcript, Elsie had to keep face, keep up appearances. Is that all we are, finally? The sum of our lives is other people’s perceptions of us? What would that make me? And what should I make of Fergus Drummond? The man was daft as a brush, but how would I have survived five years as a prisoner of war? How would I have coped on my return to this dreary landscape, without a job, without a roof over my head, without honour. And I suspected – for Drummond – it was the loss of honour that cut deepest. Mix in the Wee Free over-zealous interpretation of the Bible and you get a vengeful old prophet: St Fergus the Pain-giver unleashing his own apocalypse on the sinners and evil-doers of Glasgow.

  It was clear his men were intensely loyal to him. He’d ripped off his pips and slogged alongside them as a noncommissioned prisoner. No doubt it was his faith that had kept them going, had kept them alive though the soul-racking years, through the long sub-zero march fleeing the advancing Russians. Now they were following him blindly for the lack of anything better to do. Cornered rats. Ignored by the society they’d gone to war for. Jobless, homeless and unloved except by Drummond. Four Sancho Panzas on a righteous quest led by their very own Don Quixote.

  I wrote it up as a diatribe against a society that could let this happen to the men who’d suffered for their country. Then I binned it. Sandy’s blue pencil would have sliced right through it.

  I tried again with the emphasis on the revelation that the Marshals had been leaving a brutal calling card on their victims. That the Gazette had deliberately kept quiet about it to avoid encouraging copycat punishments. That in doing so, we’d now uncovered a new seam of wickedness using the Marshals’ modus operandi to deceive and mislead. The question was who, and why?

  Was it just a vendetta against homosexuals? Did it really madden someone so much that they were prepared to eradicate anyone with that tendency? From what I’d seen of human nature – if we count Nazis in that – the answer was a simple yes. There seemed to be no divergence from the true path that the self-righteous wouldn’t punish. They took it as a personal affront that someone thought or acted differently. That it undermined everything the true believer stood for. That his or her very soul was at risk if one heresy was allowed to flourish.

  Which brought me back to Drummond. He was just as bad. He was the sort they used to burn at the stake, his eyes raised to heaven and rapture on his face as the flames ate his bones.

  A martyr.

  FORTY-THREE

  It took three drafts to get the column in a fit state for publishing. Sandy kept sending it back with scrawled admonitions to ‘leave out the hearts and flowers’; ‘drop the cod philosophy’; and ‘we’re selling newspapers, not sermons’.

  I wasn’t happy with the end result, but I understood the need to appeal to our loyal readers’ preference for a good story over a lecture about morality.

  It went to press for Tuesday’s edition but was confined to the inside back page, overshadowed – in truth obliterated – by the ongoing frenzy of salacious gossip over Sheridan’s suspicious death. The other papers were in full outrage mode, trying desperately to catch up with Monday’s scoop by the Gazette. No one wanted to read that the Marshals might be innocent of murder. Readers were just as capable as the vigilantes of jumping to unfounded conclusions.

  I was pretty sure the Marshals would be on the phone to the Gazette within minutes of the first edition hitting the news stands. I told Morag and the other girls just to take a message. I couldn’t face getting my ear bent about failing to write something that fully exonerated them. Twice during the day I got signals that I was wanted on the phone. I waved back to indicate I was out.

  Wullie wandered in and out of the newsroom, managing to look quietly smug and serious at the same time. Eddie seemed to be on roller skates, darting in and out of his office every five minutes and revelling in the cacophony of phone calls. In the midst of the hubbub, Wullie stopped at my desk and quietly asked, ‘Any chance of corroborating that chloroform thing, Brodie?’

  ‘As it happens, I’m having a drink with Jamie Frew this evening.’

  We stood in the Horseshoe between two of the glass and wood swivel panels at the bar. It gave us some privacy. We covered the missing six years in the first five minutes. Jamie was planning an early retirement in a year’s time, to allow his passion for fly-fishing on the Spey to consume him. A part of me envied him that certainty, that simple goal. My father and I had stood on many a fast brown burn casting and casting. Some thought it a strange way of passing a day but we found it immensely calming. I learned patience – some, anyway – on the banks of the Afton down by Cumnock.

  We finally and reluctantly left the debate about the respective merits of dry and wet flies if a river’s in spate.

  ‘I thought this story about Sheridan was yours, Dougie?’

  ‘I’m working it with McAllister. It crosses both our patches.’

  ‘Your lady friend was gie upset when I mentioned the chloroform smell. Was it that bad for her?’

  I told him a little of it. He sucked his teeth. ‘Bastards,’ he said.

  ‘Aye, they were. So you can imagine her delight on finding that some of the old Slattery gang had found new employment but were using their old skills.’

  ‘She knows Sir Colin Maxwell?’

  ‘Old family friend. She was of an age with the son. A total tadger, she says. Likes hurting things. Dogs, horses, humans. According to Sam he doesn’t distinguish.’

  Jamie was nodding. ‘There’s a type there. Well, I can confirm that chloroform was used on both Sheridan and his woman. Enough to knock out a horse. Though it seems, from the torn nails and the bruises on his knuckles, Sheridan was awake when the car sank. Tough wee fella. He tried to get out, but with that amount of the drug inside him, and the water pressure, it would have been like fighting in quicksand.’

  ‘Can we use it?’

  ‘Aye, why no’? I’d be happy enough getting my books a year earlier. My pension’s no’ bad as it is.’

  ‘Thanks, Jamie.’ I noticed he was looking into his pint and his mouth was twisting. ‘What else?’

  ‘I’m really, really no’ supposed to say this.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘You know these poofters? The wans that were murdered at the Winter Gardens ?’

  ‘You’re not saying . . .!’

  He nodded. ‘Same thing. Blood full of chloroform. They must have caught them, dosed them – a pad soaked in the stuff probably; there’s indication of slight burning in the nostrils – then stripped them, mutilated them and left them to bleed to death. Poor wee bastards.’

  ‘The first one? Connie at the Monkey Club? Him too?’

  Frew shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t see him. There was no mention in the report. After I found the stuff in Sheridan and the other two I had a look. Nothing.’

  ‘Can you do another post-mortem?’

  ‘We’re too late. His pal picked up the body. It would be a struggle to get an exhumation, if he’s not already cremated.’

  We supped silently for a while, our imagination trying to reject the images swirling through our heads. It took a special depth of depravity to do that to another human being. But I’d seen enough ba
rbarism to know it wasn’t rare. Not nearly enough. You just don’t expect it on Glasgow Green.

  I left Jamie to it and headed back to Sam’s house, my mind swirling with the implications. I had no doubt this was the work of the Slattery boys: Curly and Fitz. But why? Just keeping their hand in with a couple of random homosexual slaughters? That didn’t make sense. But what the hell was the connection with Maxwell and Sheridan? If any? They’d made the three murders seem like the work of the Marshals, which suggested they didn’t want to be linked to them. Apart from the sex angle, there was nothing I knew of that linked the three killings . . . and that’s where I’d been going wrong.

  If someone had murdered three heterosexuals would I have stopped at that? Hardly. Perhaps the bedroom preferences of the three dead men were incidental? I hadn’t done much digging into their backgrounds. I cursed my sloppiness. Just because I was a reporter and not a policeman didn’t mean I could get away with shallow investigation. It made me wonder again about the usefulness of this new observer role I’d taken on. I determined to do some real backtracking on each of the victims first thing tomorrow. I wasn’t seeing the bigger picture, and that worried the life out of me. What would the killers do next? Who would be next?

  FORTY-FOUR

  The house was quiet when I woke at my now usual time of six. I’d not seen Sam the night before. She was still burrowed in her room. I heard her moving about, so at least she was still alive. Maybe tonight I could coax her out to the pictures.

  It was an hour before dawn but already the darkness was edging to grey. I decided to slip in a quick morning swim before Sam rose. I’d take her a cup of tea and some toast, and we’d try to work up some enthusiasm for life.

  I set off in the grey light. The skies were clear, making it chilly, but it signalled another perfect day for mid-September. A smell of proper autumn in the air but the promise of a warm day ahead. I knocked on the side door to the club and was let in by Robert. I changed and dived into the green depths, my splash echoing round the vaulted chamber of the pool.