a great favour by getting me to betray every professional confidence I had made over the last four weeks.
Afterwards, Hopkins had escorted me himself to the front door of the building where the Rover was waiting for me, and I hoped to hell it was the last I’d ever see or hear from him again. But as he shook my hand, he again alluded to future cooperation that might benefit me and promised he would be in touch. I had smiled and said ‘sure’ and tried to resist the temptation to run for my life.
After my encounter with the forces of official darkness, I made a real effort not to dwell on everything that had happened. I wanted to put it all behind me; far behind me. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t even tell Archie about my encounter with Hopkins. As it turned out, that was a mistake. A big one.
In the meantime, thinking back to the way Andrew Ellis had been so careful to make sure he wasn’t followed, I started taking elaborate routes from A to B that took in the rest of the alphabet on the way. And did a lot of looking over my shoulder. Whatever Ellis, the girl, Matyas or Ferenc Lang were involved in, it was big and, despite my best efforts, I found myself puzzling over what it could be. But every time it came to mind, I made a huge effort to shut it out. I had enough on my plate as it was.
We got another store-pilfering job in and I put Archie onto that, leaving me free to do the rounds again of all the contacts I had for the Frank Lang I’d been hired to find at the start of it all. This time round was proving no better than the first, and I could see that I was heading into another dead end.
In between my enquiries, I made more rounds of dismal boarding-houses, bed-sitting rooms and tenement flats. I even circled an ad for a barge for rent down near Renfrew Ferry.
Of course, there was the other ad I had circled. But that would be a big step to take, and I left it for the moment.
In the meantime, I looked at the barge.
It surprised me. After tenement flats where the running water had been mostly on the walls, I had fully expected the barge for rent to be a rotting, stinking hulk — boyish optimism was a weakness from which I didn’t suffer. The bargee himself showed me around. He was a wiry, youthful man of sixty in a city where sixty was old and usually decrepit. He explained that he had worked the Forth-Clyde canal for more than forty years but had recently injured his back badly and, although he was largely recovered and short of retirement age, he wasn’t fit to operate the barge. He now helped out on his son’s, he told me. It was clear that the old bargee took enormous pride in his boat, and he explained that he was looking to rent it out to anyone who would look after it, whether they worked it or kept it moored.
‘There’s no’ as many contracts as there used to be,’ he confided. ‘’Specially for my kind o’ barge. No coal, you see. I would’nae ever take coal, which is what most o’ the barges take, you see.’ He leaned in conspiratorially. ‘Coal’s a bastard. That coal dust gets everywhere when you’re loadin’ it. You end up caked in the bastard. You and your boat. So I only ever took clean cargo.’
I nodded. The old bargee clearly loved this inanimate lump of floating wood and steel. Everyone had to have their focus, I thought, something in which they could invest pride. As I surveyed the boat, I could understand the bargee’s passion: it was a real piece of craftsmanship and smelled of polished wood and burnished brass, with paintwork that looked like it had been done that morning.
Somewhere along the line I had gotten the idea that I would be turning up to see a narrowboat. The fact was that there was no spidering network of canals in Scotland: barges operated mainly on the Forth-Clyde canal that guillotined Scotland at the neck and connected its two major cities, Glasgow and Edinburgh, or the Monklands Canal, which brought cargo from the coal mines in Lanarkshire to feed the ever-hungry industry of Glasgow. These were wider waterways than many of the canals south of the border and the craft were, correspondingly, broader.
‘She’s a widebeam,’ the bargee informed me with pride. ‘Fifty-two foot long and fourteen foot beam. Three foot six draught.’
I nodded sagely, as if any of it meant something to me.
At the back of the boat there was a balustrade-ringed deck where the helm was located: a varnished wooden wheel exposed to the elements but which allowed the bargee the clearest view in every direction. A short staircase led down from the deck to the sliding door that offered access to the living quarters, basically the back third of the boat.
It was the living quarters that surprised me the most. Obviously, it was cramped, but there was an amazing economy in the use of space. I found myself surrounded by burnished, gleaming wood.
There were a lot of things I could be accused of. Being a cynical bastard was one of them. I had sneered and laughed at the deprivations in Glasgow; at the low expectations and short stature, at the limited imagination and even more limited ambition of the city’s people. But there was one thing I had seen and seen often: what Connelly and his kind would brand as the ‘nobility of the working man’.
Sure, there were lazy bastards about, and a lot of larcenous Govan shipyard workers’ tenements that looked like they had been fitted out by the designers of the Titanic’s first class lounge, but standing in the living quarters of that barge, I saw the Scottish work ethic at its purest. Everything gleamed. Everything was in its place. Everything spoke of a man who had focused those limited ambitions and aspirations into a single, solid form.
I was tempted by the idea of renting the barge, at least for a little while, but I told the old guy that I’d other places to see and I’d get back to him about it.
The truth was that, while the barge itself had held some kind of gypsy-caravan appeal for me, its mooring had been less than romantic. It was tethered to a quay under a canopy of cranes and sat in water as black as liquid obsidian, the oil-sleeked surface shimmering with dark rainbows. The stone quay, the cranes, the water, all were black against the slate winter sky and standing there I felt sketched in charcoal.
I got the Renfrew Ferry back across the Clyde, again checking out my fellow passengers for types foreign or secretive. Driving back into town through Clydebank did little to lift my mood. The traffic, such as it was, came to a halt before I reached the city centre. A delivery cart had shed part of its load through a loose tailgate and the coal- dustingrained driver was piling sacks of coal back onto the cart between bad-temperedly directing cars past him, all the time being watched uninterestedly over its shoulder by the carthorse: a Clydesdale who looked of a vintage to have pulled cannon at Waterloo.
I wasn’t delayed for long, but just long enough to take in my surroundings. A wall of grey-black tenements flanked the roadway, tight against it and separated by the narrow ribbon of pavement. To my right was a gap: a bomb-site breach in the wall of tenement buildings, no more than a square of rough ground, which, like the tenements, was soot-dark and broken by piles of bricks, other debris, and the occasional pool of greasy rainwater.
There was a child playing on the site, a boy of no more than eight or nine who should have been at school. He wore rubber boots and a black coat that looked too thin to protect him from the damp Glasgow winter and his head was bare, a shock of ruffled red-blond the only colour in the monochrome. He was oblivious to what was going on in the street and poked at a smear of oily water with a stick, completely lost in a world of his own imagining.
I had seen so many things, so many sad or bleak or terrible things, while I’d been in Glasgow, but for some reason the sight of that small boy depressed me more than anything else. I wondered, as I watched him lost in play, if he was contemplating his future — because I sure was. And it wasn’t good. For an instant, I understood why there were so many people like Connelly and Lynch in Glasgow. Why there were so many chips on so many shoulders and why so many wanted to turn the system on its head.
The car behind sounded its horn and I looked ahead to see the toothless mouth of the carter shape something obscene as he furiously waved his arm about to indicate I could pass his cart. I drove on, but something sat heavy in my chest whenever I thought about that small boy and his lack of future.
It was then that I made a decision about my own future. A long overdue one.
CHAPTER TWENTY
As if to reinforce my decision, I drove past my digs and, sure enough, the Jowett Javelin was parked outside. White’s visits were obviously becoming more frequent and less discreet. I drove on. Decision made and confirmed.
