I thought the old man stirred, but then he started to slip slowly, oh so slowly sideways.
I reached out to steady him, felt a wetness soaking the rough weave of his blanket, felt him slump against me in a sickening softening lurch.
I said, 'Are you OK?'
Then the torches caught him in the centre of their beams, and I saw the face that rested on my shoulder, a John the Baptist head, bearded and bloody, mouth lolling open, sweet sticky redness glazing his frozen face. The whole petrified tableau framed in the white light.
I scrambled to my feet and felt a hard grip on my arm, helping me rise out of the filth.
The policeman wasn’t acting anymore. His words were caught in a sigh that was pure anger.
'Jesus fuck! What in Christ’s name have you done?'
The police doctor who examined me was quick and businesslike. He prescribed a hot drink and pronounced me fit for interview. My clothes were put into plastic bags and I was issued with a white jumpsuit. I knew enough from the movies to ask for a solicitor and no one tried to talk me out of it. The cell was cold. I took the blanket off the bunk and draped it over my shoulders, then a wave of nausea hit me and I bent over the toilet. The orange police tea came up in a quick warm flush of liquid, followed by a painful gagging that only managed to cough up a thin streak of yellow bile. I’d corrupted the crime scene with the rest of my stomach contents when I realised what I’d been sleeping next to.
I rolled back onto the bed clutching the jaggy brown blanket around me, not caring who else might have sweated into its coarse weave. I was shivering now. I pulled my knees up to my chest; the damp of the river still seemed to cling to me. I rubbed the blanket between my fingers. It had an animal smell, the odour of all the men who had been shut in here. I tried not to think about the noise the door had made as it closed, the turn of the key in the lock. Would it square accounts to do penance for a crime I hadn’t committed in lieu of one that I had? I could feel sleep coming to claim me. How could I doze while I was at the centre of a murder? It was my last coherent thought before darkness claimed me. But then, the same thought had been in my head every night all of these long months.
I woke to the sound of the key turning the tumblers in the lock. Someone had set up a workshop in my head, but beneath the hammering in my skull and the filth of my own body I felt sharper than I had all night. I wondered what time it was. I’d handed in my watch at the front desk and the neon-lit cell gave no hint of how long had passed. The door opened and a concrete-faced policeman half-entered the room. 'Here’s your solicitor, Wilson. Are you going to behave for her?' I swung myself upright on the bunk and nodded my head. 'See that you do.'
He turned and said something to the person standing behind him, then withdrew still holding the door open.
A slim dark-haired figure walked into the room and I said, 'Ulla?' Feeling all the sharpness go out of me. And then I saw that she wasn’t Ulla. I sought for where we had met.
Desperation plucked the images from my brain. The ersatz theme bar that had been trendier than I’d realised. My old university buddy. A pair of violet eyes, and her name came to me. 'Eilidh.' The woman gave me a blank look. 'I’m a friend of Johnny’s.'
Recognition clouded her face.
'Yes,' she said. 'William.'
The policeman stuck his head back round the door.
'Everything OK?'
Eilidh gave him a professional smile.
'It’s fine.'
The door closed behind her. I’d thought I was immune to embarrassment but Eilidh’s presence made me want to pull the manky prison blanket over my head and hide until she’d gone. I attempted a smile.
'I seem to have got myself into a bit of a scrape.'
Eilidh’s mouth twitched in a quick spasm.
'You’re looking at a murder charge. What we need to establish is how are you going to plead? Guilty or not guilty?'
'I didn’t do it.'
'OK.' Her voice was coolly neutral. I imagined she’d been brought up on tales of wrongful convictions, the Guildford four, Birmingham six, Maguire seven. Perhaps these injustices had even been what had turned her towards law, the chance to save innocent people from becoming victims of the judicial system. But then none of these people had been accused of beating an old defenceless man until his head resembled a rotten strawberry.
'No,' I made my voice firm, 'I really didn’t do it.'
'OK.' The cool neutrality remained. She’d be one of the first to be dismissed from the hypnotist’s audience. 'Take me quickly through what happened.'
I started with the walk along the Clydeside, giving the old man a can, my drinking session on the bench, and finally my urge to share my last drink with the old tramp.
'You don’t believe me do you?'
Eilidh glanced up from the jotter she’d been scribbling notes into.
'It’s not me you have to convince.'
The interview room was painted a pale shade of blue I supposed was designed to keep people calm. It seemed to work. There was a dead feeling in my chest where there should have been panic. Two plainclothes men were waiting on us, a red-haired, red-faced invitation to a heart attack and a large sandy-haired man with a broken nose and ginger moustache that would have looked good on a seventies’ footballer. The sandy-haired man introduced
