He might be able to point you at other people who knew Hugh. Including the pusher. I’ll give you his address.’
She scribbled his name and address on a sheet of paper, tore it off and handed it to me. I looked at it. She was staring at me.
‘What?’
‘My turn. From what you’ve just read, what’s your verdict?’
‘If I was on the jury? And only using the evidence? Guilty.’
‘But?’
‘As an ex copper with a suspicious mind, it’s a little too watertight. I’ve never seen such an open and shut case.’
‘Can you suspend judgement?’
‘I’m not sure why.’
‘Will you at least stay and help?’
I thought I’d hardened myself to pleading eyes. But reading the trial papers had set up an itch I needed to scratch.
‘I suppose it does. For a few days anyway. I’ll need to get the rest of this week off from my boss at the London Bugle.’ I was pretty sure I could make up the time by working late or weekends, as long as I could knock up five hundred words of fearless crime reporting to keep my editor interested. I had a couple of half worked out ideas that didn’t require more research. I could write about Hugh’s predicament but it would have little interest for London readers. Besides, I’d just tie myself in knots wondering whose side I was on. Little chance of journalistic objectivity. And it would feel like I was using him.
‘Just use the phone here.’
‘I’m also going to need digs for a few nights. Any suggestions?’
She looked at me coolly for a long few seconds.
‘Do you snore? Get drunk and fall down stairs? Leave clothes on the floor? Leave toilet seats up?’
‘I can’t swear to the loo seat, but no to the rest. Though I’m not teetotal. Is this a temperance hotel you’re suggesting?’
‘I couldn’t make that claim. My folks left me their house. It’s fairly big. There’s a spare room and bathroom. In truth, there’s a choice.’
Was she just trying to make up for the initial brusqueness? I doubted it was animal passion. No need to lock my door at night. She didn’t look much like a man-eater. I hesitated. I didn’t want to be under constant inspection by this tough spinster who looked as if she had a preference for cold baths and hard beds. Cold beds, certainly.
‘Neighbours?’
She stood up, rifled through her bag and placed a key on the table. ‘It won’t be the first time I’ve scandalised them. If your reputation can stand it, so can mine.’
Scandalised the West End? Not washing her milk bottles would be enough. ‘What do you charge?’
‘Hand over your ration book and one pound ten for a week’s grub. Nothing fancy. The bed’s free, if – and only if – you come up with something new for the appeal. Deal?’
‘Miss Campbell, it’s a deal. Thank you.’
‘Call me Sam. Everyone else does. Do you prefer Doug or Douglas?
I shrugged. ‘Most just call me Brodie.’ Only my mother used my first name. And Hugh of course. I wasn’t about to get intimate with Samantha – call me Sam – Campbell.
‘Brodie it is. Are you going to try to see Father Cassidy now? Leave your case and I’ll take it back with me.’
‘Sure?’
She pointed at the corner. She scribbled her own address on a sheet of paper, together with the numbers of the trams that ran by. It was further into the city and up on the smart hillside of Kelvingrove Park. Very nice. I left her gazing at her piles of paper as though by sheer force of will they would file themselves.
ELEVEN
The Gorbals were legendary. In Kilmarnock, among the private pink and red sandstone houses that laced the better streets, the very word was synonymous with dirt and degradation. Even the working class of Kilmarnock, my class, in our roughcast council estates, gazed down with shaking head on their brethren just up the Glasgow road. The worst waster in the most run-down part of Kilmarnock clung to his illusion of being a rung above his counterpart south of the Clyde – a speculative ranking based on the size and numbers of rats patrolling the outside toilets.
For really it was only a question of scale. You’d find TB, rickets, polio and malnutrition in any sizeable Scottish town. It was just that those Glasgow wastelands stretched over a quarter of central Glasgow and were as densely packed and aromatic as a giant box of herring. And whereas Kilmarnock had its fair share of louts ready for a rammy on a Friday night, the Gorbals were infested with razor-wielding gangs like the Beehive Boys. If disease didn’t get you, a knife would. In the Kilmarnock Standard we’d read of bottle fights at the Glasgow dance halls and knew that there would be Gorbals’ thugs behind it; yet taking a tram ride through the area with your eyes part closed would have left the impression of wide streets and fine Victorian sandstone buildings, a township that should have turned out model citizens.
A closer look uncovered the deep problems: cobbled streets full of patched holes and covered in filth because the Corporation dustmen couldn’t be persuaded to visit without an armed escort; families living ten to a room; sewage systems literally bursting at the seams; and mass unemployment and illiteracy. For the last hundred years the Gorbals had been a magnet for the dispossessed. Jews fleeing Russian pogroms, Highland clearances, Irish tattie famines, and lately, Nazi persecution.
I saw the bad side first hand in the thirties when I was drafted in to help a team of detectives from Southern Division in Craigie Street track down a gang of rapists terrorising the streets. They’d wait for a gaggle of lassies to come home from the dance halls – the jigging – and pick off one of them as she entered the dark close of her tenement. There was enough amorous activity going on in every entry across the Gorbals on a Thursday night (winching night) for muffled shouts and evil grappling to go unnoticed – until the morning and the girl was found battered, weeping and bloody in the stairwell.
But my abiding memory was the stench in the worst of the closes. The smell of urine and rubbish. The hot, steamy reek of humanity piled on top of each other in the houses themselves. Cooking, defecating, procreating, fighting: like a troop of Neanderthals.
And yet, and yet…
If you looked past the gang warfare, the drunks and the no-users there was a pride and a dignity about so many of the people, especially the women, the mothers. Aged thirty and looking sixty after rearing eight weans, she should have given up long ago. Instead she’d drag her kids to the kirk, steal a shilling from her man’s drinking money for a few ribbons for her daughter’s sixteenth birthday, stitch and mend clothes till there were more mends than original. And stand with blackened eye and bruised mouth, refusing to bring charges against her drunken husband; instead helping him home from the nick to start the cycle all over again.
And they’d dream, these stubborn women, they’d dream of one day walking out of the Gorbals. A wee place of their own, maybe down by the coast, at Irvine, or Saltcoats. Or if they couldn’t make it themselves, then maybe one of the kids would get a trade, break free, allow them to visit them in their wee hoose. That would be grand. I wondered how Fiona had got used to it. Would she stick around now?
We Protestants attended the kirk. The Catholics went to the chapel. This Gorbals chapel had been built of the same red sandstone as every other building in the area. Like them it had acquired a black sheen of soot and grime blowing in from the chimneys and the shipyards and the factories around the city. The blast furnaces of the Dixon’s Blazes just a mile away belted out enough fire and brimstone, night and day, to have smeared an inch coating over the entire Hutchesontown division every week. Even cleaned up, this chapel was no cathedral, just a simple pile of stones with a cross atop its peaked roof and some undistinguished stained-glass windows on its facade.
Inside was different. It was always a shock for a wee boy who’d grown up in the austerity of the bare wood and plaster of a Presbyterian church to be confronted with bloody icons and shimmering light from mass candles.
