Authors: Frederic Lindsay
Brond
Brond
BROND
Frederic Lindsay is one of Scotland's most prolific and respected crime writers. He was born and brought up in Glasgow, and now lives near Edinburgh. After graduating with
first-class honours in English Literature and Language he worked as a library assistant, a teacher and a lecturer before becoming a full-time writer. He has written for the theatre, radio,
television and film, and is the author of over ten highly acclaimed novels, including
Jill Rips, A Charm. Against Drowning, Kissing Judas, Death Knock, The Endings Man, My Life as a Man and Tremor
of Demons.
First published in 1984 by Macdonald Publishers Ltd
This edition published in
Great Britain in 2007 by
Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd
This ebook edition published in 2012 by
Birlinn Limited
West Newington House
Newington Road
Edinburgh
EH9 1QS
www.birlinn.co.uk
Copyright © Frederic Lindsay, 1981
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.
eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-200-9
Print ISBN: 978-1-84697-032-0
Version 1.0
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication
Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
For Shirley
Contents
ONE
S
omething was wrong with the light. I could not get him into focus as he stood above me on the steps of the Union. The white shapeless flesh of his
face stretched in the strange brightness, not a sharply turned corner from chins to hairline, and cool also and unsweated despite the fact he will be wearing, hidden under the denim suit, a set of
woollen underwear down to his ankles. Hidden not secret – he wears them all the time; and asks strangers, as an introduction, if they do as well, plucking sometimes slyly at a loose fold of
trouser. It is one of his obsessions.
The Union, the University straggling schizophrenic over the hill in Gothic stone and peeling concrete, the blackened church opposite, all of it was one dimension short: a film set discarded by
the profit makers. Hard clear sunlight flooded down, pinning everything by a corner of solid shadow.
‘I am moving to the climax of a story.’ The high withdrawn voice has the Highland trick of lengthening some words into a plaintive tune.
‘The teuchter Tolstoy,’ I said.
The adjective coming from my own mouth surprised me. It was a word my father used to describe a Highlander. He was not a man of informed sympathies. Everything that was ever any good in
Scotland, he would say, came out of the Lowlands. He had never heard of the Race Relations Board; like the rest of the world, it had never heard of him.
‘Everyone interests me,’ the teller of tales said with a characteristic wriggle of his shoulders.
Under the grubby shirt, torn scars ridge the flesh of his back. Each one made, if they are there and if he is to be believed at all, by soldiers in a camp for conscientious objectors. In
anybody’s book, he is a very old student indeed.
‘Even you,’ he said. ‘Even you interest me.’
I move away as his spittle falls on me like an unintended benediction. At the corner I hesitated about walking through to Great Western Road, but turned instead into Gibson Street. In a city of
a million people, it was nice to be in a quiet street in the afternoon just before work stopped. As I came on to the bridge, I passed a boy who was pulling himself up to get a view. His behind
stuck out as he hung by his elbows from the narrow parapet of iron. In the hot stillness his feet made loud scrabbling noises as he struggled for purchase against the stone base. The noise
irritated me. Children of that age risked death too casually. I wanted to lift him down, but if anyone saw me I would feel foolish.
When I stopped in the middle of the bridge, the view wasn’t worth risking anything for: a smear of bleached grass along one bank, water that turned the blue sky grey, a whisky
advertisement on the gable end of a warehouse where the river curved out of sight. The light hurt my eyes. I looked back at the boy in time to see a man put the flat of his hand under the little
wriggling behind and give one good heave in passing that lifted him over the parapet. It looked effortless but then the boy had been drawing his weight up high.
There was nothing so explicable as a scream. Perhaps there was no time. When the noise came, it was sticks being broken on a drum. It had nothing in it of water for the boy had fallen on the
edge of a pier built out from the blank wall. One arm and a leg trailed out over that platform; he did not look much better balanced than he had on the bridge, but down there it did not matter
since the soiled water flowed near his outstretched fingers. There was red on the planks where his head had opened. Nothing could matter to him now or make a difference. At that moment I had no
doubt that he was dead.
I looked round for support and all the million people were somewhere else. The other side of the bridge was buildings – a blank factory front and a brown tenement, its smooth stones
stranger than a cliff wall, with not a face at any window to share what I felt.
If the man had stopped to look over, I still think I would have done something, but it was not like that. At school I had learned the game of chess and that a pawn can be taken by a move that is
made in passing. I hadn’t played the game much, and I could not remember the rank of the piece that made that capture. The man was big and grew bigger as he hobbled nearer. Held in the hot
still light he was a cripple. With every second step his body, deep chested in expensive grey cloth, dipped and turned from me. His eyes were bent on the swaying ground, but not evasively or with
any other emotion I was able to read in the powdered mask of a stranger’s face. Plump on the jaws but with high cheekbones, rimless glasses, a blue sheen of cropped hair on the cheeks but the
complexion pink and fresh. Powdered? I was not sure. Almost past me, he glanced up and one eyelid flickered shut.
I saw the stranger’s eye almost close and the fine hairs of the lashes suspended trembling. Perhaps it was because it was magnified by the glasses that I saw it so clearly and for what
seemed such a long time. Under the heavy white flesh of the lid, there was a line of white as if the eyeball had rolled up. At the last moment, a faint smile acknowledged me. Fixed on every
muscular fold and tightening, I did not miss a detail but had no idea what any of it meant. Meeting him at another time, another place, I would have thought his smile was too . . . friendly. I have
always been suspicious of people who wanted to be nice to me.
Confused by his smile, I let him go by, yet if I had doubted what I had seen I only had to look again over the parapet. Instead, I followed him. He did not look back. Our shadows moved along the
blank wall of the factory. The ground beat up under my feet too painfully for me to hurry. His shadow ducked and beckoned ahead of me, but when I came to the corner the narrow side street was
empty. There were half a dozen cars parked. He was not in any of them. A door opened on to a yard and I crossed and looked inside the factory. It was abandoned, derelict, a vacancy of echoing
concrete. I began to shake, but that was only because it was so cold out of the sun.
Back on the bridge, a man was leaning against the parapet looking down at the river. He wasn’t old, maybe about fifty, but he looked as if he had all the time in the world and nothing to
fill it. As I came near, he took a pipe from his mouth and with a fat plop of pursed lips spat over the side. The stream of brown juice splashed on the wood of a pier built out from the wall. There
was nothing else on it, not even a stain of red on the planks as far as I could see. It was hard to be sure though because of the strangeness of the light.
The issue settled like strings of clover honey in the frying water. Saul had slain his thousands and David his ten thousands but I gave myself the name mass-murderer, true man
of the twentieth century. It was not something I usually did in the bath. Desperate ills, unusual remedies. At least to my credit sex had been the last thing on my mind.
The door handle shook above my head. Miracle that I had been left in peace so long. Everybody would be out eating. The couple that ran the place lived on the bottom floor and let out the other
two and the attic where Muldoon roosted. They only provided breakfast, or rather he did before he went to work. Heavy food, but plenty of it, fried eggs, bacon, sausages, fried pancakes, seas of
strong tea: more a labourer’s feed than a student’s. He was from Coleraine in Northern Ireland and apparently they ate that way there. His name was Kennedy, a melancholy man looking
older than his wife, who was blonde, very small made, with a bright silly face that got unexpectedly shrewd if you claimed an overcharge on the electric. In the house they called her Jackie, which
she seemed to like, taking the joke as a compliment. He worked as a clerk in a bookie’s so he was in and out of the house at odd times.
After a pause, the handle rattled, cracking on the release like a frosty morning rifle behind the farm at home. I didn’t feel like struggling out for Willie Clarke or foxy-faced Muldoon
the failed seminarist, who had jumped over the wall into personnel in Marks or somewhere; and if it was Kilpatrick I’d hang on till he gave up, not wanting to find myself in a fight. By this
time, though, he’d have been kicking the door. I stirred the water with my hand and ran in more hot.
At the sound of the water, the door was shaken violently.
‘All right. I’m coming!’
I lay back comfortably. Although in so long, I hadn’t soaped and so the water was clear. The settled honey wove in the hair above my left ankle. I lifted my leg out of the water and rolled
hard rubbery pellets of life between my thumb and forefinger. It was tough stuff, tenacious and remarkably abundant. I thought about the people I knew, and wondered why, with so much choice, chance
should make such a hash of things.
‘Would you mind hurrying, please?’
Not Kilpatrick or Muldoon. It was Jackie Kennedy and her sharp Belfast tone broke on a sweet note of desperation. There was a lavatory as well as a bath and toilet basin in here but the need
hadn’t occurred to me since there was another downstairs. Now I wondered about a plumbing crisis.
Not knowing what to say, I yanked the plug with my big toe and landed myself flailing as the water circled away.
I opened the door with my shirt squeaking on my sides. To my surprise she didn’t explode in, bundle me out and, slamming the door, enter on the movements of Handel’s
Water Music
.
Instead, as I edged awkwardly round, resisting the temptation to gesture her in, she, cold-bloodedly enough, turned with me.
‘You’re a hell of a man,’ she said at last. ‘Don’t you know it’s weakening?’
‘—?’ I said, or even, ‘—?!’ while my left ankle hid behind the right.
‘Ba-athing. You must have been in near an hour and you look not much cleaner. Apart from being as red as a boiled lobster.’
Random Flahertyisms from ‘Man of Aran’ flickered on memory’s back projection screen – certainly we had never seen lobsters as a delicacy on the à la carte here;
fried pancakes now . . .
‘In Belgium,’ I said, ‘they charge you for the water you use.’
‘Dirty devils!’ she exclaimed, making past me at last and closing the door in my face. I hesitated and heard noises of her settling down, muttering with fearful clarity, ‘In
Belgium, for God’s sake!’
That nettle prick of foolishness must have been what brought Jackie Kennedy back to my mind hours later when Professor Gracemount tilted forward and asked Margaret Briody in
his gentle malevolent fashion, ‘Ah . . . ah, yes . . . would you care for cheese?’ I was, you see, empathising with her – though her seeming foolish was not in my opinion his
prime intention. At that time, I was a great admirer of the Professor’s and saw the offered platter of cheese as an admirably civilised attempt to take her out of the line of combat. In any
case, Miss Briody blinking her violet eyes was not it seemed violable by embarrassment.