Which gave me my next stop.
SIXTEEN
‘Where to, friend?’ asked the taxi driver.
‘Do you know Tobago Street police station?’
It caused a big sigh from the front seat. ‘Intimately. Ah’ve bailed ma faither-in-law out o’ there on many’s the occasion. Drunken aul’ sod…’
He gave me his troubles for the next ten minutes of our journey. I contributed with a random few tsks and ayes out of politeness. But my attention was on the fair city streets that I’d pounded in my good black uniform a lifetime ago. I rolled down my window to sample the air and take in the smells and sounds.
There was nothing like the damage done to London. It was a struggle for German bombers to reach this far, and none of their daunting V1s or V2s made it beyond North London. Yet they had tried their damnedest to hit the shipbuilding capacity and ammunition production of the Clyde, and some stray bomb loads had straddled the residential areas in central Glasgow. The place that really took a pasting was the town of Clydebank. Back in March 1940, the Luftwaffe had filled their fuel tanks to the brim and swarmed across the North Sea. I might even have heard the murderous drone of their massing bombers while I lay in a French field as part of the ill fated British Expeditionary Force. The bombers made it to Glasgow but missed the yards and instead razed an entire community. Only a handful of houses out of 12,000 were left unscathed. Hundreds of innocent folk – weans and women mainly – were blown to bits or crushed in the rubble of their homes. I wish I could say me and my mates in the 51st Highland Division took it out on the German army in return. But it didn’t quite turn out that way. Not then. Not for that incarnation of the 51st.
I wrenched my thoughts back to the present. Outside the window of my taxi time had stood still. There were still groups of capped men huddling on street corners puffing on fags, waiting for something to come up at the yards. These were the unskilled, the casuals, the soldiers back from the war with no job and dwindling hope. It had the ominous tang of the thirties again, the years of the Depression and the Hunger Marches. Where were the laurel leaves and the spoils of victory?
The pawnshops with their three brass balls were doing a steady trade. The old gaffers handed over their wife’s wedding ring on the Wednesday to tide them over till pay day on Friday, then they liberated the abused gold bands on the Saturday. Weekend wives, these long-suffering women, some still wrapped in their plaids, oblivious to fashion as much as to the lengthening and warming days. Some of the younger women – Highland lassies mainly – had babies tucked inside their tartan rugs, tight-swaddled like papooses with only fat red faces on show.
Suddenly, out of a close, a squadron of kids with skint knees and holed vests shot into the street. Their leader ran with the balance of a Scotland winger taking on the English defence at Hampden. His right arm was outstretched and holding an iron bar which drove a black metal hoop. This gird and cleek was a top-notch affair. I’d made my own out of an old pram wheel with the spokes and tyre removed for the cleek. And for a gird, we used sticks torn from trees to propel the hoop along. This boy’s must have been made at the yards; it was a blacksmith’s job to fashion the ring of iron and fix one end of the gird to it with another smaller hoop. The best thing was the satisfying ear-splitting noise as the cleek clattered along the cobbles with a gang of shrieking tearaways whooping after it and demanding a ‘shot’. I watched the yelling pack disappear down another close and wished I was running with them, starting again. But that’s the kind of thinking that tortured me through the winter in London. Round and round. Replaying pivotal points in my life and taking a different path. Seeing where I’d end up. Almost anywhere better than the poky wee flat in a bombed out city of strangers, with only my old pal Johnnie Walker to keep me company.
We juddered to a halt outside Tobago Street jail. It hadn’t changed either. A squat rectangle of grey sandstone, built by the Victorians, manned by the Visigoths.
‘You’re no’ the polis, are you?’ He was regretting his intimacies.
‘Sorry? No. Used to be. Not now.’
I paid him and got out. The sun warmed the street, and I was taken back ten years to my first day here in ’33. Fresh from training, my new uniform smelling of warm serge. I’d checked my tie, made sure my cap sat square on my head and marched towards the big wooden door.
Now, I straightened my jacket, adjusted my trilby and walked quickly over the road and in through the doors. The clocks had stopped inside as well as out. Same solid desk and grille, same copper behind it writing in the charge book. He raised his eyes briefly then dropped them back to his work. But then the eyes came back up slowly and he scoured my face.
‘Well, fuck me, if it isnae Detective Sergeant Douglas Brodie Esquire.’
‘You’re not my type, Alec. And it’s just Brodie now. How are you getting on?’
Well, I could see. The three stripes on his arm looked white and new. He’d probably made it in the past couple of years. He’d arrived a new recruit, raw-jawed and gangly in early ’39, about six months before I resigned and joined up. He’d elected to stay on and see the war out on Tobago Street. It had clearly been the right thing for him. Might have been the right thing for me too. I’d probably be a detective inspector by now.
We threw a few clumsy catch-up questions to each other, neither listening to the answer, then Alec Jamieson, Sergeant Alec Jamieson, flushed and said, ‘You’re here about Donovan, the bloke who killed those wee boys?’
‘He was only convicted for one murder, Alec. Anyway, you got the message?’
‘Aye, we got the message. They’re waiting for you roon’ the back.’
Alec lifted the heavy wood barrier and let me through. He told a young constable hovering in the background to man the desk. We walked along the lino floor, my boots squeaking just as they used to as we headed to the offices round the back. Sunlight puddled the floor and climbed the walls where photos hung of former DCIs; a rogues’ gallery if ever there was one. We stopped outside the office of the DCI himself and I looked quizzically at Alec Jamieson. He looked embarrassed and opened the door. The room seemed to have its own cloud system. It’s amazing how much smoke three men can generate.
I’d asked Sam to get her secretary to fix a meeting with Detective Sergeant Bill Kerr and his sidekick Detective Constable Davy White. They were the pair of local cops who’d done the grunt work on the case and who’d been put through the mill by Samantha Campbell. I didn’t know either of them and assumed they’d been posted to Tobago Street after I’d left. I guessed the two nervous-looking blokes in civvies standing either side of the desk were the happy pair. But sitting between them, hands clasped and propping his chin above his desk, was Detective Chief Inspector Willie Silver himself. In front of him a well-filled ashtray held a smouldering cigarette.
I’d known of Silver around Glasgow pre-war. He’d held various positions in nicks across the city, always managing to move on just before his drink problem got him thrown out. He was either a very talented detective or drank with the right folk to have survived this long, far less thrived. But he looked very sober indeed as he stared at me across his office. His eyes were close together above a large broken-veined nose. He raised his bottom lip and sucked at the ends of a smoke-stained moustache.
‘You wanted a wee chat, Brodie?’ he asked. His voice was deep and slow, like an undertaker trying to be sympathetic over an open coffin. I stepped forward into the room and took my hat off. Not deference, heat; the radiators were belting it out.
‘It’s the Donovan case. I’m an old friend of his. I’m helping Advocate Campbell with her appeal.’
‘She needs it. We didnae find her that appealing, did we, boys?’
The two twitchy men twisted their faces in sycophantic grins.