Digital edition published in 2012
by The Electronic Book Company
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Cover photograph by Jef Seghers
Cover design by The Electronic Book Company
Copyright 2012 by Geoff Small
CONTENTS:
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
PART TWO
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
PART THREE
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
PART FOUR
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
Language: UK English Spellings
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Copyright 2012 by Geoff Small
All rights reserved
INTRODUCTION
Set in Scotland, Guilt Tripper is the fast-moving story of Glasgow man, Danny White, an unemployed artist whose beautiful girlfriend has left him for his successful and wealthy best friend, Bob Fitzgerald. Convinced his socialist beliefs have made him soft, Danny decides things should change. So when he discovers Fitzgerald has a perverted violent side, he extorts money from him which he then uses to set up an art school in the Scottish Highlands for underprivileged teenagers.
Everything is perfect until a bedraggled Fitzgerald turns up at the school one night and tells Danny the sinister truth about the money funding his project. Horrified and conscience-stricken, Danny attempts to put things right - but is it all too late?
Please note: This book was written, produced and self-edited in the UK where some of the spellings and word usage vary slightly from U.S. English.
PART ONE
CHAPTER: 1
In the midsummer dusk, Judith hailed a taxi outside her hotel and asked to be taken to a cultured bar. On route the driver received a phone call. Whatever was said must have been pretty serious because he swung his black cab into oncoming traffic and sped off in the opposite direction. They headed north, entering a very different Glasgow, its rundown buildings alternating with overgrown wasteland. Turning off the main drag, the cab rattled along a potholed road, bisecting a field of flattened earth where a whole neighbourhood had recently been demolished. Judith was starting to worry that she’d been kidnapped, until they reached the other side, screeching up behind a police car and an ambulance, parked by some derelict, reconstituted stone tenements. Here, the driver shot out and ran into a ground floor apartment — the only one in the street which didn’t have iron sheets over the windows — while she watched powerlessly from the back seat.
Thirty-year-old Judith Child was an attractive woman with bobbed ash brown hair, a cheeky heart-shaped face and sparkling, friendly blue eyes. She worked as assistant curator at Worcester City Art Gallery, but desperately wanted to become chief somewhere in her own right. For this though, she needed an Art History Masters degree, which was why she’d come to Glasgow, for an interview up at the university. Either side of this appointment she’d be touring the city all week, so as to become better acquainted with her prospective home before driving back the following Tuesday.
Once the emergency services had left empty handed, Judith went in search of her taxi driver, whom she found in the tenement close, comforting a tracksuited teenage girl. With a nod he gestured for his fare to go on into the apartment where she took a seat in the dimly lit lounge and balked at the whiff of stale urine and the sight of the antiquated decor. The saddle brown, ‘leather look’ suite was torn, exposing the yellow foam within, while the gold metallic wallpaper from the early nineteen eighties reminded her of chocolate coins. Near the mantelpiece, surrounded by catheter bag boxes, a large portrait painting on an easel caught her attention. It depicted a woman in her thirties wearing a black dress, with long raven hair, soul penetrating chestnut coloured eyes and a determined but dignified, chiselled face.
“I’m sorry to have inconvenienced you, only my ma’s had one of her fits,” the taxi driver apologized as he entered the room, switching an orange shaded light on. “Poor wee Katy back there was minding her when it happened.”
“Will your mother be ok?”
He shook his head. “She’s been bed-ridden for over eight years now…we’re just waiting for the inevitable.”
The taxi driver stared sombrely into the middle distance, giving Judith an opportunity to study him for the first time. At five foot eleven, he was an intense looking, lean fellow approaching middle age, with sharp sculpted features and unkempt brown hair. He wore an unstylish, black crew neck T-shirt dappled with coloured oil paint, faded jeans and red, threadbare baseball pumps — the whole outfit probably costing no more than twenty pounds.
“I see somebody in the house is a painter,” she said, breaking the uncomfortable silence. “Who’s the portrait of?”
The taxi driver turned to face the painting. “That’s my mother back in the seventies: strong and indomitable, the way I like to remember her.” He went over to the easel, removed the picture and handed it to Judith. “You know, she’s sacrificed all joy and comfort for her beliefs. When I was a kid my dad wangled the eight of us a four bed-roomed house from the council — but she refused to move. She said: ‘when everyone else gets four bedrooms we’ll go. Until that day we’re staying put, in solidarity with our brothers and sisters.’ And where did all Annie White’s principles get her, eh? Paralysed at fifty nine by a stroke, that’s where.” He let out a long sigh. “Not long after, the love of my life left me. If I’m honest, I spent more time worrying about that than thinking about ma — something I’ll always regret. I’d even considered abandoning her so I could follow this girl to Italy.”
Suddenly looking ashamed, he retrieved the picture off Judith, who got up and followed him back to the mantelpiece, so she could examine an old family photo on the gold papered wall above, featuring the taxi driver as a child and what looked like four elder sisters and a younger brother in a pushchair.