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
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
ONE
Something 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 The high withdrawn voice has the Highland trick of lengthening some words into a plaintive tune.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.