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  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 The high withdrawn voice has the Highland trick of lengthening some words into a plaintive tune.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.

  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.

  We had come to the Professor’s from an uncomfortable room at the University where we had been listening to a talk on the Modern American Novel. Vonnegut, Ken Kesey, Richard Brautigan – all the great names were there. When the speaker had answered the last question, the chairman said something and people applauded.

  ‘The only American novel worth reading post-1945,’ I said then to Margaret Briody, ‘is Across the River and into the Trees.’

  I was trying to catch her interest. Those were the first words I ever addressed to her. By a happy chance, she had been seated next to me, and for more than an hour I had been deluding myself I could feel her warmth spread between us and lap around my thigh.

  Only moving around unobtrusively had kept me comfortable.

  She looked at me seriously as if she were judging what I had said against some long perspective.

  ‘I’m sure that can’t be so,’ she said, an atavistic music of peat water rippling under her Glasgow articulation. (God protect you from a teachers’ training college, prayed I in passing, and the inanities of a speech department.) ‘Although to be honest, I’ve never read any Faulkner,’ and as I wasted the moment on loving astonishment at her ignorance, she turned to some chatterer on her other side.

  The lecturer, a Liverpool voice with American back vowels as souvenirs of all those sabbatical leaves, was crying, ‘Drinkies time, Dennis? Hell, I could certainly use a drink. We leaving for your place now, Dennis?’

  ‘The Professor’s actually. But yes now, we’re going now, Jerry,’ and a set towards the door began as Dennis Harland, lecturer in Old English, six feet topped by a narrow skull and the blue eyes of a Midshipman Ready – if not Old certainly standard English – stopped in front of me. ‘Would you care to? A chance to talk over all Jerry’s given us to think about. At the Professor’s.’

  I was flattered.

  ‘Yes. Thanks very much.’

  ‘Fine. See you there then.’

  Bobbing on the tide, I was more pleased than suprised to see Margaret Briody by divine right of those long legs join the group around Jerry, who was still audible later as I drank my second glass of the Professor’s sour economy wine.

  ‘ “God, Lord David,” Jack told me he said to him, “haven’t you ever wakened up and yelled, Christ! I’m in love, I’ve possessed this woman?” and Lord David hesitated, gave him that look, you know? and replied, “Well, my dear chap, I am maw-wied.” ’

  Haw! haw! deep then and masculine from this son of the new world of exchange lectureships.

  ‘He gave me this book of his poems.’

  Held up, bashful, proud, a slim volume with, yellow on green, Cocksuck, but he was opening it to give the Professor so it might have been Slowworm or Coachtrip. Cockroach?

  ‘Dedicated it to me actually. Well, not the book, of course, but this . . . this copy. He’s written here at the front.’

  Impassive, the Professor studied the dedication and then held it up to give us a glimpse of the hasty slanted scrawl – ‘To Jerry, one of the gang – I think.’

  ‘I really value that. It’s the highlight of my last trip. I mean, it made the trip – I did feel that.’

  ‘Has Mr . . .’ the Professor wafted the volume in decreasing circles, ‘has— has he written anything else?’

  As if he had been away long enough to mistake that kind of careful stammer for nothing more than diffidence, Jerry expanded: ‘Anything else! Jesus, everything else would describe it better –
but then I’m an enthusiast.’ He grinned boyishly. ‘After putting up with me all evening, you won’t need to be told that. He’s simply covered the whole American experience. Past and present. Future too, possibly – that is if you believe Dexroth. He called the Epsilon sonnet sequence “science fiction made over into prophecy”. Wasn’t that good?’

  ‘When I listen to remarks like that,’ someone said, ‘I get the feeling we’re being asked to pay a high price for the privilege of the Americans protecting us.’

  The Professor laughed, and Jerry cried, ‘Christ! isn’t that typically English? Isn’t it time we stopped pretending to some kind of cultural superiority that hasn’t existed for fifty years?’

  ‘Is that what I was doing?’ the same someone pondered ironically. The voice was deep but soft. I envied its certainty that everyone would listen. From where I perched on the windowseat, I could see only one shoulder and a hand very white against the black leather of the chair. ‘ “Science fiction made over into prophecy.” Does that mean anything? Most science fiction tries to be some kind of prophecy anyway, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Like – ah – Dr Who,’ the Professor volunteered.

  ‘Who?’ Jerry looked bewildered.

  ‘It’s a serial on television,’ Margaret Briody said, laughing, intervening innocent in the arena to draw the Professor’s offering of biscuits and cheese and embarrass me on her behalf into a hallucinatingly vivid, brief memory of Jackie Kennedy.

  ‘Actually,’ the Professor took up the definition with surprising amiability, ‘it is by this time a series of serials. Do you see? Sets of episodes, each forming a story, and each leading into a new set while all the time featuring the same central character.’

  The incorrigible Margaret rang out, ‘We’ve discovered your secret vice – watching Dr Who.’

  ‘My grand-niece is devoted to it. But I don’t apologise for watching it. The format has some interesting conse— consequences. Take this latest episode. The Doctor is confronted by an alien intelligence, a splendid villain. For him to overcome it entirely would mean it couldn’t crop up in a later serial of the series. So, at the moment he’s about to obliterate it, his friends burst in with the best of intentions and inadvertently allow it to escape off into outer space. The intelligence which runs away, lives to fight another day – or aeon rather.’