Bitter Water by Gordon Ferris Page B

dive-bombing, towel-flicking hooligans. Just cool clear water and two other men swimming lanes and wishing me good morning. I had a month to sort out my priorities before facing the sharp financial choice: fags and booze versus watery bliss and exercise. I knew what I needed to do. What I ought to do. But whether or not a daily swim would clear my thoughts about women was another matter. Besides, I had the morning planned. I’d decided to skip my Sunday morning hospital round in favour of a duty visit to Kilmarnock. I’d promised my mother I’d go to the kirk with her. I caught an early train and met her outside the big wooden door of St Andrew’s. She was beaming and wanting to show me off. We did the rounds of her pals who all scrutinised me for signs of sin and degeneracy. That’s what Glasgow does for you. It’s in the water. I wished I still had my major’s uniform to give them something more positive to crow over. But at demob we’d had to hand back our khaki in exchange for a pinstripe from Burton’s. A poor trade.
    Still, the columns of the church didn’t tremble as I entered, and the words of the hymns didn’t stick in my throat. It was a long hot service. All I was aware of was the dust drifting through the sunlit shafts from the stained-glass windows. I was a boy again in my Boys’ Brigade uniform, bowed over my bible, looking reverential, but in truth reading dirty bits from the Song of Solomon.
    We walked home to Bonnyton and ate the potted herring and boiled tatties she’d saved. As a Sunday treat she fried up a slice of clootie dumpling. We had it with cream from the top of the bottle. While she was in the scullery I left her two ten-bob notes under the clock on her mantelpiece. I gave her a kiss and headed back to Glasgow on the late-afternoon train.

THIRTEEN
     
    I was outside the front door of the Western Baths Club as it opened first thing Monday morning. Two other men were hovering with rolled-up towels for an early-morning treat. We nodded to each other and wished each other a good morning in that focused way of men about to go over the top. An hour later I came out starving, but convinced that there were no problems that couldn’t be solved by thirty laps of a tiled pond.
    The sense of well-being sustained me right up to the moment I found two blue uniforms waiting for me as I walked into the newsroom. They were in Eddie’s office and were surely suffocating from the smoke. I tried to sneak past but that’s why Eddie’s office is positioned where it is. His door bounced open and a gust of foul air blasted out, followed by Big Eddie himself.
    ‘ Mister Brodie! Just the man. Come right in.’
    I squeezed into the already jammed room. Eddie climbed back behind his paper fortifications and faced the two policemen sitting in cramped chairs opposite. They hadn’t got up as I entered. I stood with my back against the wall and weighed up the boys in blue. The last time we’d met had been over the injured body of Alec Morton. One was the baby-faced sergeant, clasping his old-style pointy helmet in his lap as though hiding an erection. A copper’s notebook lay open in front of him. The other was Chief Inspector Walter Sangster in full dress uniform. To impress me? His flat cap with the Sillitoe check round its circumference was perched on a wobbly pile of Eddie’s documents. He held both of the letters in his gloved hand.
    I nodded at them. ‘Chief Inspector Sangster, nice to see you again.’
    ‘ Detective Chief Inspector Sangster, Mister Brodie.’
    ‘ Mazel tov . What can I do for you, gentlemen?’ I wondered if Duncan reported to him? And why hadn’t he brought Todd along?
    Sangster eyed me up and down. ‘It seems you have a talent for attracting bother, Brodie.’
    If anyone else told me that, I might start to believe it. I raised an eyebrow and waited.
    ‘What’s your connection with these vigilantes?’ he asked.
    ‘They commit crimes. I report them.’
    His thin mouth