Isvik by Hammond; Innes Page B

excitement I was inevitably feeling at being caught up in something bigger than myself, but whatever it was I found my mind was now made up. I would see it through. And once having taken that decision, I felt strangely relaxed. With the whole flight in front of me there was plenty of time to get the answers to all my questions.
    We were travelling first, something I had never done before, so that I was quite content, lying back after the meal, listening to taped music on the headphones and enjoying a brandy. I felt strangely disembodied, not sure that it was really me flying south-west in brilliant sunshine above a white sea of cloud. Another world, a world without worries, a world that had never heard of insects boring into wood, or fungi and damp rot.
    â€˜Ye awake?’ The gloved steel hand pinched my arm. ‘Ah said, are ye awake?’ He was leaning towards me. ‘Take those earphones off fur a moment.’
    I did so and he smiled. It was a switched-on sort of smile that left me wondering what he was thinking. It didn’t extend to the eyes. ‘Ye’ve got some questions,’ he said.
    I nodded.
    â€˜Well, I’ve got one for you.’ There was barely a trace of any accent now. ‘What decided you to come before I’d given you the answers to the questions you were worried about?’
    What had decided me? I shrugged and shook my head. ‘Iris Sunderby, I suppose.’
    He nodded, smiling again. ‘Aye. She’s a very attractive young woman.’
    â€˜Is?’
    â€˜Either is, or else the person phoning me Thursday evening was a very good mimic.’
    I thought of the body I had been shown in the hospital morgue. If it wasn’t hers, whose was it? But he wasn’t making it up, no point, and his face, close to mine, deadly serious. ‘Are you really Scots?’ I asked him. ‘Or do you just put it on as an act?’
    â€˜Och, no. Tha’s me natural accent.’ And he added, ‘Ye want me life story?’ The smile was more like a grin now as he leaned back, half closing his eyes. ‘All right then. Ah was born into the Glasgae Mafia.’ He said it as though it was something to be proud of. ‘A Gorbals laddie whose drunken sot o’ a mother was pitched out into a grand new high-rise tower when Ah was two years old. She was a whore. Ah never knew my farther. By the age o’ seven Ah’d been arrested twice, a real little toughie, livin’ on the streets most o’ the time, scratchin’ a livin’ round the docks an’ watchin’ the unions kill them off. In the end, Ah stowed away in the loo o’ a sleeper to London, finished up just north o’ the Mile End Road workin’ fur a man who ran a bric-à-brac barrow.’
    He was silent for a moment, his eyes tight closed so that I thought perhaps he had gone to sleep. But then he leaned towards me again. ‘Clark was ’is name. Nobby, of course. Nobby Clark. Well known in the trade, ’e was – stolen stuff, see.’ Brought up as I had been in the East of England, I could recognise genuine Cockney when I heard it, and he had slipped into it so easily. ‘Some of it was straight, nat’rally. ’E mixed it up, Nobby did, and nobody ever nicked ’im. Portobello Road, four ack emma of a Saturday, that was ’is best pitch. The boys used to bring the stuff in as soon as ’is stall was set up an’ by six o’clock all the ’ot stuff was gone, ’is pitch as clear as a whistle by the time the first copper come nosin’ ara’nd. Cor, stone the crows!’ He was almost laughing now, his eyes wide open and alight with the fun of the life he’d led. ‘The things I learned in the three years I was wiv ’im you wouldn’t believe.’
    He sighed. ‘An’ then, when I was risin’ ten, an’ just beginning to get the ’ang of things, the silly old sod goes an’ dies on