A Glasgow Trilogy

by George Friel

  Mr Daunders dismissed the last of them and prepared a memorandum for the police. Two plain-clothes men called just before the morning interval and made Mr Daunders’ little office look tiny indeed. He sat at his desk rather than stand up beside them, five feet seven against six feet one and six feet two. They made notes in a little notebook as he went through his narrative.

  ‘Looks like your boy Savage had a fight with this fellow Percy in the cellar last night,’ said one of them, thrusting his notebook into the inside pocket of his jacket. ‘They had a fight over the money. Let’s have a look at it, please.’

  Mr Daunders took them down to the cellar, and when they saw it they glanced at each other and nodded.

  ‘Yes, we know where this came from,’ said the one who hadn’t spoken before.

  ‘What we want to know is how it got here, of course,’ said the other.

  They climbed the steep staircase to the basement again and went back to the headmaster’s room. Before lunchtime they had questioned all the boys Mr Daunders had tried to question. And Noddy, Specky, Skinny, Weddeburn, Cuddy and Cutchy who had stonewalled Mr Daunders’ bowling, didn’t raise a bat when the two plain- clothes men got to work on them. There’s nobody like a plain-clothes man for getting a Glasgow schoolboy to come clean. Stringing a teacher along is all part of the natural order of things, but he doesn’t like taking a chance with a detective. The law-man always wins. The telly had taught him that, even if it had taught him nothing more.

  ‘Looks like this fellow Percy is our man,’ said the taller detective when the three of them were alone again. ‘I don’t think he knows where it came from. It looks like he just found it. But it seems pretty certain he organized these lads to spend it and then blew with the rest of it. He’s probably got thousands. We’ll push off to the infirmary and see if this boy Savage is fit to talk to. I think he guessed what Percy was up to and they had a fight about it.’

  ‘Oh, this Phinn fellow won’t get very far,’ said the other plain-clothes man. ‘We’ve got a good description. We’ll pick him up by tea-time. You can’t escape the police today. Telephones, radio, television. Wherever he goes he’ll be recognized. He hasn’t a chance.’

  ‘No,’ said Mr Daunders. ‘There’s no escape, is there? Not for any of us.’

  The two plain-clothes men took leave of Mr Daunders graciously. They were polite and unexcitable. They knew they were on the winning side.

  ‘Of course, Callum,’ said the one to the other on the way out, ‘we don’t know that Phinn will be able to tell us how it got there.’

  ‘No, that’s true, Ewan,’ answered his mate. ‘But he must know something surely. Anyway, before we go to the infirmary let’s get his description out. London, Dublin, Belfast, Liverpool, the Channel ports, the works.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Percy felt fine travelling first-class to London. He would have treated himself to travelling by air but he didn’t know if you had to book in advance, and he had no time to find out. The train was so quiet he had a compartment to himself, and he sat back enjoying his solitary comfort. This was the life. This was the beginning of his long- desired peace and quiet. Between Glasgow and Kilmar- nock he was thrilled with the speed of the train and gazed through the window with childish interest at the circular sweep of the countryside as it rushed past him. He felt the blue unclouded sky above the fields was blessing his journey and he marvelled at the way the train was devouring distance. He had never been so far from home before and his journey was hardly started. He fetched out a little diary with a map of the British Isles on the front fly-leaf and studied his route.

  ‘Morning coffee,’ intoned a man in a white jacket, sliding the door half-open, and then passed on lurching smoothly to the roll of the train.

  ‘Sure thing,’ said Percy brightly.

  He took his briefcase with him. Maybe he wasn’t a poet, maybe he was a promising young executive on his way to a conference in London. He put a distant look in his eyes as he sat alone at a table for two, his precious briefcase snugly between his side and the window. The waiter would recognize he had problems on his mind, business problems, and his case contained the documents he had to study.

  ‘White or black?’ said the waiter, two jugs at the ready.

  Percy found it a difficult question. He had never been served that way before. All his mother ever made was tea and all Sophy ever gave him was espresso coffee. He wondered which was the more sophisticated choice.

  ‘Black if you don’t mind,’ he said at last with ungainly assumption of nonchalance.

  He fumbled badly taking a couple of biscuits from the tray offered him and grew cross with himself. Anybody carrying the amount of money he was carrying had no call to get nervous. Then he made a problem out of the tip. The bill was one and six, and he had a florin and a half- crown handy. Sixpence seemed too mean a tip, too Scots for a poet on his way to Cornwall, so he put both coins down and waved away the change like a pasha dismissing an unsatisfactory dancing-girl.

  He spent the time between morning coffee and lunch brooding about it. Maybe he had tipped him too much. There was something in the arch of the waiter’s shaggy eyebrows. He had read in a magazine that the proper tip was ten per cent of the bill. Ten per cent of one and six was quite a sum for him to work out in his head. The only answer he could get sounded absurd and the calculation reminded him of Miss Elginbrod so he gave it up. Anyway, a poet was above arithmetic. There was that great French writer he had read of who used to tip the waiter at the Ritz extravagantly. If he had over-tipped he was in good company.

  Lunch came along accompanied with more problems. He felt clumsy with the soup spoon, awkward with the knife and fork, ill-at-ease with the dessert spoon. He would willingly have settled for his mother’s stand-by of mince and tatties followed by a cup of tea with no saucer. But there was no tea to follow. It was coffee again.

  It was afternoon tea finally shattered him. He was bewildered by the accent of a waiter he had seen from a distance at lunch.

  ‘Teakike aw taoust?’ he asked, bowing over him with a large tray balanced in one hand and a serving-fork in the other.

  Percy didn’t recognize the language. The cockney diphthong echoed and echoed in his head till in sheer fatigue it resolved itself into a good round long ‘o’.

  ‘Toast,’ said Percy severely, resenting the accent.

  He was left with his toast, a little china teapot and a small jar of apple jelly. The train barged on, exulting in its freedom, and it gave a heave and a sway like a wild mustang every time Percy lifted the teapot and tried to pour himself a cup of tea. He got more tea in the saucer than in the cup, and when he raised the cup and tried to find the rim with his lips drops of spilt tea fell on his lap. He decided to do without a cup of tea and eased some jelly from the jar with his knife. He nearly had it safe on his toast when the train did another bucking-bronco act, and the quivering jelly slid off his knife, missed his toast and his plate and landed plop on the white cloth. He scooped it off hastily and felt the cockney waiter’s eyes squinting at him. To assert himself and demonstrate his natural dexterity he lifted the teapot again. It was worse than the first time. He didn’t only miss the cup, he missed the saucer too. The waiter came over with unostentatious grace, murmured, ‘Excuse me, sir,’ removed the swimming saucer and dripping cup, and came back with another cup and saucer. Silently he poured Percy a cup of tea from the little pot without spilling a drop.

  Percy was humiliated. He felt all his self-esteem and all the confidence built by the money in the briefcase evaporate like moisture under a blazing sun. And the sudden evaporation chilled him to the marrow. He began to feel afraid.

  When he stepped off the train and walked through Euston Station the weakening of his confidence cracked to a complete failure of nerve. What had seemed a vague and distant future, fit material for daydreams, was now a precise and immediate problem. It was all very well saying he was going to Land’s End, but just exactly where and how would he live w
hen he got there? What would he do? He had fallen from the clouds and had to pick his way on the ground. He didn’t like it. There was no breakfast, dinner and tea, no laundry and rent, no strangers to meet and no bills to pay in his daydreams. But they were all worrying him now, little daily chores he would have to face, and he didn’t feel fit to cope. It wasn’t enough just having the money. He had to get organized.

  He took a taxi, his first taxi, to Victoria. He had picked up the idea somewhere that Victoria was the right station for the west country.

  ‘Oh, blimey!’ said the taxi-driver when Percy paid the fare with one of the fivers he had shoved into his pocket in the cellar. ‘What’s this? A soap coupon?’

  ‘That’s a perfectly good five-pound note,’ Percy told him severely, rebellious at his flippancy.

  ‘Yus, but taint an English fiver,’ the taxi-driver retorted. ‘It’s the foreign exchange you want, mate. I don’t reckon on changing fivers every trip, not Scotch ones, anyway. Is that all you’ve got?’

  ‘Yes, it’s all I’ve got,’ Percy admitted, and his head was hot and his face was red. To prove he was telling the truth he fished out the handfuls of fivers he had stuffed in his pocket.

  ‘Whatja bin doing? Robbin a bank?’ asked the taxi- driver pleasantly. ‘Youghta changed all that foreign money before you came down here, son.’

  He changed the note with a grudge, and when he had turned round in a curve hardly bigger than the arc of a Scots threepenny-bit and dashed back into Victoria Street he left a very worried Percy outside the Station.

  ‘I never thought on that,’ he meditated, alone and bewildered. ‘I should’ve got travellers’ cheques, so I should. But then I’d have to have banked it, wouldn’t I? And I couldn’t just walk into a bank and bank thousands in fivers. That would have put the ba’ up on the slates, that would! I should have studied banking instead of reading so much philosophy. I might have found a way round it then.’

  He turned his back on the station and trudged along Victoria Street, making trivial purchases here and there and changing a fiver each time. Between the difficulty caused by his accent and the strangeness of the currency he tendered, he had a rough time. He was made to feel his notes were being changed this time as a favour, but he wasn’t to do it again.

  He became so confused he forgot he had taken a taxi to get him to Victoria, and kept slouching on away from the Station. When he came to Parliament Square and Westminster Bridge the tea-time rush was at its thickest. He stood at the pavement edge, afraid to cross the road. He was a Gulliver among the Brobdingnagians. All these smart, elegant young men, these slim swift girls, seemed a superior race. Glasgow was a village in comparison, and he wished he was back there. By the time he had walked round Parliament Square and managed to get across to Westminster Bridge to look at the Thames he was lost. He wasn’t sure if Victoria Station was behind or in front of him, to his right or his left. Half an hour in London had shattered him. He fought back bravely for a moment by going up to one of the smart elegant young men in black jacket, striped trousers and bowler, with a rolled umbrella in hand, and asked him how to get to Victoria Station. It was only another defeat. The elegant young man couldn’t understand a word of Percy’s broad Glasgow and Percy couldn’t understand a word of the elegant young man’s Lambeth. (In fact all he said was, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak French.’)

  More by good luck than guidance he got back on his tracks again and his weary splay feet took him slowly back along Victoria Street. He was tired, hot and sticky, but he didn’t dare take a bus because he didn’t know which one to take, and he was sure he wouldn’t know where to get off anyway. One thing was certain, he wasn’t going to ask any of these foreigners to direct him a second time. Nobody could make out what they were saying. You asked them a simple question and you got a lot of gibberish back. Walking was safer.

  The Station frightened him when he saw it again. It was a jungle of people. He could never fight his way through there. He didn’t even try. He kept on prowling, thinking he would rest in a hotel for the night and enquire in the morning how to get to Land’s End. A small place in Wilton Road took his fancy and he sidled through the glass door into a hushed house with thick carpets. A dapper little man behind a highly polished counter greeted him in a benevolent whisper, and Percy nervously explained he had left Aberdeen in a hurry on an urgent business matter and hadn’t had time to change his Scottish fivers to English ones. He showed a handful to prove he could pay for a room. ‘Would you accept these …’ He faded away like a radio with a defective valve.

  ‘Oh, yes, of course. That’s quite all right,’ the dapper little man said courteously. With an ear accustomed to divers accents he got a working idea of what Percy was trying to say. The only thing that puzzled him was why a youth with an unmistakable Glasgow voice should say he had come from Aberdeen.

  He pushed the register across, and Percy signed his own name, too worn out to think what he was doing.

  He lay on top of his bed for an hour, his shoes and socks off, wiggling his toes to cool his fiery feet. London’s pavements were hotter than Glasgow’s. He slid into a little doze and disorderly pictures of Savage passed over his exhausted brain. Then slowly, for all his morning coffee, his three-course lunch and his afternoon tea, an appetite uncoiled in him and he had a craving for a fish supper. Surely in a big city like London he could buy a poke of fish and chips somewhere. He certainly didn’t want dinner in the hotel. What he had seen of the dining room when he was being shown upstairs to his room had been enough for him. He didn’t want a snow-white cloth and a spread of gleaming cutlery. He just wanted a poke of fish and chips, and maybe a cup of tea.

  He heaved himself up with a sigh and sat on the edge of his bed, shoving his fingers through his straw-coloured hair and yawning. When the long groaning yawn was spent he bent down to pick up his sweat-damp socks from the floor.

  ‘I should buy another pair of socks, that’s what I should do,’ he thought, groping wearily.

  There was a knock at his door. He froze, still bent down, one hand clutching one sock. He straightened slowly, holding his breath.

  ‘Aye?’ he called out hoarsely, puzzled.

  Two men came in. Two tall, broad-shouldered men, clean shaven and alert, bareheaded, one just a little grey, the other red-haired. For all his sheltered life Percy knew two plain-clothes policemen when he saw them.

  ‘Ye didn’t take long, did ye?’ he said, his bare feet on the carpet with the toes clenched.

  He looked at them plaintively and began to cry. He was tired and fed up.

  ‘Percy Phinn?’ said the grey-haired man.

  ‘Is he dead?’ Percy asked, still clutching his sock. The sole was hard where the sweat had dried. His answering one question by asking another was involuntary. He wasn’t deliberately stalling. He was worried about Savage.

  They didn’t know what he was talking about. All they had was Percy’s description and the information that he would probably be carrying a lot of money that wasn’t his own. It was all the hotel-manager had too when he phoned them. Percy didn’t know he was famous at last, just as he had longed to be, named and described on radio and television. He hadn’t thought of his flight being public knowledge by tea-time. What he thought was that only murder could have brought the police on to him so quickly.

  ‘Is who dead?’ the grey-haired man asked gently.

  ‘Savage,’ said Percy with a quivering lower lip. ‘You know about Savage. Did I kill him? I never meant to. It was an accident.’

  ‘We just want to ask you a few questions,’ the policeman said soothingly. He preferred to let the question of Savage lapse till he learned more. ‘May I see your luggage, please?’

  Percy began to cry again, with such childish abandonment that they had to take time off to comfort him. They weren’t cruel men. They didn’t enjoy seeing a big fellow like Percy in such a state.

  ‘Come on, come on now! Pull yourself together!’ said the red-haired man. ‘If you’d kil
led anybody we would know about it. We just want to have a chat with you. Come on now, you’re all right now!’

  Percy watched them take his briefcase and open it. His sobs died away. He put on his socks and shoes and stood up, willing to go. He knew he had lost the briefcase for good. It was like having a bad tooth pulled. Courage screwed to the sticking point, panic in the pit of his stomach, and then the grinding loss and the relief, the consolation of knowing he would be better off without it, the suffering over.

  He felt very important being taken away in a police-car, and when he sat in the police-station answering questions he was anxious to be friendly. He wanted to impress these two kind gentlemen who had treated him so courteously. They gave him a cup of tea. They even got a fish supper for him. He was grateful. He owed it to them to make it clear he was no dumb delinquent from a Glasgow slum. No, he was an intelligent youth with a good command of English. All the doubts that had obscurely budded within him during his journey south in the Royal Scot, all the dim misgivings that had thrown a deathly shadow over his self- esteem, the frightening sensation of being a Lilliputian in Brobdingnag when he left Euston Station, all these made him eager to surrender. But to surrender with dignity. The bubbling stream of his fluency surprised himself, and he was proud to be so clear and honest.