And the Land Lay Still

by James Robertson

  Periodically an item would appear regarding the death of Willie McRae. The procurator fiscal in Inverness had examined the case. Conclusion: no suspicious circumstances. Disbelief voiced from many quarters. Repeat: no suspicious circumstances. The Crown Office reviewed the case and was satisfied as to the circumstances of Willie McRae’s death. Satisfied! No evidence of anybody else being involved. Willie McRae’s family wished the matter closed. No further information to be released to the public.

  Peter waited. Nobody came. Nobody seemed to be watching him. His phone wasn’t being tapped. He’d got away with something, but what? Sometimes he thought he must have dreamed it all. Croick was still alive, out there somewhere in shadowland, and Peter had never had that call, never got on the bus to Glasgow, never gone up in the lift, never pushed open the door and found him lying in the bath with the tunnel in the side of his head.

  The money went soon enough. He had no other evidence that Croick had ever existed. So maybe he had dreamed it. Maybe he dreamed everything he thought was real, and all he knew of reality were the scraps he remembered from his dreams. Maybe that was how it was. How would you know?

  He’d not seen Peggy for years. Slaemill was a place he never wanted to go near again. He phoned every so often and they had stilted, unsatisfactory conversations about her health and his ‘career’, by which was meant his sporadic journalistic activity. He’d tried to tell her once about the detective agency but she didn’t want to hear. She thought it a despicable way to earn a living. He said, It’s not so different from what I did before, and you were okay about that, and she said, Don’t treat me like an idiot.

  Once it was one of his sisters, Etta he thinks, who picked up the phone. She didn’t hold back from telling him what she thought of him. He said, Could I speak to our mother, please, if you’re finished? No, she said, and hung up on him.

  This time he phoned, Peggy said, I’m buying the house. I’d be daft not to. They’re giving me a discount.

  A discount on what?

  On the market price, she said.

  It’s a council house, he said. It doesn’t have a market price.

  Yes it does, she said. Everything’s got a price. I’ve the right to buy it, and they’ve valued it, and because we’ve stayed here all this time, your father and me, and paid rent all this time, we get a discount. Sixty per cent off.

  How much do you have to pay?

  Ten thousand pounds, she said. Elspeth and Etta say I’d be daft not to do it.

  Why are they telling you to spend that kind of money at your age?

  I’m only seventy, she said fiercely. And they’re not telling me. It’s what I want. Your father had a couple of life policies so I’ve the money saved. I’ll not have to get a mortgage or anything.

  You’ll need to do your own repairs and maintenance, he said. Did Elspeth and Etta talk to you about that?

  Of course they did. At least it’ll get done if it’s needed.

  So you’ve money put by if the roof falls in?

  The roof’s not going to fall in. The house is solid as anything. They built good houses back then. It’ll see me out, and yes, I’ve money put by, but Elspeth and Etta’ll not see me starve. They’ll help me if I need help. Or I could get a loan against the house. Your sisters say the value of a good house like this, in a good neighbourhood, it’s only ever going to go up.

  I’m sure they’ve thought it all through, he said. You pay for it, they’ll get it eventually.

  They look after me, she said. They’ve been looking out for me ever since your father died. So don’t snipe at them. When was the last time you even saw them?

  They don’t like me, he said.

  They don’t like what you’ve become, she said.

  He wasn’t going to argue about that.

  There’ll be something for you too, Peggy said. In spite of everything.

  Is that why you’re doing it? To leave us something?

  He thought of her in her three-bedroom, semi-detached house, the stretch of grass between it and the road, the bit of garden with the shed at the back. He remembered when they’d first moved in there, a couple of years after the war. He’d been seven. A bathroom. Paradise.

  Partly, Peggy said. But mostly I’m doing it for myself. We could hardly dare imagine we might live in a house like this, your father and me. And then we did. But we never dreamed we could own it. And now I can.

  Is that it? he said. Is this going to be your dream come true?

  Against his will a sneer crept into the way he said it.

  Dinna knock it, son, she said, and the way she switched, just then, for a moment, into the language she’d always tried to correct in him, shocked him. It was like a dream, she went on. A total fantasy. We’d go to the pictures to see Errol Flynn and Katharine Hepburn and the like, swanning about in mansions and hotels in their beautiful clothes, and you felt you could just about reach out and touch them, even if you couldn’t really. But owning your ain hoose? That was beyond the realm of possibility. So don’t knock it just because it’s not what you want.

  Sorry, he said.

  I’ve no idea, Peggy said, what it is you want.

  JB Investigations was dying on its feet. There were other agencies in the city now, more efficient, more mobile, less prone to losing days or weeks. He needed something else. Around this time there were long and bitter disputes in the newspaper industry. The papers were adapting to new technology and the printworkers and journalists were being squeezed between old practices and privileges and the way the world was going. Often they were being set against one another in a competition for survival. The newspaper owners wanted change, and their managements delivered it, usually without much tact or diplomacy. A sub-editor Peter had worked with suggested he get in touch about a position on a city paper. The interview lasted five minutes. New terms and conditions. Not a great job, not a job with prospects, but a job.

  He knew he was being used but that was nothing new. The question of solidarity with his fellow workers occurred to him. He could live with the answer. ‘Scab’ was a word used less freely, as people came to doubt their own possible future solidarity. Plus it was a chance to wind up the agency and sever connections with the address in Leith. He looked around for the next-cheapest landlord he could find. He found Mr Fodrek, a Slovak who, by some mysterious, never-discussed route Peter suspected might not be unrelated to the kind of underground life he himself had lived, had washed up in Edinburgh several years before the Berlin Wall came down. Few questions asked, no info volunteered. Peter warmed to Mr Fodrek almost immediately, if it was possible to warm to a man who never smiled and never wasted his breath on words that weren’t about business transactions. Fine. One day Peter posted a final rent cheque to the address in West Lothian, stuck the key through the letter box, and left. No forwarding address. The next day he was Peter Bond, journalist.

  BOND: Did you phone from your hotel room or from a call box?

  BOND (as CROICK): Does it matter?

  BOND: Of course it fucking matters.

  CROICK: Well, if it makes you happier, let’s say I used another phone.

  BOND: What happened to your key?

  CROICK: Eh?

  BOND: The key to my place you had cut. What happened to it?

  CROICK: Did you not find it? Should have been in my pocket.

  BOND: Didn’t like to intrude.

  CROICK: It was just a key. Nobody could ever trace it.

  BOND: It bothers me, a thing like that. A key. Brings me out in a sweat in the night.

  CROICK: Still? After all this time? Why’s that?

  BOND: Like it’s a key to some other door. You know what’s behind it but you don’t. You have the key but you don’t want it. Like Bluebeard’s wife. Why did you apologise?

  CROICK: I never apologise.

  BOND: You did. Just before you hung up. Either you were sorry for something you’d done in the past or for something that was going to happen. Which was it?

  CROIC
K: Neither. I was just, I was just going to tell you what had happened. I thought I owed you that at least. I knew I was finished, one way or the other. I thought I’d like someone to know. Someone outside. You were the only one I could tell. I thought we could have had one of our talks, like old times. But you were too late.

  BOND: So what did happen? You can tell me now.

  CROICK: No, I can’t. I’m dead, remember?

  BOND: You killed Willie McRae, didn’t you?

  CROICK: Ah now, Peter, you’re jumping to conclusions there.

  BOND: You near as damn it admitted that was what would happen to him.

  CROICK: We’d never admit to a thing like that.

  BOND: You killed McRae but it wasn’t officially sanctioned. Or maybe you didn’t kill him but you called someone else in to do it. One of your investments. Was it Denny Hogg, was that who it was? But maybe whoever it was blew it, like they’d blown stuff before. McRae was supposed to die in a car crash but he didn’t die so someone had to use a gun. And maybe then they got nervous that you’d sell them or neutralise them now they’d done your dirty work for you. So they decided to move on you before you moved on them. Maybe that’s how it was.

  CROICK: That’s a fuck of a lot of maybes, Peter.

  BOND: You were out of line. And you wanted to confess to me but before I got there you blew your brains out or somebody else did it for you. And you knew it was going to happen. You said you needed to show me what happens. Isn’t that it?

  CROICK: Well, which one are you plumping for? It’s show time, Peter. Take the money or open the box. Take the money or open the box.

  BOND: Just tell me the fucking truth.

  CROICK: Oh, bad contestant! You took the money, Peter. The box stays closed.

  He went on taking the money, between bouts of spending it, or was it the other way round? You think back over your life and you hardly believe you existed, that you did the things you did or knew the people you knew. Life was the kind of out-of-control story you’d have been belted for in school. And then I woke up. It had all been a dream.

  He was sober for a couple of years. He had a good work rate, could turn out a shitload of words in a few hours. He even managed to keep putting money in the bank. Days were trawling for news, writing the stories up, minimum contact with other hacks, subs and editors. Not easy to be a hermit in that kind of environment but he had a good stab at it. Evenings were walking the streets, wandering the aisles of late-night bookshops, then going home and ploughing through every newspaper he’d managed to lay his hands on during the day. Nights were sorting through the bing of books, magazines and pamphlets piling up in the flat, trying to make sense of the years of information. Sleep, if it came, was a twitching, start-stop frustration that gave no rest. Only alcohol would cure the insomnia and he fought its insidious whispers all through the long hours of darkness. At work one day somebody told him he looked like a ghost. He stored that one away. It had all been a dream and then I didn’t wake up.

  He stayed off the booze and on the paper right through till the 1987 General Election, when the Tories lost more seats in Scotland than they did in the rest of the UK put together. There’d been a lot of talk beforehand about a ‘Doomsday Scenario’. This was supposed to signify constitutional meltdown: with the Tories lacking a mandate to govern north of the Border, there would be some kind of crisis. He couldn’t exactly see Donald Dewar, Labour’s leader in Scotland, at the head of a riot, but something was supposed to happen. After a lot of noise, nothing much changed. Not true. Nothing appeared to change. But it was a turning point. On the one hand, the government reached the conclusion that, no matter what it did, the Scots weren’t going to vote Conservative. The argument ran: they buy their council houses and shares in British Telecom, they might take advantage of the new economic liberalism, but they’re never going to show their gratitude at the ballot box. So, between ourselves, to hell with them. Clearly Tory majorities in Westminster are and will continue to be utterly non-dependent on Scottish seats. Let’s not waste any more time on this. If the Jocks don’t like their medicine they can vote for separatism. It’ll take decades, on current showing, for them to do that in sufficient numbers to cause any real constitutional crisis. Meanwhile North Sea oil, the cash cow of the Thatcherite revolution, keeps flowing.

  It was a realistic assessment based on past experience. But on the other hand … On the other hand, Peter detected a new mood shift: the natives finally going native. He thought of Jean Barbour confronting him all those years ago, and the assessment he’d made then, that the people weren’t ready. It felt different now.

  He felt different in himself too, ready for something. He just didn’t know what.

  Time ticked on. He tried not to pay attention to the worthy work of the Campaign for a Scottish Assembly and their production of plans for the future better governance of the country. He tried not to be impressed by the Claim of Right when it was published, nor by the broad consensus of political opinion that converged around it. That phase of his life was over, remember? He was, when it came to politics, as dead as Croick.

  I need to show you what happens.

  He missed Croick. Hated him but missed him. This is how it often is.

  He was still dicing with sobriety when Lockerbie happened. The world’s media descended on the south-west of Scotland but Peter Bond wasn’t among them. Not his area of expertise, he was only a two-bit reporter of muggings and traffic accidents. If only they’d known! He had a free weekend and went down there and found spooks crawling all over the place. Americans, Brits, he clocked them and if they’d been paying him any attention they’d have clocked him back. But their minds were on greater things. All the stuff he’d been involved in, all of Croick’s obsessions, seemed inconsequential. What were the deaths of one maverick political activist and one maverick Intelligence officer when global politics had crashed on Scotland? He came back to Edinburgh and started amassing information for no other reason than that was what he was programmed to do, and gradually Lockerbie became another bit of a vast jigsaw with no shape, no edges. He read and read and read. There were so many lies, so many versions of the truth. He thought, is there anything in life that isn’t a conspiracy if you scrape down low enough?

  Some time in the 1990s he fell off the tumbrel again. No, he didn’t exactly fall. For a while he was clinging on as the thing bumped and jolted its way across the moon or whatever desolate scape it was in. He was dragged over the jaggy ground and collected a few cuts and bruises, metaphorically speaking. Literally too. Often the pavement rose up to meet him on his way home. He knew he was on thin ice at work and that the old tolerance for alcoholic hacks was waning. He anchored himself to his desk, typed copy that was just about good enough for the subs to reshape, and didn’t care how much longer it was going to last. And when it didn’t, when some management face he didn’t even recognise told him they were dispensing with his services as a staffer though they’d always be willing to consider freelance submissions – ach, fuck it, he didn’t give a toss.

  A white knight came riding from the horizon. Peggy’s ghost. Peggy died and left her house to him and his sisters, equal shares, so Mrs Thatcher had done them all a wee favour, him in particular. The sisters couldn’t stop him getting his share, they would have if they could. After the funeral and the payout it was clear that they would never be in communication with him again.

  Fine by me, Peter thought. I just need to make Peggy’s pennies last a while.

  There was a pub near Haymarket where anybody could drink themselves to death so long as they didn’t fight, soil themselves or sleep on the premises in the process. He learned to pace himself there. There was a nice halfway stage between stone-cold and blitzed that he could stay in for hours. In this condition he could read the paper, speak more or less coherently to passers-by or sit in silence rearranging the box files on the shelves of his mind. Late one afternoon a woman sat next to him. He recognised her. She could have been thirty but then he loo
ked at her greying hair and grey teeth and the lines around her eyes and added ten years at least. The hair was long and frizzy, hippyish, the clothes post-punk. When she spoke it was with a posh drawl that she couldn’t really disguise by poor articulation and swearing. A kindred spirit, perhaps? What the fuck did he know about it or her or whether they had anything in common? But she sat next to him drinking gin and tonic and this reminded him of Croick and endeared her to him even before he worked out where he knew her from.

  She worked in a second-hand bookshop, one of a wee cluster in among the strip bars west of the Grassmarket, the city’s so-called Pubic Triangle. No, worked was too strong a word. She minded the shop when the owner wasn’t there, sitting in a shady corner behind a desk, always reading, hardly bothering to glance up when somebody came through the door. Shoplifters’ paradise. When you bought a book she begrudged the time it took to write the title and price in a big ledger and give you your change. Her stock response to any inquiry about a particular title was, If it’s not there we don’t have it. If anybody was persistent enough to oblige her to leave her chair, her resentment was palpable. Peter admired the complete absence of customer care. And now, on her way home, she was sitting next to him drinking gin and tonic.

  He said, I used to know someone else who drank that stuff.

  It’s not a crime, she said.

  No, he said, you’re right enough.

  She said, I know you.

  He said, I know you too. From that bookshop.

  Yeah, she said. But also from before that.

  When?

  Glasgow, she said. Twenty, twenty-five years ago?

  I never forget a face, he said, panicking a little because he’d forgotten hers. And he looked at her, trying to take those years off her, and then he remembered. The days of the UCS work-in and the tartan terror trials. She was the poor wee rich girl in the Che Guevara beret. He’d had a wee fancy for her then but not a lot of sympathy. Now the fancy was diminished but the sympathy was bigger. Like him she was a fugitive from the far reaches of politics, although she’d never been involved with the mad Nats because nationalism was bourgeois and reactionary.