The Deep Dark Sleep

The initial discovery of the remains was something that had passed me by; me, and the vast majority of Glasgow’s population. It had only warranted a couple of lines of red print in a late news column of the Glasgow Evening Citizen. Significance, you see, is something that tends to attach itself to things or events after the fact. To accrue. The significance of the bones, their resting place, and the monogrammed cigarette case remained disconnected for a few days. After all, it wasn’t uncommon for human remains to be found in the Clyde. More than a few tipsy fishermen or smog-blinded patrolling coppers had misjudged the long walk/short pier equation; capsized tugs and the odd shipyard launch disaster had also helped populate the river’s currents. And, of course, the city’s enterprising underworld made full use of the river’s capacity for concealment.

As for me, I had a lot of other things on my mind in that September of Nineteen fifty-five. It was the end of the hottest Glasgow summer on record which, admittedly, isn’t a big claim – like being Yorkshire’s greatest lover, the cheeriest person in Edinburgh, or Aberdeen’s most generous philanthropist – but the summer of Fifty-five had literally outshone the previous summer and temperatures had, according to the bemused local press, become hot enough to melt tarmac. Whatever the statistical truth about the temperature, I remember that Glasgow summer as sticky and acrid: the thick viscous air smelling like hot metal and the bright sky black-streaked with the dense granular smoke from the factories and shipyards. Whatever the weather, Glasgow’s element was carbon, and in the open street you felt like you were walking through the hall of a foundry.

And now the season was changing. Summer was becoming autumn, which it rarely did in Glasgow: the climate of the West of Scotland was famously mitigated by the Gulf Stream and the weather generally varied only from slightly warmer and wet in the summer to slightly cooler and wet in the winter. Glasgow’s smoke-belching heavy industry also lent the city a unique, season-fudging urban climate, and autumn normally confined itself to the calendar and sodden, adhesive, grey-brown clumps of leaves clotted over street drains. But this year, because it had been preceded by a summer to notice, autumn was a presence felt.

Glasgow’s founding city fathers had been a benevolent bunch, deciding to alleviate the cramped tenement squalor to which they had condemned the majority of Glaswegians with large, open parks. This had been the first year that I had noticed a blaze of autumn reds and golds in the trees.

There again, a lot of things were different that year.

For the first time since I rented my Gordon Street office, I was using it as my main place of business. I had just tied up three divorce and one missing person cases, and I provided security on a weekly wages run for one of the shipyards. I was particularly pleased with this last contract. Jock Ferguson, my contact at the City of Glasgow Police, had vouched for me; which was quite something, given that he was aware that I had been known to associate with the likes of Handsome Jonny Cohen or Hammer Murphy, both leading lights of the balaclava-wearing set. But Ferguson and I were part of that grim post-bellum freemasonry who recognized each other as having gone through the mincer in the war. I didn’t know what Jock’s history was – and would never ask, as he would never ask me – but I knew it was more Dark Ages than Enlightenment.

Like mine.

I also knew that Jock Ferguson reckoned me to be straight – well, comparatively speaking. There had been a time when I would have vouched for Jock with similar confidence. I had taken him as one Glasgow copper I could be sure wasn’t on the take or otherwise double-dealing; but my faith in him had taken a knock a year or so back and anyway, even at the best of times, I wasn’t the most likely to see the good in people.

The most important thing in landing the wages-run contract was that I had made a real effort to stay out of the way of the Three Kings: Cohen, Murphy and Sneddon, the triumvirate of gang bosses who ran everything worth running in the city, even if the peace between them was as tenuous as a showgirl’s chastity. The jobs I had done for the Three Kings had been more than a few and often less than legal. But it had gotten me started in Glasgow after I had been demobbed and the work had suited me more back then, still under the shadow of the mountain of crap that had built up behind me during the war.

But now, I hoped, things were beginning to change. I was beginning to change.

I had, however, made a point of making it known to those to whom it should be made known that I was running the security for a particular company’s particular wages run, and that I could develop a particularly good memory for faces if anyone tried to stick us up. So my message was hands off my run. Or else.