A Winter Grave

Chapter Five

In those days I couldn’t see myself ever getting married. I was twenty-seven years old, and I knew a lot of guys that age who were still living with their parents, drawing on the bank of Mum and Dad. But I had a top-floor flat of my own up in Maryhill. A great view of the cemetery, and a problem with dry rot that seemed to be creeping its way through the building. But it was just a rental, so what did I care?

Tiny and I had shared it in the years after we graduated from Tulliallan. That’s the police college in Fife. It’s where we met. Hit it off straight away. And blazed our way through all the pubs and clubs in Dunfermline. Heading into Edinburgh on the weekends to try our luck with the capital girls.

We were lucky to finish our training together in the Glasgow East command area, posted to the same police station in London Road. We weren’t earning much in those days, so a one-bedroom tenement flat was all we could afford. We took it in turns, alternating weeks, to sleep on the sofa bed in the front room. It was better than staying with your folks. Not that I had any left by then. But Tiny’s people were still alive.

Everyone thought there was an endless stream of girls passing through that wee flat. But in truth it was usually just me and Tiny, a six-pack of Tennent’s Lager and Sky Sports on the telly.

He was a good pal, Tiny. You could tell him anything and trust him to keep it to himself. Made me laugh. Big, long drink of water that he was. Always had a running commentary on life. You know, that observational thing that Billy Connolly had. An eye for the absurd. Always saw the funny side, even in the darkest moments.

I can confess to it now, even if I couldn’t admit it to myself at the time, but I was devastated when he met Sheila. Suddenly all those nights and weekends when we’d be watching the game, or down the pub, or off clubbing in town, came to an end. It was like losing a leg. I’d never really thought about the future. I guess I didn’t want to. I was happy with the life we had, the respect we got as cops (usually). Someone to share my thoughts with and have a laugh together. Fuck’s sake, it was almost like we were married!

Then everything was about Sheila. Can’t go to the pub. Can’t go to the game. Me and Sheila are going to the flicks tonight. Sheila’s booked a table at that Chinese in Hope Street. I’d ask you to join us, but, you know...

That’s when I got really serious about the hillwalking. If I was going to be on my own, I’d rather be climbing a mountain somewhere than sitting on my tod fetching endless beers from the fridge and watching a game that was only half as entertaining without the banter.

I was jealous as fuck when he said they were getting married. Of course, I agreed to be his best man. How could I tell him I didn’t really like his Sheila very much? I suppose there was never any chance I would. After all, she’d stolen my best mate.

He and Sheila put down a deposit on one of those four-in-a-block houses in King’s Park, and after the wedding I hardly saw him outside of work. To be honest, I didn’t want to socialise with the two of them, and I’m pretty sure Sheila didn’t like me very much anyway. I stayed on at the flat after Tiny left, but I was spending less and less time there. Every day I wasn’t working, every holiday, I was off up the Highlands bagging a Munro. In Scotland, that’s any mountain over 3,000 feet. There are 282 of them, and I must have clocked up well over a hundred back in the day. In the Mamores, the Cairngorms, the Grampians...

Tiny was still my mate, always will be. But it wasn’t the same any more. We were cops together and that was it. And I was sick to death of him telling me how great it was being married, and how I needed to find myself a woman and settle down, raise a family. Irony of it is, I was the one that ended up having the kid. Tiny and Sheila never could.

It all changed for me one October night, about a year after they were married. Tiny and I were still working out of London Road. We were lucky. We had a BMW 530, which could fairly shift when we needed it to. Tiny usually drove, cos he had these long legs that meant he had to push the seat right back, and I couldn’t be bothered readjusting it every time. I mean, I’m not short. Just under six foot. But my feet wouldn’t even reach the pedals.

A call came over the radio for us to attend a domestic at a block of flats at Soutra Place in Cranhill. Overlooking that tousy wee park. Routine shit. It was pitch when we got there, lights in all three towers burning against a black sky that had been spitting rain at us all night. Seventeen storeys in those blocks. It was just our luck that the domestic was on the fifteenth and the fucking lift wasn’t working.

I was used to climbing, so it didn’t really bother me. But Tiny was well out of puff by the time we got there. And we could hear the raised voices all the way down the hall. It sounded like World War III. The man’s voice dominating, and what sounded like a young girl pleading. A constant stream of exhortations for him to stop. And then a scream when he hit her. There were other residents standing in open doorways as we pushed along to the end door.

‘Took yer fucking time,’ someone told us in a voice that sounded like sandpaper.

‘It’s been going on for hours,’ a woman said. ‘He’s going to kill her one of these days!’

Tiny hammered on the door, and the sound of it reverberated all the way back down the hall. There was a sudden silence inside. A moment. Then a man’s voice shouting, ‘What the fuck?’

Tiny glanced at the nameplate above the bell. ‘Open up, Mr Jardine, it’s the police.’

Another pause. ‘Fuck off!’

My turn. ‘Sir, we need to verify that there is not a criminal assault in progress. If you don’t open up, we’re going to have to call in reinforcements and break your door down.’

The door flew open and Jardine stood silhouetted against the light in the hall behind him, swaying unsteadily. The smell of alcohol off him was rank. He was a big man. Not as tall as Tiny, but built. He had a half-grown beard on a pale face that was oddly handsome in its own way. Green eyes that seemed lit from behind. Sculpted eyebrows and a shock of thick, black hair. ‘There,’ he said. ‘I’m fucking fine. See? Nae blood.’

I peered around him, trying to see into the living room. ‘And the young lady?’

‘That’s no lady, that’s my wife. Ha, ha, ha. Only joking. She’s my bidey-in and she’s fine. Alright?’

‘We’d like to verify that, sir,’ Tiny said, and Jardine found himself looking up into Tiny’s implacable face. Probably something he really wasn’t used to.

Without a word he stood aside, holding the door open, and we went through into a room that looked like a bomb had gone off in it. Chairs were overturned. A burst cushion had sent feathers flying. They were still settling. There was an overturned wine bottle and a broken tumbler on a coffee table that was scorched and pitted by cigarette burns. The place smelled of alcohol and vomit and stale smoke, a fugg of it still hanging in the air. An overhead lamp threw a cold yellow light on to this sad scene of domestic bliss, casting cruel shadows on the slip of a girl who sat on the settee, hunched forward, palms pressed together between her knees.

It was the first time I ever set eyes on Mel. And I guess I knew even then there was something special about her. Can’t say what it was. I mean, she was no beauty. Not in any conventional way. There wasn’t a trace of make-up on a face that was swollen and bruised, blood clotting on a split lip. Her hair was greasy and limp, and hanging down like hanks of torn curtain that she was trying to draw on herself. As if somehow they could hide her shame.

I suppose it was her eyes. I’d never seen eyes that dark. I’d read descriptions in cheap novels of folk having eyes like coal, but it was the first time I’d been able to picture it. Later I understood that while her eyes really were a very deep brown, it was the dilation of her pupils that had made them so black that night. But you could see there was light in the darkness. And something that said there was intelligence there too, even if it wasn’t immediately apparent.

She wore a bloodstained T-shirt and baggy blue jog pants, bare feet revealing pale pink painted toenails with chipped and broken varnish.

I figured she was eighteen, maybe nineteen, and couldn’t work out what she was doing with a man a good ten years her senior. A brute of a man at that. My first instinct was to lift her to her feet and take her in my arms. My second was to beat the shit out of the man who’d done this to her. I did neither.

Tiny said, ‘Big man, eh? Beating up on a lassie.’

‘She fell,’ Jardine said.

I couldn’t bring myself to speak, but the look on my face must have said it all.

He stared back at me. ‘What!’

I said, ‘I think you’d better come down to the station with us, Mr Jardine.’

‘And why would I do that?’

‘The desk sergeant might just want to charge you with breach of the peace.’

‘Whose fucking peace?’

‘The peace of every neighbour who called to complain about the noise you’ve been making.’

Tiny said, ‘And then there’s the question of assault.’ He reached for Jardine’s wrist, but wasn’t expecting the reaction he got.

Jardine pulled away abruptly, fuelled by that potent mix of alcohol and the anger that burns in all bullies. ‘I’ll give you fucking assault,’ he shouted. And his clenched fist came swinging into the room. A punch that connected with nothing but fresh air as Tiny took a step back and Jardine lost his balance.

I moved in fast, catching his forearm and swinging him round to bang face-first into the wall. Tiny had the cuffs on him before he could move. ‘Add resisting arrest to that count,’ I breathed into his ear.

Tiny took him down to the car then, and I stayed with the girl to see if she needed medical attention.

‘I’m alright,’ she insisted. But I made her sit where she was and went through to the kitchen to boil a kettle, then wadded up some kitchen roll to clean the blood from a cut in her hairline and the split on her lip. She pulled away from the sting of it, and I looked at the bruising coming up on her face. I could see that there was old yellow bruising beneath the fresh stuff, and more on her forearms, where maybe she had raised them to protect herself.

‘You should put witch hazel on that bruising,’ I said. I remembered that my mum had always kept some in the house for when I had a tumble from my bike or got into a fight at school.

Unexpectedly, she laughed, and her face shone as if someone had turned on a light. ‘Don’t know any witches,’ she said. ‘And for sure not any called Hazel.’

‘I’ll need to introduce you to her, then. She can magic those bruises away.’ She smiled and I said, ‘What are you doing with him, darling?’ And the light went out. Tears filled those dark eyes and she shook her head.

‘None of your business.’

And maybe it wasn’t. We sat for a moment before I said, ‘What’s your name?’

In a tiny voice she said, ‘Mel.’ And then smiled again through her tears. ‘My mum was a big Spice Girls fan.’

Of course I’d heard of the Spice Girls, but they’d gone their separate ways before I even started primary school, so the reference was kind of lost on me at the time.

She saw my confusion and grinned. ‘Two of them were called Mel. Well, Melanie, I suppose. But I was just Mel. That’s what’s on my birth certificate. Just plain old Mel.’

It’s hard to describe why, but something in the childlike innocence of this touched me. It was a quality she had that she never lost, and that never failed to affect me. I would learn in time that she was also smart, and perceptive. But it was that intractable innocence that led to her downfall.

It was still raining when I got to the car. I don’t know why, but I had kind of worked myself up into a lather going back down all those stairs. The only thing I could picture was that pale bruised face, and the innocence of her smile. And the drunken fist that Jardine had thrown at Tiny. The thought of it connecting with Mel. I knew that whatever happened to him tonight, he would take it out on her when he got home, and I wanted him to know I wasn’t about to let that happen.

Tiny was sitting at the wheel with the window down. ‘She alright, mate?’ he said. But I just walked past and opened the rear door. Jardine wasn’t expecting it, so it was easy enough to pull him out on to the forecourt. He fell to his knees before scrambling unsteadily to his feet. I heard Tiny’s voice from somewhere behind me. ‘What the fuck?’

I grabbed Jardine’s jacket and pushed him up against the car, thrusting my face in his. ‘Lay a finger on that lassie again, Jardine, and I’ll fucking have you.’

‘You and whose fucking army?’ he roared. And I was totally unprepared for the headbutt. A Glasgow kiss delivered properly will break your nose, but all that Jardine managed was a clash of foreheads that stunned him and infuriated me.

I piled in with knees and fists, catching him in the crotch and pummelling his ribs until his legs gave way. A final fist caught him full in the face, jerking his head to the side before he vomited on the tarmac.

Tiny was pulling me away, his voice hissing in the dark, ‘Jesus Christ, man! Stop!

I turned towards him. ‘He headbutted me. You saw that, didn’t you?’

His face was dark with anger. ‘Fuck’s sake, Cammie! Get in the fucking car.’ And he dragged Jardine to his feet and bundled him in the back.

London Road police station comprised a long, three-storey brick building that stood in an industrial desert in the east end of Glasgow, a spit away from Celtic Park football ground. The compound at the back of it housed umpteen overspill Portakabins that had become permanent fixtures. It was a depressing place at the best of times.

The sergeant behind the charge bar cast a dubious eye over the sorry figure we presented to him at a little after one o’clock that morning. From the driving licence in Jardine’s wallet, we had gleaned that his full name was Lee Alexander Jardine, and that he was thirty-one years of age.

The blood from his nose had dried on his face, with one eye bruised and puffed up till it was almost closed. I figured there was probably a loose tooth or two, but that wasn’t obvious at a glance. His wrists were still cuffed behind him, and he stood half-hunched, his jacket stained with his own vomit, the stink of alcohol hanging about him in a cloud.

The sergeant swivelled his eyes in my direction and took in the swelling on my forehead. ‘Breach of the peace,’ I said, ‘resisting arrest, assault of an officer.’ The sergeant’s gaze flickered towards Tiny, who shuffled uncomfortably and nodded.

The sergeant’s gaze returned to me. Then back to Jardine. ‘Resistance like that would do credit to the French Maquis.’ Eyes to me again. ‘You know who that is, Brodie?’

‘No, sergeant.’

‘Nah, I thought not. He’s one helluva fucking mess, is all I can say. Used minimal force to restrain him, did you?’

‘Yes, sergeant.’

He sighed. ‘You know I’m going to have to get the doctor in.’

I returned his sigh and nodded. Medical examinations of injured suspects rarely ended well for the arresting officers.

I got home just before two that morning. Went straight to the cabinet in the bathroom. I was sure I’d brought a bottle of witch hazel from my folks’ place when I cleared it out after Dad died. And there it was, behind a bottle of mouthwash and a bunch of prescription painkillers Tiny had taken once for a twisted ankle. I showered and changed and went straight back out. Didn’t take long to get over to the east side at that time of the morning.

I was getting a bit fed up by now with the fifteen flights. I was tired after a long shift, and should just have crashed when I got home. But I needed to see her again when I was sure Jardine wouldn’t be there. Breathless, I knocked softly at the door. Didn’t want to go waking up all the neighbours again. When she didn’t respond, I tried the bell and stood waiting in the hall. Not sure why I was so tense, but I was all bunched up inside. Nervous, I guess.

And then the door opened, just a crack, and I saw the curtain of hair hanging down over her face in the dark. I could almost feel her relief as the door opened wider and she stood staring at me with startled rabbit eyes.

‘I thought you were him,’ she said in a voice so small I could barely hear it.

‘He’s being detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure,’ I told her.

‘What do you want?’

I fished the bottle of clear liquid out of my jacket pocket and held it up. ‘I promised to introduce you to Hazel. She’s a good pal.’

She looked at the label and a reluctant smile brought light to her dark eyes. She held the door wide and I brushed past her into the sitting room. In the hours since I’d left, she’d made something of an effort to clear the place up. The bottle and broken glass were gone. Chairs righted. There were still feathers everywhere. I turned as she came into the room behind me.

‘Got some cotton wool?’

She nodded and went through to the kitchen, returning with soft, coloured balls of cotton wool in a clear plastic bag. I sat down on the settee beside her, soaking a ball with the witch hazel and applying it liberally to the bruising on her face and arms.

In keeping with the rabbit eyes, she sat like one caught in the headlights and just let me do it. A patient and long-suffering creature who has learned through experience that resistance is pointless. I was so focused on what I was doing, I didn’t notice at first that although she was facing straight ahead, she had turned her eyes in my direction and was staring at me. It came as something of a shock, and I think I might have blushed.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Did Lee do that to you?’

And I felt my hand go involuntarily to the swelling on my forehead. I nodded.

‘Why are you doing this?’

It was a good question. Why was I? I couldn’t admit that I fancied her. Cos it wasn’t really that. I mean, I fancied lots of birds. But there was something... compelling about her. Yeah, that’s the word. In some way beyond my control, I had felt compelled to come back. It wasn’t a decision I took, or a choice I had made. It was her fault, not mine. But all I said was, ‘I hate bullies.’

She smiled sadly. ‘So do I.’

‘So why do you stay with him?’

She just shrugged. There was a word I’d come across recently. Lassitude. It means kind of lethargic. Lacking energy. That’s what she was like. As if the hand that life had dealt her owed everything to fate and nothing to choice. ‘It’s complicated.’

‘Then try and explain it to me.’

‘Why?’ She turned genuinely puzzled eyes towards me.

‘Because...’ She was asking such simple questions and I was finding them so hard to answer. ‘Because I’m concerned.’

Her smile then was dismissive, as if to say that I shouldn’t be wasting my time, or my concern. She said, ‘He’s not always like he was tonight.’ Her eyes turned down towards wringing fingers between her knees. ‘Not when he’s sober. Tomorrow he’ll be a different man. You wouldn’t recognise him. The place’ll be full of flowers, and chocolates. He’ll have booked us a table in a nice restaurant somewhere...’ Her voice trailed away and she cast uncertain eyes towards me, as if fearing I wouldn’t believe her. ‘He treats me well. Spoils me.’

‘Aye, until the next time.’

And she saw her own doubt reflected in my scepticism.

‘Listen...’ I took one of her hands in mine. ‘You can get away from him if you want. I can recommend a refuge. There are good people there. You’ll be safe. It’ll be the first step to a new life. One where being battered by a drunk today isn’t the price you pay for being spoiled tomorrow.’

She drew her hand quickly away from mine and wouldn’t meet my eye. ‘Lee would never let me go. He’d track me down. He’d find me.’

I found myself shaking my head, and knelt down in front of her to take her by the shoulders. It kind of forced her to look at me. ‘Mel, as long as I’m around, I’m not going to let him hurt you.’

And I saw such pain then in her black, black eyes. And felt the scorn in the breath that escaped with her words. She shook her head. ‘And when you’re not around?’

I met Tiny in the locker room when we started our shift at five the following afternoon. He was still in a mood with me, and we shared our own little pool of silence amid the banter of the guys finishing up and the officers just starting. No one seemed to notice. But there was a definite lull in the conversation when Joe Bailley stuck his head round the door and said that the sergeant wanted to see me and Tiny in his office toot sweet.

This was our regular sergeant. Not the duty officer on the charge bar from the night before. Frank Mulgrew was a big man with a ring of fuse-wire ginger hair around his otherwise bald pate.

‘Shut the door,’ he said when we went in, and we knew then that we were in trouble. He sat behind his desk and glared up at us from beneath bushy ginger brows. He lifted a handful of clipped sheets from the desk and dropped them again. ‘Medical report on one Lee Alexander Jardine. Extensive bruising, couple of cracked ribs, concussion, broken nose. Injuries not exactly consistent with a simple case of resisting arrest.’

I said, ‘He was drunk, Sarge. Headbutted me and came at Tiny fists flying.’

He cast a sceptical eye over the two of us. ‘Is that right?’ He lifted the medical report again. ‘A couple of big fellas like you needed to inflict this much damage just to restrain a drunk man?’ He almost threw it back on to the desk.

Me again. ‘He was well gone, Sarge, wouldn’t come quietly.’

Mulgrew got slowly to his feet, brown-speckled green eyes bathing us in the light of his contempt. He placed clenched fists on the desk in front of him and leaned forward on his knuckles. ‘You are so fucking lucky that Jardine’s common-law missus didn’t want to press charges against him. And he just wanted out of here so fast he wasn’t interested in raising a complaint against you two.’

‘You let him go?’ I couldn’t believe it.

‘Maybe you’d have preferred to face disciplinary charges, Brodie.’

Which shut me up.

Mulgrew raised himself up to his full and not inconsiderable height. ‘Cross the line one more time and I’ll make it my personal mission to see you both out of uniform before you can say Section 38. Now get the fuck out of my sight.’

Tiny didn’t say a word until we were safely ensconced in the BMW. Even then he just sat silent behind the wheel for the longest time before he turned a look on me that would have wilted flowers. I’d never felt the full force of his fury before. It came in softly spoken words that delivered each blow like a punch.

‘You ever do that to me again, Cammie, I’ll no’ stay silent. I’ll fucking shop you. I’ve worked hard to get where I am. No chance I’m going to throw it all away for some wanker with a hard-on.’