Dead men and broken hearts

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The policeman was only feet away from me and, even in the smog, if he turned and looked down, he would see me. At that range, I doubted very much if my improvised camouflage would do much to conceal me. I tried to ease back and down the slope, but I was afraid that doing so would cause a sound, any sound, to attract the beat copper’s attention.

I watched him. He was a big lad, right enough, youngish, probably in his early twenties. He used a bicycle-type lamp to shine around him as he searched for me. He was too green to know that the only use a flashlight has in the smog is when it’s pointing at the ground; pointing it into the mist only served to make the smog more impenetrable. For some reason that only a physicist could explain, it reflected any light directed at it.

I could tell he was listening intently. But, as I had hoped, he was searching in the wrong direction, thinking I’d run off along Clyde Street. The big question was this: had he challenged me because he had been alerted to look out for me, or was it simply because he had seen a suspicious-looking character who clearly had tried to avoid him? If it was the first, then I had trouble; if it was the second, he would probably give up and go back to patrolling. The one thing that made me hopeful was that he hadn’t blown his police whistle to attract other coppers.

After what seemed an interminable time of peering into the smog and listening, he shook his head irritatedly and headed back towards the footbridge. I watched him until he was swallowed up again by the smog.

There was no point in trying to cross by the bridge, so I turned around and slid down the embankment on my backside, again trying to make sure I didn’t end up in the Clyde. As it turned out, there was a towpath running along close to the river. I guessed that it had been used at one time for horse-drawn barges, although it was elevated and separated from the waterline by a high, brick-reinforced embankment. I offered up a small prayer to whatever gods were looking after me: the towpath meant I could move without being spotted. Hopefully.

My feet didn’t hurt any more, something that caused me concern not relief. They didn’t hurt because they were numb. Sitting down on the towpath, I eased off my mud-caked sock and felt my right foot. Like the left, it had the body temperature of an iceberg and was insensitive to my massaging.

I needed to get sorted out. And quick.

I hobbled along the towpath, not encountering anyone or anything other than the occasional scuttling sound of rats scattering as I approached. As I approached the Jamaica Bridge, I was aware that I was right in the heart of Glasgow, but passing through below street level. I kept going along the path, trying to ignore the strange experience of walking on feet that couldn’t feel the ground beneath them; but the combination of physical numbness with the enclosure of my senses by the smog, the quiet fluid sounds of the river and the distant noises of the city above me all conspired to add to the feeling of unreality.

For some reason, the song You Take the High Road started running through my head. The song was about the ancient Celtic belief that while the living travel on the surface of the earth, the dead take the ‘Low Road’, passing underground; and only occasionally do the two paths meet, when the ‘Low Road’ travellers reappear as ghosts. As I walked smog-blinded and cold-numbed along the towpath, I started to wonder if this was what it was like to take the Low Road.

In a time of crisis, I sure knew how to cheer myself up.

As it happened, I had to come up to street level when the towpath ended, not passing under the bridge but leading back up to the main road. I crossed the road and tramway at Jamaica Bridge, but as soon as I was on the other side, I found my way back to the waterfront on the Broomielaw. I paused, questioning the logic of sticking to the river. This was no forgotten towpath anymore, but the point at which the Clyde became the factory floor of the city, and I found myself with quays to my left and grimy warehouses and store-yards to my right.

I had a decision to make: whether to take to the city streets and try to cross to the west side in as plain view as the smog afforded, or stick to the waterfront and risk running into nightshift workers on the Clyde. Of course, there was a limit to what I had to fear from Glaswegian dockside workers swinging hammers or swinging the lead on the backshift, and the smog was still a cloak I could hide behind, but there was another concern: the River Police.

The Clyde was as important a thoroughfare as any road — more so — and the City of Glasgow’s River Police regulated it with vigour. Patrol boats scoured the river constantly with nothing more to do than fish out of the water the odd corpse that the Glasgow Humane Society had missed, or check the lighting on the Clutha tugs, barges and other boats that plied their trade on the waterway. And if there was anything to watch out for more than a keen-as-mustard copper, then it was a bored one looking for something, anything, to break the monotony of their shift.

I heard voices.

I stopped in my path and listened, straining to pinpoint who was talking, where they were, and what they were talking about.

I eased forward, careful not to break into view. From what I could make out, I had stumbled into a nightshift of river workers. There was a faint amber glow in the fog and I guessed they had a brazier burning, as if the smog needed any more thickening. On my left, I could just about perceive the outline of a quay jutting out into the river. I was faced with a stark choice: either walk on past the workers, as close to the quayside as I dared, or double back and lose a lot of the advantage I had gained by using the towpath. I worked out that walking past them would normally not have presented a real problem: they would assume I was another worker making my way to my shift further along the river and my grubby appearance would not be deemed anything unusual, but going to work a nightshift in November in your sock-soles would raise an eyebrow even here in Glasgow. I decided not to risk it and retraced my steps twenty yards or so. I headed away from the water, across a patch of greasy grass and mud, weaved my way through stacks of empty wooden barrels and between two brick warehouses, all the time seeing these objects loom in and out of my tiny pool of smog-edged awareness.

Back on the Broomielaw, I would have been in full view of any cars passing along the riverfront, if it hadn’t been for the dense smog remaining my ally. I made a mental note to write to my MP and ask him to oppose the implementation of the Clean Air Act.

Foggy or not, it still wasn’t safe for me to be back on the streets. The murk could hide coppers just as well as it concealed me. I had to get across town as fast as possible, ideally dropping back down to the waterfront as soon as I passed the clutch of bridges that connected the north and south sides in the city centre, each bridge a broad and normally busy roadway to be crossed. Moving as quickly as I could on my numb feet and in the smog, I only came into view of one passing tram and a couple of cars, but at a distance where I would have been just another shadowy figure in the gloom. My only big error was when I walked directly past a police box, burgundy-red in Glasgow when they were blue everywhere else. The roof-mounted light was flashing red, forlornly trying to summon the beat policeman in the gloom and indicating he had to ’phone into his station from the box. Unless the copper was within ten yards of the box, there was little hope of him seeing the beacon; but worrying that the call he had to make would be about me, I quickened my pace anyway and crossed the road. I passed through Anderston, back down to the riverfront. And right into a crowd of people.

For a moment, I thought I was hallucinating. There was a line of sixty or seventy people snaking across the quayside in the fog — men, women, even several children. What caused me greater concern was the uniformed men in peaked caps and holding flashlights, who seemed to be shepherding the others into a queue. It took me a moment to realize the uniforms were not those of policemen, and that the others in the queue were carrying luggage.

Think it through, Lennox, I told myself. I looked around me. All I could make out of the steamer anchored to my left was its stern, with the lettering The Royal Ulsterman. No hallucination; I cursed my stupidity: I had walked straight into the passenger boarding of the Burns and Laird night-time service from Glasgow to Belfast. For a split second, I considered sneaking into the back of the queue and stowing away on the steamer. A crazy thought with no logic and born of desperation.

I had a plan and had to stick with it.

Another detour.

Common sense told me that not everyone in the Second City of the British Empire was on the lookout for me, but my lack of footwear made me noticeable; being noticeable made me memorable, and I didn’t want the police to be able to use eyewitnesses to retrace my sock-soled steps.

But I couldn’t go on like this. The smog usually kept the worst cold at bay, like a turbid blanket pulled over the city, but the temperature seemed to me to have plummeted, or at least my tolerance of the cold had. If I wasn’t careful, the sole result of my great escape would be that, when they caught me, I’d be confined to a hospital room rather than a cell.

I skipped around the terminus building and back onto Anderston Quay on the other side of the passenger queue. I got as far as the Finnieston Ferry, which ran all night, before I had to make any more evasive manoeuvres. By now, my desperation had intensified to something close to panic. I felt cold, lost and increasingly without a firm plan. I had started out with a destination in mind, but it now seemed as achievable as making it to the top of Mount Everest. In my socks.

I was approaching the Queen’s Dock, which was still ringing with the sounds of metal being worked. The most risky part of my westbound journey: I would have to loop around the Dock, which would take me right past the police station on Pointhouse Road. And if I was spotted, I doubted if I could outrun another copper.

Then Fate decided to deal me a better hand. It was tethered to the bottom of a steel ladder on the dock’s Centre Pier: a rowboat. I had nearly walked on past it, hardly seeing its outline in the murk, but something instinctive took hold of my actions and before I knew it I had clambered down the ladder, untied the tether and was rowing out past the vast hulk of the hull I had watched being assembled or dismantled when I had met Jonny Cohen. I knew there would be workers and night-watchmen all around the dock, but being on the water in a small rowboat in the fog made me practically invisible. I paused when I was a safe distance out from the pier before fumbling around in the dark to feel for anything useful in the boat. I found some rags that I couldn’t see but which felt thick and oily. Nevertheless, I wrapped them around my numb feet and set to rowing my way through the dock’s ship-width bottleneck and out onto the Clyde. I knew that what I was doing made me almost impossible to find, but I didn’t try to kid myself that rowing an unlit small boat in the main navigation channels of the Clyde at night, in these conditions, wasn’t a highly dangerous business. At one point something large and dark, its navigation and cabin lights glowing dully in the fog, passed dangerously close and its wake nearly tipped me overboard. I guessed it was the Kelvinhaugh Ferry. At least I was heading in the right direction.

I tried to get a bearing on the north shore so that I could stick close to it, but again the smog closed everything in to a tight circle of viscous-looking water. I could have been ten feet from the riverbank or in the middle of the Atlantic.

I kept rowing.