Fallen Gods

Twenty-Eight

"You've fair taken my breath away, Robert, I don't mind telling you."

The old man beamed as he handed a cup of tea to his visitor. "When you called it was like hearing a voice from the past."

"I'm just glad you remember me," said Bob Skinner.

"Remember you? Remember you?" Pale blue eyes twinkled in a bald wrinkled head. "I remember you all right, and even if I didn't I only have to look at you to know who you are. You're William Skinner's son, and no mistake. I remember him well, and your grandfather, Mr. Michael Skinner, before him."

The old man lowered himself gently into an armchair. "I'm just astonished that you remember me."

"Don't be daft, man, the whole bloody town remembers you. Nicol Falkirk, CBE, the editor of the Mother well Times for the best part of the last century."

"Not quite the best part," his host corrected him, 'but a good bit of it nonetheless."

"How old are you now, if you don't mind my asking?"

"Eighty-four, and starting to feel it."

"But not look it," said Skinner, deferentially. "I passed by Hope Street when I was driving round town. I guess the paper isn't printed there any more."

"Nor has it been for a long time. They turn it out on a big web offset press somewhere well out of the town. I'm glad I'm not part of it any more. I was an old school editor; I wrote my copy in fountain ink, and it was set in hot lead by craftsmen, then made up into page form by hand, by people who, in the main, lived in the town which they were serving. That's what a local newspaper should be, Robert; truly local. That's what it was like when you worked there as a young man in your holidays, remember; just before it was sold, and everything changed."

"Worked is maybe an exaggeration, Nicol. Copy-boy, they called me."

"Not a bit of it. You did your share in the months you were there. You could write better than some of my regular reporters, I'll tell you.

They were always trying to copy the tabloid style, so they could move on to bigger jobs in Glasgow. More than a few of them did, of course; most of my trainees wound up with their own by-lines on the Herald, the Scotsman, the Mail and so on."

The venerable editor laughed. "I always liked the football reports you wrote, Robert. They were as partisan as anything," he wheezed. "You understood without being told that being unbiased is not the business of a local reporter. The readers expect you to be on the side of the home team."

"They needed all the help they could get," Bob muttered. "They still do."

"Ach, that's changed too. I was never a football man myself, but I don't approve of all these damn foreigners we have these days. This County of Lanark produced the likes of Matt Busby, Jimmy Johnstone and Ian St. John. What chance does a boy have today?"

"Come on, Nicol; times change."

"Maybe, but your father would have agreed with me. He usually did, apart from one time."

"When was that?"

"When I told him that I had hopes you might become a journalist after you left university. He said to me that if I put that idea in your head, he'd hang me up by the thumbs until the rest of me dropped off them."

Bob looked astonished. "My father said something like that?"

"He certainly did; those were his exact words, at a civic centre reception too. And do you know what? I think he meant them. Your father was dead set on you going on to do law after you finished your arts degree, and following him into the firm. He wasn't best pleased at first, when you went into the police. He did his best not to show it, but I remembered that brush that we had, and I knew."

"So did I," Skinner murmured, 'but he got over it, eventually."

"I was sorry to hear about your wife, Robert," the old man said quietly. "I remember young Myra very well; it was just too bad that she should die so young… the motor car's a blessing, but a curse too. That's why I've never had one. Aye, a girl of spirit, she was."

"Sure, and then some. That was a long time ago, though."

"I suppose it was," he mused. "That's the thing about getting old; your time-frame gets jumbled up." He smiled. "And how's your daughter?" he asked. "How's she getting on?"

"My older daughter, you mean. Very well, I'm glad to say. Now, Alexis would have made her grandfather happy. She is a lawyer, and showing promise at it too."

"You have another daughter?"

"Yes, wee Seonaid; she's coming up for a year. Then there's James Andrew, who's four and a handful, and Mark, who's going on nine."

"My, my, you have been busy."

"Not that busy. Mark's adopted."

"Busy enough." Mr. Falkirk picked up his neglected tea, took a sip, screwed up his face and put it down. "Now, Robert," he said. "Charmed as I am to see you, I know that you haven't come all this way to pay me a casual visit. What can I do for you?"

"You can write an obituary for me, and persuade your successors to run it in the Mother well Times?

"Oh, surely not. Whose?"

"You haven't seen a paper today?"

The old journalist shook his head. "I don't bother with them any more.

They're full of nonsense."

"True. I have to read them though, today especially. The obituary's for my brother Michael; he was found dead at the weekend. There's no one but you that I'd trust to do it."

The twinkle had gone from Nicol Falkirk's eyes. "Oh dear me," he sighed. "I wrote your father's, I wrote your mother's, and long before that, I wrote your grandfather's. When a journalist comes round to writing three generations of obituaries, he knows he's lived too long.

Of course I'll do it, and I'll make sure it gets a good show in the paper. I have emeritus status, you know'

"Do you remember Michael?"

"Most certainly; and before you ask, I know the story, Robert. Your father told me what had happened. He wanted to make sure that nothing appeared in the paper. He was the company's solicitor, and so he had influence with the proprietors, but if he'd been any man off the street I'd have done as he asked. It is not the function of a newspaper to pry into the private grief of any family."

He pushed himself up slowly from his chair, and walked over to a bureau beside the bay window of his bungalow. Skinner looked out through the lace curtains; the day had begun brightly in the east, but now the sky was overcast by grey cloud. It was Mother well as he remembered it.

Mr. Falkirk fumbled around in his desk, until he found a thick, well-thumbed reporter's notebook, and a fountain pen. A flash of memory came back to Bob from his copy-boy days as he watched the old editor resume his seat; he always wrote in green ink. "Just give me the basics," Mr. Falkirk instructed; suddenly there was a professional tone in his voice. "I know your family background well enough. What was your brother's full name?"

"Michael Niven Skinner; after my grandfather."

"Age?"

"Fifty-six."

"He'd have been educated at Knowetop Primary and Dalziel High, wouldn't he?"

"Yes. He played rugby for the school, and he won the English prize in his sixth year."

"Thank you, I'll mention both of those. He wouldn't have had far to walk to Dalziel," Mr. Falkirk grunted as he made the notes, 'since your house was just across the road, in Crawford Street.

"And after that," he continued, 'he was awarded a place at Sandhurst; that's right, isn't it?"

"Yes. He went straight from school. I was only about eight then,"

Skinner mused. "I remember him coming home on leave, with this wee swagger stick." He winced inwardly, but declined to mention that he had often been beaten with the same stick.

"Where did he serve, after he was commissioned?"

"At home, initially, then Germany, and finally Honduras; he saw action there."

"Yes. I remember your father telling me that it had a telling effect on him. He resigned his commission after that, didn't he, and came home?"

"Yes."

"But he couldn't settle down, could he?" the old man probed, gently.

"No. He was a lost and troubled soul."

"I know. I used to see him hanging around Mother well Cross with his cronies, going in and out of the Horseshoe Bar, or into the bookmakers' across from my office, and I used to grieve for your poor parents. I'll gloss over that part of his life, don't worry. I'll just say that he moved to… Where was it again? I only knew from your father that he was committed for a while."

"Gourock. He spent the last thirty years of his life in a Jesuit hostel in Gourock, overlooking the Clyde." Bob felt the great sadness grip him again.

"And how did he die?"

"We don't know for sure yet. His body was found in Perth on Saturday; he had been in the river. The police there are treating his death as suspicious, for the moment, pending post-mortem findings. He managed to find some sort of peace in Gourock, he managed to find true friends, and he lived there in what passed with him for happiness, until someone from his past turned up and lured him away."

"My, but that's awful. Do they know who this person was, the one he went away with?"

"No they do not, Nicol; or, rather, we do not. But you can be damned sure we're going to find out." Skinner looked across at the veteran.

"Those cronies you mentioned; can you put names to them?"

"I'm sure I can. Let me see, there was Cammy Winters and Willie Day, our printing press men, and wee Benny Crainey, and Waggy Roughhead … they called him that because of the way his head bobbed when he walked.

Then there was Jim Fletcher, the ex-policeman, and Pat Smith, the bookie's son."

"Are they still about the town?"

Mr. Falkirk scratched his chin. "Let's see. Cammy and Willie are dead; I know that. So is Fletcher. Benny and Waggy are still around, but they're old men now and no threat, I'd say to anyone. Pat Smith sold his betting shop as soon as his father died and went off to Canada with the girl who used to work behind the counter. He left his wife more or less penniless. If he ever comes back her brothers will do for him; a rough lot they were."

"Does the name Skipper mean anything to you?"

The old man frowned with the effort of recollection. "Skipper?

Skipper? Yes, of course," he exclaimed. "There was Skipper

Williamson. Do you not remember him? He was a foot baller played for Mother well, in the reserves mostly, unless they had a lot of injuries."

Skinner sent his mind scanning through the line-ups of early nineteen-seventies football teams. "Centre-half?" he asked. "Good in the air, but not too great on the ground?"

"That's him. I think his real name was Cecil; but everyone called him Skipper after they made him captain of the reserves. He liked a drink too, but not in the pubs. The foot ballers used to go to the Ex-Servicemen's Club. They thought it was more discreet. And come to think of it, that was another of your brother's hang-outs."

"Is he still around?"

"Very much so; but he's not in Mother well any more, other than at home games, in the hospitality box he keeps at Fir Park. He was a part-timer, and had a good job in the steel works so he was able to save up all his football money. Like a lot of players in those days, when he retired he bought a pub, the old Gaslight Bar in Windmillhill

Street. He refitted it, changed the name to the Bluenose Lounge, and attracted all the Rangers fans in the town. Since there are far more of them than there are Mother well supporters, he made a fortune. So he bought another old pub, in Wishaw this time, and did the same again.

Eventually, about fifteen years ago, he sold both places to one of the big brewers, and bought a hotel. He's done very well in that too, I hear."

"Do you know where?"

"Pitlochry."

Skinner felt a tiny chill ripple down his spine. "He won't find many bluenoses up there," he murmured.

"Oh, he isn't after that crowd any more. He's gone up-market. These days his clients are fishermen."