Monday January 7 th 2008
Stevie is in sight. I worked my way through the black hole that is local authority bureaucracy and discovered that the licensee for The Lame Duck was one Stephen Mailer. He may or may not be the owner but there was an address for him and I scraped enough to jump a bus and pay a visit.
He lives in Bishopbriggs on the north of the City. It is a real two day camel ride by bus and when I got there he wasn’t in. His home is a terraced house that doesn’t suggest he is a pub entrepreneur of note. I hung around for an hour or so but to no avail.
I decided to try again in the early evening in case he was working — so I duly stretched a cup of coffee to breaking point in the nearby ASDA and went for a walk — in the main to take my mind off the fact that I had no money for food.
Around seven I headed back to Stevie’s house but it still showed no signs of life. I thought about leaving a note but decided against it. The beating has sparked up my warning radar.
I headed back to the hostel and got the young internet geek to find me Stevie’s phone number on the web. This was done for free — no cigarettes — just the threat of bodily violence.
Gordon Brown
59 Minutes
Thursday January 10 ^th 2008
So Stevie exists, is alive and well and running a pub in the nether regions of Easterhouse. I phoned him two days ago and he agreed to meet in town. I suggested the Mitchell Library — to avoid the embarrassment of meeting in a pub or cafe and not having the cash to buy a drink.
I’m not big on libraries. My reading tends to be The Sun and the Daily Record and if I’m in the mood for intelligent debate I dip into the Herald. I’ve probably read six books in my entire life and most of them were forced down my throat at school. As such the ‘Mitchell’ was a bit of a wonder to me.
I waited for Stevie in the old section — a grand Victorian affair that was built when libraries were almost places of worship. High vaulted ceilings, grandiose frontage and an entrance to grace a palace.
Stevie arrived bang on time. A tall slim man with hair that looked like it had gone by the time he was thirty. He wore a pair of battered jeans and a sweat top with the words Strathclyde University emblazoned across the front. It looked old. A university degree and he was a career puller of pints. That doesn’t make him a bad person but university was a whole world away from my upbringing and I always envisaged it churning out the future leaders of the free world — people who rarely say — ‘Will that be all?’ after each sentence.
We found a table and slumped into two hard back chairs. His eyes were red. Drugs or lack of sleep — take your pick?
I opened up by handing him Martin’s letter. He looked at it suspiciously. As would I given its state after all these years. He read it with care and then handed it back to me.
‘I haven’t seen Martin since Christ left Govan.’
I nodded, waiting for him to open up a little but he stayed quiet.
I asked if he knew why I’d been left a pint. It sounded dumb.
‘It’s got fuck all to do with a pint. I wanted nothing to do with it back then. But they threatened to do some damage to my mum. Can you believe that — MY MUM. So I agreed. Take this and I’m off.’
‘Who are they?’
He blanked the question and reached into his pocket, pulled out a key, dropped it on the table and was up and off before I could speak. I grabbed the key and chased him out of the building but he broke into a run, sprinted to the roadside, leapt into an old VW Beetle, locked the doors and blanked me as he pulled away.
I watched the car merge into the traffic and when I lost sight of it I opened my hand to look at the key. It was a small brass Yale type with a few serial numbers on one side. Other than that it had nothing to indicate what it was a key for.
One mystery after another but on this occasion I know someone else that might be able to help.