At last I spoke. ‘Did Hugh know? I mean before you left him? I mean…’
She sat down. ‘Hugh and I were always having rows. Half of them were about you, Douglas Brodie, if you must know. He was drinking a lot. All that free stuff from the cooperage. We finally broke up and I met another fella, an older fella, Jimmy Hutchinson. His wife had died. I didn’t know I was pregnant. Jim and me got married. He was a good man. I always think he knew about Rory.’
I took out my cigarettes and we both took one. ‘Did you tell Hugh?’
She blew smoke into the air. ‘No. Sleeping dogs and all that. Then the bloody war came. The bloody Nazis took my Jim and they… well, you saw what they did to Hugh.’
‘When he came back, when you saw him again, did you tell him then?’
She scoffed. ‘There was nae need. The first time he saw Rory, he knew.’ She pointed at the photo.
I took my time working out how to ask her the next question. There was no easy way.
‘You don’t think, even though he knew he was Rory’s dad, that…?’
She said calmly, ‘That he did it to spite me? That it was some horrible, revenge thing? You should have seen them together, Douglas. And after, when Rory went missing, he was like a wild man. Worse than me, even.’
‘But why didn’t this come out at the trial, for God’s sake! It could have changed everything!’
‘You think so? You never saw those polis. They were going to get him no matter what. Besides…’
‘Besides what?’
She sighed. ‘Hugh didnae want it brought up. Said it wouldnae help and might look even worse for him. A father doing that to his own son. And how the Procurator Fiscal would spin the story, just like you were suggesting. And any road…’
‘And?’
‘He said I’d had enough. That I didn’t need bad things being said about me. And Rory shouldn’t have his name linked to his, if things went really bad. As if it mattered.’ Her eyes were filling again. ‘As if it bloody mattered!’
I let her dry her face. ‘What about the drugs? You knew about the heroin?’
‘Oh aye. But he was coming off that muck. It didnae really affect him. No’ like when he used to be fu’, for example. He just went calm and easy after he’d taken some stuff.’
‘So there was no time you were worried about leaving Rory with…’
‘With a junkie? Is that what you mean? No. It wisnae like that. Never.’
‘Fiona, did you ever know who gave him the stuff? Who was the dealer?’
‘Oh aye. Everybody kent that.’
I knew the answer of course.
‘Gerrit Slattery.’
*
I left the tenement and began walking back to Sam’s place. I left behind a great big pile of ‘if only’s’. But that way madness lies. Once we take certain turnings, once we make certain choices, there’s no way back to a time or a place or a person. We start down diverging paths and become changed in the process. Distance lends objectivity, but distorts perception. And then it’s gone. No turning back. The seventeen-year-old part of me would never be over the young Fiona. But the woman of thirty-four held no answer for me.
But would anyone? I know I wasn’t alone in this sense of dislocation. The war had ripped a great big hole in the continuity of all our lives. We look back with incomprehension at the time before. Like England viewed from France. Men were coming home to strangers, frightening children they’d never met. Five years of fighting alters a man’s perspective, hardens him or turns him to mush. Coming back to wives and lovers, how would they explain the night terrors and the daytime despair? How could they talk about it? The vocabulary was different and there were no translators. I was glad not to have anyone to burden.
Was I therefore being unfair to Fiona? Unfair to us? There had barely been a glimpse of the girl I knew, but in her way she’d been through worse wars than many’s the squaddie. Who was I to judge anyone who could still function, still hold her head up, living in a slum, with all that she’d loved torn or distorted? We owed each other some kindness for what we’d been. Maybe once all this had passed I’d take her out for fancy cakes and hot scones on her day off at Miss Cranston’s.
The other revelation was that all roads led to the Slatterys. But how the hell was I to get at them? I could just walk up to their big house at Bearsden and beat the door down, but I assumed they’d have boiling oil perched on the battlements to fend off intruders. Or even if they let me in, they were hardly likely to open up their black hearts to me and confess their sins. They knew they’d get no absolution from me.
I could do my pub crawl again and wait till I ran into the pair of blackguards that had thrown me to the fishes. That was certainly tempting. I had a score or two to settle. And with Samantha Campbell’s gun in my pocket, the sides were more evenly balanced. However, apart from the personal satisfaction of breaking the bastards’ heads open, it wouldn’t provide me with evidence of a stitch-up for Hugh’s appeal.
‘Can we use it?’ I asked a disconcerted Sam later.
‘Being the father neither proves nor disproves Hugh’s guilt. But if I’d known that the boy was his during the trial, I could have used it. Now, even if they believed her statement, it doesn’t basically alter the case against him.’
‘Surely they’d believe Fiona? Why on earth would she make that up?’
‘But why bring it up now?’
‘To save the father of her son from a hanging!’
‘It’s not a proof of anything.’
‘Don’t be so… so lawyerly! Wouldn’t they consider it impossible that a father could do that to his own son?’
Sam shook her head resignedly. ‘You’ve led a sheltered life, Douglas Brodie, if you think it’s too far-fetched for a father to abuse his child. The cases I’ve seen…’
In truth, I knew it too. As a copper I heard whispers in the street about certain families. You tried not to believe it. But in these overcrowded stinking dens, where three generations lived piled on top of each other, things happened that would turn your stomach. With his wife always pregnant, a goatish father with a drink in him is too easily distracted by a promising daughter. They operated like primitive tribes on the very fringe of civilisation, amoral and driven by bestial yearnings. No one wanted to believe it, and there was a silent conspiracy to keep it hushed up, as though the shame on our fair city was too much to contemplate.
But sometimes the cases were so bad they seeped into court. There the tragedies were brought steaming to the surface by a distraught daughter or a tortured son. They found it no use to cite scripture; the stories of Lot and his daughters, or Abraham and his wife-sister Sarah offered no precedent in the eyes of the Kirk or the Law. The red-eyed abusers were given hard labour by the courts and rougher justice by their fellow inmates. Even criminals had standards.
I mulled over what the appeal court judges would make of the revelation about Hugh and Rory. If Sam was representative of the sceptical judicial mind, they would have seen and heard everything in their time and wouldn’t be seduced by emotional appeals. I’d seen judges in action. They dealt with interpreting the law. It was nothing to do with justice, a term only lay folk believed in, like kids and the tooth fairy. My meeting with Fiona had edged me closer to being convinced of Hugh’s innocence, but the appeal court hadn’t danced all night with her at the Attic.