But Glasgow was nothing if not a city of balance and fairness, and there was an ultra-republican Catholic, Protestant-hating part of Bridgeton too. The Norman Conks, the Catholic counterparts of the Billy Boys, had been concentrated in the Poplin Street and Norman Street part of Bridgeton. Their speciality, as well as offering the same skills for plastic surgery with open razors as the Billy Boys, was throwing Molotov cocktails made with paraffin or petrol at the marchers on the Twelfth. Or occasionally the odd ‘sausage roll’: human excrement loosely wrapped in a sheet of newspaper.
I sometimes wondered how Rio could compete with Glasgow’s carnival atmosphere.
As I walked through Bridgeton, however, there were no marching bands and little in the way of a carnival atmosphere. In fact, even on a pleasant summer’s day, I couldn’t imagine anywhere less festive. I certainly was glad I hadn’t brought the Atlantic with me. There were no other cars parked in the street in which MacSherry resided, and a knot of five or six children, faces grimy and feet bare, were playing maliciously around a streetlamp. As I walked past one block doorway, a man of about thirty stood watching me from beneath the brim of his cap. He was wearing a collarless shirt and a waistcoat, his shirtsleeves rolled up to expose forearms that looked woven from steel cable. He had his thumbs looped into the pockets of his waistcoat and leaned against the doorway, his heavy-booted feet crossed at the ankles. It was the most casual of poses, but for some reason he gave me the idea he was some kind of guard or lookout.
The only other person I passed was a woman of about fifty who emerged from a house further up the street. She was as wide as she was tall and dressed in a formless black dress. Or maybe it was just the body beneath that was formless. She had a headscarf tied tight around her head and her legs were naked, her stockings having been rolled down into beige bracelets around her ankles. She was wearing dark tartan slippers on her feet. Something had caused the skin of her legs to mottle a purplish red and I suddenly felt the need to foreswear ever touching corned beef again. She walked past me and eyed me with even more suspicion than the shirtsleeved sentinel I had just passed.
I smiled at her and she glowered back. And just when I was about to tell her how pleased I was that Dior’s New Look had at last made it to Glasgow.
I found the tenement I was looking for and climbed up the stairwell. It was the weirdest thing about Glasgow slums: you could have eaten your dinner off the flagstone stairs or the doorsteps of each flat. Glaswegians took an inordinate pride in cleaning communal areas — closes, stairs, entrances. There was normally a strict rota, and failure to have a sparkling doorstep or landing would result in the offending housewife becoming a social pariah.
The MacSherry flat was on the third floor. The landing was as spotless as I had expected, but there was some kind of unpleasant smell wafting about in the air. I knocked on the door and it was opened by a woman in her sixties who made the female I’d passed on the street look positively svelte.
‘Hello, could I speak with Mr MacSherry, please?’
The fat woman turned from me wordlessly and waddled back along the corridor, leaving the door open behind her. She tortured some vowels in quick succession, which I took to be ‘It’s someone for you.’
A man in his late sixties or early seventies emerged from the living room and came to the door. He was short, only about five-five, but he was compact and wiry with a heavy head topped with white bristle. There was something about him made me think of an older Willie Sneddon. Except Sneddon’s razor scar was delicate needlepoint compared to the criss-cross of ancient slashes on MacSherry’s cheek and forehead. Like Uncle Bert Soutar, this was a man whose history of violence was written all over his face, but in a different vernacular.
‘What the fuck do you want?’
I smiled. ‘I wondered if you could help me. I’m looking for information on somebody. Someone from the old days.’
‘Fuck off,’ he said, without anger or malice, and pushed the door shut. I stopped it by jamming my foot between it and the jamb. Old MacSherry opened the door wide and looked deliberately down at my shoe and then back up at my face. He smiled. It was a smile I didn’t like and I contemplated the ignominy of having the crap beaten out of me by an Old Age Pensioner.
‘Sorry,’ I said swiftly and held my hands up. ‘It’s just that I’m willing to pay for the information.’
He looked at my foot again and I removed it from the doorway.
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Do you know… or did you know someone called Bert Soutar?’
‘Aye, I knew Soutar. What’s it got to do with you? You’re not police.’
‘No, no… nothing like that. I represent a group of investors who have an interest in a sporting event. Mr Soutar is involved with this event and we’re just doing a check into his background. You see, Mr Soutar has a criminal record.’
‘You don’t fucking say.’ Irony was not his strong suit.
‘I do say,’ I continued as if I had missed his sarcasm. ‘Not that that is, in itself, a problem. But we’d like to know the kind of people we’re dealing with. Did you know Mr Soutar well?’
‘You said you was willing to pay for information.’
I took out my wallet and handed him a five-pound note, keeping a second fiver in my hand. ‘Maybe we could…?’ I nodded along the hall.
‘If you like,’ said MacSherry, and he stood to one side to let me in.
The living room was small. Cramped. But again surprisingly clean. A large window with no curtains looked out over the street below and there was a bed recess, a typical feature in Glasgow tenements, in one wall. The furniture was cheap and worn but there was the occasional item that looked incongruously new and expensive, and I was surprised to see a small Pye television squashed into one corner of the room. It had a set-top aerial sitting on it, its twin extendable antennae each stretching at a wild angle from the other. I understood MacSherry’s reluctance to let me into the flat: the mix of new and old was the difference between the legitimately owned and the knocked off.
The fat woman whom I’d guessed was MacSherry’s wife left the room. It was clear that business was often conducted here.
‘Are you a fucking Yank?’ MacSherry had a charming, welcoming manner about him. I guessed I wasn’t going to be offered a cup of tea.
‘Canadian.’ I smiled. It was beginning to make my jaw ache. ‘About Soutar…’
‘He was a Billy Boy. And a boxer. He fought bare-knuckle. Hard cunt. I know what this is all about. It’s about his nephew. Bobby Kirkcaldy. That’s your fucking sporting event, isn’t it?’
‘I’m not at liberty to say, Mr MacSherry. Soutar was a member of the Bridgeton Billy Boys about the same time as you, is that right?’
‘Aye. I didn’t know him that well, though. He was a mental bastard with a razor in his hand, I can tell you that. And with his fists. But then when it got all military, you know, when the Billy Boys started having morning drills and stuff like that, he fucked off. He hated fucking Fenians but he liked making money more. He was still boxing though. It was after he cut them coppers, that was him finished.’
‘I thought you said he’d left the Billy Boys?’
‘He had. This wasn’t a rammy. It was after a match, right enough, but he was breaking into a credit union. He had some fucking mad idea that the mounted polis would be too busy dealing with the rammy. But two coppers caught him in the back close of the building. From what I heard, Soutar got lippy with them and they was going to give him a bit of a doing. That was his biggest problem, too fucking mouthy for his own good. Anyways, he always kept two razors in his waistcoat pockets. The two cops made a move on him and he cut them both. Popped an eye on one. You seen the state of his face?’