‘I’ll have to find somewhere else to eat now!’ he lamented to the bus-stop standard, and tutted to the night air at the nuisance of it. He felt himself wronged and humiliated. After the way she had mentioned her brother he would have to disappear for good so far as Sophy was concerned. He had made a mistake.
‘Ach, maybe she was right,’ he thought generously arguing against his fabricated grudge, for he took a pride in always seeing at least two sides to any question. ‘Maybe it was a mistake to offer her money. But I was desperate. I should have kept it till after.’
By the time he was speeding home on the bus his brain was empty. It was tired of fretting about Sophy and the absurd failure to seduce her. The stranger drifted in to fill the vacuum.
‘Oh, dear! There’s him to worry about!’ he remembered in misery. ‘He’s a menace, he is! I wonder where he’s got to.’
Stumbling on a rhyme he brooded about a poem in which a stranger was a danger. He thought out the first two lines.
Within life’s vale of tears I face one danger
That makes my blood run cold, a questioning stranger—
But he couldn’t go on. His headache began to bother him again, his stomach quivered, turned, tied itself in painful knots. He was frightened again. Sophy’s brother and the stranger merged into one cloud darkening his future, disturbing his peace of mind.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mrs Phinn’s daily duties as a school-cleaner were in two spells. She went in at six in the morning before the school opened and worked till a quarter to nine, and she went back at four o’clock in the afternoon when the school was dismissed and worked till six in the evening. She did it with a grudge. She hated being a poor widow who had to do a menial job for a few shillings to pay her way, and a hardup way it was. She resented being under the eye of the janitor for clocking in in the morning and clocking out at tea-time, because she despised him as an interloper. He would never have got the job if her husband hadn’t been found dead in the cellar the day after his brother was killed in a car-crash on the Glasgow–Edinburgh road, the notorious A8. And he didn’t strike her as being a janitor in the true tradition. He wasn’t like her husband, serious, clever and experienced. He was a flippant, scruffy, inexpert little man, always calling in a plumber or a joiner for jobs her man would have done himself as a matter of course. And he knew next to nothing about janitor’s stock or janitor’s requisitions. He could never say, as her husband had said in all truth, that although he was only the janitor he was just as important to the school as any headmaster. Her husband knew his job. This fellow didn’t. He didn’t even know his place. He was chatty with the headmaster and familiar with the cleaners.
‘Well, with some of them,’ she complained to Percy, not that he was listening. ‘That Mrs Winters in particular is never out of his room. I don’t see how she can be doing her job right, the time she spends sitting in there drinking tea. They think I don’t know. She’s some widow, that one Made up to kill. Out at six in the morning with her powder on thick and her lipstick on like a chorus girl. I don’t know what he thinks he’s up to. She’s no’ as young as she makes out to be. Her hair’s dyed for one thing. And he’s got a wife of his own anyway. She calls him by his first name. Imagine that! None of the cleaners ever dared call your father by his first name when he was on duty. But this little upstart never wears a hat. Your father used to polish the badge in his hat every night. He looked the part. He knew how to hold himself. He knew how to speak to cleaners. But all these things is dying out now. Everybody’s equal. It’s all wrong.’
She crossed to the main gate at six o’clock the morning after her son had kept his chastity and her body trembled with longing for the sleep the alarm had broken. Yet it was a fine summer morning, the sky above the tall tenements was blue and unclouded, and the pigeons were already talking to each other in the high roof of the sandstone school. She grudged feeling it was good to be alive after all, but she felt it, and her awakening senses granted to her weary body that it was better to be up and doing on such a lovely morning than lying in a lazy bed. She was just coming really awake, approaching the gate, when a man at the corner of Bethel Street and Tulip Place whistled to her. She was affronted. She was wearing old stockings, her bare head showed her greying hair, and anyway six o’clock in the morning, even if it was a lovely morning, was no time for a man to be accosting a woman. Her head reared and her small thin body stiffened, dignity and alarm fighting for control of her. She glanced obliquely at the whistler, just to see what kind of man he was. He came quickly towards her, beckoning her over anxiously. She stood still and waited. She wasn’t going to walk to any man. Let him come to her. The janitor would hear her if she screamed.
‘Mrs Phinn?’ he asked civilly.
She didn’t deny it.
‘I’m the man that drove the car,’ he said. ‘You know, Sammy’s car.’
She looked at him hard. She didn’t believe in ghosts at any time, certainly not at six o’clock on a summer morning.
‘He was killed,’ she said. ‘They both were killed, Sammy and the man that was driving him.’
‘Aye, on the Friday, but I mean on the Thursday. It was me that drove the car on the Thursday, that’s what I mean, on the Thursday night.’
He smiled wisely to her, showing two yellow fangs, but she was more taken by a pink line from his nose to his jawbone, the scar of a razor-slash.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’m sorry,’ she answered, her head up and back from him as if he was a bad egg she had just cracked.
‘Who are ye kidding, missis?’ he complained, not so civil now. ‘You know damn fine what Sammy was up to the Thursday night afore he was killed.’
‘He was up to no good if I know him,’ she snapped. ‘He always was up to no good.’
‘He was up to a lot of good that night,’ the stranger smiled again. ‘And he saw your man on the Friday morning afore he went to Edinburgh. You know that, don’t you?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t,’ she snubbed him. ‘I can assure you my man wanted as little to do as possible with his brother even if they was twins.’
‘Did Hamish no’ tell you what he did with it all?’ he kept at her.
‘All what?’ she asked impatiently. ‘I’ve got my work to go to, I can’t stand here wasting time talking to you, when I don’t even know who you are anyway.’
‘I’ve told you who I am,’ he said, his hands out with the palms up. ‘I’m one of Sammy’s crowd. It was me drove the car, and I got nothing for it. No, he tells me to wait, just wait. It’ll be all right in a month or two. Then he goes and gets killed and here’s me still waiting. Somebody must know. You must know. Because Sammy saw your man right after it.’
‘I assure you I don’t know,’ she insisted, very dignified with him, talking with a bogus accent to let him know she was a respectable woman who knew nothing of her criminal brother-in-law. ‘I can assure you I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’
She looked towards the gate and wondered if she could run that far and get into the school before this strange man assaulted her.
‘Don’t give us that,’ he said roughly, his palm lightly under her elbow, ready to clutch her if she moved. ‘Youmust know. Look, Sammy was coming back from Edinburgh when he had that smash, wasn’t he? And he’d been to see the jelly-man, hadn’t he? Don’t argue. I know. And he gave him fifty quid on account, but that was in fivers from another from another bank. So he’s still waiting too. The bloke with him that was killed, he went inside with Sammy, but he had nothing on him when he was killed. There’s nobody had nothing. So where is it? It’s a hell of a lot of money to be lying about.’
‘If you’re trying to insinuate that my