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THE DEEP DARK SLEEP

Craig Russell

Copyright © 2011 by Craig Russell

All rights reserved.

For my mother, Helen

PROLOGUE

Gentleman Joe Strachan, it would seem, had slept the deep, dark sleep for a long time.

Gentleman Joe had slept the deep dark sleep while I had been up to my knees in mud and blood in Italy; while the Luftwaffe had growled high above him on its way to rearrange Clydebank’s town planning; while Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had carved up Europe between them and had given an idea to Glasgow’s crime bosses, the Three Kings, about how they could do pretty much the same kind of carve-up with the Second City of the British Empire. The fireworks at Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki had also done nothing to disturb Joe’s slumber.

Even the constant toing and froing above him – the propeller churning of the vast Clyde-built ships or insolent tugs – had failed to stir him.

For the deep, dark sleep that Gentleman Joe slept was the undisturbed rest one only found at the bottom of the Clyde after somebody lullabied you to your final slumber with a solo for blunt instrument, tucked you up nice and cosy in some shipyard chains, and slipped you over the side of a midnight rowboat in the middle of the river’s deep channel.

But, as I say, I spent the war years as ignorant as everyone else about Joe’s repose. I just wish I had stayed that way.

CHAPTER ONE

I, for one, was someone for whom the whole idea of dredging up the past was particularly unappealing: being of that generation given especially colourful pasts courtesy of the little party thrown for our benefit in Europe and the Far East. My own history had been particularly gaudy, and I had to admit to adding more than a dash or two of extra colour myself over the years. I had once seen a movie about some guy who woke up in the middle of nowhere and couldn’t remember who he was or where he was from and this lack of autobiography troubled him immensely. Me, I would have given a lot to have had that kind of amnesia.

The dredging up of Joe Strachan’s past had been literal rather than metaphorical. The River Clyde must have been about the busiest waterway in the world, mainly because – wherever you were on the world’s seas – any luxury liner, cargo ship, warship, tub or rust bucket you saw bobbing past carried the mathematical probability that it had been conceived and born on the Clyde. And that meant that the riverbed along the navigation channels had continuously to be kept wide and deep by a constant grime-dark procession of scouring dredgers.

So when a tangle of skull, bones, a few rags and a gold cigarette case were hauled up in a conveyor bucket through roiled waters to the surface of the Clyde, then it really had been a literal dredging up of the past; a past that would have been best left exactly where it was.

Dredger crews on the Clyde were a pretty phlegmatic lot; they had to be. Their haul was mainly the oily, silty muck that clogged the bottom of the channels and had an odour to offend a dung beetle; but it also included everything from fossilized tree trunks and giant elk antlers from a long-inundated ancient forest, to bedsteads, pieces of ship’s engine, aborted babies in weighted Gladstone bags, dumped murder weapons, and anything else that could be jettisoned from a passing craft.

The late Mr Strachan’s were by no means the first mortal remains to be recovered from the Clyde and they certainly would not be the last. But there was a significant difference between the floating corpses retrieved from the surface by the Glasgow Humane Society and the City of Glasgow Harbour Police, and those brought up from the river bottom by the dredger crews; and that difference was all about intent. For a body to sink and stay sunk involved ballast, usually pockets filled with stones or a wrapping of chains. The bodies the dredgers brought up were the bodies that had been meant to stay lost.

Like Gentleman Joe’s.

I could imagine the scene: the dredger’s crew taking a moment to decide what to do as the still anonymous Joe beamed a bright skull grin at them from the greasy black mud of the bucket. There had probably been a debate about whether to toss the bones back into the river; there would certainly have been a tussle over the gold cigarette case. But my guess is that someone on that tub had been long enough in the tooth and had enough sense about him to think that the initials JS on a hunk of gold might just spell a lot of trouble. In any case, the decision was made to inform the City of Glasgow Police.