Chapter 6: Interrogation

Emer woke when I pulled into a filling station close to Edinburgh at about six in the morning. While I filled up, she helped a groggy Aine to the toilets and then settled her under the blankets on the back seat where the kid snuggled into sleep. My wife was in the driving seat when I returned from my own toilet break while I paid for the fuel. I had grabbed some snacks and two cups of coffee so she pulled forward and we sat sipping the scalding liquid.

“Where are we and where are we going?”

I explained that I had taken the eastern route from Skye to avoid meeting any of the Scions returning from Wales and that we were heading for Whitby so I could talk to Bert.

“You still think we’re in danger, don’t you?”

“I believe that the danger will only end when I defeat your father once and for all. I’m so convinced that I don’t want to go home until I can at least contain him. How do you fancy a little family holiday after we talk to Bert; just the three of us in a nice hotel with a beach for Aine and a heated pool for me.”

Emer put her coffee cup in the holder between the seats and drove forward only to stop after about a hundred metres.

“Which road do I take?” We both grinned when I gave her a road number and pointed in the right direction.

There was very little traffic, but she had to pay attention to the route with many intersections leading to the Scottish Capital City. I only spoke to give advance notice of the junctions. It took almost half an hour to reach the straight road south and my wife marked the reduction in stress by leaning over and giving my thigh a squeeze. She thought that a holiday was just what we needed and asked what had put the idea into my head.

“I was really hoping that we could repeat what happened the night you escaped; do you think we can reach such heights of passion again?”

I was smiling as I said it, hoping she would take me seriously but ready to turn it into a bad joke if she reacted badly. Her reply took us deeper than I intended: she asked, very seriously, if I loved her. I suddenly knew that I had to be totally honest in my reply.

“When I found out about the pills, I’d have said that I hated you. Then Aine made me promise that I would rescue you and bring you back to our family. That started a cascade of thoughts and memories; the first thing I realised was how glad I was that she wanted you with us. Then I realised that in a part of me that no one else sees and I seldom visit, I loved you. I began to understand that the reason I stand back is to save myself in case it turns out that you care for your father more than for me or our daughter.”

Emer was driving with one hand while she gripped my leg with the other. She heard me out but as soon as I finished speaking, she gave my thigh a final squeeze that left a bruise.

“Oh Jack, if you only knew. I knew I needed saving, and I knew almost at once that you were the only man who could do it. You and Aine are my life.”

She wiped a tear from her cheek and put both hands on the steering wheel while she concentrated on her driving. I was having difficulty holding back the tears myself and I thought that I should defuse the tension in the car, in the interests of road safety if for no other reason.

“So does that mean that another night of sexual excess is on the cards?”

This time she punched my shoulder, but she laughed.

It wasn’t until we were a few miles from Whitby that the subject was raised again. We had been talking about where we might go for our holiday and that seemed to lead us into talking about how Aine was settling in her new school. We were talking about making her bedroom en-suite now she was growing up; she woke up at that point, eager to impose her views on her stuffy, out-of-fashion parents. Fortunately, I spotted a hotel where we could eat breakfast, heading off a potentially acrimonious row between mother and daughter.

“Emer, I need you to tell me every single thing about your life including all the bad bits that you can’t bring yourself to remember.”

Aine had rushed ahead to make sure the hotel restaurant was open to visitors when I took the opportunity to warn my wife that she had some pain to face. Once we settled, my daughter demanded that I go through the whole business of saying where we were, why we were here and what we planned to do next. Aine was wildly enthusiastic about the idea of a holiday, suggesting that it was no more than her due since she had been wrenched away from her newly discovered cousins.

I waited until eight-thirty to phone my dad – and almost missed him. There must be more caravans per square kilometre around Whitby than anywhere else in the British Isles and I had no idea of the location where Bert had spent the night. It turned out that dad had stayed with him rather than drive back late at night. They had been grocery shopping this morning and dad was about to drive home when he stopped to answer my call.

It was after nine by the time we pulled into the car park of a wayside pub. Bert was sitting beside an older version of James and they both rose when Bert spotted the car and started towards us. Bert was grinning but Dad looked as nervous as I felt. They were still five or six paces from the car when Aine yelled out the back window:

“Hi Gramps, I knew it was you ‘cause you look just like Uncle James.”

The worried expression left his face to be replaced by a huge grin and a second later he was being throttled by his newly found granddaughter. As much to save himself from suffocation as affection, he hauled her bodily through the car window; she kept her strangle hold on his neck and added to his discomfort by putting a scissor hold on his waist that would have brought an instant submission in a wrestling match.

Dad freed his head enough to greet Emer still sitting in the driving seat. I had walked round the front of the car, and I now stood beside Bert waiting to be noticed. After that introduction it was impossible for any awkwardness to remain. Bert went inside to order more coffee and the rest of us returned to the table where the two men had awaited our arrival. On the journey, I had been reviewing my life to date so I could give dad a coherent picture when he asked.

He didn’t ask – at least, he didn’t ask then. It seemed natural to talk about the events that had led Aine and me to travel to Skye to rescue her Mum. Dad promised his help in almost the same words my brother James used. He knew most of the story as a result of talking to Shona and James after he arrived in Whitby with Bert. I took the chance to ask if he would tell me all he knew of Emer’s father and at that point dad made his first contribution.

“Why don’t you stay here and give poor Bert the third degree while I take my daughter in law and granddaughter back to meet her new grandmother. Practically all I know about Emer comes from your Aunt Jenny and she’s not the most reliable informant.”

“The only thing she’s been discreet about in her whole life was keeping your existence secret from me.”

“She means well, you know, and she’s been a good wife to my brother Jim. The one consolation is that she gets things wrong so often that I don’t believe a word she tells me. As far as I’m concerned Emer and I begin on a clean page and we’ll write our own story.”

Half an hour later, Bert and I had swapped coffee for pints but were still sitting outside the pub in warm June sunshine. The good weather we had been enjoying on Skye had followed us down, as James told me later when I phoned him. I made it clear that I intended to do everything in my power to destroy my father-in-law.

“I need all the help I can get and I’ve a strong feeling that you know more than anyone about the man – even more than his daughter.”

“I could have taken him down years ago but, by the time I realised what he was, I’d lost my chance. He and I go back a long way – a very long way – and some of the things I’ll tell you make me ashamed of myself even now.”

Bert’s Story

We were in the same class at school – and a right pair of scallywags we were, I can tell you. Birmingham in the fifties was no place for faint hearts. Our neighbourhood, like many others, was being overrun by Asians although many of them came from East Africa, escaping Idi Amin, the murderous bastard. These lads were ready to work for nothing, so we didn’t get a look in on paper rounds and Saturday jobs except with the bigots, and there were plenty of them.

Humph – that’s his right name, Humphrey, Humphrey Goldsmith – and me took the path of least resistance and joined our local gang. It was fairly new at that time and there weren’t all the elaborate rules that came later. In a way it would have been better if the rules had been clearer since it gave Humph ideas that got us into bother.

It was fine while we were still at school because all we got to do was run messages for the gang leaders and stand watch while they had board meetings on waste ground and street corners. Our speciality was shoplifting, especially from the Asian shopkeepers who seemed to be taking over every empty shop in the neighbourhood. We weren’t very good at it, to tell you the truth, but we didn’t need to be – if we were caught, the gang would threaten the shopkeeper, and he would forget about going to the cops.

It was after we left school and graduated to full membership that Humph began to take a critical interest in the way the gang was run. It was all right bullying little old men scared that they might be deported back to their home countries but bullying to keep the gang members in order just seemed stupid. Or rather, I should say that it was the stupid that ran the gang.

I’m not suggesting that Humph and me were intellectuals but we could easily see where the bully-boy mentality caused problems both with opposing gangs and with our victims. The kids stole stuff that we didn’t need or want, so we had to fence it to get some cash for ciggies and booze, which we did want. He always had the ideas but he would get me all worked up so I would blurt it out.

His first big idea won me a broken nose – you can see it’s squint if you look. I suggested to our ayatollah that we should charge the shopkeepers hard cash to stop the kids thieving from them. Even at that time it was probably an old idea in London, but we were well behind the times in Birmingham in the fifties. The response I got was: ‘Who are you to get ideas’ – thump!

“We’ve given them the chance,” Humph said, as he sat in emergency with me. “We’ll do it without them. There were three streets near us on the fringe of our gang’s territory. The butcher had just gone halal, and I think the only Brummie left was the barber. The scheme worked a treat: we collected from the shopkeepers and paid the local kids in ciggies to keep their thieving hands in their pockets.

It worked so well that the gang in the next territory decided to take us over and that led to a major battle between them and our lot. Like most wars it ended in a truce and, eventually an amalgamation of the two gangs. In the enquiry that followed, the whole blame was placed on Humph, who convinced me that I was also implicated.

We were tipped off and made our way to the lorry park where we got a lift to Carlisle. I don’t know about Humph, but I hardly knew whether we were north, east, south or west from Brum. Dropped on the north carriageway we next found ourselves in Glasgow. Humph made the tactical error of assuming that Brummies would be harder than Glaswegians, so we had to make another emergency departure.

This time we really hit the jackpot! We were on the first lorry load of sanitary ware that took the route to Kyle of Lochalsh. Skye was becoming a tourist destination, and they expected luxuries like indoor plumbing as standard. New bathrooms and toilets were being fitted as fast as the teuchter plumbers could plumb – which isn’t actually very fast. Lorries were despatched to Mallaig for the ferry crossing to Armadale but at an eye-watering price.

Big lorries couldn’t use the Kyle ferry – this was the days before the bridge, of course – but someone had the bright idea of offloading at a warehouse in Kyle and using smaller trucks for the final few miles to the building sites. Humph and me were on the first lorry and we picked up a day’s wages transferring the load to the new warehouse. That was the first time I drove a forklift – first time I saw one not in a picture. The owner showed me the controls and let me loose. No Health and Safety in those days!

It was after eleven in the morning when we were paid off and we wandered down to the pier, attracted by an argument going on close to the ferry. A Rolls-Royce was on the pier blocking the ramp while several crew members were standing shouting at a flower child. When we got closer, we could see that she was a genuine hippy complete with tie-dyed kaftan and turban.

It was hard to understand the accents of the locals and she was speaking so softly that we couldn’t understand what she was saying until we were about two paces away. She was telling the crew that it was their responsibility to drive the Roller onto the ferry; she point-blank refused to do the job and so, it appeared, did they.

Most of the onlookers were staying well clear of the combatants so when she looked round only Humph and I were within speaking distance.

“Twenty pounds if you’ll drive this heap onto the ferry,” she said, in the most aristocratic accent I had heard outside the cinema. It hardly needed the fluttering eyelashes or the seductive smile, but she deployed them anyway, with devastating results.

Humph got behind the wheel while she climbed in the back beside a man lying in the corner with a towel held against his mouth. I sat in the front passenger seat, and we purred onto the ferry. It took about ten minutes to make the crossing, at which point she instructed Humph to drive on using the speaking tube. She continued to direct us by remote control until she ordered us to park beside the garage in Broadford.

She exited the Rolls, took the keys from Humph and threw them, without looking, to a mechanic who scrambled to catch them.

“If you are looking for employment, I need a driver and a boatman; starting immediately.” She turned back to the car and told the man with the towel to come along at once. The mechanic handed me another set of keys as we followed her down a jetty where a small launch was tied up. I’d never been on a boat before, so I took a moment to study the layout. There was a steering wheel, a slot for a key and a button captioned ‘start’ so I became a mariner without further delay.