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‘Look, pal, dae me a favour, will ye? See that hankie on the table?’ He pointed with his head. ‘Could you see your way to . .
.?’
    His pinched and battered face was grubby with tears of self-pity. I picked up the hankie and dabbed at his cheeks and round his eyes. I even let him blow into it before piling it delicately back
on the table. The things I do for a story.
    ‘Would you recognise them again?’
    ‘Naw. Balaclavas.’
    ‘Local accents?’
    ‘One was, but the other was a Teuchter.’
    I stared at Docherty, my mouth suddenly dry in apprehension. Call me Ishmael . Surely not? I added some last notes to my pad and left him cursing his fate and the loss of honour between
thugs and hoodlums.
    I needed to think. I jumped on a tram outside the infirmary. We rattled and swayed down the quiet streets through the empty city centre. Everywhere was closed except the kirks and they
didn’t need my sceptical presence this morning. I got off at Jamaica Bridge and turned along by the river. It was bliss to walk in the sunshine down by the Clyde. Or it should have been. The
path was deserted apart from a pair of old winos taking their own Sunday communion.
    I searched my flexible conscience. I wasn’t too upset at such barbaric come-uppance to a loan-shark enforcer. Docherty was the sort of guy who had no qualms about breaking someone’s
kneecap for missing a single payment of a debt at a scalding interest rate. He’d not be making any collection visits any time soon. Not unless he was wheeled round in a barrow.
    But it might not have been the first such incident. There had been a late special from the Daily Record on Friday night which had some of the hallmarks of the attack on Docherty. It
concerned a would-be razor king trying to emulate his prewar legends by inflicting a small reign of terror in the Calton. It sound like the putative razor boss had been run over by a combine
harvester, so extensive were the gashes in his own head. The story mentioned two men, in balaclavas.
    I pushed the thought down but in a way it wasn’t so strange. Summary justice was well understood and expected in the West of Scotland. There was an unwritten sliding scale for criminal
offences which avoided paperwork and court time and all that pre-trial nail-biting for the accused. In the case of childhood misdemeanours these plenipotentiary powers were delegated to the nearest
adult – family member or total stranger. Ring the door and run was a high-risk gamble if you were the fattest and slowest in a gang. Or pinching apples. A street urchin caught with his jumper
stuffed with Granny Smiths in the vicinity of the mother tree could expect a cuff on the lug, especially from the owner of said apples. The urchin in question took it as a calculated risk in his
line of business and made no objection other than to run greeting to his pals who’d evaded the fell and horny hand of justice. It would certainly not have crossed his or her mind to complain
to his maw or paw, knowing with absolute certainty that it would simply earn him another skelp.
    Glasgow constabulary had another level of powers altogether, which varied according to the individual polis and the criminal activity. The good citizens of Glasgow, and perhaps more crucially,
the less good, had to take into account a particular officer’s innate fondness for violence as well as his state of mind at the time of the encounter. Knowing for example that PC McBride had
just come from another bust-up with his wife, or that the hound on which PC Fraser had wagered his pay packet had succumbed on the home stretch to the packet of Woodbine fed to it by a bribed
handler, was essential to gauging the potential degree of physical assault. Villains caught in flagrante with the takings from a chip-shop raid knew that the arrest would earn them a severe
truncheoning as a sort of pre-trial warm-up.
    But this assault on Docherty – with a crowbar, for pity’s sake – to discourage