Bitter Water by Gordon Ferris Page B

route had been set up, or
the old one reopened under new management. It meant I could sit on the two letters and the Gibson piece until I’d done more research. Not to mention talking things over with Wullie on Monday
night.
    First, I put Elspeth Macpherson on the scent. Elspeth was the Gazette ’s literary critic and by default the resident researcher and all-round fount of wisdom. Elspeth hid her
first-class honours in Classics from Edinburgh behind a curtain of frizzy blonde hair, glasses and an aura of aloofness. Even Big Eddie was wary enough of her to avoid swearing in her presence.
Mostly. Elspeth saw me as a kindred spirit. Though my own degree was a mere 2.1 in Modern Languages, it put us in a different educational league from just about everyone else on the Gazette .
Reporters and editors came up the hard way from tea-making to typesetting. Sandy Logan was a self-taught master sub-editor. The basics of grammar had been hammered into him at primary school in
Govan, but the rest came from thirty years of understudying his predecessor, and having for his pillow Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage .
    It had been a long while since I’d been able to discuss Camus or Kafka with anyone else without sounding like a pretentious swot. But at the same time I knew Elspeth had the edge on me
with her well-hidden photographic memory. A rare bird was our Elspeth.
    It took her five minutes.
    ‘The first is easy: “and they were judged every man according to their works.” It’s from Revelations 20, verse 13. The second: “they also have erred through wine,
and through strong drink are out of the way”, took a bit longer. It’s from Isaiah 28 verse 7.’
    ‘How did you find it, Elspeth? A concordance?’ I asked looking for the reference book.
    She swung her hair behind her neck. ‘Strong’s? He’s good, but I prefer my own research and cross-references. Besides, I knew straight away it was either in Leviticus or Isaiah.
It has their style.’
    ‘Style?’
    ‘The original Greek. As different as Graham Greene and John Buchan. The English translations in the St James are good but they lose some of the tone.’
    ‘Right. Thanks.’ I backed away, feeling I’d just been with the Oracle of Delphi.
    I scribbled some notes for the Gibson attack, referring to the two letters and linking it with last week’s piece on Docherty. But I didn’t run it past Eddie, not
till I’d seen McAllister. I finally left the office an hour after the pubs were open. I found oor Wullie in his usual place in the high-backed corner seat of Ross’s. He’d never
formally annexed it with a personalised brass plaque, but he was as firmly in possession of it as any habitué of a kirk pew. It was in the order of things. Similarly, it was apparently my
round. Cup-bearer indeed.
    I was standing at the bar waiting for the barrel to be changed. Two old boozers were clinging to the brass rail next to me, ruminating.
    ‘If the polis cannae catch them, then Ah don’t care wha gi’es them a skelp.’
    ‘But you cannae have folk taking the law into their ain hands. Where will it a’ end?’
    ‘Why no’? It’s what Sillitoe’s Cossacks did afore the war. That sorted oot the Billy Boys. But things have slipped back. Ah don’t care wha does it, or how, if it
gets thae scum aff the street . . .’
    It was as if they were heralds for the letter-writer, the self-styled Marshals. Things were moving fast. The old boys rabbited on in this vein for a while, intimating that there was a new
sheriff in town, a hard man, a crazy man, a potential folk hero of our times. Somewhere between Rob Roy McGregor and a Texas Ranger. I almost leaned over and said I might have met the man in
question, and he was not the full shilling. Finally their conversation returned to the well-worn speculation that Celtic’s new goalie was a Protestant plant.
    I looked across the fug-filled room to the table where my drinking pal was waiting, still thirsty