Pilgrim Soul by Gordon Ferris Read Free Book Online Page A

Maybe I was getting squeamish in my old age.
    I called Shimon Belsinger and arranged to see him and tell him how conclusively the case had been closed. One week, from start to finish, perpetrator found, justice meted out, payment on
result.
    Late morning we met in a café on the Byres Road. Shimon hunched over a milky tea, listening intently, stroking his great beard.
    ‘You’ve done well, Brodie. My colleagues will be pleased.’ He reached inside his overcoat and pulled out an envelope. ‘This is your fee and your bonus.’ He smiled.
‘You should have taken your time. Earned a bit more.’
    ‘Miss Campbell made the same point. But that’s how it goes at times.’
    ‘This man. The Jew who killed the thief. Do you know his name? Is he at Garnethill?’
    ‘Galdakis, Victor Galdakis. DI Todd says he’s Lithuanian. He has a flat in the Gorbals. So maybe he goes to Isaac’s synagogue.’
    ‘His business?’
    ‘Stallholder. That’s all I know.’
    ‘We should find him. We should thank him.’
    ‘I suppose so.’ It seemed a wee bit tasteless to applaud a frenzied killing, but I understood the broad sentiment.
    ‘Dr Tomas will know him. Tomas studied at Vilnius. He knows all the Lithuanian Jews. The ones that made it here.’
    ‘Just warn Tomas not to creep up on him.’

EIGHT
    I n the afternoon I went back to the day job with plenty of material. This would please Sandy Logan, my temporary editor standing in for the injured
Big Eddie Paton.
    Eddie was out of hospital now and convalescing at home, but when I’d visited him last week I’d found him threatening a part-time return. It was a remarkable turnaround. I’d
doubted we’d ever see him back. He’d lost several stone in weight and, with it, his bounce. And nom de plume:
Wee
Eddie from now on, bless his ink-stained heart.
    I felt irrationally guilty; the self-styled Glasgow Marshals had been after me that day, back in September. The Marshals were a wild gang of vigilantes recruited from the ranks of jobless and
homeless demobbed soldiers. Fizzing with a sense of injustice, they’d been framed for several vile murders and thought I held the key to proving their innocence. But I’d been elsewhere
the day they stormed the newsroom and took it out on Eddie Paton’s poor wee head.
    Ever since, I’d done my best to support Sandy and Eddie by cranking out a decent crime column every edition. All the time in the absence of my mentor, the doyen of crime journalism, Wullie
McAllister. Wullie was another casualty of the summer of madness; he’d got too close to the wicked creatures who’d committed the murders and framed the Marshals. He’d been
abducted and beaten to within an inch of his life and lay, mouldering and vacant, in the Erskine convalescent home.
    It had been a torrid summer, right enough.
    At my desk I bashed out an article on the violent death of a thief. At breakfast tables all over Glasgow, it would raise a chorus of sanctimonious variations on
that’s what ye get
for
. . . It might take their minds off the front page about the Jewish refugee ship
Lochita
off the coast of Palestine. I wondered if Isaac and his son had come to verbal blows over
it. Some four thousand rioting illegal immigrants had set upon our poor bloody soldiers, and one of our boys had died. How would the War Office explain that to his mum?
    I slid carbon copies into Sandy Logan’s hands. A short while later he wandered over to drape his long limbs over the filing cabinet by my desk and peer down at me. He took his pipe out of
his mouth and pointed at my draft.
    ‘A thoughtful piece, Brodie. Even-handed. One might say equivocal.’
    I nodded. ‘I hoped our readers would be similarly torn. But I doubt it. It seemed harsh punishment for nicking some trinkets.’
    ‘The ultimate price. I think this needs a follow-up.’
    ‘How?’
    ‘Go and interview the man, this Lithuanian. Bring us remorse, rage, sorrow, pride . . . bring us
emotion
, Brodie. We’ll run