The Long Glasgow Kiss Read Free Page A

bad news of the worst kind.
    When we turned off the road and headed up a narrow farm track, I started to think that the news was about to get worse. I even found myself casting an eye over the car door handle, reflecting that at this speed jumping from the car wouldn’t be a break-neck job. Getting caught by Twinkle and his taciturn chum, though, probably would be. Willie Sneddon was the kind of social host to become piqued if you declined his invitations: once I’d started running, if I wanted to hang on to my teeth, toes and maybe even my life, I’d have to keep running until I was back in Canada. We jolted over a pothole. I calmed down. It made no sense that Sneddon had anything unpleasant planned for me other than his company, which, in itself, would fill my unpleasantness quota for the month. I had done nothing to offend Sneddon or either of the other two Kings. The truth was, I had tried to avoid doing work for them as much as I could over the last year.
    I decided to sit tight and take my chances.
    The farm track ended, as you would expect, at a farm. The farmhouse was a large Victorian granite job, suggesting a gentlemanly sort of turf-turner. Beside the house was a huge stone barn that I guessed was not being used for its original purpose, unless it was home to an equally gentlemanly breed of cattle: the two small windows in its vast flank were draped in heavy velvet that glowed ember-red in the night and yellow electric light shone from under the heavy wooden barn door.
    Twinkletoes and Happy Harry the driver conducted me from the car to the barn. I could hear voices coming from inside. A lot of voices. Laughter, shouting and cheering. Twinkle pressed an electric bell push and a peephole slid open as we were checked out by whoever was on the other side.
    ‘I’ve never been to a milk bar speakeasy before,’ I said cheerfully to my less-than-cheerful driver. ‘Does Sneddon have an illicit buttermilk still in here?’
    He replied by lurking menacingly at my side. Twinkle pressed the bell push again.
    ‘Maybes we shou’ try da udder door,’ I said in my mock-New York gangster voice and smiled. It only served to confuse Twinkletoes and deepen the menace of his companion’s lurk.
    I had half expected the doorbell to be answered by a heifer in a dinner suit. As it turned out, I wasn’t far wrong: a bull-necked thug swung open the door. Stepping across the threshold was like diving into a pool; we were immersed in a humid fug of cigarette smoke, whisky fumes and sweat. And the faint copper smell of blood. A simultaneous wave of noise and odour-heavy warmth washed over us: men shouting in anger-edged eagerness, the odd female voice shrill and penetrating. The barn wasn’t exactly full of people, but they were elbow-jostle crowded in a circle around a raised platform upon which two heavily muscled men were beating the bejesus out of each other. Both were stripped to the waist, but they wore ordinary trousers and shoes rather than boxing gear. And no gloves.
    Nice, I thought. Bare-knuckle fighting. Unlicensed, unregulated, illegal. And more than occasionally fatal. I had never really understood the need to pay to watch a bare-knuckle fight in the West of Scotland. In Glasgow particularly, it seemed to me redundant, like asking a girl out on a date in the middle of an orgy.
    Twinkletoes put his hand on my shoulder and I nearly buckled under the weight. ‘Mr Sneddon says we was to get you a drink and tell you to wait till he was ready.’
    A girl of about twenty with too much lipstick and too little frock stood behind the crepe-draped trestle table that served as a bar. Unsurprisingly, she had no Canadian Club and the Scotch I took as a substitute had the same effect on the lining of my mouth that I imagined it would have on paint. I turned back to the fight and took in the audience. Most of the men wore dinner suits and the women were all young, showily dressed, and anything but wife material. The look of the men