The walk to the Central Library in Wellgate filled McBride with an unexpected sadness. It took him only four minutes but, in half that time, he experienced the kind of feelings that had made him want to leave the town in the first place.
For half the population it was boom time. They earned good money in the new industries that had replaced the spinning and weaving of the jute that had once been imported from India and Bangladesh, occupied fine houses and holidayed abroad, sometimes twice in the same year. Their offspring attended either of the two expanding universities that were beginning to acquire international reputations.
But, alongside the throng of students who strode through the city centre to lectures or coffee shops, knowing where they were going for the rest of their lives, there were other young people with less to fill their time, less to look forward to. Skimpily dressed girls with pinched faces pushed baby buggies when they should have been attending school. Instead they were adapting to motherhood at the age of fifteen. They wandered aimlessly with one hand on the buggy and spoke to their clones on mobiles held in the other – all of them contributing to the statistics that made Dundee the teenage pregnancy capital of Europe.
The largely unidentified fathers of the tots gathered in groups in the shopping centres, their acne, tattoos and earrings making them indistinguishable from each other. The only time the mothers and fathers apparently got together was to share a needle or produce another occupant for the baby carrier. Few of them worked or ever would.
Except for the phones, it had been the same kind of mind-numbing existence for their parents. Most of those in the prams were assured of an identical future. In anybody’s language, it wasn’t going to be much. So much change, yet so little.
Dundee had a heart as big as a football pitch but it ticked the poverty and deprivation boxes every time. Nobody took the blame and only the brain-dead believed the adolescent baby-makers were truly responsible for their plight.
When he walked among them through the shopping centre on his way to the library, McBride felt the sense of injustice he had forgotten he had for his fellow Dundonians. Maybe it was his conscience about the lopsided forms of life in his home town that was inexplicably coaxing him towards the belief that there might be a different kind of injustice taking place. He was beginning to feel like a missionary.
Was this what all of this was about – trying to compensate for some kind of guilt trip at leaving them behind? he asked himself. He forced images into his mind of himself cycling alone along a hot Mediterranean coastline, an easy breeze at his back. It was his usual technique for dispelling uncomfortable thoughts.
The local studies section of the library was almost empty, save for three student types earnestly making notes from a tower of books in front of them and a prematurely elderly woman who’d come in out of the cold.
‘How can we help you, Mr McBride?’ The female librarian was neither so pretty that you’d remember nor so plain you’d forget but, because of the size of her breasts, no one was ever going to describe her as ordinary. Her name badge, sitting above the more than ample chest, said she was called Elaine.
McBride was surprised by how she’d phrased her question. Even his old classmates would have had trouble recognising him after so long. Then he remembered that those who worked in libraries also read papers, especially when the news was about people who wrote books.
‘If it isn’t too much trouble, can you point me in the direction of the old, filed copies of The Courier?’ McBride replied, not sure if he should acknowledge the recognition or give her one of his practised lines. He decided to do neither and instead tried to smile modestly, an unfamiliar experience.
When he pored over the files moments later, he resisted the temptation to begin reading the news that had happened more than three years earlier. People had been known to spend entire afternoons devouring column after column of historic events when all they had wanted was to confirm what the weather had been on a particular day.
He leafed his way quickly through the dry, yellowing pages of the paper until he came to the issue chronicling the report of the High Court trial of Bryan Gilzean. It could not have been more ordinary and was exactly as he had remembered it when he had ploughed through a Courier of the same date many months earlier, in the Colindale branch of the British Library in London, when preparing the chapter about the killing of poor Alison Brown.
He read the report of the first day of the proceedings three times to be sure he had not missed anything and repeated the process for the second day. Unless you counted an unexpectedly risqué photograph of the winner of the annual Forfar Young Farmers’ Club beauty princess competition on the opposite page, nothing jumped, or even crept, out at him. He wondered if there was much point scrutinising the happenings of the third and final day of the decidedly routine trial of Bryan Gilzean but turned the pages to it anyway.
He was quite correct. There was nothing particularly enlightening to read there either. He was riveted, however, by what was absent. Removed from the report, which recounted in detail the finding of guilt and subsequent sentence of life imprisonment, was what he presumed from the layout had been a photograph of someone involved. Of much greater interest was another extraction. Cut from the body of the main text were several sentences from the middle of a long-winded testimony by a forensic scientist witness.
Both removals had been carried out with surgical precision and almost certainly by someone using a razor. There was no indiscriminate butchery or lack of regard for the rest of the article. Whoever had carried out the meticulous operation had gone well prepared for the task in hand. It was deliberate to the point of fastidious. The same result could have been more easily achieved simply by ripping the paper at the relevant section. That was what someone with less precise habits would have done.
McBride stared blankly at the page for a full five minutes, trying to make some kind of sense of what he had stumbled upon. Then, aware that his lack of movement was beginning to attract the attention of the now-bored students, he quickly flicked over a handful of pages, afraid his discovery might be shared by others.
Back at the reception desk, Elaine was also eyeing him suspiciously. In spite of his innocence, he experienced pangs of guilt and knew that, if the file was examined after his departure, he would inevitably be blamed for its defacement. It only made him feel more furtive and anxious to hoard his find.
He tried to appear casual. ‘Hi again. Thanks for that. Fascinating things, old newspapers – I could spend weeks here,’ he said with another attempt at a coy smile. He avoided adding the obvious ‘especially if you were here’. Instead, he tossed in what he hoped sounded like a conversation-making afterthought. ‘Do you get many folk in digging about in your files?’
She smiled back, trying to make the old joke sound original. ‘Nostalgia isn’t just a thing of the past, you know. It’s an endless procession, especially after your book with all the would-be Rebuses who have read it coming in to look up the facts for themselves. Some right dodgy types too. Did you get everything you wanted?’
McBride lied, ignoring another chat-up opportunity: ‘Absolutely.’ He wasn’t about to disclose the existence of the treasure trove he had unearthed, even if he hadn’t the faintest idea if it had any value at all.
Outside, sleet was swirling along the freezing corridor of Murraygate. The buskers had disappeared and the buggy-pushers without money hurried to God-knows-where.
McBride also moved quickly. He had urgent business in his old newspaper office.