Pat McIntosh - The Fourth Crow

‘Good day to you, skipper,’ he said as the mariner splashed ashore bare legged, hauling on a rope. Tam checked, glanced at him over his shoulder, and went on to moor his boat, taking deft turns of the rope about a pair of timbers hammered into the sandy shore. Socrates ambled over to examine his method. ‘I need a word wi you.’

‘Nothin’ to stop you,’ said Tam. He was a chunky, fairish man of middling height, weather browned and competent with deep-set hazel eyes, not a man to mix with in a fight Gil reckoned. Now he caught a second rope flung to him by a youngster in the boat, elbowed the dog aside and cast it round another pair of timbers.

‘You mind me? Gil Cunningham, Blacader’s quaestor.’

‘Aye.’ Tam splashed back into the water and the boy assisted him to hoist one of the canvas packs onto his shoulders.

‘You took a cargo down the water night afore last.’

‘Did I now?’ said Tam unhelpfully. He tramped past Gil, to lower the pack to the grass well above the tideline. Socrates followed him, and began a thorough inspection of the stitched canvas coverings.

‘Wi my man Euan as crew,’ Gil added. This got him a sharp look, but no answer. ‘A sack of grain, two cheeses, a barrel of apples.’ Another sharp look as the mariner passed him on the way back to the boat. ‘All with the St Mungo’s seal on them, to be sold in Dumbarton. What I need to learn from you, man, is who charged you to sell the goods, and who brought them to you the night afore you sailed.’

Tam plodded up the shore again with a second well-stitched pack, and set it down by its fellow. Turning to face Gil he studied him for a moment.

‘Very likely,’ he said. ‘But why should I tell you sic a thing? Supposing I ken the answers.’

‘What, you’d take delivery o a boatload wi no idea who handed it to you, nor who your principal might be?’

‘Aye, Tam,’ called the man in the next boat along the shore. ‘You right, man?’

‘I’m right, Dod,’ said Tam. He looked at Gil again, snorted, and set off to fetch another bale. The boy in the boat, enough like him to be a close relation, watched anxiously.

‘Or did he never tell you who the principal was?’ Gil prodded. ‘It was Barnabas the verger, wasn’t it, who brought the cart down in the night?’

‘If you’re that certain,’ Tam paused beside him, a box balanced on his sturdy shoulders, ‘why are you troubling to ask me?’

‘Was it Barnabas?’

‘Him that’s deid? Aye,’ said Tam reluctantly. ‘It was. He never tellt me his name, mind, but I asked a bit. I’ll no do business wi folk wi’out a name.’

‘And his principal?’

The mariner snorted again, and trudged up the slope with his burden. Lowering it to the grass where Socrates waited, he straightened up and eyed Gil directly.

‘I’d got his name, I made shift to do wi’out his superior’s.’

‘So there was a superior? Did he never name him?’

‘He tried to tell me he was alone in it,’ said Tam, ‘but I kent better. It was someone at St Mungo’s, that was clear enough, he’d never ha got all that stuff away on his own.’

‘What stuff?’

‘All that I took down the water and sellt for him.’

‘There was a lot, was there? How often did you take a boatload down?’

Tam shrugged.

‘Every two-three nights? Aince or twice a week, mebbe.’

‘And what did you do with the proceeds?’

‘Och, I gied it back to him,’ said Tam with the air of a scrupulous man. ‘It was St Mungo’s goods, after a’, I’d never rob Holy Kirk.’

Gil paused a moment at this utterance, but contrived to keep his face straight.

‘You never thought that Barnabas might be robbing Holy Kirk?’ he suggested.

‘What, and him one of the vergers?’ Tam stepped down the grassy slope and made for the boat again. ‘Is that all you were wanting fro me?’

‘What will you do,’ Gil asked deliberately, ‘with the coin you took in Dumbarton yesterday for the last lading? Barnabas is dead, as you said. When was he to come back with another cart-load? Is that when you should ha handed over the coin?’

The mariner made a great play of getting another pack onto his shoulder, of plodding up the slope with it through the drizzle, of setting it down with care and lining it up beside the other bales. Socrates, growing bored, paced off along the shore to investigate another boat. Gil waited. Eventually the man straightened up and looked at him.

‘He’d ha brought me some more the night, most like.’

‘Where would you meet him?’

Tam bent his head, scratching at the back of his neck, looking from side to side as he did so.

‘If you’ll bide,’ he said at last, very quietly, ‘till I shift this load, and the boy goes to advise Mistress Veitch her goods is come home, we can take a stroll on the Green.’

Gil glanced at the sky. It was not much past Terce, he reckoned; Otterburn would be expecting him to report on the death in the pilgrim hostel, but this was more immediately useful. He nodded, whistled to Socrates, and sat down on the damp canvas-covered box.

Once the boat was unloaded and the boy had returned, panting, from notifying Mistress Marion Veitch that a stack of goods had been brought upriver out of her husband’s Rose of Irvine and waited for her on the shore, Tam ordered the boy to watch them, jerked his head at Gil, and set off up the bank of the river, under the near arch of the bridge, towards the wide expanse of Glasgow Green.

‘If our luck’s in,’ he said conversationally, ‘the washer-women’ll be abroad. Aye good entertainment, they are.’

‘So where did you meet the fellow and his handcart?’ Gil asked. The mariner halted, looking about him.

‘Aye, you see,’ he said, pointing. ‘There’s the washerwomen, by the mill-burn. They’re a great draw.’

He strolled in the other direction, away from the gathering of men round the three or four huge washtubs, in which the burgh’s professional washerwomen, skirts kilted high above bare muscular calves, tramped the wet linen clean and exchanged edged pleasantries with their audience. Gil followed him without comment, and eventually the man halted on the bank of the river, looking morosely down at the rippling water.

‘You canny sell goods in Dumbarton market,’ he said. ‘No if you’re no an indweller or pay yir fee at the gates.’ Gil, who was well aware of this, kept silence, and after a little Tam went on, ‘Course they’s nothing to prevent a couple o freens striking a bargain, and if the one o them’s an indweller and can sell the goods on, it’s nothin’ to do wi the other fellow.’ Gil continued to preserve silence, and the mariner prodded at the grass of the riverbank with his bare foot. ‘I’ve aye done it,’ he said. ‘Goods that willny shift in Glasgow, items they’re short in Dumbarton. Me and a couple o the lads has a good trade going. Ye ken?’

Thus appealed to, Gil made an agreeing sound in his throat. Tam picked a dandelion out of the tussocky grass with his toes, and stared down at it.

‘I’m no saying I’ve done a thing that’s agin the law,’ he said defensively. ‘This chiel fetches up in Maggie Bell’s tavern, oh,’ he paused, reckoning, ‘after Candlemas, it would be. Wi a tale o a poke o meal he wants to shift, and having no licence to sell in the burgh he’d as soon it went elsewhere. So we came to an accommodation, and I dealt wi it for him, and when I gied him his share o the coin he said, how about another couple o pokes? And so it went on for a week or two or more, him bringing me the goods by night and then he’d be back a night or two later for the takings. And then,’ he paused, scowling at the small stook of dandelion leaves he had gathered, ‘and then around Lady Day he’d a barrel o apricocks. I thought it a strange thing for one o the vergers to get his hands on, but I took it into the boatie, and it was only the next morn when me and my freen in Dumbarton was prigging over the price that I seen the St Mungo’s seal on it.’