Craig Robertson - Snapshot

Winter realized that the woman wasn’t really talking to him any more, she was looking at the floor reminiscing. Her mind was probably full of images of two wee boys playing together, best pals, all their lives before them.

‘Grahamston, Grahamston. It was all he talked about. As if it could bring Kieran back. As if…’

She stopped mid-sentence, remembering for the first time in a few minutes that her youngest son was dead and suffering the shock all over again. Tears welled up in her eyes and Winter felt a complete bastard. He had to ask one more question though, despite the fact that he had a good idea what the answer was.

‘Did he tell you what that was all about, Mrs McKendrick. Did he say where he meant by Grahamston?’

‘No. He never told me. Neither of them ever did. It was always this silly secret they had since they were wee. I’d hear them mentioning it but they’d always shush up. I think they were worried their dad would give them trouble over it whatever it was. Do you know what it was all about? Did Ryan ever mention it to you?’

‘No, never,’ he answered truthfully. ‘He never mentioned it to me.’

It was a half-truth though. A lie in other words. He was pretty sure he knew what Grahamston meant and if he was right then he was about to do maybe the stupidest thing he’d ever done in his life.

Mrs McKendrick nodded at him sadly, flicking the smouldering end of her fag into the ashtray below.

‘You can always ask him when he gets home, I guess,’ he murmured.

‘Eh? Yes, yes I can. When he gets back from sea. I’ll ask him. Is there anything else, Tony, because I’ve got to make Suzanne’s tea. She’ll be in soon and she’ll be hungry.’

‘No, nothing. I’ll get out your way.’

Winter got to his feet and she led him to the front door, her eyes welling up with some new memory. It was an awkward moment as they both hesitated, unsure what to do. He offered an uneasy handshake which she began to reach towards before changing tack and taking another half-step closer and giving him a brief hug.

‘It’s always good to see the boys’ old friends again,’ she mumbled. ‘You take care of yourself now.’

The door shut behind him and he made his way down and out of the close as quickly as he could.

There were two Grahamstons. One in Falkirk, about twenty-five miles away, with a railway station, a crumbling football stadium and a retail park. The other was right underneath Glasgow and over 100 years away. It was possible that the McKendrick boys were always talking about running off to Falkirk together but that didn’t seem very likely. Vegas it wasn’t.

Winter remembered when he was wee, Uncle Danny telling him about the secret village that existed underneath Glasgow. Grahamston used to be a thriving community, a couple of thousand people living in a commercial and industrial hub right at the heart of the city. All roads led to Rome but in Glasgow they all went through Grahamston. It stood on the main east-west route and then later it was on the main north-south link as well. The roads to all the main towns of central Scotland, and from the Forth and Clyde canal to the ships at the Broomielaw, they all went through Grahamston.

It was at the crossroads of Union Street and Jamaica Street with Argyle Street and it was one of the busiest in Europe. Some Glaswegians will tell you it was the busiest intersection in the world at one time. There was only one street in Grahamston itself, Alston Street, and it ran the length of the village. The first permanent theatre in Glasgow, the Alston Street Playhouse, was built there in 1764, although technically it stood just outside the then city boundary.

Alston Street had a sugar refinery, warehouses, carters’ yards, pubs, houses and three hundred shops all crammed between Mitchell Street and Waterloo Street. It was famous for its breweries and that endeared it to many a man in the empire’s second city. It was some place, alright.

Winter remembered Danny showing him this old map one afternoon in the Mitchell Library. It was Glasgow in the late 1700s and to his young eyes it was amazing. This tiny city mapped out where there ought to have been the giant metropolis that he lived in. Some of the streets that he knew so well were still there and that just made it all the stranger. Buchanan Street and the High Street cutting great swathes south while one big street ploughed east to west. It started in the east as Gallowgate Street then became Trongate Street and, finally, Argyle Street.

He could remember the map like it was yesterday. He’d said it looked like had been soaked in tea and Uncle Danny had laughed. There were hardly any houses and so many fields. The big street that ran to the west, ended at a place that was spelt out in capitals as GRAHAMSTON. It had even fewer houses than the middle of the city and he’d asked Uncle Danny if it was still there.

‘Well, wee man,’ he said to him. ‘There’s a very interesting question. Some say it is and some say it isn’t.’

Winter’s eyes had grown large with wonder and Danny promised he’d tell him all about it on the way home. He had him hooked on every word as he told him how the village had grown from a row of thatched cottages to this important place, of all the people that lived there and how, with a wink, he told him of the vital role of its breweries in the life of the city.

But then came growing industrialization and Grahamston simply got in the way. Glasgow was getting bigger and bigger and people wanted to travel to and from it to the rest of Scotland and beyond. The Caledonian Railway wanted to build a huge new station to service the trains and the people. In the late 1800s they began building Central Station, moved the people out of Grahamston and the demolition crews in. They constructed the giant station right on top of the old place. Some say they knocked down Alston Street, some say they didn’t.

Danny told him how some people believe that Grahamston was still there, right under the platforms and the arches of Central Station. They say that Alston Street is intact, just the way it was the day they moved the people out. He spun this marvellous tale, making Grahamston out to be Glasgow’s version of Pompeii, a place frozen in time by the intervention of progress rather than molten lava. What got him was that there were still two buildings from old Grahamston actually standing in modern Glasgow, the Grant Arms beside the Heilan’man’s Umbrella and the Rennie Mackintosh Hotel in Union Street, the one that used to be Duncan’s Temperance Hotel. Makes you think, if they are still there…

Mind you, Danny also told him how people said that there was still silver in the shops because the shopkeepers were moved out so quickly that they didn’t have time to take it all away with them. When he was eighteen Winter realized that was bollocks but when he was eight, he truly believed.

He never forgot the story of Grahamston. It was easy to see why boys like Rory and Kieran would be drawn by it, the sense of mystery and adventure, the lost silver and the thought of Alston Street still standing, waiting to be explored. The temptation to run away to Grahamston must have been huge.

From the instant the name fell from Mrs McKendrick’s lips, it reminded him that Central Station was where the first of the shootings took place. Cairns Caldwell shot down within a couple of hundred yards from the Rennie Mackintosh Hotel and right above the tracks of the station, right above the old village. And the man that fired the shot had simply vanished as if he’d dropped into the bowels of the earth.

There was little doubt in his mind. Grahamston was where he’d find McKendrick. The only real question was whether he wanted to find him.