The Long Glasgow Kiss

The British Empire, the most avaricious piece of land theft since Genghis Khan saddled up a pony, was a remarkable thing. What made it particularly remarkable was that it had been carried out by the British, probably the most apologetic race on the planet. I always imagined them as some kind of impeccably well-mannered, latter-day Vikings, frightfully embarrassed about all the raping and pillaging. I suppose my interest in the globe-spanning collection of Raj, colonies, dominions, mandates and protectorates lay in my being very much a product of it: I was born in Glasgow but shipped off with my folks when I was still a baby and Canada was still ‘the Dominion’ as far as everyone was concerned. Then, after twenty-one summers, the ‘Mother Country’ of which I had had no direct contact, or even recollection, suddenly and urgently needed my assistance. Four thousand miles away.

And now, sixteen years on, I was living in the Second City of an Empire on which, despite classroom assurances to the contrary, the sun was most definitely now setting. For a century and a half, Glasgow had been the Empire’s industrial heart. But the War had screwed all of that up. Britain had ended the conflict all but bankrupt: if the United States had not come along in 1946 with a close on four billion dollar-loan, then the sceptr’d isle would have gone bankrupt. Now, former enemies were fast becoming new competitors in shipbuilding and heavy industry. Things were changing fast in the world. They were changing faster in Britain. And fastest in Glasgow.

Not that you would have guessed it from the activity in the docks as I drove past them. It was ten-thirty in the morning and already hot. I had both the Atlantic’s windows rolled down, and as I drove past the quays the sound of metal being hammered, clashed, seared and cut rang dull but loud in air so muggy and thick with grime you could have strained it. It was as if the temperature was being increased by the activity itself.

To my left a forest of cranes jostled at the water’s edge, swinging ceaselessly, loading and unloading docked ships or supplying vast sheets of heavy-gauge steel to the yards. I drove on past the huge red-brick dockside bonded warehouses, five storeys high behind tall fences. I parked on the street and went to the gatehouse and asked where Alain Barnier had his offices. The gateman was the usual retired cop with the usual I-couldn’t-give-a-fuck attitude, and the best I could get out of him was directions to some other smaller shipping offices where they might have a better idea. It took me half an hour of asking around before getting a pointer to Barnier’s office. By the time I got down there it was after eleven.

As Jonny had said, it was more of a shed than an office, one of a rank of semi-cylindrical Nissen huts, like a row of Sequoia logs half sunk into the earth. The sign above the door said Barnier and Clement Import Agents. I knocked and went in. As soon as I did, I could see that this was no front but a genuine working office: there was the kind of ordered chaos that’s impossible to fake. A counter separated the main body of the hut from the reception area. There was a push bell on the counter and next to it a paper spike piled high with impaled shipping bills; there were three desks behind it, half-a-dozen filing cabinets and a woman.

The woman was about five-one and dressed in a businesslike grey suit that strained a little at the waist and bust. She had a pale round face and black hair coiled in a perm so tight and unyielding it could have withstood an A-bomb test. She had a small thin-lipped slit of a mouth that she had tried to flesh up with red lipstick.

‘Can I help you?’ she asked, coming around from behind her desk and to the counter. She stretched the thin lips in a weary, perfunctory smile.

‘I’m looking for Mr Barnier.’

‘Is this about the key lan?’ she asked.

‘The key lan?’ I frowned. ‘What’s a key lan?’

She ignored me. ‘Mr Barnier’s not here at the moment. Did you have an appointment?’

‘No. No appointment. When will he be back?’

‘You’ll need an appointment to see Mr Barnier.’

‘My eyes work just fine without an appointment. When will he be back?’

She had large, round, green eyes set into her round face and she used them to stare at me as if I had been a congenital idiot. ‘An appointment …’ She came close to the kind of syllable by syllable pronunciation favoured by Twinkletoes McBride.

‘The sign says Barnier and Clement. Is Mr Clement here?’

‘Monsieur Clement,’ she said, correcting my pronunciation, dropping the hard ‘t’ at the end of the name and sounding it out as ‘Clemmong’ in the way that only the Scots can murder the French language, ‘does not work here. He is based in our French office.’

‘I see …’

There was the usual hinged lid arrangement on the counter and, swinging it open, I stepped through the counter and onto her side. The round green eyes grew rounder.

‘You’re not allowed in here …’