they never keep it up. They go away and let the Thistle or the Thirds beat them when ye least expect it.’
‘I don’t mind so long as they beat the Rangers,’ O’Donnell replied nonchalantly, offering his mate a cigarette. ‘Here! But the polis are no’ that clever either. They get them but they don’t get the money.’
‘Ye’re right there,’ said O’Neill. ‘It says in the paper there’s thirty thousand pound still missing. But the Bhoys has got youth on their side, that’s mair nor the Rangers have. You can see it in the paper there for yourself.’
O’Donnell looked at O’Neill’s paper.
‘Funny,’ he said. ‘It was just the same wi’ the Ibrox robbery. Forty thousand it was they didn’t get. But I’d never take the Bhoys in my coupon.’
‘Oh naw, neither would I,’ said O’Neill. ‘And then there’s Napper Kennedy. Maryhill. They got him in Dublin but they never got the money. Oh naw, I’d never take them in the pools. Ye canna trust them.’
‘They got some of it did they no’?’ said O’Donnell. ‘Somebody left a suitcase in the left luggage. It was his brother wasn’t it in the Central Station?’
‘Aye, they got five thousand,’ said O’Neill. ‘Nothing much. There was mair nor thirty thousand they never got yet. And there’s Charlie Hope, him that done the Partick bank. He never got as far as Dublin. They got him in his club in St Vincent Street. A bridge club he called it, some bridge club. But they got damn all else but the smell o’ his cigar. That was another thirty or forty thousand job. They boys have something to come out to so they have.’
‘Ach, they’ll never get near it,’ said O’Donnell. ‘What I say is, the Bhoys ought to spend money on a good inside forward. They’ve got a lot o’ good young yins but the young yins need an auld heid. They’ll no’ even get gaun to the lavatory without somebody on their tail.’
‘Ach, I don’t know about that,’ O’Neill shrugged. ‘They’ve got ways and means I’ll bet you. They don’t go to all that trouble for nothing. Where would ye get a good inside forward anyway? They’ve spent good money before this and it’s been money wasted. They’re better sticking tae what they’ve got.’
‘Trouble, aye it’s trouble all right,’ said O’Donnell. ‘Eight or nine years they get, every time. But you’re right enough I suppose, some of their best servants was players they got for nothing.’
‘Well, so what?’ O’Neill asked. ‘Would you no’ do eight or nine year to come out tae thirty or forty thousand?’
‘Aye, if I was coming out tae it,’ said O’Donnell. ‘But that’s what I’m arguing, they’ll no’ come out tae it. The minute they touch it they’ll be lifted.’
‘But they’ve served their time, haven’t they?’ said O’Neill. ‘They canny put them in jail twice for the wan offence.’
‘That’s murder you’re thinking of,’ said O’Donnell. ‘Robbery’s different. Sure they’d take the money from them, wouldn’t they? They’d never let them get away wi’ it. That would make it too easy. I’d do it myself for eight or nine year.’
‘But suppose somebody else has been keeping it to feed it back to them when they come out, ye know, in regular payments, quiet like.’
‘Who could they trust to keep thirty or forty thousand for them?’ O’Donnell asked derisively. ‘Would you trust anybody wi’ that amount o’ money if you were inside for eight or nine year?’
‘I don’t know,’ said O’Neill thoughtfully. ‘I’ve never had that amount o’ money. Maybe ye could if ye made it worth their while. What’ll ye have?’
‘Just as a matter of interest, how many is that now?’ O’Donnell asked.
‘It’s only yer second,’ said O’Neill. ‘You put the first wan up when we came in and that’s all we’ve had. Do ye want the same again?’
‘Naw, no’ the drinks, the bank robberies I mean ye’re talking about,’ said O’Donnell. ‘Anderston, Ibrox, Maryhill, Whiteinch, that’s four at least.’
‘Oh, there’s been a lot mair nor that,’ said O’Neill. ‘And tae think it’s a’ lying somewhere! They’re a’ inside and the money’s outside. Thirty thousand here and forty thousand there and the same again and mair. It would break yer heart just thinking about it.’
‘Aye, it would be a bit of all right finding even wan o’ they stacks. Will ye be up seeing the Bhoys on Saturday?’
‘Aye, ye could find it but would ye have the nerve tae spend it?’ said O’Neill. ‘Och aye, I’ll be there all right.’
‘I’ll see ye here at two o’clock then,’ said O’Donnell. ‘I like seeing the Bhoys when they’re doing well.’
‘But I’ll see ye before then,’ said O’Neill. ‘Ye’ll be in here the night aboot eight, will ye no’?’
‘Och aye, sure,’ said O’Donnell. ‘The Bhoys is drawing big money the now all right.’
‘Forty-five thousand there last Saturday,’ said O’Neill.
They took no more after O’Neill had returned O’Donnell’s hospitality. They were two steady working-men, and they went straight home for their tea after their second drink. They knew they would be back in the same pub in a couple of hours. And besides Glasgow’s plague of bank robberies there was the state of the Yards on the Clyde to discuss, and there was the Celtic football team to talk about. For two Glasgow Irishmen that was a topic as inexhaustible as the weather to two Englishmen.
CHAPTER TWO
That same evening, in the Bute Hall, the Glasgow University Choral Society and the University Orchestra gave a performance of Bach’s B Minor Mass. It was damned with faint praise by the music critic of the local paper, a sour Scotsman who complained of the acoustics and found the choir’s hundred and eight voices too light for the place and purpose. O’Neill and O’Donnell, like most people in the city, didn’t know the Mass was being sung by the University Choral Society, so they weren’t present. They were back in the Tappit Hen before the Sanctus. But among those who did attend the Bute Hall was the unwitting hero of this true narrative, a culture-hungry teenager who had failed in his eleven-plus examination and come to life at sixteen, just after he left school. He was working as a packer in the Scottish Cooperative Wholesale Society in Nelson Street, but he knew he deserved something a lot better. He went about his daily chores with a dagger of bitterness against a system that had refused him a higher education just because he didn’t happen to pass an examination when he was only twelve. He tried to educate himself. He went to the public library every night and brought home books on philosophy, psychology, economics, and the history of art from the cave-paintings to Picasso. He found his pleasure in the very act of borrowing them. When the girl stamped the date-label and filed the title-slips with his tickets he was sure she admired and respected him. Nobody else in his unjust position would have had the courage and intelligence to borrow such books. He had always to take them back before he had time to read them, but he felt that even having them in the house was something. To see Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason on the kitchen dresser alongside the first volume of Marx’s Capital was a great consolation to him. You never knew who might come in and see them. It only
