Phosphate Rocks Chapter 36: Empty Whisky Bottle with Hairy String

The hospital appointment is a routine check. Since John’s operation, shortly after retirement, the surgeon likes to keep an eye on him. A physician’s pride is at stake, and John doesn’t mind being a guinea pig for the medical students. He likes to watch their wee faces when they listen to him breathing, see the confusion that twists their lips and furrows their brows, the cold sweat at the temples as it dawns on them that they’ve discovered something awful, the fear that they are going to have to break bad news to him. 

Streptomycin³⁸ arrived at the end of the Second World War, just in time for John. A few months later and the TB would have taken the other lung as well. As it is, he can get by pretty well on half capacity, and who needs a full set of ribs anyway? 

The consultant chides him for bringing a bottle of whisky, reminds him that NHS staff can’t accept gifts and pretends that he’ll enter it into a charity raffle, before giving the standard spiel on the dangers of alcohol that both know will be ignored. 

John takes a bus to Torphichen Street, where Detective Inspector Rose Irvine is waiting for him in the police interview room. 

Unlike the gift John just gave the doctor, the bottle of Glenlivet single malt in the evidence tray is empty. The bottle has a string round its neck. About six feet of the stuff. Hairy string, brown and fuzzy, the kind that burns your hands if you let it slide through too fast, little fibres snatching at the flesh and worming their way under the skin. 

John picks it up and tells her what he knows. 

The whisky came from the bonded warehouse on Sally Street. Big Stu had an understanding with the night watchman. Every time there was a major movement – a lorry arriving from the distillery, a shipping container to be loaded for Brazil, six hundred bottles to be stacked and secured – a box of six would crash to the concrete floor and shatter, a breakage rate of 1 per cent, only to be expected. 

Overtime, the owners of the warehouse noticed that the breakage rate was not just about 1 per cent, but an unvarying exact 1.000%. When you drop a box of six you might expect the severity of bottle damage to vary. Sometimes one or two might break, occasionally three or four or five. But always six? The accountant became suspicious, insisting that any broken bottles be produced in evidence, which led to a roaring trade in recycled empties. 

Although Big Stu made a small profit on the sale of stolen whisky, he viewed it as a calling, more noble than mere theft. He had been much impressed by the 1949 Ealing Studios comedy Whisky Galore! and became the Robin Hood of the bonded warehouse, the Scarlet Pimpernel of Glenlivet, a rebel with a cause who provided a service to his fellow man. Why should South Americans glug fine single malts when there were hard-working Scotsmen who had never tasted their own country’s finest produce? 

Big Stu had a list. Every time he got the call from the night watchman that a delivery was imminent, Big Stu selected six names from the list and collected their money and empty bottles. A few days later he delivered the whisky. 

The delivery route was made complicated by John’s insistence on checking the breath and bags of those entering the factory. Being caught with alcohol on site was a sackable offence. This rule did not extend to the executive dining room where sherry, wine and brandy were served at lunch on special occasions. Nor did it cover the good managers who always turned up on Hogmanay to offer the shift workers a dram to see in the New Year. 

One law for the bosses, another for the workers. Various ingenious routes were devised to exchange contraband alcohol for money, but the simplest was the granulator conveyor. 

A long rubber belt connected the granulation plant to the packing unit at Salamander Street. The belt returned empty, apart from the occasional bottle of malt whisky. 

Big Stu would telephone the gatehouse before he sent something over. 

Blind Willy would put out the Tannoy call. In the daytime it had to be something anodyne so the managers in the office wouldn’t notice it, but specific enough so that the recipient understood the urgency. 

‘Granulation tractor driver to the stores, driver to the stores.’ 

At night, without bosses around to hear, the Tannoy call could be more playful. 

‘SS Cabinet Minister setting sail for Todday.’  

‘Captain Wagget requests assistance with cargo.’ 

The tractor driver would wait at the other end of the conveyor, catch the delivery, attach a long piece of hairy string to the bottle, and bury it beneath the mountain of fertiliser granules in the reject shed with the end of the string close to the surface, for easy retrieval. 

An important part of the shift handover between tractor drivers was to identify the position of these precious bottles. They couldn’t risk breaking the glass with the steel shovel of a bulldozer. The whisky never remained in place for more than a few shifts and the recipient paid the tractor driver a small fee to recover his booty. 

The drivers knew to avoid the other sorts of fertiliser amid the granules. Human fertiliser. This had never been a problem until the first female engineer came along.