That evening the Runner ran a special edition and the news went humming into the south about the fight in the Royal Mile, pitched battle between unemployed and police, how the Reds had fought the bobbies with bottles, battering them from their saddles with volleys of bottles: would you credit that, now, the coarse brutes that they were? The poor police had just tried to keep order, to stop a riot, and that’s what they’d got.

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The Reverend Edward MacShilluck in his Manse said the thing was disgraceful, ahhhhhhhhhhhh, more than that, a portent of the atheist, loose-living times. Why hadn’t the police called out the North Highlanders? … And he read up the Runner while he ate his bit supper, and called in his housekeeper and told her the news, and she said that she thought it disgraceful, just, she’d heard that a poor old man was in hospital, dying, with his breast all broken up: would he be a policeman, then, would you say? The Reverend MacShilluck gave a bit of a cough and said Well, no, he understood not—Ahhhhhhhhhhhh well, we mustn’t worry over much on these things, the proper authorities will see to them. And gave the housekeeper a slap in the bottom, well-fed, and said Eh, Pootsy, tonight? And the housekeeper simpered and said Oh, sir—

Bailie Brown, that respectable Labour man, was interviewed and was awful indignant, he said that he fought day in, day out, the cause of the unemployed on the Council, none knew the workers better than he or the grievances they had to redress. But what good did this senseless marching do?—the Council had to impose the PAC rates the National Government laid down for it, you could alter nothing for a three or four years till Labour came into power again. The unemployed must trust the Labour Party, not allow itself to be led all astray—And he shot Mr Piddle out on the street, in a hurry, like, he’d to dress for dinner.

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Lord Provost Speight was found in his garden, stroking his long, dreich, wrinkled face; and he said that this Bolshevism should be suppressed, he put the whole riot down to Communist agents, paid agitators who were trained in Moscow, the working-class was sound as a bell. If they thought they could bring pressure to bear on the Council to alter the rates of the PAC, by rioting about in Royal Mile, they were sore mistaken, he’d guarantee that—

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Duncairn’s Chief Constable said it wasn’t true the police had run, they’d just given back a wee till reinforcements came and by then the crowd had dispersed, that was all. No, they’d made only one arrest so far, the well-known agitator Trease. And the old man who had died in the hospital had been struck down by one of the rioters—

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And the men came back to their homes in Footforthie and Paldy Parish and Kirrieben, some of them walking and laughing, some glum, some of them half-carried all the way, with their broken noses, bashed faces, it made a woman go sick to see Peter or Andrew or Charlie now, his face a dripping, bloody mask, his whispering through his broken lips: I’m fine, lass, fine. Oh God, you could greet if it wasn’t that when you did that you would die….