This poem was the result of an extraordinary conversation on a windswept St Andrews beach - to understand it fully I guess you had to be there....
A hard man called Dexter McAlpine
(a self-styled hood from Dundee)
Was reading The Scotsman one morning
When a photo made him spill his tea.
The headline read “Journalist
Missing!”
And the face in the picture below
Was someone that he had “done work”
for
In St Andrews not 3 days before.
As he read further into the story
“Our Dixie” (as Dexter was known)
Let facts in his head come together
and he let out an audible groan.
Dixie knew that the man had been
digging
up dirt on a gangland “event”.
He'd written up all of his findings
and a package to Dixie was sent.
He'd wanted the stuff to be hidden.
The instructions to Dixie were plain.
“Put it somewhere that no-one will
find it
But where you can get it again.”
So Dixie had taken the package
And hidden it well, so he'd thought,
In St Andrews bus station's left
luggage,
in a locker that someone else bought.
But here this mad journo was missing
And the main thing that worried Dix now
Was that gang members kidnapped the
pressman
And would link him to Dixie somehow.
In panic he tried to think clearly.
The evidence he must get back
And dispose of it properly this time,
before the gang followed his track.
An early trip up to St Andrews
With no one around, plotted he,
Then gather up all the damned paper
And dump it this time in the sea.
So next morning off went Our Dixie.
The evidence bag was retrieved
And carried down hill past the golf
course,
where into the sea it was heaved.
Dixie stood at the wall of the seafront
Watching papers float off on the tide
Then, trying to act nonchalantly
He walked to the beach, where he spied
Two men at the top of a sand dune,
A heavy load weighing them down.
They threw the sack off the high
sand dune
Then headed off back up the town.
Our Dixie stood frozen in horror,
Mind racing with what it could mean.
Two men. Empty beach. Missing
pressman.
Heavy sack. Breakfast time. Murder
scene?
What to do? Where to go? Had they
seen him?
Were they looking for him? Did they
know?
Dixie ran from the beach in a panic -
What to do? How to act? Where to go?
Dixie boarded the bus at the station
And headed back home in a state
Where he packed all his clothes in a
holdall
Then left the house by the back gate.
No one know what became of “our
Dixie”
But the headlines the next morning read
That a journalist who had been missing
Had been found on a beach. He was
dead.
