I nodded. Willie Sneddon was right to keep his meeting and dealings with Small Change quiet. ‘And did anything unusual happen recently?’
‘No.’ It was Maggie who answered. ‘Not that either of us knew about. But Jimmy played his cards close to his chest. He kept anything to do with business to himself.’ She paused for a moment. ‘There was only one thing … not worth mentioning…’
‘Go on …’
‘Someone left a box for him. A delivery.’
‘I remember that,’ said Lorna, frowning. ‘It was strange. A wooden box with nothing in it but a couple of sticks and a ball of wool.’
‘Wool?’
‘Yes,’ said Lorna. ‘Red and white wool all bound up together.’
‘Doesn’t sound significant,’ I said. ‘Did the police go through your father’s stuff again? I mean in his office?’
‘No. Why?’
‘I just wondered.’ I shrugged and sipped my tea. ‘Did your dad keep an appointment book at home?’
‘Why are you asking?’ It was Maggie who cut in, more than a hint of suspicion in her voice. The thing about suspicion is that it can be infectious and I found myself wondering why she felt the need to be cautious.
‘Like I said to you before, the police aren’t the most imaginative bunch. Maybe they didn’t think to check for an appointment book at his home.’
‘Jimmy didn’t need one,’ said Maggie. ‘He kept everything up here …’ She tapped a demi-waved temple. ‘He didn’t need an appointment book.’
‘That’s what I thought … Never mind.’
‘Do you think it would help?’ asked Lorna, without any of her stepmother’s suspicion.
‘Maybe. At least we would know who he had seen on the day he died.’ I decided to drop it. Maybe Maggie’s answer would be enough to get Sneddon off my back.
I stayed for over an hour. Or at least until I felt I had fulfilled my duty as consort to the bereaved daughter. Lorna saw me to the door and kissed me as I was leaving. It was a desperate kind of embrace and her fingers squeezed tight and hard on my arms. It made me feel sad. Sad because she really needed something from me and I really wanted to give it to her. But I couldn’t, because it wasn’t there in me to give.
Lorna and I had been in it for the laughs, nothing more. And that was the way our little diversion should have played. But now, with her father murdered and finding herself alone, she was looking for something that neither of us had signed up for.
She seemed to sense its absence and drew back from me. Something cold had formed in her eyes: a frost of realization and resentment.
‘Listen Lorna …’ I began.
‘Save it, Lennox,’ she said.
When I came out of the mouth of the drive, a car turning in was forced to brake. I waved my thanks but the driver ignored me, heading up the drive as soon as I was clear. He didn’t even look in my direction, but I took a long look at him. The car was moderately fancy, a nearly new, maroon Lanchester Leda or Daimler Conquest, polished to gleam like a sleek droplet of fresh blood. The driver himself looked pretty polished: he was driving hatless so I could see he was around thirty with black hair and a pencil moustache. Neat. Tailored, as far as I could see. I pulled up at the kerb and considered going back up to the house to see what he wanted. He wasn’t a cop. Too well-turned out and expensively carriaged. I got out of the car and walked a little way up the drive, ducking behind a bush to take a surreptitious look. He was at the door and I could now see I was right about his suit. It was expensive. He was tall, maybe a couple of inches on me, which was rare for Glasgow. Maggie opened the door and let him in. She knew him, that was clear and they both unconsciously took a look back down the drive, as if checking no one was watching. Or maybe he had mentioned our brief encounter at the bottom of the drive. They couldn’t spot me behind my euonymus camouflage and disappeared into the house. There had been something about the way they had greeted each other that lay somewhere between the intimate and the professional. Maybe they had some business together.
There was, of course, a limit to how surreptitious they were being: Lorna was still in the house. Unless. I had a less than charitable thought about my recently bereaved sweetheart and dismissed it almost in the same instant it occurred to me. No conspiracy here, Lennox. And even if there is, I told myself, leave it alone. You’ve been warned. And anyway, while there might have been a moral imperative to help bring Small Change’s killer to justice, I had paying cases to work on.
And I was never much one for moral imperatives.
CHAPTER FOUR
It was getting late but I thought I’d call into the Horsehead Bar for a snifter before heading home. The Horsehead had become my unofficial second office. At one time my main office, but recently I’d been trying to make at least a half-hearted stab at legitimacy and had been spending less time there.
When I arrived, Big Bob the Barman grinned at me. I grinned back. He was a good sort, Big Bob. I’d often wondered if he’d become a barman for the alliterative effect; that if he had been known as Fat Fred he would have become a fireman. Whatever Big Bob had been before his time behind the bar, he was a tough son-of-a-bitch now. So close to the war, there was a bit of an unspoken rule: you recognized other men who’d been through the mincer and you didn’t talk about it. You identified each other as a common breed, but you didn’t talk about it.
‘Well fucking well.’ Bob poured me a Canadian Club. ‘Where have you been? I thought you’d fucked off back to Canada.’
‘You working for the New Brunswick tourist office too?’ I asked, he frowned. ‘I’ve been busy, Bob. Anyone been asking for me?’
‘Naw … just Little Bollocks over there.’ He nodded in the direction of a youth at the end of the bar. I beckoned for him to come over.
‘I take it he’s been nursing that half all night?’ I asked Bob, who gave a knowing look and nodded. ‘Give him a fresh pint.’
‘How’s it going, Mr Lennox?’ Davey Wallace beamed at me as he came round to my end of the bar and Big Bob handed him his beer. Davey was about five feet-seven, as fresh-faced as the Glasgow atmosphere would allow, and dressed in a too-big second-hand suit that had been expensive once. A war and a generation ago.
‘Hi, Davey,’ I said.
‘Business good?’ he bubbled with enthusiasm. ‘Any new cases?’
‘Same old stuff, Davey,’ I answered with a smile. Davey Wallace was a dreamer. A good kid, but a dreamer. For many within its boundaries, Glasgow was as much a prison as a home. The bars that confined them were the class system and, in almost every case, the lack of any viable alternative to a life of manual labour. The shipyards and the steelworks devoured the city’s young: I’d often wondered if Rotten Row, Glasgow’s appropriately named maternity hospital, simply put ‘apprentice’ instead of ‘boy’ on birth certificates.
Davey was an apprentice – an apprentice welder – working the morning shift in the shipyard. Started at fifteen and would most likely work there until he was sixty-five, by which time he would have given up his passion for Rock’n’Roll, probably because he’d be deaf from the constant riveting before he hit forty. But now, Davey Wallace, seventeen years old, parentless at seven, in an orphanage until fifteen, unmarried and with no kids yet to bind him further to an ineluctable industrial fate, escaped into the cinema every afternoon and Saturday night, where he would meet up with a different gang: Bogart, Cagney, Mitchum, Robinson, Mature.
When Davey had found out that I was a real-life enquiry agent, he had approached me in the bar like a Greek shepherd approaching Zeus. Since then, he had taken every opportunity to remind me that if I was ever looking for help …
‘Thanks for the pint, Mr Lennox.’
‘You’re welcome, Davey. Shouldn’t you be in bed? What about your early shift?’
‘I sleep in the afternoons, mostly.’ Then, as if correcting himself: ‘But I’m always available … you know, if you needed any help on one of your cases, Mr Lennox. I’m always here.’
‘Listen, Davey,’ I said. ‘It’s not like you think it is. It’s not like in the movies. There’s nothing glamorous about what I do for a living.’
His expression dulled. ‘You should try working down at the shipyards. Anything’s glamorous compared to that.’
‘Really,’ I grinned. ‘I would have thought it was riveting …’
Davey either didn’t get or didn’t appreciate the gag and stared at his pint glumly. It was, I had noticed, a Scottish tradition. I sighed.
‘Listen, Davey, I can’t offer you a job because I don’t have a job to offer. I struggle to pay my own way at times. But here’s the deal … if anything comes up where I need an extra pair of eyes, or need any kind of help, I’ll give you a shout. Okay?’
He looked up from his beer and beamed at me. ‘Anything, Mr Lennox. You can rely on me.’
‘Okay, Davey. Why don’t you finish your beer and get off home. Like I say, I’ll get in touch if I need anything.’
I let him hang on my elbow till he finished his drink. After he was gone, Big Bob came back and poured me another Canadian Club.
‘You realize I only keep this pish in here for you,’ he said. ‘Why can’t you drink Scotch like everybody else?’
I cast my gaze around the bar, trying to penetrate the bluegrey cigarette haze. A knot of older men in flat caps sat huddled around a table in the corner playing dominoes and smoking scrappy roll-up cigarettes. Swirled in cloud-like tobacco smoke, they paused from their game only to sip their whisky and laid their dominoes on the beer-ringed table top with the joyfulness of grim Titans toppling graveyard headstones. Glasgow at its most Goyaesque.
‘I don’t know, Bob,’ I said wistfully. ‘Maybe it’s a delight I’m saving myself for …’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake …’ Bob said, suddenly distracted and looking over my shoulder. I turned and saw that four young men had come in through the side door of the public bar.
‘Tommy … Jimmy …’ Bob called to the two other barmen and the three of them stepped out from behind the bar with a squared-up purposefulness and crossed to the young men. I noticed that the newcomers were dressed in rough work clothes; one wore a heavy leather armless tabard over his jacket and all four were wearing rubber boots. I noticed that their hair was longer than the usual and the guy with the tabard had thick, black, curling locks. They had the sunburned look of men who spent more time outdoors than in.
‘Fucking pikeys …’ Bob muttered under his breath as he passed me. ‘Okay you lot … fuck off out of it. I’ve told your mob before you’re not welcome here.’
‘All we want is a drink,’ said Curly, with a dull expression and a hint of Irish in his accent. It was clear he was accustomed to welcomes like the one Big Bob was offering. ‘Just a drink. Quiet like. No trouble.’
‘You’ll get no drink here. You lot don’t know how to have a quiet drink. I’ve had the place wrecked before by your kind. Now fuck off.’
One of the others stared hard at Bob. He had the ready stance of someone thinking about kicking off. Curly put a hand on his shoulder and said something to him I couldn’t understand. The tension went from his frame and the three walked out silently, but not hurriedly.
‘Fucking pikeys …’ Bob repeated after they were gone.
‘Gypsies?’ I asked.
‘Irish tinkers. They’re over here for the Vinegarhill Fair in the Gallowgate. They’ve pitched up camp by the old vinegar works.’
‘They seemed reasonable enough to me,’ I said.
Big Bob crossed his Popeye forearms across his massive chest. ‘Aye, they seem that way now, but a few drinks in them and they go fucking mental. By the end of the night I’d be picking the furniture up for firewood if I start letting knackers drink in here. Drink and fight, that’s all these bastards know.’
‘Yeah … drink and fight,’ I repeated, trying to work out how this fact distinguished them from the usual Glaswegian customer. ‘It’s funny, I was at a pikey fight the other night.’
‘Aye? I bet there was blood and snotters all over the place. Fucking mental.’ Bob shook his head in a way that reminded me of the awe Sneddon had displayed when talking about his tinker fighters.
I got back to my digs about ten. As I passed her door, I heard Fiona White switch the television off. I had bought a set six months before, when my cash flow had been going through one of its sporadically positive periods. I had come up with the pretence that the television would be better in their lounge. More room. Some crap like that. The truth was that I had no great interest in television: I still couldn’t see it replacing radio. One of my greatest disappointments had been to see the actor Valentine Dyall for the first time on television. The face behind the voice behind the ‘Man in Black’ on radio’s Appointment with Fear turned out to look like a dyspeptic bank manager.
I had told Mrs White that I could watch it at any time, if that was okay with her, but she was to feel free for her and the kids to watch it whenever they felt like it. I knew they did, but she had a habit of switching it off when I was in my flat. She had told me, when I had assured her that it was really okay with me for them to watch as much TV as they wanted, that she was worried that she would ‘wear the tube out’. The truth, I knew, was that she didn’t want to feel she owed me anything. She didn’t want to owe anyone anything. It was a drawbridge that had been drawn up a long time before I had first encountered her. Fiona White was an attractive woman, still young, but I really couldn’t recall ever having seen her smile.
I went up to my rooms and listened to the Overseas Service for a while before tuning into the Home Service. There was an item on the news about the forthcoming fight between Bobby Kirkcaldy and Jan Schmidtke. It was one of the most anticipated fights in the city’s boxing history, despite the fact that the result was a foregone conclusion: the German slugger Schmidtke was universally considered to be outclassed and outgunned by the stylist Kirkcaldy.
I grinned smugly at the thought that I’d managed to spring a ticket for the fight, after all. The grin faded though, when I thought about how big-league Willie Sneddon’s and Jonny Cohen’s ambitions were becoming. Taking a slice of Bobby Kirkcaldy was stretching them beyond Glasgow. I started to feel uneasy about getting mixed up in whatever dodgy dealings were going on behind a sporting event of national significance.
But, there again, that was the business I was in. Dodgy dealings.
*
That summer, and for about a year leading up to it, ever since I’d gotten involved in all kinds of shenanigans down at the docks and ended up with holes in me where there shouldn’t be any, I had been trying to get myself straightened out. It was difficult to frame a description of my life without resorting to profanity and it was true to say that my life was truly fucked up. I guessed that was what people said about me: ‘Oh, there goes Lennox. Okay guy. Fucked up though.’ I had made a great effort over the last twelve months to diminish the fucked-upness of my life. I had one over-arching ambition: that one morning while shaving, I could look in the mirror without disliking the person who looked back at me.
The truth was I had been a straightforward, bright and as enthusiastic-as-all-hell, all-Canadian kid growing up on the shores of the Kennebecasis, with rich parents and an education at the upper-crusty Rothesay Collegiate College. Nothing fucked-up there. But then a little Austrian corporal decided to fuck up more than my world and I found myself an officer in the First Canadian Army and four thousand miles from home and up to my knees in mud and blood. The First Canadian, or at least those who led the First Canadian, had an enthusiasm for throwing my countrymen into the mincer. Normandy, Dieppe, Sicily. Wherever there was a serious-ordnance-ripping-through-human-flesh party, we tended to get the first invite. My excursion started in Sicily and lasted all the way through Italy, Holland and Germany. It was somewhere along the way during my Grand European Tour that the Kennebecasis Kid became yet another casualty of war. Whoever it was I becam
e during the war, he fitted right in, right here in Glasgow.
And it had been while I stood in Glasgow, wearing a demob suit that I otherwise wouldn’t have been seen dead in and holding a ship ticket to Halifax, Nova Scotia, that I had first encountered the Three Kings.
There’s this misconception that all gangsters are the same. That all coppers are the same. Some people even believe, sometimes with a fair amount of justification, that all gangsters and all coppers are the same. The truth is that the underworld is a community like any other, with the same range and variety of personality, physical type and character that you find in any walk of life. You can’t even say that they are united in dishonesty or immorality. Some villains have a very strict moral code. Some don’t.
The Three Kings were a good example. What Willie Sneddon, Jonny Cohen and Hammer Murphy didn’t run in Glasgow wasn’t worth running. In 1948, Glasgow’s three leading crime lords had sat down over lunch in a civilized manner in the elegant surroundings of the Regency Oyster Bar and discussed the future. The upshot was that, while they sat and divided the lunch bill equally between them, they had done pretty much the same to Glasgow.
There had been nothing elegant or civilized about what had preceded their lunch. A vicious gang war, Sneddon and Cohen on one side, Murphy on the other, had threatened to wipe them all out. Added to which, the first casualty of war was profit. By the time Sneddon, Cohen and Murphy emerged from the Regency, a coronation had taken place: the three crime lords had become the three crime kings.
But, like I said, no one is the same, and the Three Kings were very different people. Willie Sneddon was a truly nasty piece of work. Devious and malignant. Sneddon, the Gorbals hard man, had robbed, murdered and tortured his way to the top. But he was smart. Even subtle.
Subtlety was not something you associated with Hammer Murphy, in much the same way you wouldn’t associate camels with the Antarctic. Michael Murphy had gained the epithet ‘Hammer’ after pulping the skull of rival gang boss Paul Cochrane with a lead barrel-headed builder’s mallet, in front of the assembled members of both gangs. Murphy was a man of limited intellect but possessed a viciousness as truly, awesomely monumental as the chip on his shoulder. He had embraced his new nickname with enthusiasm and was known to wield a hammer against knees, elbows and skulls whenever a suitable opportunity arose. It was, he had once confided in me, good to have a trademark.
The Long Glasgow Kiss Page 6