The Long Glasgow Kiss

by Craig Russell

  Uncle Bert took his time, holding me in place with one hand and pulling his other fist back to deliver a right that we both knew would send me sleepy-bye-byes. He had braced his legs to deliver the maximum power and I swung my foot up as hard and as swiftly as I could manage. My foot went through between his legs but my shin slammed into his groin. He doubled over and I grabbed his ears, hoisted him up and smashed my forehead into his face. The good old Glasgow Kiss.

  I pushed him away from me. Blood was pouring from his nose and I fully expected him to crumble; but Uncle Bert was an old pro and came straight back at me. I scrabbled in my pocket for my sap and swung it at him, catching him on the temple. It sent him sideways but again, amazingly, his feet remained planted and he didn’t go down. I backhanded him with the sap. He went down on one knee and I kicked him in the face. He fell backwards onto his back. I staggered forward, pulling air into my empty lungs and bent from the pain in my kidney. All the hate and the rage was back: I stood to one side of him and raised my foot, aiming to smash my heel into his ugly, old battered face.

  There was a shot. I staggered back.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I looked down at my body, then down at Bert Soutar sprawled on the ground at my feet. Neither of us was hit. When I looked up I saw Bobby Kirkcaldy, his face carrying the evidence of his defeat the night before, standing with a Browning in his hand. He’d obviously fired a shot into the air, but I now found myself looking at the business end of the automatic.

  ‘Against the wall, Lennox,’ he said, his voice still disconcertingly calm. Gentle. ‘Uncle Bert, you okay?’

  Soutar got to his feet slowly, eyeing me with malice. I knew what was coming and so, clearly, did Kirkcaldy.

  ‘Leave it, Bert,’ he said. ‘We’ll do this in the garage, like we said.’

  Soutar grabbed me by the collar of my suit jacket and pulled me from the wall. He took up position behind me and guided me with vicious shoves around to the back of the house. The drive arced round the far side of the house to a whitewashed outbuilding. It looked like it had, at one time, been a stables, but had since been converted into a garage. There was a dormer window above it suggesting that the attic had been the chauffeur’s accommodation. There were two huge double doors, and I reckoned you could easily have parked four cars inside it. I studied the structure carefully, for two reasons: the curiosity of the condemned man about his place of execution; and because I wanted to work out any possible escape routes well in advance.

  Soutar kept the shoves going and I considered dancing with him again. He was a tough old bird, all right, but I’d do my best to snap his neck before his nephew got one off. I could always hope that Kirkcaldy was a worse shot than he was a boxer.

  ‘All of this because you fixed a fight?’ I called over my shoulder. ‘I’ve got to give it to you, Kirkcaldy, you take your petty larceny very seriously.’

  ‘Shut up and walk …’ Uncle Bert gave me another shove. It was beginning to become rude.

  ‘We’ve got a friend waiting for you,’ said Kirkcaldy, and laughed in a dark, vicious way. He went ahead of us and opened one of the doors into the garage.

  Just as I had expected, there were two cars in the garage: the sleek, carmine droplet of Collins’s Lanchester and Bobby Kirkcaldy’s open-top Sunbeam-Talbot Sports. What a chump, I thought bitterly to myself. There I was thinking I was all smart and devious, stirring up Collins so he would lead me to Mr Big. Yep, I had had it all down pat, except that the delay in Collins leaving his office had been to give Kirkcaldy time to make the fifteen-minute drive from Strathblane to this place, and get himself settled in. All Collins had had to do after that was lead me by the nose. It served me right; I was beginning to believe my own advertising.

  The garage was even bigger inside than I had guessed. The two cars took up less than half of the space. Jack Collins stood in the middle of the free area of floor.

  ‘I told you he’d follow me,’ he said with a contempt I could have found hurtful.

  ‘Okay, so you’re pissed off that I’m doing my job. But like I said outside, this doesn’t smell right to me. You’re going to too much trouble just to cover up a fixed fight. Why the artillery?’ I asked, nodding to the Browning in Kirkcaldy’s hand.

  ‘Maybe you’re right, Lennox,’ Kirkcaldy said. ‘Maybe there’s more going on than you can understand.’

  ‘Try me,’ I said. ‘I’m an understanding type. But first of all, indulge my curiosity as a fan … why throw the fight last night?’

  ‘What makes you think I threw it?’

  ‘Oh, come on. I was there. And I’ve seen you fight several times before. If you could flatten McQuillan the way you did, then Jan Schmidtke should have been a walkover. You threw the fight all right. Is your heart really as bad as that?’

  ‘As a matter of fact it is,’ said Kirkcaldy, in a matter-of-fact way. ‘Congenital defect. I’ve had it since birth but didn’t know about it. It’s only over the last six months that I’ve had problems with it. The quack says I’ve to take it easy, take the stress out of my life. Maybe I should start with you, huh, Lennox?’

  ‘So I’m guessing you made a killing on the fight?’ I asked.

  ‘Jack here arranged it all for us. It actually started off as Small Change’s idea. No really big bets. Nothing that would get noticed too much, but lots of them, spread out across all the bookies. And each bet placed by a third party who couldn’t be connected to Collins, far less me.’

  ‘Very sweet,’ I said. ‘But you weren’t the only ones in the know. Two young Flash Harrys tried to broker a big bet against you winning through Tony the Pole.’

  ‘That’s something I don’t know about,’ said Kirkcaldy as casually as he could manage. If he had been as poor at throwing a feint in the ring, then his prematurely terminated career would have terminated even more prematurely.

  ‘Who were they?’ I pushed my luck. Seeing as I was at gunpoint in an outbuilding in the middle of nowhere, where a shot would go unheard far less unnoticed, I felt I was just as well pushing it.

  ‘I told you, I don’t know anything about them or anybody else laying bets.’

  I decided to move on before Kirkcaldy’s pants caught fire. ‘I’m sure your little scheme will have raked in a lot of cash. But not that much. Not enough for this kind of grief. And it doesn’t add up to something worth killing Small Change for.’

  ‘Small Change’s death has got nothing to do with us. Nothing at all. And it’s got nothing to do with the fight scam either.’

  ‘No … I believe you didn’t kill Small Change, but the fight scam does have something to do with his death. Maybe Small Change came up with the idea of you throwing the fight to start with, but when he did it was simply to get you out of the fight game with a little pension. You must have told him about your heart condition. But the real reason you needed to pull it off was because you needed to pay someone off quick. Someone who was going to give you the same treatment that Small Change got.’

  Kirkcaldy didn’t say anything, but exchanged a look with Uncle Bert.

  ‘You see, Bobby, I’m a studious sort. I spend a lot of time up at the Mitchell Library expanding my mind. One direction I’ve expanded in is the traditions and customs of our travelling cousins. Take the ones up at Vinegarhill. Now, to start with, I thought they were just Irish travellers, but it turns out they’re Minceir, proper Romanies from Ireland … the real Gypsy McCoy, you could say.’

  Kirkcaldy said nothing.

  ‘They’ve had a long and difficult history, gypsies,’ I continued. ‘They’ve been in Britain for centuries, you know. Did you know that we actually sold them to Louisiana to work as slaves for freed blacks who had their own small plantations? Or that we used to hang them just for being gypsies? It’s made them an unforgiving bunch. They’re big on vengeance and blood feud.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ Kirkcaldy said, but again I could see behind the expression.

  ‘I don’t know what you did. Th
at’s the one piece that’s missing for me. You see, like I said, I’ve been reading up on gypsy customs. And I met Sean Furie, whose son is up for Small Change’s murder. Now, to start with, I thought Furie was more Blackrock than Bulgaria, but it would seem he’s the real thing. He and his mob follow gypsy customs and law. Furie himself is a Baro – that’s a kind of clan chieftain. The kingpin gypsy. And as a Baro, Furie will also sit as a judge on the kris, the half-arsed court arrangement they have going. One of the things the kris does is sit in judgement on fellow gypsies or even on gaje as they call non-gypsies.’

  ‘Very fucking interesting,’ said Bert Soutar. ‘Consider my horizons expanded. Now get over against the wall.’

  I decided to stay where I was for the moment. ‘It is interesting. You see, one of the things the kris sits in judgement on is if one of their own is killed by someone else. Murder, say … or a careless accident. Then they can issue a sentence on the accused and the only way he can get out of it is to pay a glaba. Blood money.’ I paused for a moment. Less for dramatic effect and more to check my surroundings again. There were a couple of small, grimy windows over by the rear wall. A clutch of old and rusting garden tools, including a small hand scythe mottled with reddish-brown flecks. A shadow fell across the grime-dimmed window and passed on. There was someone else here. Outside.

  ‘Anyway,’ I continued, ‘here’s the way I see it: you, good old Uncle Bert, and young Collins here, are all under sentence of death. And death, though it’s bad enough, isn’t as scary as the kind of death you’ll have at the hands of the gypsies. Now I don’t know if Furie’s son carried out sentence on Small Change or not, but you fellas have a pretty good idea what’s ahead of you … unless, of course, you hand over a large glaba ransom.’

  ‘So what are we supposed to have done?’ asked Kirkcaldy.

  ‘Well, it’s pretty obvious at first sight. Uncle Bert here supplied that young pikey fighter for the bare-knuckle fight. Then he dies. So Soutar, Small Change and Collins are held responsible. Small Change meets a sticky end by having his skull pulped with a statue of his favourite greyhound, and you start getting traditional gypsy symbols of death dropped on your doorstep. I was supposed to work it all out. Well I have. But what I don’t get is why … the gypsy boy went into the fight of his own free will, knowing the risks, and took his chances. So why does his clan hold you responsible?’

  ‘You’re not as smart as you think you are, Lennox,’ sneered Jack Collins. His face was white and drawn. The coolness had gone. He was afraid. It was either what I had been saying, or he knew he was about to witness something unpleasant. I did my best to believe it was the power of my oratory.

  ‘Shut up, Collins,’ said Kirkcaldy. ‘Against the wall, Lennox. And keep your hands where I can see them.’

  ‘So this is it?’ I asked. I noticed I wasn’t breathing hard and I didn’t feel my heart pounding. That was what happened, I guessed, when you’d thought you were going to die so many times before. When you’d seen so many others go before you. ‘So you’re going to kill me over a gypsy curse and an amateurishly fixed fight? No … this doesn’t make sense. I’m missing something here. Who was it in Collins’s car outside your house? And why are the gyppos really after you?’

  My back was to the wall now, but, as I’d backed up, I’d angled my steps so I ended up next to the scythe. A rusty garden implement against a gun and two experienced fist fighters. They don’t stand a chance, I thought to myself.

  ‘Show him …’ Kirkcaldy barked the order at Collins and indicated his car with a jerk of his head. Collins went over to the car and opened the trunk, lifting out something wrapped in a blanket. He carried it in his arms like it was a baby. He laid it on the floor and unwrapped it for me to see. It was the Ky-Lan demon statuette. It had been broken into two pieces. The fake jade was less than an inch thick. The contents spilled from the broken sculpture: tightly wrapped waxed paper bricks.

  I sighed as something tied itself into a knot in my gut. I knew what Kirkcaldy having it meant. ‘Sammy Pollock?’

  Kirkcaldy smiled, and it reminded me of the way Sneddon smiled. ‘Just like everything else in Glasgow, Lennox, the Clyde is unpredictable. You dump two bodies at the same time in the same place and one washes up and the other sinks without trace.’

  ‘He didn’t deserve that, Kirkcaldy. He was just a kid.’ I thought about how Sheila Gainsborough would take the news. I hadn’t earned my fee on that one, that was for sure. But, there again, it wouldn’t be me who’d be breaking the news to her. I gave a bitter laugh.

  ‘What’s so fucking funny?’ asked Kirkcaldy.

  ‘Just that I was working two cases that I never connected. I’m not as smart as I thought I was.’

  ‘You’re smart, Lennox. Too smart. But you should know by now that nothing happens in this city without it being tied into everything else. And before you get all huffy about Pollock, remember that he brought it on himself. He wanted to play with the big boys. He ended up way out of his depth.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re far behind him. You having that stuff means you don’t just have a bunch of irate gypsies after you. Have you heard of John Largo?’

  ‘I’ve heard. And I know this is his stuff. But he’s still looking for Pollock and Costello. We happened on this by chance. We’re in the clear.’

  ‘Not that in the clear. I found you.’

  ‘No you didn’t. All that you said to Collins here was smoke and mirrors. You were grouse-beating. Except now it’s the grouse with the gun on you. Anyway, you’re not going to be telling anyone anything.’

  That’s that then, I thought. If there was one thing you couldn’t accuse Kirkcaldy of, it was ambiguity.

  ‘How did Costello and Pollock get their hands on the jade demon? There was no way they could have known what was in it.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong. Young master Pollock was a young man of cosmopolitan tastes. Bohemian, you might say. He was a bit of a hashish smoker and had experimented with opium. No other bastard in this city would have realized the value of refined heroin, but Pollock knew all right. But that was as smart as he got. He was no master criminal and he thought he was dealing with Al Capone when he got in tow with Paul Costello. But Costello was a wanker and as much out of his depth as Pollock was.’

  ‘So how did they get their hands on this?’ I asked. The three of them – Soutar, Collins and Kirkcaldy – were all facing me now, with their backs to the doors. Kirkcaldy had left the door open a few inches and I could have sworn that I had seen it move. My shadow at the window was maybe not another accomplice after all. I pinned my hopes on a guardian angel.

  ‘Paul Costello was always looking for a score,’ Kirkcaldy continued and I made a gargantuan effort not to cast a glance at the garage doors behind him. ‘I think he was trying to prove he could be a real player, like his Da. Fuck all chance of that. He didn’t have the brains to blow his hat off. Sammy Pollock was supposed to be the thinker. Talk about the blind leading the blind. Anyway, they did a couple of night-time jobs. They got two other guys in with them. Their first score was a warehouse with cigarettes. French shit. They didn’t have a clue how to move the stuff on, other than going round the clubs and pubs themselves. Complete amateurs. You don’t pull a job unless you’ve done a deal in advance with a fence who’ll move the stuff on. Not only did these wankers have no deal, they didn’t even know a fence.’

  ‘So they went to Small Change?’ It was all fitting now.

  ‘Aye … he took the stuff off them for peanuts. Now Small Change was no Fagin, but he did handle the odd dirty merchandise now and again. Especially if there was decent money to be made. But only if it was something special and there was a high brokering margin to be made.’

  ‘It still doesn’t explain how Pollock knew to steal the jade dragon.’

  ‘Pollock and Costello had help on their jobs. Two guys who worked for Costello’s Da and a pikey who provided extra muscle,’ said Kirkcaldy. Again something fell into place for me
.

  ‘The five of them did the cigarette job,’ Kirkcaldy went on. ‘All the stuff came from the warehouse used by that Frog, Barnier. Before they get to the cigarettes, they have to open a few crates to check before they hit the jackpot with the fags. The genius pikey cracks open a jade statue by accident and sees it’s full of packets. He tells Pollock and Pollock jumps to the conclusion that it’s hashish. So they take the statue as well and get away scot-free. But when Pollock gets home and opens one of the packets, he realizes they’re all in the deepest shite. He realizes it’s not hashish but heroin, and pretty high grade. He takes a sample from one brick, puts the brick back and glues the statue back together. He takes the sample straight to Small Change. Small Change doesn’t know the slightest thing about narcotics, so he comes straight to yours truly.’

  ‘So these two guys you said were working for Costello,’ I said, ‘I’m guessing that they did a deal with you and Small Change and then delivered up Sammy Pollock and Paul Costello … So what went wrong?’ I kept my eyes fixed on Kirkcaldy’s and ignored the figure I saw on the edge of my vision slipping in through the doors and edging, crouched down, along the wall and behind the cars.

  ‘The pikey works out there’s something more to the job and starts asking for more money or he’ll talk. Except he doesn’t know that I’m involved now. He also happens to be a bare-knuckle fighter who Uncle Bert has fixed up with a few fights at Sneddon’s place.’

  ‘And he just happens to die during the fight?’

  ‘Aye … funny that.’ Kirkcaldy smiled coldly. ‘Quite a coincidence. Particularly as Uncle Bert gave him some special medicine before the fight. Told him it would make him fight better and not feel the other bloke’s punches. The last bit was right. The stupid pikey bastard took it. The other fighter was able to beat the shite out of him and then he started bleeding like fuck. From the beating or the drugs I don’t know.’