The Long Glasgow Kiss

by Craig Russell

  ‘And your problem’s solved.’ I tried to stay relaxed and natural, when all the time I was mentally measuring the distance to the rusting scythe and waiting for the figure hidden behind the cars to make his move.

  ‘Naw … that’s when our problems just began. Turns out that the pikey is Sean Furie’s son … the brother of the one up for Small Change’s murder.’

  ‘So that’s the glaba you have to pay …’ I said. ‘A Baro’s son won’t come cheap.’

  ‘It takes more than a bunch of pig-arsed Irish gyppos to scare me. It’s a nuisance that I don’t need at the moment. I can’t sell the heroin yet and I needed to raise money to buy the knackers off.’ He jerked his chin in the direction of the broken statuette. ‘This is the biggest business opportunity I’ve ever had. This stuff’s going to be big here … Have you seen Glasgow on a Saturday night? Half the city gets totally fucking stocious. Thousands of men out of their skulls on booze. No one drinks for the taste and Christ knows they don’t drink for the social fucking aspect. Do you know what they want? They want a holiday. They drink because for a few hours they can step outside their lives. If cheap whisky or red biddy gives them a day trip to Largs, this stuff is two weeks in fucking Monte Carlo. This …’ He bounced the package in his hand, as if assessing its worth. ‘This is the future, Lennox. This is Glasgow’s future. We won’t be able to get enough of this stuff to keep up with demand. I’m fucking telling you, this stuff was made for Glasgow. Because this stuff makes Glasgow go away. Anyway, talking about making things go away, enough chat …’

  Kirkcaldy pulled the carriage back on the Browning. The three of them faced me. Collins looked even paler. He had known from the moment he left his office to lead me up here that this was what was going to happen. Bert Soutar twisted his thin lips underneath his busted-up nose. He was going to enjoy this.

  For some reason that I couldn’t fathom, Fiona White’s face came to my mind. Maybe it was the fact that she was about to have a vacancy to let.

  There was a terrible grace to it. I had guessed it would be Singer who was behind the car. After all, it had been me who had suggested he was put onto tailing Kirkcaldy. He moved out from behind the car without a sound. It was Collins’s startled cry that caused Kirkcaldy and Soutar to spin round. I saw Singer’s hand move swiftly up and make a short arc in the air. Collins made a gurgling sound and blood started to pulse from his neck where Singer’s razor had slashed him.

  I lunged for the scythe. Kirkcaldy heard the rasp as I tore it from the wall and he spun back, swinging the gun around. The scythe sliced into his wrist and the gun fell to the floor. I rushed forward and swung the scythe again, this time its tip sank into Kirkcaldy’s back and he screamed in a way that didn’t sound human. I saw that Singer and Soutar were now desperately wrestling with each other: Soutar’s iron grasp on Singer’s wrist, stopping him from bringing the razor down to his throat. I threw down the scythe and snatched up the automatic Kirkcaldy had dropped. I didn’t even think about it. I put two rounds into the side of Soutar’s head and he went down. Lifeless. His dead grip pulling Singer down on top of him.

  The whole thing would only have lasted four or five seconds, but now Soutar lay dead, Collins was on his back, shivering and twitching the last of his life away, Kirkcaldy was on his knees, clutching his hacked-open wrist.

  ‘Thanks, Singer …’ I said. ‘If you hadn’t come along, I’d be dead.’

  Singer straightened himself up and nodded. He was out of breath but I thought I detected a hint of a smile in the corners of his mouth.

  We left the bodies in the garage. I wrapped a handkerchief around Kirkcaldy’s hand and we put him in the passenger seat of his Sunbeam-Talbot Sports. Tucking the Browning into the waistband of my trousers, I gathered up the jade demon, wrapped it back into its blanket and put it into the boot of my car. I knew Kirkcaldy wouldn’t give me any more trouble, so I told Singer to follow me in my Austin Atlantic. We stopped at a telephone box by the side of the road and Singer watched Kirkcaldy as I ’phoned Willie Sneddon. I gave him a brief outline of what had happened and told him there were a couple of consignments of meat for Hammer Murphy’s mincer, and where to find them.

  We drove back into Glasgow, all the way Kirkcaldy trying to do a deal with me, offering all kinds of riches if I helped him get out of this mess. As I drove along the Clyde and into the Gallowgate, I promised I would; that I knew people who would sort him out.

  Singer parked outside and waited for me. I drove into the enclosure at Vinegarhill. The old guy I’d seen before ran across to Sean Furie’s caravan and hammered on the door. Furie nodded to me and I nodded back. Neither of us paid any heed to Kirkcaldy’s begging. I threw the keys of his car onto the ground and he fell out of the car and started to scrabble in the dust for them, but they were too far away and the ring of gypsies that had formed was already closing on him.

  When I dropped Singer off at Sneddon’s place, I thanked him again. He nodded once more and got out.

  I was tired and I was aching but I had three ’phone calls to make. It was getting dark, darker than it had been for weeks, and there was something in the late evening air that spoke of a colder season on its way. I parked by the side of the Clyde and took the shattered jade demon out of the trunk and carried it down to the water’s edge. I took a couple of the waxed-paper bricks out and held them, one in each hand. I was always looking for a way of making a buck. Here, in my hands, I had an entire retirement fund. I guessed I would even get a tidy finder’s fee if I returned the narcotics to Largo. I also knew that it was only a matter of time before Kirkcaldy’s predictions came true and the streets of Glasgow would be awash with the stuff. But there was some money that was just too dirty, even for me. I took my lock-knife from my pocket and, one by one, cut open the bricks and shook out great clouds of white powder. I watched the clouds of white powder drift away on the evening breeze, and the wrappers as they drifted away on the dark, sinewy surface of the water.

  I made my calls from a telephone box on the corner of Buchanan Street. The first was to someone everybody seemed to think of as a phantom: I told John Largo that he had an hour before I told Dex Devereaux where to find him. Without going into the specifics, I told him that all accounts had been set straight and he had no scores left to settle in Glasgow. I recommended an immediate change of climate. Probably somewhere sunny.

  The second call was to Jock Ferguson at home. I told him to meet Dex Devereaux at his hotel in half an hour and that it would mean he would get the John Largo collar.

  My third call was brief and to the point. I tried ringing Jimmy Costello at the Empire Bar. He wasn’t there but I got him at the Riviera Club. He asked me impatiently what I wanted. I understood his impatience: he had asked me to find his son for him and he had turned up dead. I was making a habit of it.

  ‘Are Skelly and Young there?’ I asked.

  ‘Aye, so fucking what?’

  ‘They’re there right now?’

  ‘Aye …’ His impatience grew. ‘I’m looking right at them.’

  ‘Then you’re looking right at the men who killed Paul. Or at least gift-wrapped him for someone else to kill. And don’t worry, all other accounts have been settled.’

  ‘If you’re fucking lying …’

  ‘I’m not. Skelly and Young stitched up Paul and Sammy Pollock for money. That’s a fact. What you do with that fact is up to you.’

  There was a pause at the other end of the line. I could hear a band in the background. The melted-together sounds of many people talking and drinking.

  ‘I’ll deal with it,’ said Costello, and I knew that he would. ‘Lennox?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  I was as good as my word to Largo and stood outside the Alpha Hotel for half an hour before I went in and asked for Dex Devereaux. The night porter had been very reluctant to let me in and even more reluctant to disturb Mr Devereaux.

  ‘It’s very important,’ I said and pushed a couple of pou
nd notes into the pocket of his waistcoat. ‘Tell him I have the address he’s been looking for. Mr Largo’s address.’

  I sat down and waited. It took less than ten minutes for a dishevelled Dex Devereaux to appear in the lobby. Dishevelled except his flat-top haircut, which looked as precision-engineered as ever. I handed him the note with the address.

  ‘You sure about this?’ He held up the note.

  ‘That’s him. That’s his address.’

  I left Devereaux, passing a flustered Jock Ferguson as the night porter let me out and him in.

  ‘Dex’ll explain,’ I said elliptically. I was in an elliptical frame of mind. I had another call to make. The one I dreaded most. I got back in the Atlantic and drove out to the West End, to Sheila Gainsborough’s apartment.

  *

  It was two weeks later that I met John Largo. Dex Devereaux had been as good as his word and had paid me the thousand dollars for the information, but when they had arrived at Largo’s place, he had flown the coop. He must have been warned off, Jock Ferguson had said to me, without a hint of suspicion.

  Largo was waiting for me, hanging back in the shadows, as I came out of the Horsehead Bar. He kept his hand in the patch pocket of his suit jacket and I suspected he was holding something more than his change. That was okay. I understood his caution.

  ‘I wanted to thank you,’ he said.

  ‘What … for turning you in?’

  ‘For giving me a chance. How did you find me?’

  I took out my cigarette case and offered him one. He took it with his left hand, keeping his right in his pocket.

  ‘You’re too sentimental,’ I said. ‘I followed you to the Lyle Hill monument. I guessed there was some connection to the Maillé-Brézé. So I did some checking.’

  As I had explained to Devereaux in the lobby of his hotel, the Maillé-Brézé had been a French Navy destroyer. It had been anchored at the berthing point at the Tail of the Bank, at the mouth of the Clyde Estuary and beneath the spot where the Free French monument now stood. The Tail of the Bank had been the gathering point for the Atlantic convoys: a bustling knot of merchant vessels and their heavily armed escorts. And it had also been where the Maillé-Brézé had been berthed in April 1940. The French destroyer had only just set out to sea when two torpedoes were accidentally launched onto the ship’s own deck. The torpedoes had exploded midships with a force that had shattered windows in Port Glasgow and the broken vessel had blazed and smoked with many of its crew trapped in the forward mess hall. Despite the efforts of the Port Glasgow fire brigade, when the Maillé-Brézé eventually sank to the bottom of the Firth, it took sixty-eight of the two-hundred-strong crew with it. I had never met anyone connected to the disaster. Until now.

  ‘I found your name all right …’ I said. ‘I mean I found the name Alain Barnier. But it was amongst the list of missing. I had no list of survivors to check.’

  ‘Alain was a friend of mine.’ Largo smiled. His face looked completely different without the goatee beard. And his hair was now as dark as mine. ‘In a way, it was my way of commemorating him … keeping his name alive. But how did you trace my name?’

  ‘Remember the fight in Port Glasgow? A couple of nights after the French fleet was sunk at Mers-el-Kébir?’

  ‘Ah …’ He nodded. ‘Of course …’

  ‘When I first came to your offices, Miss Minto corrected me when I said the name Clement the English way. There are a lot of names that are spelt the same in French and pronounced differently.’

  ‘And, of course,’ he concluded the thought for me, ‘there are many words that are spelt differently but sound the same …’

  ‘Dex Devereaux had an informant who heard mention of your name. He just reported it how he heard it, John Largo. But when I was going through the court records, I found the statement given by Capitaine Jean Largeau of the Fusiliers Marins. After that I guessed your career must have become so colourful that you adopted the name Alain Barnier.’

  ‘It was prudent at the time. I have another name now. And another port. You have succeeded in making Glasgow –’ he struggled for the right word – ‘… untenable for me.’

  ‘I can’t say I’m sorry about that. I don’t approve of your business, Jean.’

  Largeau shrugged the same Gallic shrug that he had as Alain Barnier. ‘America is corrupt, my friend. I did not create the corruption, I merely profit from it. And I do not force these blacks to use my goods. I supply a need.’

  ‘They’re going to hang the gypsy boy, you know,’ I said, changing the subject. ‘The boxer, Tommy Gun Furie.’

  Largeau made an expression of incomprehension.

  ‘For Small Change MacFarlane’s murder. He pled guilty, on his lawyer’s advice, but they’re going to hang him anyway. Which is a shame, because I don’t think he killed Small Change.’

  ‘Ah …’ Largeau shook his head slowly. ‘I’m afraid I’m not familiar with the case. But with these itinerant people, they are normally guilty … of something.’

  We talked for a few more minutes. Two men standing chatting outside a Glasgow bar. We wished each other well and he took his hand from his pocket to shake mine. I left him standing there and drove off. When I looked in my rear-view mirror he was gone.

  I don’t know why I didn’t turn Largeau in to the police, or at least why I gave him a chance of getting away before I did. I think it was probably one of those there but for the grace … moments. The war had done things to us both and I had very nearly turned out the same way.

  But I hadn’t.

  EPILOGUE

  Maggie MacFarlane, the Merry Widow of Pollokshields, took the disappearance of Jack Collins with the same stoicism as she had her husband’s demise. I guessed I would never know just how much she knew about, or was involved with, his business dealings. Jack Collins wasn’t mentioned once when I called up to see Lorna and there seemed to be some kind of peace between the two MacFarlane women. I reckoned it had about the same chance of lasting as the new armistice in Indochina.

  I told Lorna that if she needed anything, I was there for her. It was goodbye and we both knew it. She was a big girl and could look after herself – one of the things that had brought us together was that we had both been carved from the same wood – but I was beginning to question how I handled women.

  Willie Sneddon coughed up my fee in full. I had gone up to see him with Singer and we had told him the whole story. Or I told him the whole story and Singer backed me up with nods every time Sneddon looked to him for confirmation. Sneddon took his losses on the chin, but made his displeasure clear when I told him what we had done with Kirkcaldy instead of handing the boxer over to him. But Sneddon was better off out of it: a few days later the papers were full of the discovery of Bobby Kirkcaldy’s body, which, they reported, had been subjected to a protracted and brutal assault. I braced myself for a visit from Jock Ferguson or, worse still, Superintendent Willie McNab.

  There was a sudden outbreak of infectious amnesia in Glasgow: the witnesses who could place Tommy Gun Furie near Small Change MacFarlane’s place on the night of the murder recanted. The charges against Furie were dropped. I found myself wondering how many of the witnesses had been getting doorstep deliveries.

  Against her injunction, I called around to May Donaldson’s later that week. I waited outside until she got home from work and I was sure she was alone. Her face darkened when she opened the door to me.

  ‘Lennox, I told you …’

  ‘Don’t worry, May,’ I said. ‘I’m not staying. I just came to give you this …’ I handed her a white vellum envelope. It was a nice envelope. Classy-looking. Her eyes grew wide when she opened it.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘It’s five hundred pounds. Consider it a wedding present. Another wedding present. You deserve a good start.’

  ‘I can’t accept this, Lennox. You know I can’t.’ She held the envelope out to me but I pushed it back.

  ‘Yes you can. It’s something I earned and I’
m not happy about what I did to earn it. Don’t worry …’ I said, reading her look. ‘It’s not dirty money. In fact I was paid from the coffers of global law enforcement.’

  ‘Still, I really can’t take it …’ she protested, but with significantly less enthusiasm. ‘How do I explain this to George?’

  ‘Tell him you’ve inherited something from a relative you didn’t know about. I’ll send you a letter with my official heading on it, if you like.’

  She looked at the envelope with the bulge of money pushing it wide. It looked like some split-open vegetable. A cash crop. ‘Lennox …’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘There is something I’d like you to do for me. Maybe I should come in and explain …’

  I was waiting when Davey Wallace got out of hospital. The swelling had gone down but his face was still a dark spectrum of bruises. He walked slowly but gingerly, as if treading on hot coals. I guessed that anything but the gentlest footfall would jar through his cracked ribs. Somehow, he managed to grin his usual grin at me. That hurt more than if he’d swung a punch at me.

  I held open the car door for him. He got in and we drove across the city. Davey told me that he didn’t want me to worry about him and that he would be ready to do work for me again in a couple of weeks. And he would have plenty of time, he told me: he’d been laid off from the yard.

  I didn’t say anything. Instead I drove down to the river and parked on a scruffy patch of cleared bomb-site. I helped Davey to the water’s edge and we sat on a wall beneath the bristling black branches of shipyard cranes. A puffer belched blackly as it drifted past us.

  We sat there for more than an hour while I talked, without a break. I talked about my home in Canada and about the war. I talked about when I’d been Davey’s age and everything I thought the world had held for me. I talked about things that I hadn’t talked about to anybody before, and I told Davey that. I talked about Sicily and Aachen, about the friends I’d seen die and the enemies I’d killed. About the bad things I’d done because you had to do bad things in war, and the bad things I’d done even when I didn’t have to do them. I laid out my life for him. And for me.