‘I thought you’d gone!’ I said. ‘I mean of course it was the right thing what with Tweetie, but I thought you’d driven off and left me.’
‘Don’t be a goose,’ said Alec, giving me a bone-crushing hug as though we were team-mates after a winning game of rugger. ‘I saw Bonnar’s man out in the garden looking through the window and reckoned the quietest way to let them in was for me to open the front door.’
‘But how did you get here?’ I said to Bonnar, struggling out of Alec’s arms.
‘I’ve been following you,’ he said. ‘I told you that already.’
I knelt up on my heels, thinking fast. ‘Since when?’ I said.
‘All day.’
‘You didn’t follow us last night then?’ I said, slumping.
‘I was still looking for Beryl last night,’ said Bonnar. ‘I hadn’t quite given up hope then. Why?’
I could not bear to tell him that we had probably passed the van carrying his daughter’s body, that if he had been following us then he could have got her back again.
All around the room, there was a great bustle going on. One of the large men came and draped a rug over Jeanne. The other was pouring brandy for the Stotts and Mary, putting cushions at their back and stools under their feet. The third had left and minutes later I heard an engine and saw a small motorcar come up the drive, pass the front door, then reverse slowly towards it again. I shuddered. She was going to be tidied away and they were doing it so efficiently one knew it was not the first time or the tenth time they had done such tidying.
‘Do you know how she died?’ said Simon Bonnar. ‘I know what the plan was. Make it look as if she’d killed a rival and run away. And I know why, of course. I killed the girl’s father. It was years ago but I did it all the same.’
I had to tense every muscle in my body to keep myself from turning to look at Tweetie. He knew nothing of Bert’s place in his daughter’s life, nothing of Tweetie’s role in all this. He thought Jeanne had done it alone.
‘Do you know if it was quick?’ he said, reaching out and taking hold of my hand. Later that day I would put it to my face and smell the cordite on my fingers. ‘Did she suffer?’
I thought of the pink frill and how loudly it spoke of a struggle and wondered how to tell him that I didn’t know how his daughter died or where or even when.
Then a great light broke over me. A struggle meant that Beryl was alive when she left the Locarno. When I said two innocents had died, Jeanne said, ‘Not quite,’ and smirked about how clever she was. I assumed she meant that Roly was no innocent, but now I saw more clearly.
And then her last words were that Simon Bonnar was a fool to shoot her before she had the chance to speak to him. Numb with shock as I was, I staggered to my feet and reached out to grab him by the arms.
‘I think she’s alive, Mr Bonnar, but she’s hidden away.’
‘Where?’ said Bonnar. He broke free and grabbed me instead, shaking me.
‘Steady on,’ said Alec. ‘If Mrs Gilver is right, she was driven away in a van and she’s somewhere out of town beyond the village of Eaglesham. Bert drove her there late in the evening.’
‘I’d believe anything of that devil,’ said Bonnar, ‘but he didn’t. He went home and stayed put. We were watching him.’
‘Jeanne went out,’ said Tweetie. Her colour was high and her eyes were very wide.
‘Theresa!’ said her father.
‘It was after you’d gone, Mrs Gilver,’ Tweetie went on. ‘She went out again.’
I stared at her. Was she really looking me straight in the face and telling lies, with Bonnar and his men right there listening? It was a reckless move, but then the stakes could hardly be higher. And it was not the first time Tweetie had thought this fast. I remembered her sudden shrieks, which caused all the panic in the Locarno and neatly stopped the police from doing anything so useful as sealing off the exits before Beryl could be got away, or corralling the witnesses before Tweetie managed to ditch her headdress.
I exchanged a look with Alec and saw him nod slightly. He knew that Tweetie was lying as well as I did but if we played along we might learn something useful. If we challenged her, she would shut like a clam.
‘What time did Jeanne get back?’ Alec said.
Sir Percy moaned and tears sprang up in his eyes. ‘She’s lying there dead on the floor, for pity’s sake,’ he said.
I was more sure than I had ever been about anything that it was Tweetie who had gone out, Tweetie whom we had passed on the road. I turned to her mother.
‘Lady Stott,’ I said, staring hard. ‘What time did “Jeanne” get in last night?’
‘She wasn’t—’
‘Mother, for God’s sake,’ said Tweetie, her voice wire-taut.
‘Half past nine or thereabouts,’ said Lady Stott, without meeting my eye. ‘She came home in a taxi. No matter how many times I tell her.’
‘Told her,’ said Sir Percy, with a break in his voice, pointing at the wrapped bundle on the floor.
His wife subsided and said it again. ‘About half past nine.’
‘If we’re right about this van – and I think we are – then we know where Beryl was at quarter past eight,’ I said, ‘going south. And we should be able to work out where she is now, given the time for the driver to get back into town, drop off the van and pick up a taxi to get here by half past nine.’
‘But from where?’ said Simon. ‘It’s a big city. Where did she go to change from a van to a taxi? That might make all the difference in the world.’
‘Haddings Undertaker’s,’ I said.
Tweetie moaned softly. Simon Bonnar’s face grew thunderous and his eyes flashed. For the first time since I had met him, I could truly believe that he was what he was. In his cold rage, he was utterly terrifying.
‘He knew,’ he said. ‘He helped.’
‘Mr Bonnar, there is no time,’ I said. ‘Now, think. If you were on the road to Eaglesham at a quarter past eight at night and you came back from your destination to Haddings and took a cab back here, arriving at half past nine, where would you have been going?’
I saw the realisation hit him; his face lit up.
‘Boyce, McEllon,’ he said. ‘You come with me. Billy.’ He glared at the other man.
‘Right, boss,’ they all said in chorus and then he was flying out of the door with two of his henchmen at his side and Alec and me right behind him.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked as we roared through the suburban streets, tyres squealing and pedestrians scattering as we passed.
‘Cemetery,’ said Simon Bonnar, ‘where my wife’s buried. Except she’s not.’
I made a determined effort not to wonder what that might mean but when we got there it was not so bad as all that after all. All he meant was that his wife, who he loved more than his loyalty to his Protestant ways, was in a mausoleum rather than a grave, an ostentatious little folly of sparkling pink granite with railings all round and pillars to either side of the door.
‘The black devil,’ said Simon Bonnar, watching as the sexton wrestled with the enormous key. ‘He knew an undertaker’s van wouldn’t stick out and he could easily get into the wee office place and get the key to copy. Hurry up, man!’ he shouted. ‘It’s been open last night. It can’t be rusty.’
At last the key turned and Simon Bonnar pushed the sexton roughly aside and, grabbing the handle, shouldered the heavy door open on to darkness.
‘Beryl?’ he said, with a crack in his voice.
‘Da?’ came a quavering cry and all of us let out shouts of relief.
He was shrugging off his overcoat to cover her when I lit a match and got my first glimpse of them. The pink dress was streaked with dirt and she was shivering, and looked as if she had lost a stone in weight and most of it from her face. But she was awake, her eyes were bright and she was smiling.
‘I’m as clarty as all get out,’ she said. ‘Don’t touch me!’
But Simon Bonnar could not help showering
her with kisses and hugging her over and over again and no one watching could help but beam at them.
‘Da, I’m sorry,’ Beryl said.
‘You’ve done nothing to be sorry for, hen,’ said Bonnar. ‘It was Bert Bunyan and Jeanne McNab did this to you.’
‘Jeanne?’ said Beryl. ‘Someone knocked me out after Bert grabbed me away from the floor. Was it Jeanne?’
Simon Bonnar swept Beryl up into his arms. We stepped outside to let him pass through the door.
‘And I did do something,’ Beryl said. ‘I married Bert.’
Her father staggered a little as the shock of the news hit him. ‘Aye well,’ he said. ‘You’re a widow now.’
Foolishly, I thought it was a threat, a promissory note to make it so.
‘It was Jeanne who drove her out here, Mr Bonnar,’ I said, hoping to change his mind.
‘Must you punish Bert as well?’ said Alec.
‘Too late for arguments,’ said Bonnar. ‘I sent Billy to deal with him while we came here. He’s away.’
At that, finally, Beryl began to cry.
Postscript
The puppy glared at the faded tassel on the corner of the cushion, growled in her throat and then pounced on it, shaking it so hard that she lost her balance and tumbled into a heap in the corner of the blue chair.
‘She’s ruining that,’ said Alec.
‘It’s had its day,’ I said. ‘The whole place could do with a little something, in fact. I’ll wait until she’s a bit more civilised and then see about brightening things up.’
‘I still can’t believe you accepted her,’ said Alec. ‘Won’t she remind you of it every single day?’
‘I want to be reminded,’ I said. ‘I want to think of it every single day, because that way I shall keep asking myself if we did the right thing until I manage to come up with an answer.’
The trouble was that, even though Jeanne had brought punishment upon herself in a manner of speaking – for anyone who holds a knife to another’s throat is inviting danger – and even though Bert had been dealt rough justice by Simon Bonnar’s right-hand man, Tweetie was living at Balmoral with her mother and father and no matter how I tried to convince myself of it, I could not find a way to call that fair.
‘She got off scot-free,’ I had said to Alec many times. The official version was that Jeanne killed all three men, Leo and Roly and Bert too, so jealous of the dancing girls around her that she stole their partners away. Of course, it was not a story which would have been swallowed in any other city but, in dance-enthralled Glasgow and with Simon Bonnar endorsing it, it held sway. Besides, it had the merit of being much easier to understand than the true story of Goldie McNab’s naïveté, Percy Stott’s venality, Foxy Trotter’s misguided cunning, Julian’s machinations, Tweetie’s ruthlessness and Jeanne’s slow descent into sheer evil.
‘She did,’ Alec always agreed when I laid it out before him. He was agreeing again at this very moment, but still arguing too. ‘But that means Foxy is not tried for manslaughter in the death of her husband and Julian Armour is not sent away to do hard labour because of Roly either,’ he said. ‘I was convinced even before this latest development.’ He pointed the stem of his pipe at the letter in my hand, which I had just been reading to him.
Beryl had written to tell me that her father was retiring; that was the blameless way she expressed his plan to stop running what Miss Thwaite had called ‘the club’ in Glasgow.
He says it’ll be for the worse. He says within a year there’ll be worse gangs and trouble than ever happened under him and the police themselves will be harking back to the good old days when at least somebody was in charge. But I’ve told him. I’m having none of it. If he’d not been ‘in charge’, I’d have told him about Bert and me and three lives that are lost would be saved. So he’s retiring and we’re moving to England, if you can believe it! Down to the south coast near Dartmouth, to a nice wee town with a big hotel that needs a dancer. It’s the sort of place you can’t imagine murders ever happen. I’ll send you a Christmas card unless you ask me not to. Give the pup a wee clap from me. Have you decided what to call her yet? What about Tango?
Yours ever in gratitude,
Beryl Bonnar
‘Tango,’ said Alec, musing.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘For one thing people would ask me why and I’d have to lie to them.’
‘You’ll have to call her something if you’re ever to start her training,’ said Alec. ‘Which can’t, if you ask me, come a moment too soon.’ He lifted the puppy away from a chair leg she was trying to subdue with all four paws and both rows of her tiny white teeth.
‘Bunty,’ I said firmly. I had decided and, despite Hugh delivering one of the finest snorts of a long snorting life, I was fixed upon it.
The puppy raised her head, gave a yip and came trotting over to me to see what I wanted.
‘Bunty,’ I said again.
She sat down in front of my feet and waited to hear more.
Facts and Fictions
The Locarno Ballroom in Sauchiehall St was indeed the venue for the first Scottish Professional Dancing Championships in 1928 but, usefully for my purposes, it was closed and for sale between 1929 and 1934.
Razor gangs had a period of lively activity in Glasgow in the 20s and 30s, but their heyday did not begin after the departure of an all-powerful restraining presence. Simon Bonnar isn’t a fictionalisation of a real gangster; he’s totally imaginary.
It has to be said, though, that this story could not have been set much later than the summer of 1931 because, in the December of that year, the esteemable Percy Sillitoe became the Chief Constable in Glasgow and set about some ruthless and effective gang-busting. I’ve named Sir Percy Storr in his honour.
Dandy Gilver and the Unpleasantness in the Ballroom Page 30