‘But the studio …’
‘The studio knows about it. Has done for years. They fret about it all right, but that’s got nothing to do with some skewed sense of sexual morality. All they care about is the impact it would have at the box office. On the bottom line. Trust me, Hollywood has a much more liberal view of the world than Fayette County, West Virginia … or Scotland. The fact that I am homosexual is an open secret in Hollywood circles, Mr Lennox. But it is kept well out of view of the queue outside the movie theatres in Poughkeepsie or Pottsville or Peoria. What and who you see on the screen as John Macready is a falsehood … but it is a falsehood that moviegoers have to believe in.’
I thought about what Macready had said.
‘I’m not here to judge you, Mr Macready. Frankly, I don’t care what anyone gets up to behind closed doors so long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. And I agree that there are far better ways for the police to occupy their time. But you are a Hollywood star and the other party is the son of one of Scotland’s most prominent aristocrats. This is a serious situation.’
I paused and took a sip of the whiskey. It was a rich, aged bourbon and I guessed it hadn’t come from the hotel’s stock. I was four city blocks and a million miles away from the Horsehead Bar.
‘The other party in the photographs … you haven’t mentioned this to him?’ I asked.
‘No, not yet. I’ve been advised not to, but I think he has a right to know.’
‘I would stick to the advice you’ve been given, Mr Macready. The … prominence of the young gentleman in question is possibly something that could work in our favour. I really don’t see the press being allowed a free rein by the powers-that-be. It’s entirely possible that they would be stuck with a D-notice.’
Macready shrugged at me.
‘A D-notice is a banning order issued by the government to block stories that might damage the national interest.’
‘Nothing like a free press,’ said Macready with overdone irony as he sipped his bourbon.
‘Well, it’s something you might end up being grateful for.’
‘If so, isn’t that exactly why we should be telling the other party? That way we might get the whole damn thing stopped before it gets started.’
‘I think we should keep our powder dry on that one. It’s something we may have to resort to. But it would be a gamble: it could be that they could decide that he’s simply not important enough for them to issue a D-notice. In which case, he would be as well and truly screwed as we would be.’
The phrase was out before I thought it through, but Macready didn’t seem to have picked up on it. I took another sip of the bourbon and it breathed on an ember somewhere in my chest.
‘What is the big deal with Iain, anyway?’ asked Macready, giving the other party his name for the first time. ‘I knew he was some kind of aristo, but I didn’t know he was that well connected …’
‘His father is one of the big Dukes up here. And he’s a cousin – God knows how many times removed – of the Queen. The Queen’s mother is a Scot, you see. Which makes him, no matter how far down the food chain, minor royalty. Royalty is big here, Mr Macready. It’s symbolic. It’s funny, I’m investigating another case that goes all the way back to Nineteen thirty-eight, when they had a big exhibition here in Glasgow to celebrate the Empire. Well, the Empire has all but gone and that makes the monarchy all the more important. Us Canadians hang on to it to prove we’re not Americans. Yet. The Brits are clinging on to it because it’s all they’ve got of the past. If the British lose their monarchy, they’ll have to face up to the thing they fear most.’
‘Which is?’
‘The future. Or maybe even simply the reality of the present. So the monarchy is fast becoming a national treasure, like Stonehenge. And just like Stonehenge, it serves damn-all present purpose but it’s nice to look at and allows you to wallow in the past. And you, Mr Macready, have just taken a leak on Stonehenge, as far as anyone else is going to be concerned. So, like I said, I think we’ll keep the other party out of it for as long as we can. They might just throw you to the wolves.’
‘Okay. But what now?’
‘I try to find the guy who’s got the photographs and use my simple charm to win him over and get the negatives. But first I need to ask you a few questions …’
And I did.
Leonora Bryson showed me back to the lift when we were done. I made the move we were both expecting me to make, but she told me she was busy in a way that suggested she would remain busy for the rest of the century. Undaunted, I gave her my best philosophical some other time response but resolved not to give up. Some women were worth more effort than others. And I had three weeks.
CHAPTER FIVE
I went back to my office for an hour or two and tied up the loose ends on a couple of the divorce cases I’d been working on. It was mainly paperwork: the sad, sordid bureaucracy of marital disentanglement. Or extramarital entanglement. Or both. I trudged through the usual statements corroborating the evidence of a hotel manager, chambermaid or anyone else who would confirm that they had seen Mr X in bed together with Miss Y. Of course, it was all a put–up job – with me doing the putting-up for some divorce lawyer – and the witnesses were always twenty pounds better off after signing their statements. Divorce in Britain was a complicated and particularly seedy business. In Scotland, which had its own divorce laws, it was given exactly the same kind of turn of the Presbyterian screw that I had discussed with Macready.
Thinking about it, it was ironic that I was now investigating how someone had accomplished the same kind of setup I regularly put together. Except this time it had been Mr X and Mr Y, and at least one of them had not been party to the set-up.
By the end of the afternoon, I had everything I needed to tie up, tied up. I was left with just the three jobs on the books: the next day’s wages run, Isa and Violet’s job and the John Macready case. And between them, they would take up all of my time.
I made a couple of calls to those in the underground know and asked them if they knew a Henry Williamson. None did. I don’t know why that name, more than the others on the list, had stuck with me. Maybe it was because he was connected to Gentleman Joe Strachan’s First War record, which still remained a puzzle: why would his daughters believe Strachan had been a war hero when, according to Jock Ferguson, he had been anything but?
It was about seven by the time I got back to my digs, having eaten at Roselli’s, as I often did on the way home. I had the upstairs floor of a large villa on Great Western Road. It was basically a family home that had been subdivided and Mrs White, my landlady, lived downstairs with her two daughters, Elspeth and Margaret.
Mrs White – Fiona White – was a very attractive woman. Not in the same knock-your-eye-out way as the redoubtably configured Leonora Bryson, but she was even beautiful, in a careworn and weary sort of way. She had bright green eyes that should have sparkled, but never did, above Kate Hepburn cheekbones. Her hair was dark and cut conservatively and she dressed with taste, if without imagination. The reason Mrs White always looked careworn and weary was because of an unfortunate brief encounter during the war between a German torpedo and a British destroyer on convoy escort duty. The result had been that, within minutes, the destroyer was lying, broken, at the bottom of the Atlantic, taking all but a handful of its officers and men with it.
When I had first moved into my digs, it had seemed to me that the White family still waited for husband and father to return from duty, philosophical about the delay in the same way Brits had become philosophical about all delays and shortages. But Lieutenant George White slept an even deeper, darker sleep than Gentleman Joe Strachan; he was never coming home.
I was comfortable in my accommodation, other than that I had never brought a female guest to my rooms. It was pricey, I suppose, but I had become attached to the little White family. Most of all, I had long harboured a desire to become biblically attached to Fiona White.
The attraction, I knew, was
mutual, but grudging on her part. Call me finicky, but when a woman is filled with self-loathing because she finds herself attracted to me, it tends to dent my ego. The truth was, and it confused the hell out of me, Fiona White tended to bring out the gallantry in me. Which was highly unusual, because, generally, an act of gallantry for me would be to ask the young lady to remind me again of her name before we did the dirty deed in the back of my Austin Atlantic.
There were a lot of things about me that were complicated: my relationship with women wasn’t one of them. Or maybe it was.
I found that whenever I looked at Fiona White, I felt something that I didn’t feel with other women. I wanted to protect her, to talk with her. Just to be with her. To watch her laugh. Strange feelings that did not necessarily involve unbuttoning my fly.
Perhaps foolishly, I had made my feelings known to her. I had been in a particularly sentimental mood, having handed over a large amount of money – something to make me misty-eyed at the best of times – to someone for no good reason other than I felt they deserved it more than me. So, giving my shining armour a final polish, I had knocked resolutely on Mrs White’s door and asked to speak to her. Sitting with her in the small kitchen of her flat, I had done all the talking … about what the war had done to us both, about how I felt about her, about how I wanted to put the past behind me – behind us – and how we could perhaps repair the damage in each other. To help each other heal.
She had sat quietly listening to me, a hint of the sparkle that should have been in the green eyes, and when I had finished my declaration of affection she had held my gaze and, without hesitation, given me notice to quit my lodgings.
I had taken that as less than a maybe. I had, of course, tried to talk her round, but she had remained resolutely silent, simply repeating that she would be obliged if I quit my lodgings within the fortnight, as the Brits referred to two weeks. I had been, I have to admit, more than a little dejected. And that in itself told me something about my feelings towards Fiona White. Hard though it was to believe, I had occasionally encountered some women who actually managed, somehow, to find me totally resistible. But this stung.
It had been the day after when I heard a soft knock at the door. Mrs White came in and, standing awkwardly and stiffly, proceeded to tell me that I need not look for new lodgings, unless I had found some already, and that she apologized for having been so brusque. I was relieved to hear it, but the way she delivered it was so impersonal that I felt I should have been taking down minutes. She went on to explain that, while she appreciated that what I had said had been well intentioned, there was no way she would be entertaining the idea of a gentleman friend.
As she spoke, there was a breathlessness in her delivery and I could see the neck above the white collar of her blouse blossom red. I was filled with the urge to rush over to her and kiss the bloom on her neck, but I decided to hang on to my lease instead. When she had finished she asked if I was in agreement and I had said I was and she shook my hand with the tenderness of a rugby-playing bank manager.
But it had been significant. I had known that what she was telling me was that she didn’t want me to go, and her protestations that nothing could ever develop between us had rung less than convincingly.
Over the months since then, we had gradually moved to a situation where I spent the odd evening watching the television I had bought, but had suggested was better kept downstairs, together with Fiona White and her daughters. I had arranged the odd excursion to Edinburgh Zoo or the Kelvingrove Art Galleries, again always with Fiona chaperoned by her two daughters.
I was playing the long game.
In the meantime, there was the usual itch that had to be scratched and scratch I did, as I always had, but with more discretion than before. I had always sensed that Fiona White had me measured as a bit of a bad sort, based on the flimsiest of evidence: like the fact that on one occasion the police had banged on her door in the middle of the night and dragged me away in handcuffs, or the time that a young lady with whom I had recently parted company turned up and created something of a scene. I therefore did my very best to make sure that my liaisons were kept as out of view as possible.
The one major difficulty this presented was the fact that I had guessed Fiona White had always taken mental note of the occasions when I had remained out all night. So, after our heart to heart, I made sure I never stayed away overnight, unless I had given my landlady advance warning, explaining that I had to go away on business. Which it hardly ever was.
Coming home after being with a woman was not something that troubled me, to be honest. It was the difference between men and women, I supposed: women wanted you to remain after intimacy. For the average Scotsman, this was rather like being asked to hang around a football stadium for three hours after the game had ended. What they really wanted to do was get out as quickly as possible so they could get drunk with friends while giving them a summary of the match highlights.
I prided myself on being a little more considerate and sensitive than that, and certainly more discreet, but I did have a habit of finding a reason for getting home. The fact that I usually stayed at least as long as it took to smoke a couple of Players put me up in the ranks of hopeless romantics and continental lovers.
Having said that, I found the idea of waking in the morning with Fiona White on the pillow next to me was a whole different proposition. And somehow a perplexing one.
So, when I returned that evening at seven, instead of going straight up to my rooms I knocked on the Whites’ door and sat with them watching television. Fiona White smiled when she answered the door to me: a small porcelain gleam between the freshly applied lipstick. She smiled more these days. She asked me in and I sat with her, Elspeth and Margaret and watched The Grove Family on television, balancing a cup of tea on the sofa’s armrest. All around me were the signs of my increasing encroachment: the television set itself; a new standard lamp; and, in the corner, the Regentone radiogram that I had bought for fifty-nine guineas and had claimed was too big for my rooms. It all made me feel at my ease and itchingly restless at the same time. If anyone had stepped into that living room, it would have looked like a perfectly normal domestic scene with all of the essential elements of a perfectly normal family.
I was deliberately, inch-by-inch, easing myself into the gap left by a dead naval officer. I had no idea why I was doing it: it was certainly true that I liked the kids, really liked them, and my feelings for Fiona White were deeper than any I had felt for any woman, except perhaps one. But if I had felt sorted out enough, adjusted enough, to make a fist of a normal life, then why hadn’t I already left Glasgow behind and all of the dreck I’d mired myself in and, at long last, taken that ship to Halifax Nova Scotia?
My domestic idyll was interrupted by the ringing of the telephone we shared in the small hallway at the bottom of the stairs that led to my rooms. Fiona White answered it and then called me to the ’phone, a mildly disapproving frown on her face.
‘Hello,’ I said once she had gone back into the living room, closing the door behind her.
‘Lennox?’ It was a voice I didn’t recognize. It sounded like a Glasgow accent, but not as strong as most and a little bit fudged with something else.
‘Who is this?’
Only Jock Ferguson and a few others had my telephone number here. Anyone who wanted me knew to ’phone my office, or find me in the Horsehead Bar.
‘Never mind who I am. You’re looking for information on Gentleman Joe, is that right?’
‘You’re very well informed. And quickly informed for that matter. Who told you I was interested in Strachan?’
‘Are you looking for information or not?’
‘Only if it’s worthwhile.’
‘There’s a pub in the Gorbals. The Laird’s Inn. Meet me there in half an hour.’
‘I’m not going to meet you at short notice at The Laird’s Inn, The Highlander’s Rectum or The Ambush in the Heather. Just tell me what it is you have to tell.’<
br />
‘I’m not going to do that. I want paid.’
‘I’ll send you a postal order.’
‘You have to meet me.’
‘Okay. Tomorrow morning, nine sharp, at my office.’ I hung up before he had a chance to protest. I dialled Jock Ferguson’s home number.
‘What the hell is it, Lennox? The football’s about to come on. The international.’
‘I’ll save you and Kenneth Wolstenholme the trouble, Jock. Scotland will lead by one goal until the last fifteen minutes and then snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by letting three goals in in quick succession and you’ll spend the next two weeks saying “we was robbed” – like everyone else. Listen, Jock, who did you tell I was asking about Joe Strachan?’
‘Nobody. I mean, just the few other coppers I had to ask for information, like I already told you. Why?’
‘I’ve just had a call trying to lure me to the Gorbals, if you can use lure and the Gorbals in one sentence. He said he knew I was looking for information on Strachan and offered to sell me some.’
‘You’re not going, I take it?’
‘As you Glaswegians are fond of saying, I did not come up the Clyde in a banana boat. I’ve told him to call at my office tomorrow at nine. I doubt if he’ll show. I just wanted to know if it could have been someone you had spoken to.’
‘Maybe your clients have been talking.’
The Deep Dark Sleep Page 7