‘No. I thought about that but don’t see it happening. Thanks anyway, Jock.’
I hung up and went back into the living room.
‘You’re not going out then, Mr Lennox?’ Fiona White asked as I sat back down next to the girls.
‘Oh … that? No. I’m sorry about that. It was a business thing, but I don’t know how he got this number. I’ll deal with it tomorrow.’
‘I see,’ she said and turned back to the television. I could have sworn there was a hint of a smile as she did so.
I was right to have suspected an ambush. I got up and headed into my office early, but as soon as I stepped out of the front door of my lodgings I was grabbed by the throat. Except it wasn’t some thug that went for me but the lurking Glasgow climate. September was turning into October and something cold from Siberia, or worse still from Aberdeen, had moved into the city and collided with the warm air. Fog. And fog didn’t linger long in Glasgow before it became thick, choking, yellowy-green-grey smog.
Glasgow had been the industrial heart of the British Empire for a century. Factories belched thick smoke into the sky, and the greasy fuming of a hundred thousand tenement chimneys combined into a single, diffuse caliginous mass above the city. And when it combined with fog, it turned day to night and took your breath away. Literally.
I didn’t debate long about driving into the office. I generally took it that if I couldn’t see my car from the door of my digs, then driving wasn’t a great idea. The same went for the buses, which left the options of the subway, trolleybuses or trams. The trams were always the most reliable in the smog, so much so that queues of cars would trail along behind them as the only way of being sure to navigate through the miasma; although it often led to motorists finding themselves in the tram depot rather than where they thought they were going.
I walked along Great Western Road, keeping close to the kerb to make sure I didn’t wander off into the middle of the street, and eventually found the tram stop. I could see the indistinct outline of an orderly queue at the stop and, as was always the case in Glasgow, this collection of strangers were chatting among themselves as if they had known each other for years.
I was about four feet from the end of the queue, which was about as far as you could see in the fog, when I felt something jab painfully into the small of my back. I was about to spin around when a hand clenched itself around my upper arm and dug in. The smog clearly had an accomplice, after all.
‘Don’t turn around …’ I recognized the voice as the one I’d heard on the phone. The same odd mix of accent, but this time it was authoritative and calm. ‘If you see my face, I’ll have to kill you. Do you understand that?’
‘It’s not that complicated,’ I said. In the smog you were deprived of much of your vision and your other senses became keener, it seemed. I puzzled as to why I hadn’t heard him come up behind me.
‘You should have kept our appointment last night, Lennox. Now, we’re going to back away down the alley behind me and you’re going to keep nice and quiet and nothing untoward will happen to you.’
Untoward. The vocabulary and the accent were both all over the place. ‘All I want to do is to talk to you. No one need get steamed up or hurt.’
‘I’m assuming that is a gun you’ve got in my back,’ I said, ‘not a rolled-up copy of Reveille. Let me see the gun or I’m not doing anything.’
‘Nice try, Lennox. I lift the gun and you make a grab for it. I tell you what, I’ll pull the trigger and you watch a bit of your spine and maybe a chunk of liver fly off into the fog. Would that convince you?’
‘That would do the trick, for sure … but on reflection, I think I’ll take your word for it.’
It was more than ten years since the end of the war, but there were still vast quantities of guns circulating, particularly in Glasgow. The hard thrust I felt in the small of my back didn’t feel like a bluff, and my new best friend had the kind of quiet confidence that came from experience, so I decided to play nicely. Or at least play nicely for as long as it looked like I’d be able to walk away from our encounter.
He pulled me backwards and the vague outline of the tram queue was swallowed up again in the fog. We were in a side street now that was little more than an alleyway and he steered me backwards twenty yards or so before swinging me around until I was kissing brick. There were cobbles under our feet: Glasgow-black and slick, but which sounded under my heels. But not his. Like when he had come up behind me, he seemed to move silently.
‘Lay your hands flat against the wall, level with your head.’
I did what I was told, but tried to measure, from the sound of his voice, how far back from me he now stood. If he wanted to shoot me in the back of the head, now would be the time.
‘You told me on the telephone last night that you had information worth paying for,’ I said. ‘I have to tell you I find your sales technique a little pushy.’
‘Keep the wisecracks up, Lennox, and we might just seal the deal here and now.’
‘Pushy but persuasive,’ I said, still trying to measure the distance. I decided this was probably a no-sudden-moves-situation. ‘Okay, friend, what’s this all about?’
‘You’re sticking your nose into this Strachan business. I want to know why.’
‘I’m naturally curious,’ I quipped, and he quipped back by slamming a fist into my kidney. The impact jarred my cheek into the wall and drove every drop of air out of my lungs. I dug my fingers into the wall as I gasped in the tarry, damp fug. He gave me the time to recover.
‘I’ll ask you the same question, Lennox, but if you smart-mouth me again, you’ll end up pissing blood for a month. Got me?’
I nodded, still incapable of speaking and sucking air into tortured lungs.
‘You’re going to drop the whole Strachan thing, you got that? You’re going to walk away from it for good. If you don’t, you’ll end up at the bottom of the Clyde yourself. Now, I want to know why you’ve been asking about Joe Strachan. What’s he to you?’
‘Work,’ I said through tight teeth. ‘That’s all. I was hired to.’
The pain in my side was intense and nauseous. My pulse throbbed hard and sore in my head. This guy knew what he was doing but I knew that if I played along and didn’t do anything stupid, I’d probably walk away from this.
But the truth was that this guy was pushing my buttons. All the wrong buttons. The kind of buttons that made me want to play anything but nicely. The kind of buttons that stripped away ten years of civilian life and took me back to a place no one wanted me to be.
‘Who hired you?’ he asked, forgetting to give the r a celtic roll. Whoever he was, he was working hard at hiding it.
I let go a long gasp, clutching my side where he had hit me, and started to bend sideways.
‘I’m going to be sick …’ I leant away from the wall and down, my hand braced against it. I heard a muffled step backwards. He was probably trying to work out if I was genuine or making a move. I leaned deeper and began retching. I could see his shoes: tan suede with soft soles; the reason I didn’t hear him behind me. His feet were planted square and resolutely: there was nothing tentative about this guy. If I made a move he’d be ready for it.
But I made it anyway.
I heaved against the wall with the hand I had been resting on it and thrust myself at him with the loudest scream I could manage: it was he who had to worry about attracting attention, not me. I saw he was about my age and well built, and definitely not Gentleman Joe, ghost or otherwise. Fixing my attention on the gun, I didn’t have a chance to take in his face. He moved swiftly to one side, anticipating my lunge, but I swiped at him with a fist that skimmed his jaw. He swung a foot that caught me across the shins and I went sprawling on the cobbles.
I rolled as soon as I hit the ground, depriving him of an easy target, but he didn’t fire. Instead, as I struggled to get up, I saw the gun arc through the smog in a vicious slash at my temple. I took most of the power out of the blow by blocking it w
ith my left forearm and made an unsuccessful grab for the pistol with my other hand, at the same time slamming my heel upwards into his groin. I missed but caught him in the belly and he doubled. When it comes to a fight with a gun, possession is more than nine-tenths of the law and I made another grab for it. Instead of pulling against me, as most people would do instinctively, he pushed into me as I pulled and slammed the butt of the gun into my cheek, using my own force against me. We had obviously gone to the same finishing school. I felt something wet on my cheek and felt the world take a brief but perceptible wobble.
He staggered back to his feet and I saw him raise the gun to take aim. I was halfway to my feet too and dived to one side, again rolling several times before leaping up and running. I had lost all sense of direction in the smog, but as there seemed to be an upward incline beneath my feet, I guessed I was actually heading further up the side street, away from the main road. I was hidden in the smog now. But so was he, and, unlike mine, his shoes made no sound on the cobbles.
I sprinted blindly a few yards then stopped, pressing myself against the wall. I eased forward slowly, making as little sound as I could. I found a bricked-up doorway, pressed myself into it and waited for the first shot to be fired, hopefully in the direction of where I had been, rather than where I now was. But there were no shots.
I had only managed a swift look at his face, and when I had seen it, the features had been twisted into a snarl. I had gotten just enough of a view to see that he had dark hair and a hard, angular face. I was also pretty sure I had seen an ugly scar on his forehead. He wasn’t someone I had seen before.
I kept pressed into the recess of the bricked-up doorway, straining to hear any sound. In the smog, at the best of times, you can feel isolated, detached, as if someone had switched off the world and nothing existed beyond the four or five feet you could see. But I wasn’t alone: there was another wanderer out there, hunting me with a gun. At any second he could burst into my tiny circle of awareness and it would be down to who reacted quickest. By the same token, he could just as easily have been halfway to Paisley by now.
I waited, not moving, straining the smog with every sense and ready to spring at anyone or anything that came out of it. Nothing. I wiped my cheek with the back of my hand and saw it smeared red. I started to think about the man with the gun. About his fake accent and his handiness with his fists and a gun. If he had been a gangster, then he was one who’d had the kind of army training you only got in the commandos or the like. Three minutes became four, became five. I guessed he had slipped away, aware that coming looking for me in this murk was as dangerous for hunter as hunted. But I waited a minute more. He had been a cool one all right; the type that tends to have plenty of patience.
I was just about to start making my way back to the main street when I saw him. He just appeared in front of me, as if he had suddenly coalesced from the fog itself. He was more a shape than anything else and he didn’t see me pressed into the doorway.
He was moving slowly, scanning the smog-filled alley with his automatic, as if it were a torch. My doorway hiding place was just outside the arc of his vision. I slipped my hand into my jacket pocket, forgetting it had been months since I’d gone to work with a spring-handled leather blackjack in it. This was the kind of opposition you didn’t want to go up against with your bare hands. I weighed up my options, but in that split second of indecision, his form was swallowed up again as he moved further up the alleyway.
Waiting a few seconds after he passed, I crouched down, undid my laces and slipped my shoes off. Then, carrying a shoe in each hand, I moved as swiftly and as silently as I could back down the alley towards Great Western Road, leaving my dance partner still searching further up the alleyway. But I promised myself that we would dance again.
And the next time, I would lead.
I was properly shod by the time I got back to my digs. In the murk, Mrs White would not see me come up the path from the lounge window and I had hoped to slip unnoticed into my rooms to get cleaned up. As luck would have it, she opened the front door just as I got to it.
‘Mr Lennox …’ she said, shocked by my appearance. ‘What on earth has happened to you?’
‘This damned smog,’ I grumbled. ‘Pardon my language … I slipped on the kerb and smacked right into a lamppost.’ It was a perfectly credible excuse: there would be dozens of genuine accidents fitting that description that morning.
‘Come into the kitchen,’ she commanded, steering me with a firm hand on my elbow. ‘I’ll have to have a look at that.’
I was pretty groggy and went along with what she suggested. Pulling out a chair from the kitchen table, she eased me down into it. I winced as she did so.
‘Are you hurt elsewhere?’ she asked.
‘I fell after I hit my head … the kerb dug into my side. It’s mainly my cheek though …’ I hoped she bought it. Fiona White had seen me with various battle trophies, including on one occasion when they had been awarded to me by the City of Glasgow police. It was, I knew, her principal reason for wanting to keep her distance: all part of my qualifications as a shady character.
She made up a weak solution of antiseptic and boiled water and dabbed at the wound. I noticed the solution cloud pink when she dipped the gauze back into it.
‘I think you might have to have this stitched,’ she said, frowning. She came around in front of me and leaned in to examine me from that angle. Her face came close to mine and I could detect a faint scent of lavender and felt her breath on my lips. Her eyes moved to mine. She suddenly looked embarrassed and stood up in a businesslike manner; but there had been something in the look we exchanged. Or maybe there hadn’t. I was sore and groggy and confused as hell about a lot of things, not least Fiona White.
‘It’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘If you have a sticking plaster, that’ll do.’
‘I really think you should have it seen to. It’s in the same place …’ She let the sentence die.
‘As my scars? I know. They’re all healed up now, Mrs White. A scrape isn’t going to cause me any problems.’ I smiled at her and was rewarded with a stab of pain from my cheek and a trickle of fresh blood down to my jaw line. She tutted and reapplied the gauze pad. She lifted my hand onto the pad to hold it in place while she took a roll of sticking plaster from a drawer and cut three strips from it.
‘How did you get them? The scars, I mean?’ she asked, awkwardly, as she used the strips to secure a fresh pad in place. I turned my head a little and she tutted again, pushing it back with two fingers. It was the first time she had ever asked me a personal question.
‘I picked the wrong plastic surgeon,’ I said. ‘He said he’d done Hedy Lamarr’s nose and Cary Grant’s chin, but he’d only ever really done Clark Gable’s ears.’
‘Seriously …’
‘They really are plastic surgery scars,’ I said. ‘They had to patch me up after I caught the tail end of a German hand grenade.’ I didn’t tell her that it would have been much worse, if one of my men hadn’t taken most of the blast. My face had been torn open, but they’d been able to put me back together again. His splashed-in-the-mud guts were beyond any surgeon’s skill.
But the plastic guy who had fixed my face had done a pretty good job: all I had was a spider web of faint, pale scars on my right cheek. And my smile could look a little lopsided, because of nerve damage, but only in a way that made it look even more wolfish, as Leonora Bryson could fully attest.
While tea infused, Fiona White brought me a couple of aspirin and a tumbler of water. The talk became small and mainly about the smog and how it always caused trouble; but, as I sat there, a thought sunk heavy and sickeningly in my gut. I had lied to Fiona White about what happened, for the best reasons, and God knows that, on most occasions, I didn’t have to have the best reasons to lie. But I didn’t like lying to her.
That was not, however, the main cause for the feeling in the pit of my stomach. I had just evaded a very serious operator with a gun in his hand: the ver
y same person who had ’phoned me at my digs the night before. And he had clearly been waiting for me, outside the house, knowing I would be heading in to see if he kept our specious appointment.
That meant he knew where I lived. And that, in turn, placed Fiona White and her girls in danger.
‘Is something wrong, Mr Lennox?’ Fiona White asked. ‘Are you feeling worse? I really think we should see about getting you to a doctor.’
I shook my head. For a second I debated with myself about whether I should level with her or not. It would alarm her and would certainly end my tenancy, but she had a right to know.
‘I need to make a ’phone call,’ I said.
I stood up and walked through to the hall telephone.
While we waited for Jock Ferguson to arrive, I sat with Fiona White and told her exactly what had happened to me and why. For some reason I even levelled with her about the money being sent to Isa and Violet each year on the anniversary of the Empire Exhibition robbery, and told her that this was one fact that I was keeping from the police, on client confidentiality grounds. I also told her that I had another, very high profile case that I was working on that could cause all kinds of problems, but that my little samba in the smog certainly had nothing to do with that investigation.
She sat and listened to me quietly, her small, pretty hands folded on the lap of her apron and her face quiet and serious, but otherwise without any expression. I sat and listened to myself in amazement: I was the most secretive person I knew – I even kept secrets from myself – and I never talked to anyone about my work, yet here I was spilling my guts to my landlady.
I knew I should shut up. And somewhere deep inside, I was screaming to myself to shut up, but I wouldn’t stop talking. I spoke fast and urgently and once I had given her the full background to what had happened, I told Mrs White about how I was now concerned that this man, and anyone he was associated with, clearly knew where I lived. I said I would pack a few of my things and move somewhere else, at least for the time being, but I would continue to pay my rent to her. I understood that she would probably want me to move out permanently because of the inconvenience I had caused her and I said that I would, of course, comply with her wishes, but in the meantime I wanted Inspector Ferguson to know what had happened and maybe get someone to keep an eye on the place and … I seemed to run out of things to say, or breath, or both. I punctuated it all with, ‘I’m sorry …’
The Deep Dark Sleep Page 8