‘Were they?’ The massive expanse of Archie’s brow creased. ‘I didn’t know that. But if you say so.’
‘Did you ever come across someone called Billy Dunbar?’
‘No, can’t say I have,’ said Archie after a moment’s thought.
‘Here’s the last known address for him.’ I handed Archie the address given to me by Jock Ferguson. ‘That’s a starting point. Could you see if you can track him down?’
‘Is this me started, then?’ Archie raised his eyebrows. ‘When do I get my trenchcoat and six-shooter?’
‘I think you’re confusing Humphrey Bogart with John Wayne. Yes, this is a job. Keep a tally of your time and expenses. Just see if you can trace him. But try not to spook him. I just want to talk to him, okay?’
‘I will move like a panther in the night,’ said Archie.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I took the keys into the office and ran Archie home in the Atlantic. I went back to the Central Hotel to pick up my stuff, pausing in the lobby to use one of the telephone kiosks. It was all walnut, brass and polished glass and didn’t smell of piss in the slightest. I ’phoned Mrs White and told her that I was in the Central Hotel but moving on, probably, that day or the next. She sounded genuinely relieved to hear from me and I asked her if everything was all right, which she said it was, but I could tell from her voice she was tired. I told her I would keep in touch and I hung up.
I rang up to Leonora Bryson’s room, but got no answer. I had better luck when I tried John Macready’s suite. I told her I was moving out and would keep in touch about progress, I also asked what Macready’s movements would be for the next week, until he caught his flight. Her tone was as businesslike as usual and neither of us made mention of what had happened the night before: she because she was not alone in the room, probably; I, because the situation was so bizarre that I was beginning to doubt that it had really happened, or think that I had dreamt it.
After staying in the Central Hotel, I braced myself to come down in the world, and found a reasonably priced hotel down by the Gallowgate. It was more of a boarding house than a hotel and had a sign outside which declared: NO DOGS, NO BLACKS, NO IRISH. I had spotted signs like this in London and the South, but this was the first I had seen in Glasgow. I was greeted, or more confronted, by a small, rotund, balding bundle of hostility who introduced himself as the landlord. He had that speech defect that seemed to be particularly common in Glasgow, a slushy lisp where every fricative is distorted into something that sounds like radio interference. It was rather unfortunate, therefore, that his name was Mr Simpson. Or Schimpschon, as he introduced himself.
I restrained the instinct to dry my face with my handkerchief, or to ask if it was okay if I could keep Nigger, my black Irish Wolfhound, in my room, and followed Simpson up the stairs. When I answered his question about how long I would be staying, which I said would be a week, he stopped on the stair and turned, a suspicious frown creasing his porcine brow.
‘You’re no’ Irischsch, are you?’
‘What? Oh, my accent … no, I’m Canadian. Is that all right? But I did spend a weekend in Belfast once …’
My irony went over his shiny head by a mile.
‘That’sch awright. Schscho long aschsch you’re no’ Irischsch …’
The room was basic but clean, and I shared a bathroom with four other rooms and there was a pay ’phone in the hall. It would do for a week or two, if needs be. I paid three days in advance, which Simpson took thanklessly and left.
With Archie on the trail of Billy Dunbar, I decided to dedicate myself to tracking down Paul Downey, the part-time amateur photographer who had done so well in capturing John Macready’s good side.
I spent the first evening checking out the well-known queer haunts in the city centre: the Oak Café, the Royal Bar in West Nile Street and a couple of others. I decided to hold off on a trip down to Glasgow Green for the moment. Wherever I went, I was met with an almost universal suspicion, clearly being taken instantly as a copper out to trap homosexuals. I would have probably been less offended if they had thought I had been there cruising.
I tried to get around the suspicion that I was a cop by offering money for information, but that seemed to make things worse. I couldn’t blame them for clamming up. As I had told Macready, the City of Glasgow Vice Squad – and police forces in Scotland generally – pursued homos with biblical zeal which, in itself, made me question the underlying culture. I never could understand why homosexuality was illegal in the first place: if consenting adults wanted to assault each other with friendly weapons out of the sight of children and horses, then I didn’t see why that should be a police matter.
All the same, I avoided visiting the toilets while I was in the queer bars.
I was aware that somebody followed me out of the Royal. It was dark and the fog had come back, but nothing like as densely as before. Unlocking your car door is a prime time for an ambush, so I walked straight past the Atlantic, picking up my pace and taking a swift turn into the alley that connected West Nile Street with Buchanan Street. As soon as I was around the corner, I pressed into the wall and waited for him to take the turn. This time, just like I had promised myself, I was going to lead the dance.
I saw the figure hesitate for a moment, then turn into the alley. I leapt out and grabbed his coat, pulling it out and down over his shoulders and upper arms, transforming it into an improvised straightjacket. I swung him around, slammed his back into the wall and rammed my forearm up and under his chin, shutting off his windpipe.
I knew even before I got a look at his face that this wasn’t the same guy from the other morning in the smog. It had all been too easy and, anyway, this guy was too small.
A pair of scared-wide eyes stared at me through uneven horn-rimmed spectacles.
‘Please … please, don’t hurt me …’ he pleaded.
‘Shit … Mr MacGregor …’ I let go the bank’s Chief Clerk. ‘What are you doing following me?’
‘I … I saw you in the bar. I know why you were there. I just know it.’
‘Em … no, you don’t, Mr MacGregor,’ I said emphatically. ‘I’m not that type of girl.’
‘No, no … I know that, Mr Lennox. I know you were in there watching me. That’s why I came after you. I promise I’ll never go in there again. Ever. It was my first time …’ His fright turned to pleading. ‘Well, my second time, but that’s all, I swear. I promise you I won’t do it again. Listen, I have money. I’ll give it to you. Just don’t tell the bank director. I know he hired you to check up on me … Or the police. Oh, please God no, not the police …’
‘Is that why you came after me?’ I pulled his coat back up over his shoulders.
‘I saw you leaving. I didn’t see you when you were in there, but I guessed that you had seen me. Please don’t tell the bank, Mr Lennox …’
I held my hands up to placate him. ‘Take it easy, Mr MacGregor, I wasn’t in there looking for you. I had no idea that you … And no,’ I said, reading the sudden change in his expression, ‘I wasn’t in there for fun. Let’s get out of this alley before a patrolling copper takes us for a couple.’
He stepped back out onto West Nile Street. ‘Come on, I’ll give you a lift home,’ I said. This was more than just an embarrassing moment: MacGregor worked for an important client and I could do without the complication. But it began to dawn on me that there might be some mileage in having the goods on MacGregor. He told me he lived in Milngavie and we headed out of the city centre and up through Maryhill.
‘So what were you doing in the Royal?’ he asked eventually, clearly still not convinced that he had not been the subject of my surveillance.
‘I was looking for someone,’ I said. ‘A guy called Downey.’
‘Paul?’
I took my eyes off the road and turned to MacGregor. ‘You know him?’
‘I do. Did. Not well. I haven’t seen him in weeks. What do you want him for?’
‘I can’t tell you that, Mr
MacGregor. I thought you said that was only your second time in that bar …’
MacGregor reddened. I was going to be able to milk this.
‘Listen, I’m not interested in your private life, but I would greatly appreciate it if you could point me in the right direction. I really need to find Downey.’
‘He used to go to the usual places, the Oak Café, The Good Companions, all of those places. But, like I said, I haven’t seen him for weeks. You could try some of the steam rooms though. I think I heard someone say that Paul’s friend works at one of the public baths.’
‘Do you have a name?’
‘I’m afraid not. No, wait … I think his friend was called Frank, but I don’t know which baths he worked at. That’s all I can tell you, Mr Lennox. Sorry.’
‘It’s something to go on. Thanks.’
We were passing through an area of flat, open countryside as we approached Milngavie. Off in the distance – a darker grey silhouette in the lighter grey of the fog – I could see something long and cigar shaped suspended from what looked like a gantry. I had seen it before, and more clearly. It looked like something Michael Rennie should have stepped out of in a science fiction movie and it had always puzzled the hell out of me. I decided to take advantage of having a Milngavie local in the car with me.
‘Oh that? That’s the Bennie Railplane,’ MacGregor said in answer to my question. ‘It’s been there since before the war. There used to be a lot more of the track that it hangs from, but they took it down along with all of the railings and stuff for the war effort.’
‘Railplane?’
‘Yes. It was built in the Twenties or Thirties. It was going to be the transport of the future. It could travel at well over a hundred miles an hour, you know. But no one backed it and it never got more than the test track there.’
I thought about dreams of a future that never happened: the Empire Exhibition of Thirty-eight promising a cleaner, brighter Glasgow full of art deco buildings, with the Bennie Railplane connecting cities at superfast speed. What could have been. Like my wartime dream of me returning to Canada, making a proper life for myself. A lot of things had been killed in the war. Ideals and visions, as well as fifty million people.
I dropped MacGregor outside a bungalow in Milngavie which he admitted, a little embarrassedly, was where he still lived with his parents. He hesitated before getting out of the car.
‘You won’t say anything, will you, Mr Lennox?’
‘What happened tonight stays between us,’ I said.
‘I’m very grateful, Mr Lennox. I owe you for this.’
Oh, I know, I said to the empty car as I drove off. I know.
In the absence of widespread indoor bathrooms, the Victorian Glasgow that exploded in population but not in area was faced with a major public health threat. The great unwashed of Glasgow really had been. The city’s response to this problem was an array of public baths, swimming ponds, pools, Turkish baths and municipal ‘steamies’: communal laundries that were often attached to public bath houses.
In the Glasgow of the 1950s, and in the comparative rarity of the real thing, you could even have a ‘sun-ray’ bath at the Turkish Baths in Govanhill, Whitevale, Pollokshaws, Shettleston and Whiteinch. A sun-ray bath would cost you two bob; a combined Turkish-Russian and sun-ray bath would cost you four shillings and sixpence.
Bathing was segregated, the baths open between nine a.m. and nine p.m., with separate days for each gender at each venue.
Unofficially, there were set times when, if you were of a certain disposition, you could meet like-minded gentlemen in at least two of the bath houses.
I spent two evenings checking out the baths, asking if anyone knew Paul Downey or where I could find him, or if someone called Frank worked there. I was met at different locations with different responses, from the hostile and suspicious – as I had in the queer bars – to the unnervingly welcoming. But nothing took me closer to finding Downey; I could find no one who would admit even to recognizing the name.
Despite the knocks and hardship it had often endured, Glasgow was a proud city. And that pride was often given eloquent expression in the most impressive civic architecture in the most unlikely of locations. Govanhill Public Baths and Turkish Suite in Calder Street was a perfect example: a stately building from the outside, and Edwardian palace of ablution on the inside.
After asking a pool attendant, I was told that Frank was one of his colleagues and he was on lifeguard duty at the moment. The attendant sent me to wait in the gallery of the gents’ swimming pool. I sat on the fire engine-red seats and watched the handful of swimmers in the water. Every splash resounded in the chlorine-fumed air of the white-tiled and deep red-beamed pool hall. You could have held an opera here, and not just because of the acoustics; the décor of this public bath house bordered on the opulent.
‘You wanted to talk to me?’ A large collection of muscles bundled into a white tennis shirt appeared beside me. In contrast to the bulging biceps and beefy shoulders, and despite being predictably square-jawed, the features of the face were fine, almost delicate. His fair hair was bristle-cut at the sides and back but long and thick at the top, and a dense blond lock had a habit of falling across his forehead and slightly over one eye. I had the impression, somehow, of a cross between some idealized Nazi image of Aryan manhood and Veronica Lake.
‘I’m looking for Paul.’ I said it as if I knew him.
‘Paul who?’
‘You know who … Paul Downey.’
‘What do you want him for?’
‘Just to talk. I know you know where he is, Frank. Where can I find him?’
Frank leaned in closer and drew his lips back from his teeth. ‘Why don’t you just leave him alone? Didn’t he promise that he’d pay the money back?’
Interesting.
‘Maybe we can arrange easy terms,’ I said. ‘I just want to talk to him, that’s all.’
‘Anything you’ve got to say you can say through me. You’ll get your money. And soon. I thought your boss accepted that.’
‘And who, exactly, is my boss?’
Frank looked puzzled for a moment, then angry when he realized I wasn’t who he thought I was.
‘Okay, I’ll level with you, Frank,’ I said. He may have been a cream puff, but he had lots of filling and there was no need for things to turn nasty. ‘I don’t know what money you’re talking about, but I guess from what you’ve said that young Paul owes the wrong kind of people money. That’s not my concern. I’m on the supply side, not the demand. I’ve been hired to buy back certain photographs from Paul. I take it you know what I’m referring to?’
Frank shrugged his massive shoulders.
‘Listen, Frank, if you know where Paul is, tell him to ’phone me.’ I handed him a card with my office number on it. ‘And tell him that he’ll get his money, but we play this my way, not his. We’re not prepared to mail that kind of cash into a Wellington Street PO box on the strength of good faith. And it would be good if you could point out to him that he doesn’t get a single penny unless I’m totally convinced I’ve got everything: all the copies and all the negatives.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Frank, but he took the card anyway.
Frank left the Govanhill Baths about half past ten. He stood outside on Calder Street for a good five minutes, checking the road in both directions, making sure I wasn’t waiting to follow him – which I was – before heading off down the street to his tram stop. He was wearing a cheap but flashy belted raincoat and had pulled his hat down over his eyes, but there was no mistaking the shoulder to waist taper of a serious bodybuilder.
Fortunately for me, the other side of Calder Street was block after block of tenements; red sandstone beneath black soot. I had found a close, as the Scots called the open-ended entrance passageway and stair of a tenement building, and concealed myself in it while watching the bathhouse exit. Frank was a smart cookie, all right, and I found myself wondering if he had more
to do with Downey’s amateur photography club than just looking pretty.
He got on the tram heading away from the city centre and I walked around the corner to where I had parked my Atlantic. There was no rush: I knew where the tram was heading and I would catch up with it before its next stop. It was fortunate that I did, because Frank skipped off at the next stop and crossed the road. We were in a long arc of tenement-lined streets and I would have been conspicuous if I had stopped, so I drove on until I could do a u-turn out of sight. As I sat parked there, another green and orange Glasgow Corporation tram passed by, this time travelling towards the city centre. I waited long enough so that I came around the corner just in time to see Frank, in the distance, board the tram.
He was a very smart cookie.
I kept my distance, following the tram until Frank got off at Plantation, and started walking into Kinning Park. I dumped the car when it became the only vehicle on the streets and my walking pace progress, even in the light fog, would start to draw attention. I followed Frank on foot, my footfall silent because I was wearing my soft-soled suede numbers, and congratulated myself on following my alleyway chum’s footwear tips.
Frank led me into a row of three-storey tenements and turned into one of the closes. I sprinted to catch up, to see which flat he went into, and reached the mouth of the close just in time to hear the downstairs flat slam shut. I doubted if Frank and Downey lived together openly – Glasgow’s attitude toward that kind of thing made the Spanish Inquisition look tolerant – but I had put my money on Frank having wanted to tell his bestest ever friend all about my visit to the baths. I decided to give them some hello-honey-I’m-home time before I went knocking on the door.
I had noticed a call box at the corner of the street, so I headed back to it and called the lawyer, Fraser, on the out–of–hours number he had given me. I told him where I was and what I was doing.
‘And you’re outside now?’ he asked. ‘How sure are you that Downey is in the tenement?’
The Deep Dark Sleep Page 11