The Deep Dark Sleep

by Craig Russell

  I really didn’t like the walk through the forest. I found myself listening to every creak, rustle and bird cry, my heart in my mouth. There was nothing to fear here and now, of course, but I’d taken many such walks through woods just like this, and back then there were things more deadly than squirrels and rabbits hiding in the foliage.

  Ten minutes later I came out exactly where I thought I would, although it took me a minute to get my exact bearings on how far up the path I was. I looked around and found a largish rock by the side of the path. Its shape was reminiscent of a curled-up cat sleeping, or maybe it was just me who would see that. The point was it was distinctive enough for me to recognize and I moved it so that it sat out on the path. On the way back, all I had to do was find the rock, turn left into the woods and head arrow-straight towards the boundary wall.

  It was beginning to get dark, even out here beyond the gloom of the trees. I didn’t know why I was doing it, but I slipped the Webley out from my waistband, snapped open the breech and checked the cylinder was full before snapping it shut again and tucking it back into my waistband. I also checked my inside jacket pocket to make sure the photograph was there.

  It took me another fifteen minutes to reach the cottage. There were no lights showing and no sign of life, so I guessed that my luck had run out and that no one was home. I went up to the door anyway and knocked, but there was no reply. I stood there for a moment debating whether I should leave the photograph and a note, asking Dunbar to ’phone me if he recognized the man in the photograph. I decided against it. It was my only copy of the photograph and I had to be careful with it: it could, after all, connect me to a burnt-out tenement flat and a dead queer.

  I cursed the waste of time coming all the way up here for nothing and turned resignedly from the door. Before I retook the path, I went to one of the cottage windows, cupped my hands to blinker my eyes and peered through the glass. As I did so the memory of my last experience peeping through a window came to mind and I hoped with a laugh I would not catch Dunbar and his ugly wife in flagrante.

  I stopped laughing.

  I snatched the Webley from my waistband and moved back to the door. It was unlocked and I pushed it as wide as it would go, scanning the room as I entered, ready to fire at anything or anyone that moved. It was empty, except for what I had seen through the window. I moved into the kitchen. Empty too. I came back into the main room.

  It was becoming difficult to see in the gathering gloom, but I dared not switch on a light. This was a place and a situation I did not want to be seen in. I said a silent prayer of thanks that I had parked my car where I had, out of sight.

  Billy Dunbar lay on the floor of the cottage, in front of the settee. His throat had been cut and the wound gaped like a clown grin. I could just make out in the dim light a bloom of dark crimson staining on the rug beneath his head. His wife lay on the other side of the room. Same story.

  I pressed the back of my hand against Dunbar’s forehead. Stone cold. I reckoned he had been dead for at least an hour.

  I stood silently in the middle of the room, touching nothing, listening for the sounds of anyone approaching on the path, trying to think what the hell this all meant and what I was supposed to do about it.

  I thought of going for the police, but I was outside the City of Glasgow and I would find it difficult to explain my complicated involvement to some hick in a uniform who would have trouble with the most basic concepts: like it really wasn’t a good idea for first cousins to marry.

  I had no idea about the social life of gamekeepers, but I decided to get as far away as possible, as quickly as possible, in case someone else from the estate decided to drop in for a drink or to exchange beauty tips with Mrs Dunbar.

  Backing out to the door again, I took my handkerchief and swabbed the handle, the only thing I had touched, clean. I checked up and down the path. No one. Just to be on the safe side, I gave the window I had peered through a good wipe down too.

  I put the gun back in my waistband and ran down the path, back the way I had come. After a couple of hundred yards I eased the pace to a trot. It was getting really dark now and I could easily lose my footing. I remembered where I was now: the path took a sudden bend to the right and I would have another half mile to the ‘cat’ stone.

  I was fully around the corner before I saw them: a group of three men. The man in the middle turned and saw me and said something to the other two. Instantly I knew I was in trouble. Instead of coming up the path at me, the other two moved quickly off the path and into the fringe of woods, one on either side. The man in the middle stood still and watched me, his hand reaching inside his short, dark coat. I made a run for the cover of the woods to my left, trying to penetrate them as deeply as I could before the guy who had taken that side could outflank me. I was making a hell of a racket, but at this stage, distance and cover were the most important advantages to gain. I had elected for this side of the path because this was the direction the car lay in. If I had gone the other way I would have been at their mercy for longer.

  I was running blind now and my chances of getting a foot caught on a root or tripping over a rock in the dark were too high. I stopped dead and stood stock still, straining the night for any sound. Nothing. But I knew that all three were now in these woods. Again the name of the game would be to outflank me. They would guess that my car was somewhere out on the road and I would be heading back to the perimeter wall. I listened some more. Still nothing.

  I don’t know what it was about the three men on the path, but I had known instantly that they were Dunbar’s killers. Again it was something that I had picked up in the war, something I couldn’t analyse or explain: you just learned to tell whether the figures you had spotted in a landscape were combatants or civilians, even if they were vague figures, sighted from a distance. It was a predator’s instinct to recognize another predator.

  And these guys had been predators.

  More than that, there had been something about the man in the middle. He had been older than the other two. About my height. And there had been something about his bearing that, again from a distance, made me think of some kind of foreign aristocrat.

  I was pretty sure I had his photograph in my pocket.

  I took the revolver from my waistband, crouched down and waited. They were good all right, but not too good. I heard one of them far off to my left and a little ahead of me. He was moving quietly, but the sound of anything more than a crawl was difficult to hide in a forest at night. I guessed that he was about fifty yards off. My guess was that his compadre would have taken the same measure on the other side. Their boss, I reckoned, would wait until they were fifty yards into the woods and then come in to take the middle way. A triangulated search. I moved as low and silently as I could and advanced several yards to my right. There was a depression in the ground, not much of one, but it had been formed between root balls and it allowed me to crawl along beneath the profile of the forest floor.

  Somewhere to my right, something made a noise and suddenly the dark was split by three beams of light. Their torchlight converged on the same spot and a small deer that darted off deeper into the forest. The torches went off, but they had been on for long enough for me to get a rough fix on their positions. I had been right about the search pattern. These guys were good. Professional. My main problem was that the point from which the light behind me came suggested that their boss was going to walk right into me.

  The meagre light made me nostalgic for scuffles in the Glasgow smog and I inched back into the woods, trying to find an even better place to conceal myself. I picked up a rock and threw it as hard as I could into the dark. It didn’t travel as far away from me as I wanted before striking a tree. The torches came on again and focused on a point ten yards off. Not finding a Scottish Red Deer or a Greater Canadian Dumbass where they expected, they began to scan the forest and the beam of one torch passed directly over me. If I hadn’t been in the depression I would have been spotted for sure. The tw
o flankers kept their torches on, constantly scanning and keeping me pinned down, but the guy behind me switched his off. My guess was he was on the move. In my direction.

  I inched even further back. Eventually I found what I was looking for. A sprung tree had pulled itself up by the roots and a tangle of thick root, fibrous tendrils and clots of earth gave me a curtain to hide behind. In the other side was a thick fallen branch, the diameter of a small tree trunk. All thoughts of preserving suede or houndstooth forgotten, I slipped in behind the exposed root ball and hunkered down. I eased back the hammer on the Webley. Again I was back somewhere I didn’t want to be, but when it came to my life or someone else’s, I would make sure it was someone else’s. One of the searchers’ torch beams swept close over my head again and I sunk deeper. Shaking some of the soil from a root, I used it to darken my face, just in case I was caught in torchlight.

  I didn’t hear him until he was almost on top of me. He had been moving almost silently and much more quietly than the other two. He stopped in his tracks, standing on top of the ridge, no more than three feet from my head. So close I couldn’t even ease round to take aim at him. If I moved, I’d have to shoot him. If he turned on his torch, he’d see me through the tangle of roots. I held my breath. This was insane: I’d already killed one man and now I was probably going to have to kill three more if I wanted to survive.

  He moved on. But he did so so quietly that there was no way of me knowing how far. I stayed motionless. What this meant was that they were now all behind me, and between me and the perimeter wall and my car beyond. But by the same token, the way back to the path was clear. I turned slowly around in my hiding place and eased myself up to look behind me. I ducked back down when I found myself staring at the silhouette of the older guy’s back, only a few yards further on. Peering over the ridge I could see as he turned sideways. It was so dark that it was impossible to see him clearly, but again I got the impression that I was looking at the man whose picture was still in my pocket.

  I was looking at Gentleman Joe Strachan. I was sure of it.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I waited a full five minutes after the older man had been swallowed up in the dark before I made my way back towards the path. It was only a matter of time before they started to sweep back in my direction again.

  As soon as I had the path under my feet I sprinted along it in the dark, again having to ignore the risk of stumbling over something. I slowed down when I thought I was close to where I had left the ‘cat stone’, but everything was so different in the dark. I slowed to a walk and realized that I must have come too far and turned back, cursing the lost time. If my pursuers had worked out that I’d gone for the path, they’d catch up with me any moment.

  I found it. Again, it looked totally different in the dark and no longer reminded me of anything feline, but I recognized it from the position I’d left it in. I set off back into the woods, heading in a straight line at right-angles to the path, just as I had planned. This time I really did have something more than squirrels and rabbits to worry about and I kept my pace steady but slow and quiet, crouching low with my knees slightly bent and my gun held ready.

  What had taken me ten minutes on the way in took half an hour on the way out. Eventually I found the wall and recognized the mulchy bed of leaves and twigs where I’d landed. That meant that my car was directly behind the wall. I was just about to scramble up the wall when I checked myself. These guys were good. Really good. What if they had worked out that I must have come by car and one of them had checked the road around the estate? Admittedly, that was a lot of road to cover, but they would know it wouldn’t be too far from Dunbar’s cottage.

  I could climb over the wall and drop straight into an ambush.

  I decided to follow the wall about ten yards further on and climb over as quietly as I could. When I was on top of the wall, I checked to see if I could see the car, but I had chosen too well and it was concealed by bushes. I eased myself down and took the gun from my waistband again. As I edged towards the car, I could see the back of it begin to emerge. I stopped. I had been right. A figure stood by the car, watching the wall next to it with his back to me. It took me a few seconds to work out he was on his own. My guess was the other two were still searching the woods for me. I could see he was younger, leaner and shorter than the older man I’d seen in the woods. He had something in his hand. Not a gun. For a moment I thought it was a large knife but, as I crept closer, I could see it was a baton, like a policeman’s truncheon. They hadn’t expected me to be armed and I hadn’t realized that I had had an advantage. But I decided not to risk it. Turning the gun around in my hand and holding it hammer style, I crept forward until I was right behind the goon by the car.

  I let him have it hard on the back of his skull, then twice more on the way down when I didn’t really need to. He was out cold, but all of the tension and adrenalin of the chase in the woods took over and I rolled him onto his back and fixed his face for him. I guess I only hit him three or four times, and not with all my strength, but it cost him several of his teeth and his sense of smell. I wanted the others to find him and see what happened when you went Lennox-hunting but you didn’t make the kill.

  I went through his pockets and took everything he had, not taking the time to look at it but stuffing it into my jacket pockets. When I was finished I got into the car. I was shaking: my hands, my legs. That was how it got me. It wasn’t the scares, it was the adrenalin and the testosterone and whatever the hell else your body flooded with. And it never got me at the time, only after.

  I had it now, I had had it after the fight in my office, and I had gotten it regularly during the war.

  I eventually found the ignition with the key and drove off.

  I got back to my digs about nine-thirty. The Javelin was back, parked outside. I could have just gone in and gone up to my rooms, or I could have played who’s-the-gooseberry in Fiona’s living-room, but I didn’t have the stomach for it. Once I’d opened the floodgates like I just had with the goon on the country road, I generally found that I was too quick to get handy again. And I really, really wanted to get handy with that smug little shit.

  I headed down Byers Road and along Sauchiehall Street. Something gnawed at me as I drove: maybe the real reason I hadn’t gone home and stood my ground was that I knew, deep down inside, that Fiona would be better off with James White. Brother of her dead husband, dull but reliable type, the kind of steady Joe that I could never be. Maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe it was just that I was no good for Fiona. Or just no good.

  I got the same curt nod of recognition from my neckless chum on the door. No meeting with Hammer Murphy this time: I was at the Black Cat to get wet and set about it with great alacrity at the bar. The funny thing about good jazz is that it slows down your drinking and I turned my back to the bar, leaning my elbows on it cowboy style, and listened to the trio who were doing something mellow with a baroque piece; taking the mathematics out of it and playing with its rhythms. When they finished I turned back to the bar and inadvertently nudged the guy next to me.

  ‘Why don’t you watch what you’re doing?’ he whined, making a big deal of holding his drink up as if I’d spilled some of it, which I hadn’t. He was a big guy, and I could see that he had had a few, but I could tell at first glance that he was no fighter.

  ‘It was an accident, friend,’ I said. ‘No harm done.’

  ‘You spilt his drink …’ One of his buddies decided to chip in. But over his shoulder. ‘You should buy him another one. And it was a malt.’

  ‘No, I didn’t spill it. And like I said, just an accident.’

  ‘You calling me a liar?’ The big guy, emboldened by his friend’s support, turned to me, square on, but still holding his glass. I sighed, put my drink down and faced him.

  ‘Look, I didn’t spill your drink, and it was an accident. But here …’ I slapped his hand up and the entire contents of the glass splashed over his shirt, jacket and some on his fac
e. ‘Now your drink is spilled,’ I said as if explaining arithmetic to a five-year-old. ‘And that was deliberate. And yes, I’m calling you a liar. And I’m calling your mother a filthy whore who took sailors up the ass. Yours too, by the way …’ I leaned to one side, smiling, and addressed his chum as if I didn’t want to offend him by leaving him out. ‘Now if either of you two queers are man enough, which I doubt, not to take that, then I’ll happily put the pair of you in hospital. And trust me, you’ve picked the wrong night.’

  Glaswegians are as pale-complexioned as it is possible to be, yet I could have sworn both of them turned an even whiter shade.

  ‘Do we have a problem, gentlemen?’ Neckless the doorman was beside me. Buzzer behind the bar, I reckoned.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said cheerily. ‘These two gentlemen and I are just going outside for a stroll, aren’t we?’

  ‘Listen, I don’t want any trouble …’ The big guy now looked scared. The doorman wouldn’t care what happened between us if we took it outside.

  ‘Lennox …’ I felt a hand rest gently on my shoulder and got a blast of perfume. I turned and saw Martha. She smiled nervously. ‘No trouble, Lennox, okay? Why don’t you and me sit down over here and have a drink? On the house. These boys didn’t mean any harm.’

  The two guys next to me were now turned back to the bar, doing the don’t-make-eye-contact-with-the-psycho thing. Neckless backed off a little and I let Martha lead me across to the table. I noticed her nod to the barman and our drinks followed us quickly.

  I sat and glowered at the two guys at the bar for a while longer, but eventually the jazz started to soak into my bones and dissolve the tension in my muscles.

  ‘You’ve got to watch that temper of yours, Lennox,’ said Martha. ‘It could get you into bother.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be the first time,’ I said, easing back into my chair. I stopped watching the two guys at the bar, mainly because they were breaking all the laws of probability and never casting a glance anywhere on my side of the room. The next time I looked up, they were gone. ‘Anyway, I wasn’t looking for trouble. Those guys all but picked a fight.’