‘I’d better go. Back downstairs. The girls will be home in half-an-hour.’ Her daughters, Elspeth and Margaret, were due to return from school. This had become an afternoon ritual for us every Tuesday and Thursday: an hour stolen behind drawn curtains. Fiona looked tired and her voice was dull: her passion spent and that hint of guilt or sadness or both that I had increasingly noticed in her tone. Fiona White was unlike almost all of the women I’d been with. For her, sex was something that belonged only within marriage; and that was exactly the way it had been for her until the German Navy had intervened and sent her husband to the bottom of the Atlantic, condemning Fiona to a life of stretched means and lonely evenings contemplating over too many sherries a future stripped bare of its promise.
Then I had come along.
As a way of trying to make far-apart ends meet, Fiona White had converted the family home on Great Western Road into two dwellings: upper and lower apartments accessed through the same front door. I had taken the upper flat. True, initially the attraction had been as much to landlady as accommodations, but I had remained respectful and had made no move on her. This was something that, at the time, had perplexed me. It reeked of rectitude and morality, character traits that I long assumed had gone missing-in-action during my war service.
My intentions towards women had not, it had to be said, been noted for their nobility. But Fiona White seemed to bring out an older me — or younger me, depending on how you looked at it. A pre-War, pre-Glasgow, pre-Fucked-Up me.
Thing was, I didn’t know what kind of Fiona White I brought out in her.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked.
‘I’m fine,’ she said, but in a tone that didn’t put my mind much at ease. She got up and began to dress. I watched her. She had the Celtic dark auburn hair and green eyes that you saw a lot of in Glasgow, but her high cheekbones and firm jaw spoke of some other history. She was slim, and of late I had thought perhaps a little too slim, but what upholstery there was was in all the right places.
‘Don’t stand at the window without a shirt on,’ she admonished me. That was the tenor of our relationship; out of view and behind closed curtains.
I sighed and came away from the view of the wet and grey Glasgow weekday afternoon and sat on the edge of the bed, pulling on my shirt: pale blue with a faint gold stripe, French cuffs. My taste for expensive tailoring was, I knew, something Fiona both appreciated and resented. Another sign of her good old-fashioned, deeply-embedded, Calvinism. Not that I was complaining about all of that pent-up repression: what had surprised me — overwhelmed me — about Fiona was that taking her to bed had been like removing a high-pressure lid. Explosive.
But there again, our relationship had been full of surprises: like the way I had come to feel about her. Something nauseatingly honourable and deep. And I had tried so hard to keep all of my dealings with women as superficial and unembellished as possible.
As a culture, Scotland might have been more sexually repressed than a monastery with a view of a nudist beach, but I had, it had to be said, enjoyed a staggering amount of success with the opposite sex during my time in Glasgow. I put it down largely to the lack of sophisticated competition, the average Scotsman’s concept of foreplay generally being: ‘Come here a minute and grab hold of this…’
‘Will you be eating downstairs tonight?’ she asked me, becoming my landlady once more.
‘Are you sure you’re all right? You look tired.’ And she did. Her face was paler than usual and there were shadows beneath the green eyes.
‘I told you, I’m fine.’ She forced a smile. ‘Do I set a place for you?’ It had become the custom for me to join Fiona and her daughters for the evening meal most days.
‘No, not tonight,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a job on. Following a wandering husband. I’ll probably be late.’
She nodded, and finished getting dressed.
‘Do you want me to make up some sandwiches and a flask for you?’
‘That would be fine, thanks, Fiona,’ I said with a smile even more forced than hers. Nothing illustrated the chasm that still existed between us more than her asking me if I wanted sandwiches and a flask. Fiona did not seem to be able to distinguish the role of enquiry agent from that of a night-watchman. She perhaps had a point.
She turned and headed out towards the landing. I took her by the elbow and turned her around, kissing her on the lips. She responded. Just.
‘Don’t tell me my irrepressible boyish Canadian charm is fading…’ I said.
‘Lennox,’ she said, easing herself back from me. ‘We can’t go on like this. It’s not right.’
‘What’s not right about it?’ I let her go. ‘I thought you were happy.’
She cast a glance towards the bed we had shared until a few minutes before.
‘This isn’t me, Lennox. I can’t be the kind of woman you’re used to.’
‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ I protested, although I knew exactly what she meant.
Her look hardened. ‘Please do not swear at me. That’s something else I’m not used to. What I’m saying is that this isn’t right. It’s not right for me. I never wanted to end up…’ She left the thought hanging in a silence that stretched longer than it should.
‘You know how I feel about you,’ I protested.
‘Do I?’
I let her go. ‘What is this all about? What is it you want from me?’
‘Nothing, Lennox. Absolutely nothing.’ The expression in her face now stone-hewn. ‘I’ll get your sandwiches ready.’
Archie McClelland had the kind of face that Bassett hounds, undertakers and professional mourners would probably have described as unnecessarily lugubrious. A lanky six-foot three, Archie was tall for anywhere, which meant he was a giant in Glasgow, and he compensated for his height by perpetually stooping. He even stooped sitting down, as I could see through the rectangle of rear window of his ten-year-old Morris Eight as I pulled up behind it.
Archie had parked at the corner of the street, far enough from the Ellis home as not to be seen from the windows. He popped open the passenger door as I approached and I slid in next to him.
‘How’s it going?’ I asked. The gaze he turned on me was so doleful that I felt myself beginning to sink into clinical depression.
‘Dynamite came home straight from the office and hasn’t set foot outside since.’
‘Dynamite?’
Archie nodded his large high-domed head, his bald pate fringed with an unkempt horseshoe of black hair. ‘Dynamite Andy the demolitions man. I have christened the subject of our surveillance thus.’
‘Thus?’
‘Thus.’
‘Do you often come up with nicknames for people?’
‘I find it does something to ease the mind-numbing tedium of my employment by you.’
‘I see. You could just get another job,’ I said.
‘I would miss the sparkle of our chats,’ he replied. Archie’s dry wit had probably been the undoing of his police career. That and his brains. A surfeit of wit and intelligence was an encumbrance in the police, particularly when it highlighted the deficit of both amongst your superiors. What had finished his career for once and for all, however, had been a fall through a factory roof while chasing burglars. That had not been one of his brightest moments.
‘You get on home, Archie,’ I said. ‘I’ll take over. If lover-boy doesn’t go out by nine-thirty or ten, I’ll pack it in myself for the night.’
‘I bet Humpty Go-cart doesn’t worry about getting home for his jim-jams and Ovaltine. As a private eye you don’t set the example I had hoped for.’ He nodded a pale brow in the direction of the Ellis residence. ‘D’you think our chum is up to some kind of marital malarkey?’
‘Most likely.’
‘Doesn’t look the type to me, whatever the type is. At least from a distance. And if he has a fancy woman on the side, then she’s not exactly putting a spring in his step.’
‘What makes you say that?’
> ‘He doesn’t look a cheery chappy, that’s all. Just an impression I get.’
‘Well, we’ll find out in time, hopefully.’ I opened the car door. ‘I’ll see you later.’
Archie gave an American-style salute.
I was just about to go when a thought made me lean back into the car. ‘Tell me, Archie, you wouldn’t have a nickname for me, by any chance?’
‘No sir,’ he said. ‘That would be disrespectful. No references to lumberjacking whatsoever.’
After Archie left, I moved my Austin Atlantic forward a few feet and filled the space vacated by his car. I sat for an hour as, with increasing frequency, greasy globs of rain smeared the windshield and made stars out of the streetlamps. I switched on the radio and listened to the baneful baying of a dying dinosaur: the death throes of the British Empire. The news was full of Britain’s humiliation as its last, fumbling attempt to remain at the centre of the world stage — its intervention in the Suez Crisis — stumbled on. And while one empire was dying another was flexing youthful muscles: Suez competed for radio time with the latest on the Hungarian Uprising. It was an inspiring beacon of hope in the gloom of Soviet domination, apparently. It was just unfortunate that the West chose to look the other way. Oh, Brave New World…
I drank some of the tea Fiona had made up for me; it tasted odd and tinny from the vacuum flask but at least it was hot. The Glasgow climate decided to lighten my mood by turning the tap up on the rain, which now drummed angrily on the roof of my Atlantic. It was going to be a long, damp night. I decided it was far too inclement for adultery and that I would maybe head home earlier than planned. But then, at a quarter before nine, the dark was split by the light from the Ellis’s front door and I saw a tall figure, hatted, raincoated and stooped against the downpour, dash out and around the side of the house where, I knew, the garage held the family car.
Obviously the demolition business was good; the car that pulled out of the drive and onto the street was a maroon-coloured Daimler Conquest. Registration number PFF 119: the same number Pamela Ellis had given me and I had written into my notebook.
‘Whoever your squeeze is, I hope she’s worth it, bud,’ I said through the windshield and the rain, waiting until the Daimler had reached the corner when, without switching on my lights, I pulled out from the kerb and started to follow him.
CHAPTER THREE
One of the strange things about being an enquiry agent — a life into which I had carelessly stumbled — was that it was one of the few occupations that gave you a licence to be a voyeur. I considered my profession as sitting square centre between that of the anthropologist and that of the Peeping Tom. I was paid to watch individuals without them knowing they were being watched, and that gave me an insight, literally, into how some people lived their lives. There was nothing improper about the gratification it gave me: it wasn’t spying on the intimate, the furtive or the sordid moments that I enjoyed, it was the simple observation of the tiny details, the way someone behaved when they thought they were alone and unobserved; the small personal rituals that exposed the real person.
A Sauchiehall Street store — one of the big ones where the sales clerks acted superior despite the fact that they worked in a store — had once asked me to watch a female counter clerk whom they suspected of having pilfered from the till. It was strictly the smallest of small-time theft — a sixpence here and a shilling there — but over the months it had added up to a tidy sum.
I had followed the woman, too old to have been called a shop girl and too young to be called a spinster, through her dull ritual of work and home, spying on her from behind clothes rails while she took payments and totalled takings; sitting in my car outside her tenement flat while she spent empty evenings and days off at home. I had gotten the idea that the store manager was looking to make some kind of example of her: a warning to others that theft would always be found out and punished. The store certainly had to pay out ten times as much to keep me and Archie on her tail as the alleged larceny was costing them.
It eventually became clear that we were backing a loser: we could find no evidence that she was taking from the cash till.
Then, one Saturday off work, she took the morning train to Edinburgh Waverley. I had followed her onto the train and stood within range at the far end of the third class-carriage corridor. She was a frumpy type, always dressed in grey and a difficult surveillance subject because she seemed instantly to merge into any crowd. One advantage I had, however, was that she clearly had no idea she was being followed and never once checked over her shoulder.
It was when we arrived in Edinburgh that I realized the store had been right about her. This woman, whose rituals and routines were as dull and ordinary as it was possible to be, had disembarked and then done something that was not at all dull and very out-of-the-ordinary: she had retrieved a suitcase from a left-luggage locker at Waverley and disappeared into the ladies’ toilets. While I waited for her to re-emerge from the ladies’, I took a note of the locker number and then positioned myself where I could watch the washroom door without the attendant suspecting I was some kind of pervert.
I nearly missed her. If she had not been carrying the same suitcase and had not returned it to the locker, then I would not have recognized her as the same woman. It wasn’t that she had transformed herself from frumpy spinster to dazzling starlet; but she had donned an expensive and fashionable suit and high heels, had applied make-up to the otherwise perpetually naked face. The Glasgow shop attendant had become the image of a wealthy if unexceptional middle-class Edinburgh housewife. The suit she was wearing was clearly a label that a store clerkess could never aspire to, and I had realized instantly that I was looking at where the pilfered two-bobs and half-crowns had gone. It must have taken her years: years of watching women buy from her clothes she could never aspire to wear herself; years of constant reminding that everyone had a place and her place was behind the counter, not in front of it.
I realized that I could have confronted her there and then; that I could have demanded to know how she had managed to pay for the clothes, the shoes, the handbag, but there was something about what I had witnessed — its bizarre surreality — that made me want to watch her a little longer. My guess had been that this was all about a man and I decided to bide my time to see whom she met.
I had followed her on foot across Princes Street to a typically Edinburgh, typically snooty tearoom-cum-restaurant four floors up with a view of Edinburgh Castle. She ordered from a waitress who clearly knew her from previous visits and she sat contentedly eating scones, drinking tea and looking out across Princes Street Gardens to the castle. I knew then that there was no male companion, no secret tryst with a partner in crime or adultery. There was a peace and contentment about her that was fascinating and I knew I was watching her enjoy the single, complete, indivisible object of her larceny. This was what she had stolen for. It made absolutely no sense and it made absolutely perfect sense.
I followed her from the tearoom. She window-shopped, she browsed, she strolled, but didn’t buy anything. Then, after two hours, she returned to the railway station, picked up the suitcase and performed her transformation in reverse. We both caught the same train back to Glasgow but I made no effort to keep tabs on her; I had seen all I needed to see.
Like I said, it was the oddest thing about my job: to be able to look into the corners of people’s lives and see what they thought no one else could ever be party to.
The funny thing was that when it came to making my report to the store, I didn’t include the details of her trip to Edinburgh. I didn’t tell anyone about it. It wasn’t that I lied to my client: I gave a full account of the observation Archie and I had carried out and the fact that we had found no direct evidence of theft or even discrepancies in the till receipts. I don’t really know why I kept a secret for someone who didn’t know I was keeping it. Maybe it was because I could understand why someone would go to such great lengths to be, for a few hours once every month or
so, someone completely different.
And now I found myself observing another life.
I followed the Daimler at as great a distance as I could risk without losing it in the dark and the rain. Andrew Ellis drove out of Bearsden, and towards the city centre through Maryhill. Maryhill was the kind of place you drove through. Without stopping if you had any sense. It was a tough neighbourhood where a squabble over a spilt pint of beer could cost you an eye, a lung or your life, yet run-down Maryhill sat shoulder-to-shoulder with prosperous Bearsden; opposite ends of the Glasgow social spectrum squeezed together. I dare say the city fathers had had it in mind to make the commute to work easier for burglars.
Ellis took a left off Maryhill Road and an alarm bell began to ring in my head. Not that there was anything wrong with his road skills, it was just that driving a Daimler into Maryhill was kind of like a Christian standing in the middle of the Colosseum and banging a dinner gong in the direction of the lions. I followed him in, not without trepidation. He took another left, then another, and a third that took him back out onto Maryhill Road. I let him take the last turn without following him, instead driving deeper into darkest Maryhill.
Now the alarm bells in my head were deafening. I had peeled off from his tail when he took the last left because his little manoeuvre had clearly been to check if the headlights in his rear-view mirror were there by coincidence or by design. It was a pretty fancy move for a run-of-the-mill Glasgow businessman to pull, even if he was on his way to see his piece of skirt on the side.
I pulled up at the kerb to give Ellis a few minutes before trying to catch sight of him again, although that was unlikely and probably unadvisable if he was on the lookout for a tail.
Mine was the only car in a grey-black tenement-lined street that had the picturesque charm of an abattoir yard. The gloom was punctuated every twenty yards or so by the insipid sodium glow of a streetlamp and I noticed, three standards down, a knot of youths in Teddy Boy gear gathered around the lamppost, smoking cigarettes with the expected dull indolence of adolescence. They turned their attention to the car, exchanged a few words and started to move in my direction. I decided now was maybe a good time to move on, in pretty much the same way as a wagon full of settlers in Cooke’s Canyon, on seeing Apaches silhouetted against the hilltops, would have decided it was a good time to move on.
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