Dead men and broken hearts l-4

by Craig Russell

  I found myself in a fish restaurant in Sauchiehall Street. It was not the kind of place I usually frequented: generally, the range of Glaswegian gustatory delights was determined by whether or not they could be cooked by dropping them into a deep-fat fryer, and I generally tried to be more cosmopolitan in my dining habits. But I did call into this place from time to time on the conceit that it was slightly more sophisticated than the usual fish and chip joint. It was all high ceilings, porcelain and chequerboard floor tiles, and had huge windows that looked out onto the street; the waiters and waitresses wore waistcoats and aprons, your fish and chips were served on china, instead of being wrapped in the previous day’s Scottish Express, and you ate with cutlery, not your fingers.

  I was all class.

  He didn’t come into the restaurant. Instead he stood directly across the street, hiding from the rain in a bus shelter and smoking. Whoever he was, he wasn’t a pro. A pro doesn’t stand in plain sight of his target, especially when that target has gone into a public building with only one entrance and exit. My meal came with a pot of tea and I ate it leisurely, finishing off with an even more leisurely cigarette. The guy across the street let four buses come and go from the stop without budging.

  After I’d finished and paid at the cashier’s desk, I pulled my coat collar up and the brim of my hat down and shouldered my way into the rain. My ‘shadow’ across Sauchiehall Street turned his back to me and started to read a tattered bus timetable with sudden and profound interest.

  I made my way through the crowds back in the direction of my office. The Atlantic was parked a couple of streets away but I decided to do my own little test to see how far my new chum would follow me. I turned right and crossed Blythswood Street. As I casually checked the traffic, I caught a quick glance of him bustling around the corner. He was a reasonably big guy, maybe five-ten but heavy-set. He was wearing a pale grey raincoat, a matching hat and a harassed expression.

  I cut into Sauchiehall Lane, one of the intersecting alleyways that run parallel to the grid layout streets of Glasgow city centre. It was lined with the unadorned brick and steel-doored backs of the buildings that faced onto Sauchiehall Street and Bath Street, and in the rain the cobbles were greasy and treacherous underfoot. I trotted along the lane to put some distance between me and him.

  He had a round, fleshy face and large eyes, and if it had not been for the smudge of trimmed moustache above the plump lips he would have looked like an overblown baby. The big eyes got bigger when he saw me waiting for him and he stood for a moment, startled.

  Then he took a swing at me.

  ‘You bastard!’ he shouted, as his fist arced wide and as predictably as if he’d sent me a three-sheet telegram about his intentions. I blocked his punch easily with my left forearm and planted my own in the cushion of his belly just below the breastbone. He doubled up and I slammed one into the side of his head. His feet slipped on the cobbles and he fell against the wall, still clutching his gut. It was quick and easy and all of the fight went out of him. The problem was — or at least always had been since the war — that the fight never seemed to go out of me. Once I had gotten started, I found it difficult to stop. But now, as I lined up another blow, I looked down at the doubled-over guy gasping for breath. He was as good at fighting as he was at tailing people, and with a sigh I hauled him up and pushed him against the wall. His hat had come off and I could see he was bald, with only a band of close-cropped hair from temple to temple. It made him look even more like some kind of overgrown infant. The fight might have gone from him, but when our eyes met, his still burned with hatred.

  ‘You bastard…’ he repeated breathily. ‘You stay the hell away from her. Stay away from her or I’ll kill you.’

  I grabbed the collar of his coat with both hands and slammed him against brickwork.

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ I demanded. ‘Why are you following me?’

  ‘You know why, you shite.’

  ‘Cut out the name-calling, bud, or I’ll slap it out of you. Now… what the hell is wrong with you and why are you on my tail?’

  ‘I know it’s you. I know you’ve been… You and her. I found your card in her handbag…’ He reached into his coat pocket and I grabbed his wrist, easing his hand slowly into view. It was my business card, all right.

  ‘Listen, I have no idea what this is all about,’ I protested. I had been chased by more than one angry husband in my time, but it had been a while since I’d given anyone cause.

  ‘You’ve been carrying on with my wife, that’s what it’s all about, as if you didn’t know.’

  ‘Who’s your wife?’

  ‘Don’t try to come on all innocent,’ he blustered and straightened himself up. He was trying to regain some dignity, but it was still well beyond his reach. ‘You know who she is… that is unless you’ve got a string of marriages you’re wrecking, you bastard.’

  I gave him a backhander, hard across the face. ‘I told you to watch your mouth. What’s your wife’s name?’

  ‘Sylvia Dewar. I’m Tom Dewar, her husband.’ His eyes fell with the last word. The shame of a cuckold. I let him go.

  ‘Sylvia Dewar?’ The pieces began to fit. I let go of his coat and he tried to smooth the crumples out of it and his pride. ‘Listen, friend, I only met your wife the other day. On business. And I’m sure as hell not playing footsie with her.’

  ‘No?’ he looked at me defiantly. A shaky sneer on his swelling face.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then someone is. And I found your card hidden in her handbag.’

  ‘Didn’t you think to ask her who I was? Or do you just jump on the first mug you think your wife’s spoken to?’

  ‘She would just have lied if I’d asked her. She’s a liar as well as everything else. I know all about it. There are ways of knowing. It’s been going on for months.’

  ‘Not with me, it hasn’t.’

  He stared at me, the bitterness and anger still burning in the large, watery eyes. But I guessed that was the way he looked at the whole world and he was clearly less sure about his accusation. I bent down, picked up his hat and handed it to him.

  ‘Listen, Mr Dewar,’ I said, ‘I think we should grab a coffee. There’s a place around the corner.’

  We got some odd looks as we walked into the cafe. The harsh neon ceiling lights threw up the oily smears on Dewar’s coat and the angry swelling on his temple where I’d bopped him. We took a table in the corner and a glum, meagre, middle-aged waitress took our order for two frothy coffees as if it had been a personal insult.

  ‘Okay, here’s why your wife had my card…’ I explained all about my work for Joe Connelly and the union and his concern for Frank Lang’s welfare. I gave him all the main points of what I’d discussed with his wife, but, given that he’d recently taken a swing at me for stealing some of his apples, I missed out the part where Sylvia had offered me the whole fruit bowl. I ran through what she had told me about Lang going away with the men in the fancy car.

  ‘She never said anything about that to me,’ he said. ‘And I’ve never seen any fancy cars outside. All I know is he’s not been back to the house for a week or more.’

  ‘Do you believe me?’ I asked. ‘I promise you that I haven’t seen your wife before or since and our meeting was strictly business.’

  Dewar stared at me. He knew I was telling the truth, but there was desperation in his eyes, almost as if that believing it had been me, that being able to put a face to his wife’s secret lover, made it easier somehow.

  Eventually, he shook his big, baby head glumly. ‘But there is somebody. I know it. I even thought it could have been Frank next door but he’s hardly ever there.’

  ‘Quite,’ I said, but thought about how his wife had known what Lang kept in his kitchen cupboards. I had recognized something in Sylvia Dewar, something I had seen in many of the women I had known. The type of women I had known. My guess was that Dewar was making a mistake in looking for one offender. Given the f
act that I had nearly become one of them, there had probably been more than one notch on Sylvia Dewar’s bedpost. I looked at Dewar, slumped at the table, the spirit leaving him just as the fight had. Despite the fact that he had just tried to take my head off, I felt sorry for him.

  ‘Sylvia… you see, Sylvia isn’t the kind of woman that goes for someone like me,’ he said, desperation in his voice. ‘I couldn’t believe it when she went out with me and then said she would marry me. But I make a good wage and I give her a good life. I like to buy her things. She likes me buying things for her.’

  ‘Mr Dewar…’ I said as soothingly as I could manage. I was not good with other people’s unhappiness. ‘You don’t have to — ’

  ‘I’m sorry about today. But I’m going out of my mind with this. I suspect everybody and when I found your card…’

  ‘Forget it.’ I waved a dismissive hand. ‘I understand. You don’t need to explain. Let’s just forget about it.’

  ‘But your card…’ he was almost pleading. ‘It says you’re an Inquiry Agent. Is that like a private detective? Do you handle marriage cases?’

  ‘It is and I do,’ I said. ‘But before you ask, I can’t get involved. I’ve met your wife in another context and that rules me out of handling a divorce case involving her.’ I didn’t mention that the real reason I couldn’t get involved was because she had invited me to test out their marital bedsprings. Which could make things complicated.

  ‘I don’t want a divorce. I just want to find out who she’s messing about with. Will you take the case? I can pay…’ He was raising his voice in desperation, attracting more glances, including from the waitress who’d clearly gone to the same charm school as Mussolini.

  ‘I can’t, Mr Dewar.’ I sighed. ‘Listen, give yourself a few days to calm down, then call me.’ I handed him a business card. ‘You best put the other card back in your wife’s purse, just in case she looks for it. I asked her to get in touch if Frank Lang comes back home.’

  We sat over our coffees for a while and I asked him what he knew about his missing neighbour.

  ‘Not a lot,’ he said. ‘Frank keeps himself to himself. Always friendly though.’

  ‘But?’ I said, reading something in his expression.

  ‘Nothing really. Just he seems a bit of a misfit. Not odd, exactly, but he’s… I don’t know… just a bit different.’

  ‘In what way different?’

  ‘Just not your typical union man, I suppose.’ There was frustration in Dewar’s shrug: we were not talking about what he wanted to talk about, all he wanted to talk about. His wife’s suspected infidelity was filling his mental universe.

  ‘I guess he’s never left a key with you, in case he was away like he is now?’

  ‘No. Like I said, he keeps his business to himself.’

  ‘I may have to ask you and your wife more questions,’ I said. ‘But, under the circumstances, it would probably be best if I did that when you were both at home.’

  He nodded. ‘You will think about what I asked you? About maybe just keeping an eye on Sylvia to see what she’s playing at?’

  ‘I will,’ I said. ‘But at the moment it’s a definite no-can-do. Even without the complication of your wife knowing who I am, I’ve already got two cases running at the moment.’

  After a while, we ran out of things to say and we left the cafe. As he took his leave of me, Dewar apologized again for trying to jump me in the alley.

  ‘We all make mistakes,’ I said. ‘God knows, I’ve made more than my share.’

  ‘You don’t know what it’s like,’ he said, the too-large eyes cast down. ‘You don’t know what it’s like to think you have something special, something good, with a woman, only to find out it’s all a sham.’

  ‘Don’t I?’ I asked. ‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that… ’

  CHAPTER NINE

  Fiona didn’t come up to my room that Thursday afternoon as we had arranged and when I knocked on her door there was no answer; no sounds from inside her flat. As I stood at her door, I became aware of the emptiness of the house. Its quiet. I could hear the traffic on Great Western Road, the playground sounds of children streets away, the shuddering clang of a mechanical digger against tarmac somewhere less distant, but these were all the wall- and window-muffled sounds from a remote universe. The house around me was still and empty, and there was something about that stillness that gave me a bad feeling that I couldn’t explain.

  I didn’t wait. Somehow I knew she would not be back that afternoon. Instead I went back out to the car and headed back into the city centre.

  Archie was out and the office was locked up, but I found Pamela Ellis waiting for me. Eagerly. It was an adverb I would never have attached to her, but it seemed to fit with her itchy impatience when we caught sight of each other as I climbed the stairs to my office.

  ‘Ah, Mr Lennox,’ she smiled. Eagerly. ‘I hoped I would catch you. I thought you maybe wouldn’t be back and I was about to leave you a note.’

  ‘Normally I wouldn’t be back on a Thursday afternoon, Mrs Ellis, you’re lucky you caught me. My appointment was… cancelled.’ It was one way of putting it, I suppose. ‘Please…’ I unlocked the office door and held it open for her.

  She sat down in front of my desk while I hung up my coat. Her handbag sat flat on her lap, her gloved fingers interlaced on top of it. The shoulders beneath the raincoat were tense, the stare straight ahead; no relaxation in her pose. She had the demeanour of someone prepared to carry out a rehearsed task or deliver a prepared speech.

  She delivered her speech.

  ‘This is all very awkward and more than a little embarrassing for me, Mr Lennox, but I’m here to tell you that I won’t be requiring your services from today. Everything has been sorted out. It was all a huge misunderstanding, just like you said it could be. I’m sorry to have wasted your time.’

  ‘No need to apologize, Mrs Ellis. My time is your money, I’m afraid, so that’s what has been wasted. I’m just happy that everything seems to have been resolved amicably.’

  ‘Thank you Mr Lennox. I really appreciate everything you’ve done. I wonder if I could settle my account with you?’

  ‘Sure, I’ll send you a bill.’

  ‘If you don’t mind — I mean if it isn’t putting you out — I’d rather settle up now. Could you make up your account now and I’ll pay you right away.’

  I shrugged. ‘Suits me, Mrs Ellis.’

  Now, when anybody was in a hurry to settle a bill and get me out of their lives, it tended to make me a little suspicious. But when it was a Scot forcing cash on me, it was enough to make me outright paranoid.

  ‘If you don’t mind me asking,’ I said as I took my blue invoice book from the desk and slipped carbon paper between the sheets, ‘what was the big mystery? Why was Mr Ellis going out in the evenings at such short notice?’

  ‘Oh… It was all totally innocent. I feel such a fool, really…’ She pulled on a fake smile. ‘It really was all connected to the business. He was called to these meetings at very short notice because the client he is dealing with is a developer who has an unusual schedule and Andrew had to meet with him at all hours. What I didn’t know was that most of these meetings took place during normal office hours and these other ones were… well, they were just when things came up that needed to be discussed urgently.’

  ‘I see.’ I tore the invoice sheet from the book and handed it to her. I had itemized my and Archie’s time and, under sundries, added the replacement engine cables.

  ‘Oh, yes. I quite understand that you have to charge for the damage to your car; after all it happened when you were working for me.’ She nodded gravely. ‘But you should know that that vandalism didn’t have anything to do with Andrew.’

  ‘You asked him about it?’

  ‘Oh, gracious no. He doesn’t know anything about me hiring you… it’s just that I confronted him with all of my stupid suspicions and he explained everything. I’ve even met his customer. Everything i
s perfectly above board.’

  ‘And what was Tanglewood? Did your husband explain that?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, that…’ She was too slow in clearing the frown. ‘Oh, yes… Tanglewood is the name of the project that Andrew’s client is building. That’s all.’

  ‘And the girl?’

  ‘You were absolutely right.’ Pamela Ellis nodded approvingly. ‘I have to say you really know your job, Mr Lennox — you could see that there was nothing going on between them. The young lady in question works for Andrew’s client.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, as she counted out my payment in uncreased five-pound notes that looked fresh from the bank, ‘I’m glad that it’s all been sorted out.’

  I took the cash. It was exact to the last penny. No bonus. She had been told not to try to pay me extra as any hint of my being bought off would be likely to make me suspicious. I stood up and shook her hand, holding on to it for a second longer.

  ‘Mrs Ellis,’ I said, ‘are you sure everything is all right?’

  ‘Of course it is.’ Another smile that was as genuine as the fairy tale she had just spun me. ‘Like I said, I just feel so silly about the whole thing. Getting you involved in this. I should have talked to Andrew first.’

  ‘Well, as I say, I’m pleased it’s all sorted out, but if you need my help at any time, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.’

  She thanked me again and left, trying very hard, but failing, to conceal her relief.

  I sat down behind my desk and looked at the neatly counted-out cash. Sometimes there were no answers, I told myself. Or at least no answers that make any sense when you looked at them. And sometimes you just had to walk away from it — none the wiser and none the worse for it.

  Whatever had passed between husband and wife, whatever she believed or didn’t believe, whatever story she wanted to concoct for my benefit, it was no longer my business or concern. I’d been paid, and trying to work out what the hell was going on would pay me no more.