I thanked her and took my leave. She watched me balefully through the small clear circle in the frosted glass. I opened the door that led into the hall just as someone who must have come down the stairwell was leaving through the main door to the street.
My little goldfish was delighted when I reappeared at her window.
‘Are there other offices upstairs?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes, but not the name you was looking for,’ she said, again eager to please.
‘I didn’t notice a plaque outside for any businesses except yours,’ I said.
‘There’s only one,’ she said. ‘It’s some kind of small concern and I don’t know its name. It’s something to do with foreign languages, I think. Translations or something like that.’
‘Okay…’ I said as I headed back in haste to the main door, waving my thanks and leaving my homely little goldfish in her circle of glass.
I just made the street in time to catch a glimpse of the figure that had passed as I had opened the office door into the hallway. She was just disappearing around the corner at the top of the rise. I sprinted up the street to the corner, closing just enough space for me to keep her in sight when I rounded the bend without drawing attention to the fact that I was following her. I could have been wrong, of course, but it had been the odd mismatch of hat and coat that I had recognized more than anything else.
And her shape. I had not had a chance to see her face, but her figure looked right to me. As right as it was possible to be right.
There were, I had been told, whisky connoisseurs whose tastebuds were so attuned, they could identify each and every distillery; and wine buffs who could pin down a wine’s source almost to the specific vine. When it came to appreciation of the female form, I displayed pretty much the same set of skills. Once a set of curves had registered with me, it wasn’t just imprinted in my memory, it was card-indexed, cross-referenced, categorized and star-rated. Even though I had only ever seen it through the weight of her unfashionable coat, hers was one chassis that had been given its own reference section.
She walked with a steady pace, determined but not rushed, and it was no ordeal to follow her from behind, but I was concerned that there was no one else around on the street. Maybe I was flattering myself, but I felt pretty sure that if she got a good look at my face, she would recognize it as the one who had disturbed her and Ellis in the smog.
She crossed Sauchiehall Street and I trotted along behind her. There were more people about and I relaxed a little, feeling I could take better cover in the foliage of other pedestrians. When we reached Charing Cross, she walked directly to the taxi rank and I picked up the pace. I was on foot, having abandoned the Atlantic at almost exactly the same place as I had that night in the smog, and there was a real danger I was going to lose her if she jumped into a cab.
Which was exactly what she did. I sprinted to the next taxi in the rank and jumped into the back.
‘Follow that car…’ I said breathlessly.
The cabbie turned in his seat and presented me with the kind of leathery face that you could only cultivate in a boxing ring.
‘Are you trying to be funny?’
‘Right now, no… but I do have my lighter moments. Hurry up, or we’ll lose them.’
‘That taxi that that young lady just got into?’
‘That’s the one. What’s the problem here?’ I looked past him and through his windshield. Her cab had turned west along Sauchiehall Street and was about to disappear from view.
‘Listen pal, this is the way it works: if you have a destination, then give it to me and I’ll take you there. If not, get out of the cab.’
‘I really need you to follow that taxi before we lose it, it’s important.’
‘I don’t know what your game is, sir,’ he said, his tone heavy with menace. ‘But I’ll repeat the way this all works: you give me a legitimate destination and I’ll take you there. Then I charge you in accordance with the City of Glasgow Corporation’s Hackney Fare Regulations: anywhere in the city for two shillings for the first mile, plus fourpence for each additional quarter of a mile, first five minutes of waiting free, thereafter fourpence for each completed period of five minutes. Luggage not exceeding fifty-six pounds in weight is free, excluding bicycles, perambulators and-or children’s mail-carts. Maximum quantity of luggage one hundred and twelve pounds weight. Have you got it? If you’ve any complaints, please address them, quoting my driver number, to the Chief Constable, Traffic Department, twenty-one Saint Andrew’s Street, Glasgow, C-one. Alternatively, you can shove them up your arse.’
I sighed and handed him a business card. ‘I’m an enquiry agent and I’m on a case. Now would you please try to catch up with that taxi.’
‘I don’t care if you’re Dick-Fucking-Barton… I’m not taking you to follow some lassie without her knowing. Try reading the Sunday papers, pal. With these murders going on, you’re lucky I don’t just take you straight to the polis.’
I sank back into the seat, the fight gone from me. A couple of months before, three woman had been shot to death in their beds, the kind of murder never committed in Scotland, and now all of Glasgow was looking over its shoulder for a crazed killer in the shadows.
‘You sure are a by-the-book kind of guy, aren’t you?’ I said dully.
He replied by getting out of his cab and coming round to hold the door open for me.
‘If you don’t have a destination, sir, then I suggest, with the greatest respect, that you fuck off.’
‘Is that the wording from the Regulations too?’ I asked as I got out of the taxi.
‘I’m paraphrasing.’
I looked along Sauchiehall Street. The cab was gone.
‘Thanks a bunch, friend,’ I said. I thought about getting him to drive me back to Garnethill, but the idea of paying him two bob stuck in my throat. I walked across Charing Cross and back towards where I’d left the car. At least this time, I thought hopefully, it wouldn’t have been sabotaged.
I was half way up Garnett Street when I stopped to take in the view. The sun was still bright but now hung lower in the winter sky and the dark glass of Glasgow’s smoke-hazed air split it into a spectrum of golds and reds. Standing there watching the sky above the city, I lit a cigarette and took a long, slow pull on it.
I should have known better than to indulge in reflective moments.
I was so busy meditating on how industrial pollution makes for great sunsets and savouring my slow smoke that I didn’t notice until the last minute the brand new Rover as it gleamed to a halt beside me. I found myself flanked by a couple of brushed and polished burly types.
There are two types of heavy one was wont to encounter in my line of work: the professional criminal thug whose weight is all muscle and fist; then there are those who carry the weight of authority invested by the state. Policemen, mainly. I knew I was looking at the latter kind.
A third man slid out from the front passenger seat. He was taller but less built than the other two. His tailoring, unlike theirs, was the kind that was priced in guineas, not pounds. He was wearing a country set type herringbone-tweed overcoat and a matching flat cap. He wasn’t wearing plus-fours — I checked, the thought having run through my head that this could have been a press gang for shooting party ghillies. From the outfit and the casually authoritative demeanour, I guessed that his education had involved dreamy spires and his school, like his tailoring, had been paid for in guineas.
He had also been enjoying a smoke and I didn’t like the business-like way he dropped the cigarette onto the kerb and crushed it under the heel of a burnished Oxford brogue.
‘Would you be so kind as to get into the car, Mr Lennox,’ he said in an accent so cut-glass it made Waterford Crystal look slapdash. The heavy to my left showed me a warrant card. He was a policeman all right, but one of the secret denomination. But I guessed the public-school boy was slumming it. He was no Special Branch copper; he was something other.
‘What’s this all about
? Are you arresting me?’
‘Arresting you? Do we have to?’ The public-school boy affected a look of confusion. ‘I rather hope not, Mr Lennox. We simply require your help to clarify a couple of matters. I hoped you would be willing to help us and we would be able to do this without any fuss. Now, if you would be so kind…’
He opened the back door of the Rover for me. He did it very well; he must have watched his batman do it for him countless times before. It was nice to have been given the illusion that I had some choice in the matter and, shrugging, I got in and we drove off. As we did so, we passed my parked Atlantic and I turned to look back at it. A bit of me left in full view in the street.
As I sat in the back of the Rover, squeezed between the heavy shoulders of two pillars of the law, the thought struck me that it might end up being all of me that would be left visible.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I wasn’t surprised when we didn’t head into police headquarters. Instead we drove into the city centre and pulled up outside a four-storey sandstone building in Ingram Street: one of those large, impressive, Art Deco-type edifices you found scattered through Glasgow. Alternating between the huge windows were large embossed copper panels set into the walls and I could imagine it had been some place before the caustic Glasgow climate had grimed the sandstone and turned the panels’ rich copper to verdigris. Now it was just another city block you would walk by without noticing. Which was probably why it had been chosen by my new friends.
My escort had to ring to gain entry into a large, marble-flagged entrance hall of the type that seemed designed to announce your arrival by resonating and magnifying every footstep. After my public-school chum signed us in at a desk manned by two uniformed commissionaires, we echoed all the way to the cage elevator at the far end of the hall. We went up two floors and the corridor we came out into bustled with staff moving from office to office, but there was no indication of the business conducted here, other than a few of the offices seemed to be locked and unlocked by the staff as they came and went. There were no uniforms, police or otherwise.
‘Excuse me for a few moments please, Mr Lennox, Roberts and Lindsay will get you comfortable…’ He nodded to the two Special Branch heavies who eased me along the corridor. As he showed me into a room, one of them actually managed a smile; I appreciated the effort, because he looked seriously out of practice.
I was left alone in the locked room. A huge window looked out over the street and I guessed it was one of the expanses of glass I had noticed from the outside, between the huge wall panels. The room was empty except for a large table with a foolscap notebook sitting on it and four chairs. One of the walls had two vast maps on it: one of the Glasgow metropolitan area and the other of Scotland.
The door was unlocked and a young woman came in, setting a tray with a coffee percolator, two cups and saucers and a plate of Rich Tea biscuits on the table. I smiled; she ignored me and left, the door locking again behind her.
I walked over to the window. As I looked out over the city, the street lamps came on. In November in Scotland, latitude and climate conspired to squeeze afternoon into a mere sliver wedged between morning and night. I watched shoppers and office workers mill around on the street below and tried not to think of the careless freedom they enjoyed while I was locked in a room by a man without a name, in a building without a name.
Ten minutes later he came back in, on his own. Laying a buff file on the table, he asked me to sit and he did the same. He was one of those types who were practically impossible to age, having adopted at twenty a look that would stay with him till sixty. He was unremarkable but pleasant enough looking, and his lightly-oiled blond hair was immaculately combed back from a broad, high forehead and pale blue eyes.
‘I know that your chums are policemen,’ I said, ‘but I’m guessing you’re not.’
‘Then your guess would be right, Mr Lennox. I am a humble civil servant and as such I have no powers of arrest or detention, but our colleagues in Special Branch supply us with the support, should we need it.’
‘Am I detained?’
‘Not at all… You’re free to go whenever you choose, but it would most definitely be in your best interest to cooperate. Let me put it that way.’
I looked around the room. ‘I didn’t know you people had a place in Glasgow,’ I said.
‘We people?’
‘Humble civil servants who may beg favours from Special Branch.’
‘Quite…’ He smiled. I got a better look at the by-the-guinea tailoring: an expensive houndstooth-check sports jacket over a mustard waistcoat, Tattersall shirt and camel-coloured corduroy trousers. The kind of country-wear worn by those whose idea of the country was Kensington Gardens. I noticed his tie: a pattern of alternating diagonal bands, broad black broken by a narrow white edged with a red pinstripe.
‘We have only moved in here temporarily,’ he explained. ‘Needs must basis, you understand.’
‘Your old regiment?’ I asked, nodding towards his tie.
‘Oh… this? Something like that,’ he said airily. I never understood why his type always pretended to be dismissive of their school or military backgrounds, when they wore them around their necks. I had never felt the need to wear either my Rothesay Collegiate School for Boys tie or a regimental badge-emblazoned blazer. Both my old school and regiment probably appreciated my discretion.
‘I was in the First Canadian, myself,’ I said conversationally.
‘Yes, Captain Lennox. I’m fully aware of what is in your service record. And what isn’t.’
‘I see. It’s like that, is it? Why don’t you tell me what this cloak and dagger malarkey is all about? And if we’re going to get all chummy, I should at least know what to call you.’
‘Oh… didn’t I introduce myself?’ He placed his hand on the breast pocket of his jacket, as if that was where he kept his name, like a bus ticket. ‘I’m dreadfully sorry. My name is Hopkins.’
‘Does that come with a prefix… Colonel… Major… Captain…?’
‘As I told you, I’m a civil servant. Civilian. Or at least I am these days.’ He took a silver case from his pocket and offered me a cigarette, which I took.
‘What can I do for you, Mr Hopkins?’
‘These are troubling times. Take this unfortunate situation in Suez, or the current tumult in Hungary. Events in Hungary are coming to a regrettable close. Unfortunately for the Hungarians, Suez has taken everyone’s eye off the ball.’
‘But not your eye, that it?’
‘I’m a Middle Europe, not a Middle East expert. I was never looking anywhere else. The Hungarians, like the Poles, misinterpreted Khrushchev’s so-called secret speech and judged the Soviets would give them their freedom. The Poles played their hand much better and got their man Gomulka back in the premiership. But Gomulka didn’t talk about breaking free of Moscow, Nagy did. This will all end very badly for the Hungarians.’
Hopkins stood up and poured coffee from the percolator into each of the cups. He held up the cream jug and I shook my head.
‘But my interest is in what that can mean for us,’ he continued. ‘Our experts estimate that as many as a quarter of a million Hungarians will flee their native land over the next few months. That’s more than two hundred thousand threats and opportunities.’
He handed me the black coffee.
‘We picked you up because you were following a young lady we have an interest in. Her and her friends. Why were you following her?’
‘I heard she has a good goulash recipe.’
‘I believe you operate as some kind of private detective here in Glasgow, Mr Lennox.’ Hopkins adopted a tone of measured impatience. ‘I am assuming your interest in the young woman was professional? I do hope you don’t mind me asking, it’s just that we’re aware of your significant recreational interest in the fair sex, shall we say.’
‘You seem to be very well informed about me.’
Hopkins laid a proprietorial hand on top of the buff fil
e. Whether it signified he felt owned the file or the subject of the file was hard to say.
‘Why were you following the young lady?’
‘Business, Mr Hopkins. Mine and not yours. You deal in secrets, I deal in confidences. I’m not prepared to betray a professional one on account of a cup of lousy coffee and a Rich Tea.’
‘I see,’ he said. ‘I deal in facts, in information. One of the facts is that the Hamburg police — and our own Redcaps, for that matter — still have an open file going back to Nineteen Forty-five. A young man called Dietrich Holzmann was found floating face down in the Alster Lake with a broken neck. Holzmann was the front man in a major black-market operation, but he had a partner. Not so much a silent partner, as an invisible one who was suspected to be an Allied officer stationed in Hamburg. British… or Canadian. The German police would really like to talk to that officer.’
‘So this is how you win friends and influence people? By threatening them with the bent arm of the law?’ I asked without ire. ‘May I ask you a question?’
‘Please feel free…’
‘You spirited me off the street…’ I looked at my watch, ‘… thirty-five minutes ago. You and I have been together for all but fifteen of those thirty-five minutes. You haven’t once asked my name or to see some I.D., yet you are impressively well versed in every particular of my military service, both on-and off-the-record, and you seem to know all my personal details right down to my inside leg measurement.’
‘We picked you up because you were going to compromise our surveillance of the girl. I didn’t say that we were unaware of your involvement until today.’
‘So, because I innocently stumble onto your cricket pitch, you threaten me with a free ticket back to Hamburg.’ I stood up. ‘If you have anything to pass on to the German police, the Redcaps, the Mounties or my tailor, then I suggest you do it. In the meantime I’m leaving…’
‘You’re free to leave if you wish,’ he said. ‘But, I would strongly recommend you stay and answer my questions. We both know we don’t have to look as far as Germany to find something inconvenient in your past. There are answers to questions the City of Glasgow Police would be grateful to receive.’ He paused, watching my face while his remained unreadable. ‘You are a very special kind of man, Mr Lennox. Not unique, however… I have met you many times before. Different faces, different cities, different languages, but the same type of man.’
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