‘I don’t get it,’ I said. And I didn’t. ‘What’s it to you, Jonny?’
‘Michael, me and Willie Sneddon have run things in this town almost since the end of the war. We had our problems, as you know, but there’s been no trouble between us since Forty-eight. And that peace has proved very profitable for us all.’
Aye,’ said Murphy with a sneer. ‘More profitable for Willie fucking Sneddon than either of us.’
Then I saw it: Jonny Cohen fired a warning look across at his thuggish new best pal, as if Murphy had contravened an agreement they had made before meeting me. So this was what the old pals act was about. Willie Sneddon was coming out on top, as he always did with any deal, and Cohen was keeping the lid on Murphy’s resentment. But it was much, much more dangerous than that. Sneddon, the Kingpin of Kingpins, was easing himself out and into legitimate enterprise. And criminal nature abhors a vacuum.
‘Anyway, as I was saying,’ continued Cohen. ‘The three of us have done all right for ourselves. Things have been pretty good, all in all. But not one — not for a single minute during all of these years — did we stop looking over our shoulders to see if Strachan was going to make a reappearance.’
‘You wanted me to tell you about Gentleman Joe,’ said Murphy with a sneer. Or maybe he was just smiling. ‘I’ll fucking tell you. We all have our little tricks to keep everyone in fucking line. You’re really pally with that fucking monkey of Sneddon’s … the cunt with the boltcutters …’
‘Twinkletoes MacBride? I wouldn’t say we’re pally …’
‘Well he cuts toes and fingers off. Jonny here has Moose Margolis who boils your balls for you. I have …’ Murphy thought for a moment. ‘Well, I have me. The fucking point is this … we all make a big show to scare the shite out of people. Keep the fucking rank and file in line.’ Murphy leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and fixing me with those small, hard eyes of his. ‘Well, Gentleman Joe Strachan never did any of that. No show, no flash. But if you offended him, even if you didn’t mean it, you were fucked. He’d make no big deal about it, but the next fucking thing you’d know is that the one who’d crossed him would just fucking disappear off the face of the earth. No show, like I said. Nothing. And that, my friend, was the scariest fucking thing of all.’
Jonny Cohen picked up the story. ‘Every job he was involved in, every one of his men, where the cash went or what was planned next … no one ever knew anything about it. He was before my time, Lennox, but from the very first job I ever pulled, from the moment I got my foot on the ladder, I knew all about Gentleman Joe Strachan and his army of ghosts.’
‘Christ, Jonny,’ I said. ‘You’re getting lyrical in your old age.’
‘No … really, that’s what they called them. Strachan’s ghosts.’
‘And there was only one who anyone could put a fucking name to,’ said Murphy. ‘If you can call it a name …’
‘The Lad?’ I asked.
Murphy nodded. ‘So you’ve heard about him. He was called the Lad because it was like he was serving a fucking apprenticeship with Strachan. There wasn’t anything this wee fucker wouldn’t do for Gentleman Joe. And it was like Joe was training him up to take over.’
‘You know what this “Lad” looked like? Or do you have any hint of what his real name might have been or where he came from?’
‘Naw,’ said Murphy. ‘There was this one feller, going way back, fucked if I can remember his name. Anyways, this cunt starts fucking blabbing in the boozer one night about how he nearly got a job with Gentleman Joe and starts going on about this evil wee fucker they called the Lad. That’s how everybody found out about him. If this bastard hadn’t got fucking pished, we wouldn’t even know this much.’
‘Let me guess, this guy who mouthed off … he disappeared?’
‘Off the face of the fucking Earth,’ said Murphy.
‘No body ever found,’ said Jonny Cohen. ‘The thing is, Lennox, when they fished those bones out of the river, it was the first time in years that we didn’t feel we needed to keep looking over our shoulders for Strachan. But if that wasn’t his bones, then God knows where he is and what he’s got planned …’
For a moment, I thought about what they had said. ‘But that was nearly twenty years ago, Jonny. You can’t seriously think he’s come back now? If he ever showed his face in Glasgow he’d have a noose around his neck inside of a month.’
‘You’re forgetting Strachan’s “Lad”,’ said Jonny. ‘His heir apparent. If there was one thing Strachan was a master at, it was planning ahead and biding his time.’
I shook my head. ‘I still don’t get it.’
‘It’s fucking simple,’ said Murphy. ‘You’re looking into this for his girls who, incidentally, have fuck knows how many half-brothers and — sisters spread around the fucking country. Anyway, you do your job for them. That’s fucking fine and fucking dandy with us. But we will give you a thousand each if you can give us a name, an address or even a fucking face for the Lad. You point us in the right direction, and we take it from there. You also end up two grand richer.’
‘And Willie Sneddon isn’t playing?’
‘You want to fucking know something? Sneddon’s the one who’s always had the most to lose. But now he doesn’t give a flying fuck. He’s too busy becoming the Chamber of fucking Commerce’s man of the fucking month.’
It struck me that if anywhere was going to have a Chamber of Fucking Commerce, it would be Glasgow.
I shrugged. ‘It’s no skin off my nose to point out this guy, whoever he is, but I really don’t think I’m going to get within a country mile of finding out who he is.’ I paused for a moment.
‘What is it?’ asked Cohen.
I shook my head. ‘No … it’s nothing. It’s just that the morning after I started asking around about Strachan I had a brief encounter with a heavy and a thirty-eight in the fog. And this guy was good. Professional. He wanted to scare me off looking into Strachan’s disappearance.’
‘So why couldn’t it be Strachan’s lad?’
‘Too young. I mean it could be, but it would make him only seventeen or eighteen or thereabouts at the time of the robberies. Too much of a lad. Especially to work as an enforcer.’
‘When I was eighteen I could malky any bastard that got in my way.’ The pride was apparent in Murphy’s voice.
‘I’m sure you could,’ I said. ‘I don’t know … it just doesn’t feel right.’
‘Yet you say this guy was after you to put the frighteners on and get you to drop the Joe Strachan thing?’ asked Cohen.
I thought about it for a moment. It was a stretch with age, but I hadn’t gotten that good a look at the guy. He could have been five years older. Three years older. It would be enough.
‘I tell you what,’ I said. ‘If he is the Lad, then I’ll serve him up to you on a platter, with pleasure.’ Then I added, just for clarity: ‘But I’ll still take the two thousand.’
CHAPTER NINE
To say that Glasgow was a city of paradoxes is like saying the North Pole can be chilly. Everywhere you looked, everything about the city seemed to contradict itself and everything else. It was a bustling, densely populated, fuming, noisy, brash industrial city; yet, if you travelled fifteen minutes in any direction, you found yourself in vast, empty landscapes of moorland, hill and glen. It was a city defined by its people, and its people were defined by Glasgow: yet, that same small distance away, the Glaswegian identity gave way to a different type of Scottishness. In the direction Archie and I drove, it became increasingly a Highland identity.
The country estate on which Billy Dunbar worked was remote and dramatic, covering mountains, pasture and the odd salmon-stocked loch. I enjoyed getting out of the city and into this kind of landscape whenever I could, and had often driven up past the shores of Loch Lomond and stopped off at some lochside tea shop. I did have my contemplative moments — when I wasn’t peeping on adulterous spouses, slapping people about or hobnobbing with gangsters.
It took Archie and me several stops at remote petrol stations and post offices before we found our way to the estate office. Mr Dunbar, we were told by the tweedy spinster type we found in the office, was the deputy head gamekeeper. Eyeing us with that kind of keen suspicion that only comes from a long lifetime’s experience of virginity, she asked us the nature of our business with Mr Dunbar. I decided to christen her Miss Marple.
I told her that we were insurance agents and had papers for Mr Dunbar to sign. What kind of insurance we could be selling a gamekeeper beat me, other than perhaps cover against pheasant-related injury; but she seemed satisfied with the explanation and told us he was not on duty that day but we could find him at his cottage on the estate, to which she gave us directions.
I was grateful it wasn’t raining because, as Miss Marple had explained, Dunbar’s cottage was up a lane on the estate and we had to hoof it. At one time, every square yard of Scotland had been covered with an impenetrable blanket of trees: the Great Caledonian Forest. Some time in the distant past, long before Scottish history took a brighter turn and became the Dark Ages, the forest had been chopped, burned and stripped away for firewood, building materials, or simply to allow space for animals to graze. It had taken a couple of millennia, but the ancient Scots had managed to denude the majority of the Scottish landscape and turn it into peaty bog. Now, as Dr Johnson had once quipped, a tree in Scotland was as rare as a horse in Venice. Mind you, comedy had come a long way since the eighteenth century.
Notwithstanding the efforts of the troglodyte preGlaswegians, the estate we walked through was punctuated with dense clumps of mixed trees and a carpet of late afternoon sun-dappled autumn orange and red lay under our feet. It was exactly the kind of Scottish scene that you found on shortbread tins like the one that I had relieved Paul Downey of.
We reached the cottage after about ten minutes. It was small, stone-built, with a neatly laid out garden to the front and a pen with snuffling pigs to the side. A mound of raked-up autumn leaves smouldered and smoked in one corner.
A short, broad-built man in his mid-fifties came out of the cottage just as we neared it. He was dressed in a dark brown jacket of a tweed so rough it looked as if it had been woven from bramble, and a checked tweed flat cap that didn’t quite match the jacket. He had a shotgun broken over his arm. Tess of the d’Urbervilles did not, as I thought she might, come skipping out of the cottage after him.
The short man stopped as he spotted us and watched us suspiciously as we approached.
‘Can I help you?’ Despite the bucolic attire and setting, there was still a dredger bucket full of Glasgow in the accent.
‘Hello, Mr Dunbar,’ I said. ‘We’re here to talk to you about Gentleman Joe Strachan.’
He froze for a moment as the name from another life collided with him. He cast an eye back to the cottage, as if to check there was no one in the doorway behind him.
‘You police?’
‘No.’
‘No …’ he said, eyeing me from top to toe. ‘You dress too expensive for a copper. Your pal, on the other hand …’
‘I got this suit in Paisley’s on the Broomielaw, I’ll have you know …’ Again, Archie’s eyebrows left his expressionless face behind to indicate his hurt indignation as he looked down at his shapeless raincoat and the baggy suit beneath.
‘This is a lovely setting, Mr Dunbar,’ I said as disarmingly as I could. ‘Who’s estate is this?’
‘It’s one of the Duke of Strathlorne’s estates,’ he said irritatedly. ‘If you’re not police …’
‘The Duke of Strathlorne?’ I echoed. I was beginning to wonder if there was any part of Scotland he didn’t own.
‘If you’re not police,’ Dunbar repeated, ‘then what’s the deal? You work for one of the Three Kings?’
‘No, Mr Dunbar,’ I said, maintaining my friendly tone. My conviviality was prompted in part by the way he nestled the still broken-breeched shotgun in his arm. ‘Although I have helped Mr Sneddon on several occasions. You used to know Mr Sneddon, didn’t you?’
‘Aye, I know Willie. Nothing wrong with Willie Sneddon. Doing all right for himself is Willie. Willie got me this job.’
‘Really?’ I said without much interest. But I was interested: Willie Sneddon had claimed not to know anything about Dunbar’s whereabouts.
‘Aye … The last assistant gamekeeper just upped and left. Didn’t even give his notice. Willie found out about it and put me onto this number.’
‘That was good of him, Mr Dunbar. Mr Sneddon likes to take care of people, as I know myself,’ I said. By the way, my name’s Lennox. And this is Archie McClelland. We’re enquiry agents. We just want to ask you a few questions about Joe Strachan.’
‘I know fuck all about Joe Strachan. You’ve come a long way to learn fuck all.’
‘We just want to talk to you, Billy. You were quite an operator in your own way back then. There’s maybe something you know that could help us.’
‘Help you what?’
‘Listen, could we …?’ I nodded towards the cottage.
‘No. My wife’s in. I’ve got fuck all to say about fuck all. So fuck off.’
I decided against correcting his grammar. Pointing out double-negatives to someone with a double-barrelled is never the best idea.
‘Did you know that they found Joe Strachan’s remains?’
Now that, I thought, hit a nerve. Dunbar looked taken aback, then a little confused, then he returned to suspicious hostility. All a little overdone, perhaps. ‘No I didn’t. And I couldn’t care fucking less.’
‘Didn’t you read it in the papers?’ asked Archie.
‘Oh, it fucking talks … Naw. I didn’t read nothing.’
There you go again with the double negatives, I thought. ‘He was dredged up from the bottom of the Clyde,’ I said. ‘They reckon he’s been there since Thirty-eight.’
Dunbar smirked. A knowing smirk. ‘They do, do they? Well whoopee-fucking-doo. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got work to do.’
‘I thought you were off today,’ I said. He took a step towards me.
‘I’m getting fed up with this. I have had nothing to do with all of that shite since my last stretch in Barlinnie. You say Joe Strachan’s dead, fine, Joe Strachan’s dead. I haven’t heard the name in ten years, and I don’t want to get involved with whatever you’re up to.’
‘All we’re up to is finding out information about Joe Strachan, nothing else,’ I said. ‘No big deal. We’re not looking to solve the crime of the century or recover stolen cash or settle scores. We’re working for Strachan’s daughters, who want to get to the bottom of what happened to their father, that’s all.’
‘Well you’re looking in the wrong direction,’ he said. ‘Listen, I did ten years in Barlinnie: ten hard, hard years of getting fucking birched for any excuse, dodging the old queers and keeping away from the mad bastards and trying not to turn into one myself. I was twenty-two when I went in. I lost the best years of my life and I knew from the first day that I never wanted to go back to that, so I went straight. I came out in Thirty-seven and I’d only been out a couple of months when the polis picked me up and beat the shite o
ut of me because they thought I’d been in on the Empire job. Broken nose and jaw, cracked ribs, four broken fingers on my right hand.’ He looked down at the hand of the arm looped under the shotgun, as if examining the long-healed injury. ‘One of the coppers fucking stamped on it. It’s never been right since. I told them then that I knew fuck all and that’s what I’m telling you now.’
‘Why did they pick on you?’ asked Archie.
‘A copper was dead. That was all the reason they needed. Every name they had was pulled in. The bastard who stamped on my hand was a pal of the dead cop.’
‘McNab?’ I took a wild shot.
‘Aye …’ Dunbar looked surprised. ‘Willie McNab. He became a big shot in the CID afterwards. Anyway, the other reason they picked on me is the job I did ten years for … they suspected that Joe Strachan had planned it, but couldn’t prove it.’
‘Had he planned it?’
Dunbar looked at me as if I had said something stupid. ‘If Joe Strachan had planned that job, I would never have got caught.’
‘Did you do jobs with Strachan?’ I asked and got the look again. ‘Okay, did you know Strachan?’
‘I knew him all right. Not well, but I knew about him. He was beginning to make a name for himself in the Twenties. Even back then the polis were desperate to nail him. There were a lot of big jobs being put down to Strachan. Not just robberies but frauds, blackmail, housebreakings … The coppers could never prove it was Strachan.’
‘But if he had that scope of operation, he must have had a regular team.’
‘Aye, that’s as maybes. But who they were was anybody’s guess. That was another reason the coppers picked on me. Because I had kept my nose clean after prison. The theory they had was that Strachan either picked men without criminal records, or, if it was someone with form, told them not to do any other jobs than his and to keep their noses clean and their mouths shut between jobs. You know, the coppers never recovered a single fucking penny from any of the Triple Crown robberies? Not a single banknote was ever traced. That means Strachan must have had his laundry and distribution all planned out well before. But I’m only telling you what every other bastard knows. Like I told you, I know fuck all else. You could have saved your coupon.’
The Deep Dark Sleep l-3 Page 14