A ticket to a show Tommy would have had no interest in.
The body of my sure-footed and quiet friend lying broken and dead from a silent and unlikely fall.
All of my instincts were telling me to leave well enough alone. Conspiracy to open a lockfast place with intent to steal maybe didn’t sound like the crime of the century, but it was enough to put me in prison for a couple of months and end my career as an enquiry agent. I had conspired, I had driven Tommy to the lockfast place, I had sneaked my own way in. No one was looking into Tommy’s death, and that meant no one was looking for me.
But those same instincts were telling me that included in the no one looking for me was Mr McNaught, who should by now have been demanding – with promised menaces – the plans he had wanted stolen, his down-payment cash, or both.
And that didn’t make any sense at all.
*
Summer nights in Scotland never got truly dark, the ghost of the old day lingering until the infant light of the new took hold. The night of Tommy’s funeral was muggy to boot. I lay sleepless in bed, smoking and staring at the darkened bedroom ceiling, and an idea that had been floating about half-formed for weeks began to coalesce in the drifts of cigarette smoke.
It had all been a set-up.
For some reason, Quiet Tommy Quaid had been set up for a fall, in the most literal way. Someone had been on the roof waiting for him; the reason Tommy hadn’t made a sound was because his neck had already been broken before he fell. As I had learned only too well during the Grand Tour of Europe organized on my behalf by the First Canadian Army, killing a man doesn’t need to be a complicated business. Whoever had planned Quiet Tommy’s demise had gone to a lot of trouble to make it look like an accident. But even that didn’t make sense either. Stabbings and beatings-to-death were commonplace in Glasgow and, after all, Quiet Tommy Quaid was a member of the city’s underworld, where grudges and rivalries often turned deadly but difficult to trace. Even a hit-and-run with a truck would have been simpler.
Instead, Tommy’s killers had gone out of their way to make it all look like an accident – and a perfectly plausible accident. Its elaborate staging meant Tommy was involved in something, or knew something, big, and whatever it was, they didn’t want the police looking for a reason for Tommy’s death.
And I had been the patsy in the set-up: there had been no plans to be stolen, no trade secrets, no client behind McNaught. The break-in could have been anywhere, but the Saracen Foundry was an out-of-the-way, low-security place where Tommy’s killers could, as I had done, get in and out without detection. And when they had, they’d called the police anonymously to report a suspicious-looking van parked at the side of the foundry. I was supposed to have been found waiting in the van and would have told a story about trade secrets and roof-top break-ins. The fact that the police would never track down the mysterious – and probably pseudonymous – Mr McNaught would simply be put down to him having the sense to get out of Dodge.
But that hadn’t been my main purpose as a stooge. The thought stung that McNaught – or whatever his real name was – had used me because, if the job came through me, Tommy would have trusted it. For whatever reason, they had known a direct approach to Tommy would have been seen through.
That was why Tommy had seemed so different, so edgy. Shit – Tommy knew.
But why? What importance could a minor if not petty criminal have that warranted an elaborate luring to his ambush and murder?
Sleep had given up on me, so I decided to make it mutual. Pulling my dressing gown on, I went through to the dining room and poured myself a rye whiskey. The French windows opened out onto a narrow balcony, so I took my whiskey and my two-in-the-morning thoughts out into the night air.
The silk-streaked sky above the city wasn’t as clear as on the night of Tommy’s death, but the brighter stars were visible above the street-light glow of the city. I lifted my glass in a silent toast to Tommy and was immediately angry with my own maudlin sentimentality: Tommy wasn’t looking down on me; Tommy didn’t exist any more; Tommy’s light had been snuffed out by someone with a bigger plan. And I would never have an excuse to dig into what that plan was.
But that was all about to change.
Part Three
1
Two days later I got my excuse to start digging into Quiet Tommy Quaid’s death: a legitimate excuse to ask questions out in the open. An excuse that came wrapped up in a very appealing package.
Glasgow was a city of fast-changing mood and the weather had cooled right down: August guising itself as another, later season. It was nine-thirty when Jennifer Quaid came into my office. She was wearing a light tweed jacket and skirt in pale grey with a white knit top beneath. An expensive string of pearls looped around her throat. Everything she wore was quality without being ostentatious, and it was clear she had the same innate good – and expensive – taste as her brother.
Sometimes seeing a woman up close lets down the promise from a distance. It was the reverse with Jennifer Quaid: she had the same kind of misplaced nobility that Tommy had had; fine, well-proportioned features and large, intelligent, blue-green eyes. There was something of the pre-Raphaelite about her: a natural, classic, easy beauty. Her copper-blonde hair was longer than the usual style, but still short of her shoulders, and the soft waves in it looked natural and unaided by heat or permanent lotion. Her skin was pale and flawless, her lips were full without being fleshy and lipsticked pale coral, and I had the strongest instinct to smudge them.
All of this I noticed before wondering what could possibly have brought her here to my office. I had it bad. Bad, deep and instant.
While I scanned the office for a lurking winged cherub toting a bow and arrow, I let her go through the formality of introducing herself and thanking me for attending Tommy’s funeral. I returned by expressing my sorrow for her loss. Suddenly, my office seemed strangely inappropriate for our conversation.
‘Why don’t we go around the corner,’ I said. ‘There’s a tearoom.’
She nodded. I let her lead the way down the stairwell to the street and enjoyed the view: she had been very well assembled.
*
The tearoom was half a century out of date with a heavy-handed Art Nouveau feel to it, yet it was a style oddly in keeping with my companion. We were led to a window table by a waitress so elderly I worried she’d survive the trip, and so frosty she made Heinrich Himmler look like he had people skills. Only one other customer had found the waitress’s charm irresistible, but he sat over at the far side of the tearoom and I felt we were reasonably free to talk. I ordered a coffee for myself and a pot of tea for Jennifer; our unsmiling geriatric attendant shuffled back across the tearoom and potentially off this mortal coil.
‘You and Tommy were good friends, I believe,’ she said.
I nodded thoughtfully. ‘I guess you could say that. Tommy got on with most people, but I don’t know if he ever let anyone get that close. But yes, I like to think that we were friends.’
‘Well, I can tell you Tommy certainly regarded you as someone he trusted and respected very much. His trust and respect were hard to earn. Harder than his friendship.’ She spoke with the restraint of the recently bereaved, stumbling over the mention of Tommy’s name, struggling with the strange novelty of referring to him in the past tense, trying to keep a lid on her grief.
‘Tommy told me you live in London,’ I said to break an awkward silence.
‘At the moment, yes.’
‘You thinking of coming back to Glasgow?’
‘God no – but I am thinking of getting out of London. It’s as bad as here: filthy, grimy, crowded, full of slums. But at least I had a chance to become something down there. And that was all thanks to Tommy.’
‘So where do you think you’ll end up?’
‘I don’t think I’ll ever come back to Scotland. But I’d like to move to a smaller town out of London. Maybe something on the south coast. I’m a teacher so I can work anywhere there are ch
ildren.’ There was no Glasgow or Lanarkshire left in her speech; she had a soft, educated Scottish accent that you couldn’t pin down to any region, but its clarity had become slightly fudged by southern English non-rhoticism, the occasional ‘r’ getting lost in the post.
There was a pause: that conversational punctuation that tells you the small talk is over. I made an open gesture with my hands. ‘What can I do for you, Miss Quaid?’
We paused as Methuselah’s mother wordlessly and unsmilingly served us with our tea and coffee, placing one of those bone china high-tea stands, laden with unnaturally brightly coloured cakes, on the damask-covered table between us.
Once the waitress was gone Jennifer asked, ‘Do you believe Tommy’s death was an accident?’
And there it was.
I shrugged. ‘The police seemed to be satisfied it was.’
‘That’s not what I asked. I asked if you believe it was an accident.’ She held me in a penetrating blue-green gaze, as if ready to see through any falsehood or subterfuge.
‘I take it you don’t.’
She sighed, clearly annoyed at my evasiveness. ‘I know it wasn’t.’
‘And how do you know that?’
‘You still haven’t answered my question. Do you believe Tommy was killed in an accident?’
It was my turn to sigh. ‘As a matter of fact, I don’t. Tommy was too professional, too careful, to fall off a roof like that. But the fiscal has already signed it off as a misadventure during the commission of a crime. I have absolutely nothing to prove otherwise.’
‘What if I told you that Tommy knew he was in danger? That his life was threatened?’
That hit a nerve. Memories of Tommy’s strange mood after I’d been jumped in the street, uncharacteristic uncertainty the night of the job, flashed through my head. I leaned forward. ‘He said that to you?’
‘That’s why I’m here. That’s why I’ve come to see you. Like I said, Tommy thought a great deal of you and told me that if anything happened to him, you would know what to do.’
‘I don’t—’
She cut me off by reaching into an expensive ivory handbag and handing me a thickly wadded envelope. The envelope was sealed, but it didn’t stop my old Pavlovian response. So many people had given me cash-stuffed envelopes of late I could almost guess the value by heft.
‘What’s this?’
‘Two hundred pounds. Tommy said if anything happened to him, I was to come to you and give you this. If he were to die suddenly, he told me you would be the person to take care of things. To make sure that I was safe and that you would find out who killed him and you would know what to do.’
I shook my head and pushed the envelope back across the table. ‘I can’t accept this.’
‘You won’t look into what happened to him?’ She looked genuinely surprised and upset, as if I’d let her down. I’d known her for less than twenty minutes, and already the last thing in the universe I wanted was to let Jennifer Quaid down. I was usually the unsmitten type and immune to romantic foolery, but Tommy’s sister had done a hell of a lot of smiting in those twenty minutes.
‘I didn’t say that. What I said was I can’t take the money. I won’t take the money. Tommy was my friend.’
‘He wanted you to have it.’
I looked at the envelope for a moment then picked it up and slid a thumb under the sealed flap. Taking a single twenty-pound note from it, I pushed the envelope with the rest of the cash back across the table.
‘This is all I need,’ I said, holding up the twenty to let her see. ‘When I get back to the office, I’ll write you up a receipt for this. And all I need this for is to prove to the police that you have officially retained me to investigate Tommy’s death.’
‘And why do you need that?’
‘The police and the procurator fiscal’s office get very antsy when someone suggests they didn’t do their job right. I need to keep this all official – that I’m investigating professionally on behalf of a client and not just sniffing around as Tommy’s friend.’ It was true I had to prove a genuine professional connection to the case – but I didn’t mention that connection was more than a friend’s sense of duty and more to do with having been Tommy’s Cary Grant-outfitted accomplice on the night he died. ‘I have to warn you that even if I do get to the truth and find proof that Tommy’s death wasn’t an accident, it’s still highly unlikely that anything will change. At the end of the day, the police and the fiscal’s office are bureaucracies. Not the most imaginative or energetic people. All Tommy was to them was paperwork that’s already been stamped and filed.’
‘I know the police aren’t interested. I talked to them. I spoke to the policeman I saw you with at the funeral and he told me the case was closed. Tommy said that if anything happened to him, you’d know the right thing to do. Not the police – you.’
‘I can ask around but, if I’m honest, I don’t have anything to go on. Tommy was vague even when telling you he was in danger.’
Again she reached into the handbag, this time placing a key on the table, next to where the envelope still lay. I noticed the key had a similar tag on it to the one Maisie, my perpetually willing dry cleaner, had found in Tommy’s suit, but now was not the time to mention it being in my possession.
‘This . . .’ Jennifer pointed to the key. Her hands were slim, pale and porcelain delicate. ‘ . . . is for a lock-up somewhere down by the Clyde. Tommy wrote me that it was totally secret, that no one knows about it. It was one of the places he used to store his—’
‘Stuff . . .’ I said, helpfully diverting her from the word ‘proceeds’.
‘Exactly. But he said in his letter there was something there that would explain everything if anything were to happen to him. He said you’d know it when you found it. Here’s the address.’ She pushed a note across the desk.
‘Do you still have the letter Tommy sent you?’
She shook her soft waves. ‘I burned it. Tommy told me to burn it after reading it. He also told me that if anything happened to him, after I gave you the key, the address and the money, I was to get out of Glasgow and back home as quickly as I could. Whoever he was afraid of, he obviously thought they were very resourceful and had a long reach. As soon as I got the letter I 'phoned him. I was so scared for him. He told me not to worry, that nothing was going to happen to him, but it was just a precaution. But if anything did happen to him, I was to trust you completely.’
‘In either his letter or when you spoke to him, did he give any idea who would have wanted him dead? Or the reason why?’
Another shake of curls. ‘Not directly. He said he had stumbled onto something. That he had something in his possession that didn’t belong to him—’ She stopped, reading my look. ‘No, that’s not what I mean. Not just the usual stolen property – or maybe it was – but it was more significant than that. Worth more than money.’
‘He said that?’
‘Not in so many words, no. But that was the impression I got. He said there were people who would do anything to get their hands on what he had.’
‘And these people were after him?’
‘No . . . or at least not then. They would have been if they had known who they were looking for. He said that he had stumbled across something – had discovered it by mistake, by pure accident. He said he didn’t think he was in immediate danger because these people didn’t know he was the one who had found it. He told me not to worry because he was safe as long as no one linked it to him. But if anything did happen, I was to come and see you.’
‘And that’s all? He didn’t say what this thing was?’
‘Whatever it is, knowing about it obviously places you in danger. He didn’t want me placed in that danger.’
‘What about the people who want it back? Any ideas who they might be?’
‘Listen, Mr Lennox, I have no illusions about what Tommy did. I know exactly how he got his money and I know that a lot of it went to getting me out of Glasgow and into a better li
fe, so I’m in no position to judge him. I’m grateful for what he did for me and always will be. But I also know that in the kind of life Tommy led, there are a lot of very dangerous people and fall-outs and grudges are common. But I got the feeling that this wasn’t about that – that there was more to the threat than gangsters or criminals in the conventional sense.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Tommy used to 'phone me every week. The last few times he seemed odd. Preoccupied. It was maybe a month or six weeks before he died that I noticed it the most. Later, when he told me that he’d “discovered something”, I thought back to that earlier 'phone call. I think that must have been about the time he found out whatever it was he found out. He was so distracted. And he said funny things.’
‘What kind of funny things?’
‘Bitter things. And you know Tommy was never bitter. He started to talk about the people in charge being the most corrupt of all. About the whole system being rotten. More rotten than anyone could imagine.’
‘And that’s why you think the threat to Tommy came from outside his usual circle?’ I asked, remembering him expressing similar sentiments to me.
She shrugged. ‘It’s just a feeling.’
‘So have you any idea as to who else could have wished him harm?’
‘Not from anything Tommy said, no.’
‘But you have your own ideas . . .’
‘Not really, or only the vaguest ideas, and that’s just because I’ve been racking my brain.’
‘In the absence of any other kind of idea, vague is good . . .’
We had both left the garishly-coloured cakes alone and I took out my cigarette case, offering her one. She leaned close while I lit it for her and for a second her scent fumed with the cigarette smoke.
‘What do you know about Tommy’s war service?’ she asked.
‘Nothing much. I knew he’d been a commando and I got the idea from a couple of things he said that he’d had a rough time of it. We both had. Neither of us really talked much about it.’
The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5 Page 11