The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5

by Craig Russell

  But I knew it was Baines. And so did whoever had killed him and tried to set me up for it.

  Tony the Pole had taken the Wyvern back to the Wishart Brothers and settled my account with them. ‘Vee’z auld neebourz, me and zem crafty vee Vishahrd bazzdahrds,’ he had explained cheerily, ‘but you godda count your fugging fingerz avder you zhake zeir handz, make sure you get zem all back.’ And now my Sunbeam Alpine, washed and polished as promised, sat in the car park outside the apartment building.

  The only hint that Archie didn’t fully trust his new criminal fraternity chums had been his insistence that he dispose of the bloodstained money and jewellery. Fetching from the trunk of his car the canvas bag that held the wheel jack, he stuffed the money and the jewellery into it, adding a few stones for good measure. He walked to the edge of the reservoir and, swinging his long arms several times before letting go, threw the weighted bag as far out into the reservoir as he could.

  ‘Just hope we don’t get a drought any time soon,’ he had said lugubriously when he returned.

  *

  Jonny Cohen had driven me home in his Jag sports car.

  Both Tony the Pole and Twinkletoes McBride had volunteered to set up camp in my living room, but I assured them there was no reason to believe I was in immediate danger: whoever had put me to sleep in Tommy’s shed would have been long gone before the uniforms arrived, and would assume that I was now sitting in a cell, enjoying the bruising hospitality of the City of Glasgow Police. It was, of course, only a matter of time before word got out about the fire and the fact that no one had been taken into custody.

  The truth was, if my suspicions were correct, they had at least one high-placed contact inside the police. The same contact who had made sure a patrol car and uniforms were on hand the night of the foundry job. But I sent Twinkle and Tony home, nevertheless. I’d be putting theirs and Jonny’s skills to use – much better use – but that would have to wait a while.

  In any case, I had the Walther P38 pistol, along with a box of ammunition, that Handsome Jonny Cohen had given me. Jonny had also volunteered to station a couple of guys close to the telephone kiosk on Great Western Road from where they would have a view of the entrance to my apartment building. Like I had done with Twinkle and Tony, I had declined but reminded Jonny I would be expecting more – much more – from him later.

  When it came down to it, I wasn’t at all sure that they – whoever they were – would come after me now. I really wasn’t that much of a threat. I had nothing on anyone; all I could go to the police with was my memory of the photographs I’d seen and some of the names I’d seen listed. It meant nothing and I could just as well be making the whole thing up: I didn’t have the photographs any more and I didn’t have the list.

  For the moment, I was chasing shadows and they were chasing me back.

  Having seen what I had seen, and who I had seen, I also figured that taking suspicions or even hard evidence to the police – even to a copper I trusted like Jock Ferguson – would result in nothing. Or worse: like me meeting with the same kind of tragic, fatal accident as Quiet Tommy Quaid.

  Except, I promised myself, I would go anything but quietly.

  *

  My doorbell rang.

  I picked up the Walther and snapped back the carriage to put a round in the chamber. I opened the door a crack, keeping it on the chain.

  ‘Irene?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to get you on the telephone.’ Her expression was one of impatience. ‘Come on, let me in. I havnae got long.’

  ‘Give me a minute . . .’ I said. There was a shelf at the bottom of the full-length hall mirror, and beneath the shelf a concealed drawer; I opened the drawer and slipped the Walther into it before easing the door closed, taking off the chain and opening the door to let her in. She was wearing a white collarless blouse beneath a black and white houndstooth suit – bolero jacket and a pencil skirt that was hugging her ass possessively. Irene stepped close and I could smell the mixture of perfume and her own earthy scent.

  ‘What’s with the chain on the door?’ Her expression conveyed puzzled suspicion. ‘And why have you no’ been answering your 'phone?’

  ‘Long story.’ I had taken the telephone off the hook so I could sleep, but I didn’t feel like a long explanation; in any case I wasn’t in a position to give one.

  ‘Has it got anything to do with George?’

  ‘George?’

  ‘George. My husband, George.’ She was annoyed now. She pursed her full, lipstick-crimsoned mouth.

  I shook my head. ‘No. Why should it?’

  ‘He’s still acting odd. More so than ever. Still as moody as hell and looks at me all funny.’ She tilted her head and smiled wickedly. ‘But let’s no’ waste time. I didnae come here for marriage guidance.’

  I stepped back when she moved even closer to me.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘It’s not a good time, Irene. I’m sorry.’

  She looked past me along the hall. ‘You got someone else here?’ she asked. There was no anger, no jealousy; only a vague annoyance like she had turned up at the hairdresser only to find her appointment double-booked.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s nobody here.’

  ‘Then what’s the problem?’ She smiled seductively again and took a step forward; I took a step back; we were only a couple more off a waltz. The truth was I didn’t know what the problem was. A little feminine comfort would have gone a long way, but it felt wrong. For a moment, I stood a little dazed by the concept of wrong, like a caveman catching his first ever glimpse of fire.

  ‘I think we should stop seeing each other, Irene,’ someone said and I realized it was me.

  ‘Why? What’s the problem?’

  The concept wrong became the word wrong and sat clumsily in my mouth, for the moment unuttered. ‘I don’t know . . . I just can’t do it any more.’

  She looked at me for a while, as if trying to work me out. ‘You do know I’m not looking for anything from you, don’t you, Lennox? This is just a wee bit of fun. It doesnae hurt anyone.’

  ‘I’m not so sure that it doesn’t, Irene. There’s your husband, if he ever found out. Anyway, it isn’t fun any more. At least not fun for me. It feels wrong.’ And there it was, spilled out from my mouth.

  Now she was annoyed, I could tell. She didn’t say anything more, simply nodded brusquely, turned and left.

  After I closed the door behind her, I thought about what had just happened: I had acted on a decision I didn’t know I had made. Why I had made it was puzzling me, but I guessed it had something to do with having delved into Quiet Tommy Quaid’s life. The thing I had found about good men, living or dead, was that they had an irritating habit of infecting you with their sense of right and wrong.

  There was that, and the fact that I seemed unable to stop thinking about Jennifer Quaid. Whatever the reason, I strangely had no regrets about ending my relationship with Irene. Well, perhaps one: when I thought back to her houndstooth-hugged ass as she’d turned and left.

  *

  I 'phoned Jennifer at her hotel. There was something about the sound of her voice – even with the concerned tone it carried – that seemed to ease me. I told her to check out of her hotel and I would pick her up there in half an hour. She began to ask questions, but I told her to do what I asked and I would explain it all when I collected her.

  I took the Walther and Tommy’s Fairbairn-Sykes knife from the hidden drawer under the hall mirror, tucking the pistol into my trouser waistband, at the small of my back. There was nowhere convenient for me to carry the knife without it jabbing through fabric or into my flesh, so I wrapped the blade in a makeshift sheath of two handkerchiefs and placed it in my jacket outer pocket.

  I slipped on my suit jacket and looked at myself in the full-length mirror, not seeing myself but thinking about how the weapons I was carrying were enough to put me in prison for a long time. And I was carrying them with a willingness to use them.

 
Then I did see myself in the mirror. It made me think back to what I had said to Quiet Tommy Quaid about watching Saturday matinee Westerns at the Capitol picture house in Saint John. Cheering the good guys, booing the bad.

  The guy in the mirror was a good-looking, bad-looking man with raven-black hair and a face that was all sharp angles. The Jack Palance look. Jack Palance acted in Westerns.

  And he never played the good guy.

  For some reason, I acted on another decision I didn’t know I had made: before I stepped out through the door, I took the gun from my waistband and the knife from my pocket and put them back in the drawer.

  2

  Jennifer’s hotel was in the West End, so it wasn’t far from my apartment. As I drove my distinctive Sunbeam Alpine along Great Western and down Byres Road, I still checked to see if I was being followed, but not as often as I had before. I now knew that the people I was dealing with were pros, all right, and I guessed if they wanted to find me, they’d find me. In the meantime my priority was to get Jennifer to safety.

  She was waiting in the foyer. Dressed in a floral frock with a tight bodice and a pleated skirt, she had her hair up and fixed with a clasp. I felt a strange sensation in my chest when I saw her, which was anatomically considerably north of where a pretty girl usually provoked a reaction.

  ‘You look terrible,’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘It’s been a tough couple of days.’ I picked up her suitcase. ‘Let’s go get some lunch.’

  *

  I took Jennifer to a tearoom whose decor, menu and waiting staff looked like they’d remained unchanged since Violet Gibson had taken a potshot at Mussolini’s nose. But unlike our last venue, this was a friendly place, and I chatted to Jennifer about the weather, about how it was different where I came from in Canada, about how much better this tearoom was than the last one we’d been in, about a place like it in Saint John I used to go to with my folks when I was a kid . . .

  As she listened to me rattle on from one inconsequence to another, her frown and her confusion intensified.

  ‘What’s going on, Mr Lennox? Why did I have to leave my hotel so suddenly? And why do you look like you’ve been through the wars?’ Her tone was insistent: these were demands for hard facts, not expressions of idle curiosity.

  I sighed and looked out of the window. We were that little bit out of the city and everything looked brighter, cleaner, the colours more vivid. There was a small, immaculately ordered and tended garden beyond the window, the grass neatly cut, roses and rhododendrons parading with military precision. Years past of tending for the years to come. It was the badge of a normal life where you plan and plant for a future season. At that moment, it struck me as exactly the way people should live their lives. Exactly the way I should have lived my life.

  ‘Lennox,’ I said, turning back to her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Call me Lennox. Not “Mr Lennox”. Everybody calls me Lennox.’

  ‘What about your first name?’

  ‘I lost it. Dropped it somewhere in the war. Like I say, everybody here just calls me Lennox.’

  ‘Okay, Lennox . . .’ I could tell from her tone that she was losing patience with me. ‘What about answering my questions?’

  I looked at her. The light was catching the hints of bronze and gold in her hair, tracing the soft curve of cheek and jaw, dropping a sparkle into the blue-green eyes. She looked back at me frankly, but just like the first time we had met I thought – I hoped – there was a hint of something else there.

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ I said. ‘But first, can we just have lunch together and pretend for a moment we’re regular, ordinary folks?’

  She must have seen something in my expression or in my eyes – the terrible weight of it all – because she smiled and nodded.

  So I talked and she talked back. We talked all through lunch. We got to know each other at the same kind of accelerated rate people had during the war, when tomorrows were uncertain and time was precious. Maybe it was the tragedy that had brought us together and the danger that bound us, but we each opened up our lives and laid them out for the other to see. It was the oddest of things and in that unexpected blossoming of intimacy we genuinely forgot how and why we had first met.

  As our lunch drew to a close, I told her I would like to get to know her better and asked her, when this was all over, if it ever were to be all over, if she would consider seeing me again. She smiled more and said she would like that.

  Afterwards, sitting in the Alpine in the car park, I told her what she needed to know. She cried for a while and I comforted her.

  ‘I was forced to burn down Tommy’s lock-up,’ I explained. ‘Whoever attacked me and killed Baines took the folio with the evidence in it. There may have been other information there that could have led me to Tommy’s killers. I’m sorry, but I had to do it.’

  ‘I understand,’ she said. ‘They were trying to frame you for Baines.’

  ‘There’s more – there was several thousand pounds in there. Money Tommy had saved and that should have gone to you. It went up in the blaze as well.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter to me,’ she said. ‘You did what you had to do. The important thing is you got away free and clear.’

  I reached into my inside pocket, took out an envelope and handed it to her.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘There’s a little over a thousand pounds in there. It’s all that I got away with. Actually, my chum with the beefy arms must have stuffed it into my pockets when I was out for the count – another part of the frame-up. So I can’t even claim the credit for rescuing it.’

  Jennifer looked at the envelope as if it were something contaminated, then handed it back to me. ‘I don’t want it.’

  ‘This is Tommy’s money. It belongs to you.’

  ‘It’s stolen money. And it’s blood money. I want nothing to do with it. I’m glad the rest went up in flames.’

  I could tell she meant it. I slipped the envelope back into my pocket. ‘I’ll keep it for you, in case you change your mind.’

  Then she asked the question I hoped she wouldn’t ask. ‘The photographs. What was in them that was so terrible?’

  So I told her. I sat staring out of the windscreen, not looking at her, and told her exactly what I had seen. Once more Jennifer cried and I comforted her.

  When she was finished, I started the car and we drove down to Newton Mearns.

  *

  In keeping with Handsome Jonny Cohen’s movie star looks, he lived with his wife and kids in a huge, modernist sprawl that would have looked more at home in Hollywood than Newton Mearns. The house – designed by some London architect who had since become a ‘name’ – sat elevated with a view out over its neighbours and the countryside beyond. It certainly was a lot of real estate and as I swung the Alpine up the long, sweeping driveway, I reflected on how I was going to have to break the whole crime doesn’t pay thing to Jonny.

  The man who answered the door was tall, dark-haired, with a cleft in his chin that would have made Cary Grant feel inadequate. Jonny Cohen really was absurdly handsome and, despite being a crime boss and erstwhile armed robber, he had the kind of look you instinctively trusted.

  His wife joined him and they both beamed a welcome at us. I did the whole introductions thing for Jennifer’s benefit. It was all very suburban and our conversation was light and unburdened by the weight of what we were really doing there. The only hint of something other than a social call had been the couple of Jonny’s heavies we’d passed on the drive who did their best – which wasn’t that good – not to look conspicuous.

  Jonny and his wife left Jennifer and me alone in the marble-floored hallway while I took my leave of her.

  ‘You’ll be safe here,’ I said. ‘Once I get things sorted out, we can get you home, or wherever you want to go.’

  ‘Wherever I want to go?’

  ‘You said you were thinking of moving out of London. Maybe now’s a good time for a ch
ange of address.’

  ‘I think a change of address is something you should think about too,’ she said. ‘This is all too dangerous. If I’d known, I would never have got you involved.’

  ‘You didn’t get me involved: I was already involved. I was set up for this long before I met you. And anyway, I’m doing this for myself, for Tommy.’

  ‘Are you sure you can’t just go to the police? That’s their job. That way at least you wouldn’t be putting yourself at risk.’

  ‘There are coppers involved in this. Probably at a high level. Going to the police would only put me at more risk not less. I’ll be fine. The Cohens will look after you. They’re good people.’

  ‘Didn’t you say he was an armed robber?’

  ‘And Tommy was a thief, but still one of the best men I’ve ever known. These are good people. The people I’m up against, the people who arranged Tommy’s killing, are the ones who are supposed to be good. The ones we’re supposed to look up to and trust. Tommy was right: the world is absurd.’

  ‘Look after yourself,’ she said.

  I looped my arm around her waist, pulled her to me and kissed her. It took me as much by surprise as it did her. Then she kissed me back.

  She was still standing in the doorway as I headed back down the drive, passing two Jewish thugs in forty-guinea mohair suits, pretending to be gardeners.

  *

  It was another Clydeside summer’s day sketched out in charcoal against a bright sky. Oblivious to the sunshine, the dark finger of pier stretched out into the even darker Clyde. Jock Ferguson was waiting at the end, as I had asked him to. He was staring down into the river and when I came to stand beside him I followed his gaze. The stone pier sank into water dressed in a dark rainbow sheen of slicked engine oil; a scurf of brownish-white froth marked where greasy stone and greasy river met and outlined boat-washed tangles of floating, half-rotted wood. The skeleton of something iron-framed jutted rust-boned out of the water.