The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5

by Craig Russell

  ‘That’s correct.’ Moncrieff was standing now, making no sign of sitting back down. ‘We don’t charge fees and are funded principally by a joint-services charity. A benevolent fund. We get some funding from the churches as well.’

  ‘Your staff also generally have army backgrounds, I believe. You don’t by any chance have a member of staff by the name of McNaught?’

  ‘We do not.’

  ‘I’ve maybe got the name wrong. A burly chap, ex-military type. He has a war wound on his face, makes it a bit lopsided. Does that sound like anyone you would know?’

  ‘No, Mr Lennox, it doesn’t. Now I don’t want to be rude, but I am very busy.’

  I stood up. ‘Well, thanks for your time.’

  ‘Sorry I couldn’t have been more helpful,’ he said, singularly unapologetically.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that.’ I smiled.

  To make the point he walked me out of his office, along the hall and out of the front door. Behind us an electric bell trilled harshly and there was the echoing sound of many feet in transit. I noticed it was unaccompanied by the usual raucous noise of temporarily released youth.

  ‘Your pupils seem very disciplined,’ I said as I put my hat on.

  ‘It’s a virtue we impress on them,’ Moncrieff said. ‘We try to engraft the values of both collective and self-discipline. As you pointed out yourself, we are very much of a military tradition at St Andrew’s. Good day, Mr Lennox.’

  ‘Kids like that,’ I said thoughtfully, looking up at the grey milk sky, ‘I guess they don’t like to complain. Good at following orders – I suppose they’ll do pretty much anything their elders and betters tell them.’

  Moncrieff said nothing.

  ‘That must make them pretty easy to control. And I would imagine make things very easy for you, Mr Moncrieff.’ I opened the car door. ‘Well, thanks for your time.’ I got in the Alpine and drove off. I could see Moncrieff standing on the school steps watching me all the way down the drive to the coastal road.

  I had shown the dog the rabbit. Given the world a push. It was now only a matter of time.

  *

  I was almost disappointed by their predictability. It was early evening by the time I got home to my apartment; it had been thoroughly but discreetly gone over. They had done their best to cover their tracks, but I had left little traps: a hair stretched across a door jamb, a book set at a perfectly memorized angle, a puff of talc on the kitchen floor, that kind of thing. They would have been able to take their time: I had 'phoned in advance to make my appointment with Moncrieff, so they would have known for sure when they could turn my place over and I wouldn’t be there.

  They weren’t that good, though. I had always thought that the hidden drawer beneath the hall mirror’s shelf was really the result of bad design, rather than deliberate concealment. Whatever the original intention, you wouldn’t know it was there unless you looked for it. And my secret visitors had been looking but hadn’t found the drawer. Maybe McNaught and his people weren’t the same, highly professional official snoopers who had turned over Nancy Ross’s.

  Even if they had found the drawer, they would have found nothing in it. Expecting their visit, I had transferred the gun and knife to the leather satchel briefcase, which had lain stuffed beneath the passenger seat of the Alpine while I’d travelled down to St Andrew’s School. My new-found morality notwithstanding, I had thought it best not to leave them in the apartment – and given the fact I was doing all I could to force their hand, there was always the chance that they might have tried to put an end to my snooping on the lonely ribbon of coastal road as I drove home.

  I looked at the gun in my hand for a long time before I put it and the commando knife back in the drawer, along with my remaining blue-tabbed key: the one for Tommy’s apartment.

  I hadn’t been to the apartment yet. I would get round to it, but I knew that Tommy wouldn’t have left anything of any significance lying around – a lesson that my anonymous guests had just learned in turning over mine. In any case, I had the key by accident, rather than Tommy’s design.

  After I freshened up and made myself a sandwich and a coffee, I rang Cohen’s house and asked to speak to Jennifer. We talked for half an hour, neither of us making reference to the situation we were in, other than when she asked if the journey to and from Ayrshire had been okay. Otherwise, we talked the same way we had in the tearoom: about everything and nothing and I pretended I was something like a normal guy and lived something like a normal life. Talking to Jennifer cheered me up, but when I put down the receiver I felt hollow and dark, like a room where window shutters had suddenly been closed on a sunlit day.

  Archie 'phoned about nine. Not much sunlight there – but it was odd how his voice always sounded a little younger and less lugubrious when you couldn’t see the doleful eyes and undertaker face. One thing I did notice in his voice was a chord of concern. He was 'phoning, he explained, to find out how I had gotten on at the school, but I could tell he just wanted to check I was back and in one piece.

  I gave him a breakdown of everything Moncrieff had said, and hadn’t said. Then I told him that they’d been through my flat when I was away.

  ‘Do you want me to come over?’ he asked, the chord of concern pulled that little bit tighter.

  ‘No, I’m fine. What you can do for me tomorrow is to get down to the registry of companies and see what you can find about the trust that runs St Andrew’s School. Who’s involved in it.’

  He said he would, told me to take care, and hung up.

  I turned in early. I had a big day ahead of me. I switched the light off and lay in the darkened bedroom smoking a cigarette, but I felt restless, itchy. I abruptly stubbed the cigarette out, switched on the light and went through to the hall mirror.

  I lay back down and switched off the light again and fell swiftly asleep, aided by my comforter of a Walther P38 next to me on the nightstand.

  4

  It was a different type of operation to the Wishart brothers’ set-up. There were no cars for sale, no phoney glitz, just an oily dark cavern of brick garage with a single inspection pit and stacks of car parts and tyres. I had followed Tony the Pole’s lead – aided by some additional information supplied by Jonny Cohen – and found my way to the garage in Partick. Tony the Pole had suggested in eloquent Slavic-Celtic that I ‘ca’ canny’ – meaning I should take care. Not that I was to expect Davey Wilson to be dangerous either personally or in criminal connections: he was as straight and honest as his brother was quite the other thing. Tony’s advice for caution was because Davey Wilson was very protective of his brother – and Jimmy Wilson was very skilled at keeping himself hidden. If I handled it wrong, Jimmy might just dig himself deeper into his burrow and never be found.

  I parked across the street and watched for a while: I could see in through the double-width doorway that there were two men working in the garage, both dressed in mechanics’ overalls. One was young, maybe eighteen, and I guessed he was the apprentice. The older man was about forty and moved slowly but purposefully with quiet method from car to bench to parts shelves. As he worked, Davey Wilson had the quiet ease of someone content with his lot, who had found his place in the world. Watching him was like looking through a window into a different universe, a world of quiet acceptance and contentment that misfits and outsiders the likes of me or Tommy Quaid would never understand.

  I waited for the rhythm of a regulated life to take its course: at five-thirty the younger man changed out of his overalls, emerged from the garage and left for the evening. The older man came out a few minutes later, dressed in a battered tweed jacket and corduroy trousers bagged at the knees.

  I got out of the car and crossed the road. Wilson had his back to me and was pulling down the garage’s shutter-style slatted metal door.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Davey Wilson?’

  He turned, the door half-closed. Up close I could see he was nearly the same height as me, maybe a couple of inches shorter. He was lean
and wiry with hair that might have been blond in childhood but had dulled as he had grown up, as if losing interest. His eyes were a grey-blue colour.

  ‘I’m just closing.’ He stated the obvious. ‘Did you want to book your car in?’ He looked me up and down, then across the road at my gleaming, one-year-old Sunbeam Alpine, doing a quick calculation. His sum clearly totalled gangster. I could almost hear the rattling of chains as a mental drawbridge was pulled up.

  ‘My name is Lennox.’ I smiled as ungangsterly a smile as I could summon. ‘I’m looking for your brother Jimmy. It’s very important that I speak to him.’

  ‘I’ve no idea where he is.’ The greyish eyes frosted. ‘You’re obviously no’ the polis, so what’s it to you? Why do you want to know? What do you want to talk to Jimmy about?’

  I cast an eye up and down the street, checking no one who might have been following me was watching. I regretted it right away, realizing it must have made me looked shady – shadier – to Wilson.

  ‘Listen, believe it or not I’m here to help. I know Jimmy’s in a bit of a spot.’ I nodded to the garage beyond the half-closed roll-down door. ‘Could we talk in private? I’m here to help . . .’

  Davey Wilson took a moment to think about it, still appraising me. He still looked suspicious, rather than aggressive or tense. He shrugged and ducked under the half-shut door, back into the garage.

  The couple of inches or so of difference in height caused me to duck more to get under the door, something he had been counting on. I felt a boot pressed against my shoulder and suddenly I was on my side on the oily garage floor. It had been a shove, rather than a kick, and when I looked up Wilson had a heavy wrench clutched in his right fist, raised as if ready to bring it down on my head. Except he didn’t and he wasn’t going to. He’d clearly caught up on the whole aggressive and tense thing, but this was as far as it was going to go.

  I’d been in scrapes with a lot of men and you can tell the ones with the killer instinct – with my kind of fury or Baines’s kind of professional cool. There were the others who were scared, the ones who cowered and took it. Strangely they could be dangerous too: if by chance they suddenly found themselves with the upper hand, they were terrified of losing it, beating their opponents until they were incapable of re-turning tables and hurting them. Fear can be more deadly than anger.

  And then there were the types like Davey Wilson: the thinkers. In a fight, you can’t afford to think; or at least think about anything beyond the fight itself. You have to be committed to win; your head has to be totally in the moment. I could see that Wilson’s head was dealing with cause and effect, action and consequence. He stood with a lump of metal in his hand that could send me to the hospital or the graveyard and he knew it. Wilson was of the type that really didn’t want to hurt their opponents and would fight only if pushed.

  I started to get up and he tensed the arm with the wrench in it. ‘Stay where you are,’ he said. ‘Move and I’ll batter you.’

  I held one hand up appeasingly as I eased myself into a sitting position. Examining the elbow of my suit, which had taken most of the force of my fall, I sighed: it had a thick black streak of motor oil on it. Another suit ruined. I decided I was going to start a new trend in enquiry agent workwear: dungaree overalls and a fedora.

  ‘Take it easy,’ I said wearily.

  ‘I’ll take it easy when you bastards leave my brother alone. I’ve told you I don’t know where Jimmy is, and even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you. Now get in your fancy car and fuck off back to whoever you work for. Tell them to leave Jimmy alone. He’s no threat to anybody.’

  ‘Who is it you think I work for?’

  ‘I don’t know who you work for. I don’t know why you’ve got Jimmy so scared. But I’m telling you to leave him alone.’

  ‘Has there been anyone else here, looking for him?’

  ‘It’s time you got on your bike.’ He braced the arm with the wrench again.

  ‘Okay, okay – I’m going. Take it easy.’ I stood up and tried to brush down my suit. I pondered on why everybody seemed to feel the need to hit me, kick me, strangle me or otherwise do me bodily harm: I maybe just had that kind of face.

  ‘Just get out and don’t come back.’ Davey Wilson kept the wrench raised as if ready to strike.

  ‘I’m going,’ I said, again holding up my hands appeasingly.

  Wilson did his best to look resolved and not relieved. I made my move. As I passed him, I crossed one of my appeasingly held-up hands and snap-punched him in the face twice in fast succession, with my other hand grabbing and twisting the wrench free from his grasp. I followed up with a jab into his midriff that robbed him of his breath and any fight that was in him. It hadn’t taken much and I was sorry that I’d had to lay hands on him at all: the poor guy wasn’t a fighter and had just been looking out for his brother. Unlike when I’d been jumped in the street, I’d given this small workmanlike beating without heat; probably with the same amount of passion with which Wilson would have carried out an oil change. As he doubled over I grabbed him by the shoulders and eased him over to the workbench, leaning him against it.

  ‘Listen, Davey,’ I said calmly but firmly. ‘I don’t want to hurt you and I wouldn’t have if you hadn’t been waving big chunks of ironmongery at me. And I sure as hell don’t want to hurt your brother. I’m here to help him if I can. I have a pretty good idea about the kind of mess he’s in and the people he’s up against. Now – can we talk this through quietly without you waving tools or car parts at me?’

  He glowered at me. ‘And if I don’t tell you where he is, you’re going to try to beat it out of me, is that it?’

  I picked up the wrench and handed it back to him. ‘Would you feel better if you had your comforter back? I guess I couldn’t make you tell me anything that would endanger your brother and, in any case, I have no intention of trying. I understand why you don’t trust me. Believe me, I’ve had people come to me claiming to be one thing and they turn out to be the other.’ I took out my silver pocket case, took out a cigarette then offered the case to Wilson. He glowered some more but then took one. I lit us both up.

  ‘Listen, Davey, I was a good friend of Quiet Tommy Quaid and all I’m interested in is getting to the people who killed him. I think I know why they killed him and I think it’s the same reason they’ve maybe been looking for Jimmy. But they got what they wanted. The evidence. So my guess is that they’re not going to make a big effort to find Jimmy, but it’s still best that he doesn’t make it too easy for them to find him.’

  ‘So why do you want to talk to him?’

  ‘I need to know who and where the evidence came from. I have a pretty good idea, but I’m guessing Jimmy can tell me for sure. I also need him to tell me as much as he can about anything else that could help me.’

  ‘And you expect me just to tell you where to find Jimmy?’ There was more suspicion forced into the question than was in his expression.

  ‘Not at all. What I want you to do is to tell Jimmy who I am – Lennox – and that I was a friend of Tommy’s, and everything else I’ve told you. Tell him that I’m looking for an officer type with a lopsided face who may or may not call himself McNaught. And tell him that I know that the whole malarkey about Tommy Quaid and Nazi loot is being used as a smokescreen – that I know what Jimmy and Tommy found and the names they found involved in it. Then – and only then – if Jimmy’s okay with it, we can meet. I’ll meet him anywhere and at any time he chooses. Does that sound fair?’

  ‘How do I get in touch with you?’

  I handed him a business card. ‘I’ve written my home 'phone number on the back.’

  ‘You’re a private detective?’ He frowned as he read the card; I heard drawbridge chains rattling again.

  ‘My interest in this is personal, not professional. Although I am looking into it for Tommy’s sister as well as for myself. Trust me, I have a lot of personal interest in getting to the bottom of why Tommy was killed.’

  ‘I to
ld you I don’t know where Jimmy is.’ He held the card back out to me. It was a gesture as unconvincing as his spanner waving and I made no effort to take the card back.

  ‘Maybe you don’t,’ I said. ‘But keep that just in case he gets in touch. Jimmy needs all the friends he can get and, believe me, I am a friend.’

  *

  I had meant every word of what I had said to Davey Wilson. But I was, it has to be said, a less than trusting soul and while I hoped Davey would arrange the meeting, I decided to take a belt-and-braces approach.

  After I got back into the car I made a big show of driving all the way down Crow Road to Dumbarton Road, then turning towards the city. I swung the next left and, putting my foot down, hooked back round until I was parked at a junction where I had a clear view of the garage across the street.

  The shutter door was still only half-closed and there was no sign of Davey. On the sign above the garage was a business telephone number and I had seen a wall 'phone when I’d been inside talking to him. My guess had been that he would have 'phoned his brother as soon as I had left and there was always the remote chance that he would head off to see him face-to-face, leading me straight to Jimmy and saving me a lot of time and running around.

  Davey Wilson reappeared and drew down the door, locking the padlock. Wherever he was headed, I was going to stick to his tail. Hopefully I could be discreet enough: Davey had commented on my ‘flash’ Alpine and he would be watching out for someone following him.

  He was making his way over to his car when a Jag saloon and a Rover P4 pulled up fast into the forecourt. Davey turned, surprised. Two pairs of oversized shoulders got out of the Rover and moved purposefully across to Davey and flanked him. I could see right away that they were helpful types: they grabbed Davey by the elbows and guided him back over to the garage with such helpfulness that his shoes didn’t touch the ground.

  The driver of the Jag got out and leisurely crossed the forecourt, saying something to Davey and indicating the closed door of the garage. He was shorter than the other two but very solidly built and carried the air of authority. He had a hat on and from a distance you couldn’t see the lopsidedness of his face. But I recognized him.