The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5

by Craig Russell

  ‘The other guy?’ I asked hopefully: maybe he had passed the time playing Grandmaster chess with Pops and his vacant look was simply the otherworldliness of the genius.

  ‘You could see for yourself. According to Doc Banks, he could peg out at any time. There could be bleeding in his skull. In any case, his brain’s mush. All it’ll take is for his ginger chum to point to you across a courtroom and you’re looking at attempted murder.’

  ‘I wasn’t trying to kill him. The opposite, in fact.’

  ‘Tell that to the judge, as they say.’

  ‘What do we know about them?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re a couple of heavies for hire from Edinburgh,’ said Pops Loeb. ‘According to your chum Twinkletoes, they’re ex-army and thick as shit – or at least judging from the one you didn’t lobotomize. They’re not police, government, or anything official.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean to say McNaught isn’t—’ Cohen broke off when Twinkletoes came in.

  ‘Close the door behind you, please,’ said Cohen. Twinkle did as he was asked and his bulk seemed to fill the small office shed. ‘Could you tell Mr Lennox what you got out of them?’

  ‘Aye – no problem,’ said Twinkle. Even the baritone of his voice seemed to fill the shed, reverberating in the wooden walls. ‘Both done time inside army and civilian prison. They’ve done a bit of bare-knuckle and occasional work as bouncers in an Edinburgh nightclub run by the Ferguson brothers. But they’ve also done their fair bit of putting people in hospital – aye, and maybes worse – for cash. Thon feller you talked about – the one with the fucked-up face – hired them directly. McNaught was the name he used with them as well. They’d never knew or heard of McNaught before, but he paid them silly fucking money. He admitted it was made clear from the start that murdering folk was part of the job, and that was why they was being paid so much. If they talked to anyone about it, they’d end up dead too. By the way, I got everything from the ginger-heid with the busted jaw. The other one isn’t cum-puss-menttis, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘I think I do, Twinkle. Which one of them killed Tommy?’

  ‘They didn’t. Ginger swears blind him and his pal had nothing to do with it. He thinks McNaught must have other people, but he’s never seen them. It could be a load of pish, but if it isn’t, then it must’ve been one of the other teams what killed Tommy.’

  ‘You believe him?’

  ‘Oh aye, I gave his jaw a good wee shoogle and he was screaming his heid aff an’ that, then he passed out for a while. When he came round again he swore blind he didn’t know nothing about the foundry or Tommy being chucked off the roof.’

  I nodded. I had hoped it had been them. Then I might have felt a little less guilty about leaving one of them with permanent brain damage.

  ‘Where do we find McNaught?’

  McBride dipped thick fingers into his shirt pocket; he handed me a slip of paper with an address on it.

  ‘A warehouse. Ginger thinks it’s between tenants and McNaught’s just making use of it as a headquarters while it’s empty. He admitted that McNaught told them to get the information out of Davey Wilson, then do him. They was supposed to make sure the body would never be found.’

  ‘So I wouldn’t feel too guilty about your pal,’ said Cohen. ‘I’m guessing he wouldn’t have made The Brains Trust even before you malkied him. And the pair of them are life-takers. Live by the sword and all that shite.’ He paused, glancing over at Pops Loeb. ‘That still leaves the question of what we do with them . . .’

  ‘They’re not going anywhere for the meantime,’ I said, hoping that it was clear that my definition of ‘anywhere’ included an industrial mincer or the bottom of the Clyde. I turned back to Twinkletoes, holding up the slip of paper. ‘When will McNaught be here?’ I was beginning to wonder if any warehouses in Glasgow were actually used to house wares, as opposed to being hubs of criminal activity.

  ‘He was supposed to be going there tonight. Pinky and Perky were to meet him there after they’d got what they wanted out of Davey Wilson and got rid of him.’

  I looked at my watch. It was nearly eleven p.m. ‘I doubt he’s still there, but we should maybe go and take a look. Jonny?’

  ‘I’ll get some of the boys together,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll come too, Mr L,’ said McBride.

  ‘And me,’ said Loeb.

  ‘No, Pops,’ said Cohen. ‘I’ll be leaving you on your own here to watch our two chums. Do you think you can handle that?’

  ‘Do I think I can handle it?’ Loeb looked insulted. ‘One of them can hardly move his head and the other’s going to be in nappies for the rest of his life and you ask can I handle it?’

  ‘It’s no picnic,’ said Cohen. ‘Their pals could come for them. Are you heavy?’

  ‘No . . . of course I’m not heavy. What for should I be heavy?’

  Cohen took an automatic from his waistband and handed it to Pops. ‘You should be heavy.’

  Pops snorted a scornful laugh, but took the gun anyway.

  *

  Leaving Pops Loeb to keep an eye on the two bound men, Cohen rounded up another three goons and they piled, along with McBride, into the back of a Bedford van. Cohen drove and I sat up front next to him. He’d tooled everyone up; Twinkletoes McBride still had the gun we’d taken from McNaught’s man.

  ‘You still got the Walther?’ Cohen asked before starting the engine.

  ‘It’s at home.’

  He sighed. ‘A lot of fucking good it’s doing there.’ He handed me a snub-nosed Webley. I looked at it in my hand for a moment, unsure as to what to do, then slipped it into my jacket pocket. In the back two of Jonny’s men sat with sawn-off shotguns on their knees.

  ‘I just hope we’re not stopped by the police,’ I said as we bumped across town.

  ‘I’ll tell them we’re pest controllers,’ said Cohen.

  The rest of the journey was in silence.

  It was a warehouse that sat pretty much on its own, down by the river. McNaught had chosen well: from the warehouse you would be able to see anyone approaching from either direction along the riverside road. Like us.

  The summer night sky still had streaks of paler blue in it, like the lingering ghosts of the day, but even with that it was a gloomy spot. There were streetlamps dotted along the riverfront, small diamond sparkles on dark velvet, but otherwise everything was a cluster of dark shapes. The warehouse itself was a lightless black shadow tight against the dark Clyde; obviously designed originally to be serviced from the river, rather than the road, it had its own small pier.

  ‘What do you think?’ Cohen asked.

  I jutted my chin towards some open space further along the riverfront. ‘Let’s park down there and walk it back. If we stick to the shadows as much as possible, they might not see us coming. There’s always the chance that there’s nobody there.’

  Cohen did what I suggested and we drove into the patch of waste ground and parked.

  It was a stumbling walk over uneven ground down to the riverfront and along towards the warehouse: it was much darker than I thought it would have been, as if the Clyde, oozing blackly beside us, had gathered the night around itself.

  As we grew closer to the warehouse, I saw a goods winch jutting out from the pier-side flank of the building: a geometry of black spars and beams, it looked for all the world like a hangman’s scaffold against the paler sky.

  I didn’t take it as a good omen.

  *

  The last piece of cover was a long, low boathouse-type building. From there it was a hundred yards in the open to the wall of the warehouse, broken by a fence of steel pillars and wire mesh. It was difficult to tell from this distance, but the fence looked in a pretty bad state of repair and I hoped it wouldn’t hold us up too long.

  ‘You ready?’ I asked Cohen. He nodded. ‘You take the back with your guys . . . Twinkle, you and I will go round the front. And everybody keep low.’

  I took the snub-nose revolver from my pocket an
d waved it in a ‘follow me’ gesture. I felt sick: the whole set-up took me back to the kind of skulking I’d had to do during the war; the kind of skulking that always ended up with men dead. This whole thing had gotten out of hand.

  But the whole thing had been out of hand long before I’d been involved; before Tommy Quaid had become involved. There was nothing more out of hand than a bunch of rich and powerful perverts torturing kids.

  I may have had a gun in my hand, but this time I knew I was on the side of the angels.

  Despite his nickname – which he’d earned for a completely different skill anyway – Twinkletoes was anything but light on his feet. I had to keep stopping to wait until he got up again, rising as an inhumanly large shadow, every time he stumbled and fell. I took the chance to check on the progress of Cohen’s group, but they were obviously keeping low and I couldn’t see them.

  Twinkle and I reached the fence, found a gap and I slipped through, with Twinkle lumbering behind me. Eventually we were pressed against the bricks of the side of the warehouse.

  I took a look around the front. There were no cars parked there, or anywhere else I could see. I guessed that McNaught had given up waiting for his two hired heavies to return from their task.

  ‘You sure this is the warehouse he said?’ I whispered to McBride.

  ‘Aye . . . definitely.’ He pronounced it deh-finn-ately.

  We made our way to the main doors at the front: wooden double doors, fifteen feet high and the same wide, with a smaller, normal-sized door for easier access set into one of them. It was unlocked.

  I went first and slipped in, telling Twinkle to wait until I called.

  I switched on the flashlight and scanned the warehouse. It was empty, of people, of goods, of anything. I heard the sound of a door at the back yielding to a crowbar.

  ‘It’s all clear . . .’ I called to Cohen and his men as they spilled in at the opposite side. It was a vast hangar of a place: wide and deep and high. I guessed it had been built to deal with large bales of materials imported from an empire that was now shrinking into insignificance.

  And it was dark. Completely dark except for a single point of light.

  There was an electric hand lantern, an inspection lamp like the kind mechanics use in garages, hanging from a nail hammered in the wall. Like a lighthouse deliberately set to guide the way, it was the only illumination in the empty dark cavern of the warehouse; its sole function seemed to be to highlight the words daubed in white paint on the grimy red-brick wall beside it.

  I held up a hand to stop everybody’s advance and straightened up from my half-crouched position. I knew that neither McNaught nor any of his men were in the warehouse. The painted message had been left for me. For us.

  I walked over to it, Jonny Cohen at my side. The white paint hadn’t had time to dry and was still tacky; the message was short and simple:

  RIGHT IDEA.

  WRONG WAREHOUSE.

  ‘Oh fuck . . .’ said Cohen. ‘Pops . . .’

  Part Five

  1

  Handsome Jonny Cohen drove like a maniac, his gaze unblinking and his face set hard the way it had been at Davey Wilson’s garage, when he had been prepared to end lives. The gears of the Bedford ground and screeched as he tried to wrest a speed from the van that it was incapable of giving; even at that, we made our way through the city at speeds of around sixty, and I started to worry that the lives he was going to end were our own. When he barrelled through his second red light, just missing a tram, I’d had enough.

  ‘Stop, Jonny.’

  He ignored me. Or probably didn’t hear me as his mind played through all the possible scenarios that could face us back at the Clarkston warehouse.

  ‘STOP!’ I yelled and he looked at me as if I were mad.

  He had to slow a little as we approached a junction and I yanked on the handbrake. Jonny pumped the footbrake and steered into the skid as the Bedford slid sideways, tyres screeching. A mountainside fell on me: when Twinkletoes straightened up and I could breathe again, the van was stopped, angled across the road and the guys in the back, who had been thrown about by the sudden swerve and stop, cursed loudly. The sudden halt had killed the van’s engine.

  Jonny Cohen swung round on the bench seat of the van and glared at me. And there it was, that which Tommy Quaid had talked about: murder in a man’s eyes.

  ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Listen, Jonny, we have a van load of ne’er-do-wells, all armed to the teeth, and you’re breaking every road traffic law that there is. I know this is difficult to hear, but whatever has happened back at the warehouse, whatever has happened to Pops, has already happened. We need to get there quickly, all right, but we need to get there. If you run us off the road, or if the police pull us over, we won’t get there at all. And there’s always the chance that McNaught’s people could be waiting for us. That message they left for us was intended to make us do what you’re doing. I don’t want us to go steaming blindly into a trap.’

  Cohen still glared at me. He said nothing but started the engine and drove on, although less recklessly than before.

  But the truth was, if my guess was right, we really did need to get there quickly.

  *

  The large double doors of the warehouse were open to the night, as if expecting a lorry to deliver more crates. All the lights were on but there were no strange vehicles parked outside. Cohen followed my advice and stopped the Bedford some distance from the warehouse, leaving the headlights on.

  ‘Okay, boys,’ I said into the back of the van. ‘Let’s go. But be ready for anything. If these cowboys are still here, don’t hesitate to shoot the bastards, because they won’t hesitate to shoot you.’

  Cohen rested a hand on my arm. ‘They’re my team, Lennox. I give the orders.’ His composure restored, he spoke without anger or heat.

  ‘Sorry, Jonny,’ I said. ‘I thought your mind would be elsewhere.’

  ‘You’re not the only one who fought in the war,’ he said. ‘I know how to get my head into the game and deal with shite like this.’

  Out of the van, I became aware of the almost total quiet around us, broken only by the sound of a distant dog barking somewhere in Clarkston. The sky was cloud-clean and sparkled with stars; even that unnerved me, reminding me of another clear-sky night, when I’d driven a quiet man to his death. The silence and still pressed down on me.

  ‘Okay . . .’ Jonny nodded and led the way. We advanced slowly and silently on the warehouse. There was no sign of life. I was pretty sure there would be no one left inside – or at least no one alive – but I knew from bitter experience that McNaught had a penchant for surprises.

  When we went in, we all fanned out and searched the place, working from the perimeter inwards; Twinkletoes and I made our way up the wooden steps to the office. If they were still up there, the office windows would afford our opposition a clear view – and shooting – across the whole warehouse.

  Every light was on, but the office was empty.

  Looking out through the windows, I could see no sign of McNaught or anyone other than our own people. Except for the cleared area where McNaught’s two men had been tied to the chairs.

  ‘Oh fuck . . .’ said McBride, who was at my side, looking at the same thing I was.

  I rushed out of the office and shouted to Cohen and the others that we were alone. With McBride at my back, I ran to the clearing in the heart of the warehouse.

  McNaught’s two men were still there, as was Pops Loeb. The guy I’d hit too hard was still staring out into the warehouse with a complete lack of recognition. But so was his pal. Neither were capable of recognizing anyone or anything any more because their windpipes had been severed in the same way Baines’s had been: from behind with a blade inserted at the back of the windpipe and pushed forward. There was surprisingly little blood, and they would have died quickly and quietly.

  I heard Jonny Cohen give a despairing cry when he joined us with his boy
s.

  McNaught may have given his hirelings a quick and quiet death, but not so Pops Loeb. The old Jew sat slumped, tied to the chair Twinkletoes had occupied during his interrogation of the two goons. A hoop of greasy rope from one of the crates bound Pops to the chair, pinioning his arms to his sides. His head was slumped forward, his chin resting on his chest, presenting us with the thick brush of his white hair, flecked crimson. His shirt and suit were sodden dark and a disc of blood bloomed from beneath the chair and around his feet, like a glossy red-black mat on the concrete floor. He had been stabbed multiple times, but care had been taken that not one of the stab wounds would on its own be instantly fatal, and Pops had been left to bleed out slowly.

  Cohen placed his fingers under Pops’s chin and eased his head up carefully, as if afraid of hurting the old man, who was as far from hurting as it was possible to be. The leathery skin of Loeb’s face and forehead was covered in puncture wounds. His tormentors had stabbed him in the eyes and the dark skin of his cheeks was streaked with tears of blood.

  Like I’d seen so many times in so many places, it was death as a message: a totem of one human being’s absolute power over another.

  ‘I’ll fucking kill them,’ said Cohen, quietly, almost calmly. ‘I will kill every last fucking one of them.’

  ‘And you’re welcome to,’ I said. ‘But, right now, I need you to trust me and do exactly what I tell you to do.’

  Cohen looked at me, vaguely confused.

  ‘I need you to get the boys to cover the bodies up with a tarpaulin – or better still hide them behind crates – then get the van inside and cover it up with a tarp as well.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I think McNaught is trying to pull the same stunt as before. We need to get everyone inside, lock the place up tight and make sure no one can be seen from the windows. It has to look like everything is normal and there hasn’t been anyone here all night. We don’t have much time.’

  ‘I still don’t get—’ Cohen stopped mid-sentence and nodded. He barked orders at his team and within a couple of minutes everything was inside the warehouse and the doors shut up tight. There were only two windows, one on each side of the building: small squares of wire-mesh-reinforced glass intended to allow some meagre light into the warehouse during the day. We all lent a hand to move some of the crates in tight around where the bodies of Pops and the two heavies sat, obscuring the line of sight from both windows.