St Bernard’s Crescent was in the heart of Edinburgh’s Stockbridge: an arc of sandstone Georgian townhouses facing a small tree-filled park. Most of the properties were three storeys above street level and a basement level with windows peering up to wrought-iron railings. This layout was particularly relevant to the house I was visiting: they said the higher up the storey you visited, the more you paid.
Edinburgh taxi drivers are noted for having the joie de vivre of depressed undertakers and this particular cabbie had been silent throughout the journey. He managed, however, to repeat his earlier sneer as he pulled up outside the address I had given him in St Bernard’s Crescent and told me how much I was due him. I usually tipped taxi drivers well, particularly in London or Glasgow when you could often have the best conversation of your day in the back of the cab. In this case I counted out the exact change and not a penny more. My pointed meanness fell flat as the taxi driver didn’t seem to notice or care. This was Edinburgh, after all.
The house looked just the same as all of the others in the crescent; in fact the paintwork on the door and windows looked fresher and the steps better swept than its neighbours, and the young lady who admitted me was soberly dressed in a blue serge jacket and pencil skirt and white blouse. She asked me if I had an appointment and I explained that I wasn’t there on business but was a friend of Mrs Gersons. She smiled and led me into a small office-type room off the reception hall. As I passed along the hall I noticed how tasteful and expensive the decor was that Helena had invested in. It didn’t surprise me; Helena Gersons was a sophisticated and elegant lady. Yep, you certainly got a better class of whorehouse in Edinburgh, I thought to myself as I made a quick mental comparison with Arthur Parks’s place in Glasgow.
I was a cynical fuck. I admit it. The things I had seen, the things I had done, had turned me into somebody I really didn’t like and my way of dealing with it was often to greet each day with a sneer or a joke at someone else’s expense. Maybe I was just becoming acclimatized: attitudes were different here. In America and Canada we’d greet the day with ‘Another day another dollar!’; in Glasgow the motto was ‘Different day, same shite’. Whatever was going on around me, I was generally too cynical to give a crap.
However, when Helena Gersons walked into the office I felt like someone had given me a punch in the gut. Which, being between my heart and my groin, was appropriate. Helena Gersons was perhaps the most beautiful woman I had ever known. Today she was dressed in a tailored grey suit that hugged her figure in a way that made you jealous. Her hair was black. Raven-wing black and glossy and gathered up behind her head to expose a graceful neck. She had dark eyes and arching eyebrows and her full lips were lipsticked deep red. She smiled at me, but a little sadly.
‘Lennox…’ she said in an accent that was more English than Scottish and was haunted by the vaguest ghost of Europe. ‘I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.’
‘It’s a small world, Helena. How have you been?’
She made an open-handed gesture to indicate the Georgian architecture enveloping us.
‘I don’t mean business. I mean you. How are you?’
‘I’m fine. But let’s be honest, if you were that interested in my state of mind or well-being then I would have heard from you long before now.’ She frowned. ‘I’m sorry, that was uncalled for.’
‘Probably was called for.’ I put my hat on the desk.
Helena dropped ice into expensive-looking crystal and poured me a Canadian Club without asking. She poured herself a Scotch and I waited for her to sit and cross her long silk-sheathed legs before sitting down opposite her.
‘I’m a British citizen now.’ She took the cigarette I offered. ‘No longer a displaced person. I’m now… placed. Although I just got in under the wire. The police sent in a report about my little enterprise here and I should have been deported as an undesirable alien, but fortunately it got delayed somewhere along the way.’
I gave a cynical laugh. Helena Gersons had a lot of influence with a lot of people in the Edinburgh establishment. String-pullers who had themselves, at one time or other, had their strings pulled within these elegant Georgian walls.
‘So business is good?’ I asked.
‘Okay… it’s always quieter at this time of year unless there’s a ship in. Busiest time is during the Festival.’ She laughed and exposed perfect porcelain teeth. ‘And, of course, when the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland is in town. The girls are often pushed to deal with so much religious fervour.’
I laughed too. Again I noticed her Anglicized accent and perfect grammar. Just the vaguest hint now of the Vienna she had left behind, little more than a child, in thirty-six.
‘You never think about going back? To Austria, I mean?’
‘That’s another me,’ she said and not for the first time shook me up with a statement I could have made about myself. It was good to look at Helena again; to talk to her again. There had been a time, a few years back, when we had talked a lot. Through the night, hushed in the dark. ‘And in any case, Austria is still a complete mess. God knows it could go either way and maybe end up a Russian satellite state. Anyway, people like me are an embarrassment. A reminder of past sins.’ Her eyes hardened. ‘What do you want, Lennox?’
‘Is it that obvious that I want something?’
‘You always did.’
‘We both did. Two of a kind, Helena. Anyway, you’re right. Or at least in part. I thought you might know someone I’m checking out. But that’s not the only reason I came. I did want to see you.’
She arched an eyebrow. ‘I’m guessing you were in town anyway.’
‘There’s a girl…’ I ignored the accuracy of her dig. ‘She’s got a history as a pro. She’s been putting the squeeze on a client of mine, but I’m not just sure how.’
I handed her the photograph.
‘Why don’t you just ask him how she’s putting the squeeze on him if he’s your client?’
‘He’s not taking calls. Permanently.’
‘Dead?’ She pursed her lips and looked at the photograph more closely.
‘Very. A staged accident I reckon, and missy here is involved. She calls herself Lillian but she used to go by the name Sally Blane. Did some blue-movie stuff.’
The way Helena stared at the photograph, her brow furrowed, suggested she was looking at a puzzle with a piece missing. She looked up, still frowning. ‘I knew Sally Blane. Not well, but she did a few shifts here. I had heard she’d gone off to Glasgow.’
‘Is that her?’
‘Could be… I mean, it looks like her and it doesn’t. I know that doesn’t make any sense, but her face is different. The same but different. But there again I never really knew her that well. Although she did well with the clients for as long as she worked here. She was an upper-storey girl, if you know what I mean. Higher value, higher income.’
‘But she didn’t last long?’
‘No. I got the feeling she was building her own private portfolio, carving out a little business for herself.’ Helena frowned again, beautifully. ‘Wait a minute, I remember something else. Towards the end there was a man sometimes used to pick her up after work. Not a client. A boyfriend maybe. Or a pimp. A bad-looking sort. Glasgow accent.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘A wiry little thug, to be honest. Expensive clothes and a flash car, but they didn’t fit with the face, if you know what I mean.’
‘I know exactly what you mean,’ I said and thought of a Savile Row suit hung on the wrong hanger. ‘Was there ever any trouble? I mean with her Glaswegian boyfriend. If he was who I think he was then he was always trying to muscle in on other people’s action.’
‘No. No trouble. We don’t get any here. I don’t use muscle and I don’t let any gangster push me around. There are no bouncers here because half the time we have a member of the local police somewhere on the premises.’
‘It’s good to have a bobby on the beat.’ I reached for the photograph but
Helena still studied it.
‘That is strange. I don’t remember her this way. Is there any chance it could be her sister? I heard she had one but I never met her.’
‘Could be, I suppose. I’ve had a spate of siblings swapping identities.’ I took the picture back. It was certainly the same face as the Lillian/Sally in the blue movie. But it was the second time someone had done a double-take looking at the photograph.
‘She had a friend who went by the name Margot Taylor. Might even have been her sister. She worked for Arthur Parks in Glasgow and was up to the same kind of scam. You know, building a little business for herself. Parks was not as understanding, though. I gather she got a hiding and was chucked out.’
‘Sorry, the name doesn’t ring a bell.’ Helena sipped at her Scotch, the glass held in long, slender, crimson-nailed fingers. She had been a pianist, once. Rumour had it that she would sometimes play the piano for her ‘guests’ and they would be astounded to hear concert-hall-standard Bach and Mozart played in a brothel. Helena had been something of a child prodigy, but that had all been nixed when the Nazis had come to power. Helena and her older sister had both gotten out to an aunt in England just before the Anschluss. Her parents had planned to organize their affairs and follow. But when the border between Germany and Austria came down, all other borders became impenetrable for the remaining Gersons family. Helena had found out, after the war, that they had eventually made it out of Austria. But to the East. Auschwitz.
As soon as the war broke out Helena, her sister and her aunt had been arrested by the British authorities and interred on the Isle of Man as hostile aliens. Our paths had crossed immediately after the war.
We drank our drinks, smoked our cigarettes and talked about people we had both known for no other reason than to fill the quiet. Any other level of conversation would have taken us too deep.
‘I don’t work with clients any more. I just run the place. You know that don’t you, Lennox?’
‘I thought as much.’
‘One day I’ll sell this place and…’ She left the thought hanging and looked around herself at the walls. A beautiful bird in an elegant cage. There was a silence. She had taken us too deep. I picked up my hat.
‘Better go.’
‘Fine. It was good to see you.’ The temperature had dropped and she stood up and shook my hand like I was her bank manager.
I felt like crap when I hit the street and decided to walk back through the city to the station. As I walked I let scenes from my past play through my head. I was full of self-indulgent crap after seeing Helena again. I had a coffee in the station cafe before catching the four thirty train back to Glasgow. I wanted to get out of Edinburgh and back into Glasgow’s dark embrace.
The Glasgow train was quiet. The next scheduled service would have been full with office workers commuting back to Glasgow and the various stops along the way. I was still in that stupidly melancholic mood and I needed privacy to brood self-indulgently. One of the luxuries I afforded myself at my clients’ expense was to travel first-class. I found an empty compartment and settled into it, looking forward to an hour of solitary travel. Unfortunately a short, fat, balding businessman bustled in through the door in a plume of pipe smoke and piled his raincoat, newspaper, briefcase and himself onto the seats opposite.
‘Afternoon,’ he said.
I grumbled a response and he disappeared behind a fluttered wall of newsprint. At least it looked like I wasn’t going to be troubled with small talk. After a few minutes there was a great hiss of steam and the sound of the engine beginning to chug its way into motion and we were under way.
The world outside the window slid by slate-grey. I thought through everything I had on the McGahern killing. Unfortunately it didn’t take long. The businessman opposite had now folded his newspaper and set it on the seat beside him and began to read through a Country Life. He didn’t look like a shootin’ and huntin’ country type, more like a suburbanite. My idle curiosity cost me dear. He saw me looking at him and clearly took it as an invitation to strike up a conversation.
‘It’s good to get away before the rush,’ he said. He spoke with a Scots burr that was impossible to place as Glasgow or Edinburgh, working- or middle-class.
I nodded with a perfunctory smile.
‘Through in Edinburgh on business?’ he asked.
‘So to speak.’
‘Now, don’t tell me. Sorry, please indulge me for a moment. This is my little party piece: I guess people’s occupations and something about them from their appearances.’
‘Oh really?’ I said. Oh fuck off, I thought.
‘Yes… now you. You’re a challenge. Your accent is difficult to place exactly. I mean you’re clearly Canadian, not American. I’m guessing… and I could be wrong because your accent has become a little muddled… but no, I would say Eastern Canada. The Maritimes.’
‘New Brunswick,’ I said and was genuinely impressed. But not enough to continue the conversation.
‘Now, as to occupation…’ The little man with the little eyes behind his bank manager glasses was not to be put off by mere indifference. ‘What people do, that’s usually easy. But with you, I think we’re looking at something a little out of the ordinary.’ He paused and picked up his copy of Country Life. ‘Now here’s a question that always helps. I go hunting. Shooting mainly. There are two distinct types of people involved in the hunt. Or two distinct types of personality: the hunter himself and the stalker, who leads the hunter to the kill. Obviously sometimes the hunter stalks his own prey. But let’s pretend that we are after a deer, you and I. Would you see yourself as a stalker or a hunter?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said without thought. ‘Stalker maybe.’
‘Yes. Yes, that’s what I’d have you down as. Me, I’m a hunter, pure and simple. Mainly wild deer. Magnificent animals. Do you know what the most important quality in a hunter is? Respect for his prey. When I shoot a deer, I bring it down quickly. The trick is a maximum of two shots. To end life as swiftly and painlessly as possible. As I say, out of respect for the animal.’
I smiled wearily just as we passed through the blackness of the tunnel into Haymarket. The train stopped but didn’t pick anyone up. The engine exhaled a huge cloud of steam that drifted over the platforms. I felt isolated, trapped in this tiny capsule with the world’s most boring man.
‘It is remarkable, I think,’ he continued, looking out the window at a grey slideshow of Lothian scenery, ‘that we often turn out to be someone else. Not who we thought we were at all. Take me — I know what you’re thinking: an anonymous little man with no imagination and some kind of bureaucratic job.’
‘I-’ I started, beginning to feel uncomfortable with the drift of the conversation.
The strange little man cut me off. ‘It’s all right. That’s exactly who — what — I was. Or what I was destined to become. I am not an imaginative person. But what I didn’t realize was that, as a child, my lack of imagination wasn’t my only deficiency. You see, Mr Lennox, I found out at an early age that I didn’t feel things in the same way as others did. I didn’t get as happy as others, or as sad, or as frightened.’
I straightened in my seat. ‘How do you know my name?’
‘I’m not saying it particularly marked me out as being different,’ he continued, ignoring my question, ‘only I seemed to be aware of it, and my life would have followed a predictable course if the unpredictable hadn’t got in the way. By which, of course, I mean the war. But there again, you know exactly what I mean, Mr Lennox. You see, during the war, I discovered that my emotional deficiency was compensated for by an ability that others lacked. I could kill without compunction. Without thought or emotion or regret afterwards. I have a talent for it, you see. Just as some have a talent for music or art. My talent is as a killer. Something that is positively encouraged in the context of an armed conflict. I ended up being recruited into the Long Range Reconnaissance Group. I’m sure you’re aware of the group’s activity.’
> ‘Who are you? And how do you know my name?’ I started to stand.
‘Please, Mr Lennox. Sit down.’ With a movement so swift I almost missed it his hand darted into his briefcase. A very slender, very long switchblade snapped out of the knife handle. ‘Please, just sit down. And please be assured that, big and experienced as you are, any physical contact between us would have unfortunate consequences. I am very, very experienced with this thing.’
I sat down. I didn’t need to ask who he was again. I knew. What I couldn’t work out was how I could continue breathing with this knowledge. Like he said, I was big and experienced. If it came to it, I would take my chances. In the meantime I sat down and listened.
‘It was because of the skills I developed that I moved into the line of business I’m in now. A successful businessman. I have a wife and son you know, Mr Lennox.’
‘I didn’t. I don’t know anything about you, Mr Morrison. Other than your name isn’t likely to be Morrison.’
He smiled and laid the knife on the newspaper by his side, discreetly folding it over to conceal it. ‘I see… you think I’m going to kill you because you know too much, because you’ve seen my face.’
‘Something like that.’
‘I can understand that. German sailors believe in a small elf called the Klabautermann. He is invisible but brings good luck to those he sails with. But if you see the Klabautermann ’s face, you know you’re going to die. I have to admit that is the way I’ve always seen myself. But be assured that that is not the case here. Those I kill — human or animal — die quickly and most often without being aware that they are about to die. That is why I see nothing wrong in what I do. People die all of the time, in terrible pain from injury or illness. You will have seen for yourself the suffering of men in war. The agonies some die in. And not many passings from illness or accident are without great pain. But not my victims. Little or no pain. No foreknowledge and therefore no fear. So you see, Mr Lennox, if it had been my intention to kill you, you would have been none the wiser. You would be dead by now. And anyway, I chose this venue because it is ideal for a chat. If I had intended to kill you, I would have chosen somewhere with more immediate opportunities to distance myself from the act.’
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