Lennox l-1

by Craig Russell

  Again I thought of how Lillian was dancing around me in the same way as MacDonald, my teenage nemesis on skates, who had made me look pedestrian on the hockey rink. MacDonald had been signed by the Ottawa Senators before the war broke out. Then he had had his legs blown off in a minefield at Anzio. I don’t think the Senators renewed his contract.

  I was going to have to take the legs from under Lillian.

  I didn’t feel like the Horsehead Bar, but I stopped off for a couple. Maybe it was because I’d been thinking of Lillian Andrews’s legs that I found myself hankering after some gentler company than I’d find at the Horsehead.

  May Donaldson was the kind of woman it’s good for a man to know: as obliging as she was undemanding. Most women made you work hard for your entry pass. May, on the other hand, handed you a season ticket straight off. And threw in a few away games as well.

  May Donaldson’s flat was in the West End, not too far from mine, in one of the ubiquitous Victorian tenements that curled around Glasgow’s black heart. I didn’t know a lot about May’s background, but it wasn’t the usual Glasgow working-class story and things had gone wrong for her along the way. I had heard somewhere that at one time she had been married to a farmer. Apparently, he had left her to plough a different furrow.

  Being a gentleman, I never asked her age but I reckoned she was in her mid-thirties, maybe a couple of years older than me. Britain’s attitude to divorce was the attitude everywhere else had had a hundred years earlier and you could probably deduct a century or two more in Scotland. Being a divorcee here made May spoiled goods and her chances of remarriage were slim. As a consequence, she played the sad and desperate role of the good-time girl. So May and I were occasional playmates. It wasn’t the deepest of relationships, but, like I said, it was convenient.

  If I sound critical of Scotland’s divorce laws, don’t get me wrong: I had good reason to be grateful for them. Whenever I wasn’t working for one or other of the Three Kings, I helped middle-class couples dance through the legally required pantomime of divorce. It was usually still the husband who sacrificed his reputation, even if he had not been the unfaithful partner. He would fall on his sword, as it were, even if his wife had been falling on someone else’s.

  May helped me out with my divorce cases. The required choreography was that I would arrange for May and the husband to book into a hotel together, pull nightclothes over their daywear, get into bed together and I would turn up with a member of the hotel staff to witness that the delicto was indeed flagrante. The maid or the under-manager would then sign a statement and get their cut of the proceeds and the soon to be ex-spouse would shuffle off. There wasn’t a sordid business that wasn’t more sordid or more business.

  I took a taxi from the Horsehead across town to May’s. I would be able to walk back from her place to my digs afterwards. May poured me a whisky as soon as I arrived and we sat down on the sofa together. She wasn’t pretty, but she used make-up to make the most of her regular features. From the neck down, however, she was a piece of art. When I arrived she was wearing a white blouse and black pencil-skirt that hugged the most huggable parts of her.

  ‘How are things, Lennox?’ she asked.

  ‘Fine. You?’

  ‘The usual. You got a job for me?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘At least not yet. And probably not a divorce when it does come up.’

  ‘So what can I do for you?’ she asked. The hint of weariness annoyed me.

  ‘I just came by to say hello,’ I said. ‘Do I need a reason?’

  ‘Not if you don’t say so.’ She got up and poured herself another gin. I was still nursing my Scotch. It was something I’d noticed about May: that she always took a couple or three before we got down to business. Not gassed. Just enough for her to take the edge off what we both knew we were going to do. It was a thought that did my self-esteem no end of good.

  ‘Still working in the hotel?’

  ‘Still.’

  There was probably some law of physics that prevented the small talk getting any smaller and after my second whisky and her fourth gin, I moved in on her. She led me into the bedroom before heading into the bathroom to fit her cap. I stripped and lay on the bed smoking a Player’s. The wallpaper was yellow and floral-patterned, although I guessed it had been white once: May smoked even more than I did. There were scattered attempts at gentility with the furniture and the knick-knacks. Suddenly I felt depressed.

  May lightened my mood by coming back in naked except for her stockings and garter belt. She lay down next to me on the bed and we became consumed in our act of heightened apathy. At least I put my Player’s out first: in Scotland that made me Rudi Valentino.

  Afterwards she made some coffee and brought it through to the bedroom. I lit a cigarette for her and one for myself.

  ‘Do you never feel like a new start?’ she asked out of nowhere.

  ‘This is my new start,’ I said and blew a wispy circle of smoke towards the cracked plaster of the ceiling. ‘I started off life rich and content. There’s only so much of that a man can take. My life is so much more colourful now. Mainly black and blue.’

  ‘I’m being serious. I want to get out of this town, Lennox. I want to get married and have kids before it’s too late.’

  ‘May…’

  ‘Don’t get in a sweat,’ she said and laughed bitterly. ‘I’m not proposing. I didn’t come up the Clyde on a banana boat. I know exactly what I mean to you, Lennox. But sometimes I need to talk. Don’t you need to talk sometimes?’

  ‘Oh yeah. I talk. I talk myself silly.’

  ‘I want to get out of Glasgow. Get out from behind that fucking hotel bar. Go somewhere where no one knows anything about me. Somewhere cut off from everywhere else. Like South Africa or Australia. Or the middle of the bloody African jungle.’

  ‘You should think about Paisley,’ I said. ‘It’s even more removed from civilization but you can get to it by bus.’

  ‘I’m being serious. This city is shite. My life is shite. Everybody here thinks they know who I am. What I am. They know fuck all about me. Everyone in this ugly fucking city thinks the universe revolves around Glasgow. They just can’t see past it. And the truth is this isn’t a city: it’s a village. Full of petty, stupid, bigoted shits. I hate it. Fucking hate it.’ She bit into the crimson of her lower lip.

  I stroked her arm. ‘Why don’t you just leave?’

  ‘And do what?’ she said, pulling away. ‘I need money, Lennox. The kind of money that working a bar or helping you with your divorce scams doesn’t bring. I don’t suppose you know any lonely rich widowers?’

  The gag startled me for a moment. ‘I did. One. But he’s not looking in the lonely hearts any more.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  There was something nagging away at me. Everything Lillian Andrews did was carefully thought out and planned. A lot of that probably came from her association with Tam McGahern: ‘Mafeking’ Jeffrey had told me that McGahern’s war record showed him to be intelligent, organized and a natural strategist. But what got to me more was what May had said about no one in Glasgow thinking beyond the city’s tenement-fringed horizon. It was becoming clear that that was exactly what Tam had been all about.

  Everything I had heard about the high-end, West End brothel that no one knew anything much about didn’t make sense. I had seen the house they had used. You had to know where to find it. I thought of the affected Kelvinside housewife who had answered the door. I couldn’t imagine her type redirecting clients who had lost their way: ‘Oh, Eh’m ehfraid you hev the wrong door, the whooorhouse is three along, between the deyntal prehctitioner and the hayccountent…’ Lillian’s well-connected clients knew exactly where to go. So who was pointing them in the right direction?

  I used the ’phone in the hall and called Willie Sneddon. I shared my thoughts with him and asked if I could lean on Arthur Parks.

  ‘You think Parky was involved with this other outfit?’ Sneddon asked.

  �
�I don’t know. But someone was sending the right kind of client up there. Parks works the top end of the business; maybe he was creaming the best off for this special set up.’

  ‘Naw…’ said Sneddon after a moment’s silence. ‘Parky would know that I’d nail him to the fucking floor if he pulled a stunt like that.’

  I winced. From what I’d heard of Sneddon’s enforcement techniques, he wasn’t speaking metaphorically. ‘Maybe it was worth the risk,’ I said. ‘Or maybe the clients he was redirecting wouldn’t have been seen in his place anyway.’

  ‘A sideline is a fuckin’ sideline,’ said Sneddon. ‘No one works for me and runs their own wee business on the side. Parky’s not your man.’

  ‘I’d still like to lean on him. Maybe take Twinkletoes or Tiny with me.’

  ‘No way. Parky’s one of my best earners. I don’t want him… upset.’

  ‘Then let me at least talk to him again,’ I said. ‘Maybe he’s not the supplier. I have to admit that when I showed him a photograph of Lillian Andrews, he seemed genuinely not to recognize her, although she did remind him of someone else. But maybe he’s heard something more. Or there’s something he’s not telling me.’

  ‘Like I said, Lennox, I don’t want Parky upset. You know how fuckin’ antsy these mattress-munchers can be. Just find out what you have to find out without getting him worked up. And leave Twinkle and Tiny out of it. And I wouldn’t go round at this time of night. These are his big business hours. Parky shuts up shop between seven in the morning and three in the afternoon. I’ll ’phone him and tell him you’ll be round to disturb his ugly sleep tomorrow morning. I’ll advise Parky to be cooperative. That should be all you need.’

  I agreed and hung up. I wasn’t too happy about the set up. Whether Parks was involved directly or not, my instinct told me he needed leaning on to spill everything he knew. And Sneddon had just prohibited me from leaning.

  I lay on the bed with the lights out and smoked. There was all kinds of crap in my head, buzzing about like bees trapped in a jar. I kept thinking back to what May had said and the desperation with which she had said it. I thought about Lillian Andrews and her dark hair and long legs. Then for some reason I couldn’t work out, I thought of Helena Gersons sitting like a beautiful bird in a cage of Georgian architecture. We had had something once. Really had something. But each of us in our own way had been so fucked up that we didn’t want anything that made you feel. But that wasn’t why I thought of her. I thought of her because if Arthur Parks hadn’t been supplying customers to the West End operation, then the next name on the list was Helena’s. And, after all, we had a history of lies between us. But most of all, it was what May had said that kept jabbing me awake.

  I took breakfast in a cafe on Byres Road before heading off to the Park Circus area. The rain was taking a breather and the sun was trying to fill in, but Glasgow was vomiting its early-morning smoke into its face. I sat at the cafe window eating my ham and eggs — or bacon and eggs as they called it here. I watched the world go by: an older man with rickets worse than the mortuary attendant I had encountered waddled past. He looked under five foot tall but I idly wondered if he would have been six foot, straightened out. He paused, leant over, pressed his thumb to one nostril and ejected the contents of the other in a violent exhalation onto the pavement. A delivery man pulled up his dray horse and cart outside, spoiling my view of Glasgow’s cosmopolitan streetlife. The Clydesdale twitched its tail and splattered the cobbles with dung that steamed in the cool morning sunlight. I said a small prayer of thanks that I hadn’t ended up somewhere less sophisticated, like Paris or Rome.

  The ancient Greeks were great ones for reading omens. I should have read the augurs in the Clydesdale’s shit: it would have saved me a hell of a day.

  I walked back along Great Western Road and into the concentric circles of the Park Circus area. When I reached Parks’s townhouse, all of the curtains were still drawn across the windows. There was no bull-necked doorman on guard and the deep gloss red of the Georgian-panelled front door combined with the soot-blackened masonry to give the impression of a back door to hell. Or a back door to hell on its tea break. I tugged at the bellpull and rapped the ornate door knocker. After a few minutes it was clear that I wasn’t going to get an answer. But when Willie Sneddon told you to expect someone, you expected. I started to get a bad feeling about there being no one at home.

  The funny thing about the criminal fraternity is that they are generally very trusting that everyone else will be law-abiding. I walked down the steps to the basement level and found a window slightly open on its sash. I slipped in through the window into a small bedroom. Or rather a room with a bed: I got the impression not much sleeping went on there. It was decorated with red and black Paisley-patterned wallpaper and a vast gilt-framed mirror hung on one wall offering a view of the bed. Romantic. There were two other basement rooms, a hall and the stairs up to the main apartments. I recognized the waiting room in which I’d spoken to Parks before. There were four bedrooms off it. All empty. A vague funk of stale cigarette smoke, scent and whisky hung in the air. A radio played quietly somewhere. From upstairs. I called out for Parks but received no reply. An ornate staircase led up to the next floor, where I knew Parks had his living quarters.

  As I reached the top of the stairs the decor became less lurid and more tasteful. The music from the radio was louder: Perry Como informed me that she wears red feathers. I walked along the landing and came to a large, light living room. The walls were bright and broken up with framed prints and posters of various theatrical productions. The furniture was modern and tasteful and again contrasted with the contrived lurid Victorian wickedness of the decor chosen for the ‘working’ part of the house.

  ‘Hello, Arthur,’ I said to Parks. He didn’t answer. But there again I didn’t expect him to. As soon as I had come into the room and my eyes had met Parks’s, I knew only one of us was capable of seeing. He sat in the middle of the living room. Someone had pushed the coffee table and sofa to one side to clear enough room for them to go to work on Parks, whom they had tied to a kitchen chair. And go to work on him they had. His jaw sat at an angle to his face that was all wrong. Maybe they had tried to fix his underbite. Most of his face was swollen up into purple puffs of distended flesh. It takes time to bruise and swell like that, and it was my guess that whoever had killed Parks had taken a long time about it.

  Parks was dressed only in his vest and underpants and the light-coloured carpet beneath the chair was stained dark with blood and urine. His tongue hung out over the dislocated jaw and his eyes bulged at me, as if emphasizing a point: I am fucking dead. I ignored the smell and drew close, examining his neck. Something thick, like a belt, had been used to garrotte him and there were spider webs of blue-black marks where it had crushed capillaries.

  Parks’s killing had all the hallmarks of a protracted interrogation under torture followed by execution. Well, to be fair, that was the end of the playground Parks had played in. It was the end of the playground I played in. It was ludicrous to think that Sneddon might have been behind it, but I hadn’t seen Twinkletoes since the previous day and I found myself making a quick inventory of Parks’s naked toes.

  I sat down on the shoved-aside sofa and stared at Parks. It didn’t help: he didn’t have any ideas about what I should do next. I did get a clue though, when I heard the urgent trilling bells of approaching police cars. Nice. Once more I thought of MacDonald, the teenage ice hockey right forward who could literally run rings around me. I was being framed better than the theatrical posters on Parks’s walls. The police car bells sounded a street or so away but near enough for a front-door exit to be out of the question. I ran through into the kitchen. It was narrow and had a huge sash window facing the rear. The police would send a car around to the back but their main attention would be on the front door. I slid the window open. There was a pipe angled steeply away from where the kitchen drain branched down to join the main down pipe. Shinning down the main pipe
wouldn’t be too difficult, but traversing the kitchen wastepipe to get to it would.

  Still, shouldn’t be a problem, I thought: if they found me in Parks’s back yard with busted ankles after trying to escape from the floor on which they would find his tortured and murdered body, it wouldn’t take that much explaining.

  I eased out through the window and found the steep angle of the pipe with the toes of my suede Derbys. I took my hat off and threw it down onto the yard below then, scrabbling for a grip on the sandstone, I eased myself down, supporting my weight on the sill. As I inched towards the downpipe, I heard the police car bells ringing more loudly. There was no way I would be able to balance on the wastepipe: I would have to get quick purchase on it and swing over to the main downpipe, hoping that I could grab it firmly enough.

  I bent my knees and propelled myself sideways, reaching for the pipe. I grazed my knuckles painfully on the stone wall, but managed to get a decent enough grip. The sleeve of my suit jacket caught on the pipe bracket and I heard the fabric rip. I scuttled down the pipe as fast as I dared and folded into a heap on the flagstones at the bottom. I caught my breath and tried to stand. No busted ankles but my back hurt like a son-of-a-bitch. I grabbed my hat and ran across the small yard, then out onto the alleyway.

  I reckoned the coppers would be coming from the direction of Sauchiehall Street, so I headed the other way. I sprinted to the end of the alley then turned right and tried to walk as normally and inconspicuously as possible. I looked down at myself: I was wearing a dark-brown wool suit with suede Hush Puppies. I like to look smart, even if I’m just meeting with homo Glaswegian pimps. However, my choice of outfit today had been particularly fitting: the suede of my shoes and the easily bruised wool of the suit, added to my grazed knuckles, all spoke very eloquently of a recent and rushed descent down a drainpipe. I examined my sleeve and saw that a strip was missing, presumably snagged on the pipe’s support clamp.