Lennox l-1

by Craig Russell

  The stadium was packed. We parked in a car park that was ambitiously large and sparsely filled with cars but thronging with punters on foot, taking a short cut to the stands. I followed Jonny and his boys to an entrance marked ‘Management Suite’ and up into a large room with red carpet, a bar and picture windows out over the track.

  Willie Sneddon was already there. Twinkletoes McBride and Tiny Semple lurked malevolently in the corner. Someone had given Twinkletoes a going over and one eye was nearly shut. Copper or not, whoever had given him a hiding like that would be advised to sleep lightly from now on.

  Despite his complaints to me on the ’phone, Sneddon’s face was comparatively unmarked. Maybe he had managed to keep McNab’s hands busy with Masonic handshakes. Hammer Murphy’s paranoia was not totally ill-informed. Sneddon leaned against the bar, cradling a whisky glass in his fingers. He nodded in our direction when we arrived.

  ‘You all right, Willie?’ asked Jonny Cohen with a smile.

  Sneddon grunted. ‘Feeling the fuckin’ pinch, you might say. You too?’

  Jonny joined him at the bar. Behind it, a youth wearing a white waiter’s jacket and too much Brylcreem poured Jonny a Scotch. I held my hand up in response to Sneddon’s invitation. I felt like keeping as clear a battered head as I could manage and didn’t fancy the party that mixing booze and Doc Banks’s tablets would bring on.

  Murphy was late. We all knew he would be late. Just to make a point. And an entrance. A roar spilled into the entertaining suite from the terraces below as the traps clattered open to release the greyhounds. It was at that moment that Murphy came in, flanked by the same two hard-looking Micks who had persuaded me into the taxi. Sneddon stood up from the bar and faced Murphy. Twinkletoes and Tiny Semple came over to act as his bookends.

  ‘Murphy…’ Sneddon’s nodded greeting had all the warmth of a Corstorphine landlady.

  Murphy didn’t answer but something over Sneddon’s shoulder caught his eye and he threw a sneer at it. We all looked. It was a portrait of our newly minted monarch hanging on the wall. Oh good, I thought, playtime. In Glasgow’s fevered sectarian atmosphere, the reigning monarch symbolized all that was Protestant: a counterpart to the Pope. Depending where you were in Glasgow, you would see either ‘Fuck the Pope’ or ‘Fuck the Queen’ daubed on walls. Technically, of course, the Queen was the head of the Church of England and not the Kirk in Scotland. But ‘Fuck the Queen’ was easier to spell and took less whitewash than ‘Fuck the Right Reverend Doctor James Pitt-Watson, Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland’.

  ‘You carry them fuckin’ pictures around with you and hang them up everywhere you go, Sneddon?’ Murphy attempted a jocular smile that turned out simply a baring of teeth.

  ‘You want a drink, Murphy?’ Sneddon wasn’t rising to the bait. ‘We can toast Her Majesty if you like.’

  ‘Aye… toast her. That’s an idea. I suppose you’re all fuckin’ geared up for the Coronation?’

  ‘I’ll be watchin’ it on television,’ Sneddon said, his voice even and low. ‘You’ll have heard of television, I suppose.’

  ‘An’ I’ll bet she’ll be sittin’ on one of those big thick velvety cushions, like always.’

  ‘What about it?’ There was now a wire taut through Sneddon’s voice.

  ‘Now that we’re all here,’ I said in a let’s-change-the-subject-quick way, ‘I want to tell you what I’ve found out about Tam McGahern-’

  ‘You know why she sits on them?’ Murphy continued. Apparently my voice didn’t carry the way it used to.

  ‘I’ve got a funny feeling you’re going to tell me,’ said Sneddon. He put his glass down on the bar and turned to the waiter-jacketed youth. ‘You… fuck off. But leave the bottle.’

  Once more, in my head a honky-tonk player stopped mid-tune. The waiter left, but Murphy made a point of intercepting him and giving him a ten-bob tip.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ said Murphy. ‘I’ve got nothing against her. Nice enough lassie. Not much to look at, mind, but there again I think Phil spends most of his time looking at the back of her head.’

  ‘What the fuck is that meant to mean?’ Sneddon’s dense frame and hard face seemed to become denser and harder. Jonny Cohen looked over at me with eyes that very eloquently conveyed, Oh fuck!

  ‘Listen, boys,’ said Jonny. ‘This isn’t the time-’

  ‘I don’t mean nothin’,’ said Murphy. ‘Just that she sits on them big cushions. I just wonder if it’s because she’s married to a fuckin’ Greek. And you know what that means.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me?’ said Sneddon. His hand rested on the bar close to the whisky bottle.

  ‘You know, Sneddon… Phil’s a Greek. And them Greeks like to make their deliveries round the back, if you catch my drift…’ Murphy turned to his heavies. ‘What d’you think, boys?’

  ‘I think it’s part of his fuckin’ culture,’ said one of the broken noses. ‘It’s probably written into their laws or something.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Murphy. ‘Or maybes it’s in Greek wedding vows… “promise to honour and obey and take a roger up the dodger”.’

  At least, I thought, Murphy was attempting to talk about something that interested Sneddon. And nothing was closer to the heart of Willie Sneddon — ultra-patriotic, Orange Order, arse-painted-blue, Protestant Loyalist — than the new Queen. If I had had a pair of ruby slippers I’d have wished myself back in time to the OK Corral.

  ‘That Pope of yours sits on a big fuckin’ pile of cushions himself, you know,’ said Sneddon. His hand was now on the whisky bottle. I didn’t think he was going to offer Murphy a drink. ‘At least Her Majesty doesn’t need to be carried around on a fucking chair. I reckon the Pope’s always in it ’cause he’s too tired to walk after chasin’ all them fuckin’ altar boys.’

  There’s an expression ‘you could cut the atmosphere with a knife’. Considering the atmosphere was being created by Hammer Murphy and Willie Sneddon, it wasn’t the air that would end up cut with a knife. Or smashed to fuck with a hammer. They held each other with unbroken murderous glares. Although, in Hammer Murphy’s case, I couldn’t remember him look at anything or anybody with anything less than a murderous glare. Maybe, at times of intimacy with his good lady wife, or during tender moments with his children, he would reduce it to an aggravated-assault-with-menaces glare.

  ‘Come on, guys,’ I said. ‘A joke’s a joke. No harm done.’

  ‘Lennox is right,’ said Handsome Jonny with a handsome smile. ‘Where would we all be if we didn’t have a sense of humour?’

  ‘Edinburgh?’ I quipped. Sneddon and Murphy turned their murderous glares on me in a way that suggested I was about to quip my way into an early grave. At least I’d gotten them to agree on something. Now was the time to move on.

  ‘Anyway,’ I continued. ‘Much as I hate to break up this meeting of The Brains Trust, I think we should be talking about what I’ve found out, instead of tearing lumps out of each other.’ As I spoke, Jonny Cohen walked around Tiny Semple and placed himself between Sneddon and Murphy.

  ‘Lennox is right,’ he said. ‘If we start on each other then we’re all fucking doomed. Let’s not kid ourselves that there’s only the three firms in town. There’s a fourth… the polis. It would suit the coppers down to the ground if we went weak on them. We’d better listen to what Lennox has to say.’

  Again the room seemed too bright, the colours too intense, the edges too sharp.

  ‘I gotta sit down,’ I said and slumped into a leather armchair. Jonny brought me some water from the jug on the bar.

  ‘Is he fucking okay?’ asked Sneddon. I was touched by his solicitous tone.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. I took a gulp of the water. ‘You know what I like about you guys? You’re exactly who you say you are. I know that each one of you is you, and a thorough-going crooked bastard.’

  ‘Lennox…’ Jonny said warningly.

  ‘No,’ I said as happily as I could manage, ‘that’s
a good thing. I mean it as a compliment. You see every other bastard I’ve had to deal with has been someone else. Not who they said they were.’

  ‘Lennox, you’re not making any sense.’ Jonny’s tone was now one of concern. Not concern that my health had deteriorated, but that it was about to — suddenly and irrevocably — if I didn’t appease Sneddon and Murphy.

  ‘But there you have it,’ I said. ‘Nothing made sense. Frankie McGahern having a go at me with McNab there to witness it didn’t make sense. Frankie hanging around to get the shite mashed out of him in his garage didn’t make sense. But it does if nobody is who you think they are. It’s pretty obvious when you think about it. Twins. Tam the brains, the decorated Desert Rat, ex-Gideon Force… then Frankie the no-hoper.’

  ‘This is your theory that it was Frankie who got it up the ass above the Highlander, not Tam?’ asked Sneddon. I was relieved to see him pour a drink from the whisky bottle, instead of brandishing it at Murphy.

  ‘It was Frankie. To start with I thought it was a mistaken identity: that it was a simple accident that Frankie was there instead of Tam. They played this game, you see. According to Wilma, the part-time chippy who was there that night, Tam persuaded Frankie to sleep with her every now and then, just to see if she could tell the difference. A laugh. But that wasn’t it at all. Frankie was set up just like John Andrews and half a dozen others. Frankie was Tam’s twin brother. His flesh and blood. But all he meant to Tam was a face the same as his and therefore his ticket out of a tight spot. Tam had a big job planned: the robbery of all of these Sterling-Patchett machine guns. But because of the buyers he had lined up for them, he was getting heat from a mob who would never give up till they found and killed him.’

  ‘It didn’t take them long,’ said Jonny. ‘If “Frankie” was Tam, then he still got it within a few weeks.’

  ‘Again, no one is who you think they are. Tam McGahern is still very much alive.’

  ‘So who the fuck was that with their face smashed in…?’ Sneddon realized the significance of what he’d said and let the sentence die.

  ‘Exactly. Their face smashed in. And Tam McGahern had gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure that neither his nor his brother’s fingerprints were on file. My guess is the schmuck with the caved-in puss was Tam’s former commanding officer. A waster called Jimmy or Jamie Wallace. Wallace provided a lot of the intelligence and background knowledge for this deal. He also provided a corpse about the right size and colouring.’

  ‘But this isn’t like the twin thing,’ said Murphy. ‘First time round it’s someone who looks fucking identical to the real guy. The second time they’re going to see they’ve got the wrong punter. Or are you telling me they was all fucking triplets?’

  ‘No. But I am telling you that the guys who did the hit above the Highlander didn’t do the second killing. That was Tam McGahern himself. He mashed Wallace’s face and dressed him up as Frankie.’

  ‘So McGahern is hiding out somewhere?’ asked Jonny. ‘Or he must be out of town. God knows he couldn’t show his face in Glasgow.’

  ‘I was out with this girl the other night,’ I said. ‘We went to see a Jack Palance film and she said I reminded her of him. I said there was a good reason. Some Ukrainian-American bomber pilot with an unpronounceable surname refuses to bail out of his burning bomber. Very heroic but his face gets burned to fuck. Months of plastic surgery later they still can’t get it quite right and the skin is too tight over his face. But it gives him this unique look. Goodbye Volodymyr Palahniuk, hello Jack Palance. The reason I look like him is I took the tail-end of a grenade blast in the face. I end up with a tight-looking face, prominent cheekbones, et cetera.’

  ‘Really?’ said Murphy, his eyes wide with amazement. ‘That is abso-fucking-lutely fascinating. Now, are you going to get to a fucking point? Because if you don’t, I’m goin’ to get the boys here to dance on your face. Then you can entertain every cunt with the story of how you ended up looking like Lon fucking Chaney.’

  ‘The point is that Tam McGahern isn’t showing his face in Glasgow, because he doesn’t have it any more. Tam and Sally Blane, or Lillian Andrews as she now calls herself, set up this honey-trap operation and trapped a lot of important people. Including, I reckon, a top copper. Anyway, one of their targets was a plastic surgeon called Alexander Knox. Tam doesn’t hit him for money. Just a new face. He’d already fixed up Lillian’s face after a car crash and was dragged into doing a patch-up on one of Tam’s army buddies. But I reckon Tam wasn’t acting out of loyalty for a comrade… he just wanted to see how good Knox was. The point is, Tam McGahern is walking around with a new identity and a new face to go with it.’

  ‘And just how did you come up with all of this?’ asked Sneddon.

  ‘What can I tell you? I’m a genius. Added to which I got some of the story from a high-class chippy who calls herself Liz. Except my money is on her being someone else, like every other bastard. Just like Tam played at being Frankie and Sally played at being Lillian, I think Margot Taylor, Sally’s sister, is playing at being Lizzie. That, in turn, means that what I got out of her is at least half fiction.’

  I paused to take another sip of water.

  ‘I do think there was a car crash and someone’s face got mashed up a bit, but I don’t think Margot died. But I could be wrong. The important thing is that Margot and Sally-cum-Lillian helped Tam set up this honey-trap. But they weren’t alone. Arthur Parks was involved. He was directing customers and a couple of his better girls to the operation. I started off thinking that once Tam and Lillian had got what they wanted out of the operation, Arthur Parks was surplus to requirements, so they killed him. But that doesn’t fit with the way he died. Parks was killed by someone who wanted information out of him. It wasn’t a quick death. My thinking is that it was either Tam’s new business partners or the highly professional mob who thought they’d got him that night above the Highlander. Ronnie Smails got his from the same killer as Arthur Parks.’

  ‘Was Smails tortured?’ asked Jonny.

  ‘No. He wasn’t. And that doesn’t quite fit. Yet.’

  ‘So who is this highly professional outfit you keep banging on about?’ Sneddon lit a cigarette and looked at me coldly. Sceptically, I thought.

  ‘This is where it gets all very political. And why you guys have been getting the treatment.’ I took another slug of water. My head was starting to hurt again and everything still felt unreal, as if I had been detached from myself and was hearing my own words as if they were someone else’s. ‘You see, I know where these stolen guns are heading. I don’t know when, but I know how and can hazard a guess at which ship they’ll be on. I have this friend who said she was fed up with Glasgow and the way no one can see past the city boundaries. Well, Tam McGahern did. He served in the Middle East and he saw decades of strife ahead and the opportunities that that strife offered. Tam was ambitious, but every time he tried to fulfil his ambitions he ended on a collision course with the Three Kings. So he decided to go around you. Beyond your horizons. Those robbed guns will soon be on their way to Aqaba in Jordan and my guess is from there straight into the hands of Arab insurgents.’

  I gave them a moment to absorb what I’d been telling them.

  ‘I reckon Tam’s been at it for over a year,’ I continued. ‘He started off with ex-army surplus, old and decommissioned guns. But the Arabs are up against one of the best equipped and most disciplined armies in the world. So Tam saw the opportunity to strike it rich. One big deal to get him a new face and a life in a new country. The States. So he planned this robbery with Jackie Gillespie and roped in the extra skills and finance he needed through blackmail. I would reckon that there’s at least one British Army top-brass type on the list.’

  ‘This all sounds very fucking elaborate,’ said Sneddon. ‘A bit too ambitious for a couple of wee Taig shites. No offence, Murphy.’

  Hammer Murphy didn’t reply but continued to gaze his murderous hate at Sneddon. At everybody.

  ‘
Very ambitious,’ I continued. ‘These stolen weapons aren’t just any old guns. I talked to an army pal of mine; he told me they were commissioned last year to be the army’s new small-arm. The Sterling-Patchett L2A1 submachine gun, delivering five hundred and fifty rounds per minute. The Arabs are desperate to get their hands on this kind of stuff. Tam has struck gold, but the reason he needed a new face and a new start is he knew that the Israelis were already onto him and would never let go until they got him. That’s the professional mob, Mr Sneddon. Mossad, if I’m not mistaken. Which is why you three are up to your ears in shite. The City of Glasgow Police will be under enormous pressure to clear all of this up. How much they know about the destination of guns or the involvement of the Israelis, I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure they will have guessed that the guns are headed for the Middle East.’

  I paused. My head was pounding again and I felt sick. I took some more water. I noticed that everybody was looking at Jonny Cohen.

  ‘What?’ he said, his face clouding with anger and disbelief. ‘You think because I’m a Jew I’ve got something to do with this? Just because Murphy here is a fucking spudmuncher doesn’t mean he’s gun-running for the IRA.’

  ‘Take it easy, Jonny,’ I said, and then turned to the others. ‘Jonny’s right. Mossad would only use its own operatives.’

  ‘And one of them is the guy you ran into in Perth?’ asked Sneddon.

  ‘Yeah. Called himself Powell. Looked like Fred MacMurray. He and his cronies have been all over this from the start. It was they who killed Frankie McGahern, thinking it was Tam. But they’re not that easily fooled, so they spirited Wilma away and found out from her they’d got the wrong McGahern.’