The Long Glasgow Kiss (27 page)

‘So fucking what?’

‘So you’ve got a problem. Or another problem. The City of Glasgow Police are treating it as murder. Believe me, they’d much rather have chalked it up as an accident, but because of this sharp new pathologist they can’t.’

‘Fuck.’ Sneddon’s face hardened. Which was surprising, because there wasn’t much scope for further hardening. ‘I knew we should have minced the bastard. But I didn’t want Murphy knowing nothing about this.’

I nodded. Hammer Murphy, one of the other Three Kings, owned a meat-processing plant in Rutherglen. It was well known that several bodies had been disposed of through the plant’s mincer. The Three Kings had an agreement whereby Murphy, for a fee, provided the same service for Sneddon and Cohen. Not for the first time I considered vegetarianism.

‘You should have told me all of this at the start,’ I said. ‘It would have made things easier.’

‘Murder. Fuck. And for once it wasn’t …’ Sneddon shook his head self-critically. It was like watching a golfer who had missed what should have been an easy putt. The thought flashed through my head that murderers maybe have a handicap system too.

‘You say he was a traveller?’ I asked.

‘A pikey, aye … What about it?’

‘Well, that means there’s maybe no official records of his existence. No birth certificate, no war record, no National Insurance number. No paperwork means he didn’t exist officially and that makes it more difficult to tie him in with anything. I think you sit this one out.’

‘What about his family?’ asked Sneddon glumly.

‘They’re not going to go to the police, I’d say. It looks to me like they’ve already said their goodbyes.’

‘How the fuck do you know that?’ asked Sneddon. ‘You don’t even know who they are.’

‘When I called in at the Vinegarhill site there was a vardo – you know, a gypsy caravan – all dressed up with red ribbons. Deep red. That’s their colour for mourning, not black. Of course, it doesn’t mean it’s your boy. What was his name?’

‘Gypsy Rose Lee … How the fuck would I know? He was just a pikey.’

‘Go back to the fights. What was Small Change MacFarlane’s involvement in them?’

‘He set them up and ran the book on them for me. He took a percentage of the winnings and I provided the venue, and the muscle to collect unpaid bets.’

‘He supplied the fighters?’

‘Aye, kind of. He arranged for them to be supplied. The deal was he paid for that out of his cut.’ Sneddon sighed wearily. ‘It was Bert Soutar who found them for Small Change.’

‘Soutar?’ For a second I was deafened by the sound of pennies dropping. ‘Oh, I see … so Bobby Kirkcaldy had a stake in this too?’

‘In the background, aye. Kirkcaldy’s a good fighter and he’ll batter this Kraut on Saturday. But when me and Cohen put money into him, we said he was to get checked out by an independent doctor. Turns out his heart’s fucked. Arrhythmia, they call it. Two, three, more big fights and then he’ll have to give the fight game up. The Board of Control know fuck-all about it like. They’re not exactly on the ball. But Kirkcaldy likes having money, so wherever there’s a pie, he has his finger in it.’

‘So that’s why he was so out of breath …’ I said more to myself than Sneddon, remembering the toll Kirkcaldy’s skipping workout had taking on him in his basement gym. That would be why he had been doing so much training there, instead of in the city gym: no one to see him struggle for breath.

‘Then Kirkcaldy or Bert Soutar will have a name for the dead traveller?’ I asked.

‘Maybes. Maybes not.’

I leaned back into the plush red upholstery and sipped at the whisky. It all made sense.

‘So it didn’t occur to you at all that it was the tailers who were making all of these symbolic threats?’

‘Pikeys? Because of the one that got killed? No, it didn’t. It didn’t even cross my mind.’

‘I find that very difficult to believe.’

Sneddon leaned forward, as if about to share a great confidence with me. ‘I’d be very careful before you call me a liar, Lennox. Very fucking careful.’

I said nothing for a moment, doing the discretion/valour equation in my head.

‘So Soutar supplied fighters for these contests and Small Change organized them and ran your book. What about Jack Collins? He was the real fight arranger as far as Small Change was concerned.’

‘Naw. We did have dealings with Collins, but that was for proper boxing matches. What I told you that night I hired you was true. We was putting together proper bouts and running a few half-decent fighters. That was what Collins managed. And that pikey kid who’s supposed to have done Small Change in … he was moving up out of bare-knuckle and was turning into a tasty boxer. All that’s fucked now anyway.’

‘Do you still have Singer on Bobby Kirkcaldy’s tail?’ I drained my whisky and stood up.

‘Aye …’

‘Good. He needs to be watched like a hawk.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’ve got paperwork to do.’

Finding a place to park out of sight of the main road, under a dank railway arch, I sat for half an hour, smoking and listening to the steel sounds of the Clyde. It was quieter and cooler during the night, but the shipyards and repair docks never really slept. This was no man’s land, between the tenements and the docks. No one would come down here unless they had a reason. That was both good and bad for what I had planned. There would be very few people to spot my car tucked away from view; but those few people would either be up to no good, like me, or trying to catch the up-to-no-good. The last thing I needed was a patrolling bobby to happen across the Atlantic.

A train thundered over the rails above me and its rattles echoed damply in the arch. I put out my cigarette and took my stuff out of the trunk. Taking my suit jacket off, I pulled the turtleneck jumper over my shirt and I changed my shoes for the plimsolls. I unwrapped the charred corks from the newspaper and rubbed them all over my face. If that patrolling bobby were to catch me now, I’d have to convince him I was auditioning for a blackface minstrel show or face those three months in Barlinnie. Locking up the car, I pulled on my leather gloves and made my way out from under the arch. I ducked behind a bush and watched while an elderly dockworker cycled along the cobbled road that lay between me and the bonded dockside area. He pedalled so slowly that I wondered how he could remain upright with so little momentum carrying him forward. After what seemed an age, he disappeared from sight around the distant corner.

The streetlamps threw meagre pools of light onto the cobbles and I ran between them, bent over, across the road and down into the ditch on the far side. I was about three hundred yards away from the gates and the watchman’s shed when I took the wire cutters from the bag and snipped at the steel wire fence, folding it back like curtains and crawling through, hidden by the long, uncut grass.

I made my way along the inside of the fence, still keeping low because I would still be visible from the road until I reached the area where I remembered the Nissen huts to be. There was only one lamppost and the Nissens loomed darkly, with little to distinguish one from another. I didn’t want to use the bicycle lamp out in the open and it took me five minutes to find the sign
Barnier and Clement
. The front door was reasonably solid, but this was an office rather than a store, and the padlock that secured the door fell away with a sniff of the crowbar. I caught the padlock before it hit the ground and let myself into the Nissen.

Normally, I would have switched the lights on: a fully illuminated room attracts less attention than a torch flashing around; but out here in the dark of the warehouse area, switching the lights on would have been as inconspicuous as a lighthouse on a clear night.

The offices seemed pretty much as I had seen them when I had called and asked to see Barnier. I went over to the filing cabinets and was soon saying a little appreciative prayer for Miss Minto. Her filing was meticulous and easy to follow. It took me only twenty minutes to find what I was looking for: a ship’s manifest order and duplicates of a ship’s insurers claim form with a Lloyd’s Register stamp on it.

I smiled. The last thing Barnier would have wanted was for an insurance claim to be put in, but this had to be seen as a scrupulously legitimate business.

I laid the manifest on the desk and shone the bicycle lamp on it, running my finger down the list of items. There it was, as bold and innocent as could be:

ITEM
33a. 12
VIET KYLAN NEPHRITE JADE FIGURINES. CRATED
.
DESTINATION: SANTORNO ANTIQUES AND CURIOS, GREENWICH, NEW YORK, NEW YORK

Except there were only eleven now. KYLAN. When I had first turned up without an appointment, Miss Minto had thought I was there about the ‘
key lan
’. And they weren’t Chinese. They were
Kylan
, not Chinese
Qilin
. They were Viet, from French Indochina. Alain Barnier was an established importer from the Far East, exactly the kind of link that John Largo needed in his supply chain. Except now Barnier was a weak link. Taking notepad and pencil from my bag, I wrote down the details of the shipment, put all the paperwork back in the files and the files back in the cabinet.

I heard a sound outside.

I killed the light from the bicycle lamp and crouched down. Grabbing my sap from the bag, I scuttled under the lidded reception counter to the door. There was a small window next to it and, pressing myself against the wall, I stole a peek through the window. I saw the watchman’s back as he walked through the pool of light from the lamppost and out of sight. I waited for several minutes, straining my neck to watch through the window, before deciding it was safe to put my sap back in the bag, go back to the files and switch the lamp back on.

Barnier was my way to Largo. If I kept tabs on the Frenchman, there was a chance he would lead me to Largo. Or at least take me a step closer. I needed an address. Again I blessed homely, unfriendly Miss Minto, who had channelled all of the sexual and social frustration of the spinster into a fanatical efficiency. Her address book was not tabulated or indeed a proper address book. Instead it was a hardcovered notebook into which she had written all of the company’s most important contacts. It was impressively obsessive: not a name was out of perfect alphabetical order. Barnier lived some distance out of town on the Greenock Road, in Langbank. He was on the telephone and I noted both address and ’phone number. I found myself wondering about the mysterious M. Clement, and after I got the address of the
Barnier et Clement
French office in Cours Lieutaud, Marseille, I looked up and found the name Clement: Claude Clement lived somewhere called Allauch. I wrote down both addresses and put my notebook back in the bag. A worthwhile night’s work.

It was just as I had put everything back in my bag that I heard the footsteps outside the door.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

I had already switched off the bicycle lamp and put it back in my bag. I dropped down behind Miss Minto’s desk and tucked myself into the knee-hole. There was no point in trying to go out through the door: whoever it was I had heard was out there. Again, I played out all my options in my head. It could simply have been the watchman again, making a second round of this part of the bonded area; or it could have been that the watchman had noticed the missing padlock and twisted bar on the door and had called the police.

I slowly unzipped my holdall. Just enough to put my hand in and rummage around until I found my sap. This was potentially a situation where I couldn’t win; if it was the elderly watchman, I’d have to use my sap judiciously. Too hard a blow and I’d end up facing a murder charge. Added to which, although I had an unpleasant propensity towards violence, I avoided using it against the totally innocent. If it turned out to be a copper, then I’d have to hit him hard and run for it. Hitting a City of Glasgow copper usually turned out to be a much more painful experience for the attacker; the boys in blue liked to hold a little reception for you in the station. Allegedly, it normally involved being stripped naked and wrapped in a soaking wet blanket. For some physiological reason beyond my ken, the wet blanket stopped bruising when twenty or so Highland lads set in about you with their boots and truncheons. The second painful element came judicially: police assault usually combined a prison sentence with corporal punishment. The birch. You would be tied to a table and thrashed with some dried foliage. Quaintly traditional but incredibly painful.

I considered my options and huddled beneath the desk. I heard the door opening. A torch probed the recesses of the Nissen hut for a moment. It switched off and the neon strip light above me fizzed and crackled into life.

‘You was right, Billy.’ The voice had a Highland lilt to it. A copper. Option two. I guessed ‘Billy’ was the elderly night watchman. ‘Someone’s broken the lock.’

A pause. I remained absolutely still beneath the desk, controlling my breathing, ignoring the thunder of my heartbeat in my ears. All my time in Glasgow, I had avoided being charged with a criminal offence. I would do time for this. Unless I dealt with the copper and the night watchman.

‘All right …’ the unseen Highlander called out into the Nissen hut. ‘This is the police. I know that you’re in here.’ No you don’t, I thought … I could tell from the tone of his voice. ‘Show yourself now and don’t make any bother.’

Silence. I sat tight and silent. The sap was gripped so tight in my hand that I could feel the heartbeat in my fingers keeping time with the pulse in my ears.

‘Come on now … let’s not be having any silliness …’ Again the voice had the sound of someone who thought they were speaking to an empty room. I heard wood on wood: the lid on the reception counter folding over. He would be stepping through it, his baton drawn. Scottish police batons were made of Caribbean
lignum vitae
– one of the densest and strongest woods on the planet. Bone-crackingly and muscle-deadeningly hard. Whatever I did, I was going to have to avoid a blow to the head. I heard his boots now. He was at the desk in front of mine. He moved forward. One step. Two. His breathing, slow and deliberate. Not frightened. He moved something around. A chair or something. Three. Four. He was next to my desk, but couldn’t see me. Yet.

‘Nothing looks like it’s been disturbed,’ he said. ‘Maybe you frightened them off, Billy. Don’t look like there’s anyone here now.’ His boots ground grittily on the floor. He was looking around himself. Don’t look under the desk, I beamed the thought to him. Whatever you do, you big Teuchter bastard, don’t look under the desk.

‘Billy, you go and telephone the number you’ve got for the proprietor,’ he lilted. ‘I’ll stay here until he arrives.’

‘All right, Iain … I’ll do that.’ An older voice. Eager. Acquiescent to authority. Good, I thought, one less to worry about. But I’d have to make a break for it past the copper.

I heard the night watchman close the door as he left. The copper was still standing there only inches away from me. My mind sped through the options open to me. Barnier would take at least half an hour to get here, but there was no guarantee that another copper wouldn’t arrive in the meantime.

Suddenly, the desk above me creaked. I almost bolted from my hiding place but kept calm: he was sitting on the edge of the desk. There was the sound of a match being struck, then the smell of cigarette smoke. I heard a muted ping: a telephone being picked up. Dialling. The unseen policeman asked to speak to the duty sergeant and told him that he was attending an attempted break-in and gave the address. An
attempted
break-in. The idiot hadn’t searched the place properly but had decided there was no one on the premises. I silently offered heartfelt thanks to the City of Glasgow Police for recruiting from the Highlands.

My heart picked up a pace. I knew that I had to act as soon as he put the receiver down. He didn’t think there was anybody here and I could catch him off guard. But I was in the worst possible position from which to launch an attack. I hung onto every word he said into the telephone.

‘All right, Sergeant,’ he said. I heard the Bakelite clunk of the receiver in its cradle.

I was about to make my move when I heard the sound of pencils hitting the floor. There was a creak as the cop stood up from the edge of the desk. I guessed he had knocked the pencils off the table. Instead of rushing, I eased myself out from under the desk, making no sound. I turned and straightened myself up slowly. He was a uniform all right, and he was bent over, cursing poetically as only Highlanders can, gathering up the pencils. He stood up again and turned towards me.

He didn’t even have the time for surprise or shock to register on his face. I fetched him a blow across his left temple with my sap and he dropped to the floor. There was more calculation in that blow than Einstein had put into the theory of relativity: if I killed a copper then I’d hang. And if they couldn’t trace me, some other mug would swing for it. Justice had to be seen to be done. By the same token I needed him incapacitated long enough for me to make a getaway.

Looking down, I saw that he was stunned, rather than out cold. Perfect. I grabbed my bag, vaulted over him and out of the door, switching off the lights as I did. Anything to confuse my dazed sheep-botherer.

I saw ‘Billy’, the flat-capped night watchman, illuminated by the single lamppost, about a hundred and fifty yards off. He froze when he caught sight of me. I turned in the other direction and shouted to an imaginary associate already out of sight.

‘Run, Jimmy! It’s the watchy!’ I yelled, doing my best Glaswegian impersonation. I raced off towards where I’d cut the hole in the fence. I lobbed my bag over and commando-crawled through the gap I had cut.

I checked behind me: there was no sign of the constable and the elderly watchman would not risk chasing after two Drumchapel desperadoes.

I sprinted along the cobbled road and dived behind the bushes next to the railway alcove. One more check backwards: nothing. I took off the sweater and wiped my face with it, getting as much burnt cork off as possible. I threw my burglar kit into the boot of the car, put on my suit jacket and jumped in behind the driver’s seat. Keeping my lights switched off, I reversed out onto the main road. I drove slowly, with the lights still off until I reached the end of South Street. Only then did I pick up speed and switch the lights on. I drove into the countryside and out of the City of Glasgow Police jurisdiction. Ironically, I took the Greenock Road and passed only one car travelling in the opposite direction. At that time of night it was no surprise that the roads were dead and I wondered if the car I’d passed had been Barnier on his way in from his home in Langbank.

An idea flashed through my head: I would be passing Langbank and it was the one time I knew for sure that Barnier would not be at home. And I did have all of my housebreaking kit with me. I shook the idea from my head. I had no idea if Barnier lived alone or not, added to which I had had quite enough jolly japes for one night. I drove past Langbank and turned south onto a single track road that led through woods and fields. I found myself on the edge of a reservoir, its silky, still water reflecting the velvet clouds. There was a farmhouse at the head of the reservoir and I drove along the water’s edge until I was at the opposite end. Parking the car under some trees, I made a pillow out of the sweater I had worn. Despite the discomfort and the adrenalin still pumping through my system, I was asleep within minutes.

When I woke up I bad-temperedly tried to plunge back into sleep and recapture the dream I’d had: something about me and Fiona White and a new life in Canada. Or had it been me and Sheila Gainsborough? The aches in my neck and the insistent jabbing of the handbrake in my side forbade my return to my dream.

I creakingly unfolded myself. Looking in the mirror in the too bright morning light, I could see the burnt cork still ingrained in the creases and lines of my face: I looked like I was wearing Donald Wolfit’s stage make-up. Rolling up my shirt sleeves, I walked across the road to the reservoir’s edge. I scooped up some water and rubbed vigorously at my face and neck.

Once I was sure I was clear of all traces of my nocturnal adventures, I drove back into town. As I did so, I was pretty smug with myself. It was no small thing to have clobbered a copper, but I was convinced that by now Billy, the elderly night watchman, would have sworn on his mother’s grave that he had
seen
two burglars and one had been called
Jimmy
. The bobby I had tapped would only have gotten a fleeting glance of my cork-blackened face; and I was sure he would be only too willing to swear that ‘there must have been two of them’ to take him down.

Obfuscation could be such a satisfying pastime.

But the smug smile was wiped off my face as I passed my digs in Great Western Road. There was an immaculately polished, black Wolseley 6/90 parked outside, gleaming in the morning light. I was particularly impressed by the super sheen the garage had managed to get on the rectangular plate across the car’s radiator: silver letters against a dark blue background, spelling out the word POLICE.

I drove on and around the corner until I reached the newsagents, where I bought a copy of that morning’s paper before driving back, parking just around the corner. I dumped my jacket in the car, took off my tie and rolled my sleeves up. I ambled towards my flat, trying to look as casual as I could. It was probably the innocent act that the coppers had seen a thousand and one times, but I needed to make it look as if I had been at home all night and had just taken a morning stroll to pick up the paper. It all fell down, of course, if the police car had been there for anything more than half an hour.

As I drew near, both rear doors of the police car swung open. Superintendent Willie McNab emerged from one side, Jock Ferguson from the other. I put my best surprised face on, which was probably as convincing as the last time I had used it, when on my birthday my mother had presented me with the sweater I’d seen her knitting for three weeks.

‘Gentlemen … what can I do for you?’

‘You’re an early riser, Lennox,’ said McNab sourly.

‘You know what they say: birds and worms and that sort of thing.’

‘Get in the car, Lennox.’ McNab stood to one side and held the door open. I imagined it would be the first of many doors that would be closing behind me. My mouth was dry and my heart pumped madly, but I kept as much of an outer cool as I could.

‘Can I get my jacket?’ I jerked a thumb in the direction of my lodgings. As I did so, I could see Fiona White’s face at the window of her flat.

‘Go with him …’ McNab said to Ferguson, who shrugged and followed me in.

‘What’s this all about?’ I took the opportunity of having Ferguson on his own as we climbed the stairs.

‘You’ll see …’ he said. And I knew I would.

We didn’t head towards police headquarters in St. Andrew’s Square. Instead, as I sat crushed between McNab and Ferguson in the back seat of the police car, we headed out towards the river and the bonded warehouses.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked, as if I had no idea. We took a turn down onto the cobbled road and past the railway arch where I’d hidden the Atlantic.

We didn’t stop.

Instead, we drove on until we saw a uniformed constable with zebra-striped traffic cuffs over his tunic. He seemed to be standing on an unbroken piece of grass verge, but as we drew nearer he signalled us to turn in. The barely discernible mouth of a largely overgrown, cobbled access road, just wide enough for the Wolseley, opened up for us and we bumped our way down to the shore. The lane widened into an open area as we reached the water. This had obviously been a working quay, but the Luftwaffe had made a good job of making it inoperable for the rest of the century. Vast concrete blocks, like broken teeth, thrust out of the overgrown grass, rusting metal cable projecting, twisted, from their broken ends. At one corner of the site an earthmover sat, its shovel resting heavily on the ground. On what looked like it had originally been the quay’s loading area, four police cars and an ambulance, which must have struggled to negotiate the lane, huddled close to the water. Whatever this was, it didn’t look like it was about my break-in to Barnier’s office.

McNab and Ferguson led me over to where the other vehicles were parked.

‘He was found here this morning by workers clearing the site for more bonded warehouses,’ said Ferguson. ‘We reckon he’s been dead a day at least.’

‘Who? What’s this got to do with me?’ I asked, genuinely confused. I saw that the rear of the ambulance was open and there was a body inside, covered with a grey blanket, lying on the ambulance stretcher.

‘What’s it got to do with you?’ McNab sneered at me. ‘That’s what I want to know. According to our leads, you’ve been looking for this fellah for the last week or so. Now he turns up dead.’