Dead men and broken hearts

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I had, at one time or another, dealt with all sorts of dodgy characters — thugs, killers, torturers, bank robbers, pimps. Car salesmen, however, were in a league all of their own.

The showroom was owned by Willie Sneddon, one of the Three Kings, or at least he had a major interest in it. One of his legitimate fronts.

My experience with the Teddy Boy Samaritans in Maryhill had highlighted my need for something more reliable for work than the Atlantic. The repair bills were piling up and it seemed to be eating up fuel these days, which was a problem given that the cost of petrol had soared to over five shillings a gallon and rationing had been temporarily reintroduced because of the shenanigans in Suez. Most of all, the next time I had a breakdown in Maryhill or some other Badlands of Glasgow, it might not end so well.

I didn’t tell the salesman any of that. He was the predictably eager type, about thirty and wearing a dark suit and print tie. The motor trade was trying to shed the bomb-site wideboy reputation it had built up after the war. Today, car salesmen tried to dress with less flash and more like bank managers, but the trail of slime they left in their wake as they oozed across showroom floor or car lot from one customer to the next tended to dispel the illusion.

That said, the irrepressibly cheery salesman who introduced himself to me as Kenny struck me as slightly less oleaginous than most of his trade, even if he was still given to grinning periodically as if to remind me of how much he really, really liked me.

I told Kenny I was looking for something less flash and more family and spun him the usual bull about how I really didn’t want to part with my beloved Atlantic, etc. I wandered around the lot — apparently magnetized because Kenny was never more than three feet behind me — not being drawn to any particular car until I spotted a particularly nice convertible. I didn’t disguise my interest quickly enough and Kenny pounced like a lion on a deer.

‘Ah yes…’ he mewed appreciatively. ‘The Sunbeam-Talbot Ninety. Now that’s a motor with real style… Three years old, a Mark Two.’

‘Mmm…’ I said. ‘Bit too steep for me. And it’s a convertible. Let’s face it, Kenny, a convertible is about as much use in Glasgow as a yacht in the Sahara.’

‘Ah, but just imagine summer days driving around Loch Lomond or the Trossachs, the wind in your hair,’ he said wistfully. I tried hard, but all I could imagine was struggling to get the roof back up in a sudden squall.

When I asked him what kind of trade-in he would offer for the Atlantic, Kenny looked at me as if I’d asked how much he would take to sell his sister into slavery. After a minute of mental anguish, all of which played out across his face with a lack of subtlety that would have made Donald Wolfit blush, he eventually gave me a figure fifty pounds less than the car was worth. I thanked him for his time and made to leave and suddenly he found some fresh emotional and financial reserves. He was still short, so I said I would think about it and again started to leave. Kenny followed me across the lot, feeding me a line about how he couldn’t offer more against the model I was considering, how he really shouldn’t have offered what he had and could only keep it on the table for the one day… the usual bull.

He made his final offer, then another one, and by now we were on the street, Kenny trying to coax me back to discuss terms. I was trying to squeeze the last drop out of him when I was distracted. A dark green Jowett Javelin passed by on Great Western Road. I could see the passenger only briefly, but long enough to recognize her.

‘What do you say, Mr Lennox…’ Kenny oiled my ear. ‘Why don’t you come back in and we can discuss what I can do to let you drive this beauty away?’

‘What?’ I turned and stared at him as if he’d said something in Japanese. ‘No. No, I’ll think about it. I’ll come back if I decide to buy it.’

I climbed into the Atlantic and drove off towards my digs, trying not to think about whose car it had been that I just saw Fiona White in.

She was home by the time I arrived, but the Javelin wasn’t parked outside, so I guessed she had simply been dropped off at the door.

There had been no invitation to join her and her daughters for that evening’s meal, and when I walked through the front entrance into the shared hall, I paused for a moment at her door. Just as earlier that afternoon, when I had sensed the complete emptiness of the house, I could now sense Fiona’s presence beyond the door. And something else: her willing me to go on up to my room without disturbing her.

As was becoming a habit, I spent the evening in my room smoking, reading and staring at the ceiling. I could hear the sounds of the television from the flat below: the girls would be watching Lenny the Lion as they always did on a Monday at this time.

I switched on the radio. On the Third Programme, Lord Strang and some professor of Russian history discussed and debated the causes of the ‘Outburst in Europe’, as the programme’s title described recent events in Poland and Hungary. It struck me that I wasn’t the only one who didn’t understand what the hell was going on.

As I lay there on my bed, leaving the radio to chatter in the background, I tried to work out what had gone wrong between me and Fiona. Since the war, there had been a lot of women. It was true that I had been less than a gentleman with most of them, although I at least had had the decency to feel bad about how I had treated them. It seemed to me that when you didn’t care much for yourself, you didn’t care much for other people, or their feelings. But it had been totally different with Fiona: I had worked really hard to sort myself out and make a fist of a decent life and an honest living and she had been a focus of that effort.

Fiona knew some of the bad stuff — not all of it and certainly not the worst — but enough to understand I was making a real effort to put the past behind me. We had never been explicit about the future, but I had always assumed it was taken as read that there was one.

Now something had changed. And I was sure it wasn’t anything I had done.

Pouring myself a Canadian Club, I took it over to the bedside cabinet and listened to the news. After six brief days of freedom, Hungary continued to be brutalized by Soviet invaders; more British and French bombs fell on Egyptian cities while Eisenhower flexed US muscle in the United Nations. Eleven years after war’s end, the world stage seemed to be full of strutting players who didn’t know any more what role they were supposed to play. Just like me.

I switched to the Light Programme and listened to Billy Cotton shouting between turns on his Bandshow, which again did nothing to lift my mood.

After a restless hour, I decided to go out.

The Horsehead Bar was a refreshing pool of pollution into which to dive: noise and smoke and the vague chemical smells of poured spirits and spilled beer. I found my usual corner of the bar and drank a couple of Canadian Clubs too quickly to get to that point where I could enjoy the third, and fourth, more leisurely. Big Bob wasn’t on duty and I didn’t recognize either of the barmen working the taps and optics. Which was good, because I was in the mood to do some pickled brooding, which by its nature demanded solitude.

I was ready for my fourth whisky when I became aware of a small, stocky guy in a cheap black suit at my shoulder. Resting his elbows on the bar, he ordered a pint of beer in an American accent that was so cod you could have hauled it up in a trawler net. I half expected him to turn to me and say ‘Howdy Pardner’. I recognized him as ‘Sheriff Pete’, the loudmouth Big Bob had told me about and who had held court while simultaneously being held up to ridicule by his audience.

I made the mistake of ordering my whisky while he was still at the bar. On hearing my accent, he turned to me and beamed.

‘Hey, bud… you from over the pond? Like me?’

‘I’m Canadian, if that’s what you mean,’ I said wearily. ‘A genuine Canadian.’

‘Swell… I’m a New Yorker myself,’ he said with pride and in an accent that conjured up images of cowboys on the open prairies of Gartcosh. ‘Well, I was born in New York… Manhattan… but my folks moved to Detroit. Tough city, Detroit.’

I turned back to my whisky and brooding.

‘Say, where you from in Canada?’ His persistence tapped at my elbow and I was tempted to tap at his jaw. I turned to him and was disconcerted by his eyes. Dark, intense eyes. He was small — small even for Glasgow — but thick-set, and the pallor of his complexion was emphasized by the dense swirl of oiled, jet-black hair combed back from a widow’s peak on the high, broad forehead.

‘New Brunswick,’ I said. ‘Saint John.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What you drinkin’?’ He pulled a wad of notes from his trouser pocket and held it up enough for me, and everyone else, to see.

‘I’m okay,’ I said.

‘Aw, come on, bud… It ain’t every day I meet a fellow American.’ His accent was now drowning somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. Or somewhere between Jimmy Cagney and Finlay Currie. I would have found him funny, but when he bored into me with those weird dark eyes of his I could sense something even darker behind them. Something really bad.

‘Like I said, I’m Canadian.’ I nodded to the barman and my fourth whisky arrived courtesy of Sheriff Pete.

‘I heard you was a private eye. That true?’

‘Private eyes only exist in movies. I’m an enquiry agent.’

‘But you ain’t a copper…’

‘No, I’m not a copper.’

‘I hate coppers. Got good reason to.’ He leaned towards me conspiratorially. ‘I’m just out of the big house. Peterhead. Nine years.’

I nodded. I somehow couldn’t imagine him as a Peterhead prisoner. Peterhead lay in the extreme north-east of Scotland and was home to the country’s toughest jail. If you were too tough a tough-nut even for Barlinnie, you were sent to Peterhead. Its security and regime were the tightest around.

‘What did you do?’

‘They pinned a bum wrap on me.’ Another conspiratorial lean. ‘I’m a heist man. You know… do bank jobs. Big ones. Crack safes too… But that ain’t what they got me for. Man, I’ll tell you, Peterhead is a hell hole.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘And the prison isn’t much better.’

He didn’t get the gag and just stared at me though his coal-black eyes.

‘I knew someone who did time there once,’ I explained. ‘He said no one tried to escape because even if they got through all of the security and over the wall, they’d just find themselves in the middle of Peterhead and would end up knocking on the prison gates to get back in.’

‘No one would want back into that shit-hole,’ he said moodily. Whatever it was I had seen behind the dark eyes, it wasn’t a sense of humour.

I drank my fourth whisky while Sheriff Pete talked me sober. There wasn’t anything this guy hadn’t done, no woman he hadn’t bedded, no tough guy he hadn’t floored.

I got him another beer but passed on another whisky, made my excuses and stood up from the bar. He put a restraining hand on my forearm.

‘It must be great,’ he said, his transatlantic drawl fading to pure Lanarkshire for a moment. ‘I mean, being a private eye. Spying on people. You know, the power you have over them, knowing all about their lives, looking through their stuff when they don’t know you’ve been there…’

For a moment I thought he was cracking wise: mocking my way of earning a living, but I saw the earnestness glitter in the coal of his eyes.

‘I’d like that,’ he said. ‘I’d like that a lot.’

‘Don’t believe all you see in the movies. My job offers very little power, no glamour and less pay. Anyway, it was nice talking to you,’ I lied, and made my way out into the street.

I had a lot on my mind as I drove home: the going-nowhere-fast Lang job, the went-South-even-faster Ellis case, and whatever it was that was going on between Fiona and me.

But, despite these large and pressing problems, something odd kept intruding into my thoughts. Something disturbing. Sheriff Pete was a pathetic, loudmouth failure who could bore for Britain. A small man with big ideas about himself, like a thousand losers just like him.

So why was it that, every time I thought of those intense, penetrating dark eyes, I got a chill down my spine and a feeling in my gut that I had just encountered something completely evil?