Dead men and broken hearts

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

While Jonny Cohen was checking out his places, I did a tour of the remainder of Glasgow’s dance halls. For a century, Glasgow had been the workshop of the British Empire. As the Empire had grown, so had Glasgow to become the second most populous city in Britain and by far the most densely inhabited. It had been a city that, for most of its history, had rung with the sound of iron and steel being hammered, bent, moulded and fused. An expanding Empire had meant the shipyards and the factories had belched ever more smoke into the air as they swallowed ever greater numbers of workers. And to feed the factories and yards, the city had piled people on top of each other — literally — in rows of soot-black tenements. Glasgow had been a city of hard, grimy toil. And on a Saturday night, it liked to wash the grime off for a few hours and pretend it was somewhere more glamorous. On a Saturday night, Glaswegians danced.

They also drank, vomited and fought, but at least they cleaned up nice first.

It was a ritual in Glasgow to dress as much like a movie star as you could and head off to one of the various dance halls. All of which meant knowing Frank Lang liked to dance was as much use as knowing fish liked water. But, in the absence of news from Jonny and with no other lead to follow, other than the long shot that Lang was the Hungarian Donald Taylor had found in the records, I decided to do the rounds of the halls. If nothing else, it would take my mind off all of the other crap that was going on in my life at that moment.

I did the Grand Tour, starting with the city centre ballrooms: the Playhouse in Renfield Street, the Berkley and St Andrew’s Hall in Berkley Street, the Locarno and the Astoria in Sauchiehall Street, the Albert in Bath Street. Nothing. I knew a few of the doormen and swapped the odd lewd remark and off-colour joke, as you do, and, if nothing else, my rounds helped maintain a network of contacts I’d built up over the years. The dance hall staff had been useful in many of the cases I’d worked on of wandering husbands or wives. It never failed to amaze me how some men — and women for that matter — believed that for infidelity to go unnoticed, all you had to do was conduct your illicit courting in a different dance hall less than a mile and a half away from your home and in view of a couple of thousand fellow Glaswegians.

But no luck tonight. Lang’s photograph didn’t spark any flames of recognition.

The Locarno was probably the most popular of the dance halls and I asked the doormen if it was okay for me to take a five-minute walk around the place, just to see if my luck would change. They agreed, and I weaved my way between tables and around the dance floor. The place was packed and fumed with cheap perfume and pomade while the big band on stage did violence to Love is a Many Splendored Thing. The Locarno was like an alien planet, its atmosphere thick and blue-grey with smoke under the sparkle of a glitterball sun. Adrift in an ocean of cheap suits and imitation Perry Como and Liz Taylor hairstyles, I realized that I was on a fool’s errand: even if Lang was in here, I stood no chance of spotting him.

I was making my way out when I spotted someone whom I did recognize, however: Sylvia Dewar was sitting at a table near the wall. She didn’t see me as she was engaged in intimate conversation with a man who was definitely not her husband. They must have been discussing the price of their next drink because, from the angle of her arm as it disappeared beneath the table and from the expression on her friend’s face, I got the impression she was checking his trouser pocket for small change. I decided not to go over and introduce myself, just in case she felt like shaking my hand.

I thought of Dewar, driven to the brink of reason by suspicions he chased like ghosts, and felt sick. Then I thought of myself and felt sicker.

The Atlantic began acting up and it took me a few turns to get it started before driving south, across the river, and down to the Plaza in Eglinton Toll. Same story: no one knew Lang.

Back across the Clyde I checked out the Palais de Dance in Dennistoun and finished up at the Barrowland.

And it was outside the Barrowland that the Atlantic decided to give up the ghost. The Gallowgate is not the kind of place you want to be stranded at night, or any other time of day for that matter, and when my repeated oaths did nothing to get the car started, I got out and opened the hood so I could swear at the engine more directly. When that didn’t work, realizing I’d exhausted my mechanical expertise, I locked up the car. I looked up and down the Gallowgate. It was nine-fifteen, and the street was empty. I decided to head back across to the Barrowland to ask if I could use the ’phone.

I was still on the other side of the street when I saw them.

The couple had spilled out from the ballroom and even from that distance I could see — and hear — that whatever the guy’s intentions were, the girl wanted no part of it. There again, Glaswegian courting rituals had an elegance and charm to make the average mate-clubbing Neanderthal seem like Charles Boyer; but I could see that this was all wrong and the girl was desperately trying to free herself from the man’s grip on her elbow.

A solitary car slowed down as it passed, but the guy yelled obscenities at it and it drove on. Other than me, there was no one else in the street. It was too late for people to be arriving at the dance hall and too early for the crowds to be spilling out onto the street. From what I could see, the guy was trying to drag the girl around the side of the dance hall. It was a distraction I could have done without, but the Canadian in me exerted himself and I walked purposefully across the road towards them.

The man had his back to me and I had just reached them when he slashed her across the face with the back of his hand. I grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around.

‘Take it easy, friend,’ I said, but I was taken aback for a second.

‘Oh…’ I said. ‘It’s you…’

‘Aye… it’s me,’ said Sheriff Pete, without a trace of his cod-American accent. Snakes of oiled black hair hung across the pale brow and as his eyes locked with mine, they burned with a cold, dark fire. ‘Stay the fuck out of this. It’s not your business.’

I looked at the girl, still desperately trying to wriggle free from his grasp.

‘Help me, mister…’ she pleaded. ‘Please help me.’

‘Let her go.’ I crushed the cheap gabardine of his coat and pulled him away from her. Then, I said to the girl, ‘On you go, love. I’m going to have a little chat with Pete here.’

I watched her run all the way to the junction of Bain Street, where she disappeared around the corner. She had run as if her life had depended on it and I knew she had seen in Pete’s black eyes the same thing I had seen that night in the Horsehead. I let him go.

‘I think you need to calm down, fella,’ I said as soothingly as I could. But the dark fire still burned in his eyes.

‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’ he said, and I knew then how this was going to have to end. ‘Sticking your nose into my fucking business. You think you’re so fucking great, don’t you? Big man, are you?’

‘Well, truth be told I’m more of a man than you are,’ I said, still calmly. ‘I don’t feel the need to knock women about. And anyone who does is less than a man.’

‘What? Her?’ He jerked his head mockingly in the direction the fleeing girl had taken. ‘That hoor? She was in there, in the dance hall. That place is no more than a shagging shed and tarts like her go there for one thing and one thing only. They’re all sluts. They only want one fucking thing, then they make out they’re virgins.’ He stepped forward and looked up at me, doing his best to push his face into mine. I was tempted to ask if he wanted me to find a crate for him to stand on, but I decided it wouldn’t do much to defuse the situation.

‘You think you’re so fucking big, don’t you?’ he hissed at me. ‘A big fucking man. Let me tell you, you’re a nothing. A fucking nobody. But I’m somebody. No one is ever going to remember you. Nobody’s going to give a shit about you.’

‘But I suppose your name is going to be carved into immortality, is that it?’

‘Aye. That’s right. No one is ever going to forget my name. I’m going to have a big name all right. I already have, it’s just that nobody knows about it… yet. But they will. They’ll remember all right. People are going to remember my name and my face long after I’m dead. You can bet on it.’

‘Okay, fine. I get it: in my old age I’ll tell my grandkids I knew you. Now why don’t you go home and cool off, that’s a good boy. But take the opposite direction from your girlfriend.’

He sighed, took a step back from me and let the tension ease from his shoulders.

‘Okay…’ he said dejectedly, as if defeated. It was this sudden and complete change of demeanour, intended to put me off my guard, that alerted me to his real intention. But even with me being ready for it, when he made his move it was so fast and expert that he managed to catch me on the side of the head. Not just a fist, and I felt a trickle of blood from my temple. He swung again and I saw something metal flash in the streetlight.

I slammed a kick into the middle of his abdomen, just the way they’d taught me in the army, and he didn’t have enough weight to stay on his feet. I followed through on his fall and dropped down on top of him, squeezing the air out of him with my knee on his chest and pinning the hand with the weapon in it to the asphalt. I was relieved to see that it was a short length of steel tube and not a razor. I smashed the heel of my right hand into his nose and gouts of blood spurted from the nostrils. Then I started to punch him. Over and over and over. This wasn’t like the episode with Dewar in Sauchiehall Lane: I was dealing with a bad bastard here who walked around with a weapon in his pocket. So I kept hitting him.

I was still hitting him when the two uniformed coppers hauled me off.