Dead men and broken hearts

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Connelly agreed on the ’phone to meet me, but again asked that we convene at the working men’s club. It confirmed my suspicion that he didn’t much want to be seen talking to me. Apart from our first meeting at the union headquarters, whenever I had talked with him or Lynch, it had been either on the telephone or somewhere else. Whatever it was that Lang had on Connelly, his union, or both, then the union boss wanted it dealt with as off-stage as possible.

It also strengthened my conviction that when it came to the goods on Lang, I still hadn’t been handed the full basket. I more or less accused him of that, for the second time, and again I didn’t get as vigorous a defence as I had expected.

The receiver had just hit the cradle when the telephone rang. It took me a while to recognize the voice, which launched into a garble as soon as I answered. I swam upstream a torrent of words for a while before I got him to pause for breath.

‘I can’t take it any more. It’s driving me mad. I need you to help me, Mr Lennox. I need to know who it is. Who she’s seeing behind my back.’

‘Calm down, Mr Dewar,’ I said as the penny dropped. ‘What’s happened?’

‘He’s been here. They’ve been at it. In my bed. I know they have. I know she has him round whenever I’m not here.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know. That’s what’s driving me mad. I don’t know who he is. For all I know she’s at it with more than one of them. I need your help. I can’t go on like this. Please…’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Dewar,’ I said as soothingly as I could, ‘but I just can’t get involved when there’s a crossover with another case.’ It was all bull, of course. I felt genuinely sorry for the guy and, when the Ellis job had stopped being a job, I had considered taking on Dewar’s case. I certainly had a head start, having seen his wife get handy under the table with the dance hall Romeo. But it was all too complicated and I was trying to tie up loose ends, not unravel new ones.

A thought struck me. I had only gotten involved with the Dewars because they lived next door to the missing Frank Lang, and I had my suspicions that Lang had tested Mrs Dewar’s bedsprings at one time or another. Maybe I could pin down Lang if he had been pinning down Sylvia Dewar. But there was a lot of hot emotion that would make Dewar’s marital problems too hot a potato to handle.

‘I need your help,’ Dewar’s tone was beseeching. Desperate. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do if you don’t. She’s driving me mad.’

‘Okay…’ I said eventually. ‘I can’t promise anything. The truth is I’m probably going to be leaving Glasgow for good in a few weeks. But we can talk about it and maybe I can help. Where can we meet?’

‘Tonight. My house at eight.’

‘What about your wife?’

‘She going out. Again. She says she’s meeting her sister, but I know it’s all lies. Her sister’s as bad as she is. A couple of hoors.’

I calculated my timetable for the evening, centred on the immovable feast of bland dinner at the Paragon Hotel at six-thirty, on the dot.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you there at eight. Just don’t do or say anything until then.’ I was going to ask him if there had been any sign next door of Frank Lang, but decided he wasn’t in a place where I’d get a coherent answer out of him. I’d slip it in tonight, when I got a chance to calm him down.

I had never understood how something as vague and woolly as ‘instinct’ could ever have been an accepted scientific principal. Personally I split instinct into two types: the first was memories we must have inherited from our long-lost tree-climbing ancestors — fears of spiders or the dark, that kind of stuff; the second was the stuff we know without knowing we know it, deep-stored somewhere out of sight of our day-to-day thinking, only surfacing as some impulse or urge that pushes you to act in a certain way.

I had relied a lot on instinct over the years. Which probably explained why I so often ended up in the shit.

Whatever it was, and wherever it came from, the same instinct that had made me give a phoney name at the hotel made me uneasy about using the Atlantic. The fact that I was having increasing trouble getting it started was probably a big part of it, but I also was aware that it was less than inconspicuous, and — after my ambush tete-a-tetes with Matyas and Hopkins — I still got that itch between the shoulder blades that someone was tailing me.

Willie Sneddon, one of the Three Kings and the most powerful, owed me a few favours and I called one in. Not that Sneddon would have wasted the time to actually do anything on my behalf, but a ‘tell them I said it’s okay’ carried a ton of weight. He owned the car showroom on Great Western Road I’d visited before and Kenny the salesman looked perturbed when I returned. One of Sneddon’s people had ’phoned ahead and the car was waiting for me when I arrived. Not the Sunbeam, of course, but a black Ford Anglia 100E, one of the new-shape models. Small, characterless and anonymous, it was, like the hotel, perfect for my purposes.

I told Kenny that the Anglia was exactly what I needed and I settled up for the hire costs, discounted as per Sneddon’s instructions. The Atlantic was to be parked around the back and out of sight.

‘I’ll only need it for a few days,’ I explained as he handed me the keys. ‘Maybe a week.’

‘Have you thought any more about the Sunbeam-Talbot Ninety?’ Kenny asked hopefully.

‘It’s never far from my mind,’ I lied. ‘Tell you what,’ I said, ‘why don’t you have a good look at the Atlantic while it’s here and tell me what you’d give me for it.’

‘Against the Sunbeam-Talbot?’ The hopefulness in Kenny’s tone was less forced.

‘Why don’t you give me a price to buy it from me. Then we can talk about what I might replace it with,’ I said, omitting that my intention was to replace it with a ticket to the other side of the Atlantic. If Kenny offered enough, I might join the Jet-Set instead of taking a boat.

Whatever my theories about instincts, they were going wild when I pulled up in the Ford Anglia outside the Dewar house in Drumchapel. Pretty much as I expected it to be, unless my luck was going to change radically, Frank Lang’s place was in darkness; but so was the Dewars’. I checked my watch. Exactly eight p.m., just as I’d agreed with Dewar on the ’phone. I sat in the car for fifteen minutes but there were still no signs of life. The only soul I was aware of was a woman walking a dog through the drizzle. I recognized her as the same woman whose ugly little dog had taken a leak against the Atlantic’s wheel-arch the first time I’d been at Lang’s house and I wondered how much walking the pug’s stumpy legs could take each day. As she passed, the woman scowled in at me through the windshield. On balance, it was fair to say that the dog was prettier.

When the ten minutes was up, I got out and walked up to the door. The house sat dark and silent and I didn’t get an answer to my ringing of the doorbell. I was about to turn on my heel and put it down to Dewar getting confused about the time, given his agitated state of mind, but, on the ’phone, he had been so desperate for this meeting. It didn’t make sense that he wouldn’t turn up for it. I rapped on the door instead of ringing again. Still no answer.

There was no handle on the door; it was one of the new kind with a small Chubb cylinder lock with only a small brass lip curled below the keyhole with which to pull the door shut. I laid my gloved hand flat against the door and it opened with only a light push.

‘Mr Dewar?’ I called into the darkened hall. ‘Tom?’

Nothing. I roughly remembered the layout of the place from my visit with the potentially obliging Sylvia, but it took a few fumbling seconds before I found the wall switch and illuminated the hall. I closed the front door behind me, went into the living room and switched on the ceiling light.

Everything was just as it had been the last time — the only time — I’d been there. The three-piece suite still filled the room with a showroom smell, the Bush television rented from RentaSet still watched from the corner with the glossy graphite-grey eye of its huge seventeen-inch screen; every item still coordinated shop-window perfect. But something was amiss in Hire Purchase Heaven: something I had noticed before wasn’t there, but I couldn’t work out what it was.

I went through to the kitchenette, again switching on the lights. It was then I realized what had been missing from the front room. It was there, on the floor: the chunky glass ashtray that had sat on the kidney-shaped coffee table and which I had thought looked like a lump of lava. It had been dropped on the linoleum-covered concrete but hadn’t smashed, instead snapping clean into two halves, white ripples of shockwaves from the impact running through the deep red glass like tree rings.

I leaned against the doorframe while I had one of my more inspired detective moments. In an instant I worked out, Sherlock Holmes style, exactly what chain of events had led to the ashtray falling and breaking. I did it by piecing together small clues: like the body of Sylvia Dewar lying sprawled on the kitchen floor, or the dark red, viscous puddle that bloomed on the linoleum around her now misshapen skull. And, of course, there was the hair, blood and other matter stuck to the cleaved glass ashtray.

Yep. I had it all worked out, all right.