Dead men and broken hearts

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

If she had been wearing a red cape and I had been on my way to her Grandma’s house, my smile would probably have been less wolfish.

‘If you are Ferenc Lang,’ I said, ‘then I would seriously consider changing my affiliation.’

She frowned in puzzlement. ‘I do not understand,’ she said. Her voice was deep, rich, rolled and foreign in a way that weakened your knee joints. Walking across the concourse of the station, I had recognized her instantly as the woman I had seen Ellis with that night in the fog and whose curves I had followed unsuccessfully to the taxi stand.

She was dressed in exactly the same mismatched coat and toque-type hat I had seen her wearing on both previous occasions. Her black hair wasn’t loose as it had been the last time, but was swept up and fastened with a clip, and again her face was naked of make-up other than the crimson that emphasized her full lips. In the smogless, illuminated environment of the station, her nut-brown eyes were even more captivating than they had been that night in the fog.

Up close, her beauty was intoxicating. I sobered up from it pretty quickly, however, when I remembered how following her curves had led me directly into the clutches of Hopkins and his Rich Tea biscuit interrogation techniques. I scanned the station for anywhere a tail might be lurking, which was of course everywhere.

‘I can assure you I haff not been vollowed…’ she said huskily. If I hadn’t been right next to her when she spoke, I would have looked around to see where Marlene Dietrich had concealed herself.

‘Where’s Lang?’ I asked.

‘Something has come up and it is not safe for him to come here. He asked me to meet you and explain.’

We were standing on the main concourse and, taking her by the elbow, I steered her towards the coffee bar where there would be fewer eyes on us. Whatever Matyas’s little emigre group was up to, and despite all of their attempts at subterfuge, it seemed mad to use a woman like this as a courier. She was less than inconspicuous: no matter how dowdy her outfit, there would not be a man with a pulse and within visual range who would not have given anything to get inside it.

It was maybe something she was aware of, because she insisted that she went into the coffee bar first. She would find a quiet table and when I came in I could buy two coffees and bring them over. I went along with her little dance and ordered the coffees at the counter from a cute little blonde in a waitress uniform.

It took me a moment to find my Hungarian beauty; she had chosen a table right at the back, tucked into a corner and out of sight of the counter, and was sitting with her back to the rest of the patrons. She knew her business all right.

‘So is Lang coming or not?’ I asked as I placed her coffee before her.

‘You have to understand,’ she purred Continentally, ‘that we have to be very careful. Ferenc particularly. He fully intended to be here, but we realized he was being followed. I was nearest so they ’phoned me and told me to meet you and explain, if you turned up.’

‘And what’s your name?’ I asked.

‘Magda.’

‘Okay, Magda, perhaps you can tell me what Lang had to tell me.’

‘That I cannot,’ she said. ‘I do not know what he was going to tell you.’

‘Well, maybe you can tell me a little bit about your little sewing club.’

‘Sewing club?’

‘Sorry,’ I said, realizing I was going to have to park the metaphors, and the humour. ‘Your group. What can you tell me about your group?’

‘Nothing. I’m afraid that I am not authorized to discuss anything about our group, as you describe it. Please understand that this is difficult times for us.’

‘But Ferenc Lang is your leader?’

‘No. Not really. Ferenc has lived here many years, and offered to help us when we escaped from Hungary. We don’t have a leader, as you put it. But I suppose Matyas would be the closest thing to that.’

‘Well, as I told Matyas on the telephone, I no longer have a professional interest in your group. But maybe you can tell me something specific — just for my personal curiosity, you understand — are you involved with Andrew Ellis? I mean, romantically involved?’

‘Again, please excuse… I do not understand…’ She frowned. Beautifully.

‘I mean you, personally, Magda. Were you having a romantic affair with Andrew Ellis?’

The clouds began to gather in her expression and the nut-brown eyes darkened.

‘No, Mr Lennox, I have had no such involvement with Mr Ellis.’

‘Well, I don’t know if you remember me, but I was the mug lost in the smog in Garnethill that night. I saw you both together.’

‘I remember.’

‘So what were you to up to if you have no personal relationship with Mr Ellis?’

‘That is not anything of your business,’ she said, the dark fire still in her eyes.

‘Fair enough,’ I said. I smiled as disarmingly as I could. ‘May I ask if you are involved with anyone else? At the moment, I mean.’

Again it took a while for the significance of my question to sink in.

‘Again, this is not anything of your business,’ she said defiantly. ‘And no, I am not interested in any such… entanglements.’

‘I see,’ I said philosophically. ‘Then I think we are pretty much done here, Magda. Nice as it was to meet you, I don’t think either of us has benefited much from the experience.’ I stood up. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me.’

‘I have something for you…’ she said conspiratorially. She sure did have something for me, but our little exchange had revealed I wasn’t going to get it. Nor had Andrew Ellis, apparently. ‘I’ve been asked to give you this.’ She reached into her handbag and laid a package on the table. It was a slab about four inches by six and an inch or so thick, wrapped in brown parcel paper and bound with string.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘I honestly do not know,’ she said. ‘It is from Ferenc, and I was told to tell you that he will be in touch to discuss its significance.’

I picked it up. It was light and had a little give in it, like it contained paper. I made to untie it when she laid a hand on mine. A warm, firm hand that sent an electric current through me.

‘Do not open it now. Ferenc tell me that you must open it only in private. It explains everything…’

‘Okay…’ I slipped the package into my coat pocket. ‘But my mother always told me never to accept presents from pretty girls…’

She looked at me blankly. Magda was one of the sexiest women I had ever clapped my eyes on — and my eyes really were clapped on her — but she had absolutely no sense of humour. For some reason I could never understand, a sense of humour in a woman was important to me. Maybe because she’d needed it to go to bed with me.

I shrugged. ‘Well, Magda, we seem to have run out of things to say. It’s a pity Ferenc couldn’t have showed up in person, and I will have a look at what he sent me, but I don’t see that we have any more business together.’

‘You stay here,’ she said, rising from her chair. ‘Drink another coffee. It is best that we are not seen leaving together. I will go first but I suggest you wait at least ten minutes before you follow.’

‘Okay…’ I resisted the temptation to smirk. It was all too Orson Welles for me. This was Glasgow, not Vienna or Budapest.

I watched her go. She had the kind of figure you watched go.

As soon as she was out of sight, I looked at my watch and decided I had better things to do than play secret agent. Without waiting, I drained my cup, got up and headed out of the station and darted through the chill rain and across the street to my office.

The stairwell that led up to my office was narrow; wide enough to allow two people to pass each other if they angled shoulders appropriately. The two large figures who came charging down the stairs did so so fast that I had to flatten myself against the wall. Even with that, the shoulder of the second one slammed painfully into me. I expressed myself loudly and in eloquent Anglo-Saxon and grabbed his raincoat as he passed. I am pretty quick on my feet and I was ready to get chummy but he moved with professional speed, arcing his arm up and around mine and locking it, the heel of his other hand hammering home into the side of my jaw. His buddy joined in and within a second I was down on the steps with blows raining down fast. I was stunned but not out and it gave them the time they needed to get down the stairs and out of the door. I pulled myself up into a sitting position and put a shaking hand up to my face. My nose was bleeding but not broken.

There was no point in chasing after them. They could have headed in any direction when they hit the street and, anyway, there was always the danger I might catch up with them.

And, looking up the stairwell towards my office landing, I decided it might be more beneficial to find out where they had come from, rather than where they were headed.

The last person I expected to find waiting for me when I returned to my office was Andrew Ellis. After all, it had been his wife who’d been my client, not him.

But, on balance, that wasn’t the most discomfiting thing about Ellis’s presence in my business premises.

Alarm bells had begun to ring as soon as I found my office door unlocked. Not jemmied or forced, unlocked. Archie had a set of keys, of course, but I wasn’t expecting him back until later that afternoon. As I had suspected, this was where my stairwell dance partners had come from.

I stepped into my office and found it trashed. Not as if someone had been rifling through it, more as if Rocky Marciano and Jersey Joe Walcott had decided to hold a rematch there.

And then there was Ellis.

I heard him before I saw him: short, shallow urgent breathing. I found him behind my desk, next to where my captain’s chair had been tipped over and paper and the shattered glass shade of my desk light lay scattered on the bare boards of the floor. He was staring up at the ceiling, the expression on his face one of intense concentration, like a track athlete focusing on the race. But Ellis wasn’t going to win a Melbourne gold. This was a race he was going to lose.

There was blood everywhere, welling up from the wound on his chest, a vast bloom of crimson on the white of his shirt-front. The weapon lay next to him: a broad-bladed hunting-style knife. The sight of the knife did nothing to cheer me up; not just because the size and type of blade would have done the maximum damage.

It was my knife.

The one I kept in my office drawer and never used for anything more violent than rendering open my rent bill.

I knelt down beside Ellis and applied some pressure to the wound with a handkerchief that I folded into a pad. I looked around for the ’phone; it lay thrown across the room, the lead ripped from its connection box on the skirting board. Not that that mattered much. I probably wouldn’t have made the call to summon an ambulance then anyway. In the war, and on one occasion after, I had stayed with a man to ease his way out; and that was my job here. But I needed to know something first.

‘Who did this to you, Andrew?’ I asked.

He turned his intense gaze from the ceiling to my face, moving his eyes only and keeping his head still, as if held in place by a vice. His breathing came even faster, as if he was summoning up the energy to speak. He moved his pale lips but nothing came out. Ellis had started to shiver, a sign that he had passed that point where there was enough blood left in him to maintain body temperature. He tried again, and this time when it came out, it was short and hissed and I couldn’t make out what he said.

‘Who?’ I repeated. ‘I couldn’t hear you.’ I could feel the handkerchief warm and wet under my hand. I felt damp seep into the fabric of my suit trousers, at the knee, and realized I was kneeling in a pool of Ellis’s blood. Not long.

‘Tanglewood.’

‘Who is Tanglewood? What is Tanglewood?’ I asked. He shook his head. Small, sharp, urgent movements.

‘Tanglewood. You’ve got… to get… to Tanglewood…’ He reached up with his right hand and grabbed the collar of my coat, pulling me close to him. His breath spilled in my face and I could feel there was no warmth in it. His eyes were locked on mine, urgent, pleading, desperate. Then, in a second, like I had seen so many times before, the light went from them.

And it was in that pose, his hand slipping from its grasp on my collar, his face still close to mine, which itself was bruised and bloodied from my encounter on the stairs, and looking for all the world like Ellis and I were in the last stages of a fight to the death, that the coppers burst in through my office door.