Dead men and broken hearts

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

I talked solidly for an hour or more. I didn’t think about what I was saying or pause to consider how believable or ludicrous it sounded. I just talked. And, just as I had with Hopkins and as I had promised Ferguson, I gave them everything. Including Hopkins.

I could see from their faces, especially Dunlop’s fat one, that the Hopkins story was a big fish for them to swallow, but I gave them the names of the two Special Branch men who had kept Hopkins company. If there’s only one thing a copper will take at face value, it’s another copper’s word. As I spoke, Ferguson wrote the odd note into his notebook and the WPC scribbled everything in shorthand onto her pad.

Like I say, I gave them everything. Almost.

I left one small detail locked up safe and sound. They knew I had moved out of my digs and into the Paragon Hotel, and that would be enough for them. At least for now. I hoped to hell that Ferguson — because it certainly wouldn’t be Dunlop — wouldn’t catch on to the fact that I couldn’t have all of my stuff at the hotel. They had bigger and more pressing issues they wanted to deal with so, for the meantime, I decided to keep quiet about the barge I had rented to stow my stuff. After all, it could come in handy.

‘So you were working on these two cases simultaneously?’ Ferguson asked when I eventually paused to draw breath. ‘The job Connelly and his union took you on to do and the potential infidelity case you say Pamela Ellis hired you for.’

‘That’s right. For a while I thought there was a connection between them: that, by coincidence, the same Frank Lang the union was looking for was the same Frank or Ferenc Lang who is behind this Hungarian emigre group.’

‘And they’re not?’

‘No. I was looking for a coincidence where none existed. And it led me straight into all this crap. Pamela Ellis became very keen to drop me from the case, feeding me this all-a-big misunderstanding and how-could-she-have-been-so-stupid bull. Whatever it was that made her want me to drop the case is the same reason she’s now claiming she never hired me in the first place. I don’t know how or why, but Andrew Ellis was playing cloak-and-dagger games with this Hungarian outfit and they have something — everything — to do with his death. I just stumbled into their little game because of a simple case of mistaken identity — but my guess is that they thought I was investigating them and whatever they’re up to specifically. Dangerous people, Jock.’

‘Well, if the link between the cases and the two Frank Langs is coincidental, then you are the unluckiest man I know when it comes to coincidences. It just so happens that, completely independent of each other, both end up with people dead. Murdered.’

He had a point.

‘Could someone get me a change of clothes from my hotel?’ I asked when it was time to go back to my cell.

‘No can do, Lennox,’ said Ferguson. ‘We’ve already cleared out your closets and the science boys are examining them for evidence.’

‘I see,’ I said. Ferguson knew my taste for fancy tailoring and would realize they were looking at only a travelling wardrobe, when he got the report back listing the stuff examined.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘can I at least have a pair of laces for these boots? I can hardly keep them on my feet.’

‘No laces.’ Dunlop made his first and only contribution to the interrogation. ‘Suicide risk. We don’t want to find you strung up like Dewar, do we?’

‘No?’ I sneered back at Dunlop. ‘I thought that was exactly the point of this exercise.’

They put me back in my cell and I was given a bread roll with some kind of gelatinous luncheon meat in it and another cup of near-boiling, sugary tea. Practically no one in Glasgow over the age of twenty had a full set of teeth, and I could have sworn I felt a fizzing in my mouth as my dental enamel started to dissolve.

I ran a hand over my jaw and it rasped on the stubble. Unshaven, bruised from my encounter with the two guys on the stairwell, without a comb for my hair and in my fetching prisoner’s ensemble, I must have really looked the part of a guilty and desperate felon. I tried not to think of the stakes I was playing for and did my best not to imagine the kiss of three-quarter inch, white Italian hemp around my neck.

It wouldn’t come to that. It couldn’t come to that. They may have had circumstantial evidence, but surely not enough to prove a case beyond reasonable doubt. But, there again, I certainly wouldn’t be the first innocent man to drop through a trapdoor in Barlinnie Prison.

I found myself reflecting on the irony that there had been more than one thing for which I could have hanged. And about how much I hated the idea of dying here, in Glasgow.

It was already dark outside and my cell was bathed in the sickly yellow light of the caged ceiling bulb when Jock Ferguson came to my cell, around four-thirty in the afternoon. He came alone and waited till the custody man’s footsteps had faded before sitting on the edge of my bunk and offering me a cigarette.

‘You don’t really believe all of this crap, do you, Jock?’

‘The truth? No. Everything I know about you tells me that you didn’t kill Ellis. But as a police officer I’m having a really hard time finding anything to put you in the clear. Listen, Lennox, there’s only the two of us here and it’s off the record. Is there anything you’re not telling us? Have you been doing your usual and got into bother because you’ve been shagging other men’s wives?’

‘You’re not really being serious…?’

‘It’s the only possible link and it’s the one that Dunlop is putting forward.’

‘I wondered why he was so quiet in the interview room… he was obviously plum tuckered out from doing all that thinking.’

‘I wouldn’t be so glib about it, if I were you. Dunlop’s theory is the only thing at the moment that makes any sense. More sense than anything you’ve told us so far. You do realize I shouldn’t be giving you any kind of inside dope on this, don’t you?’

I nodded. ‘I appreciate it, Jock.’

‘The way Dunlop has this playing is this: Sylvia Dewar was well known for enjoying the company of men other than her husband. You have a reputation for chasing any piece of skirt. So Dunlop has it that you and Sylvia Dewar were carrying on together. And he has a witness who places you at the Dewar house a week before the deaths and at a time when Thomas Dewar would be at work and you and Sylvia would be alone. Then Dewar jumps you in Sauchiehall Street Lane, exactly as you said, because he suspects you’ve been sleeping with his wife. Except, in Dunlop’s version, Dewar’s jealous rage is entirely justified and that, I have to say, does sound more credible than him ambushing an innocent man just because he found a business card in his wife’s purse.’

‘Okay… go on…’

‘Dunlop has you painted as this manipulative Don Juan who moves in on Pamela Ellis too. Now, even Shuggie Dunlop admits Pamela Ellis is a little too old and too plain for you to take an interest in her for her own sake. Instead, he has you moving in on her so that she becomes your accomplice in knocking off her husband for his business, money and insurance payout. But you get caught and Mrs Ellis gets scared and denies all knowledge of you. The clever part in Dunlop’s theory is that it explains any telephone or other contact between you and Pamela Ellis as two accomplices planning a murder. In fact, the more difficult it is to find evidence of contact, the more it points to you going out of your way not to be seen talking to each other.’

‘So why did I kill Sylvia Dewar?’

‘Sylvia Dewar finds out about your affair with Pamela Ellis, gets jealous and blackmails you for a cut of the proceeds. She already has a previous conviction for dishonesty. You have to keep Sylvia quiet and prevent her from spilling the beans to Ellis about you and his wife, so you cave in her head with the ashtray, making sure you don’t leave prints. Then Dewar comes home and, distraught, kills himself. You come back in the evening to find out why no one is talking about Sylvia’s murder, or maybe because you’re worried you’ve left something incriminating behind. Probably the business cards, but you can’t find them.’

‘Because they’re cunningly hidden in a wallet and an address book?’ I snorted.

‘I didn’t say it was my theory. And remember you’ll be playing to a Glasgow audience. Murder juries here are not used to the accused being sophisticated in his thinking. I have to tell you, I think Dunlop’s line could run…’

‘You really think this will end up in front of a jury? What about everything I told you today?’

‘We’re checking into all of that,’ he said. ‘But I have to tell you it’s not piecing together very well.’

‘Did you speak to the union?’

‘We talked to Paul Lynch. He had a pretty good stab at trying to disavow you, but Joe Connelly confirmed that they had hired you to look for Frank Lang and some missing items. What is it?’ Ferguson read the expression on my face.

‘Nothing… just I’m relieved. Connelly and Lynch were almost obsessive about meeting me in secret and I thought they would deny knowing me.’

‘Like I said, that little shit Lynch was thinking about it, but I reminded him of the penalties of obstruction, false information, that kind of stuff. Connelly is just pissed off that we were there at all.’

‘And the rest?’

‘The rest still isn’t too good. Pamela Ellis still denies having hired you, even though I told her we were getting her ’phone records. And the Hopkins thing… well, I’ll talk to you about that later. We’re going to go out for some fresh air.’

‘So we’re travelling out of Glasgow…’ I said with dull malice.