Dead men and broken hearts

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

This was not the time to be juggling two unconnected cases, but that was exactly what I found myself doing. Mainly because my continued liberty, and maybe my neck, depended on my finding a solution to each of them.

After I left the Wicked Witch of the West, I headed back to the barge and changed once more into the outfit of flannel shirt, scratchy tweed jacket and shapeless trousers that Twinkletoes had brought me. I dressed it up a bit with a knitted silk tie; not because my sartorial sensibilities had been stretched to breaking, but because I felt the outfit was just that little bit too blue-collar for me to be seen wearing it while driving a car like Twinkletoes’s sparkling Vauxhall Cresta.

There was a Navy-issue dark blue duffle coat in the same barge closet where I’d found the wellington boots. It was in reasonably good condition and I decided I would wear it over the tweed jacket rather than the cheap, thin raincoat McBride had provided. Duffle coats were a kind of classless attire in Britain, where ex-navy captains were as likely to wear one as an ex-navvy. Again I dressed up the proletarian look with a pair of pigskin gloves that probably cost me three times what the bargee had paid for the coat. If stopped by the police, I might play the part of the eccentric dressed-down ex-naval officer. Pulling on the duffle coat, I wondered bitterly if the ensemble would have done anything to improve my chances with Fiona White.

The other advantage of the coat was, of course, its dark colour: ideal night attire for the professional prowler and loiterer. And, of course, I wasn’t just taking the gloves for their look. I would have a practical need of them too.

It was after seven when I headed back to where I had parked the Cresta, got into it, and started it up without casting guilty looks around me. It was strange to be at liberty — albeit a surreptitious liberty — in the city I had had to flee across just the night before with numb feet and in a prison uniform. But I was still a fugitive, and I knew that couldn’t last.

I stopped at a public telephone and, jamming the door open with my foot to allow the fume of urine odour to escape, I jammed my pennies in, dialled the number of the Paradise Club, jabbed the A button, and asked to speak to Larry Franks.

‘Hi, Mr Franks, this is Mr Bardstown, from Kentucky,’ I said.

‘Oh yes,’ said Franks after a short confused silence. ‘The bourbon drinker.’ He paused for a second. ‘I’m glad you ’phoned, but we’ve been having problems with the telephone recently. Like you mentioned.’

‘That’s what I thought…’ Even this coded contact was dodgy. Coppers were dim, but if there was one listening in on the line, trying to catch out something relating to Jonny Cohen’s involvement with the Arcade robbery, this stilted conversation was clearly fake.

‘Is everything all right with you?’ asked Franks. ‘You’ve been missed… a couple of friends have been looking for you two nights in a row. They were really keen to talk to you.’

‘Oh?’ I asked. ‘I’m surprised that they looked for me there.’

‘You left a wallet behind at their place. My card was in it. Your friends are really keen to reunite you with your wallet. Maybe if you were to call by the Club, they would catch up with you.’

‘That’s what I thought. I won’t be able to make it to the Club.’

‘I thought as much. That’s a pity,’ said Franks. ‘Because I found out some stuff about the names of those Bourbon brands you gave me and I was looking forward to chatting to you.’

‘That is a pity,’ I said.

‘I’m afraid I’m so busy I don’t get a chance to chat with anyone. Tonight, for example, I’m working until ten-thirty — then I have to cadge a lift home.’

‘Well, I’m sure we might bump into each other some time soon. Goodbye, Mr Franks,’ I said and hung up.

I headed up to Bearsden. On the way, feeling reasonably secure in a strange car and change of clothes, I drove past my old digs. I kidded myself that I was doing it to see if the police were watching the place but the truth, I knew, was that I just wanted to drive past Fiona’s. The curtains were drawn but I could see the light from the living-room leaching through them. I wondered what she and the girls would be doing, what they would be watching on television or talking about. What an ordinary, safe life would be like.

I drove on.

In Bearsden, I found a public-house car park and left the Cresta there. It was a busy pub, and up-market for Glasgow. Normally in the West of Scotland, if a bar wanted to show itself a cut above, it would have a special rack for you to hang up your bicycle clips next to your flat cap, so I reckoned that, having a car park, this place would be the local bees-knees, no-Catholics-no-Jews watering hole for the local golf-club-swinging crowd — lawyers, accountants and surveyors.

The car park was busy for a Wednesday night and I reckoned the Cresta would be less likely to arouse suspicion left there than parked for a second time in a side street around the corner from my goal.

It was a fog-free night, but not cloudless, and damp-cold without raining. Walking the mile or so to my destination, I pulled the hood of the duffle coat up over my head and cap. The streets of Bearsden were hardly bustling at the best of times and were empty as I walked through them in the chill early evening.

When I reached the road junction, I walked briskly and purposefully across to the other side and out of sight of the black Austin Cambridge sitting outside Pamela Ellis’s home. If the occupants of the unmarked police car had noticed me, then they would simply have seen someone look in their direction to check the road was clear before crossing. The secret was never to look tentative. Maybe, when this was all over, I could write a book: The Fugitive’s Handbook and Guide to Barge Maintenance.

I looped around one block and then another, bringing me to where Ellis’s house and its neighbours backed onto a narrow street that was more an up-market alley. The high brick wall surprised me, as most of the gardens in Bearsden were hedge-or tree-fringed, but I put it down to the fact that the backs of the gardens on one side of the narrow street looked onto the backs of those on the other side, and the walls were probably there to boost security. Even though I would not be overlooked as I scaled the wall, it would be a struggle to get over it and I knew that the locals had the habit of having broken glass cemented into the tops of walls to discourage riff-raff like me.

But it was a problem I would have to wait to deal with. Until eight-ten or eight-fifteen, if my calculations were right.

I walked the length of the narrow street and took a right turn, which meant I was now walking parallel to the one I had originally come down. My orienteering was right and I came back onto the street the Ellis house was on, but a block farther away on the other side, now looking at the back of the unmarked police Cambridge.

I checked my watch. Eight-fifteen. Maybe I was out of luck.

With a lot of time on my hands, I had lain in the barge and thought over every detail and every moment of the last three weeks. I remembered the only time I had visited the Ellis house, catching Pamela Ellis on her way out to her religiously-observed bridge night. And that was when I had gotten the idea.

But, as I stood cooling my heels on the street corner, she was yet to leave the house. There was always the chance that her current state of grief and fear had curtailed Pamela Ellis’s bridge-playing activities. But, even at a time like this, a rubber or two of bridge would be the one distraction I would put my money on Pamela Ellis indulging in.

I waited another five minutes, then ten, and decided I was not going to get the opportunity I had hoped for. My other concern was that hanging around on a dark street corner in Bearsden was a whole lot more conspicuous than in other parts of the city — like neighbouring Maryhill, where it was positively encouraged — and I had already been there for ten minutes.

I was just about to give up when I saw the maroon gleam of Ellis’s Daimler Conquest glide out of the drive. The big question now was whether the coppers in the Cambridge had been told to keep eyes on the house or on its occupant.

‘Come on, boys…’ I urged them near silently and through tight teeth. After what seemed an age, they started up and peeled off from the kerb, following the Conquest along the street and out of sight.

I decided against the high rear wall, instead striding confidently along the street, not slowing my pace as I reached the open drive gate of the Ellis house, where I wheeled breezily into and up the drive. Nothing tentative.

Without breaking pace I walked along the path at the side of the house and into the back garden. The high wall that I had checked out at the end of the garden shielded me from being seen from the large house across the way, but the neighbouring house to my left had a much better view of the rear garden. Fortunately, there were no exterior lights left on which, while encumbering my progress and colouring my language as I tripped over a plant pot, offered me added concealment.

A largish lean-to shed was doing its leaning-to against the boundary wall between the Ellis home and its immediate neighbour. I remembered what Pamela Ellis had said about the shed being her husband’s refuge and his constant complaining about her leaving it unlocked. I tried the handle. Without her husband to reproach her, she had left the door unlocked and I slipped into the shed, using my penlight to check its contents. Even if I found nothing to help me break into the house, the way every screw, nail and tool in the shed was boxed, jarred, arranged by size and labelled gave me hope for my ultimate mission. It was the rigorous, all-or-nothing organization of someone afraid of their own internal chaos, just as Pamela Ellis had described her husband.

Ellis had been an ordnance handler and bomb-disposal NCO in the army, and had then worked his way up the commercial ranks of the demolition business. Exactitude wasn’t just a quirk that gave you an advantage; absolute precision was essential and Ellis had obviously applied it to every aspect of his life.

An old, heavy, double-pedestal desk was used as a workbench with the shelves above it. To one side was a massive-looking chest, made of the same dark wood as the desk. I rummaged through tools in the desk drawer until I found a long, narrow chisel.

Before I headed back out, I cast my torch around the shed once more. I was about to break into a house, a home, yet I felt a greater sense of having intruded here, in this lean-to garden shed. This confined environment was the extension of one man’s personality, of his mind, of his particular way of seeing the world. Right at the start of all of this nonsense, I had quizzed Pamela Ellis to try to get a handle on her husband’s character; I would have been better rummaging through these drawers and shelves.

Then I thought of Ellis’s eyes searching mine, just before the light went out of them. About his final moment being shared with me.

I stepped out of the shed just as a figure walked past the mouth of the drive. I ducked around the side of the shed and into the shadows just as a dog began to bark in my direction. For a split second I wondered if the ever-vigilant Maisie McCardle and her ugly pug had a city-wide beat, before a male voice ill-temperedly told his dog to shut up and come on. I waited a moment to make sure the dog-walker was well along the street before crossing the path to the back of the house.

I found two doors into the rear of the building, both locked. The first looked like it led into some kind of pantry or boot room, so I gave up on that one, fearing that it may lead to a second time-consuming locked door. The other door led directly into the kitchen. It too was locked, so I eased the chisel in between the door and its jamb, slowly and steadily leaning my weight against the chisel until I was rewarded with a splintering crack and the door flew inwards. I shot an arm out and caught it before it crashed into something and made more even noise than I had already made. I paused for a moment, listening so hard I thought my ears would bleed, watching the house next door for lights coming on.

No lights, no dogs barking, no footsteps on the drive. Once I was convinced that no one had heard me, I slipped into the kitchen and drew the door closed behind me. Laying the chisel down on the kitchen table, I made a mental note to pick it up on the way out and return it to the garden shed. The damage to the back door would make it obvious that the house had been broken into, or at least someone had attempted to break in, but I wanted to leave as few traces of my presence as possible. After all, the police would be able to hazard a pretty good guess at who the burglar had been.

I started with a quick survey of the whole house, just so I would know what I was dealing with. Downstairs there was a large kitchen, a cloakroom and WC, a laundry room attached to a small vestibule — which had its own separate door to the back garden, the one I had discounted as a way into the house — the large flock-wallpapered lounge I had been in before, a dining room, the hallway leading to the front entrance vestibule and Ellis’s study. I marked the study for special attention later, once I had checked out the upstairs. The upper floor had a bathroom, two double bedrooms and a single bedroom that was little more than a large closet with a window. From what I could see in the small pool of light cast by the penlight, everywhere was furnished with the same predictable conservatism as the lounge.

The study was definitely my best bet. But there was nothing to say that Ellis hadn’t secreted information about Tanglewood somewhere less obvious; somewhere his wife wouldn’t think of looking. But I didn’t have time to turn over mattresses, dip into toilet cisterns or rifle through sock drawers. I had been accused of all kinds of crap over the last few days, none of which I had done, but this time I really had committed a crime by deliberately breaking into the Ellis home. If I were caught, it would give Dunlop all the excuse he needed to keep me locked up while he took his own sweet time to pin on me anything else he could dream up.

I was jumpy. This wasn’t the first time I had broken and entered, and the last time I had very nearly been caught in the act. Speed was of the essence and I would have to concentrate on the study. Then, if I didn’t find anything worthwhile, and I had time to spare, I would maybe look elsewhere in the house.

I came down the stairs as quickly as I could. It was a detached house, and empty, so I didn’t have to worry too much about sound, but I had to make sure the light from my penlight didn’t scan across the drawn curtains.

At least that’s what I thought.

I heard the key in the front door.

I was half way down the stairs and froze. The stairway led into the hallway that fed from the entrance vestibule; there was no way I could get down into the hall and through to the kitchen before whoever was unlocking the front door came into the hall. I had to go back up. Which meant I would be trapped. I had closed the door from the kitchen to the garden behind me and only close examination would reveal that it had been forced, all the damage being on the outside, but if anyone tried the door handle, then it would be obvious that an unwanted guest had gained entry. And could be still in the house.

Killing the penlight, I backed up the stairs, keeping my eyes fixed on the glass panel door that led into the hall. Just as the hall light was switched on, I reached the small stair landing, where the staircase turned on itself and couldn’t be seen from the hall. I let out a long, slow, quiet breath, realizing I had held it since hearing the key in the door.

I heard footsteps in the hall, one set, high heels sounding on the parquet. I looked around the angle of the stairs and saw Pamela Ellis drop her keys onto the hall table. I braced myself for her heading towards the stairs and readied myself to make a quiet dash for the single bedroom, which looked as if it hadn’t been used for anything in some time. I’d be very unlucky if she looked in there. Another sigh of relief as she headed along the hall, away from the foot of the stairs. I congratulated myself on leaving Ellis’s study till last. She made her way into the kitchen, where, unless she had some reason for going out through the back door, she would see no evidence of my presence.

Shit. I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth in a silent curse. Shit. Shit. Shit.

The chisel.

I had left the chisel in plain view on the kitchen table.