Dead men and broken hearts

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Or at least, from this distance, it seemed to me as if he was looking up at the roof. Of course, I was at the far side of the three blocks, and he was looking up at where I had been, rather than where I was now. But if he made the connection, worked it out, then there was nowhere for me to go.

I held my breath, not wanting to give my position away by it fuming into the cold air. If they came up for me, was I ready to use the gun? I was pretty certain they were the Hungarians, but what threw me was the man in charge being able to pass himself off as a senior copper. And I couldn’t see a Bela Lugosi type pulling that off.

The tall man continued to stare at the roof, then down to the entrance, then back to the Cresta. He turned his back to the flats and looked out over the fields. That’s it… I willed the thought into his head… out there, that’s the way I went.

Another discussion. They were clearly debating the value of splitting up and searching the fields and woods for me. If they did that, my guess is they would leave one guy by the Cresta, just in case I came back for it. I now had no doubt that they weren’t genuine coppers. No one disappeared to make a ’phone call to organize a search party; but there again, they’d maybe given me up as a lost cause.

Then they went.

The tall man slammed the flat of his hand down on the wing of the Cresta and barked some orders at the others. They all simply piled into the car and were gone. Up here, elevated above the streets in the chill, clear night, I could hear the engine, the only car on the road, as it faded into the distance.

I waited a while before crossing the roof back to the first block of flats, this time taking more care to make my footsteps light and quiet. One of the reasons I believed the party wagon had rolled out of town was because they were in full view of the apartments, and the little show put on by Franks and the uniforms would probably have woken several of the occupants. I didn’t want to attract any more attention.

I retraced my steps, crawled back through the roof void and eased back the hatch. Convinced the coast was clear, I lowered myself gingerly and dropped as quietly as I could onto the landing outside Franks’s apartment. I had to leave the hatch open behind me.

My breathing hard but controlled, I stood for a moment on the landing, gathering myself. I tried Franks’s door, in case it had been left unlocked in the haste of arresting him. Not that there was anything inside I needed; I had gotten all of my stuff together before leaving. It was locked up tight and I headed down the stairwell to the entrance hallway.

I dashed to the Cresta, started her up and drove off into the night.

My route was, to say the least, circuitous. Instead of taking the main road back to town, I drove south, only staying on the A77 until I was out of Newton Mearns and could cut across country on back roads. I dodged Eaglesham and then East Kilbride, Scotland’s first New Town, another Brave New World of soulless concrete and unshared bathrooms for Glasgow’s displaced working classes.

My plan was to take a long, slow loop to the east, then back north. It meant I would end up driving into Rutherglen and right through the middle of the city in the middle of the night, not something that was advisable given my current fugitive status. In fact, driving around anywhere at this time of night increased my chances of being stopped by some bored nightshift copper. Lying low could be as risky an option: sleeping in the car in some secluded spot was just as likely to arouse police suspicions, were I unlucky enough to be stumbled upon.

I decided to risk the second option and turned into what looked like a farm track. After a few yards I came to a large barn-type thing, wall-less but with an arched corrugated iron roof supported on wooden shafts — some kind of empty dry store. I bumped the Cresta over chilled-hard mud, lights off, and parked under the shelter, killing the engine.

And waited.

I hadn’t planned to fall asleep, but I found myself in one of those dreams where you know you’re dreaming but can’t get out of it.

In my dream, steel-helmed Werner Goldberg, the ‘Ideal German Soldier’, sat at a baize-covered card table playing Canasta with Frank Lang — or at least the Frank Lang of the photograph supplied by Lynch and Connelly — as well as Matyas, who insisted on being called Ferenc. I sat at the table too, but hadn’t been dealt a hand and was there mainly to settle a dispute about whose turn it was to play. Except I kept getting confused about how many people were really at the table. Then, when I next looked, there was only one.

‘I thought you needed a partner to play Canasta,’ I said.

‘You do,’ he said. ‘I am my own partner. But you’ve known that for some time now.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve known for some time now.’

When I opened my eyes it was beginning to get light, which, at this time of year, meant it was already getting on in the morning. I checked my watch. Eight-thirty. I got out of the car, took a shivering leak against the barn post, then drove back into town.

The roads were reasonably busy and, by the time I reached Rutherglen, the Cresta was camouflaged by lorries, buses and cars heading into the city. I stopped at a call box and ’phoned McBride, asking him to meet me at the barge, but to make doubly sure he wasn’t followed.

I exerted even more caution than usual when I got back to the barge. The team who had followed Franks and me into Newton Mearns had been good, and my head ached from the drive back, constantly aware of every vehicle around me, every turn that I did not take alone.

I heated up some water in the kettle and washed and shaved, again sparing my upper-lip the razor to allow the moustache to start back. I desperately wanted to get changed out of the tweed jacket and flannels. Normally, I would never have worn the same suit of clothes two days running, but I decided sartorial offences were the least of my concerns at the moment. I did pull a clean set of underwear and a shirt from my stores in the forward cargo compartment, stuffing my worn clothes into a canvas bag. Laundry was one of the challenges of a fugitive life that most people don’t consider. Launderettes were becoming all the rage and maybe, if I got out of all of this crap, I could open up a specialist service for today’s man-on-the-run. I brewed some tea and drank it, considering the business opportunity that offered itself. Laundry on the Lam struck me as a good name for my enterprise.

First taking out the items I’d stuffed into it, I hung the duffle coat back in the closet. I laid out on the galley table the spare magazine clip, the wax-paper-wrapped bundles of cash, the Ordnance Survey map and the torn-off corner from Ellis’s desk blotter.

I turned my attention to the scrap of blotting paper first.

I took some stale bread left over from Twinkletoes’s Red Cross parcel and moistened it under the tap, squeezing out the excess water. I held the blotting paper in place with the fingertips of one hand, while rocking the damp bread over its surface with the other. To start with, all I succeeded in doing was making a bigger mess, the ink now wet again and spreading, but I used a piece of dried bread to soak it up.

It still wasn’t clear, but it was clearer. I repeated the process with the damp bread, working away steadily but gently.

Three initials had been doodled in ballpoint pen, while the scoring out had been done with a fountain pen, making it more delible. I was also helped by the way Ellis had leaned hard as he had written the initials. NTS. Gone over and over again. NTS. Three initials significant enough that he felt he had to obscure his absent-minded doodling of them.

Three letters that had meant something to him. And meant absolutely nothing to me.

I turned my attention to the Ordnance Survey map. It covered a huge area: from the north shores of the River Clyde in the south to Breadalbane and Loch Tay in the north, and from Argyll in the west to the Ochil Hills in the east.

As far as I could see, that was it. No annotations, no circles drawn around any features, nothing. The only thing that struck me was that this was the ‘other’ Scotland. The Scotland that was neither Glasgow nor Edinburgh: vast, open and often wild spaces of moorland, highland, loch and bog. Where true Scotsmen roamed and sheep had learned to look over their shoulders.

I was folding the map up again when I saw a small, raised line on the unprinted reverse side. I flipped the map open again, my finger resting on the almost imperceptible bump on the back. I had missed it because it had been done so carefully, so precisely, and in a red ballpoint pen that almost matched the colour of the printed road it traced. This, I realized, had not been done for future reference, but had been the tracing out of a route to burn it into the memory.

The line followed the A82 out of the north side of Glasgow towards Dumbarton, then up north to run along the west shoreline of Loch Lomond. I traced its progress north along the shore, through Arden, Aldochlay, Luss… I followed the thread Ellis had so faintly spun past the north end of the Loch and up to where the road swung towards Crianlarich. Then, again barely perceptible, I found it. A small, indistinct cross, as much a faint indentation on the paper as a marking.

Whatever was there, it had been Ellis’s destination.

I picked the map up from the table, took it over to the narrow ribbon of cabin window, and examined the mark again, more closely and in the daylight.

And then I saw that the mark wasn’t a cross at all.

I heard Twinkletoes as he lumbered his way up the boat deck.

‘Hello, Mr. L.’ He beamed brightly at me as he descended into the cabin, his arms again full.

I forced some cash on him for the groceries he’d brought with him.

‘But you’ll need all the money you can get…’ he protested.

‘I’m fine. Honestly,’ I said, not wanting to elaborate by telling him that I probably had access to more ready cash than I’d had in my entire life.

We breakfasted on sausages again, this time with eggs, and china mugs full of tea fortified from McBride’s hip flask.

‘I need your help, Twinkle,’ I explained.

‘Sure thing, Mr. L.’

‘No… I need you to understand something. I need your help in the old way. I need to frighten a couple of people into telling the truth. Do you understand me?’

He frowned what brow was available. ‘If you says it’s necessary, then it is necessary.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s finish up. We’re heading out to Anniesland.’

It didn’t take long. The questions I had to ask Edward Leggat — also known as Eddy McCausland, also known as Ted Cuthbert — were straightforward, didn’t seem to incriminate anyone and, in any case, Eddy Leggat would tell me anything to keep his already broken body from Twinkletoes’s clutches.

The address for Leggat that Franks had given me was in Anniesland on the wrong side of Great Western Road. It was a pretty standard tenement flat. The only thing exceptional about it was that there wasn’t much inside it other than Leggat himself: Hammer Murphy and his associates had emptied the place of anything of any value, Leggat told us in way of explanation for the lack of places for us to sit.

When he answered the door to us, the forcibly-retired con man was dressed in suit trousers and slippers, with a pyjama top on instead of a shirt, obviously because it was cheaper to ruin a pyjama top rather than a shirt by cutting it to accommodate the plaster cast that encased his right arm and shoulder. The cast held his arm hooked out from his body, as if he had it around the shoulder of an invisible buddy. Leggat had expensively cut blond hair, was tallish, and I guessed that he had been reasonably good-looking — a description that now looked like it would remain past tense. Someone had danced the fandango on his face and his swollen and blackened nose now had more angles in it than a trigonometry textbook.

‘Hammer Murphy?’ I asked.

‘I fell down the stairs,’ he explained. I didn’t labour the point by asking him why, having fallen down the stairs once, he had obviously kept climbing back up and throwing himself down them again and again.

‘How bad’s the arm?’ I asked, and a tearful bitterness filled his eyes.

‘The elbow’s shattered. They put pins and wires and shite in it, but I’ve been told I won’t be able to bend it or straighten it fully again. It hurts like fuck all the time. Even with the painkillers.’

‘Too bad,’ I said. Hammer Murphy, whose dear old aunt Leggat had unknowingly ripped off, had gotten his nickname because of his — often deadly — handiness with a lead-headed builder’s mallet. The word was that, now he had risen to be one of the Three Kings, Murphy didn’t wield his hammer himself anymore. Instead he had minions to take over the more onerous bone-breaking duties. But when it involved family, I could imagine Murphy dipping into the old toolbox personally.

‘What is it you want?’ Leggat asked, eyeing Twinkletoes suspiciously.

‘May we come in?’ I asked. Twinkletoes rendered the question redundant by putting his massive paw over Leggat’s bruised face and pushing him into the hallway, clearing the path for me.

‘Listen…’ a terrified Leggat said after McBride took his hand from his face. ‘I already told Mr Murphy I’m going to leave Glasgow for good, just as soon as I get out of this plaster cast. And I’m sorry for what I done…’

I decided not to disabuse him of the idea that we were connected to Murphy. ‘Listen, Eddie, this doesn’t have to be unpleasant. We’re not interested in you, but someone in the same line of business.’

‘Who?’

‘Dennis Annan.’

He looked at me, then McBride, then back to me.

‘I don’t know anything about him.’

‘Twinkle?’ I said and McBride stepped forward and grabbed a corner of the plaster cast, hauling the injured man towards him. Leggat yelled out, more in pain than fear. And he was very frightened.

‘I swear… I don’t know anything about him. No one does. He’s a big time operator. I swear to you on my life that I don’t know where you can find him.’

‘Okay, Twinkle,’ I said, and McBride let Leggat go.

‘That’s fine, I didn’t say I wanted you to tell me where to find him. I have a funny idea I already know.’

Leggat looked at me, puzzled. But puzzled in a frightened way, as if his failure to understand could have painful consequences.

‘You’ve met Annan though, haven’t you?’ I asked.

‘Aye… aye, well, a long time ago.’ He nodded furiously. ‘Years back.’

I took the photograph that Lynch and Connelly had given me of Frank Lang.

‘This him?’

Leggat looked at the photograph closely, eager to please.

‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s no’ him. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s all right, Eddie. I already knew that. I just wanted to hear it from you. Now, I’m going to describe someone to you. I’m going to describe them in as much detail as I can, because I don’t have a photograph to show you. When I’m finished, I want you to tell me if my description matches Dennis Annan. I want you to understand that there are no right or wrong answers. No one is going to hurt you if you just answer a hundred percent honestly. You got that?’

He nodded.

I ran through my description and an expression of concentration tried to establish itself on Leggat’s bruised face.

‘Does that sound like Dennis Annan?’ I asked when I was finished.

‘Well, obviously that description could fit a lot of people. An awful lot of people. But that was Annan’s thing you see?’

‘What was?’

‘He had this forgettable face. Really ordinary general kind of face. That’s what gave him his advantage.’

‘So does that description fit Annan or not?’

Leggat nodded. ‘Aye. It does.’

I took a ten-pound banknote from my wallet and stuffed it in the corner of his plaster cast.

‘Thanks. Buy yourself a back scratcher.’ I turned to McBride. ‘Come on, Twinkle, it’s time you got some exercise.’