Dead men and broken hearts

CHAPTER NINE

Fiona didn’t come up to my room that Thursday afternoon as we had arranged and when I knocked on her door there was no answer; no sounds from inside her flat. As I stood at her door, I became aware of the emptiness of the house. Its quiet. I could hear the traffic on Great Western Road, the playground sounds of children streets away, the shuddering clang of a mechanical digger against tarmac somewhere less distant, but these were all the wall- and window-muffled sounds from a remote universe. The house around me was still and empty, and there was something about that stillness that gave me a bad feeling that I couldn’t explain.

I didn’t wait. Somehow I knew she would not be back that afternoon. Instead I went back out to the car and headed back into the city centre.

Archie was out and the office was locked up, but I found Pamela Ellis waiting for me. Eagerly. It was an adverb I would never have attached to her, but it seemed to fit with her itchy impatience when we caught sight of each other as I climbed the stairs to my office.

‘Ah, Mr Lennox,’ she smiled. Eagerly. ‘I hoped I would catch you. I thought you maybe wouldn’t be back and I was about to leave you a note.’

‘Normally I wouldn’t be back on a Thursday afternoon, Mrs Ellis, you’re lucky you caught me. My appointment was… cancelled.’ It was one way of putting it, I suppose. ‘Please…’ I unlocked the office door and held it open for her.

She sat down in front of my desk while I hung up my coat. Her handbag sat flat on her lap, her gloved fingers interlaced on top of it. The shoulders beneath the raincoat were tense, the stare straight ahead; no relaxation in her pose. She had the demeanour of someone prepared to carry out a rehearsed task or deliver a prepared speech.

She delivered her speech.

‘This is all very awkward and more than a little embarrassing for me, Mr Lennox, but I’m here to tell you that I won’t be requiring your services from today. Everything has been sorted out. It was all a huge misunderstanding, just like you said it could be. I’m sorry to have wasted your time.’

‘No need to apologize, Mrs Ellis. My time is your money, I’m afraid, so that’s what has been wasted. I’m just happy that everything seems to have been resolved amicably.’

‘Thank you Mr Lennox. I really appreciate everything you’ve done. I wonder if I could settle my account with you?’

‘Sure, I’ll send you a bill.’

‘If you don’t mind — I mean if it isn’t putting you out — I’d rather settle up now. Could you make up your account now and I’ll pay you right away.’

I shrugged. ‘Suits me, Mrs Ellis.’

Now, when anybody was in a hurry to settle a bill and get me out of their lives, it tended to make me a little suspicious. But when it was a Scot forcing cash on me, it was enough to make me outright paranoid.

‘If you don’t mind me asking,’ I said as I took my blue invoice book from the desk and slipped carbon paper between the sheets, ‘what was the big mystery? Why was Mr Ellis going out in the evenings at such short notice?’

‘Oh… It was all totally innocent. I feel such a fool, really…’ She pulled on a fake smile. ‘It really was all connected to the business. He was called to these meetings at very short notice because the client he is dealing with is a developer who has an unusual schedule and Andrew had to meet with him at all hours. What I didn’t know was that most of these meetings took place during normal office hours and these other ones were… well, they were just when things came up that needed to be discussed urgently.’

‘I see.’ I tore the invoice sheet from the book and handed it to her. I had itemized my and Archie’s time and, under sundries, added the replacement engine cables.

‘Oh, yes. I quite understand that you have to charge for the damage to your car; after all it happened when you were working for me.’ She nodded gravely. ‘But you should know that that vandalism didn’t have anything to do with Andrew.’

‘You asked him about it?’

‘Oh, gracious no. He doesn’t know anything about me hiring you… it’s just that I confronted him with all of my stupid suspicions and he explained everything. I’ve even met his customer. Everything is perfectly above board.’

‘And what was Tanglewood? Did your husband explain that?’ I asked.

‘Oh, that…’ She was too slow in clearing the frown. ‘Oh, yes… Tanglewood is the name of the project that Andrew’s client is building. That’s all.’

‘And the girl?’

‘You were absolutely right.’ Pamela Ellis nodded approvingly. ‘I have to say you really know your job, Mr Lennox — you could see that there was nothing going on between them. The young lady in question works for Andrew’s client.’

‘Well,’ I said, as she counted out my payment in uncreased five-pound notes that looked fresh from the bank, ‘I’m glad that it’s all been sorted out.’

I took the cash. It was exact to the last penny. No bonus. She had been told not to try to pay me extra as any hint of my being bought off would be likely to make me suspicious. I stood up and shook her hand, holding on to it for a second longer.

‘Mrs Ellis,’ I said, ‘are you sure everything is all right?’

‘Of course it is.’ Another smile that was as genuine as the fairy tale she had just spun me. ‘Like I said, I just feel so silly about the whole thing. Getting you involved in this. I should have talked to Andrew first.’

‘Well, as I say, I’m pleased it’s all sorted out, but if you need my help at any time, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.’

She thanked me again and left, trying very hard, but failing, to conceal her relief.

I sat down behind my desk and looked at the neatly counted-out cash. Sometimes there were no answers, I told myself. Or at least no answers that make any sense when you looked at them. And sometimes you just had to walk away from it — none the wiser and none the worse for it.

Whatever had passed between husband and wife, whatever she believed or didn’t believe, whatever story she wanted to concoct for my benefit, it was no longer my business or concern. I’d been paid, and trying to work out what the hell was going on would pay me no more.

Case closed.

Archie came into the office an hour later.

‘Could you do me a favour?’ I asked him before he could hang up his hat. ‘Could you go down to the Glasgow Corporation Planning Office for me?’

‘I’d be delighted.’ Archie said dully. ‘What for?’

‘I’d like you to check out any applications over the last six to nine months that involve site demolition and clearing for a new building.’

‘What? All of them?’

‘No…’ I said, looking at the crisp new fivers sitting on my desk. Next to them, where I had placed it and flattened it out, was the crumpled piece of paper with the company name and address in Garnethill I had used to direct the RAC to my disabled car. ‘Just anything that involves a project called Tanglewood.’

There were no surprises for me over the next couple of days. Archie checked and re-checked, but there was no planning request lodged with the City Corporation for any project named Tanglewood. After making a few calls myself without ringing any bells, I told Archie to forget it; that we were off the case, and we could divide our time on finding the missing Frank Lang. I went from union office to union office, from shipyard to shipyard, doors opening magically for me because I carried the standard of Joe Connelly and the Amalgamated Union of Industrial Trades. Despite Connelly wanting me to be as discreet as possible, he had spread the word far and wide. Everybody was cooperative, but nobody could tell me anything to help.

I traced Lang to his home town, or at least the address the union had for where he had lived before moving to Glasgow. I drove about half an hour south into Lanarkshire and to a small village outside Wishaw.

There was a lot of mining in Scotland. Oil shale. Ironstone. Slate. But most of all, coal.

The business of digging deep into the Earth created strange landscapes. The mining village I drove to was in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by open November-bare countryside painted in a palette of greys and dull greens; mainly farmland with the odd clump of forest. But this was every bit as much an industrial landscape as the docks, shipyards and factories of Glasgow. In the case of Cleland, as with dozens of villages just like it from Ayrshire to Fife, the industry was hidden from view, deep in the earth. The only clues to what was going on under your feet were the mine head towers and gears, and the unnatural black peaks — the spoil tips of mine waste, called bings in Scotland — that flanked the village. And, despite the rural setting, all of the dangers of heavy industry lay as much here as anywhere else, it was just that they lurked hidden from view.

I was no Red, but there were times I could understand why Scotland had become so militantly socialist. People died here all the time, smothered or crushed or drowned in the pit galleries. Even children perished here, falling into disused shafts or through the crust of a burning bing — a spoil tip that had spontaneously combusted deep within — and burning to death. I had heard that in some places, at night, you could see some of the burning bings glow menacingly in the dark, but I was yet to see one for myself.

Scottish mining villages were designed and built as if they were meant to be in urban centres. Ranks of uniform, tiny, single-storey dwellings arranged in tight, ugly rows; exactly the same kind of housing you found in the shadow of factories in towns and cities. The difference with these communities was that the dreary urban architecture would stop suddenly and sharply and you were instantly back into a gentle, rolling rural landscape. It was almost as if someone had cut out a city neighbourhood and dropped it at random into the countryside.

The village was there. The street was there — short, straight, flanked by miners’ houses and declining to a dead end — but when I looked for Lang’s old place, it wasn’t there. The street numbers stopped before they got anywhere close to the one I had for him. I saw an older man heading out of one of the houses further up, close to where I’d parked the Atlantic — the only car in the street. I strolled up and introduced myself and he looked at me as if I had come from another planet. He was small and stooped and had a face of wrinkled grey-white leather, the eyes sunk deep into it. The retired miner had a thick accent and I struggled to understand him, but I picked up that there had never been any houses other than the ones standing. I suspected some kind of administrative error on the part of the union and that the street was right but the number wrong, but the old guy, who had lived in the same house for forty years, assured me there had never been a Frank Lang in that or any nearby rows.

I stood and looked down the narrow, truncated street, across the fields to where, half a mile distant, the stark geometry of the mine head winding gear stood black against the grey sky.

When it came to Frank Lang, the dead ends were becoming more than metaphorical.

Time for a chat.