Hour Of Darkness

Twenty

Ask me on the record if Lennie Plenderleith is a friend of mine and I’d probably deny it. I’m not sure I’d pass a lie detector test if I did.

I’ve known him for twenty years, maybe more, since back in the days when he was a gangster’s minder, and the most feared young man in Edinburgh. At first I put him in a mental filing cabinet, the one where I kept the names of all the capital city’s thugs, boxes to be ticked every time one of then got put away for a worthwhile stretch.

I’m not certain when perception of him began to change, but probably it was after Tony Manson installed him as manager of a pub he owned down Leith way. Over the door it said ‘The Milton Vaults’, but in the locality it served, and in the Queen Charlotte Street police office, it was known as ‘The War Office’.

Its reputation as a rough pub went back for decades, but in the eighties and nineties, it got worse and worse, even after it was acquired by Manson from the previous owner in exchange for the write-off of a large gambling debt. Tony was a career criminal, but of the executive type. He called himself a businessman, and so he was loosely, but those businesses fronted for drugs, prostitution, loan-sharking and other activities.

He had two core skills: he never allowed any chain of evidence to lead to his door, and he never picked a quarrel that he even suspected he might not win. That was why he was able to co-exist in Edinburgh with a man called Perry Holmes, and his brutal and much less subtle younger brother, Alasdair.

If Scotland ever had an undisputed champion of the criminal underworld, it was Perry. In his time he was a feudal overlord of sorts, and his vassals were the likes of Manson, Grandpa McCullough, and others in their fiefdoms in Scotland’s cities. His power was based on intellect, money, control of all drugs importation into Scotland, and an utterly ruthless ferocity, demonstrated when necessary by his brother, and a big beast of a man called Johan Kraus.

Those days are long gone. They came to an end when a worm called Billy Spreckley, brother of the newly deceased Bella, finally turned, walking into the Holmes brothers’ Edinburgh office and starting a gunfight that was reminiscent of the OK Corral, and left as many people dead, Al Holmes and Billy himself among them. Perry survived for a few years, as a quadriplegic in a wheelchair, still with power and considerable influence, but not quite as much as before, as nature began to fill the vacuum that his limitations had created.

But I digress; back to the War Office. There came a point when the place got so bad that my old gaffer, Alf Stein, the head of CID himself, went to see Tony Manson and had a serious word with him. When Alf had a serious word, you listened, no matter who you were, and he didn’t go easy on our local Mr Big. I know because he took me along with him when he did it. My brief was to say nothing, just to be there, and not to smile under any circumstances.

When I was a boy I read Damon Runyon’s Broadway stories from start to finish, over and over again. There’s a character in them called Dave the Dude. When he went to a meeting he took a guy with him whose only function was to nod, whenever Dave looked at him and said, ‘Yes?’

I was Alf’s nod guy at that meeting, so I know that when he told Manson that if he didn’t turn the Milton Vaults into the best-behaved pub in Leith then he, Alf, would make sure personally that it burned to the fucking ground with him, Manson, inside it, the message was received, well and truly.

His response was to install his gigantic young driver, gopher and general sidekick as manager. The gambit worked, in double quick time. Lennie laid down his law. He had to make believers of a couple of fools in his first fortnight in the job, and he did it so effectively that pretty soon the Milton Vaults became a place where you could take your granny. . if she liked a pint.

I dropped in there myself a few times, just to check on the place. Lennie didn’t mind. He even offered to give cops a discount, but I told him the chief constable might not be too keen on that.

It was during the chats we had in those days, twenty years ago now, that I first realised that young Plenderleith was more than just a six-foot six-inch mountain of muscle, and that there was a good brain working in there, in spite of everything.

Where Lennie was brought up, in a part of the city that isn’t standing any more, kids often missed out on education, and he was one of those. His family background could not have been worse. His mother was a prostitute and his father was her pimp, he told me once, in a moment of frankness.

If only Manson had been sensible enough to keep him in the War Office full-time. . but he wasn’t. He still made use of his physical talents on occasion, and finally, inevitably, on one occasion too many. Lennie was caught in the act of passing on a message from Tony to some idiot who’d upset him and he went away for a few years as a result.

I wasn’t involved in his arrest, and I was surprised when it happened, since the big lad was usually very discreet on those assignments. It took another ten years for me to discover that Lennie actually wanted to be caught. He’d got himself married to a woman in the same line of work as his mother, he was miserable, he was desperate, and he wanted to find a way out of the life.

Perth Prison helped him do that, for a few years. It also started to educate him properly. He used his time there to gain the leaving certificate that his background had denied him, and picked up more Higher grade passes than he ever would have at school.

In an ideal world, he’d have gone from the jail straight to the university, but it isn’t ideal, is it? Never was, never will be. When Lennie got out, two things happened, one after the other, very quickly. His wife was murdered, and then his old boss was too. Finally, Manson had underestimated some people and it cost him his life. The wife? It was pretty obvious to us at the time that she’d pushed her husband too far.

Lennie could have run, but he didn’t; he had something to do first and he did. He tracked down the guys who had killed his benefactor and took them out. But it took him a little too long, for I caught up with him.

An hour later and he’d have been gone. As it was, he tried to go, through me, but there’s always someone who has your measure, and I had his. . just. The Crown made a couple of murder charges stick, and he was sentenced to life. I could have charged him with assault and resisting arrest too, but I figured he had enough scores against his name.

That would have finished most people, but Lennie was philosophical. He saw his stretch, however long it might turn out to be, as free higher education, and he threw himself into Open University courses. The years went by until he had more letters after his name than I have (MA (Hons) QPM, as it happens). He was able to study without the distraction of family visitors, or any other sort, save one. Me.

My first visit was professional. I wanted to ask him about something I was investigating that went back to his old days. But I was so struck by the change in him that I paid him another visit a few months later, and another, and another. I never gave advance warning; I just turned up, unannounced. We never met in general visiting areas either, always in one of the private interview rooms that prisons have available.

Mostly we talked about his studies, but occasionally he’d ask me how I was getting along. He never asked me about my work, only about my kids, my golf handicap, and such trivia as I have in my life. He once asked me if I was a Mason. When I said that I wasn’t, he laughed and said, ‘That doesn’t surprise me. You always were an atypical cop.’

I was thinking about that observation as I sat in my garden room, out in Gullane. The kids had welcomed me back, and had stayed up later than usual, until I called time and reminded them that next day was school as usual. Once they had gone upstairs, I picked up the phone and called a mobile number from my list.

‘Elgin,’ a brisk voice answered. The director of Kilmarnock Prison always sounds more like an insurance executive than someone who locks people up for a living.

‘James,’ I said. ‘Bob Skinner. I wonder if you could pass a message on for me to your senior resident. Please tell him I’d be grateful if he could find time in his busy day tomorrow to call on me in my office in Pitt Street.’