Lennox

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I lit a cigarette to dampen down the cough that had woken me. It was already light and I heard the sound of a draughthorse’s hooves outside on Great Western Road. A factory whistle flatly sounded the beginning of a day’s monotony for the masses somewhere far across the city.

I swung my legs around and sat on the edge of the bed smoking for a while before I pulled the brown envelope from under my pillow. I had stuffed the cash, the wartime photograph and the notebook I had found at McGahern’s into the envelope and hidden it there. It had been after one by the time I got in and I had seen the brief cold glow of Mrs White’s light under her door when I tiptoed in, switched on just long enough to let me know I’d disturbed her. There had been no way I could have started lifting the lid on my floorboard hidey-hole and I had been too tired to start hollowing out another book.

I sat stubbornly staring at the notebook, refusing to accept that the meaning of the rows of numbers and letters was never going to leap out at me spontaneously. After ten minutes I soothed my frustration by counting the money again. I had come out of this very nicely. And coming out of it was exactly what I wanted to do. I would give up on the two hundred Willie Sneddon was going to give me for a name. I even considered giving him the hundred back – after all I was well ahead of the game – but I decided against it. Doing that would only signal that, somehow and somewhere along the line, I had scored. I would simply tell Sneddon that I had drawn a blank: that no one was holding out on me, it was just that they really didn’t have a clue who was behind the McGahern thing.

Of course I had started the whole thing myself out of sheer curiosity and bloody-mindedness, but a couple of thousand quid did a lot to assuage one’s curiosity. Maybe it was time to move on. Or even go home. I now had a reasonable amount of cash behind me, not a fortune, but enough to go a long way in Canada. And, of course, my folks had money.

I had a vague and goofy image of myself buying a place in Rothesay or Quispamsis with a boat moored at Gondola Point, an image that impossibly included Mrs White and her kids. But I was kidding myself: it hadn’t been the want of cash that had kept me here. Everybody would be expecting the return of the Kennebecasis Kid: the youth I had been and was no more. Probably the youth I had never been: the truth was that there had always been something in me. A bad seed. The war had just cultivated it. There were a lot of adjectives to describe how men came out of the war: changed, disillusioned, dead. The adjective I used for myself was dirty. I came out of the war dirty and I didn’t want to go back to Canada until I felt clean about myself. But the truth was as time went on and I mixed with the people I mixed with I just got dirtier.

I told myself to change the record and while I washed, shaved and dressed I started to think through how I could walk away from the McGahern thing with my new-found stash, which I had now safely stowed under the floorboards. I approached the day in an upbeat mood, determined to put the McGahern business behind me.

It didn’t last.