Lennox

SAS?’

‘Of course.’ Jeffrey’s lecturing tone irritated the hell out of me, as did his phoney accent. He belonged to that class of Edinburgh North British who wore kilts to Burns Suppers and Scottish Country Dancing and the Reel Society, but at the same time fought to extirpate any hint of Scottishness from their accents.

‘As you know the SAS was set up for special missions behind enemy lines, assassination, et cetera. But it wasn’t the innovation it seemed. There was a precursor, set up by mad old Orde Wingate who also created the Chindits.’

‘Gideon?’

‘The Gideon Force. It operated in Abyssinia. It was an elite force and was made up from the oddest mix… British, Abyssinian, Sudanese and Hymies.’

‘Jews?’

‘Mmm. Strange, isn’t it? Don’t have time for them myself but apparently Wingate had always been a great supporter of our Jewish friends setting up a state in Palestine. He’d been up to all kinds of shenanigans in what we now call Israel.’

‘So what’s this got to do with McGahern?’ I asked. ‘I take it he was a member of the Gideon Force?’

‘Forty-three and forty-four, according to what I’ve been able to find out between poking around in official records and what I’ve garnered from the grapevine. You do rather owe me for this one, old boy.’

‘I don’t think we’re quite even yet, old boy.’ I offered him a cigarette to take the sting out of it.

‘Anyway,’ said Jeffrey, leaning over for the light I offered, ‘your Sergeant McGahern was a member of Gideon. But he got quite tight with the Jewboys.’

It was good to know that the small matter of six million dead had done nothing to dampen Jeffrey’s anti-Semitism. I thought of Jonny Cohen, who had fought a harder, realer war than this piece of shit, standing in the heart of Belsen. I felt the urge to smack Jeffrey about. Instead I said nothing and waited for him to continue.

‘And this is where this precursor of the SAS comes in. When things got out of hand with the Arabs in Palestine in thirty-six to thirty-nine, Wingate set up this unit called the SNS. Stood for Special Night Squads, apparently. They were unbelievably ruthless, encouraged by Wingate, and carried out raids against Arab villages and terrorist groups. Rumour has it that for every ten prisoners they took, they’d shoot one pour encourager les autres as it were. You know the Israeli general? You know, the ghaffir with the eyepatch?’

‘Moshe Dayan. I think you’ll find that ghaffir is more of a soldier than you’ll ever be, Jeffrey.’ Dayan had led the Israeli Army with devastating effectiveness in the Arab War four years before. The only war wound Jeffrey had ever risked was a paper cut.

‘Well he learned his soldiering from us. Dayan was a member of the SNS. Wingate selected Jews who had been in the Hagganah and the Jewish Settlement Police to serve in the Special Night Squads and in turn there were a number of SNS recruited into Gideon.’

For a moment Jeffrey’s attention seemed to wander. I followed his eyes to a slender, effeminate youth at the bar, no older than twenty with a cheap blue serge suit with the open collar of his shirt turned out over the lapels. The youth looked at Jeffrey blankly and turned away. I had Jeffrey’s attention again. The old problem.

Jeffrey’s predilections were the basis for my personal nickname for him. Jeffrey had never worked out why I had nicknamed him ‘Mafeking’: it was because he regularly needed relieving by boy soldiers.

It had been Jeffrey’s inclinations, no doubt cultivated in the late-night shenanigans in the dormitories of his boarding school, that had gotten him into the scrape I’d gotten him out of: a scrape with an eighteen-year-old pretty-boy conscript. It had been a set up from the start and Jeffrey found himself the victim of blackmail. I didn’t much care for Jeffrey’s type but he was what he was and I didn’t like people being screwed over for something they couldn’t help.

Added to which, let’s be honest, Jeffrey had had all kinds of contacts in army bureaucracy that would prove useful to me towards the end of my military career and, like now, after. So I had visited the pretty boy and demonstrated how easy it was for me to make him un-pretty. The fairy had handed over the photographs and the negatives and relinquished his hold on Jeffrey. Somehow or other I had never gotten round to handing them over to Jeffrey. Or destroying them.

‘Did you find out anything about the other men in this picture?’ I asked him.

‘Can’t say for sure, I’m afraid. But I did get a few names for you. There was one wallah who got pretty badly messed up. I’ve underlined his name…’ Jeffrey tore a page out of his notebook and pushed it across the table to me. His eyes darted to the boy at the bar and back.

I looked at the names. The first one to leap out at me was McGahern’s officer. Captain James Wallace.

‘William Pattison.’ I read the name Jeffrey had underlined.

‘Lance Corporal, according to records,’ said Jeffrey. ‘Apparently he got himself severely wounded. I thought it might be a starting point because I know where you can find him.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes… I would have been pushing things too far to get the pension addresses for the others, but it was in Pattison’s records that he’d been shipped home and installed in Levendale House.’

‘He’s still there?’ I knew Levendale House, or knew of it. It was a nursing home for disabled ex-servicemen.

‘That I don’t know, old boy, but I guess he would be. I mean, these chaps who go in don’t often come out.’

‘Did you find out anything else about the Gideon Force? Or Tam McGahern?’

‘Not much. Some of that stuff is still pretty secret. The other thing is, to be frank, that Sergeant McGahern didn’t mix in the same circles, as it were. Working-class Glaswegian NCO. And a mackerel-snapper, I believe.’

I frowned.

‘Catholic, old boy. Friday fish. But he did seem to be a good soldier. He’s dead, you say?’

‘Very. Do you know if he served anywhere particular in the Middle East? Before or after Abyssinia?’

‘’Fraid not. Lots of action in North Africa generally with the Desert Rats, but I don’t have details of his postings. I’m afraid I’ve pushed this as far as I can, Lennox. Any more and questions will be asked, that kind of thing.’ As he spoke, his eyes followed the young man who was making his way to the hallway behind the bar.

‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

‘If you’ll excuse me, old boy. Nature calls…’ Jeffrey stood up. I said goodbye to him and watched as he headed towards the lavatory into which the young queer had disappeared.

Unlike Glasgow, there was no subway in Edinburgh so after I left Jeffrey to his sordid lavatory-conducted business, I walked down the Royal Mile.

The March sky was bright, as it often was in Edinburgh, but chill and joyless, as it also often was in Edinburgh and the castle was squeezed up into the sterile blueness by the city’s tight-fisted grip. Edinburgh is basically divided into the medieval Old Town and the Georgian New Town, separated by Princes Street Gardens and Waverley Station. I made my way down The Mound towards Princes Street and the New Town beyond, but gave up on my original idea of walking all the way and hailed a passing cab. The otherwise glum cabbie smiled sneerily when I gave him the address I wanted in St Bernard’s Crescent.

Edinburgh is a city of self-righteous primness and was always for me, as an outsider, the counterpoint to Glasgow. Glasgow may have had a black heart, but it was a warm black heart. Edinburgh was all Presbyterian prissiness and ill-founded snobbery; or as Glaswegians were fond of saying, all fur coat and no knickers. It was actually a description that couldn’t have been more apt for the address I was about to visit. Despite Glasgow’s reputation for hard drinking, hard men and harder women, it was Edinburgh that was Scotland’s capital for sex crimes, pornography and prostitution. There was a lot of dark stuff went on behind the twitchy net curtains.

St Bernard’s Crescent was in the heart of Edinburgh’s Stockbridge: an arc of sandstone Georgian townhouses facing a small tree-filled park. Most of the properties were three storeys above street level and a basement level with windows peering up to wrought-iron railings. This layout was particularly relevant to the house I was visiting: they said the higher up the storey you visited, the more you paid.

Edinburgh taxi drivers are noted for having the joie de vivre of depressed undertakers and this particular cabbie had been silent throughout the journey. He managed, however, to repeat his earlier sneer as he pulled up outside the address I had given him in St Bernard’s Crescent and told me how much I was due him. I usually tipped taxi drivers well, particularly in London or Glasgow when you could often have the best conversation of your day in the back of the cab. In this case I counted out the exact change and not a penny more. My pointed meanness fell flat as the taxi driver didn’t seem to notice or care. This was Edinburgh, after all.

The house looked just the same as all of the others in the crescent; in fact the paintwork on the door and windows looked fresher and the steps better swept than its neighbours, and the young lady who admitted me was soberly dressed in a blue serge jacket and pencil skirt and white blouse. She asked me if I had an appointment and I explained that I wasn’t there on business but was a friend of Mrs Gersons. She smiled and led me into a small office-type room off the reception hall. As I passed along the hall I noticed how tasteful and expensive the decor was that Helena had invested in. It didn’t surprise me; Helena Gersons was a sophisticated and elegant lady. Yep, you certainly got a better class of whorehouse in Edinburgh, I thought to myself as I made a quick mental comparison with Arthur Parks’s place in Glasgow.

I was a cynical fuck. I admit it. The things I had seen, the things I had done, had turned me into somebody I really didn’t like and my way of dealing with it was often to greet each day with a sneer or a joke at someone else’s expense. Maybe I was just becoming acclimatized: attitudes were different here. In America and Canada we’d greet the day with ‘Another day another dollar!’; in Glasgow the motto was ‘Different day, same shite’. Whatever was going on around me, I was generally too cynical to give a crap.

However, when Helena Gersons walked into the office I felt like someone had given me a punch in the gut. Which, being between my heart and my groin, was appropriate. Helena Gersons was perhaps the most beautiful woman I had ever known. Today she was dressed in a tailored grey suit that hugged her figure in a way that made you jealous. Her hair was black. Raven-wing black and glossy and gathered up behind her head to expose a graceful neck. She had dark eyes and arching eyebrows and her full lips were lipsticked deep red. She smiled at me, but a little sadly.

‘Lennox…’ she said in an accent that was more English than Scottish and was haunted by the vaguest ghost of Europe. ‘I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.’

‘It’s a small world, Helena. How have you been?’

She made an open-handed gesture to indicate the Georgian architecture enveloping us.

‘I don’t mean business. I mean you. How are you?’

‘I’m fine. But let’s be honest, if you were that interested in my state of mind or well-being then I would have heard from you long before now.’ She frowned. ‘I’m sorry, that was uncalled for.’

‘Probably was called for.’ I put my hat on the desk.

Helena dropped ice into expensive-looking crystal and poured me a Canadian Club without asking. She poured herself a Scotch and I waited for her to sit and cross her long silk-sheathed legs before sitting down opposite her.

‘I’m a British citizen now.’ She took the cigarette I offered. ‘No longer a displaced person. I’m now… placed. Although I just got in under the wire. The police sent in a report about my little enterprise here and I should have been deported as an undesirable alien, but fortunately it got delayed somewhere along the way.’

I gave a cynical laugh. Helena Gersons had a lot of influence with a lot of people in the Edinburgh establishment. String-pullers who had themselves, at one time or other, had their strings pulled within these elegant Georgian walls.

‘So business is good?’ I asked.

‘Okay… it’s always quieter at this time of year unless there’s a ship in. Busiest time is during the Festival.’ She laughed and exposed perfect porcelain teeth. ‘And, of course, when the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland is in town. The girls are often pushed to deal with so much religious fervour.’

I laughed too. Again I noticed her Anglicized accent and perfect grammar. Just the vaguest hint now of the Vienna she had left behind, little more than a child, in thirty-six.

‘You never think about going back? To Austria, I mean?’

‘That’s another me,’ she said and not for the first time shook me up with a statement I could have made about myself. It was good to look at Helena again; to talk to her again. There had been a time, a few years back, when we had talked a lot. Through the night, hushed in the dark. ‘And in any case, Austria is still a complete mess. God knows it could go either way and maybe end up a Russian satellite state. Anyway, people like me are an embarrassment. A reminder of past sins.’ Her eyes hardened. ‘What do you want, Lennox?’

‘Is it that obvious that I want something?’

‘You always did.’

‘We both did. Two of a kind, Helena. Anyway, you’re right. Or at least in part. I thought you might know someone I’m checking out. But that’s not the only reason I came. I did want to see you.’

She arched an eyebrow. ‘I’m guessing you were in town anyway.’

‘There’s a girl…’ I ignored the accuracy of her dig. ‘She’s got a history as a pro. She’s been putting the squeeze on a client of mine, but I’m not just sure how.’

I handed her the photograph.

‘Why don’t you just ask him how she’s putting the squeeze on him if he’s your client?’

‘He’s not taking calls. Permanently.’

‘Dead?’ She pursed her lips and looked at the photograph more closely.

‘Very. A staged accident I reckon, and missy here is involved. She calls herself Lillian but she used to go by the name Sally Blane. Did some blue-movie stuff.’

The way Helena stared at the photograph, her brow furrowed, suggested she was looking at a puzzle with a piece missing. She looked up, still frowning. ‘I knew Sally Blane. Not well, but she did a few shifts here. I had heard she’d gone off to Glasgow.’

‘Is that her?’

‘Could be… I mean, it looks like her and it doesn’t. I know that doesn’t make any sense, but her face is different. The same but different. But there again I never really knew her that well. Although she did well with the clients for as long as she worked here. She was an upper-storey girl, if you know what I mean. Higher value, higher income.’

‘But she didn’t last long?’

‘No. I got the feeling she was building her own private portfolio, carving out a little business for herself.’ Helena frowned again, beautifully. ‘Wait a minute, I remember something else. Towards the end there was a man sometimes used to pick her up after work. Not a client. A boyfriend maybe. Or a pimp. A bad-looking sort. Glasgow accent.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘A wiry little thug, to be honest. Expensive clothes and a flash car, but they didn’t fit with the face, if you know what I mean.’

‘I know exactly what you mean,’ I said and thought of a Savile Row suit hung on the wrong hanger. ‘Was there ever any trouble? I mean with her Glaswegian boyfriend. If he was who I think he was then he was always trying to muscle in on other people’s action.’

‘No. No trouble. We don’t get any here. I don’t use muscle and I don’t let any gangster push me around. There are no bouncers here because half the time we have a member of the local police somewhere on the premises.’

‘It’s good to have a bobby on the beat.’ I reached for the photograph but Helena still studied it.

‘That is strange. I don’t remember her this way. Is there any chance it could be her sister? I heard she had one but I never met her.’

‘Could be, I suppose. I’ve had a spate of siblings swapping identities.’ I took the picture back. It was certainly the same face as the Lillian/Sally in the blue movie. But it was the second time someone had done a double-take looking at the photograph.

‘She had a friend who went by the name Margot Taylor. Might even have been her sister. She worked for Arthur Parks in Glasgow and was up to the same kind of scam. You know, building a little business for herself. Parks was not as understanding, though. I gather she got a hiding and was chucked out.’

‘Sorry, the name doesn’t ring a bell.’ Helena sipped at her Scotch, the glass held in long, slender, crimson-nailed fingers. She had been a pianist, once. Rumour had it that she would sometimes play the piano for her ‘guests’ and they would be astounded to hear concert-hall-standard Bach and Mozart played in a brothel. Helena had been something of a child prodigy, but that had all been nixed when the Nazis had come to power. Helena and her older sister had both gotten out to an aunt in England just before the Anschluss. Her parents had planned to organize their affairs and follow. But when the border between Germany and Austria came down, all other borders became impenetrable for the remaining Gersons family. Helena had found out, after the war, that they had eventually made it out of Austria. But to the East. Auschwitz.

As soon as the war broke out Helena, her sister and her aunt had been arrested by the British authorities and interred on the Isle of Man as hostile aliens. Our paths had crossed immediately after the war.

We drank our drinks, smoked our cigarettes and talked about people we had both known for no other reason than to fill the quiet. Any other level of conversation would have taken us too deep.

‘I don’t work with clients any more. I just run the place. You know that don’t you, Lennox?’

‘I thought as much.’

‘One day I’ll sell this place and…’ She left the thought hanging and looked around herself at the walls. A beautiful bird in an elegant cage. There was a silence. She had taken us too deep. I picked up my hat.

‘Better go.’

‘Fine. It was good to see you.’ The temperature had dropped and she stood up and shook my hand like I was her bank manager.

I felt like crap when I hit the street and decided to walk back through the city to the station. As I walked I let scenes from my past play through my head. I was full of self-indulgent crap after seeing Helena again. I had a coffee in the station cafe before catching the four thirty train back to Glasgow. I wanted to get out of Edinburgh and back into Glasgow’s dark embrace.

The Glasgow train was quiet. The next scheduled service would have been full with office workers commuting back to Glasgow and the various stops along the way. I was still in that stupidly melancholic mood and I needed privacy to brood self-indulgently. One of the luxuries I afforded myself at my clients’ expense was to travel first-class. I found an empty compartment and settled into it, looking forward to an hour of solitary travel. Unfortunately a short, fat, balding businessman bustled in through the door in a plume of pipe smoke and piled his raincoat, newspaper, briefcase and himself onto the seats opposite.

‘Afternoon,’ he said.

I grumbled a response and he disappeared behind a fluttered wall of newsprint. At least it looked like I wasn’t going to be troubled with small talk. After a few minutes there was a great hiss of steam and the sound of the engine beginning to chug its way into motion and we were under way.

The world outside the window slid by slate-grey. I thought through everything I had on the McGahern killing. Unfortunately it didn’t take long. The businessman opposite had now folded his newspaper and set it on the seat beside him and began to read through a Country Life. He didn’t look like a shootin’ and huntin’ country type, more like a suburbanite. My idle curiosity cost me dear. He saw me looking at him and clearly took it as an invitation to strike up a conversation.

‘It’s good to get away before the rush,’ he said. He spoke with a Scots burr that was impossible to place as Glasgow or Edinburgh, working- or middle-class.

I nodded with a perfunctory smile.

‘Through in Edinburgh on business?’ he asked.

‘So to speak.’

‘Now, don’t tell me. Sorry, please indulge me for a moment. This is my little party piece: I guess people’s occupations and something about them from their appearances.’

‘Oh really?’ I said. Oh fuck off, I thought.

‘Yes… now you. You’re a challenge. Your accent is difficult to place exactly. I mean you’re clearly Canadian, not American. I’m guessing… and I could be wrong because your accent has become a little muddled… but no, I would say Eastern Canada. The Maritimes.’

‘New Brunswick,’ I said and was genuinely impressed. But not enough to continue the conversation.

‘Now, as to occupation…’ The little man with the little eyes behind his bank manager glasses was not to be put off by mere indifference. ‘What people do, that’s usually easy. But with you, I think we’re looking at something a little out of the ordinary.’ He paused and picked up his copy of Country Life. ‘Now here’s a question that always helps. I go hunting. Shooting mainly. There are two distinct types of people involved in the hunt. Or two distinct types of personality: the hunter himself and the stalker, who leads the hunter to the kill. Obviously sometimes the hunter stalks his own prey. But let’s pretend that we are after a deer, you and I. Would you see yourself as a stalker or a hunter?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said without thought. ‘Stalker maybe.’

‘Yes. Yes, that’s what I’d have you down as. Me, I’m a hunter, pure and simple. Mainly wild deer. Magnificent animals. Do you know what the most important quality in a hunter is? Respect for his prey. When I shoot a deer, I bring it down quickly. The trick is a maximum of two shots. To end life as swiftly and painlessly as possible. As I say, out of respect for the animal.’

I smiled wearily just as we passed through the blackness of the tunnel into Haymarket. The train stopped but didn’t pick anyone up. The engine exhaled a huge cloud of steam that drifted over the platforms. I felt isolated, trapped in this tiny capsule with the world’s most boring man.

‘It is remarkable, I think,’ he continued, looking out the window at a grey slideshow of Lothian scenery, ‘that we often turn out to be someone else. Not who we thought we were at all. Take me – I know what you’re thinking: an anonymous little man with no imagination and some kind of bureaucratic job.’

‘I-’ I started, beginning to feel uncomfortable with the drift of the conversation.

The strange little man cut me off. ‘It’s all right. That’s exactly who – what – I was. Or what I was destined to become. I am not an imaginative person. But what I didn’t realize was that, as a child, my lack of imagination wasn’t my only deficiency. You see, Mr Lennox, I found out at an early age that I didn’t feel things in the same way as others did. I didn’t get as happy as others, or as sad, or as frightened.’

I straightened in my seat. ‘How do you know my name?’

‘I’m not saying it particularly marked me out as being different,’ he continued, ignoring my question, ‘only I seemed to be aware of it, and my life would have followed a predictable course if the unpredictable hadn’t got in the way. By which, of course, I mean the war. But there again, you know exactly what I mean, Mr Lennox. You see, during the war, I discovered that my emotional deficiency was compensated for by an ability that others lacked. I could kill without compunction. Without thought or emotion or regret afterwards. I have a talent for it, you see. Just as some have a talent for music or art. My talent is as a killer. Something that is positively encouraged in the context of an armed conflict. I ended up being recruited into the Long Range Reconnaissance Group. I’m sure you’re aware of the group’s activity.’

‘Who are you? And how do you know my name?’ I started to stand.

‘Please, Mr Lennox. Sit down.’ With a movement so swift I almost missed it his hand darted into his briefcase. A very slender, very long switchblade snapped out of the knife handle. ‘Please, just sit down. And please be assured that, big and experienced as you are, any physical contact between us would have unfortunate consequences. I am very, very experienced with this thing.’

I sat down. I didn’t need to ask who he was again. I knew. What I couldn’t work out was how I could continue breathing with this knowledge. Like he said, I was big and experienced. If it came to it, I would take my chances. In the meantime I sat down and listened.

‘It was because of the skills I developed that I moved into the line of business I’m in now. A successful businessman. I have a wife and son you know, Mr Lennox.’

‘I didn’t. I don’t know anything about you, Mr Morrison. Other than your name isn’t likely to be Morrison.’

He smiled and laid the knife on the newspaper by his side, discreetly folding it over to conceal it. ‘I see… you think I’m going to kill you because you know too much, because you’ve seen my face.’

‘Something like that.’

‘I can understand that. German sailors believe in a small elf called the Klabautermann. He is invisible but brings good luck to those he sails with. But if you see the Klabautermann ’s face, you know you’re going to die. I have to admit that is the way I’ve always seen myself. But be assured that that is not the case here. Those I kill – human or animal – die quickly and most often without being aware that they are about to die. That is why I see nothing wrong in what I do. People die all of the time, in terrible pain from injury or illness. You will have seen for yourself the suffering of men in war. The agonies some die in. And not many passings from illness or accident are without great pain. But not my victims. Little or no pain. No foreknowledge and therefore no fear. So you see, Mr Lennox, if it had been my intention to kill you, you would have been none the wiser. You would be dead by now. And anyway, I chose this venue because it is ideal for a chat. If I had intended to kill you, I would have chosen somewhere with more immediate opportunities to distance myself from the act.’

‘At the moment I get the idea you’re trying to talk me to death. What is it you want, Morrison?’

‘This is about what you want.’ He smiled and the small eyes twinkled coldly behind his spectacles. I thought of how those tiny, ugly bank manager eyes had been the last thing so many people had seen. I could imagine their deaths the way he had described. A moment of shock. Of disbelief. Then a final gaze into those eyes.

‘However,’ he continued, ‘I do have a proposition of sorts to put to you. But we can discuss that later. Ah… our stop. Or at least my stop and I’m afraid I’ll have to prevail on you to accompany me part of the way. And, Mr Lennox, please don’t be silly. I also have a gun.’

We got off the train, Mr Morrison staying behind me with his raincoat draped over his arm to conceal the knife. It was a small station with two platforms and a siding. It sat on the edge of a small town in the middle of a landscape of unremitting moorland bleakness. It was getting dark now and Mr Morrison indicated the direction we should take from the station. I noticed we were heading away from the town and towards the empty uplands.

A thousand different images of a thousand different endings to our outing were spinning around in my head. Sure, Mr Morrison was known to be the best in the business, but by his own admission he took most of his victims unawares; I was very much aware of the little shit behind me, the stiletto blade still tucked under his raincoat. And sure, he had all kinds of combat experience, but so did I. And he was a little guy after all. After about fifteen minutes walking uphill we reached an ugly church shaped like a vast stone barn with an undersized steeple. A wrought-iron fence formed a tight square around a clustered churchyard of headstones, some tilted, a few broken. This was Scottish Protestantism given solid form: forbidding, sinister, bleak, hard.

‘Kirk o’ Shotts…’ explained Mr Morrison. He was reduced to outlines and shadows in the half-light. I looked around me. No one in sight. This was as good a place as any to do your killing. I cursed myself for not having had a go at him earlier. Now he would be ready for me if I came at him.

‘Take it easy.’ Mr Morrison seemed to read my mind. ‘I know this is a secluded spot for a killing, but that’s not why I brought you here. Listen, can I dispense with this?’ He raised the sliver of blade and snapped it back into its handle before pocketing it. ‘Please don’t give me any trouble, Mr Lennox. I brought you here for your benefit, not mine.’ He walked across to a corner of the churchyard and eased up a broken piece of headstone that had sunk into the mossy grass. ‘I have a particular affection for this place,’ he said, retrieving a tobacco tin from the concealed depression under the stone. ‘This was – still is – the Great Road between Edinburgh and Glasgow. In the fifteenth century this was a dangerous highway to travel, mainly because of Bertram Shotts. He was a highwayman who was reputedly also a giant. Seven foot tall. Some say eight. He was supposed to have had a hideaway near the Kirk. The place is supposed to have taken its name from him.’ Mr Morrison removed a folded envelope from the tobacco tin and put it unopened into his pocket. ‘Of course he wouldn’t have been a giant, but people like to make their villains larger than life. Literally. I’m sure you’ll agree I have a reputation that is more impressive than my physical presence.’

‘Why bring me up here? Other than for an I-could-give-a-fuck history lesson.’

‘It’s a quiet place to talk and I had to pick up my mail. This is how my clients tell me they have a job for me. They leave a time and a telephone number in the tobacco tin for me to call and I call it. I have several such “mailboxes”, but this one is a favourite. It’s a difficult place for the police to stake out, being so elevated and exposed. Of course some of my clients, the Three Kings for example, have a more conventional and direct line of communication with me.’ He pointed across the valley to where a needle of ironwork pierced the almost-dark sky. ‘Things are changing, Mr Lennox. They put that up about five years ago. Television transmitter. That’s the future, apparently. Things are getting more sophisticated. More technological. The police too.’

‘I still don’t get why I’m here.’

‘First of all, I want you to know how to get in touch with me.’

‘Living in Glasgow, I could do with a half-decent tailor. Sometimes it’s difficult for my landlady to find a plumber.’ I rubbed my chin in sarcastic thoughtfulness. ‘But no… I don’t think I ever really have much call for a contract killer.’

Mr Morrison looked at me blankly. He had described his sociopathic lack of emotion. It obviously extended to any sense of humour. ‘No, no

… I don’t mean that,’ he said. ‘I have a proposition for you, like I said. I wanted you to know how to contact me if you needed. But I’ll come back to that.’

‘Oh good,’ I said, again with undetected irony.

‘The main reason I wanted to talk to you is because I have some information which I think you’ll find interesting. About a week ago I had a project to undertake for Mr Sneddon. When I was taking the brief he told me that you were looking into the Tam McGahern killing for him. Trying to find out who’s behind it. It wasn’t me, by the way.’

‘If you brought me up here to tell me that you could have spared me the hike. I knew that already.’

‘That’s not what I have to tell you. About two and a half weeks ago there was a number left in one of my mail collection points. It wasn’t one that I recognized. I work for an established clientele and don’t tout for business. As I said to you on the train, Mr Lennox, I am a hunter rather than a stalker, but I am more than capable of the odd bit of detection. I have contacts… people upon whom I can call for paid favours. None of whom, by the way, have any idea what it is I do for a living, although they probably have guessed it’s less than legal. Anyway, I had the number checked out by one of these contacts – one who works for the GPO. He told me the number belonged to a public call box in Glasgow. In Renfield Street. Whoever had left the message was being very careful to avoid being traced. Obviously, because it was a call box, they had left a specific time for me to call.’

‘Did you?’

‘No. Of course not. It could have been a police trap. So instead of calling, I hung around in Renfield Street with a view of the public telephone. Right enough, five minutes before the appointed time a smallish young man went into the call box. It could have been a coincidence, of course, but when another man started to tap impatiently on the glass, the young man opened the door and grabbed the waiting man by the collar and obviously made some kind of threat. The other man scuttled off.’

‘Yeah, but you’re talking about Glasgow. That’s a normal conversation.’ I took a cigarette from my case and lit up, offering Mr Morrison one: I thought it best to keep his hands busy. As I lit the cigarette for him his round, fleshy little face glowed in the sudden light. Given all the time in the world to place him in a profession, hit-man would never have come up. That was probably why he was so successful.

‘No. This was my man. He hogged the ’phone box for half an hour. He was the person I was clearly expected to contact.’

‘Did you recognize him?’

‘No. But I recognized his type. He was an underling. Again, another distance that whoever was trying to hire me was placing between him and me. I could tell he wasn’t my potential client from the way he dressed and the way he looked frightened when he didn’t get the call he had been told to take.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘Like I said, smallish, maybe a couple of inches taller than me. Cheap suit. Oily hair in what I believe is popularly called a “Duck’s Arse” style.’

‘Dirty blond?’

There was a pause and I guessed Mr Morrison was frowning in the dark. ‘You know him?’

‘Knew him. If he was who I think he was, then he’s no longer with us,’ I said, and had a nauseating thought about Scotch pies. ‘I think he may have been a gofer called Bobby. Worked for Tam and Frankie McGahern.’

The sky was dark-blue and velvet behind the looming black form of Kirk o’ Shotts. Morrison’s face and the mirrors of his spectacles were again briefly illuminated as he drew on his cigarette. ‘That would fit. I followed him from Renfield Street all the way back to a spit-and-sawdust place in Maryhill.’

‘The Highlander?’

‘Yes. I told Mr Sneddon about this little experience and he told me that the Highlander was run by the McGaherns.’

‘Doesn’t that breach your client-contractor confidentiality?’

‘The McGaherns weren’t my clients and were never going to be. Like I said, I don’t work for just anybody. But, as you know, killing isn’t always a refined art. Glasgow is full of men who would take a life for you for twenty pounds. Or less. I’m a specialist and I cost a lot to hire. If the late Mr McGahern had wanted to use my services then it must have been something special. Out of the ordinary.’

I thought about what Morrison was saying. I also thought of John Andrews’s faked accident. Maybe that had been planned weeks before. Maybe something was planned for me.

‘Mr Sneddon wanted you to know this. He would have told you himself but I said I wanted to talk to you about another matter.’

‘This proposition of yours.’

‘Exactly. You see, Mr Lennox, we plough parallel furrows. In an odd way we are colleagues, both independent, both working for mainly the same people. The difference is you are a stalker, I am a hunter. As such we could share the kill. As you can imagine, my anonymity is paramount. I do everything I can to remain invisible and the only reason I have exposed myself to you is because I see the potential for partnership. On certain cases, that is. You see, sometimes my observation of marks, following them and establishing patterns of movement, et cetera, exposes me to the risk of discovery. But you are a natural stalker who’s at home in the shadows and an expert at tracking people down. My proposition is simple: a fifty-fifty split on any kill we work together on.’

I dropped my cigarette butt onto the ground and crushed the spray of orange sparks with my shoe. I looked at the small, dense silhouette of the bank manager killer.

‘Thanks for the offer but no. I’m not interested in that kind of work,’ I said, trying to make my tone decisive. ‘I don’t want any part of your business.’

The silhouette remained silent for a moment. ‘Very well,’ he said eventually. ‘But I think you’re making a huge mistake. This is very lucrative work. And, whether you like it or not, you already play your part.’

‘What’s that meant to mean?’

‘Do you remember last year, when Mr Murphy asked you to track down a young couple for him?’

‘Yes.’ I remembered the job. ‘Hammer Murphy said it was a favour for a friend whose daughter had eloped. Murphy’s friend just wanted to make sure his daughter was okay.’

‘I’m afraid the truth was a little less domestic. The young man had, in fact, been an employee of Mr Murphy and had stolen a large sum of money from him. He’d also supplied the police with embarrassing information. Your job was to find them. My job was to lose them again. Permanently.’

‘The girl too?’ I remembered her. No more than twenty-two or -three.

‘The girl too. So you see, Mr Lennox, you have stalked for me before. In any case, I’d like you to think it over. Use the tobacco tin “mailbox” if you need to contact me. Anyway, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll leave you to get the train back to Glasgow. I won’t be travelling with you as I have a housecall to make near here.’ Mr Morrison began to walk towards the black shoulder of the Kirk. He paused for a moment. ‘Oh, and I take it I don’t need to stress how important it is for you, if you’re not going to consider my business proposition, that you do your best to forget my face.’

‘No. You don’t.’ The truth was that Morrison’s face had faded from my memory with the fading light. It was that kind of face. Ideal for a killer.

I walked back down what seemed the pitch-black road towards Shotts station. As I did so I had to fight the urge to glance over my shoulder to see if the eight-foot ghost of Bertram Shotts, or the five-foot-five shadow of a sociopathic bank manager, was tracking me.

I telephoned Sneddon as soon as I got back to Glasgow. In fact I ’phoned him from the station and gave him everything I had, including, this time, the fact that Bobby, the McGahern gofer, had had his head mashed in a pretty similar way to whichever McGahern brother it had been who’d had his head pulped in the Rutherglen garage. I told Sneddon that I’d had a cosy chat with Mr Morrison and that we were pretty certain that it was Bobby who had tried to hire him on Tam McGahern’s behalf. And I did tell him about my suspicions that it had been Frankie who had been the first to go.

‘So it was Tam you gave a hiding?’ asked Sneddon. ‘I wouldn’t have thought that he would have been such a push over.’

‘Nor would I. It was a set up. For some reason Superintendent McNab was watching Frankie. I think that “Frankie” was Tam and he made a deliberate exhibition in front of McNab. I started off thinking that it was to set me up as a suspect for the first murder.’

‘But you don’t think that now?’

‘No. What happened that night made me more of a suspect for the second killing which, of course, doesn’t make sense. Tam wouldn’t frame me for his own murder. It was a set up all right, but I think it wasn’t to incriminate me but so that McNab saw me give “Frankie” a hiding. Maybe McNab suspected that it was Frankie who’d been killed the first time round. If I had been in a street fight with Tam McGahern, then I would’ve had my work cut out, like you say. I think Tam deliberately took a beating to convince McNab that he was Frankie.’

There was a silence at the other end of the ’phone. I guessed Sneddon was thinking it through.

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ he said eventually. ‘Why the fuck would Tam McGahern go to all that bother to convince people that he was Frankie and not Tam?’

‘Because Tam had been their real target and because of the games he and Frankie played with poor Wilma Marshall, Frankie had been pretending to be Tam that night and ended up getting the lead enema. Tam knew that whoever was after him, they were serious professionals. He was trying to prove that they’d got the right target and leave him alone. He obviously knew enough about me to guess that I would tell him to stuff his job and give him an excuse to jump me and take a hiding in front of a police audience.’

‘So who is it that’s after him? That’s what I’m paying you to find out.’

‘With the greatest respect you’re not paying me enough. These guys are real professionals, like I said. They gave my office a going over and you would hardly have noticed it. And the way they took out the first McGahern brother was slick. Funny thing is the second killing wasn’t. And the guys who jumped me in Argyle Street were more brawn than brains.’

‘You saying you don’t want the job any more?’

I sighed. I wished that I could say I didn’t. ‘No. The truth is that there’s a connection between this and something else I’m working on.’

‘Something I should know about?’

As I fed the pay ’phone with almost all of the change in my pocket, I related the whole story of John and Lillian Andrews to Sneddon. The only thing I had changed slightly in all I had told Sneddon was the chronology to disguise the fact that I hadn’t let on right away about Bobby’s splitting headache: if Sneddon thought that I hadn’t been delivering hot-off-the-press then I might have got a bit of a slap from a couple of his boys. Nothing to put me in hospital, but enough to make me less forgetful in future. And, of course, I thought it prudent not to mention my little bathtub windfall.

I actually felt better for going through the whole story. Saying it out loud even helped me see the whole thing more clearly. Again Sneddon stayed quiet other than the odd grunt throughout. I ended the conversation by retracting my declaration of independence. Maybe Twinkletoes would be useful to have on call. It was a call for help: I didn’t hold back on telling Sneddon about John Andrews warning me that I had been set up just like him. Sneddon could have gloated – I had been pretty self-righteous about my independence – but he didn’t.

‘I’ll put a couple of guys on your tail. Twinkletoes and another guy you don’t know. His name’s Semple.’

‘Is he more subtle than Twinkletoes?’

Sneddon laughed at his end of the line. ‘Naw. Not much. But he’s the kind of punter you want around if shite occurs.’

‘That’s what I need at the moment, to be honest. But tell them to stay in the background unless there’s trouble.’

‘I’ll fix it up.’

‘Okay, thanks,’ I said.

I was just about to hang up when Sneddon added: ‘By the way, what does he look like? Mr Morrison, I mean. I’ve never actually met him face-to-face.’

‘Oh… pretty much as you’d expect,’ I said. ‘Big. About six-three. Hard-looking bastard.’

‘Mmm,’ said Sneddon. ‘Figures.’