Lennox

16HP.

I stopped under the railway bridge, switched the engine off and rolled down the window. The street was silent except for a Number Nine Corporation tram that trundled its way past heading from Paisley to Maryhill. Sam Costa and his ludicrous moustache grinned inanely at me from a tattered poster, advising me that Erasmic shaving lather was just right. The night air had a texture to it, like the cold greasy soot that smeared the railway arches.

He was gone. He could have taken any one of a dozen different directions after I had lost him dumping Jeannie on the pavement. I thought back to that moment and felt like shit, as I usually did when it came to reflecting on how I’d treated women.

There were thousands of Jeannies in this city: uncomplicated girls with crap lives who looked to the dance halls and the cinemas for a scrap of glamour. All they wanted was a few moments while they were still young in which they could pretend that they wouldn’t, after all, end up swapping the grey drudgery of working in a factory or at best a shop for the grey drudgery of slaving for a man who would show them little affection and no respect and leave them with an army of kids to care for. The monotony of their week punctuated only by loveless whisky-drenched fumblings on a Saturday night. Or maybe the odd beating.

I thought of poor Jeannie and the meagre dreams and aspirations that she may have had and felt sorry for having dumped her like that. Then I thought of how she had reminded me of Edward G. Robinson and started to laugh as I turned the ignition.

I knew I’d lost the 16HP, but I decided to trace my way back along the river-edge quays just in case. There were a hundred nooks and crannies, alleys and yards where you could lie low. But my thinking was that the driver of the 16HP had used my temporary halt to put as much distance between us as possible.

If Glasgow was the Empire’s industrial heart, then the Clyde was its main artery. I drove past Mavisbank Quay, Terminus Quay with its railyards and finally Kingston Dock. As I drove, stark white lights hovered over the ink sleek waters of the Clyde.

Even at this time of night and this far into the city the river glittered with tugs, boats and barges and I could see the occasional fountain of sparks where some nightshift sculpted steel.

I caught sight of a car pulled off the main road into a narrow cul-de-sac between two warehouses. It wasn’t my guy. The steamed windows of an ancient Ford told me hasty fornication was the motive for stealth in this case.

I drove on and into King Street, my mind no longer on my quarry but on why I was being watched by Lillian Andrews’s accomplices – and I was pretty sure that was who I was dealing with. The man behind the wheel had been the same guy who had been part of the clumsy snatch squad in the Bedford truck. Their lack of finesse didn’t fit with the professionalism with which my office had been turned over. Nor did it fit with the uneasy feeling I’d had for the last few days that I was being followed by someone who was too good to be seen. It was true that the guy in the 16HP could have been more obvious, but only if he’d had a sign on his windscreen saying, ‘I’M FOLLOWING YOU LENNOX’. Two outfits? It would fit with my Fred MacMurray lookalike and his Middle Eastern pals.

Instinctively I felt they were connected with Tam McGahern in another way, not through Lillian. But everything that Rufus Jeffrey had told me about Tam’s military service and connection to the Middle East nagged away at me. That was a link that could tie Mr Double Indemnity and his camel-jockeys in with Lillian. I drove back over Glasgow Bridge and back to where I’d dumped Jeannie. A good hour had passed and, of course, she was gone. Everything was fucked up.

I needed a drink.