Lennox

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

There was something nagging away at me. Everything Lillian Andrews did was carefully thought out and planned. A lot of that probably came from her association with Tam McGahern: ‘Mafeking’ Jeffrey had told me that McGahern’s war record showed him to be intelligent, organized and a natural strategist. But what got to me more was what May had said about no one in Glasgow thinking beyond the city’s tenement-fringed horizon. It was becoming clear that that was exactly what Tam had been all about.

Everything I had heard about the high-end, West End brothel that no one knew anything much about didn’t make sense. I had seen the house they had used. You had to know where to find it. I thought of the affected Kelvinside housewife who had answered the door. I couldn’t imagine her type redirecting clients who had lost their way: ‘Oh, Eh’m ehfraid you hev the wrong door, the whooorhouse is three along, between the deyntal prehctitioner and the hayccountent…’ Lillian’s well-connected clients knew exactly where to go. So who was pointing them in the right direction?

I used the ’phone in the hall and called Willie Sneddon. I shared my thoughts with him and asked if I could lean on Arthur Parks.

‘You think Parky was involved with this other outfit?’ Sneddon asked.

‘I don’t know. But someone was sending the right kind of client up there. Parks works the top end of the business; maybe he was creaming the best off for this special set up.’

‘Naw…’ said Sneddon after a moment’s silence. ‘Parky would know that I’d nail him to the fucking floor if he pulled a stunt like that.’

I winced. From what I’d heard of Sneddon’s enforcement techniques, he wasn’t speaking metaphorically. ‘Maybe it was worth the risk,’ I said. ‘Or maybe the clients he was redirecting wouldn’t have been seen in his place anyway.’

‘A sideline is a fuckin’ sideline,’ said Sneddon. ‘No one works for me and runs their own wee business on the side. Parky’s not your man.’

‘I’d still like to lean on him. Maybe take Twinkletoes or Tiny with me.’

‘No way. Parky’s one of my best earners. I don’t want him… upset .’

‘Then let me at least talk to him again,’ I said. ‘Maybe he’s not the supplier. I have to admit that when I showed him a photograph of Lillian Andrews, he seemed genuinely not to recognize her, although she did remind him of someone else. But maybe he’s heard something more. Or there’s something he’s not telling me.’

‘Like I said, Lennox, I don’t want Parky upset. You know how fuckin’ antsy these mattress-munchers can be. Just find out what you have to find out without getting him worked up. And leave Twinkle and Tiny out of it. And I wouldn’t go round at this time of night. These are his big business hours. Parky shuts up shop between seven in the morning and three in the afternoon. I’ll ’phone him and tell him you’ll be round to disturb his ugly sleep tomorrow morning. I’ll advise Parky to be cooperative. That should be all you need.’

I agreed and hung up. I wasn’t too happy about the set up. Whether Parks was involved directly or not, my instinct told me he needed leaning on to spill everything he knew. And Sneddon had just prohibited me from leaning.

I lay on the bed with the lights out and smoked. There was all kinds of crap in my head, buzzing about like bees trapped in a jar. I kept thinking back to what May had said and the desperation with which she had said it. I thought about Lillian Andrews and her dark hair and long legs. Then for some reason I couldn’t work out, I thought of Helena Gersons sitting like a beautiful bird in a cage of Georgian architecture. We had had something once. Really had something. But each of us in our own way had been so fucked up that we didn’t want anything that made you feel. But that wasn’t why I thought of her. I thought of her because if Arthur Parks hadn’t been supplying customers to the West End operation, then the next name on the list was Helena’s. And, after all, we had a history of lies between us. But most of all, it was what May had said that kept jabbing me awake.

I took breakfast in a cafe on Byres Road before heading off to the Park Circus area. The rain was taking a breather and the sun was trying to fill in, but Glasgow was vomiting its early-morning smoke into its face. I sat at the cafe window eating my ham and eggs – or bacon and eggs as they called it here. I watched the world go by: an older man with rickets worse than the mortuary attendant I had encountered waddled past. He looked under five foot tall but I idly wondered if he would have been six foot, straightened out. He paused, leant over, pressed his thumb to one nostril and ejected the contents of the other in a violent exhalation onto the pavement. A delivery man pulled up his dray horse and cart outside, spoiling my view of Glasgow’s cosmopolitan streetlife. The Clydesdale twitched its tail and splattered the cobbles with dung that steamed in the cool morning sunlight. I said a small prayer of thanks that I hadn’t ended up somewhere less sophisticated, like Paris or Rome.

The ancient Greeks were great ones for reading omens. I should have read the augurs in the Clydesdale’s shit: it would have saved me a hell of a day.

I walked back along Great Western Road and into the concentric circles of the Park Circus area. When I reached Parks’s townhouse, all of the curtains were still drawn across the windows. There was no bull-necked doorman on guard and the deep gloss red of the Georgian-panelled front door combined with the soot-blackened masonry to give the impression of a back door to hell. Or a back door to hell on its tea break. I tugged at the bellpull and rapped the ornate door knocker. After a few minutes it was clear that I wasn’t going to get an answer. But when Willie Sneddon told you to expect someone, you expected. I started to get a bad feeling about there being no one at home.

The funny thing about the criminal fraternity is that they are generally very trusting that everyone else will be law-abiding. I walked down the steps to the basement level and found a window slightly open on its sash. I slipped in through the window into a small bedroom. Or rather a room with a bed: I got the impression not much sleeping went on there. It was decorated with red and black Paisley-patterned wallpaper and a vast gilt-framed mirror hung on one wall offering a view of the bed. Romantic. There were two other basement rooms, a hall and the stairs up to the main apartments. I recognized the waiting room in which I’d spoken to Parks before. There were four bedrooms off it. All empty. A vague funk of stale cigarette smoke, scent and whisky hung in the air. A radio played quietly somewhere. From upstairs. I called out for Parks but received no reply. An ornate staircase led up to the next floor, where I knew Parks had his living quarters.

As I reached the top of the stairs the decor became less lurid and more tasteful. The music from the radio was louder: Perry Como informed me that she wears red feathers. I walked along the landing and came to a large, light living room. The walls were bright and broken up with framed prints and posters of various theatrical productions. The furniture was modern and tasteful and again contrasted with the contrived lurid Victorian wickedness of the decor chosen for the ‘working’ part of the house.

‘Hello, Arthur,’ I said to Parks. He didn’t answer. But there again I didn’t expect him to. As soon as I had come into the room and my eyes had met Parks’s, I knew only one of us was capable of seeing. He sat in the middle of the living room. Someone had pushed the coffee table and sofa to one side to clear enough room for them to go to work on Parks, whom they had tied to a kitchen chair. And go to work on him they had. His jaw sat at an angle to his face that was all wrong. Maybe they had tried to fix his underbite. Most of his face was swollen up into purple puffs of distended flesh. It takes time to bruise and swell like that, and it was my guess that whoever had killed Parks had taken a long time about it.

Parks was dressed only in his vest and underpants and the light-coloured carpet beneath the chair was stained dark with blood and urine. His tongue hung out over the dislocated jaw and his eyes bulged at me, as if emphasizing a point: I am fucking dead. I ignored the smell and drew close, examining his neck. Something thick, like a belt, had been used to garrotte him and there were spider webs of blue-black marks where it had crushed capillaries.

Parks’s killing had all the hallmarks of a protracted interrogation under torture followed by execution. Well, to be fair, that was the end of the playground Parks had played in. It was the end of the playground I played in. It was ludicrous to think that Sneddon might have been behind it, but I hadn’t seen Twinkletoes since the previous day and I found myself making a quick inventory of Parks’s naked toes.

I sat down on the shoved-aside sofa and stared at Parks. It didn’t help: he didn’t have any ideas about what I should do next. I did get a clue though, when I heard the urgent trilling bells of approaching police cars. Nice. Once more I thought of MacDonald, the teenage ice hockey right forward who could literally run rings around me. I was being framed better than the theatrical posters on Parks’s walls. The police car bells sounded a street or so away but near enough for a front-door exit to be out of the question. I ran through into the kitchen. It was narrow and had a huge sash window facing the rear. The police would send a car around to the back but their main attention would be on the front door. I slid the window open. There was a pipe angled steeply away from where the kitchen drain branched down to join the main down pipe. Shinning down the main pipe wouldn’t be too difficult, but traversing the kitchen wastepipe to get to it would.

Still, shouldn’t be a problem, I thought: if they found me in Parks’s back yard with busted ankles after trying to escape from the floor on which they would find his tortured and murdered body, it wouldn’t take that much explaining.

I eased out through the window and found the steep angle of the pipe with the toes of my suede Derbys. I took my hat off and threw it down onto the yard below then, scrabbling for a grip on the sandstone, I eased myself down, supporting my weight on the sill. As I inched towards the downpipe, I heard the police car bells ringing more loudly. There was no way I would be able to balance on the wastepipe: I would have to get quick purchase on it and swing over to the main downpipe, hoping that I could grab it firmly enough.

I bent my knees and propelled myself sideways, reaching for the pipe. I grazed my knuckles painfully on the stone wall, but managed to get a decent enough grip. The sleeve of my suit jacket caught on the pipe bracket and I heard the fabric rip. I scuttled down the pipe as fast as I dared and folded into a heap on the flagstones at the bottom. I caught my breath and tried to stand. No busted ankles but my back hurt like a son-of-a-bitch. I grabbed my hat and ran across the small yard, then out onto the alleyway.

I reckoned the coppers would be coming from the direction of Sauchiehall Street, so I headed the other way. I sprinted to the end of the alley then turned right and tried to walk as normally and inconspicuously as possible. I looked down at myself: I was wearing a dark-brown wool suit with suede Hush Puppies. I like to look smart, even if I’m just meeting with homo Glaswegian pimps. However, my choice of outfit today had been particularly fitting: the suede of my shoes and the easily bruised wool of the suit, added to my grazed knuckles, all spoke very eloquently of a recent and rushed descent down a drainpipe. I examined my sleeve and saw that a strip was missing, presumably snagged on the pipe’s support clamp.

All it would take would be for a patrol car to pass me, the only pedestrian in the area. Then I’d be well and truly shafted. Only the Belgian rabbit-fur felt of my expensive Borsalino fedora seemed to have survived unscathed. I put on the hat and dusted down my suit as much as possible. Casual, Lennox. Stay cool and casual.

But my mind raced. I decided to get into Kelvingrove Park and cut back up north towards Great Western Road. My guess was that they would send out teams of police on foot to search the area. By the time they got organized, I would be out of the park and sufficiently removed from the scene of the crime. But not necessarily in the clear. If it had been hinted to the police that I was a name to be looked at, then they would find my fingerprints all over the basement and upstairs kitchen sash windows as well as half a dozen door handles.

It could, of course, have been purely coincidental that I happened along just after Parks had been helped to go down a collar size; but there is a wonderful word that only the Scots use, mainly in legal contexts: timeous. Timeous means something like ‘within or at the correct time’. My discovery of Parks’s tortured body had been timeous . The arrival of the police had been timeous. All too timeous to be coincidental.

My immediate problem was to get away from the area. But there was no way of knowing just how much of a lead the police had been given.

I was now on Park Quadrant. Park Quadrant delineated the outer ring of the concentric terraced circles of Georgian townhouses. There were houses only on one side of the Quadrant: an arc of Georgian terrace. On the other side of the broad, sweeping street was a railing-edged pavement looking out over Kelvingrove Park. Unfortunately there was a drop on the other side of the railings, which prevented me simply vaulting them and disappearing into the park.

I walked as fast as I could without making myself conspicuous. I had just reached the junction of Park Terrace when a black police Wolseley coasted around the sweep of the Quadrant behind me. I dodged behind the meagre cover of the branches of a tree that overhung the railings from the Park below. I squeezed against the row of railings. Beyond them was the drop down into the park, which spread out dark-green under a granite sky.

It was my only way out. If I hung around any longer the place would be teeming with coppers. But until the police Wolseley had passed, I daren’t make a move.

The Wolseley crept past me. There would have been no way the coppers inside could have missed me if they looked in my direction. But they didn’t. The patrol car drove by, slowly. Just when I thought I was getting lucky, the Wolseley stopped fifty yards further on, on the other side of the street. I prepared to make a run for it.

A tall copper got out of the passenger seat and walked over to the front of the Georgian terrace. He leaned over the railings and looked down and along the basement entries, beneath street level. Again, he didn’t even look in my direction. The patrol car inched slowly along the Quadrant while the constable checked every basement court. I was relieved that they weren’t coming in my direction, but at the same time they were moving so slowly that I couldn’t move on. And that was a problem because very soon there would be more police cars and more flatfoots scouring every nook and cranny.

The copper moved on, still checking basements along the other side of the road. The black police Wolseley prowled beside him at walking pace. I decided to make my move: I climbed swiftly over the railings and eased myself down, my legs dangling above the bushes a dozen or so feet below. Again I spared a thought for my poor ankles, then let go of the railings. I crashed into the undergrowth but not loudly enough for the coppers to hear me. The angry fingers of the bushes scratched at me and I came to a tangled rest. Again no busted ankles, but my back protested with a stab of pain. I struggled through masses of bushes and emerged onto the thankfully empty path. Again I brushed down my suit and bashed the Borsalino back into shape before putting it on my head at an angle that would, hopefully, hide most of my features from passers-by.

I had just finished dusting myself off when I heard voices close by. It would have been perfectly normal to encounter other people in Kelvingrove Park, even on a weekday morning, but an old instinct told me to take cover.

Fortunately the civic authorities had chosen to place a vast commemorative statue directly in front of me. Even more fortunately they hadn’t replaced the railings that would have been melted down during the war to supply munitions factories. I ran around the massive rectangular base of the statue and pressed my back against an elaborate heroic frieze on the entablature: gallant soldiers of the British Empire liberating grateful natives around the world from the burden of self-determination. I looked up at the statue mounted above me. A dyspeptic, geriatric general on horseback looked out across Kelvingrove Park to the university and beyond, probably to the Empire that no one had told him was gone. The head of his steed was turned down towards me disdainfully.

The voices stopped but I heard the sound of boots on gravel. More than one pair. I stayed pressed into the entablature and waited until the footsteps had moved on. When I did look I saw the backs of three coppers. Once they were around the corner I headed off in the opposite direction. I had to get out quickly: it wouldn’t be long before the park was full with even more Highlanders in uniforms, beating bushes with sticks. I never understood why police searches always involved giving the undergrowth a damned good thrashing. Maybe it took them back to their childhoods in Stornoway or Strathpeffer, beating heather, tugging forelocks and dodging shot for the local grouse-shooting toffs.

I half-ran along the path, slowing down at corners in case I encountered anyone else: people remember a running man. And there was no guarantee that the policemen I’d dodged were the only ones in this part of the park.

I reached the north gate of the park and found a policeman on watch at the Eldon Street entrance. I cut through the trees and kept close to the edge of the River Kelvin, eventually passing under the bridge at Gibson Street. I crossed the river at the old Botanic Gardens station bridge. I climbed the railings and dropped down on the other side, attracting the attention of a couple of pedestrians. I pulled my Borsalino down over my eyes and moved swiftly away, up to where Great Western Road crossed the Kelvin Bridge.

I watched my lodgings from across the street: there were no police cars outside and everything seemed normal. Of course that didn’t mean there weren’t half a dozen Hamishes waiting for me when I got in. I crossed swiftly and went straight up to my digs. I stripped off and took a hurried bath. The carbolic stung like hell on the scratches that covered my hands and shins. Scratches that would be pretty good evidence of flight.

I shaved again and put on a fresh shirt, tie and suit. Blue this time. I bundled my other suit in wrapping paper and tied it up with string. My Borsalino could be saved and I hung it up, chose a trilby to match the serge and headed out.

I drove to the Horsehead Bar and set about buying Big Bob and a couple of the lunchtime regulars a drink. Parks was long dead but at least I would have someone to say they’d seen me relaxed and not dressed in a brown wool suit: my reckoning was that there was a chance that the two pedestrians who had seen me drop into Great Western Road from over the park railings would have mentioned it when they found a copper guarding the gate.

I forced down a Scotch pie and a pint and left when lunchtime licensing hours were up. I was walking back to the car when the sun was eclipsed. I turned to see Tiny Semple filling my universe.

‘Mr Sneddon wants to see you.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’m parked round the corner. Where shall I meet him?’

‘Leave your car. I’m to take you.’ I could have been getting paranoid, but I detected a lack of warmth in Tiny’s tone. He led me to where he’d parked the Sunbeam that Twinkletoes normally used. We drove in silence. We headed south across the Clyde and down Eglinton Street, eventually turning into a street of dingy houses overlooking the railway. There were already three cars parked outside one of the houses and Tiny parked behind them. The cars were conspicuous because no other house in the street had so much as a stick and hoop outside.

The house looked derelict, but a glance into one of the rooms off the hall revealed stacks of crates. I guessed the house was a store for stolen goods. Sitting in the middle of a street where, no doubt, the neighbours would rob you blind, this little cache would be as secure as Fort Knox. You didn’t need padlocks and bolts to keep this lot safe. All you needed was a name. Willie Sneddon. The Robin Hood of the South Side: stole from the rich, terrorized the poor.

Sneddon, Twinkletoes and another thug, DA-quiffed and shorter and leaner than Tiny but every bit as deadly-looking, were leaning against the dilapidated fireplace, smoking. There was a chair in the centre of the room. Cosy, I thought. Like in Parks’s flat, enough room to work. Twinkletoes didn’t smile at me and I did a quick scan of the room: no bolt-cutters. That I could see.

‘Sit down,’ said Sneddon. I didn’t want to. With four guys like this in the room, it wasn’t good to be the only one sitting. Chances were you’d never stand again.

‘Listen, Mr Sneddon,’ I said, still standing. ‘If this is about Parks-’

‘Sit the fuck down,’ said Sneddon in a cold, angerless way. I sat the fuck down in a cold, gutless way. I was having deja vu: my cosy chat in Murphy’s scrapyard came to mind.

‘Were you round at Parky’s this morning?’

‘Yes. Like we arranged.’

‘Do you remember me telling you I didn’t want Parky upset?’

I nodded.

‘Maybes I’m a man of too few fucking words. Maybes I should’ve made myself clearer. Parky upset would have been bad. Parky dead is ever so fucking slightly worse.’

‘Listen, Mr Sneddon. I had nothing to do with Parks’s death. Or not directly. I think someone didn’t want him to talk to me. What’s more, I think they wanted him to talk to them. Parks knew something. Or they thought he knew something. When I arrived Parks was already dead. Someone had rearranged his face over a long time and then strangled him.’

‘He’d been worked over?’ Sneddon drew on his cigarette and dropped the butt on the grimy, naked floorboards before grinding it out with his toe. I worried that he maybe needed his hands free.

‘Let’s put it this way, he was going to have trouble chewing gum. Whoever went to work on him knew they were going to kill him after. Whether he talked or not. When they got or didn’t get what they wanted from him they smashed the fuck out of his face. It wasn’t a beating Parks took. It was torture.’

‘As I remember, you wanted to lean on him. Aye, that’s what you said… lean on him. I’ll ask you this once, Lennox. Did you kill him? And before you answer, I want you to know that I do understand how these things happen. Things get out of fucking hand.’

I bet you do, I thought.

‘So, Lennox, tell me the truth,’ Sneddon continued. ‘Did you do Parky?’

‘No. If you’d seen the state his face was in you would know that. I’m not that vicious.’

‘Okay, let me see your hands.’

I held them out and felt a chill travel from the chair and into my bowels. The knuckles of both hands were raw from my rapid descent down Parks’s plumbing.

‘Now listen,’ I said. ‘I had to make an escape from Parks’s place down the drainpipe. Plus I had to schlep through half the bushes in Kelvingrove Park. I didn’t get these from torturing Parks.’

Sneddon stared hard at me for a moment. I glanced over at Twinkletoes, who still wasn’t smiling. I involuntarily wriggled my toes in my shoes.

‘Okay,’ Sneddon said at last. ‘I believe you. You didn’t get those knuckles beating a man to death. Your hands would be all swoll up like fucking balloons.’

Thank God for the voice of experience, I thought.

‘That doesn’t mean you didn’t beat him to death with something else,’ said Sneddon. ‘But I believe you.’

I tried not to look too relieved.

‘Parky made me a lot of fucking money, Lennox. I am displeased about someone killing one of my best earners. Very fucking displeased.’

‘I’m sure you are.’

‘You’ve got a new job. Forget the McGahern thing. Find out who killed Parky. And find out quickly.’

‘To be honest,’ I said, ‘I don’t think I should forget the McGahern thing. I think Parks’s death is connected. Coincidences make me uncomfortable. I tend not to believe in them, having the logical view of the universe that I do.’

‘What coincidences?’

‘That we have a conversation and you tell Parks to expect me. I arrive and Parks is freshly dead. Coincidence one. Then I have to make a back-door run for it because the police have been tipped off at that exact moment. Coincidence two.’

‘So someone was trying to put you in the frame?’

‘Well, you felt you had to ask me if I’d killed him, didn’t you? What worries me is that they gave my name to the police. Or they’ll give it when they realize that I wasn’t caught at the scene.’

‘Wait a minute…’ Sneddon frowned. ‘What you fucking mean about Parks getting killed after I arrange a meeting for you? You saying I set it up?’

‘No… No, not at all.’ I held my hands up. ‘Parks could have told someone. Or word got out somehow. All I mean is the whole thing fitted together just that little bit too conveniently. I’ve been getting that a lot, recently. And all to do with Tam and Frankie McGahern and Lillian Andrews. But I need to think it all through. My first concern is not to end up hanged for Parks’s murder.’

‘You seen leaving?’

‘Not that I know of, but all it would take is a couple of public-spirited citizens to have been looking out of their windows while I was doing a Sherpa Tenzing on Parks’s back wall. And a couple of passers-by saw me clamber out of Kelvingrove Park.’

‘Did they get a good look at you?’

‘Probably just what I was wearing. I’ve got the suit in the boot of my car. But I think I maybe left a strip of it on Parks’s drainpipe. I’m going to dump it.’

‘When you drop him off back at his car, pick up the suit,’ Sneddon said to Tiny. He turned back to me. ‘We’ll incinerate it. As for this morning when Parky was snuffed, you took your car in for repair at one of my garages. I’ll give you the name and address and two mechanics who’ll say you were there.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. But the idea of my avoiding a murder charge based on a dodgy Sneddon-supplied alibi didn’t exactly fill me with confidence. And if the police never got the real killers, then it gave Sneddon something on me. I wondered if the suit would be incinerated, after all. But I was in no position to negotiate.

‘So you’ll find out who snuffed Parky?’ Sneddon lit another cigarette. He offered me one and I took it.

‘If I can,’ I said as if I had a choice in the matter. ‘And Tam McGahern. Like I said they’re linked.’

Sneddon reached into his jacket and I tried not to flinch. He took out a thick wedge of folded fivers and handed it to me.

‘That’s on account,’ said Sneddon. ‘And it’s non-refundable. I want a fucking result, Lennox. This is a head-hunt, are we clear?’

I nodded.

‘You find who did Parky,’ said Sneddon, ‘and I’ll deal with the rest.’

‘Fair enough,’ I said, putting the cash, uncounted, into my pocket. I thought of Mr Morrison’s post boxes. I had the uncomfortable feeling that I would be supplying a name for one of them. One way or another. Sneddon had made it clear he wasn’t going to accept failure.

Tiny Semple drove me back to where I’d left my car parked near the Horsehead. He was much more chatty on the way back.

‘It’s funny you getting out of Parky’s place that way,’ he said as we drove.

‘How so?’

‘He was more used to having some fucker up his back drainpipe…’ Tiny chuckled baritonely.

I wasn’t really in the mood for gags. As we had driven away from Sneddon’s secret rendezvous, I could have sworn, looking in the wing mirror, that I saw Twinkletoes come out and put a pair of bolt-cutters in the boot of one of the other cars.

They hadn’t been needed, after all.