Lennox

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The City of Glasgow Police could not be accused of dynamism. It took Greasy George a full forty-eight hours to get first Sneddon, then the other two Kings out of custody. It also took them that length of time to find Ronnie Smails’s body, by which time his cup of tea, and the trail, would be colder than stone cold.

The local newspapers had been a little more lively. Details of the robbery were emerging. It had taken place just north of the border and the trap had been sprung with military precision. There had been three lorries and an army truck escort, because of the nature of the cargo: brand-new Sterling-Patchett L2A1 sub-machine guns, which were being brought in to replace the older Sten guns. There had been an exchange of gunfire, which had left two Tommies dead on the road. One of the drivers was still in a critical condition and had not regained consciousness. The other was providing the police with descriptions of the attack and the attackers. One of the robbers had been wounded by army fire, but had made his escape.

This had been the caper that Tam McGahern had been building up to. And I had a pretty good idea about exactly what was going to happen next.

I had two house calls to make. Both were on the South Side. But first I had to pick up a couple of things from my place. I took my Webley and stashed it under the front passenger seat of the Atlantic. One Saturday night, a couple of months previously, I had gotten into a debate with a thug in Argyle Street. He had tried to compensate for his lack of guts and skill by pulling a knife on me: a beautiful, pearl-handled Italian switchblade. We ended the encounter with me up one pearl-handled switchblade and him down several less-than-pearly teeth. I had hung onto the knife. Now I slipped it into my jacket pocket.

Then I went out to play.

First I travelled along Paisley Road West and into the future. The address I had for Jackie Gillespie was near Bellahouston Park. A reasonably new rented Glasgow Corporation semi-detached, Gillespie’s house looked clean and bright and optimistic. But the real future was looming over it: a spider’s web of scaffolding encased a stepped rank of massive, almost complete apartment blocks. Moss Heights. This was where the Glaswegian of the future would live: free from the tenement, free from overcrowding and disease.

Free from any sense of community.

The fact was that Glasgow had swollen like a tumour and was now squeezing against the Green Belt. And if you couldn’t build out, you could build up. The geniuses in the City Chambers had decided that the solution to having Glaswegians living on top of each other was to have Glaswegians living on top of each other.

Given my experience of my last couple of house calls, I took the precaution of parking a little away from Gillespie’s house. The pavement beneath my feet was pristine, as were the roughcast and roofs of the houses I passed, their gardens still raw, earth scars, waiting for the first sowing of grass. As I walked, the ringing of heavy tools echoed from the building site in the sky half a mile distant.

Jackie Gillespie, as far as I knew, had no wife or children, yet his bright, new semi-detached council house had clearly been intended for a family. As far as I could see the neighbouring house was yet to be occupied. No one answered my ringing of the doorbell and, after checking there were no neighbours watching, I slipped around to the back of the house. The back door was unlocked. Well, to tell the truth it was de -locked. Someone had applied their size tens to it and the wood had splintered. My money was on a Highlander in blue. I had decided to be a little more prepared this time and I took a pair of gloves out of my raincoat pocket and put them on before pushing open the door.

It was fast becoming a bit of a tradition for me to find a freshly strangled corpse in situations like these, and I felt almost disappointed not to find Gillespie sitting in bulge-eyed welcome. Alive or dead, he wasn’t here. But whether it had been the coppers or not, someone had given his place a thorough turning over.

I didn’t hang around. If it hadn’t been the coppers then it would be soon. They were capable of thinking, even if it was a little more slowly than the rest of us. I knew that Jackie Gillespie had been seen talking to Tam McGahern, and I knew Tam McGahern had been planning a big getout-of-Glasgow job. The police didn’t. But they would be working their way through a list of top armed robbers who could have pulled a job like this. And Jackie Gillespie was pretty close to the top of the list.

But whoever had turned over his place had made the connection before me. And that didn’t fit with the police.

I got back in the car and headed south, stopping at a callbox on the way to ’phone Sneddon. There was something even colder and harder than usual about his voice.

‘Someone’s gonna pay for this, Lennox. Someone’s gonna pay hard and long. It’s been years since a copper’s felt he’s had the balls to lift a hand to me.’

‘McNab?’

‘He’s a fuckin’ traitor. He’s supposed to be Orange, for fuck’s sake. Instead of hassling me, he should have been kicking the Irish green shite out of that fucking Fenian Murphy.’

‘To be fair, Mr Sneddon, I think he’s been doing exactly that. And Jonny Cohen.’

‘Maybes. You’re right about Cohen, though. Word is he took a hammering. The cozzers picked on him special, ’cause armed robbery’s his thing.’

I could imagine it. Jonny Cohen would be at the top of the list. But it was the other name I was interested in.

‘Have they pulled in Jackie Gillespie?’ I asked.

‘How the fuck should I know?’ said Sneddon dully. Then, after a pause, ‘Why? Is Gillespie part of the firm that pulled this stunt?’

‘I don’t know. I think so. Listen, Mr Sneddon, I think I’ve put this all together. It’s like I said to you before; this could bring all kinds of trouble for you, Murphy and Sneddon. Today was just the start. This has a political element to it. Can you call a meeting? Get the other two Kings together and I can go over what I know. I’m going to need your combined resources to crack this.’

‘I dunno, Lennox. The coppers are still sticking to us like shite to a shirt tail. I’ll do my best.’

‘I’ll ’phone back in a couple of hours.’

After hanging up, I headed off for my second house call. I drove down to Mount Vernon and parked around the corner from the tenement block I’d seen Eskimo Nell go into on the night that Smails had had his collar tightened. There were three storeys of flats above a ground floor of shop fronts. There was an Austin A30 parked outside the close. All of the flats had lights on and I guessed Eskimo Nell was in. I hoped that she was alone. If she had company I could probably deal with it, but it could make things complicated. Slow me down.

I climbed the back stairs and knocked on the door. It was opened by the girl I’d followed back from Smails’s place. She looked a little unsure of herself and kept the door on the chain. She had a pretty face. Beautiful, almost. There was no doubt about the fact that she was the woman I’d seen Lillian Andrews with. She had a touch of class about her: just like Lillian, just like Wilma, just like Lena who had been rejected because the class evaporated whenever she spoke.

‘What do you want?’ she asked.

‘I’m a friend of Tam’s,’ I said, and tried to look both conspiratorial and in a hurry. ‘And of Sally’s. I’ve got a message for you.’

I thought the script and the performance were perfect, but it was clear I’d misread my audience. She slammed the door shut. I stopped the snib catching by shouldering the door. The chain held. I rammed my foot into the gap and slammed my shoulder into the heavy teak again. This time the chain snapped and the door flew in and threw the girl backwards. She staggered into the wall and a scream started to rise in her throat. I caught it for her.

‘Listen, sister,’ I hissed as menacingly as I could manage, pinning her to the wall with the hand I had around her throat. ‘This is your choice. You can start screaming and I’ll strangle you to death here in your hall, or we can sit down, nice and civilized, on your sofa and chat. But you’ve got to understand something here and now. You’re finished with whatever business you’ve got with Sally Blane or Lillian Andrews or whatever the hell her real name is. You’re playing a different game now. It’s called survival. We’re going to talk and I’m going to ask questions, then I’m going to deliver you to the Three Kings. And, believe me, if they hand a dolly over to their boys it ends up broken. So whether or not you end tonight raped, tortured and dead depends on how well I can satisfy the Three Kings that you’ve given me all the answers I need. Do you understand?’ I loosened my grip enough for her to gasp a breath and nod vigorously. I tightened it again. ‘No funny business. Okay?’

She nodded again. I let her go. She looked at me with wild eyes and rubbed at her throat. I grabbed her arm and frogmarched her through to the living room and threw her down into the armchair. I sure was in a nice business. It was when I found myself pushing women around that I felt most proud of my career choices.

The flat was expensively furnished. And surprisingly tasteful. There was a dining table and chairs against one wall and I dragged a chair over and sat opposite her.

‘Are you Molly?’ I asked.

She shook her head.

‘No. My name is Liz. Molly was Margot… Sally’s sister. She’s dead.’

‘You worked for this special set up, didn’t you? I’m guessing the name of the game was blackmail?’

Liz nodded. ‘I don’t know much about what they squeezed out of the punters we set up. I just did as I was told.’

‘How did it work?’

‘We were given a mark… some rich or important bloke. Sometimes the mark would know we were chippies, other times they didn’t know they were being set up. But they was always married. Respectable. After a while Tam McGahern would burst in on us, shouting and swearing and threatening the mark. Sometimes he’d soften them up with a wee beatin’. Whichever one of us was working the mark, Tam made out that he was our boyfriend. He’d say he’d had a detective on us and then show the pictures. Then he’d say he was goin’ to send the pictures to the mark’s wife or the papers.’

‘Unless the mark did exactly what Tam wanted.’

‘That’s about the size of it.’

‘And John Andrews was Sally Blane’s mark?’

‘That had been goin’ on since long before I got involved. And I only ever knew Sally as Lillian Andrews. I only found out later that the girl what got killed was her sister and that Lillian’s real name was Sally.’

‘So Margot really is dead?’

‘Aye. And because of what we was doing. Tam did his usual angry boyfriend act in the street outside a club Margot and her mark had been at. Lillian was with them. Tam had the photos and everything. He started to pull the guy out of the car but the mark panicked and drove off with Margot and Lillian still inside. In the car, I mean. Tam chased the mark through the city and out onto Paisley Road West. The mark lost control and smashed into a railway bridge. Him and Margot was killed right off. Lillian was in the back. She was knocked about a bit but all right. Except her nose and jaw got busted up. She thought she was going to lose her looks, but Tam got some specialist to take care of it.’

‘Who told you all of this?’

‘One of the other girls. Wilma.’

‘Wilma Marshall?’

‘Aye. You know her?’

‘We’ve met.’

Liz rubbed her throat and frowned. ‘Can I get a glass of water?’

‘Okay. But I’ll keep you company.’

We went through to the small kitchen and she filled a glass from the tap. I leaned against the door jamb and smiled at her. I was feeling pretty smug. We exchanged a look and in that second she knew that I knew who she really was. The fear was gone from her eyes: it made way for a cold, dark hate.

‘You’ve got a great job, Lennox,’ she said. I grinned more broadly.

‘I don’t recall introducing myself,’ I said.

‘Yeah. A great job. You must spend half your life looking back over your shoulder.’

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘I tend to be a forward-thinking type. I fit in with the new age.’

‘Really? Maybe it’s time you started looking over your shoulder.’ She smiled. A smile that made me think oh fuck.

Before I had time to react, something flashed past my eyes as it was looped over my head and around my neck and drawn tight. A thick band that felt like leather. Suddenly breathing became something no longer to be taken for granted and I was pulled back against the body of my attacker. He twisted something at the back of my neck a couple of times and both my head and my chest felt like they were going to explode: one from want of blood, the other from want of air. I was going to get it the same way as Parks and Smails.

I clawed at the strap and then, uselessly, vaguely over my shoulders. The lack of oxygen started a buzz-saw in my head and I started to panic. Something of my wartime training kicked in and instead of struggling I let my legs go from under me and dropped like a stone. I went down so fast that I shifted my attacker’s centre of gravity. He maintained the pressure on the garrotte but had to stand with his legs apart and hold me like a sheep being sheared.

I reached into my jacket pocket and freed the catch on my switchblade. I put all of my strength into a sweeping upwards arc and aimed, blind, for a point about a foot above my head. I guessed that was where his balls would be. I must have been there or thereabouts, because he screamed in agony and the garrotte around my neck loosened. I still had a grip on my knife and I gave it a vicious twist to mash the potatoes. Another scream and I cheered myself with the thought that he wouldn’t be passing his strangulation skills onto the next generation.

I scrambled to my feet and spun around to face him. He was about five-eight and dark-skinned and had a Middle Eastern look to him.

I pulled the knife from his groin, giving it another malicious twist as I did so. He sank to his knees, his hands clutched to his genitals, blood spilling from between the fingers. He was retching in great big spasms. He represented no further threat to me, but the bastard had tried to kill me. And he had killed Parks and Smails.

I took my time and made sure the kick I planted hit him square in the mouth, dislodging teeth. I was back in a place I’d been too many times in the war. I got the old tingle, the slowing down of time, the total absence of any kind of feeling for the man you were killing. And I knew that was what I was going to do. I grabbed him by the hair and yanked his head up so that I could get my knife in behind his windpipe before thrusting it forward and out. Then the fucker would know what it was like to fight for breath.

The thing that I hadn’t accounted for was that, in the war, there tends not to be a woman in the room behind you with access to heavy cooking implements. I had forgotten about Liz. Mainly because she hadn’t done the usual hysterical screaming thing in the background. I was just about to finish my Arab chum off when a train ran into the back of my head.

I went down but wasn’t out. She swung some cast iron at me again and caught me on the temple. This time the lights dimmed so I could enjoy the fireworks that sparkled in my head. I was really dazed but still not out and she knew she’d have to get out quick. I heard her pulling her dusky chum to his feet and rushing him out of the apartment. I pulled myself upright, leaning on the kitchen counter. My head hurt like a bastard, I felt a warm trickle of blood down my neck and the world was still a little tilted on its axis. I looked down to where she’d dropped the cast-iron pan. I counted myself lucky that she hadn’t thought to pick up a knife instead. Glaswegians kill each other in the kitchen more than in any other room. Admittedly they usually do it by cooking, but I still considered myself fortunate to get out in one piece.

I soaked a cloth and held it to my head, but still made a stab at catching up with them. There was a smear of blood along the linoleum floor and out onto the common stair. I ran down the steps, my head throbbing with every footfall and out along the close and onto the street. They were gone, as was the Baby Austin.

I half-staggered towards where I had parked the Atlantic and had to stop halfway to vomit. It burned in my crushed throat. There was nobody on the street, but even if there had been, the sight of a Glaswegian hanging onto a lamppost and making a splash on the pavement was not an out-of-the ordinary occurrence. I felt a little better but every pulse still beat a kettle drum in my head. I’d been clobbered twice now and I knew I wasn’t in a good way. Maybe even a fractured skull. I slumped into the driver’s seat and sat for a moment, letting the spinning world catch up with me a little before I drove off.

When this was over, I was going to collect big time from the Three Kings and add it to the little nest-egg I’d built up. Maybe, when this was all over and if I was still alive, I would get that boat back to Canada. You never really know where rock bottom lies. But this sure felt like it.

I ’phoned Sneddon from a ’phone box. He had arranged a meeting for the following evening. I asked if it could be sooner but he said that each of the Kings would have to work out how to give the cops the slip. I told him what had happened in the flat.

‘The guy who tried to throttle me was the one who killed Parks and Smails,’ I said. I told Sneddon what I’d done to the Arab.

‘Good. Sounds like the bastard will bleed to death. But I want to be sure. I’ll see you at Shawfields tomorrow at eight.’

‘Okay,’ I said and hung up. I hadn’t wanted to tell Sneddon I was in bad shape. Religion and half-baked history meant Sneddon and Murphy hated each other’s guts, but they were actually mirror images of each other. Neither was the type you wanted to show weakness to. I redialled.

‘Jonny?’ I said. ‘Can I come over… and can you get me a doctor?’