The Deep Dark Sleep

CHAPTER NINE

To say that Glasgow was a city of paradoxes is like saying the North Pole can be chilly. Everywhere you looked, everything about the city seemed to contradict itself and everything else. It was a bustling, densely populated, fuming, noisy, brash industrial city; yet, if you travelled fifteen minutes in any direction, you found yourself in vast, empty landscapes of moorland, hill and glen. It was a city defined by its people, and its people were defined by Glasgow: yet, that same small distance away, the Glaswegian identity gave way to a different type of Scottishness. In the direction Archie and I drove, it became increasingly a Highland identity.

The country estate on which Billy Dunbar worked was remote and dramatic, covering mountains, pasture and the odd salmon-stocked loch. I enjoyed getting out of the city and into this kind of landscape whenever I could, and had often driven up past the shores of Loch Lomond and stopped off at some lochside tea shop. I did have my contemplative moments — when I wasn’t peeping on adulterous spouses, slapping people about or hobnobbing with gangsters.

As I drove, I thought about my meeting with Handsome Jonny Cohen and Hammer Murphy. Before I left, I had asked Murphy about his younger days when he had worked with Gentleman Joe Strachan. He hadn’t been able to tell me much, but if he had omitted the word ‘fuck’ and all its derivatives, it would have taken half as long to tell me. But the picture I had come away with was of a Joe Strachan whom Murphy had been, and remained, incapable of understanding, as if he existed on a completely different criminal plane. Murphy had done a few jobs for Strachan, but they had always been in connection with something else that Murphy had never known about, like working on one corner of a painting without being allowed to see the whole canvas. This is, of course, my analogy. Murphy had described it as ‘being kept in the fucking dark and knowing fuck all about fuck all that was fucking going on’.

It took Archie and me several stops at remote petrol stations and post offices before we found our way to the estate office. Mr Dunbar, we were told by the tweedy spinster type we found in the office, was the deputy head gamekeeper. Eyeing us with that kind of keen suspicion that only comes from a long lifetime’s experience of virginity, she asked us the nature of our business with Mr Dunbar. I decided to christen her Miss Marple.

I told her that we were insurance agents and had papers for Mr Dunbar to sign. What kind of insurance we could be selling a gamekeeper beat me, other than perhaps cover against pheasant-related injury; but she seemed satisfied with the explanation and told us he was not on duty that day but we could find him at his cottage on the estate, to which she gave us directions.

I was grateful it wasn’t raining because, as Miss Marple had explained, Dunbar’s cottage was up a lane on the estate and we had to hoof it. At one time, every square yard of Scotland had been covered with an impenetrable blanket of trees: the Great Caledonian Forest. Some time in the distant past, long before Scottish history took a brighter turn and became the Dark Ages, the forest had been chopped, burned and stripped away for firewood, building materials, or simply to allow space for animals to graze. It had taken a couple of millennia, but the ancient Scots had managed to denude the majority of the Scottish landscape and turn it into peaty bog. Now, as Dr Johnson had once quipped, a tree in Scotland was as rare as a horse in Venice. Mind you, comedy had come a long way since the eighteenth century.

Notwithstanding the efforts of the troglodyte preGlaswegians, the estate we walked through was punctuated with dense clumps of mixed trees and a carpet of late afternoon sun-dappled autumn orange and red lay under our feet. It was exactly the kind of Scottish scene that you found on shortbread tins like the one that I had relieved Paul Downey of.

We reached the cottage after about ten minutes. It was small, stone-built, with a neatly laid out garden to the front and a pen with snuffling pigs to the side. A mound of raked-up autumn leaves smouldered and smoked in one corner.

A short, broad-built man in his mid-fifties came out of the cottage just as we neared it. He was dressed in a dark brown jacket of a tweed so rough it looked as if it had been woven from bramble, and a checked tweed flat cap that didn’t quite match the jacket. He had a shotgun broken over his arm. Tess of the d’Urbervilles did not, as I thought she might, come skipping out of the cottage after him.

The short man stopped as he spotted us and watched us suspiciously as we approached.

‘Can I help you?’ Despite the bucolic attire and setting, there was still a dredger bucket full of Glasgow in the accent.

‘Hello, Mr Dunbar,’ I said. ‘We’re here to talk to you about Gentleman Joe Strachan.’

He froze for a moment as the name from another life collided with him. He cast an eye back to the cottage, as if to check there was no one in the doorway behind him.

‘You police?’

‘No.’

‘No …’ he said, eyeing me from top to toe. ‘You dress too expensive for a copper. Your pal, on the other hand …’

‘I got this suit in Paisley’s on the Broomielaw, I’ll have you know …’ Again, Archie’s eyebrows left his expressionless face behind to indicate his hurt indignation as he looked down at his shapeless raincoat and the baggy suit beneath.

‘This is a lovely setting, Mr Dunbar,’ I said as disarmingly as I could. ‘Who’s estate is this?’

‘It’s one of the Duke of Strathlorne’s estates,’ he said irritatedly. ‘If you’re not police …’

‘The Duke of Strathlorne?’ I echoed. I was beginning to wonder if there was any part of Scotland he didn’t own.

‘If you’re not police,’ Dunbar repeated, ‘then what’s the deal? You work for one of the Three Kings?’

‘No, Mr Dunbar,’ I said, maintaining my friendly tone. My conviviality was prompted in part by the way he nestled the still broken-breeched shotgun in his arm. ‘Although I have helped Mr Sneddon on several occasions. You used to know Mr Sneddon, didn’t you?’

‘Aye, I know Willie. Nothing wrong with Willie Sneddon. Doing all right for himself is Willie. Willie got me this job.’

‘Really?’ I said without much interest. But I was interested: Willie Sneddon had claimed not to know anything about Dunbar’s whereabouts.

‘Aye … The last assistant gamekeeper just upped and left. Didn’t even give his notice. Willie found out about it and put me onto this number.’

‘That was good of him, Mr Dunbar. Mr Sneddon likes to take care of people, as I know myself,’ I said. By the way, my name’s Lennox. And this is Archie McClelland. We’re enquiry agents. We just want to ask you a few questions about Joe Strachan.’

‘I know fuck all about Joe Strachan. You’ve come a long way to learn fuck all.’

‘We just want to talk to you, Billy. You were quite an operator in your own way back then. There’s maybe something you know that could help us.’

‘Help you what?’

‘Listen, could we …?’ I nodded towards the cottage.

‘No. My wife’s in. I’ve got fuck all to say about fuck all. So fuck off.’

I decided against correcting his grammar. Pointing out double-negatives to someone with a double-barrelled is never the best idea.

‘Did you know that they found Joe Strachan’s remains?’

Now that, I thought, hit a nerve. Dunbar looked taken aback, then a little confused, then he returned to suspicious hostility. All a little overdone, perhaps. ‘No I didn’t. And I couldn’t care fucking less.’

‘Didn’t you read it in the papers?’ asked Archie.

‘Oh, it fucking talks … Naw. I didn’t read nothing.’

There you go again with the double negatives, I thought. ‘He was dredged up from the bottom of the Clyde,’ I said. ‘They reckon he’s been there since Thirty-eight.’

Dunbar smirked. A knowing smirk. ‘They do, do they? Well whoopee-fucking-doo. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got work to do.’

‘I thought you were off today,’ I said. He took a step towards me.

‘I’m getting fed up with this. I have had nothing to do with all of that shite since my last stretch in Barlinnie. You say Joe Strachan’s dead, fine, Joe Strachan’s dead. I haven’t heard the name in ten years, and I don’t want to get involved with whatever you’re up to.’

‘All we’re up to is finding out information about Joe Strachan, nothing else,’ I said. ‘No big deal. We’re not looking to solve the crime of the century or recover stolen cash or settle scores. We’re working for Strachan’s daughters, who want to get to the bottom of what happened to their father, that’s all.’

‘Well you’re looking in the wrong direction,’ he said. ‘Listen, I did ten years in Barlinnie: ten hard, hard years of getting fucking birched for any excuse, dodging the old queers and keeping away from the mad bastards and trying not to turn into one myself. I was twenty-two when I went in. I lost the best years of my life and I knew from the first day that I never wanted to go back to that, so I went straight. I came out in Thirty-seven and I’d only been out a couple of months when the polis picked me up and beat the shite out of me because they thought I’d been in on the Empire job. Broken nose and jaw, cracked ribs, four broken fingers on my right hand.’ He looked down at the hand of the arm looped under the shotgun, as if examining the long-healed injury. ‘One of the coppers fucking stamped on it. It’s never been right since. I told them then that I knew fuck all and that’s what I’m telling you now.’

‘Why did they pick on you?’ asked Archie.

‘A copper was dead. That was all the reason they needed. Every name they had was pulled in. The bastard who stamped on my hand was a pal of the dead cop.’

‘McNab?’ I took a wild shot.

‘Aye …’ Dunbar looked surprised. ‘Willie McNab. He became a big shot in the CID afterwards. Anyway, the other reason they picked on me is the job I did ten years for … they suspected that Joe Strachan had planned it, but couldn’t prove it.’

‘Had he planned it?’

Dunbar looked at me as if I had said something stupid. ‘If Joe Strachan had planned that job, I would never have got caught.’

‘Did you do jobs with Strachan?’ I asked and got the look again. ‘Okay, did you know Strachan?’

‘I knew him all right. Not well, but I knew about him. He was beginning to make a name for himself in the Twenties. Even back then the polis were desperate to nail him. There were a lot of big jobs being put down to Strachan. Not just robberies but frauds, blackmail, housebreakings … The coppers could never prove it was Strachan.’

‘But if he had that scope of operation, he must have had a regular team.’

‘Aye, that’s as maybes. But who they were was anybody’s guess. That was another reason the coppers picked on me. Because I had kept my nose clean after prison. The theory they had was that Strachan either picked men without criminal records, or, if it was someone with form, told them not to do any other jobs than his and to keep their noses clean and their mouths shut between jobs. You know, the coppers never recovered a single fucking penny from any of the Triple Crown robberies? Not a single banknote was ever traced. That means Strachan must have had his laundry and distribution all planned out well before. But I’m only telling you what every other bastard knows. Like I told you, I know fuck all else. You could have saved your coupon.’

Dunbar referred to the petrol coupon it would have cost to make the trip up from Glasgow. Petrol rationing had ended five years before, but the expression had lingered.

‘Okay,’ I said resignedly. ‘Thanks for your help anyway.’ I handed him a card. ‘That’s my office number if anything should occur to you.’

‘It won’t.’

‘Fair enough,’ I said wearily. ‘Mr Dunbar, I hope you know we weren’t trying to tie you into anything or anything like that. Our interest is quite simply to let a family know if the body recovered from the Clyde is that of their father, that’s all. I’m sorry we disturbed you.’ I handed him a five pound note. ‘That’s for your time. I have to say there would have been more if you had been able to help.’

I lifted my hat an inch and turned, leaving Dunbar staring at the fiver in his hand. Archie followed me, looking disappointed, which really didn’t signify anything in Archie’s case.

‘That’s that, then,’ he said.

‘Not quite. He has something to tell us. Something he really wants to tell us. And I think I already know what it is, but I want to hear it from him. That’s why I’ve left my number.’

‘Wait!’

‘Yes, Mr Dunbar?’

‘I was telling you the truth, I didn’t have anything to do with the Empire robbery or any other Strachan job. And I’ve never seen Strachan since before I went to prison.’

‘But?’

‘But I’ve got some information that will cost you twenty-five pounds.’

‘That all depends on what it is,’ I said, but started to walk back towards Dunbar, making a show of taking my wallet out.

‘It’s about the body at the bottom of the Clyde.’

‘You can tell me who it was?’

‘No. But I can tell you who it wasn’t …’