The Deep Dark Sleep

CHAPTER TWELVE

Pushing people out of third-floor windows, apparently, contravenes some Glasgow Corporation bye-law, so I spent most of the next two days in the company of the police.

The first night was spent in the Western General, with a boy in blue sitting guard at my side. For my own protection, Jock Ferguson less than reassured me.

Despite the fact that I was perfectly capable of walking, I was confined to a bed, but not in the ward, instead ending up in a room on my own. My guess was that the police had insisted on it.

I was in good hands. If you are going to have a stab or slash wound, my advice would always be to try and arrange to have it in Glasgow. Glaswegian hospitals have an unparalleled experience of stitching up knife, razor and bottle-inflicted injuries. I even heard of a guy admitted with multiple wounds from a machete. Why a Glaswegian would have a machete was beyond me; I was pretty sure I hadn’t come across dense patches of jungle or rainforest during my time in Glasgow.

The wound to my arm was deep. A doctor who looked twelve and reddened every time I called him ‘Sonny’ told me that they had had to stitch muscle as well as skin. I could expect some nerve damage, he told me, as if it had been my own silly fault.

I gave a formal statement under caution to Jock Ferguson, witnessed by my uniformed nursemaid. I followed exactly the advice I had given Fraser and told the police the real sequence of events, describing my him-or-me struggle and how it ended with him falling through the window. Except I omitted to mention that it had taken me several shoves to get the bastard through, or that we had chatted for a while before he caught his taxi.

My heart sank when McNab joined us, squeaking a chair across the hospital floor. A professionally dour-looking detective stood behind him, at the door, with a briefcase in his hand. Not carrying your own things was obviously another privilege of rank.

McNab read through the statement I had dictated to Ferguson and signed.

‘Funny thing is,’ he said, pushing his hat up and away from his eyes, ‘that we have witnesses who report glass falling into the street some time before the victim fell.’

I didn’t like that word. Victim.

‘Could be, Superintendent. We were smashing into everything.’

‘And there were bloody handprints on the frame of the window, as if the victim had tried to hang on to prevent himself from falling.’

There it was again. That word.

‘He grabbed at it as he fell. In fact, that was when he dropped the knife. But his hands were too bloody to get a grip: that’s why he fell.’

‘Mmm. I see.’ McNab nodded to the detective behind him who handed him a roll of white cloth. Unwrapping the cloth, he revealed the knife. It had an evidence tag on it. And some blood. Mine. Flecks of it had stained the cloth.

‘This knife?’

‘That’s the one.’

Now, after the adrenalin of the fight had left my system, draining every last ounce of energy from me, the sight of the blade that had sliced into my flesh made me feel sick.

‘Aye …’ said McNab contemplatively. ‘This would be a commando knife, would it not?’

‘A Fairbairn-Sykes Fighting Knife, yes. Standard commando issue. The Canadian special forces were armed with a variation of it, the V42 Stiletto. An inferior version of it.’ I nodded to the knife and again felt my gut lurch. ‘What you have there is the world’s best close-quarters combat knife. And the guy who jumped me was an expert with it. Who was he, anyway?’

Jock fired a look at the Superintendent that wasn’t returned. ‘We don’t know. Yet.’

‘Let me guess, no ID?’

Jock Ferguson shook his head. ‘No ID, no driving licence, no labels or tags on his clothing to say where he came from … no cards, letters, chequebook.’

‘You any ideas?’ asked McNab.

‘He wasn’t local, I know that. He pretended to be, to start with, but he was English. And officer class. Listen, I was fighting for my life. It really was him or me. Am I going to be charged with his death?’

‘You’ve killed a man, Lennox. That’s a pretty big thing.’

‘I’ve killed plenty, Superintendent, but back then it wasn’t such a big thing at all.’

‘Well, we’ll have to submit a report to the Procurator Fiscal and you remain under caution. The evidence does seem to point to self-defence, like you said. But you can expect a lot of close attention over this. Some back alley razor gang killing is one thing, dropping well-dressed officer types onto the Gordon Street taxi rank is something else. You know the press is all over this?’

‘I can guess. How are you handling the “mystery man” aspect?’

‘We’re not. We’re just saying that the dead man has yet to be identified.’ McNab turned to the detective at the door. ‘Why don’t you get a coffee in the canteen, Robertson. Five minutes.’

After the detective had left, leaving me with McNab and Ferguson, I eased myself up on the bed. A copper like McNab reducing the number of witnesses to an interrogation was something that brought out the suspicious and nervy aspects of my character.

‘Listen, Lennox,’ said McNab, ‘I know you don’t go much for my way of doing things, and you know what I think about your involvement with the so-called Three Kings, but this is the hardest city on the face of the planet and you have to be hard to police it. But this whole thing you’re involved in is way beyond my ken. And I do not like things occurring inside the city boundary but outside my ken. It attracts unwanted interest.’

‘Such as?’

‘Special Branch.’ It was Jock Ferguson who answered. ‘What took place between you and our mystery dead man was text book SOE or commando stuff. It’s even been suggested that he was some kind of intelligence man.’

‘British Intelligence have taken to assassination attempts on Her Majesty’s loyal subjects? I doubt it. And if they did, it would have been done more discreetly than that.’

‘Well, it was professional enough for it to look like something specialist,’ said McNab. ‘And that means Special Branch are treading on my patch. And I don’t like anyone treading on my patch.’

‘But I take it you’ve told them that we all know what the link is? Gentleman Joe Strachan. That guy began by trying to warn me off the Strachan case, then he tried to remove me personally and permanently. This isn’t anything to do with the Empire robbery any more … it’s to do with whatever happened after the robbery. During the war.’

‘I still can’t buy that story about Strachan being an officer,’ said McNab. ‘And God knows I want to believe it wasn’t him we found at the bottom of the Clyde. But it just doesn’t make sense. He was a criminal on the run. And wanted for a policeman’s murder.’

‘That’s all true. But Isa and Violet seem convinced that their father was a war hero of some kind, while the official records show he was a deserter, an officer impersonator and paybook fraudster. But there are rumours that he traded off a spot in front of a firing squad for dangerous reconnaissance patrols. He also seemed to have regular contact with someone from his army days called Henry Williamson, who doesn’t seem to be connected to anything criminal in Glasgow.’

‘What are you getting at?’ asked McNab.

‘I really don’t know. There’s something nagging at me about it all. Let’s face it, there have been more than a few times we’ve seen the words with military precision used in headlines about robberies since the war. The one thing compulsory army service did was give your average crook the kind of discipline and training to make them all the more efficient at carrying out hold-ups.’

‘Hold on a minute …’ Ferguson laughed. ‘Last week we had a raid on a diamond merchant in the Argyle Arcades: one man with a fake pistol. He was caught because he thought the jeweller had activated some kind of automated dead-bolt on the door. What really happened was he kept pulling the door instead of pushing it. This despite the fact that there was a big brass doorplate engraved with the word PUSH. We’re not up to our eyes in master criminals or commando raiders yet, Lennox.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘But you do know what I’m talking about. My point is that what if Strachan was ahead of the game … what if he came out of the First War with skills, and maybe contacts who could have helped him plan better, more efficient robberies and other crimes.’

‘Leading up to the Triple Crown and culminating with the Empire Exhibition robbery?’ asked McNab.

‘Well, that’s the other thing. What if the Empire Exhibition robbery wasn’t the end but still the means to an end?’

‘I don’t get you.’

‘What if Strachan had something even bigger and better planned? Listen, here’s the way we’ve always seen it: Strachan puts together three huge robberies with an eye to becoming the sole King of Glasgow, but a copper is killed and things become too hot for Strachan, so he takes the cash and a powder and drops permanently out of sight, yes? Then a tangle of bones dressed in his clothes and with his monogrammed cigarette case is hauled up from the bottom of the Clyde, so all that changes. Now we have a fall-out amongst thieves, which is what you lot were putting together, where one or maybe all of Strachan’s accomplices realise their untilnow genius boss has put a rope around all of their necks. So this one or all of the gang kill Strachan, take his share and dump him in the river.’

‘It makes sense,’ said McNab defensively. Thinking is something policemen find hard work and hate it when their labours are picked apart.

‘Sure it makes sense,’ I said. ‘And it still might be the case, but we’ve got this witness who swears it was Strachan he saw in Nineteen forty-two, at Lochailort, and in an army major’s uniform.’

‘Bollocks,’ said Jock Ferguson. ‘I still think that’s shite.’

‘Well, just for a moment, pretend it isn’t. Let’s say that that really was Strachan, and he was there, fully accredited, as an army major. How could that come to be?’

‘It couldn’t,’ said McNab.

‘Now play along, Superintendent. Let’s take Strachan’s presence as an absolute fact. How could he have achieved that?’

‘Well …’ Ferguson pulled on the word thoughtfully. ‘We know that he had experience of passing himself off as an officer. And doing it very well.’

‘Which means it’s entirely conceivable that he was seen dressed as a major …’

‘But Lochailort was one of the most secure military installations in the country. It would take more than a uniform, a plum in your mouth and an authoritative demeanour to get in there.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Which is where the whole thing falls down,’ said Ferguson.

‘Let’s go back to the Triple Crown robberies. What if they were only a means to an end? From what I’ve been able to find out, Strachan would disappear for months on end. Just drop out of sight. What if he had spent months, years, establishing another identity elsewhere? Maybe more than one. What if his plan had been to use the proceeds from the Triple Crown robberies to fund something else, somewhere else?’

‘Like what?’ asked McNab.

‘Maybe just a different life somewhere else. The quality of life he imagined he deserved. Or maybe the proceeds were to be reinvested in another job: something even bigger than the Exhibition robbery … a mail train or gold bullion or the Crown bloody Jewels, I don’t know. But then, two things happen. One, things don’t go to plan during the Exhibition robbery and a copper is killed, so if Strachan’s plan was to use the money to become Glasgow King Pin, then it’s a complete wash-out. Two, Hitler invades Poland and everything is turned on its head. The whole of the country is on a war footing and pulling any big jobs becomes ten times more difficult. But I suspect something else happened. I’m not sure what, but I suspect that maybe Strachan’s officer act was part of whatever identity he set up for himself and somehow fantasy and reality fused and he ended up roped into some real unit.’

‘Have you heard of Fairy Tale Frankie Wilson?’ asked McNab, dully. I shook my head. ‘Inspector Ferguson here has come across him, haven’t you, Jock? He’s a compulsive little bastard. A compulsive thief and a compulsive liar. We call him Fairy Tale Frankie because he can’t keep it simple. When he’s trying to lie his way out of something, he keeps tripping up over his own lies, so he keeps inventing new, more outrageous lies to cover up. Before you know it his lie about why he had a jemmy in his pocket becomes a full-scale epic with a cast of characters that would send MGM into bankruptcy. But you just have to keep on listening, because it’s so bloody entertaining. I have to tell you, Lennox, even Fairy Tale Frankie couldn’t come up with anything as ridiculous as you’re suggesting.’

‘You could be right.’ I shrugged. ‘But we’re not dealing with the usual Glasgow criminal type here. And you can’t deny that that was no ordinary thug who jumped me in my office.’ I shook my head irritably as other thoughts crammed in. ‘Why are there no photographs of Strachan, anywhere? I’m telling you, he was planning his disappearance for a long, long time. This is no fairy tale, Superintendent. This is a whole new ball of wax.’

After McNab left, I smoked a couple of cigarettes with Jock Ferguson and talked the thing to death some more. We were interrupted by Dr ‘Sonny’, who gave me the all clear to go. Archie was waiting for me downstairs and shook hands with Jock Ferguson when we arrived.

‘Look after him.’ Ferguson managed to make it sound like an order.

‘I’ll keep him away from windows,’ said Archie dolefully.

I said goodbye to Ferguson, latching on, as casually as I could manage, something that I had been relieved had not yet raised its head.

‘By the way, Jock, what was all that about a murder case the other night? Govanhill, I think it was McNab said.’

I had put the question as conversationally as possible, but it still sounded clunky.

‘Why you asking?’ he asked, but with no more suspicion than usual.

‘Just curious.’

‘We think it was some kind of fairy killing. A pool lifeguard called Frank Gibson who was well known in those circles apparently.’

‘How was he killed?’

Jock Ferguson looked at me suspiciously.

‘Like I said, just curiosity.’

‘Morbid bloody curiosity. He had his throat cut. From behind. Whoever did it set the flat on fire. The whole tenement nearly went up with everybody in it. Why the hell would he set the place on fire after he’d killed Gibson?’

I shrugged to signal the limit of my curiosity, but I was thinking of the burnt furniture thrown into the back court. The answer, I felt, was obvious: fire wipes out evidence. I thought too of all of the other envelopes stuffed with negatives. Maybe Downey and Gibson had been pulling the same stunt with God knows how many others. And where was Downey now?

The kind of business I was in called for discretion. A low profile. Showing my guest the window had gotten me onto the front pages of the Bulletin, the Daily Herald, the Daily Record and the Evening Citizen. The Glasgow Herald confined me to page four. The Bulletin had a photograph of my office building with my window boarded up, and an arrow indicating the route taken by my guest to the street: just in case the Bulletin’s readers were unfamiliar with the workings of gravity.

Archie had the papers in his car when he came to pick me up. Archie’s car was pretty much as you would expect from Archie: a black Forty-seven Morris Eight into which he seemed to have to fold himself like a penknife. We didn’t talk much as we drove across the city and down to the Gallowgate. My mind suddenly filled with the fact that I had killed a man; that my actions, not for the first time, had ended a human being’s existence. I told myself that I had not had much choice in the matter. The truth was that I had had some.

Archie clearly sensed I was not in the mood for chat and we drove in silence back to my temporary lodgings. The door opened without being knocked and we were greeted sullenly by Mr Simpson. My landlord’s demeanour had shifted from suspicious to outright hostile.

‘I’ve chchread all of this schhhite in the papers. People being flung out of windowsch. We’ve got windowsch here. You’re that Lennochsch, aren’t you?’

‘I am,’ I said and noticed my bags, packed, sitting behind him in the hall. ‘But I’ve committed no crime. I was the victim of the attack, not the perpetrator. So your windows are safe.’

‘I don’t want no trouble. No trouble. You’ll have to go.’

‘Would it help if I told you I thought the guy had an Irish accent?’ I asked, deadpan. When he didn’t answer, I leaned past him to pick up my bags. He flinched as I did so and I gave him a wink.

‘Top o’ the mornin’ t’yah!’

‘Where now, boss?’ asked Archie, once we were back in the car. His voice remained dull but there was a twinkle in the large hang-dog eyes.

‘Great Western Road,’ I said. ‘But stop at a phone box on the way so I can warn my landlady.’

The world had turned on its axis a few times since I’d last spent a night in my digs, but I had somehow expected to pick up where I had left off; and specifically where I had left off my tearoom conversation with Fiona White. But things had moved on without me, somewhat.

The telephone had been engaged and I hadn’t been able to warn Fiona White that I was on my way back. And when we pulled up at my digs I noticed two cars I didn’t recognize parked outside. The first was a dark grey Humber. It had no police markings and the driver and passenger were in civvies, but it could not have looked more like a police car if it had flat feet. I felt the distinctly novel emotion of being pleased to see a police car outside my home: Jock Ferguson, or maybe McNab himself, must have arranged it. The second car was a black three- or four-year-old Jowett Javelin PE. Too flash for the police.

Lying in my hospital bed, I had played the movie of my return home in my head: Fiona White would be all nervously-contained agitation when I arrived. She would have read about the Defenestration of Gordon Street, but it would be clear she was glad to see me, and see me in one piece. A nervous little smile would play across her lips and I would have the almost uncontrollable urge to still it with a kiss. Instead I would let her fuss around in the kitchen and make Archie and me some tea.

After Archie left, we would settle into the routine of before, drifting slowly towards whatever it was we both wanted our relationship to become.

But I could tell as soon as she answered the door that my sudden and unannounced return perturbed Fiona White. She looked startled and awkward and almost hesitated before admitting me and Archie.

I didn’t like him as soon as I set eyes on him. The main reason was, for a second, I thought I recognized him, then realized he could not be the person I took him for, because the person I took him for was dead. The face was not the same, of course, there was just a strong family resemblance to the picture on the mantelpiece above the fire. The picture of the long dead naval officer.

‘You must be the lodger …’ he said smilelessly as he stood up when we entered the living room. Tea for two with best biscuits on the coffee table. He was tanned and dressed too lightly for Glasgow and had a just-arrived-from-abroad look to him.

‘You must be the brother-in-law …’ I said flatly.

‘We’ve been reading all about your … escapades. I must say that I’m not happy about you staying here at Fiona’s. Do you know that I was accosted by a policeman when I arrived here?’

‘Really? Well, you see, they’ve been told to challenge anyone who has a suspicious or dodgy look to them. And I don’t really see what my rental arrangements with Mrs White have to do with you.’

‘Well, as my sister-in-law and with my brother no longer here, I feel an obligation to Fiona and the girls’ welfare.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘And it’s taken ten years for this sense of obligation to grow on you?’

‘I’ve been away. Abroad. Working in India. But now that I’m back, I think it’s fair for you to know that things may change around here.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘Do you take the same size slippers as your brother?’

He looked stung but I knew he didn’t have it in him to take it further.

‘That’s quite enough from both of you,’ said Fiona. ‘James, I am quite capable of organizing my own affairs. Mr Lennox, you’ve had quite an ordeal. I’m sure you want to get some rest. I’ll fix something to eat about six, if you want to join us.’

I stared at her for a minute. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘My pleasure.’

I nodded to Archie and we headed up to my rooms. I was tired and pissed off and really wanted to smack the sneer off the smug bastard downstairs. But in the meantime I had bigger fish to fry.

‘I think your landlady is going to have to buy a bigger table,’ said Archie.

‘What are you talking about, Archie?’

‘If both of you are to get your feet under it.’

‘Oh yes, very funny.’

‘You okay here, chief? I can hang around if you want.’

‘No, Archie, that’s fine. I’m going to take a spin up to Billy Dunbar’s tonight to show him that photograph, but I can fly solo on that. You take the night off.’

I lay on my bed, smoking and aching. After about an hour I heard the front door open and voices. I went to the window and saw James White walk out to the Javelin. He turned and waved to Fiona and then looked pointedly up at my window. I looked pointedly back. The sight of him, his middle-class stability and his likeness to a long dead junior naval officer gave me a bad feeling in my gut. I had a vision of Fiona White’s future and no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t see me in it.

I washed and changed. Suit, shirt, underwear, everything. It was something about hospitals I could never understand: you came out of them smelling of carbolic yet you always felt dirty. I went downstairs at six and had a meal of fish, peas and potatoes with Fiona and her daughters. I tried to chat as much as I could but the truth was I was still pretty shaken up by what had happened in my office. Fiona frowned when she saw me take some prescription pills with my meal; the bandage and dressing on my arm was concealed by my shirt sleeve and she did not know how badly I’d been injured, if at all. But the other thing that nagged at me throughout the meal was the smug presence of a dead man’s brother.

After we finished, I helped Fiona take the dishes through to the kitchen but she told me to sit. The girls settled down to watch television and I closed the kitchen door.

‘Are you okay with this, Fiona?’ I asked. ‘I know that reading about what happened must have been a shock.’

She stopped washing the plate she was working on and leant against the edge of the sink, her back to me, and looking out of the kitchen window to the small garden at the back.

‘This man. You killed him? I mean it wasn’t an accident?’

I was about to say it was a little of both, but the infuriating thing about Fiona White was that she brought out the honesty in me. ‘Yes, I killed him. But it was in self-defence. He ambushed me in my office and tried to cut my throat. He was the same guy who jumped me in the fog.’

She turned to me.

‘So it’s safe for you to be back here?’ She made it more of a statement than a question.

‘That’s not one hundred per cent certain,’ I said. ‘I don’t for one minute think that this man was working on his own. But I can’t imagine whoever was behind the attack risking anything so … so visible again. Anyway, it looks like we have serious police protection now. But there is still no way I want to put you and the girls at risk. I can find new accommodation for the time being …’

‘No,’ she said, but as if she had to think about it and without emphasis.

‘It’s not always going to be like this, Fiona,’ I said. ‘Things have got all mixed up. I thought this kind of thing was behind me. I guess I was wrong.’

‘You don’t have to explain,’ she said. ‘But you know I can’t be part of that world. I can’t bring the girls into that kind of world.’

‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘But that’s what I’m trying to put behind me. Things will get better, like I said.’

‘I know they will,’ she said and smiled.

But we both knew my fate was sealed.

It had still been just within banking hours so, on the way back from the hospital, I had had Archie stop off at the bank. News of my adventures had obviously reached the bank and when I walked in it was the kind of entry that you would expect a gunfighter to get walking into a Western saloon. MacGregor himself dealt with my request to access my safety deposit box. He was overly chatty but nervous, as if making a conscious effort to avoid the word ‘window’ or any reference to catching a taxi. I was glad I had the goods on him, otherwise I reckoned I would have already lost the bank job. As it was, my knowledge of his sordid private life would do little to save me if the board of governors set their minds to get rid of me.

But there again, they maybe liked the idea of their cash being guarded by a life-taker.

I had taken the Webley from the safety deposit box and had tucked it into the waistband of my trousers. I knew that if McNab found out I was walking about his town heavy with an unlicensed gun, the recent thaw in relations would turn out to have been a false Spring. But if someone tried to kill me again, I wanted to have more than a hat stand in my hand. When I had gotten back to my digs, and after my pleasant exchange with James White, I had put the Webley under my pillow.

It was about eight-thirty when I put my jacket and hat on, went down to the hall telephone and ’phoned Isa. We arranged that I would meet her and Violet the next day.

I knocked on the Whites’ door and told Elspeth to tell her mother that I would be out for the evening. When I drove off, I was relieved to see that the dark grey Humber stayed on point outside the house, instead of following me. But I guessed my outing would be noted and radioed in.

Before I headed up north and into the country, I stopped at a telephone kiosk and called Murphy.

‘You heard what happened?’ I asked.

‘About you throwing that cunt out the fucking window? I believe it may have come to my fucking notice. I thought you was supposed to be discreet? So who was he?’

‘The same guy I told you and Jonny Cohen about. The one who jumped me in the fog.’

‘So what are you telling me, that you want your fucking money?’

‘No. Maybe. I don’t think so. Listen, I’m not at all sure that this guy was this so called Lad of Strachan’s. Unless Gentleman Joe sent him for elocution lessons, that is. He was English.’

‘Aye? Fucking reason enough to throw him out the window.’

‘Listen, Mr Murphy, could you tell Jonny Cohen about this? I’ve got to look into something else, and it might just tell us whether Strachan is alive or not. I’m also going to try to find out if this guy was the Lad or not.’

After I hung up, I drove out of Glasgow. The sky was heavy and dull but it felt good to get out of the city and into an open landscape. I guessed that there would be no one in the estate office at that time of evening, allowing me to dodge any encounter with the sexually repressed, tweed-clad Miss Marple. When I reached the estate, however, I found the gates closed and padlocked.

Running through the rough map of the place I had in my mind, I headed further on up the narrow ribbon of country road. A high dry-stone wall running along the side of the road marked the border of the estate. Eventually I found a lane that led to a disused entry, but this had been bricked up. At least the Atlantic was off the road and reasonably concealed, so I decided to risk my suede loafers and hounds-tooth suit by climbing the wall. I dropped down the other side into a mulch of old fallen leaves, twigs and branches. Ahead of me was a dense swatch of evergreens that the late evening light failed to penetrate, but I reckoned that if I walked straight ahead and managed not to break an ankle, I would come out onto the path that had led from the estate office to Dunbar’s cottage.

I really didn’t like the walk through the forest. I found myself listening to every creak, rustle and bird cry, my heart in my mouth. There was nothing to fear here and now, of course, but I’d taken many such walks through woods just like this, and back then there were things more deadly than squirrels and rabbits hiding in the foliage.

Ten minutes later I came out exactly where I thought I would, although it took me a minute to get my exact bearings on how far up the path I was. I looked around and found a largish rock by the side of the path. Its shape was reminiscent of a curled-up cat sleeping, or maybe it was just me who would see that. The point was it was distinctive enough for me to recognize and I moved it so that it sat out on the path. On the way back, all I had to do was find the rock, turn left into the woods and head arrow-straight towards the boundary wall.

It was beginning to get dark, even out here beyond the gloom of the trees. I didn’t know why I was doing it, but I slipped the Webley out from my waistband, snapped open the breech and checked the cylinder was full before snapping it shut again and tucking it back into my waistband. I also checked my inside jacket pocket to make sure the photograph was there.

It took me another fifteen minutes to reach the cottage. There were no lights showing and no sign of life, so I guessed that my luck had run out and that no one was home. I went up to the door anyway and knocked, but there was no reply. I stood there for a moment debating whether I should leave the photograph and a note, asking Dunbar to ’phone me if he recognized the man in the photograph. I decided against it. It was my only copy of the photograph and I had to be careful with it: it could, after all, connect me to a burnt-out tenement flat and a dead queer.

I cursed the waste of time coming all the way up here for nothing and turned resignedly from the door. Before I retook the path, I went to one of the cottage windows, cupped my hands to blinker my eyes and peered through the glass. As I did so the memory of my last experience peeping through a window came to mind and I hoped with a laugh I would not catch Dunbar and his ugly wife in flagrante.

I stopped laughing.

I snatched the Webley from my waistband and moved back to the door. It was unlocked and I pushed it as wide as it would go, scanning the room as I entered, ready to fire at anything or anyone that moved. It was empty, except for what I had seen through the window. I moved into the kitchen. Empty too. I came back into the main room.

It was becoming difficult to see in the gathering gloom, but I dared not switch on a light. This was a place and a situation I did not want to be seen in. I said a silent prayer of thanks that I had parked my car where I had, out of sight.

Billy Dunbar lay on the floor of the cottage, in front of the settee. His throat had been cut and the wound gaped like a clown grin. I could just make out in the dim light a bloom of dark crimson staining on the rug beneath his head. His wife lay on the other side of the room. Same story.

I pressed the back of my hand against Dunbar’s forehead. Stone cold. I reckoned he had been dead for at least an hour.

I stood silently in the middle of the room, touching nothing, listening for the sounds of anyone approaching on the path, trying to think what the hell this all meant and what I was supposed to do about it.

I thought of going for the police, but I was outside the City of Glasgow and I would find it difficult to explain my complicated involvement to some hick in a uniform who would have trouble with the most basic concepts: like it really wasn’t a good idea for first cousins to marry.

I had no idea about the social life of gamekeepers, but I decided to get as far away as possible, as quickly as possible, in case someone else from the estate decided to drop in for a drink or to exchange beauty tips with Mrs Dunbar.

Backing out to the door again, I took my handkerchief and swabbed the handle, the only thing I had touched, clean. I checked up and down the path. No one. Just to be on the safe side, I gave the window I had peered through a good wipe down too.

I put the gun back in my waistband and ran down the path, back the way I had come. After a couple of hundred yards I eased the pace to a trot. It was getting really dark now and I could easily lose my footing. I remembered where I was now: the path took a sudden bend to the right and I would have another half mile to the ‘cat’ stone.

I was fully around the corner before I saw them: a group of three men. The man in the middle turned and saw me and said something to the other two. Instantly I knew I was in trouble. Instead of coming up the path at me, the other two moved quickly off the path and into the fringe of woods, one on either side. The man in the middle stood still and watched me, his hand reaching inside his short, dark coat. I made a run for the cover of the woods to my left, trying to penetrate them as deeply as I could before the guy who had taken that side could outflank me. I was making a hell of a racket, but at this stage, distance and cover were the most important advantages to gain. I had elected for this side of the path because this was the direction the car lay in. If I had gone the other way I would have been at their mercy for longer.

I was running blind now and my chances of getting a foot caught on a root or tripping over a rock in the dark were too high. I stopped dead and stood stock still, straining the night for any sound. Nothing. But I knew that all three were now in these woods. Again the name of the game would be to outflank me. They would guess that my car was somewhere out on the road and I would be heading back to the perimeter wall. I listened some more. Still nothing.

I don’t know what it was about the three men on the path, but I had known instantly that they were Dunbar’s killers. Again it was something that I had picked up in the war, something I couldn’t analyse or explain: you just learned to tell whether the figures you had spotted in a landscape were combatants or civilians, even if they were vague figures, sighted from a distance. It was a predator’s instinct to recognize another predator.

And these guys had been predators.

More than that, there had been something about the man in the middle. He had been older than the other two. About my height. And there had been something about his bearing that, again from a distance, made me think of some kind of foreign aristocrat.

I was pretty sure I had his photograph in my pocket.

I took the revolver from my waistband, crouched down and waited. They were good all right, but not too good. I heard one of them far off to my left and a little ahead of me. He was moving quietly, but the sound of anything more than a crawl was difficult to hide in a forest at night. I guessed that he was about fifty yards off. My guess was that his compadre would have taken the same measure on the other side. Their boss, I reckoned, would wait until they were fifty yards into the woods and then come in to take the middle way. A triangulated search. I moved as low and silently as I could and advanced several yards to my right. There was a depression in the ground, not much of one, but it had been formed between root balls and it allowed me to crawl along beneath the profile of the forest floor.

Somewhere to my right, something made a noise and suddenly the dark was split by three beams of light. Their torchlight converged on the same spot and a small deer that darted off deeper into the forest. The torches went off, but they had been on for long enough for me to get a rough fix on their positions. I had been right about the search pattern. These guys were good. Professional. My main problem was that the point from which the light behind me came suggested that their boss was going to walk right into me.

The meagre light made me nostalgic for scuffles in the Glasgow smog and I inched back into the woods, trying to find an even better place to conceal myself. I picked up a rock and threw it as hard as I could into the dark. It didn’t travel as far away from me as I wanted before striking a tree. The torches came on again and focused on a point ten yards off. Not finding a Scottish Red Deer or a Greater Canadian Dumbass where they expected, they began to scan the forest and the beam of one torch passed directly over me. If I hadn’t been in the depression I would have been spotted for sure. The two flankers kept their torches on, constantly scanning and keeping me pinned down, but the guy behind me switched his off. My guess was he was on the move. In my direction.

I inched even further back. Eventually I found what I was looking for. A sprung tree had pulled itself up by the roots and a tangle of thick root, fibrous tendrils and clots of earth gave me a curtain to hide behind. In the other side was a thick fallen branch, the diameter of a small tree trunk. All thoughts of preserving suede or houndstooth forgotten, I slipped in behind the exposed root ball and hunkered down. I eased back the hammer on the Webley. Again I was back somewhere I didn’t want to be, but when it came to my life or someone else’s, I would make sure it was someone else’s. One of the searchers’ torch beams swept close over my head again and I sunk deeper. Shaking some of the soil from a root, I used it to darken my face, just in case I was caught in torchlight.

I didn’t hear him until he was almost on top of me. He had been moving almost silently and much more quietly than the other two. He stopped in his tracks, standing on top of the ridge, no more than three feet from my head. So close I couldn’t even ease round to take aim at him. If I moved, I’d have to shoot him. If he turned on his torch, he’d see me through the tangle of roots. I held my breath. This was insane: I’d already killed one man and now I was probably going to have to kill three more if I wanted to survive.

He moved on. But he did so so quietly that there was no way of me knowing how far. I stayed motionless. What this meant was that they were now all behind me, and between me and the perimeter wall and my car beyond. But by the same token, the way back to the path was clear. I turned slowly around in my hiding place and eased myself up to look behind me. I ducked back down when I found myself staring at the silhouette of the older guy’s back, only a few yards further on. Peering over the ridge I could see as he turned sideways. It was so dark that it was impossible to see him clearly, but again I got the impression that I was looking at the man whose picture was still in my pocket.

I was looking at Gentleman Joe Strachan. I was sure of it.