The Deep Dark Sleep

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I had quite a bit of time to kill, so instead of going into the office, I went back to my digs. The net curtain twitched in the downstairs window as I opened the gate and walked up the path, but Fiona didn’t come to the door as I came in, so I went straight up to my rooms.

In the bedroom, I opened the top drawer of the chest and laid the Webley in it. Reaching under the bed, I eased up the loose board and retrieved a box of shells for the revolver and a small leather roll-case. I unrolled the case on the bed and took out a hunting knife, still in its sheath and a set of brass knuckles. I laid these in the drawer with the gun and shells. Next, I found both my saps and laid them in next to the other weapons. They would stay there until tonight. I stripped off my shirt and examined the dressing on my arm. It was fresh and clean, but I would double bind it tonight, just to have that little extra support.

Back in the living room, I sat down at the bureau and wrote three letters: one to Jock Ferguson, detailing absolutely everything that had happened over the past two weeks and giving him the lowdown on a few other aspects of my colourful career. The second was to Archie, instructing him to take over my business. The third was a short note to Fiona White. I stuffed the money that Fraser had given me into the envelope for Archie. In with the letter to Fiona White, I placed my bank safety deposit box key and a letter of instruction to MacGregor, the bank’s Chief Clerk, informing him that I had taken Mrs White into my confidence in all matters relating to my investigations and she was to have unfettered access to the deposit box.

Once all the envelopes were sealed, I put them all into a larger brown envelope, on which I had written: IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH.

I had undertaken cheerier tasks.

I shut the envelope up in the bureau, but didn’t lock it, then went through to the bedroom and lay on my bed, smoking. Maybe it was because I was trying to fill my head with anything at all other than the night that lay ahead of me, but I started to think about home. Thinking about Canada was something I tried not to do too much, but now I indulged myself. I thought about the ‘Kennebecasis Kid’ as I always called that self I had been before the war: young, idealistic, blissfully ignorant of the crap life can throw at you. Stupid, probably. I thought about the killing I had done and the killing I had seen throughout the war. About how it had changed me into something I didn’t like.

All in all, I wasn’t too proud of what I had become during the war. I wasn’t too proud of most of what I had been up to since. It wasn’t that I was ashamed of myself in the way I would have been if I had become a white slave trader selling virgins into prostitution, sold drugs to school kids or played hockey for the Montreal Canadians — but I’d piled up the sins all right.

But even with all of my erring, sinning, fornication, drinking, brawling and shoving ex-commandos out of third floor windows, I was a choirboy compared to Gentleman Joe Strachan. Another thing I knew about myself was that I was bright. I had smarts enough for two, but even there I was left in Strachan’s shadow. He had made a career out of crossing, double-crossing, beguiling and confusing others with an ease and skill that was breathtaking. It was one thing I had found out about life, about people. We’re not all the same. There were always the manipulators and the manipulated, the singular and the unremarkable.

I even wondered whether it was true, after all, that Sneddon was Strachan’s illegitimate son, or if Gentleman Joe had somehow manipulated him, moulded him into the belief.

Maybe tonight it would be me who walked blindly into a trap of Strachan’s design.

There was a knock at my door.

I hadn’t heard anyone come up the stairs and I took my Webley from the drawer, draping a hand towel over the gun to conceal it. When I opened the door, Fiona White stood there, silent and awkward.

‘Fiona … come in,’ I said. ‘Excuse me for a moment …’ I went through to the bedroom and placed the gun back in the chest of drawers and pulled my shirt back on. When I returned, she now stood in the centre of the room, every bit as awkwardly as she had on the threshold.

‘Is there something wrong, Fiona?’ I asked.

‘The girls are at school …’ she said, as if I should understand what that meant.

And I did.

We spent the whole day together, mainly in bed, until the girls were due home from school. About noon, I made some coffee and she nipped down to her apartment to fetch some cold cuts for us to eat for lunch. She laughed and joked in a way I had never seen her before and the intimacy of it was even greater than the sex we’d had.

And, for a reason I couldn’t understand, or maybe I could, it made me very sad. It could have been that I really did not expect to see the next day dawn, or that I knew that even if I did, no matter how we felt about each other, our paths lay in different directions. But I laughed and joked too and bottled everything else up tight: my sadness, my fear, my hopes.

She kissed me when she left. A long, lingering kiss and she smiled again in a way that showed me the girl she had been.

I ate with her and the girls and everything was business as usual, except for the infrequent lingering glance we exchanged when the girls wouldn’t notice.

Fiona frowned, when I excused myself at eight-thirty.

‘Something I have to deal with,’ I explained. ‘Business I need to tie up.’

Collecting my stuff from my room, I strapped the knife to my right ankle, tucked the Webley into my belt, slipped the flat blackjack into my inside jacket pocket, the heavier one into one of my side pockets and the brass knuckles into the other.

That was the thing about a life of violence: it played havoc with your tailoring.

I parked the Atlantic in the city centre and hoofed it down to the waterfront, hoping that if I bumped into a copper, the fact that I was carrying a gun, knife, brass knuckles and two saps wouldn’t strike him as suspicious.

It was beginning to get dark by the time I got down to the Queen’s Dock. There was a night watchman just beginning his shift on the main gate and I walked past on the far side of the cobbled road, dodging the pools of lamplight. There was an open quay further along with several piles of crates to offer cover. I was over an hour early, but I reckoned Strachan would arrive ahead of time for his appointment with Fraser, just to scope out the location. I was applying the same logic that Provan and his buddies had applied eighteen years before. I tried not to think about how that had turned out for them.

Strachan pulled up in a glossy Triumph Mayflower. He was only ten minutes early and I was surprised, really surprised, to see that he had turned up alone.

I was impressed. Here he was on a gloomy Glasgow dockside, the Gorbals born and bred Joe Strachan, and he could not have looked more out of place. There was nothing about him that said Glasgow: he was as tall as me, and when he stepped out of the car without a coat, I could see that he was impeccably dressed as a country gentleman. The tailoring did not have the robust, shapeless and slightly tasteless look of typical British country wear; I guessed that his sports jacket and flannels were of Italian or French origin, which added to the vaguely foreign-aristocrat look I’d picked up from the photograph. And there was no doubt in my mind that he was the man in the photograph.

Strachan may have been in the back end of his fifties, but he had the physique of someone twenty years younger. This was no old man.

He stood at the end of the pier, watching the Clyde slide by inky and sleek in the dark. As I watched him, I wondered if Strachan was pondering on what it would really have been like to take the deep, dark sleep at the bottom of the river.

A second car arrived and I had to duck down behind the crates to avoid being picked up in the sweep of headlights. The car parked at the land end of the pier and Fraser got out. He walked right past my hiding place and as he made his way towards Strachan, I could see him glancing nervously about.

From my silent, shadowed hiding place I willed Fraser to stop looking around. He was sending a signal to Strachan as sure as if he had called ‘Lennox! Lennox! Come out, come out, wherever you are!’

He reached Strachan and the two men shook hands, Fraser still moving stiffly and looking as rigid as hell. I couldn’t hear what they were saying to each other but I just hoped to hell that Fraser was sticking to the script we had agreed in the car as we’d driven off the Finnieston Ferry. I’d told Fraser to say I’d come to see him and I wanted to do a deal. I wanted out of the whole business and just wanted assurances that they would leave me alone. I told Fraser to say that I had told him I had a complete dossier on Strachan, including his new identity and the photograph Paul Downey had taken, and if anything happened to me it would automatically be sent to the police, so on and so forth. I told Fraser to drop in that I had an eyewitness stashed away to boot. The eyewitness they had planned to bump off.

It was all complete guff — other than me having Paul Downey tucked away in a Largs caravan park — and Strachan would know it, but it was all just something for Fraser to say until I got a chance to get the jump on Strachan. And without his goons to support him, although it was still going to be a dangerous play, it was going to be that much easier.

As they talked, Strachan gazed at the ground in concentration and nodded, as if taking in every syllable that Fraser uttered. Then, suddenly, he held up a hand as if telling Fraser to wait. He walked over to the Mayflower and opened the boot. He hauled a small, slightly-built man with dark hair out of the boot and to his feet.

Paul Downey.

I made a start but then checked myself.

‘Good evening, Mr Lennox,’ Strachan called out into the night, but not in my direction. ‘As you see, I have your witness here.’ The accent, like the tailoring, didn’t have even the tiniest vestige of Glasgow about it. Cut-glass clear and modulated, the same way as my chum who took the window exit. ‘When you told Mr Fraser here to call my men off the search for Downey, all we had to do was to follow you. You’re really not as good as you think. Now, Mr Lennox, please don’t be tiresome. Show yourself. I know that you are here.’

It was then that I heard them: the other two. I turned to see one beginning to search the far side of the pier, starting at the top and working his way towards the water. I heard his chum on my side, further back and nearer to where Fraser had parked his car, working his way through the stacks of barrels and crates.

I kept tight, but I was pissed. I was pissed at being hunted again by these bastards. I felt my anger boil in my chest. If I was going to die here, I wasn’t going to be the only one.

‘Mr Lennox … please.’ He sighed and let go of Downey, who stood, his shoulders hunched, as if suspended by an invisible wire. Strachan now stood with Downey on one side, Fraser on the other. ‘Do you know the Fairbairn-Sykes Timetable of Death, Mr Lennox?’ He spoke loudly but did not shout. He knew I was somewhere on the pier. ‘Standard issue for commando and SOE operatives. He reached inside his jacket and slipped something from his belt. Not a gun.

‘Number One …’ Strachan held the F-S fighting knife, the same type with which my attacker had been armed, to the inside of Paul Downey’s arm, ‘the brachial artery. Depth of cut, just half an inch. Loss of consciousness, fourteen seconds. Death, one minute thirty seconds.’

I could hear Downey sob; see his shoulders shake. With lightning speed, Strachan moved the knife to Downey’s wrist. ‘Number Two … radial artery. Depth of cut, only one quarter of an inch. Slightly slower action, however and a smaller target, so I’ve never gone for it myself. Loss of consciousness, thirty seconds. Death, two minutes.’ He paused. ‘Now, Mr Lennox, please show yourself, or my demonstration might become more explicit.’

I stayed put. If he was going to kill Downey, he was going to kill Downey. I just had to work out how to get the three of us out of there. I heard noises closer to me.

Strachan sighed again. ‘All right, Mr Lennox. Do you know I’ve demonstrated these knife strikes more often than I can remember? All through the war. Now we come to the really quick kills. Number Three …’ The knife flashed and was at the side of Downey’s neck. ‘The carotid. Depth of cut, one and a half inches. Loss of consciousness in just five seconds. Death within twelve seconds. Mr Lennox?’

The guy to my right was getting really close. I slipped the Webley from my belt.

‘Now this brings me to my favourite of all strikes …’ Strachan arced his arm up, again so fast that Downey didn’t even flinch, and the blade of the commando knife was angled down resting just behind where Downey’s collar bone would be. ‘The subclavian. The gladiator strike. Depth of cut two and a half inches. Unconsciousness in two seconds. Death in three and a half. Like I said, my favourite of all cuts.’

With that, his hand arced again, the blade flashing in the dark. But this time it was away from Downey. It looked no more than a tap on the shoulder, but I could see the blade had sunk deep into Fraser’s body and was pulled free in the same sliver of a second. The lawyer sank to his knees, without uttering a sound, a dark bloom soaking his white shirt. He toppled, face down, onto the pier.

‘Now, Mr Lennox. I will give you this boy. I will let him leave here tonight to go on running and hiding and living in fear. But my price, Lennox, has to be you.’

I had a fix on the heavy searching on the far side of the pier and at that moment, the second goon emerged from behind the pile of crates next to me. His head was wrapped in bandages and from what I could see from his face, he wasn’t going to be modelling knitting patterns. He was the goon whose features I’d rearranged the night of our nature trek in the woods.

‘I’m here,’ I said quietly and stood up. I shot goon two in the bandages. I heard the percussive crack of a bullet passing close to my head and I fired at the other goon before he could improve his aim. He took it in the belly and doubled up, dropping his gun and screaming.

I aimed at Strachan, but he pulled Downey in front of his body as a shield, holding the F-S knife at the youth’s throat. And as I had just seen, he knew how to use it. There was no fear or panic in Strachan’s movements, just efficiency.

The goon behind me was still screaming, so I went over and kicked his gun out of reach. Strachan did nothing while I checked on the other goon. The bandages around his head were soaked crimson. He’d used up all the oxygen he was ever going to use.

I walked back towards where Strachan held Downey.

‘You all right, Paul?’ I asked.

‘I’ve wet myself,’ he said tearfully. ‘Please don’t let him kill me, Mr Lennox. Please don’t let him.’

‘What about it, Strachan? You said you’d let the boy go in exchange for me.’

‘That’s not quite the bargain it was, Mr Lennox, considering you have that gun.’

‘It’s the only bargain you’ll get. Let’s face it, if you kill Downey, I’ll kill you. Let him go and we can talk.’

‘By talk, do you mean bargain?’

‘If there’s one thing you should have learned about me by now, Mr Strachan … do I call you Mr Strachan? Or Joe? Or Colonel Williamson?’

‘Whatever you’re most comfortable with.’

‘Well, if there’s anything you should have learned about me, it’s that I’m pragmatic.’ I turned my attention to Downey. ‘Now, Paul, I want you to listen to me very carefully. If Mr Strachan here lets you go, I want you to run and keep running. No police. You tell nobody what happened here, ever. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, Mr Lennox.’

‘If you want to live without having to look over your shoulder for Mr Strachan, he’ll have to be convinced that you’re no threat to him. You forget what happened here and get as far away from Glasgow as you can, and don’t come back. You got it?’

‘Yes. I swear.’ He turned his head as far as Strachan’s grip would allow. ‘I promise, mister. Honest.’

‘Well, Strachan. What about it?’

Strachan let go his hold on Downey, who stood frozen for a moment, shocked and unsure what to do.

‘Go, Paul,’ I said and tried to keep the urgency from my voice. ‘Run. And remember what I said. Tell nobody anything, about what happened here, about Fraser, about Strachan, and especially about me.’

He nodded furiously, staggered a few steps forward away from Strachan, then broke into a run.

‘I suggest we tie this up quickly,’ I said once we were alone. Behind me, the goon with the burst gut had stopped screaming and was now making the low, harsh snoring sounds that herald the way out. ‘I’m guessing someone, probably the night watchman at the yard, maybe heard the shots.’

‘So you really want to bargain?’ said Strachan. ‘I thought that was all bull. Well, I’ll bargain. And I’ll tell you, I could always use a man like you.’

‘My job was to find out what happened to you. I was hired by your daughters. As far as I can tell, my business with them is concluded. And handing you over to the police isn’t my concern. Although I have to tell you they offered a handsome bounty.’

‘I’m sure I can recompense you for your loss. More than recompense you.’

‘I was counting on that.’ I smiled.

‘Could we perhaps dispense with the artillery?’ Strachan nodded towards the Webley.

‘Oh, I’m afraid not. At least not yet. I’m not that green.’

‘I can see you are indeed not, Mr Lennox. But as you say, time may be pressing. What do you want?’

‘The truth. That’s all. I think any business relationship should be based on trust. So, I want to know, how did you manage to pull the whole Colonel Williamson stunt?’

‘No stunt, Lennox. Henry Williamson is who I am. Who I became. I’ve lived this way for so long that Joe Strachan with his vulgar little ways is a stranger to me.’

‘And the real Williamson?’

‘Long gone. Let me explain something. Back in the First War, I saw the main benefit of class and privilege. The main benefit is that there is always someone to do things for you. The lower classes. And in a war like the Great War, they do the dying for you. That was the biggest benefit: keeping you out of harm’s way. So, if I wasn’t the part, I could play the part.’

‘Your little excursions impersonating officers?’

‘It started as impersonation, but then I found that I sank into it rather too well. When I was caught, I became an embarrassment to the army. The act I put on was so convincing that I kept it going throughout the trial. It really threw them. A cockney or a scouser or someone with a heavy Glaswegian accent — it was easy to put someone like that in front of a firing squad, but if you talked like an officer, then it was a bad show to put you against a wall. They knew I was putting it on, but they couldn’t see past it, or hear past it. So when I was asked if I had anything to say before sentencing, I said that I did not want my family shamed by me being branded a coward … as if my family would give a tinker’s damn about me. I asked if, instead of facing a firing squad, I could be sent on dangerous missions over the wire. Missions where I would inevitably, eventually, die in action.’

‘And they agreed to that?’

‘As I said, they couldn’t see past the bearing and the accent. I told them I would rather die fighting for my country than shot as a coward, which I was not. It was the out they were looking for and I was assigned to Battlefield Intelligence. Basically, I was ordered to crawl all the way over to the enemy’s trenches and get as much information on their deployment as possible. So I did it. And they ended up giving me a medal for it.’

‘How did you survive?’

‘The first few times I did my duty and came back with accurate reports. They were used to direct our artillery on the best points in the enemy’s lines. It was after that first artillery barrage, where they not only missed the points in the enemy trenches I had pointed out, but they missed the trenches completely, that I decided there was no point in risking my life for nothing. They had been sending me out with another ex-deserter, but he stood on a landmine, so I was left to do the intelligence gathering on my own.

‘Command seemed to think that one man was half as likely to be spotted as two. So I would crawl out into the dark, halfway into no-man’s-land, find a deep enough shell crater and have a few hours’ sleep. Then, when I got back, I would give a made-up report. Made-up, but based on what I had really seen on the first few sorties. I just changed the positions, the numbers, shuffled around the regiments, that kind of thing.’

‘And no one suspected?’

‘Not for a long while, then a young intelligence corps captain started to question me about one of my reports. He said I couldn’t have seen the regimental markings that I reported seeing. Everyone else was convinced, but Williamson insisted he came with me on the next sortie. We went all the way over to the German lines, following the route I had taken when I’d really gone over. I guided him from cover to cover, and that convinced him that I really did make the trip each night. The problem was that he then insisted on coming on other sorties. The fool was going to get me killed. But it allowed me to become chummy with him, or as chummy as the chasm in rank and class would allow. I asked him all about his background, and he told me he was South African but had been sent to their version of public school. I did a bit more chat and got out of him that he had no close family left. He was about my age and size, and even looked rather like me, so I decided I’d kill him in no-man’s-land, take his papers and all his marks of rank.

‘I needed everybody to believe that Henry Williamson was still alive, in order for me to use his identity after the war, so I planned to tell command that he had been captured, not killed. I had it all planned out for the next time we went out into no-man’s-land at night, but we were halfway across when the Germans sent up a flare right above us and we were spotted. They opened fire and Williamson was hit in the legs.’

‘So the Germans did your job for you …’

‘No. Not at all. I needed Williamson alive, so I carried him back to our trenches. And that was it. Suddenly I’m not a deserter any more, I’m a hero. Instead of getting a chest full of firing-squad bullets, I get a chest full of medals. And Williamson …’ Strachan shook his head in disbelief. ‘Williamson became my bosom buddy.’

‘Williamson survived the war?’

‘He did. He wanted to keep in touch, so I encouraged him to do just that. He came up to Glasgow unannounced, thinking it would be a great surprise for his old war chum. I thought it was all very odd, given that he was an officer and a gentleman, but then he finds out that I’m known and feared as a gang boss. It turns out that he hasn’t two pennies to rub together and no job prospects, so he asks me for a loan and if I could put any work his way. So I did. He was perfect for pulling scams, because no one suspects an officer and a gentleman. Turns out the real Henry Williamson was every bit as rotten to the core as I was; it was just that he used the advantages of class to hide it from the world.’

‘Let me guess … you convince him to teach you all the moves and manners, so you can form a double act?’

‘I’m impressed, Lennox … again. That’s exactly what I did. All the time I’m getting every detail of his history from him — as the typical gentleman’s background, of course. I found out where he went to school, who he went to school with, who the masters were, all of that. The beauty of him being South African was that he went to Michaelhouse in Natal, their version of an elite public school. It gave me social credibility without me tripping over “old school chums” here in Britain.’

‘So then you do him in?’

‘Sadly, yes. But not quite as you imagine. I had planned to, of course, but I actually caught him stealing from me. Little amounts to start with, and items — like my favourite gold cigarette case.’

‘Oh my God …’ The penny dropped. All the way to the bottom of the Clyde. ‘It was his remains they dredged up?’

‘The police were absolutely miles off with the dates. I shot him in the neck and wrapped him up in chains and dumped him in the middle of the river. But that was in Twenty-nine, not Thirty-eight. I actually felt quite badly about the whole business, so I let him keep my cigarette case, as a gesture, so to speak. I had another case made, identical, by the same goldsmith. I have to say I never thought old Henry would ever be found, and certainly not after such a long time. But the fact that everyone thought it was me was an added bonus. Joe Strachan is dead, Mr Lennox. Now, can we remove ourselves from this sorry little tableau, before someone finds us here?’

‘You’re going nowhere, Strachan. Despite your phoney accent and ersatz refined manner, you’re nothing but a common, low, Glaswegian thug. No matter what you do, you’ll never wash off the stench of the Gorbals. Drop the knife or I’ll let you have it now.’

‘You disappoint me, Mr Lennox,’ he said. The F-S knife clattered on the cobbles of the pier. ‘You’re not as bright as I thought you were. Tell me, what exactly are you going to do? You can’t hand me over to the police. For a start, I’m dead, remember? Officially I’ve been at the bottom of the Clyde for eighteen years. And secondly, how are you going to explain your involvement with the deaths of Frank Gibson, Billy Dunbar and these poor unfortunates scattered around here? No, Lennox, you don’t have much of a choice in this. So let’s do a deal. I know you won’t talk, and I’ll pay for your silence and my peace of mind.’

I sighed, and was surprised how weary my sigh sounded. We both knew where this was going; we both disbelieved everything the other said. The night was cooling and the wake of a ship that was now long passed broke against the pier. I kept my eyes fixed on Strachan because he was someone you kept your eyes fixed on, but I was aware of the shadowed shapes and distant navigation lights of ships and tugs sliding silently by, far out on the black Clyde behind him. Every journey comes to an end and this journey had been rougher than most, and it had brought me here: to the end of a Glasgow pier with the killers and the killed.

I looked at the man before me. Strachan must have been pushing sixty, but not in the way people were sixty in Glasgow. In Glasgow, sixty was elderly. Broken by hard work and harder living. Strachan’s comparative youthfulness and fitness spoke of a life a universe removed from Glasgow. A life he was desperate to return to, unscathed and unsullied by everything that had happened. I thought of my own life here, in Glasgow, and a life left behind in Canada a wartime ago. The unfairness of it made me feel sick. Strachan had paid for his second chance with the pain and blood of others.

‘So you just get to walk away?’ I said eventually. ‘And what about the trail of death and misery you’ve left behind you? I’m expected to let that all go? Just forget about the innocent people you’ve killed simply to preserve the fiction of your fake existence?’

‘Like I said, Lennox, you have no choice. Let it go. Let me go. It’ll make you a rich man. I’ll organize it through Willie Sneddon.’

‘He doesn’t even know for sure you’re alive. I don’t think he’s even sure that he really is your son.’

‘Then it’s time for a father-son reunion to put his doubts to rest. You know I’m right. You know everything I’m saying is right.’

‘That’s true,’ I said and nodded respectfully. ‘What you’ve said is all true. And do you know what the truest thing is?’

‘What?’ He was smiling now, knowing he had beaten me down with his logic.

‘The truest thing you’ve said is that you’re dead. As far as everyone is concerned you’ve slept the deep, dark sleep at the bottom of the river for eighteen years.’

‘Your point is?’ he asked, the smug smile still on his face.

‘That this isn’t murder.’

I shot him in the face. Right in the middle of his smug smile. My second and third bullet hit him in the chest and the life left him before he toppled backwards, off the pier and into the river.

‘Sleep well, Gentleman Joe,’ I said.

I used my handkerchief to wipe down the Webley before I threw it as far as I could into the dark.

I heard it splash, somewhere far out in the inky Clyde.