The Deep Dark Sleep

CHAPTER FIVE

I went back to my office for an hour or two and tied up the loose ends on a couple of the divorce cases I’d been working on. It was mainly paperwork: the sad, sordid bureaucracy of marital disentanglement. Or extramarital entanglement. Or both. I trudged through the usual statements corroborating the evidence of a hotel manager, chambermaid or anyone else who would confirm that they had seen Mr X in bed together with Miss Y. Of course, it was all a put-up job — with me doing the putting-up for some divorce lawyer — and the witnesses were always twenty pounds better off after signing their statements. Divorce in Britain was a complicated and particularly seedy business. In Scotland, which had its own divorce laws, it was given exactly the same kind of turn of the Presbyterian screw that I had discussed with Macready.

Thinking about it, it was ironic that I was now investigating how someone had accomplished the same kind of setup I regularly put together. Except this time it had been Mr X and Mr Y, and at least one of them had not been party to the set-up.

By the end of the afternoon, I had everything I needed to tie up, tied up. I was left with just the three jobs on the books: the next day’s wages run, Isa and Violet’s job and the John Macready case. And between them, they would take up all of my time.

I made a couple of calls to those in the underground know and asked them if they knew a Henry Williamson. None did. I don’t know why that name, more than the others on the list, had stuck with me. Maybe it was because he was connected to Gentleman Joe Strachan’s First War record, which still remained a puzzle: why would his daughters believe Strachan had been a war hero when, according to Jock Ferguson, he had been anything but?

It was about seven by the time I got back to my digs, having eaten at Roselli’s, as I often did on the way home. I had the upstairs floor of a large villa on Great Western Road. It was basically a family home that had been subdivided and Mrs White, my landlady, lived downstairs with her two daughters, Elspeth and Margaret.

Mrs White — Fiona White — was a very attractive woman. Not in the same knock-your-eye-out way as the redoubtably configured Leonora Bryson, but she was even beautiful, in a careworn and weary sort of way. She had bright green eyes that should have sparkled, but never did, above Kate Hepburn cheekbones. Her hair was dark and cut conservatively and she dressed with taste, if without imagination. The reason Mrs White always looked careworn and weary was because of an unfortunate brief encounter during the war between a German torpedo and a British destroyer on convoy escort duty. The result had been that, within minutes, the destroyer was lying, broken, at the bottom of the Atlantic, taking all but a handful of its officers and men with it.

When I had first moved into my digs, it had seemed to me that the White family still waited for husband and father to return from duty, philosophical about the delay in the same way Brits had become philosophical about all delays and shortages. But Lieutenant George White slept an even deeper, darker sleep than Gentleman Joe Strachan; he was never coming home.

I was comfortable in my accommodation, other than that I had never brought a female guest to my rooms. It was pricey, I suppose, but I had become attached to the little White family. Most of all, I had long harboured a desire to become biblically attached to Fiona White.

The attraction, I knew, was mutual, but grudging on her part. Call me finicky, but when a woman is filled with self-loathing because she finds herself attracted to me, it tends to dent my ego. The truth was, and it confused the hell out of me, Fiona White tended to bring out the gallantry in me. Which was highly unusual, because, generally, an act of gallantry for me would be to ask the young lady to remind me again of her name before we did the dirty deed in the back of my Austin Atlantic.

There were a lot of things about me that were complicated: my relationship with women wasn’t one of them. Or maybe it was.

I found that whenever I looked at Fiona White, I felt something that I didn’t feel with other women. I wanted to protect her, to talk with her. Just to be with her. To watch her laugh. Strange feelings that did not necessarily involve unbuttoning my fly.

Perhaps foolishly, I had made my feelings known to her. I had been in a particularly sentimental mood, having handed over a large amount of money — something to make me misty-eyed at the best of times — to someone for no good reason other than I felt they deserved it more than me. So, giving my shining armour a final polish, I had knocked resolutely on Mrs White’s door and asked to speak to her. Sitting with her in the small kitchen of her flat, I had done all the talking … about what the war had done to us both, about how I felt about her, about how I wanted to put the past behind me — behind us — and how we could perhaps repair the damage in each other. To help each other heal.

She had sat quietly listening to me, a hint of the sparkle that should have been in the green eyes, and when I had finished my declaration of affection she had held my gaze and, without hesitation, given me notice to quit my lodgings.

I had taken that as less than a maybe. I had, of course, tried to talk her round, but she had remained resolutely silent, simply repeating that she would be obliged if I quit my lodgings within the fortnight, as the Brits referred to two weeks. I had been, I have to admit, more than a little dejected. And that in itself told me something about my feelings towards Fiona White. Hard though it was to believe, I had occasionally encountered some women who actually managed, somehow, to find me totally resistible. But this stung.

It had been the day after when I heard a soft knock at the door. Mrs White came in and, standing awkwardly and stiffly, proceeded to tell me that I need not look for new lodgings, unless I had found some already, and that she apologized for having been so brusque. I was relieved to hear it, but the way she delivered it was so impersonal that I felt I should have been taking down minutes. She went on to explain that, while she appreciated that what I had said had been well intentioned, there was no way she would be entertaining the idea of a gentleman friend.

As she spoke, there was a breathlessness in her delivery and I could see the neck above the white collar of her blouse blossom red. I was filled with the urge to rush over to her and kiss the bloom on her neck, but I decided to hang on to my lease instead. When she had finished she asked if I was in agreement and I had said I was and she shook my hand with the tenderness of a rugby-playing bank manager.

But it had been significant. I had known that what she was telling me was that she didn’t want me to go, and her protestations that nothing could ever develop between us had rung less than convincingly.

Over the months since then, we had gradually moved to a situation where I spent the odd evening watching the television I had bought, but had suggested was better kept downstairs, together with Fiona White and her daughters. I had arranged the odd excursion to Edinburgh Zoo or the Kelvingrove Art Galleries, again always with Fiona chaperoned by her two daughters.

I was playing the long game.

In the meantime, there was the usual itch that had to be scratched and scratch I did, as I always had, but with more discretion than before. I had always sensed that Fiona White had me measured as a bit of a bad sort, based on the flimsiest of evidence: like the fact that on one occasion the police had banged on her door in the middle of the night and dragged me away in handcuffs, or the time that a young lady with whom I had recently parted company turned up and created something of a scene. I therefore did my very best to make sure that my liaisons were kept as out of view as possible.

The one major difficulty this presented was the fact that I had guessed Fiona White had always taken mental note of the occasions when I had remained out all night. So, after our heart to heart, I made sure I never stayed away overnight, unless I had given my landlady advance warning, explaining that I had to go away on business. Which it hardly ever was.

Coming home after being with a woman was not something that troubled me, to be honest. It was the difference between men and women, I supposed: women wanted you to remain after intimacy. For the average Scotsman, this was rather like being asked to hang around a football stadium for three hours after the game had ended. What they really wanted to do was get out as quickly as possible so they could get drunk with friends while giving them a summary of the match highlights.

I prided myself on being a little more considerate and sensitive than that, and certainly more discreet, but I did have a habit of finding a reason for getting home. The fact that I usually stayed at least as long as it took to smoke a couple of Players put me up in the ranks of hopeless romantics and continental lovers.

Having said that, I found the idea of waking in the morning with Fiona White on the pillow next to me was a whole different proposition. And somehow a perplexing one.

So, when I returned that evening at seven, instead of going straight up to my rooms I knocked on the Whites’ door and sat with them watching television. Fiona White smiled when she answered the door to me: a small porcelain gleam between the freshly applied lipstick. She smiled more these days. She asked me in and I sat with her, Elspeth and Margaret and watched The Grove Family on television, balancing a cup of tea on the sofa’s armrest. All around me were the signs of my increasing encroachment: the television set itself; a new standard lamp; and, in the corner, the Regentone radiogram that I had bought for fifty-nine guineas and had claimed was too big for my rooms. It all made me feel at my ease and itchingly restless at the same time. If anyone had stepped into that living room, it would have looked like a perfectly normal domestic scene with all of the essential elements of a perfectly normal family.

I was deliberately, inch-by-inch, easing myself into the gap left by a dead naval officer. I had no idea why I was doing it: it was certainly true that I liked the kids, really liked them, and my feelings for Fiona White were deeper than any I had felt for any woman, except perhaps one. But if I had felt sorted out enough, adjusted enough, to make a fist of a normal life, then why hadn’t I already left Glasgow behind and all of the dreck I’d mired myself in and, at long last, taken that ship to Halifax Nova Scotia?

My domestic idyll was interrupted by the ringing of the telephone we shared in the small hallway at the bottom of the stairs that led to my rooms. Fiona White answered it and then called me to the ’phone, a mildly disapproving frown on her face.

‘Hello,’ I said once she had gone back into the living room, closing the door behind her.

‘Lennox?’ It was a voice I didn’t recognize. It sounded like a Glasgow accent, but not as strong as most and a little bit fudged with something else.

‘Who is this?’

Only Jock Ferguson and a few others had my telephone number here. Anyone who wanted me knew to ’phone my office, or find me in the Horsehead Bar.

‘Never mind who I am. You’re looking for information on Gentleman Joe, is that right?’

‘You’re very well informed. And quickly informed for that matter. Who told you I was interested in Strachan?’

‘Are you looking for information or not?’

‘Only if it’s worthwhile.’

‘There’s a pub in the Gorbals. The Laird’s Inn. Meet me there in half an hour.’

‘I’m not going to meet you at short notice at The Laird’s Inn, The Highlander’s Rectum or The Ambush in the Heather. Just tell me what it is you have to tell.’

‘I’m not going to do that. I want paid.’

‘I’ll send you a postal order.’

‘You have to meet me.’

‘Okay. Tomorrow morning, nine sharp, at my office.’ I hung up before he had a chance to protest. I dialled Jock Ferguson’s home number.

‘What the hell is it, Lennox? The football’s about to come on. The international.’

‘I’ll save you and Kenneth Wolstenholme the trouble, Jock. Scotland will lead by one goal until the last fifteen minutes and then snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by letting three goals in in quick succession and you’ll spend the next two weeks saying “we was robbed” — like everyone else. Listen, Jock, who did you tell I was asking about Joe Strachan?’

‘Nobody. I mean, just the few other coppers I had to ask for information, like I already told you. Why?’

‘I’ve just had a call trying to lure me to the Gorbals, if you can use lure and the Gorbals in one sentence. He said he knew I was looking for information on Strachan and offered to sell me some.’

‘You’re not going, I take it?’

‘As you Glaswegians are fond of saying, I did not come up the Clyde in a banana boat. I’ve told him to call at my office tomorrow at nine. I doubt if he’ll show. I just wanted to know if it could have been someone you had spoken to.’

‘Maybe your clients have been talking.’

‘No. I thought about that but don’t see it happening. Thanks anyway, Jock.’

I hung up and went back into the living room.

‘You’re not going out then, Mr Lennox?’ Fiona White asked as I sat back down next to the girls.

‘Oh … that? No. I’m sorry about that. It was a business thing, but I don’t know how he got this number. I’ll deal with it tomorrow.’

‘I see,’ she said and turned back to the television. I could have sworn there was a hint of a smile as she did so.

I was right to have suspected an ambush. I got up and headed into my office early, but as soon as I stepped out of the front door of my lodgings I was grabbed by the throat. Except it wasn’t some thug that went for me but the lurking Glasgow climate. September was turning into October and something cold from Siberia, or worse still from Aberdeen, had moved into the city and collided with the warm air. Fog. And fog didn’t linger long in Glasgow before it became thick, choking, yellowy-green-grey smog.

Glasgow had been the industrial heart of the British Empire for a century. Factories belched thick smoke into the sky, and the greasy fuming of a hundred thousand tenement chimneys combined into a single, diffuse caliginous mass above the city. And when it combined with fog, it turned day to night and took your breath away. Literally.

I didn’t debate long about driving into the office. I generally took it that if I couldn’t see my car from the door of my digs, then driving wasn’t a great idea. The same went for the buses, which left the options of the subway, trolleybuses or trams. The trams were always the most reliable in the smog, so much so that queues of cars would trail along behind them as the only way of being sure to navigate through the miasma; although it often led to motorists finding themselves in the tram depot rather than where they thought they were going.

I walked along Great Western Road, keeping close to the kerb to make sure I didn’t wander off into the middle of the street, and eventually found the tram stop. I could see the indistinct outline of an orderly queue at the stop and, as was always the case in Glasgow, this collection of strangers were chatting among themselves as if they had known each other for years.

I was about four feet from the end of the queue, which was about as far as you could see in the fog, when I felt something jab painfully into the small of my back. I was about to spin around when a hand clenched itself around my upper arm and dug in. The smog clearly had an accomplice, after all.

‘Don’t turn around …’ I recognized the voice as the one I’d heard on the phone. The same odd mix of accent, but this time it was authoritative and calm. ‘If you see my face, I’ll have to kill you. Do you understand that?’

‘It’s not that complicated,’ I said. In the smog you were deprived of much of your vision and your other senses became keener, it seemed. I puzzled as to why I hadn’t heard him come up behind me.

‘You should have kept our appointment last night, Lennox. Now, we’re going to back away down the alley behind me and you’re going to keep nice and quiet and nothing untoward will happen to you.’

Untoward. The vocabulary and the accent were both all over the place. ‘All I want to do is to talk to you. No one need get steamed up or hurt.’

‘I’m assuming that is a gun you’ve got in my back,’ I said, ‘not a rolled-up copy of Reveille. Let me see the gun or I’m not doing anything.’

‘Nice try, Lennox. I lift the gun and you make a grab for it. I tell you what, I’ll pull the trigger and you watch a bit of your spine and maybe a chunk of liver fly off into the fog. Would that convince you?’

‘That would do the trick, for sure … but on reflection, I think I’ll take your word for it.’

It was more than ten years since the end of the war, but there were still vast quantities of guns circulating, particularly in Glasgow. The hard thrust I felt in the small of my back didn’t feel like a bluff, and my new best friend had the kind of quiet confidence that came from experience, so I decided to play nicely. Or at least play nicely for as long as it looked like I’d be able to walk away from our encounter.

He pulled me backwards and the vague outline of the tram queue was swallowed up again in the fog. We were in a side street now that was little more than an alleyway and he steered me backwards twenty yards or so before swinging me around until I was kissing brick. There were cobbles under our feet: Glasgow-black and slick, but which sounded under my heels. But not his. Like when he had come up behind me, he seemed to move silently.

‘Lay your hands flat against the wall, level with your head.’

I did what I was told, but tried to measure, from the sound of his voice, how far back from me he now stood. If he wanted to shoot me in the back of the head, now would be the time.

‘You told me on the telephone last night that you had information worth paying for,’ I said. ‘I have to tell you I find your sales technique a little pushy.’

‘Keep the wisecracks up, Lennox, and we might just seal the deal here and now.’

‘Pushy but persuasive,’ I said, still trying to measure the distance. I decided this was probably a no-sudden-moves-situation. ‘Okay, friend, what’s this all about?’

‘You’re sticking your nose into this Strachan business. I want to know why.’

‘I’m naturally curious,’ I quipped, and he quipped back by slamming a fist into my kidney. The impact jarred my cheek into the wall and drove every drop of air out of my lungs. I dug my fingers into the wall as I gasped in the tarry, damp fug. He gave me the time to recover.

‘I’ll ask you the same question, Lennox, but if you smart-mouth me again, you’ll end up pissing blood for a month. Got me?’

I nodded, still incapable of speaking and sucking air into tortured lungs.

‘You’re going to drop the whole Strachan thing, you got that? You’re going to walk away from it for good. If you don’t, you’ll end up at the bottom of the Clyde yourself. Now, I want to know why you’ve been asking about Joe Strachan. What’s he to you?’

‘Work,’ I said through tight teeth. ‘That’s all. I was hired to.’

The pain in my side was intense and nauseous. My pulse throbbed hard and sore in my head. This guy knew what he was doing but I knew that if I played along and didn’t do anything stupid, I’d probably walk away from this.

But the truth was that this guy was pushing my buttons. All the wrong buttons. The kind of buttons that made me want to play anything but nicely. The kind of buttons that stripped away ten years of civilian life and took me back to a place no one wanted me to be.

‘Who hired you?’ he asked, forgetting to give the r a celtic roll. Whoever he was, he was working hard at hiding it.

I let go a long gasp, clutching my side where he had hit me, and started to bend sideways.

‘I’m going to be sick …’ I leant away from the wall and down, my hand braced against it. I heard a muffled step backwards. He was probably trying to work out if I was genuine or making a move. I leaned deeper and began retching. I could see his shoes: tan suede with soft soles; the reason I didn’t hear him behind me. His feet were planted square and resolutely: there was nothing tentative about this guy. If I made a move he’d be ready for it.

But I made it anyway.

I heaved against the wall with the hand I had been resting on it and thrust myself at him with the loudest scream I could manage: it was he who had to worry about attracting attention, not me. I saw he was about my age and well built, and definitely not Gentleman Joe, ghost or otherwise. Fixing my attention on the gun, I didn’t have a chance to take in his face. He moved swiftly to one side, anticipating my lunge, but I swiped at him with a fist that skimmed his jaw. He swung a foot that caught me across the shins and I went sprawling on the cobbles.

I rolled as soon as I hit the ground, depriving him of an easy target, but he didn’t fire. Instead, as I struggled to get up, I saw the gun arc through the smog in a vicious slash at my temple. I took most of the power out of the blow by blocking it with my left forearm and made an unsuccessful grab for the pistol with my other hand, at the same time slamming my heel upwards into his groin. I missed but caught him in the belly and he doubled. When it comes to a fight with a gun, possession is more than nine-tenths of the law and I made another grab for it. Instead of pulling against me, as most people would do instinctively, he pushed into me as I pulled and slammed the butt of the gun into my cheek, using my own force against me. We had obviously gone to the same finishing school. I felt something wet on my cheek and felt the world take a brief but perceptible wobble.

He staggered back to his feet and I saw him raise the gun to take aim. I was halfway to my feet too and dived to one side, again rolling several times before leaping up and running. I had lost all sense of direction in the smog, but as there seemed to be an upward incline beneath my feet, I guessed I was actually heading further up the side street, away from the main road. I was hidden in the smog now. But so was he, and, unlike mine, his shoes made no sound on the cobbles.

I sprinted blindly a few yards then stopped, pressing myself against the wall. I eased forward slowly, making as little sound as I could. I found a bricked-up doorway, pressed myself into it and waited for the first shot to be fired, hopefully in the direction of where I had been, rather than where I now was. But there were no shots.

I had only managed a swift look at his face, and when I had seen it, the features had been twisted into a snarl. I had gotten just enough of a view to see that he had dark hair and a hard, angular face. I was also pretty sure I had seen an ugly scar on his forehead. He wasn’t someone I had seen before.

I kept pressed into the recess of the bricked-up doorway, straining to hear any sound. In the smog, at the best of times, you can feel isolated, detached, as if someone had switched off the world and nothing existed beyond the four or five feet you could see. But I wasn’t alone: there was another wanderer out there, hunting me with a gun. At any second he could burst into my tiny circle of awareness and it would be down to who reacted quickest. By the same token, he could just as easily have been halfway to Paisley by now.

I waited, not moving, straining the smog with every sense and ready to spring at anyone or anything that came out of it. Nothing. I wiped my cheek with the back of my hand and saw it smeared red. I started to think about the man with the gun. About his fake accent and his handiness with his fists and a gun. If he had been a gangster, then he was one who’d had the kind of army training you only got in the commandos or the like. Three minutes became four, became five. I guessed he had slipped away, aware that coming looking for me in this murk was as dangerous for hunter as hunted. But I waited a minute more. He had been a cool one all right; the type that tends to have plenty of patience.

I was just about to start making my way back to the main street when I saw him. He just appeared in front of me, as if he had suddenly coalesced from the fog itself. He was more a shape than anything else and he didn’t see me pressed into the doorway.

He was moving slowly, scanning the smog-filled alley with his automatic, as if it were a torch. My doorway hiding place was just outside the arc of his vision. I slipped my hand into my jacket pocket, forgetting it had been months since I’d gone to work with a spring-handled leather blackjack in it. This was the kind of opposition you didn’t want to go up against with your bare hands. I weighed up my options, but in that split second of indecision, his form was swallowed up again as he moved further up the alleyway.

Waiting a few seconds after he passed, I crouched down, undid my laces and slipped my shoes off. Then, carrying a shoe in each hand, I moved as swiftly and as silently as I could back down the alley towards Great Western Road, leaving my dance partner still searching further up the alleyway. But I promised myself that we would dance again.

And the next time, I would lead.

I was properly shod by the time I got back to my digs. In the murk, Mrs White would not see me come up the path from the lounge window and I had hoped to slip unnoticed into my rooms to get cleaned up. As luck would have it, she opened the front door just as I got to it.

‘Mr Lennox …’ she said, shocked by my appearance. ‘What on earth has happened to you?’

‘This damned smog,’ I grumbled. ‘Pardon my language … I slipped on the kerb and smacked right into a lamppost.’ It was a perfectly credible excuse: there would be dozens of genuine accidents fitting that description that morning.

‘Come into the kitchen,’ she commanded, steering me with a firm hand on my elbow. ‘I’ll have to have a look at that.’

I was pretty groggy and went along with what she suggested. Pulling out a chair from the kitchen table, she eased me down into it. I winced as she did so.

‘Are you hurt elsewhere?’ she asked.

‘I fell after I hit my head … the kerb dug into my side. It’s mainly my cheek though …’ I hoped she bought it. Fiona White had seen me with various battle trophies, including on one occasion when they had been awarded to me by the City of Glasgow police. It was, I knew, her principal reason for wanting to keep her distance: all part of my qualifications as a shady character.

She made up a weak solution of antiseptic and boiled water and dabbed at the wound. I noticed the solution cloud pink when she dipped the gauze back into it.

‘I think you might have to have this stitched,’ she said, frowning. She came around in front of me and leaned in to examine me from that angle. Her face came close to mine and I could detect a faint scent of lavender and felt her breath on my lips. Her eyes moved to mine. She suddenly looked embarrassed and stood up in a businesslike manner; but there had been something in the look we exchanged. Or maybe there hadn’t. I was sore and groggy and confused as hell about a lot of things, not least Fiona White.

‘It’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘If you have a sticking plaster, that’ll do.’

‘I really think you should have it seen to. It’s in the same place …’ She let the sentence die.

‘As my scars? I know. They’re all healed up now, Mrs White. A scrape isn’t going to cause me any problems.’ I smiled at her and was rewarded with a stab of pain from my cheek and a trickle of fresh blood down to my jaw line. She tutted and reapplied the gauze pad. She lifted my hand onto the pad to hold it in place while she took a roll of sticking plaster from a drawer and cut three strips from it.

‘How did you get them? The scars, I mean?’ she asked, awkwardly, as she used the strips to secure a fresh pad in place. I turned my head a little and she tutted again, pushing it back with two fingers. It was the first time she had ever asked me a personal question.

‘I picked the wrong plastic surgeon,’ I said. ‘He said he’d done Hedy Lamarr’s nose and Cary Grant’s chin, but he’d only ever really done Clark Gable’s ears.’

‘Seriously …’

‘They really are plastic surgery scars,’ I said. ‘They had to patch me up after I caught the tail end of a German hand grenade.’ I didn’t tell her that it would have been much worse, if one of my men hadn’t taken most of the blast. My face had been torn open, but they’d been able to put me back together again. His splashed-in-the-mud guts were beyond any surgeon’s skill.

But the plastic guy who had fixed my face had done a pretty good job: all I had was a spider web of faint, pale scars on my right cheek. And my smile could look a little lopsided, because of nerve damage, but only in a way that made it look even more wolfish, as Leonora Bryson could fully attest.

While tea infused, Fiona White brought me a couple of aspirin and a tumbler of water. The talk became small and mainly about the smog and how it always caused trouble; but, as I sat there, a thought sunk heavy and sickeningly in my gut. I had lied to Fiona White about what happened, for the best reasons, and God knows that, on most occasions, I didn’t have to have the best reasons to lie. But I didn’t like lying to her.

That was not, however, the main cause for the feeling in the pit of my stomach. I had just evaded a very serious operator with a gun in his hand: the very same person who had ’phoned me at my digs the night before. And he had clearly been waiting for me, outside the house, knowing I would be heading in to see if he kept our specious appointment.

That meant he knew where I lived. And that, in turn, placed Fiona White and her girls in danger.

‘Is something wrong, Mr Lennox?’ Fiona White asked. ‘Are you feeling worse? I really think we should see about getting you to a doctor.’

I shook my head. For a second I debated with myself about whether I should level with her or not. It would alarm her and would certainly end my tenancy, but she had a right to know.

‘I need to make a ’phone call,’ I said.

I stood up and walked through to the hall telephone.

While we waited for Jock Ferguson to arrive, I sat with Fiona White and told her exactly what had happened to me and why. For some reason I even levelled with her about the money being sent to Isa and Violet each year on the anniversary of the Empire Exhibition robbery, and told her that this was one fact that I was keeping from the police, on client confidentiality grounds. I also told her that I had another, very high profile case that I was working on that could cause all kinds of problems, but that my little samba in the smog certainly had nothing to do with that investigation.

She sat and listened to me quietly, her small, pretty hands folded on the lap of her apron and her face quiet and serious, but otherwise without any expression. I sat and listened to myself in amazement: I was the most secretive person I knew — I even kept secrets from myself — and I never talked to anyone about my work, yet here I was spilling my guts to my landlady.

I knew I should shut up. And somewhere deep inside, I was screaming to myself to shut up, but I wouldn’t stop talking. I spoke fast and urgently and once I had given her the full background to what had happened, I told Mrs White about how I was now concerned that this man, and anyone he was associated with, clearly knew where I lived. I said I would pack a few of my things and move somewhere else, at least for the time being, but I would continue to pay my rent to her. I understood that she would probably want me to move out permanently because of the inconvenience I had caused her and I said that I would, of course, comply with her wishes, but in the meantime I wanted Inspector Ferguson to know what had happened and maybe get someone to keep an eye on the place and … I seemed to run out of things to say, or breath, or both. I punctuated it all with, ‘I’m sorry …’

‘Where will you go?’ she asked in a tone that was impossible to read.

‘I don’t know … A hotel, probably. I’ll be okay.’

‘I see …’ Still nothing to read in her voice or on her face.

The doorbell went. I made her stay where she was while I got it.

I was surprised that Ferguson had come alone. I introduced him to Fiona White, but they had met once or twice before, briefly, when she had answered the door to him on a couple of the rare occasions he had visited me at my digs.

I ran through everything with him.

‘So it was your caller from last night?’

‘Looks like it, Jock.’

‘So, do you want to make a complaint of assault?’

‘No. That could make things complicated. I just want to make sure Mrs White isn’t troubled by this.’

‘So you want me to post a guard outside the front door without there being a complaint on the books to justify it?’

‘You could think of something, Jock. A prowler seen in the area, that kind of thing.’

‘Lennox, you said this guy was armed. We can’t have people running around Glasgow waving guns about.’

‘True, I can see how that would lower the tone of the place …’

Ferguson gave me a look.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I understand that. But before we start a manhunt, tell me why you’re on your own.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know what I mean. Not even a beat bobby with you.’

He turned to Fiona White and smiled. ‘Could you excuse us for a moment, please, Mrs White?’ Then turning back to me: ‘Let’s go upstairs. I’ll help you pack …’

My raincoat had taken the worst of the damage: there was a bad tear at the seam of one arm, and a sleeve and the back of the coat were smudged with tarry, black streaks where I’d skidded over the cobbles in the alley. My hat, one of my best Borsalinos, was still lying somewhere in the alley. Despite my suit being unmarked, I wanted to change it, along with my shirt, as you always want to do after you have been in a fight.

Jock Ferguson sat smoking in the lounge while I washed, changed and packed. Standing at the washstand, I looked at myself in the mirror. A faint discolouration haloed the sticking plaster on my cheek, but there was no swelling and I didn’t look too bad. I guessed that I had bled enough to prevent serious bruising.

An odd idiosyncrasy of my personality was that I was a sharp dresser: I always bought the best clothes I could afford. And often clothes I couldn’t. I packed a dozen shirts, not wanting to have to come back to pick up more, and two changes of suit, four silk ties and half a dozen handkerchiefs. I also packed a brand new pair of brown suede shoes with composition soles, which were just the latest dab. I had decided to take a leaf out of my dance partner’s book.

After I had my clothes packed, I called through to Ferguson to check he was okay and I apologized for the delay; he responded with something grunted. What I was really doing was checking where he was, and that he wasn’t about to appear in the bedroom doorway while I took a copy of H.G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come from the bookshelf and dropped it into my case. I then got down on my hands and knees and, stretching my arm under the bed, eased up two loose floorboards and reached into the floorspace. Taking the oilskin-wrapped bundle, I gave it another wrapping in an old shirt and dropped it into the case next to the book.

‘Okay, Jock …’ I said when I reappeared in my sitting room, ‘let’s have it. Why are you flying solo?’

For the first time since I’d known him, Jock Ferguson looked ill at ease.

‘I need to ask you one thing, Lennox,’ he said firmly. ‘Have you discussed your interest in the Gentleman Joe Strachan business with anyone else, other than me?’

‘Ah …’ I said. ‘I see you’ve followed the same line of thought that I have. The answer is no, I have another case on and I have been dealing with that since we spoke. I have discussed the Strachan business with no one other than you.’ Of course I had: with Willie Sneddon, but I knew that if Sneddon had wanted to frighten me off, it would have been more direct. I also knew that Sneddon kept his own counsel. In any case, I felt it best not to let Ferguson know that I’d been in touch with a King.

‘That’s what I thought …’ Ferguson said glumly. He sat on the edge of the sofa, leaning forwards, his elbows resting on his knees.

‘And you only spoke to your fellow officers about it, and then I get jumped and warned off. That’s what’s bothering you, isn’t it?’

‘It doesn’t make sense …’ He shook his head. ‘I suppose I can understand you being warned off because there are officers who are so determined to find the rest of the gang … but waving a gun about …’

‘Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves, Jock. I really think that it is unlikely to have been a copper at all. There’s always another side to every story. You suggested it yourself — my clients, Isa and Violet. Maybe they told someone that they were planning to hire someone to look into the discovery of dear old dad’s remains. They told me that they had asked around and my name had come up. It could be that someone has simply done some two and two arithmetic.’

‘And …’ asked Ferguson, reading my mind.

‘And Violet does have a husband who looks like he knows all the moves.’

‘Name?’

‘Robert …’ I struggled to remember the married names the twins had given me. I had got used to thinking of them as Isa and Violet Strachan in my head. ‘Robert McKnight. Mean anything?’

‘Not offhand. I’ll check it out. Discreetly. In the meantime I’d keep a low profile if I were you, Lennox.’

‘I’ll do my best. While I’m doing a Greta Garbo, can you have someone keep an eye on Mrs White? And give her a number to call …’

‘Fair enough, Lennox. I’ll come up with something. Probably a prowler, like you said. Just make sure you don’t sneak round the back if you need to come back for anything. And Lennox …’

‘Yeah?’

‘You’re really pushing it. Your luck with me, I mean. I could get my jotters handed to me if it was found out that I’ve covered up an assault with a firearm.’

‘I appreciate it, Jock. If anything comes out of this that leads to a big collar, you can bet your name’s on it.’

Fiona White was waiting in the hall, her arms folded and her face set hard.

‘Is this really necessary?’ she asked as I put my suitcases down in the hall.

‘It’s safer. I don’t want you and the girls involved in this. I don’t think anyone would dare show their face here again, but it would be best if I moved out.’

‘I will keep your rooms for you, Mr Lennox. I’m assuming this is a temporary arrangement.’

‘I would like it to be, Mrs White.’

The three of us stood awkwardly for a moment. Ferguson handed her a card on which he had scribbled down his home number as well as the St Andrew’s Square contact number.

‘I’ll arrange for the beat constable to check on you,’ he said. ‘But if you see anyone suspicious hanging around, ’phone me right away.’

‘I’ll ring with a contact number once I’m settled,’ I added. She nodded abruptly. Ferguson and I carried the cases out to my car.

It was still as foggy as hell. Or maybe in hell they complained about it being as foggy as Glasgow. I dumped my bags at my office and sat at my desk until it got dark and I had to switch the lamp on. The other offices were emptying and I smoked my way through half a pack of cigarettes and contemplated, not for the first time, how crap my situation was. My face hurt like a son of a bitch every time I placed even the gingerest of fingertips on it, but from what I could see from my reflection in the broad blade of my letter opener, it still hadn’t swollen. My side next to the small of my back still ached nauseatingly, but it was no longer a solo performance: all the wrenches and impacts of our scuffle in the smog were now singing in unison.

The darkening smog rubbed itself against my office window. I decided against venturing far to search for a hotel and was beginning to imagine the extra aches I would wake up with if I slept on the polished floor of my small office. Added to that, performing my ablutions in the toilet that was shared with the four other offices on my floor and the floor below did not appeal to me.

On an impulse I picked up the ’phone. I was surprised that the person I asked for took my call.

‘Hi,’ I said, failing to keep the weariness out of my voice. ‘It’s Lennox. Listen, I’m across the street in my office. I have a favour to ask … could you meet me in the lounge bar in ten minutes?’

And, to my further surprise, she said she would.

Leonora Bryson was late. Which was fair enough. There was an etiquette to these things: a woman couldn’t be seen waiting around in a bar for a man. You had to do the waiting. And women like Leonora Bryson knew that any man would wait for her, for as long as she wanted him to wait.

When she arrived in the lounge bar of the Central Hotel, she was again dressed in a formal skirt with a matching jacket and pale blue blouse beneath it. It was something that, on most women, would have looked almost drab, but on her it looked sexier than a bikini on Marilyn Monroe. She certainly attracted enough attention as she entered and I could have sworn I heard the marble bust in the corner give a gasp. I was waiting for her at the bar and suggested we take a seat at one of the tables. I asked her what she would like to drink. I was not surprised that she ordered a daiquiri, but was amazed that the Glaswegian bartender knew how to make it.

‘You look like you’ve been in the wars, Mr Lennox,’ she said, indicating the dressing on my cheek with a tilt of her daiquiri glass. There wasn’t the same frost in her voice, but there wasn’t any warmth either.

‘This? Yeah, stupid really … I walked into something in the smog.’ I neglected to explain that the something had been solid muscle with a gun.

‘Yes, I know …’ she said, suddenly animated. ‘I’ve seen some pretty bad smog in San Francisco, but this stuff is unbelievable. I mean, it’s not just dense, it’s tinged green.’

‘They colour it for the tourists. San Francisco … is that where you’re from?’

‘No … I’m from the east coast, originally. Connecticut.’

‘Then where you were brought up was a heck of a lot closer to my home town than it was to Hollywood. I was raised in New Brunswick.’

‘Really?’ she said, with an interest so tiny that you would have needed the Palomar telescope set to maximum magnification to spot it. ‘What is it you wanted to talk to me about, Mr Lennox?’

‘I need somewhere to sleep tonight …’

The final syllable had not taken form before the temperature dropped a thousand degrees.

‘No, no …’ I held my hands up. ‘Don’t get the wrong idea … With the smog and everything, and my office just over the way, I wondered if you could swing a special rate for me here. Just for tonight. It’s a bit rich for my blood normally but needs must …’

She appraised me with the glacial blue eyes and for a moment I killed the time thinking about what Rhine maidens and Valkyries might get up to in Valhalla. She seemed to make up her mind about me.

‘Actually,’ she said, ‘we have a spare room at the end of our hall. We had it for one of the studio executives, but he’s flown home early. We have kept the booking open in case we needed it. I guess tonight we do.’

‘I’ll pay, of course …’

‘No need.’ She took a long, thin cigarette of a brand I’d never seen before from a specially made silver case. I held out a light for her the instant it met her lips. She took a draw and nodded a perfunctory thanks. ‘It’s paid for whether you use it or not. And, anyway, you’re working for Mr Macready. Just tonight?’

‘Just tonight.’

‘Was there anything else, Mr Lennox?’ She frowned at me over her sipped daiquiri, as if my presence was seriously compromising her enjoyment of it.

‘As a matter of fact there was. How much do you know about why I’ve been employed by the studio? About Mr Macready’s situation?’

‘Everything,’ she said blankly. ‘I am Mr Macready’s personal assistant. To do my job, I need to know everything that’s going on, good or bad. I am how Mr Macready connects with everybody and everything around him.’

I was about to say he’d done some pretty enthusiastic connecting himself, but let it slide. ‘Did you know about his … tastes before this incident?’

‘Of course.’ A little defiance now. And resentment.

‘Where were you when Macready was at the cottage with his friend?’

‘I was at the hotel. Not this hotel … the one up north. Up past that big lake. We were there for the shooting.’

‘And Macready gave you the night off?’

‘That’s right. He was in the bar of the hotel drinking with Iain.’

‘When I asked him about it, he said it was a spur of the moment decision to go to the cottage.’

‘That’s what he told me,’ she said, holding me in a blue glacier gaze. ‘Iain’s family owned the estate we were shooting on and the cottage was one he used now and again. He paints, you see. An artist.’ She said the word with disdain. ‘Mr Macready said that Iain suggested they go to the cottage to continue drinking.’

‘But as a guest of the hotel, Macready could order drinks after closing time …’

Leonora Bryson shrugged. ‘I don’t think drinking was what was on either of their minds. Why is this so important?’

‘Have you seen the photographs?’

A split second of outrage, then the storm passed. ‘No, Mr Lennox, I haven’t.’

‘I have. I had to. They were taken with some kind of hidden camera. In a wall void or something. I can’t tell for sure because the other party … Iain … is not, I’ve been told, to be made aware of this difficulty. That means I can’t examine the cottage. But it was an elaborate set-up. That means organization. Planning in advance.’

‘And that doesn’t fit with them going to the cottage being a spur of the moment thing … is that what you’re saying?’

‘Exactly. But that leads to the conclusion that his Lordship’s — or is it his Dukeship’s? — son and heir was in on the setup. And that simply doesn’t make any sense at all. He — and his father — have as much to lose as John Macready. More, probably.’

‘So where does that leave you?’

‘Tracking down the blackmailer. Paul Downey. Believe it or not, Miss Bryson, this city is a tough place to stay hidden in. And I’ve got the kind of contacts who can tell me exactly where to look.’

‘So why haven’t you spoken to these contacts? Shouldn’t you be bumping into more mysterious objects in the smog, instead of sitting here?’

‘It’s not as simple as that. These contacts I have are, to be frank, criminals. If there’s a crooked way of making a buck, then these guys have done it. With something as delicate as this, I have to be careful about what I say and to whom.’ I noticed she had finished her daiquiri and beckoned to the waiter. ‘May I get you another?’

‘No.’ When the waiter came over she ignored my protests and told him to put the drinks on her room bill. ‘I’ll ask reception to give you the key for the room.’

‘Fine, thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll nip over to my office, if I can find it in the fog, and pick up my bags.’

‘Bags?’ She arched an eyebrow.

‘I keep some stuff in my office.’

It was a lame answer and she saw through it. I could see her reappraising the wound on my cheek.

‘Mr Lennox, I do hope that we can rely on you. I have to tell you that I was not in favour of you being hired. From what Mr Fraser told us about you, you have a lot of colour in your background. I wouldn’t like to think that that colour could interfere with you sorting this mess out for us.’

‘It won’t. For your information, Miss Bryson, it is exactly that colour that could lead me to Downey and the photographs. May I ask you a question?’

She shrugged.

‘What is it about me that you dislike so intensely?’

‘I’ve not given you that amount of thought, Mr Lennox. But if you’re going to push me on it, there isn’t anything in particular I dislike about you. It’s probably true to say that I dislike everything about you.’

I smiled. ‘How wonderfully simple yet all-embracing.’

‘I think you have made all kinds of judgements about John. You think of him as less of a man because of what he is. Well, I can tell you that John Macready is more of a man than you’ll ever be. I can tell to look at you the type you are. Arrogant, pushy, violent. You use women and have no conscience about it. You had only met me for a few minutes and you tried your moves on me. Men like you make me sick.’

‘I see,’ I said and drained my drink. ‘If I ask you for a reference after this job is over, would you mind awfully leaving that bit out?’

She laughed, but it was a twisted laugh full of distaste. ‘And you think you’re so funny. So smart. Well, make sure you’re smart enough to sort this mess out, because I’m going to make sure you don’t get a penny more until you do. Good night, Mr Lennox.’ Turning abruptly, she marched out of the lounge.

I stood there, somewhat stung by her comprehensive character assassination of me.

But it didn’t stop me watching her ass as she walked off.

I brought my cases over from my office and a porter carried them up to the room for me. I tipped him too much as I always tended to do when dealing with Glaswegians. They always chatted and joked with you, and the fact that they weren’t doing it for the tip, just because it was in their nature, always made you tip more.

The room was a smaller encapsulation of the luxury I’d seen in Macready’s suite and I decided, not for the first time, that I was definitely in the wrong business. Once I was alone, I locked the door and slid the heavy safety chain into place. Opening my suitcases, I took out the bundle and the copy of The Shape of Things to Come and laid them on the bed. I unwrapped the shirt and the oilskin from the bundle and took out the heavy, top-break Webley thirty-eight and the box of ammunition. After I’d loaded it, I thumbed down the safety, rewrapped it in the oilskin and shirt and put it back in the case. I spent more time with the copy of H.G. Wells’s chef d’oeuvre. I opened it and checked the contents: the pages had been hollowed out and in it were tightly rolled fifty-pound notes and a small bag with a handful of diamonds.

This was my Nibelungengold. It had started off with the money I had made in Germany. I had been lucky to get out of the occupation zone with it: the military police had neither understood nor appreciated my spirit of private enterprise or my trailblazing in establishing post-war trading partnerships with the Germans. Then, while I had been in Glasgow, I had been able to add to my little trust fund significantly, given the fact that the people I had been working for were not the most assiduous bookkeepers. Between us, we had eased the taxman’s workload significantly.

My move out of my digs, temporary or otherwise, had not been the main reason for me bringing my leather-bound trust fund with me: I had, for a long time, worried about the security of keeping it in my digs. I couldn’t put it in a bank without the inland revenue taking notice, and carrying it around in a suitcase or keeping it in my office were not viable options either. However, since I had been doing the wages run, I had opened a business account with the commercial house who banked the wages cash. I had also rented a safety deposit box. I was due to do the run tomorrow, and I decided to deposit the gun and the cash in the box.

But I might just pick up the gun again after the run.

After I had hung up my suits, I locked both cases, the gun and the cash in one, shut them in the wardrobe and went back down to the bar. I spent an hour and a half smoking, drinking bourbon — which was good, but clearly wasn’t of the calibre of the whiskey Macready had served me — and talked semi-drunken crap to the bartender. This was a better class of bar and bartender, so I made an effort to talk a better class of semi-drunken crap, and he did a pretty good impression of being interested. I had a great deal of admiration for bartenders and their unique skills.

I returned to my room before I started to see in plural, stripped down to my trousers and undershirt, washed my face, lay down on the expensive candlewick and smoked some more.

I must have dozed off. I woke up suddenly and had that wave of nausea you get when you’ve surfaced too quickly from a fathom of sleep. I sat up, swinging my legs off the bed, still not knowing what it had been that had woken me. My head was throbbing and my mouth felt furry. I heard it again: a knock at the door. Soft, but not tentative.

For a split second I thought about getting my gun from the case in the wardrobe, but elected for the sap that I’d slipped under the pillow. I couldn’t see how my chum from the smog could have traced me to the hotel.

‘Who is it?’ I slipped the chain from its housing and placed one hand on the latch, while the other hung at my side, weighted by the sap.

‘It’s me. Leonora Bryson.’

I opened the door and she stepped in. She was in her dressing gown.

‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Is something wrong? Has something happened?’

She closed the door behind her and, unsmiling, pushed me back into the room. As I stood there, she unfastened the gown and let it slip from her shoulders. She was naked underneath. The natural detective in me guessed we weren’t going to discuss the case again. Leonora Bryson’s body was a work of art in a way that made Michelangelo’s efforts look shoddy. Every part of her was faultlessly, firmly, shaped. I found myself staring at her perfect breasts.

‘I don’t understand …’ I said, still failing to make eye contact. I perhaps should have stopped staring at her breasts, but, having been presented with them, it somehow would have seemed churlish or unappreciative not to: like being in the Sistine Chapel and refusing to look up at the ceiling.

‘Don’t talk,’ she said, still unsmiling. ‘I don’t want you to talk.’ She closed the distance between us and fastened her mouth on mine, pushing in with her tongue, making her command redundant. I was totally confused by what was happening, but decided to go along with it. I’m obliging that way.

She pushed me down onto the bed and began tearing at my clothes, almost frantically. There was something wild about her and it infected me. It was more than passion: as we made love, her eyes burned with something akin to hatred and she raked my skin with her nails, pulled at my hair and bit into my face and neck.

It was wild, passionate sex, but I couldn’t help feeling that we could have done with a referee and a copy of the Queensberry rules at the bedside. After it was over, in the absence of smelling salts and a second in my corner to fan me with a towel, I lit a cigarette for both of us. She lay silent, smoking the cigarette before getting up abruptly, pulling on her dressing gown and leaving without a word.

I did nothing and said nothing to stop her leaving. Lying there dazed and confused, I guessed that I had just been used, and I had a pretty good idea why.

The thought made me feel dirty and cheap. Which is probably why I didn’t stop grinning until I fell asleep.