The Deep Dark Sleep

CHAPTER SIX

Walking into a bank with a gun is a bit of a Glasgow tradition. Nevertheless, it made me nervous.

I had a hire arrangement with a garage at Charing Cross Mansions, who supplied the van, at a discounted rate, for the wages run each Friday. Picking the van up early, I turned up at the bank ahead of the usual time and asked to access my safety deposit box.

While the wages run was potentially a target for armed raiders, and the bank itself had been hit for cash on more than one occasion, I knew that the safety deposit boxes here were the safest in Glasgow. Not because they had thicker walls, bigger locks or better security than anywhere else; the reason was much, much more convincing than that: at least two of the Three Kings had boxes here. If you were to turn this place over, being caught by the police was the least of your worries.

I deposited the gun and the cash-stuffed volume of Wells in the box and went back up to the ground floor to meet up with Archie, the retired policeman whom I had hired to do the run with me.

As usual, Archie was waiting right on time, talking to MacGregor, the bank’s Chief Clerk. Archie was fifty but looked older and walked with a slight limp: a souvenir of a falling through a factory roof while chasing some lead thieves. I assumed that the thieves had not been carrying the lead during their escape.

Archie was lean to the point of meagre and probably six-three, but a stoop took an inch or two off his height. An unruly horseshoe shock of black hair wrapped itself around his high-domed, bald head; he had large, watery spaniel eyes and continuously wore a tired, doleful expression. It had been this expression that had initially put me off giving him the job because it sometimes made him look lazy and unresponsive.

It had surprised me to discover that behind the dolorous mask was a mind sharper than you would expect from a Glasgow copper and a dry, dark Glasgow humour. He was also every bit as reliable as Jock Ferguson had promised. Jock had told me that Archie had always managed to give his superiors in the City of Glasgow Police the feeling that he was somehow taking the mickey, without them ever being able to put their finger on how he was doing it. That, probably more than anything, convinced me to hire him.

Originally, Archie did the wages run with me to eke out his police pension and the money he made as a shipyard night watchman, but he had lost the watchman job, the unions complaining about his harassing their members. It was a universally accepted fact along Clydeside that almost everything that could not be nailed down, and most that was, was likely to leave a Glasgow shipyard under a fitter’s raincoat or wheeled out in a barrow hidden amidst the throng of workers leaving the yards at shift-change.

Pilfering was endemic in the yards. Shipworkers’ homes in Clydebank were famed for their eclectic decor: often tenement slum chic combined with ocean liner salon, complemented with a battleship-grey colour scheme. Archie, the ex-copper, had misunderstood his brief as night watchman and had managed to stop hundreds of pounds’ worth of timber, paint and brass fittings from walking out of the yard. The management had not been able to forgive Archie for doing his job unacceptably well and he was let go. Since then, I had tried to give him whatever I could in the way of work, including the odd divorce witness job, and the Friday run was a regular fixture.

When I came back up to the main hall of the bank, Archie was talking to MacGregor, the Chief Clerk, who organized the run. MacGregor was the usual young fogey you found working in a bank — a twenty-five-year-old striving hard for middle age — and Archie made a point of befuddling him with humour at every opportunity.

Archie looked over to me with his Alastair Sim eyes as he signed the manifest log, his truncheon hanging from his wrist like a handbag.

‘There’s a bit of confusion here, boss,’ he said, without a hint of a smile. ‘Mr MacGregor here says the money is to go to the yard as usual, but I thought you said this week we were off to Barbados with it.’

‘Ignore Archie, Mr MacGregor,’ I said. ‘He’s having you on. Barbados has an extradition treaty, we’re off to Spain.’

‘This amount of money is no joking matter, Mr Lennox,’ MacGregor said to me over spectacles pushed halfway down his nose, yet another misguided affectation of middle-class middle-age. ‘You’ll telephone as usual to confirm delivery?’

I said I would and signalled for Archie to stand guard on the street while I loaded the back of the van with the sacks.

It was the usual, thankfully uneventful trip: me driving, Archie sitting lugubriously with the mail sacks in the back. We delivered the wages to the shipyard office and I ’phoned MacGregor to confirm delivery. On the way back, Archie sat in the front with me.

‘I know you’ve been hit hard by losing the watchman job,’ I said. ‘Listen, Archie, things have been picking up with the business and I could do with some help. It wouldn’t be full time, not for a while at least, but if things keep going the way they’re going, it could well become full time. You interested?’

Archie looked at me with his big, mournful eyes. ‘Would it be the same kind of stuff that I’ve been doing for you lately?’

‘Yes … divorce cases, security work, missing persons. Wearing out shoe leather and knocking on doors, that kind of thing.’

The truth was I was already using Archie more and more for divorce cases. Divorce evidence in court always sounded better coming from a retired police officer, added to which Archie’s perpetually gloomy demeanour seemed to give it added gravitas. There was also the fact that I got decidedly nervous in the witness box, something lawyers are wont to pick up on. Truth was I was worried that some bright young counsel would start to call my character as a witness into question. And my character, or at least my history, was best left unquestioned.

‘I see …’ Archie leaned back in the passenger seat and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘I was considering the chairmanship of ICI… but I suppose I could fit your jobs in. Do I get an expense account, superannuation and luncheon vouchers?’

‘You’ll get ten shillings an hour plus expenses. I’ll leave your pension fund in ICI’s hands …’

‘I shall consult with the board, of course,’ he said, hooking his thumbs in his waistcoat, ‘but in the meantime you may assume my answer to be in the affirmative.’

‘Good. I’ve got two cases on right now that I need help with. One of them is to do with Gentleman Joe Strachan and the Empire Exhibition robbery. Jock Ferguson said that you would probably have been in the force at the time.’

‘Aye … I was that. I remember it well. Bad business.’ Impossibly, his expression became more doleful. ‘Very bad business.’

‘What happened? I mean, how much do you know?’

‘Most of what there is to know. Every detail, as did every copper in Glasgow. We had the whole story drummed into us over and over again. I take it you know all about the Exhibition?’

I nodded. ‘I believe it was really something …’

‘It certainly was. The Empire Exhibition was a big thing for Glasgow back in Thirty-eight,’ Archie continued. ‘The big thing. I was there, with my wife. They built the whole exhibition in Bellahouston Park, but you would not have believed you were in the middle of Glasgow. There were towers, pavilions, a freak-show, a funfair … Oh aye, and a giant model of Victoria Falls, a hundred feet wide. There was even an entire Highland village, complete with a castle and a loch. Aye, it was some undertaking. Even your lot — the Canadians, I mean — had a pavilion, with Mounties and everything. There were these women — they called them the Giraffe-necked Women — and everybody went to see them. They’d come from Burma and had all of these rings around their necks, one added a year, until they had necks a foot long …’

Archie paused, lost for a moment in memories, a faint wistfulness flickering disturbingly across his pall-bearer’s countenance.

‘Yep,’ I said, ‘really sounds like something.’

‘It was right after the Depression, of course,’ Archie said, ‘and they thought it would do a lot of good for Glasgow, but the truth was Glasgow was about to get back to full swing anyway because of the war. And you couldn’t afford to go into any of the pavilions … at least, not if you were an ordinary Glaswegian like we were. They charged you a bob just to get through the gates. Even the kiddies had to pay sixpence. It was all supposed to be about the future but it looked to the missus and me like a future we wouldn’t afford. There were tearooms and the like, but the Atlantic Restaurant was beyond the reach of everybody except the seriously well-off. Like most people, Mavis and I spent most of the time walking around and looking at the pavilions from the outside. Do you know, we couldn’t even sit down? They charged you tuppence for a deck chair, and your ticket was only good for three hours.’

We reached Charing Cross Mansions and the garage from which I had hired the van. I pulled up outside behind where I’d parked my Atlantic, and listened to Archie while he finished his story.

‘The weather was shite,’ he continued. ‘The worst summer for rain anyone could remember, and in Glasgow that’s saying something. The Exhibition was nearly a complete wash-out, literally. But it really was something. They said that it was the future, the way things would look. All these fancy buildings. Like the ones they have in Hollywood.’

‘Art deco.’

‘Wouldn’t know. Anyway, despite the rain, the exhibition took in a fortune in cash — at all of the attractions, the restaurants and events and so forth — and the money was transferred back to the bank in the city centre. The same kind of run as we’ve just done, so to speak, but in reverse. These boys had a reinforced van, though — armoured, like. There was some kind of arrangement where the armoured car picked up the exhibition takings on its way back along Glasgow Road from a textile wholesaler out at Paisley and then back to the main bank in the city centre. They had staff working the night shift there to lock it up in the main safe, instead of it being dropped into the night safe.’

‘So there was more than the Exhibition takings in the van?’

‘Aye. But how the robbers knew that was a mystery. The CID reckoned that the robbers had help or information somewhere along the way. An inside job. But all of the staff were interrogated and the CID came up with nothing. Anyway, the Exhibition had closed for the day and the van had just done the pick-up when it was ambushed by these armed men. Five of them. The driver and the guard played along, guessing that these boys meant business after one of the robbers gave the driver a doing, but there was actually a police office as part of the Exhibition. It was supposed to be empty at that time, but the young PC who had been on duty during the day had been held up for some reason.’

‘Gourlay?’

‘Yes, Charlie Gourlay … he was on his way out of the Exhibition when he walked right into the robbery taking place. The driver of the van said in his statement that the tallest of the robbers let him have it with both barrels without a second’s hesitation. Cold blooded murder.’

‘Were you involved in the case?’

‘No … I was posted away on the other side of the city. But of course it was big, big news. A murdered policeman was seen — still is seen — as an attack on the whole force. Like I said, we were all of us dragged in and briefed and re-briefed about the robbery. I tell you, every policeman in the city was on the lookout for Joe Strachan. There were a couple of blokes got a real kicking because they fitted Strachan’s description.’

‘And they fixed on Strachan right away?’

‘Aye. There had been rumours about the Commercial Bank job and the one before it. But I think there was more to it than that.’

‘Oh?’

‘If you ask me, someone somewhere got a tip about Strachan. I mean, we weren’t looking for anybody else.’

‘But Strachan didn’t have a reputation as a life-taker, did he?’

‘No … he didn’t. No …’ Archie shrugged and left his answer hanging. He turned down the corners of his mouth, which shifted his expression from lugubrious to funereal. ‘I don’t know all the ins and outs of it, of course, only having been a humble beat bobby, but from what I do know, Strachan didn’t have any kind of record at all. No one could pin him with anything. He was a secretive type and made sure nothing incriminating could ever stick to him, so God knows what else he got up to. Maybe Gourlay wasn’t his first murder. More than that, I don’t know. You’d have to talk to someone who was in CID at the time. Or Willie McNab.’

‘Superintendent McNab?’ I laughed. ‘He’d have my balls if he knew I was involved with this case. I gather that he and Gourlay were close friends.’

‘Were they?’ The massive expanse of Archie’s brow creased. ‘I didn’t know that. But if you say so.’

‘Did you ever come across someone called Billy Dunbar?’

‘No, can’t say I have,’ said Archie after a moment’s thought.

‘Here’s the last known address for him.’ I handed Archie the address given to me by Jock Ferguson. ‘That’s a starting point. Could you see if you can track him down?’

‘Is this me started, then?’ Archie raised his eyebrows. ‘When do I get my trenchcoat and six-shooter?’

‘I think you’re confusing Humphrey Bogart with John Wayne. Yes, this is a job. Keep a tally of your time and expenses. Just see if you can trace him. But try not to spook him. I just want to talk to him, okay?’

‘I will move like a panther in the night,’ said Archie.