The Long Glasgow Kiss

CHAPTER ELEVEN

They both turned abruptly when I entered. Claire stood up so suddenly that the old chair she’d been sitting on crashed onto the grubby floor. The young man stood up too.

I had been wrong about there being no light on: a kerosene lamp sat on a table improvised from a crate, but its wick was turned so low that its light was dim and weak. Bright enough, though, for me to see that this was the kind of place you could call a hovel if you raised the tone sufficiently. A tumble of bedclothes and a large army-style knapsack were piled onto a low-slung camp bed in one corner, a primus stove sat next to a half dozen unopened cans on another crate. Empty cans and bottles lay piled in another corner. You had to be really scared to hide out this much.

I barely recognized Sammy Pollock as the cocky, smooth youth with the expensively barbered hair in the photograph Sheila Gainsborough had shown me. His dark hair was now lank and greasy and his jaw hadn’t seen a razor for several days. He looked unwashed and tired. There again, the facilities here were not all they could be. But there was something more to the tiredness that dulled his expression and draped itself around his frame: it was the high-tension, electric exhaustion of a man on the run.

‘Nice place you’ve got here,’ I said. ‘Fixer-upper?’

Sammy slipped a hand into his jacket pocket.

‘Did Largo send you?’ he asked.

‘Largo?’ I asked and smiled. I leaned forward and turned the flame on the kerosene lamp up. ‘Do you mind?’ I asked. ‘I’m doing a piece for Better Hovels and Gardens and I’d like to have a good look at the place.’ As I did so, I became aware that there were four of us in the room: me, Claire, Sammy and a two-and-a-half-feet-high, very green, very oriental demon. Or dragon. Or devil. Whatever he was, he was an ugly son-of-a-gun, for sure. He grinned at me, his long tongue lapping between jade fangs. Sammy saw me looking at it.

‘Take it,’ he said. ‘Tell Largo to leave me alone. I won’t go to the cops. I won’t do anything. Just take it and go.’

‘Thanks for the offer,’ I said, ‘but it would clash with my colour scheme. I’m not here about ornaments, I’m here for you.’ Whatever it was he had in his jacket pocket, he closed his hand around it. I tutted and shook my head. ‘Don’t even think about it. Sammy. You’re a big boy, but not big enough.’

‘Who are you?’ asked Claire, staring at me with wide, terrified eyes.

‘It’s okay, Claire. I’m the guy who wanted to talk to you about Sammy. I was hired to find him by his sister, Sheila Gainsborough. She’s been worried about him.’

Both their expressions changed and a sense of enormous relief filled the small, filthy cottage. The same kind of relief as if someone had found a whole bunch of lifeboats that no one had known about immediately after the Titanic had hit the iceberg. ‘I’m sure Paul Costello has told you all about me,’ I said. ‘Paul and I had a little chat before he followed you out of the limelight. Where is Costello, by the way?’

I got my answer. Someone was kind enough to switch out all of the lights so I could enjoy the firework display in my head better. After the fireworks, I went somewhere deep and dark and timeless.

I woke up in hell. Or at least that was the first thought I formed after my vision started to come together again. The demon I was looking up at hadn’t been carved out of jade. It was made of much sterner, tougher material.

‘What happened?’ I asked, even though I knew that Singer was incapable of answering. He helped me up to my feet. I was still in the cottage. Sammy, Claire and the little green god weren’t. Instead Twinkletoes McBride stood, hunched over because of the limited headroom. He looked like he was holding the whole roof up. Which probably wouldn’t have been a challenge. Willie Sneddon was there too, eyeing me maliciously and smoking a cigarette.

‘There’s an ashtray somewhere,’ I said as Singer eased me down into a sitting position on the crate-cum-table. ‘Don’t get ash on the carpet… I’ve just done the spring cleaning.’

‘You never tire of the wisecracks, Lennox?’ asked Sneddon.

‘I find them comforting in challenging times.’

I held my head in my hands, trying to keep it still and stop the pounding in my skull. I gingerly felt the back of my head. The skin hadn’t been broken but there was half an egg tucked behind my ear and it hurt like hell. I’d been sapped from behind. The kind of blow with a sap that can kill a man. I pictured the sap swinging through the air behind me and when I followed the imagined hand, arm and shoulder behind it, it led me to Costello’s face. I’d catch up with young Costello sooner or later. Then it would be party season.

I looked up at Sneddon and frowned; a thought suddenly hit me, which was becoming a habit. ‘How did you find me?’

‘Singer’s been on your tail for a while. Quiet, like,’ said Sneddon. Then with a malicious grin. ‘He’s good at that… quiet.’

‘Why d’you have Singer tailing me?’

‘Let’s call it insurance. I get all worked up about you maybes experiencing a crisis of interests.’

‘How did he-’

‘He had someone with him. Tam. Always does. He got Tam to drive into the nearest village and ’phone me. The rest he writes down for me. He said two men and a tart came out of here like bats out of hell. When Singer and Tam saw you didn’t, they came in and checked. Thought you was dead.’

‘How long have I been out?’

‘An hour. We’ve just arrived. We was looking for you anyway.’

‘Oh?’ I said. Then I saw Twinkletoes’ expression. It worried me. Anything other than a smile on Twinkletoes’ face worried me.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Lennox,’ said Twinkletoes. ‘It’s Davey…’

‘Davey Wallace? What about him?’

‘Someone gave him a doing,’ said Sneddon in an I-couldn’t-give-a-shit tone. ‘A really good doing.’

‘He’s in the Southern General, Mr Lennox,’ said Twinkletoes in a doleful baritone. ‘It’s not right. Not right at all. It’s egggree-jus, that’s what it is… fucking egg-gree-jus.’

‘Is he going to be all right?’

Sneddon shrugged.

‘How’d it happen?’ I tried to shake some of the fog out of my head. When I did, I kept seeing Davey’s eager, youthful face. Whatever had happened to him, I was responsible.

‘I need to go.’ I stood up but gravity objected.

‘I’ll drive you,’ said Twinkletoes as he caught my fall like I was a kid on skates for the first time.

‘My car…’ I said weakly. ‘It’s around the corner of the road. Parked by some trees.’

Singer pointed silently to himself and held out his hand. I handed over my car keys and nodded. It could have been my imagination, but these days there seemed to be less menace in his lurk.

By the time we reached the hospital, the sky had turned a velvety purple. At this time of year it never got truly dark. Glasgow’s Southern General Hospital had started off as cavalry barracks, then became the Govan Poorhouse, then a lunatic asylum, before being converted for its current use. It had somehow managed to maintain the charm of its previous incarnations and its jagged Victorian architecture was as welcoming as Castle Frankenstein.

The linoleum-floored corridors we made our way along were quiet and I did not hear distant cries of ‘It’s alive! It’s alive!’ echoing off the porcelain wall tiles. The strictly observed visiting times were over and we were confronted by a matron only slightly less forbidding than the one I had encountered at Craithie Court. She had the same singular eyebrow, with the added twist of facial hair on her upper lip that was in danger of becoming a Ronald Colman moustache. I wondered where they all came from and decided that perhaps Baron Frankenstein did have a part-time job here after all. I anticipated another frosty rebuttal, but Sneddon gained our admittance by handing the matron our special pass: a nice new, crisp, folding special pass with a picture of Her Majesty on it. Matron Karloff tucked the twenty into her apron and bustled off down the corridor, her ugly flat shoes squeaking on the linoleum.

Davey was in a room on his own. I assumed Sneddon was behind that and I was grateful to him, although I guessed that it had less to do with concern or feelings of responsibility towards Davey and more to do with keeping me sweet so I’d deliver everything I could find out.

Someone had done a real number on Davey. His head and jaw were bandaged, framing his face like a mask. And it was more like a grotesque mask than a recognizable face, puffed and swollen until the eyes had become slits between thick pads of bruised flesh. It looked like his nose had been broken but, thankfully, whoever had attended him in the hospital had made some effort to set it straight. His lips were split and the lower lip had ballooned up like Maurice Chevalier’s on a bad day. There were stitches in his upper lip.

‘Davey, it’s Lennox. Are you all right, son?’

Davey turned his head to me. His distended lips twitched and I realized he was trying to smile. That simple act caused a tidal wave of rage to swell up inside me.

‘Who did this, Davey?’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Lennox. I let you down.’ Davey’s voice was strained through clenched teeth and I realized that his jaw had been busted and wired shut.

‘You didn’t let anyone down. Who did this?’

‘I didn’t see them. They came up behind me and clobbered me. When I was on the ground they gave me this kicking. Then I passed out. That’s all I remember, Mr Lennox.’

‘Okay, Davey… okay. You take it easy. Anything else broken?’

‘Just my jaw… and some cracked ribs. The doc says I must have a steel skull. He says he doesn’t think there will be any permanent damage.’

‘That’s good, Davey. We’ll have you out of here and on your feet in no time. I owe you a bonus.’

‘You don’t need to do that, Mr Lennox. Just tell me that you’ll let me work for you again.’

‘Sure, Davey. Sure I will.’

‘Mr Kirkcaldy came to see me.’

‘Bobby Kirkcaldy?’

‘Aye… it was him what found me. He ’phoned for the ambulance and that.’

‘I see. Did he see who attacked you?’

‘No. He only came along later.’

‘I see.’

‘I lost my book,’ said Davey through the wired cage of his teeth.

‘What book?’

‘The one you gave me, Mr Lennox. My notebook that I wrote everything down in.’

‘Don’t worry about it, Davey. I’ll probably find it in the car or on the ground up there. It’s not important.’

‘I’m sorry…’ Now Davey’s voice sounded distant. He made a soft, detached groaning sound.

‘You rest, Davey. I’ll be back to see you tomorrow.’

‘Promise?’ he asked and sounded like a kid. In that moment I remembered that he was alone in the world. No parents. No brothers or sisters that he knew about. A Barnardo’s kid out in the world on his own. The thought restoked the fury in my gut. A fury that was directed in equal shares at whoever had done this to Davey, and at myself for having put the kid in that position.

‘I promise, Davey. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

We left Davey to sleep, and outside in the corridor I had as coherent a conference with Sneddon as I was capable of having. I told him to put men on watch on the Kirkcaldy house twenty-four hours a day. I asked if they could look around for Davey’s notebook, more to put the kid’s mind at rest than anything else. Given that Singer had followed me all the way out into darkest Renfrewshire without me spotting him on my tail, I suggested he be put on following Kirkcaldy. I wanted whoever clobbered Davey, and Sneddon was itchier than ever to find out what was going on with Kirkcaldy. He didn’t care about people getting hurt: he had invested in Kirkcaldy and didn’t want his money to get bruised.

We headed back along the gloomy, porcelain-tiled corridors towards the exit. My head hurt like a bastard and the lurching in my gut was turning into determined heaving. I stopped off in the washroom and only just made it to the cubicle before I vomited. After I finished retching I went over to the wash-hand basins and splashed cold water on my face. When I looked into the mirror I saw a wraith with deep blue shadows under its eyes set into a bleached face. No wonder the ladies found me so damned attractive. The harsh hospital lighting threw up the hard angles of my face: the sharp, high cheekbones and the arch of my brow. The faint scars on my cheek, the reminders of an encounter with a German hand grenade, seemed more noticeable. I smoothed my black hair back with the palms of my hands. A plastic surgeon had had to do a bit of tidying up after my adventure with German munitions and it had left me with taut skin that accentuated my features. One thing I got a lot, especially from women, was that they thought I looked a little like the actor Jack Palance. Women seemed to like my face. I’d been told I had a handsome face but it had a touch of cruelty in it. That’s why they liked it and that’s why I hated it.

‘You fucking coming?’ Sneddon was at the door of the washroom.

‘Sure,’ I said, sniffing and drying my face with a paper hand towel. ‘I’m coming. I’ve got work to do.’

I took one more look at the face in the mirror; it seemed to me it looked a little more cruel.

Singer drove me back to my digs in the Atlantic. Halfway there, I had to get him to pull over to the kerb so I could throw up again. I felt dizzy and sick, and had that feeling of unreality that comes with concussion. It wasn’t the first time I’d been clobbered on the head and it probably wouldn’t be the last, despite a doctor warning me that my skull had had just about all the punishment it could take.

It was just before eleven-thirty when Singer parked outside my flat. He helped me to the door. I thanked him and he nodded: we were bosom chums now. He went back out onto the street and climbed into the green Rover that Twinkletoes had followed us in. I didn’t go up to my room right away. There was silence from the Whites’ flat so I was as quiet as I could be as I dialled Lorna’s number. I let it ring a long time. Still no answer.

I went up to my rooms and poured myself a whisky. It was a mistake: the first swallow made me retch. I was getting too old for this kind of malarkey. I decided that I’d probably have to have my head examined in the morning; not an unusual state of affairs but this time not metaphorically.

Before the war, when I’d been a kid in New Brunswick, I’d been handy with a pencil or paint brush and had given serious thought to studying art at the college in Halifax. Then the war had come along. Fact was that I was still handy with a pencil, and before I did anything else I took a clean sheet of paper and a pencil from the sideboard drawer, sat down and sketched out what I could remember of the jade figure I had seen in the farm cottage. When I was finished my head hurt even more but I was satisfied with the image I’d drawn. Not exact, but it was my memory rather than my abilities that let me down.

When I was finished, I drank some water from the tap, splashed my face again and pressed a damp towel against the egg behind my ear. I needed to pull myself together. I shaved and changed my clothes; my suit bore the traces of country life and I needed to feel freshened up. I drank some more water, this time swallowing more than the recommended dosage of aspirin with it: a stomach ulcer was the least of my worries at the moment.

I hit the street again just before midnight, climbed wearily into the Atlantic and drove down to Pollokshields.

When I got to Lorna’s house, Benny Goodman was ‘Stompin’ at the Savoy’. In fact, he was stompin’ so hard I could hear him from the drive as I pulled up. The front door was unlocked and I let myself in. There was no sign of Maggie, Jack Collins, or any other semi-detached members of the MacFarlane dynasty.

I found Lorna in the living room, dancing with the air along to the full-volume Benny Goodman record. In Lorna’s case it should have been ‘Staggerin’ at the Savoy’, and I hooked an arm around her waist and guided her over to the sofa. I discovered she had been clutching a hidden dancing partner to her breast. I pried the tumbler full of malt from her grasp and eased her down onto the chesterfield.

‘Well, hi, handsome.’ She breathed fumes that could have fuelled a jet into my face and smiled at me in an unfocussed, cold sort of way. It was a look I was used to in Glasgow: Scottish truculence is a craftsman’s work, filtered through peat and sheep droppings and distilled till it’s a hundred proof. ‘Long time no see.’

I went over to the record player and tore the needle from its groove. Benny stopped stompin’ and I hoped the neighbours hadn’t already ’phoned the police.

‘This doesn’t help you know, Lorna,’ I said, placing the Scotch on the side table and out of her reach.

‘Nor do you. You don’t help much, do you, Lennox?’ She pushed at my chest as if ridding herself of a great annoyance. ‘So what do I owe the pleasure of your company?’

‘I read the papers. I wanted to see how you are.’

‘Well you’ve seen. You may go…’ She approximated a regal wave of dismissal.

‘Not until you’ve sobered up, Lorna. I’ll make some coffee.’

‘Fuck the coffee. Fuck you, Lennox.’ It was the first time I’d heard Lorna utter a profanity. ‘Oh… is that what you want? You want me to fuck you, Lennox? We have such a deep and meaningful relationship, don’t we, sweetheart?’

‘Lorna, be quiet. I’ve been trying to get in touch with you all day. I didn’t realize you were working so hard on tomorrow’s hangover. I’ll get you some water while the coffee’s on.’ I went through to the kitchen, filled the kettle and put it on the stove. Ditching the malt in the sink, I rinsed the glass and brought it back to Lorna, filled with water. Lorna looked at it disdainfully but I sat next to her and waited until she had drunk it all down.

‘I’m sorry, Lorna. I should have been here more often,’ I said, and meant it. ‘It’s just that I’ve been tied up with a few things, including looking into some of the deals your father was into. I thought that I might find out something about his death. But that all seems redundant now. Have the police spoken to you about the arrest?’

Another dismissive wave. Less regal this time. ‘They showed me a photograph. Asked if I’d seen him before.’

‘Had you?’

She shook her head sullenly. ‘Some bloody gyppo. He must’ve followed Dad home from Shawfields a few times to learn his routine. Then waited for him…’

‘Is that what the police told you?’

‘They told me nothing. They talked to Maggie for a while and then Jack.’

‘Jack Collins?’

‘Yes… He’s family,’ she said with what I took as a bitter laugh. There again, everything about her was bitter.

‘The gyppo must’ve broken in and waited until…’ She started to cry. ‘Daddy…’

I put my arm around her and she pulled away.

‘Have you eaten?’

She shrugged. I went through to the kitchen and made the coffee and some toast. Again I had to overcome her resistance before she drank the coffee and ate the toast. I took some coffee too and managed to keep it down. The aspirin was beginning to work on my headache: like a butterfly trying to wear away a cannonball with its wing.

We sat for an hour, saying nothing, me topping her up with coffee. Eventually the inevitable happened and she had to run for the toilet. When she came back, her face was grey-white and the streaked make-up stood out like flaking paint. We made a handsome couple. I made her drink more coffee. Gradually, her voice became less slurred and her hatred of me less intense.

‘Why did they want to talk to Jack Collins?’ I asked eventually.

‘About Dad’s business. If there could be a connection with his death. He knew all kinds. Like you do.’

I let the dig go.

‘Do they suspect Collins of being involved in any of this?’

She shrugged a loose, drunken shrug. ‘I dunno. Jack wouldn’t have anything to do with anything like that. Jack’s a good boy…’

I wasn’t going to get much sense out of her so I guided her upstairs to her bedroom. I laid her down on the bed and she grabbed my jacket by the lapels, pulling my face close to hers. She reached her mouth to mine. I gently eased her back onto the bed.

‘Stay with me, Lennox. Sleep here tonight…’

‘Okay,’ I said. It was a reflex action, like kicking your leg when a doctor hits your knee with that little rubber hammer.

It was Maggie MacFarlane who woke me up. I looked up at her, blinking. There was just too much sun streaming into the room for my bruised noggin to cope with.

‘You look terrible,’ she said. No smile. Just a hard, cold stare.

I eased myself up into a sitting position on the sofa. We were in the living room. That irritating chivalrous streak had shown itself again and I’d camped out on the sofa. To get my gallantry into perspective, I don’t think either Lorna or I had had it in us to perform a horizontal tango. So here I was on the sofa: cramped, aching and in a foul mood. I looked at my suit trousers: they had more wrinkles than a Nepalese octogenarian and I congratulated myself on the smart move of changing clothes before I came over.

‘Where have you been?’ I asked, stretching.

‘What the hell is that to do with you?’

‘I came over last night and found Lorna completely plastered. She could have done with a little step-maternal support. You know that they’ve arrested a traveller for Small Change’s murder?’

‘Of course.’ Maggie remained frosty, which was far from her usual demeanour. ‘The police told me. So it was robbery after all.’

‘Did anyone suggest it wasn’t?’ I asked.

‘I think I should go up and see Lorna,’ said Maggie, dodging the question.

‘I’ll go,’ I said, removing my restraining hand from her forearm when she looked at it as if I had been a leper. With Blackwater Fever. And a Celtic supporter. ‘I promised I’d look after her.’ Walking to the door, I added over my shoulder: ‘And how is your stepson? Or half-stepson? I get confused.’

‘What are you talking about?’ It was there in her voice: something tight and a little unsure of itself. I turned to face her.

‘Young Jack Collins, the debonair gad-about-town. I’m guessing that’s who you were with last night? I know he’s Small Change’s illegitimate son.’

‘I think you should mind your own business and stay out of other people’s,’ said Maggie. The words were hard but the tone was softening. Like an expert sailor changing tack, she had worked out she needed to approach this breeze carefully. ‘Listen, Jack’s a good kid and he treated Small Change…’

‘Like a father?’ I helped out.

‘Well, yes. There’s nothing improper going on.’

‘If you say so,’ I said. I didn’t have time for this. ‘I better see Lorna.’

It wasn’t a pretty sight. She had thrown up in her sleep onto the bed sheets and I had to help her to her feet and into the bathroom while I stripped the bed. It took me an hour to get her straightened out before I could leave. She cried a lot: the shame of the unaccustomed drunk. You didn’t see it much in Glasgow.

I got back to my digs about ten a.m. The day was off to a great start: as I walked up the path Fiona White came out of the main door. She eyed me up and down, taking in my creased suit and probably sickly-looking face. It would have done no good to explain that I was actually concussed rather than hung over and I raised my hat to her as she walked past without uttering a word.

Once I was freshened up again I drove up to Blanefield and knocked on Kirkcaldy’s door. There was no one home so I came back into town to the Maryhill address I had for his gym. It was in an old building in Bantaskin Street: a much bigger, less sophisticated and sweatier affair than the set-up he had in the basement of his house. Old Uncle Bert was there too; he showed a fidelity to his nephew that would have made Blackfriar’s Bobby look like a fly-by-night. Kirkcaldy was sparring with a padded-helmeted partner in the ring. Bert came over to me and was the most amenable I had seen him. Which still was on the hostile side of chilly.

‘We saw what happened to yon laddie of yours,’ he said through his nose. ‘That was bad. Bobby’s upset that the boy was looking out for him when he got the beating.’

‘I appreciate it,’ I said. ‘And I appreciate Bobby taking the time to call into the hospital to see him. Were you there when Bobby found him?’

‘Aye, we were both on the way back from here. The lad was lying by the car, all battered to fuck. Somebody must have belted his coupon from behind then kicked the shite out of him.’

‘You reckon?’

‘That’s what it looked like, poor kid. You want to talk to Bobby? He can’t really tell you any more than I can but you’re welcome to wait.’

I shook my head. ‘It’s okay. Tell him I called by to say thanks.’

‘I’ll do that.’

It was turning into an unproductive morning. I called around at Jimmy Costello’s. His two goons, Skelly and Young, were sitting at the bar when I went in and eyed me contemptuously, a look I was getting used to. Skelly was still wearing the marks of our recent tango. I asked Jimmy Costello if he had heard from Paul. He told me he hadn’t and I could see that he was telling the truth.

‘Why you asking?’ he said. ‘You got a lead?’

‘No, I’ve got a bump on the back of my head and I’m pretty sure it was your son who gave it to me. I tracked down Sammy Pollock but left my rear exposed, to coin an expression.’

‘Why would Paul do that?’

‘Maybe he’s not convinced that I really am just interested in tracking down Sammy. Do you know anything about a stolen jade statuette? Of some kind of oriental dragon or demon?’

‘No…’ I guessed that this was Costello’s automatic response to being asked about stolen goods so I pushed him. ‘Listen, Jimmy, it’s important. I think Paul and Sammy Pollock have bitten off more than they can chew. Now, do you really not know anything about a stolen jade figure?’

‘I swear, Lennox. If Paul knows anything about it then he’s never said fuck all to me. Not that that surprises me. We don’t talk much.’

I talked to Costello for another half hour and just went around in the same old circles. As I was leaving, I saw Skelly shoot me another filthy look. The bump on my head gave another, bigger throb and it crossed my mind that it maybe hadn’t been Paul Costello who had bushwhacked me. I crossed the bar and pulled Skelly clean off his stool. His loyal pal backed away from me.

‘You got a problem with me, shitface?’ I chose the route of diplomacy.

‘I’m not the one with the problem,’ said Skelly, pulling the tailoring from my grasp. ‘And I don’t want any trouble.’

‘So I have a problem… is that what you’re saying.’

‘I’m not saying anything. Like I said, I don’t want any trouble.’

‘Then just watch your manners when you’re around your betters, Sonny.’

He turned a sullen back on me. There was no fight in him, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t handy enough with a sap in dim light and from behind.

I left him to his sulk and ignored Jimmy Costello’s impatient glare. I was pushing my luck, I knew it, but I had a sore head and was in a bad mood and everyone I dealt with seemed to be either lying to me or hiding something.

A promise is a promise. I called in to see Davey at the lunchtime visiting hour. He was pleased to see me but I could tell he hurt like hell. I wasn’t far behind him. We talked and I joked with him and all the time I felt that old dark fury kindle itself deep in my gut.

After I left the hospital, I ’phoned Sheila Gainsborough and asked if I could meet her, either at her apartment or my office. It was important, I told her, and not something that could be discussed over the ’phone. I got my message across and she agreed to meet at her apartment. But I would have to give her an hour to sort things out. She gave me the name of a cafe around the corner from her building and said we could meet there. The decorum was unnecessary and ill-advised but I was too beat-up to argue.

I drove into the West End, found the cafe in Byres Road and took a table by the window. It was one of those Italian places, where they made an opera out of making a cup of coffee with a steam-hissing machine that sounded like it should be pulling the eleven-fifteen to London out of Central Station. At least the coffee was good.

Sheila Gainsborough arrived five minutes late. She looked flustered and apologized for the delay. She took her scarf off and everyone in the cafe made a big show of not staring at her. Staring would have been much less obvious than the clumsily stolen glances. A waiter who looked as if he’d come straight off the boat from Naples but sounded like he’d come straight off the ferry from Renfrew took her order for a coffee.

‘You have news?’ she asked urgently. Her cheeks were flushed and, despite my gloomy mood and aching head, the thought of how nice it would be to make her cheeks flush crossed my mind.

‘Like I said on the ’phone, Miss Gainsborough,’ I said quietly. ‘We should do this at your flat or my office. Like it or not, you’re a celebrity, and every ear in this place is flapping. You never know when someone’s a reporter or a copper.’

She took the point and we drank our coffee in haste and silence. Afterwards, we walked the few blocks to her apartment. Most of the dwellings in the area were tenements, townhouses or the occasional villa. Sheila Gainsborough’s place was a rupture in the grimy Victorian and Georgian facades: an Art Deco block that would have been about thirty years old. One of the interesting things about Glasgow was the richness and variety of its architecture: Victorian, slum, Art Deco, slum, Contemporary, slum…

It was a classy place. Sheila led me into a huge, bright foyer that made you feel you’d stepped straight into the mid-Twenties. A uniformed commissionaire, who had an ex-military bearing but was of a vintage to have fought Kaiser rather than Fuhrer, saluted us and we took the elevator to the top floor.

‘You want a drink?’ she asked, as she dropped her bag and scarf onto a chair in the hall. ‘You look like you could do with one.’

‘I could do with one, but it would probably finish me off.’ I moved into the lounge. Everything in the flat was clean and orderly. The furniture, like the architecture that housed it, was Art Deco and was simple and tasteful — in that subtle way that tells you simple and tasteful is more expensive. There was a huge picture window, unbroken except for a couple of widely spaced, thin, white mullions. It gave a view over the city towards the university and Kelvingrove.

‘Please…’ she said, impatiently gesturing for me to sit. I sat. I think if Sheila Gainsborough had told me to jump out the window, I’d have done it. She remained standing, clutching her hands in front of her. ‘Is this about Sammy?’ she asked anxiously.

I held my hands up. ‘Sammy’s okay. I saw him last night.’

‘Thank God he’s safe…’ she almost gasped. Tears of relief glossed her eyes.

‘I’m sorry, Miss Gainsborough, but I don’t think he is safe. I saw him last night and he was all right, but he’s in trouble. And he’s very scared.’

‘Then why in God’s name didn’t you bring him with you?’

‘Because, Miss Gainsborough, someone smacked me over the back of the head and put my lights out. Sammy and his girlfriend — and his handy associate — scarpered while I was counting sheep.’

Her face fell. I felt sorry for her, but there wasn’t a lot I could do to put a positive sheen on it.

‘I’m afraid that Sammy has gotten involved in something heavy,’ I said. ‘Something out of his league. You remember Paul Costello? The guy who was wandering in and out of Sammy’s apartment, seemingly at will?’

Sheila nodded.

‘I rather suspect it was young Mr Costello who put my lights out. They’re in this together. Whatever this is.’

‘I knew Sammy was getting in with the wrong sort…’ She frowned her cute frown again. ‘Where did you find him?’

‘Sleeping rough in a derelict farm cottage in the middle of nowhere’s back of beyond. I only found him because I spooked a girl he’s involved with — Claire Skinner — and was able to follow her.’

‘Sleeping rough?’ Her eyes glossed with tears again. ‘What do we do now?’

‘I keep looking. I think there’s a chance he’ll get in touch with you. He looked hungry and tired. My guess is he’ll need money. If he gets in touch, I need you to let me know. No matter what he says, you’ve got to tell me. Got it?’

‘I’ve got it.’

‘When I was out at the cottage, there was something odd. A statuette of a dragon. Looked like it was made of jade. Chinese by the look of it. Mean anything to you?’

She shook her head. ‘Do you think they stole it?’

‘I’m pretty sure they did. I don’t know if that’s why they think the devil himself is after them or not. I really don’t know, but it would be a good guess.’

‘Where on earth would they have stolen something like that from?’

‘I don’t know. But I maybe know someone I can ask.’