The Long Glasgow Kiss

CHAPTER TWELVE

Surprising though it might seem, I was the bookish type. I read a lot. I would read almost anything, by anyone, on any subject. I only really drew the line, as I had pointed out to Devereaux, at Hemingway.

Glasgow was the kind of city that liked to make a show of its knowledge. The University was a collection of grand and imposing Victorian buildings but the most strident statement of the city’s erudition came copper-domed: the Mitchell Library sat imposingly right at the heart of the city and was all Corinthian pillars. The original design of the building hadn’t included the St. Paul’s style dome, but the City Corporation councillors had insisted on it. Now the Mitchell Library shouted to the rest of Scotland and the world, ‘See… we do have books!’

I waited in the main hall of the library. A smallish man with prematurely greying hair approached me.

‘Hello, Lennox,’ he said, and pump-handled my arm. Ian McClelland was an enthusiastic kind of person. His easy-going exuberance cheered me up every time I met him. Despite his impeccably Celtic name, McClelland was an Englishman, from Wiltshire, who had taken the usual upper-middle-class route of top public schools and Cambridge. He was probably the only person I knew who had any idea how to hold a fish knife. What the hell he was doing in Glasgow was beyond me.

McClelland was a political science lecturer and specialist on the Far East and we’d met at a university function. I had been conjugating verbs with a young female French lecturer at the time. The romance hadn’t lasted, but the friendship with McClelland had. He dressed like an academic but didn’t for some reason look like one. On more than one occasion I had had suspicions that McClelland, who had spent a lot of time out in the Far East, had been at one time or another and to one degree or another involved with the intelligence services.

‘How’s it going, Ian?’ I asked in library tones. ‘Corrupted any young female students lately?’

‘Only their minds, old boy. Only their minds. You said on the ’phone this is about a jade figure?’

We had attracted the frowning attention of a couple of academic types at one of the desks, bent over their research. McClelland steered me to another desk where he had laid out several reference books.

‘Yes,’ I said, once we were seated. ‘Ugly as sin. All fangs and big staring eyes. I think it was a dragon. It seemed to have cloven hooves, like a goat. It was maybe a demon. Here…’ I pushed the sketch I had done into his hands.

‘The dragon is a major folkloric figure in China.’ McClelland frowned as he examined the picture. ‘But what you’ve drawn here isn’t a dragon, it’s a Qilin. The hooves give it away. Giraffe’s hooves. You say this is made out of jade?’

‘Unless the Chinese make their gods out of green Bakelite.’

‘I can understand you thinking it was a dragon. There are a lot of jade dragons about. How tall did you say it was?’

‘About a couple of feet, give or take.’

‘Then it could be worth a tidy sum.’

‘How much?’

‘It’s impossible to say without seeing it. It depends on the quality of the jade — and that varies enormously. And, of course, it is frequently faked. If it’s real solid jade, then a thousand. Maybe two. Was it a deep emerald green?’

‘The light wasn’t good. I saw more its shape than anything, but it was green.’ I set my head to working again on what I had seen, but my head was still taking a tea-break. ‘No… maybe not emerald green. Paler. Milkier. Why?’

‘Imperial jade has a wonderful translucence and a deep emerald green colour. It’s rare and extremely valuable. But the piece you’ve described could be anything. Maybe not even jade.’ He caught my frown. ‘Not what you thought?’

‘Fifteen hundred quid isn’t enough for the kind of grief this thing seems to have caused.’

He shrugged. ‘Is it stolen?’

‘Let’s just say I’m trying to return it to its rightful owner in the hope it’ll get someone off the hook. A very big, very sharp hook.’

McClelland asked me if he could keep the sketch for a few days and I said he could. The mugginess in the air hit me when I stepped out of the stone-cooled interior of the library. I found a call box and ’phoned the hospital but the officious nurse on the other end of the line said she wouldn’t give me any information because I wasn’t a relative of Davey’s.

I spent the afternoon nursing my headache and pondered whether I really should get my head checked out. A couple of hours’ rest seemed to help it though, so I decided to skip it. I called police headquarters and got put through to Dex Devereaux.

‘Hey there, Johnny Canuck, how y’doin’?’ Devereaux’s American accent seemed amplified on the ’phone.

‘Fine. I wanted to ask you something. How much is each shipment Largo’s been sending to the States? I mean size or weight.’

‘We’re talking about forty pounds a shipment.’

‘That’s not a lot.’

‘In cash terms it is. Heroin is worth a hundred-and-fifty bucks a gram. That works out at nearly five hundred dollars per pound weight. Each forty-pound shipment Largo sends over is worth twenty thousand bucks. I don’t know what that is in limey money. The exchange rate I got was two dollars eighty cents for a pound sterling so work it out yourself. This stuff is literally worth twice or three times its weight in gold.’

‘So it would be reasonably easy to hide it in other stuff and lose it in a ship’s cargo manifest,’ I said, imagining a small rank of ugly jade demons.

‘I told you that already. It’s like the A-bomb. Small package but big punch when it hits the streets. What you got, Lennox?’

‘Maybe nothing… A hunch… that’s all at the moment. But I think part of Largo’s last shipment was stolen by some of the local boys. Amateurs who are scared out of their wits. It means I might be able to give you Largo and some of the dope.’

‘Lennox, if you’re sure about this…’

‘I’m not, Dex. I’m not sure of anything. Like I say, a hunch, and it would waste your time chasing it. If it turns out to be worthwhile, I’ll hand over everything to you and you can lead the local police by the hand to make the arrests. But I need to get someone out of the picture first. Thanks for the gen, Dex. I’ll be in touch.’

I hung up before Devereaux could pressure me any more. I was putting a picture together in my head and I needed to concentrate. I also needed time to follow up a few things.

There was one thing getting in the way of everything: Small Change MacFarlane’s murder. It nagged and nagged at me and I couldn’t work out why. I had all but accused Maggie MacFarlane of a bedclothes entanglement with Jack Collins, but I had no reason to imagine it as anything more than that. I somehow couldn’t cast Jack Collins as a smitten Walter Neff, and Maggie, although she was a satisfying piece of art, was no Barbara Stanwyck. I had asked Lorna, as subtly as I could, about insurance policies and a will. Both Maggie and, to a much lesser extent Collins, would benefit right enough, but the lion’s share went to Lorna. Under Scottish Law, Maggie, as the surviving widow, would have a reasonable case in challenging MacFarlane’s provisions but, according to Lorna who certainly was not free from suspecting her stepmother, Maggie had made no suggestion that she would.

But it all still bothered me.

I’m paid to stick my nose in. More often than not, I’m paid to stick it in where noses aren’t welcome. My most irritating habit was sticking my nose in where it wasn’t welcome when I wasn’t being paid for it. When I walked into the Vinegarhill camp, my nose had never felt so shunned. I was seriously concerned that it was going to be put out of joint.

I had performed an act of faith parking the car in Molendinar Street, trying not to think what odds Tony the Pole would give me against it being in one piece, or even being there, when I got back to it. The traveller camp was set up on a barren, grubby walled square, entered by a double iron gate, permanently open, next to the sugar works. There were a handful of modern touring, car-drawn caravans, but the vast majority were the traditional vardo or burton wagons: painted, horse-drawn jobs with arched roofs, that went hand-in-hand with everybody’s romantic image of gypsies. The rough humps of bender tents domed between some of the wagons.

There was no enticing odour of simmering goulash or impassioned violin-playing to accompany my arrival. These travellers did not hail from the Hungarian plain or Carpathian mountains, unless the Hungarian plain and the Carpathian mountains had a view of Galway Bay. And the most romantic thing I saw were two unleashed mongrels copulating over by the works’ wall. A handful of kids without shoes rampaged about the camp, and I was aware that a couple of young men had moved in behind me as soon as I had entered the yard.

That would normally be my cue to reach for my sap but, in a place like this with people like these, it would have been an inadvisable move. A painfully inadvisable move. Instead, I would have to talk my way out of here, like the cavalry captain with the white flag sent into the Indian encampment to parley. I strode across to where an older man leaned against a wagon, smoking a pipe. As I did so I passed a vardo wagon with the shutters drawn and deep crimson ribbons wrapped around the shafts and tongue.

‘I’m looking for Tommy Furie’s father,’ I said, when I reached the old man. ‘Could you tell me where I could find him?’

‘The Baro? What do you want with him? Who the fuck are you?’ The old man stopped leaning and took the pipe from his mouth. He spat a greeny viscous glob which splashed close to my shoe. Jimmy Stewart or Randolph Scott were never treated like this.

‘Like I said, I want to talk to him. And I’m pretty sure he’ll be very keen to talk to me. Now, do you know where I can find him or not?’ I was aware that the two youths had positioned themselves behind me, at either shoulder. The old man jerked his head in the direction of one of the modern-style caravans, the largest on site. I nodded and walked over to it, leaving my honour guard behind.

Sean Furie was a big man in his fifties. He was tall, and had probably been heavily muscled when younger, but had turned to fat. His full head of jet black hair was without a trace of grey and was oiled and combed back from a huge face. He and Uncle Bert Soutar had obviously gone to the same place for their nose jobs. The difference with Furie was that the tip of his nose was swollen and red and river-mapped with purplish capillaries. Romany rosacea, I decided to call it — the effects of bare knuckle and bare alcohol.

I told him who I was and what I wanted to talk to him about. I braced myself for his reaction, but it took me off guard anyway. Furie was remarkably soft-spoken and politely asked me into his caravan. There was a distinctive odour inside the caravan. Not dirty or unpleasant, just distinctive. The caravan seemed huge in comparison to the vardos I’d seen outside. It was wood-panelled and had a small kitchen, a lounge, and a room closed off by a door. I assumed the bedroom lay through there.

Sitting at the far end on a built-in sofa was a large, dark-haired, doleful-looking woman in her forties. We sat and, without word or glance, she stood up and left the wagon, squeezing past me to reach the door. It was an accustomed exit; it was clear that when Furie had business to do, the womenfolk left. He offered me a whisky and I took it.

‘I saw some ribbons tied onto one of the wagons as I came in. Red ribbons.’ I decided to be conversational. It often paid to ease into the main business. ‘Is that a celebration thing?’

‘You could say…’ Furie gave a bitter laugh. ‘We’ll have the same on this wagon soon. When they hang my boy.’

‘Oh… I see.’

‘It symbolizes death,’ explained Furie. ‘And mourning. Red and white are the Romany colours for mourning.’

‘Who died?’

‘I don’t know. It’s a Nachin family I don’t know.’

‘Nachin?’

‘Scottish gypsy. We’re Minceir, from Ireland. The travellers from England are called Romanichals and the ones from Wales are called Kale. But everyone here is either Minceir or Nachin.’

‘I see,’ I said. I lit a cigarette and offered him one, which he took but tucked behind his ear.

‘They’re going to hang my boy for something he never done, Mr Lennox,’ Furie said in his soft brogue. ‘It’s a fit-up, that’s what it is. Then you’ll see the red ribbons on this caravan.’

‘Tommy hasn’t even stood trial yet, Mr Furie, far less been found guilty and sentenced. If he didn’t do it, then they’ll find it difficult to prove he did,’ I lied.

‘Well, he never done it. But that’s just what you expect me to say anyway, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘You think that I’d deny it even if I knew he done it. We’re all liars and thieves, after all. Isn’t that right?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘But you was thinking it anyway, wasn’t you?’

‘As a matter of fact I wasn’t. I don’t know anything for sure. But there’s something bothering me about MacFarlane’s murder. Maybe your son is being framed for it, but if he is, who by and how?’

‘He’s a traveller. That’s all the reason they need.’

‘With the greatest respect, no, it isn’t. There’s much more to this than your son being the wrong type in the wrong place at the wrong time. What do the police say happened?’

Furie ran through it all. Tommy Furie had been one of the boxers whom Small Change MacFarlane had been involved with developing. Reading between the lines, Small Change had been organizing bare-knuckle bouts and running a book on them, and it struck me that there was maybe another reason behind Sneddon wanting me to find any hidden log kept by the deceased bookie. I wondered who had started the regular bouts out at Sneddon’s recently acquired Dunbartonshire farm. Sean Furie explained that his son had started to work as a sparring partner at a couple of the gyms and that Small Change had gotten him a number of legitimate ring fights. Small Change was notoriously tight with his cash and there had been a dispute over payment for a bout. Tommy Furie had complained to Small Change, several times, and in front of witnesses.

‘He was at the gym that night that MacFarlane was murdered,’ said Sean Furie. ‘It was one of his regular nights. He got a ’phone call at the gym telling him to go up to MacFarlane’s house to collect the money he was due for the fight.’

‘MacFarlane ’phoned him?’ I asked.

‘No. It was someone who worked for him. Or so he said. Tommy didn’t get a name. Or can’t remember. Tommy’s a good boy, but not too clever.’

‘I see,’ I said, trying to hide my surprise at the revelation.

‘Tommy went up to the house. He’d never been there before but had the address like. So he went up. Got the tram there and back. He said no one answered when he knocked but the front door was open. He went into the room and found MacFarlane on the floor. Dead. Tommy’s not as tough as you’d think and he panicked. On the way out he knocked over a lamp and picked it up to put it back.’

‘So the police have his fingerprints on the lamp?’

‘Aye, they have.’

‘What else do the coppers say they’ve got on him?’

‘The tram conductress remembered him on the way back. All agitated like. And they’ve got his fingerprints at the house. In the room where MacFarlane was murdered.’

‘That’s it?’

‘It’s enough,’ said Furie, ‘to convict a pikey.’

‘No it’s not. What does the lawyer say?’

‘To plead guilty so he doesn’t get hung.’

‘Brilliant…’ I shook my head. ‘I suggest you get another lawyer.’

With the kind of thing I had planned — the kind of thing that could end you up on the wrong side of a set of sturdy bars — preparation was everything.

I had a small black holdall, which I brought through to the living room and placed on the table. Taking a double page out of the Glasgow Herald, I laid it out next to the holdall. I put a set of heavy-duty wire cutters, a pair of black leather gloves and a black turtleneck sweater into the holdall. I had two corks saved from empty bottles. Taking one at a time, I lit a match and set light to them, allowing them to smoulder for a good while before blowing them out and setting them down to cool. In the meantime, I placed the rest of my toolkit in the holdall: a pair of black plimsolls, a bicycle lamp, a short crowbar-style tyre lever and both my saps.

Once the charred corks had cooled I folded them neatly into the sheet of newspaper and placed them in the holdall. I paused for a moment to reflect on my highly professional selection of equipment. If I were to be stopped by a policeman curious enough to look in my bag, there was enough in there to get me a three-month stretch for intent.

I had deliberately chosen a darker suit, which was probably too heavyweight for this time of year but appropriate for what I had planned for later.

I had a lot of time to kill before I could put my plan into action, but I had to load the stuff into the car now rather than have Fiona White hear me leave the house in the dead of night.

I dumped the bag in the trunk of the Atlantic and drove to the MacFarlane place in Pollokshields, picking Lorna up about seven. I took her to the Odeon Cinema in Sauchiehall Street, where we watched Gregory Peck in The Million Pound Note. A trip to the pictures may have seemed inappropriate, but I was trying to take her mind off her troubles, if only for a couple of hours.

Lorna didn’t say much before, during or after the picture and thanked me politely without inviting me in when I dropped her off. As I was leaving, I noticed Jack Collins’s Lanchester parked in the drive.

Willie Sneddon was a man of habit. Exact habit. Sometimes peculiar habit.

I had arranged to meet with him at the Victoria Baths, where he regularly took a steam bath and swim. The Victoria Baths was a temple of sandstone, marble and porcelain in the west end of the city. It had a swimming pool beneath an Italianate cupola, Turkish baths, steam room, massage tables and a lounge. It was a private club but members could sign in guests. A lot of the guests who were signed in here were Corporation councillors and officials, senior cops and the odd MP. Most left with their pockets heavy. There were allegedly more planning permissions, and public house and club licences granted here than in the City Chambers.

I waited for Sneddon in the foyer. I never swam in the Baths myself, and certainly never in any of the municipal pools, ever since I discovered that ‘swimming pool’ and ‘urinal’ are synonyms in Glaswegian. At least I had company while I waited: Twinkletoes McBride was already there, intimidating the staff and passing bathers. It was purely unintentional and passive; he was intimidating sitting down.

‘How’s it going, Mr Lennox?’ he asked cheerily, when he looked up and saw me; then with an alarmingly sudden change to grave asked, ‘Any news about wee Davey?’

‘They won’t tell me anything because I’m not a relative but I went in to see him today. He’s bearing up.’

‘You find out who did that to wee Davey and I’ll sort the fuckers out, Mr Lennox. Big toes too. And don’t worry, I’ll do it gracious.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘ Gracious…’ Twinkle frowned. ‘No charge…’

‘Ah… you mean gratis.’

‘Aye. That. They have it coming… what they did to Davey was reppy-hen-stable.’

I formed the word reprehensible in my mouth but kept it there: there was no point in correcting him further. And, as I’d already mentioned to Sneddon, I was rather attached to my toes.

‘I appreciate it, Twinkle,’ I said, and smiled.

‘My pleasure. How’s everything else going?’ Twinkletoes was leaning forward, elbows on knees, turning his smile to me. It was a huge wide smile in a huge wide head between huge wide shoulders. Twinkletoes was friendly bulk that could be turned into unfriendly bulk at the flick of a switch. ‘I heard you was going around with a posh bit of skirt,’ he said.

For a moment I thought he meant Sheila Gainsborough. Then I twigged. ‘Oh, yes… Lorna MacFarlane. Small Change’s daughter. She does have a bit of class. Unusual around here. A bit of class and a little sophistication. I go for that in a woman.’

‘Aye? Personally I go for big tits and a fanny tighter than a Fifer’s fist.’

I didn’t get a chance to frame an answer before the Victorian stained-glass panel doors that joined the foyer to the main part of the baths swung open and Sneddon, in an expensive wide-shouldered camel sports coat, tieless and with his shirt’s top button undone, emerged pink-faced and flanked by another of his heavies.

‘Sorry, am I interrupting something?’ he asked facetiously, noticing that I was somewhat lost for words.

‘No… I was just getting a few romantic tips from Charles Boyer here.’

Sneddon went across to reception and scribbled into the log that lay open on the desk.

‘I’ve signed you in,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and get a drink. Twinkle

… you and Tam wait here. I won’t be long.’

Sneddon led me through into a large clubroom. It was the kind of place where they could have cut down on the decorating costs by simply wallpapering it with five-pound notes. If anything, it was more over-the-top than the Merchants’ Carvery. The furniture was all polished hardwood and leather and the velvet drapes were a deep crimson. The walls were dressed in flock wallpaper — burgundy red fleur-de-lis against cream damask — so thick you could vacuum it. A vast onyx-type marble fireplace dominated one wall. I imagined that this was what hell looked like if you had a first-class ticket.

Sneddon led the way to a corner at the far side and sat down on two-and-a-half cows’ worth of red leather. I sat across the coffee table from him, on the rest of the herd. There were deep red velvet drapes behind us and I felt as if we were in a crimson cave.

‘Listen, Mr Sneddon… you’ve hired me to do a job. But you can’t ask me to do a job and then give me only half the story. You’re holding back vital information. I understand that you’ve got your interests to protect and there are some things I’d probably be better off not knowing, but in this case it means I’ve been up more blind alleys than a Blythswood Square floozy.’ I paused while a burgundy-jacketed waiter came over with two malt whiskies on a silver tray. I waited until he had gone before continuing. ‘The police have got Tommy Gun Furie for Small Change’s murder. And it looks to me like a set-up. More than that, it looks to me like a very well-thought-out set-up. Timing was everything with this. Tommy Furie was summoned to MacFarlane’s by someone calling the gym he trained in. Someone knew he was going to be in the gym at that time on that night and that they could get a message to him. My guess is that Small Change was still alive when they made that ’phone call and they only killed him after they knew Furie was on his way. Which means they were pretty confident that they could reschedule the whole thing if they had to. That would suggest that they were very familiar with Small Change’s routine.’

‘So why does this mean that I’ve been holding back on you? Are you saying I had something to do with Small Change getting topped?’

‘No. But I am saying that this appointment book you asked me to look for has nothing to do with bare-knuckle fights. Big money bare-knuckle fights. And if I’m right, then you have more to worry about than whether the police put you in MacFarlane’s house for a meeting. Tommy Gun Furie was one of the fighters MacFarlane lined up for you. And right now his own lawyer is telling him he’ll be lucky not to take a short walk to a long drop through a trapdoor in Barlinnie prison. He’s going to tell the coppers everything he can to try to save his neck. Literally. And somewhere along the line your name is going to come up. The only way out of it is for us to find out who really did kill MacFarlane and why.’

Sneddon looked at me with a steady gaze: the steady gaze of a crocodile looking at an antelope.

‘Okay,’ he said at last. ‘There was some stuff I was trying to keep to myself. But it doesn’t get the pikey out of the frame. If anything, it points to him having done it. Small Change MacFarlane and me were in business together. We were fixing up fights. But not what you saw out at the farm — the usual bare-knuckle shite with a couple of fucking pikeys slapping each other around. Although you’re right that Small Change helped me organize those too. We had something different going on.’

‘What?’

Sneddon didn’t answer for a moment, instead seeming to look around to reappraise his surroundings. ‘I’ve seen the way people look at me in here sometimes. Even when I’m walking my dog in the street where I fucking live. They look away. Avoid looking me in the fucking eye. They think people like me, Cohen and Murphy are the scum of the earth. We scare them. But I’ll tell you this, it’s them that scare me.’ He paused when the waiter returned to our crimson cave to replace our empty whisky glasses with full ones.

‘You should see the so-called ordinary man in the street when people like me serve them up with what they want,’ said Sneddon when the waiter was gone. ‘They’re the fucking monsters. I have an interest in a whorehouse in Pollokshields, not far from MacFarlane’s house. Discreet. One of the girls got beaten up so fucking bad we thought she’d die. Cost me a fortune getting her treatment without it being official. You should have seen the fucker that did it to her. A wee, bald, fat cunt that looked like he wouldn’t say boo to a goose. But when he was in there with the girl he turned into some kind of fucking monster.’

‘You turn him over to the police?’ The question was out and stupid before I thought it through.

‘Aye, right. That’s just what we done. What do you think we done? Twinkletoes sorted him out with some transport. A fucking wheelchair.’

‘What’s this got to do with your deal with MacFarlane?’

‘Like I said, you have no fucking idea what ordinary people want. The worse it is, the more they want you to dish it up to them. You’re not going to believe this, Lennox, but I read a lot. History, that sort of shite.’

I shrugged. It didn’t surprise me: since I first encountered Sneddon, I had sensed a hidden, dark intelligence about him. The Smart King.

‘I read a lot about ancient Rome. There was no difference between the Caesars and Rome and the Kings and Glasgow. They even had a triumvirate. Three Kings. You can learn a lot from history.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Personally I think there’s no future in it.’

Sneddon didn’t laugh — not at my joke and not ever that I could recall. ‘I’ve read a lot about the Colosseum. It used to be packed right to the top. Ordinary people turning out to watch blood and death. The fucking crueller the better. Do you know they used to make fucking children fight with swords, to the death? Or that the comedy turn was to put blind people into the ring? They’d slash and hack each other to bits, but it would take a fucking age for one or both to die because they couldn’t see each other. And the public fucking loved it.’ He paused to sip his whisky. Silver-suited and manicured, against the crimson of the booth he looked like a clubbable Satan. ‘Nothing’s changed,’ he continued. ‘We started to draw in big money from the bare-knuckle fights. The more brutal the fight the bigger the crowd the next week. So we started to put on special fights. At special prices. Only regulars were invited to buy a ticket.’

‘What made these fights special?’ I asked, though some horrible ideas had already flashed across the screen of my imagination.

‘They was no-holds-barred. No weapons, but apart from that everything was allowed — kicking, choking, gouging, biting. It started off small then just got bigger and bigger. The more blood, the bigger the crowds. And the higher the ticket price.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s have it… what happened?’

‘Someone got killed…’ Sneddon shrugged as if a human being’s death was an inconsequence. ‘A pikey. Something happened in his head and there was fucking blood everywhere, from his nose, his ears… even his fucking eyes…’

‘Let me guess… he ended up catching a train…’ I shook my head. It had been there in front of me all the time.

Sneddon made his usual crooked mouth shape to approximate a smile. ‘You’re a smart fucking cookie, aren’t you, Lennox. You make all of the connections. Yeah… he was the pikey that got mashed by the train. So no one’s the wiser.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong.’ I put my glass down and leaned forward. ‘There’s a keen-as-mustard new pathologist on the job. Very keen on what they call forensic science. He worked out that your pikey fighter wasn’t some drunk caught on the rails. Even proved that he’d been in a fight before he died.’

‘So fucking what?’

‘So you’ve got a problem. Or another problem. The City of Glasgow Police are treating it as murder. Believe me, they’d much rather have chalked it up as an accident, but because of this sharp new pathologist they can’t.’

‘Fuck.’ Sneddon’s face hardened. Which was surprising, because there wasn’t much scope for further hardening. ‘I knew we should have minced the bastard. But I didn’t want Murphy knowing nothing about this.’

I nodded. Hammer Murphy, one of the other Three Kings, owned a meat-processing plant in Rutherglen. It was well known that several bodies had been disposed of through the plant’s mincer. The Three Kings had an agreement whereby Murphy, for a fee, provided the same service for Sneddon and Cohen. Not for the first time I considered vegetarianism.

‘You should have told me all of this at the start,’ I said. ‘It would have made things easier.’

‘Murder. Fuck. And for once it wasn’t…’ Sneddon shook his head self-critically. It was like watching a golfer who had missed what should have been an easy putt. The thought flashed through my head that murderers maybe have a handicap system too.

‘You say he was a traveller?’ I asked.

‘A pikey, aye… What about it?’

‘Well, that means there’s maybe no official records of his existence. No birth certificate, no war record, no National Insurance number. No paperwork means he didn’t exist officially and that makes it more difficult to tie him in with anything. I think you sit this one out.’

‘What about his family?’ asked Sneddon glumly.

‘They’re not going to go to the police, I’d say. It looks to me like they’ve already said their goodbyes.’

‘How the fuck do you know that?’ asked Sneddon. ‘You don’t even know who they are.’

‘When I called in at the Vinegarhill site there was a vardo — you know, a gypsy caravan — all dressed up with red ribbons. Deep red. That’s their colour for mourning, not black. Of course, it doesn’t mean it’s your boy. What was his name?’

‘Gypsy Rose Lee… How the fuck would I know? He was just a pikey.’

‘Go back to the fights. What was Small Change MacFarlane’s involvement in them?’

‘He set them up and ran the book on them for me. He took a percentage of the winnings and I provided the venue, and the muscle to collect unpaid bets.’

‘He supplied the fighters?’

‘Aye, kind of. He arranged for them to be supplied. The deal was he paid for that out of his cut.’ Sneddon sighed wearily. ‘It was Bert Soutar who found them for Small Change.’

‘Soutar?’ For a second I was deafened by the sound of pennies dropping. ‘Oh, I see… so Bobby Kirkcaldy had a stake in this too?’

‘In the background, aye. Kirkcaldy’s a good fighter and he’ll batter this Kraut on Saturday. But when me and Cohen put money into him, we said he was to get checked out by an independent doctor. Turns out his heart’s fucked. Arrhythmia, they call it. Two, three, more big fights and then he’ll have to give the fight game up. The Board of Control know fuck-all about it like. They’re not exactly on the ball. But Kirkcaldy likes having money, so wherever there’s a pie, he has his finger in it.’

‘So that’s why he was so out of breath…’ I said more to myself than Sneddon, remembering the toll Kirkcaldy’s skipping workout had taking on him in his basement gym. That would be why he had been doing so much training there, instead of in the city gym: no one to see him struggle for breath.

‘Then Kirkcaldy or Bert Soutar will have a name for the dead traveller?’ I asked.

‘Maybes. Maybes not.’

I leaned back into the plush red upholstery and sipped at the whisky. It all made sense.

‘So it didn’t occur to you at all that it was the tailers who were making all of these symbolic threats?’

‘Pikeys? Because of the one that got killed? No, it didn’t. It didn’t even cross my mind.’

‘I find that very difficult to believe.’

Sneddon leaned forward, as if about to share a great confidence with me. ‘I’d be very careful before you call me a liar, Lennox. Very fucking careful.’

I said nothing for a moment, doing the discretion/valour equation in my head.

‘So Soutar supplied fighters for these contests and Small Change organized them and ran your book. What about Jack Collins? He was the real fight arranger as far as Small Change was concerned.’

‘Naw. We did have dealings with Collins, but that was for proper boxing matches. What I told you that night I hired you was true. We was putting together proper bouts and running a few half-decent fighters. That was what Collins managed. And that pikey kid who’s supposed to have done Small Change in… he was moving up out of bare-knuckle and was turning into a tasty boxer. All that’s fucked now anyway.’

‘Do you still have Singer on Bobby Kirkcaldy’s tail?’ I drained my whisky and stood up.

‘Aye…’

‘Good. He needs to be watched like a hawk.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’ve got paperwork to do.’

Finding a place to park out of sight of the main road, under a dank railway arch, I sat for half an hour, smoking and listening to the steel sounds of the Clyde. It was quieter and cooler during the night, but the shipyards and repair docks never really slept. This was no man’s land, between the tenements and the docks. No one would come down here unless they had a reason. That was both good and bad for what I had planned. There would be very few people to spot my car tucked away from view; but those few people would either be up to no good, like me, or trying to catch the up-to-no-good. The last thing I needed was a patrolling bobby to happen across the Atlantic.

A train thundered over the rails above me and its rattles echoed damply in the arch. I put out my cigarette and took my stuff out of the trunk. Taking my suit jacket off, I pulled the turtleneck jumper over my shirt and I changed my shoes for the plimsolls. I unwrapped the charred corks from the newspaper and rubbed them all over my face. If that patrolling bobby were to catch me now, I’d have to convince him I was auditioning for a blackface minstrel show or face those three months in Barlinnie. Locking up the car, I pulled on my leather gloves and made my way out from under the arch. I ducked behind a bush and watched while an elderly dockworker cycled along the cobbled road that lay between me and the bonded dockside area. He pedalled so slowly that I wondered how he could remain upright with so little momentum carrying him forward. After what seemed an age, he disappeared from sight around the distant corner.

The streetlamps threw meagre pools of light onto the cobbles and I ran between them, bent over, across the road and down into the ditch on the far side. I was about three hundred yards away from the gates and the watchman’s shed when I took the wire cutters from the bag and snipped at the steel wire fence, folding it back like curtains and crawling through, hidden by the long, uncut grass.

I made my way along the inside of the fence, still keeping low because I would still be visible from the road until I reached the area where I remembered the Nissen huts to be. There was only one lamppost and the Nissens loomed darkly, with little to distinguish one from another. I didn’t want to use the bicycle lamp out in the open and it took me five minutes to find the sign Barnier and Clement. The front door was reasonably solid, but this was an office rather than a store, and the padlock that secured the door fell away with a sniff of the crowbar. I caught the padlock before it hit the ground and let myself into the Nissen.

Normally, I would have switched the lights on: a fully illuminated room attracts less attention than a torch flashing around; but out here in the dark of the warehouse area, switching the lights on would have been as inconspicuous as a lighthouse on a clear night.

The offices seemed pretty much as I had seen them when I had called and asked to see Barnier. I went over to the filing cabinets and was soon saying a little appreciative prayer for Miss Minto. Her filing was meticulous and easy to follow. It took me only twenty minutes to find what I was looking for: a ship’s manifest order and duplicates of a ship’s insurers claim form with a Lloyd’s Register stamp on it.

I smiled. The last thing Barnier would have wanted was for an insurance claim to be put in, but this had to be seen as a scrupulously legitimate business.

I laid the manifest on the desk and shone the bicycle lamp on it, running my finger down the list of items. There it was, as bold and innocent as could be:

ITEM 33a. 12 VIET KYLAN NEPHRITE JADE FIGURINES. CRATED. DESTINATION: SANTORNO ANTIQUES AND CURIOS, GREENWICH, NEW YORK, NEW YORK

Except there were only eleven now. KYLAN. When I had first turned up without an appointment, Miss Minto had thought I was there about the ‘ key lan ’. And they weren’t Chinese. They were Kylan, not Chinese Qilin. They were Viet, from French Indochina. Alain Barnier was an established importer from the Far East, exactly the kind of link that John Largo needed in his supply chain. Except now Barnier was a weak link. Taking notepad and pencil from my bag, I wrote down the details of the shipment, put all the paperwork back in the files and the files back in the cabinet.

I heard a sound outside.

I killed the light from the bicycle lamp and crouched down. Grabbing my sap from the bag, I scuttled under the lidded reception counter to the door. There was a small window next to it and, pressing myself against the wall, I stole a peek through the window. I saw the watchman’s back as he walked through the pool of light from the lamppost and out of sight. I waited for several minutes, straining my neck to watch through the window, before deciding it was safe to put my sap back in the bag, go back to the files and switch the lamp back on.

Barnier was my way to Largo. If I kept tabs on the Frenchman, there was a chance he would lead me to Largo. Or at least take me a step closer. I needed an address. Again I blessed homely, unfriendly Miss Minto, who had channelled all of the sexual and social frustration of the spinster into a fanatical efficiency. Her address book was not tabulated or indeed a proper address book. Instead it was a hardcovered notebook into which she had written all of the company’s most important contacts. It was impressively obsessive: not a name was out of perfect alphabetical order. Barnier lived some distance out of town on the Greenock Road, in Langbank. He was on the telephone and I noted both address and ’phone number. I found myself wondering about the mysterious M. Clement, and after I got the address of the Barnier et Clement French office in Cours Lieutaud, Marseille, I looked up and found the name Clement: Claude Clement lived somewhere called Allauch. I wrote down both addresses and put my notebook back in the bag. A worthwhile night’s work.

It was just as I had put everything back in my bag that I heard the footsteps outside the door.