The Long Glasgow Kiss

CHAPTER SIX

When the war ended, Britain had committed itself to a more equitable society. Maybe that was why, when Beveridge and company were planning the Welfare State and a fair deal for all, Willie Sneddon, Jonny Cohen and Hammer Murphy were coming up with the Three King deal. The whole idea had been to divide up Glasgow equally between them. Fair shares.

The cake may have been cut up equally, but somehow Willie Sneddon had managed to grab most of the icing. Of the Three Kings, Sneddon was by far the richest. No one really knew — but many suspected — how he had managed to amass just quite so much wealth. It was a quandary that had no doubt cost Hammer Murphy more than his fair share of sleepless nights trying to work out. Truth was that, if you knew Willie Sneddon, it wasn’t that much of a mystery. There was something dark, cunning and devious about his nature, even more than you would expect from your average crime lord. Sneddon was a wheeler and dealer. More than just a criminal, he was a criminal entrepreneur, always seeking out that extra angle; always trying to find some new way of squeezing a penny out of a situation.

I knew — although I never discussed it with him — that the bulk of Jonny Cohen’s money did not come from his clubs and other rackets. The main source of Jonny’s income came from large-scale criminal acts: robberies mainly, break-ins, long firm frauds, the odd bit of extortion. With Jonny Cohen — and Hammer Murphy, for that matter — the bulk of their earnings came from big hits which yielded large sums of cash. The big score. Willie Sneddon was in the same line of business, but everyone knew that he had so many other deals and rackets running at the same time that he had a steady, constant cash harvest. Added to all of this there was the other dimension of his activities: Willie Sneddon the businessman. Sneddon had displayed genuine acumen for legitimate business, even if it had been founded on stolen, extorted or counterfeited cash. Like most big league crooks, he had started a number of seemingly legitimate concerns, fronts through which to launder dirty money. Where Sneddon had distinguished himself from the usual robber barons was in the way he had been able to turn these fronts into genuinely successful and legitimate businesses.

But it never took much scratching to expose the brass crook under the gilt veneer. The fact was that wherever there was a shilling to be made, crooked or legit, Sneddon had the nose to sniff it out.

All of this meant that Sneddon, unlike the recently deceased Small Change MacFarlane, had been able to make it across the social Rubicon of the Clyde. And then some. The Sneddon residence, a large mock-baronial mansion on a plot of land so big it could have had its own Lord Lieutenant and council, was in the leafiest and most upmarket end of leafy and upmarket Bearsden. I knew that he counted a High Court judge, a couple of shipyard owners, and several other captains of industry amongst his neighbours. I wondered how the judge felt about sharing a laburnum and privet border with Glasgow’s most successful criminal. But there again, Willie Sneddon had attained the level of wealth and influence within the city where some of the people he had dealings with no doubt thought it bad taste to bring up some of the more dubious origins of that wealth.

And, of course, the odd brown envelope stuffed with cash would have helped. Glasgow was a city where anything could be bought. Even respectability.

I couldn’t put off seeing Sneddon any longer. He would be looking for news and the only news I had for him was that putting me on the Bobby Kirkcaldy case was a waste of time and that Maggie MacFarlane had confirmed that Small Change never kept a secret appointments diary.

It wasn’t raining. There was a more than half-hearted sun behind a milky veil of cloud and the air wasn’t heavy and oppressively humid as it had been. I got up, shaved, and dressed in a pale blue silk shirt with dark burgundy tie and a two-button two-piece: deep blue with a touch of mohair spun through it. It had no weight and hung well and had cost me an arm and a leg. Deep blue socks and burgundy Oxfords. I brushed the shoulders of the suit jacket, donned it, and straightened my tie in the mirror. I put on my new hat, a skinny-brimmed Borsalino, and checked myself in the mirror. Damn, this suit hung well. It seemed such a shame to bag it down with the weight, but I was expecting that I would, sooner or later, run into Costello or a member or two of his robust entourage.

I habitually carry a sap with me: six inches long, spring-steel with a lead ball on the end, all encased in stitched leather. But I was a slave to fashion and I didn’t want it bagging my suit. Fortunately I had a slimline equivalent: a nine-inch blackjack. Basically the same principle, but flattened out, only the width of a wallet and almost like a small version of a barber’s leather razor strop. It was an elegant-looking thing, slim and black, like something Chanel would have designed for Al Capone.

I slipped the blackjack into my inside jacket pocket. On the left, where I could pull it out with my right hand. The leaden weight of it tugged that side of my jacket, but I decided to live with it. A flat blackjack is often missed when someone frisks you: it feels like a wallet. And I didn’t feel like going out onto the street without some insurance.

I ’phoned Sneddon to arrange a meet. He told me he was tied up all day and couldn’t I give him the information over the ’phone. I said I’d rather talk to him face-to-face, and anyway it wasn’t the kind of thing to discuss over the ’phone, or some shit like that. He bought it and told me to call round in the evening, about eight-thirty.

I had ’phoned him first to make the point that calling and arranging a mutually convenient time was preferable to being lifted from the street by Twinkletoes McBride. Added to which, unlike the farmhouse out by Dumbarton, the place in Bearsden was Sneddon’s home, as well as business headquarters. Maybe I could even persuade Jimmy Costello to follow the same diary etiquette. Though I doubted it.

Before I went out, I stopped at the hall ’phone and called Lorna at home. She was bearing up well, it seemed, but her voice still sounded tired and grief-dulled. I somehow got by with a promise to ’phone her later, without calling in at the house. I did ask her if the police had been around to ask anything else and if Jack Collins had been around again. No to both questions. Then we had one of those long silences where we each waited for the other to say something. Something meaningful or comforting. Something to take us out of our depth: shallow.

‘I’ll hear from you later then,’ she said eventually, her tone still colourless, and hung up.

I drove out to the East End, to Dennistoun. Like many of the fine districts of Glasgow, it was a great thing to be able to claim that you came from Dennistoun. It was ever going back there that was to be avoided. Dennistoun was a warren of old tenements, dressed in grime that had belched from chimneys when Victoria had been a lass. As I drove into it there were gaps and clear spaces where some of the more derelict slums had been cleared. Shiny new blocks of flats were already in residence on a couple of the cleared sites.

I drove to the far side of Dennistoun, to an incongruous green patchwork square of allotments. Behind those, an equally incongruous building, made out of corrugated metal sheets bolted together and which looked like it belonged in a shipyard.

I parked and went in through a door under a sign that told the world this was McAskill’s Gymnasium. Inside, there were two practice rings, the ropes sagging and the canvas grey, and several punch bags hung unpunched from the ceiling. It was quiet in the gym. The only person was an old man in a turtleneck sweater and flat cap sitting over in the far corner on a battered old armchair, reading a newspaper. He looked up when I came in, carefully folded the newspaper and came over to me.

‘Hi, Lennox…’ Old McAskill smiled at me. It was a weary smile on a weary face that had also had more than its fair share of encounters with a gloved fist. He jerked his capped head in the direction of the office at the back. ‘He’s in there…’

I went through to the office. A lean man with a too-long face was sitting behind the desk, smoking. He looked about forty but I knew he was ten years younger than that. He had put his hat on the desktop and I could see it was the kind of wide-brimmed fedora that had been out of fashion for half-a-decade. I dropped my skinny-brimmed Borsalino on the desk next to it. To make a point.

‘Mr Lennox…’ The man smiled and stood up. He was tall. No surprise: the City of Glasgow Police had a minimum height requirement of six feet, hence the fact that at least two-thirds of their number came from outside Glasgow. He shook hands with me. Now, it has to be said that City of Glasgow cops were not in the habit of calling me ‘Mister’ or shaking hands with me, unless it was to snap a pair of cuffs on me. But Detective Constable Donald Taylor was different. We had an arrangement.

‘Thanks for coming, Donald. You on duty?’

‘Backshift. Start at two.’

‘Did you find out anything about what I asked you?’

He shook his head. ‘Not much, I’m afraid, Mr Lennox. Bobby Kirkcaldy isn’t Glaswegian. He was born in Motherwell. To sniff around any more I’d have to contact the Lanarkshire County Police. That would start questions.’

‘But you would at least be able to check out whether he has a record or not.’

‘Oh aye… I did that. Nothing. And from what I can gather there are no rumours about him. He seems to be straight.’

‘What about the other thing? Small Change MacFarlane?’

‘Sorry… no joy there either. I’m not on the case and, again, if I start asking too many questions, the gaffers’ll get suspicious. I did talk to the evidence sergeant though. Conversational, like. He said they took tons of stuff away from MacFarlane’s place. With his missus’s say-so, like.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘Couple of things. Inspector Ferguson was asking about you.’

‘He knows you know me?’

‘No, not really. Well not that we… well, do business. Inspector Ferguson doesn’t go in for that kind of thing. It was just that he knew that I’d interviewed you about that business last year. When you was away abroad.’

I nodded. Jock Ferguson had been my main contact in the police. Not paid for. A straight copper. Or so I had thought. I hadn’t spoken to him in six months.

‘What was the other thing?’ I asked.

‘It’s just one of the reasons I couldn’t ask too many questions about the MacFarlane thing. There’s been all kinds of top brass sticking their noses into it. It’s like there’s something more to it than just a simple robbery.’

‘And…?’ I said impatiently. I knew Taylor was building up to something. Or building something — or nothing — up. He knew that I only paid for results.

‘There was a Yank in St. Andrew’s Square. He was in with Superintendent McNab and the DCC.’

‘An American?’

‘Think so. I passed them in the corridor. He talked like you.’

‘I’m not American. I’m Canadian.’

‘Yeah… his accent was stronger. He was a big man. Big as McNab. Loud suits.’

‘So what’s this got to do with me?’

‘Well, you know what tarts are like. The typing pool and the women police constables were swooning all over the place because of his accent. He was the talk of the steamie. I’m friendly with one of the girls who works up in the DCC’s office. She says they asked for all the files on MacFarlane’s murder.’

‘So this guy’s an American cop?’

‘Don’t know. Someone said he was a private detective. Like you.’

‘Okay…’ I thought for a moment. ‘Anything else going on?’

‘Just this other murder.’

‘What other murder?’ I asked.

‘The guy they found by the train tracks.’

‘I thought that was an accident.’ I lit another cigarette, pushing the pack across the desk for him to help himself. ‘What are you Einsteins up to? You going to arrest the train driver?’

‘Superintendent McNab is as mad as hell about it. Everyone was happy that it was the train that killed him. I mean, they had to use spades to get all of him gathered up. But the pathologist who did the post-mortem said the guy was dead before the train ran over him. The other thing is he had two busted fingers and knuckles skinned to fuck. The quack says it looked to him like the guy’d been in a fight and was beaten to death, then dumped. The train mashed him up to buggery and the thinking is that whoever killed him dumped him on the tracks.’

‘Makes sense,’ I said. ‘There was a good chance that no one would question that the injuries were caused by anything other than the train. Who was he?’

‘No idea. No one’s reported anyone missing that fits and he didn’t have any identification on him. This pathologist is some new hot-shot with fancy tricks. He put in his report that from the stiff’s build, the calluses on his palms and his colouring, he reckons he was a manual labourer of some sort. It fits with the clothes.’ Taylor laughed. A thin, mean laugh. ‘I think the pathologist’s going to be our next murder victim. Supe — rintendent McNab is really pissed off that he’s been lumbered with another killing. Doesn’t like paperwork, does the Superintendent.’

I nodded. I could see McNab prioritizing deaths. Nobodies, somebodies and, right at the top, coppers. If you killed a policeman, then McNab would be harder to stop in his tracks than the train that had mashed the labourer’s corpse.

Taylor talked for another ten minutes without saying anything, again trying to justify his fee. When he was finished I thanked him and gave him the number of the wall ’phone in the hall at my digs.

‘Give me a ring if you hear anything else. It’ll be worth your while.’ I opened my wallet and handed him three tenners. Coppers didn’t come cheap.

After Taylor had gone I went back out into the gym. A couple of youths had arrived and had changed into boxing shorts and white singlets. They looked skinny and too pale. Both were working the punch bags and Old McAskill was leaning against the wall watching them disinterestedly.

I walked over to the old man and slipped him a fiver. ‘Thanks for the loan of the office, Mac. Do you know much about Bobby Kirkcaldy?’

‘Not much. He’s a great wee mover. He’s going to malky that Kraut next week.’

‘You reckon?’

‘No doubt about it.’

‘But you’ve never come across him? I mean through the boxing.’

‘Naw. He wouldn’t pish on a place like this if it was on fire. Anyways, he’s a country boy. No’ Glasgow.’

I smiled at the thought that McAskill pictured Motherwell as some bucolic paradise. I suppose, in comparison to Dennistoun, it was.

‘He’s got a minder. Says he’s his uncle. About your age. Calls him Uncle Bert.’

Old McAskill seemed to be concentrating. It took a lot of effort. He was clearly trying to retrieve something from a brain that had been rattled about in his skull by years of punches. It must have been like trying to pick a specific ball out of a spinning bingo cage.

‘What does he look like?’

‘Like he’s used his face to break toffee.’

‘Fuck…’ He’d clearly found the ball he’d been searching for. ‘Albert Soutar. Is he Kirkcaldy’s uncle?’

I shrugged.

‘Is his nose all busted to fuck?’

‘I don’t think to fuck covers it adequately. He could sniff his ears with it.’

‘That sounds like Soutar all right. And he had family out in Lanarkshire. That’s one bad wee fucker. Or was.’

‘In what way?’

‘In the late Twenties, early Thirties, he went professional, but he was shite. A slugger who stopped too many punches with his head. Did a lot of bare-knuckle too. Then he went inside.’

‘Prison?’

‘Aye. He was in with the Bridgeton Billy Boys. Razor gang. He was supposed to have cut up a copper. He kept his razor in the peak of his bunnet.’ McAskill touched his own flat cap. ‘He was a bad, bad bastard. He abused the privilege of being a cunt, as my old Da would say.’

I smiled, picturing the cozy fireside scene of young son on father’s knee being inducted into the world of abusive epithets.

‘So you think that Uncle Albert is the same guy?’

‘Could be.’ McAskill shook his head slowly. ‘If it is, then he’s so crooked he pisses corkscrews. I’d be surprised if young Kirkcaldy would have anything to do with him.’

I drove out of Dennistoun and had lunch — if you could call it that — at the Horsehead Bar. I ordered a pie and a pint and while I was proving valid the scientific principle that oil and water don’t mix, I spotted Joe Gallagher, a journalist friend, at the other side of the bar. I use the word friend loosely, not just in terms of this guy, but generally for the acquaintances I had made in Glasgow since I first arrived in the city. Drinking buddy would have been a better description in Joe’s case.

The price of information from journos is much cheaper than cops on the take. Usually a pint and a whisky chaser opens the channels of communication, so I made my way round to Joe’s side of the bar and asked him what he was having.

I left half an hour later. My newspaper chum had told me that he had interviewed Kirkcaldy on a couple of occasions. Smart kid, in Joe’s opinion. He had mentioned the battered old minder who seemed always to be at Kirkcaldy’s shoulder.

‘Yeah… calls him his uncle, I believe…’ I had said.

‘Some uncle,’ Joe had muttered. ‘That’s Bert Soutar. Bad sort.’

It was eight-thirty on the dot. I pulled into the long, uphill drive that led through gardens dense with thick, glossy-leaved shrubs and trees and up to Sneddon’s mansion. It was a pleasant evening. The deepening blue of the sky didn’t seem to suit as a backdrop for the Victorian architecture of Sneddon’s place. Gothic and the normal Scottish climate — and the Scottish character — were meant for each other. Even Sneddon’s black Bentley R-type seemed to lurk on the drive; I parked behind it and went up to the house, half-expecting Vincent Price to answer the door and ask me in to see his waxworks. Vincent Price would have been good: my ring of the bell was answered by Singer opening the door and silently standing to one side to let me into the hall.

Sneddon didn’t do his usual trick of keeping me waiting and I was led into his study. The bookshelved walls were heavy with learning and the room had a rich smell of walnut and leather. I somehow didn’t think that Sneddon spent much time in here acquainting himself with literature.

‘You got something for me already?’ Sneddon sat down behind a tree-and-a-half of desk. I’d seen smaller aircraft carriers. He was wearing a well-tailored blue pinstripe three-piece with a handmade white and blue striped silk shirt, and a pale and plum red tie. It could have been the outfit of a Surrey stock-broker, but all it did was emphasize the razor scar and the hard, vicious face behind it.

‘I saw Kirkcaldy yesterday,’ I said.

‘And?’

‘There’s nothing for me to go on. He can’t tell me anything. This is a watch and wait job. You’ve got to catch whoever’s doing this in the act.’

‘So watch and wait.’

‘I can’t be there twenty-four hours a day. And I would have thought that you’d maybe want a couple of your guys to be there to mete out some extemporary retribution when they do show up again.’

‘I hired you because I want you to find out what’s going on. I mean what’s really going on.’ Sneddon’s hard blue-grey eyes were fixed on mine, as if trying to communicate a deeper meaning.

‘I see. So Jonny Cohen’s not the only one who thinks there’s something more to this.’

Sneddon looked over my shoulder and past me, jerking his head in a gesture of dismissal. I turned and saw that Singer had been standing, silently of course, by the door. I had thought he’d left us alone after he’d shown us in, so if he’d been lurking for my benefit, then it had been a wasted effort.

‘I’ve got a lot of fucking money riding on Kirkcaldy,’ Sneddon said after Singer had left, closing the heavy door behind him. ‘More than you can imagine. What did he tell you?’

Referring to my notebook, I ran through the facts as Kirkcaldy had related them to me. When I had finished and closed the notebook, Sneddon kept his hard eyes on me. He raised a questioning eyebrow.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘You want to know what I think, rather than what I found out. All right… Bobby Kirkcaldy went out of his way, several times, to tell me that I was wasting my time. That it was no big deal. He positively leapt on the notion that this was all just some bollocks to put him off his game before the big fight. And he reassured me that it would do no such thing.’

‘So?’

‘It was like he wanted to brush the whole thing off. Brush me off. How did you find out about this anyway? Did Kirkcaldy tell you?’

‘No, he didn’t. His manager told me.’

‘And Kirkcaldy had complained to him about it?’

‘No, as a matter of fact.’ Sneddon’s face remained impassive. ‘His manager turned up at the house and saw the car covered in red paint. He asked Bobby what was going on and got the same tale you did.’

‘Yeah…’ I offered Sneddon a cigarette. He shook his head impatiently. I took my time lighting mine. ‘Kirkcaldy is very dismissive about the whole thing. I asked him if it could be something personal — a grudge, an old enemy from the past, that kind of thing, and not related to the fight — he made a big show of thinking about it before telling me he couldn’t think of anybody. Now if it were me and someone was leaving dead birds, nooses and crap like that on my doorstep, I think I would already have done a lot of thinking about anyone who might have an old grudge to settle. I don’t think I’d need someone to come along and put the idea to me first.’

‘So you think he knows what this is all about?’

‘I’m not saying that, but let’s face it… Jonny Cohen smells something fishy about the whole thing, so do I. Now you seem to smell a rat. What do you know about Kirkcaldy? I mean apart from his abilities in the ring?’

‘Not as much as I’d like. You seen him fight?’

‘Couple of times, yeah.’

‘I know enough about the fight game to know that being a winner — I mean a real winner — is as much about what you’ve got up here as how hard you can hit.’ Sneddon tapped his temple with his forefinger. ‘And Kirkcaldy has got it all. He boxes clever. But more than that, he’s ambitious.’

‘Well, I thought you would have wanted that in a fighter you’re backing.’

‘Aye… I do. But what worries me is how much ambition he’s got outside the ring.’

‘Listen, Mr Sneddon…’ I leaned forward and rested my elbows on my knees. ‘There’s no point in you being elliptical…’

‘What the fuck does that mean? You been at the Reader’s Digest with Twinkletoes?’

‘It’s clear to me that you have suspicions that you’re not sharing. The other thing is, you could have dealt with all of this with your own men, sitting it out until whoever is doing this shows up to pull another stunt. But you got me involved to see if I smelt the same rat that you and Jonny Cohen clearly have. So why don’t you tell me what it is you really want me to find out?’

Sneddon moved his mouth into the ugly shape he took for a smile. ‘Maybe I like being epileptic…’

‘Elliptical…’ I corrected, and wished I hadn’t. The coarse approximation of a smile dropped from Sneddon’s face. ‘Bobby Kirkcaldy has a shadow with him all the time. An old guy with a mashed-up face. Kirkcaldy calls him Uncle Bert. I’ve checked him out and it turns out he’s an ex-razor gangster called Bert Soutar. Bridgeton Billy Boys back in the Thirties.’

‘I remember the Billy Boys,’ said Sneddon. I had no doubt that he did. The Billy Boys had been a Protestant sectarian gang, organized along military lines. Sneddon had only one weakness in business, one gap in his calculating objectivity. He was a bigot to the bone. ‘But I’ve never heard tell of a Bert Soutar.’

‘He did time.’

Sneddon made a face and shrugged. ‘Cutting up a few Fenians doesn’t make him Al Capone. You think it’s significant?’

‘It suggests Kirkcaldy perhaps isn’t as up-and-up as he seems. Maybe Uncle Bert is connected to dodgy dealings. It could explain the warnings.’

‘Okay,’ said Sneddon. ‘Keep on it and see what you can turn up. I asked you about something else. Small Change’s appointment book. Have you looked for that?’

‘I asked Small Change’s wife… widow… she said he didn’t keep one. She said he did keep everything in his head. The police took some stuff away with them.’

‘They warrant it?’

‘No… no warrant. Maggie MacFarlane gave them the okay. By the way, she’s already had a gentleman caller. Jack Collins. You know him?’

‘Oh aye… I know Collins. Small Change had him as a partner in one of the bookie shops. And small-time fight arranging.’

‘Is there any reason that I should be looking at Collins for anything?’

Sneddon laughed in a way that suggested he was out of practice. ‘You could say that. Why don’t you look at Collins for a family resemblance… MacFarlane used to do business with Collins senior. He was a greyhound breeder and racer. A successful one. Truth was Small Change was supposed to have been doing more business with Collins’s mother, if you know what I mean.’

‘Small Change is Jack Collins’s father?’

‘Aye. And he knows it. Rab Collins died of a heart attack twenty-odd year ago. Since then Small Change paid for Jack to go to a fancy school, all that crap.’

‘I see.’ I made the kind of face you make when you’ve tried every combination but you still can’t get the safe open. There was a silence and Sneddon studied me for a moment. I hadn’t realized until then that scrutiny can be aggressive. Something was going through his head. Something was always going through his head, but this was tying up his attention and his expression.

‘Okay,’ he said eventually. ‘Here’s the thing… I told you I met with Small Change earlier that day.’

‘The day he was killed?’

‘Yes. Well, you know the way Small Change wasn’t totally legit, but he was more legit than not. Kinda the way you are. Well, like you, Small Change would do the odd deal with me, or Cohen or Murphy. He never did nothing that would get him lifted by the police. Nothing that he could be tied in directly, like. He was as slippery as snail shit in the rain. He liked to be the middle man. The one who arranges everything, and then he’d get an arranger’s fee or a percentage of what came out of it.’

‘And he was fixing you up with something to do with the fight game. That’s what you told me.’

Sneddon made a face. ‘I know. And to start with I thought it was. We were supposed to be meeting to talk about Bobby Kirkcaldy.’

I raised my eyebrows. It was all coming together. But what was coming together still wasn’t clear. ‘I thought you said that Small Change had nothing to do with Kirkcaldy. He wasn’t in that league.’

‘Aye. Aye… right enough. That’s what I thought. But he wanted to talk to me about some deal he wanted to broker. He said Bobby Kirkcaldy was involved. Not as a fighter. As an investor.’

‘So, you went to see Small Change. What did he say the deal was?’

‘That’s the thing. I went up to Small Change’s place… just as arranged. Got Singer to drive me and wait outside in the car. But when I got there Small Change was shiteing himself. He was white as a fucking sheet. He tried to cover it up but when he poured me a drink his hands were shaking like fuck. Then he comes out with all of this shite about being sorry to have cost me a wasted journey, but the deal he wanted to set up had gone south.’

‘Did he tell you what the deal had been?’

‘No. Or at least he spun me some shite about Kirkcaldy setting up a boxing academy in the city but that the finance on his side had fallen through.’

‘And you don’t believe that? Sounds possible.’

Sneddon shook his head. He spread his hands out on the walnut desk top, fingers splayed, and looked at them absently. ‘You know the business I’m in, Lennox. The bookies, the protection, the whores, the bank jobs, the fencing. You know what my business really is? Fear. It’s fear what keeps the whole fucking thing together. I have spent most of my life filling my pockets by making the other guy fill his pants.’ He leaned back in his chair and stared hard at me. ‘So when I say that Small Change MacFarlane had had the frighteners put on him, I know what I’m talking about.’

‘So did you challenge him?’ I asked. ‘Did you ask him what was really going on?’

‘No. There was no point. I could tell that it would have done fuck all good. Someone had done a real job on MacFarlane. I could have brought Singer in from the car and he would still have kept shtoom.’

I nodded. It was a good point. If someone had been able to out-menace Sneddon and out-lurk Singer, then there was something serious going on. Sneddon had a cigarette box on his desk: it looked solid silver and was so big it should have had fifteen pirates sitting on it. He flipped it open, took out a cigarette and nudged it across the walnut aircraft carrier in my direction. I helped myself and used the matching silver desk lighter to light us both.

‘And he ended up dead the same night,’ I said.

‘Yep.’ Sneddon screwed his eyes up against the smoke. ‘That’s why I want that appointment book.’

‘Not just to keep the cops from knowing you saw Small Change the day he died. You want to know who he saw before you.’

‘Aye. It’s maybes not even in the diary. And you say his wife says he doesn’t keep one anyhow.’

‘That’s what she said. Now I get why you wanted me to sniff around.’ I paused for a moment. I was like the clown in the circus standing dumbly till the plank the other clown is swinging around hits him on the back of the head. It hit me. ‘Oh yeah…’ I said. ‘Now I get it. That’s why you’ve got me involved with the Bobby Kirkcaldy crap. It’s the same deal, isn’t it? You want me to find out if Kirkcaldy is tied up with whatever deal Small Change was brokering.’

‘Aye. And my guess is that it’s fuck all to do with boxing academies or shite like that. Especially with what you’ve said about this dodgy fucking uncle he has in tow.’

‘And the nooses and stuff?’

‘Maybes it’s connected — with the deal I mean, and nothing to do with the fight what’s coming up.’

‘I see…’ I drew on the cigarette and contemplated the silver-grey writhes of smoke. ‘Now this takes me into dodgy territory. You too, for that matter. The police are all over Small Change’s murder and I was left in no doubt by Superintendent Willie McNab that his wife will be wearing my balls as earrings if I start sniffing around.’

There was the sound of aged wood on wood as Sneddon pulled open a desk drawer. He reached in, took something out and tossed it onto the desk in front of me. It was a large white envelope. It was tucked shut, not sealed, and it was stuffed thick. Rewardingly thick.

‘Buy yourself some new balls.’ Sneddon nodded to the envelope.

I picked it up and slipped it into my inside jacket pocket without opening it. It tugged satisfyingly at the material of my jacket, balancing the weight of the blackjack in my other inside pocket. I was going to have to start taking a satchel to work.

‘You’re right, the police are all over MacFarlane like flies on a turd.’ Sneddon exposed his talent for colourful metaphor. ‘And I ask myself why the fuck that is. He was an important bookie, but the cops on the case are too many and too high-up.’

I nodded. It fitted. I had wondered about McNab’s involvement myself. ‘So you think the police are onto whatever deal it was that Small Change was setting up?’

‘If that’s the reason, then it’s something really fucking big. And if it’s really fucking big, I really fucking want to know about it. You’ve got contacts in the police, haven’t you?’

‘Yeah…’ I said reluctantly, wondering how much Sneddon knew about my arrangement with Taylor. Then the tug of the heavy envelope in my jacket pocket reminded me not to be too reluctant. ‘So do you. Probably better than mine.’

‘Listen…’ Sneddon leaned forward and narrowed his eyes. Again he was all brow. ‘I’ve already fucking told you: I don’t want to be connected to this. That’s why I’m going through you. You want the money or not?’

Taking a last, long draw on the cigarette, I stubbed it out in a boulder of crystal ashtray, picked my hat off his desk and stood up.

‘I’ll get onto it.’ I turned towards the door then checked myself. ‘You know everybody who’s got a racket going in the city.’

‘Just about.’ Sneddon leaned back in his green leather and walnut captain’s chair. A pirate captain’s chair, probably.

‘Have you ever heard of anyone called Largo?’ I asked.

He thought for a moment then shook his head.

‘Okay… thanks. I just thought I’d ask.’

Industrial pollution can be a beautiful thing. When I came out of Sneddon’s I stood by my car for a moment, looking out over to the west. Sneddon’s house was elevated in more than a social sense and I could see out across the treetops and past the edge of the city. Glasgow’s air was of the granulated variety and it turned sunsets into vast, diffused splashes of colour, like gold and red paint strained through textured silk. I stood and gazed westward, filled with a sense of contentment.

But that had more to do with the wad of cash weighing down my suit jacket than the sunset. I climbed into the Atlantic and headed back down into the city.

I should have been more on my toes. This time there was a little more subtlety and a lot more brains employed.

I was driving back from Sneddon’s and was passing along the curve in the road where Bearsden notches down the social ladder to become Milngavie, when I saw a blue ’forty-eight Ford Zephyr Six up ahead, pulled into the kerb. The driver had the hood up and he was standing next to it on the road. He was about thirty-five, with dark hair, and from what I could see smartly dressed. I say from what I could see because he was doing what every true man does when his car breaks down: he was standing on the roadway, one hand on his hip, the other scratching his head. And like every true man, he had had to take his jacket off and roll up his sleeves to do the head-scratching. It was a pose of helplessness mitigated by stubbornness: you’ve tried everything and you’re asking for help only as a last resort.

I muttered a curse when I saw he had noticed my approach and was vaguely wafting a hand about to wave me down. It’s a rule: you don’t look too desperate for another man’s help; you’re signalling in another member of the same auto club to provide the assistance that you would provide him, in the same circumstances.

Despite my efforts to the contrary, I am a Canadian. That means, no matter how hard I had tried to cure myself of it, I suffer from the congenital, chronic and truly Canadian ailment of politeness. I may have gotten lippy with gangsters and cops, slapped the odd uppity hooligan, and I may have fornicated, cursed and sworn on occasion, sometimes the same occasion; but I had helped so many little old ladies across the street that the Boy Scouts had taken out a contract on me.

This guy clearly needed help. I had to stop to help him. I was being so Canadian that it didn’t occur to me for a second that this could have been a more discreet and subtle attempt by Jimmy Costello at abduction. There again, discreet and subtle were not traits you associated with Costello.

‘Having trouble?’ I asked as I pulled up next to him and rolled down the window.

He smiled. ‘Thanks for stopping.’ He opened the door of the Atlantic and dropped into the passenger seat before I could say anything. It was then I noticed the small crescent-shaped scar on his head. I was doing a split-second inventory in my head, trying to remember where I’d filed who had mentioned a fiveeight man with dark hair and a crescent-shaped scar on his forehead, when he produced a gun from his trouser pocket. I recognized it as a Webley point-three-two Pocket Hammerless. The youngest it could have been was 1916. It could have dated back to the turn-of-the century.

‘This is some kind of joke, right?’ I said, with a derisive eyebrow raised at the revolver. But at the same time I was assessing my chances of coshing him with the flat, spring-handled blackjack I had in my inside jacket pocket. When people point guns at me, I get tetchy. I decided it was best to go along with my new chum for the moment. There would be time to discuss my attitude towards being held at gunpoint. Later.

‘There’s nothing wrong with this gun, pal.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with my eighty-two-year-old great-uncle Frank, but I wouldn’t bring him along on an abduction.’

‘Trust me, Lennox. This Webley fires just fine.’

‘I’m sure it did when Mata Hari used it to scare off the Kaiser when he was chasing her around a banquet table. Where are you taking me? An antiques fair?’

The dark-haired goon sighed. ‘Listen, Lennox, let’s not put it to the test. Mr Costello wants to talk to you and the last time you got an invite you cut up rough.’ He was better spoken than the average Glaswegian. He was also a cool enough customer. My efforts to rile him and stall until another car came along weren’t working. I could see over his shoulder that a second goon had come out of hiding and was dropping the hood on the Zephyr Six.

‘What’s your pal got? A flintlock blunderbuss?’ I said, cracking the joke with a smile to hide the fact that I was weighing up my chances of breaking his neck before he could pull the trigger.

‘He’s going to follow us. You can drive out to the pub to meet Mr Costello. Mr Costello told me to tell you to take it easy. There’s no need to kick up a fuss. You got all heated up and messed up Tony and Joe and it was all unnecessary. This isn’t what you think.’ He gave an angled nod to indicate the road ahead. ‘Let’s go.’

I looked at the gun. It could still do the job, right enough. A bullet is a bullet, even if firing it would probably take off a couple of his fingers. ‘So you’re telling me this isn’t all about Paul Costello?’

‘You’ll have to talk to Mr Costello about that, but no. Or not in the way you think.’

‘Okay,’ I said and sighed. ‘Where to? The Riviera Club?’

‘No…’ My passenger grinned at me; his teeth were nicotine yellow and pitted. ‘We’re to take you out to the Empire. Just for a talk, like. Nothing heavy. So don’t make trouble.’

‘Me?’ I said in an offended tone. ‘I’m like Rab Butler… I’m all for consensus.’

My passenger directed me across the Clyde and we drove into Govan. Black tenements loomed on either side and he told me to park outside a public house emblazoned with a sign that declared this was the Empire Bar. The sun was now hiding behind the tenements and dressed in a winding-sheet of thin grey cloud. But gloom was something you associated with Govan.

‘Oh look,’ I said cheerily as we got out. ‘The sun is setting on the Empire.’ My companion replied by jerking his head towards the bar. The gun was pocketed now but he rested his hand in the same pocket. The Ford Zephyr Six pulled up behind us and the second guy got out. He was about an inch shorter than his colleague, with hair the colour of dirty sand. Both of them were just the way Sheila Gainsborough had described them.

We walked into the bar. It was noisy and it stank. The air was thick with cigarette smoke, stale sweat and whisky fumes. A woman with unnaturally black hair was making shrilly unpleasant sounds in the corner, accompanied by an out-of-tune piano. The Empire Bar was the kind of place you would have described as spit-and-sawdust; if they had bothered with the sawdust. I allowed myself to be guided to a corner table, guessing that Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly wouldn’t be waiting for me there. They weren’t: a short, fattish man in an expensive but ill-fitting suit was at the table, looking at me glumly as I approached with my escort. He had thick Irish-black hair that needed a cut and a pencil-moustache over a slack, ugly mouth.

‘I believe you wanted to speak with me,’ I said without a smile and sat down without being asked. Unlike Sneddon, Cohen or Murphy, Jimmy Costello didn’t warrant a respectful tone. But, there again, it was exactly that kind of attitude that had gotten me into some of my stickier moments over the last couple of years.

‘You want a drink?’ Costello asked, his tone neutral.

‘Whisky.’

Costello nodded to my dark-haired abductor, who headed off through the fug and throng to the bar, leaving us alone. Maybe this wasn’t going to be the adventure I thought it would be. The singer over by the piano seemed to enter a paroxysm of passion. She was a thick-bodied woman in her fifties, about as curvaceous as a beer barrel, with a round, white face, small eyes, hair that was too dark and too long and lips that were too red. She was clearly a singer of the traditional sort, insofar as she was following the age-old Glasgow tradition of adding an extra syllable to every lyric and then singing them through her nose. A Glasgow pub is the place to be if you have an aversion to consonants. The singer informed me and anyone else within a five-mile radius that — apparently — the pipes, the pipes were calling Dhmnnaa-anny Bhee-hoy.

My escort arrived with two whiskies and a pint of stout, then left us alone again.

‘You gave my boy Paul a hiding,’ said Costello. No anger. He sipped his stout and looked at me with little interest.

‘He asked for it, Jimmy. He went for a blade. Is this what this is all about?’

‘No. And that’s not why I sent Tony and Joe to pick you up the other day either. All of that shite… it was unnecessary. ’

‘Like I told your monkeys, if you want to talk to me, pick up a ’phone.’

‘Listen, Lennox, don’t fuck about with me. I’m letting the thing with Paul go. I’m letting the thing with Tony and Joe go… and believe me, Tony and Joe don’t want it let go… So stop talking to me like I’m a piece of shite. You’ve made it clear what you think of me, but you’re on my ground now. I could hand you over to the boys and send you home with your nose out of joint.’

I was about to answer when the singer in the corner reached new heights of volume and tunelessness. ‘ Dhmnnaaany Beh-ho-oy… dnhe beh-ipes, dnhe beh-ipes harr caw-haw-hing… ’

‘You could try,’ I said. ‘I’m working for Willie Sneddon. And that’s one nose you don’t want to put out of joint. So let’s cut the crap. What do you want?’

‘Why did you beat up Paul?’

‘I thought this wasn’t about that.’

‘It isn’t. Not directly. I just need to know why you and him had words. Was it about this Gainsborough boy?’

‘Sammy Pollock is his real name. Yes it was, as a matter of fact.’

‘He’s missing?’

‘Yes.’

‘So’s Paul.’

There was a moment’s silence. Or there would have been if Govan’s answer to Maria Callas hadn’t continued to pipe up.

‘ Fuh-hum glemn to glemn… hend de-hown dnhe mowmn-teh-ain say-hide… dnhe suhmner his ge-hon, hend hall dnhe flouw-wurs fawhhaw-ing…’

‘What do you mean missing?’ I asked.

‘What the fuck do you think I mean? He’s missing. He’s not around and no one’s seen him for three days.’

‘And you think I’ve got something to do with that?’

‘No. That’s not why you’re here. I want you to find him.’

‘I’m busy.’

‘Aye… and one of the things you is busy with is finding the Gainsborough boy. It’s all connected. Paul was going around with him. They had big ideas. Fuck knows what, but they had big ideas.’ Costello’s ugly mouth drooped even further beneath the moustache. ‘That’s all Paul has… is big ideas. No fucking guts or brains to make anything of them ideas.’

I sipped the whisky. In comparison, the stuff they had served at Sneddon’s pikey fight was nectar.

‘Diss heyoo, diss heyoo ewho mnuss ge-ho, hend heye mnuss stuhhay …’

‘And you have no idea where he’s disappeared to or why?’ I asked.

Costello shook a sullen, ugly head.

‘The two monkeys who brought me here… what are their names?’

‘What?’ Costello looked confused. ‘The dark-haired one is called Skelly. His pal is called Young. Why?’

‘Did you tell Skelly to stick a gun in my ribs to get me here? I take exception to people pointing guns at me.’

Costello looked at me dourly and shook his head. ‘He’s a fucking bampot. I told him to make sure you came here. None of my crew should have shooters unless I say so. I’ll sort him out.’

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll have a word with him. I think it’s better coming from me, if you know what I mean. But that’s not why I was asking about Skelly and Young. I was told they were hanging about Sammy Pollock before he went missing. If it wasn’t them, it was their twins, going by the description I got.’

‘They’re younger than the rest of my people. They hang around with Paul a lot. Maybe they think that he’s the future. Some fucking hope. But that’s all there is to it: Paul hung around Sammy, and Skelly and Young hung around Paul.’

I made to take another sip of the whisky, then put the glass back down again, deciding I’d rather keep my stomach lined. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ I said. ‘I’m still looking into this Sammy Pollock business. If I find out anything about Paul, I’ll let you know.’

‘I’ll pay you…’

‘No need. But you’ll owe me a favour. The other thing is I need you to forget about what happened between me and Paul. And with your other three monkeys.’

‘I already said…’

‘There’s more…’ I looked across at the bar where Skelly was talking to his sandy-haired chum. ‘I’m a man of principle, you could say. One of those principles is I don’t let people point guns at me.’

‘Aw… for fuck’s sake…’ Costello looked over to Skelly at the bar then back at me. ‘Couldn’t you let it go? I can’t have you slapping all of my people around.’

‘That’s the deal.’

Costello paused for the clapping and raucous cheering that accompanied the conclusion of Dhmnnaaany Beh-ho-oy. I felt like cheering myself. When the applause died down, Costello nodded, acquiescing in the only way he knew how: sullenly.

‘Now, back to young Paul,’ I said. ‘The first thing I would have thought you would have done is to speak to this guy Largo?’

‘What? Who the fuck is Largo?’

‘You don’t know anyone called Largo?’

‘Should I?’

I leaned back and sighed. ‘No reason you should. Everybody I’ve asked about Largo has never heard of him. When I came across Paul at Sammy’s flat, he started off thinking I was a copper.’

‘He took you for polis?’

‘Yeah… I know,’ I said with a sigh. ‘I’m making a formal complaint to my tailor. Anyway, when he realized I wasn’t, he asked if Largo had sent me. When I asked him who Largo was, he gave me the brush-off, but he did say it was somebody he owed some money to.’

Costello looked at me. His was the expressionless kind of face that was difficult to read. ‘I don’t like the sound of that,’ he said at last. ‘Why would Paul be borrowing money from someone? And if he did, how come I’ve never heard of this fucker Largo?’

‘I caught Paul on the hop. It could be that this thing about owing Largo money was just the best explanation he could think of on the spur. Anyway, like I said, I’m looking into who this Largo might be because he could be connected to this thing with Sammy Pollock. And Paul dropping out of sight is probably connected, as you’ve already guessed.’ I paused for a moment. ‘What about the “Poppy Club”… that mean anything to you?’

Costello shook his head. ‘Has that got something to do with Paul?’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Maybe to do with Sammy Pollock. Maybe nothing to do with anything.’ I stood up and picked up my hat. ‘Okay, would you tell your monkey to give me my keys back. I’ll be in touch if I find out anything about Paul.’

‘Tell me something, Lennox,’ said Costello. ‘This thing with Sammy Pollock… and now with Paul… are you looking for people or bodies. It doesn’t look good does it?’

I shrugged. ‘Them disappearing doesn’t mean they’re dead, Jimmy. I’m beginning to suspect they were doing a bit of business on the side, probably with this guy Largo who no one knows anything about. It could be that he’s after them for money and they’ve both had to take a powder for a while. Who knows.’

‘He’s my boy, Lennox. My son. He’s a waster and a wanker, but he’s my son. Find him for me. I don’t care what you say, I’ll make it worth your while.’

I nodded. ‘Okay, Jimmy. I’ll see what I can find out.’ I put on my Borsalino. ‘I’ll be waiting at the car, tell Skelly to bring my car keys out to me.’

Fresh air was a relative term in Glasgow, but it was good to get out of the Empire and onto the street. I ignored the grubby tenements and looked up above the roofs and smoke stacks. It was past ten but the sky was still reasonably light. Scotland’s latitude made for long summer evenings. There was a burst of noise behind me as the pub door swung open. I turned and saw Skelly come out; his stooge Young was at his side.

‘Here’s your keys, Lennox.’ Skelly smiled his yellow-toothed smile and held them out to me.

‘Thanks.’ I took the keys in my left hand. ‘And I’ve got a tip for you…’

I reached inside my jacket pocket with my right hand. For a minute, from the expression on his face, I think Skelly really thought I was going to hand him a ten-bob note. I pulled out the flat, spring-handled blackjack and in a continuous, backhand movement, whacked him in the side of the mouth with it. The sound was somewhere between a snap and a crunch and he dropped like a stone. His friend took a step towards me and I held out my hand, making a beckoning gesture with my fingers for him to keep coming. Young clearly decided to decline the invitation and backed off.

I leaned over Skelly. He was coming round. His face was a mess of blood. From the look of it, I had done him a favour: he clearly wasn’t too keen on toothpaste and I reckoned he would have a few less teeth to clean in the future. I patted him down with my free hand until I found what I was looking for, reached into his jacket pocket and took out the small Webley Three-Two.

‘Here’s your tip, Skelly… never, ever pull a gun on me. Even an antique like this. If you ever pull a stunt like that again, I’ll kill you. That’s not just an expression: I’ll stop you breathing. Got it?’

He made an incoherent moaning sound behind his broken teeth. I took it as his assent. I pocketed the Three-Two and turned to the sandy-haired goon.

‘If I see your face again, it’ll end up in a worse condition than his. Have you got that?’

He nodded.

‘Have a nice night, girls,’ I said amiably, then I climbed into the Atlantic and drove off.