The Long Glasgow Kiss

by Craig Russell

  And now, sixteen years on, I was living in the Second City of an Empire on which, despite classroom assurances to the contrary, the sun was most definitely now setting. For a century and a half, Glasgow had been the Empire’s industrial heart. But the War had screwed all of that up. Britain had ended the conflict all but bankrupt: if the United States had not come along in 1946 with a close on four billion dollar-loan, then the sceptr’d isle would have gone bankrupt. Now, former enemies were fast becoming new competitors in shipbuilding and heavy industry. Things were changing fast in the world. They were changing faster in Britain. And fastest in Glasgow.

  Not that you would have guessed it from the activity in the docks as I drove past them. It was ten-thirty in the morning and already hot. I had both the Atlantic’s windows rolled down, and as I drove past the quays the sound of metal being hammered, clashed, seared and cut rang dull but loud in air so muggy and thick with grime you could have strained it. It was as if the temperature was being increased by the activity itself.

  To my left a forest of cranes jostled at the water’s edge, swinging ceaselessly, loading and unloading docked ships or supplying vast sheets of heavy-gauge steel to the yards. I drove on past the huge red-brick dockside bonded warehouses, five storeys high behind tall fences. I parked on the street and went to the gatehouse and asked where Alain Barnier had his offices. The gateman was the usual retired cop with the usual I-couldn’t-give-a-fuck attitude, and the best I could get out of him was directions to some other smaller shipping offices where they might have a better idea. It took me half an hour of asking around before getting a pointer to Barnier’s office. By the time I got down there it was after eleven.

  As Jonny had said, it was more of a shed than an office, one of a rank of semi-cylindrical Nissen huts, like a row of Sequoia logs half sunk into the earth. The sign above the door said Barnier and Clement Import Agents. I knocked and went in. As soon as I did, I could see that this was no front but a genuine working office: there was the kind of ordered chaos that’s impossible to fake. A counter separated the main body of the hut from the reception area. There was a push bell on the counter and next to it a paper spike piled high with impaled shipping bills; there were three desks behind it, half-a-dozen filing cabinets and a woman.

  The woman was about five-one and dressed in a businesslike grey suit that strained a little at the waist and bust. She had a pale round face and black hair coiled in a perm so tight and unyielding it could have withstood an A-bomb test. She had a small thin-lipped slit of a mouth that she had tried to flesh up with red lipstick.

  ‘Can I help you?’ she asked, coming around from behind her desk and to the counter. She stretched the thin lips in a weary, perfunctory smile.

  ‘I’m looking for Mr Barnier.’

  ‘Is this about the key lan?’ she asked.

  ‘The key lan?’ I frowned. ‘What’s a key lan?’

  She ignored me. ‘Mr Barnier’s not here at the moment. Did you have an appointment?’

  ‘No. No appointment. When will he be back?’

  ‘You’ll need an appointment to see Mr Barnier.’

  ‘My eyes work just fine without an appointment. When will he be back?’

  She had large, round, green eyes set into her round face and she used them to stare at me as if I had been a congenital idiot. ‘An appointment …’ She came close to the kind of syllable by syllable pronunciation favoured by Twinkletoes McBride.

  ‘The sign says Barnier and Clement. Is Mr Clement here?’

  ‘Monsieur Clement,’ she said, correcting my pronunciation, dropping the hard ‘t’ at the end of the name and sounding it out as ‘Clemmong’ in the way that only the Scots can murder the French language, ‘does not work here. He is based in our French office.’

  ‘I see …’

  There was the usual hinged lid arrangement on the counter and, swinging it open, I stepped through the counter and onto her side. The round green eyes grew rounder.

  ‘You’re not allowed in here …’

  ‘I’ll wait,’ I said, and sat down behind one of the desks, pitching my hat onto a pile of papers. ‘Probably best, seeing as you can’t tell me when he’ll be back or where I could find him.’

  My dumpy girlfriend with the round eyes and thin lips lifted the hatch on the counter, as if holding it open for me. ‘You can’t wait.’

  ‘There you go underestimating me again. I can wait. I’ve done it before. Lots of times. In fact, between you and me, I’m rather good at it.’

  She picked up the telephone on her desk and dialled a number. She turned her back on me and spoke into the mouthpiece in a hushed but agitated voice. After a moment she turned and held the receiver out to me wordlessly.

  I smiled cheerfully at her: we were getting on so well.

  ‘You are looking for me?’ The voice on the other end of the line spoke perfectly articulated English. The French accent was distinct, but not heavy.

  ‘Mr Barnier? I wondered if we could have a chat.’

  ‘A chat about what?’ No suspicion or guardedness. Just impatience.

  ‘I’m trying to get in contact with someone. You may be able to help me find them.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I’d rather we discussed this face-to-face. And as soon as possible, if you don’t mind. Where could we meet?’

  ‘For whom are you looking?’ he asked again, with the acquired perfect grammar of a non-native English speaker.

  ‘Sammy Pollock. You maybe know him as Sammy Gainsborough.’

  There was a pause at his side of the connection. Then, in the same contraction-less, formal English: ‘There is something about this which suggests to me your interest is professional rather than personal, yet you did not identify yourself to Miss Minto as a police officer.’

  ‘That’s because I’m not. If I had it would have been impersonation. I’m not very good at impersonations. Except Maurice Chevalier, but I’m sure, as a Frenchman yourself, you’d be able to see through that one.’

  ‘I do not have the time for this. What is your name?’

  ‘Lennox. You do know Sammy Pollock, don’t you, Mr Barnier?’

  ‘I do. However, I do not know him well. Insufficiently well, in fact, to know anything about his whereabouts.’

  ‘I’d still like to talk to you, Mr Barnier.’

  ‘I am afraid I am too busy for this. I cannot assist you with your enquiries. And these are enquiries, are they not? I take it you are some kind of private detective?’

  ‘I’m just helping someone out, Mr Barnier. Sammy Pollock has gone missing and I’m trying to ascertain his state of health and whereabouts. I would be obliged if you could spare me a few minutes. There may be something you know that seems insignificant to you but that could help me track Sammy down.’

  ‘I am sorry. As I said I do not have the time …’

  ‘I quite understand. I’ll explain to Mr Cohen. It was he who suggested I speak to you.’

  I got what I wanted: a small silence at the other end of the line. Barnier was putting things together in his head. Whether they came together in an accurate picture or not, I didn’t really care.

  ‘Do you know the Merchants’ Carvery in the city centre?’ he said at last, a sigh spun through it.

  ‘I know it,’ I said. The Merchants’ Carvery was a no-riff-raff kind of bar and restaurant. In a riff-raff kind of city. Barnier obviously had style and the cash to back it up. I couldn’t see someone like that being involved with Sammy Pollock. Even less with scum like Paul Costello. But it had to be checked out.

  ‘Meet me there at eight p.m.,’ he said. ‘In the bar.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Barnier. I’ll be there.’

  I drove back towards the town but before I got to the centre turned up the North road towards Aberfoyle. My head hurt, a dull, persistent throbbing in the temples and behind my eyes. Glasgow had pulled a curtain over the sun, a thin, dark-flecked veil of cloud. The temperature stayed hot, however, and the air around me seemed de
nser, heavier. I knew that the pain in my head was a warning of a storm coming. Getting out of the city didn’t do much to ease the oppressive air that was now playing my sinuses like an accordion. After about fifteen minutes I was up around the Mugdock area where Glasgow yielded to open countryside and scattered, expensive houses. The sun had broken through again, but the pre-storm heaviness continued to hang in the air and the sky to the west was the colour of shipyard steel.

  Bobby Kirkcaldy’s place wasn’t the most expensive, but it was a huge step up from his origins in Motherwell. But then again, having a toilet indoors, and one that you didn’t have to share with four other families, was a huge step up. Truth was I quite admired Kirkcaldy as a boxer. He had started off welterweight, later moving up to middleweight but retaining a certain grace and lightness on his feet. I had seen him fight twice and it had been like watching two completely different boxers. Kirkcaldy was one of those boxers who, while probably no mental giant in any other way, seemed to possess a profound physical intelligence: a constant process of interpretation and fine re-calibration to match every move his opponent made. It was as if he could read any fighter within the first minute of a round and adapt his style to suit: if he was up against an infighter, Kirkcaldy subtly increased his range, forcing his opponent to stretch outside his preferred zone; if Kirkcaldy was up against an outfighter, he closed in with tight jabs, forcing his opposite number always backwards and onto the ropes.

  One of the fights I had seen had been against Pete McQuillan. McQuillan was a slugger and bruiser; a stump of a man who struggled to stay in the middleweight bracket and in terms of style was just one step up from the pikey bare-knuckle boys. McQuillan winning a fight – and he had remained undefeated until then – depended either on a knockout, or his doing so much devastation to his opponent’s face that the referee stopped the match. Then he had been matched with Bobby Kirkcaldy. It had been an amazing thing to watch: McQuillan viciously scything empty air while Kirkcaldy had danced around him, placing stinging jabs with absolute precision. It took McQuillan to a place he’d never been before: the distance. Kirkcaldy had been the unanimous points winner. Now he was the clear favourite for the European Middleweight Championship and would be meeting the West German Jan Schmidtke.

  And I would be there. I had a ticket.

  The house was roughly the same size as MacFarlane’s in Pollokshields but was more recently built, maybe in the Twenties or Thirties, and it benefited from a more prestigious geography. It had also benefited from whitewash, which made it look bright and foreign in the sunlight. The front door faced south but was shielded by a Deco arch edged in earth-red brickwork. The whitewash walls beneath the red tiles and the terracotta brick detailing was an ambitious attempt to give the house an almost Mediterranean look, which in Scotland was an achievement akin to making Lon Chaney look like Clark Gable. I wasn’t sure how much of the credit should go to the architect and how much to the alien climate that seemed to have invaded the West of Scotland.

  The door was answered almost instantly when I rang the electric push-bell. I got the idea that they had heard my Atlantic crunch its way up the drive. They were looking out for visitors, welcome or otherwise, I guessed. It wasn’t Bobby Kirkcaldy who answered the door but someone probably even more pugnacious-looking, an older man in a dark suit and thin woollen tie. He was lean and mean-looking and he had the appearance of something assembled from the toughest material; he had white bristle for hair and a deep-lined, leathery face that was more than weather-beaten. It looked as if anything capable of giving it a beating, weather or otherwise, had had its turn on his face. His flattened nose had that thick, rubbery, formless look that suggested it had been broken so many times that there was no cartilage left to give it any kind of meaningful shape. The damage wasn’t just visually apparent; when he spoke he sounded muffled and nasal. Even more than the average Glaswegian did.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

  ‘A quiet life, money, a beautiful girl and a sense of inner peace.’

  He looked at me blankly. Along with the crap, he had clearly had the humour beaten out of him.

  ‘I’m here to see Bobby,’ I sighed. I was not appreciated here. ‘My name is Lennox. I’m expected.’

  He looked me up and down. I mirrored his examination. It was difficult to age him. He could have been a battered fifty or a fit seventy. It was obvious he was an ex-fighter, but I reckoned as much damage had been done to his face outside the ring as in it. I tilted my head and smiled impatiently. The old warrior stood to one side to let me in. I was going to hand him my hat but he didn’t look the Jeeves type, so I hung on to it and followed him down a long hallway with terracotta tiles on the floor and tasteful art, some original, on the wall. I guessed that a Motherwell-raised boxer like Kirkcaldy would probably have about as much good taste as my elderly companion with the devastated nose would have a sense of smell; I put the domestic aesthetic down to a good decorator.

  He led me into a large lounge with big French windows that looked out over a massive expanse of landscaped garden to the green hills beyond. It was a nice place. The kind of nice you had to pay for. Again, what struck me most was the way it had been furnished. Glasgow was, generally, a make-do-and-mend kind of city; Britain was a make-do-and-mend society, mainly because until recently the country’s very survival had depended on it. Post-war near-bankruptcy had added inertia to the pendulum swing from austerity to prosperity. Added to all of this was Scottish social conservatism. I had seen a few homes that had been decorated in the Contemporary style – Jonny Cohen’s, for example – but generally Modernism was distrusted. And when it was used as décor, it was normally done half-heartedly or clumsily overdone.

  All of which is why Bobby Kirkcaldy’s home would have looked to the average Scot like a Hollywood set. This was all good stuff. If the furnishings weren’t original Bauhaus or le Corbusier or Eames, they were pretty good copies. There was a wall filled with books. I had the uncharitable thought that Kirkcaldy the boxer must have told his interior designer to make him look smarter. Just like in the hall, the art on the lounge walls looked original. Most of it was modern and edgy – abstracty stuff – but there was something about that kind of art that appealed to me. Like the furniture, it was new. And for me, New was Good. Again, I put it all down to an overpaid interior decorator.

  Bobby Kirkcaldy stood up when we came in. He had been sitting on a leather lounger by the big windows and when he got up and crossed the room to us, he did so with the same easy grace with which I’d seen him move in the ring. He had thick, dark hair and, unlike the old guy at my side, there wasn’t the usual evidence in Kirkcaldy’s face of a boxer’s career. His nose didn’t look as if it had ever been broken and there was only a hint of the high-cheeked angularity of a fighter’s face. He was wearing an open-necked shirt and lightweight trousers. The look was casual but had Jermyn Street all over it.

  ‘You Lennox?’ asked Kirkcaldy. He didn’t smile but there was nothing overtly hostile in his manner, either. Just businesslike.

  ‘I’m Lennox. You know why I’m here?’

  ‘To look into this nonsense that’s been going on. You’ve been hired by Willie Sneddon. To be honest, I think all this shite bothers Sneddon more than it bothers me.’ Kirkcaldy’s voice was light, almost gentle, but he managed to inject a hint of distaste when he articulated Willie Sneddon’s name. He spoke with a quiet confidence and had less of an accent than I had expected. When you saw him up close, as opposed to the distance a boxing stadium compels, there was an intelligence in the eyes. But there was something else that I couldn’t define. And it stopped me liking him.

  I turned and looked at the punch bag who had shown me in, and then back at Kirkcaldy.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Kirkcaldy said. ‘You can talk in front of Uncle Bert. Uncle Bert has coached me since I was a kid.’

  Uncle Bert looked at me expressionlessly. But, there again, he’d probably had the mobility to form an expression beaten out of his face
years ago. I found myself silently questioning his qualifications as a boxing trainer, seeing as no one seemed to have taught him the meaning of the word ‘duck’.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. I looked around the room in the way you do when you’ve got to that point where you should have been invited to sit but haven’t. ‘Nice place. Like the paintings. I’m never sure where Abstract Expressionism ends and Lyrical Abstraction begins.’

  ‘These are neither,’ said Kirkcaldy. ‘I don’t trust “isms”. Political or artistic. I just buy what I like and what I can afford. And the only reason I can afford it is because of the fight game.’ He picked up that we were still standing and pointed to a sofa that hovered just clear of the polished wooden floor. I lowered myself onto it: there was a lot of lowering involved. Kirkcaldy certainly didn’t talk like the average street-to-ring pugilist and I started to suspect the books on the shelves weren’t just for show. There was a certain type of working-class Scot who, deprived of it in their childhood, treated learning and knowledge as if they were bullion. I thought I was above making snobby judgements; I’d just proved to myself that I wasn’t. It was clear to me now that the impression of physical intelligence Kirkcaldy showed in the ring was part of something bigger.

  ‘Do you know much about art, Mr Lennox?’ he asked, and sat down on the Eames chair opposite. Uncle Bert remained standing. It was probably force of habit: staying upright had cost him dearly in the past.

  ‘Some,’ I said. ‘I was interested in it before the war. Then it was kind of expected of me to get interested in the war. But I still like to visit the odd gallery.’

  Kirkcaldy smiled and nodded. There was nothing to the smile in the same way there had been nothing to Sheila Gainsborough’s smile. ‘You know this is a lot of nonsense, don’t you?’

  I shrugged. ‘It sounds to me like someone is trying to spook you before the big fight. There are a lot of people betting a lot of money, one way or the other, on this fight. And some of those people aren’t above dodgy dealings to protect their investment.’