I did what he asked and tried the starter again while he disappeared behind the shield of the open car hood. Again a dull clunk. The RAC man came back into view, and, although he maintained his polite formality, something had shifted in his demeanour.
‘Is there a problem?’ I asked, innocently.
‘Would you mind having a look at the engine, sir?’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘But I gotta tell you that I know nothing about mechanics.’ I followed him to the front of the car and leaned in to look at the engine, succeeding in getting motor oil on my tie.
As I had said, I knew practically nothing much about engines, but I knew enough to be aware that spark plug cables were not meant to be neatly sliced in two.
I looked at the patrolman helplessly.
Fifteen minutes later, I had a new set of leads installed and was heading towards Bearsden.
Pamela Ellis was surprised and uneasy to find me standing on her doorstep and hastily ushered me into the house. I half expected her to stick her head out through the door and check the street in both directions to see if anyone had seen me.
I had seen the house often enough from the outside: an unremarkable Victorian sandstone box with bay windows and a steep-pitched roof, typical of area and class, and the interior pretty much reflected the conformity of the exterior. In almost every way, the Ellis lounge was the opposite of the front room I had shared with hostess-with-the-mostess Sylvia. But both made a statement. Just as the Dewar home had been all about the modern and synthetic, about change and the Future, about melamine, Formica and polyester, the Ellis home was about solidity, tradition and continuity. The lounge Pamela Ellis showed me into was flock-wallpapered and furnished with solid reproduction furniture with the odd genuine antique. There was no space-age decor here, and above the fireplace was the expected Farquharson print with the expected sheep in the expected sunset.
‘I thought you would ’phone first, Mr Lennox,’ she said, still flustered, as she invited me to sit. ‘I’m afraid you’ve caught me on the way out — Wednesday night is my weekly bridge night. I never miss it.’ She looked at her watch. ‘The girls will be expecting me at eight-thirty.’
‘I won’t keep you, Mrs Ellis,’ I said. ‘But I have to tell you there have been developments. I felt we needed to talk as soon as possible and I knew that your husband would be at work.’ I broke the news to her that her husband had indeed, been meeting with another woman. There were tears — tight, restrained, Scottish tears — then composure.
‘Is she younger than me?’ she asked eventually.
‘Mrs Ellis…’
‘Is she?’
‘Yes. But I need you to listen to me, Mrs Ellis. I can’t explain why, exactly, but this still may all not be what it seems to be.’
‘In what way?’
‘I don’t think your husband really is having an affair,’ I said with less certainty than I had intended.
‘Are you telling me that my husband sneaks out to meet attractive young women because they really are demolition customers?’ She gave a small, bitter laugh.
‘I watch people all the time. It’s my job. And after a while you start to develop an instinct about the way people behave. The way they act when they’re around other people, the messages you get from a dozen little things. I don’t sense a romantic involvement between your husband and this woman. And it’s not just a hunch. Mr Ellis has been taking very special care not to be followed and last night, when I returned to my car, it had been hobbled so that I couldn’t follow him when he left. By the way, I’m afraid I’ll have to charge you for a set of jump leads.’
She shook the comment away irritatedly. ‘He’s hiding an affair. That’s why he was trying to shake you off.’ A thought seemed to take root and trouble her; she bit her lip and frowned. ‘That means he knows I’m on to him. That it was me who hired you to follow him.’
‘But that’s my point, Mrs Ellis… It’s as if he knows I’m tailing him, but he’s not sure why. Now that is confusing. Why would your husband feel he was being followed, if he’s not having an affair? And if he is going to such lengths to stop me from getting evidence of infidelity, then why hobble my car after I’ve seen them together?’
‘I’m confused, Mr Lennox. Did you or did you not catch Andrew with another woman?’
‘I saw him with a young woman. And yes, you’re probably right. I tend to shave situations like these with Occam’s Razor.’
She frowned.
‘It’s a variation on if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck,’ I explained. ‘But I just feel there’s something not kosher about the whole business. And, in any case, all I saw was your husband talking with a woman. In fact, I didn’t even see them talking to each other. It’s not enough to confront your husband with, far less start divorce proceedings.’
‘So if Andrew isn’t carrying on with this woman, then what on earth is it?’
‘Can you think of anything that your husband could be involved in that he would want to try to keep from you? From everybody?’
‘Not a thing. Like I told you before, Andrew is a very ordinary, very honest, very reliable man. He wouldn’t be involved in anything illegal or funny.’
‘To be honest, that’s also the description of a man who’s unlikely to be involved in an extramarital affair, although I have seen it happen. Are you sure there isn’t something that could explain all this subterfuge?’
She held out her arms in a helpless gesture.
‘Okay…’ I said. ‘Do you want me to continue tailing your husband?’
‘Yes. I need to know what’s going on.’
‘The way your husband is giving me the slip, it could be a costly business, not least in car parts.’
‘I have enough money to pay you for another week or so. After that Andrew will know that the money’s going missing. Can you find something out in that time?’
‘I honestly don’t know, Mrs Ellis, but I’ll do my best.’
Back in the car, I examined my oil-stained tie, dabbing at the smudge with a handkerchief. It was a dark blue knitted silk tie and the stain wasn’t that noticeable, but I knew it was there. Going back to my digs to change the tie was, I knew, nothing more than an excuse to talk to Fiona away from the girls and hopefully get to the bottom of what the hell was going on with her.
However, as I passed my digs I saw a car parked outside. A Jowett Javelin — and one I recognized. Instead of pulling into the kerb, I drove on.
Deafened by the sound of pennies dropping.
Like every City of Glasgow policeman, Donald Taylor was tall; about an inch and a half taller than me. He had been a Detective Constable in Central Division for four years and for three of those had been supplying me with information in return for unreceipted donations. I was not the kind of citizen that many Glasgow coppers would want to be seen hob-nobbing with — the exception being the newly promoted Detective Chief Inspector Jock Ferguson, who was above bribery and suspicion as well as being the closest thing I had to a friend. Consequently, I arranged to meet Taylor down by the river, under the shadow of a forest of shipyard cranes.
‘Tanglewood, you say?’ Taylor took the cigarette I offered him and frowned. ‘Nope, I can’t say it means anything to me.’
‘I’ve a couple of names I’d like checked out. They’re not connected but I need to know if either has been naughty at any time. Or anything else you can dig up on them.’ I handed Taylor a folded slip of paper with Ellis’s and Lang’s names on it. It was folded around a five-pound banknote and Taylor slipped it into his coat pocket without looking at it.
‘Are they likely to have form?’ he asked.
‘Doubt it. One’s a businessman, the other’s a union official.’
Taylor frowned. ‘I’ll have to be careful with the union bloke.’
‘Why?’
‘You can have more than one kind of record, Mr Lennox. Checking out the criminal records in the Collator’s Office is
straightforward enough, but a lot of these union boys are Communist Party members and the Special Branch boys have their own rogues’ gallery. Ask the wrong questions about the wrong people and you can end up being questioned yourself. Shady bunch, Special Branch.’
‘See what you can do, anyway, Don.’ I paused for a moment, thinking about what he had told me. ‘Listen, I should maybe warn you that the first name, Ellis, belongs to someone with a Hungarian background. Pre-communist, but he was born there. I guess that could be vaguely political too.’
Taylor looked worried. Purposefully worried. I took the hint and handed him another five.
‘Like I said, see what you can find out for me and it will be much appreciated.’ I smiled my gratitude, which was as genuine as his worry had been: there was nothing more nauseating than a bent copper, even if you were the one doing the bending. ‘Any other tidbits that might be of interest?’ I asked.
‘They’ve got a lead on that jewellery robbery in the Arcades last month.’
‘Really?’ I said conversationally. ‘Who’s in the frame?’
‘Now, Mr Lennox, you know I couldn’t tell you that,’ he said. What he meant was he couldn’t tell me unless I paid him for the information. There had been a time when I would have paid well; it was the kind of news that you could sell on at a profit.
‘I don’t move in those circles any more, Don, you know that. If you can’t tell me, don’t. I’m just interested that’s all.’
I could see that I had just pulled the rug from under him. He had valuable information that was valuable only to people he could never deal with directly. He was looking for a broker, and my days as a middle-man were behind me.
‘The reason I’m mentioning it, Mr Lennox,’ he said, ‘is that it concerns someone that I think you know well.’
‘I know a lot of people well, Don.’
‘The Jew, Cohen.’ The cocky look on Taylor’s face told me that he really did have goods to sell. Goods I didn’t want to buy but, like it or not, I did owe Handsome Jonny Cohen a favour.
‘What’s the information?’
‘A name. A name of someone who’s going to turn Queen’s Evidence.’
I nodded. The police had obviously got something on one of Cohen’s people and were trading his hide for Jonny’s.
‘Well?’ he asked. I thought about old loyalties. About scrapes I’d been pulled out of. About thirteen months of trying to put distance between me and where I’d been. What I’d been.
‘I’ll pass, Don,’ I said with a sigh. ‘Like I said, I don’t move in those circles any more. And if you want my advice, I wouldn’t go about offering that kind of information for sale. Sell something like that to any of the Three Kings and you’ve sold yourself. And trust me, if they get their claws into a copper, they won’t let go and you’ll spend the rest of your career worrying about whether they’d trade you to get out of a tight spot.’ I let it sink in before continuing. ‘But get me something I can work with on the names I’ve given you and there’ll be a bonus in it for you.’
‘Okay,’ he said, clearly crestfallen. I could imagine his delight when he had happened to overhear that snippet. Cash registers ringing in his head. But what I had told him was true: there are degrees of graft. What he was selling me could get him kicked out of the police; what he wanted to sell Cohen — or to get me to sell to Cohen — could get him kicked into prison.
He hadn’t told me the name. But he had told me there was a name. What I was going to do with that information, I didn’t yet know.
It wasn’t the only piece of information I had that I didn’t know what to do with: as I walked through drizzle back to where I’d parked, I thought about the Jowett Javelin I’d seen outside Fiona’s.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I spent two days wearing out shoe leather and working up the telephone bill. The days were spent mostly on the union case, the evenings on Ellis.
Now, I considered myself to be a self-contained, independent kind of character. Maybe not a loner, but someone who tries not to give too much away about himself. I kept a lot of stuff private and a lot of the people I knew didn’t know who else I knew.
Even with that, it’s true that no man is an island. Each of us exists partly through others; the connections we make throughout our lives, good or bad, extending into a far-reaching web. A traceable web to one degree or another. Me included.
Frank Lang appeared to be the exception to John Donne’s rule. If there was a committee or a reading group or a theatre association, then Lang’s name would be on the list of members or contributors. There were lot of threads spun in Lang’s web, right enough, but they just didn’t stretch very far.
The calls I made and the people I visited confirmed the bare bones of Lang’s existence: he had been a member of the merchant marine, working as a ship’s cook; he had enrolled for evening classes through the Workers’ Educational Association; he had been on the membership lists of several societies and committees. The only thing was that no one I spoke to could really remember ever meeting Lang.
Eventually I did manage to trace two merchant seamen who had served with Lang. I showed them the photograph and they both confirmed it was him and yes, they had seen him in the flesh. One of the sailors said that he had heard that Lang had emigrated years ago, Canada or Australia.
And that was it: all I could find on Frank Lang.
Archie had been sniffing around the Ellis case where the opposite of Lang seemed to be true. Andrew Ellis’s history was eminently traceable and transparent. A well-liked and well-respected member of the Glasgow business community, he had a reputation stretching back to the end of the war. No dodgy dealings, no grey areas, no skeletons in the cupboard. His case may have been the opposite of Lang’s, but it was just as baffling.
When Archie came into the office on the Tuesday morning, he balefully confirmed that he’d been unable to dig up anything of note on Ellis.
‘The problem is our hands are tied,’ he explained. ‘I’m just nipping away at the edges here, Chief.’ Archie habitually called me Chief, despite me asking him not to. Probably because I’d asked him not to. ‘I can’t talk to his employees or customers, because that would alert him to the fact that his missus has put a couple of professional snoopers onto him. And he hasn’t answered the call of the wild for the last three nights, so there’s been nowhere or no one to follow him to. If you’ve only got until the end of the week, then I think we’re scuppered.’
‘I think so too,’ I said, infected by Archie’s dolefulness. I ran through where I was with the union thing with him, for no other real reason than to hear myself say it out loud. It didn’t sound any better.
‘What’s in the ledger?’ Archie asked.
‘That is something I am going to have to find out,’ I said. ‘Connelly is being unusually coy about it. My guess is that the missing money has been donated by supporters of the union who would rather keep their names out of the public eye, and the ledger details the payments. It sounds to me like blackmail, but Connelly denies that. Maybe Lang intends to sell it to the newspapers, but it is technically stolen property… What is it, Archie?’ I noticed him purse his thin lips as he held me in his bloodhound stare.
‘A list of union supporters? Joe Connelly and his union have hired us to track down a missing jotter with the names of a few Reds in it?’
‘You don’t think it’s likely?’
‘Well, Chief, that’s relative. Compared to Twinkletoes’s chances of winning Brain of Britain, it’s likely. Compared to there being something in that ledger that is a lot more important or embarrassing, it’s not.’
‘I know what you mean,’ I said. It had been troubling me since my meeting with Connelly and Lynch. Not what had been said, but what hadn’t been said. ‘By the way, are you happy enough to do this week’s run with Twinkletoes?’
‘Delighted. He gives me a warm glow of security. And it’s nice to reminisce. I arrested him for breach of the peace, aggravated assault, resisting arres
t and police assault back in Forty-seven, you know.’
‘Really?’
‘Mmm. Old times. It gives us something to chat about.’
I tried to imagine Archie and Twinkletoes chatting, but the effort made my head hurt.
Some people make a big show of their learning. Bookshelves dressed with the ‘right’ novels with unbroken spines, learned spoutings in the tap room, the dropping of the right names in conversation. The Mitchell Library was Glasgow’s very public, very brash statement of erudition. It was big. Very big. The largest public reference library in Europe.
I worked my way through the Commercial Reference Library and came away with details of Ellis’s company, as well as Hall Demolitions, the company he had worked for before setting up his own outfit. While I was there, I also checked out the public records on the Amalgamated Union of Industrial Trades: no mention of Frank Lang anywhere among the names of union officers.
Glasgow’s air is usually too heavy and sluggish for the wind to waste effort on, but that afternoon, as autumn oozed indistinctly into winter, it had decided to make its presence felt. As I came out of the Mitchell Library and stepped into a chill, damp swirl of rain and grime, I tightened my elbow-grip on the leather document case tucked under my arm and with my other hand clamped my protesting Borsalino to my head.
It was at times like these that I reflected on how, at the end of the war, I may have been directionless and feckless, but could not work out why I hadn’t chosen to be directionless and feckless in Paris or Rome or anywhere with a better climate. Which was hardly a restrictive criterion.
I pushed through the wind, the rain and the grim-faced crowds, steering a course back to my office.
Andrew Ellis wasn’t the only one who was skilled at spotting when he was being tailed.
I didn’t feel like going back to my digs and there was a kind of aimlessness about me when I left the office. I was still smarting about what had happened with Fiona White. I’d been all kinds of cad and swine with women, it was true, but I had been straight with Fiona White. It stung hard to be on the receiving end for a change.
Dead men and broken hearts l-4 Page 6
