‘I’m doing it for me, not Connelly or his union. Shuggie Dunlop is determined to pin a murder on me. If he can’t make Ellis’s stick, then he’ll try to nail me for Sylvia Dewar’s. But that’s not the real reason I want to find Frank Lang. Something stinks about the whole union thing.’
‘But I thought you said the two Frank Langs are unconnected?’
‘They are. I stumbled into one while looking for the other. But there are two people dead who were connected, if not very closely connected, to Frank Lang.’
‘And the Hungarians?’
‘I need to get into the Ellis house or his office or both. His wife told me when I first spoke to her that he had to write everything down. Sometimes it was just a one-word scribble or a doodle, but he couldn’t function without notes to himself. There must be something, somewhere, that might give me a hook on where to find our Magyar chums, or even what the significance of the word Tanglewood is.’
‘So you’re just going to ask the policemen nicely to let you in to the Ellis home and poke around — the policemen who are only there to make sure your feet don’t touch until you’re in a cell?’
‘That’s a wrinkle all right. I’ll have to think of something.’
‘And I don’t see you faring any better at Ellis’s company. Remember, it’s just been turned over by a gang of mime artists. Security is even tighter than it was before.’
‘Yes, Archie… I know that too. Listen, shouldn’t you be somewhere else offering words of comfort… to someone called Job?’
‘Just trying to keep you out of the cells, boss. You get caught in the Ellis house, then it’s not exactly going to do your case much good, is it?’
‘Then I’ll make sure I don’t. Talking about getting caught, we should split up. Twinkle, I’ll take you up on two of your offers. If you don’t mind, I will borrow your car and Archie can get you home. But I’ll also call on your moral support when it comes to getting some answers. In the meantime, I don’t want either of you to be caught giving succour to a fugitive.’
I saw Twinkle reach for his notebook again and I spelled out ‘succour’ for him. When I asked, he confirmed with deep pride that he was indeed on the telephone, and I got a note of his number. I told Archie I would keep in touch too.
‘I’ll leave Collins the estate agent to your tender mercies,’ I said. ‘Twinkle, you know where to find me. Let me know what you get out of him.’
‘What are you going to do in the meantime?’ asked Archie.
‘In the meantime? I’ve got to see a woman about a dog.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Old Charlie Darwin would probably have some naturally selective reason for the way we instinctively hate the ugly. Me, I always thought that ugliness tended to come in two types: the pitiable kind, where you sympathized with the person in much the same way you would a three-legged dog, and where you consoled yourself that they were most probably ‘lovely on the inside’; and then there was the loathsome ugly, where you sensed that the homeliness on the outside was merely the reflection of their inner obnoxiousness.
Maisie McCardle’s ugliness was definitely of the latter kind. Her too-long face was all points and angles. If she had painted it green, she could easily have had a career chasing Dorothy and Toto around Oz.
When she opened the door to scowl at me, the odious little pug who had taken a leak against my car appeared at her ankles, yapping shrilly. It screwed up its ugly little face too, and I wondered if they spent the long winter evenings together in front of the fire, scowling at each other.
This was going to be fun.
Her scowl soon evaporated and was replaced by an expression of alarm when she recognized me as the suspicious-looking character she had ratted on to the police. I had taken certain precautions before coming up: going back to the barge and changing out of the gear McBride had brought me and back into one of my more usual suits, hat and coat from my water-borne store-room. I had also, reluctantly, shaved off my incipient moustache. Maisie McCardle was clearly observant in a way that made the average eagle seem myopic and I didn’t want her to pass on to the police any changes in my appearance. I would start again on the moustache the next day. In fact, it would be good for the police to hear that I had made no attempt to change my look. I had also made sure that I parked Twinkle’s car out of sight. I was aided in my mission by the fact that, as far as I could see, there had still been no mention in the papers of the police looking for me.
‘Mrs McCardle?’ I said. ‘Please don’t be alarmed. My name is Lennox and I am an enquiry agent.’ I handed her my card. ‘I am working on the same case as the police. I’m afraid I was the person who found poor Mr and Mrs Dewar’s suicide.’ I knew that the police would not have offered an opinion on the nature of the deaths and chucking in the word ‘suicide’ probably took the gleam off my axe-murderer’s axe for her. She hadn’t slammed shut the door, so I kept talking. ‘I know you mentioned my being here before to Inspector Dunlop and Chief Inspector Ferguson, but I can assure you I am working with the police on this.’
Maisie eyed suspiciously first my card and then me. She was either weighing up my authenticity or checking to see if I was wearing ruby slippers.
‘Although I am helping the police in trying to get to the bottom of why Mr Dewar did what he did,’ I said, pressing on, ‘there really was no connection between the tragedy at the Dewars and the case I was investigating originally, which concerned your other neighbour, Mr Lang.’
I let it hang there. My experience had been that the naturally observant were usually the pathologically inquisitive, and I could see that her interest had been piqued.
‘Mr Lang?’
‘Yes. Mr Frank Lang. I was engaged by his employers to make sure nothing untoward has befallen him. You see, Mr Lang has been missing for some weeks now.’ I fidgeted theatrically on the doorstep, as if performing on too small a stage. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Mrs McCardle, but Chief Inspector Ferguson told me what a wonderful eye witness you were — that nothing gets by you — so I thought you would be able to help. I wonder if I may…?’ I nodded in the direction of the hall behind her. Her eyes narrowed for a moment, but the flattery and her curiosity got the better of her caution.
‘You’d better come in then.’
‘Nice place you’ve got here,’ I said appreciatively as she led me into the house, not adding that I was surprised it wasn’t made out of gingerbread and the window glass out of sugar.
The layout of the nearly-new house appeared to be identical to that of the Dewars’ place, but, where Sylvia Dewar had embraced the Atomic Age in all of its synthetic modernity, Maisie McCardle had sought to hide it, wherever possible behind lace doilies. The clock on the mantelpiece, the sofa and two-chair suite, the heavy, dull brown curtains all had that hard, uncompromising solidity of pre-war furniture. I guessed that anything in the house newer than that bore a Utility Mark. There was no television, but a pre-war Pye radio, the wooden box type with a suitcase handle on the top, sat in the corner.
The one thing that surprised me was the mirror above the mantelpiece; not that it was of a different style or vintage of any of the other pieces, just that it was there at all. Uncracked.
‘The police seemed awfully interested in you…’ she said, still eyeing me suspiciously.
‘Oh yes… I understand that. You see, I was able to give them exact times I was here and that helped them establish the sequence of events from your statements. Chief Inspector Ferguson really thought the information you gave was invaluable…’
Suddenly Maisie became uglier, her features contorting. Then I realized she was smiling.
‘Will you be wanting a cup of tea, then?’ she asked dully, as if I’d forced her into the offer.
‘I wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble…’ I said.
It was obvious that she wasn’t about to let me put her to any trouble; she didn’t push her offer of tea and instead sat down in the armchair by the radio.
‘What do you want to k
now?’ she asked.
‘May I sit down?’ I asked and she nodded sharply. ‘Like I said, I’m trying to locate Frank Lang. I spoke to poor Mrs Dewar before her death and she told me that she hardly ever saw him and had practically nothing to do with him.’
‘Did she now…?’ Maisie wriggled in her seat maliciously.
‘Are you saying that wasn’t the case?’
‘It’s true that he was hardly ever here. I hardly ever saw him and I see everything and everyone, especially when I’m walking Prince.’
‘Prince?’
‘My dog.’
I looked down at the little pug. It looked back at me, all bug eyes and a face wrinkled like a brain, its turned-up bottom lip almost wrapped over its snotty nose.
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘It isn’t right,’ she said scowling, which was beginning to lose its expressive effect. ‘I told the police that. There’s something fishy when someone pays rent for a Corporation flat and they’re never there. Very fishy.’
‘But you’re saying that Mrs Dewar’s statement wasn’t accurate?’
‘Aye… if she said she didn’t have anything to do with Lang, then it’s a lie. And I told the police that too. They wanted to know everything about Lang too.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me, Mrs McCardle. What did you tell them?’
‘That she was a slut and a whore.’ Another malicious wriggle. ‘Interested in anything in trousers.’
‘Including Lang?’
‘Like I said, he was hardly ever there, but she seemed to know when he was going to arrive. She thought she was being so clever, sneaking in through his back door, but I saw her. I heard them.’
‘So you believe that Frank Lang and Sylvia Dewar were carrying on an affair together? Have you told the police that?’
‘Yes.’
I sat and thought it through for a moment. Shuggie Dunlop was all bluff on the Dewar deaths. Good old Maisie, God bless the ugliness that reached from her face deep into her soul, would relish standing in a witness box, smearing Lang’s and Sylvia’s reputations. And, if it hadn’t been Dewar who killed his wife, then that placed Lang in the queue for the execution cell well before me. It was all beginning to form a picture.
‘The day she claimed to have seen him leave with two other men in a big car…?’ I looked through my notebook and gave her the day and date. ‘Did you see him leave?’
‘No. And I would have been in and normally I see everybody. I watch, you see. There are a lot of dodgy characters around,’ she said, her tiny eyes fixed on me for long enough to make her point. ‘I didn’t see anyone around his house ever, except for her. And no car. He hardly ever brought his own car here. I don’t know where he kept it. Maybe a garage, but not one near here.’
‘He had a car?’
‘That’s what I just said.’
‘What kind of car?’
‘It was one of these cars with the wood on them. A shooting-brake or station-wagon or whatever you call them. It was pale green. He only brought it here once or twice.’
‘A Morris Traveller?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything about cars.’
Again I thought it all through. Sylvia Dewar’s previous convictions for dishonesty. The kind of company she probably at one time kept. Her manipulation of her husband. Yes, I was beginning to see it all now, but I needed to confirm it.
‘Do you know this man?’ I said, reaching into my pocket and handing a photograph to her.
‘No.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I wouldn’t say if I wasn’t.’
‘And you definitely haven’t seen this man around here, visiting Frank Lang’s house?’
Her scowl deepened, broadened, intensified and her ugliness followed suit. ‘Do I have to keep repeating myself?’
‘No, Mrs McCardle, you don’t. I’m sorry,’ I said. Putting the photograph — the photograph of Frank Lang given to me by Lynch and Connelly — back into my jacket pocket, I took out my notebook.
‘I wonder if you could give me a description of Frank Lang.’ I smiled at her. ‘And from what Chief Inspector Ferguson has told me about you, it will be a good one…’
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
This was not the time to be juggling two unconnected cases, but that was exactly what I found myself doing. Mainly because my continued liberty, and maybe my neck, depended on my finding a solution to each of them.
After I left the Wicked Witch of the West, I headed back to the barge and changed once more into the outfit of flannel shirt, scratchy tweed jacket and shapeless trousers that Twinkletoes had brought me. I dressed it up a bit with a knitted silk tie; not because my sartorial sensibilities had been stretched to breaking, but because I felt the outfit was just that little bit too blue-collar for me to be seen wearing it while driving a car like Twinkletoes’s sparkling Vauxhall Cresta.
There was a Navy-issue dark blue duffle coat in the same barge closet where I’d found the wellington boots. It was in reasonably good condition and I decided I would wear it over the tweed jacket rather than the cheap, thin raincoat McBride had provided. Duffle coats were a kind of classless attire in Britain, where ex-navy captains were as likely to wear one as an ex-navvy. Again I dressed up the proletarian look with a pair of pigskin gloves that probably cost me three times what the bargee had paid for the coat. If stopped by the police, I might play the part of the eccentric dressed-down ex-naval officer. Pulling on the duffle coat, I wondered bitterly if the ensemble would have done anything to improve my chances with Fiona White.
The other advantage of the coat was, of course, its dark colour: ideal night attire for the professional prowler and loiterer. And, of course, I wasn’t just taking the gloves for their look. I would have a practical need of them too.
It was after seven when I headed back to where I had parked the Cresta, got into it, and started it up without casting guilty looks around me. It was strange to be at liberty — albeit a surreptitious liberty — in the city I had had to flee across just the night before with numb feet and in a prison uniform. But I was still a fugitive, and I knew that couldn’t last.
I stopped at a public telephone and, jamming the door open with my foot to allow the fume of urine odour to escape, I jammed my pennies in, dialled the number of the Paradise Club, jabbed the A button, and asked to speak to Larry Franks.
‘Hi, Mr Franks, this is Mr Bardstown, from Kentucky,’ I said.
‘Oh yes,’ said Franks after a short confused silence. ‘The bourbon drinker.’ He paused for a second. ‘I’m glad you ’phoned, but we’ve been having problems with the telephone recently. Like you mentioned.’
‘That’s what I thought…’ Even this coded contact was dodgy. Coppers were dim, but if there was one listening in on the line, trying to catch out something relating to Jonny Cohen’s involvement with the Arcade robbery, this stilted conversation was clearly fake.
‘Is everything all right with you?’ asked Franks. ‘You’ve been missed… a couple of friends have been looking for you two nights in a row. They were really keen to talk to you.’
‘Oh?’ I asked. ‘I’m surprised that they looked for me there.’
‘You left a wallet behind at their place. My card was in it. Your friends are really keen to reunite you with your wallet. Maybe if you were to call by the Club, they would catch up with you.’
‘That’s what I thought. I won’t be able to make it to the Club.’
‘I thought as much. That’s a pity,’ said Franks. ‘Because I found out some stuff about the names of those Bourbon brands you gave me and I was looking forward to chatting to you.’
‘That is a pity,’ I said.
‘I’m afraid I’m so busy I don’t get a chance to chat with anyone. Tonight, for example, I’m working until ten-thirty — then I have to cadge a lift home.’
‘Well, I’m sure we might bump into each other some time soon. Goodbye, Mr Franks,’ I said and hung up.
I headed u
p to Bearsden. On the way, feeling reasonably secure in a strange car and change of clothes, I drove past my old digs. I kidded myself that I was doing it to see if the police were watching the place but the truth, I knew, was that I just wanted to drive past Fiona’s. The curtains were drawn but I could see the light from the living-room leaching through them. I wondered what she and the girls would be doing, what they would be watching on television or talking about. What an ordinary, safe life would be like.
I drove on.
In Bearsden, I found a public-house car park and left the Cresta there. It was a busy pub, and up-market for Glasgow. Normally in the West of Scotland, if a bar wanted to show itself a cut above, it would have a special rack for you to hang up your bicycle clips next to your flat cap, so I reckoned that, having a car park, this place would be the local bees-knees, no-Catholics-no-Jews watering hole for the local golf-club-swinging crowd — lawyers, accountants and surveyors.
The car park was busy for a Wednesday night and I reckoned the Cresta would be less likely to arouse suspicion left there than parked for a second time in a side street around the corner from my goal.
It was a fog-free night, but not cloudless, and damp-cold without raining. Walking the mile or so to my destination, I pulled the hood of the duffle coat up over my head and cap. The streets of Bearsden were hardly bustling at the best of times and were empty as I walked through them in the chill early evening.
When I reached the road junction, I walked briskly and purposefully across to the other side and out of sight of the black Austin Cambridge sitting outside Pamela Ellis’s home. If the occupants of the unmarked police car had noticed me, then they would simply have seen someone look in their direction to check the road was clear before crossing. The secret was never to look tentative. Maybe, when this was all over, I could write a book: The Fugitive’s Handbook and Guide to Barge Maintenance.
I looped around one block and then another, bringing me to where Ellis’s house and its neighbours backed onto a narrow street that was more an up-market alley. The high brick wall surprised me, as most of the gardens in Bearsden were hedge-or tree-fringed, but I put it down to the fact that the backs of the gardens on one side of the narrow street looked onto the backs of those on the other side, and the walls were probably there to boost security. Even though I would not be overlooked as I scaled the wall, it would be a struggle to get over it and I knew that the locals had the habit of having broken glass cemented into the tops of walls to discourage riff-raff like me.
Dead men and broken hearts l-4 Page 25
