I was lucky and got Jock Ferguson at his desk. I asked him what he knew about Donald Fraser, which was nothing, but he said with a sigh that he would ask around. In turn, he asked why I was asking and I told him the truth: that Fraser was a solicitor in the city and wanted to hire me and that I just wanted to check Fraser’s bona fides before I took the job. Ferguson told me he would ’phone me back at my office later with whatever he could find out. He also made it plain that the next lunch I treated him to would have to be somewhere more upscale than the Horsehead Bar.
I walked back to my office. It remained unseasonably warm — and muggy, which seemed to be the only warm Glasgow did. Even in the middle of that summer’s heatwave, it had been as if the city had opened up its pores and sweated itself slick. Something in this mugginess, however, hung in my nostrils and chest; that old warning feeling I always got when a smog was on its way.
When I got back, the afternoon mail had been delivered. One envelope contained a single, plain sheet of paper with a list of names. No signature, note or anything else to show who had sent it. Isa and Violet were perhaps not as guileless as they appeared.
Of the names, I recognized only three, and one of those happened to be the name at the very top of the list. For a moment I hoped that the Michael Murphy heading the list wasn’t the one that immediately leapt to mind. I transferred the name along with all of the others to my notebook:
MICHAEL MURPHY
HENRY WILLIAMSON
JOHN BENTLEY
STEWART PROVAN
RONALD MCCOY
Five names. There had been five robbers involved in the Empire Exhibition job. But one of those five had been Strachan himself, and if the Michael Murphy on the list was the Michael Murphy I was thinking of, then I couldn’t see him having been one of that team.
During the twins’ visit to my office, Isa — or Violet — had left me a telephone number and I called it. It was Isa after all. I asked if the Michael Murphy on the list was Hammer Murphy; she told me she didn’t know for sure but it was possible. Her father had known Murphy.
‘What was your father’s involvement with Murphy?’ I asked.
‘Daddy knew all the Murphy brothers. I think they did some work for Daddy. Now and again. Mam said that that was before Michael Murphy became successful and important, in his own right, like. But Michael Murphy was round now and again. I don’t remember him being at the house, but there again I was only wee.’
‘And Henry Williamson?’ I asked. The name had leapt out at me as not being typically Glaswegian.
‘He was a good friend of Daddy’s. I never met him either, though. From what Mam said, Daddy had known him for years. Since the war. The First War, I mean.’
‘Your father served in the First War?’
‘Aye. He was a hero you know.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought your father would have been old enough.’
‘It was near the end of the war.’
‘And that was where he met Williamson?’
‘I think so.’
‘Was Williamson involved in crime too?’
There was a short silence at the other end of the telephone; I wondered if I had offended her by reminding her of the origins of her father’s wealth.
‘I don’t know. That’s the truth,’ she said. ‘I don’t think Mr Williamson was ever in prison, or anything like that, but I just don’t know. He stopped coming around after Daddy went away. But they saw each other all the time before that.’
‘Do you know where I can find him? Where he lives?’
‘Not really. All I know is that Da knew him from the war. But I don’t think he was from Glasgow.’
‘I see …’ I said.
I ran through the other names with Isa. A couple of them I knew, or realized I knew when she gave me some background information. All thieves and hardmen. I reckoned that there was a good chance, after all, that I was sitting with the names of the Empire Exhibition Gang in my hand. But could it really be as easy as that? In Thirty-eight, the police would have had exactly the same list of names, yet they never nailed even one of the robbers.
The only other name I had to ask about was John Bentley.
‘I never knew him either. Mam said that he was just someone she had heard Daddy talking about to the others.’
Before I visited Willie Sneddon, I ’phoned and made an appointment. With a secretary.
That’s what dealing with Willie Sneddon had turned into. Secretaries and appointments and meetings in offices.
Willie Sneddon was by far the most treacherous and dangerous of the Three Kings. Which was saying something when you considered that Hammer Murphy had not earned his nickname because of his joinery skills. But the thing that made Willie Sneddon more dangerous than anyone else was his brain. There were a handful of Willie Sneddons born in the slums of Glasgow every year or so: people who, despite the odds and the lack of stimulus, had the raw intelligence to clamber their way out of the gutter. More than half of them wouldn’t make it: Britain’s obsessive class-consciousness placing barriers in their way at every opportunity. The others would make it despite the odds stacked against them and become surgeons, engineers, self-made business magnates.
And a couple, like Willie Sneddon and Gentleman Joe Strachan, would use their brains to dominate and terrorize the city’s underworld. Sneddon had been too small-fry to come to Strachan’s attention; but, if Strachan hadn’t disappeared when he did, then the paths of the two would, sooner or later, have come together. In a this-town-ain’t-big-enough-for-the-both-of-us kind of coming together.
But the paths had not met, and Willie Sneddon had had a clear run at dominating the city’s underworld, which he had, much to the annoyance of the other two Kings, Murphy and Cohen. They had divided the city up equally, except that Sneddon’s share had been more equal than the others. He was the youngest of the Three Kings and had come much farther, much quicker, than the other two. And everyone knew that Sneddon’s climb to the top wasn’t yet over.
Like Strachan, Sneddon had been very careful to make sure that his only view of Barlinnie Prison was seeing it in the distance as he passed by in his Jaguar on the A8. He had had a few run-ins with the City of Glasgow Police, right enough, but hadn’t picked up any indelible blots on his copybook. His relationship with the oily lawyer George Meldrum, and his open-handedness with brown envelopes stuffed with cash, had ensured that the only bars he ever looked through were the ones he ran or from which he extracted protection money. There was even a rumour that he was tight with Superintendent McNab, through their mutual membership of the Orange Order and the Freemasons or God knows what other let’s-do-a-funny-handshake-to-prove-we-hate-the-Fenians secret society.
And Sneddon was rich. Almost inexplicably rich. He had more money than the other two Kings put together, more than anyone could fully account for. I, personally, never saw much of a difference between businessmen and gangsters, other than that I would probably trust a gangster’s word more. Sneddon combined the callousness of a gang boss with the greed and acumen of a business magnate and that, I guessed, was what made him a different kind of animal in the jungle. The apex predator, as zoologists called such creatures.
Things were changing fast for Sneddon. He had re-invested the majority of his ill-gotten gains into legitimate businesses. It had all started out as front, but then Sneddon had seen that although the benefits were fewer and the profits less than his illegal activities, the risks were much, much lower. So now he ran a successful and perfectly above-board import business, an estate agency and three car showrooms, as well as having shares in a major Clydeside ship repair yard.
And he paid his taxes in full, on time. Scrupulously.
So now, Willie Sneddon — who was reputed to have once, in one of his more whimsical moments, boiled the flesh off the feet of one of his criminal competitors simply because this particular crook had made a remark about ‘letting Sneddon stew’ over a deal — now hobnobbed with lairds, shipyard owners, Corporati
on officials and magnates.
But Willie Sneddon still, it was said, retained the services of Twinkletoes MacBride, his torturer-in-chief, and an entourage of Teddy Boy suited thugs including Singer, the ironically nicknamed mute. I often puzzled about how Twinkletoes MacBride — being big on muscle and cruelty and short on brains and subtlety — had adapted to the new commercial environment. Somehow, I now imagined him dressed in a bowler hat and pinstripe and carrying his bolt-cutters — used for removing toes of uncommunicative victims — in an attache case.
Sneddon’s secretary tried to put me off until the next day, but I piled on the charm and pushed my luck, saying it was an important and pressing matter but that it would only take up ten minutes of his time. She asked me to hang on while she consulted her boss and when she came back a minute later, she told me that Sneddon could see me in fifteen minutes.
The ’phone rang almost immediately after I hung up. It was Jock Ferguson.
‘I’ve asked around about Donald Fraser. He’s as kosher as a Tel Aviv butcher’s. He deals with contract law, mainly. I wouldn’t have thought he would be handling divorce cases.’ Ferguson had drawn the obvious conclusion; I decided not to disabuse him of it.
‘I think he’s handling this case more as an obligement than anything else. A personal favour called in by a client. Did you find out anything else about him?’
‘Nothing to find. Educated at Fettes in Edinburgh. In the Home Guard during the war. Dodgy eyesight kept him out of the regular army, apparently. His father was an officer in the Great War.’
‘God, Jock, your intelligence gathering is a hell of a lot better than I thought.’
‘Not really. One of the senior uniform boys here, Chief Superintendent Harrison, knew Fraser during the war. Fraser and Harrison are pals, apparently. So I’d say he’s okay.’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Thanks, Jock. That’s all I wanted to know.’
‘And how’s your sniffing about the Empire job going? Anyone jump up and kick you in the teeth yet?’
‘Not yet. But on that …’
‘Here we go …’ Ferguson sighed at the other end of the line.
‘On that …’ I continued, ‘what do you know about Henry Williamson and John Bentley?’
‘That’s easy,’ said Ferguson. ‘Nothing. Never heard of either of them. Well, I know a couple of Williamsons — it’s not that uncommon a name — but nobody connected to that world and certainly no one who would know Joe Strachan. And I don’t think any of them is a Henry. I could ask around, I suppose, but then you might buy me another Horsehead pie, and I’m beginning to think they’re named after their contents, not the name of the bar.’
‘Okay, next time I’ll make it an Italian meal …’ I’d treated Jock Ferguson to a meal at Rosseli’s before. In Glasgow that was as exotic as it comes and he had spent five minutes suspiciously poking around with his fork at his spaghetti. Forty minutes and two bottles of cheap Chianti later, he seemed to have developed an enthusiasm for Italian cuisine. Or as much of an enthusiasm as Jock Ferguson was capable of displaying: I could not imagine him ever throwing his arm around a waiter and bursting into ‘O sole mio’.
‘Do you have anything on either of them?’ he asked. ‘So’s I know where to start asking.’
‘Well, I think Williamson was a war buddy of Joe Strachan’s. In Number One, I mean.’ I had just finished saying it when I heard at the other end of the line something as rare as an inside toilet in Dennistoun: Ferguson laughing.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘A war buddy?’ he said. ‘Is that a polite way of saying fellow deserter?’
‘I thought Strachan had a glowing war record,’ I said. ‘A war hero, his daughter told me.’
More laughter. ‘Listen, Lennox, Strachan could sell any line of bull to anyone he chose. Do you know why everybody called him Gentleman Joe?’
‘I’ve heard that he was a flashy dresser, and liked a few of the finer things in life. Mind you, coming from the Gorbals, toilet paper that doesn’t leave newsprint on your backside counts as one of the finer things, I suppose.’
‘Joe Strachan didn’t dress flashy, Lennox. He dressed well. He knew what to wear and how, when and where to wear it. Like you say, he was one hundred per cent Gorbals, but he could pass himself off as anything, in any social circle. Believe it or not, it was actually what led the City CID in the first place to suspect him of having pulled off the Empire job and the other top-end robberies.’
‘Oh? Why?’
‘It was just by chance that a bank clerkess mentioned having served a tall, well-dressed, well-spoken gentleman a couple of weeks before the bank got hit. He had called in to cash a postal order but she had remembered that he had asked a lot of questions. Then, when they went over the other jobs, and prompted witnesses’ memories, they remembered a tall, well-spoken, well-dressed gentleman having had some kind of contact a few weeks before the job.’
‘Did he fit Strachan’s description?’
‘The description was slightly different each time, but there were enough similarities. It was by pure chance that it came out: no one thought anything of it because “gentlemen” don’t commit crime. And do you know where Strachan learned his party trick? In the army at the end of the First War.’
‘He saw active service?’ I asked. ‘I was told he volunteered as a fifteen-year-old …’
Ferguson snorted. ‘Joseph Strachan was not the volunteering type. He was too young for most of the war but was called up at the arse end of it all. But the last shot hadn’t been fired, so young Strachan showed real initiative by taking some leave without burdening his superiors with organizing it.’
‘So that was when he deserted?’
‘More than deserted … Strachan had this ability: to mimic voices, accents, mannerisms, that kind of thing.’
‘What’s your point … that Music Hall’s loss was armed robbery’s gain?’
There was a short silence and I could imagine Ferguson making an impatient face: he was not used to being interrupted. ‘Anyway, he could pass himself off as anyone. Any class, any nationality: Scottish, English, Welsh. So when he deserted, he didn’t just take a powder and lie low, like most would. Oh no, young Master Strachan also nicked a couple of subalterns’ uniforms so he could pass himself off as an officer on leave. Fooled everybody. Spent six weeks running up mess and brothel bills.’
‘Six weeks? I’m surprised he lasted that long. Passing yourself off as an officer with a put-on accent is one thing, but it’s not just how you talk, it’s what you’ve got to say about yourself.’
‘Aye … I suppose you’ll know all about that, Lennox.’ Ferguson didn’t attempt to keep the tone of contempt out of his voice. ‘You having been an officer and gone to a fancy school yourself … So what are you saying? That Strachan would be bound to give himself away by using the wrong spoon or holding his bone china the wrong way or some crap like that?’
‘I just don’t see how a thug from the Gorbals could be that convincing as a public school-educated officer.’
‘Well you’re wrong. Like I said, that’s why they called him “Gentleman” Joe: he could turn it on at the drop of the hat. You may just see him as a Gorbals monkey, but he was one smart monkey. He didn’t just put on the accent, he knew the moves. He may have left school at thirteen, but everyone knew he was a clever wee bastard. When he wasn’t shoving a gun in a bank teller’s face, he was shoving his nose into a book. He was obsessed with knowing things. And they say that’s why he got away with the officer act. He knew the right things to say at the right time. The rumour is that he also got to know the mutineer Percy Toplis and that was where he got the impersonating officers idea.’
‘You seem to know a lot about Strachan’s life story, Jock.’
‘He was a bit of a legend with the older boys here. I think there was a fair amount of grudging respect, that kind of shite. But all of that went right down the pan when that constable was gunned down. So yes, it’s not difficult to kn
ow a lot about Strachan if you’re a Glasgow copper. Added to which I’ve had my ear bent non-stop by Superintendent McNab about him since those bones were dredged up.’
I thought for a moment about McNab’s personal interest in Strachan. I was going to have to make a real effort to work around him, in much the same way as a pilot fish works around a shark.
‘So if he was a First War deserter, how come he didn’t end up in front of a firing squad?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know too much about that, but I gather that he talked his way out of it. He was good at that, from all accounts. And the odds were in his favour: there were over three thousand sentenced to death, but only three hundred or so faced a firing squad.’
I nodded slowly as I processed the information. The British had been almost as keen on shooting their own as shooting the enemy in the First War. Most of those tied to a post and shot had been men with otherwise outstanding war records, whose nerves had been shredded and reshredded by an uncaring command that did not recognize battle fatigue. And many had simply been terrified children who had lied about their age to serve King and Country. One of the finer moments of the British Empire had been when it had shot a ‘coward’ who had just turned sixteen.
‘There were rumours, apparently,’ continued Ferguson, ‘that Strachan maybe dodged a drumhead court-martial and firing squad because he volunteered to do reconnaissance work. You know, going over-the-top on your own at night and crawling around in the mud to find out what you could about the enemy disposition — barbed-wire, machine-gun posts, that kind of thing. Maybe that’s where his daughters got that mad idea that he was a war hero. It was probably dangerous, all right, but you’ve got less chance of getting shot at night on your belly than tied to a post in front of a firing squad. Anyway, have you seen Billy Dunbar yet … the guy I gave you the address for?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Well I got the name of the witness we talked about. The van driver. But you’re not going to get much out of him.’
The Deep Dark Sleep l-3 Page 5
