The Deep Dark Sleep l-3

by Craig Russell

  ‘Say goodnight to the folks, Gracie,’ I said as he hit the floor.

  Paul started to scream and I slapped him hard to shut him up. I grabbed him by the throat and slammed him against the wall.

  ‘It’s playtime, Paul,’ I said between clenched teeth. I was fired up. I had to be fired up because I hated what I was doing: Paul was no fighter and I saw nothing but raw terror in his eyes. Despite everything that I might have become, I had no appetite for picking on the weak. But this was business.

  ‘Now,’ I said slowly and menacingly. ‘I’m going to let go your throat, but you make nice and quiet, like you’re in a library, got it?’

  He nodded furiously. Desperately.

  ‘Because if you don’t, you’re going to wake up in the fractures ward. Are we simpatico?’

  He gave a strangled yes and I let him go. Frank was making a rattling snoring sound when he breathed, so I bent down and checked him out. I put him in the position we’d been taught in the army and the snoring stopped. While I was down there, I retrieved my business card from his trouser pocket and tried not to think that he would probably have enjoyed me searching for it if he had been conscious.

  ‘Is he dead?’ Downey asked, his voice high and quivering. Nice line of work, Lennox, I thought.

  ‘No. He’ll be fine. He might not be as bright as he was, but, hey, that’s brain damage for you. Now, listen. I reckon he’s out for a couple of minutes tops. If he starts to come round while I’m still here, I’m going to have to send him bye-byes again, understand? And that could mean he’ll spend the next fifty years pissing his pants and dribbling on his shirt. So, unless you’re not a true Glaswegian and actually do have a fondness for vegetables, you’ve got two jobs to do. The first is to put those photographs into my hands, and I mean everything: every print, every negative, everything. The second thing, and this is going to be by far the more difficult, is to convince me that I have got everything there is to get. Because, if I’m not convinced, then I’m going to get tetchy with you and Veronica here. And if I find out, after I’ve gone, that I haven’t left with everything, I will find you and your chum again, but next time I’ll come with some friends, and we’ll all have a real party.’

  Again he nodded furiously and I knew from the look on his face that he would do exactly as I told him.

  ‘They’re in there …’ He nodded down the hall to a closed door at the far end. I grabbed him by the shirt front and heaved him down the hall, tearing the shirt in my fist. He fumbled with the keys he took from his pocket and I snatched them from him.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘That one …’ he pointed and I saw how much his hand shook. I was beginning to get a bad feeling about this. Paul Downey just did not seem the type to mastermind this kind of blackmail scam. Nor did his boyfriend, for that matter, despite the muscles.

  I opened the door and told Downey to put on the light, which he did, bathing the small room with red light. A darkroom, but my first inspection revealed it to be a swiftly improvised one. There was a table with developing materials and trays against the wall next to a small plan chest and a cupboard, and prints hung on clothes pegs from a makeshift drying line.

  ‘Okay, Paul, hand them over.’

  He opened the cupboard and took out a shortbread tin, all red tartan and photographs of Edinburgh Castle — the Scots were the only nationality I knew that bought their own tourist tat.

  I tipped out the contents: prints of the photographs Fraser had shown me and a few more, plus a blue airmail envelope stuffed with strips of acetate. The negatives. But the Macready photographs weren’t all he had in the box: there were two more sets of photographs, each partnered with a blue airmail envelope of negatives. I spread them all out on top of the plan chest. One set featured a prominent Glasgow businessman whom I recognized instantly, despite the fact he wasn’t exactly showing me his best side in the pictures. An upstanding member of the Kirk involved in charity work, which he publicized widely. In the black and white images, he appeared as a bleached mass of pale flesh in between a thin boy whom I recognized as Paul Downey and another youth.

  The third set troubled me. No sex, no illegal activity, nothing that I could see would warrant payment of blackmail money. All the photographs were simple shots of a group of well-dressed men leaving what looked like a country house. The photographs had been taken from a distance and several were close-ups of one man in particular. The closeups had been taken with a zoom lens and were grainy, but from what I could see the man looked in his fifties and vaguely aristocratic in a foreign sort of way, with a goatee beard and skin that was a tone darker than his companions, even in the black and white pictures.

  ‘Is this everything?’ I asked Downey.

  He nodded. I took a step towards him. ‘I swear!’

  I looked again at the picture of the well-dressed, vaguely-aristocratic-vaguely-foreign-looking man.

  ‘What’s all this about?’ I asked. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Downey. He was telling the truth: I could tell from the quiver in his voice and his obvious fear that I would not be convinced by the truth. ‘I was paid to take photographs of these men. I had to hide out in the bushes. I was told to take photographs specially of the man with the goatee beard. I don’t know what it was all about.’

  ‘Who paid you?’

  ‘A man called Paisley. But I think he was working for someone else, I don’t know who. And I don’t know why anyone would pay what he paid for these photos.’

  ‘You’ve already delivered them?’

  Downey nodded.

  ‘So why…?’ I nodded towards the prints and negatives.

  ‘We thought we could maybe make some more money out of them. There was obviously something important about these photographs and we thought there might be a chance to make a bob or two in the future.’

  ‘Where were they taken?’ I asked, leaving for the moment the fact that every time Downey said ‘we’ I got a funny feeling ‘we’ was more than him and Frank.

  ‘The Duke’s estate. The same place where we took the Macready photographs.’

  I slipped the best of the close-ups into my pocket. Downey had now started to shake quite violently: the shock setting in. With some it takes all a battlefield can throw at them, with others a raised voice and the threat of worse.

  There was a wooden chair in the corner of the darkroom and I told him to sit. It only took me a minute to cast an eye over the rest of the apartment, as well as checking on sleeping beauty in the hall. Truth was, I was getting a little worried about him and decided to make sure he came to before I left.

  When I came back into the darkroom, I had an ordinary one hundred watt bulb that I had taken from the bathroom and I replaced the red light with it, flooding the small room with brilliance. I tipped out every drawer, tray cupboard and cubby-hole I could find, checking as I went. John Macready and his aristocratic playmate were clearly not the only subjects of Downey’s artistic bent.

  I decided to do some pro-bono work and gathered every print and negative I could find, other than the ones I had been contracted to deliver, placing them in an enamel developing tray. I tossed the other two sets in and started a small bonfire, that made sure Downey and his muscle-bound chum would not be making any more from fat Glasgow businessmen or foreign-looking aristos.

  ‘Okay, Paul,’ I said as the photographs and negatives burned and I hauled him back to his feet. ‘I’ll take the rest with me and that will be an end to the matter, unless you want me to come back, that is.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘But before I go, I want to know how you set it all up. The cottage and everything. It was an elaborate set-up. You plan it all?’

  ‘I needed the money. I owe money and I have to pay it back. I can’t now …’ He started to cry. ‘They’ll kill me.’

  ‘Who? Who will kill you?’

  ‘I owe money to loan sharks. Local hard men.’

  ‘So you came up with this scheme
all by yourself?’

  ‘No. It was Iain’s idea.’

  ‘Iain? Iain as in bent-over-obligingly Iain? Iain the toff in the photographs? Iain, the Duke of Strathlorne’s son?’

  ‘We used to be close. For a while. He needs money almost as badly as I do and he came up with the plan. He knew about Macready and he came up with the idea.’

  ‘Why on earth would he need money desperately? His family own half the country, for God’s sake,’ I said incredulously. ‘And anyway, doesn’t he have as much … more … to lose than Macready if this all comes out? His family name … The connections …’

  ‘Iain said that that was exactly why they would cough up. It would be such a scandal that they would pay anything to stop it coming out. And if it did come out, I don’t think Iain would be that worried. It would destroy his father, more than him. And he hates his father.’

  I regarded Downey. I guessed he was of Irish Catholic stock, brought up in Glasgow, which put you at the bottom of the social pile. And Iain, the Duke’s son, was right at the top. In class-obsessed Britain, I couldn’t work out how they could possibly have been ‘close’, as Downey had put it.

  ‘It isn’t that unusual,’ he said, reading my mind. ‘It’s a different world. You should see the businessmen and toffs who hang around Glasgow Green looking for a bit of rough. I met Iain at a party in the West End.’

  ‘Does he have copies of the photographs?’ I asked, suddenly seeing a much more complicated task in front of me.

  ‘No.’ He nodded to the tin box that I had laid back on the table. ‘That’s everything.’

  We were interrupted by Frank, who lunged into the doorframe, trying to focus his gaze on me. He made a clumsy charge and I easily sidestepped him, slamming my elbow into the bridge of his nose as he careered past. He hurtled into the table and sent the tray with the burning prints and negatives crashing to the floor with him. He wasn’t out this time, but rolled over onto his side and cupped his busted nose, blood everywhere. He was finished.

  Downey had started to shake again. I grabbed him by the shirtfront once more and pulled him towards me.

  ‘Is our business with each other concluded, Mr Downey?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said in a quivering tone. ‘You won’t hear from me again, I swear.’

  I pushed him against the wall again and he screwed his face up tight. He knew he was going to take a beating, just to get the message across. I balled my fist.

  ‘Just make sure you don’t,’ I said. I maybe should have slapped him around a bit, just to reinforce the point, as Fraser had asked for in his roundabout way. But I had my limits, I was surprised and pleased to discover, and I let him go. ‘You better see to your girlfriend.’

  We met at the Central Hotel, in a private dining room, at nine-thirty.

  After I had left Downey, I had used the same call box at the corner of the street to get in touch with Fraser and Leonora Bryson. I told them both that I had all the copies and negatives and I had put Downey and his friend out of business. I didn’t mention at that stage that I’d found out that Iain, the aristo in the pictures, had planned to be on the receiving end in more ways than one. I had decided I could tell them when we got together, which would buy me some time to think about what it meant.

  John Macready was wearing a grey chalk-stripe, double breasted suit with a white shirt and burgundy silk tie that looked like they had just been hand delivered from Jermyn Street. The guy had style, I had to give him that. He sat smoking but stood up and shook my hand when I came in. Donald Fraser and Leonora Bryson remained glued to the upholstery. I had business on my mind, but Leonora was wearing a blue silk dress that looked like the silkworms had oozed it out directly onto her skin. Her hair was up and her throat bounded by a four tier pearl choker. She sat smoking and looking at me disinterestedly, or uninterestedly, or both. I couldn’t help thinking about the night in the room upstairs and felt the urge to go over there and start tearing silk, but I guessed that would have contravened business meeting etiquette.

  ‘Did you run into problems?’ Fraser asked, indicating the plaster on my cheek.

  ‘No … this is unrelated. Everything went pretty much as I thought it would.’

  ‘You have the items?’ Fraser asked me. I handed over the tartan tin.

  ‘No … I thought I would bring you some shortbread instead. A souvenir of Scotland for our American guests.’

  He looked at me blankly with his beady lawyer’s eyes. As I didn’t have a dictionary to show him the definition of the word humour, I decided to play it straight.

  ‘They’re in there …’ I said, nodding to the shortbread tin.

  ‘All of them?’ asked Leonora.

  ‘All of them,’ I said.

  ‘You’re sure?’ asked Fraser.

  ‘I’m sure. Downey was too scared to hold back, and I saw the set-up for myself. All the negatives are there. And, just for good measure, I burned every other piece of film I could find.’ I turned to the actor. ‘It’s over, Mr Macready. You can rest easy.’

  ‘I appreciate that, Mr Lennox.’ He smiled at me, but I didn’t get the full one hundred watt business. ‘I really do. If ever I can be of any help to you, please let me know. Mr Fraser, do you think it would be possible to give Mr Lennox a small bonus? After all, he really did sort this out very quickly for us.’

  Fraser was caught totally off guard. He flustered for a moment, then reached into his jacket pocket and produced a juicily thick buff envelope.

  ‘Your fee is in there, Mr Lennox. Four thousand pounds. Not bad for a few days’ work. I trust you’ll appreciate there’s an element of hush money in there. You can never discuss this with anyone.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘And we’re paying you cash. No need to go through the books. I doubt if the taxman would believe it was the proceeds of just one assignment that lasted less than a week.’

  ‘This means I won’t have to convince him.’ I held up the envelope before slipping it into my inside jacket pocket; close to my heart, where money tended to find a natural home. ‘And don’t worry about a bonus, Mr Macready … this is more than enough.’

  In fact, it was the most I had earned in one go at any time. And three times what I’d earned in the whole of the previous year.

  Macready rose to shake my hand again. The meeting was over.

  ‘There is one more thing,’ I said, not getting up.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘As I discussed with Miss Bryson, it never did fit with me the way these photographs were taken, given that your visit to Iain’s was supposed to be spur of the moment. When I asked you if you could guess how the photographs were taken, or where you thought the photographer could have concealed himself, you said that it was a mystery. Your guess was that they were taken through a window.’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘The clarity and quality of the images suggested to me that they were taken somehow from inside the cottage. They were. There was a false mirror. Two-way. The camera and photographer were hidden behind them in the next room.’

  Macready lit a cigarette and took a pull on it before answering.

  ‘So you’re saying Iain, or someone connected to the cottage or estate was in on it?’

  ‘According to Downey, yes. It was Iain. He set the whole thing up to raise cash for some reason he can’t tell Daddy the Duke about. Someone’s leaning heavily on Downey for money and maybe Iain’s under the same pressure. He guessed you would pay anything to stop the photographs falling into the wrong hands. In other words, anyone else’s hands other than your own.’

  ‘You’ve got proof of this?’ asked Fraser.

  ‘Downey admitted it to me. And trust me, Paul Downey has neither the brains nor the balls to come up with this on his own. Now, I can’t really knock seven shades out of the son of a peer of the realm, but if you want me to talk to Iain, I’ll do it.’ I tapped the envelope in my pocket. ‘And you have a little credit with me.’

  ‘What do you think, Mr Macrea
dy?’ Fraser asked. I could see the American actor was deep in thought. It was not a nice prospect, knowing that you had been deliberately set up and used.

  ‘What would your advice be, Mr Fraser?’ he said eventually and a little wearily.

  Fraser made the type of face lawyers make to tell you that they’re thinking and shouldn’t be interrupted, because they’re thinking at premium rate. ‘I suggest we leave it, for the moment at least, Mr Macready. We have the photographs and the negatives, which can now be destroyed. It should be the end of the matter. And given the status and influence of Iain’s father, it could be a lot more trouble than it’s worth.’

  ‘Sleeping dogs?’

  ‘That would be my inclination,’ said Fraser. ‘For the moment, at least. Mr Lennox, may we feel free to call on your services in this matter, should we change our position?’

  ‘Feel free, as I said.’

  ‘I would echo Mr Macready’s sentiments, Mr Lennox: you have dealt with this case with utmost speed and efficiency. I hope that I may retain your services in the future, on other matters.’

  ‘It would be my pleasure,’ I said and shook his hand, somehow managing not to add you sententious little prick. I find it’s best not to insult people who hand you large sums of cash.

  Leonora Bryson shook my hand too, with the warmth of an undertaker. That sure was one mixed-up lady.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I was pretty pleased with myself. With the Macready case out of the way, and with more cash burning a hole in my pocket than the average working Joe could hope to amass in a lifetime, I had a lot to be pleased with myself about.

  I could now give my full attention to Isa and Violet’s quest to find out who was sending them their annual dividend. The fact that the money always arrived on the anniversary, give or take a day or two, of the Nineteen thirty-eight Empire Exhibition robbery, seemed to scream out that it was their long lost paterfamilias.

  The police, however, were absolutely certain that the bones they’d dredged up belonged to Gentleman Joe. Over the next few days, while Archie doggedly went from address to address trying to locate Billy Dunbar, I did the rounds and asked a few questions. I didn’t expect to find out anything significant, but Glasgow’s underworld was a tight-knit community. A village of thieves.