I was a great reader. I spent a lot of my time reading to try to understand how the world worked; mainly because my participation in it had only served to befuddle me. You get a lot of ideas from reading: some good, some bad. And a lot of stupid ones.
I had once read that physicists believe that the act of observing really tiny particles actually changes how they behave. The observer effect, they called it. I decided to apply the principle of observer effect on Glasgow’s criminal classes: ask the right — or the wrong — questions in the right places, and things tend to start happening.
As I had ever since our brief encounter in the smog, I kept my eye out for the guy who had jumped me with the gun. I had no sense of anyone tailing me, but there again, nor had Frank when I’d tracked him back to his flat. If you knew what you were doing, it was easy to stay out of sight. And I had the idea that this guy knew exactly what he was doing.
I lodged a few hundred pounds from the fee Fraser had given me into my business account, but the rest I stashed in the safety deposit box. I was almost as stunned by my sudden fortune as I had been by Leonora Bryson’s sudden amorous, if potentially homicidal, passion. Between one thing and another, I had more than eight thousand pounds locked away; more than enough to buy a house outright. To buy four houses in Glasgow. I now no longer had any reason not to go home to Canada. I could lodge the cash in a bank and wire it to Canada before the British inland revenue had a chance to sneeze.
But I wasn’t ready yet. Something had happened to me during the war and I still didn’t like who I had become. The folks back home would be expecting the return of the Kennebecasis Kid: the idealistic, bright-eyed, enthusiastic youth who had taken a commission for the Empire. What they would get was me: the post-war, cynical Lennox who could be hired to slap frightened queers around. And that was me on a good day.
Jock Ferguson left a message for me at the boarding house to call him and, when I did, he informed me that he had checked out Robert McKnight, Violet’s husband who played chauffeur to the twins.
‘He’s a car salesman,’ Ferguson informed me. ‘No known record.’
‘What kind of car salesman?’ I asked, as if they came in any discernible shades of character. ‘Bomb-site used or gentlemen’s Bentleys?’
‘He works at the Mitchell and Laird Garage, up in Cowcaddens. Legit. They sell new or nearly new Fords, but I don’t know if they’re an authorized dealer or not. And they carry a big stock of second-hand cars, but it seems to be quality stuff.’
‘I see,’ I said, and remembered the Ford Zephyr with the Hire Purchase gleam to it parked outside my office. ‘So he’s clean?’
‘Well … there is an interesting twist. Despite the name, the Mitchell and Laird Garage is actually owned by a trading company whose chairman just happens to be a certain William Sneddon.’
And there it was, the thing I had dreaded most: another of the Three Kings involved in my investigation. That made two, if you counted Michael Murphy’s presence on the list of their father’s associates the twins had supplied.
‘But you know that doesn’t mean anything really these days,’ continued Ferguson. ‘Willie Sneddon is still a crook and we’re still after the bastard, but the truth is he’s cleaned up his act. He has as many legit businesses as crooked ones. The Mitchell and Laird Garage just happens to be one of the legit ones. And that’s where your boy works.’
‘Yeah … my boy who just happens to be married to the daughter of one of Glasgow’s most legendary crime figures. Tell me, Jock, was there ever any connection between Willie Sneddon and Joe Strachan?’
‘None that I’m aware of. Sneddon came on the scene much later. Hammer Murphy though … I believe he was tight with Strachan for a while.’
‘Yes … I heard,’ I said gloomily. ‘Thanks, Jock.’
Archie paid me a visit just before lunchtime, which I took as a hint and I treated him to a pie and pint in the Horseshoe. He downed the pint in seconds, his bushy eyebrows jumping with each swallow, and turned to me with a pained expression on his long face. It took me a couple of seconds to realize he was smiling at me.
‘I’m like those Mounties of yours, boss,’ he said. ‘I always get my man.’
‘Billy Dunbar?’
‘The very same. I’ve run him to ground.’ Archie dug around in his raincoat pockets, pulling out various scraps of paper, a crumpled handkerchief and a couple of bus tickets, all of which he dumped on the cramped space we had in front of us on the bar. Eventually he found what he had been looking for and his eyebrows once more declared their independence from the doleful face.
‘Aye … here it is. This is where he lives now. He’s changed address three times. From what I understand, he’s straight now. Has been since his last stretch. That’s why there have been so many moves: it’s difficult to put a past like his behind you.’
‘Tell me about it,’ I said more to myself than to Archie. I looked at the address. It was a place in Stirlingshire. ‘He’s left Glasgow?’
‘You know what it’s like when one of these bozos decides he wants to go straight. It’s like coming off the bottle — most go back to it, but if you want to stay dry, you stay out of the pub. My guess is that Dunbar needed to get away from everybody who knew about his past.’
‘Good work, Archie,’ I said. Nothing registered on his face but his eyebrows looked pleased. ‘Do you want to come along for the trip? Chargeable time?’
‘All right,’ he said, frowning. ‘But I’m worried what all that fresh air will do to my constitution.’
‘I promise we’ll keep the car windows tight shut and smoke all the way. Okay?’
Archie nodded dolefully. ‘I’ll be at the office at nine.’
Hammer Murphy, as I’ve already mentioned, did not earn his nickname because he was an accomplished handyman. Well, he was an accomplished handyman, and specially skilled with a hammer, but not in the putting-up-shelves sort of way. More in the smashing a business opponent’s skull to pulp sort of way.
All in all, Hammer Murphy had always been the King I had done my best to avoid. Much in the same way as I avoided meat pies unless I was sure of their origin: Murphy owned a meat processing plant on the outskirts of Glasgow and the rumour was — well, more than a rumour — that Murphy had put some of his business rivals through the mincer. Literally. It was also widely suggested that Murphy obliged Handsome Jonny Cohen and Willie Sneddon by sub-contracting this function for them.
I mixed with a nice crowd.
I tried not to think too much about Murphy’s meat plant, but when rumours started to circulate that a couple of likely lads who had particularly annoyed Murphy had gone through the mincer, tied up but still alive and conscious, then my appetite for his company diminished as drastically as my appetite for sausages.
You get the idea: Hammer Murphy was the most violent, volatile and vindictive of the Three Kings who ran Glasgow’s criminal underworld, and someone to be avoided if at all possible.
The whole Gentleman Joe Strachan thing had taken on a bad taste for me as soon as Murphy’s name was mentioned. Strachan seemed to have this split personality thing going on: there was this image of Strachan as almost the ‘gentleman crook’: a kind of Glaswegian Raffles, if you can stretch your imagination that far; the other image of him was of a cold, ruthless and often vicious gangster and life-taker.
The presence of Murphy’s name on a list of Strachan’s associates confirmed the latter for me. Now would have been a good time for me to have ducked out; to have taken enough to cover my expenses and tell the twins that Strachan was dead, and so were all of the leads as to who was sending them the cash. After all, I had had the windfall of the Macready case, which had been preposterously lucrative. So instinct screamed at me to drop the Strachan thing; to enjoy the freedom of the city’s streets without having to do a two-step in the fog with a skilled dance partner. Unfortunately my hearing seemed to have deteriorated, and no matter how loud instinct screamed, I didn’t seem to hear it.
&n
bsp; So I placed the call I’d been putting off for more than a week. After speaking to a minion, I was put through to Murphy and the voice that came on the other end of the line was thick Glasgow accented and more abrasive than carborundum.
The conversation was brief and pithy, let’s say. I had not realized that ‘fuck off’ could be used as a response to almost every question or statement, or even when you paused to take breath. It was only when I mentioned Gentleman Joe Strachan and that I was looking into the discovery of his remains that Murphy’s curiosity was piqued.
‘Do you know the Black Cat Club?’ he asked.
‘I know it.’
‘Be there in a half an hour. Don’t be fucking late.’
Murphy hung up before I had a chance to check my social diary. I knew the Black Cat Club, all right. I was a regular. A card-holding member. It was the kind of place you needed a membership, or a warrant, to get into.
I had discovered the Black Cat not long after I had arrived in Glasgow. It was upstairs in an unimpressive-looking sandstone block way down in the West End of Sauchiehall Street, past the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and where the address numbers ran into the thousands. Britain was full of clubs with names that were always synonymous with, but generally avoided, the word ‘Pussy’. There would be the usual ill-judged attempt at glamour and sophistication in the decor, and the lounge bar would be filled with corpulent businessmen nervous that the police would raid the place and their names would end up in the papers. And of course, there would be the reason the businessmen didn’t run for their lives or reputations: the hostesses, dressed in sham Hollywood style with impressive cleavages to compensate for their Glasgow accents.
The name of the game was that the hostesses would encourage the businessmen to relax and to ease their nervousness by becoming drunk on over-priced and under-measured cocktails. The funny thing always was that visitors to these clubs seemed to lose their wallets with a frequency that defied statistical laws. Anyone fool enough to suggest theft usually found themselves face-first on the street outside. Most kept quiet and tried to work out the best way to answer their concerned wives at home when they asked, ‘When was the last time you saw your wallet, dear?’
There were probably three or four clubs like that in Glasgow, and I had no doubt that The Black Cat had started out as exactly that kind of place. But there was a funny evolutionary process behind such establishments. The Black Cat probably started its metamorphosis by accidentally hiring a piano player or a combo or a chanteuse who was a cut above the usual knocking-shop standard; my guess is that when word got around, clients started to come to listen to the music rather than test cheap bedsprings with some pneumatic hostess. And when profits went up and police raids and payoffs became fewer, the management booked more and even better jazz acts.
Sure, there were still hostesses, but they confined themselves to serving drinks that, while still expensive, were not extortionate, and any business between hostess and customer would be conducted discreetly and on a freelance basis. I had had the odd dalliance with a couple of the hostesses myself, but those had been strictly non-commercial in nature.
When I arrived at the unassuming green door with a small black cat painted above a peep hole, I was greeted with a brusque nod of recognition from a doorman with yard-wide shoulders. The fact that he nodded at all was an impressive accomplishment, given that, as far as I could see, he had no neck to speak of and his thick, Teddy Boy-quiffed, bullet head seemed to have been fused directly into the mass of his shoulders.
I went upstairs and was enveloped in a blue fug of cigarette smoke. The club was busy, with the usual mix of earnestly non-conformist types with chin beards and roll neck sweaters, trying to live the Beat lifestyle they’d started to read about in art magazines. Except they lived in Glasgow, not San Francisco or Manhattan. There was also a smattering of the usual suspects with the sharp suits and the hard look that told you that, even if you didn’t recognize them as known faces, it was better not to bump into them and spill their drinks. And there were still the businessmen, but of a different type. This version would listen to the music as earnestly as the Beat types, with God knew what going through their heads about who they should have become instead of who they were.
Don’t get me wrong, the decor and general atmosphere was still a Glaswegian painter and decorator’s concept of chic and cosmopolitan, and the environment was only slightly less sham and shoddy than the usual hostess joint, but the music and the dimmed lights lifted the tone way above the expected and gave the place an ambiance that daylight and silence would rob from it.
Martha, one of the hostesses I’d played catch-me-tickle-me with, was working the bar. She was a medium height Gene Tierney type, with dark hair, green eyes and an impressive repertoire; we exchanged a few lines before she told me that Murphy was waiting for me in a private room at the back. She frowned as she told me, in the way everyone frowns at the idea of Hammer Murphy waiting for you. She told me when she finished and asked if I wanted to come out to play, but I told her I couldn’t tonight. Even though I could. It puzzled me that I found myself thinking of Fiona White and I began to seriously worry that if I got any deeper involved with her I might catch a bad case of fidelity.
There was a Savile Row suit stuffed with muscle and latent violence in the back room. I was surprised to see Murphy was on his own — not that Michael ‘Hammer’ Murphy was someone who needed protecting, but he usually kept a couple of psychopathic goons on hand just for show.
‘Hello, Mr Murphy,’ I said. ‘Thanks for taking …’
‘Shut the fucking door …’
I shut the door and sat down opposite him.
‘Is fucking Strachan fucking dead or not?’
Murphy was not one to stretch his adjectival or adverbial vocabulary. He was a small man in height, but in every other way he projected a giant malevolent presence. He was still sporting the Ronald Colman moustache that he had the last time I’d met him and his hair was expensively and immaculately barbered. But that was as Hollywood as it got: Murphy was an ugly bastard, that was for sure. He was the only man I had ever encountered whose face looked like a deadly weapon. His nose had been broken so often it had given up all ideas of symmetry or where it should really be on his face and the small eyes were set deep into the type of padded flesh that comes from frequent exposure to fists. The man was all violence. He seethed with it. Murphy made you feel threatened just by sitting still.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘And that’s the truth. There are as many people convinced he survived the Empire Exhibition robbery as there are others who believe those were his bones at the bottom of the Clyde.’
‘Who’s fucking paying you to find out?’
‘Now you know better than that, Mr Murphy. I really can’t say, Mr Murphy. You know where I stand on client confidentiality.’
‘Aye, I suppose … And I fucking respect that about you, Lennox, I really fucking do. And I really want to save you the fucking embarrassment of betraying some cunt’s faith in you … so, here’s an idea: why don’t I get a couple of the boys to smash your fucking kneecaps to fuck so’s you can’t fucking stand anywhere on client confidentiality or fucking fuck all else.’ He paused for a moment’s sarcastic reflection, then wagged his finger. ‘I tell you what, just to keep your fucking honour in one fucking piece, we’ll do your fucking ankles and elbows as well.’
‘Isa and Violet, Strachan’s twin daughters. That’s who hired me.’ I did not for a moment feel embarrassed about folding instantly. My father had always told me to find something you were good at and make a career out of it. To say Murphy was really good at threatening physical violence, would be like saying Rembrandt was quite good at drawing.
‘What the fuck do they want to know for?’
‘They just want to know if their father is dead or not.’ I left it at that, skipping the bit about the cash dividend every anniversary of the Empire Exhibition job. Murphy was big on aggression and violence, and certainly had a
kind of animal cunning about him, but he was no Einstein and I gambled he would settle for my half-truth.
He was about to say something when the door swung open. I reckoned this would be the goons now and my joints began to itch. But it wasn’t. A tall, dark-haired man walked in. He had a Cary Grant cleft in his chin and was almost as preposterously handsome as John Macready. I recognized him instantly.
‘Hello, Jonny,’ I said as I stood up and shook his hand. ‘How’s it going?’
‘Fine, Lennox …’ said Handsome Jonny Cohen as he came in and sat down next, but not close, to Murphy. ‘Just fine. And you?’
‘Can’t complain,’ I said, trying not to look too relieved at his arrival. It hadn’t seemed to surprise Murphy and I guessed they had arranged it. But I got the feeling that Cohen had arrived a little too early and it all became clear to me: Murphy had wanted to threaten and, if necessary, beat as much out of me before Jonny arrived. But Murphy knew Jonny and I were close, even if he didn’t know why. What I couldn’t get was why Murphy had summoned Cohen at such short notice.
‘Can I get you a drink?’ asked Cohen.
‘We’re not fucking here to fucking socialize,’ said Murphy. ‘Forget the fucking drink just now and let’s get down to fucking business.’
‘Business?’ I asked. ‘I just came here to ask about your involvement with Gentleman Joe Strachan …’
‘That is business, Lennox,’ said Cohen. ‘Joe Strachan still casts a long shadow in Glasgow. Michael here ’phoned me to say you wanted info about Strachan.’
Michael … I had had no idea that things were getting so cosy between them. Of the other two Kings, it had always been Willie Sneddon that Jonny Cohen had seemed to favour, often bringing Murphy to the point of reopening the gang war that the Three King Deal had been brokered to end. Now the Catholic and the Jew were on first name terms.
The Deep Dark Sleep l-3 Page 13
