The Long Glasgow Kiss l-2

by Craig Russell

  ‘You should mind your own business…’ Soutar hid the threat in his tone with the subtlety of a turd hidden in a teacup.

  ‘But it is true, isn’t it?’ I said, pushing my luck. ‘You got involved with a kid on the make. My guess is he became a bookie. Small Change MacFarlane?’

  ‘What the fuck has that got to do with anything?’ Kirkcaldy moved closer. It wasn’t a threat: he was preparing to stop old man Soutar in his tracks if he moved to have a go at me.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I shrugged. It was true. ‘Maybe nothing. MacFarlane’s dead and they’ve got his killer. But maybe something. And if there is, I’ll find out.’

  I left them in the gym and made sure that I let myself out. There was something about the idea of taking the walk back along the hall with Soutar behind me that gave me an itch between the shoulder blades.

  I walked back up to where the cars were parked. I could see Devereaux was still holding court with Davey, who continued to hang on every word.

  ‘Problem?’ asked Devereaux as I came up to them. He obviously had a talent for reading faces. Or minds. The FBI probably ran classes in it at Quantico.

  ‘Dissatisfied customer. I would appear to be over-delivering my service.’

  We left Davey buzzing and I drove Devereaux back to his hotel.

  ‘Thanks for doing that, Dex,’ I said, as Devereaux got out of the car. ‘Davey’s got nothing. He’s stuck in a shitty home, with a shitty job with shitty prospects. You’ve made his year.’

  ‘You’re welcome, Lennox. He’s a good kid. But now you owe me.’

  ‘Anything I hear, you hear.’

  ‘Okay, Lennox. Look after yourself.’

  I watched Devereaux, a huge man in a loud suit and a straw trilby, cross the street to the hotel. Whatever else the FBI taught its agents in Quantico, how not to be conspicuously American wasn’t part of the curriculum.

  After I dropped Devereaux back at his Buchanan Street hotel, I parked and walked a few blocks to the Imperial Hotel. I wasn’t after another drink.

  May Donaldson and I had an arrangement.

  May was a divorcee. Glasgow was not New York or London high society and the Glaswegian view of divorce was less than sophisticated. It didn’t matter that she had been blameless: any divorce, for any reason, and in any class, placed a woman well and truly on the outside of Presbyterian respectability. May and I had done a few rounds together, it was true. But I liked to think that I had never actually used her. I also liked to think that Santa Claus really existed. I found May where I knew she would be, tending bar in the lounge of the Imperial Hotel. May had a knockout figure but a forgettable face, often wreathed with a kind of sadness or weariness. When I walked into the bar she was wearing a conservative white blouse and black skirt, the hotel’s required uniform. The aim was to put the title waitress rather than barmaid in the minds of patrons. May had poured me a bourbon before I reached the bar.

  ‘What’s up, Lennox? You got a job for me?’ she asked with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

  ‘Yep… but not the usual,’ I said. May did the odd job for me where she would turn up at a prearranged time and lie, fully clothed, beneath the covers in a hotel bedroom. Next to her would be a fully clothed middle-aged male. I would walk in with a member of the hotel staff and a couple of months later we would all speak of the event in a divorce courtroom as if it hadn’t really been the pantomimed sham that everyone knew it was. The British allowed divorce, but in a British way: bureaucratic, long-winded and more than a little shoddy. Which suited me fine. I had made a lot of money from staged infidelities to support divorce cases.

  ‘Oh?’ May looked at me with so much suspicion in her expression that she clearly thought I was going to offer to buy her mother for the white slave trade.

  ‘Don’t worry, nothing dodgy. I’m trying to contact a young woman who lives in one of the Corporation hostels. There’s a matron there who won’t let me in and I can’t park myself outside until she shows.’

  May arched an already arched eyebrow.

  ‘It’s not what you think,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a missing person case and this girl is maybe the last one to see my guy before he disappeared. I’d like you to call on her and ask her to meet with me so I can ask her a few questions. If she can tell you where to find the guy then that’ll do just as well.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When do you finish here?’

  ‘My shift ends at nine.’

  I looked at my watch. It was eight-fifteen. Of course, I could have stayed and drunk my bourbon and chatted to May until her shift ended, but that would have been awkward for both of us. ‘Okay, I’ll pick you up then.’

  I drank half the bourbon for appearances’ sake, paid for it, and headed back to my car. Considering May and I had been intimate on a number of occasions, I found something depressing about the sterile, businesslike exchange I’d just had with her. But then, when I thought about it, our intimacy had often been sterile and businesslike.

  I tried Lorna again from a callbox at the corner of Bath Street. Still nothing. I looked at my watch again. I had this business with May and Sammy’s putative inamorata, Claire, to sort out. It would be ten before I could head out to Lorna’s.

  I killed the half hour and went back to pick up May. She came out wearing a lightweight coat and smart black hat. They looked new but I’d seen them on her more times than I could remember. While the rest of society was coming out of austerity, a divorcee in Glasgow working behind a bar had to learn to stretch her wardrobe.

  I put the radio on as we drove to Partick. Mel Torme was singing ‘Harlem Nocturne’ and it made me think of everything Devereaux had told me about his bosses, who were convinced that Devereaux’s particular Harlem nocturne wouldn’t play in Peoria. They were wrong and Devereaux was right.

  The Velvet Fog sang, and saved both of us the effort of conversation. I don’t know what it was that was going on between May and me, but it was mutual. It was as if we were both on the brink of becoming other people. Putting a past behind us. And each represented an embarrassing reminder to the other of who they had been.

  We were halfway to Partick when May confirmed my thesis. ‘I’ve met someone, Lennox,’ she said tentatively. ‘A widower. He’s older than me but he’s a good man. Kind. He’s got two children.’

  ‘Does he come from Glasgow?’ I asked. If she said no, I would know that the chump was a ticket out of the city. May had made it very clear in the past how much she hated Glasgow. In the past, in the pluperfect, and in the present perfect continuous.

  ‘No. He has a farm in Ayrshire. You know that my ex-husband was a farmer?’

  ‘You mentioned it,’ I said. Several drunken times, I thought. ‘Does he make you happy?’

  ‘He stops me being unhappy. That’s enough for me. We need each other. I get on well with his kids and they’re at an age where they need a mother.’

  ‘Okay…’ I smiled at her. ‘I’m happy for you, May. Really. I take it there’s a reason you’re telling me this?’

  ‘I can’t do any more work for you. After tonight, that’s it. George doesn’t know that I’ve done these divorce cases with you and he can’t find out. We’re going to make a clean break, get right away from the past.’

  ‘To Ayrshire?’ I couldn’t keep the puzzlement from my voice. ‘That is the past. To be specific it’s the eighteenth century.’

  ‘No,’ she said coldly. ‘Not Ayrshire. You’ll laugh at this…’

  ‘Okay, try me.’

  ‘Canada. We’re emigrating to Canada. They’re looking for farmers there.’

  I didn’t laugh. In fact, I was surprised at my reaction. Something sharp and unpleasant bit me in the gut and I realized it was envy.

  ‘Where in Canada?’

  ‘Saskatchewan. Near Regina.’

  We pulled up outside Craithie Court. I switched Torme off mid croon. ‘I really do wish you all the best.’

  ‘The other thing, Lennox… it would be best if
you didn’t call round to the flat any more.’

  I placed my hand on hers. She stifled the instinctive recoil, but not quickly enough for me not to sense the tensing of her fist to pull away.

  ‘It’s all right, May. I understand. I really hope it works out for you. We’ll make this our last job, okay? I won’t call round any more.’

  She smiled. It would have been nice if her smile had been tinged with sadness, but the idea of not seeing me again seemed to cheer her up no end. I have that effect on some women. I went over with her again what to say to Claire Skinner and gave her Sammy Pollock’s name again. She got out of the car and went into the Hostel. When she didn’t come back immediately, I took it as a good sign.

  It was half an hour before she re-emerged and got back into the car, her face flushed and her expression dark.

  ‘Drive around the corner,’ she said without looking at me. ‘She’s probably watching the car.’

  I did what May told me. ‘What’s going on?’ I asked when we were parked again.

  ‘I don’t know, Lennox, but whatever it is, that girl in there is terrified. She said she wouldn’t come out to talk to you. She says she knows nothing about where Sammy Pollock is and she wouldn’t tell you if she did know. It’s not that she’s being tough about it, it’s just that she is so terrified.’ May frowned. ‘I don’t know what you’ve got involved with, Lennox, but you better be careful. Someone has that poor girl scared half to death.’

  ‘Okay… I guess I’ll have to wait until she has a spot at the Pacific Club and have another go at her then.’

  ‘You’ll be lucky. I get the feeling she’s keeping a low profile.’

  ‘You okay?’

  May looked at me for a moment, sighed then smiled. ‘I’m fine. It’s just she was very… agitated. I thought she was going to go for me.’

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t think…’

  ‘Forget it… it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle.’ Suddenly, May’s attention was drawn to something through the windscreen.

  ‘Look…’ she said.

  ‘Is that her?’

  I followed May’s eyes to the junction about two hundred yards ahead, to where a young woman in her early twenties was hurrying across the street, coming from the direction of Craithie Court. From this distance she appeared to be quite attractive. My experience of Glaswegian women was that they were usually only ever attractive from a distance, or through bourbon-tinted glasses. The woman up ahead was not quite slim with a slight heaviness around the waist and ankles. She had a pale grey jacket draped over one blue-bloused arm and everything about her movements suggested urgency.

  ‘You haven’t seen her before?’ May seemed surprised. ‘Yes, that’s her.’

  We watched as she made her way along the street towards the corner.

  ‘Can you drive, May?’ I asked. It was odd, but it was one of the thousands of things about May that I didn’t know.

  She shook her head. I took out my wallet and handed her everything I had in it apart from a couple of one-pound notes. It amounted to just over thirty pounds and I thrust it into her hands.

  ‘That’s for helping me out tonight. I’ve got to go after her so that’s to cover your taxi fare home too. Thanks, May.’

  ‘That’s far too much, Lennox.’

  ‘Consider it a wedding gift,’ I said. I got out of the car and May followed. ‘I’m sorry that you have to get a cab home.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ she said.

  I looked impatiently up the road to the corner around which Claire Skinner had just disappeared from view. I turned back to May. It was as if she was trying to frame a thought, put something into words.

  ‘It’s okay, May,’ I said. ‘See you around.’

  She nodded in an odd way, her eyes avoiding mine, said ‘Thanks’ and ‘Bye’, turned abruptly, and walked briskly back down Thornwood Road towards Dumbarton Road and out of my life.

  I jumped back into the Atlantic. The chances were that Claire Skinner hadn’t spotted my car outside the hostel. And my face was totally unknown to her. My fond farewell to May had cost me too much time to follow Claire on foot: I had too much distance to cover. And once I had covered it, things would get tricky: it’s never easy to follow by car someone who is on foot, without being detected. But I guessed that Claire would jump onto a bus or tram, or hail a taxi. I had no idea where she was going, but I was pretty sure whom she was going to see. I picked her up again when I turned the corner. Her trot had slowed to a brisk walk, still a determined effort on a muggy summer’s evening in Glasgow. I saw her check her watch, but I was pretty sure this was no prearranged appointment: she had been spurred into action by May’s unwelcome intervention.

  I caught up with her and had to drive past her at normal speed. I decided to pull over farther up the street, dump the car, and hoof it. A car travelling at walking pace would be far too conspicuous. I pulled over to the kerb and did a quick check of where I was. Fairlie Park Drive. I was about to get out of my car when she walked briskly past without looking in my direction. There was a telephone booth at the corner with Crow Road and Claire stepped into it. She made a short call before stepping back out and waiting outside the ’phone box. I noticed her feet, small beneath the slightly too thick ankles and doing a little side to side dance step. I decided to sit tight. The mountain was maybe on its way to Mohammed. After about ten minutes, I saw her wave furiously at something. A black taxi pulled over and she jumped in. I waited until the cab passed me and put another car between us before I pulled out.

  The taxi headed south out of the city. We passed through Pollokshields, reminding me that I’d have to return there later, then Pollokshaws, Giffnock and Newton Mearns. One of the things I could never get used to about Glasgow was the way it was this concentrated, dense knot of stone, brick and steel, factories and furnaces, tenements and bristling cranes; and then suddenly you were in open, almost empty countryside. We were on the main road south, a grey-black scar on a wrinkled blanket of green that stretched as far as I could see on either side. This was the main Carlisle road and it meant I was able to conceal myself in traffic: something that became more difficult when the taxi pulled off onto a B-road. Another turn took the cab onto an even narrower country road. This was a road to nowhere else and you needed a reason to have made that turning. I held back, allowing a gap to open up between the Atlantic and the cab. The road traced the edge of a flooded quarry that looked up at the sun like a mud-brown eye.

  I had lost sight of the taxi around a bend. It didn’t concern me because there was nowhere for it to go. A little bit of acceleration and I could bring it back into view. But when I turned the bend I was suddenly faced with the rear of the cab, pulled into a farm gate. I drove on without looking in its direction and only once I was past did I see Claire Skinner disembark and hand some notes to the driver. Clearly not waiting for change, she turned, opened the gate, and headed up what looked to me like a farm track.

  Bingo.

  I continued along the road until I reached the next bend. In my rear-view mirror I saw the taxi struggle to make a three-point turn and head back in the direction of the main road. I drove around the next bend, a sharp turn to the left. A little further on there was a copse beside the road. Bumping the Atlantic onto the grass verge, the two driver’s side wheels still on the tarmac, I felt reasonably sure I had concealed my car from the farm track and presumably any buildings at the track’s end.

  I made my way on foot through the clump of trees until I was at its edge and had a clear view across the fields. The sun was low and rich in the evening sky, softening edges and warming tones. I spotted Claire’s head for a second before it disappeared from view where the path dipped between its banks and I couldn’t see her — which meant she couldn’t see me. For how long, I didn’t know: the path could soon incline back to become level with the surrounding fields.

  I broke out from the cover of the trees and ran across the field, angling my trajectory across the grass to aim for the
field-height stretch of path behind the point at which I had last seen Claire Skinner. The lush green grass in the field was ankle height, but the ground beneath was reasonably firm, having been dried out of its normal sodden state by the recent atypical spell of sunshine. Siberia has permafrost; Scotland has permasog. My rush across the pasture was watched disinterestedly by a handful of blackfaced, dead-eyed sheep. I wasn’t hurrying in order to catch up with Claire — my guess was that there would be only one destination at the end of the lane — but rather to keep out of her sight by getting to the path before she emerged from the hollow and had a view of the field.

  Vaulting over the dry-stone wall, I dropped down onto the lane, a thin grey ribbon of dusty earth between grassy banks. There was something about the lane and the evening light that made me feel I should be in a collarless shirt, sleeves rolled up and with a scythe over my shoulder. But that wouldn’t really be me: as a character I always thought of myself as more Leslie Charteris than Thomas Hardy. Ruddy-cheeked farm girls and frothy ale weren’t my thing. Although I’d probably give the ruddy-cheeked farm girls a go.

  I put these bucolic musings out of my head and made my way along the lane at a steady, unhurried pace. There was no sign of Claire Skinner until I came to a bend in the lane. I could see her up ahead, about a hundred yards distant. I ducked behind the cover of the grassy bank and watched as she headed towards a farm cottage tucked into a tangle of bramble and bush. Scotland’s latitude made for long summer evenings, but the sun was low now and I would have expected to see a light from inside the cottage. There was none. Claire knocked on the door and had to wait for a minute or so before someone unseen to me admitted her.

  I watched the cottage for five full minutes, just to make sure it wasn’t going to be a flying visit. Seeing as Claire had dismissed the taxi at the lane’s end, and the fact that we were in the middle of nowhere, my guess was Claire had no plans to make the return journey to Glasgow that night.

  I considered my options. I would have a long loiter if I waited until it got truly dark before approaching the cottage; but in any kind of light I would be visible on the path a hundred yards away. Time enough to put a party together and shout ‘surprise!’ when I came in through the front door. I didn’t know what I was dealing with and it would be best to check it out unseen first.