The Long Glasgow Kiss l-2

by Craig Russell

  ‘How’s it going, Ian?’ I asked in library tones. ‘Corrupted any young female students lately?’

  ‘Only their minds, old boy. Only their minds. You said on the ’phone this is about a jade figure?’

  We had attracted the frowning attention of a couple of academic types at one of the desks, bent over their research. McClelland steered me to another desk where he had laid out several reference books.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, once we were seated. ‘Ugly as sin. All fangs and big staring eyes. I think it was a dragon. It seemed to have cloven hooves, like a goat. It was maybe a demon. Here…’ I pushed the sketch I had done into his hands.

  ‘The dragon is a major folkloric figure in China.’ McClelland frowned as he examined the picture. ‘But what you’ve drawn here isn’t a dragon, it’s a Qilin. The hooves give it away. Giraffe’s hooves. You say this is made out of jade?’

  ‘Unless the Chinese make their gods out of green Bakelite.’

  ‘I can understand you thinking it was a dragon. There are a lot of jade dragons about. How tall did you say it was?’

  ‘About a couple of feet, give or take.’

  ‘Then it could be worth a tidy sum.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘It’s impossible to say without seeing it. It depends on the quality of the jade — and that varies enormously. And, of course, it is frequently faked. If it’s real solid jade, then a thousand. Maybe two. Was it a deep emerald green?’

  ‘The light wasn’t good. I saw more its shape than anything, but it was green.’ I set my head to working again on what I had seen, but my head was still taking a tea-break. ‘No… maybe not emerald green. Paler. Milkier. Why?’

  ‘Imperial jade has a wonderful translucence and a deep emerald green colour. It’s rare and extremely valuable. But the piece you’ve described could be anything. Maybe not even jade.’ He caught my frown. ‘Not what you thought?’

  ‘Fifteen hundred quid isn’t enough for the kind of grief this thing seems to have caused.’

  He shrugged. ‘Is it stolen?’

  ‘Let’s just say I’m trying to return it to its rightful owner in the hope it’ll get someone off the hook. A very big, very sharp hook.’

  McClelland asked me if he could keep the sketch for a few days and I said he could. The mugginess in the air hit me when I stepped out of the stone-cooled interior of the library. I found a call box and ’phoned the hospital but the officious nurse on the other end of the line said she wouldn’t give me any information because I wasn’t a relative of Davey’s.

  I spent the afternoon nursing my headache and pondered whether I really should get my head checked out. A couple of hours’ rest seemed to help it though, so I decided to skip it. I called police headquarters and got put through to Dex Devereaux.

  ‘Hey there, Johnny Canuck, how y’doin’?’ Devereaux’s American accent seemed amplified on the ’phone.

  ‘Fine. I wanted to ask you something. How much is each shipment Largo’s been sending to the States? I mean size or weight.’

  ‘We’re talking about forty pounds a shipment.’

  ‘That’s not a lot.’

  ‘In cash terms it is. Heroin is worth a hundred-and-fifty bucks a gram. That works out at nearly five hundred dollars per pound weight. Each forty-pound shipment Largo sends over is worth twenty thousand bucks. I don’t know what that is in limey money. The exchange rate I got was two dollars eighty cents for a pound sterling so work it out yourself. This stuff is literally worth twice or three times its weight in gold.’

  ‘So it would be reasonably easy to hide it in other stuff and lose it in a ship’s cargo manifest,’ I said, imagining a small rank of ugly jade demons.

  ‘I told you that already. It’s like the A-bomb. Small package but big punch when it hits the streets. What you got, Lennox?’

  ‘Maybe nothing… A hunch… that’s all at the moment. But I think part of Largo’s last shipment was stolen by some of the local boys. Amateurs who are scared out of their wits. It means I might be able to give you Largo and some of the dope.’

  ‘Lennox, if you’re sure about this…’

  ‘I’m not, Dex. I’m not sure of anything. Like I say, a hunch, and it would waste your time chasing it. If it turns out to be worthwhile, I’ll hand over everything to you and you can lead the local police by the hand to make the arrests. But I need to get someone out of the picture first. Thanks for the gen, Dex. I’ll be in touch.’

  I hung up before Devereaux could pressure me any more. I was putting a picture together in my head and I needed to concentrate. I also needed time to follow up a few things.

  There was one thing getting in the way of everything: Small Change MacFarlane’s murder. It nagged and nagged at me and I couldn’t work out why. I had all but accused Maggie MacFarlane of a bedclothes entanglement with Jack Collins, but I had no reason to imagine it as anything more than that. I somehow couldn’t cast Jack Collins as a smitten Walter Neff, and Maggie, although she was a satisfying piece of art, was no Barbara Stanwyck. I had asked Lorna, as subtly as I could, about insurance policies and a will. Both Maggie and, to a much lesser extent Collins, would benefit right enough, but the lion’s share went to Lorna. Under Scottish Law, Maggie, as the surviving widow, would have a reasonable case in challenging MacFarlane’s provisions but, according to Lorna who certainly was not free from suspecting her stepmother, Maggie had made no suggestion that she would.

  But it all still bothered me.

  I’m paid to stick my nose in. More often than not, I’m paid to stick it in where noses aren’t welcome. My most irritating habit was sticking my nose in where it wasn’t welcome when I wasn’t being paid for it. When I walked into the Vinegarhill camp, my nose had never felt so shunned. I was seriously concerned that it was going to be put out of joint.

  I had performed an act of faith parking the car in Molendinar Street, trying not to think what odds Tony the Pole would give me against it being in one piece, or even being there, when I got back to it. The traveller camp was set up on a barren, grubby walled square, entered by a double iron gate, permanently open, next to the sugar works. There were a handful of modern touring, car-drawn caravans, but the vast majority were the traditional vardo or burton wagons: painted, horse-drawn jobs with arched roofs, that went hand-in-hand with everybody’s romantic image of gypsies. The rough humps of bender tents domed between some of the wagons.

  There was no enticing odour of simmering goulash or impassioned violin-playing to accompany my arrival. These travellers did not hail from the Hungarian plain or Carpathian mountains, unless the Hungarian plain and the Carpathian mountains had a view of Galway Bay. And the most romantic thing I saw were two unleashed mongrels copulating over by the works’ wall. A handful of kids without shoes rampaged about the camp, and I was aware that a couple of young men had moved in behind me as soon as I had entered the yard.

  That would normally be my cue to reach for my sap but, in a place like this with people like these, it would have been an inadvisable move. A painfully inadvisable move. Instead, I would have to talk my way out of here, like the cavalry captain with the white flag sent into the Indian encampment to parley. I strode across to where an older man leaned against a wagon, smoking a pipe. As I did so I passed a vardo wagon with the shutters drawn and deep crimson ribbons wrapped around the shafts and tongue.

  ‘I’m looking for Tommy Furie’s father,’ I said, when I reached the old man. ‘Could you tell me where I could find him?’

  ‘The Baro? What do you want with him? Who the fuck are you?’ The old man stopped leaning and took the pipe from his mouth. He spat a greeny viscous glob which splashed close to my shoe. Jimmy Stewart or Randolph Scott were never treated like this.

  ‘Like I said, I want to talk to him. And I’m pretty sure he’ll be very keen to talk to me. Now, do you know where I can find him or not?’ I was aware that the two youths had positioned themselves behind me, at either shoulder. The old man jerked his head in the directi
on of one of the modern-style caravans, the largest on site. I nodded and walked over to it, leaving my honour guard behind.

  Sean Furie was a big man in his fifties. He was tall, and had probably been heavily muscled when younger, but had turned to fat. His full head of jet black hair was without a trace of grey and was oiled and combed back from a huge face. He and Uncle Bert Soutar had obviously gone to the same place for their nose jobs. The difference with Furie was that the tip of his nose was swollen and red and river-mapped with purplish capillaries. Romany rosacea, I decided to call it — the effects of bare knuckle and bare alcohol.

  I told him who I was and what I wanted to talk to him about. I braced myself for his reaction, but it took me off guard anyway. Furie was remarkably soft-spoken and politely asked me into his caravan. There was a distinctive odour inside the caravan. Not dirty or unpleasant, just distinctive. The caravan seemed huge in comparison to the vardos I’d seen outside. It was wood-panelled and had a small kitchen, a lounge, and a room closed off by a door. I assumed the bedroom lay through there.

  Sitting at the far end on a built-in sofa was a large, dark-haired, doleful-looking woman in her forties. We sat and, without word or glance, she stood up and left the wagon, squeezing past me to reach the door. It was an accustomed exit; it was clear that when Furie had business to do, the womenfolk left. He offered me a whisky and I took it.

  ‘I saw some ribbons tied onto one of the wagons as I came in. Red ribbons.’ I decided to be conversational. It often paid to ease into the main business. ‘Is that a celebration thing?’

  ‘You could say…’ Furie gave a bitter laugh. ‘We’ll have the same on this wagon soon. When they hang my boy.’

  ‘Oh… I see.’

  ‘It symbolizes death,’ explained Furie. ‘And mourning. Red and white are the Romany colours for mourning.’

  ‘Who died?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s a Nachin family I don’t know.’

  ‘Nachin?’

  ‘Scottish gypsy. We’re Minceir, from Ireland. The travellers from England are called Romanichals and the ones from Wales are called Kale. But everyone here is either Minceir or Nachin.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. I lit a cigarette and offered him one, which he took but tucked behind his ear.

  ‘They’re going to hang my boy for something he never done, Mr Lennox,’ Furie said in his soft brogue. ‘It’s a fit-up, that’s what it is. Then you’ll see the red ribbons on this caravan.’

  ‘Tommy hasn’t even stood trial yet, Mr Furie, far less been found guilty and sentenced. If he didn’t do it, then they’ll find it difficult to prove he did,’ I lied.

  ‘Well, he never done it. But that’s just what you expect me to say anyway, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘You think that I’d deny it even if I knew he done it. We’re all liars and thieves, after all. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘But you was thinking it anyway, wasn’t you?’

  ‘As a matter of fact I wasn’t. I don’t know anything for sure. But there’s something bothering me about MacFarlane’s murder. Maybe your son is being framed for it, but if he is, who by and how?’

  ‘He’s a traveller. That’s all the reason they need.’

  ‘With the greatest respect, no, it isn’t. There’s much more to this than your son being the wrong type in the wrong place at the wrong time. What do the police say happened?’

  Furie ran through it all. Tommy Furie had been one of the boxers whom Small Change MacFarlane had been involved with developing. Reading between the lines, Small Change had been organizing bare-knuckle bouts and running a book on them, and it struck me that there was maybe another reason behind Sneddon wanting me to find any hidden log kept by the deceased bookie. I wondered who had started the regular bouts out at Sneddon’s recently acquired Dunbartonshire farm. Sean Furie explained that his son had started to work as a sparring partner at a couple of the gyms and that Small Change had gotten him a number of legitimate ring fights. Small Change was notoriously tight with his cash and there had been a dispute over payment for a bout. Tommy Furie had complained to Small Change, several times, and in front of witnesses.

  ‘He was at the gym that night that MacFarlane was murdered,’ said Sean Furie. ‘It was one of his regular nights. He got a ’phone call at the gym telling him to go up to MacFarlane’s house to collect the money he was due for the fight.’

  ‘MacFarlane ’phoned him?’ I asked.

  ‘No. It was someone who worked for him. Or so he said. Tommy didn’t get a name. Or can’t remember. Tommy’s a good boy, but not too clever.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, trying to hide my surprise at the revelation.

  ‘Tommy went up to the house. He’d never been there before but had the address like. So he went up. Got the tram there and back. He said no one answered when he knocked but the front door was open. He went into the room and found MacFarlane on the floor. Dead. Tommy’s not as tough as you’d think and he panicked. On the way out he knocked over a lamp and picked it up to put it back.’

  ‘So the police have his fingerprints on the lamp?’

  ‘Aye, they have.’

  ‘What else do the coppers say they’ve got on him?’

  ‘The tram conductress remembered him on the way back. All agitated like. And they’ve got his fingerprints at the house. In the room where MacFarlane was murdered.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘It’s enough,’ said Furie, ‘to convict a pikey.’

  ‘No it’s not. What does the lawyer say?’

  ‘To plead guilty so he doesn’t get hung.’

  ‘Brilliant…’ I shook my head. ‘I suggest you get another lawyer.’

  With the kind of thing I had planned — the kind of thing that could end you up on the wrong side of a set of sturdy bars — preparation was everything.

  I had a small black holdall, which I brought through to the living room and placed on the table. Taking a double page out of the Glasgow Herald, I laid it out next to the holdall. I put a set of heavy-duty wire cutters, a pair of black leather gloves and a black turtleneck sweater into the holdall. I had two corks saved from empty bottles. Taking one at a time, I lit a match and set light to them, allowing them to smoulder for a good while before blowing them out and setting them down to cool. In the meantime, I placed the rest of my toolkit in the holdall: a pair of black plimsolls, a bicycle lamp, a short crowbar-style tyre lever and both my saps.

  Once the charred corks had cooled I folded them neatly into the sheet of newspaper and placed them in the holdall. I paused for a moment to reflect on my highly professional selection of equipment. If I were to be stopped by a policeman curious enough to look in my bag, there was enough in there to get me a three-month stretch for intent.

  I had deliberately chosen a darker suit, which was probably too heavyweight for this time of year but appropriate for what I had planned for later.

  I had a lot of time to kill before I could put my plan into action, but I had to load the stuff into the car now rather than have Fiona White hear me leave the house in the dead of night.

  I dumped the bag in the trunk of the Atlantic and drove to the MacFarlane place in Pollokshields, picking Lorna up about seven. I took her to the Odeon Cinema in Sauchiehall Street, where we watched Gregory Peck in The Million Pound Note. A trip to the pictures may have seemed inappropriate, but I was trying to take her mind off her troubles, if only for a couple of hours.

  Lorna didn’t say much before, during or after the picture and thanked me politely without inviting me in when I dropped her off. As I was leaving, I noticed Jack Collins’s Lanchester parked in the drive.

  Willie Sneddon was a man of habit. Exact habit. Sometimes peculiar habit.

  I had arranged to meet with him at the Victoria Baths, where he regularly took a steam bath and swim. The Victoria Baths was a temple of sandstone, marble and porcelain in the west end of the city. It had a swimming pool beneath an Italianate cupola, Turkish baths, stea
m room, massage tables and a lounge. It was a private club but members could sign in guests. A lot of the guests who were signed in here were Corporation councillors and officials, senior cops and the odd MP. Most left with their pockets heavy. There were allegedly more planning permissions, and public house and club licences granted here than in the City Chambers.

  I waited for Sneddon in the foyer. I never swam in the Baths myself, and certainly never in any of the municipal pools, ever since I discovered that ‘swimming pool’ and ‘urinal’ are synonyms in Glaswegian. At least I had company while I waited: Twinkletoes McBride was already there, intimidating the staff and passing bathers. It was purely unintentional and passive; he was intimidating sitting down.

  ‘How’s it going, Mr Lennox?’ he asked cheerily, when he looked up and saw me; then with an alarmingly sudden change to grave asked, ‘Any news about wee Davey?’

  ‘They won’t tell me anything because I’m not a relative but I went in to see him today. He’s bearing up.’

  ‘You find out who did that to wee Davey and I’ll sort the fuckers out, Mr Lennox. Big toes too. And don’t worry, I’ll do it gracious.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘ Gracious…’ Twinkle frowned. ‘No charge…’

  ‘Ah… you mean gratis.’

  ‘Aye. That. They have it coming… what they did to Davey was reppy-hen-stable.’

  I formed the word reprehensible in my mouth but kept it there: there was no point in correcting him further. And, as I’d already mentioned to Sneddon, I was rather attached to my toes.

  ‘I appreciate it, Twinkle,’ I said, and smiled.

  ‘My pleasure. How’s everything else going?’ Twinkletoes was leaning forward, elbows on knees, turning his smile to me. It was a huge wide smile in a huge wide head between huge wide shoulders. Twinkletoes was friendly bulk that could be turned into unfriendly bulk at the flick of a switch. ‘I heard you was going around with a posh bit of skirt,’ he said.