The Long Glasgow Kiss l-2

by Craig Russell

  For a moment I thought he meant Sheila Gainsborough. Then I twigged. ‘Oh, yes… Lorna MacFarlane. Small Change’s daughter. She does have a bit of class. Unusual around here. A bit of class and a little sophistication. I go for that in a woman.’

  ‘Aye? Personally I go for big tits and a fanny tighter than a Fifer’s fist.’

  I didn’t get a chance to frame an answer before the Victorian stained-glass panel doors that joined the foyer to the main part of the baths swung open and Sneddon, in an expensive wide-shouldered camel sports coat, tieless and with his shirt’s top button undone, emerged pink-faced and flanked by another of his heavies.

  ‘Sorry, am I interrupting something?’ he asked facetiously, noticing that I was somewhat lost for words.

  ‘No… I was just getting a few romantic tips from Charles Boyer here.’

  Sneddon went across to reception and scribbled into the log that lay open on the desk.

  ‘I’ve signed you in,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and get a drink. Twinkle

  … you and Tam wait here. I won’t be long.’

  Sneddon led me through into a large clubroom. It was the kind of place where they could have cut down on the decorating costs by simply wallpapering it with five-pound notes. If anything, it was more over-the-top than the Merchants’ Carvery. The furniture was all polished hardwood and leather and the velvet drapes were a deep crimson. The walls were dressed in flock wallpaper — burgundy red fleur-de-lis against cream damask — so thick you could vacuum it. A vast onyx-type marble fireplace dominated one wall. I imagined that this was what hell looked like if you had a first-class ticket.

  Sneddon led the way to a corner at the far side and sat down on two-and-a-half cows’ worth of red leather. I sat across the coffee table from him, on the rest of the herd. There were deep red velvet drapes behind us and I felt as if we were in a crimson cave.

  ‘Listen, Mr Sneddon… you’ve hired me to do a job. But you can’t ask me to do a job and then give me only half the story. You’re holding back vital information. I understand that you’ve got your interests to protect and there are some things I’d probably be better off not knowing, but in this case it means I’ve been up more blind alleys than a Blythswood Square floozy.’ I paused while a burgundy-jacketed waiter came over with two malt whiskies on a silver tray. I waited until he had gone before continuing. ‘The police have got Tommy Gun Furie for Small Change’s murder. And it looks to me like a set-up. More than that, it looks to me like a very well-thought-out set-up. Timing was everything with this. Tommy Furie was summoned to MacFarlane’s by someone calling the gym he trained in. Someone knew he was going to be in the gym at that time on that night and that they could get a message to him. My guess is that Small Change was still alive when they made that ’phone call and they only killed him after they knew Furie was on his way. Which means they were pretty confident that they could reschedule the whole thing if they had to. That would suggest that they were very familiar with Small Change’s routine.’

  ‘So why does this mean that I’ve been holding back on you? Are you saying I had something to do with Small Change getting topped?’

  ‘No. But I am saying that this appointment book you asked me to look for has nothing to do with bare-knuckle fights. Big money bare-knuckle fights. And if I’m right, then you have more to worry about than whether the police put you in MacFarlane’s house for a meeting. Tommy Gun Furie was one of the fighters MacFarlane lined up for you. And right now his own lawyer is telling him he’ll be lucky not to take a short walk to a long drop through a trapdoor in Barlinnie prison. He’s going to tell the coppers everything he can to try to save his neck. Literally. And somewhere along the line your name is going to come up. The only way out of it is for us to find out who really did kill MacFarlane and why.’

  Sneddon looked at me with a steady gaze: the steady gaze of a crocodile looking at an antelope.

  ‘Okay,’ he said at last. ‘There was some stuff I was trying to keep to myself. But it doesn’t get the pikey out of the frame. If anything, it points to him having done it. Small Change MacFarlane and me were in business together. We were fixing up fights. But not what you saw out at the farm — the usual bare-knuckle shite with a couple of fucking pikeys slapping each other around. Although you’re right that Small Change helped me organize those too. We had something different going on.’

  ‘What?’

  Sneddon didn’t answer for a moment, instead seeming to look around to reappraise his surroundings. ‘I’ve seen the way people look at me in here sometimes. Even when I’m walking my dog in the street where I fucking live. They look away. Avoid looking me in the fucking eye. They think people like me, Cohen and Murphy are the scum of the earth. We scare them. But I’ll tell you this, it’s them that scare me.’ He paused when the waiter returned to our crimson cave to replace our empty whisky glasses with full ones.

  ‘You should see the so-called ordinary man in the street when people like me serve them up with what they want,’ said Sneddon when the waiter was gone. ‘They’re the fucking monsters. I have an interest in a whorehouse in Pollokshields, not far from MacFarlane’s house. Discreet. One of the girls got beaten up so fucking bad we thought she’d die. Cost me a fortune getting her treatment without it being official. You should have seen the fucker that did it to her. A wee, bald, fat cunt that looked like he wouldn’t say boo to a goose. But when he was in there with the girl he turned into some kind of fucking monster.’

  ‘You turn him over to the police?’ The question was out and stupid before I thought it through.

  ‘Aye, right. That’s just what we done. What do you think we done? Twinkletoes sorted him out with some transport. A fucking wheelchair.’

  ‘What’s this got to do with your deal with MacFarlane?’

  ‘Like I said, you have no fucking idea what ordinary people want. The worse it is, the more they want you to dish it up to them. You’re not going to believe this, Lennox, but I read a lot. History, that sort of shite.’

  I shrugged. It didn’t surprise me: since I first encountered Sneddon, I had sensed a hidden, dark intelligence about him. The Smart King.

  ‘I read a lot about ancient Rome. There was no difference between the Caesars and Rome and the Kings and Glasgow. They even had a triumvirate. Three Kings. You can learn a lot from history.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Personally I think there’s no future in it.’

  Sneddon didn’t laugh — not at my joke and not ever that I could recall. ‘I’ve read a lot about the Colosseum. It used to be packed right to the top. Ordinary people turning out to watch blood and death. The fucking crueller the better. Do you know they used to make fucking children fight with swords, to the death? Or that the comedy turn was to put blind people into the ring? They’d slash and hack each other to bits, but it would take a fucking age for one or both to die because they couldn’t see each other. And the public fucking loved it.’ He paused to sip his whisky. Silver-suited and manicured, against the crimson of the booth he looked like a clubbable Satan. ‘Nothing’s changed,’ he continued. ‘We started to draw in big money from the bare-knuckle fights. The more brutal the fight the bigger the crowd the next week. So we started to put on special fights. At special prices. Only regulars were invited to buy a ticket.’

  ‘What made these fights special?’ I asked, though some horrible ideas had already flashed across the screen of my imagination.

  ‘They was no-holds-barred. No weapons, but apart from that everything was allowed — kicking, choking, gouging, biting. It started off small then just got bigger and bigger. The more blood, the bigger the crowds. And the higher the ticket price.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s have it… what happened?’

  ‘Someone got killed…’ Sneddon shrugged as if a human being’s death was an inconsequence. ‘A pikey. Something happened in his head and there was fucking blood everywhere, from his nose, his ears… even his fucking eyes…’

  ‘Let me gues
s… he ended up catching a train…’ I shook my head. It had been there in front of me all the time.

  Sneddon made his usual crooked mouth shape to approximate a smile. ‘You’re a smart fucking cookie, aren’t you, Lennox. You make all of the connections. Yeah… he was the pikey that got mashed by the train. So no one’s the wiser.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong.’ I put my glass down and leaned forward. ‘There’s a keen-as-mustard new pathologist on the job. Very keen on what they call forensic science. He worked out that your pikey fighter wasn’t some drunk caught on the rails. Even proved that he’d been in a fight before he died.’

  ‘So fucking what?’

  ‘So you’ve got a problem. Or another problem. The City of Glasgow Police are treating it as murder. Believe me, they’d much rather have chalked it up as an accident, but because of this sharp new pathologist they can’t.’

  ‘Fuck.’ Sneddon’s face hardened. Which was surprising, because there wasn’t much scope for further hardening. ‘I knew we should have minced the bastard. But I didn’t want Murphy knowing nothing about this.’

  I nodded. Hammer Murphy, one of the other Three Kings, owned a meat-processing plant in Rutherglen. It was well known that several bodies had been disposed of through the plant’s mincer. The Three Kings had an agreement whereby Murphy, for a fee, provided the same service for Sneddon and Cohen. Not for the first time I considered vegetarianism.

  ‘You should have told me all of this at the start,’ I said. ‘It would have made things easier.’

  ‘Murder. Fuck. And for once it wasn’t…’ Sneddon shook his head self-critically. It was like watching a golfer who had missed what should have been an easy putt. The thought flashed through my head that murderers maybe have a handicap system too.

  ‘You say he was a traveller?’ I asked.

  ‘A pikey, aye… What about it?’

  ‘Well, that means there’s maybe no official records of his existence. No birth certificate, no war record, no National Insurance number. No paperwork means he didn’t exist officially and that makes it more difficult to tie him in with anything. I think you sit this one out.’

  ‘What about his family?’ asked Sneddon glumly.

  ‘They’re not going to go to the police, I’d say. It looks to me like they’ve already said their goodbyes.’

  ‘How the fuck do you know that?’ asked Sneddon. ‘You don’t even know who they are.’

  ‘When I called in at the Vinegarhill site there was a vardo — you know, a gypsy caravan — all dressed up with red ribbons. Deep red. That’s their colour for mourning, not black. Of course, it doesn’t mean it’s your boy. What was his name?’

  ‘Gypsy Rose Lee… How the fuck would I know? He was just a pikey.’

  ‘Go back to the fights. What was Small Change MacFarlane’s involvement in them?’

  ‘He set them up and ran the book on them for me. He took a percentage of the winnings and I provided the venue, and the muscle to collect unpaid bets.’

  ‘He supplied the fighters?’

  ‘Aye, kind of. He arranged for them to be supplied. The deal was he paid for that out of his cut.’ Sneddon sighed wearily. ‘It was Bert Soutar who found them for Small Change.’

  ‘Soutar?’ For a second I was deafened by the sound of pennies dropping. ‘Oh, I see… so Bobby Kirkcaldy had a stake in this too?’

  ‘In the background, aye. Kirkcaldy’s a good fighter and he’ll batter this Kraut on Saturday. But when me and Cohen put money into him, we said he was to get checked out by an independent doctor. Turns out his heart’s fucked. Arrhythmia, they call it. Two, three, more big fights and then he’ll have to give the fight game up. The Board of Control know fuck-all about it like. They’re not exactly on the ball. But Kirkcaldy likes having money, so wherever there’s a pie, he has his finger in it.’

  ‘So that’s why he was so out of breath…’ I said more to myself than Sneddon, remembering the toll Kirkcaldy’s skipping workout had taking on him in his basement gym. That would be why he had been doing so much training there, instead of in the city gym: no one to see him struggle for breath.

  ‘Then Kirkcaldy or Bert Soutar will have a name for the dead traveller?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybes. Maybes not.’

  I leaned back into the plush red upholstery and sipped at the whisky. It all made sense.

  ‘So it didn’t occur to you at all that it was the tailers who were making all of these symbolic threats?’

  ‘Pikeys? Because of the one that got killed? No, it didn’t. It didn’t even cross my mind.’

  ‘I find that very difficult to believe.’

  Sneddon leaned forward, as if about to share a great confidence with me. ‘I’d be very careful before you call me a liar, Lennox. Very fucking careful.’

  I said nothing for a moment, doing the discretion/valour equation in my head.

  ‘So Soutar supplied fighters for these contests and Small Change organized them and ran your book. What about Jack Collins? He was the real fight arranger as far as Small Change was concerned.’

  ‘Naw. We did have dealings with Collins, but that was for proper boxing matches. What I told you that night I hired you was true. We was putting together proper bouts and running a few half-decent fighters. That was what Collins managed. And that pikey kid who’s supposed to have done Small Change in… he was moving up out of bare-knuckle and was turning into a tasty boxer. All that’s fucked now anyway.’

  ‘Do you still have Singer on Bobby Kirkcaldy’s tail?’ I drained my whisky and stood up.

  ‘Aye…’

  ‘Good. He needs to be watched like a hawk.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’ve got paperwork to do.’

  Finding a place to park out of sight of the main road, under a dank railway arch, I sat for half an hour, smoking and listening to the steel sounds of the Clyde. It was quieter and cooler during the night, but the shipyards and repair docks never really slept. This was no man’s land, between the tenements and the docks. No one would come down here unless they had a reason. That was both good and bad for what I had planned. There would be very few people to spot my car tucked away from view; but those few people would either be up to no good, like me, or trying to catch the up-to-no-good. The last thing I needed was a patrolling bobby to happen across the Atlantic.

  A train thundered over the rails above me and its rattles echoed damply in the arch. I put out my cigarette and took my stuff out of the trunk. Taking my suit jacket off, I pulled the turtleneck jumper over my shirt and I changed my shoes for the plimsolls. I unwrapped the charred corks from the newspaper and rubbed them all over my face. If that patrolling bobby were to catch me now, I’d have to convince him I was auditioning for a blackface minstrel show or face those three months in Barlinnie. Locking up the car, I pulled on my leather gloves and made my way out from under the arch. I ducked behind a bush and watched while an elderly dockworker cycled along the cobbled road that lay between me and the bonded dockside area. He pedalled so slowly that I wondered how he could remain upright with so little momentum carrying him forward. After what seemed an age, he disappeared from sight around the distant corner.

  The streetlamps threw meagre pools of light onto the cobbles and I ran between them, bent over, across the road and down into the ditch on the far side. I was about three hundred yards away from the gates and the watchman’s shed when I took the wire cutters from the bag and snipped at the steel wire fence, folding it back like curtains and crawling through, hidden by the long, uncut grass.

  I made my way along the inside of the fence, still keeping low because I would still be visible from the road until I reached the area where I remembered the Nissen huts to be. There was only one lamppost and the Nissens loomed darkly, with little to distinguish one from another. I didn’t want to use the bicycle lamp out in the open and it took me five minutes to find the sign Barnier and Clement. The front door was reasonably solid, but this was an office rath
er than a store, and the padlock that secured the door fell away with a sniff of the crowbar. I caught the padlock before it hit the ground and let myself into the Nissen.

  Normally, I would have switched the lights on: a fully illuminated room attracts less attention than a torch flashing around; but out here in the dark of the warehouse area, switching the lights on would have been as inconspicuous as a lighthouse on a clear night.

  The offices seemed pretty much as I had seen them when I had called and asked to see Barnier. I went over to the filing cabinets and was soon saying a little appreciative prayer for Miss Minto. Her filing was meticulous and easy to follow. It took me only twenty minutes to find what I was looking for: a ship’s manifest order and duplicates of a ship’s insurers claim form with a Lloyd’s Register stamp on it.

  I smiled. The last thing Barnier would have wanted was for an insurance claim to be put in, but this had to be seen as a scrupulously legitimate business.

  I laid the manifest on the desk and shone the bicycle lamp on it, running my finger down the list of items. There it was, as bold and innocent as could be:

  ITEM 33a. 12 VIET KYLAN NEPHRITE JADE FIGURINES. CRATED. DESTINATION: SANTORNO ANTIQUES AND CURIOS, GREENWICH, NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  Except there were only eleven now. KYLAN. When I had first turned up without an appointment, Miss Minto had thought I was there about the ‘ key lan ’. And they weren’t Chinese. They were Kylan, not Chinese Qilin. They were Viet, from French Indochina. Alain Barnier was an established importer from the Far East, exactly the kind of link that John Largo needed in his supply chain. Except now Barnier was a weak link. Taking notepad and pencil from my bag, I wrote down the details of the shipment, put all the paperwork back in the files and the files back in the cabinet.

  I heard a sound outside.

  I killed the light from the bicycle lamp and crouched down. Grabbing my sap from the bag, I scuttled under the lidded reception counter to the door. There was a small window next to it and, pressing myself against the wall, I stole a peek through the window. I saw the watchman’s back as he walked through the pool of light from the lamppost and out of sight. I waited for several minutes, straining my neck to watch through the window, before deciding it was safe to put my sap back in the bag, go back to the files and switch the lamp back on.