The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5

by Craig Russell

  Again using the handkerchief, I unscrewed the cap from the Austin’s fuel tank, took some of the old newspaper and stuffed it into the tank. I tipped over the kerosene cans and one of the petrol canisters, letting them glug their contents onto the cement floor before using the two other cans to splash petrol all over the lock-up’s contents, including Baines’s body, the car and the paper stuffed into the fuel tank. I sat the remaining cans and kerosene bottles next to the Austin.

  Running over to the doors, I eased one open and peered out. The police bells had stopped and I reckoned the policemen, now on foot, were making their way through the yard, checking each shed as they went.

  Snatching the padlock from the shed door, I stuffed it into my pocket, not having time to wipe it down. I went over to the Ford Consul and put the key in the ignition without turning it. Further back in the storage site, about a couple of rows back, I could see the beams from police flashlights probing the spaces between lock-ups. It was now or never. I took the lighter I’d found in Baines’s pocket, lit it and tossed it into the lock-up.

  ‘Sorry, Baines,’ I said.

  The spilled kerosene and petrol ignited. I slammed shut the door to prevent the flames lighting me up for the coppers to see and ran to the car; without switching on the lights, I turned the key in the ignition. In the silence of the night, the approaching policemen would have heard the engine and I slammed the gears into reverse, careening backwards the way we had come in. I saw the dance of flashlight beams as the coppers, maybe three or four of them, came running through the lock-ups.

  I flew out onto the road, still in reverse, still with my lights out, reckoning that the chances of running into someone at that time of night were pretty remote. There were two empty police Wolseleys parked at the road end and I narrowly missed one. At that point the sky lit up as a huge bubble of flame surged from the lock-up and into the night sky. The car and the fuel cans had gone up.

  My guess was that one carful of coppers would be dealing with the fire; but at least one would have by now been sent running back to the parked police cars and would be on my tail any time now. I kept the lights out and gunned the engine, ripping through empty streets and hoping to God I didn’t run into anything. I took several turns and detours, then headed back towards the city centre, slowing down to normal speed and switching on the lights.

  I needed to get the Consul out of sight, and soon. There was a good chance that the police hadn’t gotten any kind of good look at the car, and wouldn’t have been able to report a make or colour – but there were so few cars on the roads at this time of night that it made it worth their while to stop any they saw. And I didn’t have a good reason for being in a car that didn’t belong to me, nor any kind of explanation for why I stank of petrol and kerosene.

  The answer came to me a couple of blocks past the Tavern Bar on Finnieston Street, in the unlikely form of ‘Chic’s Car Cavalcade’. I drove past it twice, just to make sure it wasn’t guarded by a night watchman or vicious dogs on long chains. The way my luck had been going, Chic probably had his own team of commandos or paratroopers just waiting for an intruder like me to practise their strangulation skills on.

  Security for most of the used-car stock, however, seemed to comprise a fence and a locked gate. No night watchman, no dogs, no commandos. There were a few cars parked outside the stock compound but out of immediate sight of the road, behind what I guessed was some kind of repair garage bay. I pulled the Consul into a space between two of the cars and switched off the lights.

  I checked my watch. It was nearly two a.m. I reckoned that it would be at least six or seven before anyone turned up at the garage. Clambering over the bench seat into the back of the car, I lay down and tried to calm myself.

  The smell of kerosene and petrol fumed nauseatingly in the car’s cabin and I opened the window a little. The pains in my neck, throat and ribs were singing from the same hymn sheet. And loudly.

  I wouldn’t sleep, but at least I could rest.

  Strange thing was that, even though it was a mild night, as soon as I lay down I started to shake uncontrollably. Images flashed through my head, relentlessly and vividly. I had seen a man die tonight. I had thought myself near death twice and had had the life half choked out of me. Yet none of these were the events or images that flashed through my head.

  What I saw in perfectly recalled, hideously sharp, searing detail were the photographs I had glimpsed in the glow of a flashlight for only a second or two.

  Images that I knew would stay with me for the rest of my life.

  *

  It was already fully light when I woke.

  Unlikely as I had thought sleep, I must have yielded to the intense physical and mental exhaustion resulting from everything that had happened the night before.

  I jumped up with a start into a sitting position, suddenly and completely awake, fearful that I would be discovered. But when I checked my watch it was only five-thirty a.m. I scanned the used-car lot and there was no sign of activity.

  In the full light, I could now see the state of my clothes. My suit was grubby, not too bad, but the cuff of my right jacket sleeve and, more noticeably, the shirt cuff were heavily stained with blood. I tipped out the contents of my jacket pockets; whoever had jumped me had stuffed items of jewellery into them and now the rear bench seat beside me was covered with bracelets, necklaces, brooches. Gold and silver gleamed; emeralds, rubies and sapphires sparkled. I counted out one thousand, three hundred and fifty pounds in crumpled twenty- and fifty-pound notes. I separated out eight notes that were stained with blood and put them with the jewels, folding the other notes and stuffing them in my trouser pocket.

  Everything else – the jewellery, the bloodstained banknotes – was useless, worthless. The surest way of getting caught would be to try to fence the jewellery or to spend the spoiled notes. Whatever I recovered, I would give to Jennifer: some small compensation for the fortune Tommy had accumulated and I had set fire to along with Baines and everything else. I felt bad about Baines’s body not getting a funeral. Without the car, without his watch or wallet, and with his already meagre body more than likely shrivelled to an inhuman husk, he might never be identified.

  Which was exactly what I was hoping for.

  I comforted myself with the thought that going up in flames with a stash of stolen goods and cash was maybe the crooks’ equivalent to a Viking funeral. Maybe Baines now feasted in a thieves’ Valhalla.

  I reached into my jacket and took out the Fairbairn-Sykes knife. Like my right hand, it was encrusted with flakes of dried blood. I got out of the car, checking around that I was out of sight of street and tenement, and went over to the external tap beside the double wooden doors of the repair garage. I washed the blood from my hand and then from the knife, slipping it quickly back into my jacket pocket. I scooped up handfuls and washed my face and neck, the cold water like an electric energy on my skin. I cupped my hands and drank.

  Taking my jacket off, I scrubbed at the sleeve, squeezing the fabric like a sponge, the water pooling pink at my feet. I did the same with my shirtsleeve, getting most but not all of the bloodstain out. Rolling up my sleeves did something to hide the dampened stain from sight.

  Jacketless and back in the car, I examined the fighting knife again. It was a genuine commando piece and when I examined the haft, I found the initials TQ embossed on it. I had to admit it was a nice touch: the perfect frame, including me being found to have killed Baines with Tommy Quaid’s own service knife. It would have been almost whimsical, poetic.

  I gathered up the jewels and stained cash and bundled them up in my jacket, along with the knife. Then I stuffed my jacket into the passenger footwell and out of sight.

  It was a bright morning but cool. Nevertheless I drove with the window down in an effort to clear the car’s cabin from the stink of petrol and kerosene, and my head from the stink of something else, something worse. I reckoned I should be safe enough – or at least safer – now and I drove north a
nd up through Milngavie and Bearsden, stopping first at a telephone kiosk in Maryhill to make a couple of 'phone calls.

  I drove out of the city, north towards Strathblane, until I found the spot I was looking for: a lay-by next to the Mugdock reservoir, the huge man-made lake that supplied the whole of Glasgow with its water. I got out of the car and into the July morning light. I smoked, looking out over the flat mirror of water and at the birds that dove and swooped across its surface, without seeing any of it.

  Up here I was above Glasgow. Elevated in every sense. The huddled dark mass of the city lay below me in the Clyde valley; behind me were the moors, forests and mountains of that other Scotland. Wide, clean, open spaces without the pollution of people and all their sins.

  I knew what I had to do next; I knew I would have to go back into the black heart of that city and do whatever I could to put right a wrong. The most monstrous wrong I could imagine. A wrong because of which my quiet friend had died.

  But, at that moment, all I had was the overpowering impulse to 'phone Jennifer Quaid and ask her to come here to me; to tell me there was a better place in the world, and then we could drive north to look for it, away from Glasgow.

  I looked at my watch. It was coming up to six-thirty and it would take a while longer for the calls I had made from the telephone kiosk in Maryhill to bring help. I needed help: I needed others to bear this burden with me. To share the horror. While I waited, I smoked through half a packet, thinking through all that had happened, regaining detail that had become lost.

  I thought about Nancy Ross, about her unbidden visitors, about the way Jock Ferguson’s call about the boy’s suicide had stirred the interest of a retiring Special Branch officer. I also thought, with gratitude, of how Ferguson had made sure not to mention it was me who had been asking. There again, I guessed he had done that more to protect himself than me. Had that really all been just last night?

  And then I thought again about Jennifer Quaid and how I really, really wanted to be with her right now.

  But the thing I thought about most, the small detail that had been stirred from the deep sands of my memory and had risen, bursting to the surface, was what Quiet Thomas Quaid had said to me that night in his apartment while he expertly strapped up my cracked ribs: that he would never have children; that he would never bring a child into a world as corrupt as this.

  *

  As I expected, it was Twinkletoes McBride who arrived first. Seeing me in the lay-by, he parked his impossibly brightly waxed and polished beige-over-cream Vauxhall Cresta behind the Consul, which he looked at, puzzled, as he got out and came over to me, furrowing what little forehead he had in concern.

  ‘What’s the trouble, Mister L?’ he said, and I could see his worry was genuine. ‘It sounds like you’s in a real pree-dick-ahrment.’

  ‘It’s bad, Twinkle, I won’t deny it,’ I said. ‘But if you don’t mind I’d rather wait until everyone’s here – saves me explaining things twice and, believe me, I don’t want to repeat this more than I have to. Did you 'phone Archie, like I said?’

  ‘I did. He’ll be here.’

  After another half-hour, another gleaming piece of coachwork arrived. This time it was in a completely different price bracket: a one-year-old Jaguar XK140 roadster, gleaming black paintwork with cream-walled tyres. It looked like something out of Hollywood, as did the driver who unfolded his tall frame from the driver’s seat.

  Handsome Jonny Cohen was followed a few minutes later by a more conservative, far more low-rent Anglia, then a Hillman.

  We sat for a moment – an unlikely assembly of Twinkletoes McBride, Handsome Jonny Cohen, Archie McClelland, Tony the Pole Grabowski and me – looking out at the quiet, deep waters of the reservoir. The sky was naked of cloud and the sun grew in confidence as the morning matured. It was the brightest of all possible days to be discussing the darkest of all possible thoughts.

  ‘I have a story to tell you,’ I said, after a while. ‘I’m afraid it’s not a pretty story and you won’t thank me for the telling of it. It’s also a story that a lot of people would kill – and have killed – to stop being told. Once I tell it to you, there are things that I will expect from each of you. But, I warn you, once you hear my story, you won’t be able to unhear it.’

  They said nothing.

  So I told them it.

  I told them Quiet Tommy Quaid’s story.

  Part Four

  1

  Surprisingly, I slept like a baby: the rest of that day and all of the following night lost in velvet, dreamless sleep. It was as if in sharing what I had seen, everything I had been through, I had shifted some of the burden off my shoulders. Maybe those I had shared it with wouldn’t sleep so well now.

  I had asked them to take a lot on faith. I told them exactly what I had seen, but I couldn’t show them a single proof of it. I told them about a crime that would never be punished, victims who would never be believed, culprits who were beyond the law and any justice other than the most natural kind. Even if I still had the evidence, which I didn’t, the police were no use; the press would be too afraid.

  I had explained to Jonny, Archie, Tony and Twinkletoes that I couldn’t give the names of everyone who was involved, other than the few faces I had recognized and the few names I had seen listed: politicians, lawyers, businessmen, military, police – men at the core of the Establishment. I tried to describe without being sick to my stomach the content of the photographs I had seen. As I told them, as I explained the inexplicable, their expressions changed from disbelief to disgust to anger, their faces slowly setting hard like drying concrete. I could see they believed me, despite my lack of evidence. Twinkletoes McBride in particular listened with furrowed-brow intent, as if concentrating on understanding something he could never understand.

  ‘How young?’ he had asked.

  ‘Early teens, mostly,’ I had said. ‘But quite a few younger. Much younger.’

  ‘Kiddies?’ Twinkle’s voice had cracked as he had said it. ‘Just kiddies?’

  ‘I think they may have been from a military school outside the city,’ I had said. ‘I think Robert Weston, the boy who threw himself under the train, was one of them. Or used to be one of them.’

  There had been a silence as we had all stood in the light of an inappropriately cheery sun. Then I told them that I had to find where the folio of documents and photographs had come from. Tommy Quaid had obviously found them during a break-in, but I had to find out where that break-in had been. And if at all possible, I needed to get my hands on the evidence again.

  ‘I can’t believe it . . .’ Jonny had said. ‘On that kind of scale . . .’

  ‘It happens.’ The statement surprised us all and we had all turned to Archie.

  ‘When I was a beat copper in Govan, there was a thing. A woman I knew had told me that she thought her wee boy had been – interfered with – by their local priest. She had been so afraid to tell me because you just didn’t go up against priests. I asked around a bit and started to get the impression that this bastard was at it with a load of kiddies. Next thing I know, the priest is transferred to another parish, still in Glasgow, and I get the heavy word passed down from a chief inspector that it had been “dealt with” and I was to drop it if I knew what was good for me. Never forgot his name though: Father Sean Sullivan.’

  ‘The Sean Sullivan?’ I asked. ‘The one who’s up to be made a cardinal?’

  ‘One and the same,’ said Archie. ‘A lot of damage the accusations did his career. So I’m warning you, Lennox – you’ll never get evidence against these bastards. And, even if you do, you’ll never be able to bring it to light.’

  ‘If I go through official channels – which is why I’ve told each of you. If anything happens to me the same way it did to Tommy, I want you to do right by me the way I’m trying to do right by him. And if I can get to the bottom of it all, I’m asking something big of each of you.’

  ‘Vaddya need?’ Tony the Pole had asked.

&nb
sp; ‘The people involved in this include those you might call the instruments of justice. I will come to each of you later and ask the biggest thing I could ever ask of you: to become my – to become Quiet Tommy Quaid’s – instruments of justice. But I will understand if any of you feel that you can’t commit to that. In the meantime, the only thing you can do for me is to help me out of this immediate fix.’

  It was my partner Archie I had been most unsure of telling everything. Archie was ex-City of Glasgow Police, had always done things by the book; I had always kept him away from the Three Kings and the dodgier side of my activities – yet now I had assembled him with Jonny Cohen, Twinkletoes and Tony the Pole and laid out my plans for illegal retribution.

  Archie had stood in the sun, leaning against the drystone dyke that divided the lay-by from the reservoir edge beyond, and silently taken in all I had said, passing no comment, his expression unreadable. I had told him that a man had been murdered in my presence and I couldn’t prove I hadn’t done it; I told him that I had committed arson and destroyed evidence; I told him that the whole thing had happened because I had accepted a job on the sly, behind his back, from McNaught.

  Yet, when I’d finished my story, it had been Archie who had taken over. Like a military commander, he told us all what we needed to do.

  Getting rid of the Consul was the first priority. Jonny Cohen had gone back down the road to the nearest call box. Within an hour a flatbed from one of his scrapyards had arrived and the Consul, draped in a tarpaulin, had been spirited away. Cohen knew the stakes involved and had promised Archie that nothing of the Consul would be left to go back into the marketplace. It would be broken up, all serial numbers filed off, and scattered across his scrapyards.

  Like the man himself, Baines’s car would cease to exist.

  Baines had been a long way from home. His burned body was most likely now unidentifiable, his car dismantled and dispersed. It would take the police an age and a lot of effort to identify him, and I knew they just didn’t have the attention span, patience or diligence for that.