‘So you’re here to seek revenge for Tommy?’ I asked. ‘That’s stretching the old chums thing a bit, isn’t it?’
Tarnish looked at me with an elegant, faint disdain. There really was something about him that reminded me of me. In that moment I realized that when Tommy had said I reminded him of a natural-born killer he’d known during the war, it had been Tarnish, not Baines, he had been talking about. The vague mistrust I’d felt since starting the conversation hardened into something more solid.
‘There’s me, Mayhew and Fraser here – and there was Tommy,’ said Tarnish. ‘Four of us – five if you count Baines who was only with us for a short time. Four of us out of a unit of fifteen; that’s all that survived the war. Does that explain it?’
It did and I nodded.
‘But Tommy was very different from the rest of you. He was one of the most peaceable, amenable men I’ve ever known. One of the least violent.’
Tarnish looked meaningfully over his shoulder at his comrades, both of whom smiled knowingly.
‘Am I missing something?’ I asked.
‘Tell me, Mr Lennox, was Tommy known as “Quiet Tommy Quaid” here?’
‘Yes . . .’
‘Do you know why?’
‘I don’t know for sure, but the story here is that it was because if the coppers ever caught him, he would always “come quiet”. And of course Tommy was a master at getting in and out of places silently. That and the fact that he never hurt anyone – never used violence in any of the jobs he pulled.’
‘That’s not the reason. That’s not the reason at all.’ Tarnish leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. ‘He had that nickname before he came back to Glasgow. He picked it up during the war. It’s true that his ability to get in and out of secure places without detection did have something to do with it – what we used to call in the war a “penetration specialist”.’
‘Tommy certainly was that,’ I said and grinned. Tarnish looked at me wearily and I felt like a schoolboy admonished by the headmaster.
‘That’s why I recruited Tommy in the first place,’ he said. ‘Because he was such a skilled burglar and, if we needed, could be in and out without leaving traces. But that wasn’t the main reason he was known as “Quiet Tommy”.’
‘So why was he?’
‘Tommy had other skills,’ said Tarnish. ‘Skills that in peacetime he probably didn’t know he had. You’re maybe going to find this difficult to believe but, if ever the squad needed someone taken out quickly and silently, then we’d get Tommy Quaid to do it. He killed with ease, even with grace, and always without a sound. Tommy Quaid’s speciality was the quiet death.’
I shook my head. ‘You’re right: I do find that difficult to believe. Impossible, in fact. I knew Tommy as well as anyone, and he was no killer. More than that, he hated violence.’
‘Oh it’s true, all right. He may not have been a killer in civilian life, but in the field he was one of my best. I’m not saying he relished it, but I also can’t say he was disturbed by it. Tommy was quiet in every way. He kept his thoughts and emotions to himself.’
‘That I can imagine,’ I said.
‘You’re maybe right that he hated violence, I’m sure he did. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t good at it.’ Tarnish paused to take a contemplative pull on his cigarette. ‘There was this one time in particular. We were well behind enemy lines when a young German soldier stumbled right into us by accident. I say soldier, but this was near the end of the war and this kid was Volkssturm – you know, children and old men drafted to defend the fatherland at the last ditch. He was nothing but a mere boy, lucky if he was seventeen, and very frightened. We couldn’t take him prisoner because we were so far behind enemy lines, we couldn’t tie him up and leave him to be found, and no one had the heart to kill the kid.
‘We started debating amongst ourselves, what to do with him. And the more we talked the more clearly terrified the boy became. He had probably already worked out he had to die and that we were arguing about who was going to have to do the job. While we were arguing, Tommy Quaid came up behind the boy without making a sound, reached round and stabbed him through the heart, supporting him, almost cradling him, as he fell to the ground.’ Tarnish shook his head. ‘It was the quietest and gentlest killing I’ve ever witnessed. Quaid ended the boy’s terror, and his life, with the least possible pain and distress. It was probably the most generous act I witnessed in the whole war. But also the most disturbing. Quiet Tommy Quaid.’
It was difficult to hear – and difficult to imagine Tommy as a killer, even a compassionate one – but it squared with some of the things he’d said, and not said, about his time during the war. Again there had been more meaning in the spaces between words. It made me ashamed of the way I had used the war as an excuse for the violence I had committed since, when Tommy had put it all behind him. But maybe, in the unnatural context of war, Tommy really had had more in common with Baines. I brought the thought into the open:
‘So where does Baines fit into this? He told me that he and Tommy were close.’
All three men laughed, loudly.
‘Tommy hated Dave Baines,’ said Tarnish. ‘Hated everything about him. Tommy was everything that Baines wasn’t, and vice versa. Baines was a self-centred opportunist. Most of the rumours of stolen loot probably came from him telling his story to anyone who would listen.’ Tarnish leaned back in his chair again. ‘Now, Captain Lennox, I’ve levelled with you, why don’t you level with me? Why don’t you take me through the whole story, from start to finish, including what it was you were looking for here?’
So I did. I told him the whole story, starting with McNaught and the offer he had made in my office, through the events at the foundry, all the way to that evening and my coming back to Tommy’s apartment. There were details I left out, like Twinkletoes’s and Handsome Jonny Cohen’s involvement. I also missed out everything to do with Davey and Jimmy Wilson and the goons at the garage.
Tarnish seemed to be on the level, but I was a long way off trusting him completely. As I talked he sat and listened intently, asking the odd question; the other two stayed in the background, still silent.
But I did tell Tarnish about the contents of the document wallet I’d held briefly in my hands. I told him about the photographs; about whom I’d seen in them and what they had been doing. And to who. I spared no detail and, as I talked, I could see Tarnish’s demeanour darken, and I heard Fraser, his subordinate, mutter a curse.
I described a lopsided face, then another that looked like Victor McLaglen.
When I was finished, Tarnish sat silent for a while. Then he asked me what the other blue-tabbed key was for. I explained that it was a spare key for the lock-up that had burned down.
‘And you have no idea where this red leather ledger is?’ he asked.
I shook my head. ‘My guess is that Tommy hid it somewhere. That’s why I came back here, but I knew he wouldn’t be that obvious.’
‘There’s always hiding in plain sight . . .’
‘No . . . I’ve been through everything. It’s maybe not here. There’s a good chance Tommy never had it – it was odd that I found everything else in one place. If he has left it behind thinking I’d work out where it is, then he’s overestimated my abilities as a detective.’
‘It would have been easier if Tommy had simply made a will,’ said Tarnish bitterly.
It was like an electric shock, but I tried not to show it. Tarnish’s offhand remark had dropped it back into my head: the something that had been itching in my head all the time I’d been searching Tommy’s flat.
Tommy had intended for me to find it. Me alone.
And now I knew where to look.
*
We sat talking for another half an hour. Tarnish told me that he, Fraser and Mayhew would do anything to avenge Tommy’s death, especially having heard the nature of what I had found in the lock-up. He seemed genuine, and told me that he was willing to work with me – but made it c
lear that he and his comrades might go about exacting revenge in their own way. I told him I didn’t have a problem with that, but they should leave the investigating to me. I hadn’t told Tarnish that I knew where Tommy had stolen the documents from. I also didn’t let on that I was now very late for an appointment with Jonny Cohen.
I gave Tarnish my card with my numbers on it; he told me he already had them; I guessed he had built up quite a dossier on me. We agreed to stay in touch.
All the time I had sat, patiently exchanging intelligence with Tarnish, I had to fight the urge to scratch two itches: the first was that insistent grain of suspicion, like grit in my eye, about Tarnish and his men. There was something about them that didn’t gel. It was maybe the way his men never spoke, always remaining subordinate and preserving the deferences and hierarchies of thirteen years past; as if Tarnish was their current, rather than former, commanding officer.
The second itch was, of course, to have them gone and out of the flat. All the time I spoke with Tarnish, I had used all of my willpower not to glance over at the bookcase.
‘It would have been easier if Tommy had simply made a will.’ With that comment, Tarnish had unlocked the memory that had lain just beyond my reach.
I remembered that night, after I’d been jumped by the two amateurs in the street and Tommy had strapped me up, standing by the bookcase with the Albert Camus novel The Outsider in my hand.
Tommy had said, ‘If ever anything happens to me, I’ll leave it to you in my will. Remember that.’
I had no good reason to offer Tarnish as to why I would want to stay behind in Tommy’s apartment. I thought of doing the whole shit-I’ve-left-my-car-keys-inside thing, but Tarnish and his boys were too long in the fang to fall for that kind of malarkey. And our new found all-pals-together goodwill was paper thin on both sides: I guessed Tarnish had the same grain of mistrust for me as I had for him.
So we all left together and I locked the front door.
‘I’ve got to talk to some people,’ I said. ‘Why don’t we meet here at eleven tomorrow morning?’ If the book was still there, it would still be there tomorrow morning. I could of course simply have driven around the block, parked and waited till I thought it was safe to sneak back into the apartment, but the truth was I hadn’t been too sharp when it came to spotting Tarnish’s surveillance. He’d said that there were only the three of them, but something made me suspect that Tarnish wasn’t the type to paint the whole picture. What I’d do was turn up half an hour early, pocket the book, and wait for Tarnish.
As we left, Tarnish explained they were parked around the corner and he rather pointedly watched as I went back to my car and drove off.
As I did, Quiet Tommy Quaid’s words echoed in my head: ‘Maybe, one day, this’ll be a book that will speak to you too.’
9
‘Where the fuck have you been?’ The normally affable and polite Handsome Jonny Cohen’s greeting wasn’t the most welcoming I’d had in my time in Glasgow, but neither was it the least. We stood in the marble-floored hallway of his house. You could almost have fitted Tommy’s whole flat into the hall alone and the contrast struck me, jarred with me, for some reason.
‘I got held up . . .’ I explained about Tarnish and goons with gut-aimed guns and how they’d been so insistent that I hang around that it seemed churlish to refuse. Cohen’s annoyance gave way to suspicion.
‘Do you believe Tarnish?’ he asked. ‘That he’s just here to find out what happened to Tommy Quaid and to get even for it?’
‘What other interest could he have?’
‘Maybe Baines was right. Maybe Tarnish and Quaid did lift something of value during one of their raids and Tommy stashed it away. These things did happen in the war.’
I shook my head. ‘This is all about those photographs I found. Those names. Tommy Quaid was killed because he tripped over this little ring of . . . Christ, I don’t know what you’d call them – child molesters – who also happen to be in positions of power.’
‘So Tarnish has agreed to help out?’ Cohen asked.
‘Yeah. Help out as an executioner. Speaking of which, thanks for keeping McNaught’s goons breathing. Where are they?’
‘One of my warehouses. In Clarkston.’
‘You said on the 'phone that Doc Banks fixed them up?’
‘Aye . . . as best he could. You really went to town on them.’
‘It was a tricky situation, Jonny, and they were both armed. I had to think on my feet.’ I looked along the hall, into the body of the house. ‘Can I see Jennifer before we go?’
‘Sure,’ said Cohen. ‘But make it quick. We’re already an hour behind because of your chat with Tarnish.’
*
It was a concrete-floored, corrugated-iron-walled warehouse filled with crates stacked four high. I didn’t ask Cohen what the crates contained, but I guessed that whatever it was was in a state of fluid ownership. In the corner nearest the doors, there was a flat-roofed, shed-like arrangement which obviously served as some kind of office. It was raised on a stilted platform; one wall was all windows and looked over the stacked merchandise.
A man in his late sixties came out of the office and down the steps to greet us. He was short and squat and leathery, his skin thick and dark under a shock of dense white hair, looking as if he’d spent his whole life outdoors. It was a look that sat oddly with the expensive suit.
‘Hiya, Yank,’ he said good-naturedly.
‘Hiya, Pops,’ I replied. Pops Loeb had been a gangster in his own right between the wars, when the slums of Govan rather than the semi-detacheds of Newton Mearns had been the centre of Jewish life in Glasgow. He was a tough old buzzard, but the rumour was that in his golden days his protection racket had been more protection than racket, and he had been a popular figure in his community. When the altogether more ruthless Jonny Cohen had become top dog, he had taken over Loeb’s operations more as a business merger than gang war. Cohen was clearly fond of Pops Loeb and had kept him close as an adviser; I got the impression that, these days, Loeb’s duties were light but his salary was considerable. Loeb had lost his wife to cancer young and his son had been killed in France on the retreat to Dunkirk, and Jonny Cohen had become the closest thing Pops had to family. Like Cohen, I liked Loeb: I always called him Pops and he always called me Yank, no matter how often I told him I was from Canada, not the US.
‘No one’s been sniffing around, Jonny,’ he said. ‘Your chums are through there . . .’
‘There’ was an area cleared of crates in the middle of the warehouse and McNaught’s two heavies sat tied to collapsible metal chairs. Twinkletoes McBride sat on a third chair facing them, smoking. Twinkle had his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up over forearms that looked woven from steel cable. He’d unbuttoned his shirt collar and loosened his tie and had slipped the deep red braces from his shoulders so they now hung from his waist. Seeing him like that sent a cold current through me: Twinkletoes McBride was not the kind of person you wanted to see ready for some hard physical work. Especially if you were sitting facing him, tied to a chair.
McNaught’s two men didn’t look too scared though. They sat limply, without tension, and I guessed that I’d missed the party: Twinkle had already gotten all he wanted from them.
The red-headed boxer type whose jaw I’d dislocated had had his face straightened and a bandage, looped around his head and face Humpty-Dumpty style, held his mouth tight shut. The side of his face that had taken the force of the blow was badly distended and swollen, and had started to bruise dark, which emphasized the large white wound dressing Doc Banks had applied.
He looked at me dully as I approached but didn’t seem to recognize me. I guessed that I’d clobbered him so quickly that he hadn’t gotten a good look at me, although he had been fully conscious before I left.
His pal, also with a bandaged head, showed no signs of recognizing me, either. That I could understand because I’d belted him as soon as he’d opened the door and this was the first
time I’d seen him since. But as I watched him, I noticed the same lack of recognition when he looked at Twinkletoes, at Cohen, at his friend, at his knees, at the crates, at the floor. His egg had been well and truly scrambled. I’d scrambled it. And I felt like shit standing there, looking at him.
‘Much trouble?’ I asked Twinkletoes.
‘Nope. They was very lock-way-shus. Or this one was . . .’ He pointed to the redhead with the busted jaw. ‘I didn’t need to do nothing. By the time Doc Banks was finished resetting his jaw, he would have sold his granny down the Clyde. Doc gave them something after I’d finished with them. An injection to kill the pain and they’ve been as quiet as church mice since.’
Cohen tapped me on the elbow. ‘We need to talk.’
He steered me to the corner of the warehouse and the shed-type office. Pops Loeb and two of Cohen’s men sat smoking and arguing loudly but heatlessly about something. The air was blue-thick with tobacco smoke, mainly from the stump of stogie that Pops was chewing on. The walls were covered with various pinned-up bills of lading, delivery schedules, freight notes, and a calendar with a brunette spilling out of her bikini. There was a battered old sofa in one corner, on which the two younger men were sitting.
‘Could you give us a minute, boys, please? Maybe you could keep an eye on our guests and ask Mr McBride to join us? Thanks. Pops, you hang around.’ It was something that I’d noticed about Cohen before: he was invariably polite and courteous, even to his hired thugs. I’d often wondered if, during his time as a bank robber, the demand notes he’d handed bank tellers had had an apologetic addendum: PS Sorry about the interruption to your routine. Thank you so much for the cash and your kind cooperation.
‘The guy whose jaw you busted told Twinkletoes everything you need to know,’ he said when the two heavies had left. ‘He told us everything through gritted teeth, though. After Doc Banks stitched up his face and reset his jaw, he bound him up tight and told him to keep his teeth together until he gets to a hospital and has his jaw wired. Or whatever teeth you left him with.’
The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5 Page 25
