The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5

by Craig Russell

  ‘Sit down, gentlemen,’ I said. ‘And we can begin the entertainment.’

  *

  Findlay, still hooded, gave a start when I opened the toilet door. I hauled him to his feet and led him through to the cabin, pushing him down into the seat.

  ‘I’ve some friends over,’ I said. ‘I’d like you to entertain them, do some of your act.’

  ‘What? Who’s there?’ asked Findlay from beneath his hood.

  ‘But first,’ I said, ignoring him, ‘let’s talk about this ledger with the negatives. This is the ledger you’ve had everyone searching for, when you had it all the time. Your insurance policy. A red morocco ledger. The ledger that Tommy Quaid stole from your safe. How come you’ve got it?’

  ‘I kept it separate from the other stuff, for safety, like you said. It was just the prints and the diary that went missing.’

  ‘But the ledger? Described exactly like this one. Tommy Quaid did take it from the safe.’

  The canvas hood moved and I guessed Findlay was shaking his head. ‘My wife bought me the ledgers when we were on holiday. Two identical notebooks in red morocco. I told Arbuthnot, MacIntyre and the others that Quaid and Wilson had stolen the ledger with the negatives.’

  ‘So what was in the other ledger – the one Tommy took?’

  ‘Accounts. Details of takings from each of the shows to make sure I wasn’t short-changed by the theatres. Nothing more. Honest. I swear it. But as long as the others couldn’t find it, they didn’t know I still had the negatives.’

  I sat for a minute, thinking about Jimmy Wilson, Davey Wilson, Davey Wilson’s wife; about carefully made plans for a future that would never come. I resisted the urgent impulse I had to beat Findlay senseless. Instead I said, ‘Okay. Do your act.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, do your act.’

  ‘What, now? Are you mad?’ Beneath the hood, Findlay’s voice was both frightened and incredulous.

  I picked up the gun and held it to his head, hard enough for him to feel it through the canvas.

  ‘Do your act. Do the routine you did tonight, you know, the stuff about the Jews. Tell us the one about the gas bill.’

  He hesitated and I jabbed the gun harder against his head.

  In a halting, frightened voice, Frantic Frank Findlay ran through his material, reciting it without emphasis, without performance, as if reading a grocery list. If he missed anything out, I reminded him of it and made him tell it.

  When he was finished his anti-Semitic routine, I picked up the ledger and slipped it into my pocket and stood up to leave. As I did so, I snatched the canvas hood from his head. He blinked, adjusting to the light, then he saw Handsome Jonny Cohen sitting opposite him, flanked by two Jewish heavies in mohair suits.

  As I made my way up to the deck and the fresh night air, I heard Jonny say to Findlay in a quiet, almost friendly voice: ‘It’s a nice night for a little moonlight sail.’

  6

  Twinkletoes McBride and Tony the Pole came round to my place early the following day, as we’d arranged. I ran through what had happened the previous night and told them that our list was now one name shorter. The most important name.

  I told them about the ledger and the negatives.

  ‘Tony, you have all kinds of contacts. I need someone to print out these pictures, three sets of each. But the contents of these pictures would turn the strongest stomach and it has to be someone who understands that we’re trying to stop this filth, not promote it – otherwise even the most hardened crook would turn us over to the police.’

  ‘Jeez, Lennogs – zat’s no gonna be easy. Like you zay, vizz vaht iz in zees pictures. I’ll need to think aboud it.’

  ‘We don’t have a lot of time, Tony.’

  ‘I’ll do it.’

  We both turned to McBride.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ he repeated. ‘I’ve got all the equipment, an enlarger and everything. In the spare bedroom.’

  Tony and I still looked at him, stunned.

  ‘It’s my hobby,’ he explained. ‘Photography. Wildlife. Birds, mainly. It’s very therry-pew-tick.’

  It still took me a moment to wrap my mind around the concept of Twinkletoes McBride discussing technique with Ansel Adams. ‘You can do this okay?’

  ‘I’ll take them now. Give me a couple of hours.’

  I needed to hang on to the ledger, so I had taken the negatives out and placed them in a white envelope. I handed it to Twinkletoes then turned to Tony. ‘Once we have the extra prints, can you do the break-in I was talking about?’

  ‘Sure . . .’ Tony beamed. ‘Izznae a problem.’

  ‘Okay, we’ll meet back here at noon. That enough time, Twinkle?’

  McBride nodded his Easter Island head.

  *

  I drove down to Newton Mearns and spent an hour with Jennifer. We talked about everything else other than the business at hand, then, after a while, I told her that the man who had ordered Tommy’s death had been dealt with.

  ‘Will it soon be over?’ she asked.

  ‘Very soon. Then we can get on with our lives. In fact, when all of this crap is done with, that’s something I want to talk to you about.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ she said, and smiled.

  *

  I met with Jonny Cohen before leaving.

  ‘Everything go okay last night?’ I asked.

  ‘No problems. I got one of the boys to drive Findlay’s car to Inverkip. We used a dinghy to get back to shore. Your turn now. You ready?’

  I nodded. ‘Can I use your 'phone?’

  *

  I made sure I was there a full half-hour before the agreed time. I sat in Quiet Tommy Quaid’s lounge and smoked a cigarette, taking the time to remember some of the times I’d had with him; some of the conversations we’d had, some of the women we’d picked up, some of the benders we’d gone on. I thought about him because of the time I now occupied, not the space. Tommy’s flat still gave me no feeling of his presence.

  I’d left the door between the living room and the hall open and when there was a knock on the outer door, I called out that it was unlocked and to come in. Tarnish did so. Cautiously. His two men, Fraser and Mayhew, followed him in.

  ‘I asked on the 'phone if you could come alone,’ I said, without surprise or annoyance. ‘I thought we could talk privately.’

  ‘Do you have it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The ledger,’ he said. ‘On the telephone you said you’d tracked down McNaught and you had the ledger and the negatives.’

  ‘Oh, of course . . .’ I smiled and took the ledger out of my pocket. I held it, rubbing the tooled surface of the cover with my thumb. ‘Beautiful leatherwork,’ I said.

  Tarnish didn’t sit, instead remained standing, flanked by his men. ‘May I see it?’

  ‘Sure . . .’ I didn’t get up but tossed the red leather notebook onto the surface of the table. Sighing, Tarnish leaned over and picked it up. He turned to the others and smiled. The smile faded as he flicked through the notebook.

  ‘Where are the negatives?’

  ‘Oh those . . . I’m having several sets of prints made up. One set is going to be found scattered over the desk of the Solicitor General, Donald Arbuthnot, when the police break into his study to find he couldn’t live with the shame and committed suicide.’

  ‘When did he commit suicide?’ Tarnish did his best to hide his shock.

  ‘Oh, he hasn’t, yet. He doesn’t even know that he’s going to do it. But it will happen tonight. I’m going to pay him a visit and put the idea – or something – into his head. A Polish friend of mine who’s good with locks is going to make sure I surprise him.’

  Tarnish looked relieved. ‘Who’s got the negatives now?’

  ‘They’re safe.’

  Tarnish sighed again, reached into his jacket and pulled out a revolver. ‘This is getting tiresome. I want all the prints and all the negatives, and you’re going to tell me where to find them. Trust me, it’
s better that you tell me now. Fraser and Mayhew here will get it out of you anyway and it will be very unpleasant.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘I saw their handiwork on Pops Loeb.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The old guy you did a number on in Jonny Cohen’s Clarkston warehouse.’

  Tarnish smiled, raising an eyebrow in admiration of my deductive skills. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘You described the ledger as having a red morocco cover. I didn’t know it had a red morocco cover. All I’d been told was that it had a red leather cover. Of course, it could have been an innocent assumption on your part, but it was as if someone else had described what you were looking for. And I had Twinkletoes McBride watch my back. He saw you get into the same blue van with the Home Office plates that had followed us on the bank run. So which department do you work for?’

  ‘This is unofficial,’ said Tarnish. ‘Or official-unofficial, if you know what I mean. There has to be a certain order to things; a certain sense of who’s in charge and who isn’t. Sometimes being in charge makes people feel that they can do anything, get away with anything. My job is to clear up after them. Protect the realm by protecting them. In a way, they’re right: they can get away with anything. I was brought up specially for this job because I’d been Quaid’s commanding officer.’

  ‘Which one of you killed Tommy?’

  ‘I’m afraid I did,’ said Tarnish. ‘Shame really, I really did like Quiet Tommy Quaid.’

  ‘Everyone did.’

  ‘He was so surprised,’ said Tarnish. ‘Confused, when he saw me up there on the roof. It made it easier. Now, where do I find the negatives?’

  ‘You don’t,’ I said and nodded past Tarnish.

  All three men turned around to see Jonny Cohen and his two men, who had been waiting in the bathroom and had sneaked along the hall while I’d talked with Tarnish. Each of them was pointing the armed-robber’s weapon of choice, a sawn-off shotgun. I stepped forward and snatched the revolver from Tarnish’s hand, then frisked and disarmed the other two. Between us, we tied their hands behind their backs.

  ‘You can’t seriously think you’ll get away with this,’ said Tarnish. ‘These people own you. They own everyone—’

  I shut him up with insulating tape across his mouth.

  ‘Bring the van around to the front,’ Jonny said to one of his men. ‘When the street’s clear, we’ll get them out.’

  I stepped up to Tarnish, almost nose to nose. ‘I swore I would kill the man who killed Tommy. That I would get even for him; repay like with like, an eye for an eye. But you gave Tommy a quick, quiet death and I’d feel obliged to do the same for you. An eye for an eye – it’s very Old Testament and so is Jonny here. Pops Loeb didn’t have a quiet death at all. That’s the debt I think you should pay. I promised Jonny that I’d let him settle accounts. I’m afraid you and your men are in for a somewhat biblical experience. You see, Pops Loeb really was like a father to Jonny . . .’

  *

  After Jonny and the others were gone, I sat for a while and again thought about Tommy. The dust jacket from The Outsider was folded up inside my pocket; I took it out and again read Tommy’s secret last testament, written in faint yellow pencil, explaining about the night he and Jimmy Wilson had broken into Frankie Findlay’s house, and what they had found. He had avoided naming me, in case someone else found the letter, but explained he had written it after I had left that night. I reread the last two paragraphs:

  Again, I’m sorry for bringing you into this. But it has to be a man like you to put at least some of this shite right. It has to be your kind of justice. There is no bad you can do that matches the evil these bastards have done.

  My old da was right after all. He was right to spend his life deep in the dark and the dust of a mine. It’s cleaner and more honest down there. And you are away from the crap people do to each other.

  From one Outsider to another, I wish you the very best of luck.

  Do what you have to do.

  Your friend,

  Tommy

  7

  The more skeletons that tumble out of the cupboard, the deeper you have to dig to bury them; and sometimes there’s just not enough dirt to do it. So you have to decide which bones to leave out in the open. The thing of it is, if you pile a scandal on a scandal on a scandal, then it’s difficult to cover everything up. In Solicitor General Donald Arbuthnot’s case, the manner of his death couldn’t be hidden from the public. Although the press made no mention of the suicide to start with, it became a matter of public record that the law officer had taken his own life.

  It turned out that I didn’t have to deal with Arbuthnot personally. When Twinkletoes McBride returned with the prints he’d made from the recovered negatives, he looked a broken man. It was odd to see a mountain of a man, someone who had worked as an enforcer and torturer, crumble under the weight of what the pictures contained.

  So Tony the Pole had broken in and Twinkle had put the gun to Arbuthnot’s head and pulled the trigger. Tony had typed out on Arbuthnot’s typewriter the confession I had written down.

  The story that was put about was that Arbuthnot had struggled privately with alcoholism for some time and decided to take the gentleman’s way out before disgracing his career and family. No mention was ever made, except probably in hushed whispers in police muster rooms, of the images found scattered on his desk next to his slumped body. Nor was his typewritten but unsigned confession-cum-suicide note naming all of the other great and good personages involved in the pederast ring.

  There were, however, a number of surprise retirements and resignations – and two by-elections – over the next couple of months. But no arrests, no prosecutions, no scandals. No justice.

  And that, to me and my friends, just didn’t seem right.

  Particularly galling was the way that Monsignor Sullivan, far from being exposed and punished, actually secured his elevation to cardinal. Archie McClelland reckoned it was because the Catholic Church already had the machinery in place for keeping a lid on this kind of scandal.

  I met with Jonny Cohen and we chatted about the injustice of Sullivan not only getting off scot-free, but how powerless we were to do anything about it. Jonny Cohen had looked at me meaningfully when he’d said: ‘Maybe he’ll get his reward in heaven.’

  Two weeks later the clergyman was found hanged in his chambers. Suicide was anathema to the church, but it was better than admitting that the freshly minted cardinal had been found naked from the waist down apart from a floral-design garter belt, women’s fishnet stockings and feather-fluffed high-heeled slippers. The automatic assumption would have been that Sullivan had died accidentally while committing some kind of auto-erotic act. This suspicion was probably given added weight by the fact that the priest had been stiff in more than one way. Truth was that post-mortem priapism was a common feature every hangman was familiar with, but the combination of the ladies’ underthings and a serious stiffy must have made a big impression on those who found him.

  Those were the bones that had to be hidden in Sullivan’s case; the greater scandal that had to be concealed.

  The church hid all the details of Sullivan’s death from the press, even from the police who attended, by which time the clergyman’s state of dress had been suitably adjusted. They were hidden from everyone. So how did I come to know?

  Handsome Jonny Cohen told me.

  *

  Another mystery that was unexpectedly solved was that of who had jumped me that night outside the pub. It turned out to have nothing to do with Tommy Quaid.

  Jennifer and I started to fulfil our promise of a normal relationship. About a week after everything had been dealt with, I took her out for dinner and a show in the West End. I was parking outside the restaurant when I saw a taxi pull up across the street and Irene Christie got out, all glammed up for a night out. A heavy-built, joyless-looking man, who I knew instantly was her husband, got out of the taxi behind her. The same thought that had stru
ck me that night hit me again: fuck-me-he’s-the-spit-of-Victor-McLaglen.

  *

  It took them three days to find Frankie Findlay’s drifting yacht. There was a heavy smudge of blood on the yacht’s boom, which suggested that it had swung and struck Findlay on the head, knocking him into the water. His body was never found, and everyone was mystified as to why he had suddenly left the police function he’d been attending, gone home and changed out of his evening suit, which lay scattered on the bedroom floor. His wife confirmed that his sailing clothes were missing. When his car was found abandoned at the quayside and his boat missing, they had started a sea search for him.

  It was all very mysterious, but when rumours started to circulate about Findlay’s being one of the names on Arbuthnot’s list, the whole thing was dropped.

  Newly retired Chief Inspector Bob MacIntyre didn’t get a chance to enjoy much of his retirement. His wife had expressed concern about his increasingly anxious state of mind, his constantly seeming preoccupied, which caused him to drink even more heavily than usual. He was making his way home from his local Masonic Club, apparently the worse for wear, when he fell victim to a hit-and-run driver while crossing a deserted street. Neither the vehicle that hit him nor its driver were ever traced. Jock Ferguson told me that the boys who attended the scene said that MacIntyre must have been hit by something the size of a van or truck.

  The word ‘mince’ had been used.

  What was confusing was that it looked almost as if the vehicle had reversed back over MacIntyre after hitting him, but for some reason this wasn’t pursued and it was treated as an accident.

  We hadn’t gotten around to discussing what should happen to the retired Special Branch man, so I asked Jonny Cohen and the others if they had been responsible for MacIntyre’s death, but no one knew anything about it.

  It would have appeared that we weren’t the only ones doing some housekeeping.

  With Findlay, Sullivan, Arbuthnot and MacIntyre dead, and with the other names on the list disappearing from public life, Jonny Cohen, Twinkletoes, Archie and I all got together at Tony the Pole’s transport caff. Rather than feeling celebratory, we were all surprisingly subdued: there really weren’t any winners in a game like this, just those left still standing.