Fair Friday

by Peter Turnbull

  ‘What did you shout?’

  ‘I said I’d batter her. I said if she went on like that I’d swing for her.’ He swallowed. ‘Then she started screaming, really screaming, at me. The people in the other room, the outside waiting-room came in and heard me. Also Mr Spicer came out of his office. The girl was pointing at me and said, “That thing threatened me.” I remember that. I started to talk to Mr Spicer but he yelled at me to get out. So I left.’

  ‘Then…’ nudged Donoghue.

  ‘Next day at the guest-house, early, about eight, you have to be out by nine, the woman who runs the place tells me my brother’s on the phone for me and shouts at me for having personal calls. She was away before I could tell her I didn’t have no brother. Well, when I gets on the phone it was Mr Spicer. He says he has to meet me to discuss my case and asks if I knew where the Botanical Gardens were. I said I did, so he tells me to meet him in this lane behind the gardens at eleven o’clock that night. He told me how to get to it, it was opposite a garage.’

  ‘Didn’t you think that was a strange thing to request?

  ‘Aye, so I did, but when somebody like your solicitor tells you to do something you do it, less you want deeper trouble, and I didn’t want to go inside in the summer

  ‘So you went?’

  ‘Aye. It was a Fair Friday night. That didn’t mean much to me but the whole city seemed to be drunk. I had some money and I had a bit of whisky in me.’

  ‘Do you remember what happened?’

  ‘I think so.’ Gilheaney paused for a moment. ‘Well, it was light, you know how in Scotland it stays light really late in the summertime?’

  Donoghue nodded.

  ‘Well, it was like that. Late, but I could see a long way, it was really warm and the plants in the gardens were smelling very strong. I remember the evening well, it was the last time I was a free man. I found the lane and stood at the entrance. A few cars went by but I didn’t see Mr Spicer so I walked down the lane and I saw these legs.’

  ‘Legs?’

  ‘Woman’s legs, sticking out of the bushes. So I went over, she was lying on her front, I turned her over and she was all bloody with a knife sticking out of her middle, so I pulled it out and ran to get some help. I didn’t run far because a police van pulled up at the side of me.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Donoghue nodded slowly. He had read the file on the murder and asked, ‘I understand there was some question of you being in possession of the girl’s belongings?’

  ‘You mean the keyring?’

  Donoghue grunted.

  ‘Mr Spicer gave them to me. In that long session I had with him, at the end he said he was clearing out some drawers and did I have use for a purse. So I said aye, it gave me somewhere to keep my money. So he gave it to me. It was a small purse and keyring combined.’

  ‘Did you keep the keys?’

  ‘Yes, I left them on. It made me feel important to have keys in my pocket.’

  ‘I didn’t occur to you that it was a strange thing for a solicitor to do, give a client a purse with a bunch of keys attached to them?’

  ‘No. He told me the reason.’

  In the car returning to Glasgow Donoghue did not talk to Sussock, he was pondering on the case for the prosecution against Jack ‘the Granite’ Gilheaney, alleged perpetrator of the notorious Fair Friday murder. Indicated at the instance of Her Majesty’s Advocate, defendant is a man with a long criminal history with previous convictions for violence. Defendant was heard to threaten the life of the deceased the day prior to the murder. Defendant was apprehended fleeing the scene of the crime still in possession of the murder weapon. Defendant was found to be in possession of victim’s purse containing x pounds and y pence, and was also found to be in possession of victim’s house keys.

  The long bungalow which stood in solitary splendour was in fact called the Bar J but otherwise it was as King described it. A white gate and then a drive which hooked around a pond, finishing in an open area in front of the house. The bungalow was the same colour as the gate, pure virgin white, uncomfortably clinical. An off-white or a cream colour which hinted at a degree of self-knowledge would have put Montgomerie more at ease. He was disturbed by Tiny Jardine’s choice of colour for his house, he felt it a bit like Gipsy Rose Lee shuffling along the aisle in a stiff white gown, blushing behind a posy of flowers. He was also disturbed because he didn’t know what he was doing, standing there in front of the door. Nobody had told him to interview Tiny Jardine, nobody knew where he was, he did not know what he was going to say. He should at that moment be in the West End checking out the bars for Jug and Steamroller. He decided to ring the bell once, just once, and then leave if nobody heard it. He pressed the button, which to his dismay resulted in a long peel of bells which chimed through the house, and set at least three dogs barking.

  The door was opened by a tough-looking bruiser who Montgomerie felt was used to remaining vertical after punch-ups. He looked down at Montgomerie, amused, curious, as to the identity of the person who had the effrontery to drive up to the front door and set the dogs off.

  ‘Police,’ said Montgomerie. He flashed his ID.

  The man’s face hardened. His eyes got cold, he pulled his shoulders back and looked like a villain.

  ‘I’d like to talk to Tiny,’ said Montgomerie, looking up at the thing holding the door with fleshy paws. Nicotine-stained, too, noted Montgomerie.

  ‘What about?’ The man spoke slowly.

  ‘That’s between me and him.’

  ‘I’ll have to check with the boss,’ said the man. He laboured each word but Montgomerie had the impression he was talking as fast as possible.

  ‘Go check,’ said Montgomerie. ‘I’ll wait here.’

  ‘You wait here,’ said the man. ‘I’ll go check.’ He shut the door behind him.

  Montgomerie looked around him. The lawn was vast and neatly tended, cut close, but sprouting daisies here and there. The pond had water-lilies floating and the whole spread was fenced off with parallel planks running between posts. He turned his gaze back to the house. At either side of the door stood two little figures of cowboys, about two feet high, cast in plaster and brightly painted. Montgomerie reached down and grabbed the sand-coloured Stetson of one of the figures and tipped it backwards. A door key was lying under the base of the figure.

  ‘Cowpoke never knows what he’s a sittin’ on,’ drawled Montgomerie.

  The man lumbered back to the front door and pulled it wide. ‘Boss says you can come in,’ said the man. ‘He’s resting, says you have to join him for a beer.’

  He led Montgomerie through the house. The floor was wood, the walls were plaster, prints of the old West hung everywhere.

  ‘My name’s Tex,’ said the man.

  ‘Had to be,’ murmured Montgomerie. ‘The boss give you that handle, or is it original?’

  ‘The boss,’ said Tex, descending a short flight of stairs, a manoeuvre in which he found difficulty retaining his balance, not unlike, thought Montgomerie, a grizzly bear in the Grand Tetons. Montgomerie also took each step with care, to ease the pain in his ribs. ‘Boss likes cowboys and that, my real name’s Stephen, I used to stay in Drumchapel. I used to hang around with the Mad Spaniard till he was filled in one night. You’re lucky, the boss is in a good mood today.’

  ‘He gets bad moods?’ asked Montgomerie, glancing at the print of Remington’s “Battle for the Waterhole” as he walked by it.

  ‘Oh, yeah. When the boss is in a bad mood he just grabs the nearest thing to him and chucks it. Last week he threw one of the girls through the window.’

  The corridor opened out into a lounge. There were chairs and settees in an old-fashioned design with the backs held to the sides with cords, an open hearth in which lay the remains of a small wood fire; a pair of horns from a bull were pinned to the wall and there were guns arranged in a rack. The walls were of brick painted over. Two girls were in the room, dressed in cowgirl outfits, short leather mini skirts, waistcoats, boots and stetsons t
ipped back on their heads, smiling transparently. Tiny Jardine sat on one of the settees, holding a glass of beer in his hands. He was dressed in a housecoat and was probably a little taller than he was wide. When Montgomerie came into the room Tiny Jardine smiled like a hungry cougar sizing up a foal.

  ‘This is the boss,’ said Tex. ‘Boss, this is the polis.’

  ‘Hi, pardner,’ said Tiny. ‘Sorry I ain’t dressed proper but I jus’ come in from the pool.’ As he said it the sound of a splash followed by female laughter echoed down one of the corridors leading off the lounge.

  ‘Oh, I quite understand,’ said Montgomerie, suddenly feeling very British, like he found he did when on package holidays. ‘I’m sorry I called unexpectedly.’

  ‘I wasn’t busy.’ Tiny continued to smile. ‘Susie, go fix our guest a drink.’

  ‘I…’ began Montgomerie but was silenced by Tiny’s teeth.

  ‘No man comes in my house and doesn’t get a drink, pardner.’

  Susie stood, looking like a young Scottish lassie acting out a rich man’s fantasies, and looking as though the only range she had been near was the one in the kitchen. She walked with a sexy walk through some hanging beads and down a corridor marked ‘Saloon’. Another corridor was marked ‘Chuck Wagon’. The corridor which led to the swimming pool wasn’t marked at all, but then that led to the twentieth century, heated, chlorinated water, and sunbeds.

  ‘Some place you have here,’ said Montgomerie.

  ‘Built it myself.’

  ‘With your own two hands?’ said Montgomerie, pouring ice on to the situation. ‘Or do you mean it was built to your specifications by an army of coolies?’

  ‘Now, son…’ Tiny still smiled but no longer with enthusiasm. Montgomerie let it rest there. He wanted a dialogue, but he didn’t want to be Tiny’s best buddie, especially after knowing him for all of sixty seconds. ‘Been here long?’ he asked.

  ‘Here’s your beer,’ said Tiny as Susie wriggled through the beads, holding a tray containing a glass of lager. ‘Take the weight off your feet, pardner.’ Then Tiny smiled again, just to let Montgomerie know he wasn’t inviting him to do anything.

  Montgomerie sank into the settee, which he found lower and more comfortable than he’d imagined. He took the lager from the tray and sipped it. It was served chilled, American style.

  ‘Those real?’ he asked, nodded to the collection of rifles and revolvers on the wall.

  ‘Imitations, pardner,’ said Tiny, watching Susie walk past him on her way back to the Saloon. The other girl also left the room with Susie, silently and without fuss: leaving the men to talk men talk. Tiny turned back to Montgomerie. ‘The irons are real, though.’

  ‘Irons?’

  ‘By the fire. Branding irons. I brought them back from a trip I made a few years ago. Belonged to a ranch called the Split R.’

  Montgomerie twisted in his seat and saw the irons: long metal bars lying in front of hearth. He had seen them as he came into the room and in his naivety in such matters had assumed them to be two common or garden very British pokers. He sipped his lager and smiled, turning back to face Tiny.

  ‘What can I do for you, pardner?’ smiled Tiny Jardine. ‘What brought you here?’

  ‘I don’t honestly know,’ said Montgomerie truthfully, and feeling that he wanted to be a million miles away.

  ‘Well, pardner, that means we have a problem. I like entertaining but my home isn’t exactly open to the public’

  ‘Well…’ Montgomerie felt his throat constrict.

  ‘Take your time, pardner.’ Tiny Jardine’s teeth flashed. He drank from his glass. ‘Take some beer…you want some more beer?’

  Montgomerie shook his head. It was rapidly and crushingly dawning on him that walking up to Tiny’s front door wasn’t exactly the most sensible thing he had done in his career, which itself hadn’t been exactly unchequered. If there was one thing he had excelled at, it it was getting himself into a mess, frequently, and the only thing he now expected to get out of this, his latest act of impetuosity, was his P45 with his next pay advice. He drank some more lager and didn’t feel himself the biggest, most sensible police officer in the West of Scotland.

  ‘See, pardner,’ said Tiny, ‘I reckon you got to be here for a reason, so it’s either official or criminal, ’cos it certainly isn’t going to be personal. I don’t have dicks in my address book. You’re not asking any questions so I guess it’s one thing. You sure have a brass neck though, I usually have to make the first approach. Anyway, what is it, mortgage round your neck, woman trouble? How much do you want? Think of a number and halve it and then tell me what I get in return.’

  Montgomerie choked on his lager.

  ‘Take it easy, son. It’s hard the first time. You’re straight CID, aren’t you, not in the Drug Squad? No? Pity.’

  I’m not on the take, Jardine.’ Montgomerie stood, hissing like a cornered cat, but he knew the screw was already in and turning.

  ‘Sure you’re not, son.’ Tiny Jardine smiled.

  Montgomerie threw his glass away to his side. It smashed against the gun rack. ‘I’m investigating a murder,’ he snarled. ‘You’re implicated, Jardine.’

  ‘Oh aye? So how do you work that one out, pardner?’

  ‘We’ve traced the link,’ Montgomerie was still shaking with rage. ‘From Neutron John McCusker to Spicer to you.’

  ‘Is that right, son?’ Tiny Jardine remained seated and looked up at Montgomerie. ‘That is interesting. A guy called Spicer, you say?’

  ‘Don’t come that with me, Jardine. I’m going to nail you.’

  ‘Yes, yes. I realize we have to say that. Shall we say a hundred quid a week as a retainer?’

  Leaving Tiny Jardine’s house was something that Montgomerie could never recall accurately. He just had a disjointed, dreamlike memory of crashing from side to side down the corridor, flinging a door open, with a deep belly laugh resounding behind him.

  In the car his legs were jelly and his grip weak. He stopped at the verge and walked up the road for a mile before returning to the car. He leaned forward and rested his forehead on the steering-wheel. The least damaging thing he had just done had been to wreck the entire investigation. A passing motorist would think he was consulting a road map, or maybe suffering a little from car sickness.

  King went to the address which Donoghue had given him. It was a basement flat in Clousten Street, G20. Samantha Simonds still lived there. He pressed the bell.

  ‘I didn’t care for her much, Mr King,’ said Ms Simonds. ‘I have my girl-friends, you understand, but snotty little Annie wasn’t one of them. She liked the boys. The bigger the car the better she liked them. “Boys”, I say. Darling, some of them were, as they say, old enough to be her daddy.’

  Samantha Simonds was a short stocky woman who King guessed to be about forty-five. She had walked in front of him down the long corridor to the sitting-room where two women were sitting on the floor sewing. Samantha Simonds clapped her hands and said ‘Shoo’ as she entered the room and the two women immediately left. She sat in a leather armchair and reached for a heavy briar pipe. She smoked it, looking intently at King, daring him to smirk.

  ‘Snotty?’ said King.

  ‘As snotty as hell,’ growled the woman, pulling strongly on the pipe. ‘She must have thought her double-barrelled name and private education counted for something. Well, it didn’t cut any ice in here, not while I was around.’

  ‘Double-barrelled?’

  ‘Forbes-McDonald. Miss Anne Forbes-McDonald from Edinburgh, if you please,’ said Samantha Simonds in a mock Morningside accent, which King had to admit wasn’t a bad stab and which suggested that Samantha Simonds wasn’t wholly gin-alley raised herself. ‘Educated in a private day school because Daddy didn’t agree with boarding but doesn’t like the state system. Daddy, you understand, is a banker. Not any banker, you understand, but a senior manager in the Bank of Scotland.’

  ‘I see,’ said King. ‘I gather you two didn’t hit i
t off?’

  ‘I hated the posh little calculating cow.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, don’t ask stupid bloody questions. I just did.’

  ‘I take it that you don’t own this pad?’

  ‘I don’t, dammit. If I did Anne bloody what’s-her-name wouldn’t have got her face in here.’

  ‘Figures,’ said King.

  ‘What do you mean by that, cop?’

  ‘Simply that your hostility is apparent,’ said King, trying to cool a rapidly heating situation. ‘Do you think the feeling was mutual?’

  ‘Probably. The cow hated anybody who was for the people.’

  ‘You’re for the people?’

  ‘Right. Superman is a myth. Power to the people. Join the people’s crusade, comrade.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ said King. ‘I’ve got a job to do.’

  ‘Cops!’ She struck a match and put it to her pipe even though the inferno already in the bowl didn’t need any help.

  ‘What did posh little Annie do for a living? How did she put bread on her table?’

  ‘Worked for a solicitor. She didn’t need to, that was obvious.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well, she couldn’t have afforded her lifestyle on her spending money salary. I mean her clothes, she practically bought out Fraser’s each and every Saturday. So the extra money came from Daddy, had to, the senior manager in the Royal Bank, remember?’ King nodded.

  ‘Did you ever meet her employer?’

  ‘Spicer was his name—can’t forget that, thin face like a rat with a fixed grin and underdeveloped arm. She sucked on her pipe and blew out some grey bitter-smelling smoke. ‘They didn’t get on. He came here one night and they had a real set-to.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Christ’s sake, I don’t know. All this was five years ago.’

  ‘One year before she died, two days before?’

  ‘Oh I see.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘A year, maybe more. Throughout that last year or eighteen months she went to work like she was going to war.’

  ‘What do you mean?’