‘I don’t know. Honest. But this guy was afraid of Tam. The other guy, the big fat foreigner, didn’t seem to be, and Jackie-fucking-Gillespie’s scared of nobody.’
I left Bobby in the flat and headed back out onto the street. I thought about what he’d told me. The foreigner and the guy with the droopy eye Bobby had mentioned probably weren’t significant. Just business. But Jimmy Wallace intrigued me. It was a name I hadn’t heard before, but from what Bobby had said that wasn’t surprising. He hadn’t been an active member of the McGahern crew, but it seemed as if he’d been on the payroll. I also thought that Bobby had dismissed him too easily as the killer. He may have been a wanker, as Bobby had put it, but as an ex-Desert Rat it was a safe bet that he knew how to handle himself a hell of a lot better than Bobby or his chums could. It was also quite likely that Wallace had killed during his active service. And the question remained as to why he had only cleared out when Frankie died and not when his patron, Tam, had been rubbed.
That wasn’t all that jarred with me. The unhurried manner of the killers bothered me. It was professional. If you run or speed off in a car from a killing, people get your number or clock enough to give a description. If you’re in no hurry, onlookers tend not to look on, but keep their heads down in case you haven’t finished shooting. And if you seem cool and unworried, then potential witnesses are afraid you may come back for them at a later date if they talk.
Very professional indeed. Just like the going over my office had been given.
CHAPTER FIVE
It’s difficult to stay lost in Glasgow. Like Jock Ferguson had said to me, it wasn’t really a city, just a giant village. But Wilma Marshall was making a decent job of it. I had tracked down her family home: parents and two sisters squeezed into a two-roomed flat in a rat-warren of tenements, with a toilet shared by three more families on the stair landing. The Marshall home could almost have been described as a slum: all it needed was a little fixing up to qualify. Nearly three-quarters of Glasgow’s homes could have been described the same way. It was the kind of place a girl would do anything to get away from. It was the kind of place that gave birth to the kind of vicious ambition that had driven generations of Glasgow hardmen and gangsters. And maybe a couple of businessmen.
I didn’t approach the Marshall family: the risk of them going straight to the police, if that was who had Wilma, was too great. I couldn’t even stake out their flat: Glasgow tenements teemed with life, human and otherwise, and there would be too many eyes watching the constant coming and going and my car, or just me, would stick out like a sore thumb on the street outside.
But, like I said, Glasgow is not a place to stay lost in.
It was a Friday afternoon that I saw her in Sauchiehall Street. Not Wilma Marshall, whom I should have been looking for, but Lillian Andrews, the wife of the nervous little businessman with the damp handshake and the carnation and the unconvincing story to cover up her disappearance and sudden reappearance. I had studied the photograph Andrews had given me, and I recognized Lillian Andrews instantly. She was tallish with dark hair and a full mouth lipsticked deep red. The expensive cloth of the tailored jacket and pencil skirt cleaved to her deadly curves. The fox-fur stole around her shoulders would have cost more than the average Glaswegian earns in a year. Her features were regular but short of beautiful. However Lillian Andrews was without doubt one of the most sexually attractive women I had ever seen. She oozed sex-appeal from every pore.
She caught me looking at her as I passed her in the street and her full lips twitched a small smile. Not encouragement, but acknowledgement of the only natural response a warm-blooded male could have to her. Of course she didn’t recognize me, having no idea that I was the man her husband had hired and then un-hired to find her. But I dodged her eyes. I didn’t know why: I was off the case and she was clearly no longer missing, but for some reason I hadn’t wanted her to notice me.
Lillian was with a female friend, a shorter woman with gold-blonde demi-waved hair. Lillian Andrews’s companion was almost as attractive but not quite as expensively tailored as she was. I turned to look into one of the shop windows, still sparse despite rationing having been almost completely lifted: austerity was a state of mind that seemed to linger with dark comfort in the Scottish psyche. I waited until they were about twenty yards away and a reasonable number of shoppers had curtained me before I started to follow them.
I managed to stick with the two women, unseen, for a couple of hours’ shopping. I was able to tail them through the larger stores, like Copland and Lye, but most of the time I hung around outside the stores, standing across the street and smoking, watching and waiting for them to come out of the main entrances. It was taking up my time and it was boring. But there are some things that just ring false and then nag away at you like a dull toothache. John Andrews paying me off was one of them. The other thing was that John and Lillian Andrews were the oddest odd couple I had seen. I knew that women often married for money, but Lillian Andrews could have set her sights much higher, even in Glasgow.
The two women disappeared into Coupar’s Furs for an age and when they came out the blonde was gleefully clutching a bulky, ribbon-wrapped package. It was difficult to read from across the road, but her expression conveyed more than joy at a purchase; I got the feeling she had been gifted it.
It started to get dark and I didn’t need to worry about having other shoppers to conceal me. The streets began to lurk behind a curtain of dense fog. Glasgow’s industry, the million-plus coal fires and its damp, clinging climate made it second only to London for the density and deadliness of its smog. Many babies had been conceived behind the damp curtain of Glasgow’s smog, but even more had been smothered in its shroud. The year before had been the worst on record for smog deaths in industrial cities throughout Britain, and the Great Smog in London had killed a thousand. There was talk of a Clean Air Act, but nothing had yet been done. Tonight, as happened every night, the smog descended on the city: more than one soul would depart this world for the want of a decent breath.
I had developed a sixth sense about the smog: I could always feel its grip on my lungs a good half-hour before it really settled in. The streetlights came on but were reduced to grey-wreathed glimmers. I tugged up the collar of my coat and pulled the brim of my hat low. The smog could conceal me, but it could also conceal those I followed. I would need to get closer.
Lillian Andrews kissed her friend goodbye and mounted a tram. I followed her onto the tram but sat as far back in the carriage as I could and kept the brim of my hat angled in her direction. She dismounted at the Trongate. I waited a few moments and a hundred yards before jumping off the moving tram, the conductress shouting something in unintelligible Glaswegian after me. The smog was now so dense that I could only see a matter of feet ahead. I had to move fast to get close enough to home in on the clacking of her heels on the cobbles, as she headed towards the Merchant City.
I lost her.
I stopped and listened again for the clicking of her high heels, but even that was gone. I walked on a few feet, keeping the kerb edge within sight: it was easy in the smog to wander onto the roadway and lose your bearings completely. She had led me into the Merchant City and I really wasn’t too sure which street I was in. I stopped and listened again. Nothing. I cursed, unable to make up my mind whether to go forward or try to retrace my steps through the grey murk. I walked on a few yards. As I passed the end of a narrow alley, something swift and strong grabbed me.
‘I saw you earlier,’ said Lillian Andrews as she pulled me into the alley. We were instantly curtained by the smog. ‘Watching me. You’ve been following me, haven’t you?’ She didn’t give me a chance to answer but clamped her mouth on mine. Her tongue pushed deep into my mouth. She shoved me away and leaned against the alley wall and unbuttoned her jacket and blouse, exposing her full, milky white breasts in the dim light.
‘Is this what you want? Is this why you’ve been following me?’
I stared at he
r breasts. Her hand was now on my crotch and nature had given her something to hold on to. I could still smell the perfume she had smeared on me with her kiss. I thought about the small, frightened man who had tried to buy me off.
‘Listen…’ I backed away. ‘I-’
‘No?’ she said with a cold smile. ‘I didn’t think so.’
Something that felt like a steel hammer smashed into the back of my head and the smog suddenly penetrated my skull. Became even thicker. Darker.
Like so many Glaswegians at the weekend, I woke up on Saturday morning in a ward in the Western General Hospital. A pretty nurse was sitting reading the Glasgow Herald at my bedside. I tried to sit up but something exploded in my skull. Bright lights flashed and a searing pain sliced mercilessly through my head. I gingerly explored the back of my head with my fingertips, felt my hair matted beneath my touch and winced as I found an ugly ridge on my scalp punctuated by the hard knots of surgical stitching.
‘Now, now…’ said the nurse. ‘We don’t want to be doing that, do we?’
I groaned, fighting back a wave of nausea.
‘We’ve got to take things easy.’ Nursey maintained her unconvincingly solicitous tone. Through the pain I pondered whether there was some convention, some regulation, that compelled all medical professionals to speak in the first-person plural.
The nurse — small, like most Glaswegians — creased her pretty, perplexed brow. ‘I think we should get the doctor…’
I looked at her heart-shaped face, crowned with russet hair and nurse’s cap.
‘Why don’t we do that, nurse?’ I said.
I watched her petite, trim figure disappear and made a mental note, in my searingly sore head, to make a pass at her later. It was then that the events of the night before came back to me: Lillian Andrews’s milky skin; her hot, probing tongue; the blow to my head from her accomplice, hidden in the swirls of smog.
The nurse came back with a young, skinny doctor with bad skin and an artificially authoritative manner.
‘Ah, Mr Lennox… you seem to have bashed your cranium last night. Perhaps we’ve partaken of a little too much of the uisce beatha?’ There was that first-person plural again.
‘Let’s get one thing straight,’ I said. ‘Firstly, it’s Captain Lennox. Secondly, if you had done the most basic of blood tests, you would know that there was absolutely no alcohol in my system. So, before you begin patronizing me, sonny, make sure you have the social or intellectual credentials so to do. Now, tell me… is my skull fractured?’
‘No.’ The young houseman’s cheeks flushed red. The British were always so easy to manipulate. So ridden with hang-ups about class and authority. There had been a few occasions since being demobbed where I had played the officer-class card. My accent being difficult to place also threw them. I found it funny: so many Brits had talked to me about the British ‘healthy disrespect for authority’. Next to the Germans, the British were the most likely to follow, without question, instructions from their ‘betters’. And the Germans had learned their lesson.
‘Do I have any kind of serious oedema resulting from the blow to my head?’
‘Not that I can see, Mr… Captain Lennox.’
‘Am I fit enough to be discharged?’
‘Actually, I think it would be a good idea if you stayed with us for a while.’
‘And why is that, exactly? According to what you have said, my head injury is not that serious.’
‘It’s serious enough for us to want to keep an eye on you.’ He struggled to recover some of his lost authority. ‘And if this wound was inflicted on you, then perhaps we should get the police involved. But it’s not your head injury that is our primary concern at the moment. As you know, tuberculosis is endemic in Glasgow. The National Health Service is keen to eradicate TB in the city. Everywhere for that matter. You were brought in by ambulance. You were found in, well
… unconscious in an alley. So you can understand why we thought that it had something to do with drink.’
‘What’s this got to do with tuberculosis?’
‘Well, as part of our programme, we routinely do a screen — I mean an X-ray — of the lungs of anyone brought in under such circumstances. Actually, there are plans to bring in a mobile screening service. Anyway, we did an X-ray of your chest. I’m afraid we found what would appear to be a small shadow on your left lung. However, we think it may simply be a faulty film. We’d like to take another X-ray of your chest.’
‘TB?’ I thought of the morning coughing bouts every time I lit my first cigarette; of the way I could always predict the onset of bad smog.
‘I wouldn’t be too alarmed, if I were you. There’s every chance it’s simply a smudge on the film. Have you been prone to coughing fits?’
‘Isn’t everyone in this town? Sometimes. In the morning.’
‘Is it a productive cough? I mean, do you cough anything up? Particularly blood?’
I shook my head.
‘I wouldn’t worry then. But if it is TB, then we have caught it early enough to sort out. There’s a place we can send you. A sanatorium, up north. Clean air. It would work wonders for you.’
‘One of these places where they push your bed outdoors overnight? I’d rather take my chances in the smog.’
‘It’s best to be safe.’
I spent the rest of the day in the ward while the shining machinery of Britain’s brand-new National Health Service ground with the efficiency of an ancient steamer. While I waited I used the public telephone in the hall to call Mrs White. I explained I had been taken into hospital for observation and told her that there were concerns about my chest. I left out the fact that for the second time in quick succession I’d been used as a punch-bag. I told her that I would let her know whether or not I was going to have to go into a sanatorium. In any case, I assured her, I would still pay rent to keep my rooms.
‘Let me know as soon as you find out, Mr Lennox.’ I liked the sound of her voice on the ’phone. It sounded younger. It helped me to imagine her before war and grief had changed her.
I was X-rayed again in the middle of the afternoon and an hour later the young doctor came back to confirm that it had come back clear. He re-examined my head.
‘You mentioned a sanatorium… where would that be?’
He looked confused for a moment. ‘You do understand that we’ve given you the all-clear?’
‘I know that,’ I said irritatedly. I wasn’t thinking about myself. It was a cheap lace handkerchief spotted with blood I had in mind. ‘I just want to know where you would send someone to recover if they presented tubercular or bronchial symptoms. Where are the sanatoria?’
He explained that most TB cases in Glasgow were treated at Hairmyers Hospital, from where they were sent to sanatoria in the countryside. He gave me three addresses: two in Inverness-shire, the other in Perthshire.
‘Most patients from Glasgow would be placed in the Perthshire sanatorium,’ he explained. ‘Easier for family to visit. ‘But the demand exceeds the supply. Sometimes they’re shunted further north.’
CHAPTER SIX
I had a house call to make before I took the train to Perth. After I got out of hospital I headed straight for my digs. Mrs White intercepted me at the door. I liked the tone of concern in her voice and I told her that I was in the clear. Any warmth dissipated when she saw me wince as I removed my hat.
‘Who have you been fighting this time?’ Her eyes were hard. This could be the crunch.
‘Listen, Mrs White. Someone assaulted me from behind in the smog last night. Hit me on the head. While I was in the hospital they wanted to check out whether I had TB or not. And that’s the truth. This is in no way connected to the police coming here.’
‘It seems to me that you attract trouble.’ She took my elbow and turned me brusquely around and examined the back of my head. ‘Elspeth
…’ she called through to her twelve-year-old daughter. ‘I want you to go down to Mr Wilson the fishmonger and ask for a bag
of ice.’
Mrs White conducted me into the living room and sat me down on the leather Chesterfield while she busied herself in the kitchen making tea. I had only ever seen the living room from the door before and took the opportunity to survey it. The late Mr White had been a junior naval officer in the war and his family had been reasonably well-to-do. The room was well-decorated and furnished expensively. There was a large walnut radiogram against the wall but the new medium of television which had begun to appear in the more well-heeled homes had not yet made its presence felt here. I suspected a recent-past-tense affluence. A glass-fronted cabinet held some glasses and bone-china, as well as a bottle, half-full, of Williams and Humbert Walnut Brown Sherry. A marble and brass clock was the centrepiece on the mantle and was flanked by photographs in deco-style silver frames: a formally posed wedding photograph, each of the girls as babies, an austere-looking older couple with a pretty young girl whom I recognized instantly as Fiona White, standing awkwardly beside them.
She came back in with a large pot of tea and poured me a generous cup. Just then Elspeth, her daughter, returned with an oilskin bag. Fiona White scooped out some of the ice and wrapped it in a cloth, pressing it gently against the base of my neck and instructing me to hold it there. Two beatings’ worth of pain started to ease. She stirred two headache powders into a glass of water and laid it next to my teacup, then sat down as far away from me as she could, in a large yielding leather club chair.
‘Thank you.’ My eyes fell on the photographs again. ‘It must be difficult,’ I said, and regretted it immediately.
‘What?’ Flint glinted in her green eyes.
‘Bringing up the girls alone, I mean.’ I was digging myself a deeper hole and fast.
‘I manage perfectly well, Mr Lennox.’
‘I know you do. I didn’t mean anything… I mean, I think you do a marvellous job. It’s just that I imagine it can’t be easy. Doing everything alone.’
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