Lennox l-1

by Craig Russell

  The flint remained in her eyes. The death of Fiona White’s husband had been lost in an ocean of statistics. The loss of one junior naval officer counted only in combination with the thousands of other seamen killed. The snuffing out of his life had, by itself, meant nothing to the war effort. But for Fiona White and her two daughters it had been as if the sun had been extinguished. The entire focus of their universe had been annihilated. And with his death, the person Fiona White had been had also died. Much in the same way as the kid who had played on the shores of the Kennebecasis River had died somewhere as the 1 ^st Canadian Army had killed and bled its way through Italian towns and villages with tourist-guide names. We were both victims of war.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t have-’

  ‘No, you shouldn’t have,’ she cut across me curtly. ‘How I bring up my children is entirely my affair.’ There was an embarrassed silence, then she said: ‘What is it that you do, Mr Lennox? It seems to bring you all kinds of trouble. I don’t for one moment believe that getting that bump on your head is pure coincidence.’

  ‘I told you when I applied for the flat. I’m an Enquiry Agent,’ I said. ‘It means that people pay me to find things out for them. Unfortunately other people object to things being found out.’

  ‘So why did the police treat you the way they did that night?’

  ‘Some of the people I work for come to me because they won’t or sometimes can’t go to the police. The police don’t like that. I’m a victim of professional envy.’ I smirked, but she either didn’t get the joke or chose not to. I decided to get off the subject. ‘I will be away overnight tonight, Mrs White. I’m going up to Perthshire. Business. Just the one night. Maybe two.’

  I took the powders and drained my teacup. Mrs White took my empty cup but made no effort to refill it. ‘Very good, Mr Lennox.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The journey to Perth was one back in time. The ancient city was not the most cosmopolitan of places and it felt as if it had been untouched by the war or the changes that had happened to the social structure of Britain afterwards. The forties and the fifties had got lost in the mail.

  There was only one taxi outside Perth’s railway station. It was one of the boxy types from the early thirties. The driver too was surprisingly elderly. I asked him to take me to the nearest half-decent hotel. There was no point in me going up to the sanatorium now. The evening visiting time would soon be over and it was some distance outside town, up in the hills above Perth. Although I had concerns about the vintage of both driver and conveyance, I asked the elderly taxi man if he could pick me up at ten the following morning.

  The hotel he took me to was by the Tay, and I had a room overlooking the river. The bed was comfortable enough and the street outside quiet enough but I had trouble sleeping. Every time I closed my eyelids disparate thoughts and images bounced against them. Again I saw Lillian Andrews semi-naked, sensuously wreathed in fog; I saw the desperately off-hand and totally unconvincing demeanour of her ill-matched spouse; the professional manner in which she had used sex as the lure for her ambush in the smog, not knowing the reason for me tailing her, but knowing that I was.

  Why was everything so complicated? Why did I make everything so complicated? I knew that I wasn’t going to let the Andrews thing go. There was no money in it. No one but me wanted me to push it further. But I would push at it. Until something gave and opened up a picture that made sense to me. Or maybe my inability to let it go was just a case of hurt pride at being bushwhacked from behind. I tried to put it from my mind. For the moment. I had a bigger fish to fry, and one that would pay off. But my head hurt from the blow and the thoughts still crowded in. It took me an age to get to sleep.

  My elderly taxi driver turned up exactly on time. When I gave him the address of the sanatorium, far out in the hills above the city, he eyed me suspiciously.

  ‘That’s a long way by taxi.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘It’ll cost a lot.’ It was obvious that he was worried about collecting his fare. I handed him three half-crowns.

  ‘I’ll square up with you for the rest afterwards. I’ll need you to wait for me until I finish my business at the sanatorium.’

  As we drove up into the hills the sun came out as if to showcase the beauty of the countryside for a visitor. The sanatorium itself sat in vast grounds that rose steeply to the plateau on which the vast Victorian edifice sat. The shields of manicured grass exploded into vast beds of rhododendron bushes. It seemed that every window in the building had been thrown open and there were banks of deckchairs ranged around the walls and on the flat part of the grounds. I could understand why. After Glasgow I could feel the difference in the air myself. Breathing is an unconscious act and you never think about the air you pull into your lungs, but up here each breath was like a sip of cold, clear mountain water.

  The staff-nurse at reception eyed me with the usual superciliousness as I explained that yes, I knew it wasn’t visiting time but no, I couldn’t come back later because my boss had insisted I was back in work that afternoon but I really did want to see my cousin. She checked the name again and told me to take a seat in the garden and they would bring her out to me.

  I had expected a frail waif with pale skin coughing Lady of the Camellias-like into a handkerchief. Specifically a pale-blue one with lace trim.

  Wilma Marshall was altogether more robust-looking. She was older than I had been told. Twenty-two or — three. She was brunette, about five-foot-one and as far as I could tell through the all-concealing dressing-gown had padding in all the right places. Her face was naked of make-up or lipstick and pretty, not anything outstanding, but I could see what Bobby had meant when he said she had a ‘touch of class’. But my guess was she had been little more than a diversion for Tam McGahern. One of the many he could enjoy by dint of his position.

  I stood up and smiled as the nurse escorted her across the lawn.

  ‘Wilma,’ I said as they approached. ‘You’re looking so much better.’ She looked confused, as you would expect when faced with someone who clearly wasn’t the cousin she’d been expecting to see. But she let it go and said nothing to the nurse.

  ‘Thank you, nurse,’ I said and waited till she had gone out of earshot before asking Wilma to sit down.

  ‘What is it?’ Wilma spoke in a thick Gorbals accent and the ‘touch of class’ evaporated. Her brow creased and she bit her fleshy bottom lip. ‘I thought you people said you were going to leave me alone.’

  Now I understood why she had played along: she clearly thought I was someone else.

  ‘We will,’ I said, riding the wave for as long as I could. ‘It’s just that we’ve got to be careful.’

  ‘I’ve told you everything I know. And I’ve said I won’t talk to anyone else about it.’ Her frown deepened. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘I know you’ve told us everything, Wilma. And I know that it’s an ordeal for you to go through this again.’ I talked like a copper: instinct was telling me that was who she thought I was. ‘It’s just that every time we go through it, there might be something more you remember.’

  ‘What do you mean? What are you talking about?’ Her pale brow creased even more. I was asking the wrong questions. Whoever she thought I was or represented, it wasn’t the police. Her eyes narrowed with suspicion and then she looked over her shoulder to see where the nurse was.

  ‘Listen, Wilma,’ I said as calmly and authoritatively as I could. ‘It’s my job to find out who killed Tam McGahern. And to make sure you’re kept safe and protected.’

  I could see all the alarm bells ringing in her head. ‘Who are you? What do you want? Are you from the police?’

  ‘I’m a friend, Wilma. I want to help you out. Like I said, it’s my job to find out who killed Tam. I just want to ask you a few questions about that night.’

  ‘How did you find me?’ Wilma’s expression shifted from suspicion to uncertainty to fear. ‘No one’s supposed to find me.’
<
br />   ‘I found your handkerchief in the flat above the Highlander. It was spotted with blood. I didn’t think of it then, but later I guessed that it might have something to do with TB.’

  ‘I can’t talk to you. You have to go.’ She was becoming more agitated.

  I placed my hand on hers. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of, Wilma. No one else knows that you’re here. I’m not going to tell anyone about you. I just need to know who it was that shot Tam.’

  ‘I want you to go.’ Wilma stood up. ‘I didn’t see anything or anybody that night. I just hid until they were gone.’

  ‘That’s not what Bobby, Tam McGahern’s pet monkey, told me. He said you clocked them from the window. What is it, Wilma? Did you recognize them? Was it someone you knew from the Imperial?’

  She looked around as if checking the rhododendrons for spies. ‘I can’t do this. Not now. I need to think. Come back later.’

  ‘Listen, Wilma, I know you’re scared. But I need to know what I need to know. And I can’t leave you in peace until you tell me who put you here and what it is you saw or heard that they want to keep quiet. Tell me and I’ll disappear. I promise. But if you don’t…’

  Wilma frowned and bit her bottom lip again. ‘It wasn’t Tam.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t think it was Tam that was with me that night. It was Frankie. It was Frankie that got shot at the door.’

  ‘Wilma… it couldn’t have been Frankie who was shot. I had a run in with Frankie McGahern five weeks later.’

  ‘They thought it was a big joke.’ Wilma’s eyes glossed with tears. ‘They did it to me before. Swapped places. Pretended to be each other. It started a couple of months before that night. Tam would tell me to meet him at the flat above the Highlander but sometimes it was him, sometimes it was Frankie that turned up. But Frankie’d always pretend he was Tam.’

  ‘And you’re sure it was Frankie who turned up that night?’

  Wilma nodded. ‘Big joke, eh? See if the stupid tart can tell the difference between the identical twins.’

  ‘But you could.’

  ‘Frankie was… he was different from Tam.’ She blushed and a tear ran across her cheek.

  ‘Wilma… are you absolutely sure about this?’

  ‘As sure as a woman can be. But I never said. They found stuff in his clothes that proved he was Tam. That’s what I couldn’t understand. I thought maybe I was wrong. So I played along with it.’

  I stared out across the grounds of the sanatorium. Things started to fit together only to fall apart again. Frankie dead in the flat above the Highlander. Tam the one who picked a fight with me and ended up dead later that night in the garage in Rutherglen. Tam was a tough nut with a war combat record to more than match mine. If it had been him that night, then he had deliberately taken a beating to convince the world that he was Frankie. But why? Frankie was a nobody. Only the name Tam McGahern carried enough clout to build a crime empire. Something else struck me: Jimmy Wallace, the hanger-on Bobby had talked about, must have been in on it. He didn’t clear off until after the second murder because he knew. He knew it had been Frankie, not Tam who had died the first time around. The second killing had been Tam and it had signalled to Wallace that it was time he got lost.

  ‘Who brought you here, Wilma?’

  A nurse walked by, looked at us, then at her pocket watch and frowned pointedly. Wilma looked agitated again. ‘I don’t know who they are, but they paid me money. Told me to keep quiet. They check up on me. You better go.’

  ‘Tell me exactly what happened that night.’

  ‘Not now. Come back.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Visiting hours are three till four thirty tomorrow. Come back then. But I’m not promising anything. I just want out of this mess.’

  ‘What mess, Wilma?’

  She shook her head, clearly very scared. I let it drop.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Wilma.’ When I stood up she looked relieved. I decided to temper her relief. ‘And Wilma… make sure you’re here. And no nasty surprises. I expect to be your only visitor. If I see anyone who looks remotely like a goon, then I’ll take the next train back to Glasgow and make sure anyone who wants to find you knows where to look.’

  I left her sitting in the gardens. I knew there was a pretty good chance that Wilma wouldn’t be there when I went back the next day. But I couldn’t hang around the sanatorium and I guessed it would be difficult for whoever put her there to arrange her removal at short notice. And she was maybe scared enough to do what I had told her to do.

  The last thing I needed was to kill twenty-four hours in Perth. Perth time counted five times longer than anywhere else. My elderly driver dropped me off at the hotel and I had a dismal lunch in the dining room. I was served a lamb cutlet which compensated for its lack of size by having a consistency so resistant to knife or tooth that it could have had industrial applications. I was halfway through the cutlet when a tall and solidly built young man asked with a broad smile and in an accent that was hard to place if he could join me.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Help yourself.’

  ‘You’re Canadian, aren’t you? I can tell from your accent.’

  I tried not to make my smile too weary. ‘Yes. I am.’

  ‘Pleasure to meet you. The name’s Powell… Sam Powell.’ He extended a tanned hand across the table. Tans weren’t something you saw a lot of in Scotland. I shook it. Powell radiated an irrepressibly cheerful disposition. His big smile exposed perfect teeth and he had the big-amiable-lug-type handsomeness of the actor Fred MacMurray. The dislike I took to him was as profound as it was instant. ‘I’ve spent a lot of time in Canada myself,’ he explained with an eagerness that was as unstoppable as a runaway freight train. ‘Tractors are my business. The company I work for is Anglo-Canadian. I’m in sales.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. The waitress came over to take his order. There were only two options for the main course. I sat in malicious silence and smiled as he ordered the cutlet.

  ‘Are you here on business, Mr…?’

  ‘Lennox,’ I said: there had seemed no need to use anything other than my real name when checking into the hotel. ‘Yes. Kind of.’

  ‘What business are you in, if I may ask, Mr Lennox?’ No conversational mountain was too steep for this guy to climb.

  ‘Insurance,’ I lied. The most boring business in the world usually drops into the path of a conversation like a railway sleeper. Fred MacMurray’s younger brother was not deterred.

  ‘Really? Fascinating. General or motor?’

  ‘All types. I deal with claims.’ I was rescued by the arrival of his cutlet. His mouth would be fully occupied from now on.

  I left untouched the gelatinous grey sludge that was served as dessert and excused myself from Powell’s company.

  ‘It was nice meeting you, Mr Powell.’ My joviality was genuine. I was free of him. He stood up, shook my hand and smiled his broad, Hollywood-perfect smile. I was happier than I can describe to see a particularly tenacious-looking piece of cutlet gristle jammed between two teeth.

  I decided to find another bar in town for a drink rather than risk running into Powell again in the hotel’s lounge.

  Unfortunately I had to run the gauntlet of Powell’s cheeriness at breakfast the next morning. I decided that the hotel proprietress — a stern, joyless, meagre woman of about fifty, who in temperament was the antithesis of Powell — must have been a secret sadist, subjecting me to the twin tortures of the hotel’s food and Powell’s company.

  I dodged his inquisitiveness again and after I checked out stood outside the hotel and smoked. It was a bright sunny spring morning and I left my coat with my bag in the hotel and arranged to pick them up later when my vintage driver and taxi came to collect me again. I walked along the river and thought about Wilma Marshall. It was more than possible that she had put me off until today for a reason; that she needed to get in touch with someone. Whoever that someone was, they had a lot of the answers I
was looking for.

  I nodded and said hello as I passed a smartly dressed older man in a houndstooth sports jacket with a matching cap and military tie. He walked past mute, as if he hadn’t heard or seen me.

  My money had been on the police having placed Wilma in the sanatorium, but the police didn’t pay witnesses to stay out of sight. Whoever it was had access to a lot of resources, including maybe a compliant doctor. As I walked I considered what she had said about the callous trick the McGahern twins played on her, taking turns to screw her and pretending always to be Tam. It seemed like a senseless, if supremely cruel, subterfuge.

  Perth’s single cafe was its only concession to modern times and I called in for a coffee before heading back to the hotel to pick up my stuff and meet the taxi. The hotel proprietress was at the counter when I returned. Her shapeless black dress, flat shoes, the keychain around her waist and her unsmiling, weary demeanour made her look more like the warden of a women’s prison than a convivial hostess.

  ‘Your friend Mr Powell left something in his room, Mr Lennox. A pen. I have his address. He signed the register with his business address so I can send it on to that, but I thought you might be seeing him soon.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re mistaken… I don’t know Mr Powell. I only met him at dinner yesterday.’

  She gave me her women’s-warden look. ‘But Mr Powell said he knew you. He specifically asked to be seated with you.’

  I frowned. ‘Maybe he mistook me for someone else.’

  At that point my driver arrived at reception, took my bag and we headed out to the taxi.

  ‘See Uncle Joe’s dead,’ was the taxi driver’s opening gambit.

  ‘Uncle Joe?’ I was genuinely confused for a moment.

  ‘Uncle Joe Stalin. Stalin’s popped his clogs. It was on the Home Service this morning.’ It was the cheeriest I had seen my little driver, but that was about the extent of our conversation during our half-hour drive to the sanatorium.

  ‘Wait here again,’ I said as I got out in front of the vast Victorian edifice. I had the feeling I wouldn’t be long. It was a prettier, friendlier nurse on the reception desk this time, but she frowned when I asked about Wilma.