God knows John Andrews was a difficult man to like, but it was as if I owed something to myself. To the Kennebecasis Kid. To prove that I could still do the right thing even after all the shit I’d been through. I had encountered another human being who I suspected, somehow and for whatever reason, was being exploited. Manipulated. It could be that I had it all wrong, but I knew that if I walked away, then I was walking away from whatever decency was left in me.
*
I had a habit of taking lunch in tea rooms that sat on the corner of Argyle Street. There was something about the tea rooms’ large picture windows, high vaulted ceiling and black marble that reminded me of a place in Saint John I used to go with my parents when I was a kid back in New Brunswick.
I was on my way there when they took me off the street: two big Micks with busted-up noses and dark business suits.
‘Mr Murphy has sent us. He wants to see you. Now. Get in the taxi.’ My escorts flanked me and indicated the black cab that pulled up to the kerb. I allowed myself to be guided into it. I tried not to think that this was trade-mark Murphy; that God knew how many people had been taken off the street in the same manner, probably, given their obvious accustomed expertise, by the same gentlemen. Except the others who had been spirited away had never been seen again.
They took me out to Baillieston. It sat even greyer and uglier than usual under a moody sky and the scrapyard we entered merged seamlessly with its landscape. There was a huddle of Nissen huts in one corner of the yard. Against this backdrop, the honed razor gleam of the parked silver-grey Bentley announced Hammer Murphy’s presence like a royal standard on a castle.
My escorts delivered me into the main hut and waited outside. Hammer Murphy sat behind the desk. Like the Bentley, there was the sheen of a sharpened razor about him: all grey mohair and freshly barbered and Brylcreemed. Since the last time I had seen him he had grown a pencil-thin moustache. The Ronald Colman look sat with his battered Irish spud face no better than the Tony haircut and mohair suit did.
It’s often difficult to imagine how some people can resort to the most extreme forms of brutality; to equate the inner violence with the outer appearance. That wasn’t the case with Hammer Murphy. He gave you the feeling that he was perpetually on the verge of smashing his fist into someone or something. There was an intense density to his build, almost as if fury was an energy that bound the atoms of his body tighter together.
I considered making a witticism about the new moustache, but decided I would rather survive the encounter.
‘Hello, Mr Murphy. You wanted to see me?’
Murphy looked at me with hate in his eyes. I knew not to take it personally. Hate was always there.
‘I heard you wanted to talk to me,’ he said. His thick Glasgow accent was still tinged with the Galway his parents had left. ‘But something’s come up. Something I need you to explain to me.’
‘If I can.’
‘You’re looking into Tam McGahern’s death. You’ve been throwing your weight around a bit, I hear.’
‘No more than I have had to.’
Murphy stood up. ‘Follow me.’
We went out into the yard and across to another of the Nissen huts. I noticed that I picked up my two-Mick escort again on the way. One of the heavies undid the padlock and we entered. This hut was used for storing engine parts and other smaller items salvaged from the scrap-yard. There was something bigger on the floor of the hut, wrapped in a stained oily blanket. The package was about the size of a human body. I felt my pulse pick up the pace. Whatever was wrapped up in that blanket, I didn’t want to see it. Everyone knew that Hammer Murphy was a life-taker, but no one, least of all me, wanted to be an indictable witness to the fact. That could cut short a promising career.
‘Listen, Mr Murphy…’
‘Shut the fuck up and look,’ said Murphy. One of the goons closed the door behind us. I shut the fuck up and looked. The other goon peeled back the blanket from the body’s face.
‘Fuck,’ I muttered.
‘You do this?’ Murphy asked.
‘Me? Fuck no. I thought you…’
Murphy looked at me blankly for a moment. ‘If we had done this and you was looking at it you would be lying next to him.’ I spent a moment considering my promising career while I looked down at the mortal remains of Tam McGahern’s erstwhile faithful retainer, Bobby. Someone had adjusted his DA hairstyle with a heavy object. His head was caved in on one side and a lot of what should have been inside was now outside his skull. I tried to dismiss the image of a five-pound barrel-head lead mallet from my mind. Hammer Murphy had no reason to lie to me.
‘Then who?’ I asked.
‘Well, you gave him a hiding. And one of his muckers two hidings.’
‘We had a disagreement. We fell out over who should succeed Mr Churchill. He said Rab Butler and I’m a Tony Eden man.’ The gag didn’t take so I moved quickly on. ‘Bobby and his chums didn’t tell me everything I needed to know about McGahern. Added to which they had a little party planned for me. I spoiled their surprise. Anyway, I also gave Bobby here a couple of quid. He was pathetic, in a way. A wanker playing at big shot.’
‘Could it have been that cunt Sneddon?’ Murphy said it as if it was a double-barrelled name. The Wilmington-Smythes and the Cunt-Sneddons.
‘No. Sneddon doesn’t even know about Bobby. If I had wanted Sneddon to get involved he would have sent Twinkletoes McBride to ease the flow of information. But that would have been about the extent of it. How did you come into possession of the body?’
‘Sneddon, Cohen and me are splitting up McGahern’s bars between us. Like always I got shafted. Sneddon got the Arabian Bar, the kyke got the Imperial and I get left with the fuckin’ Highlander.’
‘Good little earner, the Highlander. From what I saw,’ I said conversationally, as if we were discussing the comparative merits of models of car and there wasn’t the stink of stale blood and spilt brain matter from the Teddy Boy corpse on the floor.
‘Anyway,’ continued Murphy. ‘This piece of shite was lying upstairs from the bar.’
‘In the same flat that McGahern was killed in?’
Murphy nodded. ‘We didn’t want the polis finding out. So chummy here is going to the mincer.’
So it is true, I thought. Murphy owned a meat processing plant in Rutherglen, not far from where Tam McGahern had his garage. The rumour had always been that that was where Murphy disposed of any embarrassing reminders of business deals gone wrong. And not just his. He was supposed to have a profitable sideline in processing dead meat for Jonny Cohen and Willie Sneddon. I had become particular about where I bought my Scotch pies.
‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘He had nothing to give. He knew nothing. Why kill him?’
Murphy shrugged. ‘Wee shites like him get killed all the time. By other wee shites like him. You sure you know nothin’ about this?’
‘Nothing. I didn’t expect to see him again.’
‘You won’t now.’ Murphy nodded and the goon covered up Bobby’s face. ‘You wanted to talk to me about Tam McGahern’s killing. He had it coming. He had it coming from me. But I didn’t do it or order it. It’s like this…’ He jabbed Bobby through the blanket with the toe of his handmade oxblood. ‘All the usual suspects in the clear. There was one thing I wanted to tell you about McGahern. Something that only came up this week.’
‘Oh?’
‘I have a share in a travel agent. A silent partner, you could say.’
I’ll bet, I thought.
‘I’m not connected officially with the business,’ Murphy continued, ‘so McGahern wouldn’t have known I would find out.’
‘Find out what?’
‘Tam McGahern made three trips inside two months. To the same place. Amsterdam. Now what would a wee gobshite like McGahern be doing in fucking Holland?’
‘Tulip smuggling?’ I smiled. Then I stopped. Murphy’s expression suggested he was considering stopping me smiling permanently. ‘I don’t kno
w. You any idea?’
‘None. But it’s new gen and I thought it might be useful to you.’ He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. ‘I’ve got the exact dates here. To and from Holland. No hotel bookings though.’
‘Thanks.’ I looked at the sheet and pocketed it. ‘I needed something new to go on.’
Murphy’s taxi took me back to Argyle Street. No goons. I sat in the back as it bumped its way back into the city centre and thought about what I had got. Why had McGahern made so many trips to Holland? It was only once I was in the taxi that I remembered what Bobby had said about McGahern meeting with a foreign type at the Central Hotel. Maybe the big fat guy had been a Dutchman. After the taxi dropped me off I walked back to my office and ’phoned Willie Sneddon. He groaned when I told him about Holland and asked if I needed more money to travel there.
‘I’ve got enough to keep me going for now,’ I said. ‘It could be nothing to do with him being killed. I’ll check things out this end before I start booking boat tickets.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Not at the moment.’ Sneddon was paying the bill, but I wasn’t going to tell him about Bobby’s new hair parting. There are some things that it’s better not to have seen. I considered telling him about what Wilma had said about it being Frankie that night above the Highlander, but still held back. ‘I’m not being funny, but you are more connected to the kind of business McGahern was involved in. What would Amsterdam mean to you from a business viewpoint?’
‘Dunno. Diamonds, I suppose. But McGahern wasn’t in that kind of league. Even I would need to get expert help if I got into that. Ask Cohen.’
I said I would and hung up. I tried to get John Andrews on the ’phone again but was given the same brush-off. I considered posting the photographs to him, but there was no guarantee his wife wouldn’t open the envelope. I thought about sending them marked ‘private and confidential’ to him at his office, but all it would take would be a careless or pushy secretary and there’d be all kinds of shit to contend with. Dirty pictures of your wife in a plain brown envelope don’t do much for your standing in the business community.
Let it go, Lennox.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I took Elsie, the nurse who had so solicitously cared for my clobbered noggin, out to the Trocadero. I usually avoided Glasgow’s dance halls. They did big business: these were the mating grounds of the city’s working class. And because Glasgow was a resolutely working-class city, the dance halls were filled to bursting every Friday and Saturday night.
My dislike of the dance halls stemmed from the fact that despite the glitz and the sham Hollywood glamour, they had the charm of municipal slaughterhouses. And they frequently became just that. The bouncers often outnumbered the bar staff and nudging someone and spilling their drink by accident could cost you an eye.
But Elsie, my pretty little nurse, was ‘keen on the dancing’, so our fourth date was to the Troc. I also suspected that she took comfort in a crowd that would keep my dishonourable intentions at bay.
We squeezed through the doors at eight thirty and I was hit immediately by the clammy heat of a thousand bodies condensing against anything from outside. The band was working its hardest to balance volume and tunefulness as it bashed its way through a version of the Ray Martin Orchestra hit ‘Blue Tango’. We shouldered a path through the throng and I left Elsie standing on the edge of the dance floor while I got us some drinks. I spotted a table with two free seats and when I came back I steered her towards it. She fell into conversation, as Glaswegians tend to do with any stranger, with the three girls already seated at the table. We danced and drank the whole evening, the alcohol taking no effect in the hothouse of the dancehall.
Shortly after ten the density of the crowd in the Troc intensified as a wave of latecomers poured in, thrown out of pubs and onto the street by Scotland’s Presbyterian licensing laws. A group of boys came in, no older than nineteen, with joyously murderous hate burning in their eyes. There was a depressing predictability about what would happen next and my instincts told me it was time Elsie and I should be going.
‘There’s going to be trouble,’ I said when she protested. I was right. We had just made it to the door when we heard the familiar sounds of a gang fight breaking out.
I parked around the corner from the hospital. Glasgow was again wreathed in fog, not as thick as the night I’d encountered Lillian Andrews, but thick enough to give us the feeling of solitude.
After some kissing and fumbling Elsie pushed me away from her.
‘That’s quite enough of that, Mr Lennox.’ She smiled with coquettish reproachfulness but there was a hint of nervousness in her voice.
‘What’s the matter, Elsie? Don’t you like me?’
‘I think you’re very nice.’ She regarded me in the half dark of the car appraisingly. ‘In fact you’re very handsome.’
‘This doesn’t bother you?’ I laid my hand on my left cheek.
‘No. Not at all. The scars aren’t that bad and they make you look rugged. How did you get them?’
‘I turned the other cheek. Unfortunately I turned it to a German grenade. Actually the scars are from the surgeon patching me up.’
Elsie frowned and traced the small web of thin white scars with her fingertips. I moved in on her again and she pulled back. ‘I need to get back…’
We got out and I walked her back to the nurses’ home.
‘I found out what you were looking for,’ she said as we walked. ‘I couldn’t find out everything, but I spoke to a friend who works in Hairmyres. They specialize in TB there.’
‘What did you find out?’
‘Wilma Marshall was taken by the police to Hairmyres Hospital. They had to collapse a lung and they put her on a course of that new TB drug, streptomycin. She had a bad reaction to it so they gave her nicotine to counteract the side effects. She was in Hairmyres for two weeks and then transferred to the sanatorium in Perthshire. That’s all I could find out. My friend wasn’t happy about giving the information. You said she’s your cousin?’ There was a hint of suspicion clouding Elsie’s pretty heart-shaped face.
I nodded. ‘My aunt is very worried about her.’
We came close to the nurses’ home. I pulled Elsie gently into the mouth of an alley and out of the fog-wreathed pool of light from the street lamp. We kissed and then she protested as I hoisted her skirt up. She didn’t protest enough. Afterwards, when we stepped back out of the alley mouth, she cried a little and I had to comfort her. She made me promise to see her again and I said I would meet her the following weekend. A promise. It was a lie and we both knew it.
As I walked back to where I’d left my car, the heavy feeling in my chest again warned that the fog was going to congeal into a suffocating smog. I had to drive back along Great Western Road at little more than walking pace, guiding myself by following the ribbon of kerb along the roadside. Fiona White was still up when I arrived home and came to the door.
‘Pleasant evening, Mr Lennox?’ The air tinted with a hint of sherry when she spoke. The extent of a Saturday night’s recreation for a middle-class war widow in Glasgow.
‘It was fine, Mrs White. You?’
Her small smile bordered on a sneer. She reached into the hall and handed me an envelope. ‘A gentleman delivered this for you this afternoon.’
‘Did he leave a message?’
‘No. Goodnight, Mr Lennox.’
I threw the envelope down onto my bed unopened, took off my tie and hung up my jacket. I switched the radio on, lit a cigarette and looked out through the window at the street. The smog had closed its grip even tighter on the city. I thought of little Elsie’s tear-stained face. There was a time when I would not have used a woman like that. When I would have thought of a man like me as a total shit. There was a time when I would not have done a lot of the things I did now.
I kept my radio permanently tuned into the BBC Overseas Service, the station created to persuade Canadians lik
e me, as well as Australians and New Zealanders, that it was a jolly good idea to stay part of the British Empire. Listening to the Overseas Service had become a habit. Maybe it was because, ironically, it made me feel like I was back in New Brunswick. I listened to the news. Malenkov had succeeded Stalin as Soviet premier. Two members of the Kenyan Home Guard had been murdered in a Mau Mau guerrilla raid. Continued stalemate at Kaesong. More clashes between Arabs and Israelis. Hunt and Hillary had set up base camp in the foothills of Everest. Preparations continuing for the June coronation.
I opened the envelope Fiona White had given me. The note said simply: Worth looking at. There was a Chubb key with a tag bearing an address in Milngavie. I turned the envelope upside down and shook it: there was nothing else in it. Nothing to indicate who had sent it. My guess was that it had come from Willie Sneddon, but he hadn’t mentioned it when I had spoken to him on the ’phone earlier. Maybe it was from someone else who didn’t want to advertise their involvement, should the boys in blue visit me again and find it. I decided I would ’phone Sneddon and ask what it was all about. In the meantime, I had another property to find.
The next day I walked into Byres Road with the list of addresses I had gleaned from my calls to solicitors and estate agents. One was on Byres Road, the others on the streets that ran off it. All densely packed terraces of smaller Victorian townhouses, their faces pushed hard onto the street with only a token skirt of garden to the front. All red sandstone turned soot-black. Some of the houses had been subdivided into flats, the others still intact. Glasgow University was just around the corner and many of the flats and houses were occupied by middle-income academics.
I looked at each property from the outside first. None looked like former brothels. Or maybe they all did. I had my cover story at the ready, but was reluctant to go knocking door to door. There was one house, in Dowanside Road, about three hundred yards from the junction with Byres Road, that looked as likely as any. There was a narrow street to the side of the house that rose steeply away from Dowanside Road. I walked up it and around to the back of the house, trying to look as inconspicuous as I could on a quiet Sunday afternoon. The back of the house was guarded by rails, but I could see that the new occupant had begun renovation of a garden that had been let go. Brothel keepers don’t spend a lot of time in the garden.
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