‘No,’ I lied. ‘’Fraid not.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I have an aversion to police stations. As I walked into the St Andrew’s Street nick I felt the phantom of a farm lad’s fist on my neck. The Station-Sergeant eyed me suspiciously when I asked to speak to Detective-Inspector Ferguson. In my experience, all Station-Sergeants tended to be the same. Most of them were older coppers nearing the end of their careers, or retired to a desk for health reasons. They all wore the same weary ‘seen-it-all’ expression: it seemed to be a prerequisite to getting that little crown above your stripes that you had to be a cynical fucker. I told this particular Happy Harry that I had an appointment.
Jock Ferguson came out five minutes later and led me into his office.
‘I need a favour, Jock. I need to know who the registered owner of this vehicle is.’ I handed him a slip of paper with the number of the Bedford truck on it. I knew I was pushing my luck. Ferguson took the note and looked at it.
‘I hear you were involved in a bit of a public exhibition the other night. I take it this is the truck involved?’
I nodded.
‘Why did you tell the constable you didn’t catch the number?’
‘Delayed recall,’ I said. Ferguson didn’t laugh. ‘I wanted to keep it unofficial.’
‘And why is that? I thought you told the beat man that you reckoned they were after your car.’
‘I think it’s got something to do with the case I’m working.’
‘You know something, Lennox? I think that case is the McGahern case. If it is, you’re heading for a shitload of trouble. You were warned.’ Ferguson’s tone was neutral and I couldn’t read any threat into it. ‘Have you been poking your nose where it’s not wanted?’
‘Me? No… You know me. I’m not the curious type. But maybe someone out there thinks I’m involved because of my run-in with Frankie McGahern. It’s just that I was given a beating for some reason and they made off in that truck.’ I nodded towards the slip of paper with the number of the Bedford truck on it.
‘Okay… I’ll check it out. Give me a day.’
I had lunch at a greasy spoon place and headed back to my office. I felt a bit queasy when I arrived. It could have been the eggs I’d eaten, but it was more likely to have been the sight of an expensively tailored Willie Sneddon and a Burton-suited Twinkletoes McBride waiting for me outside the door to my office. Twinkletoes smiled at me and I felt even queasier.
‘We were in town,’ explained Sneddon. ‘I thought I’d get the latest from you.’
I unlocked my office door and let Sneddon and Twinkletoes go ahead of me.
‘There’s not much to tell,’ I said. I offered them a whisky but Sneddon turned it down for both of them. ‘But someone’s getting rattled.’ I told Sneddon about the botched attempt to snatch me on Argyle Street.
‘You recognize any of them?’ asked Sneddon.
‘No. But if it had been one of the other two Kings, they wouldn’t have sent anyone I would recognize. But that doesn’t fit. I think this is some independent outfit, maybe even something to do with McGahern’s operation. But I smell a new team in town. These guys were big and enthusiastic but really clumsy. Inexperienced.’
‘Whoever it is, they’re trying to scare you off.’ Sneddon was wearing a double-breasted mohair suit, similar to the one Hammer Murphy had been wearing the last time I saw him. He reached into his jacket pocket. For a moment I thought he was going to pull a gun. Instead he took out a gold cigarette case. A gun would probably have weighed less. He lit up.
‘No. They were trying to do more than that. They were trying to lift me off the street. Maybe they were as interested in what I could tell them as I am in what they could tell me. Or it could be that it was going to be a strictly one-way trip.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ said Sneddon. He flicked ash onto my floor. ‘That’s why I’m having Twinkletoes shadow you. Protection.’
‘I can look after myself, Mr Sneddon.’
‘I’m not offering. I’m telling.’ Sneddon’s expression darkened. ‘People know that you’re working for me, even if it’s only temporary. No one fucks about with someone who works for me. I let this go and it sends out the wrong signals. For all we know it could have been that Fenian fucker Murphy, just pushing things to see how far he can go. Twinkletoes is watching your back from now on.’ Sneddon stood up to go. Twinkletoes didn’t. ‘But listen to me good, Lennox. If I hear you’ve tried to lose him or give him the slip, then I’ll get him to give your toenails a trim. Hear me?’
‘Then I quit.’ I took the cash Sneddon had given me out of my wallet and held it out to him. ‘Your money’s all there. I can’t work the way you want me to. I talk to all sorts who would run a mile at the idea of anyone, least of all Twinkletoes, knowing they were a contact of mine. You hired me because I’m independent. Because you know that by buying my loyalty for only a short time, you’re buying it completely. I appreciate your interest in my welfare, but what I do is a risky business and I look after myself.’
Sneddon glared at me. A hardman glare. He didn’t take the money, so I dropped it onto the desk for him to pick up. We were all three standing now. Worryingly, Twinkle-toes had stopped smiling. I felt my toes wriggle involuntarily within my shoes.
‘Have it your way, Lennox.’ He picked the money up and handed it back to me. ‘It’s your neck.’
There was a pause. I spoke as much to fill the silence as anything. ‘By the way, I got the key you sent. What’s the significance?’
Sneddon looked at me blankly for a moment. ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
I took the key out of the desk drawer I had stashed it in, and handed it to Sneddon. The tag with the address in Milngavie was still attached.
‘I didn’t send you this,’ said Sneddon.
I regretted having mentioned it. I had assumed it had been Sneddon, but it could have been Jonny Cohen or even Hammer Murphy.
‘My mistake.’ I reached out for the key but Sneddon was still examining the address tag.
‘But I think I know what this key might be for. Tam McGahern lived with his brother in a flat in the West End. You can’t get near it because it’s still lousy with cops. But there was a rumour that Tam bought another couple of places. A few months ago. One of them was a house in Milngavie. But the way I heard it was an investment. He was going to rent it out or sell it at a profit.’
‘I’ll check it out,’ I said. I looked across at Twinkletoes, who still wasn’t smiling, then back to Sneddon. ‘We’re clear that I work alone on this, Mr Sneddon?’
‘I fucking said so, didn’t I?’ He stood up. ‘But keep me completely up to date on progress, Lennox. Or I swear to God I’ll have Twinkletoes make me a necklace out of your toes.’
*
Milngavie and Bearsden sat next to each other on the north side of the Clyde and were both climbers on the Glasgow social ladder. But Milngavie, bizarrely pronounced Millguy by the locals with an odd defensive pride, was one chip-on-the-shoulder rung down from its neighbour.
I waited until evening before driving up to the address on the key tag. The house itself was one of the many anonymous bungalows built twenty years before. In this case, someone had added a dormer window in the roof, obviously converting the attic into a bedroom. If Tam McGahern had intended this to be his home, then its modesty was a comparative statement of his status in Glasgow’s crime hierarchy: in contrast to Jonny Cohen’s Newton Mearns architect-designed modernity or Willie Sneddon’s mock-baronialism, this was humble stuff indeed. It was difficult to equate a flash gangster with this suburban banality.
I parked across the street and back from the house and watched for a while. Dusk turned to dark and the lights flickered on in the windows of its neighbours, but the house remained in darkness. I waited another ten minutes before leaving the car where it was and walking across to the house. There was a wrought-iron gate which protested with a squeak as I opened it, but the neighbouring houses w
ere far enough apart for it not to be heard. I moved quickly up the path that led through a well-tended garden and slipped the Chubb key into the lock. It fitted. I slipped into the dark of the hall.
The first thing I did was to go through the house and draw all of the curtains, switching the lights on in each room as I went. I had brought a torch with me, but there is nothing more certain to bring the police to the door than the report of torchlight in an unlit house.
The house surprised me. This was no investment property: Tam McGahern’s personal things were all over the place. The cops hadn’t known about this place. No one had known that Tam had built himself a little nest away from the flat he shared with his brother. Well, practically no one: whoever sent me the key had known.
The furnishings were modest and tasteful, not what you would expect from a Gorbals-bred hardman and for a moment I started to doubt if it really was McGahern’s place. But it was. The front bedroom had a large walnut wardrobe packed with the kind of exclusively tailored suits you see only on movie stars or gangsters. A bureau drawer was filled with cash: income avoiding the touch of banker or taxman.
There was also a row of photographs on the living room mantelpiece. Tam with his mother. Tam with Frankie and his mother. All the photographs were of the prosperous post-war Tam with the exception of one. In it, a younger, tanned Tam in Desert Rat uniform with sergeant’s stripes on the khaki sleeve stood smiling with a group of other men under a bright and definitely not Scottish sun. The backdrop was a sand-crusted military vehicle. There were five men in the group. Three of them looked foreign. Darker. I took a penknife, prised open the back and slipped the wartime photograph from the frame and pocketed it. As I did, I checked the back of the photograph. It had a single word written on it: Gideon.
I also liberated the bureau of its burden, doing a rough count as I stuffed the rubber-banded bundles into my jacket pockets. I reckoned there was over six hundred quid there. Whoever had sent me the key may or may not have known about the presence of the cash. If they did and had prior claim, then I would keep it safe for them. Lost and found, you could say. But Tam McGahern’s tiny empire was being carved up. This could be my little slice.
As I worked my way through the rest of Tam McGahern’s house, I was aware it was full of anomalies. Some things were typical of someone like McGahern, others weren’t. Like the books. Dozens of them. And not pulp fiction paperbacks: McGahern seemed to have had an interest in history and a couple of the volumes on the bookshelves were heavyweight academic tomes. Others were book-club editions. There was a world atlas, and one exclusively of the Middle East.
I remembered what I had heard about what the army psychologist had said about Tam’s intelligence. The evidence of it was all around me. It should have been enough to keep him alive, but the prison quack had also identified Tam’s psychotic rage. With Tam impulse always triumphed over reason. He had been killed by his own rage. More than that, he had been killed by someone who calculated that they could rely on his rage to overcome his judgement.
I had the feeling that this was a private space. Somewhere that McGahern spent time alone. It was the only reason that would explain him choosing to do his fucking in that sordid hovel above the Highlander Bar. If there were any hidden secrets, this was where Tam would hide them. I went through the house and switched off all of the lights except the one in the kitchen. I would work through the house a room at a time. There was no need to advertise my presence more than was necessary. I took a heavy-handled breadknife from the kitchen drawer and worked my way on my hands and knees across the floor, tapping the linoleum with the handle. Solid. I went through every cupboard and drawer and checked the walls for any hidden recesses. Nothing.
It took me a good hour to find it. In the bathroom. The bath was new and built-in rather than free standing, and the bath panel had been recently and expertly tiled, which was why the ragged grouting along the bottom of two of the tiles caught my eye. I used the breadknife to ease the two tiles free and jammed my hand into the void beneath the bathtub. After a bit of scrabbling my fingers closed around a cloth bag fastened with a drawstring. I pulled it out and opened it up. Jackpot.
The bag was about eight or nine inches square and packed tight. I tipped the contents out onto the linoleum floor of the bathroom. It was a criminal’s equivalent of a life-raft: the way out in an emergency. It was very impressive. Too impressive for a middle-league Glasgow crook. If things turned bad for Tam then all he needed to make a clean and total break was stowed in this canvas bag. But Tam had gone down faster than the Titanic and never did have the chance to use his carefully assembled escape package. There was money, a pocket notebook and three passports: two British and one American. It was only because they all had Tam McGahern’s photograph above false names that I could tell they were fake. Other than that, they looked perfectly genuine to me.
Forgeries of that quality took a lot of money, time and the kind of contacts that I could not imagine Tam having. I counted the US dollars; two thousand in total, tight rolls, bound by elastic bands. I remembered McNab asking me if I knew what had happened to the money that had disappeared when Tam had been murdered: this couldn’t be it. There was a lot, but not enough for McNab to get physical about. But there was more than enough to get you to the other side of the world. Or, given the presence of a fake American passport, more likely to the other side of the Atlantic.
I carefully re-rolled the money and fastened it with the elastic bands. I put it into my jacket pocket to keep the six hundred quid company. After all, I might need a life-raft myself at some point in the future. It looked like I was going to have to hollow out another volume from the H.G. Wells oeuvre.
After making a note of the fake names, I gave the passports a wipe with my handkerchief before putting them back in the bag, which I then stuffed back under the bath: I thought it best to leave something for any future visitors to find. I kept hold of the notebook. It had a list of initials and numbers, the sense of which didn’t leap out at first examination and I wanted to take my time going through it later. I fitted the tiled section back in place, switched off all the lights and made my way in darkness downstairs to the front door. I had just unfastened the Chubb lock when I heard it. The squeaking protest of the gate at the end of Tam McGahern’s garden.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I eased the Chubb closed again as quietly but quickly as I could. I moved through the darkened house to the kitchen where I used my torch to find the back door. There was a heavy key in the mortise lock. I would let myself out into the back garden, taking the key with me and lock the door from the outside, hoping that whoever was paying a visit didn’t feel like taking in the night air.
Slipping the torch back into my cash-stuffed pocket I turned the key. The door didn’t unlock: the key half-turned and then seemed to jam. I reckoned that whoever was coming up the path would be at the front door by now. I tried the lock again, turning the key one way then the other, making more noise than I should. Nothing. I heard the sound of the front door unlocking and opening. I leaned my weight against the door, pushing it back in its frame and trying the key again. It turned in the lock with a loud clunk. I slipped out into the dark garden, easing the door shut. I didn’t lock it behind me as I’d planned: it would make too much noise and for all I knew whoever was there had already heard it unlock. I eased back from the door. There was no moon and the garden to the rear was hedged in; as far as I could see, I was crouched on a small patio of concrete slabs. I moved like a blind man, afraid I might bump into something and give away my presence. The kitchen light went on. It meant I could see something of my surroundings. It also meant that anyone in the kitchen could probably see me. I scoured the garden desperately for a hiding place, but it was small and laid out as level lawn edged with low shrubs, offering no opportunity to hide.
There were three men in the kitchen, illuminated by the yellow-white ceiling light. I recognized one of them instantly. I rushed forward and ducked under the sill of t
he window, pressing hard into the wall. I slipped the sap from my pocket, ready to use it should the back door open. There was what looked like a gap between the wall edge furthest away from me and the hedge, suggesting I could get around the side of the house. I started to ease towards it, keeping low and making as little noise as I could.
I was crossing in front of the kitchen door when I heard the handle turn.
I rushed headlong towards the corner of the house. The kitchen door opened and a swathe of yellow light cut across the small lawn, framing the projected shadow of a huge man. I ducked around the corner of the house, hoping that my scrabbling across the concrete slabs had not attracted the attention of the figure in the doorway.
I found myself in a narrow space between the hedge and the wall of the house. I kept my feet planted as if glued: the space had been filled with stone chips and the slightest movement would make a crunching sound and attract the attention of the heavy at the door. There was enough shadow for me to stay concealed while keeping an eye around the corner. A second man came to the doorway with a torch and shone it into the garden. I ducked my head back out of sight. The two men exchanged a few words in a language that I didn’t recognize, then closed the door again. The kitchen light went out and the darkness dropped back into the garden.
I edged along the windowless side of the house, trying to minimize the gravel-crackle of each footstep, and checked the front. The curtains were still drawn but I could see the light from inside leach out at the window edges. I made a quick measure of the distance from the house corner where I crouched in shadow to the gate. There was a Wolseley parked outside the front gate that hadn’t been there when I had arrived. I reckoned I could move silently over the grass, but it would be quicker to grasp the nettle and use the squeaking gate, rather than risk entanglement clambering across the chest-high privet. I was just about to launch my run when I saw an amber-red glow in the cavern of the parked Wolseley suddenly swell then diminish. A drawn-on cigarette. They had obviously left a sentry outside.
Lennox l-1 Page 12
