Lennox l-1

by Craig Russell

  I caught sight of a car pulled off the main road into a narrow cul-de-sac between two warehouses. It wasn’t my guy. The steamed windows of an ancient Ford told me hasty fornication was the motive for stealth in this case.

  I drove on and into King Street, my mind no longer on my quarry but on why I was being watched by Lillian Andrews’s accomplices — and I was pretty sure that was who I was dealing with. The man behind the wheel had been the same guy who had been part of the clumsy snatch squad in the Bedford truck. Their lack of finesse didn’t fit with the professionalism with which my office had been turned over. Nor did it fit with the uneasy feeling I’d had for the last few days that I was being followed by someone who was too good to be seen. It was true that the guy in the 16HP could have been more obvious, but only if he’d had a sign on his windscreen saying, ‘I’M FOLLOWING YOU LENNOX’. Two outfits? It would fit with my Fred MacMurray lookalike and his Middle Eastern pals.

  Instinctively I felt they were connected with Tam McGahern in another way, not through Lillian. But everything that Rufus Jeffrey had told me about Tam’s military service and connection to the Middle East nagged away at me. That was a link that could tie Mr Double Indemnity and his camel-jockeys in with Lillian. I drove back over Glasgow Bridge and back to where I’d dumped Jeannie. A good hour had passed and, of course, she was gone. Everything was fucked up.

  I needed a drink.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  By the time I got to the Horsehead Bar it was already an hour after closing time. Which meant this was the time that the Horsehead did its best business. Discreetly. I gave the knock I’d learned and Big Bob let me in. A ‘lock-in’ was a quaint British custom that made use of a loophole in the licensing laws which allowed the licensee to lock the doors and privately ‘entertain’ bona-fide friends without charging. In other words, that’s when the coppers called for their free drinks and turned a blind eye to the left-open cash till and the other ‘bona-fide friends’.

  My fucked-up evening stayed true to form. I was greeted by a six-foot-six scowl from the bar.

  ‘Good evening, Superintendent McNab,’ I said as un-wearily as I could manage. I thought of asking McNab if I could buy him a drink, but he looked happy with his half of pale ale and his scowl. Also, I wasn’t mad on the company he was keeping: there was a capless and chinless army major and a sergeant at the bar with him. The sergeant’s cap sat on the bar and it was my least favourite colour: red.

  Towards the end of what had been, admittedly, a rather colourful military career I had spent quite some time in the company of the Military Police. In many ways it had been the same kind of experience that I’d had since with the civilian police: sitting in a thick-walled room with a couple of guys who want to kick the shite out of you. The difference with the redcaps was they couldn’t, because I had been an officer.

  It was as if McNab had been reading my mind. ‘Lennox here used to be an officer, you know. Captain, wasn’t it?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Aye…’ McNab eyed me up and down. ‘He used to be a gentleman and an officer. Now he’s just a gobshite.’

  The little redcap sergeant grinned. I smiled too. What I wanted to do was punch McNab in his big stupid copper moon face. But I smiled. ‘If you don’t mind, Superintendent, I won’t call on you for a character reference.’

  ‘And he’s a smart-arse. You know what you are, Lennox? You’re a sewer rat. You scuttle around in this city’s shite. But the fact is you get to hear things. Things I don’t.’

  ‘Is there a point to this, NcNab? To be honest I don’t care to be insulted by the likes of you.’ I turned square on to him. I started to weigh up the beating in the cells I would get if I busted McNab’s jaw and it was becoming an increasingly acceptable bargain. I looked at the little redcap sergeant, then at the major and successfully made the point that if I went for it, I’d make it worth my while and go for a job lot. The sergeant stopped smiling and the chinless wonder with the pips looked like he was wishing he was back in Chelsea. McNab took a step forward.

  ‘Fancy your chances, Lennox?’

  ‘Let it go, Lennox…’ Big Bob had moved up to our end of the bar. ‘He’s not worth hanging for.’

  I don’t know if it had been the sudden suggestion that he might not survive the encounter, but McNab looked a little less sure of himself. Just a flicker of uncertainty behind the tight expression.

  ‘I’ll ask you again, McNab. Do you have a point?’

  ‘Steady on, old chap…’ The MP major, looking even less sure of himself, eased between me and McNab. He had one of those plummy accents that I thought were only made up for comedy effect by the likes of Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne. ‘The Superintendent suggested we come here on the off-chance we could have a word. If you’re… connected, so to speak, it might be that you have heard something on the grapevine.’

  ‘About what?’ I kept my gaze fixed on McNab.

  ‘There was a clothing warehouse broken into last night,’ said McNab. ‘Not much taken and it wouldn’t normally be a major inquiry, but it’s what has been taken that’s important. The warehouse was used by a company that supplies uniforms. Army, air force and police.’

  ‘So what was taken?’

  ‘They were very selective. They picked up separate items that would account for five police uniforms and three army uniforms.’

  ‘And you think someone’s planning an IPO job?’

  McNab broke his gaze and sipped his pale ale. ‘That’s what it looks like. They were just uniforms, mind. No badges or insignia on either the police or the army stuff.’

  ‘I’ve not heard anything,’ I said and McNab gave me a look. ‘That’s the truth, McNab. But I have to say that I don’t think it would be any of the Three Kings. Impersonating police officers gets headlines. Attracts attention and stirs up you boys more than the usual brown envelopes can calm down.’

  McNab looked as if he was going to take a poke at me. I grinned: I’d said it to yank on his chain.

  ‘Anyway,’ I continued, ‘it’s not something I think they’d get into. Do a robbery in a police uniform and that’s another ten on your stretch if you’re caught.’

  ‘I want you to ask around,’ said McNab.

  ‘And why should I do that, Superintendent?’

  ‘Because it could make your life easier.’

  ‘And it could make it a lot more difficult if word got out that I was a grass. But maybe I will. I have an idea the Three Kings won’t like someone pulling this kind of stunt on their territory.’

  There wasn’t anything else to say and I moved round to my usual end of the bar without taking my leave. McNab and the two redcaps drained their glasses and left. After Big Bob unbolted the door to let them out he came over to me.

  ‘Listen, Lennox, you’re a good customer. And a friend. But if you ever square up to a fucking copper in here again I’ll bar you for life.’

  ‘Point taken, Bob. That fucker McNab knows how to push my buttons. I don’t think we’ll see him in here again. You hear what he was on about?’

  ‘Aye. You’re right. The Three Kings wouldn’t get involved in an IPO job. This is an outside firm. Or just a bunch of youngsters acting the cunt.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Sounds like they had a shopping list.’ I drained my whisky and Big Bob refilled my glass without being asked.

  ‘On the house,’ he said. ‘You look like you need it.’

  ‘It’s been a long, long day.’

  ‘There was someone in looking for you earlier. About eight. Didn’t leave a name.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘Fuck… I don’t know…’ Big Bob rubbed his chin thoughtfully then an expression of enlightenment lit up his face. ‘He was a big ugly cunt. Really big and really ugly. Oh aye… there was something else: a big fucking razor scar. Right cheek. Like he’d been chibbed in the past.’

  ‘A big ugly cunt with a razor scar…’ I repeated. I thought of half of the hard men I did business with
, their mothers, even some of the women I’d been with since I’d arrived here. ‘This is Glasgow, Bob,’ I said. ‘You’re going to have to be more specific.’

  Big Bob laughed. ‘You wouldn’t miss him. Really, really big fucker. Bigger than me.’

  ‘Any message?’

  ‘Just that he wanted to talk to you. Business.’

  I thought for a moment. ‘You said he had a scar. Not recent? He didn’t by any chance have a dressing on his cheek?’

  ‘Naw. This was old. Hard-looking bastard though. Oh aye, there was one thing… he was wearing a pinstripe suit. Like a businessman.’

  ‘Don’t they all,’ I said and sipped my whisky. Because it wasn’t the guy I’d chased all over town it didn’t mean it wasn’t one of Lillian’s associates. I had a funny feeling I’d be hearing from them soon. They hadn’t scared me off and I smelt a deal in the air.

  He was waiting for me outside: the monster in a pinstripe suit. I had thought Bob’s description rather vague but on seeing him I realized that nothing could fit better than ‘a big ugly cunt with a razor scar’. He was leaning against a car, presumably his, and it wasn’t the 16HP.

  I closed my hand around the sap in my pocket. I don’t frighten easily and I had been prepared to smack McNab and take the consequences, but this fucker was a whole new ball of wax. He was at least six-seven and comparisons with brick shithouses were totally inadequate: I reckoned he could have killed me just by falling on me. But it wasn’t just his build that bothered me. He had the look of a life-taker. A killer. I was glad I had my sap but wished I had had something more substantial, like my tyre iron, or my gun. Or a tank. Mind you, I reckoned that the last time he’d been in a fight he’d been probably been poleaxed by a little Jewish boy with a slingshot. He stood up from leaning on his car when he saw me and I was surprised to see he hadn’t dented the wing.

  ‘Mr Lennox?’ he asked in a baritone that must have rattled windows in Paisley. At least he was a polite killer.

  ‘Who wants to know?’ I asked, trying to work out how tall six cubits was. And a span.

  ‘Mr Sneddon sent me. Me and Twinkletoes is supposed to look after you. I tried to find you earlier but you wasn’t at home.’ He walked over to me and just kept getting bigger. He was an ugly son-of-a-bitch all right. It looked like he’d beaten up half the population of Glasgow using his face as a blunt instrument. He also had the scar that Bob had talked about: a long and deep crease in his cheek. I was impressed with the reach of the ambitious, and probably now deceased, Glaswegian that had put it there.

  ‘Please tell me you didn’t call at my digs?’ I imagined Mrs White opening the door and wondering why it hadn’t let the light in.

  ‘Naw… naw… I seen your car wasn’t there. Mr Sneddon told me to be discreet. I’m to let you know that we was watching your back and that if you need any help you’s just to shout like.’

  I suppressed a smirk at the idea of discretion coming in a six-foot-seven, twenty-three-stone package. ‘I could have done with you today. You know anyone who drives an Austin 16HP?’

  Goliath shrugged. This was impressive, given the size of his shoulders.

  ‘It’s just that I had a run in with someone in a 16HP. He’d been following me all day and I just assumed it was one of you guys.’

  ‘Naw.’

  ‘If you’re going to be watching my back, could you keep an eye out for it? Dark blue or black Austin 16HP.’

  ‘Nae problem, Mr Lennox.’

  ‘I’m going home now. I’ll be fine tonight.’

  ‘Okey dokey,’ Goliath said pleasantly in his Richter-scale baritone. ‘But I’ll follow you home. Just to make sure like.’

  ‘I take it you’re Semple,’ I said as I unlocked my car. ‘Mr Sneddon told me about you. What’s your first name, by the way?’

  ‘Everybody calls me Tiny,’ he said without a hint of irony. ‘Tiny Semple.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  There’s always a moment, when you first wake up in the morning, when you’re temporarily outside your life. Everybody gets it: that feeling of unattributable happiness or contentment or worry or despair. You lie there and think: there’s a reason I feel like this but I can’t remember what it is.

  When I woke up the following morning my gut feeling lay more on the ‘different day, same shite’ side of the mood fence than ‘another day, another dollar’. Then, like comedy bricks falling on Oliver Hardy’s head, the crap of the day before fell piece by piece into my memory. I coughed my way through my first Player’s Navy Cut of the day without getting out of bed. I lay for a moment considering staying there for the rest of the day, or finding out, at long last, if that ticket to Halifax, Nova Scotia was still valid.

  Against my better judgement I got up, washed and put on an expensive seersucker shirt, silk tie and my best suit. I didn’t shave but decided to go to ’Phersons and have a shave and haircut. It just felt like that kind of day: there was nothing like having your face scalded with a boiling towel to set you up for twenty-four hours of crap.

  There had been a Sunbeam Talbot 90 parked outside my digs and as I passed it Twinkletoes McBride looked up from his Reader’s Digest and smiled amiably: obviously Tiny was being spelled, presumably resting up on top of a beanstalk somewhere. I got the impression Twinkletoes was grateful for the interruption: a whole page of the Reader’s Digest at one sitting would probably have given him a headache. It wasn’t just that Twinkletoes’s lips moved when he read: they moved when someone else was reading. I told him I was walking to ’Phersons for a haircut and asked if he could pick me up in half an hour.

  ’Pherson’s was in the West End, off Byers Road, so not far from my digs. I don’t know where the ‘Mac’ had gotten lost but no one ever talked about MacPherson’s, just ’Pherson’s. Truth was I really liked the place. A good barber’s in twentieth-century Glasgow was the equivalent of the Regency dining room after the ladies had withdrawn: a haven of maleness. I’d heard that the red-and-white barber’s pole was the symbol of the ancient barber surgeons: blood and bandages. It wasn’t. It was a big stripy dick that stated that this was a man’s realm.

  ’Pherson’s reeked of macassar hair oil, spiced unguents, aftershave and testosterone. Which was odd, because old man ’Pherson, a frail, birdlike man in his sixties whose hair was unnaturally black for his age — actually unnaturally black for his species — was himself as queer as a nine-bob note.

  This was where I came once a fortnight, as they described two weeks in Britain, and had my hair cut and treated myself to the closest shave you could get in Glasgow apart from calling Hammer Murphy a bog-Irish Fenian fuckface from a speeding car immediately before emigrating to the other side of the planet. ’Pherson’s was also where I picked up my supply of prophylactics, known here as ‘rubber johnnies’. It was amazing the differences in expression here. I had once tried to explain to a Glaswegian that ‘blow-job’ was the American and Canadian expression for fellatio.

  ‘Oh aye,’ my conversational partner had said. ‘That’s what we call plating… or a gammy. Or a gobble.’

  Rubber johnnies. Gammies. Gobbles. I was gradually to become schooled in the quaint charms of the Old World.

  During the war I had seen for myself the way the shakes worked on a guy: fingers would tremble and knees would knock at the prospect of battle, but when the bullets started to fly you got too scared and too fired up to shake. It was like that with old ’Pherson: you’d watch the sliver of razor tremble in his thin fingers, feel his other hand’s tremulous touch on your face, then, miraculously, the blade would sweep smoothly and decisively across your pulled-taut skin.

  ’Pherson was giving me a trim, the scissors between cuts fluttering like a bird and snipping at the empty air, when I was aware of someone sitting in the barber’s chair next to mine.

  ‘We need to talk, Lennox.’

  I looked at Jock Ferguson’s profile in the mirror before me.

  ‘Sounds official.’

  ‘It is,’ he sa
id. ‘But it can wait till you’ve finished your haircut.’

  Twinkletoes looked up from his Reader’s Digest and reached for the door handle as Ferguson and I passed his car, but I frowned a warning and gave a surreptitious shake of the head and he eased back in his seat.

  It wasn’t Jock’s Morris that waited for us around the corner but a black police Wolseley 6/90 with a uniformed driver. This really was going to be official. Ferguson remained stone-faced and silent.

  ‘What’s this about, Jock?’ I asked.

  ‘You’ll see…’

  I had worked out that Ferguson wasn’t going to return the favour of the Italian meal, and we drove across town towards Glasgow Green and the Saltmarket. When the driver dropped us off at the double-door front entrance of the Glasgow City Mortuary I realized that he didn’t have a fun day out planned.

  It seemed that we were expected. Glasgow was a city of deficiencies, mainly vitamin, and the inappropriately cheery mortuary attendant who showed us down into the bowels of the morgue had the typical bow legs of someone who had suffered from rickets. It was a common look in Glasgow: a quarter of the population who had lived through the thirties looked like they were riding invisible Shetland ponies.

  Glasgow City Mortuary had moved here between the wars and the white-tiled walls reminded me of a municipal bath house. We descended down a starkly lit, wide stairway and into a basement hall.

  The smell of a mortuary isn’t what you’d expect: no stench of death, more like a mixture of carbolic soap and a faintly stale smell, as if the soap had been mixed with stagnant water. We entered a long, cavernous room. The temperature and Ferguson’s mood were both several degrees cooler than they had been at ground level. The cheery attendant with the chimpanzee swagger led us to one of the metal doors that were set in a row into the tiled wall. He slid out the tray and pulled back the white sheet that covered the body stored inside.

  ‘You know who this is?’ Ferguson didn’t expect or wait for me to be shocked. We’d never talked about it but we both knew that the other had seen the worst a war could throw up. A sort of grim freemasonry.