I looked at what was left of the face. The strange thing was the grey-white hair on the head was still perfectly combed in the over-styled way John Andrews had had it in life. Beneath the hairline, however, there was a deep impression, like a dent in the skull. There were a lot of lacerations across the bridge of the shattered nose, through the now-empty right eye socket and across the cheek. But there was enough of the mouth and the weak, bearded double-chin for me to know for sure that this was Andrews.
‘I take it the question is rhetorical,’ I said. ‘You know damned fine who he is.’
Jock Ferguson gave a curt nod in the direction of the bandy-legged mortuary attendant as a signal to leave us alone. The attendant’s smile didn’t falter as he made his waddling way back to the door.
‘It’s good to be happy in one’s work,’ I said to Ferguson. His expression told me to hold the humour.
‘Yes, I know damned fine who it is. I also know damned fine that you were attacked by men travelling in one of Andrews’s firm’s trucks. I know damned fine that you’ve been sniffing around Andrews and his wife for weeks now. And I know damned fine, even if I can’t prove it, that you don’t get your face pulped like this crashing a solid-built Bentley into a country ditch.’
I looked at the devastated face again and nodded. ‘Maybe he banged his face off the steering wheel. Ten or eleven times. I don’t know, Jock… but my guess is somebody’s gone into bat with a tyre iron.’
‘Like Frankie McGahern.’
I looked at him for a moment. There was no way out of this. ‘Just like Frankie McGahern,’ I sighed. ‘There’s a link between Lillian Andrews, or Sally Blane as she used to be known professionally, and Tam McGahern.’
‘I knew it!’ Ferguson lifted his hands and let them fall limply into the folds of his raincoat. ‘I bloody knew it. You have had your nose up this case’s arse all along, haven’t you? I warned you, Lennox
… I bloody warned you. If McNab gets wind of this he’s going to use your arse as a golfbag. I told you to stay out of this case. You don’t know what you’re messing with here. Trust me.’
‘Why don’t you tell me?’
Ferguson’s normally expressionless face made a good attempt at outraged shock. ‘You have got to be fucking kidding. I am telling you fuck all.’ He jabbed me in the chest with his finger. ‘ You are going to tell me every fucking thing you know. If you don’t, I’m going to serve you up to McNab on a silver platter.’
I looked down at John Andrews, but he clearly didn’t have an opinion on the matter. I could tell Jock Ferguson was serious. I’d lied to him. I’d gotten him to help me while lying to him. He had just cause to dump on me. All he needed to do was tell McNab I’d been running with the McGahern case and holding out on information they needed and McNab and his ruddy-faced farmlad would play bar skittles with my balls.
‘Okay,’ I said with a resigned tone. I looked at Jock Ferguson. His face was fixed. Determined. I knew I could trust him to be straight with me and I also knew he was pissed because he had thought the same of me. I don’t know why people do that.
Anyway, Ferguson was a decent, straightforward guy: that one good cop you know you can rely on. So I decided to lie to him in a decent, straightforward sort of way.
‘The truth is, Jock, I did drop the whole McGahern thing. It was looking like far too much trouble and, to be honest, like there was nothing in it for me. So I let it go. Completely.’
Ferguson gave me a sceptical look.
‘But I had this other case. He…’ I nodded to John Andrews’s corpse as if he could confirm my story. He certainly wasn’t going to deny it. ‘… told me that his wife had gone missing and he was desperately worried about her. I could tell he was genuine, which is more than I could say for his wife’s disappearance. I called to see him and he said she was back and everything was hunky-dory and it was all a big misunderstanding and sorry to have troubled you and here by the way is about three times the cash that I really owe you so thanks a bunch and go the fuck away. All of which was about as credible as a nineteen-year-old Govan virgin. So instead of doing the sensible thing and forgetting all about it, I see Lillian Andrews in the street and follow her and her friend.’
‘Which results in a tit-flashing and head-bashing, as I recall,’ said Ferguson.
‘Exactly. So one quick feel and twenty stitches later I find out that Lillian Andrews is or was Sally Blane, a whore and blue-movie actress who’s as professional with a dick in her mouth as Larry Adler is with a harmonica. Then I hear stories about a high-end, by-appointment-only brothel somewhere near Byres Road in the West End. Just a few girls, but classy and skilled. Story is that the clientele includes many of the great and the good in Glasgow. My money is on Lillian Andrews as madam. None of the Three Kings has a stake in it and my guess, like it or not, Jock, is that they have top cops either on the books as customers or as brown envelope pay-offs. Whatever the reason they’re left alone. What I didn’t know yet was that Tam McGahern was supplying heavies for security.’
‘I thought you said it was independent?’
‘It was. McGahern was a sub- not a main contractor. Or at least to start with. I find out later that McGahern was cracked up on the woman who ran the place. Who, like I say, I reckon was Lillian Andrews. But I don’t know any of this yet. So then I get a call from a woman who says she has information for me and can I meet her somewhere quiet and secluded where I can get my brains bashed in. I say no go but that I’ll be under the clock in Central Station. Time comes and goes but she doesn’t. Then I get jumped on the way back to my car by a bunch of thugs out of the Bedford van I gave you the number of.’
‘Which is owned by John Andrews’s company.’
‘Except the woman who ’phoned me and said she had information wasn’t Lillian Andrews. Or I don’t think she was. And the information she said she had for me was about Tam McGahern’s death.’
Ferguson’s face clouded again. ‘So you were still working the case.’
‘No. I’ve told you,’ I lied with indignation. ‘I’d dropped it. But when someone ’phones you and tells you that they have information on a murder the cops have suspected you know more about than you really do, you’ve got to check it out. If I’d found out anything then I’d have got in touch with you straight away.’
Jock Ferguson raised an eyebrow. He was clearly thinking of flying pigs and nineteen-year-old Govan virgins.
‘It’s the truth, Jock. Anyway, then — and don’t ask me how — I get my hands on stills from a blue movie featuring a younger Lillian Andrews slash Sally Blane playing the one-note piccolo. I still don’t know what the deal with Andrews is so I confront him with the pictures, like I told you, and it’s no surprise to him. Now I know that there’s something going on that stinks to high heaven. I actually begin to worry about his safety…’ I looked down at the smashed face of my ex-client and thought about how much good my worrying had done him. ‘Anyway, then I get a call from him and boy is he a scared bunny. He tells me he’s as good as dead and Lillian is behind it all. Being the genius I am, I tell him to tell me everything later but to get to safety. I arrange to meet him at a hotel up by Loch Lomond.’
‘Except he doesn’t make it.’
‘Exactly. Oh, and by the way, before you get all holier-than-thou with me one of the options I gave him when he ’phoned me was that I had a cop he could trust. You.’
‘If he had he’d still be alive.’
‘Maybe. Maybe not. When I suggested getting the police involved it was like he started to panic. I’ve got to be honest, Jock, it was as if he knew that Lillian and whoever she was involved with had someone inside the City Police. And that fits with my suspicions about the brothel being left alone because of police contacts.’
Ferguson frowned but his expression revealed that he knew it wasn’t impossible: there was a parlour game in Glasgow, usually played in the changing rooms of the Victoria Baths, called the Manila Envelope Shuffle. The Victoria Baths were popular wit
h senior police officers, businessmen and Glasgow Corporation councillors.
‘Anyway, that’s all I’ve got,’ I said as if I’d unburdened all that there was to unburden. It was rather convincing, even if I say so myself. But Ferguson’s expression, as always, was difficult to read.
‘You should have come to me as soon as Andrews was killed,’ he said. Our voices echoed in the cavern of the mortuary.
‘I didn’t know for sure it was murder. And anyway, you don’t have anything to go on.’ I nodded to Andrews’s body. ‘You can’t even prove this wasn’t an accident.’
‘But I’ve got enough from you to start a murder inquiry. A call for help and a declaration that his life was threatened immediately before he was killed. And we know that Tam and Frankie McGahern’s deaths were murder and now there’s a link with Andrews’s death.’
I nodded thoughtfully. I knew I hadn’t given him enough to make a case. I hadn’t told him about the faked shipment manifests that Andrews had told me about on the ’phone. And, of course, I hadn’t said a thing about a fourth connected death: Bobby, who was by now probably a better pie filling than he had been a petty crook. I also kept schtum about everything else I’d picked up, including my gut feeling that my Fred MacMurray lookalike and his chums were completely unconnected to the less than competent mob who’d tried to lift me from Argyle Street. The truth was I wanted time to dig deeper myself. Ferguson was a good cop, but he was supported by a spectrum of policing talents that ranged from the incompetent to the corrupt. They would either trample all over the evidence or, if I was right and there was someone on the inside on Lillian’s payroll, they would actively bury it. Anyway, I didn’t work for the interests of justice: I worked for Willie Sneddon.
‘You going to question Lillian Andrews?’ I asked.
‘Got to. Got to get to the bottom of this, Lennox.’
‘Listen, Jock. I’ve shown you mine, now you show me yours. What did you mean I didn’t know what I was messing with?’
Ferguson pulled the sheet back over John Andrews’s smashed face, pushed the body tray into the cubicle and closed the door. I thought of Andrews’s Bentley, his big house and its Contemporary furniture, his sixty-guinea suits. Now all he had to his name was a winding sheet and a chilled steel cabinet and even those were on loan. It made me think of when you got to know someone in the war who ended up getting killed: everything they had told you about their lives, all the conversations you had had with them, it all became unreal when they were lying in front of you, just so much mince.
‘Just trust me, Lennox: you don’t have any idea what you’re messing with. The truth is I don’t either. All I know is that it’s political or something. McNab has a bee up his arse because someone put it there, and I think it buzzed all the way from Whitehall.’
‘What?’ I shook my head in disbelief. ‘We’re talking about the McGaherns here, not Burgess and Maclean. A couple of thieves and a whore. What can be political about that?’ The truth was what Ferguson had said had started all kinds of alarms ringing. Not just politics, Middle East politics. I already had suspicions about where Fred MacMurray’s kid brother and his pals had come from, but I couldn’t for the life of me work out what they could have to do with the McGaherns’ sordid little realm.
‘I don’t know what the story is,’ said Ferguson. ‘All I do know is that there have been Special Branch types hanging around St Andrew’s Street. The odd military sort too.’
‘I bumped into McNab the other night. Or more like he bumped into me… accidently on purpose. He had a couple of MPs in tow. Some shite about stolen uniforms.’
‘No shite,’ said Ferguson. ‘But not connected, as far as I can see. The MPs are involved because a couple of army uniforms were nicked. It’s the police uniforms that McNab is worried about. He’s crapping himself in case some outfit is going to pull an IPO job. When crooks impersonate police officers the public get jittery and there’s all kind of political bollocks to deal with. And McNab has enough on his plate with the McGahern thing.’
We made our way out of the mortuary hall and back up the stairwell. Once we were out on the street we both simultaneously drew deep breaths of Glasgow air. Hardly fresh, but at least it didn’t smell stale or carbolic-rinsed.
‘I still don’t get it, Jock. I mean, how this thing with the McGaherns could possibly be political.’ I was pushing him. It was already beginning to make sense to me: phoney shipments through a company that already dealt with the Far and Near East. But I wanted to know all that Jock Ferguson knew.
‘I can’t tell you any more. Because I don’t know any more.’
‘But that’s why you warned me off the McGahern thing to start with, isn’t it?’
He offered me a cigarette. We lit up and I looked around in a leisurely way. I saw the Talbot parked on the other side of the street, about two hundred yards up. Please, Twinkletoes, I thought, don’t do the psycho-chauffeur thing and come over to pick me up.
‘You want a lift back?’ asked Ferguson. ‘I’ll get the driver to drop you. I’m just going round the corner.’ He referred to St Andrew’s Street, a block away and where the City of Glasgow HQ was located.
‘No thanks. I feel like a walk.’ The Talbot hadn’t moved. Maybe the Reader’s Digest was stretching Twinkletoes’s concentration over three-syllable words like a prisoner on the rack. ‘Jock,’ I said tentatively, ‘I’ve got a favour to ask.’
‘How fucking unlike you.’
‘Can you hold off on talking to Lillian Andrews? At least for a few days. Maybe a week.’
‘Sure. No problem. And just let me know if you want us to turn a blind eye to an armed robbery getaway car. We could even arrange a points duty bobby to hold the traffic back for it.’ Sarcasm is a fine art: Ferguson was clearly a weekend painter. ‘Andrews was murdered. Everything points to Lillian Andrews being behind it. Why should I piss about?’
‘Okay, gloves off, Jock. Because if you go steaming in now she’ll get away with it. I didn’t like Andrews. I didn’t like anything about him. But I made it my business to help him and I let him down. I want to see that bitch hang for it. You know that I can find out more in a week on my own than a team of your flatfoots would in six months. People talk to me who would clam up if you asked them the time of day. Added to which we’ve got reason to believe that Lillian probably has contacts inside the City Police. Give me a couple of weeks and I’ll give you Lillian Andrews and whoever she’s involved with. Gift-wrapped.’
Ferguson took a final draw on his cigarette and dropped the stub onto the mortuary’s step. He ground it into the stone with the toe of his shoe and stared at it. ‘Okay. Two weeks. But I won’t walk away from this empty-handed. If you fuck up and Lillian disappears into the night, then it’ll be me gift-wrapping your testicles for Superintendent McNab.’
‘Fair enough.’
I waited until Ferguson had rounded the corner before I crossed the Saltmarket and started to walk in the direction of the High Street. After a few hundred yards Twinkletoes pulled up alongside and I jumped into the passenger seat. I felt claustrophobic crammed in next to Twinkletoes’s bulk and I imagined how cosy it was going to be sharing a ride with both him and Tiny Semple. I got him to drop me off at my digs and told him to fetch Tiny.
‘We’re going visiting,’ I explained.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
When I was a kid growing up in New Brunswick, I went to Rothesay Collegiate School for Boys, which was as upper as the crust came in Canada. I played in the ice hockey team and was pretty damned good. So good that I started to harbour ambitions about turning professional.
One day we found ourselves playing against another private school: King’s Collegiate. King’s was based in Windsor, Nova Scotia and we should have taken that as a bad omen in itself, seeing as ice hockey was supposedly invented in Windsor. Anyway, there was this kid called MacDonald, not big enough to be a power forward but as fast as hell, who played the right wing and was my opposite number.
&nb
sp; Grace isn’t something you usually associate with ice hockey, but MacDonald was truly graceful. Every time I got a run he would come up and dash past me. No checking, no contact, just a flash of red and the puck would be gone. Whatever I decided to do, he’d predict it. Whatever I’d thought of, he’d thought of it first. I felt outclassed and outmanoeuvred. It was a feeling I didn’t like.
Now Lillian Andrews was making me feel like that, too.
We arrived at the Andrews house to find it deserted. But this was no hurried evacuation prompted by the unexpected complication of John Andrews’s death. The estate agent’s sign that we passed on the way into the drive and the curtainless windows told me that there had been a lot of forewarning and planning before this particular coop had been well and truly flown.
I parked on the drive and I could have sworn the Atlantic eased up several inches on its suspension when Twinkletoes and Tiny struggled out of it. I told Tiny to lean against a door at the back of the house and it took us only ten minutes to confirm that it had been thoroughly cleared out. No furniture, no personal items; and I didn’t need to lift floorboards or jemmy off bath panels to know there would be no hidden caches of currency and passports.
I stood in the lounge, now empty of low-slung Contemporary furniture and stared blankly at Twinkletoes and Tiny as I tried to work out what to do next. They gazed back at me blankly. I told them there was no point in hanging about. I drove them back to my place, where Twinkletoes had parked the Sunbeam. I told them I was calling it a day and I’d ’phone Sneddon if I needed them again. What I really needed was to be free of my two-gorilla escort for a while. I could do with time to think. The move out of the Bearsden house hadn’t been hurried or unplanned. And because an estate agent was involved in the sale of the property, the proceeds had to go somewhere. It was my guess that it had all been part of Lillian’s schedule. And maybe John Andrews’s sudden detour from the highway had been part of that schedule too.
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