Lennox l-1

by Craig Russell

  ‘A house you have in Bearsden. Ardbruach House, I believe is the name of it.’

  ‘Oh yes. Yes, of course. Give me a moment…’ He sorted through some files and handed me a typed-out sheet with a photograph attached. It was the Andrews place, all right. ‘Actually…’ he said thoughtfully, but loudly, ‘it is something of a coincidence that your client should be interested in acquiring commercial premises as well; the vendor of Ardbruach House is also about to place a substantial commercial estate up for sale. Offices in the city and dockside warehousing. Would that be the kind of thing your client would be looking for? Or perhaps it would be more manufacturing… if so we have-’

  I held my hand up. ‘I’m afraid I’m not currently at liberty to say, Mr Brodie. Suffice it to say that my client’s is a name you would recognize…’

  Brodie beamed, imagining I represented some Edinburgh financial magnate. He wouldn’t have if he had known who my client really was. Even here, deep within the comfortable yet unyielding folds of the Scottish Establishment, the name Willie Sneddon would have had the resonance to have him permanently stain some pinstripe. ‘I quite understand,’ he said knowingly. And loudly.

  I read through the particulars of the house.

  ‘Tell me, Mr Brodie,’ I said. ‘As you can imagine I am au fait with property prices across the Central Belt, not just in Edinburgh. It strikes me that Ardbruach House is being offered at a very reasonable price. In fact, this “offers over” figure seems to me considerably underestimated… at least a thousand below what I would expect. We will be doing a thorough survey of the property, so it does no one any service not to disclose any potential problems…’ My mouth was beginning to ache from talking multisyllabic shite.

  ‘Goodness no,’ said Brodie, suddenly concerned. I was surprised he hadn’t said heaven forfend. ‘I assure you that there is nothing wrong with the property. The price has been set at a lower starting point because my client is keen to attract as much interest as possible.’

  I smiled. ‘Do you mind?’ I asked and took my silver cigarette case out, offering Brodie one. I lit us both. ‘I have to be honest, Mr Brodie. I suspect that your client, for one reason or another, is looking for a quick sale. That is something we may be able to accommodate, and at or around the asking price, subject to survey. But I need to know if that is indeed the case.’

  I was good. I was projecting so little personality that I was even beginning to convince myself that I was a bona fide Edinburgh accountant. Brodie stared at me with a frown for a moment. He was working something out. Or he was counting sheep in his head. Finally he said:

  ‘My client is tying up the estate of her recently deceased spouse. It is a distressing time and she is most keen to settle matters as soon as possible.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, tilting my head back and blowing a jet of smoke towards the ceiling. ‘Then I think we can do business. Would it be possible to talk to your client?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ said Brodie apologetically. ‘I’m afraid Mrs Andrews is out of the country.’

  ‘I see…’ I said in a tone that suggested it was a problem. He didn’t respond: he was clearly concerned that I was going to walk, so I guessed he really didn’t know where she was. I let the air between us stew in silence. Then I said, ‘My client is also looking for a house for his general manager. He — I mean the general manager — had his eye on a property you had to sell on Dowanside Road. I wondered if it were still for sale.’ I took a sheet of paper from my pocket and handed Brodie the address of the former brothel.

  ‘Oh, yes…’ said Brodie, raising an eyebrow, which given it was as dense and woolly as a sheep’s fleece was no mean achievement. ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you there; it’s been sold, unfortunately.’

  ‘Who was the vendor?’ I asked. ‘That was why the general manager chose that specific house — he thought he knew the people who owned it.’

  ‘Mrs McGahern,’ said Brodie. The Neanderthal shield of his heavy Ayrshire brow slid a little over his eyes in suspicion. I guessed why: he was thinking, by my reckoning, that it was a hell of a coincidence that I should name these two properties: one owned by Lillian Andrews, the other owned by a war widow, Mrs McGahern. Who just happened to be Mrs Andrews’s sister. Brodie looked at my business card from beneath the overhang of his brow. I stood up.

  ‘Well, thank you, Mr Brodie,’ I said and we shook hands. ‘I certainly think we can do business over Ardbruach House.’

  The woolly eyebrows lifted a little and he smiled. I promised to be in touch and left.

  I ’phoned Sneddon from a telephone box on Great Western Road and brought him up to date. He sounded less than pleased that I was still following the McGahern trail, despite what I had to say to him about Arthur Parks, Lillian Andrews’s sister Margot and the big Dutchman.

  ‘Just find out who killed Parky,’ he said. ‘I don’t care how you do it.’

  ‘Listen, Mr Sneddon, I really think we’re dealing with something much bigger here. And I think it could be a threat to you and the other two Kings.’

  ‘You saying someone’s trying to take over?’

  ‘No. As a matter of fact I don’t think they are. I don’t think they’re even interested in Glasgow. But they’re working from here and I think they’re going to bring a shitstorm down on you all just by stirring up the police.’

  ‘What’s it got to do with Parky?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. But he was involved somehow. And I have a bad feeling that these stolen police uniforms have something to do with it. There’s a bigger picture than the one we’re seeing. I have a sort of half-theory about this that I need to work out. If you were to set up a blackmail operation, I mean compromising people who could afford to pay, who would you use?’

  ‘I’m not into that shite,’ said Sneddon. ‘It brings civilians into the picture.’

  ‘But if you did, who would you use?’

  ‘That’s the problem. I’d talk to Parky about it. There’s that wee shite Danny Dumfries, I suppose. But I wouldn’t trust him. He’s tied in with Murphy.’

  ‘Oh yeah… I didn’t think that would be Dumfries’s kind of thing.’

  ‘Maybes no, but he gets involved in all kinds of shady shite that we wouldn’t touch.’

  Sure, I thought, life must be one long moral dilemma for you.

  ‘They must have been hard bastards,’ said Sneddon, changing the subject. ‘I mean, to do that to Parky.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘No disrespect to him, but I would imagine a cutting bit of sarcasm would have brought Parks to his knees.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about. You know, with the McGahern thing. There maybe could have been a connection between Parky and McGahern. Parky was hard. Don’t let the pansy stuff fool you. He was hard as any of my team. Harder. I know the way he was. Never bothered me. But the army wouldn’t take his sort because they thought they would corrupt other soldiers, that sort of fucking shite. So Parky disguised it. Pretended to be something he wasn’t just so’s he could fight for King and country.’

  ‘Parks fought in the war?’

  ‘More than that. I didn’t think about it before. He was in the seventh armoured division. Parky was a Desert Rat. Like Tam McGahern.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  I drove to Edinburgh, rather than take the train again. That way I could avoid rush-hour-commuting contract killers. Before I left I ’phoned to say I was on my way. I parked the Atlantic in St Bernard’s Crescent and was shown into the same office as before.

  Helena walked into the room and I felt the same kick-in-the-gut reaction.

  ‘I don’t see you for years then twice in the space of a couple of weeks.’ She smiled and offered me a cigarette from a solid silver box. ‘Am I to infer something from that?’

  I smiled. ‘I’m not here on business, Helena,’ I lied, ‘if that’s what you mean. I wanted to see you again. Maybe we could have dinner together?’


  She angled her head back slightly, raised the arch of a perfect dark eyebrow and looked at me with her vaguely imperious manner. Like she was appraising me. Sometimes Helena could look haughty. That was when I really, really wanted to fuck her most.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘We’ll eat here. I have a flat on the top floor. Why don’t you come back at seven? There’s a door at the back takes you into the kitchen. If you ring there I’ll come and get you. I don’t want you coming in the front…’ She let the thought die but I knew what she meant: she didn’t want me reminded what her business was.

  I stood and picked up my hat. ‘It’s a date. We can talk about old times.’

  Her smile flickered. ‘No… not old times. All I want to think about is the future.’

  I drove the Atlantic back into the city centre and stopped at a snobby wine merchants in George Street. The guy behind the counter was thirty at the most but striving hard for middle-age. He wore a pair of those ridiculous tartan trousers, known as trews in Scotland, and looked at me as if I couldn’t afford the wine. Truth was, it was a push. The Scots were not great consumers of wine, preferring instead their drinks to double as drain cleaner. In Edinburgh, anything potentially exclusive had a web of snobbery swiftly spun about it, and the guy behind the counter made a point of slowly emphasizing the names of the wines, as if it would help me understand. Having been brought up in New Brunswick I could speak French well, so I amused myself by humiliating him by showing off my francophone skills, asking for wines that didn’t exist and then looking angry when he said they didn’t have them.

  I put the bottle of Fronsac in the boot of the car and walked down to a bookstore in Princes Street. A cold wind stirred the dust in the streets and tugged at the raincoats of the glum-faced passers-by. I stopped and looked up at the castle, which towered above Princes Street. There was a flutter in my chest: the same vague feeling of unease. I had had it since I had left Glasgow and at the odd time before that, too. I spun around quickly and startled a young housewife who had been walking behind me, clutching the hand of a pre-school toddler. She passed, as did several others. But I didn’t see what my instinct was telling me should be there. I walked on and into the bookstore, trying to tell myself I was imagining things. But it was still there, that feeling that I was being shadowed. Very professionally.

  After parking the Atlantic in Dean Street, I walked to the back of St Bernard’s Crescent. Helena must have been waiting for me in the kitchen, for she opened the door at my first knock. She was wearing a less formal outfit, a deep red dress that exposed her slender arms and long neck, and her hair was loose and brushed her shoulders.

  ‘Come on up,’ she said. I followed her out of the kitchen and up a tight stairwell that had obviously been intended originally for servants. It was clear she was trying to keep me from seeing the main business of the house. As if I could forget.

  I had half-expected her to bring food up with her from the kitchen, but when we got to the attic part of the house, it was clear it was a self-contained dwelling. Her space. Away from business. The rooms she had would originally have been the servants’ quarters but, given the Georgian scale of the house, were still impressive enough. There was a small alcoved section, divided off by a bead screen, behind which something bubbled on a hob and filled the room with a rich, appetizing aroma.

  ‘The only thing I miss up here is having a piano. There’s one down in the drawing room, but I seldom get a chance to play it.’ I gave her the book I’d picked up for her that afternoon in Princes Street, Coins in the Fountain by John Secondari, and she took the wine from me, pouring us a glass each.

  While she cooked I looked out of the window. There was a stone pillared colonnade edging the roof and I could see out across the trees in the crescent below. Edinburgh sat mute and grey under a sky shot through with sunset-red silk. I thought of how I’d been here before, in a different apartment looking out over a different city while Helena had cooked and we had chatted and laughed and deceived each other with talk of the future. In my experience, the future was like a seaside day out to Largs: in principle it sounded great, but when you arrived there it just turned out to be the same old shite.

  I suddenly felt tired and wished I wasn’t there. But I smiled as cheerfully as I could when she came through with two plates of goulash.

  ‘It’s almost impossible to find half-decent ingredients here,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what it is the British have against food that you can taste. That you’d want to taste.’ She laughed and revealed a hint of the girl she’d probably been before the war. She seemed relaxed and I noticed I could hear her accent more. She had left something of the Helena I’d talked to two weeks before down in the house below. Like a formal coat she wore only for business.

  The goulash was delicious. As it always had been. We drank the wine I’d brought and then a second bottle she had. We talked and laughed some more, then fell on each other with a savagery that was almost frightening. She scratched and bit me and stared at me wildly with something akin to hatred in her eyes. Afterwards we lay naked on the rug, drank what was left of the wine and smoked.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me why you’re really here?’ she asked, her voice suddenly cold and hard again.

  ‘I’m here to see you, Helena,’ I said, and almost believed it myself. ‘After I saw you the other week I couldn’t stop thinking about you. About us.’ At least that much was true.

  ‘There is no us,’ she said, but the chill had thawed a little. She turned on her side and we looked into each other’s eyes. ‘There never was an us. So why don’t you save us both a lot of time and get to what it is you want. Unless you’ve just had it.’

  ‘Don’t, Helena. It’s not you.’

  ‘What? To be bitter and cynical?’ She laughed and rolled onto her back again. She stared up at the ceiling and smoked and I took in her finely sculpted profile. ‘We’re both cut from the same rotten wood, you and I, Lennox. So cut the crap and tell me what you want.’

  ‘Okay, I did want to ask you something, but I did come here to see you. To be with you.’ I sat up and took a long pull on my cigarette. ‘Listen, Helena, someone… a friend of mine… was talking to me the other day. About wanting to get away. To have a new start. Why can’t we?’

  Helena turned to me. The only light was the glow from the fire and the red-gold of it etched the contours of her body. When she spoke her voice was low. ‘Stop it. We’ve been here before.’

  ‘Were we wrong? Why couldn’t it work?’ I realized that, at that moment, I meant what I was saying. ‘My folks have money. I have some money saved. And God knows you must have a bit put away. You said yourself the last time I was here that you dreamed of selling up and starting a new life. We could go to Canada. Away from everyone and everything that’s gone wrong in our lives.’

  Helena stood up and pulled her dress back over her body. The ice was back in her voice. ‘The main thing that’s gone wrong in our lives is us. Like I said, Lennox, you and I are both rotten. We blame it all on everything that has happened to us, but the truth is it was always there in us both. It just took a little bit of history to bring it to the surface. Forget what I said before… sometimes I talk nonsense. To keep sane. So why don’t you just tell me what it is that you want?’

  Sometimes you feel more naked than others. I stood up and pulled on my clothes, feeling uncomfortable under her gaze.

  ‘Arthur Parks is dead.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I’m to find out who killed him.’

  ‘And what does that have to do with me?’ It was fully dark outside and the dying fire was all the light I had to see her face. But I sensed it set hard.

  ‘Okay, Helena, I’ll tell you all that I know and what I haven’t told my client yet. And it’ll tell you exactly what I think it has to do with you. Arthur Parks was murdered by someone connected to whatever happened to Tam McGahern, the tough spivvy-type you say you saw Sally Blane with.

  ‘This is the way I see it,
or I’m guessing it… Tam McGahern sees he can’t expand his little empire beyond Glasgow. The Three Kings have him in their sights if he puts a foot wrong. It’s true that Tam McGahern may be a psychopath, but he’s also smarter than the Three Kings put together. And he’s seen that there are opportunities to be had in the big wide world outside Glasgow. So he comes up with a scheme… and here’s where it gets a little sketchy, because I’m not a hundred per cent on what the scheme was, but it’s got to do with the Middle East. So Tam decides to hook himself a few big fish. With me so far?’

  ‘Go on.’ Helena’s face was suddenly illuminated as she lit another cigarette.

  ‘So Tam conceives this honey-trap operation, gets together a handful of really classy chippies. Not the usual sort, girls with a bit of class and real lookers. He sets them up in a house in the West End, but my guess is that some of the punters who go there don’t even know they’re whores or that the house is a bordello. Tam was in the Desert Rats and Gideon, so he has an interesting network of friends, including, I think, Arthur Parks. So Tam gives Arthur a cut of the action in exchange for helping him set it all up — creaming off the best customers and sending them to the West End operation. Like I said, I think a few non-punters were also targeted by the girls directly. To start with I thought that this was all a trap-fuck-and-blackmail operation. But they are too selective in their targets. It’s a list of names, Helena. A list of names that McGahern needs to make his plan work. One of them is Alexander Knox, the plastic surgeon. Why they need him beats me. But the main target is John Andrews, the poor mug who marries Lillian not knowing she is really a prostitute and porn-film actress called Sally Blane. Andrews seems to be their main target because they need to use his importing business.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘That I’m not entirely sure of. But I am sure it involves taking things in or out of the Middle East. Anyway, something goes wrong. Tam is targeted by someone who doesn’t like his enterprising spirit, so he fakes his own death by killing his brother. But his hunters aren’t convinced and they do both brothers. Tam exits stage left under his twin brother’s name. But Sally Blane, or Lillian Andrews as she now is, keeps the plan running. Part of that plan is to divert suspicion for the second McGahern death onto me, and then to frame me good and proper for the Parks murder.’