Smails had been my man. I was now certain he had taken the photographs for the blackmail operation but I knew a search of the place would be futile: the pics and the negs would be long gone.
Parks dead. Smails dead. There were two other contacts that Tam McGahern had had before his demise: the fat Dutchman and Jackie Gillespie, the armed robber. I wondered if they were both still breathing.
Remembering my experience at Arthur Parks’s place, I decided to get out quick, just in case the cozzers were on their way again, maybe this time without bells and flashing lights. I paused long enough to wipe down with a handkerchief the surfaces and handles that I remembered touching. My fingerprints weren’t on record, but they were all over the Parks place and I didn’t want my dabs to be the link between two murder scenes. I switched all of the lights off and slipped out into the street.
I had had the sense not to park the Atlantic directly outside, mainly because I didn’t want to scare Smails off if he had returned while I was still inside. I was just about to turn the key in the ignition when a taxi stopped outside Smails. Two women got out. I couldn’t see them too well but as far as I could tell they were reasonably well put together and I guessed that they were a couple of Smails’s ‘models’. One paid the taxi driver, while the other rang Smails’s doorbell. I had locked the door and hastily tapped the small glass pane into place. The brass at the door called over to her chum, obviously to tell the taxi driver to wait. She rang again and rapped on the door. As far as I could see her knocking hadn’t dislodged the pane. She gave up and climbed back into the taxi.
I followed them across town. I had noticed that they weren’t cheaply dressed and they certainly weren’t concerned about the cost of the taxi. The dark-haired girl I’d seen knocking at Smails’s door got off at the Saltmarket. I decided to stick with the taxi. It headed south and we passed Hampden Stadium and eventually stopped outside a tenement in Mount Vernon. The girl got out and paid the taxi driver. Bingo: she was none other than Eskimo Nell. And now I remembered where I’d seen her before. She was the woman I’d twice seen Lillian Andrews with. I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible but it was difficult with so few cars on the street.
A number twelve Corporation tram stopped and half a dozen people dismounted. I parked and walked briskly into the midst of the passengers. The blonde disappeared into the communal tenement close. I was just in time to see her turn the corner at the far end of the close and climb the rear stairs. I moved as quietly as I could to the end of the passageway and watched from its cover as she entered her flat. Making a mental note of the number, I headed back out to the Atlantic.
The only reason I didn’t make a house call there and then was I did not want her to work out that I’d followed her from Smails’s. After all, he would be found over the next day or so and they would work out a rough time of death. Roughly the time that coincided with me being there. And the City of Glasgow Police had a problem with the concept of coincidence.
I drove past Smails’s place on the way back. No police cars outside and the place was still in darkness. I tried to ’phone Willie Sneddon to give him an update, but he was out. I headed back to my digs and turned in for the night. But every time sleep started to come it was shouldered out of the way by something big and ugly and frightening. I lay in the dark and thought of Helena and Fiona White and May Donaldson and new starts in Canada. The idea had never been so appealing. I had gotten involved in something a little too deadly this time. I realized that, for the first time in a very long time, I was actually a little scared.
My foreboding turned out to be well-founded. An ill-tempered Mrs White called me down to the shared hall telephone at seven the next morning. It was Willie Sneddon.
‘Lennox, don’t talk but listen. The polis are on their way to arrest me and I’m going to be here when they arrive. The coppers have lifted Murphy and Cohen. About an hour ago. I was supposed to be lifted at the same time but I wasn’t at home. The bastards have lifted most of my team as well, including Twinkletoes and Tiny. I need you to contact George Meldrum — he’s my lawyer — and tell him to bail me out. I can’t get him on the ’phone and they’ll be here any moment. The cops will leave you alone because you’re not on any of our teams.’
‘What the hell has happened?’
‘I don’t fucking know. Just get Meldrum as fast as you can.’
‘Okay, if it’s as big as it seems to be, then they won’t let you near Meldrum.’
‘Just do it.’ He hung up.
I knew of Greasy George Meldrum. I reckoned there was a picture of him on every dartboard in every police canteen in Glasgow. He was known as Greasy George for two reasons: his overly groomed appearance, over-elaborate vocabulary and oiled hair, and the fact that everything he touched seemed to become slippery. Just as the police had a solid case against one of the Three Kings, it would slip from their grasp, thanks to Greasy George.
I got Meldrum’s home number from the book and dialled it. No answer. I got dressed quickly, unsuccessfully tried to reach him again by ’phone, and jumped into the Atlantic. I decided it was pointless driving up to his Milngavie home and instead decided to head into my office and wait until nearer nine, when I’d probably catch Meldrum at his offices in Wellington Street.
I listened to the Home Service on the car radio on the way in to my office. One story dominated the news. I pulled quickly over to the kerb and listened intently to the whole report. I muttered fuck as all of the pieces suddenly fell into place. Unfortunately the pieces falling into place meant that all hell was breaking loose. I now understood why the Three Kings had been pulled in. I went straight to Meldrum’s office and sat outside until his staff started to arrive. I followed them in.
A pretty receptionist greeted me a little disdainfully, obviously annoyed at someone turning up before she could settle into her day. She was also seriously unimpressed that I didn’t have an appointment. It was only after I told her I was representing the interests of Mr William Sneddon — and probably those of Mr Michael Murphy and Mr Jonathan Cohen — that she suddenly became very much more accommodating.
I sat for an hour waiting in the reception area trying to work out just how accommodating the receptionist might become. Eventually Greasy George arrived. He was tallish, well-built and balding and wore an expensively tailored blue-pinstripe business suit. I intercepted him as he passed through reception.
‘I’ve heard a great deal about you, Mr Lennox,’ he said amiably. ‘But our paths have never crossed. Some of our mutual clients speak very highly of you. Please…’ he held the door open to his office.
‘I tried to get you at home,’ I said, sitting down.
‘I’m afraid I was staying overnight at a friend’s house.’ He still smiled. It was the type of smile you wanted, for no good reason, to punch. ‘My good lady wife and children are away for a few days, so I took the opportunity to visit my friend.’
‘I understand,’ I said. We both knew I did. ‘Have you heard the news?’
‘What news would that be, Mr Lennox?’
‘The armed robbery. It was the main story this morning. I’ve no doubt it will hit later editions of the papers. There was an army convoy on its way from the Royal Ordnance Arsenal at Fazakerly in Liverpool to Redford and Dreghorn Barracks. It was stopped by police officers at a checkpoint. Except they weren’t police officers. It was a highly organized job, but something seems to have gone disastrously wrong. The result is two dead soldiers, a driver badly beaten and in a coma, and a ton of the latest sub-machine guns gone.’
‘I see…’ The smile faded. ‘I’m guessing that this has something to do with those stolen uniforms.’
‘You know about the uniforms?’ I asked.
‘Yes, I do. Messrs Sneddon, Murphy and Cohen have been receiving the attentions of our constabulary a little too persistently over the last while.’
‘Well, that’s why I’m here. Sneddon ’phoned me this morning. The CID have taken them all in for questioning. Snedd
on needs you to head over to St Andrew’s Street with a get-out-of-jail-free card.’
‘I’m afraid it will be anything but free.’
I smiled. ‘I would think you’d want to get all three out of there as quick as possible. After all, between them, the Three Kings must pay more than your tailor’s bills.’
‘In which case, we’re both in the same position, as far as I can gather.’
‘True,’ I said. ‘So I suggest we both work, each in his own way, to free up our revenue sources.’
We left together, Meldrum pausing to tell his secretary to cancel all his appointments for the day. I wondered how many of his clients were on the ’phone. It was quite an achievement for him to get such a large percentage of his clients off: he had a growing word-of-scum reputation and everybody knew that if Greasy George Meldrum was your lawyer, you were as guilty as sin.
We parted company on the street outside his office. He shook my hand and handed me one of his expensive embossed cards.
‘Thanks,’ I smiled, ‘but I don’t think I’ll be needing your services.’
‘You never know, Mr Lennox. But that’s not why I gave it to you.’ He unlocked the door of his new Bentley R-type and I could have sworn I smelled polished walnut and leather from twenty yards away. ‘It is I who may need your services in the future.’ He got into his Bentley and drove off. I stared at his card. So far I’d been offered informal partnerships with a professional murderer and the most despised figure in the Scottish legal system. Maybe I should change my image.
I pocketed the card. I’d told him I would never need his services. Truth was that if the police made the link between the Parks and Smails murder scenes, then Greasy George could be exactly who I’d need.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The City of Glasgow Police could not be accused of dynamism. It took Greasy George a full forty-eight hours to get first Sneddon, then the other two Kings out of custody. It also took them that length of time to find Ronnie Smails’s body, by which time his cup of tea, and the trail, would be colder than stone cold.
The local newspapers had been a little more lively. Details of the robbery were emerging. It had taken place just north of the border and the trap had been sprung with military precision. There had been three lorries and an army truck escort, because of the nature of the cargo: brand-new Sterling-Patchett L2A1 sub-machine guns, which were being brought in to replace the older Sten guns. There had been an exchange of gunfire, which had left two Tommies dead on the road. One of the drivers was still in a critical condition and had not regained consciousness. The other was providing the police with descriptions of the attack and the attackers. One of the robbers had been wounded by army fire, but had made his escape.
This had been the caper that Tam McGahern had been building up to. And I had a pretty good idea about exactly what was going to happen next.
I had two house calls to make. Both were on the South Side. But first I had to pick up a couple of things from my place. I took my Webley and stashed it under the front passenger seat of the Atlantic. One Saturday night, a couple of months previously, I had gotten into a debate with a thug in Argyle Street. He had tried to compensate for his lack of guts and skill by pulling a knife on me: a beautiful, pearl-handled Italian switchblade. We ended the encounter with me up one pearl-handled switchblade and him down several less-than-pearly teeth. I had hung onto the knife. Now I slipped it into my jacket pocket.
Then I went out to play.
First I travelled along Paisley Road West and into the future. The address I had for Jackie Gillespie was near Bellahouston Park. A reasonably new rented Glasgow Corporation semi-detached, Gillespie’s house looked clean and bright and optimistic. But the real future was looming over it: a spider’s web of scaffolding encased a stepped rank of massive, almost complete apartment blocks. Moss Heights. This was where the Glaswegian of the future would live: free from the tenement, free from overcrowding and disease.
Free from any sense of community.
The fact was that Glasgow had swollen like a tumour and was now squeezing against the Green Belt. And if you couldn’t build out, you could build up. The geniuses in the City Chambers had decided that the solution to having Glaswegians living on top of each other was to have Glaswegians living on top of each other.
Given my experience of my last couple of house calls, I took the precaution of parking a little away from Gillespie’s house. The pavement beneath my feet was pristine, as were the roughcast and roofs of the houses I passed, their gardens still raw, earth scars, waiting for the first sowing of grass. As I walked, the ringing of heavy tools echoed from the building site in the sky half a mile distant.
Jackie Gillespie, as far as I knew, had no wife or children, yet his bright, new semi-detached council house had clearly been intended for a family. As far as I could see the neighbouring house was yet to be occupied. No one answered my ringing of the doorbell and, after checking there were no neighbours watching, I slipped around to the back of the house. The back door was unlocked. Well, to tell the truth it was de — locked. Someone had applied their size tens to it and the wood had splintered. My money was on a Highlander in blue. I had decided to be a little more prepared this time and I took a pair of gloves out of my raincoat pocket and put them on before pushing open the door.
It was fast becoming a bit of a tradition for me to find a freshly strangled corpse in situations like these, and I felt almost disappointed not to find Gillespie sitting in bulge-eyed welcome. Alive or dead, he wasn’t here. But whether it had been the coppers or not, someone had given his place a thorough turning over.
I didn’t hang around. If it hadn’t been the coppers then it would be soon. They were capable of thinking, even if it was a little more slowly than the rest of us. I knew that Jackie Gillespie had been seen talking to Tam McGahern, and I knew Tam McGahern had been planning a big getout-of-Glasgow job. The police didn’t. But they would be working their way through a list of top armed robbers who could have pulled a job like this. And Jackie Gillespie was pretty close to the top of the list.
But whoever had turned over his place had made the connection before me. And that didn’t fit with the police.
I got back in the car and headed south, stopping at a callbox on the way to ’phone Sneddon. There was something even colder and harder than usual about his voice.
‘Someone’s gonna pay for this, Lennox. Someone’s gonna pay hard and long. It’s been years since a copper’s felt he’s had the balls to lift a hand to me.’
‘McNab?’
‘He’s a fuckin’ traitor. He’s supposed to be Orange, for fuck’s sake. Instead of hassling me, he should have been kicking the Irish green shite out of that fucking Fenian Murphy.’
‘To be fair, Mr Sneddon, I think he’s been doing exactly that. And Jonny Cohen.’
‘Maybes. You’re right about Cohen, though. Word is he took a hammering. The cozzers picked on him special, ’cause armed robbery’s his thing.’
I could imagine it. Jonny Cohen would be at the top of the list. But it was the other name I was interested in.
‘Have they pulled in Jackie Gillespie?’ I asked.
‘How the fuck should I know?’ said Sneddon dully. Then, after a pause, ‘Why? Is Gillespie part of the firm that pulled this stunt?’
‘I don’t know. I think so. Listen, Mr Sneddon, I think I’ve put this all together. It’s like I said to you before; this could bring all kinds of trouble for you, Murphy and Sneddon. Today was just the start. This has a political element to it. Can you call a meeting? Get the other two Kings together and I can go over what I know. I’m going to need your combined resources to crack this.’
‘I dunno, Lennox. The coppers are still sticking to us like shite to a shirt tail. I’ll do my best.’
‘I’ll ’phone back in a couple of hours.’
After hanging up, I headed off for my second house call. I drove down to Mount Vernon and parked around the corner from the tenement block I�
�d seen Eskimo Nell go into on the night that Smails had had his collar tightened. There were three storeys of flats above a ground floor of shop fronts. There was an Austin A30 parked outside the close. All of the flats had lights on and I guessed Eskimo Nell was in. I hoped that she was alone. If she had company I could probably deal with it, but it could make things complicated. Slow me down.
I climbed the back stairs and knocked on the door. It was opened by the girl I’d followed back from Smails’s place. She looked a little unsure of herself and kept the door on the chain. She had a pretty face. Beautiful, almost. There was no doubt about the fact that she was the woman I’d seen Lillian Andrews with. She had a touch of class about her: just like Lillian, just like Wilma, just like Lena who had been rejected because the class evaporated whenever she spoke.
‘What do you want?’ she asked.
‘I’m a friend of Tam’s,’ I said, and tried to look both conspiratorial and in a hurry. ‘And of Sally’s. I’ve got a message for you.’
I thought the script and the performance were perfect, but it was clear I’d misread my audience. She slammed the door shut. I stopped the snib catching by shouldering the door. The chain held. I rammed my foot into the gap and slammed my shoulder into the heavy teak again. This time the chain snapped and the door flew in and threw the girl backwards. She staggered into the wall and a scream started to rise in her throat. I caught it for her.
‘Listen, sister,’ I hissed as menacingly as I could manage, pinning her to the wall with the hand I had around her throat. ‘This is your choice. You can start screaming and I’ll strangle you to death here in your hall, or we can sit down, nice and civilized, on your sofa and chat. But you’ve got to understand something here and now. You’re finished with whatever business you’ve got with Sally Blane or Lillian Andrews or whatever the hell her real name is. You’re playing a different game now. It’s called survival. We’re going to talk and I’m going to ask questions, then I’m going to deliver you to the Three Kings. And, believe me, if they hand a dolly over to their boys it ends up broken. So whether or not you end tonight raped, tortured and dead depends on how well I can satisfy the Three Kings that you’ve given me all the answers I need. Do you understand?’ I loosened my grip enough for her to gasp a breath and nod vigorously. I tightened it again. ‘No funny business. Okay?’
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