She nodded again. I let her go. She looked at me with wild eyes and rubbed at her throat. I grabbed her arm and frogmarched her through to the living room and threw her down into the armchair. I sure was in a nice business. It was when I found myself pushing women around that I felt most proud of my career choices.
The flat was expensively furnished. And surprisingly tasteful. There was a dining table and chairs against one wall and I dragged a chair over and sat opposite her.
‘Are you Molly?’ I asked.
She shook her head.
‘No. My name is Liz. Molly was Margot… Sally’s sister. She’s dead.’
‘You worked for this special set up, didn’t you? I’m guessing the name of the game was blackmail?’
Liz nodded. ‘I don’t know much about what they squeezed out of the punters we set up. I just did as I was told.’
‘How did it work?’
‘We were given a mark… some rich or important bloke. Sometimes the mark would know we were chippies, other times they didn’t know they were being set up. But they was always married. Respectable. After a while Tam McGahern would burst in on us, shouting and swearing and threatening the mark. Sometimes he’d soften them up with a wee beatin’. Whichever one of us was working the mark, Tam made out that he was our boyfriend. He’d say he’d had a detective on us and then show the pictures. Then he’d say he was goin’ to send the pictures to the mark’s wife or the papers.’
‘Unless the mark did exactly what Tam wanted.’
‘That’s about the size of it.’
‘And John Andrews was Sally Blane’s mark?’
‘That had been goin’ on since long before I got involved. And I only ever knew Sally as Lillian Andrews. I only found out later that the girl what got killed was her sister and that Lillian’s real name was Sally.’
‘So Margot really is dead?’
‘Aye. And because of what we was doing. Tam did his usual angry boyfriend act in the street outside a club Margot and her mark had been at. Lillian was with them. Tam had the photos and everything. He started to pull the guy out of the car but the mark panicked and drove off with Margot and Lillian still inside. In the car, I mean. Tam chased the mark through the city and out onto Paisley Road West. The mark lost control and smashed into a railway bridge. Him and Margot was killed right off. Lillian was in the back. She was knocked about a bit but all right. Except her nose and jaw got busted up. She thought she was going to lose her looks, but Tam got some specialist to take care of it.’
‘Who told you all of this?’
‘One of the other girls. Wilma.’
‘Wilma Marshall?’
‘Aye. You know her?’
‘We’ve met.’
Liz rubbed her throat and frowned. ‘Can I get a glass of water?’
‘Okay. But I’ll keep you company.’
We went through to the small kitchen and she filled a glass from the tap. I leaned against the door jamb and smiled at her. I was feeling pretty smug. We exchanged a look and in that second she knew that I knew who she really was. The fear was gone from her eyes: it made way for a cold, dark hate.
‘You’ve got a great job, Lennox,’ she said. I grinned more broadly.
‘I don’t recall introducing myself,’ I said.
‘Yeah. A great job. You must spend half your life looking back over your shoulder.’
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘I tend to be a forward-thinking type. I fit in with the new age.’
‘Really? Maybe it’s time you started looking over your shoulder.’ She smiled. A smile that made me think oh fuck.
Before I had time to react, something flashed past my eyes as it was looped over my head and around my neck and drawn tight. A thick band that felt like leather. Suddenly breathing became something no longer to be taken for granted and I was pulled back against the body of my attacker. He twisted something at the back of my neck a couple of times and both my head and my chest felt like they were going to explode: one from want of blood, the other from want of air. I was going to get it the same way as Parks and Smails.
I clawed at the strap and then, uselessly, vaguely over my shoulders. The lack of oxygen started a buzz-saw in my head and I started to panic. Something of my wartime training kicked in and instead of struggling I let my legs go from under me and dropped like a stone. I went down so fast that I shifted my attacker’s centre of gravity. He maintained the pressure on the garrotte but had to stand with his legs apart and hold me like a sheep being sheared.
I reached into my jacket pocket and freed the catch on my switchblade. I put all of my strength into a sweeping upwards arc and aimed, blind, for a point about a foot above my head. I guessed that was where his balls would be. I must have been there or thereabouts, because he screamed in agony and the garrotte around my neck loosened. I still had a grip on my knife and I gave it a vicious twist to mash the potatoes. Another scream and I cheered myself with the thought that he wouldn’t be passing his strangulation skills onto the next generation.
I scrambled to my feet and spun around to face him. He was about five-eight and dark-skinned and had a Middle Eastern look to him.
I pulled the knife from his groin, giving it another malicious twist as I did so. He sank to his knees, his hands clutched to his genitals, blood spilling from between the fingers. He was retching in great big spasms. He represented no further threat to me, but the bastard had tried to kill me. And he had killed Parks and Smails.
I took my time and made sure the kick I planted hit him square in the mouth, dislodging teeth. I was back in a place I’d been too many times in the war. I got the old tingle, the slowing down of time, the total absence of any kind of feeling for the man you were killing. And I knew that was what I was going to do. I grabbed him by the hair and yanked his head up so that I could get my knife in behind his windpipe before thrusting it forward and out. Then the fucker would know what it was like to fight for breath.
The thing that I hadn’t accounted for was that, in the war, there tends not to be a woman in the room behind you with access to heavy cooking implements. I had forgotten about Liz. Mainly because she hadn’t done the usual hysterical screaming thing in the background. I was just about to finish my Arab chum off when a train ran into the back of my head.
I went down but wasn’t out. She swung some cast iron at me again and caught me on the temple. This time the lights dimmed so I could enjoy the fireworks that sparkled in my head. I was really dazed but still not out and she knew she’d have to get out quick. I heard her pulling her dusky chum to his feet and rushing him out of the apartment. I pulled myself upright, leaning on the kitchen counter. My head hurt like a bastard, I felt a warm trickle of blood down my neck and the world was still a little tilted on its axis. I looked down to where she’d dropped the cast-iron pan. I counted myself lucky that she hadn’t thought to pick up a knife instead. Glaswegians kill each other in the kitchen more than in any other room. Admittedly they usually do it by cooking, but I still considered myself fortunate to get out in one piece.
I soaked a cloth and held it to my head, but still made a stab at catching up with them. There was a smear of blood along the linoleum floor and out onto the common stair. I ran down the steps, my head throbbing with every footfall and out along the close and onto the street. They were gone, as was the Baby Austin.
I half-staggered towards where I had parked the Atlantic and had to stop halfway to vomit. It burned in my crushed throat. There was nobody on the street, but even if there had been, the sight of a Glaswegian hanging onto a lamppost and making a splash on the pavement was not an out-of-the ordinary occurrence. I felt a little better but every pulse still beat a kettle drum in my head. I’d been clobbered twice now and I knew I wasn’t in a good way. Maybe even a fractured skull. I slumped into the driver’s seat and sat for a moment, letting the spinning world catch up with me a little before I drove off.
When this was over, I was going to collect big time from the Three Kings and add
it to the little nest-egg I’d built up. Maybe, when this was all over and if I was still alive, I would get that boat back to Canada. You never really know where rock bottom lies. But this sure felt like it.
I ’phoned Sneddon from a ’phone box. He had arranged a meeting for the following evening. I asked if it could be sooner but he said that each of the Kings would have to work out how to give the cops the slip. I told him what had happened in the flat.
‘The guy who tried to throttle me was the one who killed Parks and Smails,’ I said. I told Sneddon what I’d done to the Arab.
‘Good. Sounds like the bastard will bleed to death. But I want to be sure. I’ll see you at Shawfields tomorrow at eight.’
‘Okay,’ I said and hung up. I hadn’t wanted to tell Sneddon I was in bad shape. Religion and half-baked history meant Sneddon and Murphy hated each other’s guts, but they were actually mirror images of each other. Neither was the type you wanted to show weakness to. I redialled.
‘Jonny?’ I said. ‘Can I come over… and can you get me a doctor?’
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Jonny Cohen’s home in Newton Mearns was nearer than either of the other Three Kings’, but there was more to it than that. My instinct told me I’d get the help I needed there.
I did, however, feel the need to warn Jonny that I was in a bad way and to suggest that we should maybe meet up somewhere other than his house, but he insisted, saying he’d meet me at the door and get me looked after. He told me that I’d have to accept that the cops would see me arrive: they had him under surveillance, just like the other two Kings and all their chief officers.
It was difficult, but I somehow managed to drive south to Newton Mearns and park the Atlantic three blocks away from Jonny’s, hopefully out of sight of the coppers on watch. It was that three-block walk to Jonny’s house that took the most out of me. I tugged my hat’s brim low over my eyes and pulled the collar of my raincoat up. Two reasons: to hide my face as much as possible, and to conceal the bright red that the collar of my shirt had turned. I walked as straight and purposefully as I could, but now I felt hot and I knew that the sweat I felt in my hatband and trickling down my neck was really blood.
Jonny answered the door and casually invited me in. At least casually from a cop car’s distance away. It didn’t do me much good to see the shock in Jonny’s expression, especially considering his own face was still bruised and swollen under one eye from his encounter with Super-intendent McNab and his boys.
‘For fuck’s sake, Lennox…’ he said after he closed the door. I didn’t answer: I was too busy hurtling towards the Italian tiles of his hallway.
I came to at about lunchtime the following day. There was a fat, middle-aged woman sitting reading a newspaper beside the bed and as soon as she heard me stirring she got up and leaned over me, placing a hand on either shoulder to pin me to the bed.
‘Not now, sweetheart,’ I said weakly. ‘I’ve got a headache.’
‘Aye, very funny,’ she said in a way that told me she didn’t think it. ‘Stay still and don’t move your head. I’ll go and get Mr Cohen.’
I lay still and looked up at the ceiling. I felt as sick as hell and my head still rang with the constant, high-pitched pain. Jonny came in and leaned over me.
‘What the fuck have you been doing, Lennox? I got Doc Banks to look you over. He’s stitched up your head but he was pretty insistent that you go to a hospital as soon as possible. He says your skull could be fractured.’
‘No time, Jonny. Do you know about the meet tonight?’
‘At Shawfields? Aye. I hope you know what the fuck you’re about, Lennox. I have spent the last five years in the middle of Sneddon and Murphy. Trying to keep the bastards apart. Every time they meet Murphy starts the wisecracks about the Queen and Sneddon about the Pope. All of this sectarian shite, it does my head in.’
‘I suppose you’re neutral. Being Jewish, I mean.’
‘Doesn’t always follow,’ he grinned. ‘You can’t just be Jewish in Glasgow. You have to be a Protestant Jew or a Catholic Jew. Growing up here I was always being asked if I supported Rangers or Celtic.’
‘What did you say?’
‘That I was a Partick Thistle supporter.’
‘Smart move… dodge the sectarian issue and win their sympathy at the same time.’
‘Aye, but I still got stick for being Jewish. I remember kicking the shite out of this kid at school who said that us Jews had all the money. It wasn’t his insults that got to me… I was just so fucking furious that my wealthy Jewish parents were making us live in a tenement slum in Newlands.’
I laughed and somewhere in darkest Haiti a voodoo witch doctor shoved a pin through a dummy of my head. The homely, middle-aged woman tutted loudly and told me to lie still.
‘Give us a minute, Lizzie,’ said Jonny. ‘I’ll make sure he behaves.’
‘I think she fancies me,’ I said after she’d gone.
‘Lizzie Sharp,’ explained Jonny. ‘She used to be a matron at the Western General. She had a sideline in helping out young ladies in a spot of bother. Got three years for it. She’s pretty handy when someone’s banged up. Listen, Lennox, you need to get to a hospital. Doc Banks is worried about you.’
‘If Doc Banks had ever worried about anything other than where his next drink came from, he wouldn’t have been struck off. I’ll be fine.’ I eased up into a sitting position to prove I was right, but another stab from the witch doctor proved I wasn’t.
Jonny shrugged and tossed me a bottle that rattled in my hand when I caught it. ‘The doc says these will kill a lot of the pain. He said they’re really strong stuff. But you’ve to make sure and lay off the booze or they’ll make you nuts.’
I’d been tended by a corrupt nurse, medicated by a corrupt doctor who presumably got supplies like these from a corrupt pharmacist. I spilled a couple of the pills onto the palm of my hand. They were the size of horse-tablets; maybe Doc Banks got them from a corrupt vet instead.
‘Bloody hell, Jonny,’ I said. ‘Last time anybody prescribed tablets this size, Moses carried them down from Mount Sinai. Am I expected to run in the four o’clock at Troon after taking these?’
‘The doc said you’ve to break them in half before taking them. Don’t worry… Doc Banks knows not to cross me.’ He handed me a glass of water. ‘Sleep for a couple of hours, then we can see about losing our cop friends outside before heading up to Shawfields.’
*
The pills Doc Banks had left did the trick all right. The pain faded enough and I didn’t so much fall as plummet asleep. I was plunged into a vivid dreamworld of nauseatingly bright colours and painfully sharp edges. Lillian Andrews, ever the girl of my dreams, was there. She sat in a low-slung Contemporary chair in the middle of a wall-less, infinite room and smoked while all around her men killed each other. The floor beneath her feet was carpeted deep red.
‘It’s very practical,’ she said calmly. ‘The blood doesn’t show at all.’ Her point was illustrated as Hammer Murphy caved in the side of Bobby’s head with a swing of his mallet and a spray of blood, the same shade as the carpet and Lillian’s lips, spattered her cheek.
‘I’m going to kill you,’ I said to her without anger or malice as I sat down opposite her on a chair that appeared beneath me. Ronnie Smails and Arthur Parks joined us, each sitting in the chairs I’d found them in. Neither spoke. Parks’s lower jaw still jutted at an unnatural angle. I took a glass of red wine from her and we toasted the memory of her husband.
‘Are you going to fuck me first,’ Lillian asked in a matter-of-fact voice, ‘or after?’
‘I haven’t decided.’
She said something in reply but I couldn’t hear it over the screams of the fighting and dying. I sipped the red wine and it was thick and warm and coppery.
I woke up.
The curtains were drawn and the bedroom I lay in suddenly seemed tiny and cramped after the impossible architecture of the room in my dream. I felt sick. I stood up a
nd rushed out of the room. I found the bathroom at the end of the hall just in time. I vomited up all that was in my gut but continued retching for a couple of endless minutes.
I washed my face and looked in the bathroom mirror. The world seemed to still have the hard-edged, harsh hyper-reality of my dream. A pale, drawn face with dark-shad-owed eyes stared back out at me. My hair was plastered to my forehead like black seaweed on a beach. I looked old. I felt old. There was a large gauze bundle taped to the side of my head where Doc Banks had stitched me up. Jonny appeared behind me at the door. I looked at the reflection of his bruised face.
‘You okay?’ he asked.
‘I’ll live,’ I said without much conviction. ‘Let’s go.’
Lizzie, the matronly abortionist, dressed my head with a more discreet pad and I took another couple of Banks’s horse-tablets. Again something appeared turned up in my head and I seemed to see in Gone with the Wind Technicolor.
At least my head had stopped hurting.
One of Jonny’s minders was about his size and colouring. We waited until he changed into one of Jonny’s suits, raincoat and hat. Jonny handed him the keys to the Riley and we watched as the police car outside followed the fake Jonny away.
‘I feel guilty, in a way,’ said Jonny. ‘It’s like bemusing children for sport.’
We waited a couple of minutes before going out of the back door, across a couple of neighbours’ fences and out onto the street. Jonny brought a couple of heavies with him: it was the expected form for one of these meets. We walked the three blocks to where I’d parked the Atlantic and headed up through Giffnock and Pollockshields before cutting across to Rutherglen. Shawfields Stadium had an art deco, mock-Egyptian entrance that would have done a pharaoh proud — if there ever had been a pharaoh who called his hunting hounds names like Blue-Boy and Jack’s-m’Lad and was partial to placing the odd five-bob bet.
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