It was Jock Ferguson who pissed on my parade, albeit with the best of intentions. And at my own request.
I offered to buy Ferguson lunch at the Trieste, as thanks for checking out the Bedford van registration. It was as close as I would ever get to bribing him. At first he declined and declared that a pie and a pint at the Horsehead would do fine, but I insisted and he met me there just after one.
‘As I’ve said before, you lead an interesting and complicated life, Lennox.’ Ferguson eyed me with the same suspicion as he had his spaghetti when it had arrived. ‘I checked out the number of that truck you gave me.’
‘And?’
‘And it’s nothing to do with the McGahern case.’
That’s what you think, I thought. Hell of a coincidence that a truck full of heavies is parked behind me after I’ve been lured out by a call promising information on Tam McGahern.
‘So who does the truck belong to?’
‘You should think about making a formal complaint about this. There’s clearly something rotten going on-’
‘Jock…’ I said impatiently.
‘The registered owner of the Bedford is CCI.’ Ferguson slid the name and address across the Formica table top. ‘Clyde Consolidated Importing.’
‘John Andrews’s company?’
‘The same. Obviously he’s not as straight and clean as you thought. You’ve stirred something up there.’
So there it was. I tried to conceal the jolt that ran through me. Just when I thought I was going to get clear of the McGahern case. The call I got to draw me to Central Station had been specifically about Tam McGahern; then, when it turned into a no-show, I got jumped by goons from a van registered to John Andrews’s company. Whatever Lillian Andrews was into – and I knew it was Lillian Andrews and not John Andrews – had something to do with Tam or Frankie McGahern. I was convinced that I had been right about John Andrews all along. Lillian was pulling his strings.
‘You okay?’ Ferguson frowned at me. His chin was tomato-striped where his spaghetti had whipped it. ‘You looked a little taken aback.’
‘How’s the spaghetti?’ I nodded towards his chin and he wiped it clean.
‘Really good. Never had it before. Never been in an Italian restaurant before, for that matter. You surprised?’
‘The cultural poverty of Glaswegians never fails to surprise me.’
‘Not that, you clot. Are you surprised that it was one of John Andrews’s company vans?’
I lit a cigarette, leaned back and smiled. ‘Nothing surprises me these days.’
*
I had intended to ’phone John Andrews, but thought better of it. Why should he take my call now? Added to which, for all I knew Lillian and her cronies might now be monitoring all his calls, even in the office. I would have to think of a way of getting Andrews on his own. Maybe intercept him on his way into work. I’d have to think it through. I had left Jock Ferguson with not only a newfound appreciation of Italian cuisine but also a growing curiosity about Andrews, CCI and whatever the hell I’d got myself involved with. It would be best to keep a low profile around Jock for a while.
The main thing to come out of my lunch with Ferguson was that I wasn’t finished with the McGahern mess. I wanted to forget all about it, but now that I knew the Andrews business was mixed up in it I was sure that there were those who wouldn’t let me forget. I spent the afternoon in more stubborn fruitlessness trying to decode the notebook I had taken from Tam’s Milngavie retreat. I moved on to studying the photograph I had found. Gideon. Why had a Glaswegian gangster like McGahern written the name of a biblical judge on the back of a snap of wartime chums? Given the infinity of sand in the background, the blazing sun and the desert fatigues, the photograph had clearly not been taken on Mallaig beach. This was the Middle East. And Fred MacMurray and his chums from the night before had been speaking a foreign language that hadn’t sounded European to me.
*
There was something about the whole set up that was making me twitchy. Twitchy was fast becoming paranoid and I was sure that someone followed me back to my digs after I left the office around three forty-five. Glasgow didn’t have a lot of cars for a city its size and I should have been able to recognize any tail I had picked up, but the lack of a recurring grille in my rear-view mirror didn’t do much to ease the feeling in my gut.
I ate sandwiches and used up the last of my precious supply of good coffee to make a pot. I ate lying on my bed reading, the Overseas Service mumbling in the background as I tried to force myself to relax. Every now and then, however, I felt the need to twitch the net curtain and check there was no movie heavy leaning on a lamp-post outside smoking. It was about eight thirty when Mrs White called me down to the telephone at the bottom of the hallway we shared and wordlessly handed me the receiver.
‘Lennox. Is that you, Lennox?’ I recognized the voice on the other end of the line instantly.
‘Is everything all right, Mr Andrews?’
John Andrews gave a bitter laugh. ‘I’m a dead man, Lennox. I hope you remember this call for the rest of your life. A conversation with a dead man. Just talking to you means they’ll kill me.’
‘Who’ll kill you, Mr Andrews? Lillian? If you’re in some kind of danger you should ’phone the police. Or I can speak to a detective I know, Jock Ferguson at Central Division…’ I made the offer even though it would mean me having to explain to Jock Ferguson that there was a connection with Tam McGahern and that I’d been sticking my nose exactly where I’d been told not to.
‘No. No police. Say nothing to the police.’ He was getting agitated.
‘Okay, okay. No police. Who’s going to kill you, Mr Andrews?’
‘They set me up. They had it all planned from the beginning, from the first day I met Lillian…’ John Andrews sounded as if he’d been drinking and I heard noises in the background that suggested he wasn’t ’phoning from home. A pub, maybe. It made me nervous: he was not an impulsive man and certainly not a courageous man, and I had the sense that the nerve it had taken to ’phone me had come distilled.
‘Set you up for what?’
‘My business. They need my business to make it all work. Not that I know it all, but I’ve been able to put enough together. And that’s another reason for them to kill me. Lillian’s been making me forge shipments. Change the details. But that’s not why I ’phoned. They set me up and I walked straight into their trap. But so did you. That’s why I’m ’phoning you, Lennox. Like I said, I’m dead already, but you could still get out of it all.’
‘You’re not making sense. Set up for what? And how did they set me up?’
‘I’m sorry…’ he said and I knew that he meant it. ‘Through me. They set you up through me. When Lillian went missing… when she was supposed to go missing… they told me to contact you. They wanted you involved.’
I thought about what Andrews was saying. It didn’t seem to make any sense but what chilled my gut was that somewhere, deep at the back of my mind, it did.
‘Where are you?’ I asked. ‘I’ll come and get you.’
‘No… no, it’s not safe. Nowhere’s safe.’ There was a pause and I listened to the background sounds of a bar. ‘Help me, Lennox. You’ve got to help me.’
I thought for a moment. I stared at the brownish floral wallpaper on the wall opposite and felt the draft from the gap beneath the front door. ‘Listen, Andrews, do you have your car handy?’
‘It’s outside.’
‘I want you to go right now and get in it. Are you sober enough to drive?’
‘Think so.’
‘Then I want you to get into your car and drive out of the city. North. Take the Aberfoyle road. Don’t take Maryhill Road and go through Bearsden and Drymen. I don’t want you to go anywhere near your house or your office. Don’t stop to pick anything up; don’t go anywhere else; don’t stop anywhere else. Are you listening?’
‘I’ve got it. I won’t.’ I could tell he was taking strength from my sense of purpose.
‘There’s a hotel at the north end of Loch Lomond. It’s called the Royal Hotel. Do you know it?’
‘I know where it is.’
‘I want you to drive up there right now and check in under a fake name. I’ll meet you there later tonight. Call yourself Jones… no, call yourself Mr Fraser, so I know who to ask for. Have you got that?’
‘Yes. Royal Hotel, Mr Fraser.’
‘Like I said, don’t stop for anything: I’ll bring a change of clothes and toothbrush and stuff for you. And listen, Mr Andrews, I will get you out of this. I promise.’
‘Thank you, Lennox.’ I could hear a vibrato in his voice. The guy was as close to cracking as you could get. He had given up and now was struggling to accept that there was maybe some hope. ‘I don’t know how to thank you.’
‘You can start by telling me when I get up there everything you know about what Lillian and her cronies are up to.’
‘Why are you doing this? Why are you helping me like this?’
‘You’re my client, Mr Andrews. Or maybe it’s just that I’ve watched too many Westerns. It’s my turn to be the good guy.’ I laughed bitterly at my own joke. ‘Call me the Kennebecasis Kid.’
After I hung up I ran upstairs, threw a few things into an overnight bag for Andrews and grabbed my keys and jacket. I was halfway back down the stairs when I checked myself. I went back up and unlocked the door of my apartment. I took the bent nail from inside the vase on the mantle and slid under my bed. I used the nail to hook and ease up the floorboard. I reached in underneath and found the oilskin-wrapped bundle, pulled it out and draped my raincoat over it before heading back down the stairs and out onto the street. I put the bundle on the passenger seat and placed my coat over it. I carried out each of these actions quickly and mechanically. I didn’t want to think about the seriousness of what I was doing.
But the truth was that John Andrews’s ’phone call had spooked me. Whatever the connection between Lillian and Tam McGahern had been, whatever the caper was they had planned, it was big. They had been working on it for months, since whenever Lillian had hooked Andrews, a gullible, lonely widower with a business they needed to control to make their project work. As I drove out of town I tried to think it through as calmly as I could manage. What was the connection between McGahern and Lillian? She could have been the ‘Mrs McGahern’ who had sold on the house in the West End. I had certainly seen the evidence of Lillian Andrews’s impressively professional expertise in administering blow-jobs on screen; it didn’t take an enormous leap of imagination to envisage Lillian running a brothel. But what didn’t gel was Tam McGahern being a partner in whatever scam Lillian and her associates were involved in. It was too big-league for either McGahern. It was more likely that Tam had been involved in some minor way and had started to try to muscle his way in. There was the connection. Maybe. Maybe the connection was simply that whoever Lillian was involved with had killed Tam. And Frankie.
I was now out of Glasgow. It was getting darker and the clutter of the city around me gave way to the increasingly dramatic dark undulations of the Trossachs. It’s amazing how you can be in the black heart of Britain’s most industrial city and within twenty minutes be driving through a landscape full of drama and empty of people. The road was quiet and I hadn’t seen another car for five minutes so I pulled over tight to the verge.
The guys who had tried to snatch me off the pavement in Argyle Street had been enthusiastic for my company. So I had reluctantly taken out a little added insurance. After I parked, I took the tyre iron from the trunk of my car and dropped it into the passenger seat footwell. I thought it fitting, considering my potential opponents had used a tyre iron to pulp Frankie McGahern’s head. Although I was now pretty sure that it had been Tam who had been the second McGahern twin to depart this life.
But my main insurance policy lay on the passenger seat, under my coat, wrapped in oilskin. I unwrapped it. It contained a Webley Mk IV revolver and a packet of. 38 ammunition. The pistol was identical to the one I had been issued with during the war. But I had liberated this revolver in such a way that it would never be directly linked to me.
I wiped the grease from the Webley, snapped open its top break and loaded it with six rounds then slipped it uncomfortably into my waistband and tugged my double-breasted jacket over it. Again I thought about how much walking around heavy upped the ante: the problem with carrying a gun is that you tend to end up using it. Ten years ago that had not been a problem. In fact it had been expected of me. Encouraged. Now I could end up with a noose around my neck.
The Royal Hotel had a car park that looked out down the length of Loch Lomond. I sat in my Austin with the cold hard edges of the Webley digging into me and watched the clouds scud between the mountains and the inky water glisten. I looked at my watch. It was now past nine. This was my second clandestine meeting in a week. This time there was no Bedford parked behind me and I was more than prepared for any nasty surprises. And I had something better than the Central Station departure board to look at.
I got the impression that the middle-aged woman behind the small reception desk was the owner of the hotel. All the alarm bells started ringing in my head as soon as she frowned when I asked to speak to Mr Fraser. I knew at that moment that John Andrews hadn’t made it. Just to be sure that Andrews hadn’t been too scared and too drunk to remember the name I told him, I checked Jones. Then Andrews. I explained that they were business colleagues and we had agreed to meet at the hotel. The small woman shook her head concernedly, clearly feeling that she had let me down when she told me that no one had checked in that evening.
I walked back out to the car park. There were two other cars parked, neither John Andrews’s Bentley and both seemingly unoccupied. Nevertheless I unbuttoned my jacket and let my hand rest on the butt of the Webley in my waistband. I stood for a few seconds, satisfying myself that there was no menace in the car park other than the hulking shadow of Ben Lomond against a violet-black sky. I turned the ignition key of my Austin and started the drive back to Glasgow, taking the Drymen road in case Andrews had ignored my warning about passing up through Bearsden. Maybe the idiot had stopped off at his house to pick something up. Andrews had been right about one thing: I had had a conversation with a dead man.
It was a skinny young police constable who waved me down with his torch. There was a knot of other police officers and a Bedford ambulance pulled over at the side of the road. I could see from where I had been pulled over that there was a gap in the fencing. I checked that the pistol-butt bulge in my jacket wasn’t too conspicuous before winding down the window.
‘What’s the problem, constable?’ I asked.
‘Accident, sir. I’m afraid someone’s gone over the edge.’
‘Dead?’
‘Didn’t stand a chance. Just be careful as you go past the other vehicles, sir. You’ll have to pull over a little onto the verge.’
‘Okay.’ I eased the car forward, taking two wheels up onto the grass. As I passed the gap in the fence I looked down. I caught a glimpse of the tailgate of the car that had gone over the edge. It was a Bentley. I turned my attention back to the road and drove on. I didn’t need to look any more to know that it was John Andrews down there. The car would be pretty badly smashed up having taken a tumble like that, but I wondered if the police surgeon might, just for a second, be puzzled as to how the driver’s head had gotten quite so pulped.
*
It wasn’t a good-mood morning. It was difficult to find real coffee in Glasgow and my supply had run out. I had been forced to buy the locally produced alternative: a bottle of thick coffee and chicory which you diluted with boiling water. I decided to forgo the pleasure and went straight to the office. It was in the Glasgow Herald I picked up on the way: a short piece headed ‘Clyde Consolidated Importing chairman killed in tragic accident’. No real detail other than Andrews had been found dead at the scene. I winced as I read it: I am ashamed to say not out of sympathy for John Andrews but because I knew that a certain Detective-Inspector Jock Ferguson was likely to read the same piece in the course of the next day and come knocking on my door. Mind you, it could have been worse: at least it wouldn’t provoke a visit by Superintendent Willie McNab and his farmhand. Hopefully.
I still found myself looking over my shoulder and I now had more reason than ever. John Andrews hadn’t been killed because he was out for a drive in the country. Whoever killed him would have known he was meeting with someone and more likely than not that that someone was me. Of course, there was always the possibility that it had genuinely been an accident. After all, he had sounded more than a little drunk on the ’phone: maybe the booze and the dark and the sudden bend in the road had been the only conspirators in his death. It was a scrap of a hope to hang on to, anyway. But whether his death had been by accident or design, John Andrews had told me more than enough to shake me up: he had been set up by Lillian and whomever she was involved with, and he had told me that I had been set up. However, he hadn’t told me enough to indicate the direction I should be looking in. I decided that I was going to have to go to Sneddon and tell him everything I knew. Sneddon had been right, after all: I needed someone to watch my back.
Sneddon was out when I ’phoned and I left a message that I needed to talk to him. I looked out of my office window and watched people go about their day on Gordon Street. Trams passed. Taxis, like black beetles under a stone, scuttled in and out from under the lattice iron-worked canopy of Central Station. It was three in the afternoon. In the Maritimes of Canada it would be eleven in the morning. I never understood why I did that, but whenever I was stressed I thought of what time of day it would be at home. I had done it across Europe, imagining what my parents were doing, what the light in the garden would be like in New Brunswick, while I watched men die.
I unlocked my desk drawer – I had taken to locking it since my office had been so expertly searched – and took out the notebook and the photograph I had found in McGahern’s place. I looked again at the list of letters and numbers in the notebook. I noticed that most of the numbers ended in fifty-one and fifty-two. Nineteen fifty-two? Could these be dated shipment numbers? Andrews had said they were using his business to ship stolen goods. But there was no way I could get access to the CCI records now that he was dead.
I looked at the photograph again. There were five men in the picture. Again it looked to me like two, maybe three of them were foreign, too dark to be Scots. Scots are the whitest people on the planet: sometimes they’re almost blue-white. The only tans you ever saw in Glasgow were on stout walking brogues. But there again even Tam looked bronzed in the photograph. The last tanned face I’d encountered recently had been the cheery Fred MacMurray look-alike.
I picked up the ’phone and dialled an Edinburgh number. It was time to pull in a few favours.