There’s always a moment, when you first wake up in the morning, when you’re temporarily outside your life. Everybody gets it: that feeling of unattributable happiness or contentment or worry or despair. You lie there and think: there’s a reason I feel like this but I can’t remember what it is.
When I woke up the following morning my gut feeling lay more on the ‘different day, same shite’ side of the mood fence than ‘another day, another dollar’. Then, like comedy bricks falling on Oliver Hardy’s head, the crap of the day before fell piece by piece into my memory. I coughed my way through my first Player’s Navy Cut of the day without getting out of bed. I lay for a moment considering staying there for the rest of the day, or finding out, at long last, if that ticket to Halifax, Nova Scotia was still valid.
Against my better judgement I got up, washed and put on an expensive seersucker shirt, silk tie and my best suit. I didn’t shave but decided to go to ’Phersons and have a shave and haircut. It just felt like that kind of day: there was nothing like having your face scalded with a boiling towel to set you up for twenty-four hours of crap.
There had been a Sunbeam Talbot 90 parked outside my digs and as I passed it Twinkletoes McBride looked up from his Reader’s Digest and smiled amiably: obviously Tiny was being spelled, presumably resting up on top of a beanstalk somewhere. I got the impression Twinkletoes was grateful for the interruption: a whole page of the Reader’s Digest at one sitting would probably have given him a headache. It wasn’t just that Twinkletoes’s lips moved when he read: they moved when someone else was reading. I told him I was walking to ’Phersons for a haircut and asked if he could pick me up in half an hour.
’Pherson’s was in the West End, off Byers Road, so not far from my digs. I don’t know where the ‘Mac’ had gotten lost but no one ever talked about MacPherson’s, just ’Pherson’s. Truth was I really liked the place. A good barber’s in twentieth-century Glasgow was the equivalent of the Regency dining room after the ladies had withdrawn: a haven of maleness. I’d heard that the red-and-white barber’s pole was the symbol of the ancient barber surgeons: blood and bandages. It wasn’t. It was a big stripy dick that stated that this was a man’s realm.
’Pherson’s reeked of macassar hair oil, spiced unguents, aftershave and testosterone. Which was odd, because old man ’Pherson, a frail, birdlike man in his sixties whose hair was unnaturally black for his age – actually unnaturally black for his species – was himself as queer as a nine-bob note.
This was where I came once a fortnight, as they described two weeks in Britain, and had my hair cut and treated myself to the closest shave you could get in Glasgow apart from calling Hammer Murphy a bog-Irish Fenian fuckface from a speeding car immediately before emigrating to the other side of the planet. ’Pherson’s was also where I picked up my supply of prophylactics, known here as ‘rubber johnnies’. It was amazing the differences in expression here. I had once tried to explain to a Glaswegian that ‘blow-job’ was the American and Canadian expression for fellatio.
‘Oh aye,’ my conversational partner had said. ‘That’s what we call plating… or a gammy. Or a gobble.’
Rubber johnnies. Gammies. Gobbles. I was gradually to become schooled in the quaint charms of the Old World.
During the war I had seen for myself the way the shakes worked on a guy: fingers would tremble and knees would knock at the prospect of battle, but when the bullets started to fly you got too scared and too fired up to shake. It was like that with old ’Pherson: you’d watch the sliver of razor tremble in his thin fingers, feel his other hand’s tremulous touch on your face, then, miraculously, the blade would sweep smoothly and decisively across your pulled-taut skin.
’Pherson was giving me a trim, the scissors between cuts fluttering like a bird and snipping at the empty air, when I was aware of someone sitting in the barber’s chair next to mine.
‘We need to talk, Lennox.’
I looked at Jock Ferguson’s profile in the mirror before me.
‘Sounds official.’
‘It is,’ he said. ‘But it can wait till you’ve finished your haircut.’
Twinkletoes looked up from his Reader’s Digest and reached for the door handle as Ferguson and I passed his car, but I frowned a warning and gave a surreptitious shake of the head and he eased back in his seat.
It wasn’t Jock’s Morris that waited for us around the corner but a black police Wolseley 6/90 with a uniformed driver. This really was going to be official. Ferguson remained stone-faced and silent.
‘What’s this about, Jock?’ I asked.
‘You’ll see…’
I had worked out that Ferguson wasn’t going to return the favour of the Italian meal, and we drove across town towards Glasgow Green and the Saltmarket. When the driver dropped us off at the double-door front entrance of the Glasgow City Mortuary I realized that he didn’t have a fun day out planned.
It seemed that we were expected. Glasgow was a city of deficiencies, mainly vitamin, and the inappropriately cheery mortuary attendant who showed us down into the bowels of the morgue had the typical bow legs of someone who had suffered from rickets. It was a common look in Glasgow: a quarter of the population who had lived through the thirties looked like they were riding invisible Shetland ponies.
Glasgow City Mortuary had moved here between the wars and the white-tiled walls reminded me of a municipal bath house. We descended down a starkly lit, wide stairway and into a basement hall.
The smell of a mortuary isn’t what you’d expect: no stench of death, more like a mixture of carbolic soap and a faintly stale smell, as if the soap had been mixed with stagnant water. We entered a long, cavernous room. The temperature and Ferguson’s mood were both several degrees cooler than they had been at ground level. The cheery attendant with the chimpanzee swagger led us to one of the metal doors that were set in a row into the tiled wall. He slid out the tray and pulled back the white sheet that covered the body stored inside.
‘You know who this is?’ Ferguson didn’t expect or wait for me to be shocked. We’d never talked about it but we both knew that the other had seen the worst a war could throw up. A sort of grim freemasonry.
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 with 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.