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 and 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.
The stadium was packed. We parked in a car park that was ambitiously large and sparsely filled with cars but thronging with punters on foot, taking a short cut to the stands. I followed Jonny and his boys to an entrance marked ‘Management Suite’ and up into a large room with red carpet, a bar and picture windows out over the track.
Willie Sneddon was already there. Twinkletoes McBride and Tiny Semple lurked malevolently in the corner. Someone had given Twinkletoes a going over and one eye was nearly shut. Copper or not, whoever had given him a hiding like that would be advised to sleep lightly from now on.
Despite his complaints to me on the ’phone, Sneddon’s face was comparatively unmarked. Maybe he had managed to keep McNab’s hands busy with Masonic handshakes. Hammer Murphy’s paranoia was not totally ill-informed. Sneddon leaned against the bar, cradling a whisky glass in his fingers. He nodded in our direction when we arrived.
‘You all right, Willie?’ asked Jonny Cohen with a smile.
Sneddon grunted. ‘Feeling the fuckin’ pinch, you might say. You too?’
Jonny joined him at the bar. Behind it, a youth wearing a white waiter’s jacket and too much Brylcreem poured Jonny a Scotch. I held my hand up in response to Sneddon’s invitation. I felt like keeping as clear a battered head as I could manage and didn’t fancy the party that mixing booze and Doc Banks’s tablets would bring on.
Murphy was late. We all knew he would be late. Just to make a point. And an entrance. A roar spilled into the entertaining suite from the terraces below as the traps clattered open to release the greyhounds. It was at that moment that Murphy came in, flanked by the same two hard-looking Micks who had persuaded me into the taxi. Sneddon stood up from the bar and faced Murphy. Twinkletoes and Tiny Semple came over to act as his bookends.
‘Murphy…’ Sneddon’s nodded greeting had all the warmth of a Corstorphine landlady.
Murphy didn’t answer but something over Sneddon’s shoulder caught his eye and he threw a sneer at it. We all looked. It was a portrait of our newly minted monarch hanging on the wall. Oh good, I thought, playtime. In Glasgow’s fevered sectarian atmosphere, the reigning monarch symbolized all that was Protestant: a counterpart to the Pope. Depending where you were in Glasgow, you would see either ‘Fuck the Pope’ or ‘Fuck the Queen’ daubed on walls. Technically, of course, the Queen was the head of the Church of England and not the Kirk in Scotland. But ‘Fuck the Queen’ was easier to spell and took less whitewash than ‘Fuck the Right Reverend Doctor James Pitt-Watson, Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland’.
‘You carry them fuckin’ pictures around with you and hang them up everywhere you go, Sneddon?’ Murphy attempted a jocular smile that turned out simply a baring of teeth.
‘You want a drink, Murphy?’ Sneddon wasn’t rising to the bait. ‘We can toast Her Majesty if you like.’
‘Aye… toast her. That’s an idea. I suppose you’re all fuckin’ geared up for the Coronation?’
‘I’ll be watchin’ it on television,’ Sneddon said, his voice even and low. ‘You’ll have heard of television, I suppose.’
‘An’ I’ll bet she’ll be sittin’ on one of those big thick velvety cushions, like always.’
‘What about it?’ There was now a wire taut through Sneddon’s voice.
‘Now that we’re all here,’ I said in a let’s-change-the-subject-quick way, ‘I want to tell you what I’ve found out about Tam McGahern-’
‘You know why she sits on them?’ Murphy continued. Apparently my voice didn’t carry the way it used to.
‘I’ve got a funny feeling you’re going to tell me,’ said Sneddon. He put his glass down on the bar and turned to the waiter-jacketed youth. ‘You… fuck off. But leave the bottle.’
Once more, in my head a honky-tonk player stopped mid-tune. The waiter left, but Murphy made a point of intercepting him and giving him a ten-bob tip.
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ said Murphy. ‘I’ve got nothing against her. Nice enough lassie. Not much to look at, mind, but there again I think Phil spends most of his time looking at the back of her head.’
‘What the fuck is that meant to mean?’ Sneddon’s dense frame and hard face seemed to become denser and harder. Jonny Cohen looked over at me with eyes that very eloquently conveyed, Oh fuck!
‘Listen, boys,’ said Jonny. ‘This isn’t the time-’
‘I don’t mean nothin’,’ said Murphy. ‘Just that she sits on them big cushions. I just wonder if it’s because she’s married to a fuckin’ Greek. And you know what that means.’
‘Why don’t you tell me?’ said Sneddon. His hand rested on the bar close to the whisky bottle.
‘You know, Sneddon… Phil’s a Greek. And them Greeks like to make their deliveries round the back, if you catch my drift…’ Murphy turned to his heavies. ‘What d’you think, boys?’
‘I think it’s part of his fuckin’ culture,’ said one of the broken noses. ‘It’s probably written into their laws or something.’
‘Aye,’ said Murphy. ‘Or maybes it’s in Greek wedding vows… “promise to honour and obey and take a roger up the dodger”.’
At least, I thought, Murphy was attempting to talk about something that interested Sneddon. And nothing was closer to the heart of Willie Sneddon – ultra-patriotic, Orange Order, arse-painted-blue, Protestant Loyalist – than the new Queen. If I had had a pair of ruby slippers I’d have wished myself back in time to the OK Corral.
‘That Pope of yours sits on a big fuckin’ pile of cushions himself, you know,’ said Sneddon. His hand was now on the whisky bottle. I didn’t think he was going to offer Murphy a drink. ‘At least Her Majesty doesn’t need to be carried around on a fucking chair. I reckon the Pope’s always in it ’cause he’s too tired to walk after chasin’ all them fuckin’ altar boys.’
There’s an expression ‘you could cut the atmosphere with a knife’. Considering the atmosphere was being created by Hammer Murphy and Willie Sneddon, it wasn’t the air that would end up cut with a knife. Or smashed to fuck with a hammer. They held each other with unbroken murderous glares. Although, in Hammer Murphy’s case, I couldn’t remember him look at anything or anybody with anything less than a murderous glare. Maybe, at times of intimacy with his good lady wife, or during tender moments with his children, he would reduce it to an aggravated-assault-with-menaces glare.
‘Come on, guys,’ I said. ‘A joke’s a joke. No harm done.’
‘Lennox is right,’ said Handsome Jonny with a handsome smile. ‘Where would we all be if we didn’t have a sense of humour?’
‘Edinburgh?’ I quipped. Sneddon and Murphy turned their murderous glares on me in a way that suggested I was about to quip my way into an early grave. At least I’d gotten them to agree on something. Now was the time to move on.
‘Anyway,’ I continued. ‘Much as I hate to break up this meeting of The Brains Trust, I think we should be talking about what I’ve found out, instead of tearing lumps out of each other.’ As I spoke, Jonny Cohen walked around Tiny Semple and placed himself between Sneddon and Murphy.
‘Lennox is right,’ he said. ‘If we start on each other then we’re all fucking doomed. Let’s not kid ourselves that there’s only the three firms in town. There’s a fourth… the polis. It would suit the coppers down to the ground if we went weak on them. We’d better listen to what Lennox has to say.’
Again the room seemed too bright, the colours too intense, the edges too sharp.
‘I gotta sit down,’ I said and slumped into a leather armchair. Jonny brought me some water from the jug on the bar.
‘Is he fucking okay?’ asked Sneddon. I was touched by his solicitous tone.
‘I’m fine,’ I said. I took a gulp of the water. ‘You know what I like about you guys? You’re exactly who you say you are. I know that each one of you is you, and a thorough-going crooked bastard.’
‘Lennox…’ Jonny said warningly.
‘No,’ I said as happily as I could manage, ‘that’s a good thing. I mean it as a compliment. You see every other bastard I’ve had to deal with has been someone else. Not who they said they were.’
‘Lennox, you’re not making any sense.’ Jonny’s tone was now one of concern. Not concern that my health had deteriorated, but that it was about to – suddenly and irrevocably – if I didn’t appease Sneddon and Murphy.
‘But there you have it,’ I said. ‘Nothing made sense. Frankie McGahern having a go at me with McNab there to witness it didn’t make sense. Frankie hanging around to get the shite mashed out of him in his garage didn’t make sense. But it does if nobody is who you think they are. It’s pretty obvious when you think about it. Twins. Tam the brains, the decorated Desert Rat, ex-Gideon Force… then Frankie the no-hoper.’
‘This is your theory that it was Frankie who got it up the ass above the Highlander, not Tam?’ asked Sneddon. I was relieved to see him pour a drink from the whisky bottle, instead of brandishing it at Murphy.
‘It was Frankie. To start with I thought it was a mistaken identity: that it was a simple accident that Frankie was there instead of Tam. They played this game, you see. According to Wilma, the part-time chippy who was there that night, Tam persuaded Frankie to sleep with her every now and then, just to see if she could tell the difference. A laugh. But that wasn’t it at all. Frankie was set up just like John Andrews and half a dozen others. Frankie was Tam’s twin brother. His flesh and blood. But all he meant to Tam was a face the same as his and therefore his ticket out of a tight spot. Tam had a big job planned: the robbery of all of these Sterling-Patchett machine guns. But because of the buyers he had lined up for them, he was getting heat from a mob who would never give up till they found and killed him.’
‘It didn’t take them long,’ said Jonny. ‘If “Frankie” was Tam, then he still got it within a few weeks.’
‘Again, no one is who you think they are. Tam McGahern is still very much alive.’
‘So who the fuck was that with their face smashed in…?’ Sneddon realized the significance of what he’d said and let the sentence die.
‘Exactly. Their face smashed in. And Tam McGahern had gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure that neither his nor his brother’s fingerprints were on file. My guess is the schmuck with the caved-in puss was Tam’s former commanding officer. A waster called Jimmy or Jamie Wallace. Wallace provided a lot of the intelligence and background knowledge for this deal. He also provided a corpse about the right size and colouring.’
‘But this isn’t like the twin thing,’ said Murphy. ‘First time round it’s someone who looks fucking identical to the real guy. The second time they’re going to see they’ve got the wrong punter. Or are you telling me they was all fucking triplets?’
‘No. But I am telling you that the guys who did the hit above the Highlander didn’t do the second killing. That was Tam McGahern himself. He mashed Wallace’s face and dressed him up as Frankie.’
‘So McGahern is hiding out somewhere?’ asked Jonny. ‘Or he must be out of town. God knows he couldn’t show his face in Glasgow.’
‘I was out with this girl the other night,’ I said. ‘We went to see a Jack Palance film and she said I reminded her of him. I said there was a good reason. Some Ukrainian-American bomber pilot with an unpronounceable surname refuses to bail out of his burning bomber. Very heroic but his face gets burned to fuck. Months of plastic surgery later they still can’t get it quite right and the skin is too tight over his face. But it gives him this unique look. Goodbye Volodymyr Palahniuk, hello Jack Palance. The reason I look like him is I took the tail-end of a grenade blast in the face. I end up with a tight-looking face, prominent cheekbones, et cetera.’
‘Really?’ said Murphy, his eyes wide with amazement. ‘That is abso-fucking-lutely fascinating. Now, are you going to get to a fucking point? Because if you don’t, I’m goin’ to get the boys here to dance on your face. Then you can entertain every cunt with the story of how you ended up looking like Lon fucking Chaney.’
‘The point is that Tam McGahern isn’t showing his face in Glasgow, because he doesn’t have it any more. Tam and Sally Blane, or Lillian Andrews as she now calls herself, set up this honey-trap operation and trapped a lot of important people. Including, I reckon, a top copper. Anyway, one of their targets was a plastic surgeon called Alexander Knox. Tam doesn’t hit him for money. Just a new face. He’d already fixed up Lillian’s face after a car crash and was dragged into doing a patch-up on one of Tam’s army buddies. But I reckon Tam wasn’t acting out of loyalty for a comrade… he just wanted to see how good Knox was. The point is, Tam McGahern is walking around with a new identity and a new face to go with it.’
‘And just how did you come up with all of this?’ asked Sneddon.
‘What can I tell you? I’m a genius. Added to which I got some of the story from a high-class chippy who calls herself Liz. Except my money is on her being someone else, like every other bastard. Just like Tam played at being Frankie and Sally played at being Lillian, I think Margot Taylor, Sally’s sister, is playing at being Lizzie. That, in turn, means that what I got out of her is at least half fiction.’
I paused to take another sip of water.
‘I do think there was a car crash and someone’s face got mashed up a bit, but I don’t think Margot died. But I could be wrong. The important thing is that Margot and Sally-cum-Lillian helped Tam set up this honey-trap. But they weren’t alone. Arthur Parks was involved. He was directing customers and a couple of his better girls to the operation. I started off thinking that once Tam and Lillian had got what they wanted out of the operation, Arthur Parks was surplus to requirements, so they killed him. But that doesn’t fit with the way he died. Parks was killed by someone who wanted information out of him. It wasn’t a quick death. My thinking is that it was either Tam’s new business partners or the highly professional mob who thought they’d got him that night above the Highlander. Ronnie Smails got his from the same killer as Arthur Parks.’
‘Was Smails tortured?’ asked Jonny.
‘No. He wasn’t. And that doesn’t quite fit. Yet.’
‘So who is this highly professional outfit you keep banging on about?’ Sneddon lit a cigarette and looked at me coldly. Sceptically, I thought.
‘This is where it gets all very political. And why you guys have been getting the treatment.’ I took another slug of water. My head was starting to hurt again and everything still felt unreal, as if I had been detached from myself and was hearing my own words as if they were someone else’s. ‘You see, I know where these stolen guns are heading. I don’t know when, but I know how and can hazard a guess at which ship they’ll be on. I have this friend who said she was fed up with Glasgow and the way no one can see past the city boundaries. Well, Tam McGahern did. He served in the Middle East and he saw decades of strife ahead and the opportunities that that strife offered. Tam was ambitious, but every time he tried to fulfil his ambitions he ended on a collision course with the Three Kings. So he decided to go around you. Beyond your horizons. Those robbed guns will soon be on their way to Aqaba in Jordan and my guess is from there straight into the hands of Arab insurgents.’
I gave them a moment to absorb what I’d been telling them.
‘I reckon Tam’s been at it for over a year,’ I continued. ‘He started off with ex-army surplus, old and decommissioned guns. But the Arabs are up against one of the best equipped and most disciplined armies in the world. So Tam saw the opportunity to strike it rich. One big deal to get him a new face and a life in a new country. The States. So he planned this robbery with Jackie Gillespie and roped in the extra skills and finance he needed through blackmail. I would reckon that there’s at least one British Army top-brass type on the list.’
‘This all sounds very fucking elaborate,’ said Sneddon. ‘A bit too ambitious for a couple of wee Taig shites. No offence, Murphy.’
Hammer Murphy didn’t reply but continued to gaze his murderous hate at Sneddon. At everybody.
‘ Very ambitious,’ I continued. ‘These stolen weapons aren’t just any old guns. I talked to an army pal of mine; he told me they were commissioned last year to be the army’s new small-arm. The Sterling-Patchett L2A1 submachine gun, delivering five hundred and fifty rounds per minute. The Arabs are desperate to get their hands on this kind of stuff. Tam has struck gold, but the reason he needed a new face and a new start is he knew that the Israelis were already onto him and would never let go until they got him. That’s the professional mob, Mr Sneddon. Mossad, if I’m not mistaken. Which is why you three are up to your ears in shite. The City of Glasgow Police will be under enormous pressure to clear all of this up. How much they know about the destination of guns or the involvement of the Israelis, I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure they will have guessed that the guns are headed for the Middle East.’
I paused. My head was pounding again and I felt sick. I took some more water. I noticed that everybody was looking at Jonny Cohen.
‘What?’ he said, his face clouding with anger and disbelief. ‘You think because I’m a Jew I’ve got something to do with this? Just because Murphy here is a fucking spudmuncher doesn’t mean he’s gun-running for the IRA.’
‘Take it easy, Jonny,’ I said, and then turned to the others. ‘Jonny’s right. Mossad would only use its own operatives.’
‘And one of them is the guy you ran into in Perth?’ asked Sneddon.
‘Yeah. Called himself Powell. Looked like Fred MacMurray. He and his cronies have been all over this from the start. It was they who killed Frankie McGahern, thinking it was Tam. But they’re not that easily fooled, so they spirited Wilma away and found out from her they’d got the wrong McGahern.’
‘So you’re saying they tortured and killed Parky?’ asked Sneddon.
‘Maybe. But I think there’s something more to that. There’s a Dutchman around. Big guy, rich. I reckon he’s brokered the sale of the guns.’
‘McGahern’s trips to Amsterdam?’ asked Sneddon.
‘That’s my guess.’
‘Well,’ said Murphy. ‘Those kyke bastards have stirred up all kinds of shite for us. I say we get even.’
I laughed at Murphy and he reminded me with a threatening look that he was unused to the experience. ‘You don’t understand, do you?’ I said. ‘Just eight years ago there were six million dead Jews across Europe. Maybe more. Millions of others left homeless or totally fucked up. All the Jews know now is that a very serious and nearly successful attempt was made to wipe them off the face of the earth. Now, call them touchy, but they seem to have gotten a little pissed about it all. Get this into your head, Mr Murphy… all of you… the people you are talking about going up against are the toughest, hardest, deadliest, most unforgiving bastards that have ever walked the earth. I don’t know what Mossad’s motto is, but I can have a guess: nobody fucks with the Jews any more.’
‘So what do we do?’
‘There are three ships that McGahern has been using to ship weapons out to Jordan. All done through John Andrews’s shipping company. All I need to find out is when they’re planning to move the guns.’
‘Then what?’ asked Jonny Cohen.
‘One of two things. We can tip off the cops so they capture McGahern and company in the act, or you combine all of your forces and hit McGahern together. Then we dump the guns and tell the cops where to find them. My ideal solution would be to get in touch with the Mossad boys. They’re more than capable of taking it from there. Unfortunately they seem to have forgotten to put their number in the ’phone directory.’
‘Fucking easy choice,’ said Murphy. ‘We tell the coppers and they take all the fucking risks. And they’ll maybes start leaving us alone.’
‘That would be ideal… but, like I said, I’ve a funny feeling that McGahern’s got a copper on the payroll. McGahern could be warned off and we’re back to square one.’
‘So a fucking bloodbath down at the docks is the way to go. That what you’re suggesting?’ asked Murphy.
‘Listen, the alternative is that you lose your crowns. This has been a four-sided game until now: your three outfits and the police. And let’s be honest boys, you’ve all got at least a couple of coppers each in your pockets. But Tam McGahern’s raised the stakes, and the temperature. Because of these guns going missing, Glasgow will be crawling with Ministry of Defence types, Special Branch and Military Intelligence. Added to them there’s a Mossad assassination squad out there and, I’m guessing, a few Arabs over here to keep tabs on the deal.’
I leaned back in the chair. My head still swam. I closed my eyes and took another long drink of water.
‘The first thing we’ve got to do is find Jackie Gillespie. One of the robbers is supposed to be wounded and it’s my guess it’s Gillespie.’
‘Why?’ asked Jonny.
‘Because I’ll bet he wasn’t wounded by an army bullet. I’ve seen the way Tam and Lillian work. They don’t want partners. Leaving Gillespie dead at the scene would have worked for them. No one associates Gillespie with the McGaherns, but everyone knows that he’s worked for each of you at one time or another.’
‘Bastard…’ muttered Sneddon.
‘Jackie Gillespie can’t stay hidden if all your people are looking for him. He can hide from the police, but not the Three Kings.’ I took another sip of water. I felt really sick now and wanted to stop talking. ‘I need you three to work together. We need your hardest and most experienced men on this. When we know which ship and when, then we hit the bastards. One more thing. I don’t think any of you is the sentimental type, but I’ve got to make this clear. Lillian Andrews may be a woman, but she’s as much the brains behind this as Tam. You’ve got to see her, and deal with her, the same way. That’s it.’
The room seemed to buzz with talk as Sneddon, Murphy and Jonny engaged in heated debate. I sat and felt my head throb with every beat of my pulse. I took another one of Doc Banks’s horse tablets and broke it in two, swallowing it in stages with the last of my water. I closed my eyes. There was a rush of sound from outside again as another set of traps opened and the crowd roared. Again, even with my eyes closed, everything seemed bigger and harder and sharper than it should. I imagined I could feel the fall of each paw of every greyhound. Something tidal was going on in my gut. I opened my eyes and stood up. I made my way to the door marked ‘toilets’, unnoticed by the others because they were still debating who should do what, who was in charge of whom. There was a short corridor then another door, marked ‘WC’.
I just made it. Once more I continued to retch, even after my gut was empty. When I was finished I cupped some water from the hand basin and rinsed my mouth. I reckoned that the pill had been puked up so I took another, halved it and washed it down with more tap water. I stood and rested my forehead on the cool porcelain of the tiles. I became aware I could hear the voices from the entertaining suite. Too loud. Not talking: shouting.
I headed back along the corridor and heard glass shattering, furniture breaking. Fuck. I thought I could trust them to pull together and they were ripping each other apart. I opened the door to step back into the suite but eased it shut again as quickly and quietly as I could. No one had seen me, I thought. But I had seen enough. I opened the door again a crack and peered through. Sneddon, Murphy, Jonny and their respective heavies were all on the floor, their faces shoved into the red carpet by burly Highlanders. Batons were arcing through the air and colliding with ribs, arms, heads. I saw Superintendent McNab walk calmly through the carnage. I reckoned there were at least twenty coppers crammed into the room. Half in civvies, the other half in uniform.
I backed away from the door. If I had gone out into the entertaining suite I would have got the same treatment as the others, and I reckoned another stiff blow to the head would probably be enough to finish me off. It would only be a matter of minutes before the police had everybody subdued and handcuffed. Then they would check the toilets for any stragglers.
I went back through the door marked WC and closed it behind me but didn’t lock it. There was a tall, narrow window of frosted glass beside the cistern, but high up. This is getting to be a habit, I thought to myself as I braced one foot on the toilet, the other on the wall and eased myself up, undid the catch and swung open the window. It took all that was left of my strength to haul myself up and wriggle my head and right shoulder out through the window. I found myself looking straight down at a two-storey drop onto the car park below. I continued to ease myself through, gripping the wooden frame of the window. I got a leg free and eased a foot down onto the sill. I heard voices in the hall outside the toilet. I pushed through and eased the window closed.
I was outside, but I would still be seen against the frosted glass. The sill extended a foot or so on either side of the window and I worked my way along to its end. There was no downpipe this time; no projection on the stadium’s architecture to use as a stepping stone. I turned my back to the window, remained motionless and hoped that no one would pay too much attention to the window. I heard voices in the toilet. Then nothing.
I looked down at the car park. It was getting dark but I could see the police cars and a van parked outside. There were still a few punters milling about. I felt another lurch in my gut, this time from the sight of a figure leaning against the van and smoking, wearing a peaked driver’s cap with a City of Glasgow Police chequered band around it. Don’t look up, I thought. Whatever you do, don’t look up.
I knew the coppers would come out with their captures soon and my chances of being seen would increase to the almost certain. As I was too well-dressed for a window cleaner, I decided the best thing was to climb back into the toilet. I moved as quietly as I could and slid back through the window. I could still hear voices from the entertaining suite, but, having checked the toilet once, I didn’t think they would come back.
Not so clever Lennox. The one thing I didn’t take into account, of course, was that while my place of hiding may have been checked out, it was, after all, a toilet. I only just managed to duck behind the door as it swung open and a large uniformed figure stepped through and into the cubicle. He had his back to me and was clearly unbuttoning his fly. A man is never more vulnerable than when he’s got his dick in his hand and I knew what I had to do. I couldn’t let him see me and I couldn’t be captured. I cursed inwardly and took the sap from my pocket and swung it at the back of the copper’s head. He stumbled forward but steadied himself with his hand against the wall. He wasn’t out. I swung again, harder, trying not to think what would happen to my neck if I killed a copper. He went down, his face smashing into the porcelain of the toilet bowl and splashing it with blood.
It had been quiet. Messy, but quiet. But had it been quiet enough? I stood stock still and listened for anyone approaching. Nothing. I went back along the hall. The door at the end was open and revealed the suite was empty. The copper I clobbered had obviously come back to take a leak. But he would be missed.
I moved swiftly across the suite and out onto the stairwell. Making sure that the last of the coppers was heading out of the bottom door, I ran silently down the steps and watched through a crack in the door as the police piled the Three Kings and their bodyguards into the van. The tablet I’d taken earlier had really kicked in and I was back in a Technicolor world. I saw several faces streaked with blood, glistening in the stadium lamplight that seemed to me to sparkle in the dusk.
A small crowd had gathered in the car park and was watching the proceedings. As a group of onlookers passed by the entrance to the suite, I slipped out into their number and walked into the main racing stadium.
I watched three races before I risked going back to the car park. When I did, the police cars were gone and I assumed they had not yet missed their colleague. I found a pay ’phone, made a pithy call to Greasy George and explained he had better get his Bentley and his ass into gear. I made my way to the Atlantic and drove off. I knew that when the copper with his face in the toilet came to, or was discovered, then the Three Kings would each get very special treatment to cough up who had been left behind. But I knew they wouldn’t give me up. Not through any sense of comradeship or loyalty – just because I was the only hope they had of getting out of this mess.
Some hope, I thought to myself as I looked at my face in the rear-view mirror of the Atlantic.