It took me a little while and another conversation with her supercilious agent, before I finally arranged a meeting with Sheila Gainsborough. Telling her that the person her missing brother had gone missing with had turned up dead was the kind of thing you had to do face to face.
I met her again at her apartment. She took it well, or at least as well as it could be taken, and much better than I had anticipated. I suspected there was an element of blind wishful thinking on her part; or maybe it simply didn’t occur to her that her brother might be just as dead as Paul Costello but no one had found the body yet. It was a thought that was never far from the front of my mind.
For my part, I played it all down, as much as you can play down a sliced throat. It also didn’t occur to her that eventually the police would want to talk to Sammy. It was only a matter of time and lack of results before they would start to look around for the most convenient possible suspect. That’s when Sammy’s name would be pulled out of McNab’s hat and I would be elbowed out of the way.
I had things to do and places to be, but I could see that Sheila Gainsborough was in a fragile state, so I gave her all kinds of assurances that I would double my efforts now that the stakes were higher, and that I would definitely bring Sammy back in one piece. Making promises to women was something I did all the time — especially ones like that, where there was every chance I wasn’t going to be able to deliver on it.
After I left Sheila, I went to a telephone kiosk and rang Ian McClelland at the University. We did the usual banter thing and then I got down to business.
‘Ian, could you tell me what a Baro is? In a gypsy or tinker context?’
‘Gosh, Lennox, it’s not really my field, but I could check it out. What was the context?’
‘I was meeting with someone, a gypsy, and another gypsy referred to him as the Baro.’
‘Okay, I know someone I can ask…’ said McClelland.
‘Could you ask the same people what significance a wooden box with pieces of wood and red and white wool might have as well? About nine inches square, I’d say.’ I described the box Lorna told me had been delivered to her father shortly before his death. ‘The wool was rolled up into a ball.’
‘Certainly, old man. In fact I’m just along the corridor from the very person. Can I call you back in ten minutes?’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘What about the description and drawing of the dragon I gave you?’
‘As I thought, it’s a Chinese Qilin.’
‘Actually, you’re wrong…’ I sounded rather smug. ‘Not a Qilin, it’s a Vietnamese Ky-lan, if my information’s correct.’
‘Probably is,’ said McClelland. If he was impressed with my knowledge of the finer points of oriental mythology, he hid it well. ‘It is a Sino-Vietnamese character. It looks fierce but it’s one of the good guys. It brings you luck and wealth and looks after the good and the honourable.’
‘I can tell,’ I said. ‘My luck’s been just dandy since I first saw him.’
As good as his word, Ian McClelland called back ten minutes later.
‘A Baro is a clan chieftain,’ he explained. ‘A real bigwig in Romany circles. And I hope you didn’t find that box you were talking about… the one with the wool in it.’
‘No I didn’t… why?’
‘It’s a bitchapen… it’s a kind of gift, but not the kind you want to get. Everyone in the gypsy tribe touches it and passes on everything ill or evil into it. It rids them of ill-fortune but whoever finds the bitchapen gets the lot.’
‘Thanks, Ian,’ I said. ‘That makes a lot of sense.’
I met up with Dex Devereaux for a drink in the bar of the Alpha Hotel. I told him about Sammy, Paul Costello, Claire Skinner, their little jade demon friend and the charming country retreat they all shared. But for the moment I kept my suspicions about Alain Barnier and his possible connection to John Largo quiet. I had one very good reason to keep quiet: the big American was a good guy, but, at the end of the day, he was a copper. The last thing I needed was the City of Glasgow Police connecting me with Barnier. They may not have been the Brains Trust, but it wouldn’t take much thinking to place me at the Barnier and Clement office on the night of the break-in with a sap in my hand and a semi-conscious Highlander at my feet.
Maybe they would pick up Billy the night watchman’s glasses for him. The City of Glasgow CID must have had a leading neurologist working for them: they had a remarkable record of suddenly curing witnesses of bad vision and unreliable memory.
After I said goodbye to Devereaux, I drove up to see Lorna and check how she was. Again, she responded as passionately as a bank manager and Maggie MacFarlane was positively frosty. There was no sign of Jack Collins when I called. Lorna made some tea and we sat in the lounge drinking it, me doing my best to say the right solicitous things and Lorna remaining sullen and unresponsive, her expression one of barely concealed resentment. She knew I was going through the motions and would have given anything for a way out. And we both knew that if the roles had been reversed she would have been the same. Neither of us had signed up for emotional involvement.
I spent the next two days keeping tabs on Alain Barnier. Because I had so many other things to juggle, including squeezing in a daily visit to Davey, it was an inter alia kind of surveillance and therefore pretty hit or miss.
What made following the Frenchman especially difficult was that he was hardly a creature of habit. On average he would only spend two or three hours of each day in the office, and not always the same two or three hours. The rest of the time he spent doing his rounds of clients, mainly hotels and restaurants. Wines and spirits were not his sole stock in trade: he also did a fair amount of visiting antique dealers, a handful in Glasgow and several more in Edinburgh.
Following Barnier was time-consuming and seemed largely pointless, but there was always the chance that he would lead me somewhere that would be one step closer to John Largo. Although, as Barnier went about his mundane daily business, I found myself doubting that this debonair, cultured and educated Frenchman could have anything to do with an international peddler of narcotics.
I was maybe getting cocky, but I actually took to parking the Atlantic under the same railway arch that I had used on the night of the break-in. From there I could see the gates into the bonded area and pick up Barnier’s Simca whenever he left his office. He emerged at three-thirty in the afternoon; leaving early was something he did quite often, squeezing in a few client calls before driving home to Langbank.
It may have seemed like a pointless exercise, but I followed him anyway. An ugly jade demon and a dead gangster’s son were pointing me in that direction. And then there was the gut feeling I had about the Frenchman too: I liked the guy but every time I thought of him it was like someone prodding something that had been curled up for a nap in a room somewhere at the back of my brain.
One afternoon I waited outside the bonded docks until about six. When Barnier’s Simca pulled out through the gates, I followed. When he drove west towards Greenock, I guessed we were heading straight to his home in Langbank. I had to hold back as far as I could without losing him. The road ribboned along the side of the Clyde and, despite this being the main road that connected Glasgow with its satellite town Greenock, there were practically no other cars in either direction. We passed the point where I had turned south and camped out in my car by the reservoir. Then, surprisingly, the Simca drove past Langbank and out towards the west. I couldn’t imagine what business an importer of fine wines and oriental curios could possibly have in Greenock.
He drove towards the town and I lost him where the coast takes a sudden sweep southwards. I accelerated a little and nearly missed his turning. Port Glasgow had a vast sugar works and the hill above it had been named Lyle Hill. Why Tate didn’t deserve recognition was something I didn’t know. Driving up the sweep of Lyle Hill I passed Barnier’s parked Simca. I drove on, not even slowing down until I was around the bend in Lyle Road, out of sight of where he had parked. I pulled over and took a set of binoculars out of the glove compartment. I had to scrabble up the hillside to get a vantage point from which I could watch Barnier. The leather soles of my Gibsons slipped on slimy grass and I came down onto my knees several times, cursing the damp, dark staining on my suit trousers. Glasgow was a city with a heavy-industrial attitude to everything and I had found out to my cost that laundries in the city approached the dry-cleaning of my best suits with a delicacy that make steel-smelting look like needlepoint.
I made it to the top of the hill and seemed to be on the edge of a golf course. There was brush and some meagre trees to give me shelter and I looked down at where the road swept around the edge of Lyle Hill. The view was breathtaking: out across the Clyde to the mountains of the Cowal Peninsula. Immediately below was Greenock on one side and Gourock on the other. And, further out, the Tail of the Bank. This had been the departure point for my parents when they took me, as a baby, to start a new life in Canada.
But what struck me most about what I was looking at was the fact that Barnier had stopped at the monument that commanded the best of the view. The memorial was in the form of a vast white ship’s anchor, the shaft of which thrust dramatically up into the sky. But instead of having the usual rode-eye at the top, the anchor shaft had two beams cross it, one shorter than the other. A Cross of Lorraine. As a piece of civic sculpture, it could not have been more dramatic. And I knew something about what it commemorated.
I watched Barnier. It was difficult to tell if he was waiting for someone or if the monument had some particular significance for him. He stood as if reading the inscription on the base. Then he turned and leaned against the border rail, with his back to me, and seemed to be gazing out over the Firth of Clyde. He stood there for a good ten minutes before turning and heading back towards his car. I cursed inwardly. I had been sure he was going to meet someone, and the monument seemed an ideal place for a rendezvous. But I had probably just watched too many Orson Welles movies.
I scrabbled down the side of the hill as fast as I could to get back to the Atlantic. If Barnier turned back down the hill then I would have to hurry or lose him. As I scrambled, fingers of tree branch snagged at my suit to impede my descent. My hat came off a couple of times and it was only by some nifty goal-keeping that I saved my Borsalino from the mud. I burst out from the green web of bushes and onto the road, a few feet from where I had parked the Atlantic.
You see it all the time in Westerns. The settlers look up from the pass and spot the menacingly still and silent silhouettes of mounted Apaches or banditos up on the hillside looking down on them. The Badlands.
Port Glasgow was Scotland’s equivalent of the Painted Desert, and when I came out onto the road again there were three Teddy Boy Comancheros waiting by my car. My gut feeling was that there was nothing professional or organized about this encounter: it had nothing to do with my tailing of Barnier and was just your run-of-the-mill Scottish small-industrial-town thuggery. I reckoned that they were all about nineteen. They clearly identified themselves with the emerging Teddy Boy fashion, but none of them had been able to put together a complete assembly. Instead one wore the thigh-length jacket, one had drainpipe trousers and the jacketless third thug had had to settle for a bootlace tie.
Between them they had enough oil in their hair to lubricate a battle ship and an array of skin conditions impressive enough to keep a dermatologist on a stipend.
‘This your car, pal?’ the youth with the Teddy Boy jacket asked. He was clearly the leader; maybe that was why he’d got the jacket. He was leaning against the wing of the Atlantic and looked relaxed. A bad sign. Confidence in any kind of physical encounter is half the battle. The other two just looked at me with a dull-eyed lack of interest, as if this was something they did every day, which it probably was.
‘Yeah, this is my car,’ I sighed, brushing the worst of the leaves and mud from my suit trousers.
‘We’ve been looking after it for you,’ said one of the others. I had to concentrate hard: I hadn’t brought my Greenock phrase-book with me. It had taken me years to understand the Glasgow accent. But Greenock was beyond the pale.
‘I appreciate that,’ I said with a smile. I took my keys out of my pocket and headed to the door. No rush now. I was going to have to let Barnier get away. I had more immediate problems. The leader in the Edwardian jacket slid along the wing and positioned himself in front of the door.
‘Well, it’s like this. You could’ve come back here and found your tyres all flat and fuck knows what else. But we was here to make sure nobody touched it. So we think that you should maybes give us a couple of quid, like.’
His two mates took up position on either side of me, squaring their shoulders. Not much to square.
‘Yeah?’ I said. ‘Very enterprising of you. But the trick is to ask for the money first, Einstein.’
He furrowed his brow. Not anger, just uncertainty about the insult. I realized he didn’t have a clue who Einstein was. I was going to have to learn to keep my references simple. I sighed and reached into my pocket and the frown on his pimply brow eased. It shouldn’t have.
They were just kids. I knew that and I didn’t want trouble. But I knew they would have beaten the crap out of me so they could empty my pockets and probably steal the car, given half the chance. In the army, I learned that if there’s a threat, you have to neutralize it. And I’d done more than my fair share of neutralizing. So I decided to feel sorry for them later.
I drew the sap out of my inside pocket and, again in a single, continuous movement, backhanded the lead Teddy across the temple with it. The youth on my right lunged forward and I jabbed out the hand I held my car keys in. The key split his cheek and chipped against his teeth. He screamed and staggered back, clutching his bleeding face. The third thug reached into his pocket and started to pull out a razor. I swung the sap at him, not taking time to aim properly. By luck it caught him on the side of his weak chin and he dropped stone-out. The first guy started to ease himself up from the ground and I dissuaded him with the heel of my Gibson across his mouth. The thug with the keyhole in his cheek was running back down the hill, still clutching his face and crying.
Pulling the lead hooligan out of my way, I got into the Atlantic and headed back down Lyle Hill. Halfway down I passed the running, crying youth. I rolled down my window and, beaming a smile at him, asked him if he needed a lift. I guessed he preferred to walk because he just stared at me wildly, turned on his heel and started running in the opposite direction, back up the hill.
I pulled over to where Barnier had parked. The monument was set in a rectangle edged with railings and a gate repeating the cross of Lorraine motif. I got out and stood, taking in the view for a moment before reading the inscription on the base of the monument:
THIS MONUMENT IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF THE SAILORS OF THE FREE FRENCH NAVAL FORCES WHO SAILED FROM GREENOCK IN THE YEARS 1940–1945 AND GAVE THEIR LIVES IN THE BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC FOR THE LIBERATION OF FRANCE AND THE SUCCESS OF THE ALLIED CAUSE
On the other panels, specific Free French vessels were mentioned: the submarine SURCOUF, the corvettes ALYSSE and MIMOSA. But, as everyone knew, while the monument may have been officially dedicated to all of the Free French sailors who had been based in Scotland during the war, it had a very special significance for a particular group of Frenchmen. And related to a particular event. Something that had happened before the Free French forces were officially formed. Something that happened right here, within sight of the spot where the monument now stood.
And Alain Barnier seemed to be connected to it.
I didn’t see the road as I drove back to Glasgow. And I didn’t think much about what had brought me to Greenock. Someone was poking away again at that curled-up sleeping thing and had switched on the light in the room at the back of my brain. I saw a name. Maille-Breze.
But the ghosts of dead French seamen weren’t the only things that were nagging at me. I should have been happy that I had stopped beating on the three thugs as soon as they no longer represented a threat to me. That I had displayed an element of restraint. Even a few months earlier, once I had the advantage, I would have given them a serious hiding. A hospital hiding. I should have been happy. But I wasn’t.
The truth was that I had still enjoyed it.