First thing the next morning, I made another trip to the Mitchell Library. This time it wasn’t to meet with anyone. I was looking for a very specific piece of information.
I was aided in my search by a rather accommodating librarian who fell for my helpless hunk act. She was a brunette, about thirty, and was dressed in a vaguely bohemian way, or as bohemian as the formality of the city library would allow, with her dark hair loose. I had spotted her from across the main library. She had been supporting an impressive array of heavy reference books in her arms and in turn supporting an equally impressive bust on the books. She looked to me like a free-thinking type: I found an open-minded attitude an asset in a woman. We hit it off right away. It could, of course have been our shared bibliophilia, but my guess was it was more likely to be my very obvious and profound appreciation of her best assets.
In any case, her cooperation made my search faster and more efficient than if I’d stumbled around myself. It took me forty-five minutes to compile the newspaper articles, service reports and casualty lists that I needed. Of course, there were details that I couldn’t get to: Britain was a secretive state, and nearly ten years after the end of the war there were details of the conflict that remained locked away in Whitehall basements, where they would remain for another eighty years at least. But I found enough to be getting along with; I also managed to get the home address of my brunette research partner as well as very specific times I could call: along with the vaguely bohemian dress, she wore a wedding band on her left hand. I guessed her husband was neither bohemian nor open-minded.
She left me at one of the desks with all of my research materials. I was focussed on one event and I spent two hours going through newspaper accounts and official reports on the disaster. But it was the casualty lists and service lists that interested me most. Finally, I found what I was looking for: Alain Barnier had been a junior officer on the Maille-Breze. It would explain the Frenchman’s attachment to this part of the world. It would also explain his visits to the memorial on Lyle Hill.
But, as I looked at Barnier’s name on the page, it left more unexplained than explained.
I read through back issues of the Greenock Telegraph, covering the earlier years of the war. There had been a lot of French sailors stationed in the area during the war and I scanned every mention of the French forces. They were mainly the usual flag-waving, forget-Napoleon-we’re-all-pals-now pieces. The Scots had a very different relationship with the French than the English had: there had been the Auld Alliance, the Franco-Scottish-Norwegian treaty that had preceded the British Act of Union, and to which the Scots romantically attached great importance. The relationship between the French sailors and the locals had been generally positive. There was certainly not going to be anything negative said about it in the wartime press.
But I did find something significant in the court records. Three Greenock dockyard workers, exempt from military service because of their reserved occupation, had appeared in the town’s sheriff court charged with breach of the peace, assault and police assault. Apparently the three locals had been involved in a melee in the town. The local police, and provosts of the Gendarmerie Maritime had had to break up a major brawl that had spilled out of a Greenock bar and into the streets. The date was significant: 5 July, 1940 — two days after the British Royal Navy had attacked the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir to stop the ships falling into German hands. Ten ships had been sunk and nearly 1300 French sailors killed. It had been a diplomatic disaster and had left the French asking ‘with friends like these…’
It didn’t take massive skills of deduction to work out that tensions had been high and some loudmouth must have said something to get a fight started between the French sailors and the locals. Of course, it didn’t need to be that. In the West of Scotland you didn’t need much of a reason for a fight, and seeing as many of the local girls had earned, with much enthusiasm, the epithet of matelots’ mattresses, the good old standards of sexual jealousy and booze were always available for the potentially pugnacious.
I was about to move on when a statement by one of the witnesses drew me back into the report. A group of French sailors had found themselves surrounded by a mob of locals. They were rescued by a group of local police and French naval provosts made up of naval gendarmes and Fusiliers Marins. The witness’s statement described how some of the French provosts had used ‘some kind of fancy foot-fighting’ to drive back the crowd.
I asked my librarian if she could photostat the report for me and, after a little gentle persuasion and much Lennox charm, she agreed. But I would have to pay for the materials and call back for the prints.
It was nearly lunchtime and I made my daily trip to see Davey at the hospital. His face was becoming slightly more recognizable but, if anything, he seemed less chipper than he had been right after the attack. After you’ve taken a beating, it takes a while for the pain to settle itself in, to find the little corners it wants to occupy; to soak itself deep into your muscle and bone. Usually it invites shock and depression as roommates. It was clear that young Davey Wallace’s broken body was now fully let.
It suddenly occurred to me that I had been so obsessed with what had happened immediately before the attack on him that I hadn’t asked Davey if anything unusual had happened earlier in the day, during his watch.
‘Did you find my notebook, Mr Lennox?’ Davey asked through his cage of wired-shut teeth — that was another thing to dampen your spirit a week or so after a beating, having to be fed through a tube because your teeth are wired shut. Whoever had done this to Davey had opened an account with me and I was due them a lot of interest.
‘No, Davey,’ I said. ‘There was no sign of it where the car was parked.’
‘I’ve been thinking about that notebook, Mr Lennox. I have a lot of time to think, here. I don’t lose things. I’m very careful that way. Even with what happened to me, in all of that confusion. That notebook was in my jacket pocket. It should still be there and it’s gone now. Whoever duffed me up took it. I think I saw something or someone that I didn’t take seriously and they thought I’d made a note of it.’
‘What?’
‘I’ve been racking my brains about it. It’s been doing my head in.’ Davey paused to wince. Some pain, somewhere inside, had moved about a bit, just to remind him of its tenancy. ‘Like I said, I’ve had lots of time to think about it. But nothing special happened that day. The only thing that came to me was the car that I saw.’
‘Someone who went into Kirkcaldy’s place?’ I asked. I lit a cigarette and held it to his lips.
‘No. Two people in the car, but I didn’t really get a look at them. Just a glimpse of the driver as he passed. I thought they were going to park and go into Mr Kirkcaldy’s house, but the car drove on by. I know it’s daft, like, but I got the idea that they maybes saw me parked and watching the house and decided not to stop.’
‘It’s not daft, Davey. It’s instinct. If Dex Devereaux was here he would tell you that every detective, every FBI man needs it. Did you see what make of car it was?’
‘I don’t know much about cars,’ said Davey melancholically, again as if he had let me down. ‘Makes and that. But that’s why I was asking about the notebook. I wrote down the registration number. It was a big car, but. Fancy, like.’
‘What colour was the car?’
‘Red,’ said Davey. ‘Deep red. A sort of winey colour?’
‘Burgundy?’
‘Sorry, I don’t know… is that winey colour?’
‘Do you know what a Lanchester looks like? Or a Daimler Conquest?’
‘Sorry, Mr Lennox, like I said, I don’t really know anything about cars.’
‘That’s okay, Davey. You’ve done fine. Just fine. I have a hunch about who it might have been in the car. And it is important. Thanks, you’ve been a big help.’
I left Davey, his mood lightened by my praise. I dialled Lorna from a pay ’phone in the hospital. Her tone remained distant and cool, but I tried to sound as chatty and informal as possible, hiding the real reason for my call: a casual question camouflaged in the deep foliage of small talk.
‘No,’ she said in reply. ‘Jack isn’t here at the moment. He doesn’t spend all his time here you know.’
‘Have you any idea where he might be?’
‘I don’t know. At work, probably. He has an office above the boxing gym in Maryhill. Why? What’s the sudden interest in Jack?’
‘Nothing,’ I bluffed. I wondered for a second how many boxing gyms there could be in Maryhill. ‘I just wanted to talk to him about the fight last night.’
I moved the conversation on to how she was and if she wanted me to come up to see her that night. She said she was having an early night: the doctor had given her something to help her sleep. Maybe that explained, I thought, why Lorna had begun to sound so distant. But her coolness was more than pharmaceutical. Maybe I was losing my touch. How women, once exposed to my charms, could then go on to resist them had always dumbfounded me. But, somehow, they seemed to manage just fine.
It’s odd how things just seem to come together: red ribbons tied to a gypsy vardo wagon, an off-the-cuff remark made by Tony the Pole, the colour of a car remembered by Davey Wallace, a reference to a Fusiliers Marins officer in a Greenock court report, a guardedness in Lorna’s answer.
I was spreading myself too thin working two cases at the same time, both of which had grown into something much bigger than it had first appeared. To start with, I had thought that finding Sammy Pollock was going to be a straightforward job and not interfere with my getting to the bottom of the Bobby Kirkcaldy thing. But I should have known that nothing in this life is straightforward. The truth was that I had suspected for a while that there had been some kind of connection between them. There was an oddly coincidental chronology here. Sammy Pollock’s disappearance had been coincidental with two things: the theft of one or more of Alain Barnier’s jade Ky-lan demons and the untimely demise of Small Change MacFarlane.
Willie Sneddon was the kind of man my dad would have described as ‘so crooked they’ll dig his grave with a corkscrew’, and I still had reason to doubt that Sneddon had told me all there was to tell about his involvement with Bobby Kirkcaldy. But I had no reason to doubt the truth of what he had told me. And that included the fact that somebody or something had terrified Small Change MacFarlane immediately before Sneddon had met with him that day.
Now, for me, a coincidence was kind of like Socialism: a nice idea, looks good from a distance, but when you get up good and close you can’t really bring yourself to believe in it. I was pretty convinced that MacFarlane’s murder was connected to at least one of the cases. MacFarlane was a backroom player, a money man with his finger in almost as many pies as Sneddon. But, unlike Sneddon, MacFarlane could get his fingers burned. There was a picture coming together in my head. Like a Picasso it was pretty ugly, jumbled, and didn’t make any sense to me.
My immediate and main problem was how to keep tabs on two pilgrims at the same time: Alain Barnier and Jack Collins. Then I had an idea, but first I needed to speak to Collins.
It was basically two small offices on the upper floor of a two-storey building, the lower floor devoted to a boxing gym. It was an older building that was crumbling a bit around the edges. I passed the door to the gym and climbed the stairs to the offices.
When I walked in I was greeted by a secretary who I guessed hadn’t been hired for her shorthand skills. Her hair was the kind of blonde that comes out of a bottle and her figure was the kind that comes out of a teenager’s wet dream. She parted crimson lips and flashed white teeth at me and showed me into the inner office.
Jack Collins sat behind a desk and a dense screen of blue-grey cigarette haze. When I went in, he had been running a finger down a ledger column and yanking at the crank handle of an adding machine. He was in shirtsleeves, his cuffs kept clear of ink and paper by arm garters positioned above his elbows and just beneath his biceps. Seeing Jack Collins close confirmed my first impression of him: he was smooth, expensively tailored, and groomed to an exceptional degree for a city where panache was defined by beating the coal dust from your flat cap before you took a girl up a darkened alley. He was a lean man, his face long, and his features elegant if a little too fine. His thick black hair was immaculately combed back from a broad, tanned brow, and he sported a pencil moustache that was so neat that he must have trimmed it on the hour.
‘Someone to see you, Jacky,’ said the blonde secretary over my shoulder.
‘Senga,’ he said wearily, looking past me. ‘How many times have I told you to get their names first?’
‘I’m Lennox,’ I said helpfully.
‘I know,’ he replied, looking back to ‘Senga’ and making an impatient gesture of dismissal. ‘It’s okay, you go back to whatever it is you have to do. Close the door behind you.’
‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘I’m training her up at the moment.’
‘I can imagine that would be taxing,’ I said, and sat down opposite him. He stubbed out a cigarette and lit another immediately. ‘Sorry,’ he said, and pushed the packet towards me. ‘Help yourself.’
‘No thanks,’ I said, and took my cigarette case out and lit one of my own. ‘I don’t smoke filters. They’re French, aren’t they?’ I nodded to the ashtray bristling with filter stubs. Each had two bands of gold around them.
‘Yes. Montpelliers. I don’t usually smoke them but I got a job lot from an importer friend of mine. You’re the chap who’s been seeing Lorna, aren’t you?’
‘Your half-sister… yes.’
He stared evenly at me. Cool and unruffled. ‘You know about that?’
‘That you’re Small Change MacFarlane’s son? I’m sorry, but it’s not the big secret you think it is. Half of Glasgow knows.’
‘I see. What can I do for you, Mr Lennox?’ Still relaxed. Collins was either extremely cool or he had been expecting my visit.
‘I’ve been looking into a few things concerning Bobby Kirkcaldy. I thought you might be able to cast some light on them.’
‘Really? Why me?’
‘You know something, Jack… Do you mind if I call you Jack? You know something, Jack, I’m quite a philosophical cove. I reflect on the nature of things. One of the things I’ve been reflecting on is the nature of coincidences.’
‘Oh?’ He put on an unimpressed act. Or maybe it wasn’t an act.
‘Yeah… Just like nature abhors a vacuum, I abhor a coincidence,’ I said.
‘What kind of coincidence do you have in mind?’
‘Well, for a start, you are the semi-secret and completely illegitimate son of Small Change MacFarlane. The population of this city is over two million, yet your father’s murderer just happens to train in the gym downstairs. In fact, his defence is based on the claim that he got an anonymous telephone call to the only place with a ’phone where he could be reached. In the gym downstairs. And then there’s Bobby Kirkcaldy, who’s famous for his rigorous training regimen. And where does he train? In the gym downstairs. Then, of course, there’s the fact that every bookie in town is smarting because Bobby Kirkcaldy folded in the middle of a fight that he was expected to win easily. Every bookie, that is, except you.’
‘I’m not a bookmaker.’
‘Not officially, but you and Small Change had a real MacFarlane and Son thing going. I’m guessing that you’ve taken over his book. That’s why there was no paperwork worth a damn for the police to find. My God, you must have moved quickly. And I have to say your grief over your father didn’t impede your business acumen, did it?’
‘You’re becoming very offensive, Mr Lennox. And what makes you think that I didn’t lose out? Everybody expected Bobby Kirkcaldy to walk that fight.’
‘A friend of mine seemed to think that there was someone in the know. Someone who didn’t so much hedge his bets as get Capability Brown to landscape them.’
‘You shouldn’t believe everything Tony the Pole tells you,’ said Collins with a sneer. He was a bright boy, right enough.
‘I don’t understand everything that Tony the Pole tells me. And before you go pointing fingers, I did a lot of asking about and everyone says it was you who scooped on the fight. There are a lot of fingers pointing at you.’
‘What is it you want from me, Lennox?’ He leaned back in the chair, elbows resting on the arms, slender fingers interlocked beneath his chin. A pose of contrived concentration.
‘What I want is to know what exactly you, Small Change and Bobby Kirkcaldy have gotten yourselves involved in. I was hired by Willie Sneddon to find out who was trying to intimidate Kirkcaldy and to look after his investment. Now, after that sham last night, it looks to me like whoever it was succeeded and Sneddon’s investment has gone down the pan. Either that, or a deal of some kind has been done to get you all off the hook. What I want to know is with whom.’
Collins watched me as I talked, still cool and unflustered. I had to resist the temptation to walk around the desk and kick the chair from under him.
‘If what you’re saying is true, what’s it to you? Why should you care? You’ve run your errand for Sneddon. Fight’s over, the outcome is what it is, whether Sneddon likes it or not.’
‘Well, first of all, I have a funny feeling that it wasn’t some disenchanted gypsy brawler who killed Small Change. Secondly, even though you seem to be taking it remarkably well, the bottom has fallen out of Lorna’s world and I feel I owe her something. And thirdly…’ I stood up and leaned knuckles on his desk, pushing my face towards him. ‘And this is the thing that really riles me… There’s a kid lying in the Southern General taking his lunches through a straw, all because there was a chance he saw you arrive to talk with Bobby Kirkcaldy. And that’s where it gets puzzling. It was no secret that Kirkcaldy and Small Change did business. And you were Small Change’s partner in at least one enterprise. So what I’m wondering is who was in the car with you and why he didn’t want to be seen arriving that night.’
‘Listen, Lennox… if you’re really interested in clearing up Jimmy’s death, like you say you are, then I’m grateful for it… though it looks pretty much to me like the police have got their man. But putting that aside, do you think I would really have anything to do with killing Jimmy? Like you said, he was my father, whether it was public knowledge or not, and he looked after me. There were lots of things we were going to do together. He had big plans for me. Why would I have anything to do with his death?’
‘I don’t think you did. I don’t think you were responsible for his death and I don’t think you wanted his death. But I do think you’re scared. And I know Small Change was scared witless before he died. Whoever had him scared has got you toeing the line, for fear of getting the same treatment.’
‘This is shite, Lennox. God knows where you’re getting this stuff. I wasn’t anywhere near Kirkcaldy’s house that day or any other.’
‘What day? I didn’t say when it was. And I didn’t say whether it was day or night.’
Collins gave a small laugh. ‘Look, you’re not tricking me into saying anything because there’s nothing for me to say. You’re barking up the wrong tree.’
‘Really? I think different. But, like you say, I’ve got nothing to back it up. Yet. When I do, it will be interesting to see who your biggest problem is: the police or Willie Sneddon. But, in the meantime, you think things over. If you decide you need my help to get yourself out of whatever it is you’ve gotten into, give me a call.’ I pointedly tossed my card onto his desk. He pointedly didn’t pick it up.