The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5 Read online

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Also by Craig Russell

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Three

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Four

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Five

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  First published in Great Britain in 2016 by

  Quercus Editions Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © 2016 Craig Russell

  The moral right of Craig Russell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Ebook ISBN 978 1 78429 239 3

  Print ISBN 978 1 78087 488 3

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  Also by Craig Russell

  THE LENNOX THRILLERS

  Lennox

  The Long Glasgow Kiss

  The Deep Dark Sleep

  Dead Men and Broken Hearts

  THE JAN FABEL THRILLERS

  Blood Eagle

  Brother Grimm

  Eternal

  Carnival Master

  The Valkyrie Song

  A Fear of Dark Water

  The Ghosts of Altona

  AS CHRISTOPHER GALT

  The Third Testament

  ‘I have a story to tell you,’ I said, after a while. ‘I’m afraid it’s not a pretty story and you won’t thank me for the telling of it. It’s also a story that a lot of people would kill – and have killed – to stop being told. Once I tell it to you, there are things that I will expect from each of you. But, I warn you, once you hear my story, you won’t be able to unhear it.’

  They said nothing.

  So I told them it.

  I told them Quiet Tommy Quaid’s story.

  Part One

  1

  I liked Quiet Tommy Quaid.

  Everyone liked him: every thief, thug, racketeer and ne’er-do-well in Glasgow liked Quiet Tommy Quaid; every street-corner kid, every shopkeeper and publican had a good word to say about him; women in particular had a fondness for Quaid’s quiet but potent charms. Even the police liked him. In fact, I had heard it had been the police who had christened him ‘Quiet Tommy’ in the certain knowledge that whenever they caught him – not that they caught him often these days – Tommy would invariably put his hands up and ‘come quiet’. And, of course, in all the many crimes he had committed over the years, Quiet Tommy Quaid had never once used violence.

  In fact, violence seemed to be a language Quaid neither spoke nor understood, which was somewhat at odds with his wartime service as a commando – a highly decorated commando, I’d been told. I dare say that Adolf’s Kommandobefehl notwithstanding, if they had captured him, the Germans would probably have liked Quiet Tommy Quaid too.

  And everyone seemed to like him totally: without that hidden ire we tend secretly to reserve for the naturally amiable. Yep . . . Quiet Tommy Quaid was a thoroughly likeable cove. He had practically no vices – except for equally excessive womanizing and drinking, which in nineteen fifty-eight Glasgow were pretty much looked on as virtues, not vices. And in that respect I myself was to be considered virtuous to the point of sainthood. But unlike me, Thomas Quaid was the most equanimous person you could encounter: a calm, easy-going, friendly sort who accepted the occasional misfortune – especially the misfortune of arrest – with calm resignation.

  The strange thing was Quiet Tommy Quaid also happened to be one of the wisest men I’d ever known, with a calm, deep-flowing intelligence that he shared seldom and only with those he chose to trust. I felt honoured to be amongst the few allowed the odd rare glimpse into the deep waters beneath the still surface.

  But Quiet Tommy did have one flaw – a mental deficiency, I suppose you’d call it. Everybody has something they find difficult to understand: I personally struggled to wrap my mind around the musings of Niels Bohr or Albert Einstein; the City of Glasgow Police failed to understand the lexical difference between the nouns ‘Catholic’ and ‘suspect’; but for Quiet Tommy Quaid, the one concept that eluded comprehension was that of private ownership. That isn’t to say he was one of Glasgow’s many red-flag-waving, Lenin-quoting, class-warrior idealists – it was simply that Tommy couldn’t seem to understand that if something belonged to someone else, he couldn’t just up and take it.

  I’m not saying that Tommy was some kind of common thief: Quaid was most definitely a thief, and every bit as definitely anything but common. He had intelligence, he had flair, he had style. He had inches on other Glaswegians. When it came to the population’s height, Glasgow was the kind of place where Snow White would have felt right at home – generations of bad diet, hard labour and equally hard drinking, coupled with appalling living conditions, had stunted the city’s population – but Tommy Quaid was unusually tall for Glasgow; he was always immaculately groomed, his expensively barbered, copper-coloured hair sleeked but not oily and combed back from a broad-browed, handsome and vaguely aristocratic face, a neat moustache lining his top lip. Speaking for myself as someone who was known for his appreciation of good tailoring, I can tell you that the perpetually well-turned-out Tommy Quaid’s suits were always top-notch. I had once been tempted to ask him who his tailor was, but thought better of it, realizing that he probably gave new depth to the concept of prêt à porter – prêt à porter through the skylight window of a tailor’s storeroom, usually.

  But the thing I liked most about Quiet Tommy Quaid, and I guessed that everyone else liked most, was that you knew exactly where you were with him, exactly who it was you were dealing with. Here, everybody realized, was someone who was precisely, simply and totally who and what he seemed to be.

  We had no idea how wrong we were.

  2

  I would have good cause to remember that day; most people would remember it, but for a different reason.<
br />
  Friday the eleventh of July, nineteen fifty-eight was an auspicious day all right. An auspicious day for Glasgow – for all of Scotland, for that matter. The reason that day would live in so many memories was because a lever was pulled and an insignificant-looking, five-foot-four-inch monster – known in the press as ‘The Beast of Birkenshaw’ – took the shortest of journeys through a Barlinnie Prison trap door and into the afterlife. And as multiple murderer Peter Manuel breathed his last, the rest of the country breathed a sigh of relief.

  Manuel had been on my mind a lot that day. I’d come across him once, in the Horsehead Bar: a short-arsed loudmouth with a cod American accent, he had been the object of ridicule. But what I remembered most were his eyes: Manuel had had the palest complexion under an oily mop of jet-black hair, the frame for small, dark eyes that glittered black like Airdrie anthracite and seemed to bore into you. Or maybe it was just hindsight that made me wax lyrical, having read about his monstrous crimes in the papers. As we had learned from Herr Hitler, monsters rarely look like monsters and guise themselves as insignificant, even comical-looking.

  At the time I was not aware that Manuel’s hanging would not be the event that would mark out the day for me. What would, in the fullness of time, make Friday the eleventh of July nineteen fifty-eight an auspicious day was something else completely.

  It was the day I met Mr McNaught.

  *

  The post-war landscape of my life could generally have been described as less than easy-going, but the years fifty-seven and fifty-eight had been especially rocky – both personally and professionally. The women in my life had always had a tendency towards dramatic exits and for the second time a woman for whom I had had something like genuine above-the-waist feelings had died. After I had found out that cancer had taken Fiona White, I had become lost for a while.

  A year before, I’d hired Archie McClelland, an ex-City of Glasgow policeman, to help in the business. After Fiona’s death, I hadn’t exactly left Archie to carry the business on his own, but he had shouldered more than his share while I had not so much gone off the rails as taken a branch line for a while. I had drunk too much even by my standards and had buried myself in the soft folds of female comfort a little more than Errol Flynn would have found seemly; but I had, by and large, managed to keep myself together. Or at least functioning.

  Lugubrious, chain-smoking Archie, who had the tall, stooping posture of an undertaker and the doleful eyes of Alastair Sim, had done much to keep me on the straight and narrow, but I’d still managed to get into a few dodgy areas, both morally and legally – which, of course, weren’t always the same thing.

  Archie had never complained, never asked for anything as reward; but because of everything he’d done, the sign on the door now said Lennox and McClelland Enquiry Agents. At least I kidded myself that my partnership offer was simply about rewarding Archie. My gratitude really was a big part of it, of course, but the truth was also that having straight-as-a-die, ex-City of Glasgow Police beat-man Archie as a partner took off my shoulders a lot of the aspects of the work I couldn’t be bothered with. Most importantly, it helped me legitimize the business that little bit more.

  Before Archie had come along, most of the work I’d done had been for the Three Kings, the triumvirate of crook monarchs who ran much that was legal and everything that wasn’t in Glasgow. Some of the waters I’d gotten into had been so murky that they made the Clyde look limpid. The war had messed me up – me and a million others – and more than once I’d found myself in a situation that had brought out the old demons. On a couple of occasions, the prison yard – even the hanging shed – had beckoned and I’d decided to straighten myself, my life and my business out. I’d hired ex-cop Archie and, between us, we had successfully steered the business away from providing services to the Three Kings.

  But the Three Kings – Willie Sneddon, Hammer Murphy and Handsome Jonny Cohen – were not the kind of people who generally accepted no as an answer, so the price I had paid was still to do the odd job for the Kings ‘off the books’ – and very much out of Archie’s sight. Generally, I liked to think I had much in common with Mae West: we both tried to remain as white as snow, but had a tendency to drift.

  So on that auspicious Friday morning of the eleventh of July, nineteen fifty-eight – as I stood staring out of my office window, bereaved, mildly hungover, generally pissed with everything, and morally overdrawn if not completely bankrupt – the stage was set for Mr McNaught’s entrance.

  *

  Archie had just left for a meeting with the Scottish and Northern Bank, around the corner from our Gordon Street offices and for whom we had been providing transfer security for two years. It didn’t occur to me at the time that McNaught’s arrival coincided with Archie’s departure, with just enough time for them not to pass each other in the stairwell. It wasn’t something that would have occurred to anyone: that no one ever saw Mr McNaught except me.

  Of course, there was the distraction of the goings-on over at the station.

  Even I didn’t see McNaught arrive, despite the fact that I had been looking out the third-floor window of my office when he must have come in through the street entrance below. I had been drawn to the window by the urgent trilling of bells from approaching police cars and an ambulance.

  Our Gordon Street office was directly opposite Central Station, looking down on the ornate Victorian latticed ironwork of its entrance. Three police cars had arrived with the ambulance and had pulled up immediately outside the main entry. The coppers and the ambulance men, carrying a stretcher, had trotted off into the main concourse of the station. I was as subject to morbid curiosity as the next man – perhaps even more so – and I lit a cigarette and watched the comings and goings below.

  Another police car arrived, this time with an inspector and driver, both of whom also disappeared into the railway station. It was another cigarette’s length before the ambulance men reappeared, their stretcher empty, and drove off in the ambulance, only to be replaced a minute or so later by a Black Maria police van. Two more coppers answered the question as to why the ambulance had left by taking out what looked like a black coffin from the back of the Black Maria. I knew it was a ‘body shell’, as the boys in blue called it – the rigid but lightweight container the police used to remove dead bodies to the mortuary, and made out of fibreglass because the effluent residue of the leaving of life could be easily hosed from it.

  Obviously someone had died in the station. It could have been anything from a heart attack – from which, it seemed to me, every Glaswegian over the age of sixteen was at danger – or an accident involving a rail worker. I reflected that if it had been a typical accident on the rails, then they probably wouldn’t have needed the body shell: a couple of good-sized suitcases would have done the job.

  Whatever the cause, someone’s light, an entire universe of experiences and senses, had been extinguished somewhere inside the station. And I would completely forget the incident by the end of the day.

  A third police Wolseley pulled up and three men, two in uniform, one in plainclothes, got out. The plainclothesman was older – almost too old to still be in police service – but clearly senior in more than age as all the other officers obviously deferred to him. They headed in through the ornate entrance and disappeared from my view and interest.

  When I turned from the window, McNaught was there, framed in my office doorway, watching me in lopsided silence. History was something that tended to be written as much in the faces of men as in books: McNaught’s face contained several volumes’ worth. With appendices.

  Mr McNaught – he never did give a first name and I guessed his surname was about as genuine as Hemingway’s machismo – introduced himself as a ‘businessman’. He didn’t look the business type, although he didn’t look the criminal type either. But there was something about him that told you he was no stranger to violence: he had a build that made the Forth Bridge look flimsy and a face that some event had stripped of
symmetry.

  A decade or so after the war there were a lot of lopsided faces about, some deficient to the tune of an eye, some twisted into unintentional sneers by inexpert battlefield surgery. McNaught’s face wasn’t that bad, but it was worse than mine. I’d been left with a faint web of white scars on one side of my face from a German grenade that had landed not too close to me but conveniently close to one of my men, who had unintentionally shielded me from the brunt of the blast. A plastic surgeon had done his stuff on me but, nearly a decade and a half on, the scars were still visible if you got close enough. Whatever the plastic surgeon had done had changed my appearance, making the skin taut and emphasizing my cheekbones. The Jack Palance look, I’d been told. The unintentional result was a subtle transformation that, while it hadn’t robbed me of my looks, had given me a harder, crueller appearance. It was something that seemed to make me more attractive to women. And coppers.

  McNaught, on the other hand, just looked a little fucked up. The odd thing was that neither half of his face would have looked wrong by itself or married to its mirror image, it was more that each cheek was at a different angle and location from its opposite number, like mismatched socks. A clue to the cause lay in the deep crease of a crescent-shaped scar that arced around the bottom of his right cheek. My guess was that McNaught had been that little bit closer to a shell, grenade or machine-gun burst but, unlike me, hadn’t had one of his men to run interference for him; the result being he’d lost flesh and a little bone on the right side of his face.

  ‘Sorry . . . I didn’t see you come in.’ I waved a thumb vaguely at the window as if he should know what had distracted me.

  ‘I’d like to hire your services,’ he said, after he had introduced himself, we had shaken hands and I’d invited him to take a seat. McNaught had a military bearing, all right; the kind who managed to stand at attention even when sitting down. ‘It won’t take up much of your time, but it will be financially very worthwhile for you.’

  I smiled, which was something of a Pavlovian response with me to the stimulus of easy money. I took a second to weigh McNaught up: his accent was Scottish middle-class and his tailoring was very British: sharp, neat and completely and studiously devoid of style. He was one of those men you saw a lot after the war, wearing immaculately pressed tweed suits and immaculately polished burgundy brogues as if they were still in uniform. He also wore a lovat-green mac over his suit, despite it being a July afternoon. There again, in Glasgow, the concept of seasons could be at best abstract.