The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5 Page 12

  ‘So you didn’t know Tommy was in prison at the start of the war?’

  ‘No . . . no, I didn’t.’

  ‘Tommy kept quiet about his record. Or at least he fudged it a little. He let people think that he’d done a year of prison time here, a few months there, but it wasn’t like that. Tommy was sentenced to eighteen months when he was still a teenager, but got out early for good behaviour. They arrested him God knows how many times after that but could never get enough for a conviction. Then, just at the start of the war, he broke into the house of Sir John MacIlwain.’

  ‘The shipyard owner?’

  ‘Yes. MacIlwain also owned the mining company our father had worked for. I think Tommy thought he was collecting dues. He struck it rich that night all right: it was estimated that he got away with fifteen thousand pounds’ worth of cash and jewels – although Tommy swore that MacIlwain exaggerated the loss for the insurance company. If Tommy had stuck to the cash, he’d have been all right, but the fence he’d done a deal with for the jewellery was caught and through him they got Tommy. Because the value of the cash and goods recovered didn’t match the claim, they really threw the book at him. That and the fact that there was a war on and the MacIlwain yards were seen as essential to the war effort. Suddenly, stealing from a multimillionaire became unpatriotic. Tommy got fifteen years. Truth is that I think he really did keep some of the proceeds back. I think that was what paid for me to go to an independent school.’

  ‘He obviously didn’t serve his whole sentence,’ I said.

  ‘He’d done less than two years when the army came calling. They made Tommy an offer – from what he could work out, they had offered the same deal to a handful of other burglars and safecrackers. The offer was that they would wipe Tommy’s slate clean if he agreed to serve in the army for the duration.’

  ‘The commandos.’

  ‘Actually no. Or not at the start. According to Tommy, they said he would be with the Royal Engineers, but that he might have to do dangerous work behind enemy lines. It was obvious that the military wanted people who were skilled in breaking into places. It was a gamble for Tommy: for all he knew the war could have gone on for longer than his fifteen year sentence, and he seemed to have adjusted to prison life, but he said yes.’

  I thought about what she had said. I knew the army had effectively offered freedom for service to a small number of convicted felons with special skills. The kind of skills valued in wartime but criminal in peacetime.

  ‘So why would you think his war service might have something to do with his death?’

  ‘I don’t know. Before the invasion, Tommy was transferred to the commandos. A special unit. You know Tommy – he was tight-lipped at the best of times and that’s all I know. Except that, after the war, he never had anything to do with anyone he served with. I can’t say if there was any kind of fall-out, or whether Tommy just wanted to put everything that happened in the war behind him.’

  ‘The war was a long time ago. What makes you think that old comrades could be involved in his death thirteen years later?’

  ‘Nothing . . .’ She shook her head as if annoyed at the foolishness of her logic. ‘It was just that, at the funeral, there was a man – there was something about him that I didn’t like. He had travelled up from England to come to the funeral. He said he had served with Tommy during the war. That’s what made me think of him.’

  ‘What did he look like?’ I asked, braced for a description of a big, burly military type with a lopsided face.

  ‘He wasn’t very tall. Or very well-built. Almost slight. And he seemed, well, shifty.’

  ‘I think I saw him,’ I said. ‘I thought he was maybe one of Tommy’s criminally connected friends, but Inspector Ferguson didn’t know him either. And yes, there was something shifty about him. But he was maybe just there to pay his respects.’

  ‘You’re probably right, but it’s a long way to come up from England when there wasn’t even a funeral service. I wanted to have one, by the way, but you know how Tommy had funny ideas about that kind of thing.’

  I nodded. ‘Did you speak to him?’

  ‘Only briefly. And that was what made me start thinking about Tommy’s war service maybe having something to do with what had been troubling him before his death. You see, all Baines seemed to be interested in was if Tommy had seen any of his old unit recently.’

  ‘Baines?’

  ‘That was his name. He told me his first name, but I’ve forgotten it.’ Something seemed to strike her. She reached down and picked up her handbag again. ‘Speaking of names, I thought this might be useful.’ She took an expensive-looking notebook, bound in burgundy leather, from her handbag. ‘It’s Tommy’s diary and address book. I found it among his stuff. I thought it would be useful.’

  ‘It definitely will be,’ I said encouragingly and slipped the notebook into my pocket, although I guessed Tommy would hesitate to commit his more interesting contacts to paper. I certainly hoped he hadn’t pencilled in his professional engagements – Sunday, breaking into Saracen Foundry with Lennox.

  ‘I’m afraid that’s everything. I’ve given you as much as I can for you to go on. I’m sorry it’s not much. I’m guessing that whatever is in Tommy’s lock-up will give you the answers.’

  I looked at the key to a lock-up on the Clyde – and to Pandora’s Box. If I found whatever it was he’d hidden there, then I would be in the same position Tommy had been in. I knew I’d go and look: but I vowed in the meantime to avoid rooftops and even high pavements.

  I took the blue-fobbed key and slipped it into my pocket. The envelope with the cash remained untouched on the table; I picked it up and handed it to her. ‘You’d better get that into a bank. If our charming waitress sees it she might think it’s a tip for her wonderful service.’

  She looked at the envelope, her expression worried. ‘Tommy said I was to give you that. He insisted.’

  ‘Listen, Jennifer, I’ll do what Tommy asked. I’m just not going to take money for it. I’d rather you kept it.’

  ‘Believe me, Tommy’s taken care of me financially—’

  ‘All the same . . .’

  She put the envelope back in her bag.

  We talked a little more, I being mindful of the fragility of Jennifer’s grief, she pulling a veil of politeness over it. I arranged to keep in touch and, before heading back to my office from the tearoom, I got the details of the hotel she was staying at, walked her to the taxi rank at Central Station and saw her into a cab.

  As I watched the taxi make the turn into Waterloo Street, I thought about the face I’d sat opposite in the tearoom. It had been a long time since I’d spent time with a woman I really wanted to get to know, to get to understand fully, to share something of each other – rather than my usual base instinct just to nail her.

  But, of course, I also really, really wanted to nail her.

  2

  I tried not to look too surprised – or guilty. Coppers have an instinct for that kind of thing: reading first reactions. Or maybe they teach it to them at basic training along with masonic handshakes and how not to leave bruises on suspects.

  When I got back to my office, Jock Ferguson was sitting very comfortably at my desk, chatting to Archie. That was another thing I’d noticed about coppers: they were very good at making themselves at home.

  ‘Hello, Jock,’ I said casually. ‘Have you decided to join the private sector?’

  He smiled his usual half-smile: the other half, I had always thought, must have gotten lost in the war.

  ‘Divorce cases, lost dogs and bank runs? Such dizzy heights are not for me, I’m afraid. I was just passing and I thought I’d let you know that I checked out that van registration you gave me.’

  ‘Oh . . . stolen?’

  ‘Not quite . . .’ He stretched the words out contemplatively. ‘Are you sure you wrote down the right number?’

  ‘I didn’t – it was Twinkletoes who noted it down.’

  Ferguson made an
ah-that-explains-it face. ‘Then he wrote it down wrong. It doesn’t belong to any registered vehicle that we can trace, stolen or otherwise. But the number sounded wrong anyway.’

  ‘Wrong how?’ asked Archie.

  ‘SLR 882 – the SLR prefix makes it a London-registered vehicle. I mean, that’s not impossible, but it’s unlikely that crooks would fake a number plate that would be so obviously out of place in Glasgow.’

  ‘But if the number can’t be found,’ I said, ‘then surely that means exactly that – that they’re fake plates.’

  ‘Let’s face it, Lennox – Twinkletoes McBride isn’t famed for his intellectual prowess. I’d say it’s the safest guess that he wrote the number down wrong.’

  ‘I guess . . .’ I said. The truth was Twinkle may not have been the sharpest knife in the cutlery drawer, but he was diligent. I had asked him at the time if he had been certain that he’d gotten the right number, and he had assured me he had. Whether the number was genuine or not, listed or not, I trusted Twinkletoes that that was what had been on the van’s plates.

  And there was something else that wasn’t ringing true: Jock Ferguson had come to tell me in person that Twinkle’s note-taking was below par, something that he could easily have done over the telephone. I was probably reading too much into it, but it was almost as if he needed to see me convinced.

  Picking his hat up from the desk, Ferguson rose from my chair. ‘Well, I’d better let you get back to your divorces and lost dogs.’

  ‘Actually, while you’re here . . .’ I said, and Ferguson responded by doing his eyebrow-arching thing. ‘Was there anything suspicious noted about Quiet Tommy Quaid’s death?’ I asked.

  ‘Why? What’s it to you?’

  ‘I’m officially on the case,’ I said, trying not to emphasize the word officially. ‘Tommy’s next of kin has hired me to look into his death.’

  ‘Next of kin? You mean that sister of Tommy’s you couldn’t take your beadies off?’

  ‘My interest is purely professional. Was there anything odd about Tommy’s death?’

  ‘Like I told you at the funeral: occupational hazard. If you clamber about on roofs in the middle of the night, then there’s always the chance you’re going to take the quick way down. What are you getting at? That it could be something else? Murder?’

  ‘I just asked if there was anything odd you’d picked up.’

  ‘Well . . . the only thing is that Tommy clearly got to the place in a stolen van – we found it locked and abandoned outside the foundry. We couldn’t find the van keys on Tommy, or anywhere near him; that kind of points to an accomplice. A driver. Maybe someone who was up on the roof with him. If you’re trying to suggest murder, then the missing van driver would be your only suspect.’

  I tried not to swallow too hard. ‘Any ideas who Tommy’s accomplice might have been?’

  ‘Not really.’ Ferguson shook his head. ‘If there was an accomplice. But the only other odd thing is that we haven’t been able to find Jimmy Wilson. Remember I said he sometimes worked with Tommy?’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘Well, we can’t find hide nor hair of him. Dropped off the planet completely. So maybe he was with Tommy. But even if he was, and he was up on the roof with Tommy, there’s no way that Jimmy would have pushed him off. Like Tommy, Jimmy Wilson isn’t the violent type. Anyway, what possible motive could he have? My money is on him having seen Tommy fall and panicked . . . if he was there at all.’

  I shrugged. ‘All I know is that, of all the roofs for Quiet Tommy Quaid to fall off, that wasn’t a likely candidate.’

  ‘You know the foundry?’ asked Ferguson. I tried not to let my mental oh fuck show in my expression.

  ‘I checked out where he’s supposed to have fallen from.’ The secret to a successful lie is to lie without hesitation and not to look for hints of belief in your interrogator. ‘You know Tommy was a pro. One of the best. I can’t see him taking that fall.’

  ‘It happens, Lennox. You can drown in a tumbler of water, or break your neck tripping on a kerb. God knows the number of times I’ve done someone for murder or manslaughter when a single punch has turned out fatal.’

  I nodded. It was time for me to let it drop. My first priority, I knew, was to get to Jimmy Wilson before the coppers did. I also had to get out to the Saracen Foundry to make true my claim to Ferguson that I’d seen the scene of the ‘accident’. It would also give me a chance to check if anyone had spotted anyone else around that shouldn’t have been there. Including a limping man in a Cary Grant burglar outfit.

  *

  I spent the rest of the morning going through the paperwork of the divorce we were working on. Just before lunch, Archie went out to get witness statements and I was left alone in the office. I took out the two keys, each attached to the same type of blue plastic fob, and laid them on the desk. Funnily enough, staring at them didn’t get them to give up their secrets, but it allowed me to get my thoughts into some kind of rough order. Two keys, both given to me indirectly by Quiet Tommy Quaid. One key to his home, the other to a location he’d kept secret and which, if what Jennifer had said was right, contained a secret that was important enough to kill for.

  I hadn’t, of course, been totally truthful with Jennifer Quaid when I said I had nothing to go on. After all, I’d been with Tommy the night he had died; worse still, it had been me who had, albeit unknowingly, sent her brother to his death. And I knew about Mr McNaught. I was the only one who knew about Mr McNaught. I also didn’t tell Jennifer about the key I had to Tommy’s flat, or the ticket stub for the Frantic Frankie Findlay show.

  I checked the address and directions to the lock-up again, slipped the keys back into my pocket, and headed out to where my car was parked in Argyle Street.

  I drove towards Clydebank, following the course of the river. Again the shore bristled with loading cranes and just like on the shipyard wages run, there was no doubt I was in a landscape of labour, of industry. It was maybe because of the bank run experience, or maybe because of my post-McNaught paranoia, that I checked my rear-view mirror more than normal. Right enough, I became sure I was being followed. No blue van this time, and whoever was stalking me was taking more care about it. A lot more care.

  About three cars back, there was a Ford Consul – one of the new models – the coachwork two-tone, light blue over cream. What troubled me was I was pretty sure I’d seen it before – or at least the same model and same colours – parked outside the cemetery gates among the Bentleys and Jags the day Quiet Tommy Quaid was planted for eternity.

  I made a couple of turns, indicating well in advance, to see if the Consul would follow. It did. Unlike Archie’s evasions, I made sure the turns I made weren’t sudden or obvious and didn’t take me too far off course. After a couple, I lost sight of the Consul and headed back towards the riverfront. He was there again, further back, maybe four cars behind. He was good; better than me. This time, I was being tailed by a pro.

  I reached the entrance to the lock-ups: serried ranks of large wooden storage sheds dark-varnished almost black. I knew they were rented out mainly to companies involved in shipbuilding, as well as tradesmen, a few private individuals and, as I now knew, the odd career thief. I drove past without turning in.

  And when I did that, the Consul took the next turning off the main road and disappeared. Either I had been wrong and the presence of the car was a coincidence, or chummy had turned off to convince me that he hadn’t been tailing me after all. What bothered me was that if he had been following me, then he had decided to break off when he saw I didn’t turn into the lock-ups.

  Which would mean the location of Tommy’s secret stash wasn’t so completely secret after all.

  *

  Sometimes it didn’t pay to be flash. My Sunbeam Alpine convertible was too conspicuous for surveillance work – and as I found out the night of the foundry job, it was even too flash to drive down Maryhill Road in the hours of darkness without attracting a copper’s attention. Pr
obably in the hours of daylight, too. So when it came to dodging others who were surveilling me, driving about in it was a positive liability.

  I decided to leave the lock-up until after dark. I stopped at a telephone box and called Archie at the office, explaining I had a couple of things to do and wouldn’t be back for the rest of the day. Truth was, I had lost my tail and didn’t want to pick it up again by going back and parking near the office.

  I had places to go and people to see; what I needed was something less conspicuous for a few hours. I had a contact who ran a garage in Maryhill, and I arced up along the south and east sides of the city. They rented out cars to me on an informal basis, as and when I needed something inconspicuous. The Wishart brothers not only repaired, bought and sold cars, they had unravelled a mystery of physics that had eluded Einstein and his buddies: the reversal of Time itself. When a car left their garage, the cars they sold always had considerably lower mileages on the clock than when they had bought them.

  Willie Wishart wore the suit and his brother Bobby the overalls, and when I arrived at the garage, Willie was laying it on with a trowel to a worried-looking young couple. I gestured to him that I’d wait in the ‘sales-office’: an ancient, battered old shed, the wooden clapboard looking like it was held together by the layers of creosote that had been lathered onto it over half a century. A sign above the door promised DOUBLE THE CAR AT HALF THE PRICE, which I had heard was a promise the Wisharts regularly lived up to: the cars they sold were often the welded-together undamaged halves of insurance write-offs.

  The odd thing was that Bobby Wishart was an excellent mechanic and whenever I needed the Alpine serviced and tuned, it was the Wisharts who did it for me. When Willie finished with the customers, I told him I needed something reliable, but which would blend into the background. He gave me the keys for a black forty-eight Vauxhall Wyvern. It was inconspicuous and reliable all right, but I wouldn’t have wanted to have gotten into a car chase with it, given that the only thing it was capable of outrunning was a pushbike.

  ‘I’ll need it for a few hours,’ I told Willie. ‘Maybe overnight. Can you valet and wax the Alpine while it’s here? Garage it overnight?’