Dead men and broken hearts l-4 Page 14

  ‘And what type of man is that?’

  ‘A man who leaves behind him a trail of dead men and broken hearts.’

  ‘Dead men and broken hearts?’ I smiled appreciatively. ‘Very lyrical.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I did read it in a book. But that is exactly what you have left behind you. Here in Glasgow too. If you want, I can be very specific about the dead men part.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘Listen, this doesn’t have to be about threats,’ he cradled his coffee cup as if sitting in a vicarage parlour, ‘There are also opportunities for us both.’

  ‘What kind of opportunities?’

  ‘We could use someone like you. On occasion. You have… skills… we could use. But, for the moment, I really do need to know why you were following our surveillance suspect. Then, hopefully, we can discuss opportunities for future cooperation — or at the very least get out of each other’s hair.’

  I weighed him up; Hopkins was as in control of the situation as it was possible to be. But, there again, he had had a lot of experience. The pattern on his tie told me he would be expert at getting more out of someone in five minutes with a cup of tea and a digestive biscuit than the average Glasgow copper could beat out of a suspect after a month of swinging a rubber hosepipe. I sat back down.

  ‘So why were you following that particular young lady?’ he asked again.

  ‘The truth? No politics, no cloaks and no daggers. A marital fidelity case, plain and simple. I saw her with the husband in question. I was just following it up.’

  ‘I see,’ said Hopkins. ‘We seem both to be in the business of assessing fidelity, of one kind or another. And you are working on this case at the moment?’

  ‘I am… I mean, I was… It’s complicated.’

  ‘You are either being paid to follow this woman around Glasgow or you’re not. I don’t see anything complicated in that.’

  ‘The wife paid me off. She said she was happy with her husband’s explanation.’

  ‘So why are you still following the girl? Why not the errant husband? If you are going to do some pro bono tailing, that would make more sense.’

  I had the answer, of course: a simple coincidence involving two men called Frank Lang. But Connelly’s union wouldn’t appreciate being brought to the attention of someone like Hopkins.

  ‘Look,’ I said, trying to sound appeasing, ‘I understand I’ve trodden on toes — but all that’s happened is I’ve innocently stumbled into a much bigger deal than anything I’m interested in.’

  Hopkins sat with his hand still resting on the file, his expression unreadable beneath the cloak of his polite smile.

  ‘Okay,’ I nodded again to his neckwear. ‘Unless I’m mistaken, that’s an Intelligence Corps tie. I’m guessing you’re now with the Security Service or MI5 or whatever it is they call themselves these days and your job is to keep tabs on Johnny Foreigner on British soil. Am I right?’

  ‘In spirit if not in substance. Who was your client?’

  ‘You know I can’t tell you that. But I promise you that whatever your interest in this girl or her chums, it has nothing to do with why I was following her.’

  ‘My department does indeed deal with monitoring the activities of foreign nationals. Specifically emigre, refugee and other expatriate groups active within the UK.’ He opened the file and slid a large head-and-shoulders photograph across the table to me. The woman I had seen with Ellis. In this official picture, however, her hair was scraped and tied back and her face was naked of make-up under the harsh, uncompromising light of a flashbulb. She still looked a knock-out.

  ‘This is the woman you were following?’

  I nodded. Hopkins slid a second photograph across to me.

  ‘Do you recognize this man?’ he asked, his eyes locked on my face.

  I made a big deal of studying the photograph before shaking my head. Too big a deal, from the weary expression on Hopkins’s face.

  ‘You were seen talking to this gentleman in a cafe in the West End of Glasgow just two days ago. Listen, old boy, I really would rather avoid any unpleasantness so I would ask you not to insult my intelligence.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So I’ve seen him. But it wasn’t an arranged meeting. He pulled the same stunt as you and introduced himself and made it clear he was pretty up-to-date with my social calendar too. So he followed me to the cafe and you followed him. You know something? I must wander about Glasgow blissfully unaware that I have an entourage bigger than the Queen’s.’

  ‘What did he discuss with you?’

  ‘He asked me to keep my nose out of his business. I guess he knew that I’d seen my client’s husband with her…’ I stabbed a finger at the photograph of the woman. It was a lie, of course, and I didn’t mention that my call to Tabori the Hungarian consul was really what had spiked Matyas’s interest. I had to keep Hopkins away from my looking for Frank Lang for Connelly. But for all I knew, Hopkins knew all about that as well.

  ‘And he told you his name?’ Hopkins asked as he topped up his coffee cup.

  ‘Just his first name. Matyas. Matthew.’

  ‘Yes… Matyas Pasztor. He was a founding member of Petofi Circle

  …’

  I shrugged.

  ‘A group of writers and intellectuals who started off the protests against the Rakosi government in Hungary. Pasztor is a poet. He has organized his own emigre group here in Glasgow. The young lady you followed belongs to his group.’

  ‘He doesn’t sound like a dangerous alien,’ I said.

  ‘Probably not. But he is helping others escape from Hungary — and it would appear some chaff is getting through with the wheat.’

  ‘What kind of chaff?’

  ‘Let’s just say undesirable elements. Undesirable on both sides of the Curtain.’

  ‘Would one of those elements go by the name of Ferenc Lang?’ I asked.

  For a moment, Hopkins looked at me long and hard.

  ‘I think, Mr Lennox, you had better tell me absolutely everything you know about Ferenc Lang.’

  And I did.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Two Frank Langs. There had been two of them all along.

  I had lectured Pamela Ellis on how it was always best to apply Occam’s Razor, or the Duck Rule, to every situation, and that the simplest explanation was usually the right one — but I had failed to do the same thing myself. There had been two Frank Langs from the beginning, completely unconnected other than for the fact that the name had cropped up when Taylor had been sniffing about and his Frank Lang had been Hungarian-born like Ellis.

  There was, of course, every chance that Hopkins had been playing me. Deception was his stock-in-trade, after all, but there was no reason for him to throw up a smokescreen: I already was as lost as it was possible to be. And the truth was I didn’t care. Sometimes you just had to learn to take a warning and the warning I had been given had done the trick. Hopkins had rattled the right skeletons in the right closets for me to get the message loud and clear. I resolved to drop the whole Ellis thing and go back to looking for my Frank Lang, the Frank Lang whose Lanarkshire origins were less than exotic.

  My resolve didn’t prevent me becoming increasingly paranoid over the next three days. It was the right place at the right time for paranoia: the world had dimmed a little more as the Scottish winter days shortened and the weather took a turn for the worse. I spent much of my time looking over my shoulder for shadowy Hungarians, even shadowier government agents, or even the odd ghost from Hamburg lurking somewhere in the gloom. I also grew cagey about whom I spoke to and what I said on the ’phone.

  Hopkins had kept me for four hours, with a break for sandwiches and more crap coffee, all the time telling me how free I was to leave whenever I wished. In my time, I’d been put through the mill by all kinds of cops, both civilian and military. No one had ever gotten a word out of me that I didn’t want them to have. Hopkins, I had decided, would be no different. Putting up a stonewall defence, I ha
d been absolutely determined to stop him getting anything from me.

  By the time his beefy chums from Special Branch had dropped me back at my car, Hopkins had wheedled every last bit of information he had wanted to get out of me. There wasn’t a bean that I left unspilled. The one thing I had been determined to keep out of his view was my involvement with Connelly and the union and the truth of why I’d been looking for a Frank Lang.

  I told him all about that too.

  The information you get from people by pulling out their fingernails is never reliable. Any sane person tells their torturer whatever the hell they think he wants to hear, whether it is the truth or not, just so they can hang on to their ability to scratch their backsides. Hopkins was the most skilled interrogator I had ever experienced, and he hadn’t even resorted to being brusque — which caused me to reflect on how different history would have been if the Spanish Inquisition had relied on the use of muffins and sherry.

  Every time I had lied or bent the truth to send Hopkins in the wrong direction, it seemed to expose another truth elsewhere. It was like plugging holes in a dyke only to see the water break through somewhere out of reach. And all the time, whenever I had managed to hold something back, he would bring the conversation back to my dubious history and I would tell him the truth to keep him away from my personal demons and secrets.

  The only thing he didn’t get out of me was the word Tanglewood. It wasn’t that I made a huge effort to keep it from my scrupulously polite, Savile Row-tailored inquisitor; it was simply that it didn’t come up. That meant it was either of no significance or, if it was, Hopkins did not know about it. Of course, there was always the chance that he was keeping it from me.

  By the time we were through, I guessed he knew that he had gotten the truth out of me. It was an odd feeling: both relief and self-disgust. He had somehow managed to make me feel unburdened, as if he had done me a great favour by getting me to betray every professional confidence I had made over the last four weeks.

  Afterwards, Hopkins had escorted me himself to the front door of the building where the Rover was waiting for me, and I hoped to hell it was the last I’d ever see or hear from him again. But as he shook my hand, he again alluded to future cooperation that might benefit me and promised he would be in touch. I had smiled and said ‘sure’ and tried to resist the temptation to run for my life.

  After my encounter with the forces of official darkness, I made a real effort not to dwell on everything that had happened. I wanted to put it all behind me; far behind me. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t even tell Archie about my encounter with Hopkins. As it turned out, that was a mistake. A big one.

  In the meantime, thinking back to the way Andrew Ellis had been so careful to make sure he wasn’t followed, I started taking elaborate routes from A to B that took in the rest of the alphabet on the way. And did a lot of looking over my shoulder. Whatever Ellis, the girl, Matyas or Ferenc Lang were involved in, it was big and, despite my best efforts, I found myself puzzling over what it could be. But every time it came to mind, I made a huge effort to shut it out. I had enough on my plate as it was.

  We got another store-pilfering job in and I put Archie onto that, leaving me free to do the rounds again of all the contacts I had for the Frank Lang I’d been hired to find at the start of it all. This time round was proving no better than the first, and I could see that I was heading into another dead end.

  In between my enquiries, I made more rounds of dismal boarding-houses, bed-sitting rooms and tenement flats. I even circled an ad for a barge for rent down near Renfrew Ferry.

  Of course, there was the other ad I had circled. But that would be a big step to take, and I left it for the moment.

  In the meantime, I looked at the barge.

  It surprised me. After tenement flats where the running water had been mostly on the walls, I had fully expected the barge for rent to be a rotting, stinking hulk — boyish optimism was a weakness from which I didn’t suffer. The bargee himself showed me around. He was a wiry, youthful man of sixty in a city where sixty was old and usually decrepit. He explained that he had worked the Forth-Clyde canal for more than forty years but had recently injured his back badly and, although he was largely recovered and short of retirement age, he wasn’t fit to operate the barge. He now helped out on his son’s, he told me. It was clear that the old bargee took enormous pride in his boat, and he explained that he was looking to rent it out to anyone who would look after it, whether they worked it or kept it moored.

  ‘There’s no’ as many contracts as there used to be,’ he confided. ‘’Specially for my kind o’ barge. No coal, you see. I would’nae ever take coal, which is what most o’ the barges take, you see.’ He leaned in conspiratorially. ‘Coal’s a bastard. That coal dust gets everywhere when you’re loadin’ it. You end up caked in the bastard. You and your boat. So I only ever took clean cargo.’

  I nodded. The old bargee clearly loved this inanimate lump of floating wood and steel. Everyone had to have their focus, I thought, something in which they could invest pride. As I surveyed the boat, I could understand the bargee’s passion: it was a real piece of craftsmanship and smelled of polished wood and burnished brass, with paintwork that looked like it had been done that morning.

  Somewhere along the line I had gotten the idea that I would be turning up to see a narrowboat. The fact was that there was no spidering network of canals in Scotland: barges operated mainly on the Forth-Clyde canal that guillotined Scotland at the neck and connected its two major cities, Glasgow and Edinburgh, or the Monklands Canal, which brought cargo from the coal mines in Lanarkshire to feed the ever-hungry industry of Glasgow. These were wider waterways than many of the canals south of the border and the craft were, correspondingly, broader.

  ‘She’s a widebeam,’ the bargee informed me with pride. ‘Fifty-two foot long and fourteen foot beam. Three foot six draught.’

  I nodded sagely, as if any of it meant something to me.

  At the back of the boat there was a balustrade-ringed deck where the helm was located: a varnished wooden wheel exposed to the elements but which allowed the bargee the clearest view in every direction. A short staircase led down from the deck to the sliding door that offered access to the living quarters, basically the back third of the boat.

  It was the living quarters that surprised me the most. Obviously, it was cramped, but there was an amazing economy in the use of space. I found myself surrounded by burnished, gleaming wood.

  There were a lot of things I could be accused of. Being a cynical bastard was one of them. I had sneered and laughed at the deprivations in Glasgow; at the low expectations and short stature, at the limited imagination and even more limited ambition of the city’s people. But there was one thing I had seen and seen often: what Connelly and his kind would brand as the ‘nobility of the working man’.

  Sure, there were lazy bastards about, and a lot of larcenous Govan shipyard workers’ tenements that looked like they had been fitted out by the designers of the Titanic’s first class lounge, but standing in the living quarters of that barge, I saw the Scottish work ethic at its purest. Everything gleamed. Everything was in its place. Everything spoke of a man who had focused those limited ambitions and aspirations into a single, solid form.

  I was tempted by the idea of renting the barge, at least for a little while, but I told the old guy that I’d other places to see and I’d get back to him about it.

  The truth was that, while the barge itself had held some kind of gypsy-caravan appeal for me, its mooring had been less than romantic. It was tethered to a quay under a canopy of cranes and sat in water as black as liquid obsidian, the oil-sleeked surface shimmering with dark rainbows. The stone quay, the cranes, the water, all were black against the slate winter sky and standing there I felt sketched in charcoal.

  I got the Renfrew Ferry back across the Clyde, again checking out my fellow passengers for types foreign or secretive. Driving back into town through Clydebank did little
to lift my mood. The traffic, such as it was, came to a halt before I reached the city centre. A delivery cart had shed part of its load through a loose tailgate and the coal-dustingrained driver was piling sacks of coal back onto the cart between bad-temperedly directing cars past him, all the time being watched uninterestedly over its shoulder by the carthorse: a Clydesdale who looked of a vintage to have pulled cannon at Waterloo.

  I wasn’t delayed for long, but just long enough to take in my surroundings. A wall of grey-black tenements flanked the roadway, tight against it and separated by the narrow ribbon of pavement. To my right was a gap: a bomb-site breach in the wall of tenement buildings, no more than a square of rough ground, which, like the tenements, was soot-dark and broken by piles of bricks, other debris, and the occasional pool of greasy rainwater.

  There was a child playing on the site, a boy of no more than eight or nine who should have been at school. He wore rubber boots and a black coat that looked too thin to protect him from the damp Glasgow winter and his head was bare, a shock of ruffled red-blond the only colour in the monochrome. He was oblivious to what was going on in the street and poked at a smear of oily water with a stick, completely lost in a world of his own imagining.

  I had seen so many things, so many sad or bleak or terrible things, while I’d been in Glasgow, but for some reason the sight of that small boy depressed me more than anything else. I wondered, as I watched him lost in play, if he was contemplating his future — because I sure was. And it wasn’t good. For an instant, I understood why there were so many people like Connelly and Lynch in Glasgow. Why there were so many chips on so many shoulders and why so many wanted to turn the system on its head.