Dead men and broken hearts l-4 Page 16

  ‘I got it, Mr L. You know I am the soul of description.’

  I decided against correcting him. ‘Good. And once we’ve done this, I want you to drop me back in town, near the Art School, then take the van back to the garage.’

  ‘Okey-doke.’

  The old bargee was standing on deck when we arrived.

  ‘With the greatest respect, and I dinnae mean no diss-parragement, Mr L.,’ said Twinkletoes, enunciating yet another recently learned word syllable by tortured syllable, as we pulled up on the quayside. ‘But you’ve got to be fucking joking. You’re gonnae live on a boat?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘You just forget all about the barge and where it is. Like I said, this is between us.’

  ‘Aye… but a fucking boat?’

  I left McBride to deal with his disappointment and spoke to the bargee. The barge was his baby and his tone continually shifted from pride to distrust and back again as he ran through the essentials of barge maintenance. I could understand him being like that: his barge had been his livelihood, his transport, his work tool and his home all rolled up in one.

  ‘I promise you that I will look after it,’ I assured him. One thing about a Scotsman’s gloom is that it is as easy to dispel as it is deep, and I handed him twenty pounds extra on top of the advance rent I had paid him. ‘Consider ten pounds of that as a deposit,’ I said as his eyes lit up. ‘Against damages. But I assure you there will be none and you can refund it.’

  ‘And the other tenner?’ he asked, a flint gleam in the grey eyes.

  ‘A goodwill gesture.’

  He seemed to be satisfied with my cash-backed assurances and he volunteered to help Twinkle and me with loading my stuff into the barge.

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘I’d worry about your bad back.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Twinkle helpfully. ‘Lifting heavy stuff could exasperate a bad back.’

  ‘The word’s exacerbate, Twinkle,’ I said and he scowled.

  The bargee shrugged, but hung around while we loaded the stuff. I got the impression that he had only volunteered to help because he wanted to make sure none of his precious paint-work got scratched.

  It took even less time to unload my earthlies into the barge than it had to empty my flat. Not much for the sum total of a man’s life, even if it was just the ten post-war years of it.

  ‘Do you ever have any problems with break-ins?’ I asked, casting my gaze around the quayside, the cranes and the Nissen huts beyond.

  ‘No one comes down here unless they have river business,’ he said.

  I nodded. But some of the people I’d dealt with over the last few years had a different idea of ‘river business’ — usually involving a midnight rowboat ride, a weighted body and an unofficial burial at sea.

  I locked up the barge anyway.

  I hung onto a single case with a change of suit, and McBride dropped me at the hotel on his way to return the van. It wasn’t my redhead on duty, but a skinny runt of a man in his late fifties who acknowledged me with a forced smile. His thick-framed National Health Service spectacles looked so heavy they must have given him neck strain. His thinning hair was the same copper colour as the girl’s, if peppered with grey, and I had worked out that the hotel was owned and run by a family: he was the father and she the daughter.

  ‘Will you be dining with us this evening, Mr Kelvin?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, I will.’

  ‘Dinner is at six-thirty,’ he said, over the top of his dense spectacles frames. ‘Sharp.’

  I nodded, went up to my room and changed before heading back out and taking a cab to my office.

  After all the focused activity of sorting out personal business, I sat at my desk slightly at a loss about what to do next. Now I was faced with the task of continuing the Frank Lang case and I had even less to go on than when I had started.

  My old man had always lectured me about how you can’t sit around and wait for something to happen, you had to get out there and make it happen: a philosophy that had led him out of Glasgow and over the Atlantic; then into a business that put us pretty much at the top of the New Brunswick tree and me in the private Collegiate School. But sometimes you just didn’t have the raw materials to make something spark. And that was where I was with the Lang case.

  Dad had been wrong. Sometimes things do happen without you making them happen or even expecting them.

  And something was about to happen that would make me wish I’d planned my return to Canada a lot earlier.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Connelly agreed on the ’phone to meet me, but again asked that we convene at the working men’s club. It confirmed my suspicion that he didn’t much want to be seen talking to me. Apart from our first meeting at the union headquarters, whenever I had talked with him or Lynch, it had been either on the telephone or somewhere else. Whatever it was that Lang had on Connelly, his union, or both, then the union boss wanted it dealt with as off-stage as possible.

  It also strengthened my conviction that when it came to the goods on Lang, I still hadn’t been handed the full basket. I more or less accused him of that, for the second time, and again I didn’t get as vigorous a defence as I had expected.

  The receiver had just hit the cradle when the telephone rang. It took me a while to recognize the voice, which launched into a garble as soon as I answered. I swam upstream a torrent of words for a while before I got him to pause for breath.

  ‘I can’t take it any more. It’s driving me mad. I need you to help me, Mr Lennox. I need to know who it is. Who she’s seeing behind my back.’

  ‘Calm down, Mr Dewar,’ I said as the penny dropped. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘He’s been here. They’ve been at it. In my bed. I know they have. I know she has him round whenever I’m not here.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s what’s driving me mad. I don’t know who he is. For all I know she’s at it with more than one of them. I need your help. I can’t go on like this. Please…’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Dewar,’ I said as soothingly as I could, ‘but I just can’t get involved when there’s a crossover with another case.’ It was all bull, of course. I felt genuinely sorry for the guy and, when the Ellis job had stopped being a job, I had considered taking on Dewar’s case. I certainly had a head start, having seen his wife get handy under the table with the dance hall Romeo. But it was all too complicated and I was trying to tie up loose ends, not unravel new ones.

  A thought struck me. I had only gotten involved with the Dewars because they lived next door to the missing Frank Lang, and I had my suspicions that Lang had tested Mrs Dewar’s bedsprings at one time or another. Maybe I could pin down Lang if he had been pinning down Sylvia Dewar. But there was a lot of hot emotion that would make Dewar’s marital problems too hot a potato to handle.

  ‘I need your help,’ Dewar’s tone was beseeching. Desperate. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do if you don’t. She’s driving me mad.’

  ‘Okay…’ I said eventually. ‘I can’t promise anything. The truth is I’m probably going to be leaving Glasgow for good in a few weeks. But we can talk about it and maybe I can help. Where can we meet?’

  ‘Tonight. My house at eight.’

  ‘What about your wife?’

  ‘She going out. Again. She says she’s meeting her sister, but I know it’s all lies. Her sister’s as bad as she is. A couple of hoors.’

  I calculated my timetable for the evening, centred on the immovable feast of bland dinner at the Paragon Hotel at six-thirty, on the dot.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you there at eight. Just don’t do or say anything until then.’ I was going to ask him if there had been any sign next door of Frank Lang, but decided he wasn’t in a place where I’d get a coherent answer out of him. I’d slip it in tonight, when I got a chance to calm him down.

  I had never understood how something as vague and woolly as ‘instinct’ could ever have been an accepted
scientific principal. Personally I split instinct into two types: the first was memories we must have inherited from our long-lost tree-climbing ancestors — fears of spiders or the dark, that kind of stuff; the second was the stuff we know without knowing we know it, deep-stored somewhere out of sight of our day-to-day thinking, only surfacing as some impulse or urge that pushes you to act in a certain way.

  I had relied a lot on instinct over the years. Which probably explained why I so often ended up in the shit.

  Whatever it was, and wherever it came from, the same instinct that had made me give a phoney name at the hotel made me uneasy about using the Atlantic. The fact that I was having increasing trouble getting it started was probably a big part of it, but I also was aware that it was less than inconspicuous, and — after my ambush tete-a-tetes with Matyas and Hopkins — I still got that itch between the shoulder blades that someone was tailing me.

  Willie Sneddon, one of the Three Kings and the most powerful, owed me a few favours and I called one in. Not that Sneddon would have wasted the time to actually do anything on my behalf, but a ‘tell them I said it’s okay’ carried a ton of weight. He owned the car showroom on Great Western Road I’d visited before and Kenny the salesman looked perturbed when I returned. One of Sneddon’s people had ’phoned ahead and the car was waiting for me when I arrived. Not the Sunbeam, of course, but a black Ford Anglia 100E, one of the new-shape models. Small, characterless and anonymous, it was, like the hotel, perfect for my purposes.

  I told Kenny that the Anglia was exactly what I needed and I settled up for the hire costs, discounted as per Sneddon’s instructions. The Atlantic was to be parked around the back and out of sight.

  ‘I’ll only need it for a few days,’ I explained as he handed me the keys. ‘Maybe a week.’

  ‘Have you thought any more about the Sunbeam-Talbot Ninety?’ Kenny asked hopefully.

  ‘It’s never far from my mind,’ I lied. ‘Tell you what,’ I said, ‘why don’t you have a good look at the Atlantic while it’s here and tell me what you’d give me for it.’

  ‘Against the Sunbeam-Talbot?’ The hopefulness in Kenny’s tone was less forced.

  ‘Why don’t you give me a price to buy it from me. Then we can talk about what I might replace it with,’ I said, omitting that my intention was to replace it with a ticket to the other side of the Atlantic. If Kenny offered enough, I might join the Jet-Set instead of taking a boat.

  Whatever my theories about instincts, they were going wild when I pulled up in the Ford Anglia outside the Dewar house in Drumchapel. Pretty much as I expected it to be, unless my luck was going to change radically, Frank Lang’s place was in darkness; but so was the Dewars’. I checked my watch. Exactly eight p.m., just as I’d agreed with Dewar on the ’phone. I sat in the car for fifteen minutes but there were still no signs of life. The only soul I was aware of was a woman walking a dog through the drizzle. I recognized her as the same woman whose ugly little dog had taken a leak against the Atlantic’s wheel-arch the first time I’d been at Lang’s house and I wondered how much walking the pug’s stumpy legs could take each day. As she passed, the woman scowled in at me through the windshield. On balance, it was fair to say that the dog was prettier.

  When the ten minutes was up, I got out and walked up to the door. The house sat dark and silent and I didn’t get an answer to my ringing of the doorbell. I was about to turn on my heel and put it down to Dewar getting confused about the time, given his agitated state of mind, but, on the ’phone, he had been so desperate for this meeting. It didn’t make sense that he wouldn’t turn up for it. I rapped on the door instead of ringing again. Still no answer.

  There was no handle on the door; it was one of the new kind with a small Chubb cylinder lock with only a small brass lip curled below the keyhole with which to pull the door shut. I laid my gloved hand flat against the door and it opened with only a light push.

  ‘Mr Dewar?’ I called into the darkened hall. ‘Tom?’

  Nothing. I roughly remembered the layout of the place from my visit with the potentially obliging Sylvia, but it took a few fumbling seconds before I found the wall switch and illuminated the hall. I closed the front door behind me, went into the living room and switched on the ceiling light.

  Everything was just as it had been the last time — the only time — I’d been there. The three-piece suite still filled the room with a showroom smell, the Bush television rented from RentaSet still watched from the corner with the glossy graphite-grey eye of its huge seventeen-inch screen; every item still coordinated shop-window perfect. But something was amiss in Hire Purchase Heaven: something I had noticed before wasn’t there, but I couldn’t work out what it was.

  I went through to the kitchenette, again switching on the lights. It was then I realized what had been missing from the front room. It was there, on the floor: the chunky glass ashtray that had sat on the kidney-shaped coffee table and which I had thought looked like a lump of lava. It had been dropped on the linoleum-covered concrete but hadn’t smashed, instead snapping clean into two halves, white ripples of shockwaves from the impact running through the deep red glass like tree rings.

  I leaned against the doorframe while I had one of my more inspired detective moments. In an instant I worked out, Sherlock Holmes style, exactly what chain of events had led to the ashtray falling and breaking. I did it by piecing together small clues: like the body of Sylvia Dewar lying sprawled on the kitchen floor, or the dark red, viscous puddle that bloomed on the linoleum around her now misshapen skull. And, of course, there was the hair, blood and other matter stuck to the cleaved glass ashtray.

  Yep. I had it all worked out, all right.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  While I was waiting for the City of Glasgow Police to turn up, I checked the rest of the house and found Tom Dewar upstairs in the dark of the front bedroom. He was staring out through the window with nothing much of an expression on his face, other than whatever it was he was staring at was making his eyes bulge. Which wasn’t surprising, as he had clearly decided to improve his point of view by stringing himself up from the ceiling light fitting, an extra length of electrical flex around his neck. Given that his bloated face and swollen hands were purple-black with post-mortem lividity, I didn’t bother checking for a pulse. He wasn’t going to share his troubles with me after all. And whatever those troubles had been, they were now most definitely behind him.

  I remembered what Hopkins had said about dead men and broken hearts. Now I was finding them together in the same place.

  I went back downstairs when I heard the trilling bells of approaching police cars and was at the front door to greet the uniforms as they arrived. The first copper was one of the many Highlanders who made up the force and he actually did ask me, ‘Are you the one who ’phoned us?’

  I was about to point out that, of the three occupants of the house, the other two were currently indisposed to using the telephone, but I couldn’t be bothered and simply nodded instead.

  Jock Ferguson was on the scene within fifteen minutes of the first car arriving. I was glad to see him, as the uniformed Gaelic geniuses first on the scene had treated me with undisguised suspicion. I was, it had to be said, well used to coppers treating me with suspicion, but I had had a long day and I was bone weary and felt more than a little sick. I’d seen a lot of death — too much for one lifetime — but there was a difference when women were involved.

  Towards the end of the war, just outside Bremen where we had encountered particularly fierce resistance, I had happened on the body of a woman defender. She had been one of the hundreds of women and kids that the SS had equipped with old rifles and too little ammunition and forced to fight the advancing Allies. The heroes of the SS had ensured the compliance of the women and kids by hanging behind and forcing them to advance, shooting anyone who tried to retreat. It was difficult to tell how old the woman was, anywhere between late teens and early thirties, but her muddied body had lain in a ditch, her rifle be
side her, shot in the face and head. Her skirt was up around her waist and her underthings ripped. Indignity and humiliation before death. I had no idea which side had done it, and I didn’t care. It had been one of the many things I had seen that had convinced me that any ideas of fighting a noble war was a crock of shit; and that all of the systems and rules and codes by which we were supposed to live our lives came from the same crock. Seeing what happened to women and kids was the one thing I couldn’t take during the war.

  And seeing a murdered woman in her kitchen had turned my gut.

  Again I thought of how right Hopkins had been about the trail left behind me. In a day of big decisions, I made another, that the bodies of the dead woman in Germany and the dead woman in Drumchapel would mark the beginning and end of that trail.

  I now knew that I didn’t just want to get back to Canada; I had to.

  It hadn’t just been the sight of Sylvia Dewar sprawled on the kitchen floor, spilling brains and blood onto the linoleum, that had turned my gut: it was the knowledge that I could perhaps have stopped it happening. I couldn’t have stopped her fooling around with other men, but if I had said yes to Dewar’s request, if I hadn’t been blind to the desperation and mental anguish of a man who had attacked me in a back alley because he thought I was someone his wife was messing around with, then maybe I could have prevented this from happening. I tried to tell myself that I wasn’t a social worker or a marriage counsellor, but none of that helped when I thought of the broken ashtray and broken skull on the kitchen floor.

  Jock Ferguson had me go through the whole story there and then. Well, when I say the whole story, I told Ferguson that Dewar had ’phoned me at my office and arranged to meet me at his home that evening. The reason for his call, I told Ferguson, was that he wanted me to investigate his wife’s alleged infidelity. I explained that I’d arranged to meet Dewar at short notice because he had seemed agitated and desperate on the ’phone.