Dead men and broken hearts l-4 Page 17

  Everything I told Ferguson was the truth. But not the whole and nothing but. I missed out the part about me having been at the Dewar home before and that my real professional interest had been in their neighbour, Frank Lang. It wasn’t that I was trying to protect Connelly and his union as my client — after all, I’d spilled the beans to Hopkins who would be a greater concern to Connelly — I was aware that simply finding a body, or bodies, is a lot less complicated an involvement in a murder case than having any kind of entanglement or history with the deceased.

  And I had a boat to catch in a month’s time.

  By my reckoning, this was a straightforward case of murder-suicide and I should be able to walk away from it free and clear by giving a signed deposition for the inquest. I certainly wasn’t going to tell Ferguson about my plan to skip town in a month or so. That I would do nearer the time in a less professional and more boozy context.

  As it turned out, it took two hours to satisfy Ferguson, and even then there was a hint of suspicion in his manner. After he was done, I had to give the whole spiel again to a plain-clothes constable who took it all down in longhand in his notebook, getting me to sign it when we were done.

  I was just glad that Hopkins hadn’t been there to beat the truth out of me with doughnuts and a cup of Earl Grey.

  ‘Just stay in touch, Lennox,’ said Ferguson, and I braced myself for him telling me, like they always did in the movies, not to leave town. But he didn’t.

  Before I climbed into the unfamiliar Ford Anglia, I had to ask the cops to move a couple of black police Wolseleys that were blocking me in. All the lights were on in the street now, dressing-gowned neighbours standing urgently cross-armed at doors, others peeking out through curtains at the police inactivity in the street.

  As I turned the corner out of the street, I passed the last ghoul hanging over her gate, scowling eagerly down the street at the knot of police cars. As I passed she scowled in at me. I nearly didn’t recognize her without her dog.

  Bad dreams again. To be expected I told myself.

  It wasn’t my pneumatic little redhead on duty at breakfast the next morning but her parsimonious little father instead, who tottered about bad-temperedly between the only two occupied tables and the kitchen. I was yet to see the mother working in the hotel. Leaving as much of my breakfast as I could without provoking the ire of the hotelier, I decided I would pick up something less fatty, like a half-pound of lard, on my way, and headed into the office early.

  After the usual morning catch-up on cases with Archie, who had already built up quite a case on the pilfering store staff, I told him about what had happened the night before and my discovery of Dewar and his wife.

  ‘You don’t think there is any link between what happened and Frank Lang?’ Archie asked when I was finished.

  ‘No. Or at least not directly. I suspect that Lang may have been one of the troop of bedroom jockeys Sylvia Dewar went over the jumps with, but I doubt if he was the only one. Well, I know that for sure, having seen her manipulative skills with that guy in the Locarno.’

  ‘Race…’ said Archie flatly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Race,’ he repeated. ‘A race of bedroom jockeys. Race is the collective noun for jockeys, not troop. Apes, mushrooms and kangaroos come in troops. Sometimes lions. But not jockeys.’

  ‘I’m indebted, Archie.’

  ‘I do a lot of crosswords,’ he explained.

  ‘What about enquiry agents?’ I asked. ‘Is there a collective noun for them?’

  ‘Private detectives? That’s one I don’t know. Probably a snoop. Do you have anything else on Frank Lang or has that line of enquiry gone completely dead?’

  ‘It was never alive,’ I said. ‘Frank Lang has no history to speak of. And Connelly is still holding something back. Lang was no government or police spy, but I do believe that he’s not who or what he said he was and he has infiltrated the union for some other reason.’

  ‘Then I can see only two possible reasons for someone going to so much trouble,’ said Archie. ‘Maybe Lang is spying on the union for some political party or group, or even for some foreign government, although that’s all too James Bond.’

  ‘James who?’ I asked.

  ‘A book the wife’s reading. About some super spy. Gives her something to do while I’m doing the crossword. Anyway, I don’t think your Frank Lang is a Russian spy, and I think it highly unlikely that the Milngavie Conservative Association use secret agents to infiltrate unions, so that leaves the second option, which is that Frank Lang is a common-or-garden fraud merchant.’

  ‘That’s where I’d put my money,’ I said. Archie had mirrored my own thought processes. ‘But maybe not so common-or-garden. Two years of building a back-story is a big investment of time and effort just to steal an address book with a few embarrassing names in it. This has echoes of long firm to it. Who do you know in the long firm racket?’

  Archie paused to roll and light a cigarette. Like everything with Archie, it was done slowly and deliberately and as a diversion while he was thinking. As I waited, I thought about him taking over the business. Archie was smart and persistent, but lacked drive and ambition. But he’d do well taking over the enquiry agent business; he’d probably be better at it than me.

  ‘I was in uniform, not CID,’ he said eventually, blowing a thin jet of blue smoke into the air and picking a shard of tobacco from pursed lips. ‘The City of Glasgow seemed to feel my talents were better employed dodging pish-filled beer bottles at Parkhead football stadium. More Old Firm than Long Firm. But I would have thought you had people in CID you could get the information from.’ Archie said it without looking at me, instead examining the shard of tobacco he now held up in the air between finger and thumb. I didn’t know if he was hinting that he knew all about Taylor, my bent copper, or if he simply meant Jock Ferguson.

  ‘Come on, Archie, you must know someone,’ I protested. It was a question Jonny Cohen would have been better placed to answer, but asking would be difficult, given the attention he was getting from coppers investigating the Arcades robbery.

  ‘Give me a minute…’ Archie picked up the receiver and dialled a number he clearly knew by heart. After a few minutes talking and scribbling in a notepad, he hung up.

  ‘It would appear I am better connected than I thought,’ he said, handing me the note. ‘Three names. The last two have done time for dishonesty offences and they’ve all been linked to long firm frauds. The name at the top… he’s never been done. No record.’

  I read the name: Dennis Annan. ‘So how come he’s known?’

  ‘He’s never been caught, but he’s been questioned about several big frauds. He’s too clever… all of his scams are blind and double-blind stuff and he runs rings around the average flatfoot. Christ knows how you’ll find him though.’

  ‘But he’s in Glasgow?’

  ‘Glasgow, Edinburgh… anywhere he can run a scam. My contact says that he thinks Annan is originally from somewhere in the Borders.’

  ‘The Borders?’

  ‘Aye…’ Archie raised the two huge beetles of his eyebrows. ‘Not the usual starting point for a career con man. Maybe when he left Galashiels his head was turned by our fancy city ways, like wearing shoes and using cutlery.’

  ‘And your guy has no idea where I could find Annan?’

  ‘Not a hope. And half the time he won’t be going by the name of Annan. Your best bet, according to my contact, is to work on the other two lesser mortals. As you can see, I got addresses for them. Annan’s not going to be Frank Lang… from what I gather about him the union would be too small time and labour-intensive, if you’ll pardon the pun. But Annan knows everyone in the business. He’d be the best way to Lang, if you could get him to tell you anything, that is.’

  ‘And you can’t tell me anything more about him?’

  Archie shrugged. ‘No, not really. He was in the merchant marine during the war. Ship’s cook. There was some talk of him training as a chef, but he
gave up the petit pois for petty larceny.’

  ‘Ship’s cook?’ I asked.

  ‘Aye… why?’

  ‘That’s what Frank Lang was supposed to have been. For a time, anyway.’ I looked at the names. I still had the sense that I wasn’t getting anywhere, but at least it was a new direction in which not to get anywhere.

  The second name on the list was Edward Leggat, or Eddy McCausland, or Ted Cuthbert, depending on which way the wind was blowing and which old ladies he was tricking out of their life savings. The address I had for him, in a tenement block in Raeberry Street turned out to be a dud, and I considered moving on to the third name on Archie’s list, but first I called St Andrew’s Square from a pay telephone. I was told Donald Taylor wasn’t on duty until the backshift and I hung up when asked for my name.

  Leaving the Ford Anglia parked outside the hotel, I decided to take the trolleybus. Introduced seven years before and nicknamed ‘the Whispering Death’ by Glaswegians, the near silent, double-decker electric buses had frequently conspired with Glasgow’s dense smog to take a life.

  I got off at the Broomielaw, a flank of ornate Victorian buildings that lined the Clyde, housing shipping companies and other dock-related businesses. The place I was looking for was in a totally different type of business, however.

  The Pacific Club was a private cocktail bar tucked into the basement of a soot-blackened Broomielaw five-storey. It was one of those members-only joints where you had to sign in, meaning it was exempt from the licensing laws that applied to ordinary bars. Jonny Cohen had told me that he had gotten the idea from ‘business associates’ in Soho, London. I had never been there in the evening, only ever having graced it with my presence when meeting up with Cohen. The truth was that Handsome Jonny was very rarely to be seen in the place, unless by prior arrangement. Given Jonny’s current predicament, I knew he wouldn’t be there.

  I was let in by a dinner-jacketed heavy who could have been Twinkletoes long-lost, and who defined exactly why some people called evening wear a ‘monkey suit’. His tailoring certainly wasn’t off-the-peg, given that the jacket’s arms had to be long enough to allow his knuckles to reach the ground.

  The Pacific was a drearily South-Seas-cum-nautical-themed place dressed in coconuts, crab-shells, anchors and ships’ life rings. In the corner was a palm-fringed bar with the words ‘HAWAIIAN HULA BAR’ above it.

  I had done a lot of bad things in my life and, whenever I visited the Pacific Club, I found myself in fear for my mortal soul: if hell really was waiting for me, I knew this would take the form of an eternity’s membership to the Pacific.

  There was a small, dark-haired guy behind the bar. He was jacketless but didn’t have his shirtsleeves rolled up and was lost in calculation of some figures in a ledger. He looked up when he realized I was across the bar from him and his face broke into a broad grin.

  ‘Lennox… how are you?’

  ‘I’m fine, Larry, you?’

  ‘What can I tell you? Business could be better, as Jonny keeps reminding me.’ Larry Franks was a good-looking Jew in his forties. He had an accent that most people in Glasgow would have taken for London but, if you listened closely, you would hear the traces of something much more distant. I liked Franks. Despite his employer’s other business activities and the company he kept, Franks wasn’t really a crook. He ran the Pacific as legitimately as he could, even if he knew the hostesses were running their own enterprises and allowed them the use of the private ‘Luau’ rooms. He seemed to be perpetually cheerful, one of nature’s optimists, which I greatly admired. Mainly because I knew why he kept his shirt sleeves rolled down.

  ‘Can I get you a drink, Lennox?’ he asked. ‘I’ve still got some of that Bourbon that Jonny got in for special.’

  It was too early in the day for me, but the bourbon was something special, all the way from Bardstown, Kentucky. For a rye drinker in Scotland, it was like finding an oasis in the Sahara.

  ‘I’m sure the sun is over the yardarm somewhere,’ I said and smiled.

  He poured me the bourbon and it went down smooth and easy.

  ‘What can I do for you, Lennox?’ asked Franks.

  ‘I need to get a message to Jonny and, seeing as things are awkward at the moment, I thought we could use you as…’

  ‘A messenger boy?’

  ‘Well, you know what I mean. I hope you don’t mind.’

  Franks smiled. ‘Sure… What is it you want me to tell Jonny?’

  ‘I gave him a picture a week or so ago. A guy I’m trying to find.’

  ‘Yeah… I’ve seen it,’ said Franks. ‘Jonny’s been doing the rounds personally with it. Not anybody I’ve seen before, but Jonny said he was maybe more a dance hall type.’

  ‘That’s the one. There’s a slim chance that he’s maybe some kind of con-merchant and I’m trying to talk to other faces in the game to see if they can point me in the right direction. There’s a well-known long firm fixer called Eddy Leggat, and he could maybe help. Actually the feller I’m really after goes by the name of Dennis Annan, but he’s the invisible man, apparently, so Leggat’s a better bet to find. I’ve got another name too, so any pointer I can get on any or all of them would be good, but I’m concentrating on Leggat first. I thought there was a chance that Jonny might know of him or where I might find him.’

  Franks took the stub of pencil from behind his ear and scribbled down the three names I gave him.

  ‘I’ll ask Jonny.’

  ‘Larry… do me a favour and wait until you see Jonny face-to-face. The way things are, I wouldn’t want you to discuss it on the ’phone. That’s why I’m going through all of these hoops.’

  ‘’Course, leave it with me.’

  I sipped at my Bardstown and we chatted about nothing in particular. Somehow we got onto current affairs. That November, almost any conversation with anyone anywhere in Britain had a tendency to turn to current affairs. Like everyone else we talked about the mess in Suez, how the Americans had reacted and everything that it was going to mean for Britain. The conversation naturally turned to the other crisis that was rapidly being side-lined: the revolt in Hungary. Or at least I turned it in that direction; Franks didn’t seem to have much to say and I detected, like a subtle shift of wind direction, a faint change in his mood.

  ‘It’s their problem,’ he said eventually, the smile gone. ‘They brought it on themselves.’

  ‘What?’ I laughed. ‘Don’t tell me you’re a closet commie. You think they should lie down for the Ruskies?’

  ‘I was born in Hungary,’ he explained.

  ‘You’re Hungarian?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s not what I said. I said I was born in Hungary. I used to think I was Hungarian, but it was made very, very clear to me that I was mistaken.’

  ‘Ah…’ I said, and looked down into my glass, as if in it I’d find my way out of the corner I’d talked myself into.

  Franks rolled up his left sleeve and held his forearm toward me. I had known there was a tattoo there, but had never seen it. The letter B followed by four numbers.

  ‘They gave me this, just to remind me of my error.’ There was irony but little bitterness in Franks’s tone. ‘June Nineteen-Forty-four. A present for my twenty-first birthday. I’m a B because I came in the second shipment, after they’d already done twenty thousand A s. The Germans started rounding us up as soon as they moved in in March ’Forty-four. But their pals in the Arrow Cross and other Hungarian Nazis had made sure we were all ready for them.’

  I realized I was staring too hard at Franks, searching his face for a lost youth. I had always taken him as being somewhere in his forties, a few years older than me. If he had been twenty-one in Nineteen Forty-four, he could only be thirty-three now. Along with a lot else, ten years had been stolen from him in a place I could name but could never understand.

  ‘Shit, Larry…’

  ‘Sorry, Lennox.’ Franks’s habitual good-natured grin returned. ‘I didn’t mean to make you feel awkward.’


  I shook my head in disbelief that he was apologizing to me.

  ‘The only reason I’m going on about it,’ he said with a shrug, ‘is that I know the Hungarians are going through a tough time at the moment, but, frankly, I don’t give a shit — just like they didn’t give a shit when I was rounded up along with my family. What people forget is that the Hungarians started to pass anti-Jewish laws long before the Germans even got the idea. My father wasn’t allowed to study at university because of Horthy’s laws restricting Jewish places way back in Nineteen-Twenty.’ He paused and shrugged. ‘Sorry… I get a bit heated when people get all sympathetic about the Magyars. Just because the Germans took over in March Forty-four, and then the Russians in Forty-five, they’re treated as victims.’

  As quick as we could, we moved on to more general chat about the weather and how we both wished we were sitting in the Melbourne sun watching lithe-limbed female athletes, and anything else inconsequential we could think to talk about.

  I arranged with Franks to call back in the next couple of days and left after a second Bourbon, which warmed me against the chill damp of the day. I took the trolley bus back into town and had lunch in Rosselli’s, keeping my Bourbon glow burning with a couple of glasses of rough Italian wine. I needed it, and not just because of the Glaswegian winter that glowered at me through the restaurant window. There were ghosts there too, the most vivid being the flashbulb image of Sylvia Dewar from the night before, her head caved in, and her husband’s plump baby face swollen and dark as he hung from the bedroom ceiling. And the blue-black numbers on Larry Franks’s forearm kept intruding. I thought that I had long ago been beyond the emotional reach of man’s-inhumanity-to-man-and-all-that-jazz, but maybe I wasn’t as immune to suffering as I had thought. Or maybe the immunity was wearing off.

  Finishing my spaghetti and red wine, I skipped coffee and picked up the Anglia at the hotel. I had an appointment to keep.