Lennox l-1 Read online

  Post-war me.

  To start with I thought it had been a thunderstorm that had woken me up. I switched on the bedside lamp, checked my watch and saw that it was just before three a.m., and recognized the thunder as the flat-fisted thudding of a copper’s knock. I started to cough the rheumy cough that always came when I awoke, grumbled something obscene and unlocked the door. I didn’t get a chance to count how many of them were outside on the landing before the fist that had been knocking on the door knocked on my face, sending me crashing back into my flat and onto the floor.

  The City of Glasgow Police has a history of recruiting from the Highlands. Highlanders tend to be tall and hefty, towering above the average Glaswegian, although their impressive physical stature tends not to extend to their intellects. Ideal qualifications for a copper. Highlanders also have a pleasant, lilting accent, and the red-haired bear who hauled me to my feet seemed to serenade me with foul oaths. Another copper twisted my hands behind my back and snapped shut the bars of a set of handcuffs. I felt sick from sudden wakefulness and the taste of blood in my mouth. The large frame of McNab filled my doorway.

  ‘What the fuck is this all about, McNab?’

  McNab nodded to a plainclothesman, who swung an eight-inch sap at my head and my sudden wakefulness ceased to be a problem.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The large police cell I came to in had the regulation smell of disinfectant, musty blankets and stale piss. I found myself sitting on a chair, my hands still cuffed behind me. I was dressed in just my vest and trousers and either I had been caught in a sudden downpour on the way to the station or someone had thrown water over me to wake me up.

  McNab sat on the tiled bunk of the cell. There was a younger, mean-looking cop standing beside me with an empty bucket. His big farm-boy face was ruddy from too much of his childhood spent in a Hebridean field looking into the wind. He was jacketless, had his sleeves rolled up and his collar loosened. As if anticipating some hard physical work. I resigned myself to a tough beating.

  ‘Exactly what is it I’m supposed to confess to?’ I asked McNab, but watched the other cop as he wrapped a soaked piece of cloth around the knuckles of his right hand.

  ‘Don’t play funny buggers with me, Lennox. You know why you’re here.’ He punctuated his statement with a nod at the younger cop and a fist slammed into the nape of my neck. There’s an art to beating a confession out of a suspect. The neck blow is an old favourite: it causes intense pain in the head, and for weeks after you’re reminded of it every time you turn your head, but it doesn’t leave a bruise that’s visible to a judge or jury. The wet rag around the fist further inhibits bruising. Mainly to the hands of the hard-working and underpaid public servant administering the beating. McNab said something, then waited till I shook the bells out of my ears before repeating it.

  ‘Why did you kill Frankie McGahern?’

  I stared at McNab in confusion. ‘What are you talking about? He wasn’t dead. You were there. You spoke to him after he came round.’

  Another nod. More lightning in my skull. Bells in my ears.

  ‘But then you came back later to finish the job. I’m surprised at you, Lennox. No finesse. You really did turn him into mince. We had a probationer puking all over the place. What did you use, Lennox? Just the tyre iron?’

  I looked at McNab for a moment. He kept me fixed with small, grey eyes set in a too-broad face. I couldn’t tell whether he really believed that I had killed McGahern or not, but the beating I was getting suggested he thought I knew more than I was telling. Which was a problem, because I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. I told him so in fluent Anglo-Saxon and got it in the neck. Again. The pain made me feel sick and I fought back the urge to retch.

  ‘Your neck sore, Lennox?’ McNab stood up and took a position that suggested I was in for a game of doubles. I looked down at his feet. Brown brogues, polished. Heavy tweed trouser cuffs pressed knife-sharp. ‘Well your neck won’t bother you after they break it dropping you through the hatch at Barlinnie. That’s two murders we’re looking at you for. A matching McGahern pair.’

  ‘I didn’t know Tam McGahern at all, and I didn’t know Frankie until he introduced himself to me in the Horsehead Bar last night.’

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘He didn’t say. Mainly because I didn’t let him say. But he did tell me it was my kind of job. Finding things out. I reckoned he wanted me to look into his brother’s death.’

  ‘That’s your kind of job is it, Lennox? Solving murders? I was under the impression it was ours.’

  ‘Some people can’t come to you. Frankie McGahern, for example. But whatever he wanted me to find out, I told him to take a long walk off a short pier. That’s why he was waiting for me outside. Hurt pride. What I can’t work out is what you were doing there. You must have been watching him.’

  ‘I don’t answer to the likes of you, Lennox. All that’s important is for you to tell us why you went back to McGahern’s place and finished the job you started.’

  ‘I don’t even know where McGahern’s place is.’

  ‘Oh no?’ McNab reached into some tweed and produced the card Frankie had given me. And I had forgotten about. ‘We found this at your place. In your jacket.’

  ‘I had Frankie’s card because he gave it to me in the Horsehead Bar. Ask Big Bob, the barman. Anyway, it doesn’t have his address on it. Just some garage-’

  ‘That’s where we found McGahern. In the repair shop of his garage. His head pulped with a tyre iron.’

  ‘You got the weapon? There must be prints.’

  ‘No prints. You wore gloves.’

  I gave a sigh. ‘We both know you don’t think I did it. And I know I didn’t. What’s this all about?’

  ‘Don’t tell me what I think.’ McNab grabbed a handful of my hair and snapped my head back. The sudden jerk sent another pulse of pain through my neck. He pushed his big moon-face into mine and bathed me in stale Player’s and Bell’s breath. ‘Why don’t you tell me what it was all about, Lennox? Frankie work out that it was you who killed his brother? Or is it about the money?’

  I said nothing. McNab let go of my hair and I waited for the next blow. It didn’t come. McNab sat back down on the bunk and indicated the cell door with a nod of his head. The shirt-sleeved copper unwrapped his fist and left.

  ‘Tea break?’ I asked with a smile.

  The heavy took a step back into the cell but slunk out when McNab shook his head. After he was gone, McNab unlocked my handcuffs. He took a packet of Player’s out and lit up, sitting back down on the bunk. We were getting pally.

  ‘I don’t like you, Lennox,’ he said without malice, as if commenting on the current weather. Maybe we weren’t getting pally. ‘I don’t like anything about you. The people you know. The way you stick your nose where it’s not wanted. I don’t even like the Yank way you talk.’ He picked up the buff file that had been sitting next to him on the bunk. ‘I’ve been looking into your background. Nothing fits with you. A Canadian. An ex-officer. Rich parents. Fancy private school. And then you turn up here. Why should someone like you want to live here and mix with the kind of people you do?’

  ‘I was born here. But brought up in Canada. My father was from Glasgow.’ I was out of wisecracks. I had a past that was best left buried and I didn’t like McNab rooting about in it.

  The truth was that I’d been demobilized in the United Kingdom and handed a ship ticket to Halifax, Nova Scotia. But coming out of the war was kind of like coming out of prison and, as I stood blinking in the cold daylight, Glasgow was waiting for me, like a dark and brooding thug hanging on a street corner. And here I was, eight years later, in the Second City of the British Empire. Glasgow suited me: it offered a dense, dark comfort. The kind of city where you could hide in the crowds. Even from yourself.

  ‘There was a bit of trouble, as far as I can see,’ said McNab, thumbing through the file. ‘You came a ball-hair away from being court-martialled.’

  �
��I was honourably discharged.’ My mouth was dry and I felt sick. My neck and head throbbed. McNab was riling me and I wanted to smack his big, round, stupid face. But, of course, I couldn’t.

  ‘Only because they couldn’t nail anything on you. It’s funny… the army were reluctant to hand over any information on you, but when the Military Police found out that I was going to be able to nail you with something, they became very cooperative. The redcaps don’t like you much, do they, Lennox?’

  ‘What can I say? You can’t be popular with everyone.’

  ‘Something to do with the black market in the British Zone in Germany. Selling army medical supplies to civilians. Quinine to prostitutes for abortions, penicillin for syphilis and gonorrhoea. Nice business.’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘Aye,’ continued McNab, ‘a nice business indeed. But the rumour is that you fell out with your German partner — who ended up floating face down in Hamburg harbour.’

  ‘That had nothing to do with me.’

  ‘Just like Frankie McGahern’s death has got nothing to do with you.’

  ‘Just like.’

  ‘And you say you never met Tam McGahern? Not even in the army during the war?’

  I frowned. My confusion was genuine. ‘Different armies. Different wars, for that matter. I heard that Tam McGahern was a Desert Rat.’

  There was a pause. McNab and I stared at each other. For such a big man, he was fastidiously neat. Crisp white shirt beneath the brown tweed, burgundy tie perfectly knotted. I was unshaven, sitting in a wet vest, trousers and no shoes. McNab’s neatness was a psychological weapon and the only way I could counter it was to focus on the angry red line where his perfect collar had rubbed the skin on his neck. There was such a thing as too much starch.

  ‘You asked me about money. What did you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘I ask the questions, Lennox. You answer them,’ he replied without anger. I laughed at the movie line cliche and managed to restore McNab’s anger. ‘Okay, smart-arse, the money that went missing when Tam McGahern was murdered. Several thousand if the rumours are to be believed.’

  McNab dropped the butt of his cigarette onto the floor and crushed it under the toe of his brogue, twisting it into the concrete in a ‘tea break’s over’ kind of way. ‘Now I’m going to have to ask Fraser to join us again,’ he said, almost apologetically, which disturbed me more. ‘You’re not telling me everything. There’s more to this than you hurting Frankie McGahern’s pride. He came at you with a razor. And personally, not one of his boys. Frankie may not have been half the man his brother was, but he was still in charge of a sizeable team. For him to want to deal with you personally tells me that you two had something more going on. What you’re telling me doesn’t make sense.’

  I could see his point. I had expected trouble with Frankie McGahern. But it had turned uglier than I had expected, quicker than I had expected. There again, in Glasgow, things turned ugly all the time, fast and for no good reason. McNab waited a moment for me to answer. When I didn’t he made his way to the cell door to summon back the fine farmer’s lad with the sore knuckles.

  ‘Wait…’ I said, not really knowing what to say next. ‘I’m giving you all that I’ve got. It doesn’t make sense to me either, but I’m telling you the truth. I didn’t have anything to do with either of the McGaherns before Frankie came up to me in the bar last night.’

  ‘I find that difficult to believe, considering the circles you move in, Lennox.’

  ‘I don’t move in any “circles”, Superintendent. My work means that I have contact with some characters — including some coppers, I have to say — that other people would cross the street to avoid. But Frankie McGahern was not one of my contacts. Nor was his brother.’

  Another pause. McNab didn’t call in his thug. But he didn’t sit back down again either.

  ‘Anything more I tell you,’ I continued, ‘is just going to be invented to avoid a beating.’

  Another copper appeared in the cell passage. I recognized him. I tried to suppress any expression of relief, but at that moment I felt like the last survivor of the wagon train when he hears the bugle call of approaching cavalry.

  ‘What is it, Inspector?’ McNab made it clear he was annoyed by the interruption. The detective in the hall looked pointedly at me, at my wet vest and naked feet, before answering.

  ‘I’ve spoken with Mr Lennox’s landlady, sir. She confirms that he arrived home about ten fifteen and didn’t leave again until we came and arrested him.’

  The collar-roughened skin on McNab’s neck reddened more. There’s nothing more infuriating than being told what you knew all along but had conveniently and indefinitely filed in pending.

  ‘As far as she can tell…’ said McNab. ‘She would have been asleep.’

  ‘She says there’s no way he could have left the building without her hearing. Says she’s prepared to stand up in court and say so.’

  McNab’s collarline blemish was subsumed into the general angry red that bloomed across his thick neck. He glowered at the younger detective for a moment before turning to me and telling me I could go.

  Jock Ferguson was waiting for me in the reception area of the station. McNab’s reluctant release of me hadn’t extended to a ride home, and I was relieved when Ferguson handed me a shirt, my suit jacket and some shoes.

  ‘No socks?’ I asked and Ferguson shrugged.

  Jock Ferguson was the more-of-a-contact-than-acquaintance-than-friend who had first told me about Tam McGahern’s demise. He was one of the cops that I had dealt with over the last five years. He was about my age, thirty-five, but looked older, as did many men who had passed from adolescence straight into middle age during the war. Maybe that was how I looked to other people. Ferguson was smarter than the average copper and knew it. Coppers generally like things to be simple and straightforward, and Jock Ferguson was neither. I got the feeling that he had always been something of an outsider in the force. The brains would have done that all right. I also recognized him as someone who was haunted by the person he had once been. Maybe that was why he bothered with me. I couldn’t work it out otherwise.

  ‘Thanks for that,’ I said. ‘That was all getting a little too cosy.’

  Ferguson didn’t answer me and I saw that we had the full cheerless attention of the Station-Sergeant who was leaning his stripes on the counter. Ferguson led me out of the station and into the street.

  ‘I’ll give you a lift home,’ he said. Glasgow was grey-black in a sulky dawn and I felt its chill breath around my naked ankles. ‘Wait here and I’ll bring the car around.’

  ‘What’s going on with the McGahern thing?’ I asked as we drove in Ferguson’s Morris through the city. ‘McNab was digging for something. And he was pissed off that he was digging in the wrong spot.’

  Ferguson offered me a cigarette. I shook my head and he lit his own. ‘You know this city,’ he said. ‘Two, maybe three million people crammed into it and it’s still a village. Everyone knows who’s who, who does what… and who to. But the McGahern killing…’ Ferguson corrected himself, ‘the McGahern killings have shaken everyone up. No one knows who did them or why. McNab’s been under pressure to get it cleared up. Big pressure, from above. And the problem with pressure from above is that it tends to continue downwards.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘right onto the back of my neck.’

  ‘But McNab hasn’t a clue. That’s why he’s clutching at straws. It’s just that you were unlucky enough to be one of those straws.’

  ‘You any ideas?’ We were the only car on the streets and we passed a horse and cart laden with coal, and a stream of flat-caps cycling into their early shift. I turned my head a little and was reminded with a jolt of pain of my encounter with McNab’s ruddy-cheeked farmhand.

  ‘Me?’ Ferguson snorted. ‘No. My ignorance is truly blissful. I’m trying to stay out of this one. Just like you. More trouble than it’s worth.’

  We didn’t say much more until Ferguso
n pulled up outside my digs. As I got out he leaned across the passenger seat.

  ‘Lennox… I’d lie low for a while if I were you. If you’ve got any ideas about sticking your nose in, forget them.’

  I watched Ferguson’s Morris head along Great Western Road. I trusted him as much as I could any copper. So why was it that something nagged at me? And why did I feel that he had just delivered the punchline for McNab?

  My digs were in the upstairs of a reasonably substantial Victorian villa on Great Western Road. I shared the main door with my landlady, Fiona White, who lived with her kids downstairs and it would have been she who had admitted the police in the wee small hours.

  She was waiting for me when I opened the front door. ‘You look like you could do with a cup of tea,’ she said, unsmiling.

  I followed her into the kitchen of her flat. She stood leaning against the kitchen counter, her arms crossed.

  ‘You look rough,’ she said without solicitude. ‘Mr Lennox, I can’t have the police knocking on my door at all hours of the night.’

  ‘You want me to leave, Mrs White?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. But this is a decent neighbourhood. I’ve already had a stream of neighbours at my door asking what was wrong. They’ve already got you down as an axe-murderer.’

  ‘How do you know I’m not?’

  ‘Presumably they wouldn’t have let you go.’ She lit a cigarette for herself and threw the packet onto the kitchen table. ‘Help yourself. I’ve got my children to think about, Mr Lennox. This is not the kind of thing I want them exposed to.’

  ‘I was a witness, Mrs White. Not a suspect.’

  ‘I wasn’t aware that the police dragged witnesses semiconscious from their homes in the middle of the night.’