Dead men and broken hearts l-4 Read online

  I left one small detail locked up safe and sound. They knew I had moved out of my digs and into the Paragon Hotel, and that would be enough for them. At least for now. I hoped to hell that Ferguson — because it certainly wouldn’t be Dunlop — wouldn’t catch on to the fact that I couldn’t have all of my stuff at the hotel. They had bigger and more pressing issues they wanted to deal with so, for the meantime, I decided to keep quiet about the barge I had rented to stow my stuff. After all, it could come in handy.

  ‘So you were working on these two cases simultaneously?’ Ferguson asked when I eventually paused to draw breath. ‘The job Connelly and his union took you on to do and the potential infidelity case you say Pamela Ellis hired you for.’

  ‘That’s right. For a while I thought there was a connection between them: that, by coincidence, the same Frank Lang the union was looking for was the same Frank or Ferenc Lang who is behind this Hungarian emigre group.’

  ‘And they’re not?’

  ‘No. I was looking for a coincidence where none existed. And it led me straight into all this crap. Pamela Ellis became very keen to drop me from the case, feeding me this all-a-big misunderstanding and how-could-she-have-been-so-stupid bull. Whatever it was that made her want me to drop the case is the same reason she’s now claiming she never hired me in the first place. I don’t know how or why, but Andrew Ellis was playing cloak-and-dagger games with this Hungarian outfit and they have something — everything — to do with his death. I just stumbled into their little game because of a simple case of mistaken identity — but my guess is that they thought I was investigating them and whatever they’re up to specifically. Dangerous people, Jock.’

  ‘Well, if the link between the cases and the two Frank Langs is coincidental, then you are the unluckiest man I know when it comes to coincidences. It just so happens that, completely independent of each other, both end up with people dead. Murdered.’

  He had a point.

  ‘Could someone get me a change of clothes from my hotel?’ I asked when it was time to go back to my cell.

  ‘No can do, Lennox,’ said Ferguson. ‘We’ve already cleared out your closets and the science boys are examining them for evidence.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. Ferguson knew my taste for fancy tailoring and would realize they were looking at only a travelling wardrobe, when he got the report back listing the stuff examined.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘can I at least have a pair of laces for these boots? I can hardly keep them on my feet.’

  ‘No laces.’ Dunlop made his first and only contribution to the interrogation. ‘Suicide risk. We don’t want to find you strung up like Dewar, do we?’

  ‘No?’ I sneered back at Dunlop. ‘I thought that was exactly the point of this exercise.’

  They put me back in my cell and I was given a bread roll with some kind of gelatinous luncheon meat in it and another cup of near-boiling, sugary tea. Practically no one in Glasgow over the age of twenty had a full set of teeth, and I could have sworn I felt a fizzing in my mouth as my dental enamel started to dissolve.

  I ran a hand over my jaw and it rasped on the stubble. Unshaven, bruised from my encounter with the two guys on the stairwell, without a comb for my hair and in my fetching prisoner’s ensemble, I must have really looked the part of a guilty and desperate felon. I tried not to think of the stakes I was playing for and did my best not to imagine the kiss of three-quarter inch, white Italian hemp around my neck.

  It wouldn’t come to that. It couldn’t come to that. They may have had circumstantial evidence, but surely not enough to prove a case beyond reasonable doubt. But, there again, I certainly wouldn’t be the first innocent man to drop through a trapdoor in Barlinnie Prison.

  I found myself reflecting on the irony that there had been more than one thing for which I could have hanged. And about how much I hated the idea of dying here, in Glasgow.

  It was already dark outside and my cell was bathed in the sickly yellow light of the caged ceiling bulb when Jock Ferguson came to my cell, around four-thirty in the afternoon. He came alone and waited till the custody man’s footsteps had faded before sitting on the edge of my bunk and offering me a cigarette.

  ‘You don’t really believe all of this crap, do you, Jock?’

  ‘The truth? No. Everything I know about you tells me that you didn’t kill Ellis. But as a police officer I’m having a really hard time finding anything to put you in the clear. Listen, Lennox, there’s only the two of us here and it’s off the record. Is there anything you’re not telling us? Have you been doing your usual and got into bother because you’ve been shagging other men’s wives?’

  ‘You’re not really being serious…?’

  ‘It’s the only possible link and it’s the one that Dunlop is putting forward.’

  ‘I wondered why he was so quiet in the interview room… he was obviously plum tuckered out from doing all that thinking.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so glib about it, if I were you. Dunlop’s theory is the only thing at the moment that makes any sense. More sense than anything you’ve told us so far. You do realize I shouldn’t be giving you any kind of inside dope on this, don’t you?’

  I nodded. ‘I appreciate it, Jock.’

  ‘The way Dunlop has this playing is this: Sylvia Dewar was well known for enjoying the company of men other than her husband. You have a reputation for chasing any piece of skirt. So Dunlop has it that you and Sylvia Dewar were carrying on together. And he has a witness who places you at the Dewar house a week before the deaths and at a time when Thomas Dewar would be at work and you and Sylvia would be alone. Then Dewar jumps you in Sauchiehall Street Lane, exactly as you said, because he suspects you’ve been sleeping with his wife. Except, in Dunlop’s version, Dewar’s jealous rage is entirely justified and that, I have to say, does sound more credible than him ambushing an innocent man just because he found a business card in his wife’s purse.’

  ‘Okay… go on…’

  ‘Dunlop has you painted as this manipulative Don Juan who moves in on Pamela Ellis too. Now, even Shuggie Dunlop admits Pamela Ellis is a little too old and too plain for you to take an interest in her for her own sake. Instead, he has you moving in on her so that she becomes your accomplice in knocking off her husband for his business, money and insurance payout. But you get caught and Mrs Ellis gets scared and denies all knowledge of you. The clever part in Dunlop’s theory is that it explains any telephone or other contact between you and Pamela Ellis as two accomplices planning a murder. In fact, the more difficult it is to find evidence of contact, the more it points to you going out of your way not to be seen talking to each other.’

  ‘So why did I kill Sylvia Dewar?’

  ‘Sylvia Dewar finds out about your affair with Pamela Ellis, gets jealous and blackmails you for a cut of the proceeds. She already has a previous conviction for dishonesty. You have to keep Sylvia quiet and prevent her from spilling the beans to Ellis about you and his wife, so you cave in her head with the ashtray, making sure you don’t leave prints. Then Dewar comes home and, distraught, kills himself. You come back in the evening to find out why no one is talking about Sylvia’s murder, or maybe because you’re worried you’ve left something incriminating behind. Probably the business cards, but you can’t find them.’

  ‘Because they’re cunningly hidden in a wallet and an address book?’ I snorted.

  ‘I didn’t say it was my theory. And remember you’ll be playing to a Glasgow audience. Murder juries here are not used to the accused being sophisticated in his thinking. I have to tell you, I think Dunlop’s line could run…’

  ‘You really think this will end up in front of a jury? What about everything I told you today?’

  ‘We’re checking into all of that,’ he said. ‘But I have to tell you it’s not piecing together very well.’

  ‘Did you speak to the union?’

  ‘We talked to Paul Lynch. He had a pretty good stab at trying to disavow you, but Joe Connelly confirmed that
they had hired you to look for Frank Lang and some missing items. What is it?’ Ferguson read the expression on my face.

  ‘Nothing… just I’m relieved. Connelly and Lynch were almost obsessive about meeting me in secret and I thought they would deny knowing me.’

  ‘Like I said, that little shit Lynch was thinking about it, but I reminded him of the penalties of obstruction, false information, that kind of stuff. Connelly is just pissed off that we were there at all.’

  ‘And the rest?’

  ‘The rest still isn’t too good. Pamela Ellis still denies having hired you, even though I told her we were getting her ’phone records. And the Hopkins thing… well, I’ll talk to you about that later. We’re going to go out for some fresh air.’

  ‘So we’re travelling out of Glasgow…’ I said with dull malice.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  A uniform came for me half-an-hour after Ferguson left. He was capped, coated and gloved and he handed me an army surplus greatcoat, one of those things with fabric so dense it could probably have stood up by itself. He led me down the cell passage to where Ferguson and Dunlop, also both in their outdoor wear, were waiting for me. Dunlop’s tent-sized raincoat emphasized his bulk.

  ‘We off camping boys?’ I asked gleefully and Ferguson shot me a warning look.

  It was only just before six, but it was night outside. Despite the heavy army coat I felt the bite of the chilled air. I still didn’t have laces for the one-size-too-big boots and I struggled to keep them on my feet as I walked to the black police Wolseley. I felt something more than the chill in the air: a tightening in my chest warned me, as it always did, of a coming fog, and there was no sparkle to the streetlights or car headlights as they were dulled by something gathering in the dark air.

  Sitting in the back of the police car between Dunlop and the burly uniformed constable would be tolerable providing our journey was short enough that I didn’t need to breathe till we arrived. Ferguson sat in the front. I was surprised that they hadn’t handcuffed me and wondered just what, exactly, my legal status was. I hadn’t been charged yet, but I had been cautioned before giving my statement, and it was clear that Dunlop was trying to build a case against me that would stand up in court.

  Maybe, I thought, I should ask for a lawyer.

  ‘Where are we off to?’

  Ferguson twisted around in his seat. ‘The address you gave us in Ingram Street. It’s past office hours but, if the people you say operate out of that building really are who you say they are, then I wouldn’t think that they keep banker’s hours.’

  As we made our way through the city, the fog that had dimmed the sparkle of the streetlights became thick and viscous, on the tipping point to becoming smog. By the time we pulled up in Ingram Street and got out of the car, across the street from the Art Nouveau frontage of the building in which I had met Hopkins, I could only see the street for one block in either direction, and approaching headlights only a block beyond that. I don’t know why, but I took a strange, sad comfort in seeing the smog close in, closing in my perception of the world with it. Sometimes, in the smog, you could imagine that the entire universe, the whole of reality, only extended as far as you could see, and that anything else beyond it, and any time before or after that moment, did not exist. It was a form of solipsism that, given my current situation, I found very comforting.

  ‘Another bad one,’ Dunlop muttered to Ferguson as we all decanted from the car, with me struggling not to lose an oversized, unlaced boot in the process.

  ‘Soon be a thing of the past,’ said Ferguson, ‘with this Clean Air Act coming into force. Won’t you miss that back in Canada?’ he asked, turning to me.

  ‘Me and my lungs both,’ I said, cheered by the thought that Ferguson could see a future for me that did not involve Italian hemp or a twelve-by-eight prison cell.

  My cheer did not last long.

  The uniformed copper grabbed a fistful of my coat sleeve at the wrist and led me across the road. A short, skinny man in his thirties waited for us outside the building, huddled against the gathering damp. He looked like some kind of mid-range clerk and Ferguson addressed him as Mr Collins, thanking him for coming along outside office hours. Collins had a heavy set of keys and let us in through the main door.

  ‘Isn’t there a buzzer too?’ I asked. ‘A sort of security system?’

  Collins looked me up and down and it was clear he didn’t like what he saw. Despite there being three coppers to protect him, the sight of a dishevelled, unshaven and bruised desperado in a prison uniform clearly shook him. Before answering he looked at Ferguson, who nodded.

  ‘No,’ he said in a thin, wheedling kind of voice. ‘There is not.’

  And there wasn’t. Nor were there any commissionaires on the empty desk, nor any sign of occupancy of the building on any level. I led everyone across marble to the cage elevator and pressed the button for Hopkins’s floor. When we came out there was no bustle of office types, no office furniture, no locked doors to rooms full of secrets.

  ‘Where did Hopkins question you?’ asked Ferguson. I appreciated his omission of the word supposed.

  I led them into the room and put on the lights. No Hopkins. No table, no chairs, no foolscap notebooks, no maps on the walls.

  ‘Jock…’ I turned to Ferguson.

  ‘I checked this afternoon, Lennox. This building has been empty for two months. It’s about to be refurbished for a new commercial tenant. And before you ask: no, the new occupants have nothing to do with national security. I don’t have many contacts in that area, but those that I do have say they’ve never heard of anyone called Hopkins operating North of the border.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist,’ I said and failed to keep the pleading out of my tone. ‘The very nature of that type of work means there’ll be lots of outfits and people operating independently of each other.’

  ‘True… but where I don’t have a lot of contacts in the security and intelligence services, I do have contacts in every police force in Scotland. And I can’t find any officers with the names Roberts or Lindsey in any Special Branch division. I’m sorry Lennox, but I don’t see where we go from here. Without Hopkins to support your story, there’s nothing to prove that this elusive Hungarian emigre group exists.’ He held his arms out and looked around the empty room. ‘No Hopkins.’

  I looked around the room too. I had exactly the same sense of unreality I had had outside in the smog: a feeling that the empty building around me was all that was real, and my memory of Hopkins was some kind of illusion. I felt suddenly dizzy and wobbled slightly on my feet.

  ‘Are you okay, Lennox,’ asked Ferguson. I nodded impatiently.

  ‘When I was here Hopkins said something about them only using this building on a temporary basis. Maybe they’ve moved on to somewhere else.’

  It sounded lame even to me and I could see a sad weariness settle into Ferguson’s expression.

  ‘If you didn’t believe that I met Hopkins here,’ I said, ‘then what was the point of going through this charade?’

  ‘Because I wanted to see if you believed it. Come on, Lennox, let’s go.’

  I found my focus again and my mind raced as we made our way back down to the ground floor in the cage elevator. None of this made any sense to me, so God alone knew what it must have sounded like to a couple of professional coppers who had heard every hare-brained and half-assed story under the sun.

  The elevator bounced to a halt and we stepped out onto the marble of the grand entrance hall.

  I turned to Ferguson. ‘I need to get to the bottom of this, Jock. It’s all an elaborate set-up and I need to find out why and who’s behind it. Let me loose.’

  Ferguson gave as small laugh. ‘No way, Lennox. If anyone’s going to get to the bottom of this case, it’ll be us.’

  ‘Listen, Jock…’ I jerked my head in the direction of Dunlop. ‘Your fat friend here has already made up his mind about me, and that means he’s not even going to start l
ooking for an answer anywhere else. If you want answers, real answers, then let me go so that I can ask my own questions in my own way. Only then will we really get to the bottom of all of this.’

  Dunlop grunted, which was appropriate for his physique. ‘Do you honestly think that we’re going to let you wander about free as a bird?’

  ‘If you want some proper answers, then yes. Let me go on police bail or whatever you have to. You can put a tail on me. I’ll give you hourly reports. Whatever you need. But a bunch of coppers flat-footing it all over the place isn’t going to clear this up.’

  ‘Maybe we think we already have got it cleared up,’ said Dunlop.

  ‘And that’s exactly what this Hungarian mob want you to think, don’t you see that? I’m not a moron, Dunlop. Do you think that if I had killed Ellis, especially if it was premeditated, I wouldn’t have come up with something a lot less cockamamie than what I’ve told you?’

  Dunlop smirked and shook his head.

  ‘Sorry, Dunlop. That was maybe too difficult for you to take in, the question having a double-negative in it and all.’

  The fat detective took a step towards me but Ferguson checked him.

  ‘You have a point,’ said Ferguson. ‘But there’s absolutely no way we can release you until we’ve carried out more enquiries.’

  I sighed, the fight out of me.

  ‘Let’s get back to the Square,’ said Ferguson. ‘There’s nothing more to be gained by hanging around here.’

  Collins, who I now guessed to be some kind of letting or estate agent, let us out of the building, switching off the lights and shutting the door behind us. There was an urgent exchange between the policemen on the pavement, I guessed about the smog that had grown denser while we had been inside. Getting back to St Andrew’s Square was going to be quite an undertaking. Ferguson said something to the uniformed cop, who renewed his tight grip on my coat sleeve.

  In that kind of smog, crossing the road becomes a job for all your senses. When taxis or buses have a habit of looming suddenly out of the murk, only feet away from you, you learn to listen out for the sound of approaching motor engines, hearing them long before you see a glimmer of headlights.