The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5 Read online

  And one of the codes that still adhered was that relating to pregnancy. In Presbyterian Scotland, there was a prescribed and immutable chronology to pregnancy: conception and pregnancy followed marriage. If conception preceded marriage, then marriage had better follow in short order and well before birth, or mother and baby would soon part company.

  There was something of that sort written in the history of Irene Christie.

  Irene was a good-looking woman, and she knew it. Her hair was dark, nearly as black as mine, kept short and in a permanent so it curled at the nape of her neck and over her delicate ears. Her eyes were large and blue-green beneath the black arches of her eyebrows, her nose smallish and her lips promisingly full and lipsticked crimson. She had the kind of curvy hourglass figure that hinted that gravity would eventually do its work on the hourglass’s sand but at the moment it was a delight to behold.

  Irene was very much the kind of woman I seemed to have leant towards of late. And I had done an awful, awful lot of leaning. She was undemanding – except to make the same kind of demands on me that I made on her – and she was wise enough to be beyond romantic foolery. The talk we made was almost exclusively small, but I had gotten the idea that Irene had started out an attractive girl who, not realizing she would mature into a beautiful woman, had seen her prettiness as a diminishing asset and had chosen to make the most of it while she still could.

  Whatever the background, teenage behind-the-ballroom and back-row-picture-house fumbles had led to a fruitful exchange – but without a union to be blessed. So, pregnant and eighteen, Irene had married. Her husband, reading between the lines, or the sheets, had been the best of the bunch at the time, but was an unexceptional man of little ambition and less ability: a tradesman of some sort whom the socially ambitious Irene had mercilessly harried into better tailoring, a Bearsden bungalow and his own business.

  Dragging her hapless and reluctant husband bumping up the steep steps of social advance had clearly fatigued Irene; she had chosen me to rub her aching muscles.

  In a place and time – and of a class – where women were more often than not simply their husbands’ shadows, Irene was an independent woman. She drove her own car and, at the beginning, we would meet for a drink somewhere out of town where we’d be unlikely to meet anyone who might know either of us; but once we’d pretty much exhausted the few conversation topics of vaguely mutual interest, we decided Irene should just park her car around the corner and come directly to my place where we could get on with the business at hand.

  As agreed, she turned up at my apartment at eight that evening.

  ‘I can only stay an hour,’ she said as way of greeting when I let her into the flat. ‘George thinks I’m at my sister’s so I better show face there later.’ She walked straight past me, along the hall and into the bedroom.

  Irene was my kind of woman, all right.

  I followed her in and was about to ask her how she was but the sudden presence of two tongues in my mouth at the same time made clear diction difficult. We fell onto the bed and did what we did best.

  Sex with Irene was always explosive, almost violent. She navigated the male anatomy with an expertise probably matched only by the Flying Dutchman’s knowledge of the world’s seaways – and more than once she’d put her finger on a sequestered point on the map that I myself hadn’t known existed. It was almost perfect sex. Almost. The only negative aspect of it was Irene’s propensity for cheering me on. During the act of love, particularly approaching its climax, Irene had a tendency, well, to provide instruction. ‘Come on, Lennox! Come oaaaan! No . . . no’ like that . . . aye . . . like THAT!’

  In my usual perverse way, it called to mind a football trainer on the sidelines yelling encouragement or criticism of the on-pitch performance of his players. It was mildly off-putting, but given the other compensations, more than tolerable. I was just relieved that she’d never brought a football rattle to bed or had, on the point of orgasm, yelled out, ‘Ya BEAUTY!’

  After we’d rattled the bedposts a couple of times, Irene and I lay smoking. It became clear she was in a stinker of a mood for some reason she couldn’t be bothered explaining and in any case I didn’t care about. But whatever was troubling her, it had been a bonus for me, because the pent-up heat of her frustration had combusted in my bed. I had struggled to match it and worried momentarily that I was about to be relegated to the substitutes’ bench.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I asked to fill a silence. ‘You seem tense.’

  ‘I’m fine. Just a bit fed up.’

  ‘Fed up with what?’

  ‘Wi’ George, mostly. He could do so much more with the business. With everything. And he’s been acting funny. Moody.’

  ‘Do you think he suspects?’

  Irene shook her head. ‘George? Christ no. He doesnae have enough imagination. I don’t know what’s wrong with him. Don’t worry, he isnae on to us. He hasnae the imagination even for that.’

  I watched her profile as she lay next to me: under her frown her big eyes were fixed on the ceiling as if concentrating on a sum she couldn’t add up. Her crimson lipstick had smudged, leaving her lips lighter, and her skin was pale and freckled. Suddenly I saw the girl who had got herself knocked up and trapped in a device that, for all I knew, had been of her own making. I suddenly didn’t feel very good about myself, which wasn’t that unusual.

  I put my arm around her to comfort her but the signal was misunderstood and before I knew it we were rattling the bedhead for the third time. Afterwards she got up, dressed quickly and left. We had hardly exchanged anything other than our brief intercoital chat.

  *

  After Irene was gone, I took a bath and dressed in a fresh set of clothes: I’d been down in London that spring and had picked up a couple of seersucker shirts I was particularly fond of – white with a navy chalk stripe – and I put one on with a knotted plum silk tie. I had been lucky, after a lot of searching, to have found a tailor in Glasgow capable of rising to the challenge of the new Continental style and he had made me a lightweight, mid-grey single-breasted Prince of Wales check suit.

  I finished the outfit off with a pair of burgundy wingtips: a French chum had once told me that black shoes should only be worn to weddings and funerals and the custom had sort of stuck with me. Similarly I’d given up on wider-brimmed Borsalinos and the hat I chose from the coat-rack on the way out was a narrow-snap-brimmed trilby, which was becoming the fashion in the world outside and a decade ahead of Glasgow. Before I left the flat to meet with Quiet Tommy Quaid, I checked myself in the hall mirror by the door: I was looking good. Empty, but good.

  I would maybe have chosen a different outfit if I’d known what lay ahead.

  4

  Quiet Tommy Quaid was dressed every bit as sharply as I was.

  Like me, Quaid wasn’t the type to give away much about himself, but from what I’d been able to find out he had spent a not inconsiderable chunk of his early adult life behind bars and his childhood had been in some shitty mining village in the distant back of beyond, or somewhere even worse, like Lanarkshire.

  But, as I saw him sitting with his drink over in the corner of the lounge bar, I could easily have believed he was the scion of some noble lineage out slumming it for the night. It was the leisurely expectation with which he sat – a quiet patience that said the world was there for him, not the other way around – that gave him the composed, graceful ease of an aristocrat. Only the lingering Motherwell in his accent when he spoke gave away a less illustrious background. That, and the fact that the deep-blue suit he wore – Continental-cut with cuffless trousers – was far too elegant for the British aristocracy. The thought again crossed my mind that I should maybe give Tommy my measurements for the next time he went skylight shopping.

  We were a couple of swells, all right, and whenever Tommy and I met we did so in the few bars in Glasgow where you didn’t order a punch in the puss with your pint to save time and formality. So, for our business discussion, we had arran
ged to meet in a less-rough-than-the-usual bar in the West End, close to one of the dance halls. Drinking sessions with Tommy had usually ended up with us scoring a couple of women, but this was business and an element of discretion, sobriety and unaccustomed moral continence was called for.

  As I came in, Tommy saw me through the blue-grey smoke haze, stood up and waved. When I reached him I saw he already had a Canadian Club sitting waiting for me on the table. We drank a couple or three before we got down to business.

  ‘The Saracen Foundry?’ Tommy’s confused reaction when I’d filled him in on the details matched mine when McNaught had told me.

  ‘I know.’ I shrugged. ‘Not what you imagine as the typical target for industrial espionage, but it’s the client’s money.’

  ‘Speaking of which . . . ?’

  ‘Four hundred for you – a hundred now and the rest paid on delivery. I get a finder’s fee and you deal only with me. Not my decision, but it’s the way the client wants it.’

  ‘Four hundred . . . that’s a lot for a job like this.’

  ‘You think it’ll be easy?’

  ‘Piece of pish, as my dear old da used to say.’ He frowned. ‘Seems far too easy for that kind of cash.’

  I shrugged. ‘Whatever these plans are, they obviously have a lot more value than we would think. I guess whoever’s behind my contact is paying a premium to get the job done as professionally as possible. No mistakes and no obvious trail for the coppers to follow. So much so, they want to know exactly when you’ll do the job and they’d like it if you could do your best to cover your traces so the break-in isn’t discovered for a while.’

  ‘Not a problem.’ Tommy paused, his expression thoughtful. ‘But this is an odd one, Lennox. The only security worth a damn will be at the other end of the complex, where the wages office is, and even that doesn’t keep cash overnight – they bring the wages in from the bank on payday.’

  ‘There’s a night watchman.’

  Tommy shook his head. ‘Some old codger doing his rounds at ground level isn’t worth shite. The only other worry, and it’s hardly that, is that the foundry’s such a huge place there’s bound to be a nightshift working somewhere. But, apart from that, it’s a piece of cake. I mean, it’s an ironworks for fuck’s sake – there’s nothing much worth stealing and anything that is worth stealing is too heavy to carry out unless you take it out on a flatbed. They won’t be looking for thieves and that means bugger all chance of getting caught. Like I say, it’s almost too good to be true.’ He frowned again; this time I saw something else in his expression, something deeper and darker than doubt. It troubled me because Tommy Quaid’s inner feelings never seemed to break through to the surface. ‘You do think it’s all kosher?’ he asked.

  I shrugged. ‘The money certainly is. And these plans, whatever they’re for, obviously have great value to my contact’s client. A value we can’t see – maybe only they can see.’

  ‘That’s the other thing. All the cloak-and-dagger stuff makes me jumpy. You say this guy looked like a tough nut?’

  ‘Not in the usual way. More military. For all I know he’s really the client himself but just wants to fudge things up a bit. Listen, Tommy, if you just don’t like the feel of it, I understand. But you know you’re the only guy I trust with these jobs.’

  Tommy thought for a while. I’d noticed that my mention that McNaught had had a military look had caused his frown to deepen. Again I got the feeling there was something else in the mix I didn’t know about; and again it troubled me.

  ‘I’d like to scope the place out first,’ he said eventually.

  ‘They’ve done their own survey. Watchman rounds, ways in and out, that kind of thing. I can give it to you.’

  ‘I’d still like to do my own scope.’

  ‘I guessed you would.’

  ‘And will you do the driving and lookout?’

  I thought for a moment. I hadn’t considered going along on the job and had imagined that while Tommy was slipping quietly into the foundry, I’d be doing pretty much the same with Irene, cosy at home. I nodded. ‘If you need me, then yes. No problem. You in?’

  Tommy thought it all through; then he said, very seriously, something I would have cause to recall later: ‘I trust you, Lennox. You know that, don’t you?’ The gravity with which he said it took me aback.

  ‘Sure, Tommy. I trust you too. Explicitly. That’s why you’re the only man for this job . . .’

  Again Tommy paused thoughtfully, then grinned. Whatever it was that had caused the darkness in his expression, it was gone like the shadow of a cloud passing in front of the sun. ‘That amount of money for a walk in the park? I’m in. When does it need to be done?’

  I ran through everything that McNaught had told me, including that he wanted the file for the end of the month. I suggested we do the foundry the following Friday, but Tommy said he had another job on that night.

  ‘This bugger’s less of a walk in the park,’ he said. I wondered if it had been this other job that had preoccupied him, but I knew better than to quiz Tommy on matters that weren’t my concern.

  I ran through the job and Tommy sat quietly, nodding. When I was finished he asked questions in a systematic way, taking the job apart piece by piece and stretching me to remember all the details. Tommy was smart, very smart: his interrogation of the job reminded me, not for the first time, that there was a keen intelligence working behind the calm, quiet exterior. He read my mind.

  ‘I’m thorough, eh? You’re wondering how, if I’m so careful, I spent so much time in chokey?’ he asked when we’d finished the business of the day.

  ‘I was, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘I’m a journeyman, a tradesman – maybe even a craftsman. Like every tradesman I served an apprenticeship.’

  ‘And part of that apprenticeship was getting caught?’

  Before he could answer, the door of the bar opened and two young women, a blonde and a brunette, walked into the lounge. Dressed-up factory girls, their mayfly youth and freedom squeezed between school and marriage, they were young, sleek and unexceptionally pretty and looked around the bar with the Friday-night-hungry eyes of willing prey. They saw us looking at them and leant heads together, exchanging a giggled something.

  Tommy turned back to his drink and me and shrugged. ‘Occupational hazard. I made stupid mistakes – it’s all part of learning your trade. And even if you don’t make stupid mistakes, this is a risky business. There’s always the chance that there’ll be a copper where he shouldn’t be, or an alarm pad that you missed. It’s been years since I’ve been caught and I intend to keep it that way. But when you’ve not been caught for so long it can make you sloppy. Even with a job as easy as this, all it takes is one bit of bad luck. One foot put wrong. That’s why I plan everything out to the last detail.’

  ‘I couldn’t do it. The prison time, I mean,’ I said and I meant it: there had been a couple of times, including in Hamburg, where prison had become a distinct possibility.

  Tommy was distracted while he exchanged mating rituals with the blonde of the two women who now sat at the opposite side of the lounge, but deliberately in eyeline. Tommy had a naturally easy way with women. He seemed genuinely interested in them, in what they had to say. Me? Women seemed to expect me to be bad; being a polite Canadian, I didn’t like to disappoint them.

  ‘Prison’s just a place, like any other,’ he said eventually. ‘People ask me how I put up with it, I ask them how they put up with this . . .’ He waved a hand to indicate our surroundings. ‘The truth is, Lennox, we’re all born into a prison. Just some walls are easier to see than others.’

  ‘And some prisons are easier to live in.’

  He smiled and shook his head. ‘You’re wrong, Lennox, all prisons are the same. Remind me to tell you about my old da—’ Tommy broke off as he looked past me, grinned and raised his glass. I turned in the direction of the two girls.

  ‘Anyway, Lennox old chum,’ he said, draining his glass, and ri
sing from the table, ‘business over. I think it’s time we had our bells rung . . .’

  5

  I had done enough bedhead rattling for one day but stayed long enough as support act while Tommy worked his gentle magic on the blonde. The brunette seemed to be happy to be paired off with me and she was a cute enough girl, but I was tired and I wanted to get home to bed.

  She got all swoony over my ‘American’ accent and I got the impression that, if I’d made the obligatory moves and for-appearances persuasions, she would have happily accompanied me, but once I’d made final arrangements to meet with Tommy to do the job, I made my excuses and left.

  For form’s sake I asked the brunette for her 'phone number. Explaining that she wasn’t on the 'phone, she scribbled her name and address down on a handbag-scrabbled-for piece of paper and eagerly handed it to me. I was tired and tempted to point out that I’d be looking for a shag, not a pen-pal, but instead smiled gallantly and took her note.

  I could have given David Niven tips on how to be a gentleman.

  The weather outside was still sluggishly warmish but there was what Glaswegians, with their usual poetic turn of phrase, called a smirr: an all-pervading fine rain that hung like muslin gauze in the air. With a logic that only the Scots could understand, they believed that this kind of rain got you wetter than any other. On leaving the bar, my main concern was that I hadn’t brought a coat and that the damp would play havoc with the fine worsted of my suit.

  It was stupid that I let such a trivial concern force me into a half-run along the street to where I’d parked the Sunbeam Alpine. Glasgow at night was generally a place you had to keep your wits about you and I was about to pay dearly for my sartorial conceit.

  I suddenly felt propelled forward, the flat of someone’s boot slamming into the small of my back and adding to the momentum of my run. The impetus snapped my head back and I lost my hat and footing in the same instant. Arms flailing, I struggled and failed to keep upright and fell face down, skidding to a halt on the wet pavement. Instinct and experience told me to get to my feet as fast as possible, but kicks were already slamming into my ribs on both sides.