Dead men and broken hearts l-4 Read online

  Despite patriotic chest-beating to the contrary, British engineering was not, it had to be said, a wonderful thing. Why the design and construction of an even moderately reliable automobile lay beyond the nation that had come up with the Industrial Revolution was a puzzle that I found myself addressing, in slightly more colourful language, as my Atlantic stalled in the middle of the three-point turn, leaving me stranded and straddling the cobbled street.

  I glanced, as casually as I could, towards the advancing Teddy Boys. Five of them. I could handle myself pretty well — a little too well, to be honest — but the arithmetic was against me. As I slipped the column shift into neutral, turned the key off then on again, and stabbed with my thumb at the starter button on the dash, an image flashed through my mind of my scalp adorning the mantelpiece of a Maryhill tenement while the residents whooped and pow-wow-danced around the coal scuttle.

  The Atlantic wheezed rhythmically, threatened to cough into life, but spluttered to a stall. I repeated the procedure, aware that the gang of young thugs was almost at my door. This time the engine caught. I put the car into gear and gave it some gas. Time to go.

  The engine died again.

  There was a tapping on the window. A long face with small eyes and bad skin was leaned in towards the glass. He sported a Teddy quiff that clearly needed more grease to maintain than the average ten-axle freight locomotive. I was outnumbered, I had no sap or any other kind of weapon with me. I decided to play nice, for the moment. I rolled down my window.

  ‘Nice motor, pal…’ The Teddy Boy’s small eyes glittered hard as he spoke without removing the minuscule stub of a still glowing roll-up from his almost lipless mouth.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘Austin Atlantic A90, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. I noticed the others nodded approvingly at his superior knowledge.

  ‘Aye… that’s what I reckoned. I thought they was all for export to the Yanks.’

  ‘No… not all of them. I picked this one up in Glasgow. Second hand.’

  ‘You a Yank?’ he said, frowning at my accent in a way I didn’t like.

  ‘American? No. I’m Canadian.’

  ‘Canadian?’ He turned to his pals. ‘Hear that? He’s a Canadian…’ Then to me. ‘I got an uncle and cousins in Canada…’

  ‘Hasn’t everyone?’ I quipped. It was something that came up a lot when people found out I was a Canuck. Almost everyone in Glasgow had a relative who’d recently emigrated to Canada. Since the war, Glasgow had been haemorrhaging people and there were regularly round-the-block queues of hopeful would-be-immigrants outside the Canadian High Commission in Woodlands Terrace. As I smiled at my Teddy Boy chum and took in the grimy, wet gloom of a Maryhill street, I could understand the appeal of the Prairies.

  The chief Ted leaned his head in through the window. It made him vulnerable and I considered making my move there and then. Taking him out would reduce the odds against me and, because he was clearly the leader, it might make the others less sure of themselves.

  And in this kind of dance party, being sure of yourself was everything.

  ‘Do you know what your problem is, pal?’ he asked me.

  I sighed. ‘Let me guess, you’re going to tell me.’

  ‘Okay boys,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘You know what to do…’

  Party time.

  I put my hand on the door handle. I intended to slam him hard with the door and get out into the open where I’d be free to move. For as long as I was capable of moving. I noticed that his little gang had all moved around to the back of the car, leaving their leader on his own. A mistake.

  ‘Half choke,’ he said. ‘That’s your problem.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Half choke. Pull the choke out half ways and me and the boys’ll give you a push.’

  I did what he said and he joined his friends at the back of the car. I steered the car as they eased it forward until it was facing the right way. My Teddy Boy chums then picked up the pace and the Atlantic lurched as I eased off the clutch, the engine kicking into life. I drove on a few yards, leaving them behind, then stopped, revving the engine a few times.

  Leaving the motor running, I got out and walked back to where they stood, wheezing and bent over. Glasgow’s climate, dirty air and its passion for tobacco meant that the city was yet to produce an Olympic sprinter.

  ‘Thanks guys,’ I said and tossed an unopened packet of Players I’d taken from the glove box to the leader with the bad skin, the small eyes and the three pints of grease in his hair. Between gasps, he waved his enthusiastic thanks and I drove on.

  Glasgow.

  After ten years, I still didn’t have it figured.

  There was no point in me trying to find Ellis. By now he would have reached the city centre and could have taken a dozen different directions. For all I knew he could be happily on his way to Edinburgh, if it was possible for anyone to be happy about being on their way to Edinburgh. When I got back onto Maryhill Road I decided to head back to my digs. It took me on the same route Ellis had been on so I kept my eyes open for the Daimler, but it was nowhere to be seen.

  It was late and I didn’t want to use the shared ‘phone in the hall at my digs so, as I drove back, I applied my mind to the needle/haystack conundrum of where I could find a urine-free telephone kiosk in Glasgow on a Friday night. Against my better judgement I headed into the city centre and to the Horsehead Bar. Of course, it was now far after closing time.

  Which meant nothing.

  When I walked into the Horsehead it was packed. This was called a ‘lock-in’ and all of these good citizens were, in the eyes of the licensing regulations, bona fide ‘guests of the management’. It was the job of the police to make sure that this was the case and that the till, whose drawer had been left open, did not accept cash for drinks. From the number of uniformed and plainclothes coppers propping up the bar, it was a responsibility the City of Glasgow Police clearly took very seriously. And they were putting the bar staff to the test by accepting pints and shorts without paying for them. Funny thing was, something always seemed to distract their attention at those crucial moments when other ‘guests of the management’ handed over cash.

  I was no great hand at physics, but I knew that most scientists held that air is not solid. The atmosphere inside the public bar gave a lie to that otherwise universal scientific truth. Coming in from the cold night, the air inside was dense, sweat-and-whisky humid, blue-grey with cigarette smoke, and it wrapped itself around my face like a stale barber’s towel.

  I ploughed a channel through the fug to the bar, its long sweep of oak, punctuated by slender brass taps for adding water to whisky, hidden from me behind a curtain of hunched shoulders and flat caps.

  ‘Not seen you for a few weeks, Lennox.’ Big Bob the barman poured me a Canadian Club from a bottle that had clearly sat untouched since my last visit. ‘The Horsehead too downmarket for you these days?’

  ‘Too many people look for me here, Bobby. The wrong kind of people.’ It was my own fault: at one time I’d set up the Horsehead as an unofficial office. Somewhere those who didn’t keep business hours could find me.

  ‘Aye… I suppose I know what you mean. Handsome Jonny Cohen was in here a couple of nights back.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Aye. Just for a quick pint, he said. As if he ever comes in here for a quick pint. But he came in with a couple of knuckle-draggers.’

  ‘Looking for me?’

  ‘Not that he said. But let’s just say you came up in conversation. Asked me when you was last in. I said you didn’t come in much any more. I thought you and Cohen were tight.’

  I nodded. Of the Three Kings, Handsome Jonny was the one I trusted most, which wasn’t saying much. But Jonny and I had a history and I owed him. No matter how much I owed him, he was still someone who lived in a landscape I was trying to distance myself from.

  ‘No one else?’

  ‘Naw.’ Bob nodded towards th
e glass in my hand, the bottle still in his. Drinking was something done at a trot in Glasgow. I drained the whisky and he poured me another.

  I noticed a knot of drinkers at the far end of the bar gathered around a younger man who was clearly holding court. His appearance struck me right away: he was small but stocky, coatless, and dressed in a white shirt and black suit. His tailoring — combined with a pale complexion made striking by the black of his hair and dark eyes — made him look colourless, monochrome. I couldn’t hear what he was giving forth about, but each pronouncement was greeted with slaps on the back, cheers and encouragement from the older men. Monochrome Man was clearly basking in their admiration. However, what he was unable to see but I could, was the exchange of glances between the older men as he spoke and they encouraged him.

  ‘Who’s the bigmouth?’ I asked.

  ‘Bigmouth right enough,’ answered Bob. ‘He’s only in here after hours because the boys enjoy taking the pish out of him. We call him Sheriff Pete — he puts on the cod Yank accent and tells everyone he’s from New York.’

  ‘And he’s not?’

  ‘Maybe he is.’ Bob pursed his mouth as if considering the possibility. ‘If New York is just outside fucking Motherwell.’

  The small man caught me looking at him and held my gaze for a moment, his face expressionless, before turning back to his audience. They were laughing at him all right, but I had seen something in that brief look that I didn’t like. Something bad. I held out a ten-shilling note to Bob. ‘Do me a favour and give me change for the ‘phone.’

  ‘Chasing skirt again, Lennox?’ He pushed the coins across the counter to me.

  ‘This is business, Bob. Strictly business.’

  I went out to the pay telephone that hung on the wall by the door. After confirming that Ellis had not returned home, I started by explaining to Pamela Ellis that I was having to ’phone from a public bar, lest she thought the raucous background noise indicated that I was slacking and drinking on the job. I don’t think I did much to allay her fears.

  ‘You say you lost him, Mr Lennox?’

  ‘I’m afraid I did. Or, more correctly, he lost me.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand…’

  ‘I have to say it’s not a good sign, Mrs Ellis. There’s no doubt in my mind that your husband was taking measures — quite expert measures — to ensure he was not being followed. He deliberately led me all around the houses, literally.’

  ‘So he is up to something… is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘I’m afraid it is. Quite what that something is, I promise you I’ll find out. If you still want me to.’

  ‘More than ever, Mr Lennox.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  This time, the client I was meeting had made a proper appointment, although the tone on the telephone had been more that of a summons than of an invitation. I had received a call giving me the address and time I was to be there. Ten-thirty a.m.

  The headquarters of the Amalgamated Union of Industrial Trades, to which I’d been summoned, was in the West End of Glasgow, housed in one of a sweeping arc of Georgian town houses. I guessed that the choice of location and architecture was in itself a statement. A statement that things were changing; that the old order was on its way out and the genteel had to get used to new neighbours.

  Where once a butler would have opened the door to me, it was answered instead by a none-too-tall, lean-to-scrawny man in his late thirties, tieless and jacketless and with his shirtsleeves rolled up past the elbows. He had a look that was common in Glasgow: a pale, pinched long face, lipless tight line of a mouth, tiny eyes and a plume of badly cut black hair. He reminded me of an older version of the Maryhill Teddy Boy who’d given the Atlantic a push. The only thing about him that was even vaguely butler-like, however, was the practised disdain with which he looked me up and down, taking in the twelve-pound Borsalino, the thirty-guinea overcoat and the thirty-five-guinea suit beneath it. I could hear the cash register ringing away in his head and it was clear he had taken an instant and profound dislike to me. I decided to save time and do the same.

  ‘Is the master of the house at home, my good man?’ I asked, stepping across the threshold without waiting to be asked. I was going to push the gag further by handing him my Borsalino, but I decided the gigantic chip on his shoulder was burden enough for him to bear.

  ‘You Lennox?’

  ‘I’m Mr Lennox, yes. I have an appointment to see…’

  ‘Joe Connelly. Aye. We’ve been expecting you. You’re late.’

  ‘I’m working to rule,’ I said.

  My new bestest friend led me along a high-ceilinged hall with elaborate plaster cornicing stained yellow by Woodbine smoke, somehow perfectly capturing the spirit of the new age. He rushed me past several offices filled with cigarette haze and burly men who looked as at home behind a desk as a Home Counties accountant would at a mine coalface. A few hard-faced women typed industrially. I noticed I was attracting the odd look that made my skinny pal’s welcome seem positively warm. I really should, I decided, make an effort to dress appropriately for the event. Unfortunately my wardrobe didn’t extend to a flat cap and clogs.

  We went up the stairwell and I was shown into a large office with a view out over Kelvingrove Park. A fat, florid-faced man was using a worn-down stub of a pencil to scribble into a large ledger. Looking up, he saw me, stood up and came round the desk, his face empty of expression. Like the pencil, he was a worn-down stump. Short and squat and livid and tough. He was committing several crimes against tailoring in a too-tight, dark brown suit.

  ‘Mr Connelly?’ I asked.

  ‘Aye, I’m Joe Connelly. You Lennox?’

  I nodded. ‘You asked to see me. What can I do for you, Mr Connelly?’

  ‘Did anyone see him come in?’ Connelly asked the younger man.

  The younger man shrugged. ‘I told you we should have had the meeting somewhere private. But no one knows who he is or why he’s here.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Do I have offensive body odour or something?’

  ‘Sit down,’ said Connelly. ‘I’ve got a job for you to do. If you’ll take it.’ He waited till I sat. ‘It’s highly confidential and it’s best if no one else in the union knows about your involvement. From now on, I think our meetings should be conducted somewhere out of public view.’

  ‘Sounds a bit cloak-and-dagger for a trade union,’ I said.

  ‘Before I go into detail, I need to establish something. Whether you accept this job or you don’t, I take it anything we discuss here is considered privileged and will be treated confidentially?’ Connelly’s accent was broad Glasgow, but he spoke with the precise, deliberate articulation of a self-taught man.

  ‘Of course. So long as it’s all legal.’

  ‘A crime has been committed, Mr Lennox. But this union is the victim of that crime. We do not, for the moment, want to involve the police. However that may change.’

  ‘Anything you tell me will go no farther, Mr Connelly.’ I looked across at the skinny guy who had shown me in. He was making no effort to leave.

  ‘Paul Lynch here is my deputy.’ Connelly had clearly read my expression. ‘Brother Lynch takes care of a number of key areas of our activity, including safeguarding the good name of our union.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, and looked again at Lynch, who looked back at me with his tiny, hard eyes. There was something about those eyes that told me this was not someone on whom to turn your back. I found myself wondering what kind of ‘safeguarding’ Lynch did for the union.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me what this is all about? You say it involves a crime. What kind of crime?’

  ‘Theft,’ said Lynch.

  ‘From this building,’ Connelly added. ‘We are having difficulty getting in touch with one of our union officers.’

  ‘Let me guess. You’re also having difficulty getting in touch with some union funds?’

  Lynch again turned his tiny, cold eyes on me. ‘A ledger has been stole
n, along with thirty-five-thousand pounds in union funds.’

  I blew a whistle. ‘Who took it?’

  ‘His name is Frank Lang,’ said Connelly. ‘He is a member of the union and was carrying out some sensitive work for us.’

  ‘What kind of sensitive work?’

  ‘We can only discuss that when we know you’ll take the job,’ said Connelly.

  I took a cigarette out and lit it, blowing a blue jet into the air. ‘And the sensitivity of this work… I take it that’s why you’re not involving the police?’

  ‘What you have to understand,’ said Connelly, ‘is that a trade union is a complex body. It has many dimensions and many functions beyond the immediate one of protecting its members’ rights and welfare. It is a political entity as well, and there are those who see us as a danger to the status quo. Who would wish to spy on us and do us harm.’

  ‘The police?’

  ‘If you could find Frank Lang within the next few days, then we can maybe persuade him to return what he took. He’ll be kicked out of the union, for sure, and I will personally make sure he never finds a job again, but he won’t go to prison.’

  ‘And in return you won’t have the police and the press sticking their noses into your business.’

  ‘Believe me, Lennox,’ Lynch chipped in. ‘The last thing we want to do is involve someone like you in our business either. We’ve tried to find Lang ourselves, but he’s disappeared without trace. This is something that’s outside the union’s expertise or resources. That’s why we contacted you. This is your kind of work, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sure…’ I nodded. ‘But the police have more and better resources than anyone. I know they’re not your favourite people, but I still don’t really understand why you are so reluctant to get them involved if a crime has been committed.’