The Long Glasgow Kiss l-2 Read online

  ‘That’s if it isn’t fucking beneath you to do a job for me, Lennox,’ he said maliciously.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Anyway, you don’t need to worry, you won’t get your hands dirty. It’s a legit job.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Like I said, I’m getting into the fight game. Me and Jonny the kike have each got a share in a fighter.’

  ‘You and Handsome Jonny Cohen?’

  ‘Yeah, me and Cohen. You got a problem with that?’

  ‘Me? Not at all. It’s very ecumenical of you.’

  ‘I’m not prejudiced. I’ll do business with anyone. Absolutely anyone.’ He paused. ‘Except Fenians, of course. Anyways, this young fighter we’ve got shares in… he’s going places. He has a coupon-mashing right hook. The thing is, he’s been getting a bit of grief.’

  ‘What kind of grief?’

  ‘Fucking stupid stuff. A dead bird put through his letterbox, paint on his car, that kinda shite.’

  ‘Sounds like he’s upset someone. Has he spoken to the police?’

  Sneddon gave me a look. ‘Aye… seeing as I have such a cosy relationship with them, that’s the first thing I said he should do. Use your head, Lennox. If the polis start sniffing about then they’ll sooner or later end up on my doorstep or Jonny Cohen’s. We’d both rather keep our investment quiet. It was Cohen what said we should get you to look into it. Discreet, like.’

  ‘Discretion,’ I said sententiously, ‘is my middle name. So who has he pissed off enough to start a vendetta?’

  ‘No one. Or no one that he can think of. I mean, he’s hurt a few in the ring, but I don’t think that’s what this is all about. I reckon that someone has put a stash on him to lose when he fights the Kraut and they’re just trying to put the wind up him before the fight. You know, like chucking a fish supper into a greyhound’s kennel the night before the race.’

  ‘Wait a minute… you said before he fights the Kraut. By Kraut do you mean Jan Schmidtke? Is your boxer Bobby Kirkcaldy?’

  ‘He’s not my boxer. I own a piece of him, you could say. So what?’

  I blew a long, low whistle. ‘That’s a wise investment, Mr Sneddon. Kirkcaldy’s tasty. And you’re right, he is going places.’

  ‘Oh…’ Again Sneddon smiled the only way he could. Sneeringly. ‘I am so fucking pleased that my business decisions meet with your approval. Cohen and me both lost sleep worrying that we’d gone ahead without your okay.’

  I had to admit, Sneddon was much better at sarcasm than McNab. But still nowhere near as good as me.

  ‘I’m just saying that Kirkcaldy is hot property,’ I said. ‘The stakes are high with him, literally. You got any idea who’s trying to spook him?’

  Sneddon shrugged. ‘That’s your job. You find out… if you do, don’t let them know you’re onto them. You want the job?’

  ‘Usual fees?’

  Reaching into his hand-tailoring, Sneddon pulled out his wallet and handed me forty pounds in fives. It was more than most people made in a month but didn’t seem to lighten Sneddon’s wallet too much. ‘There’s another hundred in it for you when you give me a name for who’s behind all this malarkey.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ I took the money with a smile. It was part of my customer relations policy. There again, smiling when people gave me money came pretty naturally to me. It was a clean job. Legit, like Sneddon had said. All I had to deliver was a name, but I tried not to think too much about what would happen to the face behind the name once I’d delivered it.

  ‘You said you were talking to Small Change MacFarlane about a couple of fighters. Was Kirkcaldy one of them?’

  ‘Fuck no. No, it wasn’t nothing in that league. Just a couple of potential up-and-comers, that’s all. Small Change didn’t even know of my interest in Kirkcaldy. You’ve got to fucking watch what you say to bookies. This is Kirkcaldy’s address.’ Sneddon handed me a folded note. ‘Is there anything else you need?’

  I made a show of a thoughtful frown, even though the idea had come to me as soon as I had heard mention of Kirkcaldy’s name. ‘Maybe it would be a good idea if you could spring me a ticket for the big fight. Means I can check out anyone dodgy.’

  ‘I would sincerely fucking hope that you’ve got to the bottom of this before then. But aye… I can manage that. Anything else?’

  ‘If there is, I’ll let you know,’ I said, inwardly cursing that I hadn’t thought of a reason to ask for two tickets.

  ‘Right. You can fuck off now,’ said Sneddon. I wondered if the freshly minted Queen followed the same court etiquette. ‘And don’t forget to have a sniff about for Small Change’s appointments book. I’ll get Singer to drive you back to your car. You know Singer, don’t you?’ Sneddon beckoned across to the Teddy Boy who’d driven me and Twinkletoes out to the farm.

  ‘Oh yeah… we chatted all the way over here.’ I leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘To be honest, I found it difficult to get a word in edgewise…’

  Sneddon gave me another of his sneers-or-smiles. ‘Singer’ certainly didn’t seem to like my witticism, I could have been becoming paranoid, but I thought I detected even more menace in his lurking.

  ‘Aye…’ said Sneddon. ‘Singer’s not much of a conversationalist. Not much of a singer either come to that, are you, Singer?’

  Singer interrupted his lurk long enough to shake his head.

  ‘You could say Singer is a man of action, not words.’ Sneddon paused to take a cigarette from a gold cigarette case so heavy it threatened to sprain his wrist. He didn’t offer me one. ‘Singer’s Da was a real bastard. Used to beat the shite out of him when he was a kiddie. Knocked his mother about too. You know, more than normal. But Singer had this talent. He got it from his Ma. He had a cracking wee voice on him. Or so people tell me. Never heard it myself. Anyways, at weddings and shite like that Singer and his Ma was always asked to stand up and give a song. Not that he took much asking, did you, Singer? He used to sing all the time. The only thing the wee bastard had…’

  I looked at Singer who returned my stare emptily. He was obviously used to Sneddon discussing his most intimate personal history with a complete stranger. Either that or he just didn’t care.

  ‘But it used to wind up his Da no end. He’d come home drunk and no one was allowed to make a sound. Any peep out of Singer and his Da would kick the shite out of him. Literally, sometimes. Then one day Singer’s old man comes back with a really black one on. Wee Singer is innocently chirping away with his Ma in the kitchen, but his Da gets the idea that there should be a meal on the table for him. He goes fucking mental. He grabs Singer and starts to beat the shite out of him. So his Ma comes to try to defend the wee fella. So do you know what he does?’

  I shrugged. I looked at Singer: I had a good four inches on him, but he was a hard-looking bastard. Vicious-looking. But I didn’t like listening to Sneddon rejoicing in his misery.

  ‘He cut Singer’s Ma’s throat,’ Sneddon answered his own question. There was a hint of awe in his voice. ‘Took a penknife — a penknife mind — and cut her throat from ear to ear, right in front of the wee fella. So Singer’s never sung — or spoken — since.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said to Singer because it was the only thing I could think to say. He looked at me expressionlessly.

  ‘Aye… a bad bastard was Singer’s Da. They hung the fucker at Duke Street and Singer was put into an orphanage. Then a kind of funny farm because of him not talking and that.’ Sneddon looked at Singer knowingly. ‘But you’re not mad, are you, Singer? Just bad… all the way through. I found out about him because Tam, one of my boys, did time with Singer. Shared a cell. Will I tell him what your speciality was, Singer?’

  Singer, unsurprisingly, said nothing. But he didn’t nod or move or blink.

  ‘Someone grassed him up to the police for a robbery he did. But without the witness there was no evidence. But Singer didn’t kill the bastard. He cut his fucking tongue out. All of it. Kind of poetic, isn’t it?’
/>   ‘Yeah…’ I said. Singer’s face was still impassive. ‘Positively Audenesque.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Sneddon. ‘I like having Singer around. D’you know the ancient Greeks liked to have mutes around at funerals? Professional mourners. Anyway, I look after Singer now, don’t I, Singer?’

  Singer nodded.

  ‘And Singer looks after me. And my interests.’

  I was acutely aware of Twinkletoes’ absence in the car on the way back into town, as if he had left twin voids of space and silence. I took a Player’s Navy Blue and offered the packet to Singer, who shook his head without taking his eyes off the road. He was that kind of guy. Focussed. I had forgotten exactly where I’d left the car, but Singer found his way to it first shot.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said as I got out of the car. Singer was about to drive off when, on an impulse, I tapped on his window. He rolled it down.

  ‘Listen, I just wanted to say…’ What? What the hell was it I wanted to say? ‘I just wanted to say that I’m sorry about the wisecracks I made… you know, about you not talking. I didn’t know about… well, you know… that was a shitty break…’ I fell silent. It seemed best considering I seemed to have lost the ability to string a coherent sentence together.

  Singer looked at me for a moment, in that cold, expressionless way he had, then gave a nod. He drove off. I stood and watched the Humber disappear around the corner, wondering why the hell, after all of the other shit I had done and seen in my life, I had felt the need to apologize to a cheap Glasgow hoodlum. Maybe it was because what had happened to Singer had happened when he was a kid. It was the one thing I found tough to take: the crap that happens to kids. In war. In their own homes.

  Not for the first time, I considered the colourful life I had forged for myself here in Glasgow. And the interesting people I got to meet.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It’s funny: at the time, I didn’t think of the week after Small Change’s murder as ‘the week after Small Change’s murder’. I had other things to think about, other things to do. It’s often only in retrospect that you see the significance of a particular moment in your life. At the time it’s just the same old crap, and you just stumble along oblivious to the fact that you should be keeping a scrapbook, or a diary, or photographing the minutiae of your life; that at some time in the future you would look back and think, if only I’d known what the fuck was going on.

  Obviously, I saw Lorna every day that week. And obviously I kept my hands out of her underwear — I am nothing if not a gentleman — and, anyway, experience had told me that the ardour of even the most enthusiastic of mattress companions diminishes with grief. Not with death; with grief. I’d learned during the war that death and violence tend to be powerful aphrodisiacs for both genders. Suffice it to say, I became the most solicitous and least lecherous of suitors.

  To be honest, I had other distractions.

  They say Eskimos have a hundred words for snow. Glaswegians must have twice that many for the different kinds of rain that batters down on the city year-round. In winter, Glasgow lies under an assault of chilled wet bullets; in summer, the rain falls in greasy, tepid globs, like the sky sweating on the city. Completely atypically, Glasgow was experiencing a dry and searingly hot summer. Half of the city’s population spent most of that summer looking up, squinting at the sky and trying to form the word blue.

  I found the hot weather disconcerting. Usually any sunlight in Glasgow was mitigated by a sooty veil thrown up by the factories and tenement chimneys; but that summer there were disorientating moments when the sky cleared and the heat and the light reminded me of summers back home in New Brunswick. It was only ever a fleeting illusion, though, repeatedly shattered by the fuming, dark-billowing reality of the city around me.

  At least I got to wear lightweight suits that hung better. When it came to material, the Scots had a year-round preference for tweed, the scratchier and denser the better. A Scottish acquaintance had once tried to reassure me that tweed from the Isle of Harris was less scratchy, explaining that this was because it was traditionally soaked in human urine. I could have been accused of being picky, but I preferred couture that hadn’t been pissed on by an inbred crofter.

  I had spent three days getting all the gen I could on Sneddon’s fighter. Bobby Kirkcaldy had been born in Glasgow but raised in Lanarkshire, first in an orphanage and then by an aunt. Both his parents had died prematurely from heart attacks when Kirkcaldy was a child. Tragic, but not unusual: if cardiac disease had been a sport, then the entire British Olympic team would have been made up of Glaswegians.

  Young Bobby Kirkcaldy had used his fists to fight his way up and out of the Motherwell slum that had been his adoptive home. To put his success in context, Motherwell was the kind of place anyone would fight like hell to get out of. I’d been able to track down a couple of businesses that Kirkcaldy had invested in and it was clear he was getting good advice on cashing in on his success when he eventually hung up his gloves. Either that, or he was as nifty with investment as he was in the ring. In fact, for someone approaching the height of his boxing career, he seemed to have his mind, and money, on other things.

  My office was three floors up, across Gordon Street from Central Station, and by Thursday I had done just about all I could do on the ’phone and was going to take an afternoon trip out to see young Mr Kirkcaldy. I decided to drink a coffee and read the newspaper before I left. I like to keep up with things. I never knew when Rab Butler or Tony Eden would ask for my advice.

  All the news was gloomy. Britain wasn’t the only nation struggling with the loss of an empire: the French were having the stuffing kicked out of them in Indochina by the Vietminh. There had been a clash of razor gangs in the Gorbals. A man had been run over by a train on the outskirts of the city. The police hadn’t issued a name. The only thing that cheered me up was an advertised assurance that, apparently, taking an Amplex chlorophyll tablet each day guaranteed breath and body freshness; obviously an attempt to break into an underexploited market.

  I was in the middle of Rip Kirby when I got a pleasant surprise. A very pleasant, five-foot-three, blonde surprise. I recognized her as soon as she walked into my office, despite the fact that we had never met before. She dressed with an elegance that Glasgow didn’t stretch to. Cream silk blouse, figure-hugging powder blue pencil skirt, long legs sheathed in sheer silk. Her throat was ringed with a necklace with pearls so big the diver must have had to bring them up one at a time. Earrings to match. She wore a small white pillbox-type hat and white gloves, but had a jacket that matched the skirt draped over the same forearm as a handbag that, in a previous life, had swum in the Nile or the Florida Everglades.

  I stood up and tried to prevent my smile from resembling a leer. It probably just looked goofy. But Sheila Gainsborough was probably used to men smiling at her goofily.

  ‘Hello, Miss Gainsborough,’ I said. ‘Please sit down. What can I do for you?’

  ‘You know me?’ She smiled a famous person’s smile, that polite perfunctory baring of teeth that doesn’t mean anything.

  ‘Everybody knows you, Miss Gainsborough. Certainly everybody in Glasgow. I have to say I don’t get many celebrities walking into my office.’

  ‘Don’t you?’ She frowned, lowering her flawlessly arched eyebrows and wrinkling a fold of skin on her otherwise flawless brow. Flawlessly. ‘I would have imagined…’ Shrugging off the thought and the frown, she sat down and I followed suit. ‘I’ve never been to a private detective before. Never seen one before, come to that, other than Humphrey Bogart in the pictures.’

  ‘We’re taller in real life.’ I smiled at my own witticism. Goofily. ‘And I call myself an enquiry agent. So why do you need to see one now?’

  She unclipped the sixty-guinea crocodile and handed me a photograph. It was a professional, showbizzy shot. Colour. I didn’t recognize the young man in the picture but decided in an instant that I didn’t like him. The smile was fake and too self-assured. He was wearing an expensive
-looking shirt open at the neck and arranged over the collar of an even more pricey-looking light grey suit. His chestnut hair was well cut and lightly oiled. He was good-looking, but in a too-slick and weak-chinned sort of way. Despite his dark hair, he had the same striking, pale blue eyes as Sheila Gainsborough.

  ‘He’s my brother. Sammy. My younger brother.’

  ‘Is he in show business too, Miss Gainsborough?’

  ‘No. Well, not really. He sings, occasionally. He’s tried every other kind of business though. Some of which I’m afraid haven’t been totally… honourable.’ She sighed and leaned forward, resting her forearms on the edge of my desk. Her skin was tanned. Not dark, just pale gold. The cute frown was back. ‘It’s maybe all my fault. I spoil him, give him more money than he can handle.’ I noticed that she had a vaguely Americanized accent. I spoke the same way, but that was because I’d been raised in Canada. As far as I was aware, Sheila Gainsborough had never been further west than Dunoon. I guessed she had been voice-trained to sink the Glasgow in her accent somewhere deep and mid-Atlantic.

  ‘Is Sammy in some kind of trouble?’ I too leaned forward and frowned my concern, taking the opportunity to cast a glance down the front of her blouse.

  ‘He’s gone missing,’ she said.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘A week. Maybe ten days. We had a meeting at the bank — he’s overdrawn the account I set up for him — but he didn’t turn up. That was last Thursday. I went to his apartment but he wasn’t there. There was two days’ mail behind the door.’

  I took a pad from my desk drawer and scribbled a few notes on it. It was window dressing, people feel comforted if you take notes. Somehow it looks like you’re taking it all that little bit more seriously. Nodding sagely as you write helps.

  ‘Has Sammy done this kind of thing before. Gone off without letting you know?’

  ‘No. Or at least not like this. Not for a week. Occasionally he’s gone off on a bender. One… two days, but that’s all. And whenever I’m in town — you know, not on a tour or in London — we meet up every Saturday and have lunch in Cranston’s Tea Rooms on Sauchiehall Street. He never misses it.’