The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5 Page 5

  ‘Maybe they were simply after your wallet.’

  I shook my head. ‘They weren’t the type. I got the impression that their experience of rough-and-tumble has more to do with the rugby club or amateur boxing than real street stuff. They weren’t pros and they got more than they bargained for. If they hadn’t jumped me from behind and got me on the ground, they wouldn’t have cut the mustard at all. The fact that they had me on the ground and that I managed to get to my feet and give them a hiding speaks for itself.’

  ‘Amateurs or not, they’ve given you something to think about for the next week or so.’ Tommy nodded to my chest. ‘There’s no way it could be connected to this ironworks job?’

  ‘I can’t see how. Maybe it was a case of mistaken identity.’ I smiled, but then a thought occurred to me. I looked down at the suit trousers I now wore – the ones Tommy had lent me. He read my thoughts and laughed.

  ‘Aye . . . I thought about that too – I do wear that suit a fair bit, and we’re roughly the same height and build – but unlike you, Lennox, my disposition is famously sunny. No one has a grudge against me and everybody I do business with knows I’m fair and square. So no . . . they weren’t after me.’

  I shrugged and my ribs shouted at my shoulders to be still. ‘Maybe we’ll never know. Tell me about your father.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘In the pub you said to remind you to tell me about him.’ I had sensed a thaw in Tommy and I wanted to steer the conversation away from the events of that night.

  ‘Oh, that . . . Forget it. Sometimes I get too philosophical for my own good.’

  ‘Tell me anyway. It’ll take my mind off my ribs.’

  Tommy shrugged. ‘All right . . . you asked me about how I was able to do the prison time . . . how I was able to give up my freedom. Well my old da had freedom: he never spent a day of his life in a cell – born free, lived free, died free. Never bent a law in his life, never mind break one. But the laws and rules he lived his life by had fuck all to do with him, they were other people’s rules. Any freedom he had was what someone else decided was freedom. My old man died free all right – at fifty-three years old, coughing and spitting up black phlegm and blood. And he lived free too . . . a free life spent three fathoms deep working a coal seam, one eye always on the water seeping through the gallery walls or on the gas alert. Even the food we ate wasn’t up to us – the pit foreman would come knocking and looking for answers if you didn’t buy your groceries from the mine company store. Aye, my da lived free – free with the constant threat of drowning or suffocating and ended up doing both on his deathbed. Fuck that, Lennox. If you call that freedom, give me a Barlinnie cell any day.’ He took a drink.

  ‘I never took you for a Marxist . . .’

  Tommy laughed. ‘They’re as bad as the bosses. Just a different set of rules. Just a different set of bosses.’

  ‘It doesn’t mean you have to turn to crime and accept being chucked in chokey. There are easier ways—’

  ‘Are there? Oh you mean education? Learning your way out of the pit? I must have missed the scouts from Oxford and Cambridge waiting for me when I left Dalziel Secondary at fourteen. The pit foremen were there though, looking for apprentices to bury in the mine.’

  ‘You’ve got brains, Tommy—’

  He cut me off with a laugh. ‘Brains? Do you think they count for anything? My da had plenty to spare. Down the pit since he was twelve, practically no education – but he spent hours in the miners’ library, then the Motherwell library. Then the Mitchell Library in Glasgow. He used to learn stories and poems by heart so he could repeat them in his head when he was down in the dark.’

  Tommy took another sip of his drink.

  ‘My da had brains all right, and you’re right to say he passed them on – to both me and my sister – but they never got him out of the pit. I could never understand why he lived his life by someone else’s rules. You know . . . why he worked so hard for fuck-all except to make rich private coal companies richer. Then I worked it out. Everything’s fucked up. The whole world is totally absurd and filled with people doing things the way they’ve always been done, just because it’s the way they’ve always been done. It was only after he died that I worked out that my da dedicated himself to what he did because he was trying to make some kind of sense of his life.’

  ‘But you’re not.’

  ‘No, I’m not. That’s why prison never bothered me: it’s just another place, just another room you’re in. Except prison makes more sense than the outside world. I’m a thief: I steal things and if I get caught I get punished for it. There’s nothing absurd about that. But the truth is that everyone is a thief. Everyone steals from everyone else and the whole system is run by the best thieves of them all – the ones who steal power and opportunity from you. Steal your life. You want to know the difference between prison and the outside world? The people you meet in prison are more fucking honest. If you knew—’

  It was there again: something bigger, something more immediate and specific behind his anger, a brief shadow on the threshold. Tommy decided against sharing it and the fire in his eyes dulled.

  ‘And you’re the same as me, Lennox,’ he said. ‘People like us see things the way they really are because we’ve had the shite knocked out of us. We both see that everything is chaos and crap and we just go along for the ride. Play the game without playing it, if you know what I mean. Make the most of it.’

  ‘And what does your sister make of it? You said she has brains too.’

  Tommy smiled. ‘Jennifer? Aye, she’s got brains too. But she’s well out of Glasgow. I used my earnings to send her to college in England. She’s got a good job in London. Nobody tells our Jennifer what to do, she’s her own woman. If there’s one thing I’m proud of, it’s that I got her the hell out of Glasgow. She has a life. A future.’

  ‘What about you, Tommy?’ I asked. ‘Do you think you’ll ever settle down? Get married? Have kids?’

  ‘Never. I’d never bring a child into this evil, fucked-up world. You don’t grow out of childhood here, you survive it. Or some bastard rips it away from you.’ Tommy gave an awkward laugh, embarrassed at his own sudden vehemence. He took another drink. ‘Sorry. I like kids. I just think they get the shite end of the stick.’

  *

  We drifted back into discussion about the foundry job and it was agreed that we’d do it a week Sunday night, when there would be the least chance of there being anyone around. In the meantime Tommy would survey the site and draw up his plans. All I had to do was act as a driver and lookout, Tommy providing the vehicle. Given the profit I was going to make, I readily agreed. After we had finished, Tommy offered me a couch for the night, but my ribs protested that they needed the comfort of my own bed and I drove home.

  I had an allocated space in the parking lot outside the apartment. When I parked, I sat for a moment with the car’s engine switched off, checking parked cars for silhouettes or the tell-tale red glow of a cigarette tip, then searching the shadows between the pools of pale light from the lamps in the car park and the bushes that fringed it. As I got out and crossed to the building entrance, I kept checking the three a.m. darkness for lurking goons. No one jumped me and when I got into my flat, everything was in order.

  I’d already begun to stiffen up and any movement of my arms seemed to send a jolt through my ribcage, making getting out of Tommy’s loaned suit a slow, cautious process. I swallowed some aspirin and swilled my mouth with water to cleanse it of the sour taste of Scotch and violence.

  Easing myself into bed, I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but my ribs ember-glowed with a malevolent ache and the events of the evening kept running like an endless film loop against the screen of my closed eyelids. In a city where violence was common and generally senseless, I couldn’t understand why I was struggling so hard to make sense of my ambush.

  The birds had already started singing by the time I fell asleep.

  6

  I spent the next t
wo days recuperating. Irene and I had made no arrangement to meet because, it being the weekend, she was playing the role of mother and wife. In any case, the stiffness I was feeling as a result of my encounter with pavement and boot was not the kind of rigidity that would have been of any use to Irene.

  By the Sunday, the pain had dulled into a persistent but manageable ache, but when I removed the strapping to soak my battered torso in the bath, I saw that both sides were covered with livid blossoms of purple, maroon and black. Amateurs or not, I’d taken a kicking all right. The bruise blooming out from my hairline onto my forehead was also diffusing into a fudged rainbow, and I was already planning out my Monday morning explanation for Archie, whose seemingly slow, dull, watery eyes missed nothing.

  I hadn’t slept well either night, small electric jolts in my ribs wakening me regularly. When I had managed to find some sleep, it had filled with vivid dreams, including the one that had haunted me so often: a terrified face that was more boy than man desperately begging me. In German. The same dream that seemed to re-emerge every time I’d gotten myself into a fight, like some kind of echo reminding me how hollow I had become.

  I eased myself gingerly into the day. I knew I had to be by the 'phone at one p.m. to take McNaught’s call, but first I wanted to pick up the newspapers and a supply of cigarettes. As the sun was making an unaccustomed appearance, I decided to walk instead of drive, thinking the activity might loosen me up. So, once I’d done my best to strap my ribs up tight, I headed out into the sunshine and down Great Western Road. The Glasgow sky rewarded my spirit of endeavour by clouding over before I had reached the newsvendor outside the Gaumont Cinema, which for some reason the locals still called the Ascot. I could hear him from half a mile away, shouting out ‘Heeeeauheennyoooos! Geaytyooheeeeauheennyoooos’ in that near consonantless language of newsvendors that was unintelligible everywhere, but in a Glaswegian accent was doubly encrypted.

  Tucking the papers under my arm, I nipped into the foyer of the Gaumont: I’d been cultivating the redhead who worked the tobacco kiosk and while I picked up some cigarettes I shot her a line or two. It was less of an angling trip and more of a fish-shoot in a barrel and I got a note of her days off. She was cute enough all right, but had a smoked-deep voice and a grit-and-glass accent that made me hope desperately that she didn’t get vocal at times of passion. Generally, I found it off-putting for Finlay Currie to come to mind during intimacy.

  ‘Ah’m no’ on the phoan, but,’ she rumbled. I assured her that I’d call by the kiosk later in the week to make final arrangements.

  *

  I was back in my flat by twelve-thirty and, at exactly one p.m., my 'phone rang. I recognized the voice right away as belonging to my new friend with the lopsided face.

  ‘Have you fixed a schedule for what we discussed?’ he asked without preliminaries.

  ‘Next Monday, one a.m.,’ I said.

  ‘And you can rely on your associate to stick to that time?’

  ‘I can,’ I said. ‘I’ll be taking him there.’

  ‘Good. This is an important mission. I was hoping you would personally supervise it.’

  ‘How do I contact you to arrange delivery and payment?’ I asked.

  ‘You don’t. I’ll 'phone you again after that date to arrange collection of the information and payment of the rest of your fee.’ He hung up. I guessed we weren’t going to be close.

  *

  Tommy Quaid’s two-day-old, chicory-flavoured assault on my palate had haunted me almost as much as the kicking my ribs had taken, so after I’d spoken with McNaught, I fixed myself a proper coffee. I’d recently picked up a new recording at the record store in Sauchiehall Street and put the long-player of Brahms’ first piano concerto on the radiogram; I may have been accused of being a thug and worse at various times, but at least I was a cultured thug. While Leon Fleisher arpeggiated, I eased myself, stiff-backed, into the armchair by the window and read through the news.

  There was nothing of any note: mainly the usual crap about the forthcoming Empire and Commonwealth Games – but as headbutting wasn’t a scheduled event, I didn’t expect a strong representation from Glasgow in the Scottish team. The only thing that caught my eye was a three-column-inches mention of the incident I’d witnessed from my office window while Mr McNaught had been making his unobserved way up the stairwell. Headed CENTRAL STATION ACCIDENT VICTIM STILL UNIDENTIFIED, it explained that the body was of a young male who had apparently wandered onto the tracks somewhere between the Broomielaw, where trains crossing the bridge over the Clyde began slowing as they approached the terminus, and the station platforms. The police had given no further details other than that the deceased was not a railway employee and that they were not treating the death as suspicious.

  I closed the papers and drank my coffee, watching nothing through the lounge’s bay window.

  For a sliver of a moment, I wondered why, if the dead man had been between the platforms and the Broomielaw, they had gone in through the main concourse and brought the body out the same way. That was all I thought about it.

  At the time.

  7

  As we had agreed, a week later, an hour after Sunday had become Monday, Tommy and I met to do the foundry job.

  At least I looked the part: I had dressed in a pair of dark cavalry twills, a black sweater the neck of which covered up my shirt collar, and a pair of rubber-soled, black suede desert boots. Examining the figure I cut in the full-length hall mirror, I couldn’t help but laugh: all I was doing was driving Tommy and keeping an eye out for night watchmen or strolling coppers, yet I’d dressed as some kind of Hollywood movie-version diamond thief. At least if we got caught I’d have a Cary Grant mugshot.

  Leaving my apartment building as quietly as possible, I eased the Alpine out of the car park onto Great Western Road and headed west. At the best of times, Glasgow at one in the morning was a haunted-looking place; the streets blank and silent, blind between the pools of street-lamp light. Tonight, one-in-the-morning Glasgow was especially haunted-looking under an uncharacteristically cloudless sky. The third-quarter moon had withdrawn into a sliver of crescent, giving up the night to the sparkle of stars. The next full moon, Tommy had informed me, would not be until the thirtieth. ‘No point in putting on a shadow show,’ he had said in the pub when we had planned the break-in. ‘The full moon’s like a spotlight – you become a silhouette up there on a rooftop and you’d be as well doing a dance routine for the coppers. Always best to go on a cloudy, moonless night.’

  The only car on the streets, I got all the way past the Maryhill canal locks without spotting a soul, but as soon as I turned into Maryhill Road I saw a copper on foot patrol watch me as I drove past. I gave a small wave and he saluted – driving a new Sunbeam Alpine in Glasgow gave me salutable status – but I still checked my side and rear-view mirrors to make sure his hand didn’t fall from the salute onto his notebook pocket. It didn’t and he walked on, continuing his patrol through Maryhill, where he’d find nothing else that night to salute.

  Tommy’s instructions had been clear: I turned off Maryhill Road at Bilsland Drive and pulled over, leaving the parking lights on, a hundred yards from the junction. I scanned the tenement-flanked street on both sides and in both directions, but could see no sign of Tommy, or anyone else. A disconsolate-looking dog, some kind of black-and-white mongrel, trotted along the middle of the road and passed the car without looking in. I cricked my neck to watch it head back towards the junction, and also again to check for any sign of Tommy; there was still none. I was turning back to face front when the passenger door opened and Tommy dropped into the seat.

  ‘How the hell did you do that?’ I asked, genuinely impressed. ‘Where did you come from?’

  ‘Trade secret.’ Tommy grinned and tapped the side of his nose with his finger. ‘Speaking of trade secrets . . .’

  I nodded and pulled out from the kerb. Tommy told me to keep heading along Bilsland Drive. Past the smoke-blackened brick of the ra
ilway arch, the tenements to our right gave way to the bush- and tree-edged Ruchill Park, dark and dense in the night. We passed the Elizabethan gables of the gatehouses of the infectious diseases Ruchill Hospital, the black silhouette of the hospital’s baroque tower, the highest structure in Glasgow, a darker looming against the starry sky.

  Eventually, Tommy directed me into a dead-end street that, like almost all of its neighbours, was empty of cars. Empty except for a scruffy old Fordson works van, green paintwork and red wheels faded and grimy, garage livery on the side barely legible. From its styling I could see it was a pre-war model; from its condition I wondered if the war it had been pre- had been the one we’d fought with the Boers.

  ‘We can’t take your car to the job. It’s far too flash and we don’t want anyone remembering it or some keen-as-mustard new bobby noting down the number. Park between the street lights.’ Tommy pointed to a spot in the street where the car would be in the least light. I did what he asked, deciding now wasn’t the time to tell him about the patrolman saluting me on Maryhill Road. We got out and I locked up the Alpine.

  ‘I managed to borrow this.’ Tommy spoke quietly as he led the way to the parked van. Spoke and moved quietly: he seemed to be able to walk without sound, as if he made no real contact with the ground. ‘If we bump into any coppers, we can maybe convince them that we’re mechanics called out to an emergency breakdown.’ Scanning the dark eyes of early-hours tenement windows to make sure we hadn’t awoken curiosity, Tommy donned a pair of gloves before unlocking the van, reaching in and handing me out a dark-blue boiler suit and another pair of gloves. ‘Best put these on before you get in.’

  He took out a matching pair of overalls for himself and wriggled into them.

  ‘I’m guessing from the gloves that the van owner isn’t aware he’s loaned you the van?’ I asked.