The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5 Page 6

Tommy grinned, handing me the keys. ‘I’m sure he’d be fine with it – I just didn’t want to trouble him by waking him up and asking. I’ll get it back before it’s noticed missing in the morning.’

  ‘Isn’t this a risk?’ I asked as I got into the driver’s seat. ‘You said yourself the job itself’s reasonably risk free. It’d be a real pity to be pinched for stealing a van.’

  Tommy shook his head. ‘We’re only ten minutes away from the ironworks so we’d be really fucking unlucky to run over a copper in the time it takes us to get there and back. And anyway,’ he made a sweeping gesture with his hands to take in the van, ‘who’d want to steal a piece of shite like this? The coppers wouldn’t give it a second look, even at this time of night.’

  ‘You’re the boss . . .’ I turned the key in the ignition and the Ford gave a rheumy cough, but didn’t start. I looked at Tommy meaningfully; he caught the meaning.

  ‘It just needs a bit of choke.’

  I pulled the choke halfway out and tried again. The engine lurched into life and I three-point-turned the van and headed out of the street.

  ‘By the way,’ I said as we headed towards Possilpark. ‘Thanks again for the loan of the suit – I’ll get it back to you, but I’ll have it dry cleaned first.’

  ‘Thanks. How are the ribs?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Any more ideas on why those monkeys jumped you?’

  ‘None.’

  *

  In nine minutes we were in Possilpark: an artificial settlement built with only one purpose, to house workers for the Saracen Foundry. The original works in the Gallowgate’s Saracen Lane had given the foundry its name, but demand had outstripped capacity and the decision had been made to find a dedicated out-of-city site. The fields and copses of the bucolic Possil estate had been bought, bulldozed and built over. Possilpark, a sprawling grid of four-storey red-sandstone tenements, now sat smirched greasy black by a century of smoke and soot from the massive, fourteen-acre foundry that formed its dark, smouldering heart.

  ‘Look at this place.’ Tommy’s thoughts obviously paralleled mine. ‘You notice there’s a pub on almost every third street corner? Mass anaesthesia. Keep the poor fuckers stupefied.’ He shook his head as if bemused. ‘Wait until this place goes bust – and it will go bust – then there’ll be generations of waste.’

  There were tenements almost right up to the foundry’s main entrance on Hawthorn Street; but the huge site was surrounded at the sides and back by areas of waste ground, all rubble and bare earth, as if scorched by the foundry’s toxic presence.

  The vast, arched double doors of the main entrance, like the gates of a prison, were flanked by two smaller but still huge gates; an ornate, stepped dome, something like a basilica, rose above the central doors. Everything wreathed in ornate ironwork. A high wall ran all the way around the foundry and the night sky above was pierced by the stretched spindles of tall, slender brick chimneys, one at each corner of the site and each topped with onion-dome ironwork, making the chimneys reminiscent of minarets.

  ‘It’s best we avoid passing the main gates,’ said Tommy. ‘Swing round next left and park at the side, near the back corner.’

  ‘You going in through the side entrance?’ I remembered McNaught’s layout plans had indicated the various gates and where the drawing offices were.

  ‘No, there’s a less-used gate at the rear.’

  I followed Tommy’s directions.

  ‘Pull up here,’ he said eventually. To our right was the side wall of the foundry, an area of waste ground to our left. I reached down to switch off the engine but he laid a hand on my forearm to stop me. ‘Leave it running.’

  I’d expected Tommy to swing immediately into action but instead he sat staring out through the windshield of the van, his expression as he looked at the dark brick shoulder of the ironworks suggesting he’d been presented with something alien, surreal. I’d seen that expression before, mainly in Glaswegian restaurants when vegetables were served.

  ‘You going in?’ I asked when Tommy still made no sign of moving.

  ‘I still think this is all very strange,’ he said eventually. ‘I mean, it just doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘You want to pull out?’ I asked without rancour. If Quiet Tommy Quaid had a bad feeling about a job, I had to take it seriously. After all, I was on the job with him. An accessory. My flimsy disguise of boiler suit and car mechanic’s van wouldn’t stand up to even a Glasgow copper’s scrutiny. All they’d have to ask me to do was change a spark plug.

  Tommy shook his head. ‘That would leave you in a fix. The bloke who gave you this job sounds like he doesn’t take no for an answer.’

  ‘I can handle that. I’ll tell him we were spotted and had to call off. I can arrange something for another time.’

  Again Tommy stayed quiet for a moment. And again it worried me that he had to think it through: he had said himself it was as straightforward a job as he could get, yet his thief’s instincts seemed to be echoing in the pit of his stomach every bit as much as McNaught’s threat was in mine.

  He took a sharp breath in and in a decisive gesture pulled on a tuque hat to hide his copper-coloured hair. ‘No . . . I’m just getting jittery in my old age. Wait here . . . leave the engine running, I don’t trust this rust bucket not to pack in if it’s switched off.’ He opened the door to get out. ‘It’s quarter-past one. I should be in and out in twenty minutes at the most. If I’m not, it means either I’ve had to duck down and wait it out because some bugger’s in my way, or because I’ve been nabbed. If I’m not back by twenty to two, drive around the block a couple of times, just in case I’ve had to take another way out. But no more than twice – if there’s still no sign of me by ten to two, then take off. Dump the car, but not within a mile of where yours is parked.’

  ‘Christ, Tommy,’ I said. ‘If you feel that we have to—’

  ‘Normal precautions. I usually fly solo, but when I work with someone else, we always plan it out like this. Things go south and sometimes you get separated, but it doesn’t mean one of you’s been pinched. You’ve no idea how often the polis use getting separated to get you to stitch yourself up or give away who was on the job with you. If I don’t make it back to the rendezvous, clear out and keep your head down. And you know what to do if you see a copper or anything else?’

  ‘Yep. Drive off and give two long blasts of the horn when I’m around the corner.’

  Tommy nodded. ‘This time of night the sound’ll carry. If needs be, I’ll lie low for as long as it takes.’ He looked at me and smiled. ‘But don’t worry, Lennox, old chum. It’ll be a piece of cake.’

  I watched him in the side mirror, walking close to the blackened brick flank of the foundry, a shadow becoming lost in a darker shadow. I switched off the parking lights but left the engine running, constantly scanning the street front and back for any sign of an approaching police car or foot patrol. There was something about the situation that put me particularly on edge and I couldn’t work out what. Maybe, I thought, it was just that it reminded me of those older, wartime playtimes in the dark. I fumbled beneath the overalls and found my cigarettes and lighter. After another check to make sure there was no one around to see the hand-shielded flare, I lit a cigarette and took a long, deep pull. It did a little, but not much, to relieve my nagging unease. All I could do now was sit it out.

  8

  Tommy didn’t come back after fifteen minutes. Or twenty. Or half an hour.

  The jangling in my head and gut had by now become alarm bells and klaxons. I hadn’t driven off as Tommy had said, instead waiting for him to find me where he’d left me. But he had told me that his way out of the works might have to be different from his way in, so I drove slowly around the whole site, including the main Hawthorn Street entrance, twice. No sign. I couldn’t risk passing by the manned main gates again, but instead of following Tommy’s instructions to quit the area in the hope we could regroup later, I pulled up back at the same spot I’d been
parked before. I broke another of Tommy’s rules by switching the engine off and locking up the van before retracing the steps I’d seen him take before he’d melted into the shadows.

  I couldn’t really explain why I felt the need to put myself at unnecessary risk by going to look for Tommy, but it had a lot to do with what you went through in wartime: the instinct not to leave a man behind. And now all of my instincts were telling me that something had gone very badly wrong.

  I reached where the wall turned ninety degrees, its corner curved like the shoulder of a battlement, rather than sharp angled, and I found myself making my way along the back of the foundry. The wall broke for an entrance to the works – a high railing gate with a wooden gatehouse like a garden shed set just inside – and I pressed in against the greasy, black brickwork. This had been on the plans and I knew it wasn’t the main rear entrance. Because the foundry covered a fourteen-acre site, it had many entrances for different purposes: the main gates were used for the bulk of the workers at shift change, as well as for larger lorries, but there were several smaller entrances for deliveries and access to specific worksheds. This, I knew, was a minor entry and the one Tommy had planned to use. According to McNaught’s timetable and confirmed by Tommy’s own surveillance, the night watchman didn’t occupy any of the gatehouses for any length of time but just called by to make sure each of the gates was secure. Another night watchman was on stationary duty at the main gates.

  The door of the watchman’s shed was open, but the interior was in total darkness, suggesting there was no one inside, so I eased forward, grateful that I had put on the rubber-soled desert boots. I was no Quiet Tommy Quaid, but I reckoned I could scale the metal gates without too much delay or noise, so I moved towards them.

  A second earlier and I would have been spotted. I was in front and slightly to the side of the gates when I heard a rumbling, rheumy cough from inside the shed, followed by a deep-throated racking before the concealed watchman spat out onto the cobbles. I could hear his breath wheezing before the cavern of his post glowed red for a moment as the tubercular watchman soothed his lungs with a drag on his cigarette. Fred Astaire would have admired my silent-tap sidestep as I dodged obliquely and into the wall beside the gatehouse. I would now only be a matter of feet from the watchman, separated by the gate edge and wooden sidewall of his shed.

  Again I’d been in very similar situations before, but if I were rumbled here I couldn’t resolve it with a Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife through a sentry’s windpipe. In any case, from the sounds of it, the night watchman had found a much more efficient way of suffocating to death.

  In Glasgow, elderly could begin anywhere from fifty onwards, but the stooped man who emerged from the shed looked as if he could remember the Relief of Mafeking, probably because his son had taken part. He had his back to me as he waddled out and I could see he wasn’t much over five foot tall but was nearly as wide. The shapeless jacket of dense, dark tweed he wore was separated from a flat cap of the same cloth by a roll of thick, pallid neck. His dark trousers were baggy, adding to the squatness of his figure. Standing there with his back to me, he looked as if paused in thought, his hand hanging at his side, the last half-inch of a roll-up cigarette pinched between thick finger and thumb. Taking a final draw from his meagre smoke, he flicked it away to bounce on the cobbles in a firework shower of red embers. He took a battery torch from a cavernous pocket and thumbed it on. Then, like the Queen Mary announcing its departure from dock, he let out a low, rumbling fart before continuing his waddling patrol of the foundry.

  Watching the old guy wobble back into the body of the works, it struck me that the owners didn’t feel unduly besieged by the forces of crime; if they had secret designs or patents, they sure didn’t seem to think they needed robust guarding.

  Once the elderly watchman was out of sight and earshot, I again examined the gate. If the shed was able to bear my weight, then climbing over the gate and coming down onto its roof was probably my best way in. I took a moment, though, to assess my options. For all I knew Tommy had found his way back to the van, only to find it locked up and empty. He certainly wouldn’t have appreciated my cack-handedly amateur efforts at breaking in. But those old instincts were jangling again, telling me that something wasn’t right. I thought back to Tommy’s own hesitation, and his question about whether or not I thought that everything was kosher with this job.

  The gate rattled more than I had anticipated and I was glad to swing over the top and get my feet onto the roof of the watchman’s shed. I eased myself down and headed in the same direction the old guy had taken. During the war I’d become used to reading maps and plans, often in a hurry, and McNaught’s schematic of the works had stuck in my mind. Almost all the foundry’s site was built up with tight-packed, side-by-side worksheds: each brick-built and thirty feet wide and the same height with a pitched roof. Each workshed was stretched out long, some were three-quarters of the total width of the site and the only source of light came from the tented skylights along the roofs.

  Following the route along the ground that mirrored the one Tommy would have taken at roof level, I found myself in a narrow section that ran almost like a street between the blank brick sides of the worksheds. I could hear the sounds of heavy industry, but distant and muffled, and all of the sheds at this end of the foundry were silent and dark. Pulled back into the shadows, all my senses stretching out into the works, it was strange to listen to the dull throb of the place, like it was a living being. Every now and then the rumble would be punctuated by a bang or a clash of metal ringing out, muffled by the baffle of the foundry’s walls.

  The lighting was pretty meagre and widely spaced, affording me plenty of shadows. The odd thing was that what light there was came from the kind of lamp-posts I associated with Parisian boulevards: richly ornate iron standards with barley-sugar twists in the shaft and elaborate filigree brackets holding the lamp – itself a high-power bulb rather than a modern sodium light. I realized these lamps were more for display – examples of the foundry’s craft – and I reckoned they must have been here for forty years or more.

  The street between the sheds opened out suddenly into a large, better-lit square. Like a surreal arena in the midst of the industrial sheds, it had a massive bandstand at its centre. Iron looped and spiralled, burst into ferrous blossoms and arced up into the huge dome of the bandstand, which in turn rose above the tented rooftops of the foundry. The bandstand wasn’t alone: a few yards to its right was an equally impressive, if waterless, fountain; to its left, between two stone stanchions that were connected to nothing else, massive Art Deco gates stood guard over nothing. And all around these central exhibits were drinking fountains, pagodas, canopies, even French-style urinals, and, of course, telephone boxes – all ornately shaped out of iron. This was the foundry’s sales floor, where customers from across the Empire and around the world would examine the massive samples and place their orders for their parks, municipal spaces, rail stations or presidential palaces.

  Tommy had been right, this was a museum: the kind of grandiosity that belonged in the past, to an empire now dissolving, and probably to the time when Albert was still making Victoria go bug-eyed. But this was a new age of brutalist architecture and modernist lines: no one sought out the ornate any more; the shape of the future was being cast in concrete, not wrought in iron. Again the thought nagged at me: what kind of advanced technological or production secret could this place possibly be hiding from the world?

  I made my way along the edge of the display area towards the drawing office. It loomed up suddenly: a six-storey block, flat-roofed and the only new addition to the largely Victorian architecture of the foundry. The lighting was once again meagre and I understood why the elderly watchman made his rounds carrying a flashlight. Stumbling over an uneven cobble, I cursed out loud and nearly fell. I paused for a moment, annoyed at my own clumsiness, then made my way forward, keeping a steadying left hand on the wall. My reasoning was that if I made it to the
main door of the building holding the drawing office, I could perhaps find my way in and up to find out what the hell had happened to Tommy.

  I almost missed it.

  There was a dull thump about fifty yards ahead of me. I didn’t see the object fall, nor hear any sound as it fell – just the noise of impact. To start with I thought it was a heap of empty sacks – a dark bundled shape on the cobbled yard, no more than three feet out from the wall – but the instinctive lurch in my gut and chest told me that it wasn’t. I looked up to the roofline but couldn’t see anyone, just the black silhouette of the building against the stars, like cut-out stage scenery; no sound except the brick-muted throb and rattle of the foundry. I ran across to where the bundle had landed.

  I knew before I got to it, before I could make out its shape as human, that the object on the ground was Tommy. When I got to him I could see right away that he was dead: his eyes were open and lifeless, a halo of blood blooming black on the cobbles around his head, his hair and the injury still concealed by the dark woollen tuque. I didn’t need to check for a pulse: unless Tommy had been preternaturally double-jointed, I could tell instantly that his neck was very definitely broken. I again looked up to where he must have fallen from, but there was no sign of anything or anyone untoward.

  My mind raced. Unusually for me, I didn’t have a clue what my next move should be but I was prompted into action by a horn sounding somewhere inside one of the halls, presumably announcing a refreshment break or change of shift. About three hundred yards away, double doors opened, flooding the cobbled yard with light and workers. I shrank back into the shadows and started to trace my way back to the side gate, hugging the wall and keeping an eye out for the geriatric night watchman. I got to the gate and hoisted myself onto the roof of the shed, then hauled myself up and over the iron gates, dropping clumsily on the other side. I landed badly and was rewarded with perfectly synchronized sharp twinges in my left ankle and in my ribs, which had been slowly easing over the last week. Limping off towards where I’d left the van, I realized that nothing was broken and the sprain was a mild one – it wouldn’t cause me too much trouble, so long as I got back to the van and got my weight off that ankle as soon as possible.