The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5 Read online

  I got clear of the gates and made my way back along the rear perimeter wall. I stopped before I got to the corner and looked back to make sure no one was following me. They maybe even hadn’t found Tommy’s body yet, and if they had, there would be a lot of confusion about who he was and how he’d ended up broken and dead on the foundry yard. Searching for an accomplice wouldn’t come to mind.

  Quiet Tommy Quaid was dead. He was dead and had been killed pulling a job for me.

  It was a fact: a brutal, sudden fact that I would have to come to terms with. But later. For now, my instincts were telling me to get as far as possible, as quickly as possible, from the foundry and Tommy’s body, but I knew I would be doing a lot of reckoning afterwards.

  Pulling the ignition key from the pocket of my overalls, I came round the corner and saw the van; I also saw a black police Wolseley pulled up alongside it, two coppers examining it, one cupping his eyes with his hands as he peered through the driver’s window. I ducked back around the corner and pressed my back against the greasy brickwork while I considered how famously my night was going.

  I tried to work out how the police could have cottoned on to the van so quickly; perhaps my slow drive twice past the main gates had aroused suspicion, but I doubted it. I tried to think it all through: there was no way of getting back to the van, but at least the coppers wouldn’t find anything to link me to it – unless they caught me with the key in my pocket. I had no choice but to hoof it back to where I left my own car. A dull throb in my ankle reminded me of my haste in dropping down the side of the gate and that the walk back to the car, assuming I could get away from the foundry without detection, was going to be an uncomfortable stroll.

  I stole a glance around the corner again: the coppers were still there and looked like they had no intention of moving off. The van was of interest to them; again, something I couldn’t understand. Tommy was meticulous in his planning and if he had said that the van wouldn’t be missed until morning, then it wouldn’t be missed until morning. And there was no way these coppers could already know about Tommy’s death in the foundry.

  Tommy.

  His face flashed in front of me again, the eyes open and dead, his mouth loose, his head at a sickening angle to his shoulders. I had been right to have that foreboding; all of that thinking back to the war. It had been like that then, too: you got to know someone, to get inside their head; you got to like them. Then one day you’d end up looking at them when they were nothing more than lifeless meat.

  I had to get away.

  I reckoned I had a good half-hour walk to get back to where my car was parked, but the cops were in my way and if I went back the way I’d come I’d have to pass the side gate again. My only option was to take a roundabout route that would put a block of tenements between me and the foundry.

  Crossing the road behind the works kept me out of sight of the coppers at the van but potentially not the rear gatehouse, but if the elderly watchman had headed back in that direction, he would be occupied with Tommy. Once I was across, I headed up a side street between tenements, effectively in the opposite direction to where I wanted to go. I dropped the van’s ignition key down the first storm drain I could find, severing my connection with one object of police interest. Memorizing every right and left turn to try to keep my bearings, I navigated what I thought would be a route to take me all the way around the foundry. I came out on a main road and for a moment my sense of direction was confused. Then I realized that across the street was the edge of Ruchill Park. I decided to follow the fence until I found a pedestrian gate into the park, but I’d only gone a few yards when I saw two sets of headlights, one behind the other, come around the corner at the far end of the road. They were moving quickly and I guessed they were more police cars; at this time of night, with the roads to themselves, there was no need for them to sound their bells. With shenanigans at the foundry there was no way they wouldn’t stop to question a Canadian in overalls limping along in both the middle of the night and the middle of nowhere. I knew I had to get out of sight quick. The park fence to my right was too high for me to climb and I wouldn’t have enough time to get back across the street. Ignoring the pain in my ankle, I sprinted towards the approaching lights, hoping I would find some way into the park. I realized it would only be a matter of seconds before they saw me and I was short on credible explanations for my presence.

  I was just about to fall into the range of the first car’s headlights when the fence dropped to waist height, with a turntable gate for pedestrians to enter the park about fifteen yards ahead. I didn’t have enough time to reach the gate so I vaulted the fence and thrashed into the shrubbery beyond. I pushed down into the soil and hoped I hadn’t been spotted. I would have been pretty pissed if I’d gone through all of that for a couple of goods lorries, and was almost relieved when I turned just in time to see the vehicles pass: another police Wolseley, followed by a Black Maria, clearly on their way to the foundry.

  They must have found Tommy and called it in.

  I lay for a while, tangled and breathless in the bushes, gathering my composure and reflecting that Cary Grant had never had to put up with this kind of thing. I had planned to lose the overalls as soon as I could but was grateful for the extra protection against thorns and dirt they’d afforded me. It was entirely possible that the occupants of the first car had seen me, so I stayed very still until I was sure that the coppers weren’t going to pull up or turn around. Then, pushing through the bushes, I slipped into the darkness of the park. My ankle was throbbing but still able to take my weight: I seriously considered finding a park bench to spend the night, allowing my swelling ankle and the reawoken protesting from my ribs the chance to subside, but my instinct was still to get as far away as quickly as I could. Added to that, I was less likely to be spotted retrieving the Alpine at night than during the day. There were lamp standards along the park’s tree-lined footpaths, splashing pools of light on the pavement, so I made my way directly across the grass and darkness, hoping like hell I didn’t fall into some ornamental pond. As it happened, my trajectory brought me into a thick swathe of trees and bushes and I had to trace my way around them, first of all stripping off the overalls, bundling them up and stuffing them as deep as I could into the bushes, hoping they’d be as concealed in daylight as they seemed at night. Eventually I saw the street lights on the far side of the park.

  I came out onto the street and again it took me a while to get my bearings. When I did, I walked as briskly as my ankle allowed until I found myself again on Bilsland Drive. I turned up the dead-end street and was relieved to see no policemen waiting by the Alpine. Of course it would have made no sense for there to be any; but nor had it made any sense for there to be any waiting at the van Tommy had stolen.

  I got into the Alpine. Sitting in the warm leather had never felt so good. It had taken me fifty minutes to make a journey that should have only taken twenty-five.

  I was startled by Tommy’s voice. He said, just as he had in the bar that night: ‘I trust you, Lennox. You know that, don’t you?’ I turned, smiling, ready to congratulate him on fooling me again, the way he had on the way to the job when he had appeared out of nowhere. But I was alone in the car. Tommy was still dead. Still lying broken on an ironwork’s cobbles.

  I sat for a moment, partly again to gather myself but also because a light had gone on in one of the upper tenements. Once it went out I drove off, retracing my route from earlier and hoping not to earn any salutes on Maryhill Road.

  ‘I trust you, Lennox . . .’

  *

  As I drove, my thoughts were filled with Quiet Tommy Quaid. Most of all, I thought about one thing – something that nagged and worried at the frayed edges of my exhausted mind. I reflected on how Quiet Tommy had lived up to his name until the very end. How he had fallen from a six-storey rooftop to his death without making a single sound.

  No matter how I thought about it, Tommy Quaid’s quiet death made no sense to me at all.

>   Part Two

  1

  By the end of the week I began to breathe a little easier.

  I’d picked up a divorce case and was purposefully giving it my full-time attention: not that there was any real detective work involved. Divorce in Scotland was a pantomime involving staged, often fully clothed, mock-infidelities, bribed hotel staff and a mountain of statements. Scottish society at all levels remained censorious about divorce and I liked to think that I was doing a public service by helping the unhappily coupled de-couple, navigating them through a largely hostile legal system. The fact that I came out of it with better-lined pockets was all to the good.

  All of the divorce cases I landed were sent my way by two Glasgow legal firms, both of whom trusted me to be efficient and prompt in ‘gathering’ evidence. Everyone knew that I booked the rooms, arranged the times for the soon-to-be-ex-spouse and often professional co-respondent to lie fully clothed in the bed while two members of hotel staff, both of whom I also paid for their services, entered the room and witnessed the ‘infidelity’.

  It was all a very Scottish affair – a dry, emotionless, clinical business. Often it was kept dull to avoid the interest of the press, should the plaintiff or appellant be in the public eye, which they hardly ever were. My job was to make sure there was never anything titillating or salacious in the evidence: no talk of Roman orgies in Rutherglen or transvestism in Teuchar; no photographs of Mr A bent naked over the knee of Madame X and having his bottom spanked with a rolled-up copy of The People’s Friend.

  So I applied myself diligently to arranging the evidence in the case of Murray v Murray. I even turned down Archie’s offer to lend a hand – Archie, being a suitably dour-looking type and an ex-policeman without a stain on his record, made a particularly credible witness. My credentials and background did not stand up so well to scrutiny, so I had tended to avoid presenting evidence in court. But as this was a case where both parties were solely interested in parting company, my evidence would be unchallenged.

  The main reason I’d devoted myself to the divorce case was really because I was trying to put that night and what had happened to Tommy out of my head. It was a fool’s errand: Tommy would flash into my mind whenever I wasn’t otherwise mentally occupied and frequently when I was. I’d see him lying there, twisted and broken, his open eyes dulled. And all of the questions I struggled to ignore would crowd in on me whenever I tried to get to sleep: like the fact that Quiet Tommy Quaid was the best roof man in the business and could tightrope-walk his way with arrogant ease along the ridge-piece of a ten-storey-high roof apex; so why had he fallen over the edge of a flat-roofed building? I also found myself wondering why I had heard nothing from McNaught, who had been so very clear in his threats about failure to deliver. What trade secrets could a failing foundry have that would be worth stealing? And what brought the police to the parked van? A parked van I was supposed to be sitting in?

  And then there was the biggest puzzler of them all: why had Tommy not cried out, made any sound at all, as he fell to his death?

  I wanted to push them all out of my head. My main aim was to keep out of the whole thing. Whatever the whole-and-nothing-but about that night turned out to be, I was best left well out of it. There had been more than enough in my past, both before my time in Glasgow and during it, that was best kept beyond police scrutiny.

  There were plenty of people who knew I was friendly with Tommy; there were one or two who even knew of my occasional employment of his services. It was a connection I didn’t want made: if the coppers took that much of an interest, they could perhaps trace sightings of the stolen van back to where it had been parked and a Sunbeam Alpine convertible, a rare sight in Glasgow, had shown up. From there it would be only a small step away from a particular patrolling bobby remembering a particular salute. Sometimes I could be too flash for my own good.

  For most of that week, I half expected a visit from the police. My sleepless nights had been spent working out strategies, the best of which was straight denial: I couldn’t see them having any clear evidence of my presence, other than a car like mine being seen in the small hours in Maryhill. I’d brazen it out, I decided.

  But I never did get a visit.

  2

  I needed to establish a chronology: for someone to remember breaking the news to me about Quiet Tommy’s death. It was time for me to call into the Horsehead Bar.

  The Horsehead was just around the corner from my offices and I’d been a regular there for most of my time in Glasgow. I visited the Horsehead less often now, and never at a regular time. I’d changed my habits mainly because, in the past, people had known about my ‘double office hours’: if you were an ordinary Joe and had something legal, or at least semi-legal, you wanted me to do for you, you called into my regular office; if you were one of the Three Kings, worked for them, or you were otherwise feloniously employed and you needed something ‘looked into’, everyone knew where to find me. It had been a well-known fact that I’d be at the Horsehead Bar between seven and eight most nights. It was a routine I had very purposefully broken to send out the message that, like Doris Day’s, my virginity had been restored.

  It hadn’t been until after six months of being on the comparatively straight-and-narrow that I heard Jock Ferguson – who was one of the few coppers in the City of Glasgow Police I liked, and the only one I trusted – had turned up regularly at the Horsehead during my former consulting hours to make sure I wasn’t there. It was shortly after that that Ferguson had recommended me as security for the bank run. It was an act of faith I hadn’t forgotten.

  The Horsehead always bustled, but was bustling a little less despite it being a Friday night. There was a crew of three behind the bar: hard-faced, tough-looking types whose demeanour indicated they were no strangers to trouble and could handle anything anyone threw at them. And two of them were barmaids. The third was in charge: a huge bear of a man whose heavily tattooed forearms could have been the model for Popeye’s, had they not been too big.

  When he saw me arrive, Big Bob the barman greeted me warmly, as he always did. Bob seemed to like me – more importantly, he seemed to have some kind of respect for me – which I always took as a compliment. From Big Bob’s position behind a Glasgow bar, he would have seen the worst of people. The paradox of booze was that the cleverer it made you think you were, the more stupid you sounded. Alcohol was a mental laxative, opening emotional bowels and releasing a torrent of verbal shite and Bob would have heard it all, seen it all. I’d probably had more than the occasional bout of vocal incontinence myself, but it seemed to have done my standing with Bob no harm. And he had liked and respected Quiet Tommy Quaid as well; maybe even more. But there again, I had seen Quiet Tommy tie one on more than a few times, and the booze never seemed to have any visible effect. I had always put it down to his equanimity being thoroughgoing, but of late I had begun to wonder if it was simply that he kept everything locked up tight. I’d always kept a ‘there’s less to me than meets the eye’ thing going, particularly around coppers; maybe Quiet Tommy had outmastered me at it, and had depths and dimensions and secrets that no one ever got to see. The closest had been, I realized, the passing shadow in his expression the night after I’d been jumped.

  My visit to the Horsehead had three specific purposes: it would establish a credible chronology for me, would allow me to gauge how much suspicion there was about Tommy’s death, and whether anyone had made a link between me and the thief’s demise. Bob, more than most people, knew that Tommy and I had been friends.

  Big Bob’s smile faded and he asked me if I knew about Quiet Tommy. I feigned ignorance and he broke the news to me. And with it my credible chronology was established: any longer than a week after the fact and I would struggle to claim I didn’t know what had happened to Tommy, but would have to explain how I found out. Now I could say I’d heard about it six days later from Big Bob at the Horsehead. All perfectly credible.

  ‘You an’ Quiet Tommy got on, didn’t you?�
� Big Bob asked.

  ‘Sure. I really liked Tommy. I guess everyone did . . .’ I said. ‘It’s terrible news.’

  Big Bob poured me a Canadian Club on the house and I realized I hadn’t really been feigning. There had been something about discussing Tommy’s death with another person for the first time that shifted it from a bad dream into reality, and the shock of the transition must have shown in my face.

  ‘Anybody know what happened to him?’ I asked.

  Big Bob shrugged. ‘Slipped an’ fell, the poor bastard. After a’ them years clambering about on roofs in the dark, it was bound to happen, I suppose. What the fuck he was doing breaking into the Saracen Foundry is beyond me. It’s a real shame, though. You’d struggle to find anybody to say a bad word about Tommy Quaid.’

  ‘You would that . . .’ I said gloomily as Bob excused himself to serve a customer further down the long sweep of the curving bar.

  I drank another three whiskies before saying goodnight to Bob. There had been no more discussion of Tommy and I had accomplished my mission.

  There was another fine drizzle hanging in the limp, tepid Glasgow air when I came out of the Horsehead. This time I valued my security over my tailoring and, as I made my way back to my car, I checked every doorway and every corner with a vigilance that would have made John Wayne leading a wagon train of virgins, whiskey and guns through Apache country look relaxed. There were no lurking ambushers.

  But that had been another question that came back to haunt me during that week: I still could not work out why the two amateur heavies had jumped me that night outside the bar in the West End. Everywhere I went, just like when I came out of the Horsehead, I still kept an eye out for them, or any other likelies, as I went about my business. Because I had been on the clinically paranoid side of watchful, by the middle of the following week I could be sure that no one was watching me, tailing me or otherwise showing undue interest in my movements.