The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5 Page 9

  When I was finished, she smiled and suggested she could kiss it all better, but either her aim or her knowledge of anatomy was seriously off, because it wasn’t my ribs her lips made contact with. I over-exerted again.

  When Irene was leaving, I noticed that, as she tucked her blouse into the waist of her grey check pencil skirt, she went over to the window and looked down, scanning the car park: something she had done a couple of times since she’d arrived.

  ‘Is everything okay?’ I asked.

  She turned and looked at me blankly for a moment, as if she hadn’t understood me, then shook her head. ‘Aye . . . everything’s fine. Why wouldn’t it be?’

  ‘You seem jumpy.’

  ‘It’s just George. He’s been funny lately.’

  ‘You said that before. But you said you didn’t think he was on to us.’

  ‘Aye . . .’ She turned from the window. ‘It’s just that the other day I went shopping. He was supposed to be at work, but he was following me.’

  ‘Following you? You sure? I mean, you sure it was definitely him?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘And did he know you spotted him?’

  ‘I don’t think so. But I’ve been watching my back since.’

  ‘And you haven’t seen him following you again?’

  ‘No. But it’s not just that . . . he’s been so moody recently. Snappy round the kids; almost sulky with me. I think he suspects I’ve been seeing someone, but he cannae prove it, even to himself.’

  I lit cigarettes for us both. I didn’t say it, but Irene’s marital backstory was a complication I could do without – a potentially nuisancesome third dimension to our hitherto strictly two-dimensional relationship. I maybe didn’t say it, but I guess my expression shouted it: Irene finished her cigarette and left.

  6

  The next day was the day for the bank run. The ten-thirty sun was suddenly eclipsed and the office fell into shadow. Twinkletoes McBride – whose build could indeed best have been described as planetary – had come into the office and was standing by the window, blocking out the light.

  Twinkletoes was dressed smartly, as he habitually was. He wore a dark blue serge Burton’s suit that I guessed had been made to measure – although he must have paid for cloth by the acre rather than the yard – and a copy of the Readers’ Digest jutted from his jacket pocket. Twinkletoes read the Readers’ Digest specifically for its ‘Improve your Wordpower’ section, committed as he was to learning every day a new word to mispronounce.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Lennox,’ he said amiably, but in a seismic baritone that probably caused china in Pollockshields to rattle on its shelves.

  ‘How’s it going, Twinkle?’

  ‘I am in the very-table pink, Mr L. And you?’ Twinkletoes was also courteous to a fault. I’d known him for years: long enough to know the queasy reason for his nickname. Before I’d offered him a job doing the security for wages and bank runs – his first legal employment ‘with insurance stamp and everything’, as he had gratefully pointed out – Twinkletoes had worked for Willie Sneddon, one of the Three Kings.

  Unlike the other two Kings, Sneddon had the vision to see beyond his criminal activities. With Sneddon’s gradual legitimization, Twinkletoes had become largely surplus to requirements.

  But before Sneddon had yielded to legitimization and the appeal of Rotary Club and the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce memberships, he had employed Twinkle in what could best be described as something between a pedicurist and a public relations role. Twinkletoes had been tasked with dealing with anyone who had earned Sneddon’s ire: those who’d been ill-advised enough to set up in competition to the crime boss, defaulters on debts, and anyone in the Sneddon empire who was thought to have a too talkative nature when in the company of the boys in blue.

  Twinkletoes’s nickname (or sore-brick-ett as he would solemnly intone) had been inspired by his method of removing his victims’ shoes and socks and reciting ‘This Little Piggy’ as he set to work on their toes with a pair of boltcutters. It may not have seemed the most auspicious work history, but if there was one thing I could say with confidence about Twinkletoes, it was that he possessed an impeccable work ethic. In the past Twinkle may have been a merciless, inconceivably violent gangland torturer and thug, but at least he had been a diligently merciless, inconceivably violent gangland torturer and thug. And courteous.

  And I knew I could rely on him.

  The funny thing was it became very clear that Twinkletoes’s heart hadn’t really been that much in his previous work and I had been surprised by how grateful he had been when I had offered him a way out. As I had gotten to know him better, I found out that the thug with violence sewn into his fabric was also a devoted family man with two young kids he doted on. On the few occasions I’d been to his home, it had been the strangest thing to watch him with his children: in their presence, he became a child himself – a huge, lumbering, gentle infant, playful yet always protective. It was a sight that, for some reason, filled me with hope.

  In our different ways, we were both committed to getting beyond the reach of the Three Kings. It had to be said that Sneddon, however, had not fully emerged from the shadows, and I knew better than to ask Twinkle what he got up to on his days off.

  Archie ran through the usual procedures again for the bank run, but this time he made sure Twinkletoes got everything well and truly into his head. I generally left Archie and Twinkletoes to handle the bank transfers. Twinkletoes’s sheer physical bulk was enough both to the bank and to deter any would-be robbers, but I’d hired him for more than that: Twinkle was known – specifically known – to have been connected to Sneddon’s outfit, and that meant that the usual heist crews would think twice before having a go for fear of bringing the wrath of one or all of the Three Kings down on them. We hadn’t had as much as a sideways glance since we’d been doing the run, but the bank had picked up the business of another shipyard, meaning our payload had suddenly become that bit more attractive, and that bit more worth the risk. So this week, I joined the posse.

  At Archie’s insistence, we had invested in a reasonably new Bedford van. Previously, we had hired a van each week for the run, but Archie put forward the case that wages runs had become the most lucrative part of our business and it would be cheaper in the long run to buy rather than keep hiring vans. It also allowed us to reinforce the doors, locks and cargo cabin of the van. I’d gone along with it, despite my concern that we would be using the same van all the time: hiring vans meant we could change them each week to further camouflage our activity.

  Archie had brought the van in with him: it was kept at his house and he used it for other work when his antique Austin let him down, which it frequently did. There had been talk about Twinkletoes keeping it between jobs, but one thing I had found out about the Gallowgate giant was that he was really rather snobby about the cars he drove, or more particularly those seen parked on the street outside his tenement flat.

  *

  We arrived at the bank bang on time. Both Archie and Twinkletoes were armed with coppers’ truncheons: fifteen inches of iron-hard lignum vitae that, strictly speaking, it was illegal for us to carry, but to which the police turned a blind eye. It was more for show and to reassure the client: most bank robbers came armed with sawn-offs. Personally, I carried a concealed, lead-filled leather sap – a slim blackjack that sat nicely in my inside pocket without ruining the line of my suit.

  We made the pick-up in the usual way. Twinkletoes, bless him, had a face that any self-respecting Neanderthal would have considered primitive. It was all brow and busted nose and over the years the other features had been jumbled about by repeated contact with fists, bottles and Christ knows what else. His bag-of-spanners face, combined with his intimidating physical presence, made him the ideal deterrent: so while Archie and I pass-the-parcelled the canvas cash bags into the van from the bank’s rear door, Twinkle stood guard, baton in meaty fist, watching the street and scowling passers-by over to the oth
er side of the street. I could have sworn I even saw a couple of birds change flight path too.

  Once we were loaded up, Twinkle climbed into the back of the van with the cash, hunching his massive shoulders and sitting stooped on the bench, his truncheon braced on his knees. I sat in the front and Archie drove.

  As a trio, the difference in backgrounds was odd, funny almost. And as we had filled up the van with the heavy canvas-and-leather cash bags, I caught Archie, the ex-policeman, eyeing me and Twinkle in a way that suggested he sometimes worried that our not-too-distant pasts, plus the temptation of several thousand pounds in portable cash, might awaken the recidivists in us.

  I think that the extra cash made us all a little jumpy – even poacher-turned-gamekeeper Twinkletoes had seemed edgy – and I was relieved when we made our first delivery of the day. My reasoning was that if anyone knew about our newly bountiful cargo, they would have hit us when we’d had a full load.

  There was a strange Gothic beauty to the working Clyde – a beauty I daresay completely eluded the poor schmucks working in its yards and worksheds. But it was there all the same and I reflected on it as we headed out of the first shipyard. A forest of latticed iron cranes, interlaced with a web of cables and lines, bristled along the waterfront and pontoons, rising over and huddling around the dark hulks of forming ships, the ale-dark, oil-sleeked waters of the Clyde beyond. They looked like impossible, giant insects at work weaving and cocooning their offspring.

  Twinkle banged on the panel that divided the cargo and driver’s cabins, and I slid open the door of the face-sized hatch between them – or it would have been face-sized if it had been anyone other than Twinkletoes on the other side.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t mean to cause any undue trepp-er-day-shun, Mr Lennox, but there’s a blue works van behind us. It could be followin’ us . . . I think it was there before we made the first drop-off.’

  I looked to Archie, who was already checking his side-view mirror. ‘I see him. Driver and front passenger. There could be others in the back but I can’t see. I’ll make a couple of unscheduled turns and see what he does.’

  ‘You keep an eye on them too,’ I said to Twinkle and left the panel open.

  We were in the heart of the shipyards, the road flanked on one side by the river with its quays and cranes and on the other by soot-blackened worksheds. This was no residential area and Archie struggled to find a side street to deviate from his route. There were, however, entrance gates to the various factories and yards. I hoped that our chums were innocent workers and would turn off into one of them.

  ‘They still there?’ I asked through the hatch.

  ‘Aye,’ rumbled Twinkletoes. ‘They’re still there.’

  Ahead of us, to our right, there was a break in the industrial architecture: a wasteground square of rubble and scrub grass with twisted fingers of rusted metal pointing to the sky, probably in accusation at the German pilot who’d cleared the site with a bomb more than a decade before.

  I indicated the section with a jut of my chin. ‘If our chums behind are after our cash, that’s where they’ll do it. We’ll be out of sight for fifty yards.’ I turned to the hatch. ‘Twinkle, get ready to dance.’

  Archie suddenly swung to the right and into the entrance to one of the yards. It had a gatehouse manned by a uniformed security man. Archie pulled up at the gatehouse and jumped out of the van. I followed suit, first telling Twinkle to stay put with the doors locked.

  Archie and I watched the blue van make its way along past the stretch of waste ground. By the time we were out of our Bedford, it was too late to get any kind of look at the driver. The blue van didn’t slow down or show any sign of stopping. There was no hint that they had any interest in us whatsoever. Archie and I watched until it was out of sight. The security man, a tall, heavy man of about sixty, came over to us.

  ‘What d’you think you are doing?’ he lilted with a Highland accent. ‘You can’t be blocking the entrance like that – Oh, it’s you, Archie.’ He pronounced it ‘Erchie’. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Archie obviously recognized the older man as a former colleague. The City of Glasgow Police compulsorily retired all its officers at age fifty-five; the pension was good, but most retirees ended up doing security work. Archie explained about the wages run and the van, and the security man went back to his gatehouse, picking up the 'phone. After a while he came back out and spoke to Archie.

  ‘I telephoned along to the next gatehouse – remember Harry MacTavish? He’s on the gate at the Merchiston yard now. He said he did see a blue van pass his gatehouse chust now but it drove on westwards. Could you not have been mistaken, do you think? I could telephone the station and get a car down.’

  Archie didn’t answer for a moment, still watching the road. He was bareheaded and his bald scalp domed pale in the daylight. After a moment he said, ‘No need, thanks, Geordie.’ When the watchman returned to his gatehouse, Archie turned to me. ‘What do you think?’

  I shrugged. ‘Just workmen going into one of the yards, probably.’

  We got back into the driver’s cabin, ‘It’s all right, Twinkle,’ I said through the hatch. ‘False alarm.’

  We were a couple of minutes late for the wages drop-off at the second shipyard. It was enough to have riled the pay-office manager – not that he was an undue stickler for punctuality, but that each wages office had strict instructions to 'phone the police if we were more than five minutes behind schedule.

  The third drop was a shipyard further down the Clyde, out towards Dumbarton. As we drove, I noticed Archie checking the side mirrors.

  ‘See anything?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘How about you, Twinkle?’ I asked through the hatch.

  ‘All clear, Mr L,’ he replied in his usual rumble and I could have sworn the metal of the van vibrated.

  We reached the shipyard. I was still puzzled as to why I felt so relieved. It had happened before: some innocent motorist had just happened to follow the same route, or perhaps had lacked the confidence to overtake the slower-moving van. But there had been something different about that day. Something different about the feeling I’d got.

  We made the drop and headed out the main gates and back towards the city. It was almost as if I could physically feel the lightening of our burden with the last of the cash delivered.

  ‘Mr Lennox . . .’ Twinkletoes’s baritone was infused with a warning.

  ‘It’s okay, Twinkle,’ I said, looking in the wing mirror at the blue van following us. ‘I see him . . .’

  7

  We were back into the outskirts of Govan, the Clyde’s dark industry still pushing sooty fingers through where people lived, repair sheds now grudgingly sharing the landscape with workers’ tenements. It was the same shit deal as Possilpark – drone hives huddled close to their place of toil; lives subordinated to industry’s need.

  Not that I was paying much attention to the scenery: I was too preoccupied with the blue van following us. I could see Archie watching in his wing mirror too.

  ‘What do you think his game is?’ he asked. ‘He was tailing us earlier and must know we’ve offloaded the cash.’

  ‘Maybe we’ve got the dumbest armed robbers in Glasgow.’

  ‘Or maybe they’re casing us out – checking out our routine so they can plan when and where to hit us on a future run.’

  ‘Could be.’ I leaned into the hatch again. ‘Twinkle, can you see if you can get the registration number?’

  ‘Sure thing, Mr L.’ Twinkletoes’s voice rumbled in the cargo cabin.

  ‘What do we do?’ asked Archie. ‘I could detour a little again and see if they stick with us.’

  ‘Do it. See if you can lead them into somewhere they can’t pass us.’

  ‘You thinking of having it out with them?’ Archie’s tone suggested he thought it was a bad idea bordering on idiotic.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘And what if they’ve come
tooled up?’

  ‘Then we put our hands up and let them rob an empty van . . . Twinkle, you set?’

  ‘Ready when you are, Mr Lennox . . .’

  ‘As soon as we stop, get out of the van.’

  ‘I thought I was to stay in here, no matters what,’ he rumbled doubtfully.

  I sighed. ‘No, Twinkle, that’s only when there’s cash in the van with you. It’s empty now.’

  ‘Righty-oh, Mr L. My faw-pass.’

  ‘If our chums come after us, be ready to get handy. But if they’ve got guns, don’t do anything. There’s nothing for them to take.’

  I checked the mirror again. It was still there, trying to skulk behind the scant cover of the car it had allowed to get between us.

  Archie was scanning the soot-dark topography of tenement and cobble with his watery, Alastair Sim eyes. ‘I used to patrol here when I was in uniform,’ he said casually, as if being a beat bobby in Govan didn’t make being a Christian sharing the Colosseum with lions sound cosy. ‘There’s a street up ahead I can turn into. One way in, one way out.’

  I reached into some Savile Row and pulled out the blackjack. I rested my other hand on the door handle. ‘Okay.’

  Just as he’d done at the factory gates, Archie didn’t slow down or indicate we were turning and the tyres squealed in protest as we swung into the alley. The van tilted as it turned and for a moment I worried about Twinkletoes’s bulk shifting too suddenly and toppling us over. Archie slammed on the brakes and the Bedford slipped wetly on greasy cobbles. I was out before the van stopped moving. By the time I got around to the back, Twinkletoes had burst out of the rear door. The overhang of his brow had lowered even more over his eyes and he bared his teeth in a grimace. Again the police-issue truncheon looked small in his fist. Not for the first time, I was glad we were on the same side.