Lillian Andrews opened the door with the blank expression of someone expecting to see a postman on the threshold. She was wearing a pastel-blue sweater with a double row of pearls tight at her throat, dark-blue Capri pants and low-heeled mules. It was a reasonably conservative outfit, but she looked sexier in it than most women would dressed only in French lingerie. There was the tiniest flicker of recognition in her eyes, then it was swept instantly away. She was good. Very good.
‘Yes?’ she asked uninterestedly. For a moment she nearly convinced me that we had never before encountered each other.
‘Hello again, Mrs Andrews. I’m glad to say that the smog seems to have lifted.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said and started to close the door. ‘I don’t buy anything from door-to-door salesmen.’
I got my foot jammed in the door just in time and leaned my shoulder into it so hard that she nearly fell over backwards. We stood just inside the threshold and her dark eyes burned with hate.
‘Get out! Get out now!’
‘I need to talk to you, Mrs Andrews.’
‘What about?’ She backed towards the hallstand and picked up the receiver of the ivory-coloured telephone. ‘If you don’t get out, then I’m ’phoning the police.’
‘You could do that,’ I said, taking off my hat. ‘But there again, the police know me. They know that the information I give them is pretty accurate.’ I smiled, thinking of the ruddy-cheeked farmer’s boy who had worked hard to make sure it was. ‘So I’m sure they will be interested in why your husband is running so scared and why you ambushed me in the fog the other night.’
‘You know my husband?’ She put the ’phone down.
‘You didn’t know that the other night, did you? I know all about your little disappearance and reappearance act. What I want to know is why you bushwhacked me and who it was that parted my hair for me.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never seen you before in my life.’
‘Don’t mess me about, Lillian.’ I closed the door behind me. ‘There’s something about this whole set up that stinks. If you don’t tell me what it’s all about maybe I should talk to your husband.’
She laughed. ‘Go right ahead.’ No bluff.
I grabbed her wrist and dragged her into the living room. I suppose in Bearsden they called it a lounge. It was furnished in Contemporary style: sofa and armchairs slung so low that you needed a lift to get out of them; low-level light-wood coffee table; geometric wrought-iron and hardwood room divider; the small grey eye of a brand-new television set watching us from the corner. I threw her down onto one of the chairs. For a suburban housewife she didn’t seem particularly perturbed by the rough stuff. She eyed me with the same hate in her dark eyes. Not fear. Hate.
‘Listen, Lillian, you can pretend all you like, but we both know it was you with your hand round my dick immediately before the lights went out. All you were interested in was to find out if it was my hard-on following you or whether I had another reason for watching you. Well, I did. A professional reason which I’m not going to share with you. But what started out as professional curiosity became very personal very quickly after your goon tried to fracture my skull.’ I sat down opposite her and dropped my hat onto the sofa next to me. ‘So, what’s the story?’
She stared hard at me but the hate was dissipating. She gave a cynical laugh as if something had just fallen into place for her.
‘You’re working for John, aren’t you? He’s been paying you to snoop on me, hasn’t he?’
I didn’t say anything but she nodded to herself.
‘That’s what I thought. Okay, I made a mistake. I got involved with someone. Someone who was bad for me. I went away with him. I was going to leave John. But then I saw sense and came home. My… friend… well, he didn’t accept that I was going back to John and he threatened to make all kinds of trouble for me. So I agreed to meet him the other night. To tell him it was all over. I told him that someone was following me. That’s why he clobbered you. I’m sorry. But he’s crazy that way. That was one of the reasons I broke it off with him.’
‘Really? I have to say that he’s the most broad-minded jealous lover I’ve ever come across. I mean, letting you flash your tits at me and put your tongue halfway down my throat.’
She took a cigarette from a packet on the coffee table and lit it with a marble table-lighter. She tapped the packet with slim crimson-tipped fingers.
‘You don’t understand. Things like that can get complicated. Sex is complicated. When I’m with him I become another person.’
‘And this is all over?’ I asked.
‘Completely.’
‘Then you won’t mind giving me chummy’s address. I’d like to pay him a call. Balance things up a little.’
Her eyes went hard again. ‘No. I won’t. I want all of this in the past. He’s a violent and dangerous man. As you already know. Please, leave it alone.’
‘His name?’
She walked over to a sideboard and opened a drawer. She took ten five-pound notes from a wallet and held them out at arm’s length towards me. ‘Take it.’
‘Your husband has already paid me.’
‘Now I’m paying you. To forget all about this. I’m back with my husband and he’s none the wiser. I feel bad about what happened the other night. Please take this. Consider it compensation.’
I took the money and pocketed it. Like she said: compensation.
I stood up and put my hat on. She showed me to the door.
‘Are we agreed that this whole unfortunate episode is over, Mr Lennox?’
‘Agreed. Just one last thing… does the name Margot Taylor mean anything to you?’
She pursed her full lips thoughtfully. ‘No, nothing. Why?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Someone who looks a little like you. I just thought you might be related.’
She watched me from the door until I turned out of the driveway. I sat in my car for a while and contemplated the windscreen. There were three things that were very clear to me. The first was that if the bribe hadn’t worked then Lillian Andrews would have fucked me to keep me out of her business. Probably on top of the cash. Second, the name Margot Taylor, coming out of the blue, had sparked a hastily concealed reaction.
And the third thing was that all of my original suspicions about her were true. She had called me Mr Lennox.
I hadn’t told her my name.
CHAPTER TEN
I woke up in the middle of the night, my pulse pounding in my ears. The nightmare drifted away before I could capture it, but it had had something to do with a young, frightened face screaming at me. Begging me. In German.
I smoked a cigarette in the dark, its glow painting the walls deep red when I drew on it, then fading again. For some reason I started to think about home. It was my little joke whenever anyone asked me where I was from. My accent had got a little muddled over the years and some people here thought I was American, others that I was English or even Irish. When pushed, which I rarely was, I would say I came from Rothesay and, although puzzled, people generally accepted it. It was actually the truth, but the Rothesay I meant was not the one they thought of: the dismal tourist escape for Glaswegians on the Scottish Isle of Bute. My Rothesay was another. Far distant, in more ways than one: an ocean and a wartime away.
So I lay smoking in the dark thinking about Rothesay and Saint John. About bike rides and canoe trips along the Kennebecasis River. About my exclusive education at the Collegiate School. About the big turn-of-the-century house I grew up in that always smelled of rich, aged wood. About the kid with big ideas and bigger ideals who had died in Europe. A casualty of war.
I hadn’t been the only casualty. As I lay in the dark feeling sorry for myself I heard the soft, muffled sound of a woman sobbing. From Mrs White’s flat.
The morning sun again struggled to make its presence felt through the grey plumes of mill and factory smoke that drifted over the city. I took the car down to Newton Mearns, to the south of Glasgow. The formation of the state of Israel was still big in people’s minds and the latest joke was to refer to Newton Mearns, because of its largely Jewish population, as Tel-Aviv on the Clyde. It took more than a few concentration camps to kill the good old anti-Semitic gag. But, to be fair, one of the things that I liked about Glasgow was the openness and friendliness of Glaswegians. Glasgow was a hard and dark and violent place, and it was always difficult to reconcile this with the warmth of its people. Glasgow was probably the least anti-Semitic city in Europe. But less than ten years after the liberation of the camps, that was a very relative statement.