‘Me? Fuck no. I thought you…’
Murphy looked at me blankly for a moment. ‘If we had done this and you was looking at it you would be lying next to him.’ I spent a moment considering my promising career while I looked down at the mortal remains of Tam McGahern’s erstwhile faithful retainer, Bobby. Someone had adjusted his DA hairstyle with a heavy object. His head was caved in on one side and a lot of what should have been inside was now outside his skull. I tried to dismiss the image of a five-pound barrel-head lead mallet from my mind. Hammer Murphy had no reason to lie to me.
‘Then who?’ I asked.
‘Well, you gave him a hiding. And one of his muckers two hidings.’
‘We had a disagreement. We fell out over who should succeed Mr Churchill. He said Rab Butler and I’m a Tony Eden man.’ The gag didn’t take so I moved quickly on. ‘Bobby and his chums didn’t tell me everything I needed to know about McGahern. Added to which they had a little party planned for me. I spoiled their surprise. Anyway, I also gave Bobby here a couple of quid. He was pathetic, in a way. A wanker playing at big shot.’
‘Could it have been that cunt Sneddon?’ Murphy said it as if it was a double-barrelled name. The Wilmington-Smythes and the Cunt-Sneddons.
‘No. Sneddon doesn’t even know about Bobby. If I had wanted Sneddon to get involved he would have sent Twinkletoes McBride to ease the flow of information. But that would have been about the extent of it. How did you come into possession of the body?’
‘Sneddon, Cohen and me are splitting up McGahern’s bars between us. Like always I got shafted. Sneddon got the Arabian Bar, the kyke got the Imperial and I get left with the fuckin’ Highlander.’
‘Good little earner, the Highlander. From what I saw,’ I said conversationally, as if we were discussing the comparative merits of models of car and there wasn’t the stink of stale blood and spilt brain matter from the Teddy Boy corpse on the floor.
‘Anyway,’ continued Murphy. ‘This piece of shite was lying upstairs from the bar.’
‘In the same flat that McGahern was killed in?’
Murphy nodded. ‘We didn’t want the polis finding out. So chummy here is going to the mincer.’
So it is true, I thought. Murphy owned a meat processing plant in Rutherglen, not far from where Tam McGahern had his garage. The rumour had always been that that was where Murphy disposed of any embarrassing reminders of business deals gone wrong. And not just his. He was supposed to have a profitable sideline in processing dead meat for Jonny Cohen and Willie Sneddon. I had become particular about where I bought my Scotch pies.
‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘He had nothing to give. He knew nothing. Why kill him?’
Murphy shrugged. ‘Wee shites like him get killed all the time. By other wee shites like him. You sure you know nothin’ about this?’
‘Nothing. I didn’t expect to see him again.’
‘You won’t now.’ Murphy nodded and the goon covered up Bobby’s face. ‘You wanted to talk to me about Tam McGahern’s killing. He had it coming. He had it coming from me. But I didn’t do it or order it. It’s like this…’ He jabbed Bobby through the blanket with the toe of his handmade oxblood. ‘All the usual suspects in the clear. There was one thing I wanted to tell you about McGahern. Something that only came up this week.’
‘Oh?’
‘I have a share in a travel agent. A silent partner, you could say.’
I’ll bet, I thought.
‘I’m not connected officially with the business,’ Murphy continued, ‘so McGahern wouldn’t have known I would find out.’
‘Find out what?’
‘Tam McGahern made three trips inside two months. To the same place. Amsterdam. Now what would a wee gobshite like McGahern be doing in fucking Holland?’
‘Tulip smuggling?’ I smiled. Then I stopped. Murphy’s expression suggested he was considering stopping me smiling permanently. ‘I don’t know. You any idea?’
‘None. But it’s new gen and I thought it might be useful to you.’ He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. ‘I’ve got the exact dates here. To and from Holland. No hotel bookings though.’
‘Thanks.’ I looked at the sheet and pocketed it. ‘I needed something new to go on.’
Murphy’s taxi took me back to Argyle Street. No goons. I sat in the back as it bumped its way back into the city centre and thought about what I had got. Why had McGahern made so many trips to Holland? It was only once I was in the taxi that I remembered what Bobby had said about McGahern meeting with a foreign type at the Central Hotel. Maybe the big fat guy had been a Dutchman. After the taxi dropped me off I walked back to my office and ’phoned Willie Sneddon. He groaned when I told him about Holland and asked if I needed more money to travel there.
‘I’ve got enough to keep me going for now,’ I said. ‘It could be nothing to do with him being killed. I’ll check things out this end before I start booking boat tickets.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Not at the moment.’ Sneddon was paying the bill, but I wasn’t going to tell him about Bobby’s new hair parting. There are some things that it’s better not to have seen. I considered telling him about what Wilma had said about it being Frankie that night above the Highlander, but still held back. ‘I’m not being funny, but you are more connected to the kind of business McGahern was involved in. What would Amsterdam mean to you from a business viewpoint?’
‘Dunno. Diamonds, I suppose. But McGahern wasn’t in that kind of league. Even I would need to get expert help if I got into that. Ask Cohen.’
I said I would and hung up. I tried to get John Andrews on the ’phone again but was given the same brush-off. I considered posting the photographs to him, but there was no guarantee his wife wouldn’t open the envelope. I thought about sending them marked ‘private and confidential’ to him at his office, but all it would take would be a careless or pushy secretary and there’d be all kinds of shit to contend with. Dirty pictures of your wife in a plain brown envelope don’t do much for your standing in the business community.
Let it go, Lennox.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I took Elsie, the nurse who had so solicitously cared for my clobbered noggin, out to the Trocadero. I usually avoided Glasgow’s dance halls. They did big business: these were the mating grounds of the city’s working class. And because Glasgow was a resolutely working-class city, the dance halls were filled to bursting every Friday and Saturday night.
My dislike of the dance halls stemmed from the fact that despite the glitz and the sham Hollywood glamour, they had the charm of municipal slaughterhouses. And they frequently became just that. The bouncers often outnumbered the bar staff and nudging someone and spilling their drink by accident could cost you an eye.
But Elsie, my pretty little nurse, was ‘keen on the dancing’, so our fourth date was to the Troc. I also suspected that she took comfort in a crowd that would keep my dishonourable intentions at bay.
We squeezed through the doors at eight thirty and I was hit immediately by the clammy heat of a thousand bodies condensing against anything from outside. The band was working its hardest to balance volume and tunefulness as it bashed its way through a version of the Ray Martin Orchestra hit ‘Blue Tango’. We shouldered a path through the throng and I left Elsie standing on the edge of the dance floor while I got us some drinks. I spotted a table with two free seats and when I came back I steered her towards it. She fell into conversation, as Glaswegians tend to do with any stranger, with the three girls already seated at the table. We danced and drank the whole evening, the alcohol taking no effect in the hothouse of the dancehall.
Shortly after ten the density of the crowd in the Troc intensified as a wave of latecomers poured in, thrown out of pubs and onto the street by Scotland’s Presbyterian licensing laws. A group of boys came in, no older than nineteen, with joyously murderous hate burning in their eyes. There was a depressing predictability about what would happen next and my instincts told me it was time Elsie and I should be going.