‘There’s going to be trouble,’ I said when she protested. I was right. We had just made it to the door when we heard the familiar sounds of a gang fight breaking out.
I parked around the corner from the hospital. Glasgow was again wreathed in fog, not as thick as the night I’d encountered Lillian Andrews, but thick enough to give us the feeling of solitude.
After some kissing and fumbling Elsie pushed me away from her.
‘That’s quite enough of that, Mr Lennox.’ She smiled with coquettish reproachfulness but there was a hint of nervousness in her voice.
‘What’s the matter, Elsie? Don’t you like me?’
‘I think you’re very nice.’ She regarded me in the half dark of the car appraisingly. ‘In fact you’re very handsome.’
‘This doesn’t bother you?’ I laid my hand on my left cheek.
‘No. Not at all. The scars aren’t that bad and they make you look rugged. How did you get them?’
‘I turned the other cheek. Unfortunately I turned it to a German grenade. Actually the scars are from the surgeon patching me up.’
Elsie frowned and traced the small web of thin white scars with her fingertips. I moved in on her again and she pulled back. ‘I need to get back…’
We got out and I walked her back to the nurses’ home.
‘I found out what you were looking for,’ she said as we walked. ‘I couldn’t find out everything, but I spoke to a friend who works in Hairmyres. They specialize in TB there.’
‘What did you find out?’
‘Wilma Marshall was taken by the police to Hairmyres Hospital. They had to collapse a lung and they put her on a course of that new TB drug, streptomycin. She had a bad reaction to it so they gave her nicotine to counteract the side effects. She was in Hairmyres for two weeks and then transferred to the sanatorium in Perthshire. That’s all I could find out. My friend wasn’t happy about giving the information. You said she’s your cousin?’ There was a hint of suspicion clouding Elsie’s pretty heart-shaped face.
I nodded. ‘My aunt is very worried about her.’
We came close to the nurses’ home. I pulled Elsie gently into the mouth of an alley and out of the fog-wreathed pool of light from the street lamp. We kissed and then she protested as I hoisted her skirt up. She didn’t protest enough. Afterwards, when we stepped back out of the alley mouth, she cried a little and I had to comfort her. She made me promise to see her again and I said I would meet her the following weekend. A promise. It was a lie and we both knew it.
As I walked back to where I’d left my car, the heavy feeling in my chest again warned that the fog was going to congeal into a suffocating smog. I had to drive back along Great Western Road at little more than walking pace, guiding myself by following the ribbon of kerb along the roadside. Fiona White was still up when I arrived home and came to the door.
‘Pleasant evening, Mr Lennox?’ The air tinted with a hint of sherry when she spoke. The extent of a Saturday night’s recreation for a middle-class war widow in Glasgow.
‘It was fine, Mrs White. You?’
Her small smile bordered on a sneer. She reached into the hall and handed me an envelope. ‘A gentleman delivered this for you this afternoon.’
‘Did he leave a message?’
‘No. Goodnight, Mr Lennox.’
I threw the envelope down onto my bed unopened, took off my tie and hung up my jacket. I switched the radio on, lit a cigarette and looked out through the window at the street. The smog had closed its grip even tighter on the city. I thought of little Elsie’s tear-stained face. There was a time when I would not have used a woman like that. When I would have thought of a man like me as a total shit. There was a time when I would not have done a lot of the things I did now.
I kept my radio permanently tuned into the BBC Overseas Service, the station created to persuade Canadians like me, as well as Australians and New Zealanders, that it was a jolly good idea to stay part of the British Empire. Listening to the Overseas Service had become a habit. Maybe it was because, ironically, it made me feel like I was back in New Brunswick. I listened to the news. Malenkov had succeeded Stalin as Soviet premier. Two members of the Kenyan Home Guard had been murdered in a Mau Mau guerrilla raid. Continued stalemate at Kaesong. More clashes between Arabs and Israelis. Hunt and Hillary had set up base camp in the foothills of Everest. Preparations continuing for the June coronation.
I opened the envelope Fiona White had given me. The note said simply: Worth looking at. There was a Chubb key with a tag bearing an address in Milngavie. I turned the envelope upside down and shook it: there was nothing else in it. Nothing to indicate who had sent it. My guess was that it had come from Willie Sneddon, but he hadn’t mentioned it when I had spoken to him on the ’phone earlier. Maybe it was from someone else who didn’t want to advertise their involvement, should the boys in blue visit me again and find it. I decided I would ’phone Sneddon and ask what it was all about. In the meantime, I had another property to find.
The next day I walked into Byres Road with the list of addresses I had gleaned from my calls to solicitors and estate agents. One was on Byres Road, the others on the streets that ran off it. All densely packed terraces of smaller Victorian townhouses, their faces pushed hard onto the street with only a token skirt of garden to the front. All red sandstone turned soot-black. Some of the houses had been subdivided into flats, the others still intact. Glasgow University was just around the corner and many of the flats and houses were occupied by middle-income academics.
I looked at each property from the outside first. None looked like former brothels. Or maybe they all did. I had my cover story at the ready, but was reluctant to go knocking door to door. There was one house, in Dowanside Road, about three hundred yards from the junction with Byres Road, that looked as likely as any. There was a narrow street to the side of the house that rose steeply away from Dowanside Road. I walked up it and around to the back of the house, trying to look as inconspicuous as I could on a quiet Sunday afternoon. The back of the house was guarded by rails, but I could see that the new occupant had begun renovation of a garden that had been let go. Brothel keepers don’t spend a lot of time in the garden.
The affected accent of the Kelvinside area of Glasgow was a remarkable piece of vocal engineering. The socially pretentious Kelvinsiders could not imitate the vowel sounds of Standard Southern English, so instead tried to torture the instinctive Glasgow flatness out of each syllable. Cavalry became kevelry, cash became kesh. The woman who answered the door was the Torquemada of vowels. She was a small, plain housewife in her late thirties with dull reddish-blonde hair and a frosty manner. I could hear the sounds of children from inside the house.
‘Ken I help you?’ she said.
‘Hi, ma’am. My name is Wilbur Kaznyk. I’m over here on vacation from the States and I was hoping to look up an old buddy of mine. War buddy. Frank Harris. I don’t have his exact address, but I know it’s here in Dowanside Road. Someone told me he’d sold up and moved. I believe you folks’ve just bought this house.’
For a moment she eyed me suspiciously. She called over her shoulder into the hall. ‘Henry… there’s a menn here looking for a Frenk Herris.’
Henry appeared at his wife’s shoulder. He was a small mole of a man behind thick glasses. I repeated my fiction about being an American guest.
‘It wasn’t this house,’ he said. ‘We bought this house from a Mrs McGahern. She was a young war widow, apparently.’
‘Did you meet Mrs McGahern?’ I pushed credibility as far as I could. ‘I mean, maybe she bought the place from Frank and has a forwarding address.’
‘We nayver met Mrs McGeyhern,’ continued Henry’s wife. ‘She hed already moved. Everything was conducted through Mason and Brodie, her solicitors.’ It had been Mason and Brodie who had given me the address. ‘Perhepps you should ask them. Their offices are in St Vincent Street. Good day.’