The first thing I did was to go through the house and draw all of the curtains, switching the lights on in each room as I went. I had brought a torch with me, but there is nothing more certain to bring the police to the door than the report of torchlight in an unlit house.
The house surprised me. This was no investment property: Tam McGahern’s personal things were all over the place. The cops hadn’t known about this place. No one had known that Tam had built himself a little nest away from the flat he shared with his brother. Well, practically no one: whoever sent me the key had known.
The furnishings were modest and tasteful, not what you would expect from a Gorbals-bred hardman and for a moment I started to doubt if it really was McGahern’s place. But it was. The front bedroom had a large walnut wardrobe packed with the kind of exclusively tailored suits you see only on movie stars or gangsters. A bureau drawer was filled with cash: income avoiding the touch of banker or taxman.
There was also a row of photographs on the living room mantelpiece. Tam with his mother. Tam with Frankie and his mother. All the photographs were of the prosperous post-war Tam with the exception of one. In it, a younger, tanned Tam in Desert Rat uniform with sergeant’s stripes on the khaki sleeve stood smiling with a group of other men under a bright and definitely not Scottish sun. The backdrop was a sand-crusted military vehicle. There were five men in the group. Three of them looked foreign. Darker. I took a penknife, prised open the back and slipped the wartime photograph from the frame and pocketed it. As I did, I checked the back of the photograph. It had a single word written on it: Gideon.
I also liberated the bureau of its burden, doing a rough count as I stuffed the rubber-banded bundles into my jacket pockets. I reckoned there was over six hundred quid there. Whoever had sent me the key may or may not have known about the presence of the cash. If they did and had prior claim, then I would keep it safe for them. Lost and found, you could say. But Tam McGahern’s tiny empire was being carved up. This could be my little slice.
As I worked my way through the rest of Tam McGahern’s house, I was aware it was full of anomalies. Some things were typical of someone like McGahern, others weren’t. Like the books. Dozens of them. And not pulp fiction paperbacks: McGahern seemed to have had an interest in history and a couple of the volumes on the bookshelves were heavyweight academic tomes. Others were book-club editions. There was a world atlas, and one exclusively of the Middle East.
I remembered what I had heard about what the army psychologist had said about Tam’s intelligence. The evidence of it was all around me. It should have been enough to keep him alive, but the prison quack had also identified Tam’s psychotic rage. With Tam impulse always triumphed over reason. He had been killed by his own rage. More than that, he had been killed by someone who calculated that they could rely on his rage to overcome his judgement.
I had the feeling that this was a private space. Somewhere that McGahern spent time alone. It was the only reason that would explain him choosing to do his fucking in that sordid hovel above the Highlander Bar. If there were any hidden secrets, this was where Tam would hide them. I went through the house and switched off all of the lights except the one in the kitchen. I would work through the house a room at a time. There was no need to advertise my presence more than was necessary. I took a heavy-handled breadknife from the kitchen drawer and worked my way on my hands and knees across the floor, tapping the linoleum with the handle. Solid. I went through every cupboard and drawer and checked the walls for any hidden recesses. Nothing.
It took me a good hour to find it. In the bathroom. The bath was new and built-in rather than free standing, and the bath panel had been recently and expertly tiled, which was why the ragged grouting along the bottom of two of the tiles caught my eye. I used the breadknife to ease the two tiles free and jammed my hand into the void beneath the bathtub. After a bit of scrabbling my fingers closed around a cloth bag fastened with a drawstring. I pulled it out and opened it up. Jackpot.
The bag was about eight or nine inches square and packed tight. I tipped the contents out onto the linoleum floor of the bathroom. It was a criminal’s equivalent of a life-raft: the way out in an emergency. It was very impressive. Too impressive for a middle-league Glasgow crook. If things turned bad for Tam then all he needed to make a clean and total break was stowed in this canvas bag. But Tam had gone down faster than the Titanic and never did have the chance to use his carefully assembled escape package. There was money, a pocket notebook and three passports: two British and one American. It was only because they all had Tam McGahern’s photograph above false names that I could tell they were fake. Other than that, they looked perfectly genuine to me.
Forgeries of that quality took a lot of money, time and the kind of contacts that I could not imagine Tam having. I counted the US dollars; two thousand in total, tight rolls, bound by elastic bands. I remembered McNab asking me if I knew what had happened to the money that had disappeared when Tam had been murdered: this couldn’t be it. There was a lot, but not enough for McNab to get physical about. But there was more than enough to get you to the other side of the world. Or, given the presence of a fake American passport, more likely to the other side of the Atlantic.
I carefully re-rolled the money and fastened it with the elastic bands. I put it into my jacket pocket to keep the six hundred quid company. After all, I might need a life-raft myself at some point in the future. It looked like I was going to have to hollow out another volume from the H.G. Wells oeuvre.
After making a note of the fake names, I gave the passports a wipe with my handkerchief before putting them back in the bag, which I then stuffed back under the bath: I thought it best to leave something for any future visitors to find. I kept hold of the notebook. It had a list of initials and numbers, the sense of which didn’t leap out at first examination and I wanted to take my time going through it later. I fitted the tiled section back in place, switched off all the lights and made my way in darkness downstairs to the front door. I had just unfastened the Chubb lock when I heard it. The squeaking protest of the gate at the end of Tam McGahern’s garden.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I eased the Chubb closed again as quietly but quickly as I could. I moved through the darkened house to the kitchen where I used my torch to find the back door. There was a heavy key in the mortise lock. I would let myself out into the back garden, taking the key with me and lock the door from the outside, hoping that whoever was paying a visit didn’t feel like taking in the night air.
Slipping the torch back into my cash-stuffed pocket I turned the key. The door didn’t unlock: the key half-turned and then seemed to jam. I reckoned that whoever was coming up the path would be at the front door by now. I tried the lock again, turning the key one way then the other, making more noise than I should. Nothing. I heard the sound of the front door unlocking and opening. I leaned my weight against the door, pushing it back in its frame and trying the key again. It turned in the lock with a loud clunk. I slipped out into the dark garden, easing the door shut. I didn’t lock it behind me as I’d planned: it would make too much noise and for all I knew whoever was there had already heard it unlock. I eased back from the door. There was no moon and the garden to the rear was hedged in; as far as I could see, I was crouched on a small patio of concrete slabs. I moved like a blind man, afraid I might bump into something and give away my presence. The kitchen light went on. It meant I could see something of my surroundings. It also meant that anyone in the kitchen could probably see me. I scoured the garden desperately for a hiding place, but it was small and laid out as level lawn edged with low shrubs, offering no opportunity to hide.