There were three men in the kitchen, illuminated by the yellow-white ceiling light. I recognized one of them instantly. I rushed forward and ducked under the sill of the window, pressing hard into the wall. I slipped the sap from my pocket, ready to use it should the back door open. There was what looked like a gap between the wall edge furthest away from me and the hedge, suggesting I could get around the side of the house. I started to ease towards it, keeping low and making as little noise as I could.
I was crossing in front of the kitchen door when I heard the handle turn.
I rushed headlong towards the corner of the house. The kitchen door opened and a swathe of yellow light cut across the small lawn, framing the projected shadow of a huge man. I ducked around the corner of the house, hoping that my scrabbling across the concrete slabs had not attracted the attention of the figure in the doorway.
I found myself in a narrow space between the hedge and the wall of the house. I kept my feet planted as if glued: the space had been filled with stone chips and the slightest movement would make a crunching sound and attract the attention of the heavy at the door. There was enough shadow for me to stay concealed while keeping an eye around the corner. A second man came to the doorway with a torch and shone it into the garden. I ducked my head back out of sight. The two men exchanged a few words in a language that I didn’t recognize, then closed the door again. The kitchen light went out and the darkness dropped back into the garden.
I edged along the windowless side of the house, trying to minimize the gravel-crackle of each footstep, and checked the front. The curtains were still drawn but I could see the light from inside leach out at the window edges. I made a quick measure of the distance from the house corner where I crouched in shadow to the gate. There was a Wolseley parked outside the front gate that hadn’t been there when I had arrived. I reckoned I could move silently over the grass, but it would be quicker to grasp the nettle and use the squeaking gate, rather than risk entanglement clambering across the chest-high privet. I was just about to launch my run when I saw an amber-red glow in the cavern of the parked Wolseley suddenly swell then diminish. A drawn-on cigarette. They had obviously left a sentry outside.
I drew back and muttered a few words that my mother didn’t think I knew. I leaned against the wall and considered my situation. A typical Lennox one: I was crouched in the dark with nearly two thousand American dollars and six hundred English pounds bulging in my pockets, there were four heavies to deal with, one sitting smack bang in the middle of my escape route and another inside whom I already knew to be a real pro. I’d started off thinking that I’d be lucky to get out of here with the cash. Now, I’d consider myself lucky to get out in one piece.
There was nothing else for it than to sit tight and wait until the guys inside finished whatever it was they had to finish or found whatever it was they had to find. The last thought chilled me: what if they were picking up the cash? Maybe they would put two and two together and work out that the cash had gone out the unlocked back door. Then they’d come looking. I pushed at the hedge tight in front of me. With a little effort I could squeeze through it and into the garden of the house next door. But it would be noisy.
I couldn’t see my watch but I reckoned I’d been in the house for roughly a couple of hours and out here for twenty minutes. That made it about half past midnight. Not a lot happened in Milngavie at half past midnight and there wasn’t even the sound of cars in the distance. I decided to wait it out.
I didn’t have to wait long. I heard the front door open and the three goons from inside headed out. No hint of them searching for an intruder. They walked quietly to the Wolseley and got in. The last guy out turned as he closed the gate, trying to minimize the squeaking. His face in the streetlight was shadowed by the brim of his hat but he seemed to look directly at me and my chest went very tight very fast. He turned and got into the car and they coasted down the incline for a hundred yards before starting the engine.
In the sterile Milngavie quiet I could hear the car until it faded into the far distance. Still I waited another ten minutes to reassure myself there hadn’t been a fifth goon left inside McGahern’s house before I made my way as quietly as possible across the grass, through the gate and back towards where I had parked the car.
While I waited I thought about the figure I had seen in the light of Tam McGahern’s kitchen and the strange language he had spoken to the other two men. They had looked foreign. Dark. But, whatever lingo he had been speaking, it had done nothing to dispel the impression I had of him the first time I’d met him. He still reminded me of the actor Fred MacMurray.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I lit a cigarette to dampen down the cough that had woken me. It was already light and I heard the sound of a draughthorse’s hooves outside on Great Western Road. A factory whistle flatly sounded the beginning of a day’s monotony for the masses somewhere far across the city.
I swung my legs around and sat on the edge of the bed smoking for a while before I pulled the brown envelope from under my pillow. I had stuffed the cash, the wartime photograph and the notebook I had found at McGahern’s into the envelope and hidden it there. It had been after one by the time I got in and I had seen the brief cold glow of Mrs White’s light under her door when I tiptoed in, switched on just long enough to let me know I’d disturbed her. There had been no way I could have started lifting the lid on my floorboard hidey-hole and I had been too tired to start hollowing out another book.
I sat stubbornly staring at the notebook, refusing to accept that the meaning of the rows of numbers and letters was never going to leap out at me spontaneously. After ten minutes I soothed my frustration by counting the money again. I had come out of this very nicely. And coming out of it was exactly what I wanted to do. I would give up on the two hundred Willie Sneddon was going to give me for a name. I even considered giving him the hundred back – after all I was well ahead of the game – but I decided against it. Doing that would only signal that, somehow and somewhere along the line, I had scored. I would simply tell Sneddon that I had drawn a blank: that no one was holding out on me, it was just that they really didn’t have a clue who was behind the McGahern thing.
Of course I had started the whole thing myself out of sheer curiosity and bloody-mindedness, but a couple of thousand quid did a lot to assuage one’s curiosity. Maybe it was time to move on. Or even go home. I now had a reasonable amount of cash behind me, not a fortune, but enough to go a long way in Canada. And, of course, my folks had money.
I had a vague and goofy image of myself buying a place in Rothesay or Quispamsis with a boat moored at Gondola Point, an image that impossibly included Mrs White and her kids. But I was kidding myself: it hadn’t been the want of cash that had kept me here. Everybody would be expecting the return of the Kennebecasis Kid: the youth I had been and was no more. Probably the youth I had never been: the truth was that there had always been something in me. A bad seed. The war had just cultivated it. There were a lot of adjectives to describe how men came out of the war: changed, disillusioned, dead. The adjective I used for myself was dirty. I came out of the war dirty and I didn’t want to go back to Canada until I felt clean about myself. But the truth was as time went on and I mixed with the people I mixed with I just got dirtier.