‘It’s outside.’
‘I want you to go right now and get in it. Are you sober enough to drive?’
‘Think so.’
‘Then I want you to get into your car and drive out of the city. North. Take the Aberfoyle road. Don’t take Maryhill Road and go through Bearsden and Drymen. I don’t want you to go anywhere near your house or your office. Don’t stop to pick anything up; don’t go anywhere else; don’t stop anywhere else. Are you listening?’
‘I’ve got it. I won’t.’ I could tell he was taking strength from my sense of purpose.
‘There’s a hotel at the north end of Loch Lomond. It’s called the Royal Hotel. Do you know it?’
‘I know where it is.’
‘I want you to drive up there right now and check in under a fake name. I’ll meet you there later tonight. Call yourself Jones… no, call yourself Mr Fraser, so I know who to ask for. Have you got that?’
‘Yes. Royal Hotel, Mr Fraser.’
‘Like I said, don’t stop for anything: I’ll bring a change of clothes and toothbrush and stuff for you. And listen, Mr Andrews, I will get you out of this. I promise.’
‘Thank you, Lennox.’ I could hear a vibrato in his voice. The guy was as close to cracking as you could get. He had given up and now was struggling to accept that there was maybe some hope. ‘I don’t know how to thank you.’
‘You can start by telling me when I get up there everything you know about what Lillian and her cronies are up to.’
‘Why are you doing this? Why are you helping me like this?’
‘You’re my client, Mr Andrews. Or maybe it’s just that I’ve watched too many Westerns. It’s my turn to be the good guy.’ I laughed bitterly at my own joke. ‘Call me the Kennebecasis Kid.’
After I hung up I ran upstairs, threw a few things into an overnight bag for Andrews and grabbed my keys and jacket. I was halfway back down the stairs when I checked myself. I went back up and unlocked the door of my apartment. I took the bent nail from inside the vase on the mantle and slid under my bed. I used the nail to hook and ease up the floorboard. I reached in underneath and found the oilskin-wrapped bundle, pulled it out and draped my raincoat over it before heading back down the stairs and out onto the street. I put the bundle on the passenger seat and placed my coat over it. I carried out each of these actions quickly and mechanically. I didn’t want to think about the seriousness of what I was doing.
But the truth was that John Andrews’s ’phone call had spooked me. Whatever the connection between Lillian and Tam McGahern had been, whatever the caper was they had planned, it was big. They had been working on it for months, since whenever Lillian had hooked Andrews, a gullible, lonely widower with a business they needed to control to make their project work. As I drove out of town I tried to think it through as calmly as I could manage. What was the connection between McGahern and Lillian? She could have been the ‘Mrs McGahern’ who had sold on the house in the West End. I had certainly seen the evidence of Lillian Andrews’s impressively professional expertise in administering blow-jobs on screen; it didn’t take an enormous leap of imagination to envisage Lillian running a brothel. But what didn’t gel was Tam McGahern being a partner in whatever scam Lillian and her associates were involved in. It was too big-league for either McGahern. It was more likely that Tam had been involved in some minor way and had started to try to muscle his way in. There was the connection. Maybe. Maybe the connection was simply that whoever Lillian was involved with had killed Tam. And Frankie.
I was now out of Glasgow. It was getting darker and the clutter of the city around me gave way to the increasingly dramatic dark undulations of the Trossachs. It’s amazing how you can be in the black heart of Britain’s most industrial city and within twenty minutes be driving through a landscape full of drama and empty of people. The road was quiet and I hadn’t seen another car for five minutes so I pulled over tight to the verge.
The guys who had tried to snatch me off the pavement in Argyle Street had been enthusiastic for my company. So I had reluctantly taken out a little added insurance. After I parked, I took the tyre iron from the trunk of my car and dropped it into the passenger seat footwell. I thought it fitting, considering my potential opponents had used a tyre iron to pulp Frankie McGahern’s head. Although I was now pretty sure that it had been Tam who had been the second McGahern twin to depart this life.
But my main insurance policy lay on the passenger seat, under my coat, wrapped in oilskin. I unwrapped it. It contained a Webley Mk IV revolver and a packet of. 38 ammunition. The pistol was identical to the one I had been issued with during the war. But I had liberated this revolver in such a way that it would never be directly linked to me.
I wiped the grease from the Webley, snapped open its top break and loaded it with six rounds then slipped it uncomfortably into my waistband and tugged my double-breasted jacket over it. Again I thought about how much walking around heavy upped the ante: the problem with carrying a gun is that you tend to end up using it. Ten years ago that had not been a problem. In fact it had been expected of me. Encouraged. Now I could end up with a noose around my neck.
The Royal Hotel had a car park that looked out down the length of Loch Lomond. I sat in my Austin with the cold hard edges of the Webley digging into me and watched the clouds scud between the mountains and the inky water glisten. I looked at my watch. It was now past nine. This was my second clandestine meeting in a week. This time there was no Bedford parked behind me and I was more than prepared for any nasty surprises. And I had something better than the Central Station departure board to look at.
I got the impression that the middle-aged woman behind the small reception desk was the owner of the hotel. All the alarm bells started ringing in my head as soon as she frowned when I asked to speak to Mr Fraser. I knew at that moment that John Andrews hadn’t made it. Just to be sure that Andrews hadn’t been too scared and too drunk to remember the name I told him, I checked Jones. Then Andrews. I explained that they were business colleagues and we had agreed to meet at the hotel. The small woman shook her head concernedly, clearly feeling that she had let me down when she told me that no one had checked in that evening.
I walked back out to the car park. There were two other cars parked, neither John Andrews’s Bentley and both seemingly unoccupied. Nevertheless I unbuttoned my jacket and let my hand rest on the butt of the Webley in my waistband. I stood for a few seconds, satisfying myself that there was no menace in the car park other than the hulking shadow of Ben Lomond against a violet-black sky. I turned the ignition key of my Austin and started the drive back to Glasgow, taking the Drymen road in case Andrews had ignored my warning about passing up through Bearsden. Maybe the idiot had stopped off at his house to pick something up. Andrews had been right about one thing: I had had a conversation with a dead man.
It was a skinny young police constable who waved me down with his torch. There was a knot of other police officers and a Bedford ambulance pulled over at the side of the road. I could see from where I had been pulled over that there was a gap in the fencing. I checked that the pistol-butt bulge in my jacket wasn’t too conspicuous before winding down the window.
‘What’s the problem, constable?’ I asked.
‘Accident, sir. I’m afraid someone’s gone over the edge.’
‘Dead?’
‘Didn’t stand a chance. Just be careful as you go past the other vehicles, sir. You’ll have to pull over a little onto the verge.’
‘Okay.’ I eased the car forward, taking two wheels up onto the grass. As I passed the gap in the fence I looked down. I caught a glimpse of the tailgate of the car that had gone over the edge. It was a Bentley. I turned my attention back to the road and drove on. I didn’t need to look any more to know that it was John Andrews down there. The car would be pretty badly smashed up having taken a tumble like that, but I wondered if the police surgeon might, just for a second, be puzzled as to how the driver’s head had gotten quite so pulped.