*
It wasn’t a good-mood morning. It was difficult to find real coffee in Glasgow and my supply had run out. I had been forced to buy the locally produced alternative: a bottle of thick coffee and chicory which you diluted with boiling water. I decided to forgo the pleasure and went straight to the office. It was in the Glasgow Herald I picked up on the way: a short piece headed ‘Clyde Consolidated Importing chairman killed in tragic accident’. No real detail other than Andrews had been found dead at the scene. I winced as I read it: I am ashamed to say not out of sympathy for John Andrews but because I knew that a certain Detective-Inspector Jock Ferguson was likely to read the same piece in the course of the next day and come knocking on my door. Mind you, it could have been worse: at least it wouldn’t provoke a visit by Superintendent Willie McNab and his farmhand. Hopefully.
I still found myself looking over my shoulder and I now had more reason than ever. John Andrews hadn’t been killed because he was out for a drive in the country. Whoever killed him would have known he was meeting with someone and more likely than not that that someone was me. Of course, there was always the possibility that it had genuinely been an accident. After all, he had sounded more than a little drunk on the ’phone: maybe the booze and the dark and the sudden bend in the road had been the only conspirators in his death. It was a scrap of a hope to hang on to, anyway. But whether his death had been by accident or design, John Andrews had told me more than enough to shake me up: he had been set up by Lillian and whomever she was involved with, and he had told me that I had been set up. However, he hadn’t told me enough to indicate the direction I should be looking in. I decided that I was going to have to go to Sneddon and tell him everything I knew. Sneddon had been right, after alclass="underline" I needed someone to watch my back.
Sneddon was out when I ’phoned and I left a message that I needed to talk to him. I looked out of my office window and watched people go about their day on Gordon Street. Trams passed. Taxis, like black beetles under a stone, scuttled in and out from under the lattice iron-worked canopy of Central Station. It was three in the afternoon. In the Maritimes of Canada it would be eleven in the morning. I never understood why I did that, but whenever I was stressed I thought of what time of day it would be at home. I had done it across Europe, imagining what my parents were doing, what the light in the garden would be like in New Brunswick, while I watched men die.
I unlocked my desk drawer – I had taken to locking it since my office had been so expertly searched – and took out the notebook and the photograph I had found in McGahern’s place. I looked again at the list of letters and numbers in the notebook. I noticed that most of the numbers ended in fifty-one and fifty-two. Nineteen fifty-two? Could these be dated shipment numbers? Andrews had said they were using his business to ship stolen goods. But there was no way I could get access to the CCI records now that he was dead.
I looked at the photograph again. There were five men in the picture. Again it looked to me like two, maybe three of them were foreign, too dark to be Scots. Scots are the whitest people on the planet: sometimes they’re almost blue-white. The only tans you ever saw in Glasgow were on stout walking brogues. But there again even Tam looked bronzed in the photograph. The last tanned face I’d encountered recently had been the cheery Fred MacMurray look-alike.
I picked up the ’phone and dialled an Edinburgh number. It was time to pull in a few favours.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Glasgow may have been the Empire’s Second City, but much-smaller Edinburgh was Scotland’s capital. Edinburgh’s inhabitants called it ‘the Athens of the North’, presumably because none of them had actually seen Athens. If Glasgow could be described as a black city, then Edinburgh was grey. Grey buildings and grey people. It was also the most Anglicized city in Scotland, which is perhaps why its residents were the most Anglophobe you could encounter: what you hate the most is that which you most want to be but are not.
When the train pulled into Waverley station I was greeted with a banner declaring Ceud Mille Failte, which I had been told was Gaelic for ‘A Hundred Thousand Welcomes’. Having got to know the personality of Edinburgh a little, I would have better believed it meant ‘Fuck off, you English Bastard’.
But Edinburgh’s ire was aimed at more than the English. The rivalry between Scotland’s two main cities was vast and vicious. Much was made of the cultural differences between Glasgow and Edinburgh. In Glasgow they called children weans and in Edinburgh they were bairns; in Edinburgh they took their fish and chips with salt ’n’ sauce, in Glasgow with salt ’n’ vinegar; Glaswegians inexplicably ended their sentences with the conjunction ‘but’, in Edinburgh with the interrogative ‘eh?’.
Sometimes I found myself dizzy from Scotland’s cultural kaleidoscope.
I took a taxi from the rank up to Edinburgh Castle and was dropped at the Esplanade. The officious little corporal on guard was reluctant to let me into the barracks until I informed him that I was Captain Lennox and I was here to meet Captain Jeffrey. He indicated the main office and when I got there Rufus ‘Mafeking’ Jeffrey was waiting, hatless and dressed in civvies. ‘Mafeking’ was the nickname I had given him years before and which he resented, although he had no idea why I called him it. Jeffrey was a tall, lanky sort with blond hair frizzily receding. I could tell that he wasn’t particularly pleased to see me and, to be honest, I was never particularly happy to be back in a military environment, even the Chocolate Soldier setting of Edinburgh Castle.
‘I thought we’d grab a pint down in the Royal Mile, if that’s all right with you, old boy.’ Jeffrey’s smile was as genuine as his mock upper-class English accent, which had come courtesy of an Edinburgh private boarding school.
A Military Police sergeant marched his red cap past us and into the office. He brought back some unpleasant memories. ‘Sure,’ I said and we headed back down the Esplanade.
*
We sat in a corner of the pub. The bleak March sunlight from the window behind him sliced through blue smoke and made a halo of ‘Mafeking’ Jeffrey’s frizzy blond hair. We made small talk about the time that had intervened since our last meeting. The smallest of small talk: the truth was neither gave a crap about what had happened in the other’s life. I didn’t like Jeffrey and he didn’t like me, but I had something on him and I had, at one time, pulled his fat out of the fire. He had good reason to be grateful to me. Gratitude is by far the best foundation on which to build a true hatred.
‘Do you have the photograph you mentioned?’ he asked pleasantly enough. I slid it across the pub table to him. ‘Gideon…’ he read the back of it. ‘I know what this is. And I looked into this Sergeant McGahern for you. He may have started his service as a Desert Rat, but he didn’t end it as one. It would appear that Sergeant McGahern was a man of… how can I put it?… particular talents.’
‘A natural killer.’
‘And then some. But he was apparently quite the tactician and was also a natural leader of men. As you know yourself, Lennox, our last little European conflict required some innovation. You’ve heard of the
SAS?’
‘Of course.’ Jeffrey’s lecturing tone irritated the hell out of me, as did his phoney accent. He belonged to that class of Edinburgh North British who wore kilts to Burns Suppers and Scottish Country Dancing and the Reel Society, but at the same time fought to extirpate any hint of Scottishness from their accents.