But it had been significant. I had known that what she was telling me was that she didn’t want me to go, and her protestations that nothing could ever develop between us had rung less than convincingly.
Over the months since then, we had gradually moved to a situation where I spent the odd evening watching the television I had bought, but had suggested was better kept downstairs, together with Fiona White and her daughters. I had arranged the odd excursion to Edinburgh Zoo or the Kelvingrove Art Galleries, again always with Fiona chaperoned by her two daughters.
I was playing the long game.
In the meantime, there was the usual itch that had to be scratched and scratch I did, as I always had, but with more discretion than before. I had always sensed that Fiona White had me measured as a bit of a bad sort, based on the flimsiest of evidence: like the fact that on one occasion the police had banged on her door in the middle of the night and dragged me away in handcuffs, or the time that a young lady with whom I had recently parted company turned up and created something of a scene. I therefore did my very best to make sure that my liaisons were kept as out of view as possible.
The one major difficulty this presented was the fact that I had guessed Fiona White had always taken mental note of the occasions when I had remained out all night. So, after our heart to heart, I made sure I never stayed away overnight, unless I had given my landlady advance warning, explaining that I had to go away on business. Which it hardly ever was.
Coming home after being with a woman was not something that troubled me, to be honest. It was the difference between men and women, I supposed: women wanted you to remain after intimacy. For the average Scotsman, this was rather like being asked to hang around a football stadium for three hours after the game had ended. What they really wanted to do was get out as quickly as possible so they could get drunk with friends while giving them a summary of the match highlights.
I prided myself on being a little more considerate and sensitive than that, and certainly more discreet, but I did have a habit of finding a reason for getting home. The fact that I usually stayed at least as long as it took to smoke a couple of Players put me up in the ranks of hopeless romantics and continental lovers.
Having said that, I found the idea of waking in the morning with Fiona White on the pillow next to me was a whole different proposition. And somehow a perplexing one.
So, when I returned that evening at seven, instead of going straight up to my rooms I knocked on the Whites’ door and sat with them watching television. Fiona White smiled when she answered the door to me: a small porcelain gleam between the freshly applied lipstick. She smiled more these days. She asked me in and I sat with her, Elspeth and Margaret and watched The Grove Family on television, balancing a cup of tea on the sofa’s armrest. All around me were the signs of my increasing encroachment: the television set itself; a new standard lamp; and, in the corner, the Regentone radiogram that I had bought for fifty-nine guineas and had claimed was too big for my rooms. It all made me feel at my ease and itchingly restless at the same time. If anyone had stepped into that living room, it would have looked like a perfectly normal domestic scene with all of the essential elements of a perfectly normal family.
I was deliberately, inch-by-inch, easing myself into the gap left by a dead naval officer. I had no idea why I was doing it: it was certainly true that I liked the kids, really liked them, and my feelings for Fiona White were deeper than any I had felt for any woman, except perhaps one. But if I had felt sorted out enough, adjusted enough, to make a fist of a normal life, then why hadn’t I already left Glasgow behind and all of the dreck I’d mired myself in and, at long last, taken that ship to Halifax Nova Scotia?
My domestic idyll was interrupted by the ringing of the telephone we shared in the small hallway at the bottom of the stairs that led to my rooms. Fiona White answered it and then called me to the ’phone, a mildly disapproving frown on her face.
‘Hello,’ I said once she had gone back into the living room, closing the door behind her.
‘Lennox?’ It was a voice I didn’t recognize. It sounded like a Glasgow accent, but not as strong as most and a little bit fudged with something else.
‘Who is this?’
Only Jock Ferguson and a few others had my telephone number here. Anyone who wanted me knew to ’phone my office, or find me in the Horsehead Bar.
‘Never mind who I am. You’re looking for information on Gentleman Joe, is that right?’
‘You’re very well informed. And quickly informed for that matter. Who told you I was interested in Strachan?’
‘Are you looking for information or not?’
‘Only if it’s worthwhile.’
‘There’s a pub in the Gorbals. The Laird’s Inn. Meet me there in half an hour.’
‘I’m not going to meet you at short notice at The Laird’s Inn, The Highlander’s Rectum or The Ambush in the Heather. Just tell me what it is you have to tell.’
‘I’m not going to do that. I want paid.’
‘I’ll send you a postal order.’
‘You have to meet me.’
‘Okay. Tomorrow morning, nine sharp, at my office.’ I hung up before he had a chance to protest. I dialled Jock Ferguson’s home number.
‘What the hell is it, Lennox? The football’s about to come on. The international.’
‘I’ll save you and Kenneth Wolstenholme the trouble, Jock. Scotland will lead by one goal until the last fifteen minutes and then snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by letting three goals in in quick succession and you’ll spend the next two weeks saying “we was robbed” — like everyone else. Listen, Jock, who did you tell I was asking about Joe Strachan?’
‘Nobody. I mean, just the few other coppers I had to ask for information, like I already told you. Why?’
‘I’ve just had a call trying to lure me to the Gorbals, if you can use lure and the Gorbals in one sentence. He said he knew I was looking for information on Strachan and offered to sell me some.’
‘You’re not going, I take it?’
‘As you Glaswegians are fond of saying, I did not come up the Clyde in a banana boat. I’ve told him to call at my office tomorrow at nine. I doubt if he’ll show. I just wanted to know if it could have been someone you had spoken to.’
‘Maybe your clients have been talking.’
‘No. I thought about that but don’t see it happening. Thanks anyway, Jock.’
I hung up and went back into the living room.
‘You’re not going out then, Mr Lennox?’ Fiona White asked as I sat back down next to the girls.
‘Oh … that? No. I’m sorry about that. It was a business thing, but I don’t know how he got this number. I’ll deal with it tomorrow.’
‘I see,’ she said and turned back to the television. I could have sworn there was a hint of a smile as she did so.
I was right to have suspected an ambush. I got up and headed into my office early, but as soon as I stepped out of the front door of my lodgings I was grabbed by the throat. Except it wasn’t some thug that went for me but the lurking Glasgow climate. September was turning into October and something cold from Siberia, or worse still from Aberdeen, had moved into the city and collided with the warm air. Fog. And fog didn’t linger long in Glasgow before it became thick, choking, yellowy-green-grey smog.
Glasgow had been the industrial heart of the British Empire for a century. Factories belched thick smoke into the sky, and the greasy fuming of a hundred thousand tenement chimneys combined into a single, diffuse caliginous mass above the city. And when it combined with fog, it turned day to night and took your breath away. Literally.