I didn’t debate long about driving into the office. I generally took it that if I couldn’t see my car from the door of my digs, then driving wasn’t a great idea. The same went for the buses, which left the options of the subway, trolleybuses or trams. The trams were always the most reliable in the smog, so much so that queues of cars would trail along behind them as the only way of being sure to navigate through the miasma; although it often led to motorists finding themselves in the tram depot rather than where they thought they were going.
I walked along Great Western Road, keeping close to the kerb to make sure I didn’t wander off into the middle of the street, and eventually found the tram stop. I could see the indistinct outline of an orderly queue at the stop and, as was always the case in Glasgow, this collection of strangers were chatting among themselves as if they had known each other for years.
I was about four feet from the end of the queue, which was about as far as you could see in the fog, when I felt something jab painfully into the small of my back. I was about to spin around when a hand clenched itself around my upper arm and dug in. The smog clearly had an accomplice, after all.
‘Don’t turn around …’ I recognized the voice as the one I’d heard on the phone. The same odd mix of accent, but this time it was authoritative and calm. ‘If you see my face, I’ll have to kill you. Do you understand that?’
‘It’s not that complicated,’ I said. In the smog you were deprived of much of your vision and your other senses became keener, it seemed. I puzzled as to why I hadn’t heard him come up behind me.
‘You should have kept our appointment last night, Lennox. Now, we’re going to back away down the alley behind me and you’re going to keep nice and quiet and nothing untoward will happen to you.’
Untoward. The vocabulary and the accent were both all over the place. ‘All I want to do is to talk to you. No one need get steamed up or hurt.’
‘I’m assuming that is a gun you’ve got in my back,’ I said, ‘not a rolled-up copy of Reveille. Let me see the gun or I’m not doing anything.’
‘Nice try, Lennox. I lift the gun and you make a grab for it. I tell you what, I’ll pull the trigger and you watch a bit of your spine and maybe a chunk of liver fly off into the fog. Would that convince you?’
‘That would do the trick, for sure … but on reflection, I think I’ll take your word for it.’
It was more than ten years since the end of the war, but there were still vast quantities of guns circulating, particularly in Glasgow. The hard thrust I felt in the small of my back didn’t feel like a bluff, and my new best friend had the kind of quiet confidence that came from experience, so I decided to play nicely. Or at least play nicely for as long as it looked like I’d be able to walk away from our encounter.
He pulled me backwards and the vague outline of the tram queue was swallowed up again in the fog. We were in a side street now that was little more than an alleyway and he steered me backwards twenty yards or so before swinging me around until I was kissing brick. There were cobbles under our feet: Glasgow-black and slick, but which sounded under my heels. But not his. Like when he had come up behind me, he seemed to move silently.
‘Lay your hands flat against the wall, level with your head.’
I did what I was told, but tried to measure, from the sound of his voice, how far back from me he now stood. If he wanted to shoot me in the back of the head, now would be the time.
‘You told me on the telephone last night that you had information worth paying for,’ I said. ‘I have to tell you I find your sales technique a little pushy.’
‘Keep the wisecracks up, Lennox, and we might just seal the deal here and now.’
‘Pushy but persuasive,’ I said, still trying to measure the distance. I decided this was probably a no-sudden-moves-situation. ‘Okay, friend, what’s this all about?’
‘You’re sticking your nose into this Strachan business. I want to know why.’
‘I’m naturally curious,’ I quipped, and he quipped back by slamming a fist into my kidney. The impact jarred my cheek into the wall and drove every drop of air out of my lungs. I dug my fingers into the wall as I gasped in the tarry, damp fug. He gave me the time to recover.
‘I’ll ask you the same question, Lennox, but if you smart-mouth me again, you’ll end up pissing blood for a month. Got me?’
I nodded, still incapable of speaking and sucking air into tortured lungs.
‘You’re going to drop the whole Strachan thing, you got that? You’re going to walk away from it for good. If you don’t, you’ll end up at the bottom of the Clyde yourself. Now, I want to know why you’ve been asking about Joe Strachan. What’s he to you?’
‘Work,’ I said through tight teeth. ‘That’s all. I was hired to.’
The pain in my side was intense and nauseous. My pulse throbbed hard and sore in my head. This guy knew what he was doing but I knew that if I played along and didn’t do anything stupid, I’d probably walk away from this.
But the truth was that this guy was pushing my buttons. All the wrong buttons. The kind of buttons that made me want to play anything but nicely. The kind of buttons that stripped away ten years of civilian life and took me back to a place no one wanted me to be.
‘Who hired you?’ he asked, forgetting to give the r a celtic roll. Whoever he was, he was working hard at hiding it.
I let go a long gasp, clutching my side where he had hit me, and started to bend sideways.
‘I’m going to be sick …’ I leant away from the wall and down, my hand braced against it. I heard a muffled step backwards. He was probably trying to work out if I was genuine or making a move. I leaned deeper and began retching. I could see his shoes: tan suede with soft soles; the reason I didn’t hear him behind me. His feet were planted square and resolutely: there was nothing tentative about this guy. If I made a move he’d be ready for it.
But I made it anyway.
I heaved against the wall with the hand I had been resting on it and thrust myself at him with the loudest scream I could manage: it was he who had to worry about attracting attention, not me. I saw he was about my age and well built, and definitely not Gentleman Joe, ghost or otherwise. Fixing my attention on the gun, I didn’t have a chance to take in his face. He moved swiftly to one side, anticipating my lunge, but I swiped at him with a fist that skimmed his jaw. He swung a foot that caught me across the shins and I went sprawling on the cobbles.
I rolled as soon as I hit the ground, depriving him of an easy target, but he didn’t fire. Instead, as I struggled to get up, I saw the gun arc through the smog in a vicious slash at my temple. I took most of the power out of the blow by blocking it with my left forearm and made an unsuccessful grab for the pistol with my other hand, at the same time slamming my heel upwards into his groin. I missed but caught him in the belly and he doubled. When it comes to a fight with a gun, possession is more than nine-tenths of the law and I made another grab for it. Instead of pulling against me, as most people would do instinctively, he pushed into me as I pulled and slammed the butt of the gun into my cheek, using my own force against me. We had obviously gone to the same finishing school. I felt something wet on my cheek and felt the world take a brief but perceptible wobble.
He staggered back to his feet and I saw him raise the gun to take aim. I was halfway to my feet too and dived to one side, again rolling several times before leaping up and running. I had lost all sense of direction in the smog, but as there seemed to be an upward incline beneath my feet, I guessed I was actually heading further up the side street, away from the main road. I was hidden in the smog now. But so was he, and, unlike mine, his shoes made no sound on the cobbles.
I sprinted blindly a few yards then stopped, pressing myself against the wall. I eased forward slowly, making as little sound as I could. I found a bricked-up doorway, pressed myself into it and waited for the first shot to be fired, hopefully in the direction of where I had been, rather than where I now was. But there were no shots.