I had only managed a swift look at his face, and when I had seen it, the features had been twisted into a snarl. I had gotten just enough of a view to see that he had dark hair and a hard, angular face. I was also pretty sure I had seen an ugly scar on his forehead. He wasn’t someone I had seen before.
I kept pressed into the recess of the bricked-up doorway, straining to hear any sound. In the smog, at the best of times, you can feel isolated, detached, as if someone had switched off the world and nothing existed beyond the four or five feet you could see. But I wasn’t alone: there was another wanderer out there, hunting me with a gun. At any second he could burst into my tiny circle of awareness and it would be down to who reacted quickest. By the same token, he could just as easily have been halfway to Paisley by now.
I waited, not moving, straining the smog with every sense and ready to spring at anyone or anything that came out of it. Nothing. I wiped my cheek with the back of my hand and saw it smeared red. I started to think about the man with the gun. About his fake accent and his handiness with his fists and a gun. If he had been a gangster, then he was one who’d had the kind of army training you only got in the commandos or the like. Three minutes became four, became five. I guessed he had slipped away, aware that coming looking for me in this murk was as dangerous for hunter as hunted. But I waited a minute more. He had been a cool one all right; the type that tends to have plenty of patience.
I was just about to start making my way back to the main street when I saw him. He just appeared in front of me, as if he had suddenly coalesced from the fog itself. He was more a shape than anything else and he didn’t see me pressed into the doorway.
He was moving slowly, scanning the smog-filled alley with his automatic, as if it were a torch. My doorway hiding place was just outside the arc of his vision. I slipped my hand into my jacket pocket, forgetting it had been months since I’d gone to work with a spring-handled leather blackjack in it. This was the kind of opposition you didn’t want to go up against with your bare hands. I weighed up my options, but in that split second of indecision, his form was swallowed up again as he moved further up the alleyway.
Waiting a few seconds after he passed, I crouched down, undid my laces and slipped my shoes off. Then, carrying a shoe in each hand, I moved as swiftly and as silently as I could back down the alley towards Great Western Road, leaving my dance partner still searching further up the alleyway. But I promised myself that we would dance again.
And the next time, I would lead.
I was properly shod by the time I got back to my digs. In the murk, Mrs White would not see me come up the path from the lounge window and I had hoped to slip unnoticed into my rooms to get cleaned up. As luck would have it, she opened the front door just as I got to it.
‘Mr Lennox …’ she said, shocked by my appearance. ‘What on earth has happened to you?’
‘This damned smog,’ I grumbled. ‘Pardon my language … I slipped on the kerb and smacked right into a lamppost.’ It was a perfectly credible excuse: there would be dozens of genuine accidents fitting that description that morning.
‘Come into the kitchen,’ she commanded, steering me with a firm hand on my elbow. ‘I’ll have to have a look at that.’
I was pretty groggy and went along with what she suggested. Pulling out a chair from the kitchen table, she eased me down into it. I winced as she did so.
‘Are you hurt elsewhere?’ she asked.
‘I fell after I hit my head … the kerb dug into my side. It’s mainly my cheek though …’ I hoped she bought it. Fiona White had seen me with various battle trophies, including on one occasion when they had been awarded to me by the City of Glasgow police. It was, I knew, her principal reason for wanting to keep her distance: all part of my qualifications as a shady character.
She made up a weak solution of antiseptic and boiled water and dabbed at the wound. I noticed the solution cloud pink when she dipped the gauze back into it.
‘I think you might have to have this stitched,’ she said, frowning. She came around in front of me and leaned in to examine me from that angle. Her face came close to mine and I could detect a faint scent of lavender and felt her breath on my lips. Her eyes moved to mine. She suddenly looked embarrassed and stood up in a businesslike manner; but there had been something in the look we exchanged. Or maybe there hadn’t. I was sore and groggy and confused as hell about a lot of things, not least Fiona White.
‘It’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘If you have a sticking plaster, that’ll do.’
‘I really think you should have it seen to. It’s in the same place …’ She let the sentence die.
‘As my scars? I know. They’re all healed up now, Mrs White. A scrape isn’t going to cause me any problems.’ I smiled at her and was rewarded with a stab of pain from my cheek and a trickle of fresh blood down to my jaw line. She tutted and reapplied the gauze pad. She lifted my hand onto the pad to hold it in place while she took a roll of sticking plaster from a drawer and cut three strips from it.
‘How did you get them? The scars, I mean?’ she asked, awkwardly, as she used the strips to secure a fresh pad in place. I turned my head a little and she tutted again, pushing it back with two fingers. It was the first time she had ever asked me a personal question.
‘I picked the wrong plastic surgeon,’ I said. ‘He said he’d done Hedy Lamarr’s nose and Cary Grant’s chin, but he’d only ever really done Clark Gable’s ears.’
‘Seriously …’
‘They really are plastic surgery scars,’ I said. ‘They had to patch me up after I caught the tail end of a German hand grenade.’ I didn’t tell her that it would have been much worse, if one of my men hadn’t taken most of the blast. My face had been torn open, but they’d been able to put me back together again. His splashed-in-the-mud guts were beyond any surgeon’s skill.
But the plastic guy who had fixed my face had done a pretty good job: all I had was a spider web of faint, pale scars on my right cheek. And my smile could look a little lopsided, because of nerve damage, but only in a way that made it look even more wolfish, as Leonora Bryson could fully attest.
While tea infused, Fiona White brought me a couple of aspirin and a tumbler of water. The talk became small and mainly about the smog and how it always caused trouble; but, as I sat there, a thought sunk heavy and sickeningly in my gut. I had lied to Fiona White about what happened, for the best reasons, and God knows that, on most occasions, I didn’t have to have the best reasons to lie. But I didn’t like lying to her.
That was not, however, the main cause for the feeling in the pit of my stomach. I had just evaded a very serious operator with a gun in his hand: the very same person who had ’phoned me at my digs the night before. And he had clearly been waiting for me, outside the house, knowing I would be heading in to see if he kept our specious appointment.
That meant he knew where I lived. And that, in turn, placed Fiona White and her girls in danger.
‘Is something wrong, Mr Lennox?’ Fiona White asked. ‘Are you feeling worse? I really think we should see about getting you to a doctor.’
I shook my head. For a second I debated with myself about whether I should level with her or not. It would alarm her and would certainly end my tenancy, but she had a right to know.
‘I need to make a ’phone call,’ I said.
I stood up and walked through to the hall telephone.
While we waited for Jock Ferguson to arrive, I sat with Fiona White and told her exactly what had happened to me and why. For some reason I even levelled with her about the money being sent to Isa and Violet each year on the anniversary of the Empire Exhibition robbery, and told her that this was one fact that I was keeping from the police, on client confidentiality grounds. I also told her that I had another, very high profile case that I was working on that could cause all kinds of problems, but that my little samba in the smog certainly had nothing to do with that investigation.