‘Yeah … my boy who just happens to be married to the daughter of one of Glasgow’s most legendary crime figures. Tell me, Jock, was there ever any connection between Willie Sneddon and Joe Strachan?’
‘None that I’m aware of. Sneddon came on the scene much later. Hammer Murphy though … I believe he was tight with Strachan for a while.’
‘Yes … I heard,’ I said gloomily. ‘Thanks, Jock.’
Archie paid me a visit just before lunchtime, which I took as a hint and I treated him to a pie and pint in the Horseshoe. He downed the pint in seconds, his bushy eyebrows jumping with each swallow, and turned to me with a pained expression on his long face. It took me a couple of seconds to realize he was smiling at me.
‘I’m like those Mounties of yours, boss,’ he said. ‘I always get my man.’
‘Billy Dunbar?’
‘The very same. I’ve run him to ground.’ Archie dug around in his raincoat pockets, pulling out various scraps of paper, a crumpled handkerchief and a couple of bus tickets, all of which he dumped on the cramped space we had in front of us on the bar. Eventually he found what he had been looking for and his eyebrows once more declared their independence from the doleful face.
‘Aye … here it is. This is where he lives now. He’s changed address three times. From what I understand, he’s straight now. Has been since his last stretch. That’s why there have been so many moves: it’s difficult to put a past like his behind you.’
‘Tell me about it,’ I said more to myself than to Archie. I looked at the address. It was a place in Stirlingshire. ‘He’s left Glasgow?’
‘You know what it’s like when one of these bozos decides he wants to go straight. It’s like coming off the bottle — most go back to it, but if you want to stay dry, you stay out of the pub. My guess is that Dunbar needed to get away from everybody who knew about his past.’
‘Good work, Archie,’ I said. Nothing registered on his face but his eyebrows looked pleased. ‘Do you want to come along for the trip? Chargeable time?’
‘All right,’ he said, frowning. ‘But I’m worried what all that fresh air will do to my constitution.’
‘I promise we’ll keep the car windows tight shut and smoke all the way. Okay?’
Archie nodded dolefully. ‘I’ll be at the office at nine.’
Hammer Murphy, as I’ve already mentioned, did not earn his nickname because he was an accomplished handyman. Well, he was an accomplished handyman, and specially skilled with a hammer, but not in the putting-up-shelves sort of way. More in the smashing a business opponent’s skull to pulp sort of way.
All in all, Hammer Murphy had always been the King I had done my best to avoid. Much in the same way as I avoided meat pies unless I was sure of their origin: Murphy owned a meat processing plant on the outskirts of Glasgow and the rumour was — well, more than a rumour — that Murphy had put some of his business rivals through the mincer. Literally. It was also widely suggested that Murphy obliged Handsome Jonny Cohen and Willie Sneddon by sub-contracting this function for them.
I mixed with a nice crowd.
I tried not to think too much about Murphy’s meat plant, but when rumours started to circulate that a couple of likely lads who had particularly annoyed Murphy had gone through the mincer, tied up but still alive and conscious, then my appetite for his company diminished as drastically as my appetite for sausages.
You get the idea: Hammer Murphy was the most violent, volatile and vindictive of the Three Kings who ran Glasgow’s criminal underworld, and someone to be avoided if at all possible.
The whole Gentleman Joe Strachan thing had taken on a bad taste for me as soon as Murphy’s name was mentioned. Strachan seemed to have this split personality thing going on: there was this image of Strachan as almost the ‘gentleman crook’: a kind of Glaswegian Raffles, if you can stretch your imagination that far; the other image of him was of a cold, ruthless and often vicious gangster and life-taker.
The presence of Murphy’s name on a list of Strachan’s associates confirmed the latter for me. Now would have been a good time for me to have ducked out; to have taken enough to cover my expenses and tell the twins that Strachan was dead, and so were all of the leads as to who was sending them the cash. After all, I had had the windfall of the Macready case, which had been preposterously lucrative. So instinct screamed at me to drop the Strachan thing; to enjoy the freedom of the city’s streets without having to do a two-step in the fog with a skilled dance partner. Unfortunately my hearing seemed to have deteriorated, and no matter how loud instinct screamed, I didn’t seem to hear it.
So I placed the call I’d been putting off for more than a week. After speaking to a minion, I was put through to Murphy and the voice that came on the other end of the line was thick Glasgow accented and more abrasive than carborundum.
The conversation was brief and pithy, let’s say. I had not realized that ‘fuck off’ could be used as a response to almost every question or statement, or even when you paused to take breath. It was only when I mentioned Gentleman Joe Strachan and that I was looking into the discovery of his remains that Murphy’s curiosity was piqued.
‘Do you know the Black Cat Club?’ he asked.
‘I know it.’
‘Be there in a half an hour. Don’t be fucking late.’
Murphy hung up before I had a chance to check my social diary. I knew the Black Cat Club, all right. I was a regular. A card-holding member. It was the kind of place you needed a membership, or a warrant, to get into.
I had discovered the Black Cat not long after I had arrived in Glasgow. It was upstairs in an unimpressive-looking sandstone block way down in the West End of Sauchiehall Street, past the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and where the address numbers ran into the thousands. Britain was full of clubs with names that were always synonymous with, but generally avoided, the word ‘Pussy’. There would be the usual ill-judged attempt at glamour and sophistication in the decor, and the lounge bar would be filled with corpulent businessmen nervous that the police would raid the place and their names would end up in the papers. And of course, there would be the reason the businessmen didn’t run for their lives or reputations: the hostesses, dressed in sham Hollywood style with impressive cleavages to compensate for their Glasgow accents.
The name of the game was that the hostesses would encourage the businessmen to relax and to ease their nervousness by becoming drunk on over-priced and under-measured cocktails. The funny thing always was that visitors to these clubs seemed to lose their wallets with a frequency that defied statistical laws. Anyone fool enough to suggest theft usually found themselves face-first on the street outside. Most kept quiet and tried to work out the best way to answer their concerned wives at home when they asked, ‘When was the last time you saw your wallet, dear?’
There were probably three or four clubs like that in Glasgow, and I had no doubt that The Black Cat had started out as exactly that kind of place. But there was a funny evolutionary process behind such establishments. The Black Cat probably started its metamorphosis by accidentally hiring a piano player or a combo or a chanteuse who was a cut above the usual knocking-shop standard; my guess is that when word got around, clients started to come to listen to the music rather than test cheap bedsprings with some pneumatic hostess. And when profits went up and police raids and payoffs became fewer, the management booked more and even better jazz acts.
Sure, there were still hostesses, but they confined themselves to serving drinks that, while still expensive, were not extortionate, and any business between hostess and customer would be conducted discreetly and on a freelance basis. I had had the odd dalliance with a couple of the hostesses myself, but those had been strictly non-commercial in nature.
When I arrived at the unassuming green door with a small black cat painted above a peep hole, I was greeted with a brusque nod of recognition from a doorman with yard-wide shoulders. The fact that he nodded at all was an impressive accomplishment, given that, as far as I could see, he had no neck to speak of and his thick, Teddy Boy-quiffed, bullet head seemed to have been fused directly into the mass of his shoulders.