‘We need your help …’
‘… about our father.’
‘I suppose you’ve read all about him …’
‘… in the papers …’
I smiled, a little confused. The truth was I had been a little discomfited by their arrival. They were both very pretty. Well, exactly as pretty as each other. And they were twins. The usual lustful scenario that would lurch unbidden into my imaginings when faced with a set of curves was subject to multiplication and I had to snap out of my speculation about what other tasks they might be disposed to take in turns.
‘Your father?’ I asked with a professional frown.
‘Yes. Daddy.’
‘Our maiden name you see …’
‘… is Strachan,’ they concluded in unison.
Even then it took me a moment to catch on; for significance to attach.
‘The remains found in the Clyde?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’ Another chorus.
‘Gentleman Joe Strachan?’
‘Joseph Strachan was our father.’ The two pretty heart-shaped faces took on an identically harder look.
‘But you must hardly have known him,’ I said. ‘From what I’ve read, Joe Strachan has been missing for nearly eighteen years.’
‘We were eight,’ said Isa. Or Violet.
‘When Daddy had to go away.’
‘We’ve never forgotten him.’
‘I’m sure.’ I nodded sagely.
When people pay you to find out things, sagacity is an attribute you should project at every opportunity. Much in the same way that when you visit a doctor you want him to exude an absolute mastery of his craft, despite the fact that the workings of the human body leave him almost as confused as everyone else. I wanted to impress the twins by saying, as they do in all the best movies, ‘So you want me to find out …’ and then anticipate their request.
It wasn’t working for me: I hadn’t a clue what they could want from me, other than to find out who dumped Daddy in the drink. And that couldn’t be it, because the police were all over that like a rash. There was, after all, the matter of a dead patrolling copper who happened to be at the right place at the wrong time eighteen years before. Whoever nudged Gentleman Joe over the side would know who tapped the beat bobby. The City of Glasgow Police were a less than cerebral bunch and if the case had been beyond them two decades before, I couldn’t see them making anything of it now. And I would make even less.
‘So what can I do for you?’ I switched off the bulb of my omniscient sagacity for a moment.
They simultaneously lifted their handbags and placed them on their laps, snapped them open and took out identical wrapped wads of cash, placing them on the desk. The wads had made their handbags bulge and were now having the same effect on my eyes. The big Bank of England notes were crisp and new. And twenties: a denomination you would not exactly hand over the counter in a fish and chip shop. For a moment I thought this was an advance payment and from the size of the bundles, I saw myself working exclusively for the twins for the next three years.
‘We get this every year …’
‘On the twenty-third of July …’
‘One thousand pounds exactly, each.’
I couldn’t resist picking up a bundle in each hand, just for the feel of them, responding to an instinct similar to the one I’d had when the twins had first walked in.
‘For how long?’ I asked, bouncing the wads in my hands as if weighing them.
‘Since Daddy left. Our mother got the money for us each year and then, when we were eighteen, it came directly to us.’
‘Does your mother get any money for herself?’
‘Mam passed on a couple of years ago …’
‘… but before that, she got the same.’
‘… a thousand pounds each year.’
‘I’m sorry for your loss …’ I said.
After an appropriate pause I blew a long, low whistle. ‘Three thousand pounds a year is a very substantial amount of money,’ I said. It certainly was, especially in a city where the average wage was about seven pounds a week. ‘And it always arrives on the twenty-third of July?’
‘Yes. Give or take a day …’
‘… if it falls on a Sunday …’
‘… for example.’
‘Is that your birthdays?’ I asked.
‘No,’ they said in unison and I could see identical reluctance on both faces.
‘So what is the significance of the twenty-third of July?’
The twins looked at each other before answering.
‘The robbery …’
‘… in Nineteen thirty-eight …’
‘… at the Empire Exhibition …’
‘Saturday the twenty-third of July was the day the robbery took place …’
‘Do you see …’
‘… our conundrum?’ The twins asked between them.
I leaned back in my captain’s chair and laced my fingers before me — sagely — while thinking of how much I really would like to see their conundrums. The truth was that I was struggling: I’d worked out that Isa and Violet were twins as soon as I saw them and felt that should have been enough Holmesian deduction for one day. I could see identical disappointment on their faces.
‘We knew that Daddy had had to go away …’
‘… after all of that trouble …’
‘… but we knew he was looking after us …’
‘… by sending us the money every year …’
And then it hit me. The discovery of his remains in the river meant that Gentleman Joe Strachan had been in a state of terminal repose for eighteen years and, as far as I was aware, there was no postal pick-up at the bottom of the Clyde.
‘So you want to know who’s been sending you the money, if not your father?’
‘Exactly,’ Isa and Violet said in emphatic unison.
‘Unless it’s not your father’s remains they found …’ I said.
Two identical heads shook with identical grim certainty. ‘The police showed us the cigarette case …’
‘… we both recognized it right away …’
‘… we remembered it clearly …’
‘… and our Mam always said to us how Daddy wouldn’t go nowhere without his special cigarette case.’
‘But that’s all there is to go on?’ I asked.
‘No …’
‘… they found clothes …’
‘… rotted to rags …’
‘… but they were able to read the labels …’
‘… and they were from Daddy’s tailors …’
‘… and our Da was always particular about where he bought his clothes …’
‘What about dental records?’ I asked. They both looked at me with blank confusion, which shouldn’t have surprised me. This was Glasgow, after all.
‘Our Da was tall …’
‘… five foot eleven …’
‘… and the police said the leg bones matched someone that height …’
I nodded. Five foot eleven was tall for Glasgow. I was tall for Glasgow and it was my height. I reluctantly handed back the wads. Isaac Newton had formulated the concept that every mass, from a coffee cup to a mountain to the Earth, had its own gravitational field: for me, cash always seemed to exert an irresistible force disproportionate to its mass. And as an object, I was anything but immoveable.
‘I have to tell you ladies,’ I said, ‘that I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to walk around the streets of Glasgow with that amount of cash about your persons.’
‘Oh, it’s all right,’ said Isa. ‘Violet’s husband Robert drove us here. We’re on our way to deposit the money in the Clydesdale Bank around the corner.’
‘But we thought we’d come and see you first.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I suppose the starting point has to be the money itself. It would appear to be the only material clue we have at the moment. It arrives by post, you say?’
Another simultaneous nod, followed by another coordinated dip into the handbags which resulted in two empty brown envelopes presenting themselves on my desk. Each was addressed differently, but in the same hand. There was a London postmark on each.
‘These are your current addresses?’
More harmonious concurrence.
‘And you have had no contact with the sender?’
‘Of course not.’