‘You wanted me to tell you about Gentleman Joe,’ said Murphy with a sneer. Or maybe he was just smiling. ‘I’ll fucking tell you. We all have our little tricks to keep everyone in fucking line. You’re really pally with that fucking monkey of Sneddon’s … the cunt with the boltcutters …’
‘Twinkletoes MacBride? I wouldn’t say we’re pally …’
‘Well he cuts toes and fingers off. Jonny here has Moose Margolis who boils your balls for you. I have …’ Murphy thought for a moment. ‘Well, I have me. The fucking point is this … we all make a big show to scare the shite out of people. Keep the fucking rank and file in line.’ Murphy leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and fixing me with those small, hard eyes of his. ‘Well, Gentleman Joe Strachan never did any of that. No show, no flash. But if you offended him, even if you didn’t mean it, you were fucked. He’d make no big deal about it, but the next fucking thing you’d know is that the one who’d crossed him would just fucking disappear off the face of the earth. No show, like I said. Nothing. And that, my friend, was the scariest fucking thing of all.’
Jonny Cohen picked up the story. ‘Every job he was involved in, every one of his men, where the cash went or what was planned next … no one ever knew anything about it. He was before my time, Lennox, but from the very first job I ever pulled, from the moment I got my foot on the ladder, I knew all about Gentleman Joe Strachan and his army of ghosts.’
‘Christ, Jonny,’ I said. ‘You’re getting lyrical in your old age.’
‘No … really, that’s what they called them. Strachan’s ghosts.’
‘And there was only one who anyone could put a fucking name to,’ said Murphy. ‘If you can call it a name …’
‘The Lad?’ I asked.
Murphy nodded. ‘So you’ve heard about him. He was called the Lad because it was like he was serving a fucking apprenticeship with Strachan. There wasn’t anything this wee fucker wouldn’t do for Gentleman Joe. And it was like Joe was training him up to take over.’
‘You know what this “Lad” looked like? Or do you have any hint of what his real name might have been or where he came from?’
‘Naw,’ said Murphy. ‘There was this one feller, going way back, fucked if I can remember his name. Anyways, this cunt starts fucking blabbing in the boozer one night about how he nearly got a job with Gentleman Joe and starts going on about this evil wee fucker they called the Lad. That’s how everybody found out about him. If this bastard hadn’t got fucking pished, we wouldn’t even know this much.’
‘Let me guess, this guy who mouthed off … he disappeared?’
‘Off the face of the fucking Earth,’ said Murphy.
‘No body ever found,’ said Jonny Cohen. ‘The thing is, Lennox, when they fished those bones out of the river, it was the first time in years that we didn’t feel we needed to keep looking over our shoulders for Strachan. But if that wasn’t his bones, then God knows where he is and what he’s got planned …’
For a moment, I thought about what they had said. ‘But that was nearly twenty years ago, Jonny. You can’t seriously think he’s come back now? If he ever showed his face in Glasgow he’d have a noose around his neck inside of a month.’
‘You’re forgetting Strachan’s “Lad”,’ said Jonny. ‘His heir apparent. If there was one thing Strachan was a master at, it was planning ahead and biding his time.’
I shook my head. ‘I still don’t get it.’
‘It’s fucking simple,’ said Murphy. ‘You’re looking into this for his girls who, incidentally, have fuck knows how many half-brothers and — sisters spread around the fucking country. Anyway, you do your job for them. That’s fucking fine and fucking dandy with us. But we will give you a thousand each if you can give us a name, an address or even a fucking face for the Lad. You point us in the right direction, and we take it from there. You also end up two grand richer.’
‘And Willie Sneddon isn’t playing?’
‘You want to fucking know something? Sneddon’s the one who’s always had the most to lose. But now he doesn’t give a flying fuck. He’s too busy becoming the Chamber of fucking Commerce’s man of the fucking month.’
It struck me that if anywhere was going to have a Chamber of Fucking Commerce, it would be Glasgow.
I shrugged. ‘It’s no skin off my nose to point out this guy, whoever he is, but I really don’t think I’m going to get within a country mile of finding out who he is.’ I paused for a moment.
‘What is it?’ asked Cohen.
I shook my head. ‘No … it’s nothing. It’s just that the morning after I started asking around about Strachan I had a brief encounter with a heavy and a thirty-eight in the fog. And this guy was good. Professional. He wanted to scare me off looking into Strachan’s disappearance.’
‘So why couldn’t it be Strachan’s lad?’
‘Too young. I mean it could be, but it would make him only seventeen or eighteen or thereabouts at the time of the robberies. Too much of a lad. Especially to work as an enforcer.’
‘When I was eighteen I could malky any bastard that got in my way.’ The pride was apparent in Murphy’s voice.
‘I’m sure you could,’ I said. ‘I don’t know … it just doesn’t feel right.’
‘Yet you say this guy was after you to put the frighteners on and get you to drop the Joe Strachan thing?’ asked Cohen.
I thought about it for a moment. It was a stretch with age, but I hadn’t gotten that good a look at the guy. He could have been five years older. Three years older. It would be enough.
‘I tell you what,’ I said. ‘If he is the Lad, then I’ll serve him up to you on a platter, with pleasure.’ Then I added, just for clarity: ‘But I’ll still take the two thousand.’
CHAPTER NINE
To say that Glasgow was a city of paradoxes is like saying the North Pole can be chilly. Everywhere you looked, everything about the city seemed to contradict itself and everything else. It was a bustling, densely populated, fuming, noisy, brash industrial city; yet, if you travelled fifteen minutes in any direction, you found yourself in vast, empty landscapes of moorland, hill and glen. It was a city defined by its people, and its people were defined by Glasgow: yet, that same small distance away, the Glaswegian identity gave way to a different type of Scottishness. In the direction Archie and I drove, it became increasingly a Highland identity.
The country estate on which Billy Dunbar worked was remote and dramatic, covering mountains, pasture and the odd salmon-stocked loch. I enjoyed getting out of the city and into this kind of landscape whenever I could, and had often driven up past the shores of Loch Lomond and stopped off at some lochside tea shop. I did have my contemplative moments — when I wasn’t peeping on adulterous spouses, slapping people about or hobnobbing with gangsters.
As I drove, I thought about my meeting with Handsome Jonny Cohen and Hammer Murphy. Before I left, I had asked Murphy about his younger days when he had worked with Gentleman Joe Strachan. He hadn’t been able to tell me much, but if he had omitted the word ‘fuck’ and all its derivatives, it would have taken half as long to tell me. But the picture I had come away with was of a Joe Strachan whom Murphy had been, and remained, incapable of understanding, as if he existed on a completely different criminal plane. Murphy had done a few jobs for Strachan, but they had always been in connection with something else that Murphy had never known about, like working on one corner of a painting without being allowed to see the whole canvas. This is, of course, my analogy. Murphy had described it as ‘being kept in the fucking dark and knowing fuck all about fuck all that was fucking going on’.
It took Archie and me several stops at remote petrol stations and post offices before we found our way to the estate office. Mr Dunbar, we were told by the tweedy spinster type we found in the office, was the deputy head gamekeeper. Eyeing us with that kind of keen suspicion that only comes from a long lifetime’s experience of virginity, she asked us the nature of our business with Mr Dunbar. I decided to christen her Miss Marple.