‘I don’t see the conflict of interest,’ said McNab. ‘You can tell them that and point me in the right direction. I know you’ve had a lot of shady stuff in your background, but I also know that you’re the kind of man who wouldn’t sit still and let someone get away with murder, whether it’s a policeman’s murder or not.’
‘It would be a mistake to overestimate my nobility, McNab. But from what I’ve heard about Strachan, yes, it wouldn’t upset me to see him caught. But we have different furrows to plough, Superintendent.’
‘Give me something, Lennox.’
Again I paused, struggling with where I was with this.
‘Okay, like I said, I am looking into Strachan’s disappearance for his daughters. I had only made a couple of enquiries, barely putting my head above the parapet, when some guy jumps me in a foggy alley and tells me to lay off. Now this guy could handle himself, I mean really handle himself. Not like a street thug, more like a commando. It gets me thinking, if Strachan is dead, why am I getting serious professional advice to drop it?’
McNab’s broad face lit up with something. I was telling him what he wanted to hear. I decided not to tell him that my dance partner had stuck a gun in my back.
‘Then … and don’t ask me how I found this out, because I’m not going to tell you … but then I get an account from an eyewitness who swears he saw Strachan during the war. In the summer of Nineteen forty-two, to be exact.’
McNab looked as if an electrical charge had just run through him. ‘I knew it! I bloody knew it! Where?’
‘Now don’t get too excited …’ I tried to inject a cautious tone. ‘The rest of this doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, so just hear me through. This eyewitness, whom I tend to believe, said that he saw Strachan wearing the uniform of a major up at Lochailort. My witness reckons that Strachan was involved in the training of Auxiliary Units.’
I could see the electricity drain from McNab. ‘That can’t have been Strachan,’ he said.
‘That’s what I thought to start with too, but don’t dismiss it. I found out about Strachan’s less than glorious service in the First War. He regularly went AWOL, wearing officers’ uniforms and made an embarrassingly good job of passing himself off as an officer. You know yourself that he probably passed himself off as some plausible upper-class type to carry out reconnaissance of the locations of each of his major robberies. So Strachan being seen in an officer’s uniform isn’t that big a leap.’
‘But you said he was at Lochailort. There’s no way anyone, even Strachan, could have bluffed his way in there without the right papers and without others knowing exactly who he was and from what unit.’
‘That’s where I get stuck. And that’s where we could do a little quid pro quo. I can’t gain access to that kind of information; but you can.’
‘I don’t know, Lennox. There’s only so much the City of Glasgow Police can get out of the military. Especially about places like Lochailort, that are still subject to the Official Secrets Act.’
‘You’ve got a better chance than me.’
‘And what do I get in return?’
‘A call. If I find that Strachan is alive, and if I discover where he’s hidden himself, I’ll stick a couple of pennies in a pay ’phone. You probably won’t believe this, but I’ve already cautioned my clients that if I do find Strachan is alive and well, I would be compelled to do my civic duty.’
‘Just make sure no one gets a five-minute start, Lennox. Or our new found chumminess may falter.’ In a gesture of purposeful ceremony, McNab used two fingers to push the envelope across the table towards me. I pushed it back.
‘Like I said, Mr McNab, civic duty. Keep your money.’
McNab paused for a moment as if assessing me, then shrugged and pocketed the envelope as he stood up.
‘Can I use your ’phone?’ he asked, but had already spun it around to face him and lifted the receiver.
‘Superintendent McNab here,’ he said after a moment. ‘I’m clocking off. Anything come in before I head home?’
He sighed as he listened to the answer, then took his notebook from his coat and scribbled into it.
‘No rest for the wicked, I guess,’ I said after he hung up.
‘I’ve got to go,’ he said. ‘There’s been a murder. Some nancy-boy out in Govanhill …’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
After McNab left, I tried unsuccessfully to get a hold of Jock Ferguson. He was on duty, the desk sergeant who answered the ’phone told me, but was out on a call.
Of course it could, I tried to convince myself, be a pure coincidence. But how many ‘nancy-boys’, as McNab called them, could there be in Govanhill? And like Glasgow Corporation buses, coincidences tended to come along in threes. Maybe Jock Ferguson had been called out to another case, but I couldn’t stop the reel on the scene playing in my head: Jock Ferguson standing over the body and suddenly remembering, probably the instant McNab arrived, that the name of the deceased just happened to be the same as one of the names I asked him to check out for me.
I decided to grab the bull by the horns and drive over to the tenement. On the way over I would have to do a lot of quick thinking on how I was going to explain my interest, but without bringing Hollywood stars or minor royalty into it. I had just put on my hat and coat when I checked myself. Of course, that had not been Paul Downey’s flat; it was Frank, the muscle-bound pool attendant, whose name was on the rent book. Maybe it was he who had been murdered, which meant I had some time before flat-feet plodded along a trail that would lead them to Paul Downey. But, pedestrian as they were, the CID would eventually make the connection, and Jock Ferguson would make another.
For once, I was grateful for the smog. It had come back with a vengeance and I decided to take the Underground to Kinning Park and hoof it the rest of the way. I walked past the end of the road, but the fog was too thick for me to see the far end and whether or not there were police cars parked outside. Walking past the street end, I turned into the next, which ran parallel to Frank’s, and walked almost to its end before cutting through a tenement passageway and into the communal back court.
The communal court was a vast rectangle, fringed by tenements on all sides and punctuated by small, squat wash-houses and clusters of trashcans and heaped rubbish. The demarcation between each tenement’s section of yard was marked by low railings, most of which were broken.
It was the kind of place the Black Death would have been happy to call home.
The court was overlooked by the backs of tenements on both streets, as well as the blocks at either end that connected them into a stretched rectangle. Not that there was much overlooking being done: the fog had dimmed the light from the windows to vague glows in the gloom and the far end of the rectangle was completely obscured. As I crossed the court, stepping through or over the railings I came to, I guessed I was pretty well concealed. The fogged air of the yard carried a rank smell and the cobbles beneath my feet felt slimy and I had to concentrate on not losing my footing. A sudden noise halted me when I was about halfway across and I froze for a moment, then realized it was something scuttling around in the trashcans. I continued my progress across the court: if I had calculated right, I would be directly opposite the tenement I’d followed Frank to. I listened for a moment but could hear no voices anywhere near, so I guessed the back court was empty behind Frank’s, but I didn’t want to take the risk of bumping into a copper taking a leak or having a crafty smoke.
As I drew closer, I could have sworn the air became denser and suffused with the smell of burning.
When I could see the tenements opposite more clearly, I angled my approach to take me towards the tenement next to Frank’s and the acrid tinge to the air intensified. I could just make out, further down and behind Frank’s tenement, a scattering of black-silhouetted objects. And voices. Many voices. I crept closer until I reached the first object: a scorched and blackened armchair that was still warm to the touch, despite having been doused in water.