It was a scene that bordered on the surreaclass="underline" McNab, Jock Ferguson and I chatting like a bunch of old women over cups of tea and digestive biscuits. I did most of the talking and told them almost everything I had, again skipping the details of my nature trek in the forest. I did tell them that I’d been to see Billy Dunbar, accompanied by Archie, a reliable witness to the fact that Billy and his wife were both breathing when we left.
One thing that I had been expecting was to be hit with my possible connection to the death of Frank Gibson, Paul Downey’s muscular innamorato, but either Jock Ferguson hadn’t made the connection between Downey and Gibson, or he had forgotten that I had asked about someone with that name.
I placed the photograph on the desk.
‘I could have sworn this was going to turn out to be Gentleman Joe Strachan, but it’s not. It’s a guy he used to know. A friend of his called Henry Williamson. From what I’ve heard, he’s straight, but I’m pretty sure the guy who fell out of my window was working for him.’
I stabbed the photograph with my finger. I hoped the emphasis would prevent them asking exactly why I suspected him of being the brains behind the attack. McNab stared at the photograph and frowned. It gave me a bad feeling. The kind of bad feeling you get when the husband of someone you’ve got playful with stares at the smudge of lipstick you’ve got on your shirt collar.
McNab picked up the phone on the desk and tapped at the cradle before sighing and walking out of the room without a word. Ferguson looked at me and shrugged.
McNab came back in and sat down, staring at the photograph.
‘What’s up, Superintendent?’ asked Jock.
‘I’ve asked Jimmy Duncan in records to come up and join us. He works part-time as a civvy clerk, but was on the force until three years ago. He was senior man when I joined as a probationer. There’s not a face in Glasgow that he can’t put a name to.’
We sat in expectant silence for five minutes, then a heavy-built man in shirtsleeves, wearing ugly health service hornrimmed glasses and with a shock of white hair walked in. He may have been pushing sixty, but he had the look of someone you would not want to tangle with.
‘What is it, Willie?’ asked the retired constable-turned-filing clerk, as if the Chief Superintendent was still his probationer.
‘We don’t have any photographs of Joseph Strachan on file, do we? But you saw him, didn’t you, face to face?’
‘Aye, Willie, I did, but that was thirty year back and I didn’t see him for long. Didn’t talk to him or anything like that …’
McNab handed him the photograph. ‘Is that Joseph Strachan. Or could be Joseph Strachan now?’
Duncan looked at the picture for a long time.
‘I don’t know, Willie … I really couldn’t say. It really isn’t a good photograph and people change a lot in twenty year.’
‘I’ve been told that the person in the picture is called Henry Williamson,’ I said. ‘Does that name mean anything to you?’
Duncan looked at me as if I’d spoken to him in Albanian, then McNab gave him the nod that it was okay to answer.
‘Naw …’ He shook his head thoughtfully. ‘I can’t say that it does. Not as far as records is concerned.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, there was a Henry Williamson who had dealings with us right at the beginning of the war. Involved in the Home Guard.’ He looked at the picture again. ‘But I couldn’t say if this is him either. But again I only saw him the once and in passing. I had to drive Chief Superintendent Harrison over to Edinburgh for a conference about the Home Guard. Over at Craigiehall … you know, army headquarters.’
‘Home Guard, you say?’ Jock Ferguson chipped in. He didn’t look up from his tea cup and I could tell he was trying to hide the question behind a curtain of casualness. I just hoped McNab had not seen through it as easily as I had.
‘Aye, that’s right,’ said Duncan. ‘Like I said, Chief Superintendent Harrison was the force liaison with the Home Guard. Of course he was just an inspector back then.’
Ferguson looked across at me, but without much of an expression. I got his meaning though. That morning I had been jumped in the fog, the only people who had known about my interest in Strachan had been Willie Sneddon, who was unlikely to have mentioned it to anybody, and the police officers with whom Jock Ferguson had made casual inquiries.
And one of them, as he had told me, had been Chief Superintendent Edward Harrison.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
When I was leaving my digs in the morning, I bumped into Fiona White as she was coming out of her ground floor flat. Bumped into in the sense that I had the distinct impression she had been waiting to hear my footfall on the stairs before coming out.
It was a sad little exchange. I was still mixed up about her and the sudden appearance of her dead husband’s brother, or substitute, or whatever the hell he was. She was trying to frame something that she had not fully thought through: some kind of reassurance, I guess, but we were both all at sea. After all, anything that there was between us had been, until then, unspoken — if you excluded my soliloquizing the year before. And that had done more to formalize whatever we had between us than anything else. She told me that James was just concerned, as the girls’ uncle, for their well-being and there was not much else to be said. I said that it really was none of my business and that, I could see, stung her.
It was thus that our little stairwell exchange ended and I headed out to the Atlantic, feeling like crap. Always a good way to start the day.
I got to the office in time to let the joiner and glaziers in. They took most of the morning to replace the window. I hadn’t been allowed to repair it until then, but once the coppers had all of the photographs and fingerprints they wanted, I had got the go-ahead to replace the temporary boarding with new glazing. For the rest of the day, my office stank of putty, resin and the strangely lingering odour of workman sweat.
I took out a note pad and did a quick calculation of where I was with the money I had earned; none of it likely to come to the taxman’s attention. It was a lot. A whole lot. The John Macready case had been ridiculously overpaid. It annoyed me that people giving me unreasonably large sums of tax-free cash brought out the suspicious side to my nature. It annoyed me intensely. But it did.
I was now officially off the Macready and Strachan cases. I had narrowly dodged taking a long sleep in a shallow grave in the forest and I had more than enough cash to do whatever I should be doing with my life. Now, Lennox, I kept telling myself, is the time to leave well alone.
It appeared I was as deaf to internal dialogue as I was to instinct.
I found out from Donald Fraser that Macready and entourage were leaving town and flying back to the US the next day. I ’phoned Leonora Bryson and asked if we could meet for a coffee.
‘I really don’t see the point,’ she said. ‘Whatever happened between us, I don’t want you to think that it means anything.’
‘Oh, believe me, sister, you’ve made that crystal clear. But this is business. A little epilogue to my investigation, you might say.’
I could tell from her tone that she was unsure what to do; she eventually agreed to meet me. But in my office.
She turned up quarter of an hour later. She was wearing a less formal outfit that hugged her figure. I guessed that every man she had passed on the short walk across from the Central Hotel was now wearing a neck brace. She wore a silk patterned headscarf instead of a hat.
‘So, Mr Lennox. What’s on your mind?’ She squeezed an impressive amount of boredom into the question. She should have looked at her watch to underline the point, but she didn’t.