I went across to my office window while their heels were still clacking their way down the stairwell. Gordon Street below and the entrance to Central Station opposite were both thronging with people. Because it was before noon, there were no parking restrictions on Gordon Street and there was a car pulled up directly outside the entrance to my building. A brand new Ford Zephyr, all black and Hire Purchase shiny. A smartly dressed man stood leaning against the wing smoking a cigarette. He wasn’t wearing a hat and I could see he had a full head of thick, dark hair. The suit looked expensive and must have been tailor-made to fit the shoulders that bulked beneath the material. He snapped away his cigarette and dutifully held open the door for the twins when they emerged from the doorway. So that was Violet’s husband, Robert. I could tell, even from the distance of four floors up, that this guy was ‘handy’, as my shady business chums would say.
I found myself wondering how much of Robert’s tailoring was paid for through the largesse of his wife’s anonymous benefactor and how much came from earnings that spared the taxman effort. I couldn’t see his face and therefore couldn’t tell if he was someone I’d come across in my dealings with Glasgow’s less salubrious social set.
After they had driven off, I sat at my desk frowning, without knowing what it was I was frowning about. Or maybe I did: I had spent a long time putting some distance between myself and the Three Kings. I still got the very occasional job from them, and it was difficult to refuse Willie Sneddon, Handsome Jonny Cohen or Hammer Murphy. Murphy particularly had a problem with anyone saying no to him, and had a temper that a psychopath would deem unseemly. It was blindingly obvious that this case, involving as it did the famous — or infamous, depending on your point of view of a sawn-off shotgun — Gentleman Joe Strachan, was going to suck me right back into that world.
But it wasn’t even that: there was more to the nagging in the back of my brain. I frowned some more.
Then I took the cash the twins had handed me out of the drawer and counted it. Then counted it again. I stopped frowning.
CHAPTER THREE
Three thousand miles and a wartime before, about the time that Gentleman Joe Strachan’s criminal career was already well underway, I had been an eager-beaver schoolboy in the prestigious Boys’ Collegiate School in Rothesay, New Brunswick, on Canada’s Atlantic coast, where Glasgow was far, far away. Mind you, no further away than Vancouver. One of the subjects at which I had excelled at school was History. Then, without pause or hesitation, I’d answered the King’s call and rushed to defend, against a small Austrian corporal, the Empire and a Mother Country I had left before I’d been toilet trained.
The funny thing about the reality of war was that you suddenly lost your enthusiasm for history. Watching men die in the mud, screaming or crying or calling for their mothers, blunted your appetite for memorizing the dates of battles or for learning the glories of past conflict. If the war had taught me anything about history, it was that there was no future in it.
That was probably why, despite there being an impressive wad of cash in my desk drawer, I put off delving into the history of Glasgow’s most audacious robbery and the colourful if dangerous character behind it. It was true, of course, that I really needed the list of names that Isa and Violet had promised me before my delving could have any clear direction, but the truth was I knew where I could get started and I was putting it off for a day or two.
The day before the twins had turned up, I had received a telephone call asking for an appointment to see me. The male voice on the line had had that accent that was normally associated with Kelvinside: nasally and vaguely camp, with the tortuously articulated vowels that over-compensated to hide a Glasgow accent. I had lived in the city for a couple of years before I’d worked out that Kay Vale-Ray wasn’t some obscure nightclub chanteuse, but referred to a company of mounted soldiers.
The voice spoke in multi-syllabically dense sentences and told me that it belonged to Donald Fraser, a solicitor, and that he would appreciate me calling out to see him at his office in St Vincent Street on ‘a matter of not inconsiderable delicacy’. More than that he was ‘unprepared to divulge telephonically’. I let it go and agreed to meet with him: as an enquiry agent, I had learned that some people desperately wanted to tell you their story — and their whole reason for contacting you was to tell you their story — but nevertheless needed time to open up; and they expected you to coax it out of them. I was rather good at it, and had often contemplated that my talents would have been equally well employed if I’d qualified as a doctor of venereal diseases. The truth was that I would probably have had to listen to less sordid stories.
In any case, I hadn’t pushed Fraser for more information. The other reason was that he was a lawyer in a firm whose name I recognized. Being an enquiry agent, the city’s lawyers were a key source of legitimate jobs. Mainly divorces, which under Scottish law required some upstanding member of society such as myself to testify that some other member of society had been upstanding when, where and with whom he shouldn’t have been.
After Isa and Violet left, I had a couple of hours before my appointment with Fraser. I picked up the phone and asked the operator for Bell 3500, the number of police headquarters in Saint Andrew’s Square, and asked to be put through to Inspector Jock Ferguson.
‘Fancy a pie and a pint?’ I asked him.
‘What is it you’re after, Lennox?’ I could hear the chatter of a typewriter in the background. I imagined a burly, ruddy-cheeked Highlander in uniform tapping away with two fingers, tongue jutting sideways from his mouth, frowning in concentration.
‘What do I want? The pleasure of your society, of course. And a pie and a pint. But don’t pin me down too soon … I need to view the Horsehead Bar’s a la carte options, first.’
‘The Horsehead?’ Ferguson snorted.
‘For some reason I’m harbouring a grudge against my digestive system.’
‘Aye … and mine, it would seem. Why don’t you save us the indigestion and just tell me what you’re after?’
‘Just a chat. See you there in half an hour?’
Ferguson grunted his assent and hung up. Small talk was not his forte.
Scotland had two national pastimes, the only subjects that awoke profound passion in the Scottish breast: football and the consumption of alcohol. The funny thing was that they were as spectacularly bad at the first as they excelled at the second. Like the Irish, the Scots seemed to have a prodigious thirst woven through the fabric of their being. But being Presbyterian, the Scots felt the need to temper, contain and regulate anything that could be deemed pleasurable and make it run to a timetable. Midday drinking was therefore restricted by law to between eleven a.m. and two-thirty p.m. Bars were only allowed to open between five and nine-thirty in the evening. Sundays were dry.
There were, of course, all kinds of social clubs that found their way around the licensing laws but, generally, the Scots had learned to consume impressively large quantities of alcohol with breathtaking speed. So when I walked into the Horsehead Bar at one, it was shoulder-to-shoulder packed and the air was eye-stingingly dense with cigarette smoke. It was a typical Glasgow city-centre-pub lunchtime: mainly flat caps but a fair smattering of pinstripe. I saw Jock Ferguson at the bar and squeezed my way to him through the sea of drinkers. I washed up on the shore of the counter, resting my elbows on it.
‘How’s it going, Jock?’ I asked cheerfully. And loudly, to be heard above the din of the other drinkers. We didn’t shake hands. We never shook hands. ‘Waiting long?’ I noticed there was no drink before him. He had been waiting for me to buy the first round. I reckoned I’d be buying the second and third.