‘That night, when the Lad approached the Railplane site … he won’t have had a balaclava on then. Did you get a look at him?’
‘No. Or not enough to ever recognize him again. Like I said, it was as dark as a coon’s arse that night and he didn’t get close enough for me to get a decent squizz at him. But he was young. Younger than I thought and a lot younger than me.’
I took another few sips of the whisky but decided not to drain the tumbler, unless I wanted to see dual carriageways through Glasgow again.
‘What are you going to do now?’ I asked.
‘Believe me, Lennox, I’m open to suggestions.’
‘Do you have a car?’
‘Aye. In the garage.’
‘Then I suggest you get packed. Right now. And get in your car and drive. Lock this place up, empty your bank account and drive. South. England. Don’t tell me where, just go. And I suggest you stay there for a few weeks, or until you hear that this is all over.’ I handed him a business card. ‘Telephone me every Monday morning at ten a.m. I’ll tell you what the state of play is. Call yourself Mr French when you call and if you hear anybody’s voice but mine, hang up. Got it?’
He nodded, but had a strange expression. Not suspicious, more confused.
‘Why are you helping me?’ he asked.
‘It’s Bob-a-Job week and I’m a Boy Scout. By the way, you owe me a shilling. I don’t know … I think you’ve been punished enough for your involvement in the robbery. You didn’t get anything out of it and you’ve spent the last eighteen years looking over your shoulder. And whether it’s Strachan or the Lad or someone else, whoever’s behind all of this mayhem has made it all very personal with me, like I told you.’
‘Well,’ said Provan. ‘It’s appreciated. Sorry about …’ He nodded to my blood-stained hand.
‘That’s okay. I don’t feel like I’m me if I’m not bleeding or bruised. Anyway, it’s a souvenir from my encounter with my commando window cleaner.’ I nodded to the kitchen sink. ‘Do you mind if I clean up?’
‘No problem. I’ve got a first aid kit if that helps.’
I took off my jacket and rolled my shirt sleeves up. My right sleeve was sodden with blood. I eased up the dressing and saw that two of the stitches had popped, as I’d suspected and the wound gaped slightly at one end. I took a fresh pad and bandage from the frowning Provan and patched myself up as well as I could.
While I cleaned up, Provan packed a couple of holdalls for himself. He saw me out, locked the bungalow’s door behind him and shook my hand.
‘Thanks again, Lennox,’ he said.
‘Don’t thank me yet. Like I said, keep driving until you’re the only one with a Scottish accent, then drive some more.’
‘Will do.’ He waved and headed into the green-painted wooden garage.
I sat in the Atlantic for a moment and considered my next move. I knew who I had to see. I’d known it for some time now. My guess was that if I didn’t see him, he’d come visit me. And there was Fraser, the solicitor, with whom I had an account to settle. But I decided that before I did anything, I’d have to visit the Casualty Department and get my wound stitched up again. Then I’d visit a sign painter and get the lettering on my office window changed to ‘Lennox. Enquiry Agent and Human Tapestry’.
I could have sworn the whole car shunted sideways. The blast sideswiped the Atlantic and I felt the same stunned paralysis that I’d got during the war every time a shell or a grenade had gone off that little bit too close to me. And as the scars on my face attested, they had gone off too close. I ducked down and hugged my knees and a shower of green painted wood clattered down on the car. After it subsided I turned and looked out of my cracked side window. The garage was gone, along with a lot of Provan’s car. And Provan. I could make out something barely recognizable as a human shape blazing like the rest of the car.
Instinct took over and I sped off, taking the first turning off Provan’s street, hopefully before the neighbours who were coming running from their homes spotted my car or, worse still, my licence plate.
I cursed as I drove. I still didn’t know exactly whom I was cursing, but I cursed colourfully and loudly. Once I was in open countryside, I pulled over to the side of the road and checked the Atlantic for damage. Nothing much, apart from the cracked window on the driver’s side. I brushed what fragments of green-painted wood were left on the roof and bonnet and drove off at speed.
Into Glasgow.
I was left waiting in the Western Infirmary’s Casualty Department for four hours before a doctor deigned to see me. He tutted and sighed until I glowered at him with sufficient menace to change his attitude. Then he and a pretty nurse stitched me back up. I smiled at the nurse while the doctor worked. It is one of the paradoxes of being a man, or maybe just of being a Lennox, that you can be battered and bleeding, you can have just seen someone blasted and burned to death, you can have the most dangerous villains hunting you down, but somehow you still take time to make a move on pretty nurses.
Like the suicidal spawning journey of wild salmon, it was one of the wonders of Nature.
I called Fraser from a pay ’phone in the hospital.
‘We need to talk,’ I said firmly.
‘I’ve been somewhat expecting your call, Mr Lennox. I agree, we do have to talk. I do so hope we can resolve matters between us.’
‘In that case you’ll understand that I’d like to meet somewhere public. The Finnieston Vehicular Ferry, tomorrow morning, the first sailing at six-thirty, if that’s not too early for a lawyer.’
‘I’ll be there. I’ll bring a small bonus for you, Mr Lennox, just as a goodwill gesture. I don’t see that we need to rock the boat.’
I wondered if Fraser was making a joke about the ferry, but decided that that kind of humour would be more alien to him than a little green man from Mars. I hung up.
I went to the hospital canteen and had a coffee, more to wash down the antibiotics I had been given to fight infection than anything else. I noticed my hand shook as I held the cup and the image of Provan’s burning silhouette kept pushing its way to the front of my mind.
After I’d calmed down a little, I made my way out to the car park. There were two men waiting at the Atlantic. One was a wiry, hard-looking Teddy Boy. The other was sitting on the wing of my Atlantic and I was seriously worried about permanent damage to the suspension. He stood up as I approached and the Atlantic bounced.
I knew them both.
‘Hello, Mr Lennox,’ said the giant, in a baritone that bordered on the bottom of the human hearing range. ‘We’ve been re-quest-ed to furr-nush you with conney-vey-ance to see Mr Sneddon.’
‘I was kind of expecting that, Twinkle,’ I said. ‘I see you have Singer with you. Hello, Singer.’
Singer nodded. Which was all he could do. I thought of quipping ‘I see I’m in for the silent treatment’, but joking about Singer’s affliction was something I never did, for some reason I didn’t fully understand.
Singer was mute. He was also the meanest, most vicious life-taker you could encounter. But I owed him: he had saved my life once and, as far as I could tell, he had some kind of regard for me, as did Twinkletoes. I liked Twinkletoes. He was a great one for self-improvement and worked tirelessly at improving his word-power, mainly through study of the Reader’s Digest. The funny thing was that, despite this, Twinkletoes managed somehow to speak English, his native tongue, as if it were a second language.
This endearing image of Twinkletoes was the one I tried to keep at the forefront of my thinking as he escorted me into the back of the Jaguar they had parked behind my Atlantic. The alternative image was of the psychopathic torturer who handed you your toes one by one while reciting ‘This Little Piggy’.