But even with all of my erring, sinning, fornication, drinking, brawling and shoving ex-commandos out of third floor windows, I was a choirboy compared to Gentleman Joe Strachan. Another thing I knew about myself was that I was bright. I had smarts enough for two, but even there I was left in Strachan’s shadow. He had made a career out of crossing, double-crossing, beguiling and confusing others with an ease and skill that was breathtaking. It was one thing I had found out about life, about people. We’re not all the same. There were always the manipulators and the manipulated, the singular and the unremarkable.
I even wondered whether it was true, after all, that Sneddon was Strachan’s illegitimate son, or if Gentleman Joe had somehow manipulated him, moulded him into the belief.
Maybe tonight it would be me who walked blindly into a trap of Strachan’s design.
There was a knock at my door.
I hadn’t heard anyone come up the stairs and I took my Webley from the drawer, draping a hand towel over the gun to conceal it. When I opened the door, Fiona White stood there, silent and awkward.
‘Fiona … come in,’ I said. ‘Excuse me for a moment …’ I went through to the bedroom and placed the gun back in the chest of drawers and pulled my shirt back on. When I returned, she now stood in the centre of the room, every bit as awkwardly as she had on the threshold.
‘Is there something wrong, Fiona?’ I asked.
‘The girls are at school …’ she said, as if I should understand what that meant.
And I did.
We spent the whole day together, mainly in bed, until the girls were due home from school. About noon, I made some coffee and she nipped down to her apartment to fetch some cold cuts for us to eat for lunch. She laughed and joked in a way I had never seen her before and the intimacy of it was even greater than the sex we’d had.
And, for a reason I couldn’t understand, or maybe I could, it made me very sad. It could have been that I really did not expect to see the next day dawn, or that I knew that even if I did, no matter how we felt about each other, our paths lay in different directions. But I laughed and joked too and bottled everything else up tight: my sadness, my fear, my hopes.
She kissed me when she left. A long, lingering kiss and she smiled again in a way that showed me the girl she had been.
I ate with her and the girls and everything was business as usual, except for the infrequent lingering glance we exchanged when the girls wouldn’t notice.
Fiona frowned, when I excused myself at eight-thirty.
‘Something I have to deal with,’ I explained. ‘Business I need to tie up.’
Collecting my stuff from my room, I strapped the knife to my right ankle, tucked the Webley into my belt, slipped the flat blackjack into my inside jacket pocket, the heavier one into one of my side pockets and the brass knuckles into the other.
That was the thing about a life of violence: it played havoc with your tailoring.
I parked the Atlantic in the city centre and hoofed it down to the waterfront, hoping that if I bumped into a copper, the fact that I was carrying a gun, knife, brass knuckles and two saps wouldn’t strike him as suspicious.
It was beginning to get dark by the time I got down to the Queen’s Dock. There was a night watchman just beginning his shift on the main gate and I walked past on the far side of the cobbled road, dodging the pools of lamplight. There was an open quay further along with several piles of crates to offer cover. I was over an hour early, but I reckoned Strachan would arrive ahead of time for his appointment with Fraser, just to scope out the location. I was applying the same logic that Provan and his buddies had applied eighteen years before. I tried not to think about how that had turned out for them.
Strachan pulled up in a glossy Triumph Mayflower. He was only ten minutes early and I was surprised, really surprised, to see that he had turned up alone.
I was impressed. Here he was on a gloomy Glasgow dockside, the Gorbals born and bred Joe Strachan, and he could not have looked more out of place. There was nothing about him that said Glasgow: he was as tall as me, and when he stepped out of the car without a coat, I could see that he was impeccably dressed as a country gentleman. The tailoring did not have the robust, shapeless and slightly tasteless look of typical British country wear; I guessed that his sports jacket and flannels were of Italian or French origin, which added to the vaguely foreign-aristocrat look I’d picked up from the photograph. And there was no doubt in my mind that he was the man in the photograph.
Strachan may have been in the back end of his fifties, but he had the physique of someone twenty years younger. This was no old man.
He stood at the end of the pier, watching the Clyde slide by inky and sleek in the dark. As I watched him, I wondered if Strachan was pondering on what it would really have been like to take the deep, dark sleep at the bottom of the river.
A second car arrived and I had to duck down behind the crates to avoid being picked up in the sweep of headlights. The car parked at the land end of the pier and Fraser got out. He walked right past my hiding place and as he made his way towards Strachan, I could see him glancing nervously about.
From my silent, shadowed hiding place I willed Fraser to stop looking around. He was sending a signal to Strachan as sure as if he had called ‘Lennox! Lennox! Come out, come out, wherever you are!’
He reached Strachan and the two men shook hands, Fraser still moving stiffly and looking as rigid as hell. I couldn’t hear what they were saying to each other but I just hoped to hell that Fraser was sticking to the script we had agreed in the car as we’d driven off the Finnieston Ferry. I’d told Fraser to say I’d come to see him and I wanted to do a deal. I wanted out of the whole business and just wanted assurances that they would leave me alone. I told Fraser to say that I had told him I had a complete dossier on Strachan, including his new identity and the photograph Paul Downey had taken, and if anything happened to me it would automatically be sent to the police, so on and so forth. I told Fraser to drop in that I had an eyewitness stashed away to boot. The eyewitness they had planned to bump off.
It was all complete guff — other than me having Paul Downey tucked away in a Largs caravan park — and Strachan would know it, but it was all just something for Fraser to say until I got a chance to get the jump on Strachan. And without his goons to support him, although it was still going to be a dangerous play, it was going to be that much easier.
As they talked, Strachan gazed at the ground in concentration and nodded, as if taking in every syllable that Fraser uttered. Then, suddenly, he held up a hand as if telling Fraser to wait. He walked over to the Mayflower and opened the boot. He hauled a small, slightly-built man with dark hair out of the boot and to his feet.
Paul Downey.
I made a start but then checked myself.
‘Good evening, Mr Lennox,’ Strachan called out into the night, but not in my direction. ‘As you see, I have your witness here.’ The accent, like the tailoring, didn’t have even the tiniest vestige of Glasgow about it. Cut-glass clear and modulated, the same way as my chum who took the window exit. ‘When you told Mr Fraser here to call my men off the search for Downey, all we had to do was to follow you. You’re really not as good as you think. Now, Mr Lennox, please don’t be tiresome. Show yourself. I know that you are here.’
It was then that I heard them: the other two. I turned to see one beginning to search the far side of the pier, starting at the top and working his way towards the water. I heard his chum on my side, further back and nearer to where Fraser had parked his car, working his way through the stacks of barrels and crates.