The door was answered almost instantly when I rang the electric push-bell. I got the idea that they had heard my Atlantic crunch its way up the drive. They were looking out for visitors, welcome or otherwise, I guessed. It wasn’t Bobby Kirkcaldy who answered the door but someone probably even more pugnacious-looking, an older man in a dark suit and thin woollen tie. He was lean and mean-looking and he had the appearance of something assembled from the toughest material; he had white bristle for hair and a deep-lined, leathery face that was more than weather-beaten. It looked as if anything capable of giving it a beating, weather or otherwise, had had its turn on his face. His flattened nose had that thick, rubbery, formless look that suggested it had been broken so many times that there was no cartilage left to give it any kind of meaningful shape. The damage wasn’t just visually apparent; when he spoke he sounded muffled and nasal. Even more than the average Glaswegian did.
‘What do you want?’ he asked.
‘A quiet life, money, a beautiful girl and a sense of inner peace.’
He looked at me blankly. Along with the crap, he had clearly had the humour beaten out of him.
‘I’m here to see Bobby,’ I sighed. I was not appreciated here. ‘My name is Lennox. I’m expected.’
He looked me up and down. I mirrored his examination. It was difficult to age him. He could have been a battered fifty or a fit seventy. It was obvious he was an ex-fighter, but I reckoned as much damage had been done to his face outside the ring as in it. I tilted my head and smiled impatiently. The old warrior stood to one side to let me in. I was going to hand him my hat but he didn’t look the Jeeves type, so I hung on to it and followed him down a long hallway with terracotta tiles on the floor and tasteful art, some original, on the wall. I guessed that a Motherwell-raised boxer like Kirkcaldy would probably have about as much good taste as my elderly companion with the devastated nose would have a sense of smell; I put the domestic aesthetic down to a good decorator.
He led me into a large lounge with big French windows that looked out over a massive expanse of landscaped garden to the green hills beyond. It was a nice place. The kind of nice you had to pay for. Again, what struck me most was the way it had been furnished. Glasgow was, generally, a make-do-and-mend kind of city; Britain was a make-do-and-mend society, mainly because until recently the country’s very survival had depended on it. Post-war near-bankruptcy had added inertia to the pendulum swing from austerity to prosperity. Added to all of this was Scottish social conservatism. I had seen a few homes that had been decorated in the Contemporary style — Jonny Cohen’s, for example — but generally Modernism was distrusted. And when it was used as decor, it was normally done half-heartedly or clumsily overdone.
All of which is why Bobby Kirkcaldy’s home would have looked to the average Scot like a Hollywood set. This was all good stuff. If the furnishings weren’t original Bauhaus or le Corbusier or Eames, they were pretty good copies. There was a wall filled with books. I had the uncharitable thought that Kirkcaldy the boxer must have told his interior designer to make him look smarter. Just like in the hall, the art on the lounge walls looked original. Most of it was modern and edgy — abstracty stuff — but there was something about that kind of art that appealed to me. Like the furniture, it was new. And for me, New was Good. Again, I put it all down to an overpaid interior decorator.
Bobby Kirkcaldy stood up when we came in. He had been sitting on a leather lounger by the big windows and when he got up and crossed the room to us, he did so with the same easy grace with which I’d seen him move in the ring. He had thick, dark hair and, unlike the old guy at my side, there wasn’t the usual evidence in Kirkcaldy’s face of a boxer’s career. His nose didn’t look as if it had ever been broken and there was only a hint of the high-cheeked angularity of a fighter’s face. He was wearing an open-necked shirt and lightweight trousers. The look was casual but had Jermyn Street all over it.
‘You Lennox?’ asked Kirkcaldy. He didn’t smile but there was nothing overtly hostile in his manner, either. Just businesslike.
‘I’m Lennox. You know why I’m here?’
‘To look into this nonsense that’s been going on. You’ve been hired by Willie Sneddon. To be honest, I think all this shite bothers Sneddon more than it bothers me.’ Kirkcaldy’s voice was light, almost gentle, but he managed to inject a hint of distaste when he articulated Willie Sneddon’s name. He spoke with a quiet confidence and had less of an accent than I had expected. When you saw him up close, as opposed to the distance a boxing stadium compels, there was an intelligence in the eyes. But there was something else that I couldn’t define. And it stopped me liking him.
I turned and looked at the punch bag who had shown me in, and then back at Kirkcaldy.
‘It’s okay,’ Kirkcaldy said. ‘You can talk in front of Uncle Bert. Uncle Bert has coached me since I was a kid.’
Uncle Bert looked at me expressionlessly. But, there again, he’d probably had the mobility to form an expression beaten out of his face years ago. I found myself silently questioning his qualifications as a boxing trainer, seeing as no one seemed to have taught him the meaning of the word ‘duck’.
‘Okay,’ I said. I looked around the room in the way you do when you’ve got to that point where you should have been invited to sit but haven’t. ‘Nice place. Like the paintings. I’m never sure where Abstract Expressionism ends and Lyrical Abstraction begins.’
‘These are neither,’ said Kirkcaldy. ‘I don’t trust “isms”. Political or artistic. I just buy what I like and what I can afford. And the only reason I can afford it is because of the fight game.’ He picked up that we were still standing and pointed to a sofa that hovered just clear of the polished wooden floor. I lowered myself onto it: there was a lot of lowering involved. Kirkcaldy certainly didn’t talk like the average street-to-ring pugilist and I started to suspect the books on the shelves weren’t just for show. There was a certain type of working-class Scot who, deprived of it in their childhood, treated learning and knowledge as if they were bullion. I thought I was above making snobby judgements; I’d just proved to myself that I wasn’t. It was clear to me now that the impression of physical intelligence Kirkcaldy showed in the ring was part of something bigger.
‘Do you know much about art, Mr Lennox?’ he asked, and sat down on the Eames chair opposite. Uncle Bert remained standing. It was probably force of habit: staying upright had cost him dearly in the past.
‘Some,’ I said. ‘I was interested in it before the war. Then it was kind of expected of me to get interested in the war. But I still like to visit the odd gallery.’
Kirkcaldy smiled and nodded. There was nothing to the smile in the same way there had been nothing to Sheila Gainsborough’s smile. ‘You know this is a lot of nonsense, don’t you?’
I shrugged. ‘It sounds to me like someone is trying to spook you before the big fight. There are a lot of people betting a lot of money, one way or the other, on this fight. And some of those people aren’t above dodgy dealings to protect their investment.’
‘It’s obviously somebody trying to spook me, but it’s not working. I don’t spook easily, and anyone who’s had anything to do with me would know I’d quit the ring before throwing a fight.’
‘Has anyone approached you about it? ’Phone calls, notes under the door, that kind of thing.’
‘No. Nothing. Like you say, just a spook job. Trying to put me off my preparation for the fight.’
I nodded and noted. Maybe it would get back to Sneddon that I had nodded and noted. This was a wild goose chase, just like the thing with Small Change’s appointment book. The only thing that surprised me about it was Kirkcaldy’s willingness to accept it was someone trying to queer him for the fight. Like Jonny Cohen, I got the impression this was about something else. I decided to run the idea past him.