The cake may have been cut up equally, but somehow Willie Sneddon had managed to grab most of the icing. Of the Three Kings, Sneddon was by far the richest. No one really knew — but many suspected — how he had managed to amass just quite so much wealth. It was a quandary that had no doubt cost Hammer Murphy more than his fair share of sleepless nights trying to work out. Truth was that, if you knew Willie Sneddon, it wasn’t that much of a mystery. There was something dark, cunning and devious about his nature, even more than you would expect from your average crime lord. Sneddon was a wheeler and dealer. More than just a criminal, he was a criminal entrepreneur, always seeking out that extra angle; always trying to find some new way of squeezing a penny out of a situation.
I knew — although I never discussed it with him — that the bulk of Jonny Cohen’s money did not come from his clubs and other rackets. The main source of Jonny’s income came from large-scale criminal acts: robberies mainly, break-ins, long firm frauds, the odd bit of extortion. With Jonny Cohen — and Hammer Murphy, for that matter — the bulk of their earnings came from big hits which yielded large sums of cash. The big score. Willie Sneddon was in the same line of business, but everyone knew that he had so many other deals and rackets running at the same time that he had a steady, constant cash harvest. Added to all of this there was the other dimension of his activities: Willie Sneddon the businessman. Sneddon had displayed genuine acumen for legitimate business, even if it had been founded on stolen, extorted or counterfeited cash. Like most big league crooks, he had started a number of seemingly legitimate concerns, fronts through which to launder dirty money. Where Sneddon had distinguished himself from the usual robber barons was in the way he had been able to turn these fronts into genuinely successful and legitimate businesses.
But it never took much scratching to expose the brass crook under the gilt veneer. The fact was that wherever there was a shilling to be made, crooked or legit, Sneddon had the nose to sniff it out.
All of this meant that Sneddon, unlike the recently deceased Small Change MacFarlane, had been able to make it across the social Rubicon of the Clyde. And then some. The Sneddon residence, a large mock-baronial mansion on a plot of land so big it could have had its own Lord Lieutenant and council, was in the leafiest and most upmarket end of leafy and upmarket Bearsden. I knew that he counted a High Court judge, a couple of shipyard owners, and several other captains of industry amongst his neighbours. I wondered how the judge felt about sharing a laburnum and privet border with Glasgow’s most successful criminal. But there again, Willie Sneddon had attained the level of wealth and influence within the city where some of the people he had dealings with no doubt thought it bad taste to bring up some of the more dubious origins of that wealth.
And, of course, the odd brown envelope stuffed with cash would have helped. Glasgow was a city where anything could be bought. Even respectability.
I couldn’t put off seeing Sneddon any longer. He would be looking for news and the only news I had for him was that putting me on the Bobby Kirkcaldy case was a waste of time and that Maggie MacFarlane had confirmed that Small Change never kept a secret appointments diary.
It wasn’t raining. There was a more than half-hearted sun behind a milky veil of cloud and the air wasn’t heavy and oppressively humid as it had been. I got up, shaved, and dressed in a pale blue silk shirt with dark burgundy tie and a two-button two-piece: deep blue with a touch of mohair spun through it. It had no weight and hung well and had cost me an arm and a leg. Deep blue socks and burgundy Oxfords. I brushed the shoulders of the suit jacket, donned it, and straightened my tie in the mirror. I put on my new hat, a skinny-brimmed Borsalino, and checked myself in the mirror. Damn, this suit hung well. It seemed such a shame to bag it down with the weight, but I was expecting that I would, sooner or later, run into Costello or a member or two of his robust entourage.
I habitually carry a sap with me: six inches long, spring-steel with a lead ball on the end, all encased in stitched leather. But I was a slave to fashion and I didn’t want it bagging my suit. Fortunately I had a slimline equivalent: a nine-inch blackjack. Basically the same principle, but flattened out, only the width of a wallet and almost like a small version of a barber’s leather razor strop. It was an elegant-looking thing, slim and black, like something Chanel would have designed for Al Capone.
I slipped the blackjack into my inside jacket pocket. On the left, where I could pull it out with my right hand. The leaden weight of it tugged that side of my jacket, but I decided to live with it. A flat blackjack is often missed when someone frisks you: it feels like a wallet. And I didn’t feel like going out onto the street without some insurance.
I ’phoned Sneddon to arrange a meet. He told me he was tied up all day and couldn’t I give him the information over the ’phone. I said I’d rather talk to him face-to-face, and anyway it wasn’t the kind of thing to discuss over the ’phone, or some shit like that. He bought it and told me to call round in the evening, about eight-thirty.
I had ’phoned him first to make the point that calling and arranging a mutually convenient time was preferable to being lifted from the street by Twinkletoes McBride. Added to which, unlike the farmhouse out by Dumbarton, the place in Bearsden was Sneddon’s home, as well as business headquarters. Maybe I could even persuade Jimmy Costello to follow the same diary etiquette. Though I doubted it.
Before I went out, I stopped at the hall ’phone and called Lorna at home. She was bearing up well, it seemed, but her voice still sounded tired and grief-dulled. I somehow got by with a promise to ’phone her later, without calling in at the house. I did ask her if the police had been around to ask anything else and if Jack Collins had been around again. No to both questions. Then we had one of those long silences where we each waited for the other to say something. Something meaningful or comforting. Something to take us out of our depth: shallow.
‘I’ll hear from you later then,’ she said eventually, her tone still colourless, and hung up.
I drove out to the East End, to Dennistoun. Like many of the fine districts of Glasgow, it was a great thing to be able to claim that you came from Dennistoun. It was ever going back there that was to be avoided. Dennistoun was a warren of old tenements, dressed in grime that had belched from chimneys when Victoria had been a lass. As I drove into it there were gaps and clear spaces where some of the more derelict slums had been cleared. Shiny new blocks of flats were already in residence on a couple of the cleared sites.
I drove to the far side of Dennistoun, to an incongruous green patchwork square of allotments. Behind those, an equally incongruous building, made out of corrugated metal sheets bolted together and which looked like it belonged in a shipyard.
I parked and went in through a door under a sign that told the world this was McAskill’s Gymnasium. Inside, there were two practice rings, the ropes sagging and the canvas grey, and several punch bags hung unpunched from the ceiling. It was quiet in the gym. The only person was an old man in a turtleneck sweater and flat cap sitting over in the far corner on a battered old armchair, reading a newspaper. He looked up when I came in, carefully folded the newspaper and came over to me.
‘Hi, Lennox…’ Old McAskill smiled at me. It was a weary smile on a weary face that had also had more than its fair share of encounters with a gloved fist. He jerked his capped head in the direction of the office at the back. ‘He’s in there…’
I went through to the office. A lean man with a too-long face was sitting behind the desk, smoking. He looked about forty but I knew he was ten years younger than that. He had put his hat on the desktop and I could see it was the kind of wide-brimmed fedora that had been out of fashion for half-a-decade. I dropped my skinny-brimmed Borsalino on the desk next to it. To make a point.