‘The dragon is a major folkloric figure in China.’ McClelland frowned as he examined the picture. ‘But what you’ve drawn here isn’t a dragon, it’s a Qilin. The hooves give it away. Giraffe’s hooves. You say this is made out of jade?’
‘Unless the Chinese make their gods out of green Bakelite.’
‘I can understand you thinking it was a dragon. There are a lot of jade dragons about. How tall did you say it was?’
‘About a couple of feet, give or take.’
‘Then it could be worth a tidy sum.’
‘How much?’
‘It’s impossible to say without seeing it. It depends on the quality of the jade — and that varies enormously. And, of course, it is frequently faked. If it’s real solid jade, then a thousand. Maybe two. Was it a deep emerald green?’
‘The light wasn’t good. I saw more its shape than anything, but it was green.’ I set my head to working again on what I had seen, but my head was still taking a tea-break. ‘No… maybe not emerald green. Paler. Milkier. Why?’
‘Imperial jade has a wonderful translucence and a deep emerald green colour. It’s rare and extremely valuable. But the piece you’ve described could be anything. Maybe not even jade.’ He caught my frown. ‘Not what you thought?’
‘Fifteen hundred quid isn’t enough for the kind of grief this thing seems to have caused.’
He shrugged. ‘Is it stolen?’
‘Let’s just say I’m trying to return it to its rightful owner in the hope it’ll get someone off the hook. A very big, very sharp hook.’
McClelland asked me if he could keep the sketch for a few days and I said he could. The mugginess in the air hit me when I stepped out of the stone-cooled interior of the library. I found a call box and ’phoned the hospital but the officious nurse on the other end of the line said she wouldn’t give me any information because I wasn’t a relative of Davey’s.
I spent the afternoon nursing my headache and pondered whether I really should get my head checked out. A couple of hours’ rest seemed to help it though, so I decided to skip it. I called police headquarters and got put through to Dex Devereaux.
‘Hey there, Johnny Canuck, how y’doin’?’ Devereaux’s American accent seemed amplified on the ’phone.
‘Fine. I wanted to ask you something. How much is each shipment Largo’s been sending to the States? I mean size or weight.’
‘We’re talking about forty pounds a shipment.’
‘That’s not a lot.’
‘In cash terms it is. Heroin is worth a hundred-and-fifty bucks a gram. That works out at nearly five hundred dollars per pound weight. Each forty-pound shipment Largo sends over is worth twenty thousand bucks. I don’t know what that is in limey money. The exchange rate I got was two dollars eighty cents for a pound sterling so work it out yourself. This stuff is literally worth twice or three times its weight in gold.’
‘So it would be reasonably easy to hide it in other stuff and lose it in a ship’s cargo manifest,’ I said, imagining a small rank of ugly jade demons.
‘I told you that already. It’s like the A-bomb. Small package but big punch when it hits the streets. What you got, Lennox?’
‘Maybe nothing… A hunch… that’s all at the moment. But I think part of Largo’s last shipment was stolen by some of the local boys. Amateurs who are scared out of their wits. It means I might be able to give you Largo and some of the dope.’
‘Lennox, if you’re sure about this…’
‘I’m not, Dex. I’m not sure of anything. Like I say, a hunch, and it would waste your time chasing it. If it turns out to be worthwhile, I’ll hand over everything to you and you can lead the local police by the hand to make the arrests. But I need to get someone out of the picture first. Thanks for the gen, Dex. I’ll be in touch.’
I hung up before Devereaux could pressure me any more. I was putting a picture together in my head and I needed to concentrate. I also needed time to follow up a few things.
There was one thing getting in the way of everything: Small Change MacFarlane’s murder. It nagged and nagged at me and I couldn’t work out why. I had all but accused Maggie MacFarlane of a bedclothes entanglement with Jack Collins, but I had no reason to imagine it as anything more than that. I somehow couldn’t cast Jack Collins as a smitten Walter Neff, and Maggie, although she was a satisfying piece of art, was no Barbara Stanwyck. I had asked Lorna, as subtly as I could, about insurance policies and a will. Both Maggie and, to a much lesser extent Collins, would benefit right enough, but the lion’s share went to Lorna. Under Scottish Law, Maggie, as the surviving widow, would have a reasonable case in challenging MacFarlane’s provisions but, according to Lorna who certainly was not free from suspecting her stepmother, Maggie had made no suggestion that she would.
But it all still bothered me.
I’m paid to stick my nose in. More often than not, I’m paid to stick it in where noses aren’t welcome. My most irritating habit was sticking my nose in where it wasn’t welcome when I wasn’t being paid for it. When I walked into the Vinegarhill camp, my nose had never felt so shunned. I was seriously concerned that it was going to be put out of joint.
I had performed an act of faith parking the car in Molendinar Street, trying not to think what odds Tony the Pole would give me against it being in one piece, or even being there, when I got back to it. The traveller camp was set up on a barren, grubby walled square, entered by a double iron gate, permanently open, next to the sugar works. There were a handful of modern touring, car-drawn caravans, but the vast majority were the traditional vardo or burton wagons: painted, horse-drawn jobs with arched roofs, that went hand-in-hand with everybody’s romantic image of gypsies. The rough humps of bender tents domed between some of the wagons.
There was no enticing odour of simmering goulash or impassioned violin-playing to accompany my arrival. These travellers did not hail from the Hungarian plain or Carpathian mountains, unless the Hungarian plain and the Carpathian mountains had a view of Galway Bay. And the most romantic thing I saw were two unleashed mongrels copulating over by the works’ wall. A handful of kids without shoes rampaged about the camp, and I was aware that a couple of young men had moved in behind me as soon as I had entered the yard.
That would normally be my cue to reach for my sap but, in a place like this with people like these, it would have been an inadvisable move. A painfully inadvisable move. Instead, I would have to talk my way out of here, like the cavalry captain with the white flag sent into the Indian encampment to parley. I strode across to where an older man leaned against a wagon, smoking a pipe. As I did so I passed a vardo wagon with the shutters drawn and deep crimson ribbons wrapped around the shafts and tongue.
‘I’m looking for Tommy Furie’s father,’ I said, when I reached the old man. ‘Could you tell me where I could find him?’
‘The Baro? What do you want with him? Who the fuck are you?’ The old man stopped leaning and took the pipe from his mouth. He spat a greeny viscous glob which splashed close to my shoe. Jimmy Stewart or Randolph Scott were never treated like this.
‘Like I said, I want to talk to him. And I’m pretty sure he’ll be very keen to talk to me. Now, do you know where I can find him or not?’ I was aware that the two youths had positioned themselves behind me, at either shoulder. The old man jerked his head in the direction of one of the modern-style caravans, the largest on site. I nodded and walked over to it, leaving my honour guard behind.
Sean Furie was a big man in his fifties. He was tall, and had probably been heavily muscled when younger, but had turned to fat. His full head of jet black hair was without a trace of grey and was oiled and combed back from a huge face. He and Uncle Bert Soutar had obviously gone to the same place for their nose jobs. The difference with Furie was that the tip of his nose was swollen and red and river-mapped with purplish capillaries. Romany rosacea, I decided to call it — the effects of bare knuckle and bare alcohol.