‘I can tell,’ I said. ‘My luck’s been just dandy since I first saw him.’
As good as his word, Ian McClelland called back ten minutes later.
‘A Baro is a clan chieftain,’ he explained. ‘A real bigwig in Romany circles. And I hope you didn’t find that box you were talking about… the one with the wool in it.’
‘No I didn’t… why?’
‘It’s a bitchapen… it’s a kind of gift, but not the kind you want to get. Everyone in the gypsy tribe touches it and passes on everything ill or evil into it. It rids them of ill-fortune but whoever finds the bitchapen gets the lot.’
‘Thanks, Ian,’ I said. ‘That makes a lot of sense.’
I met up with Dex Devereaux for a drink in the bar of the Alpha Hotel. I told him about Sammy, Paul Costello, Claire Skinner, their little jade demon friend and the charming country retreat they all shared. But for the moment I kept my suspicions about Alain Barnier and his possible connection to John Largo quiet. I had one very good reason to keep quiet: the big American was a good guy, but, at the end of the day, he was a copper. The last thing I needed was the City of Glasgow Police connecting me with Barnier. They may not have been the Brains Trust, but it wouldn’t take much thinking to place me at the Barnier and Clement office on the night of the break-in with a sap in my hand and a semi-conscious Highlander at my feet.
Maybe they would pick up Billy the night watchman’s glasses for him. The City of Glasgow CID must have had a leading neurologist working for them: they had a remarkable record of suddenly curing witnesses of bad vision and unreliable memory.
After I said goodbye to Devereaux, I drove up to see Lorna and check how she was. Again, she responded as passionately as a bank manager and Maggie MacFarlane was positively frosty. There was no sign of Jack Collins when I called. Lorna made some tea and we sat in the lounge drinking it, me doing my best to say the right solicitous things and Lorna remaining sullen and unresponsive, her expression one of barely concealed resentment. She knew I was going through the motions and would have given anything for a way out. And we both knew that if the roles had been reversed she would have been the same. Neither of us had signed up for emotional involvement.
I spent the next two days keeping tabs on Alain Barnier. Because I had so many other things to juggle, including squeezing in a daily visit to Davey, it was an inter alia kind of surveillance and therefore pretty hit or miss.
What made following the Frenchman especially difficult was that he was hardly a creature of habit. On average he would only spend two or three hours of each day in the office, and not always the same two or three hours. The rest of the time he spent doing his rounds of clients, mainly hotels and restaurants. Wines and spirits were not his sole stock in trade: he also did a fair amount of visiting antique dealers, a handful in Glasgow and several more in Edinburgh.
Following Barnier was time-consuming and seemed largely pointless, but there was always the chance that he would lead me somewhere that would be one step closer to John Largo. Although, as Barnier went about his mundane daily business, I found myself doubting that this debonair, cultured and educated Frenchman could have anything to do with an international peddler of narcotics.
I was maybe getting cocky, but I actually took to parking the Atlantic under the same railway arch that I had used on the night of the break-in. From there I could see the gates into the bonded area and pick up Barnier’s Simca whenever he left his office. He emerged at three-thirty in the afternoon; leaving early was something he did quite often, squeezing in a few client calls before driving home to Langbank.
It may have seemed like a pointless exercise, but I followed him anyway. An ugly jade demon and a dead gangster’s son were pointing me in that direction. And then there was the gut feeling I had about the Frenchman too: I liked the guy but every time I thought of him it was like someone prodding something that had been curled up for a nap in a room somewhere at the back of my brain.
One afternoon I waited outside the bonded docks until about six. When Barnier’s Simca pulled out through the gates, I followed. When he drove west towards Greenock, I guessed we were heading straight to his home in Langbank. I had to hold back as far as I could without losing him. The road ribboned along the side of the Clyde and, despite this being the main road that connected Glasgow with its satellite town Greenock, there were practically no other cars in either direction. We passed the point where I had turned south and camped out in my car by the reservoir. Then, surprisingly, the Simca drove past Langbank and out towards the west. I couldn’t imagine what business an importer of fine wines and oriental curios could possibly have in Greenock.
He drove towards the town and I lost him where the coast takes a sudden sweep southwards. I accelerated a little and nearly missed his turning. Port Glasgow had a vast sugar works and the hill above it had been named Lyle Hill. Why Tate didn’t deserve recognition was something I didn’t know. Driving up the sweep of Lyle Hill I passed Barnier’s parked Simca. I drove on, not even slowing down until I was around the bend in Lyle Road, out of sight of where he had parked. I pulled over and took a set of binoculars out of the glove compartment. I had to scrabble up the hillside to get a vantage point from which I could watch Barnier. The leather soles of my Gibsons slipped on slimy grass and I came down onto my knees several times, cursing the damp, dark staining on my suit trousers. Glasgow was a city with a heavy-industrial attitude to everything and I had found out to my cost that laundries in the city approached the dry-cleaning of my best suits with a delicacy that make steel-smelting look like needlepoint.
I made it to the top of the hill and seemed to be on the edge of a golf course. There was brush and some meagre trees to give me shelter and I looked down at where the road swept around the edge of Lyle Hill. The view was breathtaking: out across the Clyde to the mountains of the Cowal Peninsula. Immediately below was Greenock on one side and Gourock on the other. And, further out, the Tail of the Bank. This had been the departure point for my parents when they took me, as a baby, to start a new life in Canada.
But what struck me most about what I was looking at was the fact that Barnier had stopped at the monument that commanded the best of the view. The memorial was in the form of a vast white ship’s anchor, the shaft of which thrust dramatically up into the sky. But instead of having the usual rode-eye at the top, the anchor shaft had two beams cross it, one shorter than the other. A Cross of Lorraine. As a piece of civic sculpture, it could not have been more dramatic. And I knew something about what it commemorated.
I watched Barnier. It was difficult to tell if he was waiting for someone or if the monument had some particular significance for him. He stood as if reading the inscription on the base. Then he turned and leaned against the border rail, with his back to me, and seemed to be gazing out over the Firth of Clyde. He stood there for a good ten minutes before turning and heading back towards his car. I cursed inwardly. I had been sure he was going to meet someone, and the monument seemed an ideal place for a rendezvous. But I had probably just watched too many Orson Welles movies.
I scrabbled down the side of the hill as fast as I could to get back to the Atlantic. If Barnier turned back down the hill then I would have to hurry or lose him. As I scrambled, fingers of tree branch snagged at my suit to impede my descent. My hat came off a couple of times and it was only by some nifty goal-keeping that I saved my Borsalino from the mud. I burst out from the green web of bushes and onto the road, a few feet from where I had parked the Atlantic.
You see it all the time in Westerns. The settlers look up from the pass and spot the menacingly still and silent silhouettes of mounted Apaches or banditos up on the hillside looking down on them. The Badlands.