At least I got to wear lightweight suits that hung better. When it came to material, the Scots had a year-round preference for tweed, the scratchier and denser the better. A Scottish acquaintance had once tried to reassure me that tweed from the Isle of Harris was less scratchy, explaining that this was because it was traditionally soaked in human urine. I could have been accused of being picky, but I preferred couture that hadn’t been pissed on by an inbred crofter.
I had spent three days getting all the gen I could on Sneddon’s fighter. Bobby Kirkcaldy had been born in Glasgow but raised in Lanarkshire, first in an orphanage and then by an aunt. Both his parents had died prematurely from heart attacks when Kirkcaldy was a child. Tragic, but not unusuaclass="underline" if cardiac disease had been a sport, then the entire British Olympic team would have been made up of Glaswegians.
Young Bobby Kirkcaldy had used his fists to fight his way up and out of the Motherwell slum that had been his adoptive home. To put his success in context, Motherwell was the kind of place anyone would fight like hell to get out of. I’d been able to track down a couple of businesses that Kirkcaldy had invested in and it was clear he was getting good advice on cashing in on his success when he eventually hung up his gloves. Either that, or he was as nifty with investment as he was in the ring. In fact, for someone approaching the height of his boxing career, he seemed to have his mind, and money, on other things.
My office was three floors up, across Gordon Street from Central Station, and by Thursday I had done just about all I could do on the ’phone and was going to take an afternoon trip out to see young Mr Kirkcaldy. I decided to drink a coffee and read the newspaper before I left. I like to keep up with things. I never knew when Rab Butler or Tony Eden would ask for my advice.
All the news was gloomy. Britain wasn’t the only nation struggling with the loss of an empire: the French were having the stuffing kicked out of them in Indochina by the Vietminh. There had been a clash of razor gangs in the Gorbals. A man had been run over by a train on the outskirts of the city. The police hadn’t issued a name. The only thing that cheered me up was an advertised assurance that, apparently, taking an Amplex chlorophyll tablet each day guaranteed breath and body freshness; obviously an attempt to break into an underexploited market.
I was in the middle of Rip Kirby when I got a pleasant surprise. A very pleasant, five-foot-three, blonde surprise. I recognized her as soon as she walked into my office, despite the fact that we had never met before. She dressed with an elegance that Glasgow didn’t stretch to. Cream silk blouse, figure-hugging powder blue pencil skirt, long legs sheathed in sheer silk. Her throat was ringed with a necklace with pearls so big the diver must have had to bring them up one at a time. Earrings to match. She wore a small white pillbox-type hat and white gloves, but had a jacket that matched the skirt draped over the same forearm as a handbag that, in a previous life, had swum in the Nile or the Florida Everglades.
I stood up and tried to prevent my smile from resembling a leer. It probably just looked goofy. But Sheila Gainsborough was probably used to men smiling at her goofily.
‘Hello, Miss Gainsborough,’ I said. ‘Please sit down. What can I do for you?’
‘You know me?’ She smiled a famous person’s smile, that polite perfunctory baring of teeth that doesn’t mean anything.
‘Everybody knows you, Miss Gainsborough. Certainly everybody in Glasgow. I have to say I don’t get many celebrities walking into my office.’
‘Don’t you?’ She frowned, lowering her flawlessly arched eyebrows and wrinkling a fold of skin on her otherwise flawless brow. Flawlessly. ‘I would have imagined…’ Shrugging off the thought and the frown, she sat down and I followed suit. ‘I’ve never been to a private detective before. Never seen one before, come to that, other than Humphrey Bogart in the pictures.’
‘We’re taller in real life.’ I smiled at my own witticism. Goofily. ‘And I call myself an enquiry agent. So why do you need to see one now?’
She unclipped the sixty-guinea crocodile and handed me a photograph. It was a professional, showbizzy shot. Colour. I didn’t recognize the young man in the picture but decided in an instant that I didn’t like him. The smile was fake and too self-assured. He was wearing an expensive-looking shirt open at the neck and arranged over the collar of an even more pricey-looking light grey suit. His chestnut hair was well cut and lightly oiled. He was good-looking, but in a too-slick and weak-chinned sort of way. Despite his dark hair, he had the same striking, pale blue eyes as Sheila Gainsborough.
‘He’s my brother. Sammy. My younger brother.’
‘Is he in show business too, Miss Gainsborough?’
‘No. Well, not really. He sings, occasionally. He’s tried every other kind of business though. Some of which I’m afraid haven’t been totally… honourable.’ She sighed and leaned forward, resting her forearms on the edge of my desk. Her skin was tanned. Not dark, just pale gold. The cute frown was back. ‘It’s maybe all my fault. I spoil him, give him more money than he can handle.’ I noticed that she had a vaguely Americanized accent. I spoke the same way, but that was because I’d been raised in Canada. As far as I was aware, Sheila Gainsborough had never been further west than Dunoon. I guessed she had been voice-trained to sink the Glasgow in her accent somewhere deep and mid-Atlantic.
‘Is Sammy in some kind of trouble?’ I too leaned forward and frowned my concern, taking the opportunity to cast a glance down the front of her blouse.
‘He’s gone missing,’ she said.
‘How long?’
‘A week. Maybe ten days. We had a meeting at the bank — he’s overdrawn the account I set up for him — but he didn’t turn up. That was last Thursday. I went to his apartment but he wasn’t there. There was two days’ mail behind the door.’
I took a pad from my desk drawer and scribbled a few notes on it. It was window dressing, people feel comforted if you take notes. Somehow it looks like you’re taking it all that little bit more seriously. Nodding sagely as you write helps.
‘Has Sammy done this kind of thing before. Gone off without letting you know?’
‘No. Or at least not like this. Not for a week. Occasionally he’s gone off on a bender. One… two days, but that’s all. And whenever I’m in town — you know, not on a tour or in London — we meet up every Saturday and have lunch in Cranston’s Tea Rooms on Sauchiehall Street. He never misses it.’
I noted. I nodded. Sagely. ‘You said his account is overdrawn — have there been any more withdrawals since he went awol?’
‘I don’t know…’ Suddenly she looked perplexed, as if she’d let him down — let me down — by not checking. ‘Can you find that out?’
‘’Fraid not. You say you were supposed to attend the meeting at the bank with him?’
‘I’m a co-signatory,’ she said. The frown still creased the otherwise flawless brow. With due cause, I thought. Her brother sounded like a big spender. A high liver. If he hadn’t been trying to pull cash from his already overdrawn account, then he wasn’t spending big or living high. Or maybe even simply not living.
‘Then you can check,’ I said. ‘The bank will give you that information, but not me. Even the police would have to get a court order. Have you been to the police, Miss Gainsborough?’
‘I was waiting. I kept thinking Sammy would turn up. Then, when he didn’t, I thought I’d be better getting a private detective… I mean enquiry agent.’
‘Why me?’ I asked. ‘I mean, who put you in contact with me?’
‘I have a road manager, Jack Beckett. He says he knows you.’
I frowned. ‘Can’t say…’
‘Or at least knows of you. He said…’ She hesitated, as if unsure to commit the rest of her thought to words. ‘He said that you were reliable, but that you had contact with — well, that you knew people that were more the kind that Sammy has been mixing with.’