Craig Russell - Lennox

I managed to stick with the two women, unseen, for a couple of hours’ shopping. I was able to tail them through the larger stores, like Copland and Lye, but most of the time I hung around outside the stores, standing across the street and smoking, watching and waiting for them to come out of the main entrances. It was taking up my time and it was boring. But there are some things that just ring false and then nag away at you like a dull toothache. John Andrews paying me off was one of them. The other thing was that John and Lillian Andrews were the oddest odd couple I had seen. I knew that women often married for money, but Lillian Andrews could have set her sights much higher, even in Glasgow.

The two women disappeared into Coupar’s Furs for an age and when they came out the blonde was gleefully clutching a bulky, ribbon-wrapped package. It was difficult to read from across the road, but her expression conveyed more than joy at a purchase; I got the feeling she had been gifted it.

It started to get dark and I didn’t need to worry about having other shoppers to conceal me. The streets began to lurk behind a curtain of dense fog. Glasgow’s industry, the million-plus coal fires and its damp, clinging climate made it second only to London for the density and deadliness of its smog. Many babies had been conceived behind the damp curtain of Glasgow’s smog, but even more had been smothered in its shroud. The year before had been the worst on record for smog deaths in industrial cities throughout Britain, and the Great Smog in London had killed a thousand. There was talk of a Clean Air Act, but nothing had yet been done. Tonight, as happened every night, the smog descended on the city: more than one soul would depart this world for the want of a decent breath.

I had developed a sixth sense about the smog: I could always feel its grip on my lungs a good half-hour before it really settled in. The streetlights came on but were reduced to grey-wreathed glimmers. I tugged up the collar of my coat and pulled the brim of my hat low. The smog could conceal me, but it could also conceal those I followed. I would need to get closer.

Lillian Andrews kissed her friend goodbye and mounted a tram. I followed her onto the tram but sat as far back in the carriage as I could and kept the brim of my hat angled in her direction. She dismounted at the Trongate. I waited a few moments and a hundred yards before jumping off the moving tram, the conductress shouting something in unintelligible Glaswegian after me. The smog was now so dense that I could only see a matter of feet ahead. I had to move fast to get close enough to home in on the clacking of her heels on the cobbles, as she headed towards the Merchant City.

I lost her.

I stopped and listened again for the clicking of her high heels, but even that was gone. I walked on a few feet, keeping the kerb edge within sight: it was easy in the smog to wander onto the roadway and lose your bearings completely. She had led me into the Merchant City and I really wasn’t too sure which street I was in. I stopped and listened again. Nothing. I cursed, unable to make up my mind whether to go forward or try to retrace my steps through the grey murk. I walked on a few yards. As I passed the end of a narrow alley, something swift and strong grabbed me.

‘I saw you earlier,’ said Lillian Andrews as she pulled me into the alley. We were instantly curtained by the smog. ‘Watching me. You’ve been following me, haven’t you?’ She didn’t give me a chance to answer but clamped her mouth on mine. Her tongue pushed deep into my mouth. She shoved me away and leaned against the alley wall and unbuttoned her jacket and blouse, exposing her full, milky white breasts in the dim light.

‘Is this what you want? Is this why you’ve been following me?’

I stared at her breasts. Her hand was now on my crotch and nature had given her something to hold on to. I could still smell the perfume she had smeared on me with her kiss. I thought about the small, frightened man who had tried to buy me off.

‘Listen…’ I backed away. ‘I-’

‘No?’ she said with a cold smile. ‘I didn’t think so.’

Something that felt like a steel hammer smashed into the back of my head and the smog suddenly penetrated my skull. Became even thicker. Darker.

Like so many Glaswegians at the weekend, I woke up on Saturday morning in a ward in the Western General Hospital. A pretty nurse was sitting reading the Glasgow Herald at my bedside. I tried to sit up but something exploded in my skull. Bright lights flashed and a searing pain sliced mercilessly through my head. I gingerly explored the back of my head with my fingertips, felt my hair matted beneath my touch and winced as I found an ugly ridge on my scalp punctuated by the hard knots of surgical stitching.

‘Now, now…’ said the nurse. ‘We don’t want to be doing that, do we?’

I groaned, fighting back a wave of nausea.

‘We’ve got to take things easy.’ Nursey maintained her unconvincingly solicitous tone. Through the pain I pondered whether there was some convention, some regulation, that compelled all medical professionals to speak in the first-person plural.

The nurse — small, like most Glaswegians — creased her pretty, perplexed brow. ‘I think we should get the doctor…’

I looked at her heart-shaped face, crowned with russet hair and nurse’s cap.

‘Why don’t we do that, nurse?’ I said.

I watched her petite, trim figure disappear and made a mental note, in my searingly sore head, to make a pass at her later. It was then that the events of the night before came back to me: Lillian Andrews’s milky skin; her hot, probing tongue; the blow to my head from her accomplice, hidden in the swirls of smog.

The nurse came back with a young, skinny doctor with bad skin and an artificially authoritative manner.

‘Ah, Mr Lennox… you seem to have bashed your cranium last night. Perhaps we’ve partaken of a little too much of the uisce beatha?’ There was that first-person plural again.

‘Let’s get one thing straight,’ I said. ‘Firstly, it’s Captain Lennox. Secondly, if you had done the most basic of blood tests, you would know that there was absolutely no alcohol in my system. So, before you begin patronizing me, sonny, make sure you have the social or intellectual credentials so to do. Now, tell me… is my skull fractured?’

‘No.’ The young houseman’s cheeks flushed red. The British were always so easy to manipulate. So ridden with hang-ups about class and authority. There had been a few occasions since being demobbed where I had played the officer-class card. My accent being difficult to place also threw them. I found it funny: so many Brits had talked to me about the British ‘healthy disrespect for authority’. Next to the Germans, the British were the most likely to follow, without question, instructions from their ‘betters’. And the Germans had learned their lesson.

‘Do I have any kind of serious oedema resulting from the blow to my head?’

‘Not that I can see, Mr… Captain Lennox.’

‘Am I fit enough to be discharged?’

‘Actually, I think it would be a good idea if you stayed with us for a while.’

‘And why is that, exactly? According to what you have said, my head injury is not that serious.’

‘It’s serious enough for us to want to keep an eye on you.’ He struggled to recover some of his lost authority. ‘And if this wound was inflicted on you, then perhaps we should get the police involved. But it’s not your head injury that is our primary concern at the moment. As you know, tuberculosis is endemic in Glasgow. The National Health Service is keen to eradicate TB in the city. Everywhere for that matter. You were brought in by ambulance. You were found in, well