Craig Russell - Lennox

‘That’s what I thought. Okay, I made a mistake. I got involved with someone. Someone who was bad for me. I went away with him. I was going to leave John. But then I saw sense and came home. My… friend… well, he didn’t accept that I was going back to John and he threatened to make all kinds of trouble for me. So I agreed to meet him the other night. To tell him it was all over. I told him that someone was following me. That’s why he clobbered you. I’m sorry. But he’s crazy that way. That was one of the reasons I broke it off with him.’

‘Really? I have to say that he’s the most broad-minded jealous lover I’ve ever come across. I mean, letting you flash your tits at me and put your tongue halfway down my throat.’

She took a cigarette from a packet on the coffee table and lit it with a marble table-lighter. She tapped the packet with slim crimson-tipped fingers.

‘You don’t understand. Things like that can get complicated. Sex is complicated. When I’m with him I become another person.’

‘And this is all over?’ I asked.

‘Completely.’

‘Then you won’t mind giving me chummy’s address. I’d like to pay him a call. Balance things up a little.’

Her eyes went hard again. ‘No. I won’t. I want all of this in the past. He’s a violent and dangerous man. As you already know. Please, leave it alone.’

‘His name?’

She walked over to a sideboard and opened a drawer. She took ten five-pound notes from a wallet and held them out at arm’s length towards me. ‘Take it.’

‘Your husband has already paid me.’

‘Now I’m paying you. To forget all about this. I’m back with my husband and he’s none the wiser. I feel bad about what happened the other night. Please take this. Consider it compensation.’

I took the money and pocketed it. Like she said: compensation.

I stood up and put my hat on. She showed me to the door.

‘Are we agreed that this whole unfortunate episode is over, Mr Lennox?’

‘Agreed. Just one last thing… does the name Margot Taylor mean anything to you?’

She pursed her full lips thoughtfully. ‘No, nothing. Why?’

‘It doesn’t matter. Someone who looks a little like you. I just thought you might be related.’

She watched me from the door until I turned out of the driveway. I sat in my car for a while and contemplated the windscreen. There were three things that were very clear to me. The first was that if the bribe hadn’t worked then Lillian Andrews would have fucked me to keep me out of her business. Probably on top of the cash. Second, the name Margot Taylor, coming out of the blue, had sparked a hastily concealed reaction.

And the third thing was that all of my original suspicions about her were true. She had called me Mr Lennox.

I hadn’t told her my name.

I woke up in the middle of the night, my pulse pounding in my ears. The nightmare drifted away before I could capture it, but it had had something to do with a young, frightened face screaming at me. Begging me. In German.

I smoked a cigarette in the dark, its glow painting the walls deep red when I drew on it, then fading again. For some reason I started to think about home. It was my little joke whenever anyone asked me where I was from. My accent had got a little muddled over the years and some people here thought I was American, others that I was English or even Irish. When pushed, which I rarely was, I would say I came from Rothesay and, although puzzled, people generally accepted it. It was actually the truth, but the Rothesay I meant was not the one they thought of: the dismal tourist escape for Glaswegians on the Scottish Isle of Bute. My Rothesay was another. Far distant, in more ways than one: an ocean and a wartime away.

So I lay smoking in the dark thinking about Rothesay and Saint John. About bike rides and canoe trips along the Kennebecasis River. About my exclusive education at the Collegiate School. About the big turn-of-the-century house I grew up in that always smelled of rich, aged wood. About the kid with big ideas and bigger ideals who had died in Europe. A casualty of war.

I hadn’t been the only casualty. As I lay in the dark feeling sorry for myself I heard the soft, muffled sound of a woman sobbing. From Mrs White’s flat.

The morning sun again struggled to make its presence felt through the grey plumes of mill and factory smoke that drifted over the city. I took the car down to Newton Mearns, to the south of Glasgow. The formation of the state of Israel was still big in people’s minds and the latest joke was to refer to Newton Mearns, because of its largely Jewish population, as Tel-Aviv on the Clyde. It took more than a few concentration camps to kill the good old anti-Semitic gag. But, to be fair, one of the things that I liked about Glasgow was the openness and friendliness of Glaswegians. Glasgow was a hard and dark and violent place, and it was always difficult to reconcile this with the warmth of its people. Glasgow was probably the least anti-Semitic city in Europe. But less than ten years after the liberation of the camps, that was a very relative statement.

Glasgow’s Jewish community owed its origin largely to deception: many Jewish families, escaping the nineteenth-century pogroms of Russia, had been disembarked at the Port of Glasgow and told by disingenuous ship captains that they had arrived in New York. One such family who had eagerly searched Clydebank for a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty had been the Cohen family, who had learned from bitter experience a fierce and uncompromising toughness. One grandson of the original settlers was Jonny Cohen. Handsome Jonny.

The second of the Three Kings.

I had ’phoned Jonny before coming down to see him. We arranged to meet at his home. Unlike Sneddon’s mansion, Jonny Cohen’s house was modern, designed by some up-and-coming London architect. It looked more like something you would expect to see sprawling across a lot in Beverly Hills.

There were no drainpipe-trousered hoodlums in Jonny’s drive. No hint of anything other than here resided a successful businessman and family man.

I rang the doorbell. The door was opened by a tall, tanned and dark-haired man. His face was big and hand-some with a cleft in his chin he could have carried small change in. Jonny Cohen had the kind of looks normally associated with the more masculine Hollywood leading men. They were the kind of looks that women swooned over. Pointlessly. As a husband Jonny Cohen was the model of fidelity; as a father he was loving and fiercely protective; as a gangster he was by far the most intelligent of the Three Kings. Intelligent, ruthless and highly dangerous. But hospitable.

‘Hi, Lennox,’ Jonny said in his rich baritone and beamed a bright smile at me. ‘Come on in…’

There are some people you come across in life whom you can’t help liking in spite of yourself. Jonny Cohen was exactly that type of person: you found yourself putting to one side the fact that he was a violent villain. There was no doubt that Jonny was someone you would be wise not to cross and the Cohen firm had supplied its fair share of custom to the city’s hospitals and, on the odd necessary occasion, mortuary. But according to Einstein everything is relative and in Glasgow you couldn’t hold a couple of murders against a guy’s character. And anyway, Jonny had his own code of ethics. He didn’t run loan sharks like the other two Kings; his money came from illegal gambling, prostitution and a string of restaurants and clubs. Most of all, Jonny Cohen was a robber baron: his success lay in the cruel efficiency of the armed robberies he sponsored, planned and on more than one occasion led.

Jonny showed me into a large, open-plan living room. It was populated with Modernist furniture similar to the stuff in the Andrews’s house. Again there was a television in the corner. He caught me looking at it.