Craig Russell - Lennox

‘I couldn’t tell you. All our payments were made on a strictly cash basis. No tax, no names, no pack drill. My guess is that it was a professional name though. Her sister worked for us too and she used a completely different name.’

The boxer placed the film spool back in the can and stacked them with some others. He handed me a brown foolscap envelope.

‘These are stills taken from some of the films Sally made for us.’ The boxer’s voice was cluttered with long, flat Edinburgh vowels. ‘We thought you’d maybe need a copy of them. If you need proof.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. I had a sickening feeling when I thought about the not too distant future: to showing John Andrews photographs of his wife performing sex for money. I should have walked away from this one when I had had the chance. I could still walk away. But I knew I wouldn’t.

Jonny Cohen dropped his two heavies at one of his clubs before driving me back to where my car was parked outside the Italian restaurant.

‘That was good of you, Jonny,’ I said as we parked. ‘I mean, going to all that trouble for something that isn’t of any concern to you. I appreciate it.’ As I made to get out of the car, he placed his driver-gloved hand on my forearm.

‘I won’t say think nothing of it, Lennox. You owe me. It’s a favour I may call in some day.’

I thought about what he said for a moment and then nodded. ‘Fair enough, Jonny.’

I stood and watched the deep-green Riley purr into the distance and felt an indistinct unease somewhere deep inside. I was working for Sneddon. I was indebted to Jonny Cohen. I was getting sucked deeper into a case for which I had stopped being paid. I reckoned I couldn’t be in a much worse situation.

But I was wrong. I could.

I remember seeing, before the war, a circus film in which a lion-tamer placed his head in the mouth of a lion. I recall thinking it was a pretty stupid way to make a living. Now it was my turn. There was one last King left in the pack.

Hammer Murphy.

A name like Murphy was a badge in Glasgow. It marked you out, made clear your background and allegiances. Your religion. To Glasgow’s Protestant majority, a name like Michael Murphy was the name of the enemy. A Fenian. A Mick. A Taig. Glasgow may have been the least anti-Semitic city in Europe, but it made up for it in the red-hot mutual hatred between Protestant and Catholic. It wasn’t really anything to do with religion, but with origin. The Protestants were indigenous Scots, the Catholics the descendant families of nineteenth-century Irish immigrants.

Hammer Murphy was no more than five foot seven but could never be described as a small man. He gave the impression of being as wide as he was tall. Packed with muscle. Packed with hate. The other two Kings tended to joke about Murphy’s lack of brains. He certainly was no scholar, but there was no underestimating Murphy’s vicious animal intelligence.

Everybody knew Hammer Murphy’s story. It was the stuff of legends. And knowing the story made you want to avoid knowing the man.

Murphy had learned at an early age that he had been born with the deck stacked against him. He realized that he didn’t have the intelligence to learn his way out of the cramped Maryhill tenement flat he shared with his parents, five brothers and two sisters. He also worked out that the British class system strictly rationed opportunity and that as a working-class Glasgow Catholic he didn’t even own a ration book. It had been obvious to the young Murphy that he would never enjoy the things in life that others had been gifted by birth outside the tenements. Unless he took them.

All of this had contributed to a dark, malevolent fury that burned deep within Murphy. To begin with, violence had been his way of venting that fury. Violence for its own sake: ‘Old Firm’ matches between Celtic and Rangers providing the fevered tribal atmosphere. Then he had sought to combine violence with a strategy for survival and success. Productive violence. In his five brothers he had a ready-made gang. The Murphy firm had never been imaginative. It had taken the obvious route: starting with a minor local protection racket, stealing cars, house-breaking. Then they moved into loan sharking. And into another gang’s patch.

It had all started as small stuff: a squabble between two insignificant wideboy gangs over a worthless patch of Glasgow turf. But a legend had been born. It was then that Murphy earned his nickname.

The other gang’s leader had been Paul Cochrane. The usual way these things were settled was through attrition. Repeated gang battles. Advances made racket by racket, shop by shop, bar by bar, bookie by bookie. But Murphy had suggested to Cochrane that they settle it between themselves. A ‘square-go’ in front of both gangs. Whoever won would be the leader of both. Cochrane didn’t ask what would happen to the loser.

It was expected that weapons would be used and Cochrane had had a set of home-made knuckledusters, a short but lethal spike projecting from its top. Murphy had used his fists, his feet, his forehead. Even his teeth. Cochrane’s kicks and punches had made no impact on Murphy’s battle-hardened face. When Cochrane had come at him with his weapon, Murphy had broken his arm. The fight had been swift, brutal and very one-sided. Cochrane had gestured his surrender with his unbroken arm.

The triumphant Murphy had then turned to the assembled gang members and told them they were now totally under his control. That now they were stronger. Better. Harder. He promised more money. More power. This was the beginning of something good for them all. Then, in a calm, measured tone, he told them that anyone who opposed him would get the exactly same as Cochrane was about to get.

It was a builder’s short-handled, barrel-headed lead mallet.

In front of forty witnesses, Michael Murphy committed murder. More than that, he made it a spectacle: an exposition of extreme, psychotic violence to shock men who dealt in violence every day. When he was finished, he made Cochrane’s former deputy scrape up what was left of the erstwhile gang boss’s head with a shovel. His point had been made.

Everybody got to know about it. Including the police.

Murphy had been arrested, naturally. He could easily have ended up being hanged. But he had already achieved the status of a legend. The fear that surrounded him bordered on the superstitious. Maybe some thought that if they bore witness against Hammer Murphy, his execution would be no barrier to his returning to exact revenge.

The police knew that he had killed Cochrane. They knew where, when and how. But they couldn’t put together a case against him. Murphy was released.

Two more bosses were to meet a literally sticky end courtesy of Murphy’s lead mallet. After that, his criminal organization spread like a stain across Glasgow’s West Side. It grew to such an extent that the only obstacles to total domination of Glasgow were Willie Sneddon and Jonny Cohen, the two most successful black marketeers in immediate post-war Glasgow.

Things soon got messy. The Second World War had just ended and there were a lot of guns in illegal circulation. The conflict between the three yet-uncrowned Kings had threatened to turn Glasgow into a new Chicago. At the beginning of ’forty-nine, Sneddon and Cohen combined forces and hit Murphy hard. Murphy’s bookies were turned over by Cohen’s armed robbers every second week. Top men in the Murphy organization were crippled or killed by Sneddon’s hardmen. In the meantime Murphy hit both the Cohen and Sneddon operations hard. After Murphy’s Jaguar exploded just as he was about to get into it, he called for a truce.

Jonny Cohen had then brokered the Three Kings Deal. In October nineteen forty-nine, over lunch in the elegant art deco surroundings of the Regent Oyster Bar in Glasgow’s business district, the three most violent and powerful criminals in Glasgow divided up the city and its most profitable criminal activities. It was the coronation of the Three Kings. The deal struck became a successful and stable arrangement and now, five years on, Glasgow’s criminal business was still conducted in comparative peace.