Craig Russell - Lennox

St Bernard’s Crescent was in the heart of Edinburgh’s Stockbridge: an arc of sandstone Georgian townhouses facing a small tree-filled park. Most of the properties were three storeys above street level and a basement level with windows peering up to wrought-iron railings. This layout was particularly relevant to the house I was visiting: they said the higher up the storey you visited, the more you paid.

Edinburgh taxi drivers are noted for having the joie de vivre of depressed undertakers and this particular cabbie had been silent throughout the journey. He managed, however, to repeat his earlier sneer as he pulled up outside the address I had given him in St Bernard’s Crescent and told me how much I was due him. I usually tipped taxi drivers well, particularly in London or Glasgow when you could often have the best conversation of your day in the back of the cab. In this case I counted out the exact change and not a penny more. My pointed meanness fell flat as the taxi driver didn’t seem to notice or care. This was Edinburgh, after all.

The house looked just the same as all of the others in the crescent; in fact the paintwork on the door and windows looked fresher and the steps better swept than its neighbours, and the young lady who admitted me was soberly dressed in a blue serge jacket and pencil skirt and white blouse. She asked me if I had an appointment and I explained that I wasn’t there on business but was a friend of Mrs Gersons. She smiled and led me into a small office-type room off the reception hall. As I passed along the hall I noticed how tasteful and expensive the decor was that Helena had invested in. It didn’t surprise me; Helena Gersons was a sophisticated and elegant lady. Yep, you certainly got a better class of whorehouse in Edinburgh, I thought to myself as I made a quick mental comparison with Arthur Parks’s place in Glasgow.

I was a cynical fuck. I admit it. The things I had seen, the things I had done, had turned me into somebody I really didn’t like and my way of dealing with it was often to greet each day with a sneer or a joke at someone else’s expense. Maybe I was just becoming acclimatized: attitudes were different here. In America and Canada we’d greet the day with ‘Another day another dollar!’; in Glasgow the motto was ‘Different day, same shite’. Whatever was going on around me, I was generally too cynical to give a crap.

However, when Helena Gersons walked into the office I felt like someone had given me a punch in the gut. Which, being between my heart and my groin, was appropriate. Helena Gersons was perhaps the most beautiful woman I had ever known. Today she was dressed in a tailored grey suit that hugged her figure in a way that made you jealous. Her hair was black. Raven-wing black and glossy and gathered up behind her head to expose a graceful neck. She had dark eyes and arching eyebrows and her full lips were lipsticked deep red. She smiled at me, but a little sadly.

‘Lennox…’ she said in an accent that was more English than Scottish and was haunted by the vaguest ghost of Europe. ‘I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.’

‘It’s a small world, Helena. How have you been?’

She made an open-handed gesture to indicate the Georgian architecture enveloping us.

‘I don’t mean business. I mean you. How are you?’

‘I’m fine. But let’s be honest, if you were that interested in my state of mind or well-being then I would have heard from you long before now.’ She frowned. ‘I’m sorry, that was uncalled for.’

‘Probably was called for.’ I put my hat on the desk.

Helena dropped ice into expensive-looking crystal and poured me a Canadian Club without asking. She poured herself a Scotch and I waited for her to sit and cross her long silk-sheathed legs before sitting down opposite her.

‘I’m a British citizen now.’ She took the cigarette I offered. ‘No longer a displaced person. I’m now… placed. Although I just got in under the wire. The police sent in a report about my little enterprise here and I should have been deported as an undesirable alien, but fortunately it got delayed somewhere along the way.’

I gave a cynical laugh. Helena Gersons had a lot of influence with a lot of people in the Edinburgh establishment. String-pullers who had themselves, at one time or other, had their strings pulled within these elegant Georgian walls.

‘So business is good?’ I asked.

‘Okay… it’s always quieter at this time of year unless there’s a ship in. Busiest time is during the Festival.’ She laughed and exposed perfect porcelain teeth. ‘And, of course, when the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland is in town. The girls are often pushed to deal with so much religious fervour.’

I laughed too. Again I noticed her Anglicized accent and perfect grammar. Just the vaguest hint now of the Vienna she had left behind, little more than a child, in thirty-six.

‘You never think about going back? To Austria, I mean?’

‘That’s another me,’ she said and not for the first time shook me up with a statement I could have made about myself. It was good to look at Helena again; to talk to her again. There had been a time, a few years back, when we had talked a lot. Through the night, hushed in the dark. ‘And in any case, Austria is still a complete mess. God knows it could go either way and maybe end up a Russian satellite state. Anyway, people like me are an embarrassment. A reminder of past sins.’ Her eyes hardened. ‘What do you want, Lennox?’

‘Is it that obvious that I want something?’

‘You always did.’

‘We both did. Two of a kind, Helena. Anyway, you’re right. Or at least in part. I thought you might know someone I’m checking out. But that’s not the only reason I came. I did want to see you.’

She arched an eyebrow. ‘I’m guessing you were in town anyway.’

‘There’s a girl…’ I ignored the accuracy of her dig. ‘She’s got a history as a pro. She’s been putting the squeeze on a client of mine, but I’m not just sure how.’

I handed her the photograph.

‘Why don’t you just ask him how she’s putting the squeeze on him if he’s your client?’

‘He’s not taking calls. Permanently.’

‘Dead?’ She pursed her lips and looked at the photograph more closely.

‘Very. A staged accident I reckon, and missy here is involved. She calls herself Lillian but she used to go by the name Sally Blane. Did some blue-movie stuff.’

The way Helena stared at the photograph, her brow furrowed, suggested she was looking at a puzzle with a piece missing. She looked up, still frowning. ‘I knew Sally Blane. Not well, but she did a few shifts here. I had heard she’d gone off to Glasgow.’

‘Is that her?’

‘Could be… I mean, it looks like her and it doesn’t. I know that doesn’t make any sense, but her face is different. The same but different. But there again I never really knew her that well. Although she did well with the clients for as long as she worked here. She was an upper-storey girl, if you know what I mean. Higher value, higher income.’

‘But she didn’t last long?’

‘No. I got the feeling she was building her own private portfolio, carving out a little business for herself.’ Helena frowned again, beautifully. ‘Wait a minute, I remember something else. Towards the end there was a man sometimes used to pick her up after work. Not a client. A boyfriend maybe. Or a pimp. A bad-looking sort. Glasgow accent.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘A wiry little thug, to be honest. Expensive clothes and a flash car, but they didn’t fit with the face, if you know what I mean.’

‘I know exactly what you mean,’ I said and thought of a Savile Row suit hung on the wrong hanger. ‘Was there ever any trouble? I mean with her Glaswegian boyfriend. If he was who I think he was then he was always trying to muscle in on other people’s action.’