Craig Russell - Lennox

This was where I came once a fortnight, as they described two weeks in Britain, and had my hair cut and treated myself to the closest shave you could get in Glasgow apart from calling Hammer Murphy a bog-Irish Fenian fuckface from a speeding car immediately before emigrating to the other side of the planet. ’Pherson’s was also where I picked up my supply of prophylactics, known here as ‘rubber johnnies’. It was amazing the differences in expression here. I had once tried to explain to a Glaswegian that ‘blow-job’ was the American and Canadian expression for fellatio.

‘Oh aye,’ my conversational partner had said. ‘That’s what we call plating… or a gammy. Or a gobble.’

Rubber johnnies. Gammies. Gobbles. I was gradually to become schooled in the quaint charms of the Old World.

During the war I had seen for myself the way the shakes worked on a guy: fingers would tremble and knees would knock at the prospect of battle, but when the bullets started to fly you got too scared and too fired up to shake. It was like that with old ’Pherson: you’d watch the sliver of razor tremble in his thin fingers, feel his other hand’s tremulous touch on your face, then, miraculously, the blade would sweep smoothly and decisively across your pulled-taut skin.

’Pherson was giving me a trim, the scissors between cuts fluttering like a bird and snipping at the empty air, when I was aware of someone sitting in the barber’s chair next to mine.

‘We need to talk, Lennox.’

I looked at Jock Ferguson’s profile in the mirror before me.

‘Sounds official.’

‘It is,’ he said. ‘But it can wait till you’ve finished your haircut.’

Twinkletoes looked up from his Reader’s Digest and reached for the door handle as Ferguson and I passed his car, but I frowned a warning and gave a surreptitious shake of the head and he eased back in his seat.

It wasn’t Jock’s Morris that waited for us around the corner but a black police Wolseley 6/90 with a uniformed driver. This really was going to be official. Ferguson remained stone-faced and silent.

‘What’s this about, Jock?’ I asked.

‘You’ll see…’

I had worked out that Ferguson wasn’t going to return the favour of the Italian meal, and we drove across town towards Glasgow Green and the Saltmarket. When the driver dropped us off at the double-door front entrance of the Glasgow City Mortuary I realized that he didn’t have a fun day out planned.

It seemed that we were expected. Glasgow was a city of deficiencies, mainly vitamin, and the inappropriately cheery mortuary attendant who showed us down into the bowels of the morgue had the typical bow legs of someone who had suffered from rickets. It was a common look in Glasgow: a quarter of the population who had lived through the thirties looked like they were riding invisible Shetland ponies.

Glasgow City Mortuary had moved here between the wars and the white-tiled walls reminded me of a municipal bath house. We descended down a starkly lit, wide stairway and into a basement hall.

The smell of a mortuary isn’t what you’d expect: no stench of death, more like a mixture of carbolic soap and a faintly stale smell, as if the soap had been mixed with stagnant water. We entered a long, cavernous room. The temperature and Ferguson’s mood were both several degrees cooler than they had been at ground level. The cheery attendant with the chimpanzee swagger led us to one of the metal doors that were set in a row into the tiled wall. He slid out the tray and pulled back the white sheet that covered the body stored inside.

‘You know who this is?’ Ferguson didn’t expect or wait for me to be shocked. We’d never talked about it but we both knew that the other had seen the worst a war could throw up. A sort of grim freemasonry.

I looked at what was left of the face. The strange thing was the grey-white hair on the head was still perfectly combed in the over-styled way John Andrews had had it in life. Beneath the hairline, however, there was a deep impression, like a dent in the skull. There were a lot of lacerations across the bridge of the shattered nose, through the now-empty right eye socket and across the cheek. But there was enough of the mouth and the weak, bearded double-chin for me to know for sure that this was Andrews.

‘I take it the question is rhetorical,’ I said. ‘You know damned fine who he is.’

Jock Ferguson gave a curt nod in the direction of the bandy-legged mortuary attendant as a signal to leave us alone. The attendant’s smile didn’t falter as he made his waddling way back to the door.

‘It’s good to be happy in one’s work,’ I said to Ferguson. His expression told me to hold the humour.

‘Yes, I know damned fine who it is. I also know damned fine that you were attacked by men travelling in one of Andrews’s firm’s trucks. I know damned fine that you’ve been sniffing around Andrews and his wife for weeks now. And I know damned fine, even if I can’t prove it, that you don’t get your face pulped like this crashing a solid-built Bentley into a country ditch.’

I looked at the devastated face again and nodded. ‘Maybe he banged his face off the steering wheel. Ten or eleven times. I don’t know, Jock… but my guess is somebody’s gone into bat with a tyre iron.’

‘Like Frankie McGahern.’

I looked at him for a moment. There was no way out of this. ‘Just like Frankie McGahern,’ I sighed. ‘There’s a link between Lillian Andrews, or Sally Blane as she used to be known professionally, and Tam McGahern.’

‘I knew it!’ Ferguson lifted his hands and let them fall limply into the folds of his raincoat. ‘I bloody knew it. You have had your nose up this case’s arse all along, haven’t you? I warned you, Lennox

… I bloody warned you. If McNab gets wind of this he’s going to use your arse as a golfbag. I told you to stay out of this case. You don’t know what you’re messing with here. Trust me.’

‘Why don’t you tell me?’

Ferguson’s normally expressionless face made a good attempt at outraged shock. ‘You have got to be fucking kidding. I am telling you fuck all.’ He jabbed me in the chest with his finger. ‘ You are going to tell me every fucking thing you know. If you don’t, I’m going to serve you up to McNab on a silver platter.’

I looked down at John Andrews, but he clearly didn’t have an opinion on the matter. I could tell Jock Ferguson was serious. I’d lied to him. I’d gotten him to help me while lying to him. He had just cause to dump on me. All he needed to do was tell McNab I’d been running with the McGahern case and holding out on information they needed and McNab and his ruddy-faced farmlad would play bar skittles with my balls.

‘Okay,’ I said with a resigned tone. I looked at Jock Ferguson. His face was fixed. Determined. I knew I could trust him to be straight with me and I also knew he was pissed because he had thought the same of me. I don’t know why people do that.

Anyway, Ferguson was a decent, straightforward guy: that one good cop you know you can rely on. So I decided to lie to him in a decent, straightforward sort of way.

‘The truth is, Jock, I did drop the whole McGahern thing. It was looking like far too much trouble and, to be honest, like there was nothing in it for me. So I let it go. Completely.’

Ferguson gave me a sceptical look.

‘But I had this other case. He…’ I nodded to John Andrews’s corpse as if he could confirm my story. He certainly wasn’t going to deny it. ‘… told me that his wife had gone missing and he was desperately worried about her. I could tell he was genuine, which is more than I could say for his wife’s disappearance. I called to see him and he said she was back and everything was hunky-dory and it was all a big misunderstanding and sorry to have troubled you and here by the way is about three times the cash that I really owe you so thanks a bunch and go the fuck away. All of which was about as credible as a nineteen-year-old Govan virgin. So instead of doing the sensible thing and forgetting all about it, I see Lillian Andrews in the street and follow her and her friend.’