Craig Russell - Lennox

‘Which results in a tit-flashing and head-bashing, as I recall,’ said Ferguson.

‘Exactly. So one quick feel and twenty stitches later I find out that Lillian Andrews is or was Sally Blane, a whore and blue-movie actress who’s as professional with a dick in her mouth as Larry Adler is with a harmonica. Then I hear stories about a high-end, by-appointment-only brothel somewhere near Byres Road in the West End. Just a few girls, but classy and skilled. Story is that the clientele includes many of the great and the good in Glasgow. My money is on Lillian Andrews as madam. None of the Three Kings has a stake in it and my guess, like it or not, Jock, is that they have top cops either on the books as customers or as brown envelope pay-offs. Whatever the reason they’re left alone. What I didn’t know yet was that Tam McGahern was supplying heavies for security.’

‘I thought you said it was independent?’

‘It was. McGahern was a sub- not a main contractor. Or at least to start with. I find out later that McGahern was cracked up on the woman who ran the place. Who, like I say, I reckon was Lillian Andrews. But I don’t know any of this yet. So then I get a call from a woman who says she has information for me and can I meet her somewhere quiet and secluded where I can get my brains bashed in. I say no go but that I’ll be under the clock in Central Station. Time comes and goes but she doesn’t. Then I get jumped on the way back to my car by a bunch of thugs out of the Bedford van I gave you the number of.’

‘Which is owned by John Andrews’s company.’

‘Except the woman who ’phoned me and said she had information wasn’t Lillian Andrews. Or I don’t think she was. And the information she said she had for me was about Tam McGahern’s death.’

Ferguson’s face clouded again. ‘So you were still working the case.’

‘No. I’ve told you,’ I lied with indignation. ‘I’d dropped it. But when someone ’phones you and tells you that they have information on a murder the cops have suspected you know more about than you really do, you’ve got to check it out. If I’d found out anything then I’d have got in touch with you straight away.’

Jock Ferguson raised an eyebrow. He was clearly thinking of flying pigs and nineteen-year-old Govan virgins.

‘It’s the truth, Jock. Anyway, then — and don’t ask me how — I get my hands on stills from a blue movie featuring a younger Lillian Andrews slash Sally Blane playing the one-note piccolo. I still don’t know what the deal with Andrews is so I confront him with the pictures, like I told you, and it’s no surprise to him. Now I know that there’s something going on that stinks to high heaven. I actually begin to worry about his safety…’ I looked down at the smashed face of my ex-client and thought about how much good my worrying had done him. ‘Anyway, then I get a call from him and boy is he a scared bunny. He tells me he’s as good as dead and Lillian is behind it all. Being the genius I am, I tell him to tell me everything later but to get to safety. I arrange to meet him at a hotel up by Loch Lomond.’

‘Except he doesn’t make it.’

‘Exactly. Oh, and by the way, before you get all holier-than-thou with me one of the options I gave him when he ’phoned me was that I had a cop he could trust. You.’

‘If he had he’d still be alive.’

‘Maybe. Maybe not. When I suggested getting the police involved it was like he started to panic. I’ve got to be honest, Jock, it was as if he knew that Lillian and whoever she was involved with had someone inside the City Police. And that fits with my suspicions about the brothel being left alone because of police contacts.’

Ferguson frowned but his expression revealed that he knew it wasn’t impossible: there was a parlour game in Glasgow, usually played in the changing rooms of the Victoria Baths, called the Manila Envelope Shuffle. The Victoria Baths were popular with senior police officers, businessmen and Glasgow Corporation councillors.

‘Anyway, that’s all I’ve got,’ I said as if I’d unburdened all that there was to unburden. It was rather convincing, even if I say so myself. But Ferguson’s expression, as always, was difficult to read.

‘You should have come to me as soon as Andrews was killed,’ he said. Our voices echoed in the cavern of the mortuary.

‘I didn’t know for sure it was murder. And anyway, you don’t have anything to go on.’ I nodded to Andrews’s body. ‘You can’t even prove this wasn’t an accident.’

‘But I’ve got enough from you to start a murder inquiry. A call for help and a declaration that his life was threatened immediately before he was killed. And we know that Tam and Frankie McGahern’s deaths were murder and now there’s a link with Andrews’s death.’

I nodded thoughtfully. I knew I hadn’t given him enough to make a case. I hadn’t told him about the faked shipment manifests that Andrews had told me about on the ’phone. And, of course, I hadn’t said a thing about a fourth connected death: Bobby, who was by now probably a better pie filling than he had been a petty crook. I also kept schtum about everything else I’d picked up, including my gut feeling that my Fred MacMurray lookalike and his chums were completely unconnected to the less than competent mob who’d tried to lift me from Argyle Street. The truth was I wanted time to dig deeper myself. Ferguson was a good cop, but he was supported by a spectrum of policing talents that ranged from the incompetent to the corrupt. They would either trample all over the evidence or, if I was right and there was someone on the inside on Lillian’s payroll, they would actively bury it. Anyway, I didn’t work for the interests of justice: I worked for Willie Sneddon.

‘You going to question Lillian Andrews?’ I asked.

‘Got to. Got to get to the bottom of this, Lennox.’

‘Listen, Jock. I’ve shown you mine, now you show me yours. What did you mean I didn’t know what I was messing with?’

Ferguson pulled the sheet back over John Andrews’s smashed face, pushed the body tray into the cubicle and closed the door. I thought of Andrews’s Bentley, his big house and its Contemporary furniture, his sixty-guinea suits. Now all he had to his name was a winding sheet and a chilled steel cabinet and even those were on loan. It made me think of when you got to know someone in the war who ended up getting killed: everything they had told you about their lives, all the conversations you had had with them, it all became unreal when they were lying in front of you, just so much mince.

‘Just trust me, Lennox: you don’t have any idea what you’re messing with. The truth is I don’t either. All I know is that it’s political or something. McNab has a bee up his arse because someone put it there, and I think it buzzed all the way from Whitehall.’

‘What?’ I shook my head in disbelief. ‘We’re talking about the McGaherns here, not Burgess and Maclean. A couple of thieves and a whore. What can be political about that?’ The truth was what Ferguson had said had started all kinds of alarms ringing. Not just politics, Middle East politics. I already had suspicions about where Fred MacMurray’s kid brother and his pals had come from, but I couldn’t for the life of me work out what they could have to do with the McGaherns’ sordid little realm.

‘I don’t know what the story is,’ said Ferguson. ‘All I do know is that there have been Special Branch types hanging around St Andrew’s Street. The odd military sort too.’

‘I bumped into McNab the other night. Or more like he bumped into me… accidently on purpose. He had a couple of MPs in tow. Some shite about stolen uniforms.’

‘No shite,’ said Ferguson. ‘But not connected, as far as I can see. The MPs are involved because a couple of army uniforms were nicked. It’s the police uniforms that McNab is worried about. He’s crapping himself in case some outfit is going to pull an IPO job. When crooks impersonate police officers the public get jittery and there’s all kind of political bollocks to deal with. And McNab has enough on his plate with the McGahern thing.’