Craig Russell - Lennox

We made our way out of the mortuary hall and back up the stairwell. Once we were out on the street we both simultaneously drew deep breaths of Glasgow air. Hardly fresh, but at least it didn’t smell stale or carbolic-rinsed.

‘I still don’t get it, Jock. I mean, how this thing with the McGaherns could possibly be political.’ I was pushing him. It was already beginning to make sense to me: phoney shipments through a company that already dealt with the Far and Near East. But I wanted to know all that Jock Ferguson knew.

‘I can’t tell you any more. Because I don’t know any more.’

‘But that’s why you warned me off the McGahern thing to start with, isn’t it?’

He offered me a cigarette. We lit up and I looked around in a leisurely way. I saw the Talbot parked on the other side of the street, about two hundred yards up. Please, Twinkletoes, I thought, don’t do the psycho-chauffeur thing and come over to pick me up.

‘You want a lift back?’ asked Ferguson. ‘I’ll get the driver to drop you. I’m just going round the corner.’ He referred to St Andrew’s Street, a block away and where the City of Glasgow HQ was located.

‘No thanks. I feel like a walk.’ The Talbot hadn’t moved. Maybe the Reader’s Digest was stretching Twinkletoes’s concentration over three-syllable words like a prisoner on the rack. ‘Jock,’ I said tentatively, ‘I’ve got a favour to ask.’

‘How fucking unlike you.’

‘Can you hold off on talking to Lillian Andrews? At least for a few days. Maybe a week.’

‘Sure. No problem. And just let me know if you want us to turn a blind eye to an armed robbery getaway car. We could even arrange a points duty bobby to hold the traffic back for it.’ Sarcasm is a fine art: Ferguson was clearly a weekend painter. ‘Andrews was murdered. Everything points to Lillian Andrews being behind it. Why should I piss about?’

‘Okay, gloves off, Jock. Because if you go steaming in now she’ll get away with it. I didn’t like Andrews. I didn’t like anything about him. But I made it my business to help him and I let him down. I want to see that bitch hang for it. You know that I can find out more in a week on my own than a team of your flatfoots would in six months. People talk to me who would clam up if you asked them the time of day. Added to which we’ve got reason to believe that Lillian probably has contacts inside the City Police. Give me a couple of weeks and I’ll give you Lillian Andrews and whoever she’s involved with. Gift-wrapped.’

Ferguson took a final draw on his cigarette and dropped the stub onto the mortuary’s step. He ground it into the stone with the toe of his shoe and stared at it. ‘Okay. Two weeks. But I won’t walk away from this empty-handed. If you fuck up and Lillian disappears into the night, then it’ll be me gift-wrapping your testicles for Superintendent McNab.’

‘Fair enough.’

I waited until Ferguson had rounded the corner before I crossed the Saltmarket and started to walk in the direction of the High Street. After a few hundred yards Twinkletoes pulled up alongside and I jumped into the passenger seat. I felt claustrophobic crammed in next to Twinkletoes’s bulk and I imagined how cosy it was going to be sharing a ride with both him and Tiny Semple. I got him to drop me off at my digs and told him to fetch Tiny.

‘We’re going visiting,’ I explained.

When I was a kid growing up in New Brunswick, I went to Rothesay Collegiate School for Boys, which was as upper as the crust came in Canada. I played in the ice hockey team and was pretty damned good. So good that I started to harbour ambitions about turning professional.

One day we found ourselves playing against another private school: King’s Collegiate. King’s was based in Windsor, Nova Scotia and we should have taken that as a bad omen in itself, seeing as ice hockey was supposedly invented in Windsor. Anyway, there was this kid called MacDonald, not big enough to be a power forward but as fast as hell, who played the right wing and was my opposite number.

Grace isn’t something you usually associate with ice hockey, but MacDonald was truly graceful. Every time I got a run he would come up and dash past me. No checking, no contact, just a flash of red and the puck would be gone. Whatever I decided to do, he’d predict it. Whatever I’d thought of, he’d thought of it first. I felt outclassed and outmanoeuvred. It was a feeling I didn’t like.

Now Lillian Andrews was making me feel like that, too.

We arrived at the Andrews house to find it deserted. But this was no hurried evacuation prompted by the unexpected complication of John Andrews’s death. The estate agent’s sign that we passed on the way into the drive and the curtainless windows told me that there had been a lot of forewarning and planning before this particular coop had been well and truly flown.

I parked on the drive and I could have sworn the Atlantic eased up several inches on its suspension when Twinkletoes and Tiny struggled out of it. I told Tiny to lean against a door at the back of the house and it took us only ten minutes to confirm that it had been thoroughly cleared out. No furniture, no personal items; and I didn’t need to lift floorboards or jemmy off bath panels to know there would be no hidden caches of currency and passports.

I stood in the lounge, now empty of low-slung Contemporary furniture and stared blankly at Twinkletoes and Tiny as I tried to work out what to do next. They gazed back at me blankly. I told them there was no point in hanging about. I drove them back to my place, where Twinkletoes had parked the Sunbeam. I told them I was calling it a day and I’d ’phone Sneddon if I needed them again. What I really needed was to be free of my two-gorilla escort for a while. I could do with time to think. The move out of the Bearsden house hadn’t been hurried or unplanned. And because an estate agent was involved in the sale of the property, the proceeds had to go somewhere. It was my guess that it had all been part of Lillian’s schedule. And maybe John Andrews’s sudden detour from the highway had been part of that schedule too.

Again I thought of how Lillian was dancing around me in the same way as MacDonald, my teenage nemesis on skates, who had made me look pedestrian on the hockey rink. MacDonald had been signed by the Ottawa Senators before the war broke out. Then he had had his legs blown off in a minefield at Anzio. I don’t think the Senators renewed his contract.

I was going to have to take the legs from under Lillian.

I didn’t feel like the Horsehead Bar, but I stopped off for a couple. Maybe it was because I’d been thinking of Lillian Andrews’s legs that I found myself hankering after some gentler company than I’d find at the Horsehead.

May Donaldson was the kind of woman it’s good for a man to know: as obliging as she was undemanding. Most women made you work hard for your entry pass. May, on the other hand, handed you a season ticket straight off. And threw in a few away games as well.

May Donaldson’s flat was in the West End, not too far from mine, in one of the ubiquitous Victorian tenements that curled around Glasgow’s black heart. I didn’t know a lot about May’s background, but it wasn’t the usual Glasgow working-class story and things had gone wrong for her along the way. I had heard somewhere that at one time she had been married to a farmer. Apparently, he had left her to plough a different furrow.

Being a gentleman, I never asked her age but I reckoned she was in her mid-thirties, maybe a couple of years older than me. Britain’s attitude to divorce was the attitude everywhere else had had a hundred years earlier and you could probably deduct a century or two more in Scotland. Being a divorcee here made May spoiled goods and her chances of remarriage were slim. As a consequence, she played the sad and desperate role of the good-time girl. So May and I were occasional playmates. It wasn’t the deepest of relationships, but, like I said, it was convenient.