Craig Russell - Lennox

I agreed and hung up. I wasn’t too happy about the set up. Whether Parks was involved directly or not, my instinct told me he needed leaning on to spill everything he knew. And Sneddon had just prohibited me from leaning.

I lay on the bed with the lights out and smoked. There was all kinds of crap in my head, buzzing about like bees trapped in a jar. I kept thinking back to what May had said and the desperation with which she had said it. I thought about Lillian Andrews and her dark hair and long legs. Then for some reason I couldn’t work out, I thought of Helena Gersons sitting like a beautiful bird in a cage of Georgian architecture. We had had something once. Really had something. But each of us in our own way had been so fucked up that we didn’t want anything that made you feel. But that wasn’t why I thought of her. I thought of her because if Arthur Parks hadn’t been supplying customers to the West End operation, then the next name on the list was Helena’s. And, after all, we had a history of lies between us. But most of all, it was what May had said that kept jabbing me awake.

I took breakfast in a cafe on Byres Road before heading off to the Park Circus area. The rain was taking a breather and the sun was trying to fill in, but Glasgow was vomiting its early-morning smoke into its face. I sat at the cafe window eating my ham and eggs — or bacon and eggs as they called it here. I watched the world go by: an older man with rickets worse than the mortuary attendant I had encountered waddled past. He looked under five foot tall but I idly wondered if he would have been six foot, straightened out. He paused, leant over, pressed his thumb to one nostril and ejected the contents of the other in a violent exhalation onto the pavement. A delivery man pulled up his dray horse and cart outside, spoiling my view of Glasgow’s cosmopolitan streetlife. The Clydesdale twitched its tail and splattered the cobbles with dung that steamed in the cool morning sunlight. I said a small prayer of thanks that I hadn’t ended up somewhere less sophisticated, like Paris or Rome.

The ancient Greeks were great ones for reading omens. I should have read the augurs in the Clydesdale’s shit: it would have saved me a hell of a day.

I walked back along Great Western Road and into the concentric circles of the Park Circus area. When I reached Parks’s townhouse, all of the curtains were still drawn across the windows. There was no bull-necked doorman on guard and the deep gloss red of the Georgian-panelled front door combined with the soot-blackened masonry to give the impression of a back door to hell. Or a back door to hell on its tea break. I tugged at the bellpull and rapped the ornate door knocker. After a few minutes it was clear that I wasn’t going to get an answer. But when Willie Sneddon told you to expect someone, you expected. I started to get a bad feeling about there being no one at home.

The funny thing about the criminal fraternity is that they are generally very trusting that everyone else will be law-abiding. I walked down the steps to the basement level and found a window slightly open on its sash. I slipped in through the window into a small bedroom. Or rather a room with a bed: I got the impression not much sleeping went on there. It was decorated with red and black Paisley-patterned wallpaper and a vast gilt-framed mirror hung on one wall offering a view of the bed. Romantic. There were two other basement rooms, a hall and the stairs up to the main apartments. I recognized the waiting room in which I’d spoken to Parks before. There were four bedrooms off it. All empty. A vague funk of stale cigarette smoke, scent and whisky hung in the air. A radio played quietly somewhere. From upstairs. I called out for Parks but received no reply. An ornate staircase led up to the next floor, where I knew Parks had his living quarters.

As I reached the top of the stairs the decor became less lurid and more tasteful. The music from the radio was louder: Perry Como informed me that she wears red feathers. I walked along the landing and came to a large, light living room. The walls were bright and broken up with framed prints and posters of various theatrical productions. The furniture was modern and tasteful and again contrasted with the contrived lurid Victorian wickedness of the decor chosen for the ‘working’ part of the house.

‘Hello, Arthur,’ I said to Parks. He didn’t answer. But there again I didn’t expect him to. As soon as I had come into the room and my eyes had met Parks’s, I knew only one of us was capable of seeing. He sat in the middle of the living room. Someone had pushed the coffee table and sofa to one side to clear enough room for them to go to work on Parks, whom they had tied to a kitchen chair. And go to work on him they had. His jaw sat at an angle to his face that was all wrong. Maybe they had tried to fix his underbite. Most of his face was swollen up into purple puffs of distended flesh. It takes time to bruise and swell like that, and it was my guess that whoever had killed Parks had taken a long time about it.

Parks was dressed only in his vest and underpants and the light-coloured carpet beneath the chair was stained dark with blood and urine. His tongue hung out over the dislocated jaw and his eyes bulged at me, as if emphasizing a point: I am fucking dead. I ignored the smell and drew close, examining his neck. Something thick, like a belt, had been used to garrotte him and there were spider webs of blue-black marks where it had crushed capillaries.

Parks’s killing had all the hallmarks of a protracted interrogation under torture followed by execution. Well, to be fair, that was the end of the playground Parks had played in. It was the end of the playground I played in. It was ludicrous to think that Sneddon might have been behind it, but I hadn’t seen Twinkletoes since the previous day and I found myself making a quick inventory of Parks’s naked toes.

I sat down on the shoved-aside sofa and stared at Parks. It didn’t help: he didn’t have any ideas about what I should do next. I did get a clue though, when I heard the urgent trilling bells of approaching police cars. Nice. Once more I thought of MacDonald, the teenage ice hockey right forward who could literally run rings around me. I was being framed better than the theatrical posters on Parks’s walls. The police car bells sounded a street or so away but near enough for a front-door exit to be out of the question. I ran through into the kitchen. It was narrow and had a huge sash window facing the rear. The police would send a car around to the back but their main attention would be on the front door. I slid the window open. There was a pipe angled steeply away from where the kitchen drain branched down to join the main down pipe. Shinning down the main pipe wouldn’t be too difficult, but traversing the kitchen wastepipe to get to it would.

Still, shouldn’t be a problem, I thought: if they found me in Parks’s back yard with busted ankles after trying to escape from the floor on which they would find his tortured and murdered body, it wouldn’t take that much explaining.

I eased out through the window and found the steep angle of the pipe with the toes of my suede Derbys. I took my hat off and threw it down onto the yard below then, scrabbling for a grip on the sandstone, I eased myself down, supporting my weight on the sill. As I inched towards the downpipe, I heard the police car bells ringing more loudly. There was no way I would be able to balance on the wastepipe: I would have to get quick purchase on it and swing over to the main downpipe, hoping that I could grab it firmly enough.

I bent my knees and propelled myself sideways, reaching for the pipe. I grazed my knuckles painfully on the stone wall, but managed to get a decent enough grip. The sleeve of my suit jacket caught on the pipe bracket and I heard the fabric rip. I scuttled down the pipe as fast as I dared and folded into a heap on the flagstones at the bottom. I caught my breath and tried to stand. No busted ankles but my back hurt like a son-of-a-bitch. I grabbed my hat and ran across the small yard, then out onto the alleyway.