Craig Russell - Lennox

I drove to the Horsehead Bar and set about buying Big Bob and a couple of the lunchtime regulars a drink. Parks was long dead but at least I would have someone to say they’d seen me relaxed and not dressed in a brown wool suit: my reckoning was that there was a chance that the two pedestrians who had seen me drop into Great Western Road from over the park railings would have mentioned it when they found a copper guarding the gate.

I forced down a Scotch pie and a pint and left when lunchtime licensing hours were up. I was walking back to the car when the sun was eclipsed. I turned to see Tiny Semple filling my universe.

‘Mr Sneddon wants to see you.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’m parked round the corner. Where shall I meet him?’

‘Leave your car. I’m to take you.’ I could have been getting paranoid, but I detected a lack of warmth in Tiny’s tone. He led me to where he’d parked the Sunbeam that Twinkletoes normally used. We drove in silence. We headed south across the Clyde and down Eglinton Street, eventually turning into a street of dingy houses overlooking the railway. There were already three cars parked outside one of the houses and Tiny parked behind them. The cars were conspicuous because no other house in the street had so much as a stick and hoop outside.

The house looked derelict, but a glance into one of the rooms off the hall revealed stacks of crates. I guessed the house was a store for stolen goods. Sitting in the middle of a street where, no doubt, the neighbours would rob you blind, this little cache would be as secure as Fort Knox. You didn’t need padlocks and bolts to keep this lot safe. All you needed was a name. Willie Sneddon. The Robin Hood of the South Side: stole from the rich, terrorized the poor.

Sneddon, Twinkletoes and another thug, DA-quiffed and shorter and leaner than Tiny but every bit as deadly-looking, were leaning against the dilapidated fireplace, smoking. There was a chair in the centre of the room. Cosy, I thought. Like in Parks’s flat, enough room to work. Twinkletoes didn’t smile at me and I did a quick scan of the room: no bolt-cutters. That I could see.

‘Sit down,’ said Sneddon. I didn’t want to. With four guys like this in the room, it wasn’t good to be the only one sitting. Chances were you’d never stand again.

‘Listen, Mr Sneddon,’ I said, still standing. ‘If this is about Parks-’

‘Sit the fuck down,’ said Sneddon in a cold, angerless way. I sat the fuck down in a cold, gutless way. I was having deja vu: my cosy chat in Murphy’s scrapyard came to mind.

‘Were you round at Parky’s this morning?’

‘Yes. Like we arranged.’

‘Do you remember me telling you I didn’t want Parky upset?’

I nodded.

‘Maybes I’m a man of too few fucking words. Maybes I should’ve made myself clearer. Parky upset would have been bad. Parky dead is ever so fucking slightly worse.’

‘Listen, Mr Sneddon. I had nothing to do with Parks’s death. Or not directly. I think someone didn’t want him to talk to me. What’s more, I think they wanted him to talk to them. Parks knew something. Or they thought he knew something. When I arrived Parks was already dead. Someone had rearranged his face over a long time and then strangled him.’

‘He’d been worked over?’ Sneddon drew on his cigarette and dropped the butt on the grimy, naked floorboards before grinding it out with his toe. I worried that he maybe needed his hands free.

‘Let’s put it this way, he was going to have trouble chewing gum. Whoever went to work on him knew they were going to kill him after. Whether he talked or not. When they got or didn’t get what they wanted from him they smashed the fuck out of his face. It wasn’t a beating Parks took. It was torture.’

‘As I remember, you wanted to lean on him. Aye, that’s what you said… lean on him. I’ll ask you this once, Lennox. Did you kill him? And before you answer, I want you to know that I do understand how these things happen. Things get out of fucking hand.’

I bet you do, I thought.

‘So, Lennox, tell me the truth,’ Sneddon continued. ‘Did you do Parky?’

‘No. If you’d seen the state his face was in you would know that. I’m not that vicious.’

‘Okay, let me see your hands.’

I held them out and felt a chill travel from the chair and into my bowels. The knuckles of both hands were raw from my rapid descent down Parks’s plumbing.

‘Now listen,’ I said. ‘I had to make an escape from Parks’s place down the drainpipe. Plus I had to schlep through half the bushes in Kelvingrove Park. I didn’t get these from torturing Parks.’

Sneddon stared hard at me for a moment. I glanced over at Twinkletoes, who still wasn’t smiling. I involuntarily wriggled my toes in my shoes.

‘Okay,’ Sneddon said at last. ‘I believe you. You didn’t get those knuckles beating a man to death. Your hands would be all swoll up like fucking balloons.’

Thank God for the voice of experience, I thought.

‘That doesn’t mean you didn’t beat him to death with something else,’ said Sneddon. ‘But I believe you.’

I tried not to look too relieved.

‘Parky made me a lot of fucking money, Lennox. I am displeased about someone killing one of my best earners. Very fucking displeased.’

‘I’m sure you are.’

‘You’ve got a new job. Forget the McGahern thing. Find out who killed Parky. And find out quickly.’

‘To be honest,’ I said, ‘I don’t think I should forget the McGahern thing. I think Parks’s death is connected. Coincidences make me uncomfortable. I tend not to believe in them, having the logical view of the universe that I do.’

‘What coincidences?’

‘That we have a conversation and you tell Parks to expect me. I arrive and Parks is freshly dead. Coincidence one. Then I have to make a back-door run for it because the police have been tipped off at that exact moment. Coincidence two.’

‘So someone was trying to put you in the frame?’

‘Well, you felt you had to ask me if I’d killed him, didn’t you? What worries me is that they gave my name to the police. Or they’ll give it when they realize that I wasn’t caught at the scene.’

‘Wait a minute…’ Sneddon frowned. ‘What you fucking mean about Parks getting killed after I arrange a meeting for you? You saying I set it up?’

‘No… No, not at all.’ I held my hands up. ‘Parks could have told someone. Or word got out somehow. All I mean is the whole thing fitted together just that little bit too conveniently. I’ve been getting that a lot, recently. And all to do with Tam and Frankie McGahern and Lillian Andrews. But I need to think it all through. My first concern is not to end up hanged for Parks’s murder.’

‘You seen leaving?’

‘Not that I know of, but all it would take is a couple of public-spirited citizens to have been looking out of their windows while I was doing a Sherpa Tenzing on Parks’s back wall. And a couple of passers-by saw me clamber out of Kelvingrove Park.’

‘Did they get a good look at you?’

‘Probably just what I was wearing. I’ve got the suit in the boot of my car. But I think I maybe left a strip of it on Parks’s drainpipe. I’m going to dump it.’

‘When you drop him off back at his car, pick up the suit,’ Sneddon said to Tiny. He turned back to me. ‘We’ll incinerate it. As for this morning when Parky was snuffed, you took your car in for repair at one of my garages. I’ll give you the name and address and two mechanics who’ll say you were there.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. But the idea of my avoiding a murder charge based on a dodgy Sneddon-supplied alibi didn’t exactly fill me with confidence. And if the police never got the real killers, then it gave Sneddon something on me. I wondered if the suit would be incinerated, after all. But I was in no position to negotiate.