Craig Russell: Lennox

The collar-roughened skin on McNab’s neck reddened more. There’s nothing more infuriating than being told what you knew all along but had conveniently and indefinitely filed in pending.

‘As far as she can tell…’ said McNab. ‘She would have been asleep.’

‘She says there’s no way he could have left the building without her hearing. Says she’s prepared to stand up in court and say so.’

McNab’s collarline blemish was subsumed into the general angry red that bloomed across his thick neck. He glowered at the younger detective for a moment before turning to me and telling me I could go.

Jock Ferguson was waiting for me in the reception area of the station. McNab’s reluctant release of me hadn’t extended to a ride home, and I was relieved when Ferguson handed me a shirt, my suit jacket and some shoes.

‘No socks?’ I asked and Ferguson shrugged.

Jock Ferguson was the more-of-a-contact-than-acquaintance-than-friend who had first told me about Tam McGahern’s demise. He was one of the cops that I had dealt with over the last five years. He was about my age, thirty-five, but looked older, as did many men who had passed from adolescence straight into middle age during the war. Maybe that was how I looked to other people. Ferguson was smarter than the average copper and knew it. Coppers generally like things to be simple and straightforward, and Jock Ferguson was neither. I got the feeling that he had always been something of an outsider in the force. The brains would have done that all right. I also recognized him as someone who was haunted by the person he had once been. Maybe that was why he bothered with me. I couldn’t work it out otherwise.

‘Thanks for that,’ I said. ‘That was all getting a little too cosy.’

Ferguson didn’t answer me and I saw that we had the full cheerless attention of the Station-Sergeant who was leaning his stripes on the counter. Ferguson led me out of the station and into the street.

‘I’ll give you a lift home,’ he said. Glasgow was grey-black in a sulky dawn and I felt its chill breath around my naked ankles. ‘Wait here and I’ll bring the car around.’

‘What’s going on with the McGahern thing?’ I asked as we drove in Ferguson’s Morris through the city. ‘McNab was digging for something. And he was pissed off that he was digging in the wrong spot.’

Ferguson offered me a cigarette. I shook my head and he lit his own. ‘You know this city,’ he said. ‘Two, maybe three million people crammed into it and it’s still a village. Everyone knows who’s who, who does what… and who to. But the McGahern killing…’ Ferguson corrected himself, ‘the McGahern killings have shaken everyone up. No one knows who did them or why. McNab’s been under pressure to get it cleared up. Big pressure, from above. And the problem with pressure from above is that it tends to continue downwards.’

‘I know,’ I said, ‘right onto the back of my neck.’

‘But McNab hasn’t a clue. That’s why he’s clutching at straws. It’s just that you were unlucky enough to be one of those straws.’

‘You any ideas?’ We were the only car on the streets and we passed a horse and cart laden with coal, and a stream of flat-caps cycling into their early shift. I turned my head a little and was reminded with a jolt of pain of my encounter with McNab’s ruddy-cheeked farmhand.

‘Me?’ Ferguson snorted. ‘No. My ignorance is truly blissful. I’m trying to stay out of this one. Just like you. More trouble than it’s worth.’

We didn’t say much more until Ferguson pulled up outside my digs. As I got out he leaned across the passenger seat.

‘Lennox… I’d lie low for a while if I were you. If you’ve got any ideas about sticking your nose in, forget them.’

I watched Ferguson’s Morris head along Great Western Road. I trusted him as much as I could any copper. So why was it that something nagged at me? And why did I feel that he had just delivered the punchline for McNab?

My digs were in the upstairs of a reasonably substantial Victorian villa on Great Western Road. I shared the main door with my landlady, Fiona White, who lived with her kids downstairs and it would have been she who had admitted the police in the wee small hours.

She was waiting for me when I opened the front door. ‘You look like you could do with a cup of tea,’ she said, unsmiling.

I followed her into the kitchen of her flat. She stood leaning against the kitchen counter, her arms crossed.

‘You look rough,’ she said without solicitude. ‘Mr Lennox, I can’t have the police knocking on my door at all hours of the night.’

‘You want me to leave, Mrs White?’

‘I didn’t say that. But this is a decent neighbourhood. I’ve already had a stream of neighbours at my door asking what was wrong. They’ve already got you down as an axe-murderer.’

‘How do you know I’m not?’

‘Presumably they wouldn’t have let you go.’ She lit a cigarette for herself and threw the packet onto the kitchen table. ‘Help yourself. I’ve got my children to think about, Mr Lennox. This is not the kind of thing I want them exposed to.’

‘I was a witness, Mrs White. Not a suspect.’

‘I wasn’t aware that the police dragged witnesses semiconscious from their homes in the middle of the night.’

‘It took them a while to work out that I was a witness.’ I sipped my tea. It was sweet and hot and eased the throbbing in my head. I wasn’t in the mood for the third degree from my landlady too.

A baker’s van sounded its horn out on the street and she excused herself in a ‘we haven’t finished’ way, grabbed her purse and trotted out. I watched her go. She was slim, maybe a little too slim. She was an attractive woman, with Kate Hepburn cheeks and eyes and would have been prettier had it not been for the perpetual wraith of sad tiredness that haunted her face. Fiona White would have been no more than thirty-five or — six, but looked older.

I had grown attached to the sad little White family, who had acknowledged that father and husband lay at the bottom of the Atlantic, yet still seemed to be waiting for his return from a war long-ended. I drank my tea.

‘So… would you rather that I left?’ I asked again when she returned.

‘I don’t want this kind of thing to happen again. That’s all I’m saying for now, Mr Lennox. If it does, then I think you should look elsewhere for somewhere to stay.’

‘Fair enough.’ I drained my cup and stood up. ‘It won’t, Mrs White. By the way, thanks for telling the police I was here last night. That saved me a lot of… awkwardness, you could say.’

‘I only told them the truth.’

The police had been busy in my digs and it took me a half-hour of housekeeping to get things back into order. My flat was really the two upstairs bedrooms and a bathroom of the original house layout. They were good-sized rooms and had big sash windows that let in a lot of light and a view along Great Western Road. The biggest of the bedrooms had been converted into a living room-cum-kitchen. Mrs White was fair with rent, but it was still pricey.

The first thing I checked was the copy of H.G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come I had jammed in the middle of my bookshelves. I opened it and made sure that the hollowed-out section was still full of large, white, crisp Bank of England five-pound notes. It was. My Niebelungsgold from Germany, to which I’d been able to add during my time in Glasgow. I had a lot of books and it had seemed a pretty safe hiding place: policemen tend not to be the most literary bunch. The next thing was to check that the floor beneath the bed hadn’t been disturbed. I lifted up the section that I had cut out and reached in underneath the floorboards. My hand cupped the heavy, hard object wrapped in oilcloth.