Craig Russell - Lennox

‘Goodness no,’ said Brodie, suddenly concerned. I was surprised he hadn’t said heaven forfend. ‘I assure you that there is nothing wrong with the property. The price has been set at a lower starting point because my client is keen to attract as much interest as possible.’

I smiled. ‘Do you mind?’ I asked and took my silver cigarette case out, offering Brodie one. I lit us both. ‘I have to be honest, Mr Brodie. I suspect that your client, for one reason or another, is looking for a quick sale. That is something we may be able to accommodate, and at or around the asking price, subject to survey. But I need to know if that is indeed the case.’

I was good. I was projecting so little personality that I was even beginning to convince myself that I was a bona fide Edinburgh accountant. Brodie stared at me with a frown for a moment. He was working something out. Or he was counting sheep in his head. Finally he said:

‘My client is tying up the estate of her recently deceased spouse. It is a distressing time and she is most keen to settle matters as soon as possible.’

‘I see,’ I said, tilting my head back and blowing a jet of smoke towards the ceiling. ‘Then I think we can do business. Would it be possible to talk to your client?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ said Brodie apologetically. ‘I’m afraid Mrs Andrews is out of the country.’

‘I see…’ I said in a tone that suggested it was a problem. He didn’t respond: he was clearly concerned that I was going to walk, so I guessed he really didn’t know where she was. I let the air between us stew in silence. Then I said, ‘My client is also looking for a house for his general manager. He — I mean the general manager — had his eye on a property you had to sell on Dowanside Road. I wondered if it were still for sale.’ I took a sheet of paper from my pocket and handed Brodie the address of the former brothel.

‘Oh, yes…’ said Brodie, raising an eyebrow, which given it was as dense and woolly as a sheep’s fleece was no mean achievement. ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you there; it’s been sold, unfortunately.’

‘Who was the vendor?’ I asked. ‘That was why the general manager chose that specific house — he thought he knew the people who owned it.’

‘Mrs McGahern,’ said Brodie. The Neanderthal shield of his heavy Ayrshire brow slid a little over his eyes in suspicion. I guessed why: he was thinking, by my reckoning, that it was a hell of a coincidence that I should name these two properties: one owned by Lillian Andrews, the other owned by a war widow, Mrs McGahern. Who just happened to be Mrs Andrews’s sister. Brodie looked at my business card from beneath the overhang of his brow. I stood up.

‘Well, thank you, Mr Brodie,’ I said and we shook hands. ‘I certainly think we can do business over Ardbruach House.’

The woolly eyebrows lifted a little and he smiled. I promised to be in touch and left.

I ’phoned Sneddon from a telephone box on Great Western Road and brought him up to date. He sounded less than pleased that I was still following the McGahern trail, despite what I had to say to him about Arthur Parks, Lillian Andrews’s sister Margot and the big Dutchman.

‘Just find out who killed Parky,’ he said. ‘I don’t care how you do it.’

‘Listen, Mr Sneddon, I really think we’re dealing with something much bigger here. And I think it could be a threat to you and the other two Kings.’

‘You saying someone’s trying to take over?’

‘No. As a matter of fact I don’t think they are. I don’t think they’re even interested in Glasgow. But they’re working from here and I think they’re going to bring a shitstorm down on you all just by stirring up the police.’

‘What’s it got to do with Parky?’

‘I don’t know yet. But he was involved somehow. And I have a bad feeling that these stolen police uniforms have something to do with it. There’s a bigger picture than the one we’re seeing. I have a sort of half-theory about this that I need to work out. If you were to set up a blackmail operation, I mean compromising people who could afford to pay, who would you use?’

‘I’m not into that shite,’ said Sneddon. ‘It brings civilians into the picture.’

‘But if you did, who would you use?’

‘That’s the problem. I’d talk to Parky about it. There’s that wee shite Danny Dumfries, I suppose. But I wouldn’t trust him. He’s tied in with Murphy.’

‘Oh yeah… I didn’t think that would be Dumfries’s kind of thing.’

‘Maybes no, but he gets involved in all kinds of shady shite that we wouldn’t touch.’

Sure, I thought, life must be one long moral dilemma for you.

‘They must have been hard bastards,’ said Sneddon, changing the subject. ‘I mean, to do that to Parky.’

‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘No disrespect to him, but I would imagine a cutting bit of sarcasm would have brought Parks to his knees.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about. You know, with the McGahern thing. There maybe could have been a connection between Parky and McGahern. Parky was hard. Don’t let the pansy stuff fool you. He was hard as any of my team. Harder. I know the way he was. Never bothered me. But the army wouldn’t take his sort because they thought they would corrupt other soldiers, that sort of fucking shite. So Parky disguised it. Pretended to be something he wasn’t just so’s he could fight for King and country.’

‘Parks fought in the war?’

‘More than that. I didn’t think about it before. He was in the seventh armoured division. Parky was a Desert Rat. Like Tam McGahern.’

I drove to Edinburgh, rather than take the train again. That way I could avoid rush-hour-commuting contract killers. Before I left I ’phoned to say I was on my way. I parked the Atlantic in St Bernard’s Crescent and was shown into the same office as before.

Helena walked into the room and I felt the same kick-in-the-gut reaction.

‘I don’t see you for years then twice in the space of a couple of weeks.’ She smiled and offered me a cigarette from a solid silver box. ‘Am I to infer something from that?’

I smiled. ‘I’m not here on business, Helena,’ I lied, ‘if that’s what you mean. I wanted to see you again. Maybe we could have dinner together?’

She angled her head back slightly, raised the arch of a perfect dark eyebrow and looked at me with her vaguely imperious manner. Like she was appraising me. Sometimes Helena could look haughty. That was when I really, really wanted to fuck her most.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘We’ll eat here. I have a flat on the top floor. Why don’t you come back at seven? There’s a door at the back takes you into the kitchen. If you ring there I’ll come and get you. I don’t want you coming in the front…’ She let the thought die but I knew what she meant: she didn’t want me reminded what her business was.

I stood and picked up my hat. ‘It’s a date. We can talk about old times.’

Her smile flickered. ‘No… not old times. All I want to think about is the future.’

I drove the Atlantic back into the city centre and stopped at a snobby wine merchants in George Street. The guy behind the counter was thirty at the most but striving hard for middle-age. He wore a pair of those ridiculous tartan trousers, known as trews in Scotland, and looked at me as if I couldn’t afford the wine. Truth was, it was a push. The Scots were not great consumers of wine, preferring instead their drinks to double as drain cleaner. In Edinburgh, anything potentially exclusive had a web of snobbery swiftly spun about it, and the guy behind the counter made a point of slowly emphasizing the names of the wines, as if it would help me understand. Having been brought up in New Brunswick I could speak French well, so I amused myself by humiliating him by showing off my francophone skills, asking for wines that didn’t exist and then looking angry when he said they didn’t have them.