Craig Russell - Lennox

Whatever Smails’s talents as a photographer, he was never going to char for me. The studio was filthy and looked as if it hadn’t been swept out in a couple of months. I looked through some of the display drawers and found a collection of photographs. Mainly wedding and portrait pics, some of which were ancient. Smails’s trade was less than brisk.

I went through to the darkroom. There were several prints hanging on the line. All of them portrayed what tended to happen after the wedding ceremony. This was Smails’s real business. The commonality between the photographs was that they all illustrated the act of physical union between two or several individuals. The other common factor was that, for some inexplicable reason, the men all had kept their socks on.

I rifled through a steel cabinet and found more of the same predictable fuck and suck shots. But these were posed, not surreptitiously taken blackmail photos. There was one set of photographs that did, strangely, make me a little homesick. It was the most creatively conceived of the scenarios: a Canadian tableau in which a Mountie and a trapper were showing a young lady partially attired as an Eskimo the true meaning of what it meant to spear a beaver. I felt a tear in my eye and had to resist the temptation to burst into a chorus of Oh, Canada!

I was about to put the photographs back when I realized that the Eskimo Nell was familiar. To be honest, I hadn’t really been examining her face so I took a closer look. She was really quite pretty and I was sure I had seen her somewhere before, but in a completely different context. I pocketed one of the photographs that showed something of her face and put the rest back in the cabinet.

I went through the rest of the place and couldn’t find anything that fitted with extortion. Switching the lights out, I climbed the stairs to the apartment above. Maybe there was a hidey-hole up there. Again the flat was in darkness and I flicked the light switch. Nothing. I had to fumble along the hall until I found a standard lamp. It flooded the hall and the rooms off with an insipid, jaundiced light. Smails had obviously opted for a design motif that could best be described as Early Shithole. The place was filthy and smelly and I doubted that this was anybody that McGahern would get involved with.

I was wrong.

I found Smails in the living room. This time there had been no torture, just simple execution. He sat on a grubby clubchair, a long-cold cup of tea on the side table next to him and a cigarette between his fingers that had burned down and scorched unfeeling flesh. A copy of Spick magazine had slipped from his fingers and onto the floor at his feet. Smails obviously made a big effort to keep up to date with what was current in his profession.

I examined him more closely. His face showed all the signs of strangulation. He had been choked to death with the same width of garrotte as Arthur Parks. Unlike Parks, Smails hadn’t had any information worth torturing out of him and he had been killed swiftly and silently.

He maybe hadn’t told his killers anything, but he was telling me exactly what I wanted to know: he was a small man with greasy grey hair long overdue a cutting and his eyes were open and staring, as they would have been in life. But Smails had obviously had some kind of congenital defect: his right eyelid drooped over the eye. Just the way Bobby had described the ‘greasy wee shite’ he had seen Tam McGahern talking to shortly before he died.

Smails had been my man. I was now certain he had taken the photographs for the blackmail operation but I knew a search of the place would be futile: the pics and the negs would be long gone.

Parks dead. Smails dead. There were two other contacts that Tam McGahern had had before his demise: the fat Dutchman and Jackie Gillespie, the armed robber. I wondered if they were both still breathing.

Remembering my experience at Arthur Parks’s place, I decided to get out quick, just in case the cozzers were on their way again, maybe this time without bells and flashing lights. I paused long enough to wipe down with a handkerchief the surfaces and handles that I remembered touching. My fingerprints weren’t on record, but they were all over the Parks place and I didn’t want my dabs to be the link between two murder scenes. I switched all of the lights off and slipped out into the street.

I had had the sense not to park the Atlantic directly outside, mainly because I didn’t want to scare Smails off if he had returned while I was still inside. I was just about to turn the key in the ignition when a taxi stopped outside Smails. Two women got out. I couldn’t see them too well but as far as I could tell they were reasonably well put together and I guessed that they were a couple of Smails’s ‘models’. One paid the taxi driver, while the other rang Smails’s doorbell. I had locked the door and hastily tapped the small glass pane into place. The brass at the door called over to her chum, obviously to tell the taxi driver to wait. She rang again and rapped on the door. As far as I could see her knocking hadn’t dislodged the pane. She gave up and climbed back into the taxi.

I followed them across town. I had noticed that they weren’t cheaply dressed and they certainly weren’t concerned about the cost of the taxi. The dark-haired girl I’d seen knocking at Smails’s door got off at the Saltmarket. I decided to stick with the taxi. It headed south and we passed Hampden Stadium and eventually stopped outside a tenement in Mount Vernon. The girl got out and paid the taxi driver. Bingo: she was none other than Eskimo Nell. And now I remembered where I’d seen her before. She was the woman I’d twice seen Lillian Andrews with. I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible but it was difficult with so few cars on the street.

A number twelve Corporation tram stopped and half a dozen people dismounted. I parked and walked briskly into the midst of the passengers. The blonde disappeared into the communal tenement close. I was just in time to see her turn the corner at the far end of the close and climb the rear stairs. I moved as quietly as I could to the end of the passageway and watched from its cover as she entered her flat. Making a mental note of the number, I headed back out to the Atlantic.

The only reason I didn’t make a house call there and then was I did not want her to work out that I’d followed her from Smails’s. After all, he would be found over the next day or so and they would work out a rough time of death. Roughly the time that coincided with me being there. And the City of Glasgow Police had a problem with the concept of coincidence.

I drove past Smails’s place on the way back. No police cars outside and the place was still in darkness. I tried to ’phone Willie Sneddon to give him an update, but he was out. I headed back to my digs and turned in for the night. But every time sleep started to come it was shouldered out of the way by something big and ugly and frightening. I lay in the dark and thought of Helena and Fiona White and May Donaldson and new starts in Canada. The idea had never been so appealing. I had gotten involved in something a little too deadly this time. I realized that, for the first time in a very long time, I was actually a little scared.

My foreboding turned out to be well-founded. An ill-tempered Mrs White called me down to the shared hall telephone at seven the next morning. It was Willie Sneddon.

‘Lennox, don’t talk but listen. The polis are on their way to arrest me and I’m going to be here when they arrive. The coppers have lifted Murphy and Cohen. About an hour ago. I was supposed to be lifted at the same time but I wasn’t at home. The bastards have lifted most of my team as well, including Twinkletoes and Tiny. I need you to contact George Meldrum — he’s my lawyer — and tell him to bail me out. I can’t get him on the ’phone and they’ll be here any moment. The cops will leave you alone because you’re not on any of our teams.’