Craig Russell - Lennox

Free from any sense of community.

The fact was that Glasgow had swollen like a tumour and was now squeezing against the Green Belt. And if you couldn’t build out, you could build up. The geniuses in the City Chambers had decided that the solution to having Glaswegians living on top of each other was to have Glaswegians living on top of each other.

Given my experience of my last couple of house calls, I took the precaution of parking a little away from Gillespie’s house. The pavement beneath my feet was pristine, as were the roughcast and roofs of the houses I passed, their gardens still raw, earth scars, waiting for the first sowing of grass. As I walked, the ringing of heavy tools echoed from the building site in the sky half a mile distant.

Jackie Gillespie, as far as I knew, had no wife or children, yet his bright, new semi-detached council house had clearly been intended for a family. As far as I could see the neighbouring house was yet to be occupied. No one answered my ringing of the doorbell and, after checking there were no neighbours watching, I slipped around to the back of the house. The back door was unlocked. Well, to tell the truth it was de — locked. Someone had applied their size tens to it and the wood had splintered. My money was on a Highlander in blue. I had decided to be a little more prepared this time and I took a pair of gloves out of my raincoat pocket and put them on before pushing open the door.

It was fast becoming a bit of a tradition for me to find a freshly strangled corpse in situations like these, and I felt almost disappointed not to find Gillespie sitting in bulge-eyed welcome. Alive or dead, he wasn’t here. But whether it had been the coppers or not, someone had given his place a thorough turning over.

I didn’t hang around. If it hadn’t been the coppers then it would be soon. They were capable of thinking, even if it was a little more slowly than the rest of us. I knew that Jackie Gillespie had been seen talking to Tam McGahern, and I knew Tam McGahern had been planning a big getout-of-Glasgow job. The police didn’t. But they would be working their way through a list of top armed robbers who could have pulled a job like this. And Jackie Gillespie was pretty close to the top of the list.

But whoever had turned over his place had made the connection before me. And that didn’t fit with the police.

I got back in the car and headed south, stopping at a callbox on the way to ’phone Sneddon. There was something even colder and harder than usual about his voice.

‘Someone’s gonna pay for this, Lennox. Someone’s gonna pay hard and long. It’s been years since a copper’s felt he’s had the balls to lift a hand to me.’

‘McNab?’

‘He’s a fuckin’ traitor. He’s supposed to be Orange, for fuck’s sake. Instead of hassling me, he should have been kicking the Irish green shite out of that fucking Fenian Murphy.’

‘To be fair, Mr Sneddon, I think he’s been doing exactly that. And Jonny Cohen.’

‘Maybes. You’re right about Cohen, though. Word is he took a hammering. The cozzers picked on him special, ’cause armed robbery’s his thing.’

I could imagine it. Jonny Cohen would be at the top of the list. But it was the other name I was interested in.

‘Have they pulled in Jackie Gillespie?’ I asked.

‘How the fuck should I know?’ said Sneddon dully. Then, after a pause, ‘Why? Is Gillespie part of the firm that pulled this stunt?’

‘I don’t know. I think so. Listen, Mr Sneddon, I think I’ve put this all together. It’s like I said to you before; this could bring all kinds of trouble for you, Murphy and Sneddon. Today was just the start. This has a political element to it. Can you call a meeting? Get the other two Kings together and I can go over what I know. I’m going to need your combined resources to crack this.’

‘I dunno, Lennox. The coppers are still sticking to us like shite to a shirt tail. I’ll do my best.’

‘I’ll ’phone back in a couple of hours.’

After hanging up, I headed off for my second house call. I drove down to Mount Vernon and parked around the corner from the tenement block I’d seen Eskimo Nell go into on the night that Smails had had his collar tightened. There were three storeys of flats above a ground floor of shop fronts. There was an Austin A30 parked outside the close. All of the flats had lights on and I guessed Eskimo Nell was in. I hoped that she was alone. If she had company I could probably deal with it, but it could make things complicated. Slow me down.

I climbed the back stairs and knocked on the door. It was opened by the girl I’d followed back from Smails’s place. She looked a little unsure of herself and kept the door on the chain. She had a pretty face. Beautiful, almost. There was no doubt about the fact that she was the woman I’d seen Lillian Andrews with. She had a touch of class about her: just like Lillian, just like Wilma, just like Lena who had been rejected because the class evaporated whenever she spoke.

‘What do you want?’ she asked.

‘I’m a friend of Tam’s,’ I said, and tried to look both conspiratorial and in a hurry. ‘And of Sally’s. I’ve got a message for you.’

I thought the script and the performance were perfect, but it was clear I’d misread my audience. She slammed the door shut. I stopped the snib catching by shouldering the door. The chain held. I rammed my foot into the gap and slammed my shoulder into the heavy teak again. This time the chain snapped and the door flew in and threw the girl backwards. She staggered into the wall and a scream started to rise in her throat. I caught it for her.

‘Listen, sister,’ I hissed as menacingly as I could manage, pinning her to the wall with the hand I had around her throat. ‘This is your choice. You can start screaming and I’ll strangle you to death here in your hall, or we can sit down, nice and civilized, on your sofa and chat. But you’ve got to understand something here and now. You’re finished with whatever business you’ve got with Sally Blane or Lillian Andrews or whatever the hell her real name is. You’re playing a different game now. It’s called survival. We’re going to talk and I’m going to ask questions, then I’m going to deliver you to the Three Kings. And, believe me, if they hand a dolly over to their boys it ends up broken. So whether or not you end tonight raped, tortured and dead depends on how well I can satisfy the Three Kings that you’ve given me all the answers I need. Do you understand?’ I loosened my grip enough for her to gasp a breath and nod vigorously. I tightened it again. ‘No funny business. Okay?’

She nodded again. I let her go. She looked at me with wild eyes and rubbed at her throat. I grabbed her arm and frogmarched her through to the living room and threw her down into the armchair. I sure was in a nice business. It was when I found myself pushing women around that I felt most proud of my career choices.

The flat was expensively furnished. And surprisingly tasteful. There was a dining table and chairs against one wall and I dragged a chair over and sat opposite her.

‘Are you Molly?’ I asked.

She shook her head.

‘No. My name is Liz. Molly was Margot… Sally’s sister. She’s dead.’

‘You worked for this special set up, didn’t you? I’m guessing the name of the game was blackmail?’

Liz nodded. ‘I don’t know much about what they squeezed out of the punters we set up. I just did as I was told.’

‘How did it work?’

‘We were given a mark… some rich or important bloke. Sometimes the mark would know we were chippies, other times they didn’t know they were being set up. But they was always married. Respectable. After a while Tam McGahern would burst in on us, shouting and swearing and threatening the mark. Sometimes he’d soften them up with a wee beatin’. Whichever one of us was working the mark, Tam made out that he was our boyfriend. He’d say he’d had a detective on us and then show the pictures. Then he’d say he was goin’ to send the pictures to the mark’s wife or the papers.’