Craig Russell - Lennox

Still there. If I needed it.

I slept most of that day, but the next I rose early, had a bath, shaved and put on one of my smarter dark suits. I needed to feel clean and fresh. The pain in my neck still nagged at me and I borrowed a couple of sachets of aspirin from Mrs White. But something else was nagging at me and I couldn’t quite pin it down. The papers were full of Frankie McGahern’s murder and I had sensed an even deeper chill in my landlady’s demeanour.

Petrol rationing had ended two years before but I’d gotten into the habit of leaving the car at home if I was just going into the office. I took the tram into town and unlocked the door of my one-room office in Gordon Street. I had often thought about dumping my office, seeing as most of my business was conducted from the Horsehead Bar, but it made sense to keep it for legal and tax reasons. It also provided me with the odd missing person, divorce case or factory theft case: some legitimate sleaze to show the coppers and the revenue.

It was my office that disturbed me most.

Whereas the police had gone through my flat with their usual ham-fistedness, there was no outward sign that someone had been in my office, far less searched it. But I knew they had. The angle of the ’phone on my desk. The position of the inkwell. The fact that my chair was pushed squarely and neatly into the desk. This was a truly professional job. Whoever did this was skilled in searching without detection. Not something the police had to worry about.

After going through every drawer and every file, I was certain nothing had been removed from the office. I checked the door, paying particular attention to the keyhole. No sign of forced entry or even of someone fiddling with the lock. And I had the only set of keys. Whoever had done this was good. Very good. And I had no doubt that if it had been them who’d gone through my home then they would have found both my nest egg and my stash hidden beneath the floorboards. But I had the feeling I wasn’t dealing with common thieves and in any case it would be much more difficult to get in and out of my place while Mrs White was in.

I tried to put it out of my mind and focused on the missing-person case I’d been working on. Jobs like these were essential: a client who was legitimate and who gave and asked for receipts meant I had something convincing to show the tax inspector. At least fifty per cent of my clients didn’t like to trouble the taxman and, I have to admit, I liked to ease his workload a little myself. The case I had spent the last week on was that of the missing wife of a Glasgow businessman. She was young, pretty and lively and he was middle-aged, paunchy, with bad teeth and definitely no Robert Taylor to look at. It was a clear mismatch based on money and I knew I wasn’t going to give the client the happy end he was looking for.

I decided to focus my attention on the missing wife. Maybe if I pretended the whole McGahern thing wasn’t there it would go away. I ’phoned the husband, John Andrews, at his office and arranged to meet him at his home at six that evening.

Glasgow was a sleeves-rolled-up city. For a hundred years its sole reason for being had been to serve as the Empire’s factory. The industrial revolution had been born here with a scream of metal and thundering mills. Britain’s mercantile and military ships were built here. The vast machines that powered the British Empire were assembled here. The fuel to drive those machines was hewn from the earth here. Glasgow was a city where pretensions of gentility rang false, where the villa of the mogul had to rub grubby shoulders with the tenement. Bearsden lay to the north of the city and dressed itself up as Surrey, yet was within soot-flecked spitting distance of run-down, violent Maryhill. John Andrews’s home was set back from the sweep of the street in a large, wooded garden. I didn’t fully understand what it was Andrews did; it was one of these occupations that were dismissed with a vague generalization: ‘import-export, that kind of thing’. Whatever it was he did, it paid well. Ardbruach House, Andrews’s home, was three floors of Victorian villa, built as much to impress as to accommodate. The truth was I had nothing new to tell Andrews, mainly because I had dropped the ball on his wife’s case with all that had happened since my encounter with Frankie McGahern.

Andrews had been brusque on the ’phone. He didn’t like me ’phoning his office, despite the fake name and company he had given me as a code for his receptionist. But when I pulled up at his mansion, he was waiting for me at the door with what looked like a practised smile. The kind that quivers at the corners.

Andrews was a small, tubby man with whitish-grey hair and a wattle of fat beneath his weak jaw. He wore a fresh carnation in the buttonhole of his sixty-guinea suit. When he shook my hand, his fleshy palm felt moist. ‘I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted journey, Mr Lennox. I didn’t get a chance to call you. Mystery solved!’ He made a big shrug with his small shoulders and it was as fake as the smile. I was getting all kinds of bad feelings about this. And after the McGahern episode, I could have done with something straightforward.

‘Mr Andrews, is there something wrong?’

‘Wrong?’ He laughed but didn’t hold my gaze. ‘Quite the contrary. I’m afraid this has all been a terrible misunderstanding. Lillian telephoned me this afternoon, not long after you and I had spoken. She was called on at short notice to visit her sister in Edinburgh. Her sister took ill very suddenly you see. Lillian had left me a note all along, but it had slipped behind the bureau. It was only when she ’phoned that she realized that I’d been so worried.’

‘Oh, I see,’ I said. He was talking nonsense, or as the locals were wont to call it, shite.

‘Here, Mr Lennox.’ Andrews made no attempt to invite me in: instead he took a cheque from his pocket and handed it to me. It was for much more than I was due. ‘I feel guilty about your wasted effort. I hope this covers the inconvenience.’

This was so wrong. But I pocketed the cheque.

‘Do you mind if I have a look at the note your wife left?’ I asked.

Andrews’s relief faltered and he looked flustered. ‘The note? Why? Oh… I’m afraid I threw it away after I found it. There seemed little point in hanging on to it.’

‘I see.’ I lifted my hat an inch. ‘Well, I’m glad things are settled. Goodbye, Mr Andrews.’

Something flickered in his expression. A faint doubt, or hope. Then it was gone.

‘Goodbye, Mr Lennox.’

Maybe it was because I was at a loose end that I didn’t go straight home. There are more ways than ‘import-export’ to make the kind of money to afford a home in Bearsden. I headed north through Glasgow’s leafy suburb and turned into another lengthy drive through manicured bushes and trees. But when I reached the top, it wasn’t a short, fleshy businessman who stood outside the small mansion. Instead there was a huddle of thugs in cheap suits, maliciously eyeing my progress up the drive.

‘And what can I do for you?’ The Glasgow accent was as thick as the macassar on the hair of the heavy who came over to the car window. He was dressed in tight drainpipe trousers and a mid-thigh-length jacket. It was the latest fashion, apparently. It was supposed to look ‘Edwardian’ and I’d heard followers of it called themselves ‘Teddy Boys’.

‘I’d like to see Mr Sneddon.’

‘Oh you would, would you? Do you have an appointment?’ He pronounced every consonant of ‘appointment’ as if he’d been practising it.

‘No. Tell him Lennox is here. I want to talk to him.’

‘What about?’

‘That’s between me and Mr Sneddon.’