Craig Russell - Lennox

‘You okay?’ he asked.

‘I’ll live,’ I said without much conviction. ‘Let’s go.’

Lizzie, the matronly abortionist, dressed my head with a more discreet pad and I took another couple of Banks’s horse-tablets. Again something appeared turned up in my head and I seemed to see in Gone with the Wind Technicolor.

At least my head had stopped hurting.

One of Jonny’s minders was about his size and colouring. We waited until he changed into one of Jonny’s suits, raincoat and hat. Jonny handed him the keys to the Riley and we watched as the police car outside followed the fake Jonny away.

‘I feel guilty, in a way,’ said Jonny. ‘It’s like bemusing children for sport.’

We waited a couple of minutes before going out of the back door, across a couple of neighbours’ fences and out onto the street. Jonny brought a couple of heavies with him: it was the expected form for one of these meets. We walked the three blocks to where I’d parked the Atlantic and headed up through Giffnock and Pollockshields before cutting across to Rutherglen. Shawfields Stadium had an art deco, mock-Egyptian entrance that would have done a pharaoh proud — if there ever had been a pharaoh who called his hunting hounds names like Blue-Boy and Jack’s-m’Lad and was partial to placing the odd five-bob bet.

The stadium was packed. We parked in a car park that was ambitiously large and sparsely filled with cars but thronging with punters on foot, taking a short cut to the stands. I followed Jonny and his boys to an entrance marked ‘Management Suite’ and up into a large room with red carpet, a bar and picture windows out over the track.

Willie Sneddon was already there. Twinkletoes McBride and Tiny Semple lurked malevolently in the corner. Someone had given Twinkletoes a going over and one eye was nearly shut. Copper or not, whoever had given him a hiding like that would be advised to sleep lightly from now on.

Despite his complaints to me on the ’phone, Sneddon’s face was comparatively unmarked. Maybe he had managed to keep McNab’s hands busy with Masonic handshakes. Hammer Murphy’s paranoia was not totally ill-informed. Sneddon leaned against the bar, cradling a whisky glass in his fingers. He nodded in our direction when we arrived.

‘You all right, Willie?’ asked Jonny Cohen with a smile.

Sneddon grunted. ‘Feeling the fuckin’ pinch, you might say. You too?’

Jonny joined him at the bar. Behind it, a youth wearing a white waiter’s jacket and too much Brylcreem poured Jonny a Scotch. I held my hand up in response to Sneddon’s invitation. I felt like keeping as clear a battered head as I could manage and didn’t fancy the party that mixing booze and Doc Banks’s tablets would bring on.

Murphy was late. We all knew he would be late. Just to make a point. And an entrance. A roar spilled into the entertaining suite from the terraces below as the traps clattered open to release the greyhounds. It was at that moment that Murphy came in, flanked by the same two hard-looking Micks who had persuaded me into the taxi. Sneddon stood up from the bar and faced Murphy. Twinkletoes and Tiny Semple came over to act as his bookends.

‘Murphy…’ Sneddon’s nodded greeting had all the warmth of a Corstorphine landlady.

Murphy didn’t answer but something over Sneddon’s shoulder caught his eye and he threw a sneer at it. We all looked. It was a portrait of our newly minted monarch hanging on the wall. Oh good, I thought, playtime. In Glasgow’s fevered sectarian atmosphere, the reigning monarch symbolized all that was Protestant: a counterpart to the Pope. Depending where you were in Glasgow, you would see either ‘Fuck the Pope’ or ‘Fuck the Queen’ daubed on walls. Technically, of course, the Queen was the head of the Church of England and not the Kirk in Scotland. But ‘Fuck the Queen’ was easier to spell and took less whitewash than ‘Fuck the Right Reverend Doctor James Pitt-Watson, Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland’.

‘You carry them fuckin’ pictures around with you and hang them up everywhere you go, Sneddon?’ Murphy attempted a jocular smile that turned out simply a baring of teeth.

‘You want a drink, Murphy?’ Sneddon wasn’t rising to the bait. ‘We can toast Her Majesty if you like.’

‘Aye… toast her. That’s an idea. I suppose you’re all fuckin’ geared up for the Coronation?’

‘I’ll be watchin’ it on television,’ Sneddon said, his voice even and low. ‘You’ll have heard of television, I suppose.’

‘An’ I’ll bet she’ll be sittin’ on one of those big thick velvety cushions, like always.’

‘What about it?’ There was now a wire taut through Sneddon’s voice.

‘Now that we’re all here,’ I said in a let’s-change-the-subject-quick way, ‘I want to tell you what I’ve found out about Tam McGahern-’

‘You know why she sits on them?’ Murphy continued. Apparently my voice didn’t carry the way it used to.

‘I’ve got a funny feeling you’re going to tell me,’ said Sneddon. He put his glass down on the bar and turned to the waiter-jacketed youth. ‘You… fuck off. But leave the bottle.’

Once more, in my head a honky-tonk player stopped mid-tune. The waiter left, but Murphy made a point of intercepting him and giving him a ten-bob tip.

‘Don’t get me wrong,’ said Murphy. ‘I’ve got nothing against her. Nice enough lassie. Not much to look at, mind, but there again I think Phil spends most of his time looking at the back of her head.’

‘What the fuck is that meant to mean?’ Sneddon’s dense frame and hard face seemed to become denser and harder. Jonny Cohen looked over at me with eyes that very eloquently conveyed, Oh fuck!

‘Listen, boys,’ said Jonny. ‘This isn’t the time-’

‘I don’t mean nothin’,’ said Murphy. ‘Just that she sits on them big cushions. I just wonder if it’s because she’s married to a fuckin’ Greek. And you know what that means.’

‘Why don’t you tell me?’ said Sneddon. His hand rested on the bar close to the whisky bottle.

‘You know, Sneddon… Phil’s a Greek. And them Greeks like to make their deliveries round the back, if you catch my drift…’ Murphy turned to his heavies. ‘What d’you think, boys?’

‘I think it’s part of his fuckin’ culture,’ said one of the broken noses. ‘It’s probably written into their laws or something.’

‘Aye,’ said Murphy. ‘Or maybes it’s in Greek wedding vows… “promise to honour and obey and take a roger up the dodger”.’

At least, I thought, Murphy was attempting to talk about something that interested Sneddon. And nothing was closer to the heart of Willie Sneddon — ultra-patriotic, Orange Order, arse-painted-blue, Protestant Loyalist — than the new Queen. If I had had a pair of ruby slippers I’d have wished myself back in time to the OK Corral.

‘That Pope of yours sits on a big fuckin’ pile of cushions himself, you know,’ said Sneddon. His hand was now on the whisky bottle. I didn’t think he was going to offer Murphy a drink. ‘At least Her Majesty doesn’t need to be carried around on a fucking chair. I reckon the Pope’s always in it ’cause he’s too tired to walk after chasin’ all them fuckin’ altar boys.’

There’s an expression ‘you could cut the atmosphere with a knife’. Considering the atmosphere was being created by Hammer Murphy and Willie Sneddon, it wasn’t the air that would end up cut with a knife. Or smashed to fuck with a hammer. They held each other with unbroken murderous glares. Although, in Hammer Murphy’s case, I couldn’t remember him look at anything or anybody with anything less than a murderous glare. Maybe, at times of intimacy with his good lady wife, or during tender moments with his children, he would reduce it to an aggravated-assault-with-menaces glare.