Craig Russell - Lennox

‘I give them the chance to talk before I do the big toe,’ the normally laconic McBride had once explained to me. ‘Unless Mr Sneddon has said he doesn’t want them to walk again. You can’t balance without your big toe, you know.’

‘That’s a really interesting fact,’ I had said.

‘Aye…’ Twinkletoes’s vast, battered moon of a face had shone with an almost child-like pride in his learning. ‘I read it in the Reader’s Digest.’

I smiled to myself on the way out of Sneddon’s mock-baronial, mock-Gothic, mock-respectable mansion. I had managed to become unemployed and employed within an hour. And between John Andrews’s cheque and Sneddon’s bundle of fivers, I was already two hundred pounds richer.

The only downside was that I hadn’t a clue where to start looking, I had the City of Glasgow Police breathing down my already bruised neck, someone highly professional had given my office a thorough going over, and the Neanderthal chiropodist from hell was shadowing me.

The first thing I set about doing was finding out who the girl was that Tam McGahern had been giving the seeing-to immediately before his untimely demise. No name had been mentioned. Normally I would have bought Jock Ferguson a pint in the Horsehead Bar and teased it out of him. But every time I thought about his parting shot in the car, it was like touching an electric fence around the police. It was one source — usually my most important and reliable — that I wouldn’t be able to use this time. I had no choice but to dive right on in there and go round to McGahern’s bar in Maryhill.

The Highlander Bar was surprisingly free of any cultural reference to the Highlands or Highlanders. No grand paintings on the walls of ‘Stag at Bay’ or ‘The Bonnie Prince’. Nor was there a comprehensive array of the fine single malts of Scotland behind the bar. No aroma of rain-washed heather, unless rain-washed heather smells like smoke and piss. Instead the Highlander Bar was typical of the kind of spit-and-sawdust Glasgow pubs that turned over a huge profit. This was a drinking factory. The men who came here — and there was no snug or lounge for the ladies — worked harder at their consumption of beer, fortified sherry or the cheapest blended Scotch they could find than they did in the shipyards or steelworks they had come directly from. I arrived just after opening and the Highlander Bar was already heaving. I am just shy of six foot but still felt awash in an ocean of chest-high flat caps, wreathed in a sea fog of tobacco smoke.

There were three barmen working the bar with a joyless, industrial efficiency. One seemed to be in charge, barking sideways orders to the others as he worked the pumps and the optics. He was a short, angry-looking man in a striped shirt with elasticated sleeve-garters to keep his white cuffs clear of his wrists. He spotted me across the mass of customers and frowned. He disappeared out of sight for a moment and the next thing I knew there were two cap-less thugs in cheap suits flanking me.

‘You all right, pal?’ said one with a yellow-toothed grin. He was a short, ugly youth with dirty blond hair sleeked back in panels at the side that arced into a ‘DA’ hairstyle. He was trying too hard to project friendly menace.

‘I’m fine. You?’

‘Oh the best, pal. If you don’t mind me saying, you’re not one of the usuals here.’ His companion was also smiling with the same insincere friendliness. ‘What brings you here, if you don’t mind me asking?’

I made a ‘you got me’ face. ‘I’m a reporter. To be honest I’m here because of that murder. You know, the one upstairs.’

A third thug came in through the doors behind me. He was bigger than the other two. But, like them, he was trying too hard to look tough.

‘It was a fucking liberty. A fucking liberty,’ said the short blond thug. ‘Mr McGahern was a gentleman. Treated everybody right. Listen, pal, we used to work for Mr McGahern. We still do, in a way. We can give you all the gen you need.’

‘You can?’

‘Oh, aye… no problem at all. Anything you need to know.’

‘And why would you do that?’

‘Because we’ll do anything to help catch the bastards that did it,’ the taller, dark-haired one said. ‘Get it all in the papers and that.’

Most of the customers were ranged four deep at the bar. In Glasgow drinking was a business so serious you did it standing up. Or standing up till you fell down. It was mostly the older men who sat at the scattered, scratched tables.

‘Okay. Let’s sit down and talk.’ I pointed to an empty table. ‘First I’ll get a round in.’

I took their orders and went up to the bar. When I came back they broke up their huddled conference. The smiles were back in place. This was going to be fun. The youth with the dirty yellow hair introduced himself as Bobby. His friends were Dougie and Pete. We drank warm, sour stout and talked about the night of the killing. Bobby and his pals made a big show of being reluctant to go into detail in a public place.

‘We’ve got the keys to the flat upstairs. We could take you up there, pal. Show you where it all happened, like,’ said Bobby conspiratorially. No one had yet asked me what newspaper it was that I was supposed to work for. He glanced around the bar and paused as a man of about seventy staggered past. ‘We can’t talk here.’

‘Okay,’ I said and we made our way out the open side door of the pub and into an alley that stank of urine and worse. As soon as we were outside, the three thugs blocked my way. This was the move they had been telegraphing from our first encounter. I turned square on and looked down on them, my hand closing around the sap in my pocket.

‘You’re not a reporter,’ said Bobby. The smile was gone and his movements had the jerkiness of someone hyped up and ready for action. ‘You’re that Yank Lennox. You’re the one that killed Frankie.’

‘If you want to play, you wee shite,’ I said, moving towards him and forcing him to step back, ‘we’ll play. And it doesn’t matter how many of your little pals you’ve got with you; it’s you I’m going to hurt. Bad. You understand? I don’t like the way you look. And I don’t like the way you smell.’

I took the sap from my pocket and shoved him in the chest with my other hand. He staggered back another two paces. His back was against the alley wall and his confidence was gone. I could see the other two move in on me and I turned.

‘As for you two… I’m here working for Willie Sneddon. So back the fuck off or you’ll end up like your bosses.’

The small blond one narrowed his eyes at me, trying to regain some credibility. I slapped him. Hard. Strands of oily blond hair fell across his brow. A few flat caps inside the pub turned in our direction. ‘What you going to do now, shitface?’

The other two didn’t make their move. Instead they glared hatred at their colleague, who had lost face for them all.

‘I’ll tell you what you’re going to do,’ I continued. ‘Fuck all. Because that’s what you are… fuck all. Nothing. Your boss is dead. His brother is dead. You’re about to be eaten up by the big boys, so don’t pretend you’re here to defend anything.’

I waited for them to make their move. They didn’t. Instead they looked at each other indecisively. I was in charge now.

‘What you three wee poofs are going to do now is take me upstairs, just like you said, show me the flat and tell me everything I need to know. I mean everything. And there isn’t going to be any trouble and you’re not going to hold back on me. Because if you do, I’ll be back. And I won’t be alone. Willie Sneddon has given me a loan of Twinkletoes McBride if I feel you’re not cooperating.’