Craig Russell - The Deep Dark Sleep

And a couple, like Willie Sneddon and Gentleman Joe Strachan, would use their brains to dominate and terrorize the city’s underworld. Sneddon had been too small-fry to come to Strachan’s attention; but, if Strachan hadn’t disappeared when he did, then the paths of the two would, sooner or later, have come together. In a this-town-ain’t-big-enough-for-the-both-of-us kind of coming together.

But the paths had not met, and Willie Sneddon had had a clear run at dominating the city’s underworld, which he had, much to the annoyance of the other two Kings, Murphy and Cohen. They had divided the city up equally, except that Sneddon’s share had been more equal than the others. He was the youngest of the Three Kings and had come much farther, much quicker, than the other two. And everyone knew that Sneddon’s climb to the top wasn’t yet over.

Like Strachan, Sneddon had been very careful to make sure that his only view of Barlinnie Prison was seeing it in the distance as he passed by in his Jaguar on the A8. He had had a few run-ins with the City of Glasgow Police, right enough, but hadn’t picked up any indelible blots on his copybook. His relationship with the oily lawyer George Meldrum, and his open-handedness with brown envelopes stuffed with cash, had ensured that the only bars he ever looked through were the ones he ran or from which he extracted protection money. There was even a rumour that he was tight with Superintendent McNab, through their mutual membership of the Orange Order and the Freemasons or God knows what other let’s-do-a-funny-handshake-to-prove-we-hate-the-Fenians secret society.

And Sneddon was rich. Almost inexplicably rich. He had more money than the other two Kings put together, more than anyone could fully account for. I, personally, never saw much of a difference between businessmen and gangsters, other than that I would probably trust a gangster’s word more. Sneddon combined the callousness of a gang boss with the greed and acumen of a business magnate and that, I guessed, was what made him a different kind of animal in the jungle. The apex predator, as zoologists called such creatures.

Things were changing fast for Sneddon. He had re-invested the majority of his ill-gotten gains into legitimate businesses. It had all started out as front, but then Sneddon had seen that although the benefits were fewer and the profits less than his illegal activities, the risks were much, much lower. So now he ran a successful and perfectly above-board import business, an estate agency and three car showrooms, as well as having shares in a major Clydeside ship repair yard.

And he paid his taxes in full, on time. Scrupulously.

So now, Willie Sneddon — who was reputed to have once, in one of his more whimsical moments, boiled the flesh off the feet of one of his criminal competitors simply because this particular crook had made a remark about ‘letting Sneddon stew’ over a deal — now hobnobbed with lairds, shipyard owners, Corporation officials and magnates.

But Willie Sneddon still, it was said, retained the services of Twinkletoes MacBride, his torturer-in-chief, and an entourage of Teddy Boy suited thugs including Singer, the ironically nicknamed mute. I often puzzled about how Twinkletoes MacBride — being big on muscle and cruelty and short on brains and subtlety — had adapted to the new commercial environment. Somehow, I now imagined him dressed in a bowler hat and pinstripe and carrying his bolt-cutters — used for removing toes of uncommunicative victims — in an attache case.

Sneddon’s secretary tried to put me off until the next day, but I piled on the charm and pushed my luck, saying it was an important and pressing matter but that it would only take up ten minutes of his time. She asked me to hang on while she consulted her boss and when she came back a minute later, she told me that Sneddon could see me in fifteen minutes.

The ’phone rang almost immediately after I hung up. It was Jock Ferguson.

‘I’ve asked around about Donald Fraser. He’s as kosher as a Tel Aviv butcher’s. He deals with contract law, mainly. I wouldn’t have thought he would be handling divorce cases.’ Ferguson had drawn the obvious conclusion; I decided not to disabuse him of it.

‘I think he’s handling this case more as an obligement than anything else. A personal favour called in by a client. Did you find out anything else about him?’

‘Nothing to find. Educated at Fettes in Edinburgh. In the Home Guard during the war. Dodgy eyesight kept him out of the regular army, apparently. His father was an officer in the Great War.’

‘God, Jock, your intelligence gathering is a hell of a lot better than I thought.’

‘Not really. One of the senior uniform boys here, Chief Superintendent Harrison, knew Fraser during the war. Fraser and Harrison are pals, apparently. So I’d say he’s okay.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Thanks, Jock. That’s all I wanted to know.’

‘And how’s your sniffing about the Empire job going? Anyone jump up and kick you in the teeth yet?’

‘Not yet. But on that …’

‘Here we go …’ Ferguson sighed at the other end of the line.

‘On that …’ I continued, ‘what do you know about Henry Williamson and John Bentley?’

‘That’s easy,’ said Ferguson. ‘Nothing. Never heard of either of them. Well, I know a couple of Williamsons — it’s not that uncommon a name — but nobody connected to that world and certainly no one who would know Joe Strachan. And I don’t think any of them is a Henry. I could ask around, I suppose, but then you might buy me another Horsehead pie, and I’m beginning to think they’re named after their contents, not the name of the bar.’

‘Okay, next time I’ll make it an Italian meal …’ I’d treated Jock Ferguson to a meal at Rosseli’s before. In Glasgow that was as exotic as it comes and he had spent five minutes suspiciously poking around with his fork at his spaghetti. Forty minutes and two bottles of cheap Chianti later, he seemed to have developed an enthusiasm for Italian cuisine. Or as much of an enthusiasm as Jock Ferguson was capable of displaying: I could not imagine him ever throwing his arm around a waiter and bursting into ‘O sole mio’.

‘Do you have anything on either of them?’ he asked. ‘So’s I know where to start asking.’

‘Well, I think Williamson was a war buddy of Joe Strachan’s. In Number One, I mean.’ I had just finished saying it when I heard at the other end of the line something as rare as an inside toilet in Dennistoun: Ferguson laughing.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘A war buddy?’ he said. ‘Is that a polite way of saying fellow deserter?’

‘I thought Strachan had a glowing war record,’ I said. ‘A war hero, his daughter told me.’

More laughter. ‘Listen, Lennox, Strachan could sell any line of bull to anyone he chose. Do you know why everybody called him Gentleman Joe?’

‘I’ve heard that he was a flashy dresser, and liked a few of the finer things in life. Mind you, coming from the Gorbals, toilet paper that doesn’t leave newsprint on your backside counts as one of the finer things, I suppose.’

‘Joe Strachan didn’t dress flashy, Lennox. He dressed well . He knew what to wear and how, when and where to wear it. Like you say, he was one hundred per cent Gorbals, but he could pass himself off as anything, in any social circle. Believe it or not, it was actually what led the City CID in the first place to suspect him of having pulled off the Empire job and the other top-end robberies.’

‘Oh? Why?’

‘It was just by chance that a bank clerkess mentioned having served a tall, well-dressed, well-spoken gentleman a couple of weeks before the bank got hit. He had called in to cash a postal order but she had remembered that he had asked a lot of questions. Then, when they went over the other jobs, and prompted witnesses’ memories, they remembered a tall, well-spoken, well-dressed gentleman having had some kind of contact a few weeks before the job.’