Craig Russell - The Deep Dark Sleep

I paused and took a sip of the whiskey. It was a rich, aged bourbon and I guessed it hadn’t come from the hotel’s stock. I was four city blocks and a million miles away from the Horsehead Bar.

‘The other party in the photographs … you haven’t mentioned this to him?’ I asked.

‘No, not yet. I’ve been advised not to, but I think he has a right to know.’

‘I would stick to the advice you’ve been given, Mr Macready. The … prominence of the young gentleman in question is possibly something that could work in our favour. I really don’t see the press being allowed a free rein by the powers-that-be. It’s entirely possible that they would be stuck with a D-notice.’

Macready shrugged at me.

‘A D-notice is a banning order issued by the government to block stories that might damage the national interest.’

‘Nothing like a free press,’ said Macready with overdone irony as he sipped his bourbon.

‘Well, it’s something you might end up being grateful for.’

‘If so, isn’t that exactly why we should be telling the other party ? That way we might get the whole damn thing stopped before it gets started.’

‘I think we should keep our powder dry on that one. It’s something we may have to resort to. But it would be a gamble: it could be that they could decide that he’s simply not important enough for them to issue a D-notice. In which case, he would be as well and truly screwed as we would be.’

The phrase was out before I thought it through, but Macready didn’t seem to have picked up on it. I took another sip of the bourbon and it breathed on an ember somewhere in my chest.

‘What is the big deal with Iain, anyway?’ asked Macready, giving the other party his name for the first time. ‘I knew he was some kind of aristo, but I didn’t know he was that well connected …’

‘His father is one of the big Dukes up here. And he’s a cousin — God knows how many times removed — of the Queen. The Queen’s mother is a Scot, you see. Which makes him, no matter how far down the food chain, minor royalty. Royalty is big here, Mr Macready. It’s symbolic. It’s funny, I’m investigating another case that goes all the way back to Nineteen thirty-eight, when they had a big exhibition here in Glasgow to celebrate the Empire. Well, the Empire has all but gone and that makes the monarchy all the more important. Us Canadians hang on to it to prove we’re not Americans. Yet. The Brits are clinging on to it because it’s all they’ve got of the past. If the British lose their monarchy, they’ll have to face up to the thing they fear most.’

‘Which is?’

‘The future. Or maybe even simply the reality of the present. So the monarchy is fast becoming a national treasure, like Stonehenge. And just like Stonehenge, it serves damn-all present purpose but it’s nice to look at and allows you to wallow in the past. And you, Mr Macready, have just taken a leak on Stonehenge, as far as anyone else is going to be concerned. So, like I said, I think we’ll keep the other party out of it for as long as we can. They might just throw you to the wolves.’

‘Okay. But what now?’

‘I try to find the guy who’s got the photographs and use my simple charm to win him over and get the negatives. But first I need to ask you a few questions …’

And I did.

Leonora Bryson showed me back to the lift when we were done. I made the move we were both expecting me to make, but she told me she was busy in a way that suggested she would remain busy for the rest of the century. Undaunted, I gave her my best philosophical some other time response but resolved not to give up. Some women were worth more effort than others. And I had three weeks.

I went back to my office for an hour or two and tied up the loose ends on a couple of the divorce cases I’d been working on. It was mainly paperwork: the sad, sordid bureaucracy of marital disentanglement. Or extramarital entanglement. Or both. I trudged through the usual statements corroborating the evidence of a hotel manager, chambermaid or anyone else who would confirm that they had seen Mr X in bed together with Miss Y. Of course, it was all a put-up job — with me doing the putting-up for some divorce lawyer — and the witnesses were always twenty pounds better off after signing their statements. Divorce in Britain was a complicated and particularly seedy business. In Scotland, which had its own divorce laws, it was given exactly the same kind of turn of the Presbyterian screw that I had discussed with Macready.

Thinking about it, it was ironic that I was now investigating how someone had accomplished the same kind of setup I regularly put together. Except this time it had been Mr X and Mr Y, and at least one of them had not been party to the set-up.

By the end of the afternoon, I had everything I needed to tie up, tied up. I was left with just the three jobs on the books: the next day’s wages run, Isa and Violet’s job and the John Macready case. And between them, they would take up all of my time.

I made a couple of calls to those in the underground know and asked them if they knew a Henry Williamson. None did. I don’t know why that name, more than the others on the list, had stuck with me. Maybe it was because he was connected to Gentleman Joe Strachan’s First War record, which still remained a puzzle: why would his daughters believe Strachan had been a war hero when, according to Jock Ferguson, he had been anything but?

It was about seven by the time I got back to my digs, having eaten at Roselli’s, as I often did on the way home. I had the upstairs floor of a large villa on Great Western Road. It was basically a family home that had been subdivided and Mrs White, my landlady, lived downstairs with her two daughters, Elspeth and Margaret.

Mrs White — Fiona White — was a very attractive woman. Not in the same knock-your-eye-out way as the redoubtably configured Leonora Bryson, but she was even beautiful, in a careworn and weary sort of way. She had bright green eyes that should have sparkled, but never did, above Kate Hepburn cheekbones. Her hair was dark and cut conservatively and she dressed with taste, if without imagination. The reason Mrs White always looked careworn and weary was because of an unfortunate brief encounter during the war between a German torpedo and a British destroyer on convoy escort duty. The result had been that, within minutes, the destroyer was lying, broken, at the bottom of the Atlantic, taking all but a handful of its officers and men with it.

When I had first moved into my digs, it had seemed to me that the White family still waited for husband and father to return from duty, philosophical about the delay in the same way Brits had become philosophical about all delays and shortages. But Lieutenant George White slept an even deeper, darker sleep than Gentleman Joe Strachan; he was never coming home.

I was comfortable in my accommodation, other than that I had never brought a female guest to my rooms. It was pricey, I suppose, but I had become attached to the little White family. Most of all, I had long harboured a desire to become biblically attached to Fiona White.

The attraction, I knew, was mutual, but grudging on her part. Call me finicky, but when a woman is filled with self-loathing because she finds herself attracted to me, it tends to dent my ego. The truth was, and it confused the hell out of me, Fiona White tended to bring out the gallantry in me. Which was highly unusual, because, generally, an act of gallantry for me would be to ask the young lady to remind me again of her name before we did the dirty deed in the back of my Austin Atlantic.

There were a lot of things about me that were complicated: my relationship with women wasn’t one of them. Or maybe it was.