Craig Russell - The Deep Dark Sleep

‘I’m not going to do that. I want paid.’

‘I’ll send you a postal order.’

‘You have to meet me.’

‘Okay. Tomorrow morning, nine sharp, at my office.’ I hung up before he had a chance to protest. I dialled Jock Ferguson’s home number.

‘What the hell is it, Lennox? The football’s about to come on. The international.’

‘I’ll save you and Kenneth Wolstenholme the trouble, Jock. Scotland will lead by one goal until the last fifteen minutes and then snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by letting three goals in in quick succession and you’ll spend the next two weeks saying “we was robbed” — like everyone else. Listen, Jock, who did you tell I was asking about Joe Strachan?’

‘Nobody. I mean, just the few other coppers I had to ask for information, like I already told you. Why?’

‘I’ve just had a call trying to lure me to the Gorbals, if you can use lure and the Gorbals in one sentence. He said he knew I was looking for information on Strachan and offered to sell me some.’

‘You’re not going, I take it?’

‘As you Glaswegians are fond of saying, I did not come up the Clyde in a banana boat. I’ve told him to call at my office tomorrow at nine. I doubt if he’ll show. I just wanted to know if it could have been someone you had spoken to.’

‘Maybe your clients have been talking.’

‘No. I thought about that but don’t see it happening. Thanks anyway, Jock.’

I hung up and went back into the living room.

‘You’re not going out then, Mr Lennox?’ Fiona White asked as I sat back down next to the girls.

‘Oh … that? No. I’m sorry about that. It was a business thing, but I don’t know how he got this number. I’ll deal with it tomorrow.’

‘I see,’ she said and turned back to the television. I could have sworn there was a hint of a smile as she did so.

I was right to have suspected an ambush. I got up and headed into my office early, but as soon as I stepped out of the front door of my lodgings I was grabbed by the throat. Except it wasn’t some thug that went for me but the lurking Glasgow climate. September was turning into October and something cold from Siberia, or worse still from Aberdeen, had moved into the city and collided with the warm air. Fog. And fog didn’t linger long in Glasgow before it became thick, choking, yellowy-green-grey smog.

Glasgow had been the industrial heart of the British Empire for a century. Factories belched thick smoke into the sky, and the greasy fuming of a hundred thousand tenement chimneys combined into a single, diffuse caliginous mass above the city. And when it combined with fog, it turned day to night and took your breath away. Literally.

I didn’t debate long about driving into the office. I generally took it that if I couldn’t see my car from the door of my digs, then driving wasn’t a great idea. The same went for the buses, which left the options of the subway, trolleybuses or trams. The trams were always the most reliable in the smog, so much so that queues of cars would trail along behind them as the only way of being sure to navigate through the miasma; although it often led to motorists finding themselves in the tram depot rather than where they thought they were going.

I walked along Great Western Road, keeping close to the kerb to make sure I didn’t wander off into the middle of the street, and eventually found the tram stop. I could see the indistinct outline of an orderly queue at the stop and, as was always the case in Glasgow, this collection of strangers were chatting among themselves as if they had known each other for years.

I was about four feet from the end of the queue, which was about as far as you could see in the fog, when I felt something jab painfully into the small of my back. I was about to spin around when a hand clenched itself around my upper arm and dug in. The smog clearly had an accomplice, after all.

‘ Don’t turn around …’ I recognized the voice as the one I’d heard on the phone. The same odd mix of accent, but this time it was authoritative and calm. ‘If you see my face, I’ll have to kill you. Do you understand that?’

‘It’s not that complicated,’ I said. In the smog you were deprived of much of your vision and your other senses became keener, it seemed. I puzzled as to why I hadn’t heard him come up behind me.

‘You should have kept our appointment last night, Lennox. Now, we’re going to back away down the alley behind me and you’re going to keep nice and quiet and nothing untoward will happen to you.’

Untoward . The vocabulary and the accent were both all over the place. ‘All I want to do is to talk to you. No one need get steamed up or hurt.’

‘I’m assuming that is a gun you’ve got in my back,’ I said, ‘not a rolled-up copy of Reveille . Let me see the gun or I’m not doing anything.’

‘Nice try, Lennox. I lift the gun and you make a grab for it. I tell you what, I’ll pull the trigger and you watch a bit of your spine and maybe a chunk of liver fly off into the fog. Would that convince you?’

‘That would do the trick, for sure … but on reflection, I think I’ll take your word for it.’

It was more than ten years since the end of the war, but there were still vast quantities of guns circulating, particularly in Glasgow. The hard thrust I felt in the small of my back didn’t feel like a bluff, and my new best friend had the kind of quiet confidence that came from experience, so I decided to play nicely. Or at least play nicely for as long as it looked like I’d be able to walk away from our encounter.

He pulled me backwards and the vague outline of the tram queue was swallowed up again in the fog. We were in a side street now that was little more than an alleyway and he steered me backwards twenty yards or so before swinging me around until I was kissing brick. There were cobbles under our feet: Glasgow-black and slick, but which sounded under my heels. But not his. Like when he had come up behind me, he seemed to move silently.

‘Lay your hands flat against the wall, level with your head.’

I did what I was told, but tried to measure, from the sound of his voice, how far back from me he now stood. If he wanted to shoot me in the back of the head, now would be the time.

‘You told me on the telephone last night that you had information worth paying for,’ I said. ‘I have to tell you I find your sales technique a little pushy.’

‘Keep the wisecracks up, Lennox, and we might just seal the deal here and now.’

‘Pushy but persuasive,’ I said, still trying to measure the distance. I decided this was probably a no-sudden-moves-situation. ‘Okay, friend, what’s this all about?’

‘You’re sticking your nose into this Strachan business. I want to know why.’

‘I’m naturally curious,’ I quipped, and he quipped back by slamming a fist into my kidney. The impact jarred my cheek into the wall and drove every drop of air out of my lungs. I dug my fingers into the wall as I gasped in the tarry, damp fug. He gave me the time to recover.

‘I’ll ask you the same question, Lennox, but if you smart-mouth me again, you’ll end up pissing blood for a month. Got me?’

I nodded, still incapable of speaking and sucking air into tortured lungs.

‘You’re going to drop the whole Strachan thing, you got that? You’re going to walk away from it for good. If you don’t, you’ll end up at the bottom of the Clyde yourself. Now, I want to know why you’ve been asking about Joe Strachan. What’s he to you?’

‘Work,’ I said through tight teeth. ‘That’s all. I was hired to.’

The pain in my side was intense and nauseous. My pulse throbbed hard and sore in my head. This guy knew what he was doing but I knew that if I played along and didn’t do anything stupid, I’d probably walk away from this.