Craig Russell - The Deep Dark Sleep

‘Shit … Mr MacGregor …’ I let go the bank’s Chief Clerk. ‘What are you doing following me?’

‘I … I saw you in the bar. I know why you were there. I just know it.’

‘Em … no, you don’t, Mr MacGregor,’ I said emphatically. ‘I’m not that type of girl.’

‘No, no … I know that, Mr Lennox. I know you were in there watching me. That’s why I came after you. I promise I’ll never go in there again. Ever. It was my first time …’ His fright turned to pleading. ‘Well, my second time, but that’s all, I swear . I promise you I won’t do it again. Listen, I have money. I’ll give it to you. Just don’t tell the bank director. I know he hired you to check up on me … Or the police. Oh, please God no, not the police …’

‘Is that why you came after me?’ I pulled his coat back up over his shoulders.

‘I saw you leaving. I didn’t see you when you were in there, but I guessed that you had seen me. Please don’t tell the bank, Mr Lennox …’

I held my hands up to placate him. ‘Take it easy, Mr MacGregor, I wasn’t in there looking for you. I had no idea that you … And no,’ I said, reading the sudden change in his expression, ‘I wasn’t in there for fun. Let’s get out of this alley before a patrolling copper takes us for a couple.’

He stepped back out onto West Nile Street. ‘Come on, I’ll give you a lift home,’ I said. This was more than just an embarrassing moment: MacGregor worked for an important client and I could do without the complication. But it began to dawn on me that there might be some mileage in having the goods on MacGregor. He told me he lived in Milngavie and we headed out of the city centre and up through Maryhill.

‘So what were you doing in the Royal?’ he asked eventually, clearly still not convinced that he had not been the subject of my surveillance.

‘I was looking for someone,’ I said. ‘A guy called Downey.’

‘Paul?’

I took my eyes off the road and turned to MacGregor. ‘You know him?’

‘I do. Did. Not well. I haven’t seen him in weeks. What do you want him for?’

‘I can’t tell you that, Mr MacGregor. I thought you said that was only your second time in that bar …’

MacGregor reddened. I was going to be able to milk this.

‘Listen, I’m not interested in your private life, but I would greatly appreciate it if you could point me in the right direction. I really need to find Downey.’

‘He used to go to the usual places, the Oak Cafe, The Good Companions, all of those places. But, like I said, I haven’t seen him for weeks. You could try some of the steam rooms though. I think I heard someone say that Paul’s friend works at one of the public baths.’

‘Do you have a name?’

‘I’m afraid not. No, wait … I think his friend was called Frank, but I don’t know which baths he worked at. That’s all I can tell you, Mr Lennox. Sorry.’

‘It’s something to go on. Thanks.’

We were passing through an area of flat, open countryside as we approached Milngavie. Off in the distance — a darker grey silhouette in the lighter grey of the fog — I could see something long and cigar shaped suspended from what looked like a gantry. I had seen it before, and more clearly. It looked like something Michael Rennie should have stepped out of in a science fiction movie and it had always puzzled the hell out of me. I decided to take advantage of having a Milngavie local in the car with me.

‘Oh that? That’s the Bennie Railplane,’ MacGregor said in answer to my question. ‘It’s been there since before the war. There used to be a lot more of the track that it hangs from, but they took it down along with all of the railings and stuff for the war effort.’

‘Railplane?’

‘Yes. It was built in the Twenties or Thirties. It was going to be the transport of the future. It could travel at well over a hundred miles an hour, you know. But no one backed it and it never got more than the test track there.’

I thought about dreams of a future that never happened: the Empire Exhibition of Thirty-eight promising a cleaner, brighter Glasgow full of art deco buildings, with the Bennie Railplane connecting cities at superfast speed. What could have been. Like my wartime dream of me returning to Canada, making a proper life for myself. A lot of things had been killed in the war. Ideals and visions, as well as fifty million people.

I dropped MacGregor outside a bungalow in Milngavie which he admitted, a little embarrassedly, was where he still lived with his parents. He hesitated before getting out of the car.

‘You won’t say anything, will you, Mr Lennox?’

‘What happened tonight stays between us,’ I said.

‘I’m very grateful, Mr Lennox. I owe you for this.’

Oh, I know, I said to the empty car as I drove off. I know.

In the absence of widespread indoor bathrooms, the Victorian Glasgow that exploded in population but not in area was faced with a major public health threat. The great unwashed of Glasgow really had been. The city’s response to this problem was an array of public baths, swimming ponds, pools, Turkish baths and municipal ‘steamies’: communal laundries that were often attached to public bath houses.

In the Glasgow of the 1950s, and in the comparative rarity of the real thing, you could even have a ‘sun-ray’ bath at the Turkish Baths in Govanhill, Whitevale, Pollokshaws, Shettleston and Whiteinch. A sun-ray bath would cost you two bob; a combined Turkish-Russian and sun-ray bath would cost you four shillings and sixpence.

Bathing was segregated, the baths open between nine a.m. and nine p.m., with separate days for each gender at each venue.

Unofficially, there were set times when, if you were of a certain disposition, you could meet like-minded gentlemen in at least two of the bath houses.

I spent two evenings checking out the baths, asking if anyone knew Paul Downey or where I could find him, or if someone called Frank worked there. I was met at different locations with different responses, from the hostile and suspicious — as I had in the queer bars — to the unnervingly welcoming. But nothing took me closer to finding Downey; I could find no one who would admit even to recognizing the name.

Despite the knocks and hardship it had often endured, Glasgow was a proud city. And that pride was often given eloquent expression in the most impressive civic architecture in the most unlikely of locations. Govanhill Public Baths and Turkish Suite in Calder Street was a perfect example: a stately building from the outside, and Edwardian palace of ablution on the inside.

After asking a pool attendant, I was told that Frank was one of his colleagues and he was on lifeguard duty at the moment. The attendant sent me to wait in the gallery of the gents’ swimming pool. I sat on the fire engine-red seats and watched the handful of swimmers in the water. Every splash resounded in the chlorine-fumed air of the white-tiled and deep red-beamed pool hall. You could have held an opera here, and not just because of the acoustics; the decor of this public bath house bordered on the opulent.

‘You wanted to talk to me?’ A large collection of muscles bundled into a white tennis shirt appeared beside me. In contrast to the bulging biceps and beefy shoulders, and despite being predictably square-jawed, the features of the face were fine, almost delicate. His fair hair was bristle-cut at the sides and back but long and thick at the top, and a dense blond lock had a habit of falling across his forehead and slightly over one eye. I had the impression, somehow, of a cross between some idealized Nazi image of Aryan manhood and Veronica Lake.

‘I’m looking for Paul.’ I said it as if I knew him.