Craig Russell - The Deep Dark Sleep

All in all, Hammer Murphy had always been the King I had done my best to avoid. Much in the same way as I avoided meat pies unless I was sure of their origin: Murphy owned a meat processing plant on the outskirts of Glasgow and the rumour was — well, more than a rumour — that Murphy had put some of his business rivals through the mincer. Literally. It was also widely suggested that Murphy obliged Handsome Jonny Cohen and Willie Sneddon by sub-contracting this function for them.

I mixed with a nice crowd.

I tried not to think too much about Murphy’s meat plant, but when rumours started to circulate that a couple of likely lads who had particularly annoyed Murphy had gone through the mincer, tied up but still alive and conscious, then my appetite for his company diminished as drastically as my appetite for sausages.

You get the idea: Hammer Murphy was the most violent, volatile and vindictive of the Three Kings who ran Glasgow’s criminal underworld, and someone to be avoided if at all possible.

The whole Gentleman Joe Strachan thing had taken on a bad taste for me as soon as Murphy’s name was mentioned. Strachan seemed to have this split personality thing going on: there was this image of Strachan as almost the ‘gentleman crook’: a kind of Glaswegian Raffles, if you can stretch your imagination that far; the other image of him was of a cold, ruthless and often vicious gangster and life-taker.

The presence of Murphy’s name on a list of Strachan’s associates confirmed the latter for me. Now would have been a good time for me to have ducked out; to have taken enough to cover my expenses and tell the twins that Strachan was dead, and so were all of the leads as to who was sending them the cash. After all, I had had the windfall of the Macready case, which had been preposterously lucrative. So instinct screamed at me to drop the Strachan thing; to enjoy the freedom of the city’s streets without having to do a two-step in the fog with a skilled dance partner. Unfortunately my hearing seemed to have deteriorated, and no matter how loud instinct screamed, I didn’t seem to hear it.

So I placed the call I’d been putting off for more than a week. After speaking to a minion, I was put through to Murphy and the voice that came on the other end of the line was thick Glasgow accented and more abrasive than carborundum.

The conversation was brief and pithy, let’s say. I had not realized that ‘fuck off’ could be used as a response to almost every question or statement, or even when you paused to take breath. It was only when I mentioned Gentleman Joe Strachan and that I was looking into the discovery of his remains that Murphy’s curiosity was piqued.

‘Do you know the Black Cat Club?’ he asked.

‘I know it.’

‘Be there in a half an hour. Don’t be fucking late.’

Murphy hung up before I had a chance to check my social diary. I knew the Black Cat Club, all right. I was a regular. A card-holding member. It was the kind of place you needed a membership, or a warrant, to get into.

I had discovered the Black Cat not long after I had arrived in Glasgow. It was upstairs in an unimpressive-looking sandstone block way down in the West End of Sauchiehall Street, past the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and where the address numbers ran into the thousands. Britain was full of clubs with names that were always synonymous with, but generally avoided, the word ‘Pussy’. There would be the usual ill-judged attempt at glamour and sophistication in the decor, and the lounge bar would be filled with corpulent businessmen nervous that the police would raid the place and their names would end up in the papers. And of course, there would be the reason the businessmen didn’t run for their lives or reputations: the hostesses, dressed in sham Hollywood style with impressive cleavages to compensate for their Glasgow accents.

The name of the game was that the hostesses would encourage the businessmen to relax and to ease their nervousness by becoming drunk on over-priced and under-measured cocktails. The funny thing always was that visitors to these clubs seemed to lose their wallets with a frequency that defied statistical laws. Anyone fool enough to suggest theft usually found themselves face-first on the street outside. Most kept quiet and tried to work out the best way to answer their concerned wives at home when they asked, ‘When was the last time you saw your wallet, dear?’

There were probably three or four clubs like that in Glasgow, and I had no doubt that The Black Cat had started out as exactly that kind of place. But there was a funny evolutionary process behind such establishments. The Black Cat probably started its metamorphosis by accidentally hiring a piano player or a combo or a chanteuse who was a cut above the usual knocking-shop standard; my guess is that when word got around, clients started to come to listen to the music rather than test cheap bedsprings with some pneumatic hostess. And when profits went up and police raids and payoffs became fewer, the management booked more and even better jazz acts.

Sure, there were still hostesses, but they confined themselves to serving drinks that, while still expensive, were not extortionate, and any business between hostess and customer would be conducted discreetly and on a freelance basis. I had had the odd dalliance with a couple of the hostesses myself, but those had been strictly non-commercial in nature.

When I arrived at the unassuming green door with a small black cat painted above a peep hole, I was greeted with a brusque nod of recognition from a doorman with yard-wide shoulders. The fact that he nodded at all was an impressive accomplishment, given that, as far as I could see, he had no neck to speak of and his thick, Teddy Boy-quiffed, bullet head seemed to have been fused directly into the mass of his shoulders.

I went upstairs and was enveloped in a blue fug of cigarette smoke. The club was busy, with the usual mix of earnestly non-conformist types with chin beards and roll neck sweaters, trying to live the Beat lifestyle they’d started to read about in art magazines. Except they lived in Glasgow, not San Francisco or Manhattan. There was also a smattering of the usual suspects with the sharp suits and the hard look that told you that, even if you didn’t recognize them as known faces, it was better not to bump into them and spill their drinks. And there were still the businessmen, but of a different type. This version would listen to the music as earnestly as the Beat types, with God knew what going through their heads about who they should have become instead of who they were.

Don’t get me wrong, the decor and general atmosphere was still a Glaswegian painter and decorator’s concept of chic and cosmopolitan, and the environment was only slightly less sham and shoddy than the usual hostess joint, but the music and the dimmed lights lifted the tone way above the expected and gave the place an ambiance that daylight and silence would rob from it.

Martha, one of the hostesses I’d played catch-me-tickle-me with, was working the bar. She was a medium height Gene Tierney type, with dark hair, green eyes and an impressive repertoire; we exchanged a few lines before she told me that Murphy was waiting for me in a private room at the back. She frowned as she told me, in the way everyone frowns at the idea of Hammer Murphy waiting for you. She told me when she finished and asked if I wanted to come out to play, but I told her I couldn’t tonight. Even though I could. It puzzled me that I found myself thinking of Fiona White and I began to seriously worry that if I got any deeper involved with her I might catch a bad case of fidelity.

There was a Savile Row suit stuffed with muscle and latent violence in the back room. I was surprised to see Murphy was on his own — not that Michael ‘Hammer’ Murphy was someone who needed protecting, but he usually kept a couple of psychopathic goons on hand just for show.