Craig Russell - The Long Glasgow Kiss

There was a wall ’phone on the stairs that we both shared and when I got back to my digs I ’phoned Lorna. I had hoped to satisfy her with a call but she was insistent that I come round.

Doing the gentlemanly thing was getting to be a bad habit and I drove across to Pollokshields. When I arrived at the house, I was surprised to find my Hebridean chum back on guard duty at the front door, ‘chust forr the laydees peace hoff mind’ he sang reassuringly to me.

I sat between Lorna and Maggie, the atmosphere so charged that I expected to be struck by lightning at any time. I comforted. I soothed. I made my talk as small as it was possible to make it, avoiding anything that might remind us all that we were just twenty-four hours on from a brutal murder. Maggie made some tea and offered me a cigarette from a hundred-box on the coffee table. I noticed the brand was Four Square, made by Dobie of Paisley.

‘That’s not what you were smoking the other night,’ I said. ‘The fancy cork tips.’

‘Oh those?’ She shrugged. ‘Jimmy got me them. It’s not my usual brand.’

Reaching into my jacket pocket, I pulled out the stub I’d lifted from Sammy Pollock’s hall stand ashtray. I held it out to Maggie so she could see the twin gold bands around the filter. She frowned.

‘That’s them all right. Where d’you get that?’

‘It’s a case I’m working on. Missing person.’

‘Is the missing person French?’

‘Not that I’m aware. Why do you ask that?’

‘Montpellier, that’s the brand. French. Jimmy got half a dozen packets from someone. Probably smuggled. Maybe that’s why you’ve found someone else smoking them. Maybe someone’s smuggled a lorry load in.’

‘Could be.’ I turned to Lorna. ‘Have the police got any news? Have they said anything about the investigation?’

‘Superintendent McNab has been back,’ she said. Her eyelids looked heavy and settled-in grief had dulled her expression. ‘He asked some more questions.’

‘What kind of questions?’

‘Who Dad had seen over the last few weeks. If anything unusual happened.’

I nodded. Willie Sneddon was right to keep his meeting and dealings with Small Change quiet. ‘And did anything unusual happen recently?’

‘No.’ It was Maggie who answered. ‘Not that either of us knew about. But Jimmy played his cards close to his chest. He kept anything to do with business to himself.’ She paused for a moment. ‘There was only one thing… not worth mentioning…’

‘Go on…’

‘Someone left a box for him. A delivery.’

‘I remember that,’ said Lorna, frowning. ‘It was strange. A wooden box with nothing in it but a couple of sticks and a ball of wool.’

‘Wool?’

‘Yes,’ said Lorna. ‘Red and white wool all bound up together.’

‘Doesn’t sound significant,’ I said. ‘Did the police go through your father’s stuff again? I mean in his office?’

‘No. Why?’

‘I just wondered.’ I shrugged and sipped my tea. ‘Did your dad keep an appointment book at home?’

‘Why are you asking?’ It was Maggie who cut in, more than a hint of suspicion in her voice. The thing about suspicion is that it can be infectious and I found myself wondering why she felt the need to be cautious.

‘Like I said to you before, the police aren’t the most imaginative bunch. Maybe they didn’t think to check for an appointment book at his home.’

‘Jimmy didn’t need one,’ said Maggie. ‘He kept everything up here

…’ She tapped a demi-waved temple. ‘He didn’t need an appointment book.’

‘That’s what I thought… Never mind.’

‘Do you think it would help?’ asked Lorna, without any of her stepmother’s suspicion.

‘Maybe. At least we would know who he had seen on the day he died.’ I decided to drop it. Maybe Maggie’s answer would be enough to get Sneddon off my back.

I stayed for over an hour. Or at least until I felt I had fulfilled my duty as consort to the bereaved daughter. Lorna saw me to the door and kissed me as I was leaving. It was a desperate kind of embrace and her fingers squeezed tight and hard on my arms. It made me feel sad. Sad because she really needed something from me and I really wanted to give it to her. But I couldn’t, because it wasn’t there in me to give.

Lorna and I had been in it for the laughs, nothing more. And that was the way our little diversion should have played. But now, with her father murdered and finding herself alone, she was looking for something that neither of us had signed up for.

She seemed to sense its absence and drew back from me. Something cold had formed in her eyes: a frost of realization and resentment.

‘Listen Lorna…’ I began.

‘Save it, Lennox,’ she said.

When I came out of the mouth of the drive, a car turning in was forced to brake. I waved my thanks but the driver ignored me, heading up the drive as soon as I was clear. He didn’t even look in my direction, but I took a long look at him. The car was moderately fancy, a nearly new, maroon Lanchester Leda or Daimler Conquest, polished to gleam like a sleek droplet of fresh blood. The driver himself looked pretty polished: he was driving hatless so I could see he was around thirty with black hair and a pencil moustache. Neat. Tailored, as far as I could see. I pulled up at the kerb and considered going back up to the house to see what he wanted. He wasn’t a cop. Too well-turned out and expensively carriaged. I got out of the car and walked a little way up the drive, ducking behind a bush to take a surreptitious look. He was at the door and I could now see I was right about his suit. It was expensive. He was tall, maybe a couple of inches on me, which was rare for Glasgow. Maggie opened the door and let him in. She knew him, that was clear and they both unconsciously took a look back down the drive, as if checking no one was watching. Or maybe he had mentioned our brief encounter at the bottom of the drive. They couldn’t spot me behind my euonymus camouflage and disappeared into the house. There had been something about the way they had greeted each other that lay somewhere between the intimate and the professional. Maybe they had some business together.

There was, of course, a limit to how surreptitious they were being: Lorna was still in the house. Unless. I had a less than charitable thought about my recently bereaved sweetheart and dismissed it almost in the same instant it occurred to me. No conspiracy here, Lennox. And even if there is, I told myself, leave it alone. You’ve been warned. And anyway, while there might have been a moral imperative to help bring Small Change’s killer to justice, I had paying cases to work on.

And I was never much one for moral imperatives.

It was getting late but I thought I’d call into the Horsehead Bar for a snifter before heading home. The Horsehead had become my unofficial second office. At one time my main office, but recently I’d been trying to make at least a half-hearted stab at legitimacy and had been spending less time there.

When I arrived, Big Bob the Barman grinned at me. I grinned back. He was a good sort, Big Bob. I’d often wondered if he’d become a barman for the alliterative effect; that if he had been known as Fat Fred he would have become a fireman. Whatever Big Bob had been before his time behind the bar, he was a tough son-of-a-bitch now. So close to the war, there was a bit of an unspoken rule: you recognized other men who’d been through the mincer and you didn’t talk about it. You identified each other as a common breed, but you didn’t talk about it.

‘Well fucking well.’ Bob poured me a Canadian Club. ‘Where have you been? I thought you’d fucked off back to Canada.’