Craig Russell - The Long Glasgow Kiss

‘What happened?’ she asked as she let me in, but her concern was grief-dulled and she was content with a dismissive shrug and a mumbled ‘It’s nothing…’

We sat in the living room, alone. Maggie MacFarlane was out. Making arrangements, she had told Lorna. I wondered how many of those arrangements would involve the matinee idol I saw pull up the day before.

Lorna looked tired and her eyes were red-rimmed from crying. I spoke softly and soothingly and did all of the right things that a sensitive suitor should do. After a while, and when the moment seemed to open up and allow it, I asked her about the visitor in the Lanchester-Daimler. She looked at me blankly for a moment.

‘Tall, dark hair… moustache,’ I prompted.

A look of dull enlightenment crossed her expression. ‘Oh yes… Jack. Jack Collins. He was Dad’s partner. And he’s a family friend.’

‘Partner? I didn’t think that your father had a partner.’

‘Oh, no, not in the bookie business. Jack Collins is involved with boxing. He arranges matches. I think he’s like an agent or promoter for some of the fights. He and my father were putting together some fights. They had set up a company together. Jack and my dad were… close. Jack really is like a member of the family.’

‘They weren’t involved in arranging this Kirkcaldy-Schmidtke fight, were they?’

‘No… nothing as big as that. Why are you asking?’

‘Just curious,’ I said. ‘Why was he round here yesterday?’

‘He’s been helping sort out some of the business stuff.’

‘I see. Helping your stepmother?’

Lorna looked at me puzzled. Then it dawned on her. ‘Oh no. Nothing like that. Trust me, I wouldn’t put it past Maggie. I wouldn’t put anything past Maggie. But I don’t think Jack is in the slightest bit interested. Apparently he has a string of glamorous girlfriends.’ She made an attempt at a mischievous smile, but her sadness washed it away as if it had been drawn in sand. ‘Like I said, Jack and Dad were very close. There’s no way Jack would…’

‘What did he want? Last night, I mean?’

‘Just to see if he could help. And he was looking for some papers that Dad had.’

‘Did he find them?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

I had a drink with Lorna and she clung to me again when I was leaving. I fought down the sense of irritation that seemed to well up inside me. Again Lorna was breaking our contract of being mutually undemanding. I was, I thought to myself, a real piece of work.

When I got back to my apartment, I used the ’phone in the hall to call Sheila Gainsborough at the number she had given me for her agent. The same light, effeminate voice answered. I asked to speak to Miss Gainsborough: there was a sigh and a silence, then she came on the line. I went through the progress I had made, which didn’t take long.

‘Have you heard from Sammy at all?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Nothing.’ The transatlantic voice sounded tired and strained. ‘I was hoping…’

‘I’m still looking, Miss Gainsborough. I spoke to the Frenchman, Barnier. He doesn’t seem to know Sammy that well after all.’

‘Doesn’t he?’ She sounded surprised. But only vaguely. ‘Sammy mentioned him a couple of times. I thought they knew each other.’

‘Oh, he does know Sammy. Just not that well.’

We talked for another few minutes: there was little more she could tell me and there was less I could tell her. I promised to keep her fully informed of progress.

After I hung up I felt something dead and leaden in my chest. Every time I thought about Sammy Pollock, the picture darkened a little.

When the war ended, Britain had committed itself to a more equitable society. Maybe that was why, when Beveridge and company were planning the Welfare State and a fair deal for all, Willie Sneddon, Jonny Cohen and Hammer Murphy were coming up with the Three King deal. The whole idea had been to divide up Glasgow equally between them. Fair shares.

The cake may have been cut up equally, but somehow Willie Sneddon had managed to grab most of the icing. Of the Three Kings, Sneddon was by far the richest. No one really knew — but many suspected — how he had managed to amass just quite so much wealth. It was a quandary that had no doubt cost Hammer Murphy more than his fair share of sleepless nights trying to work out. Truth was that, if you knew Willie Sneddon, it wasn’t that much of a mystery. There was something dark, cunning and devious about his nature, even more than you would expect from your average crime lord. Sneddon was a wheeler and dealer. More than just a criminal, he was a criminal entrepreneur, always seeking out that extra angle; always trying to find some new way of squeezing a penny out of a situation.

I knew — although I never discussed it with him — that the bulk of Jonny Cohen’s money did not come from his clubs and other rackets. The main source of Jonny’s income came from large-scale criminal acts: robberies mainly, break-ins, long firm frauds, the odd bit of extortion. With Jonny Cohen — and Hammer Murphy, for that matter — the bulk of their earnings came from big hits which yielded large sums of cash. The big score. Willie Sneddon was in the same line of business, but everyone knew that he had so many other deals and rackets running at the same time that he had a steady, constant cash harvest. Added to all of this there was the other dimension of his activities: Willie Sneddon the businessman. Sneddon had displayed genuine acumen for legitimate business, even if it had been founded on stolen, extorted or counterfeited cash. Like most big league crooks, he had started a number of seemingly legitimate concerns, fronts through which to launder dirty money. Where Sneddon had distinguished himself from the usual robber barons was in the way he had been able to turn these fronts into genuinely successful and legitimate businesses.

But it never took much scratching to expose the brass crook under the gilt veneer. The fact was that wherever there was a shilling to be made, crooked or legit, Sneddon had the nose to sniff it out.

All of this meant that Sneddon, unlike the recently deceased Small Change MacFarlane, had been able to make it across the social Rubicon of the Clyde. And then some. The Sneddon residence, a large mock-baronial mansion on a plot of land so big it could have had its own Lord Lieutenant and council, was in the leafiest and most upmarket end of leafy and upmarket Bearsden. I knew that he counted a High Court judge, a couple of shipyard owners, and several other captains of industry amongst his neighbours. I wondered how the judge felt about sharing a laburnum and privet border with Glasgow’s most successful criminal. But there again, Willie Sneddon had attained the level of wealth and influence within the city where some of the people he had dealings with no doubt thought it bad taste to bring up some of the more dubious origins of that wealth.

And, of course, the odd brown envelope stuffed with cash would have helped. Glasgow was a city where anything could be bought. Even respectability.

I couldn’t put off seeing Sneddon any longer. He would be looking for news and the only news I had for him was that putting me on the Bobby Kirkcaldy case was a waste of time and that Maggie MacFarlane had confirmed that Small Change never kept a secret appointments diary.

It wasn’t raining. There was a more than half-hearted sun behind a milky veil of cloud and the air wasn’t heavy and oppressively humid as it had been. I got up, shaved, and dressed in a pale blue silk shirt with dark burgundy tie and a two-button two-piece: deep blue with a touch of mohair spun through it. It had no weight and hung well and had cost me an arm and a leg. Deep blue socks and burgundy Oxfords. I brushed the shoulders of the suit jacket, donned it, and straightened my tie in the mirror. I put on my new hat, a skinny-brimmed Borsalino, and checked myself in the mirror. Damn, this suit hung well. It seemed such a shame to bag it down with the weight, but I was expecting that I would, sooner or later, run into Costello or a member or two of his robust entourage.