Craig Russell - The Long Glasgow Kiss

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘You want to know what I think, rather than what I found out. All right… Bobby Kirkcaldy went out of his way, several times, to tell me that I was wasting my time. That it was no big deal. He positively leapt on the notion that this was all just some bollocks to put him off his game before the big fight. And he reassured me that it would do no such thing.’

‘So?’

‘It was like he wanted to brush the whole thing off. Brush me off. How did you find out about this anyway? Did Kirkcaldy tell you?’

‘No, he didn’t. His manager told me.’

‘And Kirkcaldy had complained to him about it?’

‘No, as a matter of fact.’ Sneddon’s face remained impassive. ‘His manager turned up at the house and saw the car covered in red paint. He asked Bobby what was going on and got the same tale you did.’

‘Yeah…’ I offered Sneddon a cigarette. He shook his head impatiently. I took my time lighting mine. ‘Kirkcaldy is very dismissive about the whole thing. I asked him if it could be something personal — a grudge, an old enemy from the past, that kind of thing, and not related to the fight — he made a big show of thinking about it before telling me he couldn’t think of anybody. Now if it were me and someone was leaving dead birds, nooses and crap like that on my doorstep, I think I would already have done a lot of thinking about anyone who might have an old grudge to settle. I don’t think I’d need someone to come along and put the idea to me first.’

‘So you think he knows what this is all about?’

‘I’m not saying that, but let’s face it… Jonny Cohen smells something fishy about the whole thing, so do I. Now you seem to smell a rat. What do you know about Kirkcaldy? I mean apart from his abilities in the ring?’

‘Not as much as I’d like. You seen him fight?’

‘Couple of times, yeah.’

‘I know enough about the fight game to know that being a winner — I mean a real winner — is as much about what you’ve got up here as how hard you can hit.’ Sneddon tapped his temple with his forefinger. ‘And Kirkcaldy has got it all. He boxes clever. But more than that, he’s ambitious.’

‘Well, I thought you would have wanted that in a fighter you’re backing.’

‘Aye… I do. But what worries me is how much ambition he’s got outside the ring.’

‘Listen, Mr Sneddon…’ I leaned forward and rested my elbows on my knees. ‘There’s no point in you being elliptical…’

‘What the fuck does that mean? You been at the Reader’s Digest with Twinkletoes?’

‘It’s clear to me that you have suspicions that you’re not sharing. The other thing is, you could have dealt with all of this with your own men, sitting it out until whoever is doing this shows up to pull another stunt. But you got me involved to see if I smelt the same rat that you and Jonny Cohen clearly have. So why don’t you tell me what it is you really want me to find out?’

Sneddon moved his mouth into the ugly shape he took for a smile. ‘Maybe I like being epileptic…’

‘Elliptical…’ I corrected, and wished I hadn’t. The coarse approximation of a smile dropped from Sneddon’s face. ‘Bobby Kirkcaldy has a shadow with him all the time. An old guy with a mashed-up face. Kirkcaldy calls him Uncle Bert. I’ve checked him out and it turns out he’s an ex-razor gangster called Bert Soutar. Bridgeton Billy Boys back in the Thirties.’

‘I remember the Billy Boys,’ said Sneddon. I had no doubt that he did. The Billy Boys had been a Protestant sectarian gang, organized along military lines. Sneddon had only one weakness in business, one gap in his calculating objectivity. He was a bigot to the bone. ‘But I’ve never heard tell of a Bert Soutar.’

‘He did time.’

Sneddon made a face and shrugged. ‘Cutting up a few Fenians doesn’t make him Al Capone. You think it’s significant?’

‘It suggests Kirkcaldy perhaps isn’t as up-and-up as he seems. Maybe Uncle Bert is connected to dodgy dealings. It could explain the warnings.’

‘Okay,’ said Sneddon. ‘Keep on it and see what you can turn up. I asked you about something else. Small Change’s appointment book. Have you looked for that?’

‘I asked Small Change’s wife… widow… she said he didn’t keep one. She said he did keep everything in his head. The police took some stuff away with them.’

‘They warrant it?’

‘No… no warrant. Maggie MacFarlane gave them the okay. By the way, she’s already had a gentleman caller. Jack Collins. You know him?’

‘Oh aye… I know Collins. Small Change had him as a partner in one of the bookie shops. And small-time fight arranging.’

‘Is there any reason that I should be looking at Collins for anything?’

Sneddon laughed in a way that suggested he was out of practice. ‘You could say that. Why don’t you look at Collins for a family resemblance… MacFarlane used to do business with Collins senior. He was a greyhound breeder and racer. A successful one. Truth was Small Change was supposed to have been doing more business with Collins’s mother, if you know what I mean.’

‘Small Change is Jack Collins’s father?’

‘Aye. And he knows it. Rab Collins died of a heart attack twenty-odd year ago. Since then Small Change paid for Jack to go to a fancy school, all that crap.’

‘I see.’ I made the kind of face you make when you’ve tried every combination but you still can’t get the safe open. There was a silence and Sneddon studied me for a moment. I hadn’t realized until then that scrutiny can be aggressive. Something was going through his head. Something was always going through his head, but this was tying up his attention and his expression.

‘Okay,’ he said eventually. ‘Here’s the thing… I told you I met with Small Change earlier that day.’

‘The day he was killed?’

‘Yes. Well, you know the way Small Change wasn’t totally legit, but he was more legit than not. Kinda the way you are. Well, like you, Small Change would do the odd deal with me, or Cohen or Murphy. He never did nothing that would get him lifted by the police. Nothing that he could be tied in directly, like. He was as slippery as snail shit in the rain. He liked to be the middle man. The one who arranges everything, and then he’d get an arranger’s fee or a percentage of what came out of it.’

‘And he was fixing you up with something to do with the fight game. That’s what you told me.’

Sneddon made a face. ‘I know. And to start with I thought it was. We were supposed to be meeting to talk about Bobby Kirkcaldy.’

I raised my eyebrows. It was all coming together. But what was coming together still wasn’t clear. ‘I thought you said that Small Change had nothing to do with Kirkcaldy. He wasn’t in that league.’

‘Aye. Aye… right enough. That’s what I thought. But he wanted to talk to me about some deal he wanted to broker. He said Bobby Kirkcaldy was involved. Not as a fighter. As an investor.’

‘So, you went to see Small Change. What did he say the deal was?’

‘That’s the thing. I went up to Small Change’s place… just as arranged. Got Singer to drive me and wait outside in the car. But when I got there Small Change was shiteing himself. He was white as a fucking sheet. He tried to cover it up but when he poured me a drink his hands were shaking like fuck. Then he comes out with all of this shite about being sorry to have cost me a wasted journey, but the deal he wanted to set up had gone south.’

‘Did he tell you what the deal had been?’

‘No. Or at least he spun me some shite about Kirkcaldy setting up a boxing academy in the city but that the finance on his side had fallen through.’

‘And you don’t believe that? Sounds possible.’