Craig Russell - The Long Glasgow Kiss

‘No. Two people in the car, but I didn’t really get a look at them. Just a glimpse of the driver as he passed. I thought they were going to park and go into Mr Kirkcaldy’s house, but the car drove on by. I know it’s daft, like, but I got the idea that they maybes saw me parked and watching the house and decided not to stop.’

‘It’s not daft, Davey. It’s instinct. If Dex Devereaux was here he would tell you that every detective, every FBI man needs it. Did you see what make of car it was?’

‘I don’t know much about cars,’ said Davey melancholically, again as if he had let me down. ‘Makes and that. But that’s why I was asking about the notebook. I wrote down the registration number. It was a big car, but. Fancy, like.’

‘What colour was the car?’

‘Red,’ said Davey. ‘Deep red. A sort of winey colour?’

‘Burgundy?’

‘Sorry, I don’t know… is that winey colour?’

‘Do you know what a Lanchester looks like? Or a Daimler Conquest?’

‘Sorry, Mr Lennox, like I said, I don’t really know anything about cars.’

‘That’s okay, Davey. You’ve done fine. Just fine. I have a hunch about who it might have been in the car. And it is important. Thanks, you’ve been a big help.’

I left Davey, his mood lightened by my praise. I dialled Lorna from a pay ’phone in the hospital. Her tone remained distant and cool, but I tried to sound as chatty and informal as possible, hiding the real reason for my call: a casual question camouflaged in the deep foliage of small talk.

‘No,’ she said in reply. ‘Jack isn’t here at the moment. He doesn’t spend all his time here you know.’

‘Have you any idea where he might be?’

‘I don’t know. At work, probably. He has an office above the boxing gym in Maryhill. Why? What’s the sudden interest in Jack?’

‘Nothing,’ I bluffed. I wondered for a second how many boxing gyms there could be in Maryhill. ‘I just wanted to talk to him about the fight last night.’

I moved the conversation on to how she was and if she wanted me to come up to see her that night. She said she was having an early night: the doctor had given her something to help her sleep. Maybe that explained, I thought, why Lorna had begun to sound so distant. But her coolness was more than pharmaceutical. Maybe I was losing my touch. How women, once exposed to my charms, could then go on to resist them had always dumbfounded me. But, somehow, they seemed to manage just fine.

It’s odd how things just seem to come together: red ribbons tied to a gypsy vardo wagon, an off-the-cuff remark made by Tony the Pole, the colour of a car remembered by Davey Wallace, a reference to a Fusiliers Marins officer in a Greenock court report, a guardedness in Lorna’s answer.

I was spreading myself too thin working two cases at the same time, both of which had grown into something much bigger than it had first appeared. To start with, I had thought that finding Sammy Pollock was going to be a straightforward job and not interfere with my getting to the bottom of the Bobby Kirkcaldy thing. But I should have known that nothing in this life is straightforward. The truth was that I had suspected for a while that there had been some kind of connection between them. There was an oddly coincidental chronology here. Sammy Pollock’s disappearance had been coincidental with two things: the theft of one or more of Alain Barnier’s jade Ky-lan demons and the untimely demise of Small Change MacFarlane.

Willie Sneddon was the kind of man my dad would have described as ‘so crooked they’ll dig his grave with a corkscrew’, and I still had reason to doubt that Sneddon had told me all there was to tell about his involvement with Bobby Kirkcaldy. But I had no reason to doubt the truth of what he had told me. And that included the fact that somebody or something had terrified Small Change MacFarlane immediately before Sneddon had met with him that day.

Now, for me, a coincidence was kind of like Socialism: a nice idea, looks good from a distance, but when you get up good and close you can’t really bring yourself to believe in it. I was pretty convinced that MacFarlane’s murder was connected to at least one of the cases. MacFarlane was a backroom player, a money man with his finger in almost as many pies as Sneddon. But, unlike Sneddon, MacFarlane could get his fingers burned. There was a picture coming together in my head. Like a Picasso it was pretty ugly, jumbled, and didn’t make any sense to me.

My immediate and main problem was how to keep tabs on two pilgrims at the same time: Alain Barnier and Jack Collins. Then I had an idea, but first I needed to speak to Collins.

It was basically two small offices on the upper floor of a two-storey building, the lower floor devoted to a boxing gym. It was an older building that was crumbling a bit around the edges. I passed the door to the gym and climbed the stairs to the offices.

When I walked in I was greeted by a secretary who I guessed hadn’t been hired for her shorthand skills. Her hair was the kind of blonde that comes out of a bottle and her figure was the kind that comes out of a teenager’s wet dream. She parted crimson lips and flashed white teeth at me and showed me into the inner office.

Jack Collins sat behind a desk and a dense screen of blue-grey cigarette haze. When I went in, he had been running a finger down a ledger column and yanking at the crank handle of an adding machine. He was in shirtsleeves, his cuffs kept clear of ink and paper by arm garters positioned above his elbows and just beneath his biceps. Seeing Jack Collins close confirmed my first impression of him: he was smooth, expensively tailored, and groomed to an exceptional degree for a city where panache was defined by beating the coal dust from your flat cap before you took a girl up a darkened alley. He was a lean man, his face long, and his features elegant if a little too fine. His thick black hair was immaculately combed back from a broad, tanned brow, and he sported a pencil moustache that was so neat that he must have trimmed it on the hour.

‘Someone to see you, Jacky,’ said the blonde secretary over my shoulder.

‘Senga,’ he said wearily, looking past me. ‘How many times have I told you to get their names first?’

‘I’m Lennox,’ I said helpfully.

‘I know,’ he replied, looking back to ‘Senga’ and making an impatient gesture of dismissal. ‘It’s okay, you go back to whatever it is you have to do. Close the door behind you.’

‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘I’m training her up at the moment.’

‘I can imagine that would be taxing,’ I said, and sat down opposite him. He stubbed out a cigarette and lit another immediately. ‘Sorry,’ he said, and pushed the packet towards me. ‘Help yourself.’

‘No thanks,’ I said, and took my cigarette case out and lit one of my own. ‘I don’t smoke filters. They’re French, aren’t they?’ I nodded to the ashtray bristling with filter stubs. Each had two bands of gold around them.

‘Yes. Montpelliers. I don’t usually smoke them but I got a job lot from an importer friend of mine. You’re the chap who’s been seeing Lorna, aren’t you?’

‘Your half-sister… yes.’

He stared evenly at me. Cool and unruffled. ‘You know about that?’

‘That you’re Small Change MacFarlane’s son? I’m sorry, but it’s not the big secret you think it is. Half of Glasgow knows.’

‘I see. What can I do for you, Mr Lennox?’ Still relaxed. Collins was either extremely cool or he had been expecting my visit.

‘I’ve been looking into a few things concerning Bobby Kirkcaldy. I thought you might be able to cast some light on them.’

‘Really? Why me?’

‘You know something, Jack… Do you mind if I call you Jack? You know something, Jack, I’m quite a philosophical cove. I reflect on the nature of things. One of the things I’ve been reflecting on is the nature of coincidences.’