Craig Russell - Dead men and broken hearts

He hadn’t told me the name. But he had told me there was a name. What I was going to do with that information, I didn’t yet know.

It wasn’t the only piece of information I had that I didn’t know what to do with: as I walked through drizzle back to where I’d parked, I thought about the Jowett Javelin I’d seen outside Fiona’s.

I spent two days wearing out shoe leather and working up the telephone bill. The days were spent mostly on the union case, the evenings on Ellis.

Now, I considered myself to be a self-contained, independent kind of character. Maybe not a loner, but someone who tries not to give too much away about himself. I kept a lot of stuff private and a lot of the people I knew didn’t know who else I knew.

Even with that, it’s true that no man is an island. Each of us exists partly through others; the connections we make throughout our lives, good or bad, extending into a far-reaching web. A traceable web to one degree or another. Me included.

Frank Lang appeared to be the exception to John Donne’s rule. If there was a committee or a reading group or a theatre association, then Lang’s name would be on the list of members or contributors. There were lot of threads spun in Lang’s web, right enough, but they just didn’t stretch very far.

The calls I made and the people I visited confirmed the bare bones of Lang’s existence: he had been a member of the merchant marine, working as a ship’s cook; he had enrolled for evening classes through the Workers’ Educational Association; he had been on the membership lists of several societies and committees. The only thing was that no one I spoke to could really remember ever meeting Lang.

Eventually I did manage to trace two merchant seamen who had served with Lang. I showed them the photograph and they both confirmed it was him and yes, they had seen him in the flesh. One of the sailors said that he had heard that Lang had emigrated years ago, Canada or Australia.

And that was it: all I could find on Frank Lang.

Archie had been sniffing around the Ellis case where the opposite of Lang seemed to be true. Andrew Ellis’s history was eminently traceable and transparent. A well-liked and well-respected member of the Glasgow business community, he had a reputation stretching back to the end of the war. No dodgy dealings, no grey areas, no skeletons in the cupboard. His case may have been the opposite of Lang’s, but it was just as baffling.

When Archie came into the office on the Tuesday morning, he balefully confirmed that he’d been unable to dig up anything of note on Ellis.

‘The problem is our hands are tied,’ he explained. ‘I’m just nipping away at the edges here, Chief.’ Archie habitually called me Chief, despite me asking him not to. Probably because I’d asked him not to. ‘I can’t talk to his employees or customers, because that would alert him to the fact that his missus has put a couple of professional snoopers onto him. And he hasn’t answered the call of the wild for the last three nights, so there’s been nowhere or no one to follow him to. If you’ve only got until the end of the week, then I think we’re scuppered.’

‘I think so too,’ I said, infected by Archie’s dolefulness. I ran through where I was with the union thing with him, for no other real reason than to hear myself say it out loud. It didn’t sound any better.

‘What’s in the ledger?’ Archie asked.

‘That is something I am going to have to find out,’ I said. ‘Connelly is being unusually coy about it. My guess is that the missing money has been donated by supporters of the union who would rather keep their names out of the public eye, and the ledger details the payments. It sounds to me like blackmail, but Connelly denies that. Maybe Lang intends to sell it to the newspapers, but it is technically stolen property… What is it, Archie?’ I noticed him purse his thin lips as he held me in his bloodhound stare.

‘A list of union supporters? Joe Connelly and his union have hired us to track down a missing jotter with the names of a few Reds in it?’

‘You don’t think it’s likely?’

‘Well, Chief, that’s relative. Compared to Twinkletoes’s chances of winning Brain of Britain, it’s likely. Compared to there being something in that ledger that is a lot more important or embarrassing, it’s not.’

‘I know what you mean,’ I said. It had been troubling me since my meeting with Connelly and Lynch. Not what had been said, but what hadn’t been said. ‘By the way, are you happy enough to do this week’s run with Twinkletoes?’

‘Delighted. He gives me a warm glow of security. And it’s nice to reminisce. I arrested him for breach of the peace, aggravated assault, resisting arrest and police assault back in Forty-seven, you know.’

‘Really?’

‘Mmm. Old times. It gives us something to chat about.’

I tried to imagine Archie and Twinkletoes chatting, but the effort made my head hurt.

Some people make a big show of their learning. Bookshelves dressed with the ‘right’ novels with unbroken spines, learned spoutings in the tap room, the dropping of the right names in conversation. The Mitchell Library was Glasgow’s very public, very brash statement of erudition. It was big. Very big. The largest public reference library in Europe.

I worked my way through the Commercial Reference Library and came away with details of Ellis’s company, as well as Hall Demolitions, the company he had worked for before setting up his own outfit. While I was there, I also checked out the public records on the Amalgamated Union of Industrial Trades: no mention of Frank Lang anywhere among the names of union officers.

Glasgow’s air is usually too heavy and sluggish for the wind to waste effort on, but that afternoon, as autumn oozed indistinctly into winter, it had decided to make its presence felt. As I came out of the Mitchell Library and stepped into a chill, damp swirl of rain and grime, I tightened my elbow-grip on the leather document case tucked under my arm and with my other hand clamped my protesting Borsalino to my head.

It was at times like these that I reflected on how, at the end of the war, I may have been directionless and feckless, but could not work out why I hadn’t chosen to be directionless and feckless in Paris or Rome or anywhere with a better climate. Which was hardly a restrictive criterion.

I pushed through the wind, the rain and the grim-faced crowds, steering a course back to my office.

Andrew Ellis wasn’t the only one who was skilled at spotting when he was being tailed.

I didn’t feel like going back to my digs and there was a kind of aimlessness about me when I left the office. I was still smarting about what had happened with Fiona White. I’d been all kinds of cad and swine with women, it was true, but I had been straight with Fiona White. It stung hard to be on the receiving end for a change.

I found myself in a fish restaurant in Sauchiehall Street. It was not the kind of place I usually frequented: generally, the range of Glaswegian gustatory delights was determined by whether or not they could be cooked by dropping them into a deep-fat fryer, and I generally tried to be more cosmopolitan in my dining habits. But I did call into this place from time to time on the conceit that it was slightly more sophisticated than the usual fish and chip joint. It was all high ceilings, porcelain and chequerboard floor tiles, and had huge windows that looked out onto the street; the waiters and waitresses wore waistcoats and aprons, your fish and chips were served on china, instead of being wrapped in the previous day’s Scottish Express, and you ate with cutlery, not your fingers.

I was all class.

He didn’t come into the restaurant. Instead he stood directly across the street, hiding from the rain in a bus shelter and smoking. Whoever he was, he wasn’t a pro. A pro doesn’t stand in plain sight of his target, especially when that target has gone into a public building with only one entrance and exit. My meal came with a pot of tea and I ate it leisurely, finishing off with an even more leisurely cigarette. The guy across the street let four buses come and go from the stop without budging.