Craig Russell - Dead men and broken hearts

He opened the back door of the Rover for me. He did it very well; he must have watched his batman do it for him countless times before. It was nice to have been given the illusion that I had some choice in the matter and, shrugging, I got in and we drove off. As we did so, we passed my parked Atlantic and I turned to look back at it. A bit of me left in full view in the street.

As I sat in the back of the Rover, squeezed between the heavy shoulders of two pillars of the law, the thought struck me that it might end up being all of me that would be left visible.

I wasn’t surprised when we didn’t head into police headquarters. Instead we drove into the city centre and pulled up outside a four-storey sandstone building in Ingram Street: one of those large, impressive, Art Deco-type edifices you found scattered through Glasgow. Alternating between the huge windows were large embossed copper panels set into the walls and I could imagine it had been some place before the caustic Glasgow climate had grimed the sandstone and turned the panels’ rich copper to verdigris. Now it was just another city block you would walk by without noticing. Which was probably why it had been chosen by my new friends.

My escort had to ring to gain entry into a large, marble-flagged entrance hall of the type that seemed designed to announce your arrival by resonating and magnifying every footstep. After my public-school chum signed us in at a desk manned by two uniformed commissionaires, we echoed all the way to the cage elevator at the far end of the hall. We went up two floors and the corridor we came out into bustled with staff moving from office to office, but there was no indication of the business conducted here, other than a few of the offices seemed to be locked and unlocked by the staff as they came and went. There were no uniforms, police or otherwise.

‘Excuse me for a few moments please, Mr Lennox, Roberts and Lindsay will get you comfortable…’ He nodded to the two Special Branch heavies who eased me along the corridor. As he showed me into a room, one of them actually managed a smile; I appreciated the effort, because he looked seriously out of practice.

I was left alone in the locked room. A huge window looked out over the street and I guessed it was one of the expanses of glass I had noticed from the outside, between the huge wall panels. The room was empty except for a large table with a foolscap notebook sitting on it and four chairs. One of the walls had two vast maps on it: one of the Glasgow metropolitan area and the other of Scotland.

The door was unlocked and a young woman came in, setting a tray with a coffee percolator, two cups and saucers and a plate of Rich Tea biscuits on the table. I smiled; she ignored me and left, the door locking again behind her.

I walked over to the window. As I looked out over the city, the street lamps came on. In November in Scotland, latitude and climate conspired to squeeze afternoon into a mere sliver wedged between morning and night. I watched shoppers and office workers mill around on the street below and tried not to think of the careless freedom they enjoyed while I was locked in a room by a man without a name, in a building without a name.

Ten minutes later he came back in, on his own. Laying a buff file on the table, he asked me to sit and he did the same. He was one of those types who were practically impossible to age, having adopted at twenty a look that would stay with him till sixty. He was unremarkable but pleasant enough looking, and his lightly-oiled blond hair was immaculately combed back from a broad, high forehead and pale blue eyes.

‘I know that your chums are policemen,’ I said, ‘but I’m guessing you’re not.’

‘Then your guess would be right, Mr Lennox. I am a humble civil servant and as such I have no powers of arrest or detention, but our colleagues in Special Branch supply us with the support, should we need it.’

‘Am I detained?’

‘Not at all… You’re free to go whenever you choose, but it would most definitely be in your best interest to cooperate. Let me put it that way.’

I looked around the room. ‘I didn’t know you people had a place in Glasgow,’ I said.

‘We people?’

‘Humble civil servants who may beg favours from Special Branch.’

‘Quite…’ He smiled. I got a better look at the by-the-guinea tailoring: an expensive houndstooth-check sports jacket over a mustard waistcoat, Tattersall shirt and camel-coloured corduroy trousers. The kind of country-wear worn by those whose idea of the country was Kensington Gardens. I noticed his tie: a pattern of alternating diagonal bands, broad black broken by a narrow white edged with a red pinstripe.

‘We have only moved in here temporarily,’ he explained. ‘Needs must basis, you understand.’

‘Your old regiment?’ I asked, nodding towards his tie.

‘Oh… this? Something like that,’ he said airily. I never understood why his type always pretended to be dismissive of their school or military backgrounds, when they wore them around their necks. I had never felt the need to wear either my Rothesay Collegiate School for Boys tie or a regimental badge-emblazoned blazer. Both my old school and regiment probably appreciated my discretion.

‘I was in the First Canadian, myself,’ I said conversationally.

‘Yes, Captain Lennox. I’m fully aware of what is in your service record. And what isn’t.’

‘I see. It’s like that, is it? Why don’t you tell me what this cloak and dagger malarkey is all about? And if we’re going to get all chummy, I should at least know what to call you.’

‘Oh… didn’t I introduce myself?’ He placed his hand on the breast pocket of his jacket, as if that was where he kept his name, like a bus ticket. ‘I’m dreadfully sorry. My name is Hopkins.’

‘Does that come with a prefix… Colonel… Major… Captain…?’

‘As I told you, I’m a civil servant. Civilian. Or at least I am these days.’ He took a silver case from his pocket and offered me a cigarette, which I took.

‘What can I do for you, Mr Hopkins?’

‘These are troubling times. Take this unfortunate situation in Suez, or the current tumult in Hungary. Events in Hungary are coming to a regrettable close. Unfortunately for the Hungarians, Suez has taken everyone’s eye off the ball.’

‘But not your eye, that it?’

‘I’m a Middle Europe, not a Middle East expert. I was never looking anywhere else. The Hungarians, like the Poles, misinterpreted Khrushchev’s so-called secret speech and judged the Soviets would give them their freedom. The Poles played their hand much better and got their man Gomulka back in the premiership. But Gomulka didn’t talk about breaking free of Moscow, Nagy did. This will all end very badly for the Hungarians.’

Hopkins stood up and poured coffee from the percolator into each of the cups. He held up the cream jug and I shook my head.

‘But my interest is in what that can mean for us,’ he continued. ‘Our experts estimate that as many as a quarter of a million Hungarians will flee their native land over the next few months. That’s more than two hundred thousand threats and opportunities.’

He handed me the black coffee.

‘We picked you up because you were following a young lady we have an interest in. Her and her friends. Why were you following her?’

‘I heard she has a good goulash recipe.’

‘I believe you operate as some kind of private detective here in Glasgow, Mr Lennox.’ Hopkins adopted a tone of measured impatience. ‘I am assuming your interest in the young woman was professional? I do hope you don’t mind me asking, it’s just that we’re aware of your significant recreational interest in the fair sex, shall we say.’