Craig Russell - Dead men and broken hearts

‘Yes… Matyas Pasztor. He was a founding member of Petofi Circle

…’

I shrugged.

‘A group of writers and intellectuals who started off the protests against the Rakosi government in Hungary. Pasztor is a poet. He has organized his own emigre group here in Glasgow. The young lady you followed belongs to his group.’

‘He doesn’t sound like a dangerous alien,’ I said.

‘Probably not. But he is helping others escape from Hungary — and it would appear some chaff is getting through with the wheat.’

‘What kind of chaff?’

‘Let’s just say undesirable elements. Undesirable on both sides of the Curtain.’

‘Would one of those elements go by the name of Ferenc Lang?’ I asked.

For a moment, Hopkins looked at me long and hard.

‘I think, Mr Lennox, you had better tell me absolutely everything you know about Ferenc Lang.’

And I did.

Two Frank Langs. There had been two of them all along.

I had lectured Pamela Ellis on how it was always best to apply Occam’s Razor, or the Duck Rule, to every situation, and that the simplest explanation was usually the right one — but I had failed to do the same thing myself. There had been two Frank Langs from the beginning, completely unconnected other than for the fact that the name had cropped up when Taylor had been sniffing about and his Frank Lang had been Hungarian-born like Ellis.

There was, of course, every chance that Hopkins had been playing me. Deception was his stock-in-trade, after all, but there was no reason for him to throw up a smokescreen: I already was as lost as it was possible to be. And the truth was I didn’t care. Sometimes you just had to learn to take a warning and the warning I had been given had done the trick. Hopkins had rattled the right skeletons in the right closets for me to get the message loud and clear. I resolved to drop the whole Ellis thing and go back to looking for my Frank Lang, the Frank Lang whose Lanarkshire origins were less than exotic.

My resolve didn’t prevent me becoming increasingly paranoid over the next three days. It was the right place at the right time for paranoia: the world had dimmed a little more as the Scottish winter days shortened and the weather took a turn for the worse. I spent much of my time looking over my shoulder for shadowy Hungarians, even shadowier government agents, or even the odd ghost from Hamburg lurking somewhere in the gloom. I also grew cagey about whom I spoke to and what I said on the ’phone.

Hopkins had kept me for four hours, with a break for sandwiches and more crap coffee, all the time telling me how free I was to leave whenever I wished. In my time, I’d been put through the mill by all kinds of cops, both civilian and military. No one had ever gotten a word out of me that I didn’t want them to have. Hopkins, I had decided, would be no different. Putting up a stonewall defence, I had been absolutely determined to stop him getting anything from me.

By the time his beefy chums from Special Branch had dropped me back at my car, Hopkins had wheedled every last bit of information he had wanted to get out of me. There wasn’t a bean that I left unspilled. The one thing I had been determined to keep out of his view was my involvement with Connelly and the union and the truth of why I’d been looking for a Frank Lang.

I told him all about that too.

The information you get from people by pulling out their fingernails is never reliable. Any sane person tells their torturer whatever the hell they think he wants to hear, whether it is the truth or not, just so they can hang on to their ability to scratch their backsides. Hopkins was the most skilled interrogator I had ever experienced, and he hadn’t even resorted to being brusque — which caused me to reflect on how different history would have been if the Spanish Inquisition had relied on the use of muffins and sherry.

Every time I had lied or bent the truth to send Hopkins in the wrong direction, it seemed to expose another truth elsewhere. It was like plugging holes in a dyke only to see the water break through somewhere out of reach. And all the time, whenever I had managed to hold something back, he would bring the conversation back to my dubious history and I would tell him the truth to keep him away from my personal demons and secrets.

The only thing he didn’t get out of me was the word Tanglewood. It wasn’t that I made a huge effort to keep it from my scrupulously polite, Savile Row-tailored inquisitor; it was simply that it didn’t come up. That meant it was either of no significance or, if it was, Hopkins did not know about it. Of course, there was always the chance that he was keeping it from me.

By the time we were through, I guessed he knew that he had gotten the truth out of me. It was an odd feeling: both relief and self-disgust. He had somehow managed to make me feel unburdened, as if he had done me a great favour by getting me to betray every professional confidence I had made over the last four weeks.

Afterwards, Hopkins had escorted me himself to the front door of the building where the Rover was waiting for me, and I hoped to hell it was the last I’d ever see or hear from him again. But as he shook my hand, he again alluded to future cooperation that might benefit me and promised he would be in touch. I had smiled and said ‘sure’ and tried to resist the temptation to run for my life.

After my encounter with the forces of official darkness, I made a real effort not to dwell on everything that had happened. I wanted to put it all behind me; far behind me. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t even tell Archie about my encounter with Hopkins. As it turned out, that was a mistake. A big one.

In the meantime, thinking back to the way Andrew Ellis had been so careful to make sure he wasn’t followed, I started taking elaborate routes from A to B that took in the rest of the alphabet on the way. And did a lot of looking over my shoulder. Whatever Ellis, the girl, Matyas or Ferenc Lang were involved in, it was big and, despite my best efforts, I found myself puzzling over what it could be. But every time it came to mind, I made a huge effort to shut it out. I had enough on my plate as it was.

We got another store-pilfering job in and I put Archie onto that, leaving me free to do the rounds again of all the contacts I had for the Frank Lang I’d been hired to find at the start of it all. This time round was proving no better than the first, and I could see that I was heading into another dead end.

In between my enquiries, I made more rounds of dismal boarding-houses, bed-sitting rooms and tenement flats. I even circled an ad for a barge for rent down near Renfrew Ferry.

Of course, there was the other ad I had circled. But that would be a big step to take, and I left it for the moment.

In the meantime, I looked at the barge.

It surprised me. After tenement flats where the running water had been mostly on the walls, I had fully expected the barge for rent to be a rotting, stinking hulk — boyish optimism was a weakness from which I didn’t suffer. The bargee himself showed me around. He was a wiry, youthful man of sixty in a city where sixty was old and usually decrepit. He explained that he had worked the Forth-Clyde canal for more than forty years but had recently injured his back badly and, although he was largely recovered and short of retirement age, he wasn’t fit to operate the barge. He now helped out on his son’s, he told me. It was clear that the old bargee took enormous pride in his boat, and he explained that he was looking to rent it out to anyone who would look after it, whether they worked it or kept it moored.

‘There’s no’ as many contracts as there used to be,’ he confided. ‘’Specially for my kind o’ barge. No coal, you see. I would’nae ever take coal, which is what most o’ the barges take, you see.’ He leaned in conspiratorially. ‘Coal’s a bastard. That coal dust gets everywhere when you’re loadin’ it. You end up caked in the bastard. You and your boat. So I only ever took clean cargo.’