Craig Russell - Dead men and broken hearts

‘I was in uniform, not CID,’ he said eventually, blowing a thin jet of blue smoke into the air and picking a shard of tobacco from pursed lips. ‘The City of Glasgow seemed to feel my talents were better employed dodging pish-filled beer bottles at Parkhead football stadium. More Old Firm than Long Firm. But I would have thought you had people in CID you could get the information from.’ Archie said it without looking at me, instead examining the shard of tobacco he now held up in the air between finger and thumb. I didn’t know if he was hinting that he knew all about Taylor, my bent copper, or if he simply meant Jock Ferguson.

‘Come on, Archie, you must know someone,’ I protested. It was a question Jonny Cohen would have been better placed to answer, but asking would be difficult, given the attention he was getting from coppers investigating the Arcades robbery.

‘Give me a minute…’ Archie picked up the receiver and dialled a number he clearly knew by heart. After a few minutes talking and scribbling in a notepad, he hung up.

‘It would appear I am better connected than I thought,’ he said, handing me the note. ‘Three names. The last two have done time for dishonesty offences and they’ve all been linked to long firm frauds. The name at the top… he’s never been done. No record.’

I read the name: Dennis Annan. ‘So how come he’s known?’

‘He’s never been caught, but he’s been questioned about several big frauds. He’s too clever… all of his scams are blind and double-blind stuff and he runs rings around the average flatfoot. Christ knows how you’ll find him though.’

‘But he’s in Glasgow?’

‘Glasgow, Edinburgh… anywhere he can run a scam. My contact says that he thinks Annan is originally from somewhere in the Borders.’

‘The Borders?’

‘Aye…’ Archie raised the two huge beetles of his eyebrows. ‘Not the usual starting point for a career con man. Maybe when he left Galashiels his head was turned by our fancy city ways, like wearing shoes and using cutlery.’

‘And your guy has no idea where I could find Annan?’

‘Not a hope. And half the time he won’t be going by the name of Annan. Your best bet, according to my contact, is to work on the other two lesser mortals. As you can see, I got addresses for them. Annan’s not going to be Frank Lang… from what I gather about him the union would be too small time and labour-intensive, if you’ll pardon the pun. But Annan knows everyone in the business. He’d be the best way to Lang, if you could get him to tell you anything, that is.’

‘And you can’t tell me anything more about him?’

Archie shrugged. ‘No, not really. He was in the merchant marine during the war. Ship’s cook. There was some talk of him training as a chef, but he gave up the petit pois for petty larceny.’

‘Ship’s cook?’ I asked.

‘Aye… why?’

‘That’s what Frank Lang was supposed to have been. For a time, anyway.’ I looked at the names. I still had the sense that I wasn’t getting anywhere, but at least it was a new direction in which not to get anywhere.

The second name on the list was Edward Leggat, or Eddy McCausland, or Ted Cuthbert, depending on which way the wind was blowing and which old ladies he was tricking out of their life savings. The address I had for him, in a tenement block in Raeberry Street turned out to be a dud, and I considered moving on to the third name on Archie’s list, but first I called St Andrew’s Square from a pay telephone. I was told Donald Taylor wasn’t on duty until the backshift and I hung up when asked for my name.

Leaving the Ford Anglia parked outside the hotel, I decided to take the trolleybus. Introduced seven years before and nicknamed ‘the Whispering Death’ by Glaswegians, the near silent, double-decker electric buses had frequently conspired with Glasgow’s dense smog to take a life.

I got off at the Broomielaw, a flank of ornate Victorian buildings that lined the Clyde, housing shipping companies and other dock-related businesses. The place I was looking for was in a totally different type of business, however.

The Pacific Club was a private cocktail bar tucked into the basement of a soot-blackened Broomielaw five-storey. It was one of those members-only joints where you had to sign in, meaning it was exempt from the licensing laws that applied to ordinary bars. Jonny Cohen had told me that he had gotten the idea from ‘business associates’ in Soho, London. I had never been there in the evening, only ever having graced it with my presence when meeting up with Cohen. The truth was that Handsome Jonny was very rarely to be seen in the place, unless by prior arrangement. Given Jonny’s current predicament, I knew he wouldn’t be there.

I was let in by a dinner-jacketed heavy who could have been Twinkletoes long-lost, and who defined exactly why some people called evening wear a ‘monkey suit’. His tailoring certainly wasn’t off-the-peg, given that the jacket’s arms had to be long enough to allow his knuckles to reach the ground.

The Pacific was a drearily South-Seas-cum-nautical-themed place dressed in coconuts, crab-shells, anchors and ships’ life rings. In the corner was a palm-fringed bar with the words ‘HAWAIIAN HULA BAR’ above it.

I had done a lot of bad things in my life and, whenever I visited the Pacific Club, I found myself in fear for my mortal soul: if hell really was waiting for me, I knew this would take the form of an eternity’s membership to the Pacific.

There was a small, dark-haired guy behind the bar. He was jacketless but didn’t have his shirtsleeves rolled up and was lost in calculation of some figures in a ledger. He looked up when he realized I was across the bar from him and his face broke into a broad grin.

‘Lennox… how are you?’

‘I’m fine, Larry, you?’

‘What can I tell you? Business could be better, as Jonny keeps reminding me.’ Larry Franks was a good-looking Jew in his forties. He had an accent that most people in Glasgow would have taken for London but, if you listened closely, you would hear the traces of something much more distant. I liked Franks. Despite his employer’s other business activities and the company he kept, Franks wasn’t really a crook. He ran the Pacific as legitimately as he could, even if he knew the hostesses were running their own enterprises and allowed them the use of the private ‘Luau’ rooms. He seemed to be perpetually cheerful, one of nature’s optimists, which I greatly admired. Mainly because I knew why he kept his shirt sleeves rolled down.

‘Can I get you a drink, Lennox?’ he asked. ‘I’ve still got some of that Bourbon that Jonny got in for special.’

It was too early in the day for me, but the bourbon was something special, all the way from Bardstown, Kentucky. For a rye drinker in Scotland, it was like finding an oasis in the Sahara.

‘I’m sure the sun is over the yardarm somewhere,’ I said and smiled.

He poured me the bourbon and it went down smooth and easy.

‘What can I do for you, Lennox?’ asked Franks.

‘I need to get a message to Jonny and, seeing as things are awkward at the moment, I thought we could use you as…’

‘A messenger boy?’

‘Well, you know what I mean. I hope you don’t mind.’

Franks smiled. ‘Sure… What is it you want me to tell Jonny?’

‘I gave him a picture a week or so ago. A guy I’m trying to find.’

‘Yeah… I’ve seen it,’ said Franks. ‘Jonny’s been doing the rounds personally with it. Not anybody I’ve seen before, but Jonny said he was maybe more a dance hall type.’

‘That’s the one. There’s a slim chance that he’s maybe some kind of con-merchant and I’m trying to talk to other faces in the game to see if they can point me in the right direction. There’s a well-known long firm fixer called Eddy Leggat, and he could maybe help. Actually the feller I’m really after goes by the name of Dennis Annan, but he’s the invisible man, apparently, so Leggat’s a better bet to find. I’ve got another name too, so any pointer I can get on any or all of them would be good, but I’m concentrating on Leggat first. I thought there was a chance that Jonny might know of him or where I might find him.’