Craig Russell - Dead men and broken hearts

Franks took the stub of pencil from behind his ear and scribbled down the three names I gave him.

‘I’ll ask Jonny.’

‘Larry… do me a favour and wait until you see Jonny face-to-face. The way things are, I wouldn’t want you to discuss it on the ’phone. That’s why I’m going through all of these hoops.’

‘’Course, leave it with me.’

I sipped at my Bardstown and we chatted about nothing in particular. Somehow we got onto current affairs. That November, almost any conversation with anyone anywhere in Britain had a tendency to turn to current affairs. Like everyone else we talked about the mess in Suez, how the Americans had reacted and everything that it was going to mean for Britain. The conversation naturally turned to the other crisis that was rapidly being side-lined: the revolt in Hungary. Or at least I turned it in that direction; Franks didn’t seem to have much to say and I detected, like a subtle shift of wind direction, a faint change in his mood.

‘It’s their problem,’ he said eventually, the smile gone. ‘They brought it on themselves.’

‘What?’ I laughed. ‘Don’t tell me you’re a closet commie. You think they should lie down for the Ruskies?’

‘I was born in Hungary,’ he explained.

‘You’re Hungarian?’ I asked.

‘That’s not what I said. I said I was born in Hungary. I used to think I was Hungarian, but it was made very, very clear to me that I was mistaken.’

‘Ah…’ I said, and looked down into my glass, as if in it I’d find my way out of the corner I’d talked myself into.

Franks rolled up his left sleeve and held his forearm toward me. I had known there was a tattoo there, but had never seen it. The letter B followed by four numbers.

‘They gave me this, just to remind me of my error.’ There was irony but little bitterness in Franks’s tone. ‘June Nineteen-Forty-four. A present for my twenty-first birthday. I’m a B because I came in the second shipment, after they’d already done twenty thousand A s. The Germans started rounding us up as soon as they moved in in March ’Forty-four. But their pals in the Arrow Cross and other Hungarian Nazis had made sure we were all ready for them.’

I realized I was staring too hard at Franks, searching his face for a lost youth. I had always taken him as being somewhere in his forties, a few years older than me. If he had been twenty-one in Nineteen Forty-four, he could only be thirty-three now. Along with a lot else, ten years had been stolen from him in a place I could name but could never understand.

‘Shit, Larry…’

‘Sorry, Lennox.’ Franks’s habitual good-natured grin returned. ‘I didn’t mean to make you feel awkward.’

I shook my head in disbelief that he was apologizing to me.

‘The only reason I’m going on about it,’ he said with a shrug, ‘is that I know the Hungarians are going through a tough time at the moment, but, frankly, I don’t give a shit — just like they didn’t give a shit when I was rounded up along with my family. What people forget is that the Hungarians started to pass anti-Jewish laws long before the Germans even got the idea. My father wasn’t allowed to study at university because of Horthy’s laws restricting Jewish places way back in Nineteen-Twenty.’ He paused and shrugged. ‘Sorry… I get a bit heated when people get all sympathetic about the Magyars. Just because the Germans took over in March Forty-four, and then the Russians in Forty-five, they’re treated as victims.’

As quick as we could, we moved on to more general chat about the weather and how we both wished we were sitting in the Melbourne sun watching lithe-limbed female athletes, and anything else inconsequential we could think to talk about.

I arranged with Franks to call back in the next couple of days and left after a second Bourbon, which warmed me against the chill damp of the day. I took the trolley bus back into town and had lunch in Rosselli’s, keeping my Bourbon glow burning with a couple of glasses of rough Italian wine. I needed it, and not just because of the Glaswegian winter that glowered at me through the restaurant window. There were ghosts there too, the most vivid being the flashbulb image of Sylvia Dewar from the night before, her head caved in, and her husband’s plump baby face swollen and dark as he hung from the bedroom ceiling. And the blue-black numbers on Larry Franks’s forearm kept intruding. I thought that I had long ago been beyond the emotional reach of man’s-inhumanity-to-man-and-all-that-jazz, but maybe I wasn’t as immune to suffering as I had thought. Or maybe the immunity was wearing off.

Finishing my spaghetti and red wine, I skipped coffee and picked up the Anglia at the hotel. I had an appointment to keep.

That itch was still there between my shoulder blades. I was pretty sure I hadn’t been followed and I had avoided using the rental car anywhere I would be expected to be seen. I even took circuitous routes back to the hotel from my office, often taking me far out of my way. My meeting with Hopkins had shaken me, added to which was the odd feeling I had that I was trying to shake off my old life before starting a new one. The fact remained, however, that I still got an uneasy feeling that I was being watched. Stalked.

Jock Ferguson didn’t need to go to such extremes to find me. He called into my office the following morning, just before ten and just after I’d finished talking through the caseload with Archie. I had an old hunting knife that I’d had since I was a kid in Canada, and when Ferguson walked in, I was opening the mail with it.

‘I hope you never walk around with that on your person,’ said Ferguson, nodding to the hunting knife.

‘This? No, Inspector… that would be against the law. It was a gift from my Dad for weekend hunting trips, but I’ve given up the outdoor lifestyle since I moved to Glasgow. I only use it as a letter opener these days. ’

Ferguson and Archie spent a few minutes chatting while I boiled up the electric kettle I kept on top of the filing cabinet. It had been Ferguson who had put me in touch with Archie in the first place and I knew that, somewhere along the line and before Ferguson had begun his ascent of the ranks, the two had served together as beat coppers.

After Archie left I sat drinking black tea with Ferguson and chatting casually; which was a ploy, because Ferguson wasn’t the type of friend, or copper, just to drop in on you while passing. Or chat casually.

‘What happened with my buddy, Sheriff Pete?’ I asked, as much to divert him as anything: I didn’t give a damn about the bad little bastard.

‘He’s locked up nice and tight, for the moment,’ said Ferguson. ‘We’ve got him for a theft from a colliery in Lanarkshire. Smalltime stuff but enough to keep him under lock and key. While we’re on that subject, the night you got into a tussle with him, who was the woman involved?’

‘The girl he was manhandling?’ I asked, confused. ‘I haven’t a clue. I don’t even know if he actually knew her or if they’d just bumped into each other in the ballroom or on the way out. Why?’

‘Oh, nothing. I just wondered if you knew who she was.’

‘I’m aware I have a certain reputation in Glasgow, Jock,’ I said, ‘but, believe it or not, I don’t actually know every beddable woman in the city.’

‘Sure…’ he said and we danced about a little more. It took him five minutes of carefully aimless chat to get to the punchline, which he went out of his way to make sound as casual as possible.

‘We’re just putting the initial report to bed on the Dewar murder-suicide,’ he explained. ‘Tying up any loose ends.’

‘Oh?’ I said with equally forced casualness. I couldn’t think what ends I had left in my statement, loose or otherwise.