Craig Russell - Dead men and broken hearts

‘Who?’ I repeated. ‘I couldn’t hear you.’ I could feel the handkerchief warm and wet under my hand. I felt damp seep into the fabric of my suit trousers, at the knee, and realized I was kneeling in a pool of Ellis’s blood. Not long.

‘Tanglewood.’

‘Who is Tanglewood? What is Tanglewood?’ I asked. He shook his head. Small, sharp, urgent movements.

‘Tanglewood. You’ve got… to get… to Tanglewood…’ He reached up with his right hand and grabbed the collar of my coat, pulling me close to him. His breath spilled in my face and I could feel there was no warmth in it. His eyes were locked on mine, urgent, pleading, desperate. Then, in a second, like I had seen so many times before, the light went from them.

And it was in that pose, his hand slipping from its grasp on my collar, his face still close to mine, which itself was bruised and bloodied from my encounter on the stairs, and looking for all the world like Ellis and I were in the last stages of a fight to the death, that the coppers burst in through my office door.

I was given the third degree by Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.

The balding, fat Detective Inspector, who did most of the talking, didn’t introduce himself or the skinny, vacant-looking Detective Sergeant next to him who did none of it. Throughout the questions about when I was supposed to have gotten back to my office and found Ellis, and what my supposed connection with him was, and where and when I was supposed to have been when Ellis was being filleted with my knife, I half expected the Detective Sergeant to unfold a handkerchief, tap a hard-boiled egg on the desktop and start peeling it, only to have the fat senior copper slap it out of his hands. I knew I was being too glib, too flippant about the position I was in, but there were too many people to back up my story for them to seriously believe I had murdered Andrew Ellis.

And the duo across the desk really did remind me of Stan and Ollie.

I had already given a full written statement, in detail, but they made me go through everything over and over again. I accounted for my time down to the last minute, including toilet breaks.

It was the usual police procedure. A big lie is easy: saying you didn’t commit a crime you had committed is a granite block of a lie that no amount of chipping away at will break. But get the tiniest detail wrong — change the brand of the cigarettes you say you bought at a certain place at a certain time, or who was standing in front of you in the bus queue — and that tiny crack in your carefully constructed story will bring the whole thing down on you. Coppers were never particularly bright, but you didn’t have to be; all you needed to be was methodical, patient and take notes.

The fat copper may not have introduced himself or his partner, but I knew who he was. Inspector Shuggie Dunlop.

Shuggie was one of those strange Scottish diminutive forms that was actually longer and infinitely uglier than the original name, Hugh. And Shuggie Dunlop was infinitely uglier than his name. A big man in all three dimensions, he was clearly a keen collector of chins and, in keeping with his surname, spare tyres. Jacketless, the roll of blubber that spilled over his belt and strained his cheap white shirt seemed completely to encircle him, like a built-in life-ring.

It had become clear from the outset that I was not being treated as a witness, but a suspect. This time, no one had called me Mr Lennox when I had arrived at St Andrew’s Square, and Dunlop was engaging me in a battle of wits. Which, to be honest, was kind of like being challenged to an arm-wrestling contest by Shirley Temple.

The first thing I had asked when I’d been taken into custody was that I be allowed to get a change of clothes. The fine worsted of my suit trousers had absorbed Ellis’s blood like blotting paper. What hadn’t soaked into the material as a red-black stain had dried and crusted on the surface of the cloth and I doubted if any cleaner could restore the suit to wearable. Which was annoying, because it was one of my bespokes and cost me far more than I should ever have paid for tailoring.

But it wasn’t my sartorial sensibilities that had been my main reason for wanting to get out of the suit: it was a skin I needed to shed to lose the taint of death. Maybe then, the image of Ellis’s face as he stared up at me, letting go of my collar and his life, would stop pushing its way to the front of my mind, jostling with the image of Sylvia Dewar’s broken skull.

Once more, I felt Canada beckoning. But this time it seemed to beckon from much further away.

As it turned out, the police were only too happy to assist me get out of my stained suit. In fact they insisted on it. I was put in a custody cell and ordered to strip down to my underwear and they took everything — coat, jacket, trousers, hat, shirt, tie, shoes — and placed each item in a separate canvas bag, labelled it and took everything away.

They refused my request that I be allowed to pick up fresh stuff from my hotel and instead I was given a neatly folded stack of clothes to change into. It was an interesting get-up: a collarless grey-white shirt and a prison uniform of battledress type jacket and formless trousers. It was scratchy, uncomfortable and smelled as if it could have done with another couple of runs through the laundry. The ensemble was rounded off with a pair of laceless, army-style boots, the leather of which was dull and scuffed.

The prison uniform instantly gave the interrogator an advantage: dressed in that outfit, even I started to believe I might be guilty.

‘You realize you could hang for this Lennox, don’t you?’ Dunlop leaned forward, resting his fat elbows on the wooden desk between us.

‘Really?’ I asked amiably. ‘I would have thought that there was a tiny obstacle in the way of that — and I know it’s a technical point, really — but I didn’t kill Andrew Ellis.’

I was smart-mouthing to push for a reaction, even if it was to come in the form of a fat fist. I was a little disconcerted when I didn’t get one. Dunlop gave a quiet, contemptuous laugh that quivered his fleshy face.

‘Well, I say you did. And it’s not just Andrew Ellis you’ll hang for…’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You’re here for more than the one killing, Lennox. You thought you were going to get away free and — ’

Dunlop was interrupted by the door behind me swinging open. When I turned, I was relieved to see Jock Ferguson framed in the doorway, although the timing of his appearance troubled me. Dunlop had just been about to give away more than he had gotten out of me and the unpleasant suspicion crossed my mind that Ferguson had perhaps been listening to Dunlop’s questioning from a neighbouring room and had judged it was time to intervene.

‘Jock…’ I said. ‘Am I glad to see you.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t say the same, Lennox.’

I didn’t like the look on Ferguson’s face one little bit. He nodded to Laurel and Hardy and they stood up wordlessly and left the room. Taking the chair vacated by Dunlop’s bulk, Ferguson took a packet of cigarettes out, lit one and slid the pack and lighter across the table to me.

The room was lit by a couple of neon strips, suspended by wires and thin, painted chains from the ceiling. The walls were distempered in two tones: dark green to waist-height, then a buttery cream above. It was a bleak, stark room and, somehow, Jock Ferguson, with his ill-fitting, dull grey gabardine suit, his long, pale face and hooded eyes, seemed to fit right in.

He leaned forwards, elbows on the desk, his gaze empty and focused on the desktop.

‘You’re in trouble, Lennox,’ he said when he looked up to face me. ‘You’re in an awful lot of trouble, and I don’t think there’s much I can do to help you.’