Craig Russell - Dead men and broken hearts

Maybe, I thought, I should ask for a lawyer.

‘Where are we off to?’

Ferguson twisted around in his seat. ‘The address you gave us in Ingram Street. It’s past office hours but, if the people you say operate out of that building really are who you say they are, then I wouldn’t think that they keep banker’s hours.’

As we made our way through the city, the fog that had dimmed the sparkle of the streetlights became thick and viscous, on the tipping point to becoming smog. By the time we pulled up in Ingram Street and got out of the car, across the street from the Art Nouveau frontage of the building in which I had met Hopkins, I could only see the street for one block in either direction, and approaching headlights only a block beyond that. I don’t know why, but I took a strange, sad comfort in seeing the smog close in, closing in my perception of the world with it. Sometimes, in the smog, you could imagine that the entire universe, the whole of reality, only extended as far as you could see, and that anything else beyond it, and any time before or after that moment, did not exist. It was a form of solipsism that, given my current situation, I found very comforting.

‘Another bad one,’ Dunlop muttered to Ferguson as we all decanted from the car, with me struggling not to lose an oversized, unlaced boot in the process.

‘Soon be a thing of the past,’ said Ferguson, ‘with this Clean Air Act coming into force. Won’t you miss that back in Canada?’ he asked, turning to me.

‘Me and my lungs both,’ I said, cheered by the thought that Ferguson could see a future for me that did not involve Italian hemp or a twelve-by-eight prison cell.

My cheer did not last long.

The uniformed copper grabbed a fistful of my coat sleeve at the wrist and led me across the road. A short, skinny man in his thirties waited for us outside the building, huddled against the gathering damp. He looked like some kind of mid-range clerk and Ferguson addressed him as Mr Collins, thanking him for coming along outside office hours. Collins had a heavy set of keys and let us in through the main door.

‘Isn’t there a buzzer too?’ I asked. ‘A sort of security system?’

Collins looked me up and down and it was clear he didn’t like what he saw. Despite there being three coppers to protect him, the sight of a dishevelled, unshaven and bruised desperado in a prison uniform clearly shook him. Before answering he looked at Ferguson, who nodded.

‘No,’ he said in a thin, wheedling kind of voice. ‘There is not.’

And there wasn’t. Nor were there any commissionaires on the empty desk, nor any sign of occupancy of the building on any level. I led everyone across marble to the cage elevator and pressed the button for Hopkins’s floor. When we came out there was no bustle of office types, no office furniture, no locked doors to rooms full of secrets.

‘Where did Hopkins question you?’ asked Ferguson. I appreciated his omission of the word supposed.

I led them into the room and put on the lights. No Hopkins. No table, no chairs, no foolscap notebooks, no maps on the walls.

‘Jock…’ I turned to Ferguson.

‘I checked this afternoon, Lennox. This building has been empty for two months. It’s about to be refurbished for a new commercial tenant. And before you ask: no, the new occupants have nothing to do with national security. I don’t have many contacts in that area, but those that I do have say they’ve never heard of anyone called Hopkins operating North of the border.’

‘That doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist,’ I said and failed to keep the pleading out of my tone. ‘The very nature of that type of work means there’ll be lots of outfits and people operating independently of each other.’

‘True… but where I don’t have a lot of contacts in the security and intelligence services, I do have contacts in every police force in Scotland. And I can’t find any officers with the names Roberts or Lindsey in any Special Branch division. I’m sorry Lennox, but I don’t see where we go from here. Without Hopkins to support your story, there’s nothing to prove that this elusive Hungarian emigre group exists.’ He held his arms out and looked around the empty room. ‘No Hopkins.’

I looked around the room too. I had exactly the same sense of unreality I had had outside in the smog: a feeling that the empty building around me was all that was real, and my memory of Hopkins was some kind of illusion. I felt suddenly dizzy and wobbled slightly on my feet.

‘Are you okay, Lennox,’ asked Ferguson. I nodded impatiently.

‘When I was here Hopkins said something about them only using this building on a temporary basis. Maybe they’ve moved on to somewhere else.’

It sounded lame even to me and I could see a sad weariness settle into Ferguson’s expression.

‘If you didn’t believe that I met Hopkins here,’ I said, ‘then what was the point of going through this charade?’

‘Because I wanted to see if you believed it. Come on, Lennox, let’s go.’

I found my focus again and my mind raced as we made our way back down to the ground floor in the cage elevator. None of this made any sense to me, so God alone knew what it must have sounded like to a couple of professional coppers who had heard every hare-brained and half-assed story under the sun.

The elevator bounced to a halt and we stepped out onto the marble of the grand entrance hall.

I turned to Ferguson. ‘I need to get to the bottom of this, Jock. It’s all an elaborate set-up and I need to find out why and who’s behind it. Let me loose.’

Ferguson gave as small laugh. ‘No way, Lennox. If anyone’s going to get to the bottom of this case, it’ll be us.’

‘Listen, Jock…’ I jerked my head in the direction of Dunlop. ‘Your fat friend here has already made up his mind about me, and that means he’s not even going to start looking for an answer anywhere else. If you want answers, real answers, then let me go so that I can ask my own questions in my own way. Only then will we really get to the bottom of all of this.’

Dunlop grunted, which was appropriate for his physique. ‘Do you honestly think that we’re going to let you wander about free as a bird?’

‘If you want some proper answers, then yes. Let me go on police bail or whatever you have to. You can put a tail on me. I’ll give you hourly reports. Whatever you need. But a bunch of coppers flat-footing it all over the place isn’t going to clear this up.’

‘Maybe we think we already have got it cleared up,’ said Dunlop.

‘And that’s exactly what this Hungarian mob want you to think, don’t you see that? I’m not a moron, Dunlop. Do you think that if I had killed Ellis, especially if it was premeditated, I wouldn’t have come up with something a lot less cockamamie than what I’ve told you?’

Dunlop smirked and shook his head.

‘Sorry, Dunlop. That was maybe too difficult for you to take in, the question having a double-negative in it and all.’

The fat detective took a step towards me but Ferguson checked him.

‘You have a point,’ said Ferguson. ‘But there’s absolutely no way we can release you until we’ve carried out more enquiries.’

I sighed, the fight out of me.

‘Let’s get back to the Square,’ said Ferguson. ‘There’s nothing more to be gained by hanging around here.’

Collins, who I now guessed to be some kind of letting or estate agent, let us out of the building, switching off the lights and shutting the door behind us. There was an urgent exchange between the policemen on the pavement, I guessed about the smog that had grown denser while we had been inside. Getting back to St Andrew’s Square was going to be quite an undertaking. Ferguson said something to the uniformed cop, who renewed his tight grip on my coat sleeve.