Craig Russell - Dead men and broken hearts

‘The police seemed awfully interested in you…’ she said, still eyeing me suspiciously.

‘Oh yes… I understand that. You see, I was able to give them exact times I was here and that helped them establish the sequence of events from your statements. Chief Inspector Ferguson really thought the information you gave was invaluable…’

Suddenly Maisie became uglier, her features contorting. Then I realized she was smiling.

‘Will you be wanting a cup of tea, then?’ she asked dully, as if I’d forced her into the offer.

‘I wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble…’ I said.

It was obvious that she wasn’t about to let me put her to any trouble; she didn’t push her offer of tea and instead sat down in the armchair by the radio.

‘What do you want to know?’ she asked.

‘May I sit down?’ I asked and she nodded sharply. ‘Like I said, I’m trying to locate Frank Lang. I spoke to poor Mrs Dewar before her death and she told me that she hardly ever saw him and had practically nothing to do with him.’

‘Did she now…?’ Maisie wriggled in her seat maliciously.

‘Are you saying that wasn’t the case?’

‘It’s true that he was hardly ever here. I hardly ever saw him and I see everything and everyone, especially when I’m walking Prince.’

‘Prince?’

‘My dog.’

I looked down at the little pug. It looked back at me, all bug eyes and a face wrinkled like a brain, its turned-up bottom lip almost wrapped over its snotty nose.

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘It isn’t right,’ she said scowling, which was beginning to lose its expressive effect. ‘I told the police that. There’s something fishy when someone pays rent for a Corporation flat and they’re never there. Very fishy.’

‘But you’re saying that Mrs Dewar’s statement wasn’t accurate?’

‘Aye… if she said she didn’t have anything to do with Lang, then it’s a lie. And I told the police that too. They wanted to know everything about Lang too.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me, Mrs McCardle. What did you tell them?’

‘That she was a slut and a whore.’ Another malicious wriggle. ‘Interested in anything in trousers.’

‘Including Lang?’

‘Like I said, he was hardly ever there, but she seemed to know when he was going to arrive. She thought she was being so clever, sneaking in through his back door, but I saw her. I heard them.’

‘So you believe that Frank Lang and Sylvia Dewar were carrying on an affair together? Have you told the police that?’

‘Yes.’

I sat and thought it through for a moment. Shuggie Dunlop was all bluff on the Dewar deaths. Good old Maisie, God bless the ugliness that reached from her face deep into her soul, would relish standing in a witness box, smearing Lang’s and Sylvia’s reputations. And, if it hadn’t been Dewar who killed his wife, then that placed Lang in the queue for the execution cell well before me. It was all beginning to form a picture.

‘The day she claimed to have seen him leave with two other men in a big car…?’ I looked through my notebook and gave her the day and date. ‘Did you see him leave?’

‘No. And I would have been in and normally I see everybody. I watch, you see. There are a lot of dodgy characters around,’ she said, her tiny eyes fixed on me for long enough to make her point. ‘I didn’t see anyone around his house ever, except for her. And no car. He hardly ever brought his own car here. I don’t know where he kept it. Maybe a garage, but not one near here.’

‘He had a car?’

‘That’s what I just said.’

‘What kind of car?’

‘It was one of these cars with the wood on them. A shooting-brake or station-wagon or whatever you call them. It was pale green. He only brought it here once or twice.’

‘A Morris Traveller?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything about cars.’

Again I thought it all through. Sylvia Dewar’s previous convictions for dishonesty. The kind of company she probably at one time kept. Her manipulation of her husband. Yes, I was beginning to see it all now, but I needed to confirm it.

‘Do you know this man?’ I said, reaching into my pocket and handing a photograph to her.

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I wouldn’t say if I wasn’t.’

‘And you definitely haven’t seen this man around here, visiting Frank Lang’s house?’

Her scowl deepened, broadened, intensified and her ugliness followed suit. ‘Do I have to keep repeating myself?’

‘No, Mrs McCardle, you don’t. I’m sorry,’ I said. Putting the photograph — the photograph of Frank Lang given to me by Lynch and Connelly — back into my jacket pocket, I took out my notebook.

‘I wonder if you could give me a description of Frank Lang.’ I smiled at her. ‘And from what Chief Inspector Ferguson has told me about you, it will be a good one…’

This was not the time to be juggling two unconnected cases, but that was exactly what I found myself doing. Mainly because my continued liberty, and maybe my neck, depended on my finding a solution to each of them.

After I left the Wicked Witch of the West, I headed back to the barge and changed once more into the outfit of flannel shirt, scratchy tweed jacket and shapeless trousers that Twinkletoes had brought me. I dressed it up a bit with a knitted silk tie; not because my sartorial sensibilities had been stretched to breaking, but because I felt the outfit was just that little bit too blue-collar for me to be seen wearing it while driving a car like Twinkletoes’s sparkling Vauxhall Cresta.

There was a Navy-issue dark blue duffle coat in the same barge closet where I’d found the wellington boots. It was in reasonably good condition and I decided I would wear it over the tweed jacket rather than the cheap, thin raincoat McBride had provided. Duffle coats were a kind of classless attire in Britain, where ex-navy captains were as likely to wear one as an ex-navvy. Again I dressed up the proletarian look with a pair of pigskin gloves that probably cost me three times what the bargee had paid for the coat. If stopped by the police, I might play the part of the eccentric dressed-down ex-naval officer. Pulling on the duffle coat, I wondered bitterly if the ensemble would have done anything to improve my chances with Fiona White.

The other advantage of the coat was, of course, its dark colour: ideal night attire for the professional prowler and loiterer. And, of course, I wasn’t just taking the gloves for their look. I would have a practical need of them too.

It was after seven when I headed back to where I had parked the Cresta, got into it, and started it up without casting guilty looks around me. It was strange to be at liberty — albeit a surreptitious liberty — in the city I had had to flee across just the night before with numb feet and in a prison uniform. But I was still a fugitive, and I knew that couldn’t last.

I stopped at a public telephone and, jamming the door open with my foot to allow the fume of urine odour to escape, I jammed my pennies in, dialled the number of the Paradise Club, jabbed the A button, and asked to speak to Larry Franks.

‘Hi, Mr Franks, this is Mr Bardstown, from Kentucky,’ I said.

‘Oh yes,’ said Franks after a short confused silence. ‘The bourbon drinker.’ He paused for a second. ‘I’m glad you ’phoned, but we’ve been having problems with the telephone recently. Like you mentioned.’

‘That’s what I thought…’ Even this coded contact was dodgy. Coppers were dim, but if there was one listening in on the line, trying to catch out something relating to Jonny Cohen’s involvement with the Arcade robbery, this stilted conversation was clearly fake.