Craig Russell - Dead men and broken hearts

I was still a hunted man. I had given Ferguson everything he needed to clear up Sylvia Dewar’s death, but no one had seriously been looking at me for that. They were after me for killing Andrew Ellis and — until I could find out what or where Tanglewood was and who Ferenc Lang was — I would remain the number one suspect for Ellis’s murder.

I headed back to the barge and cleaned up. I made up some sandwiches from the stuff McBride had brought me and ate them slowly, thinking through what I was going to do next.

I folded out Ellis’s map again, calculating times and distances. From his home in Bearsden, which was on the right side of the city, to the mark on the map and back, allowing for an hour’s meeting, the timings fitted with those given to me by Pamela Ellis. This was the regular rendezvous, not somewhere in Garnethill. They had changed venue the night I found Ellis with ‘Magda’ simply because of the smog, I guessed. Or maybe he had picked her up at the translation bureau to go on together to some other location. But this place on the map was their principal trysting point. I would have bet all my money on it.

The thought of money made me set to my next task. I took the wax-paper-wrapped bundles of cash in three denominations and gave them a second wrapping in newspaper. I took the brown paper shopping bag McBride had brought the groceries in and cut it up to improvise wrapping paper. Before I wrapped the money up and addressed the package, I wrote a brief note.

Dear Mrs Ellis,

The enclosed money was placed in my trust by your husband to be given to you in the case of his death or disappearance. His primary concern was always that you be catered for should something happen to him. He instructed me to tell you that under no circumstances were you to inform the police or anyone else about this money.

Nothing can make up for the loss of your husband, but the enclosed was his way of ensuring some comfort in the future.

Yours,

A Wellwisher

I folded the note and placed it in the parcel before wrapping it up, writing the address and securing the package with string.

Then, after washing the dishes, I fell into bed. It was going to be a big day tomorrow.

My moustache was coming in well, and again I complemented the tweed and flannel outfit with the navy duffle coat before heading out to a camping store I knew about in the West End of the city. It was the kind of place that catered for the serious canvas-shelterer and I picked up a good quality bivouac, a camping stove and gas canister, a trenching tool, sleeping bag, as well as a kitbag and canteen. From the outdoor clothing section, I picked out the kind of pullover anorak favoured by Sir Edmund Hillary, archaeology field-trip students and secondary modern geography teachers. My biggest expense, more than the tent, was a pair of heavy walking boots.

The salesman insisted I try them on with a pair of heavy socks and walk around the store with the boots on. I appreciated his professionalism: I already knew from my army days that the wrong size of boots could end up crippling you. In the army your boots, after your gun, were your most important piece of kit. What was more, my feet were still painful from my sock-soled flight across Glasgow and needed the best protection I could give them.

Adding three pairs of heavy socks to wear with the boots and an oiled wool turtleneck that would have stood up on its own, I picked out a pair of waterproof trousers and another flat cap, something I would normally not be seen dead in. I really was pushing my luck, making the salesman’s day by buying the whole camping caboodle. In November. And that meant he would remember me.

I fed him some baloney about buying the tent as a Christmas present for my nephew, and I was getting myself kitted out because, although I’d never been camping before, I had promised to take my nephew on a trip to the Trossachs in the spring, as soon as the weather improved. It was all a strain, because I went through the whole process putting on a vaguely Glaswegian accent. Or at least what I thought would sound like a Glasgow accent, but somehow came out more Boston Irish than anything else.

He’d probably remember that too.

When he took me to the cash desk to pay for the gear. I thought I caught the girl at the desk eyeing the bruises on my face, despite me doing my best to present everyone with my unblemished side as much as possible. The salesman was so pleased with my custom that he insisted on helping me out with the stuff, ignoring my repeated assurances that I could manage myself by making a couple of trips to the car. I had deliberately parked the Cresta out of sight of the shop, but my continued insistence on carrying the stuff myself would soon become in itself suspicious.

Piling the clothing into the back seat, I got the salesman to place the tent and the rest of the hardware in the trunk of the car. I’d forgotten that the bolt cutters were in there, but my overly helpful assistant seemed to pay them no heed, pushing them to the back as he carefully organized my purchases in the trunk.

I repeated my act in a grocer’s in Milngavie, on the way out of the city, picking up some extra provisions. It was getting better. The trick, I learned, was not to work at it too hard. So instead of trying to do an impersonation of a Glaswegian, which always turned out bizarre, I used my natural voice but bent the Canadian a little and rolled the r’s more. If there was one thing I could say for the fugitive lifestyle, it was that it exposed talents and abilities you didn’t know you possessed. Music Hall now beckoned along with the laundry business as a possible postprison career.

The grocer’s was one of a small knot of shops in the centre of Milngavie, so I called into the newsagent-cum-tobacconist kiosk in the middle of the small square. The hunch-shouldered kiosk man tucked behind the counter with his paraffin heater was small and mean-looking and eyed me with suspicious loathing. I tried not to read too much into it, because that, I had found, was one of the two standard customer service ethics in Scotland: you were served either with intense hostility or embarrassing servility, with no middle ground between the two extremes. But, again, I thought he had examined the bruising on my face just that little bit too closely. I asked for four packs of cigarettes, two boxes of matches and a local newspaper.

It was all over the front page.

The police, the headline stated, were investigating the murder of Andrew Ellis, who was found dead from stab wounds in a city centre office. Ellis, who was a prominent member of the city’s business community, had left a widow but no issue. Police were now keen to ascertain the whereabouts of…

And there it was. My name. The fact that I was a Canadian national. And a pretty damned good description. The only thing I was grateful for was that there was no mention of my bearing any marks or bruises on my face.

I folded the paper under my arm and paid the newsagent as matter-of-factly as I could. Then, looking behind him, I saw a rack of pipes. As if acting on a whim, I asked him for the most expensive of the pipes and a tin of ready-rub. It would go with my new image of the Scottish outdoorsman, I thought.

Maybe I was being paranoid — or more paranoid, as that had become more or less my permanent state of mind — but I was pretty sure that the little, hostile tobacconist was watching me from his kiosk as I walked back to the car. Fortunately, I had again taken the precaution of parking out of sight.

Heading first west to Dumbarton, then north to Loch Lomond, I pulled up in a lay-by off the road once I was out of town. This was one of the main routes north from Glasgow and there was a fair amount of traffic passing in both directions, so I couldn’t very well step out of the car, peel off my clothes and change. Instead, I struggled in the confines of the Cresta, wriggling into the waterproof trousers over my flannels.