Craig Russell - Dead men and broken hearts

Connelly stared at me with not much to read in the way of an expression. It was as if he wore the slightly livid, puffy flesh of his face as a mask to hide what was going on in the mind behind it — a skill probably honed throughout years of industrial confrontation and wage negotiation.

‘I’m not what you would call a political animal,’ I said, as much to fill the silence as anything. ‘Maybe a touch of classical liberal. Not much Marx about me, unless you count Groucho.’

‘There is a revolution going on in this country. A slow, quiet social revolution that has picked up pace since the end of the war,’ continued Connelly. ‘Any revolution, by its very nature, involves displacing the powers-that-be. And the powers-that-be in this nation will do their damnedest to stop that revolution in its tracks. I know what I’m talking about. I’ve seen the lengths the British Establishment will go to crush opposition. I stood alongside Manny Shinwell and Willie Gallacher during the Battle of George Square in Nineteen-Nineteen. I saw with my own eyes British tanks brought out onto the streets of Glasgow to crush legitimate protest.’

‘Before my time, I’m afraid,’ I said. But the truth was I knew all about Red Clydeside and the riots in Glasgow in 1919. The Coalition Government had thought that Glasgow was the kicking-off point for a Bolshevik revolution and had flooded the city with troops, machine-gun posts and tanks. I decided it wouldn’t be helpful to point out to Connelly that, as we sat there and chatted, his communist comrades were in the process of using the same tactics, but much more ruthlessly, in the streets of Budapest. Or that, just a few months before, good socialist soldiers in Poland had gunned down unarmed strikers in Poznan.

‘Well, take my word for it,’ continued Connelly. ‘This union is at the forefront of a social and political revolution. That means we come under the frequent and unwelcome scrutiny of the police and other government agencies. Believe me, they would just love an excuse to come in here and start poking around in our affairs. But we have to be seen to observe the law in its smallest detail, Mr Lennox, and that means eventually we will have to contact the police and report the theft — unless someone finds Lang in the meantime and we can persuade him to return the stolen items. It would save me a lot of embarrassment and Frank Lang a prison term if you could find him. Will you take the job?’

‘Then I need to know what his work for the union entailed. Without that, no deal.’

Lynch looked to Connelly for guidance. The union boss gave a curt nod.

‘Lang is an ex-merchant navy man,’ said Lynch. ‘A member of the seaman’s union and active in a number of areas. I have to admit that he had some kind of shady past, but we didn’t ask too many questions about that.’

‘I see…’ I said, and wondered if I should apply for a fulltime job with the union. ‘What’s he got on you?’

‘What?’ asked Lynch irritably.

‘All of this discretion is one thing,’ I said, ‘but thirty-five-thousand is a lot to be discreet about. So what has he got on you? Is Lang blackmailing the union?’

‘No.’ Connelly sighed impatiently. ‘But if Lang hands the ledger over to the wrong hands, then people are going to suffer. Mr Lennox, will you take this job on?’

‘I don’t know, Mr Connelly. This sounds all very political and, like I say, politics aren’t my thing.’

‘The politics don’t concern you, Lennox,’ said Lynch. ‘This is a simple theft and recovery case, as far as you’re concerned.’

‘I have to tell you that I don’t charge union rates…’

Connelly took an envelope from his drawer and held it out to me. I left it hanging in his hand.

‘There is a hundred and fifty pounds in there. In advance. This also contains all of the information you will need.’

A hundred and fifty pounds. I suddenly became filled with the warm glow of solidarity with the working man. Deciding the weight of the package was causing Connelly discomfort, I reached across the desk and relieved him of it.

I spent the next couple of days getting stuff sorted out. I had taken on two jobs, both of which would need a lot of man hours. And if the Ellis job became a full-blown divorce case, it would involve a lot of paperwork. The problem I had was the Friday bank run. It was a two-man job and Archie always rode shotgun for me. Or at least he sat in the van’s passenger seat with a fifteen-inch police truncheon on his lap. I decided that I would need to take on some extra casual help; someone handy enough with their fists, or a police truncheon, to sit in the van next to Archie and ensure the wages run was completed without incident.

It said a lot about my life up till then that finding someone with those skills would not present much of a problem.

Twinkletoes McBride showed up at my office on the Tuesday morning at eleven a.m. sharp, just as I had asked him to. I told him to take a seat. Twinkletoes was someone you wanted to sit, because when he stood he filled the room and made the furniture look like it belonged in a doll’s house. He certainly had a primeval, backward-evolved sort of presence about him. If Charles Darwin had ever met Twinkle, he probably would have tossed the manuscript of On the Origin of Species into the fire. Twinkle was a big lad — he would have made it to six-foot-six if he hadn’t wanted for a forehead — and he was as bulky as he was tall. Sadly, his physical presence was not, it had to be said, matched by much of an intellectual one. More like an absence.

‘I brung them letters of reference you asked for, Mr Lennox,’ Twinkletoes said in a polite baritone that made the floor vibrate. He handed me two envelopes as he sat down and I half expected to hear the splintering of wood.

‘Thanks, Twinkle,’ I said, and read through them.

‘They okay, Mr Lennox?’ he asked earnestly, frowning as much as his lack of forehead would allow.

‘Twinkle, you know these are for me to show the bank?’

‘Yes, Mr Lennox.’

‘Well, the one from Willie Sneddon is fine, but the other one is no good.’

‘That’s from Mr Frazer, what used to be my manager when I was in the fight game, like. He says I was a good employee with a lot of heart, he says.’

‘I can see that, Twinkle. It’s a glowing reference and it would be fine, if it weren’t for the fact that he’s written it on paper that’s headed HM Prison Barlinnie.’

‘Mr Frazer’s had some bad luck,’ said Twinkletoes dolefully.

‘Yeah… I heard,’ I said, but didn’t mention that the three men he’d had beaten into comas had been a tad unluckier.

‘I think we’ll shelve this one, Twinkle. Like I said, Mr Sneddon’s should be fine.’ Willie Sneddon was still one of the Three Kings, but he’d worked a public relations miracle and become a reasonably respected figure in the world of legitimate Glasgow business, if that wasn’t a contradiction in terms.

‘Now, you do understand that you’re there to make sure nobody robs the van, don’t you?’

‘Oh yes, Mr L. I app-ree-shee-ate that,’ he said with syllabic precision. Twinkletoes might not have been one of Nature’s great thinkers or scholars but he had to be commended on his efforts to improve his mind — and there was immense room for improvement. McBride devoted hours each day to reading. Sometimes as many as two pages in one day. The Reader’s Digest, Boy’s Own and The Hotspur were his favoured tomes from the literary canon. He had once confided in me that he sought to learn a new word every day.

‘This is a great pre-village for me. It being a straight job, and that. I hope them bank people know that I’ll not let any bastard put a finger on their money when I’m looking after it. Nobody’s gonna be better than me at spotting a robbery about to kick off… you know, with me knowing what it’s like from the other — ’