Craig Russell - Dead men and broken hearts

‘I think we should keep details of your relevant experience to ourselves,’ I said, cutting him off. He nodded gravely.

I had known Twinkletoes on and off for the last five years and, apart from one painful run-in for which he had apologized profusely, I had not been on the receiving end of his professional abilities. Especially those abilities that had earned him his nickname. ‘Twinkletoes’ derived from his means — his very effective means — of extracting either information or unpaid debts from the recalcitrant on behalf of Willie Sneddon. It was a method that involved bolt cutters and Twinkle’s recitation of This little Piggy…

‘And remember that your gaffer on this job is Archie McClelland,’ I said. ‘And Archie is ex-police. It would not be a good idea for you to share camp-fire stories.’ Twinkle attempted a frown again and I could see he was trying to work out where camp fires fitted into the job. ‘What I mean is don’t talk about the stuff you’ve done for Willie Sneddon. A copper is a copper. Ex or not.’

‘Got you, Mr L.’

I smiled, but somehow did not feel reassured. When Sneddon had switched to using a five-iron for its intended purpose on a golf course, rather than as a weapon, it had left Twinkletoes and Singer, his fellow thug, at something of a loose end. Sneddon kept them around and on the payroll, but more to keep them out of sight than anything, so I had had to clear it with Sneddon first before approaching Twinkletoes about the job. It would only be once a week, after all, and it would leave me free to pursue other work.

Employing a hardened thug with a criminal record as a security guard on a wages run may have been a risk, but anyone in Glasgow who ever sawed off the barrels of a shotgun or pulled a stocking over their heads would know who Twinkletoes was. And that he was connected to Willie Sneddon. My logic was that that would be enough to set toes itching before anyone thought about holding up my wages run.

At least, that was what I kept telling myself as I sent a happy and gainfully employed Twinkletoes McBride on his way.

I read through the information that Connelly and Lynch had given me on their missing comrade. Frank Lang had been a cook and union shop steward, working on cargo ships. He was a member of all the right associations and labour bodies. There wasn’t a lot of background in the information, but enough for me to feel the draught of a red flag being vigorously waved.

The supplied picture of Lang was some kind of official photograph taken for records. From the picture it looked to me like Lang was in his middle thirties, with a long narrow face and a round chin. Even in the black-and-white photograph it was clear that the hair was a very light blond and the eyes were a very pale shade of grey or blue. He wasn’t particularly handsome, or otherwise remarkable-looking, but there was something about his face that looked vaguely aristocratic. For no good reason, I found myself taking out the picture Pamela Ellis had given me of her errant husband and placed it next to Lang’s. They were, of course, totally different in appearance and just about every other way, but it just seemed strange to me that I was involved with two men who, each in his own way, was some kind of outsider. Ellis by dint of his foreign heritage and Lang because… because why? What was it about the picture of this thirty-seven-year-old union official that screamed out at me that he was a misfit. A square peg.

Maybe, I thought, it takes one to know one.

It was just after ten the following day when I parked outside a row of terraced houses in Drumchapel. It was a working-class district, all right, but this particular area was the domain of the new working class. These houses were less than two years old and were part of the Corporation’s initiative to replace the unsanitary conditions of the tenements with brand new, twentieth-century homes. As I stood there, the carbolic odour of The Future reaching through the damp late-autumn air, I wondered if Andrew Ellis’s company had blasted away the past to clear the site on which these new dwellings stood. There were four units to a block and Lang’s had a house on either side. There was no access to the back of the house that I could see without going around one of the ends, which would be less than inconspicuous. Added to which I had noticed the twitching of lace in the window next door and I spotted a woman walking her dog up the street, in my direction. A little impromptu burglary, which I had had in mind, was clearly not going to be an option.

Pausing to light a cigarette killed enough time to allow the woman walking the dog to pass me, but the ugly little pug paused himself to raise a hind leg and take a leak against the wheel arch of the Atlantic. I looked from the dog to his owner, who scowled back at me. She was a squat woman in her late forties with a headscarf-framed face to sink a thousand ships, wearing a coat of a material that could have served equally well for carpeting and whose legs were as thick at the ankles as at the knees.

Miss Scotland walked on, still scowling at the world, and I swung open the metal gate that still gleamed new, walked up the short path and rang the doorbell for appearances’ sake. Stranger things had happened than for a supposedly missing shop steward to answer his own front door. But, in this case, they didn’t. There was a small, fence-edged rectangle of well-kept grass to my right and I stepped onto it to peer through the window.

‘Can I help you?’

I turned to see a woman of about thirty standing at the neighbouring door, leaning against the jamb with her arms crossed. I worked out that she must have been the curtain-twitcher.

‘Oh… I didn’t see you there…’ I smiled at her disarmingly. She was worth smiling at. Dark blonde hair demi-waved and short, not too much make-up for town but too much for housework. Not knock-out but well constructed. She was wearing a pink woollen sweater that did a lot of good clinging and deep pink slacks.

‘Well, I saw you. What are you up to?’

‘I’m looking for Frank Lang,’ I said. ‘I’ve been sent by the union.’

‘You don’t look like a union type to me,’ she said, looking in the direction of the car, then back to me. Her expression was full of suspicion but not fear or unease. She could look after herself.

‘Can you tell me when you last saw Mr Lang?’ I asked. Still smiling.

‘You look more like a salesman,’ she said. ‘Are you a salesman?’

‘No, ma’am,’ I said. My cheeks were beginning to ache. ‘Like I said, I’ve been asked by the union to find Mr Lang. Urgent business. Could you tell me when you last saw him?’

‘What about those other men?’ she asked. ‘Weren’t they from the union?’

‘What other men?’

‘The ones he went away with. Weren’t they union people?’

I stopped smiling. ‘No, I don’t think they could have been. When did this happen?’

She looked me up and down then straightened up from her door jamb lean with a sigh. ‘You better come in, then…’

I sat in the small front room — they had front rooms in Drumchapel and not lounges, like they had in Bearsden — and took in my surroundings.

Everything was new: a patterned three-piece suite that still smelled of the showroom; the same geometric patterns on the linoleum floor reversed on the hearth rug; a sideboard against one wall; a matching kidney-shaped coffee table with a chunky red glass ashtray looking like a splash of lava on the teak veneer, a chrome sunburst wall clock above the mantelpiece. It was as if they had asked for the store window display to be shipped “as is” direct into their brand-new council home.

The thing that most caught my attention was the sixty-quid Bush television set that stood in one corner: one of the new jobs with the big seventeen-inch screens. I knew the price because I had been doing a bit of window shopping myself, playing with the idea that I could maybe get a new and bigger TV for Fiona and the girls for Christmas. I had built up a fair bit of cash over the last few years but had no one to spend it on other than myself. And except for my taste for expensive tailoring, my needs were pretty minimal. The only thing that had held me back from buying a set was my uncertainty about how it would go down with Fiona.