Craig Russell - Dead men and broken hearts

‘Who, where or what is “Tanglewood”?’

It was a simple question and, given the circumstances, an entirely reasonable and necessary one. Neither I nor my soon-to-be-client were filled with dread at my utterance of those six innocent words.

The thing is, though, we should have been.

Nineteen Fifty-six, the year that was winding up, may have been a bad year for the British Empire but had, for me, been a good one business-wise. Not as lucrative as some of its predecessors, admittedly, but for the first time in years the buck I was turning was completely honest. It had been a full thirteen months since I had done any work for any one of the Three Kings, Glasgow Underworld’s answer to Caesar, Pompey and Crassus, and I hadn’t gotten into any real tangles.

The last tangle, however, had ended in a way that could have had me stretching a length of hangman’s hemp. An experience like that increased the appeal of the straight and narrow.

Since then, I had decided to keep a profile that was as legitimate as it was low. Most of the work I now did was gathering evidence for divorce cases, security work, or snooping about for companies or lawyers. Divorce in 1950s Scotland was a protracted, painful and Rhadamanthine process; meaning it offered a great opportunity for turning a profit. I had taken help on full time: Archie McClelland, the ex-City of Glasgow Police beat man, who did most of the court work for me. Courtrooms made me nervous, especially when some smartass lawyer started to call into question my credentials as a witness. Some things don’t bear a great deal of scrutiny. My past was definitely one of them.

The most important thing was that it had been quite a while since I’d found myself wrestling with a thug, looking down a gun barrel or fending off some Teddy Boy armed with a tyre lever, knuckleduster or switchblade. That was one thing I could say about divorce cases: bursting in on unfaithful husbands in flagrante with their secretaries meant that the only weapons you tended to find being waved in your direction pretty rapidly lost their ability to bruise.

‘I don’t know,’ Pamela Ellis said in answer to my question. ‘I don’t even know if Tanglewood is a who, a where, or a what.’

‘But you overheard him say it, so you must have heard it in the context of a sentence, something to give us a clue.’

‘All I heard Andrew say was the word “Tanglewood”. He was on the telephone and I heard him say “Got it. Tanglewood.” Then the person at the other end of the line must have been speaking — for quite a time — and then Andrew just said “okay” and hung up the receiver.’

‘And then he went out?’

‘Then he went out. He left a note on the hall table, by the telephone, saying he had been called out to a customer and he wouldn’t be back until very late, and that he would get something to eat while he was out.’

‘And you were where?’

‘In the lounge,’ she said. They had lounges in Bearsden. Not parlours or living rooms; lounges. ‘I had come back early and he didn’t know I was in the house. He came in through the front door, made the call on the hall telephone, then left again.’

I leaned back in my chair. Pamela Ellis was a woman loitering uncertainly on the threshold of middle age, as if undecided whether she should simply surrender to the thickening of waist and hip and answer the call of tweed and stout shoes. It was clear that she had once been pretty, and was still a handsome woman, but there was a weariness that seemed to hang about her. She had called into my third-floor office in Gordon Street without having first made an appointment. It was the kind of thing that I decided I should discourage by telling my secretary to send away anyone who turned up without an appointment. But I’d have to start by hiring a secretary.

‘And he came back when?’

‘Late. I stayed up for him and he didn’t get back till eleven. He’d been gone for over five hours.’

‘And how was he with you when he got home?’

‘Fine. Well, you wouldn’t expect him to be anything else.’

‘And you were fine with him?’

‘I tried to be as normal as possible… You know, as if I didn’t suspect anything.’

‘We don’t know yet that there is anything to suspect. Did he offer any further explanation for where he had been?’

‘He said it had had something to do with work. Someone needing an estimate. That’s what he’s been saying about all the times he disappears: that it’s to do with work.’

‘You do know, Mrs Ellis, that there is every chance that it is all exactly as innocent as that?’

‘I know. I want to believe that… and it really could be business. It’s just that he’s been so strange lately. Usually, when he gets home from work, he just relaxes. Sits and chats with me. I mean, demolition isn’t the kind of business you do out of office hours. The customers Andrew usually deals with are councils or building firms needing a site cleared. And he has salesmen to deal with most of that side of things anyway. But it’s not just him going out in the evening at short notice that’s worrying me, it’s the way he is when he’s at home, too; the way he’s withdrawn into himself. When he isn’t out, he’s so quiet. Sometimes he just sits for an hour, staring at the fire and saying nothing. It’s just not like him. He has this shed, you see, in the garden. He used to spend hours there, tinkering with stuff. If ever I go into it to borrow something, I always forget to lock the shed behind me. Andrew is always giving me rows about that, but now he’s hardly in there. Just sits moping by the fire. The other thing is that I can’t find any notes.’

‘Notes?’

‘Andrew is incredibly organized. Actually, that’s not true… he’s terribly dis organized and forgetful, so he writes everything down. Makes notes about everything — every meeting, every new client’s name, every appointment time or figure quoted. He uses notebooks mainly, but I’m always finding notes on scraps of paper. You see, that’s the thing

… there’s nothing about these meetings and there’s never been any note referring to “Tanglewood”. I’m telling you, Mr Lennox, the fact that he is making such an effort not to put anything down is suspicious in its own right.’

‘When he goes out, is it always for five or six hours?’

‘Not always. Sometimes he’s only gone an hour. Other times it’s five hours. It never seems to be anything in between. There is one odd thing, though, about the longer disappearances…’

‘Oh?’

‘He takes a pair of heavy boots with him. I mean, he often takes wellington boots with him if he’s visiting a site, but not his heavy boots.’

I nodded, taking it all in. ‘Is there anything that you can think of that might be bothering him?’ I asked. ‘Preying on his mind?’

‘No, nothing that I can think of. He’s annoyed about all of this carry-on in Hungary at the moment. He listens to the news and it seems to make him worse, but there’s something more than that going on in his head.’

‘I think it’s safe to say that annoyance at current affairs doesn’t explain his behaviour being quite so odd,’ I said.

‘No. It doesn’t. Nothing does.’

‘So that’s why you suspect it could be another woman?’ She shrugged. ‘I just don’t know. I can’t think what else it could be.’

‘Listen, Mrs Ellis… far be it from me to try to talk you out of giving me work, but before you do hire me, you’ve got to think about where this may lead you. Let’s say your husband is carrying on an affair with another woman and we manage to prove that… what then? Do you want to divorce your husband if we prove he’s been unfaithful? It’s a messy, unpleasant business.’