Liam McIlvanney - The Quaker

They remembered him all right. When his phone rang last week it took less than a second to place the voice. Dazzle from Hopehill Road. Stephen Dalziel. They’d known each other since they were six years old. They lived in the same street, went through St Roch’s together, ran in the Fleet, tanned a few sub-post offices, shared their hundred days of borstal. ‘Hoosey,’ Paton remembered with a smile; that was what you called it; Daein’ hoosey . They got tattooed on the same day at Terry’s: a lion rampant on the shoulder for Dazzle; a wee swallow on the back of each hand for Paton. They hadn’t spoken in ten years but Paton could picture the dark-brown eyes, the yellow shine of Dazzle’s buzzcut, the purple acne scarring round the mouth. A job had come up, Dazzle told him. A job requiring particular skills.

Before the train had properly stopped, Paton had his arm through the pull-down window of the door, wrenching the handle.

He walked out briskly, the holdall tight to his side. The concourse was quiet. He left the station by the Hope Street exit and walked up Waterloo Street. At the junction with Pitt Street he flagged a cab and gave the driver the address of a small hotel on Argyle Street.

The sun was out for once, and the men on Bothwell Street had their jackets slung over their shoulders, hooked on one finger. It didn’t look too shabby, the old place, not when the sun was shining.

The desk clerk at the Parkside Hotel was a fat, pale youth with thinning Brylcreemed hair. Paton paid in advance, letting the clerk glimpse the crisp English banknotes in his wallet. A radio was playing in the back office and a vaguely cabbagey smell was coming from somewhere.

‘Up from London?’ the clerk said. The flesh of his neck bulged over the tightly buttoned collar. Paton wanted to reach over and flip the top button with his finger and thumb, let the pressure off those veins.

Paton nodded.

‘Long journey, sir.’ The clerk pursed his plump lips. ‘You’ll be tired.’

Paton nodded. He scooped his key from the desk and turned to go.

‘Could I arrange for something in the way of relaxation?’

Paton stopped. He bounced the key in his hand a couple of times. ‘What did you have in mind?’

The clerk saw that he’d made a mistake. His eyebrows dropped. A pink sliver of tongue came out and wetted his lips. ‘Something from the bar, perhaps. A wee reviver? Small whisky?’

Paton held the clerk’s wavering gaze. ‘I’ll take a rain check on that.’

His room was on the second floor. A bed, a desk, a spindly chair. A tiny etching on the wall showed the spire of the university through the trees of Kelvingrove Park. He crossed to close the curtains. He opened the wardrobe to the silvery jangle of coat-hangers and hung up his jacket and trousers and shirt and lay on the bed in his Y-fronts and vest. There were still two hours before Dazzle’s driver was due to pick him up. A walk in the park? A swift half in one of the teuchter pubs on Argyle Street? In the end, he dozed on the candlewick bedspread and studied the cornicing.

‘You’ll see changes, all right.’ They were driving through Anderston, heading west. The pillars of the new motorway bridge loomed up in the darkness. The driver had introduced himself as Bobby Stokes.

‘How do you know Dazzle, then, Bobby?’

Stokes frowned. ‘I don’t. Not really. I know him through Cursiter. Cursiter’s the muscle. You’ll meet him.’

They passed the Kelvin Hall on the left-hand side, the Art Gallery looming on the right.

‘So what’s the job?’

Stokes took his time overtaking a bus. Paton thought he hadn’t heard. Eventually Stokes said, ‘Better let Dazzle fill you in on that.’

‘I get it.’ Paton wound down the window to flick his cigarette-end. ‘You’re the driver.’

The driver took him to a tenement block in Scotstoun. Two flights up. Dazzle answered the door and showed them through to the living room where a great bear of a man in a brown leather jacket was squeezed into a chair at a round Formica-topped table. Paton and Stokes joined him. It looked like a card game without any cards.

‘You’ve met Bobby,’ Dazzle said to Paton. ‘This is Brian Cursiter.’

The big man put his hand out as if for an arm-wrestle. Paton shook it. There was a bottle of White Horse on the table and a stack of upturned tumblers. Paton reached for the bottle and filled out a measure of whisky.

Dazzle rose and went through to the kitchen, returning with a four pack of tinnies, McEwan’s Export. He passed them out.

Paton sipped his whisky, set his glass on the table.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Fill me in. What’s the mark?’

‘Glendinnings.’ Dazzle pulled the ring on his beer-can and the contents fizzed over: he clamped his mouth to the opening and slurped.

‘The auctioneer’s? They still on the go?’

‘What, you think the world stops because you’ve fucked off to London?’

The others laughed. Paton sipped his whisky and waited. Dazzle wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and started to explain the job. Glendinnings was an old-school auction house in the city centre. It was also, according to Dazzle, the agent for a forthcoming contents sale. Big house in Perthshire, one of the shooting estates. The owners had died; now the son in London was selling it off, lock, stock and barrel. There were some paintings that had the valuers excited – a Raeburn and an early Peploe – but the good stuff was the jewels. Diamonds, mainly. Pearls. Bit of gold. They had an insider, a girl in the office. Cursiter knew her. (At this point the big bloke tipped two fingers in a mock salute.) The plan was to hit the place a week from now, just after midnight on the night before the sale. The nightwatchman was sixty-something, ex-army, bad hip, walked with a limp. Sometimes the firm gave him a short-term deputy in the run-up to a big sale. The stones would be in the safe in the MD’s office.

‘What about access?’

Dazzle smiled and jerked his head towards Cursiter, who was slouching down in his seat and working his fingers into the ticket pocket of his jeans. In a minute he was holding up a Yale key between his thumb and forefinger. It looked like a pin in his massive hand. He snapped it down on the desk.

‘Basement door,’ he said, grinning. ‘We just walk in at midnight. No fuss. No drama. The night before the auction.’

Paton sipped his whisky.

‘Bath Street, right?’

‘Aye.’

‘So it’s central. Good chance of being spotted. Some busybody clocks a light.’

‘It’s all commercial, though,’ Dazzle said. ‘Round there. There’s nothing residential for five or six blocks.’

‘And the security’s just the two bodies – we’re sure about this?’

They all turned to Cursiter ‘That’s max. Could be just the old fella on his own.’

‘Do we have a plan of the building? Do we know the layout?’

‘Jenny’ll get one.’

Paton nodded. The others said nothing, they were waiting for the verdict. He twisted his whisky glass on the tabletop, turned back to Cursiter. ‘This your girlfriend?’

‘Who?’

‘Your insider. The secretary.’

‘She’s the cashier. No, she’s not my girlfriend.’

‘You’ve fucked her, though, right?’

‘Yeah. I mean, twice. Three times.’

Paton was nodding. ‘So they can link to you from her.’

‘Naw, that’s—’

‘And they can link to us from you.’

‘No! Look. It’s not like that. Nobody knows.’

‘Nobody knows what – that you fucked her?’

‘That’s what I’m saying.’

‘Explain it to me. What’s your name – Brian? Explain it to me, Brian. How did you meet her?’

Cursiter looked at Dazzle; Dazzle nodded. Cursiter planted his elbows on the table. ‘Jenny McIndoe she’s called. Nice lassie. She does the day-job at Glendinnings but works nights in a hotel out near Drymen. Used to have lock-ins. I took her upstairs a couple of times.’