Dead Men and Broken Hearts: A Lennox Thriller (Lennox 4) (26 page)

‘And you believe her?

‘I have no reason not to believe her.’

‘She was in my office, Jock. And we spoke on the ’phone. How does she explain that?’

‘Archie confirmed that you had him follow Ellis’s car.’

‘Well then? I told you …’

‘All that proves is you told Archie to keep tabs on Ellis. And that you, for some reason, were following Ellis yourself. Archie would do anything for you, Lennox, except lie. He couldn’t tell me that he had been there when you were supposed to have
met with Pamela Ellis. In fact, he’s never met or even seen Pamela Ellis.’

‘
Supposed
to have met?’ I looked at Ferguson beseechingly. ‘For Christ’s sake, Jock, just tell me straight if you don’t believe me.’

‘This isn’t about what I believe or don’t believe. This is about what can be proved or disproved in court.’ He sighed. ‘And, call me picky, but my belief in you tends to get shaky when you tell me outright lies.’

‘I’m sorry I didn’t front up about having had prior knowledge of the Dewars. It was just that the Dewar thing looked like a straightforward murder-suicide. I thought if I kept it simple all you would need would be a deposition and the inquest and paperwork wouldn’t get in the way of me getting back to Canada. And, if you must know, I felt pretty shitty about the whole thing. Dewar was in a hell of a state that day he jumped me and after that he badgered me to take on his case. The fact remains that I turned my back on a desperate man. And that is the extent of my responsibility for the Dewar deaths. And the extent of my lying. Everything else I’ve told you is true. Can I have another cigarette?’ I stubbed out what was left of the one I’d been smoking. Ferguson pushed the pack and lighter to me and I lit another.

‘Listen,’ I went on, blowing a jet of smoke towards the ceiling strip lights. ‘I’m not saying that I haven’t bent the truth on occasion – but if I were lying to you to cover up that I’d killed either of the Dewars or Andrew Ellis, I’d make it a hell of a lot more convincing and a hell of a lot less elaborate than this crap. Shit, Jock, it even sounds made up to me.’

‘But the fact remains that there is no evidence of you ever having met Pamela Ellis.’

‘Like I said, she was in my office and I ’phoned her. You can check her ’phone records.’

‘That’ll take both a warrant and an age.’

‘But it will at least prove we had a conversation.’

‘Okay. I’ll look into it. Can you give me a date and a rough time?’

My heart sank and the sinking must have shown on my face.

‘What is it?’ asked Ferguson.

‘I ’phoned her from the pub. The Horsehead. I don’t think I ’phoned from the office at all.’

‘A call from a pub doesn’t prove anything.’

‘Yes, Jock,’ I said forcefully, ‘I’m well aware of that.’ Another thought struck me. ‘Wait … she made a call to my digs. She ’phoned to tell me her husband had just gone out. Fiona White took the call before passing it on to me.’

‘Did she tell Mrs White who was calling?’

‘No. But at least it’s proof of contact.’

‘If we can track the call down with the GPO. Even then it doesn’t prove much other than a woman ’phoned you from Andrew Ellis’s home. The fact is his wife flatly denies hiring you and that leaves you following her husband around for reasons of your own. A husband who ends up dead in your office.’

‘She’s lying. This Hungarian group killed her husband and have probably threatened to do the same to her if she talks. You convict me and they’re free and clear. I’ve been set up very professionally and they’re not about to let Pamela Ellis unhitch it all.’

‘Listen, Lennox, this all smacks of you holding back on me. Like you held back on me about your involvement with the Dewars. I have to tell you that we also have witnesses – the
doormen – who say you and Sylvia Dewar left the Locarno at almost the same time. Separately, but within a couple of minutes of each other. The same night you get into a tussle in the street with Sheriff Pete outside the Barrowlands over an unnamed woman.’

‘Jesus, Jock … now you’re really clutching at straws.’

‘The truth is I’ve got a lot to clutch at.’

‘Well,’ I said with as much confidence as I could muster, ‘the one thing you don’t seem to have been able to come up with is the most important thing of all: a motive. Say one or both of the Dewars was murdered by a hand other than Tom Dewar’s own; say the Ellis killing, which is completely unconnected in any way to the Dewar deaths, went down the way you’re suggesting it did, the question remains,
why
? What possible motive would I have for either killing?’

‘On the night before he was murdered, Andrew Ellis’s business premises were broken into. As you know, he was in the demolition business but the target of the raid wasn’t the secure explosives locker. The night watchman was held at gunpoint, tied up and had his public spiritedness pistol-whipped out of him. The one thing he could tell us about the raiders was that they carried the whole job out with military precision. And they communicated by hand signals, not speaking once.’

‘What’s this got to do with me?’

‘The raiders stole fifteen thousand pounds in wages cash from the office safe. Everything this team did was highly professional and showed they had really done their homework. They knew the money would be there that night and the night watchman said they seemed to know their way around perfectly. Almost as if they had had someone on the inside.’

‘Well, don’t you see?’ I said, suddenly energized. ‘All of that
with the hand signals … that’s exactly what you would do if your team had voices that would be remembered, either because they would have to talk in Hungarian or Bela Lugosi English. Maybe Ellis himself was their man on the inside, either because he sympathized with them or because he was coerced. I’m telling you, Jock, you find who carried out that robbery and you’ll find who murdered Ellis.’

‘So, let me get this straight,’ Ferguson spoke slowly and deliberately, as if laying down one thought after the other like paving slabs, ‘Whoever took the cash that night murdered Ellis? That’s what you’re saying?’

‘Exactly!’ I held my hands out then let them fall onto my thighs with a slap.

Ferguson reached into the folder again. This time he laid a package on the table next to where he’d left both my business cards lying. The package had been wrapped in brown parcel paper and tied with string, but the police had obviously opened then loosely re-wrapped it. Ferguson eased back the paper to reveal an inch-and-a-half thick brick of banknotes. Fivers.

I hadn’t known what had been inside it, but I recognized the wrapping paper, the string and the size of the package. With everything that had happened with Ellis and subsequently, I had forgotten the package Magda had passed on to me from Ferenc Lang.

‘We found this in your coat pocket. The serial numbers match the stolen cash.’ Ferguson leaned back and folded his arms. ‘Like I said, Lennox, you’ve been holding back on me and now, most definitely, is not the time to be holding back. So let’s have it. Everything.’

And that was exactly what I gave him.

I talked solidly for an hour or more. I didn’t think about what I was saying or pause to consider how believable or ludicrous it sounded. I just talked. And, just as I had with Hopkins and as I had promised Ferguson, I gave them everything. Including Hopkins.

I could see from their faces, especially Dunlop’s fat one, that the Hopkins story was a big fish for them to swallow, but I gave them the names of the two Special Branch men who had kept Hopkins company. If there’s only one thing a copper will take at face value, it’s another copper’s word. As I spoke, Ferguson wrote the odd note into his notebook and the WPC scribbled everything in shorthand onto her pad.

Like I say, I gave them everything. Almost.

I left one small detail locked up safe and sound. They knew I had moved out of my digs and into the Paragon Hotel, and that would be enough for them. At least for now. I hoped to hell that Ferguson – because it certainly wouldn’t be Dunlop – wouldn’t catch on to the fact that I couldn’t have all of my stuff at the hotel. They had bigger and more pressing issues they wanted to deal with so, for the meantime, I decided to keep quiet about the barge I had rented to stow my stuff. After all, it could come in handy.

‘So you were working on these two cases simultaneously?’ Ferguson asked when I eventually paused to draw breath. ‘The job Connelly and his union took you on to do and the potential infidelity case you say Pamela Ellis hired you for.’

‘That’s right. For a while I thought there was a connection between them: that, by coincidence, the same Frank Lang the union was looking for was the same Frank or Ferenc Lang who is behind this Hungarian émigré group.’

‘And they’re not?’

‘No. I was looking for a coincidence where none existed. And it led me straight into all this crap. Pamela Ellis became very keen to drop me from the case, feeding me this all-a-big misunderstanding and how-could-she-have-been-so-stupid bull. Whatever it was that made her want me to drop the case is the same reason she’s now claiming she never hired me in the first place. I don’t know how or why, but Andrew Ellis was playing cloak-and-dagger games with this Hungarian outfit and they have something – everything – to do with his death. I just stumbled into their little game because of a simple case of mistaken identity – but my guess is that they thought I was investigating them and whatever they’re up to specifically. Dangerous people, Jock.’

‘Well, if the link between the cases and the two Frank Langs is coincidental, then you are the unluckiest man I know when it comes to coincidences. It just so happens that, completely independent of each other, both end up with people dead. Murdered.’

He had a point.

‘Could someone get me a change of clothes from my hotel?’ I asked when it was time to go back to my cell.

‘No can do, Lennox,’ said Ferguson. ‘We’ve already cleared
out your closets and the science boys are examining them for evidence.’

‘I see,’ I said. Ferguson knew my taste for fancy tailoring and would realize they were looking at only a travelling wardrobe, when he got the report back listing the stuff examined.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘can I at least have a pair of laces for these boots? I can hardly keep them on my feet.’

‘No laces.’ Dunlop made his first and only contribution to the interrogation. ‘Suicide risk. We don’t want to find you strung up like Dewar, do we?’

‘No?’ I sneered back at Dunlop. ‘I thought that was exactly the point of this exercise.’

They put me back in my cell and I was given a bread roll with some kind of gelatinous luncheon meat in it and another cup of near-boiling, sugary tea. Practically no one in Glasgow over the age of twenty had a full set of teeth, and I could have sworn I felt a fizzing in my mouth as my dental enamel started to dissolve.

I ran a hand over my jaw and it rasped on the stubble. Unshaven, bruised from my encounter with the two guys on the stairwell, without a comb for my hair and in my fetching prisoner’s ensemble, I must have really looked the part of a guilty and desperate felon. I tried not to think of the stakes I was playing for and did my best not to imagine the kiss of three-quarter inch, white Italian hemp around my neck.

It wouldn’t come to that. It
couldn’t
come to that. They may have had circumstantial evidence, but surely not enough to prove a case beyond reasonable doubt. But, there again, I certainly wouldn’t be the first innocent man to drop through a trapdoor in Barlinnie Prison.

I found myself reflecting on the irony that there had been more than one thing for which I could have hanged. And about how much I hated the idea of dying here, in Glasgow.

It was already dark outside and my cell was bathed in the sickly yellow light of the caged ceiling bulb when Jock Ferguson came to my cell, around four-thirty in the afternoon. He came alone and waited till the custody man’s footsteps had faded before sitting on the edge of my bunk and offering me a cigarette.

‘You don’t really believe all of this crap, do you, Jock?’

‘The truth? No. Everything I know about you tells me that you didn’t kill Ellis. But as a police officer I’m having a really hard time finding anything to put you in the clear. Listen, Lennox, there’s only the two of us here and it’s off the record. Is there anything you’re not telling us? Have you been doing your usual and got into bother because you’ve been shagging other men’s wives?’

‘You’re not really being serious …?’

‘It’s the only possible link and it’s the one that Dunlop is putting forward.’

‘I wondered why he was so quiet in the interview room … he was obviously plum tuckered out from doing all that thinking.’

‘I wouldn’t be so glib about it, if I were you. Dunlop’s theory is the only thing at the moment that makes any sense. More sense than anything you’ve told us so far. You do realize I shouldn’t be giving you any kind of inside dope on this, don’t you?’

I nodded. ‘I appreciate it, Jock.’

‘The way Dunlop has this playing is this: Sylvia Dewar was
well known for enjoying the company of men other than her husband. You have a reputation for chasing any piece of skirt. So Dunlop has it that you and Sylvia Dewar were carrying on together. And he has a witness who places you at the Dewar house a week before the deaths and at a time when Thomas Dewar would be at work and you and Sylvia would be alone. Then Dewar jumps you in Sauchiehall Street Lane, exactly as you said, because he suspects you’ve been sleeping with his wife. Except, in Dunlop’s version, Dewar’s jealous rage is entirely justified and that, I have to say, does sound more credible than him ambushing an innocent man just because he found a business card in his wife’s purse.’

‘Okay … go on …’

‘Dunlop has you painted as this manipulative Don Juan who moves in on Pamela Ellis too. Now, even Shuggie Dunlop admits Pamela Ellis is a little too old and too plain for you to take an interest in her for her own sake. Instead, he has you moving in on her so that she becomes your accomplice in knocking off her husband for his business, money and insurance payout. But you get caught and Mrs Ellis gets scared and denies all knowledge of you. The clever part in Dunlop’s theory is that it explains any telephone or other contact between you and Pamela Ellis as two accomplices planning a murder. In fact, the more difficult it is to find evidence of contact, the more it points to you going out of your way not to be seen talking to each other.’