Prized Possessions (40 page)

‘Did he not owe you money?'

McGuire lifted his hand and gave it a little mid-air shake. ‘I took somethin' from him now an' again. God knows why he came to me. It wasn't much at all, though. Twenty, twenty-five. Somethin' like that. I'll write it off.'

‘I would rather you did not,' said Dominic. ‘How much?'

‘Call it thirty, that'll be doin' it.'

When Dominic put his hand into his overcoat pocket McGuire stiffened slightly. He could not help himself. He raised his shoulders from the chairback and wriggled his broad bottom on the padding. He watched the hand emerge and ogled the sheaf of brand-new ten pound notes with relief not greed. He watched Dominic peel three notes from the sheaf, then three more, then five after that, glancing up from the Italian's hands to his face now and then, frowning.

‘What's this?' he said.

Dominic said, ‘I think you have made a mistake.'

‘Nup, no mistake, Dom. This is too much.'

‘Well, better too much than not enough,' Dominic said. ‘It's the way Tommy would have wanted it. It is the least I can do for him now.'

‘Well, you're a generous man. I wouldn't be doin' this for any o' my boys, dead or alive, I can be tellin' you that. I'm certain Tommy's soul will be restin' all the easier for knowin' that his debts have been paid.'

‘I am sure it will,' Dominic said.

He placed the banknotes upon the desk, balancing them on top of the stubby little radio. McGuire did not reach out for them, did not grab. He left them where they were, stood and offered a handshake which Dominic accepted.

‘You're a real gent, Dom,' he said. ‘Peace to poor Tommy then.'

‘Peace to us all.'

‘Is that what you want?' McGuire said.

‘Of course. Isn't that what we all want?'

‘Sure an' it is,' said McGuire. ‘Sure an' you're right as usual.'

There was no sign of either of the runners on the landing or the stairs. Dominic did not hurry. He picked his way carefully, not looking back. He knew that McGuire was above him, leaning against the angle of the stairhead. Just before he reached the street he heard the bookmaker shout, ‘Don't be a stranger now, Dom. Don't be a stranger.'

Dominic gave a little wave of acknowledgement, went out into the grey daylight and walked unhurriedly to the motorcar that was parked at the street's end. He climbed into the passenger seat and the car took off.

Tony, at the wheel, said, ‘Well?'

And Dominic said, ‘Take him out.'

Chapter Eighteen

On the day of the night of the murder of Charles Henry McGuire – a Friday – police throughout the city had been occupied in the exasperating task of escorting a horde of demonstrators from Argyll Street, up into Renfield Street, along Sauchiehall Street, and back again; two or three thousand men marching abreast, shouting slogans and chanting songs of a derogatory character aimed against the forces of law and order.

The forces of law and order, none too chuffed, had been culled from several different divisions to flank the army of the unemployed and smother on the spot any outbreaks of violence that might happen to occur. Behind the demonstrators, like a buffer, came another wedge of the boys in blue and behind them again a rank of beautiful mounted horse any one of which – horse not rider – would have made a grand centrepiece to a family dinner, served with peas, potatoes and a dash of gravy browning. The intention of the marchers was to disrupt traffic, make a whale of a noise and draw as much attention as possible to the fact that there were a hundred and twenty thousand men out there whose wives and children were slowly starving to death on the Westminster dole. The coppers were not unsympathetic to the cause but they, the coppers, had seen just too much of the underside of life to be entirely free of cynicism and knew that no matter how tough things got for the wives and kiddies back home publicans and bookmakers would continue to grow fat on the crumbs that fell from the table not of the rich but the poor.

Sore heads and aching feet did not make for vigilance late that Friday night, particularly as the pubs were packed, the shebeens doing a roaring trade and not a tart between Scotstoun and Saracen Cross was left stranded for long without the attentions of a gentleman friend. The brawling brown wind that blew warmth and a false taste of spring up the valley of the Clyde may have had something to do with it, but the consensus of opinion under the blue lamps was that the buggers were simply making hay before – to mix a metaphor – the roof fell in with a vengeance and the government cracked down again.

What then was one corpse more or less, another stabbing, another victim of the senseless sectarian rage that no right-minded citizen could properly put a name to, that was just part of the unholy game that the Glasgow keelies played one with the other and all for one.

If Charles Henry McGuire had been found hanging on the monument at Gorbals Cross or face down in a pool of blood at Eglinton Toll then a wee bit more fuss might have been made, more attention paid to the nature of the crime and the apprehension of the criminal. But McGuire was not found on his own patch. He was found at half past five o'clock in the morning huddled on waste ground behind the Marine Social Club in Vine Street across the river in the former burgh of Partick. Naturally the constable who found him hadn't a clue who he was. The detectives who were summoned to the scene were no wiser but, given that the corpse had been stripped of all means of identification, surmised that the motive was probably robbery and nothing more sordid or sinister.

What the bookmaker had been doing in Partick on a blustery Friday night in January was a mystery that was never solved. Perhaps he had been taking bets on another bookie's turf or sampling the rare vintages that were offered in the pubs west of the river. Perhaps he had a secret love nest in that part of town, though neither his current girlfriend nor his wife would wear that theory and were all for elevating Chick to sainthood as far as the interrogating officers were concerned.

Nobody could explain how McGuire travelled to Vine Street. No witnesses came forward to place him on a bus or tram, no cabby willing to swear that he had taken him on as a fare. Nobody in the pubs remembered him; which wasn't really surprising since Friday night did tend to induce amnesia in a lot of folk, a condition somehow exacerbated by the appearance of inquisitive police officers, in or out of uniform.

Certainly nobody had noticed the Singer Senior Six that had prowled into the bottom end of Vine Street at approximately five past midnight or had seen the driver and his companion open the upright boot, or what the boot had contained, or what had been done with what the boot had contained. There had been no cry, no groan from what the boot had contained to catch the attention of the citizens of Vine Street, for what the boot had contained had been dead for an hour or more and had bled all over the tarpaulin in which O'Hara and Tony Lombard had wrapped it back over the river in the vicinity of Chandler Street where, in fact, the deed had been done.

Poor old ostentatious Chick: he lay unclaimed on a slab in the Marine Division mortuary for the best part of forty-eight hours during which period the medical examiner concluded that death was due to a series of eleven stab wounds to chest and neck, specifically a penetrative intrusion deep into the plural cavity and a slash that had all but severed the internal carotid artery thereby causing the victim to drown in his own blood. Lacerations to hands and wrists, together with tearing to the sleeves of overcoat, sports jacket and shirt suggested that the victim had endeavoured to defend himself and may even himself have been armed. The point was moot. No weapon connected with the murder was ever traced. The chap was dead and that was that.

Martha, McGuire's wife, reported him missing late Sunday afternoon, identified the corpse mid-morning Monday and tearfully provided enough detail for the CID to decide that this was an opportunist murder and that theft was the only motive; a natural error given that Mr McGuire's wallet, fountain pens and wristlet watch were missing and that he hadn't so much as a brass farthing in his pockets when found.

At the request of officers west of the river, Southside Division made a few enquiries among the Gorbals lads and grilled the amiable John James Flint, Chick's second-in-command. No charges were forthcoming, however, not even in respect of illegal bookmaking, and the case was handed back to where it properly belonged, out of sight and out of mind in dear old distant Partick.

If any of McGuire's boys nurtured funny ideas about who might have done the dastardly deed they prudently kept their mouths shut. ‘Flinty' Flint had let it be known that it would be business as usual in the old homestead and no more nibbling away at the Italians' territory. In fact, Flint was installed in Chick's squeaky swivel chair in the office off the Paisley Road before the first greyhound leaped from its trap on Monday evening. And that was more or less the end of the story – except that on the following Friday Tommy Bonnar and his two little ‘nephews' were buried side by side in the Southern Necropolis, official victims of nothing more dramatic than a tragic accident.

Sober and solemn in dark suits and black alpaca overcoats, most of Tommy's friends and acquaintances attended the committal.

Afterwards they solemnly shook hands with Tommy's father who had taken time off work to be there and to thank them all, especially young Mr Manone, for looking after Tommy down through the years.

It was all rather moving, really, though nobody quite managed to shed a tear; nobody except Alex O'Hara who, for some odd reason, found that without his boyhood rival to browbeat, bully and bait, the world was curiously empty and by no means a better place.

*   *   *

Patsy Walsh knew nothing of this. He had departed from Glasgow Central on the night train to London at ten minutes past eleven o'clock on Friday, January 9th, which, as it happened, was almost exactly the moment when Charles Henry McGuire was breathing his last. Patsy was in Paris, installed in a flea-bag hotel in the Marais, before McGuire was identified and, passport stamped and papers in order, was tramping the streets in search of honest employment at precisely the time Tommy Bonnar's coffin was being lowered into the ground.

The Hallops, on the other hand, knew about everything, and understood practically nothing. They hemmed-and-hawed about turning up at the funeral, were still hemming-and-hawing when the first clod hit the coffin lid, still tucked away in the windy heights of the Sunbeam Garage trying to decipher what it all meant and how it would affect them and deciding, ostrich-like, that if Mr Manone didn't actually see them then Mr Manone might forget that they had ever existed and that the whole thing would blow over once and for all.

Lizzie Conway and her girls had more to occupy them than the rumours that tripped through the Gorbals, though Polly at least harboured a few dark thoughts about the nature of coincidence apropos the murder of the bookmaker and what role, if any, Dominic Manone might have played in it.

Lizzie was still on cloud nine, still dazed by love.

Appearances by Bernard Peabody were no longer confined to Friday nights, nor were the girls shuttled out of the kitchen when Mr Peabody arrived, for he, Bernard, seemed to regard them with something of the same fondness as he regarded their mother. His injured right hand had been stitched and was healing well and, in the interim, he had all but mastered the tricky art of filling out forms with his left and would, when Lizzie pressed him, demonstrate his cleverness by making neat little drawings – a house, a mouse, an apple tree – with his rent-book pencil on the back of the
Evening Citizen
for which he received by way of reward a big bosomy hug from the woman and enthusiastic applause from Rosie and Babs.

Against the grain of the times, there were indications that things were showing signs of improvement for the Conways.

Mr Feldman had arranged an interview for Rosie in a famous Glasgow bookshop, the sort of establishment that lay so far beyond Lizzie's ken that it might have been situated on the moon. Far from putting up an objection, as Mr Feldman had feared she might, Rosie's mother was delighted and gave her whole-hearted approval and support.

Babs too had been elevated, moved out of the CWC counting house into an office on the second floor where, on a brand-new Underwood typewriter, she hammered away at letters rather than invoices.

At first Babs could not imagine why she had been promoted or why Miss Crawford and Mrs Anderson suddenly began to treat her if not as an equal certainly with a measure of respect. She was even permitted to enter Mr MacDermott's office now and then and saw with her own eyes the big new Hobbs safe, identical to the one that reposed at the bottom of the Clyde, and a newly glazed window protected by four stout iron bars through which not even Patsy Walsh could have squeezed himself.

Naturally she reported her promotion to her mother and discussed its implications with Polly and eventually concluded that Dominic Manone was responsible and that he had arranged it not to reward her personally but, rather, to please and impress Polly.

Polly was not so sure.

Polly was in a low state, not depressed, not even bored, just curiously restless and impatient. She had expected more attention from Dominic Manone. She was disappointed that he had not been in touch with her again and could not help but feel that somehow she had been used and had become more embroiled than she might care to admit in Dominic's cloudy affairs.

The fact that she had turned into a thief and had pilfered money that her daddy had stolen from the Manones did not trouble her. The fact that she had lied and engaged in several small, almost random betrayals did not even enter her head. She was caught in an eddy and as she waited for something novel and exciting to happen, something to do with Dominic, she trundled through the days in a state of inexplicable agitation.