The Long Glasgow Kiss (12 page)

‘I think you could do with another cognac, no?’

‘I could do with another cognac, yes,’ I said.

We went back and sat at the same booth. ‘What did you say to get rid of the cops?’ I asked.

‘I told them that you were my cousin from Quebec and that you couldn’t speak a word of English. I told them that the two guys outside had tried to rob you and that I and the manager in here had seen the whole thing. I gave them a phoney description of the car and sent them on their way.’

‘They didn’t want to speak to me?’

‘I told them you spoke only French and that you were going home in a couple of days and that you did not want the complication of pressing charges or having to delay travelling.’

‘And they were satisfied with that?’

‘This is the police we are discussing, my friend. Dealing with a foreign national who is about to head off home is complicated. And if there is one thing I have learned about policemen the world over, it is that they do not like complications. Now, why not tell me what that was really all about. Has it some connection to young Mr Pollock’s disappearance?’

‘Yes. Or at least in a way. Sammy Pollock was hanging around with Paul Costello. He’s the son of Jimmy Costello. Have you heard of Jimmy Costello?’

Barnier gave another Gallic shrug and shook his head.

‘Costello is a crook and a thug. Small-time stuff, but he has a small gang. Our two dancing partners would be paid-up members. Costello also has a waster of a son. It takes something to be such a wash-out that you’re a disappointment to the underworld, but that’s what young Paul is. Anyway, he was hanging around with Sammy Pollock before he went missing. He also had a key for Sammy’s apartment. I took it from him and we had a frank exchange of views. So frank that I think I may have cracked the odd bone.’

‘And Papa Costello is not pleased?’

‘It would appear not. But, to be honest, I don’t think he gives a shit. That outside was him going through the motions. He maybe doesn’t really care about me giving his son a slap, but he has to be seen to take exception. Big people for appearances, our criminal fraternity chums …’

‘Well, I think you may receive a return visit from your friends. Or their colleagues.’ He arched an eyebrow.

‘Maybe I should hang around you. That was pretty fancy foot-work.’

‘
Savate
. French Foot Fighting. It is sometimes called the
jeu Marseillais
because it became very popular in Marseille in the last century. Sailors, you see. The idea is that if you are fighting on a ship at sea, then it is better to have a hand free to hang onto something if the ship is pitching.’

‘Yeah …’ I said. I’d heard of
savate
, but what I’d seen outside had been something more. ‘But I thought that
savate
was a type of street fighting. Dockers and sailors. If you don’t mind me saying, you don’t strike me as someone who spent his youth brawling in the backstreets of Marseille.’

‘Do I not?’ Barnier replied. ‘Perhaps not. But if there’s one thing I have learned in life, it’s that people are very seldom who we think they are. Anyway,
savate
has become a little gentrified over the years. A sport. Alexandre Dumas
fils
studied it.’ I watched the Frenchman’s cruel, handsome face. The smile he framed with the trimmed moustache and goatee beard had something knowing about it. And something melancholic. He struck me as a weary, sad Satan.

‘Well, whatever its origins,’ I said. ‘I was glad of it. Thanks for your help out there. And with the police.’

Barnier gave a small shrug.

There seemed to be nothing more to say to each other and my feet took me back out onto the street and to my car. This time there were no heavies waiting for me. For the moment. I would have to deal with the Costello situation sooner or later. As I opened the door of the Atlantic, I looked back towards the Merchants’ Carvery. Barnier was at the window of the lounge bar, watching; just as he must have done when he saw Costello’s men jump me.

Barnier bothered me. I had no reason to doubt what he had told me about his relationship, or lack of it, with Sammy Pollock. What was bothering me probably had nothing to do with that at all. It was just that there was something about the Frenchman. Some shadow he dragged around with him. And for a wine merchant, he certainly knew how to handle himself.

I called in at Lorna’s on the way back to my flat. I had hoped that the cold compress had stopped the side of my face swelling up and bruising too much, but it was still tender to the touch and Lorna noticed it as soon as I arrived.

‘What happened?’ she asked as she let me in, but her concern was grief-dulled and she was content with a dismissive shrug and a mumbled ‘It’s nothing …’

We sat in the living room, alone. Maggie MacFarlane was out. Making arrangements, she had told Lorna. I wondered how many of those arrangements would involve the matinee idol I saw pull up the day before.

Lorna looked tired and her eyes were red-rimmed from crying. I spoke softly and soothingly and did all of the right things that a sensitive suitor should do. After a while, and when the moment seemed to open up and allow it, I asked her about the visitor in the Lanchester–Daimler. She looked at me blankly for a moment.

‘Tall, dark hair … moustache,’ I prompted.

A look of dull enlightenment crossed her expression. ‘Oh yes… Jack. Jack Collins. He was Dad’s partner. And he’s a family friend.’

‘Partner? I didn’t think that your father had a partner.’

‘Oh, no, not in the bookie business. Jack Collins is involved with boxing. He arranges matches. I think he’s like an agent or promoter for some of the fights. He and my father were putting together some fights. They had set up a company together. Jack and my dad were …
close
. Jack really is like a member of the family.’

‘They weren’t involved in arranging this Kirkcaldy–Schmidtke fight, were they?’

‘No … nothing as big as that. Why are you asking?’

‘Just curious,’ I said. ‘Why was he round here yesterday?’

‘He’s been helping sort out some of the business stuff.’

‘I see. Helping your stepmother?’

Lorna looked at me puzzled. Then it dawned on her. ‘Oh no. Nothing like that. Trust me, I wouldn’t put it past Maggie. I wouldn’t put anything past Maggie. But I don’t think Jack is in the slightest bit interested. Apparently he has a string of glamorous girlfriends.’ She made an attempt at a mischievous smile, but her sadness washed it away as if it had been drawn in sand. ‘Like I said, Jack and Dad were very close. There’s no way Jack would …’

‘What did he want? Last night, I mean?’

‘Just to see if he could help. And he was looking for some papers that Dad had.’

‘Did he find them?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

I had a drink with Lorna and she clung to me again when I was leaving. I fought down the sense of irritation that seemed to well up inside me. Again Lorna was breaking our contract of being mutually undemanding. I was, I thought to myself, a real piece of work.

When I got back to my apartment, I used the ’phone in the hall to call Sheila Gainsborough at the number she had given me for her agent. The same light, effeminate voice answered. I asked to speak to Miss Gainsborough: there was a sigh and a silence, then she came on the line. I went through the progress I had made, which didn’t take long.

‘Have you heard from Sammy at all?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Nothing.’ The transatlantic voice sounded tired and strained. ‘I was hoping …’

‘I’m still looking, Miss Gainsborough. I spoke to the Frenchman, Barnier. He doesn’t seem to know Sammy that well after all.’

‘Doesn’t he?’ She sounded surprised. But only vaguely. ‘Sammy mentioned him a couple of times. I thought they knew each other.’

‘Oh, he does know Sammy. Just not that well.’

We talked for another few minutes: there was little more she could tell me and there was less I could tell her. I promised to keep her fully informed of progress.

After I hung up I felt something dead and leaden in my chest. Every time I thought about Sammy Pollock, the picture darkened a little.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

When the war ended, Britain had committed itself to a more equitable society. Maybe that was why, when Beveridge and company were planning the Welfare State and a fair deal for all, Willie Sneddon, Jonny Cohen and Hammer Murphy were coming up with the Three King deal. The whole idea had been to divide up Glasgow equally between them. Fair shares.

The cake may have been cut up equally, but somehow Willie Sneddon had managed to grab most of the icing. Of the Three Kings, Sneddon was by far the richest. No one really knew – but many suspected – how he had managed to amass just quite so much wealth. It was a quandary that had no doubt cost Hammer Murphy more than his fair share of sleepless nights trying to work out. Truth was that, if you knew Willie Sneddon, it wasn’t that much of a mystery. There was something dark, cunning and devious about his nature, even more than you would expect from your average crime lord. Sneddon was a wheeler and dealer. More than just a criminal, he was a criminal entrepreneur, always seeking out that extra angle; always trying to find some new way of squeezing a penny out of a situation.

I knew – although I never discussed it with him – that the bulk of Jonny Cohen’s money did not come from his clubs and other rackets. The main source of Jonny’s income came from large-scale criminal acts: robberies mainly, break-ins, long firm frauds, the odd bit of extortion. With Jonny Cohen – and Hammer Murphy, for that matter – the bulk of their earnings came from big hits which yielded large sums of cash. The big score. Willie Sneddon was in the same line of business, but everyone knew that he had so many other deals and rackets running at the same time that he had a steady, constant cash harvest. Added to all of this there was the other dimension of his activities: Willie Sneddon the businessman. Sneddon had displayed genuine acumen for legitimate business, even if it had been founded on stolen, extorted or counterfeited cash. Like most big league crooks, he had started a number of seemingly legitimate concerns, fronts through which to launder dirty money. Where Sneddon had distinguished himself from the usual robber barons was in the way he had been able to turn these fronts into genuinely successful and legitimate businesses.

But it never took much scratching to expose the brass crook under the gilt veneer. The fact was that wherever there was a shilling to be made, crooked or legit, Sneddon had the nose to sniff it out.

All of this meant that Sneddon, unlike the recently deceased Small Change MacFarlane, had been able to make it across the social Rubicon of the Clyde. And then some. The Sneddon residence, a large mock-baronial mansion on a plot of land so big it could have had its own Lord Lieutenant and council, was in the leafiest and most upmarket end of leafy and upmarket Bearsden. I knew that he counted a High Court judge, a couple of shipyard owners, and several other captains of industry amongst his neighbours. I wondered how the judge felt about sharing a laburnum and privet border with Glasgow’s most successful criminal. But there again, Willie Sneddon had attained the level of wealth and influence within the city where some of the people he had dealings with no doubt thought it bad taste to bring up some of the more dubious origins of that wealth.

And, of course, the odd brown envelope stuffed with cash would have helped. Glasgow was a city where anything could be bought. Even respectability.

I couldn’t put off seeing Sneddon any longer. He would be looking for news and the only news I had for him was that putting me on the Bobby Kirkcaldy case was a waste of time and that Maggie MacFarlane had confirmed that Small Change never kept a secret appointments diary.

It wasn’t raining. There was a more than half-hearted sun behind a milky veil of cloud and the air wasn’t heavy and oppressively humid as it had been. I got up, shaved, and dressed in a pale blue silk shirt with dark burgundy tie and a two-button two-piece: deep blue with a touch of mohair spun through it. It had no weight and hung well and had cost me an arm and a leg. Deep blue socks and burgundy Oxfords. I brushed the shoulders of the suit jacket, donned it, and straightened my tie in the mirror. I put on my new hat, a skinny-brimmed Borsalino, and checked myself in the mirror. Damn, this suit hung well. It seemed such a shame to bag it down with the weight, but I was expecting that I would, sooner or later, run into Costello or a member or two of his robust entourage.

I habitually carry a sap with me: six inches long, spring-steel with a lead ball on the end, all encased in stitched leather. But I was a slave to fashion and I didn’t want it bagging my suit. Fortunately I had a slimline equivalent: a nine-inch blackjack. Basically the same principle, but flattened out, only the width of a wallet and almost like a small version of a barber’s leather razor strop. It was an elegant-looking thing, slim and black, like something Chanel would have designed for Al Capone.

I slipped the blackjack into my inside jacket pocket. On the left, where I could pull it out with my right hand. The leaden weight of it tugged that side of my jacket, but I decided to live with it. A flat blackjack is often missed when someone frisks you: it feels like a wallet. And I didn’t feel like going out onto the street without some insurance.

I ’phoned Sneddon to arrange a meet. He told me he was tied up all day and couldn’t I give him the information over the ’phone. I said I’d rather talk to him face-to-face, and anyway it wasn’t the kind of thing to discuss over the ’phone, or some shit like that. He bought it and told me to call round in the evening, about eight-thirty.

I had ’phoned him first to make the point that calling and arranging a mutually convenient time was preferable to being lifted from the street by Twinkletoes McBride. Added to which, unlike the farmhouse out by Dumbarton, the place in Bearsden was Sneddon’s home, as well as business headquarters. Maybe I could even persuade Jimmy Costello to follow the same diary etiquette. Though I doubted it.

Before I went out, I stopped at the hall ’phone and called Lorna at home. She was bearing up well, it seemed, but her voice still sounded tired and grief-dulled. I somehow got by with a promise to ’phone her later, without calling in at the house. I did ask her if the police had been around to ask anything else and if Jack Collins had been around again. No to both questions. Then we had one of those long silences where we each waited for the other to say something. Something meaningful or comforting. Something to take us out of our depth: shallow.

‘I’ll hear from you later then,’ she said eventually, her tone still colourless, and hung up.

I drove out to the East End, to Dennistoun. Like many of the fine districts of Glasgow, it was a great thing to be able to claim that you came from Dennistoun. It was ever going back there that was to be avoided. Dennistoun was a warren of old tenements, dressed in grime that had belched from chimneys when Victoria had been a lass. As I drove into it there were gaps and clear spaces where some of the more derelict slums had been cleared. Shiny new blocks of flats were already in residence on a couple of the cleared sites.

I drove to the far side of Dennistoun, to an incongruous green patchwork square of allotments. Behind those, an equally incongruous building, made out of corrugated metal sheets bolted together and which looked like it belonged in a shipyard.

I parked and went in through a door under a sign that told the world this was
McAskill’s Gymnasium
. Inside, there were two practice rings, the ropes sagging and the canvas grey, and several punch bags hung unpunched from the ceiling. It was quiet in the gym. The only person was an old man in a turtleneck sweater and flat cap sitting over in the far corner on a battered old armchair, reading a newspaper. He looked up when I came in, carefully folded the newspaper and came over to me.

‘Hi, Lennox …’ Old McAskill smiled at me. It was a weary smile on a weary face that had also had more than its fair share of encounters with a gloved fist. He jerked his capped head in the direction of the office at the back. ‘He’s in there …’

I went through to the office. A lean man with a too-long face was sitting behind the desk, smoking. He looked about forty but I knew he was ten years younger than that. He had put his hat on the desktop and I could see it was the kind of wide-brimmed fedora that had been out of fashion for half-a-decade. I dropped my skinny-brimmed Borsalino on the desk next to it. To make a point.

‘Mr Lennox …’ The man smiled and stood up. He was tall. No surprise: the City of Glasgow Police had a minimum height requirement of six feet, hence the fact that at least two-thirds of their number came from outside Glasgow. He shook hands with me. Now, it has to be said that City of Glasgow cops were not in the habit of calling me ‘Mister’ or shaking hands with me, unless it was to snap a pair of cuffs on me. But Detective Constable Donald Taylor was different. We had an arrangement.

‘Thanks for coming, Donald. You on duty?’

‘Backshift. Start at two.’

‘Did you find out anything about what I asked you?’

He shook his head. ‘Not much, I’m afraid, Mr Lennox. Bobby Kirkcaldy isn’t Glaswegian. He was born in Motherwell. To sniff around any more I’d have to contact the Lanarkshire County Police. That would start questions.’

‘But you would at least be able to check out whether he has a record or not.’

‘Oh aye … I did that. Nothing. And from what I can gather there are no rumours about him. He seems to be straight.’

‘What about the other thing? Small Change MacFarlane?’

‘Sorry … no joy there either. I’m not on the case and, again, if I start asking too many questions, the gaffers’ll get suspicious. I did talk to the evidence sergeant though. Conversational, like. He said they took tons of stuff away from MacFarlane’s place. With his missus’s say-so, like.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘Couple of things. Inspector Ferguson was asking about you.’

‘He knows you know me?’

‘No, not really. Well not that we … well, do
business
. Inspector Ferguson doesn’t go in for that kind of thing. It was just that he knew that I’d interviewed you about that business last year. When you was away abroad.’

I nodded. Jock Ferguson had been my main contact in the police. Not paid for. A straight copper. Or so I had thought. I hadn’t spoken to him in six months.

‘What was the other thing?’ I asked.

‘It’s just one of the reasons I couldn’t ask too many questions about the MacFarlane thing. There’s been all kinds of top brass sticking their noses into it. It’s like there’s something more to it than just a simple robbery.’

‘And …?’ I said impatiently. I knew Taylor was building up to something. Or building something – or nothing – up. He knew that I only paid for results.

‘There was a Yank in St. Andrew’s Square. He was in with Superintendent McNab and the DCC.’

‘An American?’

‘Think so. I passed them in the corridor. He talked like you.’

‘I’m not American. I’m Canadian.’

‘Yeah … his accent was stronger. He was a big man. Big as McNab. Loud suits.’

‘So what’s this got to do with me?’

‘Well, you know what tarts are like. The typing pool and the women police constables were swooning all over the place because of his accent. He was the talk of the steamie. I’m friendly with one of the girls who works up in the DCC’s office. She says they asked for all the files on MacFarlane’s murder.’

‘So this guy’s an American cop?’

‘Don’t know. Someone said he was a private detective. Like you.’

‘Okay …’ I thought for a moment. ‘Anything else going on?’

‘Just this other murder.’

‘What other murder?’ I asked.

‘The guy they found by the train tracks.’

‘I thought that was an accident.’ I lit another cigarette, pushing the pack across the desk for him to help himself. ‘What are you Einsteins up to? You going to arrest the train driver?’

‘Superintendent McNab is as mad as hell about it. Everyone was happy that it was the train that killed him. I mean, they had to use
spades
to get all of him gathered up. But the pathologist who did the post-mortem said the guy was dead before the train ran over him. The other thing is he had two busted fingers and knuckles skinned to fuck. The quack says it looked to him like the guy’d been in a fight and was beaten to death, then dumped. The train mashed him up to buggery and the thinking is that whoever killed him dumped him on the tracks.’

‘Makes sense,’ I said. ‘There was a good chance that no one would question that the injuries were caused by anything other than the train. Who was he?’

‘No idea. No one’s reported anyone missing that fits and he didn’t have any identification on him. This pathologist is some new hot-shot with fancy tricks. He put in his report that from the stiff’s build, the calluses on his palms and his colouring, he reckons he was a manual labourer of some sort. It fits with the clothes.’ Taylor laughed. A thin, mean laugh. ‘I think the pathologist’s going to be our next murder victim. Supe -rintendent McNab is really pissed off that he’s been lumbered with another killing. Doesn’t like paperwork, does the Superintendent.’

I nodded. I could see McNab prioritizing deaths. Nobodies, somebodies and, right at the top, coppers. If you killed a policeman, then McNab would be harder to stop in his tracks than the train that had mashed the labourer’s corpse.

Taylor talked for another ten minutes without saying anything, again trying to justify his fee. When he was finished I thanked him and gave him the number of the wall ’phone in the hall at my digs.

‘Give me a ring if you hear anything else. It’ll be worth your while.’ I opened my wallet and handed him three tenners. Coppers didn’t come cheap.

After Taylor had gone I went back out into the gym. A couple of youths had arrived and had changed into boxing shorts and white singlets. They looked skinny and too pale. Both were working the punch bags and Old McAskill was leaning against the wall watching them disinterestedly.

I walked over to the old man and slipped him a fiver. ‘Thanks for the loan of the office, Mac. Do you know much about Bobby Kirkcaldy?’