Dead Men and Broken Hearts: A Lennox Thriller (Lennox 4) (20 page)

I’d locked up the office when I’d left to pick up the van and I was aware of the stairwell being darker than usual as I made my way back up it on my return. The human eclipse blocking out what light came in through the landing window was waiting patiently for me outside my office.

‘You got a job for me, Mr Lennox?’ Twinkletoes McBride asked amiably, but resonated menacingly in the echo chamber of the
stairwell. ‘Archie said you was wanting me this afternoon.’ He pronounced Archie ‘Erchie’ and afternoon, ‘effternoon’. I knew that when I left the city, I would miss the majesty of the Glaswegian vowel, flatter and broader than the Saskatchewan prairie.

‘Nothing grand, Twinkle,’ I said. ‘I just need to borrow your muscles.’

‘Oh aye? Nae problem, Mr L. Do I need to get any tools?’

‘No, no, nothing like that …’ I said emphatically, seeing he’d gotten the wrong idea. ‘I just need you to help me load and unload some stuff onto a van. But give me a minute … I have a quick ’phone call to make.’

He waited in the hallway while I ’phoned the bargee’s number again. This time I got to speak to him directly and he agreed to the short-term let.

‘Okay, Twinkle, we’re on,’ I said, as I came back out onto the landing, locking the office door behind me.

‘Where’s we goin’, Mr L?’ he asked.

‘I’m moving address …’

I parked the van where I’d positioned Archie’s car to watch the house before. We arrived at one-thirty and I decided to give it until two or quarter after. If I could avoid Fiona, I would; if I couldn’t, I wouldn’t.

I cursed the predictability of it all: the Jowett Javelin pulled up outside at two and James White trotted up to the house. After five minutes he re-emerged with Fiona in tow and they drove off.

‘Okay, Twinkle,’ I said, ‘let’s go.’

I drove up to the space vacated by the Javelin and parked, leaving enough tailgate space for us to load the van.

‘We’re just going to get my stuff. There’s not much but I’ve got a couple of heavy crates with books in them.’

‘Sure thing. You doing a midnight flit? You know, with us waiting for the place to be empty?’

‘No. I’m paying up for the month,’ I said. A ‘midnight flit’ was what the Scots called a sneaking your stuff out of property to avoid paying overdue rent.

It took less than twenty minutes for us to clear out my rooms. Most of the time was spent carefully packing my suits and other personal stuff into the trunk and two suitcases I’d bought from Copland and Lye, while Twinkle lugged my crated library down and into the van with disturbing ease and speed.

I felt strangely numb leaving the rooms I had occupied for more than three years. Everything going through my head came together from opposite directions, continually clashing. Standing there, I knew I had had real feelings for Fiona White. Strong feelings that I’d felt only once before. Yet I had this overpowering urge to get as far away from her, from Glasgow, from everything I’d known there.

‘You all right, Mr Lennox?’

I turned to see McBride standing there, his demi-brow furrowed with concern.

‘I’m fine. That us?’

He nodded.

‘Then let’s go.’

On the way out, I pushed an envelope under Fiona’s door. More than two months’ rent in cash. I hoped that would cover things until she found a new lodger. Nothing else: no note, no explanation, no forwarding address.

I pushed my key through the letterbox as I stepped out onto the street, pulling the main door closed behind me.

‘I want you to understand something,’ I said to Twinkle as we drove out of town along Great Western Road. ‘Where we’re going … no one knows about this place. No one. We’ll dump most of my stuff there but only you and I are to know about it. Got that?’

‘I got it, Mr L. You know I am the soul of
description
.’

I decided against correcting him. ‘Good. And once we’ve done this, I want you to drop me back in town, near the Art School, then take the van back to the garage.’

‘Okey-doke.’

The old bargee was standing on deck when we arrived.

‘With the greatest respect, and I dinnae mean no
diss-parragement
, Mr L.,’ said Twinkletoes, enunciating yet another recently learned word syllable by tortured syllable, as we pulled up on the quayside. ‘But you’ve got to be fucking joking. You’re gonnae live on a boat?’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘You just forget all about the barge and where it is. Like I said, this is between us.’

‘Aye … but a fucking
boat
?’

I left McBride to deal with his disappointment and spoke to the bargee. The barge was his baby and his tone continually shifted from pride to distrust and back again as he ran through the essentials of barge maintenance. I could understand him being like that: his barge had been his livelihood, his transport, his work tool and his home all rolled up in one.

‘I promise you that I will look after it,’ I assured him. One thing about a Scotsman’s gloom is that it is as easy to dispel as it is deep, and I handed him twenty pounds extra on top of the advance rent I had paid him. ‘Consider ten pounds of that as a deposit,’ I said as his eyes lit up. ‘Against damages. But I
assure you there will be none and you can refund it.’

‘And the other tenner?’ he asked, a flint gleam in the grey eyes.

‘A goodwill gesture.’

He seemed to be satisfied with my cash-backed assurances and he volunteered to help Twinkle and me with loading my stuff into the barge.

‘We’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘I’d worry about your bad back.’

‘Aye,’ said Twinkle helpfully. ‘Lifting heavy stuff could
exasperate
a bad back.’

‘The word’s exacerbate, Twinkle,’ I said and he scowled.

The bargee shrugged, but hung around while we loaded the stuff. I got the impression that he had only volunteered to help because he wanted to make sure none of his precious paint-work got scratched.

It took even less time to unload my earthlies into the barge than it had to empty my flat. Not much for the sum total of a man’s life, even if it was just the ten post-war years of it.

‘Do you ever have any problems with break-ins?’ I asked, casting my gaze around the quayside, the cranes and the Nissen huts beyond.

‘No one comes down here unless they have river business,’ he said.

I nodded. But some of the people I’d dealt with over the last few years had a different idea of ‘river business’ – usually involving a midnight rowboat ride, a weighted body and an unofficial burial at sea.

I locked up the barge anyway.

I hung onto a single case with a change of suit, and McBride dropped me at the hotel on his way to return the van. It wasn’t
my redhead on duty, but a skinny runt of a man in his late fifties who acknowledged me with a forced smile. His thick-framed National Health Service spectacles looked so heavy they must have given him neck strain. His thinning hair was the same copper colour as the girl’s, if peppered with grey, and I had worked out that the hotel was owned and run by a family: he was the father and she the daughter.

‘Will you be dining with us this evening, Mr Kelvin?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I will.’

‘Dinner is at six-thirty,’ he said, over the top of his dense spectacles frames. ‘Sharp.’

I nodded, went up to my room and changed before heading back out and taking a cab to my office.

After all the focused activity of sorting out personal business, I sat at my desk slightly at a loss about what to do next. Now I was faced with the task of continuing the Frank Lang case and I had even less to go on than when I had started.

My old man had always lectured me about how you can’t sit around and wait for something to happen, you had to get out there and make it happen: a philosophy that had led him out of Glasgow and over the Atlantic; then into a business that put us pretty much at the top of the New Brunswick tree and me in the private Collegiate School. But sometimes you just didn’t have the raw materials to make something spark. And that was where I was with the Lang case.

Dad had been wrong. Sometimes things do happen without you making them happen or even expecting them.

And something was about to happen that would make me wish I’d planned my return to Canada a lot earlier.

Connelly agreed on the ’phone to meet me, but again asked that we convene at the working men’s club. It confirmed my suspicion that he didn’t much want to be seen talking to me. Apart from our first meeting at the union headquarters, whenever I had talked with him or Lynch, it had been either on the telephone or somewhere else. Whatever it was that Lang had on Connelly, his union, or both, then the union boss wanted it dealt with as off-stage as possible.

It also strengthened my conviction that when it came to the goods on Lang, I still hadn’t been handed the full basket. I more or less accused him of that, for the second time, and again I didn’t get as vigorous a defence as I had expected.

The receiver had just hit the cradle when the telephone rang. It took me a while to recognize the voice, which launched into a garble as soon as I answered. I swam upstream a torrent of words for a while before I got him to pause for breath.

‘I can’t take it any more. It’s driving me mad. I need you to help me, Mr Lennox. I need to know who it is. Who she’s seeing behind my back.’

‘Calm down, Mr Dewar,’ I said as the penny dropped. ‘What’s happened?’

‘He’s been here. They’ve been at it. In my bed. I know they
have. I know she has him round whenever I’m not here.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know. That’s what’s driving me mad. I don’t know who he is. For all I know she’s at it with more than one of them. I need your help. I can’t go on like this. Please …’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Dewar,’ I said as soothingly as I could, ‘but I just can’t get involved when there’s a crossover with another case.’ It was all bull, of course. I felt genuinely sorry for the guy and, when the Ellis job had stopped being a job, I had considered taking on Dewar’s case. I certainly had a head start, having seen his wife get handy under the table with the dance hall Romeo. But it was all too complicated and I was trying to tie up loose ends, not unravel new ones.

A thought struck me. I had only gotten involved with the Dewars because they lived next door to the missing Frank Lang, and I had my suspicions that Lang had tested Mrs Dewar’s bedsprings at one time or another. Maybe I could pin down Lang if he had been pinning down Sylvia Dewar. But there was a lot of hot emotion that would make Dewar’s marital problems too hot a potato to handle.

‘I need your help,’ Dewar’s tone was beseeching. Desperate. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do if you don’t. She’s driving me mad.’

‘Okay …’ I said eventually. ‘I can’t promise anything. The truth is I’m probably going to be leaving Glasgow for good in a few weeks. But we can talk about it and maybe I can help. Where can we meet?’

‘Tonight. My house at eight.’

‘What about your wife?’

‘She going out. Again. She says she’s meeting her sister, but I know it’s all lies. Her sister’s as bad as she is. A couple of hoors.’

I calculated my timetable for the evening, centred on the immovable feast of bland dinner at the Paragon Hotel at six-thirty, on the dot.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you there at eight. Just don’t do or say anything until then.’ I was going to ask him if there had been any sign next door of Frank Lang, but decided he wasn’t in a place where I’d get a coherent answer out of him. I’d slip it in tonight, when I got a chance to calm him down.

I had never understood how something as vague and woolly as ‘instinct’ could ever have been an accepted scientific principal. Personally I split instinct into two types: the first was memories we must have inherited from our long-lost tree-climbing ancestors – fears of spiders or the dark, that kind of stuff; the second was the stuff we know without knowing we know it, deep-stored somewhere out of sight of our day-to-day thinking, only surfacing as some impulse or urge that pushes you to act in a certain way.

I had relied a lot on instinct over the years. Which probably explained why I so often ended up in the shit.

Whatever it was, and wherever it came from, the same instinct that had made me give a phoney name at the hotel made me uneasy about using the Atlantic. The fact that I was having increasing trouble getting it started was probably a big part of it, but I also was aware that it was less than inconspicuous, and – after my ambush tête-à-têtes with Mátyás and Hopkins – I still got that itch between the shoulder blades that someone was tailing me.

Willie Sneddon, one of the Three Kings and the most powerful, owed me a few favours and I called one in. Not that Sneddon would have wasted the time to actually do anything on my
behalf, but a ‘tell them I said it’s okay’ carried a ton of weight. He owned the car showroom on Great Western Road I’d visited before and Kenny the salesman looked perturbed when I returned. One of Sneddon’s people had ’phoned ahead and the car was waiting for me when I arrived. Not the Sunbeam, of course, but a black Ford Anglia 100E, one of the new-shape models. Small, characterless and anonymous, it was, like the hotel, perfect for my purposes.

I told Kenny that the Anglia was exactly what I needed and I settled up for the hire costs, discounted as per Sneddon’s instructions. The Atlantic was to be parked around the back and out of sight.

‘I’ll only need it for a few days,’ I explained as he handed me the keys. ‘Maybe a week.’

‘Have you thought any more about the Sunbeam-Talbot Ninety?’ Kenny asked hopefully.

‘It’s never far from my mind,’ I lied. ‘Tell you what,’ I said, ‘why don’t you have a good look at the Atlantic while it’s here and tell me what you’d give me for it.’

‘Against the Sunbeam-Talbot?’ The hopefulness in Kenny’s tone was less forced.

‘Why don’t you give me a price to buy it from me. Then we can talk about what I might replace it with,’ I said, omitting that my intention was to replace it with a ticket to the other side of the Atlantic. If Kenny offered enough, I might join the Jet-Set instead of taking a boat.

Whatever my theories about instincts, they were going wild when I pulled up in the Ford Anglia outside the Dewar house in Drumchapel. Pretty much as I expected it to be, unless my luck was going to change radically, Frank Lang’s place was in
darkness; but so was the Dewars’. I checked my watch. Exactly eight p.m., just as I’d agreed with Dewar on the ’phone. I sat in the car for fifteen minutes but there were still no signs of life. The only soul I was aware of was a woman walking a dog through the drizzle. I recognized her as the same woman whose ugly little dog had taken a leak against the Atlantic’s wheel-arch the first time I’d been at Lang’s house and I wondered how much walking the pug’s stumpy legs could take each day. As she passed, the woman scowled in at me through the windshield. On balance, it was fair to say that the dog was prettier.