The Long Glasgow Kiss (26 page)

‘MacFarlane ’phoned him?’ I asked.

‘No. It was someone who worked for him. Or so he said. Tommy didn’t get a name. Or can’t remember. Tommy’s a good boy, but not too clever.’

‘I see,’ I said, trying to hide my surprise at the revelation.

‘Tommy went up to the house. He’d never been there before but had the address like. So he went up. Got the tram there and back. He said no one answered when he knocked but the front door was open. He went into the room and found MacFarlane on the floor. Dead. Tommy’s not as tough as you’d think and he panicked. On the way out he knocked over a lamp and picked it up to put it back.’

‘So the police have his fingerprints on the lamp?’

‘Aye, they have.’

‘What else do the coppers say they’ve got on him?’

‘The tram conductress remembered him on the way back. All agitated like. And they’ve got his fingerprints at the house. In the room where MacFarlane was murdered.’

‘That’s it?’

‘It’s enough,’ said Furie, ‘to convict a
pikey
.’

‘No it’s not. What does the lawyer say?’

‘To plead guilty so he doesn’t get hung.’

‘Brilliant …’ I shook my head. ‘I suggest you get another lawyer.’

With the kind of thing I had planned – the kind of thing that could end you up on the wrong side of a set of sturdy bars – preparation was everything.

I had a small black holdall, which I brought through to the living room and placed on the table. Taking a double page out of the
Glasgow Herald
, I laid it out next to the holdall. I put a set of heavy-duty wire cutters, a pair of black leather gloves and a black turtleneck sweater into the holdall. I had two corks saved from empty bottles. Taking one at a time, I lit a match and set light to them, allowing them to smoulder for a good while before blowing them out and setting them down to cool. In the meantime, I placed the rest of my toolkit in the holdall: a pair of black plimsolls, a bicycle lamp, a short crowbar-style tyre lever and both my saps.

Once the charred corks had cooled I folded them neatly into the sheet of newspaper and placed them in the holdall. I paused for a moment to reflect on my highly professional selection of equipment. If I were to be stopped by a policeman curious enough to look in my bag, there was enough in there to get me a three-month stretch for intent.

I had deliberately chosen a darker suit, which was probably too heavyweight for this time of year but appropriate for what I had planned for later.

I had a lot of time to kill before I could put my plan into action, but I had to load the stuff into the car now rather than have Fiona White hear me leave the house in the dead of night.

I dumped the bag in the trunk of the Atlantic and drove to the MacFarlane place in Pollokshields, picking Lorna up about seven. I took her to the Odeon Cinema in Sauchiehall Street, where we watched Gregory Peck in
The Million Pound Note
. A trip to the pictures may have seemed inappropriate, but I was trying to take her mind off her troubles, if only for a couple of hours.

Lorna didn’t say much before, during or after the picture and thanked me politely without inviting me in when I dropped her off. As I was leaving, I noticed Jack Collins’s Lanchester parked in the drive.

Willie Sneddon was a man of habit. Exact habit. Sometimes peculiar habit.

I had arranged to meet with him at the Victoria Baths, where he regularly took a steam bath and swim. The Victoria Baths was a temple of sandstone, marble and porcelain in the west end of the city. It had a swimming pool beneath an Italianate cupola, Turkish baths, steam room, massage tables and a lounge. It was a private club but members could sign in guests. A lot of the guests who were signed in here were Corporation councillors and officials, senior cops and the odd MP. Most left with their pockets heavy. There were allegedly more planning permissions, and public house and club licences granted here than in the City Chambers.

I waited for Sneddon in the foyer. I never swam in the Baths myself, and certainly never in any of the municipal pools, ever since I discovered that ‘swimming pool’ and ‘urinal’ are synonyms in Glaswegian. At least I had company while I waited: Twinkletoes McBride was already there, intimidating the staff and passing bathers. It was purely unintentional and passive; he was intimidating sitting down.

‘How’s it going, Mr Lennox?’ he asked cheerily, when he looked up and saw me; then with an alarmingly sudden change to grave asked, ‘Any news about wee Davey?’

‘They won’t tell me anything because I’m not a relative but I went in to see him today. He’s bearing up.’

‘You find out who did that to wee Davey and I’ll sort the fuckers out, Mr Lennox. Big toes too. And don’t worry, I’ll do it
gracious
.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘
Gracious
…’ Twinkle frowned. ‘No charge …’

‘Ah … you mean
gratis
.’

‘Aye. That. They have it coming … what they did to Davey was
reppy-hen-stable
.’

I formed the word
reprehensible
in my mouth but kept it there: there was no point in correcting him further. And, as I’d already mentioned to Sneddon, I was rather attached to my toes.

‘I appreciate it, Twinkle,’ I said, and smiled.

‘My pleasure. How’s everything else going?’ Twinkletoes was leaning forward, elbows on knees, turning his smile to me. It was a huge wide smile in a huge wide head between huge wide shoulders. Twinkletoes was friendly bulk that could be turned into unfriendly bulk at the flick of a switch. ‘I heard you was going around with a posh bit of skirt,’ he said.

For a moment I thought he meant Sheila Gainsborough. Then I twigged. ‘Oh, yes … Lorna MacFarlane. Small Change’s daughter. She does have a bit of class. Unusual around here. A bit of class and a little sophistication. I go for that in a woman.’

‘Aye? Personally I go for big tits and a fanny tighter than a Fifer’s fist.’

I didn’t get a chance to frame an answer before the Victorian stained-glass panel doors that joined the foyer to the main part of the baths swung open and Sneddon, in an expensive wide-shouldered camel sports coat, tieless and with his shirt’s top button undone, emerged pink-faced and flanked by another of his heavies.

‘Sorry, am I interrupting something?’ he asked facetiously, noticing that I was somewhat lost for words.

‘No … I was just getting a few romantic tips from Charles Boyer here.’

Sneddon went across to reception and scribbled into the log that lay open on the desk.

‘I’ve signed you in,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and get a drink. Twinkle … you and Tam wait here. I won’t be long.’

Sneddon led me through into a large clubroom. It was the kind of place where they could have cut down on the decorating costs by simply wallpapering it with five-pound notes. If anything, it was more over-the-top than the Merchants’ Carvery. The furniture was all polished hardwood and leather and the velvet drapes were a deep crimson. The walls were dressed in flock wallpaper – burgundy red fleur-de-lis against cream damask – so thick you could vacuum it. A vast onyx-type marble fireplace dominated one wall. I imagined that this was what hell looked like if you had a first-class ticket.

Sneddon led the way to a corner at the far side and sat down on two-and-a-half cows’ worth of red leather. I sat across the coffee table from him, on the rest of the herd. There were deep red velvet drapes behind us and I felt as if we were in a crimson cave.

‘Listen, Mr Sneddon … you’ve hired me to do a job. But you can’t ask me to do a job and then give me only half the story. You’re holding back vital information. I understand that you’ve got your interests to protect and there are some things I’d probably be better off not knowing, but in this case it means I’ve been up more blind alleys than a Blythswood Square floozy.’ I paused while a burgundy-jacketed waiter came over with two malt whiskies on a silver tray. I waited until he had gone before continuing. ‘The police have got Tommy Gun Furie for Small Change’s murder. And it looks to me like a set-up. More than that, it looks to me like a very well-thought-out set-up. Timing was everything with this. Tommy Furie was summoned to MacFarlane’s by someone calling the gym he trained in. Someone knew he was going to be in the gym at that time on that night and that they could get a message to him. My guess is that Small Change was still alive when they made that ’phone call and they only killed him after they knew Furie was on his way. Which means they were pretty confident that they could reschedule the whole thing if they had to. That would suggest that they were very familiar with Small Change’s routine.’

‘So why does this mean that I’ve been holding back on you? Are you saying I had something to do with Small Change getting topped?’

‘No. But I
am
saying that this appointment book you asked me to look for has nothing to do with bare-knuckle fights. Big money bare-knuckle fights. And if I’m right, then you have more to worry about than whether the police put you in MacFarlane’s house for a meeting. Tommy Gun Furie was one of the fighters MacFarlane lined up for you. And right now his own lawyer is telling him he’ll be lucky not to take a short walk to a long drop through a trapdoor in Barlinnie prison. He’s going to tell the coppers everything he can to try to save his neck. Literally. And somewhere along the line your name is going to come up. The only way out of it is for us to find out who really did kill MacFarlane and why.’

Sneddon looked at me with a steady gaze: the steady gaze of a crocodile looking at an antelope.

‘Okay,’ he said at last. ‘There was some stuff I was trying to keep to myself. But it doesn’t get the pikey out of the frame. If anything, it points to him having done it. Small Change MacFarlane and me were in business together. We were fixing up fights. But not what you saw out at the farm – the usual bare-knuckle shite with a couple of fucking pikeys slapping each other around. Although you’re right that Small Change helped me organize those too. We had something different going on.’

‘What?’

Sneddon didn’t answer for a moment, instead seeming to look around to reappraise his surroundings. ‘I’ve seen the way people look at me in here sometimes. Even when I’m walking my dog in the street where I fucking live. They look away. Avoid looking me in the fucking eye. They think people like me, Cohen and Murphy are the scum of the earth. We scare them. But I’ll tell you this, it’s them that scare me.’ He paused when the waiter returned to our crimson cave to replace our empty whisky glasses with full ones.

‘You should see the so-called ordinary man in the street when people like me serve them up with what they want,’ said Sneddon when the waiter was gone. ‘They’re the fucking monsters. I have an interest in a whorehouse in Pollokshields, not far from MacFarlane’s house. Discreet. One of the girls got beaten up so fucking bad we thought she’d die. Cost me a fortune getting her treatment without it being official. You should have seen the fucker that did it to her. A wee, bald, fat cunt that looked like he wouldn’t say boo to a goose. But when he was in there with the girl he turned into some kind of fucking monster.’

‘You turn him over to the police?’ The question was out and stupid before I thought it through.

‘Aye, right. That’s just what we done. What do you think we done? Twinkletoes sorted him out with some transport. A fucking wheelchair.’

‘What’s this got to do with your deal with MacFarlane?’

‘Like I said, you have no fucking idea what ordinary people want. The worse it is, the more they want you to dish it up to them. You’re not going to believe this, Lennox, but I read a lot. History, that sort of shite.’

I shrugged. It didn’t surprise me: since I first encountered Sneddon, I had sensed a hidden, dark intelligence about him. The Smart King.

‘I read a lot about ancient Rome. There was no difference between the Caesars and Rome and the Kings and Glasgow. They even had a triumvirate. Three Kings. You can learn a lot from history.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Personally I think there’s no future in it.’

Sneddon didn’t laugh – not at my joke and not ever that I could recall. ‘I’ve read a lot about the Colosseum. It used to be packed right to the top. Ordinary people turning out to watch blood and death. The fucking crueller the better. Do you know they used to make fucking children fight with swords, to the death? Or that the comedy turn was to put blind people into the ring? They’d slash and hack each other to bits, but it would take a fucking age for one or both to die because they couldn’t see each other. And the public fucking
loved
it.’ He paused to sip his whisky. Silver-suited and manicured, against the crimson of the booth he looked like a clubbable Satan. ‘Nothing’s changed,’ he continued. ‘We started to draw in big money from the bare-knuckle fights. The more brutal the fight the bigger the crowd the next week. So we started to put on special fights. At special prices. Only regulars were invited to buy a ticket.’

‘What made these fights special?’ I asked, though some horrible ideas had already flashed across the screen of my imagination.

‘They was no-holds-barred. No weapons, but apart from that everything was allowed – kicking, choking, gouging, biting. It started off small then just got bigger and bigger. The more blood, the bigger the crowds. And the higher the ticket price.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s have it … what happened?’

‘Someone got killed …’ Sneddon shrugged as if a human being’s death was an inconsequence. ‘A pikey. Something happened in his head and there was fucking blood everywhere, from his nose, his ears … even his fucking eyes …’

‘Let me guess … he ended up catching a train …’ I shook my head. It had been there in front of me all the time.

Sneddon made his usual crooked mouth shape to approximate a smile. ‘You’re a smart fucking cookie, aren’t you, Lennox. You make all of the connections. Yeah … he was the pikey that got mashed by the train. So no one’s the wiser.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong.’ I put my glass down and leaned forward. ‘There’s a keen-as-mustard new pathologist on the job. Very keen on what they call forensic science. He worked out that your pikey fighter wasn’t some drunk caught on the rails. Even proved that he’d been in a fight before he died.’