keeping Ellis in sight.
There was a tried and tested habit in the Glasgow smog of playing follow-my-leader, leaving the driver in front to work for you by keeping the kerb in sight, so I knew that Ellis would not suspect the lights in his rear-view were anything other than an innocent fellow traveller navigating the miasma. Fortunately, one of the many things to have failed recently on the Atlantic was the central headlamp; if Ellis had seen me the first evening I had tailed him, then tonight the Atlantic would not be showing its distinctive three lamps in his mirror.
Progress became painfully slow as Glasgow’s night air took on the consistency of broth. Travelling little faster than walking pace, Ellis led me — and three cars behind me — through the city and out to the West End. A couple of turnings and I lost both the entourage of cars and my bearings. Mine being the only other car following Ellis’s made me more conspicuous, and I eased back until the Daimler’s tail lights reduced to faint red smudges in the gloom. It was practically impossible to get any kind of idea of where we were in the smog, but I reckoned we were somewhere in the Garnethill district of the city. Driving through smog demands total focus and I wasn’t able to look out for some kind of landmark or street sign to become visible, but I knew I would need something if I wanted to find my way back in the daylight.
We turned into a narrow street that seemed to arc around then uphill. I wondered if Ellis was doing the same kind of elaborate stunt he had pulled in Maryhill and was taking odd turns just to check if I was following him. After about twenty yards, the Daimler stopped. We were now in a narrow street with only the odd parked car. I drove past and allowed myself to be swallowed up by the smog before pulling up after fifty yards or so at what I hoped was the kerb.
I switched the engine off and got out of the car as quickly as I could, straining to hear any sounds from the Daimler. I locked the Atlantic and found the pavement without tripping over it, then fumbled my way back to where Ellis had stopped. Smog in Glasgow is the most difficult thing to describe to someone who has never experienced it. The oily smoke that the city’s industry and tenement chimneys pumped into the sky seemed to be drawn back into the ground-hugging fog that soaked it up like a sponge. The result was something dense and choking that took the lives of anyone too weak, too ill, too old or too young to resist its smothering blanket. Whatever the chemistry involved, the mix of soot, smoke and fog became something green-tinged and cloying. The simple act of walking became an experience of sensory deprivation where you existed in a tiny, arm’s-length confined universe. My unease in the smog was particularly acute: I had been jumped twice before by attackers using the dense fug as cover. These were, without doubt, the worst possible conditions for surveillance and I cursed Glasgow’s climate with more vehemence than usual.
The Daimler was parked and empty and I considered myself lucky to have found it. I peered through the miasma to try to estimate where exactly I was and which direction Ellis was likely to have taken. I found myself against a high, windowless wall and, running my hand along the brickwork as a guide, I tried to find a doorway.
I almost walked straight into Ellis.
He was standing at the foot of some steps that led up to an arched doorway. I realized that the masonry I had been following wasn’t the wall of a building, but a soil-retaining bulwark that divided the roadway from a terrace of buildings elevated above it. As I had followed the wall around the sweep of the street, I had been climbing to the same level as the buildings.
And now I was face-to-face with the man I was supposed to be shadowing. Stealth was my middle name.
Ellis turned and looked startled for a moment when he first saw me and I was pretty sure that I must have had the same expression on my face. But I was confronted with more than Ellis: I was faced with the fact that his wife had been right all along. Next to Ellis was a young woman with unfashionably shoulder-length black hair. Like the hair, her clothes were out of fashion and looked old without being shabby. Her coat was too heavy for November in the west of Scotland, where the emphasis had to be on waterproofing rather than insulation, and the cut was something I hadn’t seen in Glasgow before. Perched on her head was a small toque-type hat that did not match the coat. None of which mattered, because she had the kind of smouldering dark beauty that made you want to look through the clothes rather than at them. Set above a classical architecture of cheekbone and jaw, her eyes were large and a dark, nutty brown; her full lips had been lipsticked crimson but otherwise her face seemed naked of make-up that she would not have needed.
She was a piece of art, all right. I found myself thinking about Pamela Ellis’s desperate wish to find out why her husband was acting so strangely, and her vague hope that there was something more, or less, than simple adultery behind his behaviour. But I had the answer standing right there in front of me: the kind of woman who would make Ellis, me, or any man with a pulse, act strangely.
‘What a night!’ I said to them both as casually as I could manage. ‘Sorry… I nearly walked straight into you. You can’t see your hand in front of your face in this muck.’
They both stared at me wordlessly, like a couple of entomologists studying a bug. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I detected a hint of suspicion in Ellis’s eyes. He looked past me in the direction I had come, as if he could see through the smog, and I wondered if he was trying to work out if my face and the headlights that had been in his mirror since Maryhill Road were connected. I thought about claiming to have lost my way and asking exactly where we were, but I decided it would be best to move on as quickly as possible.
Ellis had seen me for only a matter of seconds, but I could almost hear the click of the camera shutter in his memory. The girl’s too. There was something about the set-up I didn’t like; secretive rather than furtive, conspiratorial rather than adulterous. A subtle difference.
I walked on in the opposite direction to my car and into the smog, hoping that I would be able to find my way back. I reached a corner and another doorway, in which I sheltered while lighting a cigarette. I only began to make my way back after I had finished my second smoke. This time I approached much more slowly, ready to pull back if I heard voices, but when I eventually reached the steps, Ellis, the girl and the Daimler were all gone.
I made my way up the steps to the doorway of the building. The sandstone arch, like most stonework in Glasgow, was sooty black, but I could see that this was not a tenement or any other type of residence and the building probably housed some kind of offices. Perhaps the girl had not come from inside and this had been a randomly chosen meeting point, but I guessed that she lived not far from here. I found a brass plate next to the door and noted down a couple of the company names, simply to allow me to find the exact address in the telephone directory and find my way back when the smog had lifted.
I headed back to my car.
I sat for a moment and tried to work out what it was that was nagging at me about Ellis and the girl. It was something more than the way they didn’t gel as partners in extra-marital crime. I shook my head trying to loosen the thought from my brain, turned the ignition key and thumbed the starter button.
This time, I didn’t even get a splutter out of the engine, just a dull, dry clunk.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It took me an hour on foot to fumble my way to a rank of stationary taxi-cabs with drivers intent on staying stationary. It was only after a twenty-minute wait and a slight easing of the smog that one of the cabbies reluctantly agreed to take my fare.
The White flat was in darkness and silence when I got back and I went straight up to my rooms. It had been a confusing day and my head buzzed with unconnected thoughts like bees trapped in a jar. It was nearly two a.m. before I fell asleep.
I dreamed that night. It was the dream that I thought I had stopped having; the dream I used to have every night, for months and years after the war had ended. But it had been a long time since I’d last dreamt it, and I woke cold and afraid with the ghost of another man’s screaming echoing in the room.
A bad omen.
For some reason, I had become a member of the RAC earlier that year. Maybe because I liked watching their uniformed patrolmen wobble on their motorcycles as they passed because they were compelled, on seeing the bumper badge, to salute me. There were times I loved the British.
After I had breakfast, I checked out in the directory the address of the company names I had noted and used
