‘Doubt it. One’s a businessman, the other’s a union official.’
Taylor frowned. ‘I’ll have to be careful with the union bloke.’
‘Why?’
‘You can have more than one kind of record, Mr Lennox. Checking out the criminal records in the Collator’s Office is straightforward enough, but a lot of these union boys are Communist Party members and the Special Branch boys have their own rogues’ gallery. Ask the wrong questions about the wrong people and you can end up being questioned yourself. Shady bunch, Special Branch.’
‘See what you can do, anyway, Don.’ I paused for a moment, thinking about what he had told me. ‘Listen, I should maybe warn you that the first name, Ellis, belongs to someone with a Hungarian background. Pre- communist, but he was born there. I guess that could be vaguely political too.’
Taylor looked worried. Purposefully worried. I took the hint and handed him another five.
‘Like I said, see what you can find out for me and it will be much appreciated.’ I smiled my gratitude, which was as genuine as his worry had been: there was nothing more nauseating than a bent copper, even if you were the one doing the bending. ‘Any other tidbits that might be of interest?’ I asked.
‘They’ve got a lead on that jewellery robbery in the Arcades last month.’
‘Really?’ I said conversationally. ‘Who’s in the frame?’
‘Now, Mr Lennox, you know I couldn’t tell you that,’ he said. What he meant was he couldn’t tell me unless I paid him for the information. There had been a time when I would have paid well; it was the kind of news that you could sell on at a profit.
‘I don’t move in those circles any more, Don, you know that. If you can’t tell me, don’t. I’m just interested that’s all.’
I could see that I had just pulled the rug from under him. He had valuable information that was valuable only to people he could never deal with directly. He was looking for a broker, and my days as a middle-man were behind me.
‘The reason I’m mentioning it, Mr Lennox,’ he said, ‘is that it concerns someone that I think you know well.’
‘I know a lot of people well, Don.’
‘The Jew, Cohen.’ The cocky look on Taylor’s face told me that he really did have goods to sell. Goods I didn’t want to buy but, like it or not, I did owe Handsome Jonny Cohen a favour.
‘What’s the information?’
‘A name. A name of someone who’s going to turn Queen’s Evidence.’
I nodded. The police had obviously got something on one of Cohen’s people and were trading his hide for Jonny’s.
‘Well?’ he asked. I thought about old loyalties. About scrapes I’d been pulled out of. About thirteen months of trying to put distance between me and where I’d been. What I’d been.
‘I’ll pass, Don,’ I said with a sigh. ‘Like I said, I don’t move in those circles any more. And if you want my advice, I wouldn’t go about offering that kind of information for sale. Sell something like that to any of the Three Kings and you’ve sold yourself. And trust me, if they get their claws into a copper, they won’t let go and you’ll spend the rest of your career worrying about whether they’d trade you to get out of a tight spot.’ I let it sink in before continuing. ‘But get me something I can work with on the names I’ve given you and there’ll be a bonus in it for you.’
‘Okay,’ he said, clearly crestfallen. I could imagine his delight when he had happened to overhear that snippet. Cash registers ringing in his head. But what I had told him was true: there are degrees of graft. What he was selling me could get him kicked out of the police; what he wanted to sell Cohen — or to get me to sell to Cohen — could get him kicked into prison.
He hadn’t told me the name. But he had told me there was a name. What I was going to do with that information, I didn’t yet know.
It wasn’t the only piece of information I had that I didn’t know what to do with: as I walked through drizzle back to where I’d parked, I thought about the Jowett Javelin I’d seen outside Fiona’s.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I spent two days wearing out shoe leather and working up the telephone bill. The days were spent mostly on the union case, the evenings on Ellis.
Now, I considered myself to be a self-contained, independent kind of character. Maybe not a loner, but someone who tries not to give too much away about himself. I kept a lot of stuff private and a lot of the people I knew didn’t know who else I knew.
Even with that, it’s true that no man is an island. Each of us exists partly through others; the connections we make throughout our lives, good or bad, extending into a far-reaching web. A traceable web to one degree or another. Me included.
Frank Lang appeared to be the exception to John Donne’s rule. If there was a committee or a reading group or a theatre association, then Lang’s name would be on the list of members or contributors. There were lot of threads spun in Lang’s web, right enough, but they just didn’t stretch very far.
The calls I made and the people I visited confirmed the bare bones of Lang’s existence: he had been a member of the merchant marine, working as a ship’s cook; he had enrolled for evening classes through the Workers’ Educational Association; he had been on the membership lists of several societies and committees. The only thing was that no one I spoke to could really remember ever meeting Lang.
Eventually I did manage to trace two merchant seamen who had served with Lang. I showed them the photograph and they both confirmed it was him and yes, they had seen him in the flesh. One of the sailors said that he had heard that Lang had emigrated years ago, Canada or Australia.
And that was it: all I could find on Frank Lang.
Archie had been sniffing around the Ellis case where the opposite of Lang seemed to be true. Andrew Ellis’s history was eminently traceable and transparent. A well-liked and well-respected member of the Glasgow business community, he had a reputation stretching back to the end of the war. No dodgy dealings, no grey areas, no skeletons in the cupboard. His case may have been the opposite of Lang’s, but it was just as baffling.
When Archie came into the office on the Tuesday morning, he balefully confirmed that he’d been unable to dig up anything of note on Ellis.
‘The problem is our hands are tied,’ he explained. ‘I’m just nipping away at the edges here, Chief.’ Archie habitually called me Chief, despite me asking him not to. Probably because I’d asked him not to. ‘I can’t talk to his employees or customers, because that would alert him to the fact that his missus has put a couple of professional snoopers onto him. And he hasn’t answered the call of the wild for the last three nights, so there’s been nowhere or no one to follow him to. If you’ve only got until the end of the week, then I think we’re scuppered.’
‘I think so too,’ I said, infected by Archie’s dolefulness. I ran through where I was with the union thing with him, for no other real reason than to hear myself say it out loud. It didn’t sound any better.
‘What’s in the ledger?’ Archie asked.
‘That is something I am going to have to find out,’ I said. ‘Connelly is being unusually coy about it. My guess is that the missing money has been donated by supporters of the union who would rather keep their names out of the public eye, and the ledger details the payments. It sounds to me like blackmail, but Connelly denies that. Maybe Lang intends to sell it to the newspapers, but it is technically stolen property… What is it, Archie?’ I noticed him purse his thin lips as he held me in his bloodhound stare.
‘A list of union supporters? Joe Connelly and his union have hired us to track down a missing jotter with the names of a few Reds in it?’
‘You don’t think it’s likely?’
‘Well, Chief, that’s relative. Compared to Twinkletoes’s chances of winning Brain of Britain, it’s likely. Compared to there being something in that ledger that is a lot more important or embarrassing, it’s not.’
‘I know what you mean,’ I said. It had been troubling me since my meeting with Connelly and Lynch. Not what had been said, but what hadn’t been said. ‘By the way, are you happy enough to do this week’s run with
