unfaithful? It’s a messy, unpleasant business.’
‘You can take it to a divorce case?’ she asked, perplexed. She clearly had not thought the process through to its natural conclusion.
‘I can recommend a lawyer and I — or at least my associate, Mr Archibald McClelland — can appear in court to provide evidence of infidelity, should we find it. My point is that it is a huge step to take — and a difficult one. Sometimes, I’m afraid to say, ignorance really can be bliss. If you want to walk away from this now, I would fully understand.’
I always gave clients this opportunity to consider their options. Of those options, divorce was the toughest and messiest one. Divorce in Britain generally was a difficult and sordid affair, and particularly so in staunchly Presbyterian Scotland. At the end of the war, the divorce rate had rocketed, reaching an all-time record in Forty- seven. It was all the sad result of men coming back broken or bitter or altered and dropped straight back into a society that no longer made much sense to them. Sometimes there would be evidence — often living, breathing, nappy-wearing evidence — of a wife’s infidelity.
Ten years after the war was over, it was still claiming casualties, but casualties of battles fought in the divorce courts. I had a theory about it all — as I tended to have about most things. The Great Lennox Theory of Divorce Law was that the government and the law lords went out of their way not to modernize divorce laws that were woefully in need of reform; and the reason for their reluctance to make the process easier was some deep fear that the very fabric of British society was in danger of coming apart. They should have come to Glasgow, I had often thought, to see how threadbare and tattered that fabric was at the best of times.
Pamela Ellis thought about what I had said for a moment, frowning. Then, decisively, she said, ‘No. No, Mr Lennox, I need to know. I don’t know what I’ll do if you find anything. Maybe I’ll just confront him about it. Or maybe I’ll not say anything. But at least I’ll know. At least I’ll have found out for sure.’
I smiled. ‘That’s your decision, Mrs Ellis. Can you tell me some more about your husband, please? Personal history, habits… anything that might help me build a picture of Andrew Ellis.’
‘Oh, I don’t know… Andrew’s an ordinary kind of man, really. Someone I’ve always felt, well, comfortable with. I mean, that’s partly why I find his behaviour of late so disturbing. It’s so unlike him to be anything other than ordinary. He doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink much… he’s not much of a one for the pub. Work is everything to him. That and his home life…’ She choked on the last part and clearly struggled to keep a lid on her emotions. But she managed. Ten years of living in Scotland had shown me the Scots were world champions at keeping a lid on emotions.
‘Do you have any children?’
She shook her head. ‘We tried, but we can’t.’
‘What about work?’ I asked. ‘How did Mr Ellis get into the demolition business?’
‘He was in the RAOC and then the Royal Engineers during the war. Bomb disposal to start with then demolition. Andrew always said that he spent half his time stopping things blowing up and then the other half making them blow up.’
‘Officer?’
‘NCO. He was a volunteer. He had been exempt from the call-up, but he wanted to serve so he volunteered.’
‘Because he was in a reserved occupation?’ I asked. A lot of Glaswegians had dodged the bullet of wartime conscription, sometimes more than metaphorically, because they worked in essential industries such as the shipyards or munitions.
‘No. No it wasn’t that. Andrew had to go through all of these panels and interviews when it came out about his family background.’
‘I’m sorry, what do you mean, “family background”?’
‘Andrew’s parents were Hungarian,’ she explained. ‘They changed their name to Ellis from Eles. They came over after the Great War. That’s why he was so upset about all of this trouble in Hungary. Andrew has never thought of himself as anything other than a Glaswegian, a Scot. But when he volunteered to serve his country, he suddenly found himself being treated as a foreigner. Worse than that, they treated him as a potential enemy alien because Hungary was an Axis power.’
‘But he got in.’
‘Only by volunteering to train for bomb disposal. It was dangerous work and there was a shortage of volunteers.’
‘I can imagine…’ I said. I had myself had an encounter with a German grenade that had been some way distant, and with one of my men between me and it. The long-term result of this confrontation had been the faint web of pale scars on my right cheek, still visible every morning in the shaving mirror. The bomb boys got a lot more up close and intimate with munitions than I had been and it took a special kind of cool. Or stupidity. ‘And after the war he set up business using the skills he’d learned?’ I asked.
‘After he was demobbed, Andrew went to work for Hall’s Demolitions. That’s where I met him. I worked in the office, you see. He went straight in as an ordnance handler because of his war experience and was team boss in no time. But then, when old man Hall died, Andrew couldn’t work with his son so he went out on his own.’
‘And you went with him?’
‘I did all the paperwork when the business was small. I left when the business became established and we took on staff.’
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Ellis, but I have to ask: has your husband had any affairs in the past, or behaved with women in a way that has caused you concern?’
‘Never.’
‘So why now?’
‘Like I told you, he’s changed. He’s different… preoccupied, I suppose, like there’s something weighing on his mind. Almost like he’s haunted.’
I nodded. Haunted was a look that a lot of men who’d been in the war had. But it didn’t tend to be something that came on suddenly a decade later, like delayed shock.
‘Could he be worried about the business?’
She shook her head. ‘No, business has been good. Andrew’s got a lot of contracts from the Corporation. You know, clearing slums for new flats.’
‘I guess it’s a boom time for that…’ I said, and grinned. She either didn’t get the gag or chose not to, which I couldn’t blame her for — it was a pretty lame gag. But I did see that there would be a lot of demolition work available: Glasgow Corporation was in the process of blasting more Glaswegian real estate out of existence than the Luftwaffe had managed. The Future, apparently, was High-Rise. Hundreds of Glaswegian families now stood staring in slack-jawed amazement at toilets that they didn’t need to go outside to use. And that they didn’t need to share with five other families.
‘Could he be worried about something else? You don’t think there could be some kind of medical concern that he’s not telling you about?’
‘I doubt it. Andrew’s one of the healthiest people I know.’
‘I see,’ I said, and tried to work out how relative that statement was in Glasgow. I had grown to have a deep affection for Glaswegians, but remained confused by their lemming-like attitude to diet, cigarettes and booze. I was witness to a million slow-motion suicides by lard. ‘Well, I suggest that we keep tabs on your husband for a while, Mrs Ellis. May I ’phone you at home to keep you informed?’
She scribbled down a number with a tiny green pencil in a tiny green notebook, tore out a page and passed it to me. ‘Please, Mr Lennox, make sure you only call when Andrew is at work.’
‘Of course. I will need a reasonably up-to-date-’
She anticipated my request by taking a photograph from her handbag and handing it to me. The dark-haired man in the picture had pale-coloured eyes, a strong jaw and the type of regular, well-proportioned features that should have made him handsome but instead somehow made him anonymous. Bland, almost. His look was not typical for Glasgow, but he was not the handlebar-moustachioed Magyar I had started to imagine. The main impression I got from the photograph was that this was the kind of face most people would take as that of a pleasant, honest man. But I had learned not to take honesty at face value.
Thanking her for the picture, I then questioned her further about her husband’s routine: the usual times he came home or went out, and so on. I took down the addresses of his business premises, his golf club, the number
