get out of the cab.’
‘I really need you to follow that taxi before we lose it, it’s important.’
‘I don’t know what your game is, sir,’ he said, his tone heavy with menace. ‘But I’ll repeat the way this all works: you give me a legitimate destination and I’ll take you there. Then I charge you in accordance with the City of Glasgow Corporation’s Hackney Fare Regulations: anywhere in the city for two shillings for the first mile, plus fourpence for each additional quarter of a mile, first five minutes of waiting free, thereafter fourpence for each completed period of five minutes. Luggage not exceeding fifty-six pounds in weight is free, excluding bicycles, perambulators and-or children’s mail-carts. Maximum quantity of luggage one hundred and twelve pounds weight. Have you got it? If you’ve any complaints, please address them, quoting my driver number, to the Chief Constable, Traffic Department, twenty-one Saint Andrew’s Street, Glasgow, C-one. Alternatively, you can shove them up your arse.’
I sighed and handed him a business card. ‘I’m an enquiry agent and I’m on a case. Now would you please try to catch up with that taxi.’
‘I don’t care if you’re Dick-Fucking-Barton… I’m not taking you to follow some lassie without her knowing. Try reading the Sunday papers, pal. With these murders going on, you’re lucky I don’t just take you straight to the polis.’
I sank back into the seat, the fight gone from me. A couple of months before, three woman had been shot to death in their beds, the kind of murder never committed in Scotland, and now all of Glasgow was looking over its shoulder for a crazed killer in the shadows.
‘You sure are a by-the-book kind of guy, aren’t you?’ I said dully.
He replied by getting out of his cab and coming round to hold the door open for me.
‘If you don’t have a destination, sir, then I suggest, with the greatest respect, that you fuck off.’
‘Is that the wording from the Regulations too?’ I asked as I got out of the taxi.
‘I’m paraphrasing.’
I looked along Sauchiehall Street. The cab was gone.
‘Thanks a bunch, friend,’ I said. I thought about getting him to drive me back to Garnethill, but the idea of paying him two bob stuck in my throat. I walked across Charing Cross and back towards where I’d left the car. At least this time, I thought hopefully, it wouldn’t have been sabotaged.
I was half way up Garnett Street when I stopped to take in the view. The sun was still bright but now hung lower in the winter sky and the dark glass of Glasgow’s smoke-hazed air split it into a spectrum of golds and reds. Standing there watching the sky above the city, I lit a cigarette and took a long, slow pull on it.
I should have known better than to indulge in reflective moments.
I was so busy meditating on how industrial pollution makes for great sunsets and savouring my slow smoke that I didn’t notice until the last minute the brand new Rover as it gleamed to a halt beside me. I found myself flanked by a couple of brushed and polished burly types.
There are two types of heavy one was wont to encounter in my line of work: the professional criminal thug whose weight is all muscle and fist; then there are those who carry the weight of authority invested by the state. Policemen, mainly. I knew I was looking at the latter kind.
A third man slid out from the front passenger seat. He was taller but less built than the other two. His tailoring, unlike theirs, was the kind that was priced in guineas, not pounds. He was wearing a country set type herringbone-tweed overcoat and a matching flat cap. He wasn’t wearing plus-fours — I checked, the thought having run through my head that this could have been a press gang for shooting party ghillies. From the outfit and the casually authoritative demeanour, I guessed that his education had involved dreamy spires and his school, like his tailoring, had been paid for in guineas.
He had also been enjoying a smoke and I didn’t like the business-like way he dropped the cigarette onto the kerb and crushed it under the heel of a burnished Oxford brogue.
‘Would you be so kind as to get into the car, Mr Lennox,’ he said in an accent so cut-glass it made Waterford Crystal look slapdash. The heavy to my left showed me a warrant card. He was a policeman all right, but one of the secret denomination. But I guessed the public-school boy was slumming it. He was no Special Branch copper; he was something other.
‘What’s this all about? Are you arresting me?’
‘Arresting you? Do we have to?’ The public-school boy affected a look of confusion. ‘I rather hope not, Mr Lennox. We simply require your help to clarify a couple of matters. I hoped you would be willing to help us and we would be able to do this without any fuss. Now, if you would be so kind…’
He opened the back door of the Rover for me. He did it very well; he must have watched his batman do it for him countless times before. It was nice to have been given the illusion that I had some choice in the matter and, shrugging, I got in and we drove off. As we did so, we passed my parked Atlantic and I turned to look back at it. A bit of me left in full view in the street.
As I sat in the back of the Rover, squeezed between the heavy shoulders of two pillars of the law, the thought struck me that it might end up being all of me that would be left visible.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I wasn’t surprised when we didn’t head into police headquarters. Instead we drove into the city centre and pulled up outside a four-storey sandstone building in Ingram Street: one of those large, impressive, Art Deco-type edifices you found scattered through Glasgow. Alternating between the huge windows were large embossed copper panels set into the walls and I could imagine it had been some place before the caustic Glasgow climate had grimed the sandstone and turned the panels’ rich copper to verdigris. Now it was just another city block you would walk by without noticing. Which was probably why it had been chosen by my new friends.
My escort had to ring to gain entry into a large, marble-flagged entrance hall of the type that seemed designed to announce your arrival by resonating and magnifying every footstep. After my public-school chum signed us in at a desk manned by two uniformed commissionaires, we echoed all the way to the cage elevator at the far end of the hall. We went up two floors and the corridor we came out into bustled with staff moving from office to office, but there was no indication of the business conducted here, other than a few of the offices seemed to be locked and unlocked by the staff as they came and went. There were no uniforms, police or otherwise.
‘Excuse me for a few moments please, Mr Lennox, Roberts and Lindsay will get you comfortable…’ He nodded to the two Special Branch heavies who eased me along the corridor. As he showed me into a room, one of them actually managed a smile; I appreciated the effort, because he looked seriously out of practice.
I was left alone in the locked room. A huge window looked out over the street and I guessed it was one of the expanses of glass I had noticed from the outside, between the huge wall panels. The room was empty except for a large table with a foolscap notebook sitting on it and four chairs. One of the walls had two vast maps on it: one of the Glasgow metropolitan area and the other of Scotland.
The door was unlocked and a young woman came in, setting a tray with a coffee percolator, two cups and saucers and a plate of Rich Tea biscuits on the table. I smiled; she ignored me and left, the door locking again behind her.
I walked over to the window. As I looked out over the city, the street lamps came on. In November in Scotland, latitude and climate conspired to squeeze afternoon into a mere sliver wedged between morning and night. I watched shoppers and office workers mill around on the street below and tried not to think of the careless freedom they enjoyed while I was locked in a room by a man without a name, in a building without a name.
Ten minutes later he came back in, on his own. Laying a buff file on the table, he asked me to sit and he did the same. He was one of those types who were practically impossible to age, having adopted at twenty a look that would stay with him till sixty. He was unremarkable but pleasant enough looking, and his lightly-oiled blond hair was immaculately combed back from a broad, high forehead and pale blue eyes.
‘I know that your chums are policemen,’ I said, ‘but I’m guessing you’re not.’
‘Then your guess would be right, Mr Lennox. I am a humble civil servant and as such I have no powers of arrest or detention, but our colleagues in Special Branch supply us with the support, should we need it.’
‘Am I detained?’
