me.
‘I want you to understand something,’ I said to Twinkle as we drove out of town along Great Western Road. ‘Where we’re going… no one knows about this place. No one. We’ll dump most of my stuff there but only you and I are to know about it. Got that?’
‘I got it, Mr L. You know I am the soul of description.’
I decided against correcting him. ‘Good. And once we’ve done this, I want you to drop me back in town, near the Art School, then take the van back to the garage.’
‘Okey-doke.’
The old bargee was standing on deck when we arrived.
‘With the greatest respect, and I dinnae mean no diss-parragement, Mr L.,’ said Twinkletoes, enunciating yet another recently learned word syllable by tortured syllable, as we pulled up on the quayside. ‘But you’ve got to be fucking joking. You’re gonnae live on a boat?’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘You just forget all about the barge and where it is. Like I said, this is between us.’
‘Aye… but a fucking boat?’
I left McBride to deal with his disappointment and spoke to the bargee. The barge was his baby and his tone continually shifted from pride to distrust and back again as he ran through the essentials of barge maintenance. I could understand him being like that: his barge had been his livelihood, his transport, his work tool and his home all rolled up in one.
‘I promise you that I will look after it,’ I assured him. One thing about a Scotsman’s gloom is that it is as easy to dispel as it is deep, and I handed him twenty pounds extra on top of the advance rent I had paid him. ‘Consider ten pounds of that as a deposit,’ I said as his eyes lit up. ‘Against damages. But I assure you there will be none and you can refund it.’
‘And the other tenner?’ he asked, a flint gleam in the grey eyes.
‘A goodwill gesture.’
He seemed to be satisfied with my cash-backed assurances and he volunteered to help Twinkle and me with loading my stuff into the barge.
‘We’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘I’d worry about your bad back.’
‘Aye,’ said Twinkle helpfully. ‘Lifting heavy stuff could exasperate a bad back.’
‘The word’s exacerbate, Twinkle,’ I said and he scowled.
The bargee shrugged, but hung around while we loaded the stuff. I got the impression that he had only volunteered to help because he wanted to make sure none of his precious paint-work got scratched.
It took even less time to unload my earthlies into the barge than it had to empty my flat. Not much for the sum total of a man’s life, even if it was just the ten post-war years of it.
‘Do you ever have any problems with break-ins?’ I asked, casting my gaze around the quayside, the cranes and the Nissen huts beyond.
‘No one comes down here unless they have river business,’ he said.
I nodded. But some of the people I’d dealt with over the last few years had a different idea of ‘river business’ — usually involving a midnight rowboat ride, a weighted body and an unofficial burial at sea.
I locked up the barge anyway.
I hung onto a single case with a change of suit, and McBride dropped me at the hotel on his way to return the van. It wasn’t my redhead on duty, but a skinny runt of a man in his late fifties who acknowledged me with a forced smile. His thick-framed National Health Service spectacles looked so heavy they must have given him neck strain. His thinning hair was the same copper colour as the girl’s, if peppered with grey, and I had worked out that the hotel was owned and run by a family: he was the father and she the daughter.
‘Will you be dining with us this evening, Mr Kelvin?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I will.’
‘Dinner is at six-thirty,’ he said, over the top of his dense spectacles frames. ‘Sharp.’
I nodded, went up to my room and changed before heading back out and taking a cab to my office.
After all the focused activity of sorting out personal business, I sat at my desk slightly at a loss about what to do next. Now I was faced with the task of continuing the Frank Lang case and I had even less to go on than when I had started.
My old man had always lectured me about how you can’t sit around and wait for something to happen, you had to get out there and make it happen: a philosophy that had led him out of Glasgow and over the Atlantic; then into a business that put us pretty much at the top of the New Brunswick tree and me in the private Collegiate School. But sometimes you just didn’t have the raw materials to make something spark. And that was where I was with the Lang case.
Dad had been wrong. Sometimes things do happen without you making them happen or even expecting them.
And something was about to happen that would make me wish I’d planned my return to Canada a lot earlier.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Connelly agreed on the ’phone to meet me, but again asked that we convene at the working men’s club. It confirmed my suspicion that he didn’t much want to be seen talking to me. Apart from our first meeting at the union headquarters, whenever I had talked with him or Lynch, it had been either on the telephone or somewhere else. Whatever it was that Lang had on Connelly, his union, or both, then the union boss wanted it dealt with as off-stage as possible.
It also strengthened my conviction that when it came to the goods on Lang, I still hadn’t been handed the full basket. I more or less accused him of that, for the second time, and again I didn’t get as vigorous a defence as I had expected.
The receiver had just hit the cradle when the telephone rang. It took me a while to recognize the voice, which launched into a garble as soon as I answered. I swam upstream a torrent of words for a while before I got him to pause for breath.
‘I can’t take it any more. It’s driving me mad. I need you to help me, Mr Lennox. I need to know who it is. Who she’s seeing behind my back.’
‘Calm down, Mr Dewar,’ I said as the penny dropped. ‘What’s happened?’
‘He’s been here. They’ve been at it. In my bed. I know they have. I know she has him round whenever I’m not here.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know. That’s what’s driving me mad. I don’t know who he is. For all I know she’s at it with more than one of them. I need your help. I can’t go on like this. Please…’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Dewar,’ I said as soothingly as I could, ‘but I just can’t get involved when there’s a crossover with another case.’ It was all bull, of course. I felt genuinely sorry for the guy and, when the Ellis job had stopped being a job, I had considered taking on Dewar’s case. I certainly had a head start, having seen his wife get handy under the table with the dance hall Romeo. But it was all too complicated and I was trying to tie up loose ends, not unravel new ones.
A thought struck me. I had only gotten involved with the Dewars because they lived next door to the missing Frank Lang, and I had my suspicions that Lang had tested Mrs Dewar’s bedsprings at one time or another. Maybe I could pin down Lang if he had been pinning down Sylvia Dewar. But there was a lot of hot emotion that would make Dewar’s marital problems too hot a potato to handle.
‘I need your help,’ Dewar’s tone was beseeching. Desperate. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do if you don’t. She’s driving me mad.’
‘Okay…’ I said eventually. ‘I can’t promise anything. The truth is I’m probably going to be leaving Glasgow for good in a few weeks. But we can talk about it and maybe I can help. Where can we meet?’
‘Tonight. My house at eight.’
