‘What about your wife?’
‘She going out. Again. She says she’s meeting her sister, but I know it’s all lies. Her sister’s as bad as she is. A couple of hoors.’
I calculated my timetable for the evening, centred on the immovable feast of bland dinner at the Paragon Hotel at six-thirty, on the dot.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you there at eight. Just don’t do or say anything until then.’ I was going to ask him if there had been any sign next door of Frank Lang, but decided he wasn’t in a place where I’d get a coherent answer out of him. I’d slip it in tonight, when I got a chance to calm him down.
I had never understood how something as vague and woolly as ‘instinct’ could ever have been an accepted scientific principal. Personally I split instinct into two types: the first was memories we must have inherited from our long-lost tree-climbing ancestors — fears of spiders or the dark, that kind of stuff; the second was the stuff we know without knowing we know it, deep-stored somewhere out of sight of our day-to-day thinking, only surfacing as some impulse or urge that pushes you to act in a certain way.
I had relied a lot on instinct over the years. Which probably explained why I so often ended up in the shit.
Whatever it was, and wherever it came from, the same instinct that had made me give a phoney name at the hotel made me uneasy about using the Atlantic. The fact that I was having increasing trouble getting it started was probably a big part of it, but I also was aware that it was less than inconspicuous, and — after my ambush tete-a- tetes with Matyas and Hopkins — I still got that itch between the shoulder blades that someone was tailing me.
Willie Sneddon, one of the Three Kings and the most powerful, owed me a few favours and I called one in. Not that Sneddon would have wasted the time to actually do anything on my behalf, but a ‘tell them I said it’s okay’ carried a ton of weight. He owned the car showroom on Great Western Road I’d visited before and Kenny the salesman looked perturbed when I returned. One of Sneddon’s people had ’phoned ahead and the car was waiting for me when I arrived. Not the Sunbeam, of course, but a black Ford Anglia 100E, one of the new-shape models. Small, characterless and anonymous, it was, like the hotel, perfect for my purposes.
I told Kenny that the Anglia was exactly what I needed and I settled up for the hire costs, discounted as per Sneddon’s instructions. The Atlantic was to be parked around the back and out of sight.
‘I’ll only need it for a few days,’ I explained as he handed me the keys. ‘Maybe a week.’
‘Have you thought any more about the Sunbeam-Talbot Ninety?’ Kenny asked hopefully.
‘It’s never far from my mind,’ I lied. ‘Tell you what,’ I said, ‘why don’t you have a good look at the Atlantic while it’s here and tell me what you’d give me for it.’
‘Against the Sunbeam-Talbot?’ The hopefulness in Kenny’s tone was less forced.
‘Why don’t you give me a price to buy it from me. Then we can talk about what I might replace it with,’ I said, omitting that my intention was to replace it with a ticket to the other side of the Atlantic. If Kenny offered enough, I might join the Jet-Set instead of taking a boat.
Whatever my theories about instincts, they were going wild when I pulled up in the Ford Anglia outside the Dewar house in Drumchapel. Pretty much as I expected it to be, unless my luck was going to change radically, Frank Lang’s place was in darkness; but so was the Dewars’. I checked my watch. Exactly eight p.m., just as I’d agreed with Dewar on the ’phone. I sat in the car for fifteen minutes but there were still no signs of life. The only soul I was aware of was a woman walking a dog through the drizzle. I recognized her as the same woman whose ugly little dog had taken a leak against the Atlantic’s wheel-arch the first time I’d been at Lang’s house and I wondered how much walking the pug’s stumpy legs could take each day. As she passed, the woman scowled in at me through the windshield. On balance, it was fair to say that the dog was prettier.
When the ten minutes was up, I got out and walked up to the door. The house sat dark and silent and I didn’t get an answer to my ringing of the doorbell. I was about to turn on my heel and put it down to Dewar getting confused about the time, given his agitated state of mind, but, on the ’phone, he had been so desperate for this meeting. It didn’t make sense that he wouldn’t turn up for it. I rapped on the door instead of ringing again. Still no answer.
There was no handle on the door; it was one of the new kind with a small Chubb cylinder lock with only a small brass lip curled below the keyhole with which to pull the door shut. I laid my gloved hand flat against the door and it opened with only a light push.
‘Mr Dewar?’ I called into the darkened hall. ‘Tom?’
Nothing. I roughly remembered the layout of the place from my visit with the potentially obliging Sylvia, but it took a few fumbling seconds before I found the wall switch and illuminated the hall. I closed the front door behind me, went into the living room and switched on the ceiling light.
Everything was just as it had been the last time — the only time — I’d been there. The three-piece suite still filled the room with a showroom smell, the Bush television rented from RentaSet still watched from the corner with the glossy graphite-grey eye of its huge seventeen-inch screen; every item still coordinated shop-window perfect. But something was amiss in Hire Purchase Heaven: something I had noticed before wasn’t there, but I couldn’t work out what it was.
I went through to the kitchenette, again switching on the lights. It was then I realized what had been missing from the front room. It was there, on the floor: the chunky glass ashtray that had sat on the kidney-shaped coffee table and which I had thought looked like a lump of lava. It had been dropped on the linoleum-covered concrete but hadn’t smashed, instead snapping clean into two halves, white ripples of shockwaves from the impact running through the deep red glass like tree rings.
I leaned against the doorframe while I had one of my more inspired detective moments. In an instant I worked out, Sherlock Holmes style, exactly what chain of events had led to the ashtray falling and breaking. I did it by piecing together small clues: like the body of Sylvia Dewar lying sprawled on the kitchen floor, or the dark red, viscous puddle that bloomed on the linoleum around her now misshapen skull. And, of course, there was the hair, blood and other matter stuck to the cleaved glass ashtray.
Yep. I had it all worked out, all right.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
While I was waiting for the City of Glasgow Police to turn up, I checked the rest of the house and found Tom Dewar upstairs in the dark of the front bedroom. He was staring out through the window with nothing much of an expression on his face, other than whatever it was he was staring at was making his eyes bulge. Which wasn’t surprising, as he had clearly decided to improve his point of view by stringing himself up from the ceiling light fitting, an extra length of electrical flex around his neck. Given that his bloated face and swollen hands were purple-black with post-mortem lividity, I didn’t bother checking for a pulse. He wasn’t going to share his troubles with me after all. And whatever those troubles had been, they were now most definitely behind him.
I remembered what Hopkins had said about dead men and broken hearts. Now I was finding them together in the same place.
I went back downstairs when I heard the trilling bells of approaching police cars and was at the front door to greet the uniforms as they arrived. The first copper was one of the many Highlanders who made up the force and he actually did ask me, ‘Are you the one who ’phoned us?’
I was about to point out that, of the three occupants of the house, the other two were currently indisposed to using the telephone, but I couldn’t be bothered and simply nodded instead.
Jock Ferguson was on the scene within fifteen minutes of the first car arriving. I was glad to see him, as the uniformed Gaelic geniuses first on the scene had treated me with undisguised suspicion. I was, it had to be said, well used to coppers treating me with suspicion, but I had had a long day and I was bone weary and felt more than a little sick. I’d seen a lot of death — too much for one lifetime — but there was a difference when women were involved.
Towards the end of the war, just outside Bremen where we had encountered particularly fierce resistance, I had happened on the body of a woman defender. She had been one of the hundreds of women and kids that the SS had equipped with old rifles and too little ammunition and forced to fight the advancing Allies. The heroes of the SS
