‘Dynamite came home straight from the office and hasn’t set foot outside since.’
‘Dynamite?’
Archie nodded his large high-domed head, his bald pate fringed with an unkempt horseshoe of black hair. ‘Dynamite Andy the demolitions man. I have christened the subject of our surveillance thus.’
‘Thus?’
‘Thus.’
‘Do you often come up with nicknames for people?’
‘I find it does something to ease the mind-numbing tedium of my employment by you.’
‘I see. You could just get another job,’ I said.
‘I would miss the sparkle of our chats,’ he replied. Archie’s dry wit had probably been the undoing of his police career. That and his brains. A surfeit of wit and intelligence was an encumbrance in the police, particularly when it highlighted the deficit of both amongst your superiors. What had finished his career for once and for all, however, had been a fall through a factory roof while chasing burglars. That had not been one of his brightest moments.
‘You get on home, Archie,’ I said. ‘I’ll take over. If lover-boy doesn’t go out by nine-thirty or ten, I’ll pack it in myself for the night.’
‘I bet Humpty Go-cart doesn’t worry about getting home for his jim-jams and Ovaltine. As a private eye you don’t set the example I had hoped for.’ He nodded a pale brow in the direction of the Ellis residence. ‘D’you think our chum is up to some kind of marital malarkey?’
‘Most likely.’
‘Doesn’t look the type to me, whatever the type is. At least from a distance. And if he has a fancy woman on the side, then she’s not exactly putting a spring in his step.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘He doesn’t look a cheery chappy, that’s all. Just an impression I get.’
‘Well, we’ll find out in time, hopefully.’ I opened the car door. ‘I’ll see you later.’
Archie gave an American-style salute.
I was just about to go when a thought made me lean back into the car. ‘Tell me, Archie, you wouldn’t have a nickname for me, by any chance?’
‘No sir,’ he said. ‘That would be disrespectful. No references to lumberjacking whatsoever.’
After Archie left, I moved my Austin Atlantic forward a few feet and filled the space vacated by his car. I sat for an hour as, with increasing frequency, greasy globs of rain smeared the windshield and made stars out of the streetlamps. I switched on the radio and listened to the baneful baying of a dying dinosaur: the death throes of the British Empire. The news was full of Britain’s humiliation as its last, fumbling attempt to remain at the centre of the world stage — its intervention in the Suez Crisis — stumbled on. And while one empire was dying another was flexing youthful muscles: Suez competed for radio time with the latest on the Hungarian Uprising. It was an inspiring beacon of hope in the gloom of Soviet domination, apparently. It was just unfortunate that the West chose to look the other way. Oh, Brave New World…
I drank some of the tea Fiona had made up for me; it tasted odd and tinny from the vacuum flask but at least it was hot. The Glasgow climate decided to lighten my mood by turning the tap up on the rain, which now drummed angrily on the roof of my Atlantic. It was going to be a long, damp night. I decided it was far too inclement for adultery and that I would maybe head home earlier than planned. But then, at a quarter before nine, the dark was split by the light from the Ellis’s front door and I saw a tall figure, hatted, raincoated and stooped against the downpour, dash out and around the side of the house where, I knew, the garage held the family car.
Obviously the demolition business was good; the car that pulled out of the drive and onto the street was a maroon-coloured Daimler Conquest. Registration number PFF 119: the same number Pamela Ellis had given me and I had written into my notebook.
‘Whoever your squeeze is, I hope she’s worth it, bud,’ I said through the windshield and the rain, waiting until the Daimler had reached the corner when, without switching on my lights, I pulled out from the kerb and started to follow him.
CHAPTER THREE
One of the strange things about being an enquiry agent — a life into which I had carelessly stumbled — was that it was one of the few occupations that gave you a licence to be a voyeur. I considered my profession as sitting square centre between that of the anthropologist and that of the Peeping Tom. I was paid to watch individuals without them knowing they were being watched, and that gave me an insight, literally, into how some people lived their lives. There was nothing improper about the gratification it gave me: it wasn’t spying on the intimate, the furtive or the sordid moments that I enjoyed, it was the simple observation of the tiny details, the way someone behaved when they thought they were alone and unobserved; the small personal rituals that exposed the real person.
A Sauchiehall Street store — one of the big ones where the sales clerks acted superior despite the fact that they worked in a store — had once asked me to watch a female counter clerk whom they suspected of having pilfered from the till. It was strictly the smallest of small-time theft — a sixpence here and a shilling there — but over the months it had added up to a tidy sum.
I had followed the woman, too old to have been called a shop girl and too young to be called a spinster, through her dull ritual of work and home, spying on her from behind clothes rails while she took payments and totalled takings; sitting in my car outside her tenement flat while she spent empty evenings and days off at home. I had gotten the idea that the store manager was looking to make some kind of example of her: a warning to others that theft would always be found out and punished. The store certainly had to pay out ten times as much to keep me and Archie on her tail as the alleged larceny was costing them.
It eventually became clear that we were backing a loser: we could find no evidence that she was taking from the cash till.
Then, one Saturday off work, she took the morning train to Edinburgh Waverley. I had followed her onto the train and stood within range at the far end of the third class-carriage corridor. She was a frumpy type, always dressed in grey and a difficult surveillance subject because she seemed instantly to merge into any crowd. One advantage I had, however, was that she clearly had no idea she was being followed and never once checked over her shoulder.
It was when we arrived in Edinburgh that I realized the store had been right about her. This woman, whose rituals and routines were as dull and ordinary as it was possible to be, had disembarked and then done something that was not at all dull and very out-of-the-ordinary: she had retrieved a suitcase from a left-luggage locker at Waverley and disappeared into the ladies’ toilets. While I waited for her to re-emerge from the ladies’, I took a note of the locker number and then positioned myself where I could watch the washroom door without the attendant suspecting I was some kind of pervert.
I nearly missed her. If she had not been carrying the same suitcase and had not returned it to the locker, then I would not have recognized her as the same woman. It wasn’t that she had transformed herself from frumpy spinster to dazzling starlet; but she had donned an expensive and fashionable suit and high heels, had applied make-up to the otherwise perpetually naked face. The Glasgow shop attendant had become the image of a wealthy if unexceptional middle-class Edinburgh housewife. The suit she was wearing was clearly a label that a store clerkess could never aspire to, and I had realized instantly that I was looking at where the pilfered two-bobs and half-crowns had gone. It must have taken her years: years of watching women buy from her clothes she could never aspire to wear herself; years of constant reminding that everyone had a place and her place was behind the counter, not in front of it.
I realized that I could have confronted her there and then; that I could have demanded to know how she had managed to pay for the clothes, the shoes, the handbag, but there was something about what I had witnessed — its bizarre surreality — that made me want to watch her a little longer. My guess had been that this was all about a man and I decided to bide my time to see whom she met.
I had followed her on foot across Princes Street to a typically Edinburgh, typically snooty tearoom-cum-
