‘Did you speak to the union?’
‘We talked to Paul Lynch. He had a pretty good stab at trying to disavow you, but Joe Connelly confirmed that they had hired you to look for Frank Lang and some missing items. What is it?’ Ferguson read the expression on my face.
‘Nothing… just I’m relieved. Connelly and Lynch were almost obsessive about meeting me in secret and I thought they would deny knowing me.’
‘Like I said, that little shit Lynch was thinking about it, but I reminded him of the penalties of obstruction, false information, that kind of stuff. Connelly is just pissed off that we were there at all.’
‘And the rest?’
‘The rest still isn’t too good. Pamela Ellis still denies having hired you, even though I told her we were getting her ’phone records. And the Hopkins thing… well, I’ll talk to you about that later. We’re going to go out for some fresh air.’
‘So we’re travelling out of Glasgow…’ I said with dull malice.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
A uniform came for me half-an-hour after Ferguson left. He was capped, coated and gloved and he handed me an army surplus greatcoat, one of those things with fabric so dense it could probably have stood up by itself. He led me down the cell passage to where Ferguson and Dunlop, also both in their outdoor wear, were waiting for me. Dunlop’s tent-sized raincoat emphasized his bulk.
‘We off camping boys?’ I asked gleefully and Ferguson shot me a warning look.
It was only just before six, but it was night outside. Despite the heavy army coat I felt the bite of the chilled air. I still didn’t have laces for the one-size-too-big boots and I struggled to keep them on my feet as I walked to the black police Wolseley. I felt something more than the chill in the air: a tightening in my chest warned me, as it always did, of a coming fog, and there was no sparkle to the streetlights or car headlights as they were dulled by something gathering in the dark air.
Sitting in the back of the police car between Dunlop and the burly uniformed constable would be tolerable providing our journey was short enough that I didn’t need to breathe till we arrived. Ferguson sat in the front. I was surprised that they hadn’t handcuffed me and wondered just what, exactly, my legal status was. I hadn’t been charged yet, but I had been cautioned before giving my statement, and it was clear that Dunlop was trying to build a case against me that would stand up in court.
Maybe, I thought, I should ask for a lawyer.
‘Where are we off to?’
Ferguson twisted around in his seat. ‘The address you gave us in Ingram Street. It’s past office hours but, if the people you say operate out of that building really are who you say they are, then I wouldn’t think that they keep banker’s hours.’
As we made our way through the city, the fog that had dimmed the sparkle of the streetlights became thick and viscous, on the tipping point to becoming smog. By the time we pulled up in Ingram Street and got out of the car, across the street from the Art Nouveau frontage of the building in which I had met Hopkins, I could only see the street for one block in either direction, and approaching headlights only a block beyond that. I don’t know why, but I took a strange, sad comfort in seeing the smog close in, closing in my perception of the world with it. Sometimes, in the smog, you could imagine that the entire universe, the whole of reality, only extended as far as you could see, and that anything else beyond it, and any time before or after that moment, did not exist. It was a form of solipsism that, given my current situation, I found very comforting.
‘Another bad one,’ Dunlop muttered to Ferguson as we all decanted from the car, with me struggling not to lose an oversized, unlaced boot in the process.
‘Soon be a thing of the past,’ said Ferguson, ‘with this Clean Air Act coming into force. Won’t you miss that back in Canada?’ he asked, turning to me.
‘Me and my lungs both,’ I said, cheered by the thought that Ferguson could see a future for me that did not involve Italian hemp or a twelve-by-eight prison cell.
My cheer did not last long.
The uniformed copper grabbed a fistful of my coat sleeve at the wrist and led me across the road. A short, skinny man in his thirties waited for us outside the building, huddled against the gathering damp. He looked like some kind of mid-range clerk and Ferguson addressed him as Mr Collins, thanking him for coming along outside office hours. Collins had a heavy set of keys and let us in through the main door.
‘Isn’t there a buzzer too?’ I asked. ‘A sort of security system?’
Collins looked me up and down and it was clear he didn’t like what he saw. Despite there being three coppers to protect him, the sight of a dishevelled, unshaven and bruised desperado in a prison uniform clearly shook him. Before answering he looked at Ferguson, who nodded.
‘No,’ he said in a thin, wheedling kind of voice. ‘There is not.’
And there wasn’t. Nor were there any commissionaires on the empty desk, nor any sign of occupancy of the building on any level. I led everyone across marble to the cage elevator and pressed the button for Hopkins’s floor. When we came out there was no bustle of office types, no office furniture, no locked doors to rooms full of secrets.
‘Where did Hopkins question you?’ asked Ferguson. I appreciated his omission of the word supposed.
I led them into the room and put on the lights. No Hopkins. No table, no chairs, no foolscap notebooks, no maps on the walls.
‘Jock…’ I turned to Ferguson.
‘I checked this afternoon, Lennox. This building has been empty for two months. It’s about to be refurbished for a new commercial tenant. And before you ask: no, the new occupants have nothing to do with national security. I don’t have many contacts in that area, but those that I do have say they’ve never heard of anyone called Hopkins operating North of the border.’
‘That doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist,’ I said and failed to keep the pleading out of my tone. ‘The very nature of that type of work means there’ll be lots of outfits and people operating independently of each other.’
‘True… but where I don’t have a lot of contacts in the security and intelligence services, I do have contacts in every police force in Scotland. And I can’t find any officers with the names Roberts or Lindsey in any Special Branch division. I’m sorry Lennox, but I don’t see where we go from here. Without Hopkins to support your story, there’s nothing to prove that this elusive Hungarian emigre group exists.’ He held his arms out and looked around the empty room. ‘No Hopkins.’
I looked around the room too. I had exactly the same sense of unreality I had had outside in the smog: a feeling that the empty building around me was all that was real, and my memory of Hopkins was some kind of illusion. I felt suddenly dizzy and wobbled slightly on my feet.
‘Are you okay, Lennox,’ asked Ferguson. I nodded impatiently.
‘When I was here Hopkins said something about them only using this building on a temporary basis. Maybe they’ve moved on to somewhere else.’
It sounded lame even to me and I could see a sad weariness settle into Ferguson’s expression.
‘If you didn’t believe that I met Hopkins here,’ I said, ‘then what was the point of going through this charade?’
‘Because I wanted to see if you believed it. Come on, Lennox, let’s go.’
I found my focus again and my mind raced as we made our way back down to the ground floor in the cage elevator. None of this made any sense to me, so God alone knew what it must have sounded like to a couple of professional coppers who had heard every hare-brained and half-assed story under the sun.
The elevator bounced to a halt and we stepped out onto the marble of the grand entrance hall.
I turned to Ferguson. ‘I need to get to the bottom of this, Jock. It’s all an elaborate set-up and I need to find out why and who’s behind it. Let me loose.’
Ferguson gave as small laugh. ‘No way, Lennox. If anyone’s going to get to the bottom of this case, it’ll be us.’
