characters around,’ she said, her tiny eyes fixed on me for long enough to make her point. ‘I didn’t see anyone around his house ever, except for her. And no car. He hardly ever brought his own car here. I don’t know where he kept it. Maybe a garage, but not one near here.’
‘He had a car?’
‘That’s what I just said.’
‘What kind of car?’
‘It was one of these cars with the wood on them. A shooting-brake or station-wagon or whatever you call them. It was pale green. He only brought it here once or twice.’
‘A Morris Traveller?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything about cars.’
Again I thought it all through. Sylvia Dewar’s previous convictions for dishonesty. The kind of company she probably at one time kept. Her manipulation of her husband. Yes, I was beginning to see it all now, but I needed to confirm it.
‘Do you know this man?’ I said, reaching into my pocket and handing a photograph to her.
‘No.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I wouldn’t say if I wasn’t.’
‘And you definitely haven’t seen this man around here, visiting Frank Lang’s house?’
Her scowl deepened, broadened, intensified and her ugliness followed suit. ‘Do I have to keep repeating myself?’
‘No, Mrs McCardle, you don’t. I’m sorry,’ I said. Putting the photograph — the photograph of Frank Lang given to me by Lynch and Connelly — back into my jacket pocket, I took out my notebook.
‘I wonder if you could give me a description of Frank Lang.’ I smiled at her. ‘And from what Chief Inspector Ferguson has told me about you, it will be a good one…’
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
This was not the time to be juggling two unconnected cases, but that was exactly what I found myself doing. Mainly because my continued liberty, and maybe my neck, depended on my finding a solution to each of them.
After I left the Wicked Witch of the West, I headed back to the barge and changed once more into the outfit of flannel shirt, scratchy tweed jacket and shapeless trousers that Twinkletoes had brought me. I dressed it up a bit with a knitted silk tie; not because my sartorial sensibilities had been stretched to breaking, but because I felt the outfit was just that little bit too blue-collar for me to be seen wearing it while driving a car like Twinkletoes’s sparkling Vauxhall Cresta.
There was a Navy-issue dark blue duffle coat in the same barge closet where I’d found the wellington boots. It was in reasonably good condition and I decided I would wear it over the tweed jacket rather than the cheap, thin raincoat McBride had provided. Duffle coats were a kind of classless attire in Britain, where ex-navy captains were as likely to wear one as an ex-navvy. Again I dressed up the proletarian look with a pair of pigskin gloves that probably cost me three times what the bargee had paid for the coat. If stopped by the police, I might play the part of the eccentric dressed-down ex-naval officer. Pulling on the duffle coat, I wondered bitterly if the ensemble would have done anything to improve my chances with Fiona White.
The other advantage of the coat was, of course, its dark colour: ideal night attire for the professional prowler and loiterer. And, of course, I wasn’t just taking the gloves for their look. I would have a practical need of them too.
It was after seven when I headed back to where I had parked the Cresta, got into it, and started it up without casting guilty looks around me. It was strange to be at liberty — albeit a surreptitious liberty — in the city I had had to flee across just the night before with numb feet and in a prison uniform. But I was still a fugitive, and I knew that couldn’t last.
I stopped at a public telephone and, jamming the door open with my foot to allow the fume of urine odour to escape, I jammed my pennies in, dialled the number of the Paradise Club, jabbed the A button, and asked to speak to Larry Franks.
‘Hi, Mr Franks, this is Mr Bardstown, from Kentucky,’ I said.
‘Oh yes,’ said Franks after a short confused silence. ‘The bourbon drinker.’ He paused for a second. ‘I’m glad you ’phoned, but we’ve been having problems with the telephone recently. Like you mentioned.’
‘That’s what I thought…’ Even this coded contact was dodgy. Coppers were dim, but if there was one listening in on the line, trying to catch out something relating to Jonny Cohen’s involvement with the Arcade robbery, this stilted conversation was clearly fake.
‘Is everything all right with you?’ asked Franks. ‘You’ve been missed… a couple of friends have been looking for you two nights in a row. They were really keen to talk to you.’
‘Oh?’ I asked. ‘I’m surprised that they looked for me there.’
‘You left a wallet behind at their place. My card was in it. Your friends are really keen to reunite you with your wallet. Maybe if you were to call by the Club, they would catch up with you.’
‘That’s what I thought. I won’t be able to make it to the Club.’
‘I thought as much. That’s a pity,’ said Franks. ‘Because I found out some stuff about the names of those Bourbon brands you gave me and I was looking forward to chatting to you.’
‘That is a pity,’ I said.
‘I’m afraid I’m so busy I don’t get a chance to chat with anyone. Tonight, for example, I’m working until ten- thirty — then I have to cadge a lift home.’
‘Well, I’m sure we might bump into each other some time soon. Goodbye, Mr Franks,’ I said and hung up.
I headed up to Bearsden. On the way, feeling reasonably secure in a strange car and change of clothes, I drove past my old digs. I kidded myself that I was doing it to see if the police were watching the place but the truth, I knew, was that I just wanted to drive past Fiona’s. The curtains were drawn but I could see the light from the living-room leaching through them. I wondered what she and the girls would be doing, what they would be watching on television or talking about. What an ordinary, safe life would be like.
I drove on.
In Bearsden, I found a public-house car park and left the Cresta there. It was a busy pub, and up-market for Glasgow. Normally in the West of Scotland, if a bar wanted to show itself a cut above, it would have a special rack for you to hang up your bicycle clips next to your flat cap, so I reckoned that, having a car park, this place would be the local bees-knees, no-Catholics-no-Jews watering hole for the local golf-club-swinging crowd — lawyers, accountants and surveyors.
The car park was busy for a Wednesday night and I reckoned the Cresta would be less likely to arouse suspicion left there than parked for a second time in a side street around the corner from my goal.
It was a fog-free night, but not cloudless, and damp-cold without raining. Walking the mile or so to my destination, I pulled the hood of the duffle coat up over my head and cap. The streets of Bearsden were hardly bustling at the best of times and were empty as I walked through them in the chill early evening.
When I reached the road junction, I walked briskly and purposefully across to the other side and out of sight of the black Austin Cambridge sitting outside Pamela Ellis’s home. If the occupants of the unmarked police car had noticed me, then they would simply have seen someone look in their direction to check the road was clear before crossing. The secret was never to look tentative. Maybe, when this was all over, I could write a book: The Fugitive’s Handbook and Guide to Barge Maintenance.
I looped around one block and then another, bringing me to where Ellis’s house and its neighbours backed onto a narrow street that was more an up-market alley. The high brick wall surprised me, as most of the gardens in Bearsden were hedge-or tree-fringed, but I put it down to the fact that the backs of the gardens on one side of the narrow street looked onto the backs of those on the other side, and the walls were probably there to boost security. Even though I would not be overlooked as I scaled the wall, it would be a struggle to get over it and I knew that the locals had the habit of having broken glass cemented into the tops of walls to discourage riff-raff like me.
