of her errant husband and placed it next to Lang’s. They were, of course, totally different in appearance and just about every other way, but it just seemed strange to me that I was involved with two men who, each in his own way, was some kind of outsider. Ellis by dint of his foreign heritage and Lang because… because why? What was it about the picture of this thirty-seven-year-old union official that screamed out at me that he was a misfit. A square peg.
Maybe, I thought, it takes one to know one.
It was just after ten the following day when I parked outside a row of terraced houses in Drumchapel. It was a working-class district, all right, but this particular area was the domain of the new working class. These houses were less than two years old and were part of the Corporation’s initiative to replace the unsanitary conditions of the tenements with brand new, twentieth-century homes. As I stood there, the carbolic odour of The Future reaching through the damp late-autumn air, I wondered if Andrew Ellis’s company had blasted away the past to clear the site on which these new dwellings stood. There were four units to a block and Lang’s had a house on either side. There was no access to the back of the house that I could see without going around one of the ends, which would be less than inconspicuous. Added to which I had noticed the twitching of lace in the window next door and I spotted a woman walking her dog up the street, in my direction. A little impromptu burglary, which I had had in mind, was clearly not going to be an option.
Pausing to light a cigarette killed enough time to allow the woman walking the dog to pass me, but the ugly little pug paused himself to raise a hind leg and take a leak against the wheel arch of the Atlantic. I looked from the dog to his owner, who scowled back at me. She was a squat woman in her late forties with a headscarf-framed face to sink a thousand ships, wearing a coat of a material that could have served equally well for carpeting and whose legs were as thick at the ankles as at the knees.
Miss Scotland walked on, still scowling at the world, and I swung open the metal gate that still gleamed new, walked up the short path and rang the doorbell for appearances’ sake. Stranger things had happened than for a supposedly missing shop steward to answer his own front door. But, in this case, they didn’t. There was a small, fence-edged rectangle of well-kept grass to my right and I stepped onto it to peer through the window.
‘Can I help you?’
I turned to see a woman of about thirty standing at the neighbouring door, leaning against the jamb with her arms crossed. I worked out that she must have been the curtain-twitcher.
‘Oh… I didn’t see you there…’ I smiled at her disarmingly. She was worth smiling at. Dark blonde hair demi- waved and short, not too much make-up for town but too much for housework. Not knock-out but well constructed. She was wearing a pink woollen sweater that did a lot of good clinging and deep pink slacks.
‘Well, I saw you. What are you up to?’
‘I’m looking for Frank Lang,’ I said. ‘I’ve been sent by the union.’
‘You don’t look like a union type to me,’ she said, looking in the direction of the car, then back to me. Her expression was full of suspicion but not fear or unease. She could look after herself.
‘Can you tell me when you last saw Mr Lang?’ I asked. Still smiling.
‘You look more like a salesman,’ she said. ‘Are you a salesman?’
‘No, ma’am,’ I said. My cheeks were beginning to ache. ‘Like I said, I’ve been asked by the union to find Mr Lang. Urgent business. Could you tell me when you last saw him?’
‘What about those other men?’ she asked. ‘Weren’t they from the union?’
‘What other men?’
‘The ones he went away with. Weren’t they union people?’
I stopped smiling. ‘No, I don’t think they could have been. When did this happen?’
She looked me up and down then straightened up from her door jamb lean with a sigh. ‘You better come in, then…’
I sat in the small front room — they had front rooms in Drumchapel and not lounges, like they had in Bearsden — and took in my surroundings.
Everything was new: a patterned three-piece suite that still smelled of the showroom; the same geometric patterns on the linoleum floor reversed on the hearth rug; a sideboard against one wall; a matching kidney-shaped coffee table with a chunky red glass ashtray looking like a splash of lava on the teak veneer, a chrome sunburst wall clock above the mantelpiece. It was as if they had asked for the store window display to be shipped “as is” direct into their brand-new council home.
The thing that most caught my attention was the sixty-quid Bush television set that stood in one corner: one of the new jobs with the big seventeen-inch screens. I knew the price because I had been doing a bit of window shopping myself, playing with the idea that I could maybe get a new and bigger TV for Fiona and the girls for Christmas. I had built up a fair bit of cash over the last few years but had no one to spend it on other than myself. And except for my taste for expensive tailoring, my needs were pretty minimal. The only thing that had held me back from buying a set was my uncertainty about how it would go down with Fiona.
‘Nice place you have here,’ I said amiably when Lang’s neighbour came back from her kitchen, tea tray in hand.
‘Aye…’ she said, almost as if bored with the thought. ‘Better than our last place.’
‘Do you mind if I ask how much your TV cost you? I’m thinking about getting something similar.’
She shrugged. ‘Don’t know. It’s from RentaSet.’
‘I see,’ I said, and wondered how much of the Brave New World around me was on HP terms. ‘My name’s Lennox, by the way.’
‘Sylvia…’ she said. ‘Sylvia Dewar.’
‘You said Frank Lang went off with some men. When was this?’ I took the duck egg blue cup and saucer she handed me. Melamine, not china.
‘A week ago. No… nine days ago. Last Wednesday morning. About ten, ten-thirty.’ There was a change of wind and the cloud of suspicion drifted back over her expression. ‘What’s this all about? Like I said, you’re no union man.’
I laid a business card on the coffee table in front of her. ‘I’m an enquiry agent, Mrs Dewar. But I am working on the union’s behalf. Frank Lang has… well, he hasn’t exactly gone missing. Not yet, anyway, not officially… but the union have been trying to reach him and they are concerned about him.’
‘Oh… I see.’ She thought for a moment, pursing her lips. I noticed the lipstick was fresher than it had been when she went into the kitchen. ‘So you think these men he went with came and took him away against his will?’
‘I don’t know, Mrs Dewar — ’
‘Sylvia. You can call me Sylvia.’
‘I don’t know, Sylvia. You saw them. You saw Lang go with them. Did it look to you like he was unwilling to go?’
‘No. Not at all. He clearly knew them and they were chatting as they went to the car. And they certainly didn’t look like union men, either. They came in a big car. Expensive-looking.’
‘Do you know the make?’
She laughed. ‘I don’t know one car from the other. All I know is it wasn’t the type you usually see around here. And that it was dark red or brown.’
‘I see. Have there been any other odd comings and goings, recently?’
‘Not really. Frank Lang keeps himself to himself and is hardly ever at home. No wife, no family. The only time we know he’s there is when we smell his cooking.’
‘His cooking?’
‘I think he cooks fancy stuff. French, or something else foreign. That’s what it smells like, anyway. And he keeps all of these spices and things in his cupboards. Other than that I couldn’t say — my husband has more to do with him than me. He gets the impression that Frank spends most of his time attending meetings and talks, that kind of thing. Although I think he likes to dance.’
‘Dance?’
‘He went out every Saturday night. Always in a nice suit. A friend of mine said she saw him at the Palais. He was very good, she said.’
‘I see…’
‘Do you like to dance, Mr Lennox? I like to dance.’ The wistful expression gave way to bitterness. ‘Tom —
