CHAPTER FIVE
It’s difficult to stay lost in Glasgow. Like Jock Ferguson had said to me, it wasn’t really a city, just a giant village. But Wilma Marshall was making a decent job of it. I had tracked down her family home: parents and two sisters squeezed into a two-roomed flat in a rat-warren of tenements, with a toilet shared by three more families on the stair landing. The Marshall home could almost have been described as a slum: all it needed was a little fixing up to qualify. Nearly three-quarters of Glasgow’s homes could have been described the same way. It was the kind of place a girl would do anything to get away from. It was the kind of place that gave birth to the kind of vicious ambition that had driven generations of Glasgow hardmen and gangsters. And maybe a couple of businessmen.
I didn’t approach the Marshall family: the risk of them going straight to the police, if that was who had Wilma, was too great. I couldn’t even stake out their flat: Glasgow tenements teemed with life, human and otherwise, and there would be too many eyes watching the constant coming and going and my car, or just me, would stick out like a sore thumb on the street outside.
But, like I said, Glasgow is not a place to stay lost in.
It was a Friday afternoon that I saw her in Sauchiehall Street. Not Wilma Marshall, whom I should have been looking for, but Lillian Andrews, the wife of the nervous little businessman with the damp handshake and the carnation and the unconvincing story to cover up her disappearance and sudden reappearance. I had studied the photograph Andrews had given me, and I recognized Lillian Andrews instantly. She was tallish with dark hair and a full mouth lipsticked deep red. The expensive cloth of the tailored jacket and pencil skirt cleaved to her deadly curves. The fox-fur stole around her shoulders would have cost more than the average Glaswegian earns in a year. Her features were regular but short of beautiful. However Lillian Andrews was without doubt one of the most sexually attractive women I had ever seen. She oozed sex-appeal from every pore.
She caught me looking at her as I passed her in the street and her full lips twitched a small smile. Not encouragement, but acknowledgement of the only natural response a warm-blooded male could have to her. Of course she didn’t recognize me, having no idea that I was the man her husband had hired and then un-hired to find her. But I dodged her eyes. I didn’t know why: I was off the case and she was clearly no longer missing, but for some reason I hadn’t wanted her to notice me.
Lillian was with a female friend, a shorter woman with gold-blonde demi-waved hair. Lillian Andrews’s companion was almost as attractive but not quite as expensively tailored as she was. I turned to look into one of the shop windows, still sparse despite rationing having been almost completely lifted: austerity was a state of mind that seemed to linger with dark comfort in the Scottish psyche. I waited until they were about twenty yards away and a reasonable number of shoppers had curtained me before I started to follow them.
I managed to stick with the two women, unseen, for a couple of hours’ shopping. I was able to tail them through the larger stores, like Copland and Lye, but most of the time I hung around outside the stores, standing across the street and smoking, watching and waiting for them to come out of the main entrances. It was taking up my time and it was boring. But there are some things that just ring false and then nag away at you like a dull toothache. John Andrews paying me off was one of them. The other thing was that John and Lillian Andrews were the oddest odd couple I had seen. I knew that women often married for money, but Lillian Andrews could have set her sights much higher, even in Glasgow.
The two women disappeared into Coupar’s Furs for an age and when they came out the blonde was gleefully clutching a bulky, ribbon-wrapped package. It was difficult to read from across the road, but her expression conveyed more than joy at a purchase; I got the feeling she had been gifted it.
It started to get dark and I didn’t need to worry about having other shoppers to conceal me. The streets began to lurk behind a curtain of dense fog. Glasgow’s industry, the million-plus coal fires and its damp, clinging climate made it second only to London for the density and deadliness of its smog. Many babies had been conceived behind the damp curtain of Glasgow’s smog, but even more had been smothered in its shroud. The year before had been the worst on record for smog deaths in industrial cities throughout Britain, and the Great Smog in London had killed a thousand. There was talk of a Clean Air Act, but nothing had yet been done. Tonight, as happened every night, the smog descended on the city: more than one soul would depart this world for the want of a decent breath.
I had developed a sixth sense about the smog: I could always feel its grip on my lungs a good half-hour before it really settled in. The streetlights came on but were reduced to grey-wreathed glimmers. I tugged up the collar of my coat and pulled the brim of my hat low. The smog could conceal me, but it could also conceal those I followed. I would need to get closer.
Lillian Andrews kissed her friend goodbye and mounted a tram. I followed her onto the tram but sat as far back in the carriage as I could and kept the brim of my hat angled in her direction. She dismounted at the Trongate. I waited a few moments and a hundred yards before jumping off the moving tram, the conductress shouting something in unintelligible Glaswegian after me. The smog was now so dense that I could only see a matter of feet ahead. I had to move fast to get close enough to home in on the clacking of her heels on the cobbles, as she headed towards the Merchant City.
I lost her.
I stopped and listened again for the clicking of her high heels, but even that was gone. I walked on a few feet, keeping the kerb edge within sight: it was easy in the smog to wander onto the roadway and lose your bearings completely. She had led me into the Merchant City and I really wasn’t too sure which street I was in. I stopped and listened again. Nothing. I cursed, unable to make up my mind whether to go forward or try to retrace my steps through the grey murk. I walked on a few yards. As I passed the end of a narrow alley, something swift and strong grabbed me.
‘I saw you earlier,’ said Lillian Andrews as she pulled me into the alley. We were instantly curtained by the smog. ‘Watching me. You’ve been following me, haven’t you?’ She didn’t give me a chance to answer but clamped her mouth on mine. Her tongue pushed deep into my mouth. She shoved me away and leaned against the alley wall and unbuttoned her jacket and blouse, exposing her full, milky white breasts in the dim light.
‘Is this what you want? Is this why you’ve been following me?’
I stared at her breasts. Her hand was now on my crotch and nature had given her something to hold on to. I could still smell the perfume she had smeared on me with her kiss. I thought about the small, frightened man who had tried to buy me off.
‘Listen…’ I backed away. ‘I-’
‘No?’ she said with a cold smile. ‘I didn’t think so.’
Something that felt like a steel hammer smashed into the back of my head and the smog suddenly penetrated my skull. Became even thicker. Darker.
Like so many Glaswegians at the weekend, I woke up on Saturday morning in a ward in the Western General Hospital. A pretty nurse was sitting reading the Glasgow Herald at my bedside. I tried to sit up but something exploded in my skull. Bright lights flashed and a searing pain sliced mercilessly through my head. I gingerly explored the back of my head with my fingertips, felt my hair matted beneath my touch and winced as I found an ugly ridge on my scalp punctuated by the hard knots of surgical stitching.
‘Now, now…’ said the nurse. ‘We don’t want to be doing that, do we?’
I groaned, fighting back a wave of nausea.
‘We’ve got to take things easy.’ Nursey maintained her unconvincingly solicitous tone. Through the pain I pondered whether there was some convention, some regulation, that compelled all medical professionals to speak in the first-person plural.
The nurse — small, like most Glaswegians — creased her pretty, perplexed brow. ‘I think we should get the doctor…’
I looked at her heart-shaped face, crowned with russet hair and nurse’s cap.
‘Why don’t we do that, nurse?’ I said.
I watched her petite, trim figure disappear and made a mental note, in my searingly sore head, to make a pass at her later. It was then that the events of the night before came back to me: Lillian Andrews’s milky skin; her hot, probing tongue; the blow to my head from her accomplice, hidden in the swirls of smog.
