which I had stopped being paid. I reckoned I couldn’t be in a much worse situation.
But I was wrong. I could.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I remember seeing, before the war, a circus film in which a lion-tamer placed his head in the mouth of a lion. I recall thinking it was a pretty stupid way to make a living. Now it was my turn. There was one last King left in the pack.
Hammer Murphy.
A name like Murphy was a badge in Glasgow. It marked you out, made clear your background and allegiances. Your religion. To Glasgow’s Protestant majority, a name like Michael Murphy was the name of the enemy. A Fenian. A Mick. A Taig. Glasgow may have been the least anti-Semitic city in Europe, but it made up for it in the red-hot mutual hatred between Protestant and Catholic. It wasn’t really anything to do with religion, but with origin. The Protestants were indigenous Scots, the Catholics the descendant families of nineteenth-century Irish immigrants.
Hammer Murphy was no more than five foot seven but could never be described as a small man. He gave the impression of being as wide as he was tall. Packed with muscle. Packed with hate. The other two Kings tended to joke about Murphy’s lack of brains. He certainly was no scholar, but there was no underestimating Murphy’s vicious animal intelligence.
Everybody knew Hammer Murphy’s story. It was the stuff of legends. And knowing the story made you want to avoid knowing the man.
Murphy had learned at an early age that he had been born with the deck stacked against him. He realized that he didn’t have the intelligence to learn his way out of the cramped Maryhill tenement flat he shared with his parents, five brothers and two sisters. He also worked out that the British class system strictly rationed opportunity and that as a working-class Glasgow Catholic he didn’t even own a ration book. It had been obvious to the young Murphy that he would never enjoy the things in life that others had been gifted by birth outside the tenements. Unless he took them.
All of this had contributed to a dark, malevolent fury that burned deep within Murphy. To begin with, violence had been his way of venting that fury. Violence for its own sake: ‘Old Firm’ matches between Celtic and Rangers providing the fevered tribal atmosphere. Then he had sought to combine violence with a strategy for survival and success. Productive violence. In his five brothers he had a ready-made gang. The Murphy firm had never been imaginative. It had taken the obvious route: starting with a minor local protection racket, stealing cars, house- breaking. Then they moved into loan sharking. And into another gang’s patch.
It had all started as small stuff: a squabble between two insignificant wideboy gangs over a worthless patch of Glasgow turf. But a legend had been born. It was then that Murphy earned his nickname.
The other gang’s leader had been Paul Cochrane. The usual way these things were settled was through attrition. Repeated gang battles. Advances made racket by racket, shop by shop, bar by bar, bookie by bookie. But Murphy had suggested to Cochrane that they settle it between themselves. A ‘square-go’ in front of both gangs. Whoever won would be the leader of both. Cochrane didn’t ask what would happen to the loser.
It was expected that weapons would be used and Cochrane had had a set of home-made knuckledusters, a short but lethal spike projecting from its top. Murphy had used his fists, his feet, his forehead. Even his teeth. Cochrane’s kicks and punches had made no impact on Murphy’s battle-hardened face. When Cochrane had come at him with his weapon, Murphy had broken his arm. The fight had been swift, brutal and very one-sided. Cochrane had gestured his surrender with his unbroken arm.
The triumphant Murphy had then turned to the assembled gang members and told them they were now totally under his control. That now they were stronger. Better. Harder. He promised more money. More power. This was the beginning of something good for them all. Then, in a calm, measured tone, he told them that anyone who opposed him would get the exactly same as Cochrane was about to get.
It was a builder’s short-handled, barrel-headed lead mallet.
In front of forty witnesses, Michael Murphy committed murder. More than that, he made it a spectacle: an exposition of extreme, psychotic violence to shock men who dealt in violence every day. When he was finished, he made Cochrane’s former deputy scrape up what was left of the erstwhile gang boss’s head with a shovel. His point had been made.
Everybody got to know about it. Including the police.
Murphy had been arrested, naturally. He could easily have ended up being hanged. But he had already achieved the status of a legend. The fear that surrounded him bordered on the superstitious. Maybe some thought that if they bore witness against Hammer Murphy, his execution would be no barrier to his returning to exact revenge.
The police knew that he had killed Cochrane. They knew where, when and how. But they couldn’t put together a case against him. Murphy was released.
Two more bosses were to meet a literally sticky end courtesy of Murphy’s lead mallet. After that, his criminal organization spread like a stain across Glasgow’s West Side. It grew to such an extent that the only obstacles to total domination of Glasgow were Willie Sneddon and Jonny Cohen, the two most successful black marketeers in immediate post-war Glasgow.
Things soon got messy. The Second World War had just ended and there were a lot of guns in illegal circulation. The conflict between the three yet-uncrowned Kings had threatened to turn Glasgow into a new Chicago. At the beginning of ’forty-nine, Sneddon and Cohen combined forces and hit Murphy hard. Murphy’s bookies were turned over by Cohen’s armed robbers every second week. Top men in the Murphy organization were crippled or killed by Sneddon’s hardmen. In the meantime Murphy hit both the Cohen and Sneddon operations hard. After Murphy’s Jaguar exploded just as he was about to get into it, he called for a truce.
Jonny Cohen had then brokered the Three Kings Deal. In October nineteen forty-nine, over lunch in the elegant art deco surroundings of the Regent Oyster Bar in Glasgow’s business district, the three most violent and powerful criminals in Glasgow divided up the city and its most profitable criminal activities. It was the coronation of the Three Kings. The deal struck became a successful and stable arrangement and now, five years on, Glasgow’s criminal business was still conducted in comparative peace.
But Hammer Murphy continually strained at the bonds the deal put on him. Of the Three Kings, the bookies’ money was on Murphy to be the one to shatter the peace. Whenever a deal was done, Murphy worried that he had been swindled by the other two. He also envied the influence his rivals had with the police, a foothold he had failed to attain. And if one of his firm was arrested, Murphy suspected that Sneddon or Cohen had instigated it through the bent coppers on their payroll.
Murphy was volatile, unpredictable, suspicious to the point of paranoia and the chip on his shoulder was as precariously balanced as it could be. And now I was going to have to find out if he was holding back about Tam McGahern’s murder.
There was no way I could simply turn up on Hammer Murphy’s doorstep the way I had with Jonny Cohen, or even Willie Sneddon. Instead, I ’phoned him from my office. I only got to speak to one of his goons but left a message explaining in none-too-specific terms what I wanted to talk to him about. I was told to call back the next day for an answer.
But I got my answer within a couple of hours.
After I ’phoned Murphy, I called John Andrews at his office and gave my code name and fake company details again. He didn’t take my call. I explained to his secretary that it was urgent and she checked again, but again I got the brush-off. In a way I was glad to put off showing him the stills of his wife. Again I thought about how easy it would be to walk away from the whole sordid business.
God knows John Andrews was a difficult man to like, but it was as if I owed something to myself. To the Kennebecasis Kid. To prove that I could still do the right thing even after all the shit I’d been through. I had encountered another human being who I suspected, somehow and for whatever reason, was being exploited. Manipulated. It could be that I had it all wrong, but I knew that if I walked away, then I was walking away from whatever decency was left in me.
