I was in the taxi that I remembered what Bobby had said about McGahern meeting with a foreign type at the Central Hotel. Maybe the big fat guy had been a Dutchman. After the taxi dropped me off I walked back to my office and ’phoned Willie Sneddon. He groaned when I told him about Holland and asked if I needed more money to travel there.
‘I’ve got enough to keep me going for now,’ I said. ‘It could be nothing to do with him being killed. I’ll check things out this end before I start booking boat tickets.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Not at the moment.’ Sneddon was paying the bill, but I wasn’t going to tell him about Bobby’s new hair parting. There are some things that it’s better not to have seen. I considered telling him about what Wilma had said about it being Frankie that night above the Highlander, but still held back. ‘I’m not being funny, but you are more connected to the kind of business McGahern was involved in. What would Amsterdam mean to you from a business viewpoint?’
‘Dunno. Diamonds, I suppose. But McGahern wasn’t in that kind of league. Even I would need to get expert help if I got into that. Ask Cohen.’
I said I would and hung up. I tried to get John Andrews on the ’phone again but was given the same brush- off. I considered posting the photographs to him, but there was no guarantee his wife wouldn’t open the envelope. I thought about sending them marked ‘private and confidential’ to him at his office, but all it would take would be a careless or pushy secretary and there’d be all kinds of shit to contend with. Dirty pictures of your wife in a plain brown envelope don’t do much for your standing in the business community.
Let it go, Lennox.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I took Elsie, the nurse who had so solicitously cared for my clobbered noggin, out to the Trocadero. I usually avoided Glasgow’s dance halls. They did big business: these were the mating grounds of the city’s working class. And because Glasgow was a resolutely working-class city, the dance halls were filled to bursting every Friday and Saturday night.
My dislike of the dance halls stemmed from the fact that despite the glitz and the sham Hollywood glamour, they had the charm of municipal slaughterhouses. And they frequently became just that. The bouncers often outnumbered the bar staff and nudging someone and spilling their drink by accident could cost you an eye.
But Elsie, my pretty little nurse, was ‘keen on the dancing’, so our fourth date was to the Troc. I also suspected that she took comfort in a crowd that would keep my dishonourable intentions at bay.
We squeezed through the doors at eight thirty and I was hit immediately by the clammy heat of a thousand bodies condensing against anything from outside. The band was working its hardest to balance volume and tunefulness as it bashed its way through a version of the Ray Martin Orchestra hit ‘Blue Tango’. We shouldered a path through the throng and I left Elsie standing on the edge of the dance floor while I got us some drinks. I spotted a table with two free seats and when I came back I steered her towards it. She fell into conversation, as Glaswegians tend to do with any stranger, with the three girls already seated at the table. We danced and drank the whole evening, the alcohol taking no effect in the hothouse of the dancehall.
Shortly after ten the density of the crowd in the Troc intensified as a wave of latecomers poured in, thrown out of pubs and onto the street by Scotland’s Presbyterian licensing laws. A group of boys came in, no older than nineteen, with joyously murderous hate burning in their eyes. There was a depressing predictability about what would happen next and my instincts told me it was time Elsie and I should be going.
‘There’s going to be trouble,’ I said when she protested. I was right. We had just made it to the door when we heard the familiar sounds of a gang fight breaking out.
I parked around the corner from the hospital. Glasgow was again wreathed in fog, not as thick as the night I’d encountered Lillian Andrews, but thick enough to give us the feeling of solitude.
After some kissing and fumbling Elsie pushed me away from her.
‘That’s quite enough of that, Mr Lennox.’ She smiled with coquettish reproachfulness but there was a hint of nervousness in her voice.
‘What’s the matter, Elsie? Don’t you like me?’
‘I think you’re very nice.’ She regarded me in the half dark of the car appraisingly. ‘In fact you’re very handsome.’
‘This doesn’t bother you?’ I laid my hand on my left cheek.
‘No. Not at all. The scars aren’t that bad and they make you look rugged. How did you get them?’
‘I turned the other cheek. Unfortunately I turned it to a German grenade. Actually the scars are from the surgeon patching me up.’
Elsie frowned and traced the small web of thin white scars with her fingertips. I moved in on her again and she pulled back. ‘I need to get back…’
We got out and I walked her back to the nurses’ home.
‘I found out what you were looking for,’ she said as we walked. ‘I couldn’t find out everything, but I spoke to a friend who works in Hairmyres. They specialize in TB there.’
‘What did you find out?’
‘Wilma Marshall was taken by the police to Hairmyres Hospital. They had to collapse a lung and they put her on a course of that new TB drug, streptomycin. She had a bad reaction to it so they gave her nicotine to counteract the side effects. She was in Hairmyres for two weeks and then transferred to the sanatorium in Perthshire. That’s all I could find out. My friend wasn’t happy about giving the information. You said she’s your cousin?’ There was a hint of suspicion clouding Elsie’s pretty heart-shaped face.
I nodded. ‘My aunt is very worried about her.’
We came close to the nurses’ home. I pulled Elsie gently into the mouth of an alley and out of the fog- wreathed pool of light from the street lamp. We kissed and then she protested as I hoisted her skirt up. She didn’t protest enough. Afterwards, when we stepped back out of the alley mouth, she cried a little and I had to comfort her. She made me promise to see her again and I said I would meet her the following weekend. A promise. It was a lie and we both knew it.
As I walked back to where I’d left my car, the heavy feeling in my chest again warned that the fog was going to congeal into a suffocating smog. I had to drive back along Great Western Road at little more than walking pace, guiding myself by following the ribbon of kerb along the roadside. Fiona White was still up when I arrived home and came to the door.
‘Pleasant evening, Mr Lennox?’ The air tinted with a hint of sherry when she spoke. The extent of a Saturday night’s recreation for a middle-class war widow in Glasgow.
‘It was fine, Mrs White. You?’
Her small smile bordered on a sneer. She reached into the hall and handed me an envelope. ‘A gentleman delivered this for you this afternoon.’
‘Did he leave a message?’
‘No. Goodnight, Mr Lennox.’
I threw the envelope down onto my bed unopened, took off my tie and hung up my jacket. I switched the radio on, lit a cigarette and looked out through the window at the street. The smog had closed its grip even tighter on the city. I thought of little Elsie’s tear-stained face. There was a time when I would not have used a woman like that. When I would have thought of a man like me as a total shit. There was a time when I would not have done a lot of the things I did now.
I kept my radio permanently tuned into the BBC Overseas Service, the station created to persuade Canadians like me, as well as Australians and New Zealanders, that it was a jolly good idea to stay part of the British Empire. Listening to the Overseas Service had become a habit. Maybe it was because, ironically, it made me feel like I was back in New Brunswick. I listened to the news. Malenkov had succeeded Stalin as Soviet premier. Two members of the Kenyan Home Guard had been murdered in a Mau Mau guerrilla raid. Continued stalemate at Kaesong. More clashes between Arabs and Israelis. Hunt and Hillary had set up base camp in the foothills of Everest. Preparations continuing for the June coronation.
