The silhouette remained silent for a moment. ‘Very well,’ he said eventually. ‘But I think you’re making a huge mistake. This is very lucrative work. And, whether you like it or not, you already play your part.’
‘What’s that meant to mean?’
‘Do you remember last year, when Mr Murphy asked you to track down a young couple for him?’
‘Yes.’ I remembered the job. ‘Hammer Murphy said it was a favour for a friend whose daughter had eloped. Murphy’s friend just wanted to make sure his daughter was okay.’
‘I’m afraid the truth was a little less domestic. The young man had, in fact, been an employee of Mr Murphy and had stolen a large sum of money from him. He’d also supplied the police with embarrassing information. Your job was to find them. My job was to lose them again. Permanently.’
‘The girl too?’ I remembered her. No more than twenty-two or — three.
‘The girl too. So you see, Mr Lennox, you have stalked for me before. In any case, I’d like you to think it over. Use the tobacco tin “mailbox” if you need to contact me. Anyway, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll leave you to get the train back to Glasgow. I won’t be travelling with you as I have a housecall to make near here.’ Mr Morrison began to walk towards the black shoulder of the Kirk. He paused for a moment. ‘Oh, and I take it I don’t need to stress how important it is for you, if you’re not going to consider my business proposition, that you do your best to forget my face.’
‘No. You don’t.’ The truth was that Morrison’s face had faded from my memory with the fading light. It was that kind of face. Ideal for a killer.
I walked back down what seemed the pitch-black road towards Shotts station. As I did so I had to fight the urge to glance over my shoulder to see if the eight-foot ghost of Bertram Shotts, or the five-foot-five shadow of a sociopathic bank manager, was tracking me.
I telephoned Sneddon as soon as I got back to Glasgow. In fact I ’phoned him from the station and gave him everything I had, including, this time, the fact that Bobby, the McGahern gofer, had had his head mashed in a pretty similar way to whichever McGahern brother it had been who’d had his head pulped in the Rutherglen garage. I told Sneddon that I’d had a cosy chat with Mr Morrison and that we were pretty certain that it was Bobby who had tried to hire him on Tam McGahern’s behalf. And I did tell him about my suspicions that it had been Frankie who had been the first to go.
‘So it was Tam you gave a hiding?’ asked Sneddon. ‘I wouldn’t have thought that he would have been such a push over.’
‘Nor would I. It was a set up. For some reason Superintendent McNab was watching Frankie. I think that “Frankie” was Tam and he made a deliberate exhibition in front of McNab. I started off thinking that it was to set me up as a suspect for the first murder.’
‘But you don’t think that now?’
‘No. What happened that night made me more of a suspect for the second killing which, of course, doesn’t make sense. Tam wouldn’t frame me for his own murder. It was a set up all right, but I think it wasn’t to incriminate me but so that McNab saw me give “Frankie” a hiding. Maybe McNab suspected that it was Frankie who’d been killed the first time round. If I had been in a street fight with Tam McGahern, then I would’ve had my work cut out, like you say. I think Tam deliberately took a beating to convince McNab that he was Frankie.’
There was a silence at the other end of the ’phone. I guessed Sneddon was thinking it through.
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ he said eventually. ‘Why the fuck would Tam McGahern go to all that bother to convince people that he was Frankie and not Tam?’
‘Because Tam had been their real target and because of the games he and Frankie played with poor Wilma Marshall, Frankie had been pretending to be Tam that night and ended up getting the lead enema. Tam knew that whoever was after him, they were serious professionals. He was trying to prove that they’d got the right target and leave him alone. He obviously knew enough about me to guess that I would tell him to stuff his job and give him an excuse to jump me and take a hiding in front of a police audience.’
‘So who is it that’s after him? That’s what I’m paying you to find out.’
‘With the greatest respect you’re not paying me enough. These guys are real professionals, like I said. They gave my office a going over and you would hardly have noticed it. And the way they took out the first McGahern brother was slick. Funny thing is the second killing wasn’t. And the guys who jumped me in Argyle Street were more brawn than brains.’
‘You saying you don’t want the job any more?’
I sighed. I wished that I could say I didn’t. ‘No. The truth is that there’s a connection between this and something else I’m working on.’
‘Something I should know about?’
As I fed the pay ’phone with almost all of the change in my pocket, I related the whole story of John and Lillian Andrews to Sneddon. The only thing I had changed slightly in all I had told Sneddon was the chronology to disguise the fact that I hadn’t let on right away about Bobby’s splitting headache: if Sneddon thought that I hadn’t been delivering hot-off-the-press then I might have got a bit of a slap from a couple of his boys. Nothing to put me in hospital, but enough to make me less forgetful in future. And, of course, I thought it prudent not to mention my little bathtub windfall.
I actually felt better for going through the whole story. Saying it out loud even helped me see the whole thing more clearly. Again Sneddon stayed quiet other than the odd grunt throughout. I ended the conversation by retracting my declaration of independence. Maybe Twinkletoes would be useful to have on call. It was a call for help: I didn’t hold back on telling Sneddon about John Andrews warning me that I had been set up just like him. Sneddon could have gloated — I had been pretty self-righteous about my independence — but he didn’t.
‘I’ll put a couple of guys on your tail. Twinkletoes and another guy you don’t know. His name’s Semple.’
‘Is he more subtle than Twinkletoes?’
Sneddon laughed at his end of the line. ‘Naw. Not much. But he’s the kind of punter you want around if shite occurs.’
‘That’s what I need at the moment, to be honest. But tell them to stay in the background unless there’s trouble.’
‘I’ll fix it up.’
‘Okay, thanks,’ I said.
I was just about to hang up when Sneddon added: ‘By the way, what does he look like? Mr Morrison, I mean. I’ve never actually met him face-to-face.’
‘Oh… pretty much as you’d expect,’ I said. ‘Big. About six-three. Hard-looking bastard.’
‘Mmm,’ said Sneddon. ‘Figures.’
CHAPTER TWENTY
Sneddon was as good as his word. I turned in early that night and when I opened the curtains in my digs the next morning I saw a dark Austin 16HP, about seven or eight years old, parked on the street outside, about fifty yards up and on the other side of Great Western Road. One man behind the wheel. Of course it might not have been Sneddon’s men, but the vague feeling I had had over the few days before had suggested that if someone was following me, then they were too good for me to catch sight of.
After breakfast I drove west along Dumbarton Road and out of the city. The dark Austin 16HP dutifully followed. It only took me fifteen minutes to reach Levendale House. It was a vast place that had been designed and built as an expression of vast wealth and superiority. It had started life as a stately home: the kind of place you usually saw sitting in the heart of some majestic and beautiful Highland estate. Except it didn’t: it sat on the outskirts of Bishopbriggs.
War fucks everything up. More than that, it fucks people up. And that’s what Levendale House had become: a refuge for the seriously fucked up.
The funny thing about when the war was over was that everybody wanted to talk about it. Eulogize about it. And when they weren’t talking about it they were watching films about it, all of which seemed to star John Mills. It was as if there was some collective desire to convince each other that it had actually been a big adventure that brought everybody together and had brought the best out of even the worst.
