with Andrews is so I confront him with the pictures, like I told you, and it’s no surprise to him. Now I know that there’s something going on that stinks to high heaven. I actually begin to worry about his safety…’ I looked down at the smashed face of my ex-client and thought about how much good my worrying had done him. ‘Anyway, then I get a call from him and boy is he a scared bunny. He tells me he’s as good as dead and Lillian is behind it all. Being the genius I am, I tell him to tell me everything later but to get to safety. I arrange to meet him at a hotel up by Loch Lomond.’
‘Except he doesn’t make it.’
‘Exactly. Oh, and by the way, before you get all holier-than-thou with me one of the options I gave him when he ’phoned me was that I had a cop he could trust. You.’
‘If he had he’d still be alive.’
‘Maybe. Maybe not. When I suggested getting the police involved it was like he started to panic. I’ve got to be honest, Jock, it was as if he knew that Lillian and whoever she was involved with had someone inside the City Police. And that fits with my suspicions about the brothel being left alone because of police contacts.’
Ferguson frowned but his expression revealed that he knew it wasn’t impossible: there was a parlour game in Glasgow, usually played in the changing rooms of the Victoria Baths, called the Manila Envelope Shuffle. The Victoria Baths were popular with senior police officers, businessmen and Glasgow Corporation councillors.
‘Anyway, that’s all I’ve got,’ I said as if I’d unburdened all that there was to unburden. It was rather convincing, even if I say so myself. But Ferguson’s expression, as always, was difficult to read.
‘You should have come to me as soon as Andrews was killed,’ he said. Our voices echoed in the cavern of the mortuary.
‘I didn’t know for sure it was murder. And anyway, you don’t have anything to go on.’ I nodded to Andrews’s body. ‘You can’t even prove this wasn’t an accident.’
‘But I’ve got enough from you to start a murder inquiry. A call for help and a declaration that his life was threatened immediately before he was killed. And we know that Tam and Frankie McGahern’s deaths were murder and now there’s a link with Andrews’s death.’
I nodded thoughtfully. I knew I hadn’t given him enough to make a case. I hadn’t told him about the faked shipment manifests that Andrews had told me about on the ’phone. And, of course, I hadn’t said a thing about a fourth connected death: Bobby, who was by now probably a better pie filling than he had been a petty crook. I also kept schtum about everything else I’d picked up, including my gut feeling that my Fred MacMurray lookalike and his chums were completely unconnected to the less than competent mob who’d tried to lift me from Argyle Street. The truth was I wanted time to dig deeper myself. Ferguson was a good cop, but he was supported by a spectrum of policing talents that ranged from the incompetent to the corrupt. They would either trample all over the evidence or, if I was right and there was someone on the inside on Lillian’s payroll, they would actively bury it. Anyway, I didn’t work for the interests of justice: I worked for Willie Sneddon.
‘You going to question Lillian Andrews?’ I asked.
‘Got to. Got to get to the bottom of this, Lennox.’
‘Listen, Jock. I’ve shown you mine, now you show me yours. What did you mean I didn’t know what I was messing with?’
Ferguson pulled the sheet back over John Andrews’s smashed face, pushed the body tray into the cubicle and closed the door. I thought of Andrews’s Bentley, his big house and its Contemporary furniture, his sixty-guinea suits. Now all he had to his name was a winding sheet and a chilled steel cabinet and even those were on loan. It made me think of when you got to know someone in the war who ended up getting killed: everything they had told you about their lives, all the conversations you had had with them, it all became unreal when they were lying in front of you, just so much mince.
‘Just trust me, Lennox: you don’t have any idea what you’re messing with. The truth is I don’t either. All I know is that it’s political or something. McNab has a bee up his arse because someone put it there, and I think it buzzed all the way from Whitehall.’
‘What?’ I shook my head in disbelief. ‘We’re talking about the McGaherns here, not Burgess and Maclean. A couple of thieves and a whore. What can be political about that?’ The truth was what Ferguson had said had started all kinds of alarms ringing. Not just politics, Middle East politics. I already had suspicions about where Fred MacMurray’s kid brother and his pals had come from, but I couldn’t for the life of me work out what they could have to do with the McGaherns’ sordid little realm.
‘I don’t know what the story is,’ said Ferguson. ‘All I do know is that there have been Special Branch types hanging around St Andrew’s Street. The odd military sort too.’
‘I bumped into McNab the other night. Or more like he bumped into me… accidently on purpose. He had a couple of MPs in tow. Some shite about stolen uniforms.’
‘No shite,’ said Ferguson. ‘But not connected, as far as I can see. The MPs are involved because a couple of army uniforms were nicked. It’s the police uniforms that McNab is worried about. He’s crapping himself in case some outfit is going to pull an IPO job. When crooks impersonate police officers the public get jittery and there’s all kind of political bollocks to deal with. And McNab has enough on his plate with the McGahern thing.’
We made our way out of the mortuary hall and back up the stairwell. Once we were out on the street we both simultaneously drew deep breaths of Glasgow air. Hardly fresh, but at least it didn’t smell stale or carbolic- rinsed.
‘I still don’t get it, Jock. I mean, how this thing with the McGaherns could possibly be political.’ I was pushing him. It was already beginning to make sense to me: phoney shipments through a company that already dealt with the Far and Near East. But I wanted to know all that Jock Ferguson knew.
‘I can’t tell you any more. Because I don’t know any more.’
‘But that’s why you warned me off the McGahern thing to start with, isn’t it?’
He offered me a cigarette. We lit up and I looked around in a leisurely way. I saw the Talbot parked on the other side of the street, about two hundred yards up. Please, Twinkletoes, I thought, don’t do the psycho-chauffeur thing and come over to pick me up.
‘You want a lift back?’ asked Ferguson. ‘I’ll get the driver to drop you. I’m just going round the corner.’ He referred to St Andrew’s Street, a block away and where the City of Glasgow HQ was located.
‘No thanks. I feel like a walk.’ The Talbot hadn’t moved. Maybe the Reader’s Digest was stretching Twinkletoes’s concentration over three-syllable words like a prisoner on the rack. ‘Jock,’ I said tentatively, ‘I’ve got a favour to ask.’
‘How fucking unlike you.’
‘Can you hold off on talking to Lillian Andrews? At least for a few days. Maybe a week.’
‘Sure. No problem. And just let me know if you want us to turn a blind eye to an armed robbery getaway car. We could even arrange a points duty bobby to hold the traffic back for it.’ Sarcasm is a fine art: Ferguson was clearly a weekend painter. ‘Andrews was murdered. Everything points to Lillian Andrews being behind it. Why should I piss about?’
‘Okay, gloves off, Jock. Because if you go steaming in now she’ll get away with it. I didn’t like Andrews. I didn’t like anything about him. But I made it my business to help him and I let him down. I want to see that bitch hang for it. You know that I can find out more in a week on my own than a team of your flatfoots would in six months. People talk to me who would clam up if you asked them the time of day. Added to which we’ve got reason to believe that Lillian probably has contacts inside the City Police. Give me a couple of weeks and I’ll give you Lillian Andrews and whoever she’s involved with. Gift-wrapped.’
Ferguson took a final draw on his cigarette and dropped the stub onto the mortuary’s step. He ground it into the stone with the toe of his shoe and stared at it. ‘Okay. Two weeks. But I won’t walk away from this empty- handed. If you fuck up and Lillian disappears into the night, then it’ll be me gift-wrapping your testicles for Superintendent McNab.’
‘Fair enough.’
I waited until Ferguson had rounded the corner before I crossed the Saltmarket and started to walk in the direction of the High Street. After a few hundred yards Twinkletoes pulled up alongside and I jumped into the passenger seat. I felt claustrophobic crammed in next to Twinkletoes’s bulk and I imagined how cosy it was going to be sharing a ride with both him and Tiny Semple. I got him to drop me off at my digs and told him to fetch Tiny.
‘We’re going visiting,’ I explained.
