come into the room and my eyes had met Parks’s, I knew only one of us was capable of seeing. He sat in the middle of the living room. Someone had pushed the coffee table and sofa to one side to clear enough room for them to go to work on Parks, whom they had tied to a kitchen chair. And go to work on him they had. His jaw sat at an angle to his face that was all wrong. Maybe they had tried to fix his underbite. Most of his face was swollen up into purple puffs of distended flesh. It takes time to bruise and swell like that, and it was my guess that whoever had killed Parks had taken a long time about it.
Parks was dressed only in his vest and underpants and the light-coloured carpet beneath the chair was stained dark with blood and urine. His tongue hung out over the dislocated jaw and his eyes bulged at me, as if emphasizing a point: I am fucking dead. I ignored the smell and drew close, examining his neck. Something thick, like a belt, had been used to garrotte him and there were spider webs of blue-black marks where it had crushed capillaries.
Parks’s killing had all the hallmarks of a protracted interrogation under torture followed by execution. Well, to be fair, that was the end of the playground Parks had played in. It was the end of the playground I played in. It was ludicrous to think that Sneddon might have been behind it, but I hadn’t seen Twinkletoes since the previous day and I found myself making a quick inventory of Parks’s naked toes.
I sat down on the shoved-aside sofa and stared at Parks. It didn’t help: he didn’t have any ideas about what I should do next. I did get a clue though, when I heard the urgent trilling bells of approaching police cars. Nice. Once more I thought of MacDonald, the teenage ice hockey right forward who could literally run rings around me. I was being framed better than the theatrical posters on Parks’s walls. The police car bells sounded a street or so away but near enough for a front-door exit to be out of the question. I ran through into the kitchen. It was narrow and had a huge sash window facing the rear. The police would send a car around to the back but their main attention would be on the front door. I slid the window open. There was a pipe angled steeply away from where the kitchen drain branched down to join the main down pipe. Shinning down the main pipe wouldn’t be too difficult, but traversing the kitchen wastepipe to get to it would.
Still, shouldn’t be a problem, I thought: if they found me in Parks’s back yard with busted ankles after trying to escape from the floor on which they would find his tortured and murdered body, it wouldn’t take that much explaining.
I eased out through the window and found the steep angle of the pipe with the toes of my suede Derbys. I took my hat off and threw it down onto the yard below then, scrabbling for a grip on the sandstone, I eased myself down, supporting my weight on the sill. As I inched towards the downpipe, I heard the police car bells ringing more loudly. There was no way I would be able to balance on the wastepipe: I would have to get quick purchase on it and swing over to the main downpipe, hoping that I could grab it firmly enough.
I bent my knees and propelled myself sideways, reaching for the pipe. I grazed my knuckles painfully on the stone wall, but managed to get a decent enough grip. The sleeve of my suit jacket caught on the pipe bracket and I heard the fabric rip. I scuttled down the pipe as fast as I dared and folded into a heap on the flagstones at the bottom. I caught my breath and tried to stand. No busted ankles but my back hurt like a son-of-a-bitch. I grabbed my hat and ran across the small yard, then out onto the alleyway.
I reckoned the coppers would be coming from the direction of Sauchiehall Street, so I headed the other way. I sprinted to the end of the alley then turned right and tried to walk as normally and inconspicuously as possible. I looked down at myself: I was wearing a dark-brown wool suit with suede Hush Puppies. I like to look smart, even if I’m just meeting with homo Glaswegian pimps. However, my choice of outfit today had been particularly fitting: the suede of my shoes and the easily bruised wool of the suit, added to my grazed knuckles, all spoke very eloquently of a recent and rushed descent down a drainpipe. I examined my sleeve and saw that a strip was missing, presumably snagged on the pipe’s support clamp.
All it would take would be for a patrol car to pass me, the only pedestrian in the area. Then I’d be well and truly shafted. Only the Belgian rabbit-fur felt of my expensive Borsalino fedora seemed to have survived unscathed. I put on the hat and dusted down my suit as much as possible. Casual, Lennox. Stay cool and casual.
But my mind raced. I decided to get into Kelvingrove Park and cut back up north towards Great Western Road. My guess was that they would send out teams of police on foot to search the area. By the time they got organized, I would be out of the park and sufficiently removed from the scene of the crime. But not necessarily in the clear. If it had been hinted to the police that I was a name to be looked at, then they would find my fingerprints all over the basement and upstairs kitchen sash windows as well as half a dozen door handles.
It could, of course, have been purely coincidental that I happened along just after Parks had been helped to go down a collar size; but there is a wonderful word that only the Scots use, mainly in legal contexts: timeous. Timeous means something like ‘within or at the correct time’. My discovery of Parks’s tortured body had been timeous. The arrival of the police had been timeous. All too timeous to be coincidental.
My immediate problem was to get away from the area. But there was no way of knowing just how much of a lead the police had been given.
I was now on Park Quadrant. Park Quadrant delineated the outer ring of the concentric terraced circles of Georgian townhouses. There were houses only on one side of the Quadrant: an arc of Georgian terrace. On the other side of the broad, sweeping street was a railing-edged pavement looking out over Kelvingrove Park. Unfortunately there was a drop on the other side of the railings, which prevented me simply vaulting them and disappearing into the park.
I walked as fast as I could without making myself conspicuous. I had just reached the junction of Park Terrace when a black police Wolseley coasted around the sweep of the Quadrant behind me. I dodged behind the meagre cover of the branches of a tree that overhung the railings from the Park below. I squeezed against the row of railings. Beyond them was the drop down into the park, which spread out dark-green under a granite sky.
It was my only way out. If I hung around any longer the place would be teeming with coppers. But until the police Wolseley had passed, I daren’t make a move.
The Wolseley crept past me. There would have been no way the coppers inside could have missed me if they looked in my direction. But they didn’t. The patrol car drove by, slowly. Just when I thought I was getting lucky, the Wolseley stopped fifty yards further on, on the other side of the street. I prepared to make a run for it.
A tall copper got out of the passenger seat and walked over to the front of the Georgian terrace. He leaned over the railings and looked down and along the basement entries, beneath street level. Again, he didn’t even look in my direction. The patrol car inched slowly along the Quadrant while the constable checked every basement court. I was relieved that they weren’t coming in my direction, but at the same time they were moving so slowly that I couldn’t move on. And that was a problem because very soon there would be more police cars and more flatfoots scouring every nook and cranny.
The copper moved on, still checking basements along the other side of the road. The black police Wolseley prowled beside him at walking pace. I decided to make my move: I climbed swiftly over the railings and eased myself down, my legs dangling above the bushes a dozen or so feet below. Again I spared a thought for my poor ankles, then let go of the railings. I crashed into the undergrowth but not loudly enough for the coppers to hear me. The angry fingers of the bushes scratched at me and I came to a tangled rest. Again no busted ankles, but my back protested with a stab of pain. I struggled through masses of bushes and emerged onto the thankfully empty path. Again I brushed down my suit and bashed the Borsalino back into shape before putting it on my head at an angle that would, hopefully, hide most of my features from passers-by.
I had just finished dusting myself off when I heard voices close by. It would have been perfectly normal to encounter other people in Kelvingrove Park, even on a weekday morning, but an old instinct told me to take cover.
Fortunately the civic authorities had chosen to place a vast commemorative statue directly in front of me. Even more fortunately they hadn’t replaced the railings that would have been melted down during the war to supply munitions factories. I ran around the massive rectangular base of the statue and pressed my back against an elaborate heroic frieze on the entablature: gallant soldiers of the British Empire liberating grateful natives around the world from the burden of self-determination. I looked up at the statue mounted above me. A dyspeptic, geriatric general on horseback looked out across Kelvingrove Park to the university and beyond, probably to the Empire that no one had told him was gone. The head of his steed was turned down towards me disdainfully.
The voices stopped but I heard the sound of boots on gravel. More than one pair. I stayed pressed into the entablature and waited until the footsteps had moved on. When I did look I saw the backs of three coppers. Once they were around the corner I headed off in the opposite direction. I had to get out quickly: it wouldn’t be long
