shoulders.
‘Come on up,’ she said. I followed her out of the kitchen and up a tight stairwell that had obviously been intended originally for servants. It was clear she was trying to keep me from seeing the main business of the house. As if I could forget.
I had half-expected her to bring food up with her from the kitchen, but when we got to the attic part of the house, it was clear it was a self-contained dwelling. Her space. Away from business. The rooms she had would originally have been the servants’ quarters but, given the Georgian scale of the house, were still impressive enough. There was a small alcoved section, divided off by a bead screen, behind which something bubbled on a hob and filled the room with a rich, appetizing aroma.
‘The only thing I miss up here is having a piano. There’s one down in the drawing room, but I seldom get a chance to play it.’ I gave her the book I’d picked up for her that afternoon in Princes Street, Coins in the Fountain by John Secondari, and she took the wine from me, pouring us a glass each.
While she cooked I looked out of the window. There was a stone pillared colonnade edging the roof and I could see out across the trees in the crescent below. Edinburgh sat mute and grey under a sky shot through with sunset-red silk. I thought of how I’d been here before, in a different apartment looking out over a different city while Helena had cooked and we had chatted and laughed and deceived each other with talk of the future. In my experience, the future was like a seaside day out to Largs: in principle it sounded great, but when you arrived there it just turned out to be the same old shite.
I suddenly felt tired and wished I wasn’t there. But I smiled as cheerfully as I could when she came through with two plates of goulash.
‘It’s almost impossible to find half-decent ingredients here,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what it is the British have against food that you can taste. That you’d want to taste.’ She laughed and revealed a hint of the girl she’d probably been before the war. She seemed relaxed and I noticed I could hear her accent more. She had left something of the Helena I’d talked to two weeks before down in the house below. Like a formal coat she wore only for business.
The goulash was delicious. As it always had been. We drank the wine I’d brought and then a second bottle she had. We talked and laughed some more, then fell on each other with a savagery that was almost frightening. She scratched and bit me and stared at me wildly with something akin to hatred in her eyes. Afterwards we lay naked on the rug, drank what was left of the wine and smoked.
‘Why don’t you tell me why you’re really here?’ she asked, her voice suddenly cold and hard again.
‘I’m here to see you, Helena,’ I said, and almost believed it myself. ‘After I saw you the other week I couldn’t stop thinking about you. About us.’ At least that much was true.
‘There is no us,’ she said, but the chill had thawed a little. She turned on her side and we looked into each other’s eyes. ‘There never was an us. So why don’t you save us both a lot of time and get to what it is you want. Unless you’ve just had it.’
‘Don’t, Helena. It’s not you.’
‘What? To be bitter and cynical?’ She laughed and rolled onto her back again. She stared up at the ceiling and smoked and I took in her finely sculpted profile. ‘We’re both cut from the same rotten wood, you and I, Lennox. So cut the crap and tell me what you want.’
‘Okay, I did want to ask you something, but I did come here to see you. To be with you.’ I sat up and took a long pull on my cigarette. ‘Listen, Helena, someone… a friend of mine… was talking to me the other day. About wanting to get away. To have a new start. Why can’t we?’
Helena turned to me. The only light was the glow from the fire and the red-gold of it etched the contours of her body. When she spoke her voice was low. ‘Stop it. We’ve been here before.’
‘Were we wrong? Why couldn’t it work?’ I realized that, at that moment, I meant what I was saying. ‘My folks have money. I have some money saved. And God knows you must have a bit put away. You said yourself the last time I was here that you dreamed of selling up and starting a new life. We could go to Canada. Away from everyone and everything that’s gone wrong in our lives.’
Helena stood up and pulled her dress back over her body. The ice was back in her voice. ‘The main thing that’s gone wrong in our lives is us. Like I said, Lennox, you and I are both rotten. We blame it all on everything that has happened to us, but the truth is it was always there in us both. It just took a little bit of history to bring it to the surface. Forget what I said before… sometimes I talk nonsense. To keep sane. So why don’t you just tell me what it is that you want?’
Sometimes you feel more naked than others. I stood up and pulled on my clothes, feeling uncomfortable under her gaze.
‘Arthur Parks is dead.’
‘I know.’
‘I’m to find out who killed him.’
‘And what does that have to do with me?’ It was fully dark outside and the dying fire was all the light I had to see her face. But I sensed it set hard.
‘Okay, Helena, I’ll tell you all that I know and what I haven’t told my client yet. And it’ll tell you exactly what I think it has to do with you. Arthur Parks was murdered by someone connected to whatever happened to Tam McGahern, the tough spivvy-type you say you saw Sally Blane with.
‘This is the way I see it, or I’m guessing it… Tam McGahern sees he can’t expand his little empire beyond Glasgow. The Three Kings have him in their sights if he puts a foot wrong. It’s true that Tam McGahern may be a psychopath, but he’s also smarter than the Three Kings put together. And he’s seen that there are opportunities to be had in the big wide world outside Glasgow. So he comes up with a scheme… and here’s where it gets a little sketchy, because I’m not a hundred per cent on what the scheme was, but it’s got to do with the Middle East. So Tam decides to hook himself a few big fish. With me so far?’
‘Go on.’ Helena’s face was suddenly illuminated as she lit another cigarette.
‘So Tam conceives this honey-trap operation, gets together a handful of really classy chippies. Not the usual sort, girls with a bit of class and real lookers. He sets them up in a house in the West End, but my guess is that some of the punters who go there don’t even know they’re whores or that the house is a bordello. Tam was in the Desert Rats and Gideon, so he has an interesting network of friends, including, I think, Arthur Parks. So Tam gives Arthur a cut of the action in exchange for helping him set it all up — creaming off the best customers and sending them to the West End operation. Like I said, I think a few non-punters were also targeted by the girls directly. To start with I thought that this was all a trap-fuck-and-blackmail operation. But they are too selective in their targets. It’s a list of names, Helena. A list of names that McGahern needs to make his plan work. One of them is Alexander Knox, the plastic surgeon. Why they need him beats me. But the main target is John Andrews, the poor mug who marries Lillian not knowing she is really a prostitute and porn-film actress called Sally Blane. Andrews seems to be their main target because they need to use his importing business.’
‘What for?’
‘That I’m not entirely sure of. But I am sure it involves taking things in or out of the Middle East. Anyway, something goes wrong. Tam is targeted by someone who doesn’t like his enterprising spirit, so he fakes his own death by killing his brother. But his hunters aren’t convinced and they do both brothers. Tam exits stage left under his twin brother’s name. But Sally Blane, or Lillian Andrews as she now is, keeps the plan running. Part of that plan is to divert suspicion for the second McGahern death onto me, and then to frame me good and proper for the Parks murder.’
‘But that doesn’t make sense,’ said Helena. She kept the lights out.
‘Maybe they fell out. Or maybe getting rid of Parks, just like getting rid of Frankie, was part of the plan from the start.’
‘I still don’t see what this has to do with me, Lennox.’
‘Parks wasn’t the only one supplying names and helping set up the West End operation. Parks didn’t have the style for it. I got chatting to one of McGahern’s former lackeys, a nobody called Bobby who tells me that McGahern was cracked up on the woman who ran the shop for him. Molly. To start with I think that’s Lillian, but there’s talk of a foreign woman.’
‘Me.’
‘That’s what I don’t know. I hope to God it’s not, Helena. Because if it is, you’ve got yourself into some serious trouble. Whoever did Tam is a serious outfit. And I don’t think we’re talking about gangsters.’
