We parted company on the street outside his office. He shook my hand and handed me one of his expensive embossed cards.
‘Thanks,’ I smiled, ‘but I don’t think I’ll be needing your services.’
‘You never know, Mr Lennox. But that’s not why I gave it to you.’ He unlocked the door of his new Bentley R- type and I could have sworn I smelled polished walnut and leather from twenty yards away. ‘It is I who may need your services in the future.’ He got into his Bentley and drove off. I stared at his card. So far I’d been offered informal partnerships with a professional murderer and the most despised figure in the Scottish legal system. Maybe I should change my image.
I pocketed the card. I’d told him I would never need his services. Truth was that if the police made the link between the Parks and Smails murder scenes, then Greasy George could be exactly who I’d need.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The City of Glasgow Police could not be accused of dynamism. It took Greasy George a full forty-eight hours to get first Sneddon, then the other two Kings out of custody. It also took them that length of time to find Ronnie Smails’s body, by which time his cup of tea, and the trail, would be colder than stone cold.
The local newspapers had been a little more lively. Details of the robbery were emerging. It had taken place just north of the border and the trap had been sprung with military precision. There had been three lorries and an army truck escort, because of the nature of the cargo: brand-new Sterling-Patchett L2A1 sub-machine guns, which were being brought in to replace the older Sten guns. There had been an exchange of gunfire, which had left two Tommies dead on the road. One of the drivers was still in a critical condition and had not regained consciousness. The other was providing the police with descriptions of the attack and the attackers. One of the robbers had been wounded by army fire, but had made his escape.
This had been the caper that Tam McGahern had been building up to. And I had a pretty good idea about exactly what was going to happen next.
I had two house calls to make. Both were on the South Side. But first I had to pick up a couple of things from my place. I took my Webley and stashed it under the front passenger seat of the Atlantic. One Saturday night, a couple of months previously, I had gotten into a debate with a thug in Argyle Street. He had tried to compensate for his lack of guts and skill by pulling a knife on me: a beautiful, pearl-handled Italian switchblade. We ended the encounter with me up one pearl-handled switchblade and him down several less-than-pearly teeth. I had hung onto the knife. Now I slipped it into my jacket pocket.
Then I went out to play.
First I travelled along Paisley Road West and into the future. The address I had for Jackie Gillespie was near Bellahouston Park. A reasonably new rented Glasgow Corporation semi-detached, Gillespie’s house looked clean and bright and optimistic. But the real future was looming over it: a spider’s web of scaffolding encased a stepped rank of massive, almost complete apartment blocks. Moss Heights. This was where the Glaswegian of the future would live: free from the tenement, free from overcrowding and disease.
Free from any sense of community.
The fact was that Glasgow had swollen like a tumour and was now squeezing against the Green Belt. And if you couldn’t build out, you could build up. The geniuses in the City Chambers had decided that the solution to having Glaswegians living on top of each other was to have Glaswegians living on top of each other.
Given my experience of my last couple of house calls, I took the precaution of parking a little away from Gillespie’s house. The pavement beneath my feet was pristine, as were the roughcast and roofs of the houses I passed, their gardens still raw, earth scars, waiting for the first sowing of grass. As I walked, the ringing of heavy tools echoed from the building site in the sky half a mile distant.
Jackie Gillespie, as far as I knew, had no wife or children, yet his bright, new semi-detached council house had clearly been intended for a family. As far as I could see the neighbouring house was yet to be occupied. No one answered my ringing of the doorbell and, after checking there were no neighbours watching, I slipped around to the back of the house. The back door was unlocked. Well, to tell the truth it was de — locked. Someone had applied their size tens to it and the wood had splintered. My money was on a Highlander in blue. I had decided to be a little more prepared this time and I took a pair of gloves out of my raincoat pocket and put them on before pushing open the door.
It was fast becoming a bit of a tradition for me to find a freshly strangled corpse in situations like these, and I felt almost disappointed not to find Gillespie sitting in bulge-eyed welcome. Alive or dead, he wasn’t here. But whether it had been the coppers or not, someone had given his place a thorough turning over.
I didn’t hang around. If it hadn’t been the coppers then it would be soon. They were capable of thinking, even if it was a little more slowly than the rest of us. I knew that Jackie Gillespie had been seen talking to Tam McGahern, and I knew Tam McGahern had been planning a big getout-of-Glasgow job. The police didn’t. But they would be working their way through a list of top armed robbers who could have pulled a job like this. And Jackie Gillespie was pretty close to the top of the list.
But whoever had turned over his place had made the connection before me. And that didn’t fit with the police.
I got back in the car and headed south, stopping at a callbox on the way to ’phone Sneddon. There was something even colder and harder than usual about his voice.
‘Someone’s gonna pay for this, Lennox. Someone’s gonna pay hard and long. It’s been years since a copper’s felt he’s had the balls to lift a hand to me.’
‘McNab?’
‘He’s a fuckin’ traitor. He’s supposed to be Orange, for fuck’s sake. Instead of hassling me, he should have been kicking the Irish green shite out of that fucking Fenian Murphy.’
‘To be fair, Mr Sneddon, I think he’s been doing exactly that. And Jonny Cohen.’
‘Maybes. You’re right about Cohen, though. Word is he took a hammering. The cozzers picked on him special, ’cause armed robbery’s his thing.’
I could imagine it. Jonny Cohen would be at the top of the list. But it was the other name I was interested in.
‘Have they pulled in Jackie Gillespie?’ I asked.
‘How the fuck should I know?’ said Sneddon dully. Then, after a pause, ‘Why? Is Gillespie part of the firm that pulled this stunt?’
‘I don’t know. I think so. Listen, Mr Sneddon, I think I’ve put this all together. It’s like I said to you before; this could bring all kinds of trouble for you, Murphy and Sneddon. Today was just the start. This has a political element to it. Can you call a meeting? Get the other two Kings together and I can go over what I know. I’m going to need your combined resources to crack this.’
‘I dunno, Lennox. The coppers are still sticking to us like shite to a shirt tail. I’ll do my best.’
‘I’ll ’phone back in a couple of hours.’
After hanging up, I headed off for my second house call. I drove down to Mount Vernon and parked around the corner from the tenement block I’d seen Eskimo Nell go into on the night that Smails had had his collar tightened. There were three storeys of flats above a ground floor of shop fronts. There was an Austin A30 parked outside the close. All of the flats had lights on and I guessed Eskimo Nell was in. I hoped that she was alone. If she had company I could probably deal with it, but it could make things complicated. Slow me down.
I climbed the back stairs and knocked on the door. It was opened by the girl I’d followed back from Smails’s place. She looked a little unsure of herself and kept the door on the chain. She had a pretty face. Beautiful, almost. There was no doubt about the fact that she was the woman I’d seen Lillian Andrews with. She had a touch of class about her: just like Lillian, just like Wilma, just like Lena who had been rejected because the class evaporated whenever she spoke.
‘What do you want?’ she asked.
‘I’m a friend of Tam’s,’ I said, and tried to look both conspiratorial and in a hurry. ‘And of Sally’s. I’ve got a message for you.’
I thought the script and the performance were perfect, but it was clear I’d misread my audience. She
