‘We’ll cross that bridge when you come to it, Lennox. Just remember who’s paying you. You find out something, I hear it first. And if I say no one else hears about it, that’s the way it’ll be.’
‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘Maybe we can start with you telling me something more about Tam and Frankie. I don’t know much about them at all. Never had to come across them.’ I rubbed the back of my neck, remembering how difficult it had been to convince McNab of that fact.
‘Not much to tell,’ said Sneddon. ‘Couple of wee Fenians on the make. You know the type: one generation away from shiteing in a Galway peat bog. They were trying to carve themselves a wee empire. More Tam than Frankie. Tam was hard, ambitious and sharp as a tack. Frankie was just…’ Sneddon frowned as he sought an appropriate comparative. ‘Frankie was just a wee cunt.’
‘I would have thought that they’d have divided the action up equally, being twins and all.’
‘Aye, you would have thought that. But the brains weren’t divided equally. Tam and Frankie were only identical twins in the way they looked. Like I said, Tam was the brains… and the muscle… of the operation. He was a clever wee fucker, by all accounts. Frankie wasn’t. Tam ran things and looked after Frankie. Threw him scraps from the table.’
‘So they were close?’
‘How the fuck am I supposed to know? Not my type of people, if you catch my drift. But I did hear one story about how Frankie leaned on some whore who was operating her business independently. Tam found out and gave Frankie a real hiding. But then there’s another story about how Tam paid a fucking fortune to have some nobody take a rap and do six months inside for Frankie. Just so Frankie didn’t have a record.’
‘Frankie’s got no criminal record?’
‘None.’ Sneddon lit a cigarette without offering me one. ‘Neither of them has. Tam because he was smart. Frankie because it was as if Tam went out of his way to keep Frankie’s record clean. But, like I say, he wasn’t above giving Frankie a hiding.’
‘What operations did they run?’ I asked.
‘Three bars — the Highlander, the Imperial and the Westfield — and a couple of bookies; they did a few half- decent hold-ups and they ran security for a whore-house. And they had a small-time protection thing going on. But, like I say, Tam McGahern was a cunning wee shite. He always had some kind of scam going on. We tried to keep track of what he was up to but he always was too slippery.’
‘Okay,’ I said and stood up, lifting my hat from Sneddon’s ornate desk. ‘I’ll see what I can find out. But it may be tricky. A lot of people are nervous about the whole McGahern thing. Reluctant to talk.’
Sneddon leaned to one side in his chair and shouted ‘Twinkletoes!’ past me and out into the hall.
Suddenly the light in the study dimmed, as if the door had been closed. I knew, without turning, that it hadn’t: it was just that Twinkletoes McBride was standing in the door frame.
‘You’ve met Twinkletoes before, haven’t you, Lennox?’
‘Not in a professional capacity.’ I smiled weakly and turned to nod a greeting to the beast in the doorway.
‘Hello, Mr Lennox,’ Twinkletoes said in his troll baritone, smiled and sat down on the chair by the door. He was a friendly cuss. Not too bright. Read comic books. Occasionally quoted from the Reader’s Digest. Tortured people for Sneddon.
‘This is going to be a tough nut to crack, Lennox,’ said Sneddon. ‘People aren’t keen to talk. I want you to use Twinkletoes if that happens.’
‘Listen, Mr Sneddon… that’s not really my style. No offence, Twinkletoes.’
Twinkletoes McBride sat smiling silently, a dark mass of friendly menace in the corner. Conversation was not his strong point: his reputation was for getting other people to talk. The origin of the epithet ‘Twinkletoes’ lay in his methods as Sneddon’s torturer. These involved the removal of the victim’s socks and shoes, the use of a pair of bolt cutters and McBride’s recitation, with a surprising use of ironic humour, of ‘this little piggy went to market’. Apparently Twinkletoes would leave the big toe of each foot until last.
‘I give them the chance to talk before I do the big toe,’ the normally laconic McBride had once explained to me. ‘Unless Mr Sneddon has said he doesn’t want them to walk again. You can’t balance without your big toe, you know.’
‘That’s a really interesting fact,’ I had said.
‘Aye…’ Twinkletoes’s vast, battered moon of a face had shone with an almost child-like pride in his learning. ‘I read it in the Reader’s Digest.’
I smiled to myself on the way out of Sneddon’s mock-baronial, mock-Gothic, mock-respectable mansion. I had managed to become unemployed and employed within an hour. And between John Andrews’s cheque and Sneddon’s bundle of fivers, I was already two hundred pounds richer.
The only downside was that I hadn’t a clue where to start looking, I had the City of Glasgow Police breathing down my already bruised neck, someone highly professional had given my office a thorough going over, and the Neanderthal chiropodist from hell was shadowing me.
CHAPTER FOUR
The first thing I set about doing was finding out who the girl was that Tam McGahern had been giving the seeing-to immediately before his untimely demise. No name had been mentioned. Normally I would have bought Jock Ferguson a pint in the Horsehead Bar and teased it out of him. But every time I thought about his parting shot in the car, it was like touching an electric fence around the police. It was one source — usually my most important and reliable — that I wouldn’t be able to use this time. I had no choice but to dive right on in there and go round to McGahern’s bar in Maryhill.
The Highlander Bar was surprisingly free of any cultural reference to the Highlands or Highlanders. No grand paintings on the walls of ‘Stag at Bay’ or ‘The Bonnie Prince’. Nor was there a comprehensive array of the fine single malts of Scotland behind the bar. No aroma of rain-washed heather, unless rain-washed heather smells like smoke and piss. Instead the Highlander Bar was typical of the kind of spit-and-sawdust Glasgow pubs that turned over a huge profit. This was a drinking factory. The men who came here — and there was no snug or lounge for the ladies — worked harder at their consumption of beer, fortified sherry or the cheapest blended Scotch they could find than they did in the shipyards or steelworks they had come directly from. I arrived just after opening and the Highlander Bar was already heaving. I am just shy of six foot but still felt awash in an ocean of chest-high flat caps, wreathed in a sea fog of tobacco smoke.
There were three barmen working the bar with a joyless, industrial efficiency. One seemed to be in charge, barking sideways orders to the others as he worked the pumps and the optics. He was a short, angry-looking man in a striped shirt with elasticated sleeve-garters to keep his white cuffs clear of his wrists. He spotted me across the mass of customers and frowned. He disappeared out of sight for a moment and the next thing I knew there were two cap-less thugs in cheap suits flanking me.
‘You all right, pal?’ said one with a yellow-toothed grin. He was a short, ugly youth with dirty blond hair sleeked back in panels at the side that arced into a ‘DA’ hairstyle. He was trying too hard to project friendly menace.
‘I’m fine. You?’
‘Oh the best, pal. If you don’t mind me saying, you’re not one of the usuals here.’ His companion was also smiling with the same insincere friendliness. ‘What brings you here, if you don’t mind me asking?’
I made a ‘you got me’ face. ‘I’m a reporter. To be honest I’m here because of that murder. You know, the one upstairs.’
A third thug came in through the doors behind me. He was bigger than the other two. But, like them, he was trying too hard to look tough.
‘It was a fucking liberty. A fucking liberty,’ said the short blond thug. ‘Mr McGahern was a gentleman. Treated everybody right. Listen, pal, we used to work for Mr McGahern. We still do, in a way. We can give you all the gen you need.’
‘You can?’
‘Oh, aye… no problem at all. Anything you need to know.’
