Lorna saw me to the door and kissed me as I was leaving. It was a desperate kind of embrace and her fingers squeezed tight and hard on my arms. It made me feel sad. Sad because she really needed something from me and I really wanted to give it to her. But I couldn’t, because it wasn’t there in me to give.
Lorna and I had been in it for the laughs, nothing more. And that was the way our little diversion should have played. But now, with her father murdered and finding herself alone, she was looking for something that neither of us had signed up for.
She seemed to sense its absence and drew back from me. Something cold had formed in her eyes: a frost of realization and resentment.
‘Listen Lorna…’ I began.
‘Save it, Lennox,’ she said.
When I came out of the mouth of the drive, a car turning in was forced to brake. I waved my thanks but the driver ignored me, heading up the drive as soon as I was clear. He didn’t even look in my direction, but I took a long look at him. The car was moderately fancy, a nearly new, maroon Lanchester Leda or Daimler Conquest, polished to gleam like a sleek droplet of fresh blood. The driver himself looked pretty polished: he was driving hatless so I could see he was around thirty with black hair and a pencil moustache. Neat. Tailored, as far as I could see. I pulled up at the kerb and considered going back up to the house to see what he wanted. He wasn’t a cop. Too well-turned out and expensively carriaged. I got out of the car and walked a little way up the drive, ducking behind a bush to take a surreptitious look. He was at the door and I could now see I was right about his suit. It was expensive. He was tall, maybe a couple of inches on me, which was rare for Glasgow. Maggie opened the door and let him in. She knew him, that was clear and they both unconsciously took a look back down the drive, as if checking no one was watching. Or maybe he had mentioned our brief encounter at the bottom of the drive. They couldn’t spot me behind my euonymus camouflage and disappeared into the house. There had been something about the way they had greeted each other that lay somewhere between the intimate and the professional. Maybe they had some business together.
There was, of course, a limit to how surreptitious they were being: Lorna was still in the house. Unless. I had a less than charitable thought about my recently bereaved sweetheart and dismissed it almost in the same instant it occurred to me. No conspiracy here, Lennox. And even if there is, I told myself, leave it alone. You’ve been warned. And anyway, while there might have been a moral imperative to help bring Small Change’s killer to justice, I had paying cases to work on.
And I was never much one for moral imperatives.
CHAPTER FOUR
It was getting late but I thought I’d call into the Horsehead Bar for a snifter before heading home. The Horsehead had become my unofficial second office. At one time my main office, but recently I’d been trying to make at least a half-hearted stab at legitimacy and had been spending less time there.
When I arrived, Big Bob the Barman grinned at me. I grinned back. He was a good sort, Big Bob. I’d often wondered if he’d become a barman for the alliterative effect; that if he had been known as Fat Fred he would have become a fireman. Whatever Big Bob had been before his time behind the bar, he was a tough son-of-a-bitch now. So close to the war, there was a bit of an unspoken rule: you recognized other men who’d been through the mincer and you didn’t talk about it. You identified each other as a common breed, but you didn’t talk about it.
‘Well fucking well.’ Bob poured me a Canadian Club. ‘Where have you been? I thought you’d fucked off back to Canada.’
‘You working for the New Brunswick tourist office too?’ I asked, he frowned. ‘I’ve been busy, Bob. Anyone been asking for me?’
‘Naw… just Little Bollocks over there.’ He nodded in the direction of a youth at the end of the bar. I beckoned for him to come over.
‘I take it he’s been nursing that half all night?’ I asked Bob, who gave a knowing look and nodded. ‘Give him a fresh pint.’
‘How’s it going, Mr Lennox?’ Davey Wallace beamed at me as he came round to my end of the bar and Big Bob handed him his beer. Davey was about five feet-seven, as fresh-faced as the Glasgow atmosphere would allow, and dressed in a too-big second-hand suit that had been expensive once. A war and a generation ago.
‘Hi, Davey,’ I said.
‘Business good?’ he bubbled with enthusiasm. ‘Any new cases?’
‘Same old stuff, Davey,’ I answered with a smile. Davey Wallace was a dreamer. A good kid, but a dreamer. For many within its boundaries, Glasgow was as much a prison as a home. The bars that confined them were the class system and, in almost every case, the lack of any viable alternative to a life of manual labour. The shipyards and the steelworks devoured the city’s young: I’d often wondered if Rotten Row, Glasgow’s appropriately named maternity hospital, simply put ‘apprentice’ instead of ‘boy’ on birth certificates.
Davey was an apprentice — an apprentice welder — working the morning shift in the shipyard. Started at fifteen and would most likely work there until he was sixty-five, by which time he would have given up his passion for Rock’n’Roll, probably because he’d be deaf from the constant riveting before he hit forty. But now, Davey Wallace, seventeen years old, parentless at seven, in an orphanage until fifteen, unmarried and with no kids yet to bind him further to an ineluctable industrial fate, escaped into the cinema every afternoon and Saturday night, where he would meet up with a different gang: Bogart, Cagney, Mitchum, Robinson, Mature.
When Davey had found out that I was a real-life enquiry agent, he had approached me in the bar like a Greek shepherd approaching Zeus. Since then, he had taken every opportunity to remind me that if I was ever looking for help…
‘Thanks for the pint, Mr Lennox.’
‘You’re welcome, Davey. Shouldn’t you be in bed? What about your early shift?’
‘I sleep in the afternoons, mostly.’ Then, as if correcting himself: ‘But I’m always available… you know, if you needed any help on one of your cases, Mr Lennox. I’m always here.’
I exchanged a look with Big Bob, who grinned.
‘Listen, Davey,’ I said. ‘It’s not like you think it is. It’s not like in the movies. There’s nothing glamorous about what I do for a living.’
His expression dulled. ‘You should try working down at the shipyards. Anything’s glamorous compared to that.’
‘Really,’ I grinned. ‘I would have thought it was riveting…’
Davey either didn’t get or didn’t appreciate the gag and stared at his pint glumly. It was, I had noticed, a Scottish tradition. I sighed.
‘Listen, Davey, I can’t offer you a job because I don’t have a job to offer. I struggle to pay my own way at times. But here’s the deal… if anything comes up where I need an extra pair of eyes, or need any kind of help, I’ll give you a shout. Okay?’
He looked up from his beer and beamed at me. ‘Anything, Mr Lennox. You can rely on me.’
‘Okay, Davey. Why don’t you finish your beer and get off home. Like I say, I’ll get in touch if I need anything.’
I let him hang on my elbow till he finished his drink. After he was gone, Big Bob came back and poured me another Canadian Club.
‘You realize I only keep this pish in here for you,’ he said. ‘Why can’t you drink Scotch like everybody else?’
I cast my gaze around the bar, trying to penetrate the bluegrey cigarette haze. A knot of older men in flat caps sat huddled around a table in the corner playing dominoes and smoking scrappy roll-up cigarettes. Swirled in cloud-like tobacco smoke, they paused from their game only to sip their whisky and laid their dominoes on the beer-ringed table top with the joyfulness of grim Titans toppling graveyard headstones. Glasgow at its most Goyaesque.
‘I don’t know, Bob,’ I said wistfully. ‘Maybe it’s a delight I’m saving myself for…’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake…’ Bob said, suddenly distracted and looking over my shoulder. I turned and saw that four
