young men had come in through the side door of the public bar.
‘Tommy… Jimmy…’ Bob called to the two other barmen and the three of them stepped out from behind the bar with a squared-up purposefulness and crossed to the young men. I noticed that the newcomers were dressed in rough work clothes; one wore a heavy leather armless tabard over his jacket and all four were wearing rubber boots. I noticed that their hair was longer than the usual and the guy with the tabard had thick, black, curling locks. They had the sunburned look of men who spent more time outdoors than in.
‘Fucking pikeys…’ Bob muttered under his breath as he passed me. ‘Okay you lot… fuck off out of it. I’ve told your mob before you’re not welcome here.’
‘All we want is a drink,’ said Curly, with a dull expression and a hint of Irish in his accent. It was clear he was accustomed to welcomes like the one Big Bob was offering. ‘Just a drink. Quiet like. No trouble.’
‘You’ll get no drink here. You lot don’t know how to have a quiet drink. I’ve had the place wrecked before by your kind. Now fuck off.’
One of the others stared hard at Bob. He had the ready stance of someone thinking about kicking off. Curly put a hand on his shoulder and said something to him I couldn’t understand. The tension went from his frame and the three walked out silently, but not hurriedly.
‘Fucking pikeys…’ Bob repeated after they were gone.
‘Gypsies?’ I asked.
‘Irish tinkers. They’re over here for the Vinegarhill Fair in the Gallowgate. They’ve pitched up camp by the old vinegar works.’
‘They seemed reasonable enough to me,’ I said.
Big Bob crossed his Popeye forearms across his massive chest. ‘Aye, they seem that way now, but a few drinks in them and they go fucking mental. By the end of the night I’d be picking the furniture up for firewood if I start letting knackers drink in here. Drink and fight, that’s all these bastards know.’
‘Yeah… drink and fight,’ I repeated, trying to work out how this fact distinguished them from the usual Glaswegian customer. ‘It’s funny, I was at a pikey fight the other night.’
‘Aye? I bet there was blood and snotters all over the place. Fucking mental.’ Bob shook his head in a way that reminded me of the awe Sneddon had displayed when talking about his tinker fighters.
I got back to my digs about ten. As I passed her door, I heard Fiona White switch the television off. I had bought a set six months before, when my cash flow had been going through one of its sporadically positive periods. I had come up with the pretence that the television would be better in their lounge. More room. Some crap like that. The truth was that I had no great interest in television: I still couldn’t see it replacing radio. One of my greatest disappointments had been to see the actor Valentine Dyall for the first time on television. The face behind the voice behind the ‘Man in Black’ on radio’s Appointment with Fear turned out to look like a dyspeptic bank manager.
I had told Mrs White that I could watch it at any time, if that was okay with her, but she was to feel free for her and the kids to watch it whenever they felt like it. I knew they did, but she had a habit of switching it off when I was in my flat. She had told me, when I had assured her that it was really okay with me for them to watch as much TV as they wanted, that she was worried that she would ‘wear the tube out’. The truth, I knew, was that she didn’t want to feel she owed me anything. She didn’t want to owe anyone anything. It was a drawbridge that had been drawn up a long time before I had first encountered her. Fiona White was an attractive woman, still young, but I really couldn’t recall ever having seen her smile.
I went up to my rooms and listened to the Overseas Service for a while before tuning into the Home Service. There was an item on the news about the forthcoming fight between Bobby Kirkcaldy and Jan Schmidtke. It was one of the most anticipated fights in the city’s boxing history, despite the fact that the result was a foregone conclusion: the German slugger Schmidtke was universally considered to be outclassed and outgunned by the stylist Kirkcaldy.
I grinned smugly at the thought that I’d managed to spring a ticket for the fight, after all. The grin faded though, when I thought about how big-league Willie Sneddon’s and Jonny Cohen’s ambitions were becoming. Taking a slice of Bobby Kirkcaldy was stretching them beyond Glasgow. I started to feel uneasy about getting mixed up in whatever dodgy dealings were going on behind a sporting event of national significance.
But, there again, that was the business I was in. Dodgy dealings.
That summer, and for about a year leading up to it, ever since I’d gotten involved in all kinds of shenanigans down at the docks and ended up with holes in me where there shouldn’t be any, I had been trying to get myself straightened out. It was difficult to frame a description of my life without resorting to profanity and it was true to say that my life was truly fucked up. I guessed that was what people said about me: ‘Oh, there goes Lennox. Okay guy. Fucked up though.’ I had made a great effort over the last twelve months to diminish the fucked-upness of my life. I had one over-arching ambition: that one morning while shaving, I could look in the mirror without disliking the person who looked back at me.
The truth was I had been a straightforward, bright and as enthusiastic-as-all-hell, all-Canadian kid growing up on the shores of the Kennebecasis, with rich parents and an education at the upper-crusty Rothesay Collegiate College. Nothing fucked-up there. But then a little Austrian corporal decided to fuck up more than my world and I found myself an officer in the First Canadian Army and four thousand miles from home and up to my knees in mud and blood. The First Canadian, or at least those who led the First Canadian, had an enthusiasm for throwing my countrymen into the mincer. Normandy, Dieppe, Sicily. Wherever there was a serious-ordnance-ripping-through- human-flesh party, we tended to get the first invite. My excursion started in Sicily and lasted all the way through Italy, Holland and Germany. It was somewhere along the way during my Grand European Tour that the Kennebecasis Kid became yet another casualty of war. Whoever it was I became during the war, he fitted right in, right here in Glasgow.
And it had been while I stood in Glasgow, wearing a demob suit that I otherwise wouldn’t have been seen dead in and holding a ship ticket to Halifax, Nova Scotia, that I had first encountered the Three Kings.
There’s this misconception that all gangsters are the same. That all coppers are the same. Some people even believe, sometimes with a fair amount of justification, that all gangsters and all coppers are the same. The truth is that the underworld is a community like any other, with the same range and variety of personality, physical type and character that you find in any walk of life. You can’t even say that they are united in dishonesty or immorality. Some villains have a very strict moral code. Some don’t.
The Three Kings were a good example. What Willie Sneddon, Jonny Cohen and Hammer Murphy didn’t run in Glasgow wasn’t worth running. In 1948, Glasgow’s three leading crime lords had sat down over lunch in a civilized manner in the elegant surroundings of the Regency Oyster Bar and discussed the future. The upshot was that, while they sat and divided the lunch bill equally between them, they had done pretty much the same to Glasgow.
There had been nothing elegant or civilized about what had preceded their lunch. A vicious gang war, Sneddon and Cohen on one side, Murphy on the other, had threatened to wipe them all out. Added to which, the first casualty of war was profit. By the time Sneddon, Cohen and Murphy emerged from the Regency, a coronation had taken place: the three crime lords had become the three crime kings.
But, like I said, no one is the same, and the Three Kings were very different people. Willie Sneddon was a truly nasty piece of work. Devious and malignant. Sneddon, the Gorbals hard man, had robbed, murdered and tortured his way to the top. But he was smart. Even subtle.
Subtlety was not something you associated with Hammer Murphy, in much the same way you wouldn’t associate camels with the Antarctic. Michael Murphy had gained the epithet ‘Hammer’ after pulping the skull of rival gang boss Paul Cochrane with a lead barrel-headed builder’s mallet, in front of the assembled members of both gangs. Murphy was a man of limited intellect but possessed a viciousness as truly, awesomely monumental as the chip on his shoulder. He had embraced his new nickname with enthusiasm and was known to wield a hammer against knees, elbows and skulls whenever a suitable opportunity arose. It was, he had once confided in me, good to have a trademark.
Jonny Cohen, the third king, was a perfect illustration of the variety of personality and type within the criminal fraternity. Known as Handsome Jonny because of his film-star looks, Cohen was a decent kind of guy and a devoted husband and father who lived a quiet life in Newton Mearns — Tel-Aviv on the Clyde, as it was known in Glasgow. Or at least he was a decent, quiet-living kind of guy when he wasn’t holding up banks, organizing jewel robberies, running illegal bookies, that kind of thing. It was also true to say that Jonny had moved a few souls closer to the Lord in his time, but they had all been competitors or active playmates in the big Glasgow game. No civilians. I liked
