Sammy Pollock. Even less with scum like Paul Costello. But it had to be checked out.
‘Meet me there at eight p.m.,’ he said. ‘In the bar.’
‘Thank you, Mr Barnier. I’ll be there.’
I drove back towards the town but before I got to the centre turned up the North road towards Aberfoyle. My head hurt, a dull, persistent throbbing in the temples and behind my eyes. Glasgow had pulled a curtain over the sun, a thin, dark-flecked veil of cloud. The temperature stayed hot, however, and the air around me seemed denser, heavier. I knew that the pain in my head was a warning of a storm coming. Getting out of the city didn’t do much to ease the oppressive air that was now playing my sinuses like an accordion. After about fifteen minutes I was up around the Mugdock area where Glasgow yielded to open countryside and scattered, expensive houses. The sun had broken through again, but the pre-storm heaviness continued to hang in the air and the sky to the west was the colour of shipyard steel.
Bobby Kirkcaldy’s place wasn’t the most expensive, but it was a huge step up from his origins in Motherwell. But then again, having a toilet indoors, and one that you didn’t have to share with four other families, was a huge step up. Truth was I quite admired Kirkcaldy as a boxer. He had started off welterweight, later moving up to middleweight but retaining a certain grace and lightness on his feet. I had seen him fight twice and it had been like watching two completely different boxers. Kirkcaldy was one of those boxers who, while probably no mental giant in any other way, seemed to possess a profound physical intelligence: a constant process of interpretation and fine re-calibration to match every move his opponent made. It was as if he could read any fighter within the first minute of a round and adapt his style to suit: if he was up against an infighter, Kirkcaldy subtly increased his range, forcing his opponent to stretch outside his preferred zone; if Kirkcaldy was up against an outfighter, he closed in with tight jabs, forcing his opposite number always backwards and onto the ropes.
One of the fights I had seen had been against Pete McQuillan. McQuillan was a slugger and bruiser; a stump of a man who struggled to stay in the middleweight bracket and in terms of style was just one step up from the pikey bare-knuckle boys. McQuillan winning a fight — and he had remained undefeated until then — depended either on a knockout, or his doing so much devastation to his opponent’s face that the referee stopped the match. Then he had been matched with Bobby Kirkcaldy. It had been an amazing thing to watch: McQuillan viciously scything empty air while Kirkcaldy had danced around him, placing stinging jabs with absolute precision. It took McQuillan to a place he’d never been before: the distance. Kirkcaldy had been the unanimous points winner. Now he was the clear favourite for the European Middleweight Championship and would be meeting the West German Jan Schmidtke.
And I would be there. I had a ticket.
The house was roughly the same size as MacFarlane’s in Pollokshields but was more recently built, maybe in the Twenties or Thirties, and it benefited from a more prestigious geography. It had also benefited from whitewash, which made it look bright and foreign in the sunlight. The front door faced south but was shielded by a Deco arch edged in earth-red brickwork. The whitewash walls beneath the red tiles and the terracotta brick detailing was an ambitious attempt to give the house an almost Mediterranean look, which in Scotland was an achievement akin to making Lon Chaney look like Clark Gable. I wasn’t sure how much of the credit should go to the architect and how much to the alien climate that seemed to have invaded the West of Scotland.
The door was answered almost instantly when I rang the electric push-bell. I got the idea that they had heard my Atlantic crunch its way up the drive. They were looking out for visitors, welcome or otherwise, I guessed. It wasn’t Bobby Kirkcaldy who answered the door but someone probably even more pugnacious-looking, an older man in a dark suit and thin woollen tie. He was lean and mean-looking and he had the appearance of something assembled from the toughest material; he had white bristle for hair and a deep-lined, leathery face that was more than weather-beaten. It looked as if anything capable of giving it a beating, weather or otherwise, had had its turn on his face. His flattened nose had that thick, rubbery, formless look that suggested it had been broken so many times that there was no cartilage left to give it any kind of meaningful shape. The damage wasn’t just visually apparent; when he spoke he sounded muffled and nasal. Even more than the average Glaswegian did.
‘What do you want?’ he asked.
‘A quiet life, money, a beautiful girl and a sense of inner peace.’
He looked at me blankly. Along with the crap, he had clearly had the humour beaten out of him.
‘I’m here to see Bobby,’ I sighed. I was not appreciated here. ‘My name is Lennox. I’m expected.’
He looked me up and down. I mirrored his examination. It was difficult to age him. He could have been a battered fifty or a fit seventy. It was obvious he was an ex-fighter, but I reckoned as much damage had been done to his face outside the ring as in it. I tilted my head and smiled impatiently. The old warrior stood to one side to let me in. I was going to hand him my hat but he didn’t look the Jeeves type, so I hung on to it and followed him down a long hallway with terracotta tiles on the floor and tasteful art, some original, on the wall. I guessed that a Motherwell-raised boxer like Kirkcaldy would probably have about as much good taste as my elderly companion with the devastated nose would have a sense of smell; I put the domestic aesthetic down to a good decorator.
He led me into a large lounge with big French windows that looked out over a massive expanse of landscaped garden to the green hills beyond. It was a nice place. The kind of nice you had to pay for. Again, what struck me most was the way it had been furnished. Glasgow was, generally, a make-do-and-mend kind of city; Britain was a make-do-and-mend society, mainly because until recently the country’s very survival had depended on it. Post-war near-bankruptcy had added inertia to the pendulum swing from austerity to prosperity. Added to all of this was Scottish social conservatism. I had seen a few homes that had been decorated in the Contemporary style — Jonny Cohen’s, for example — but generally Modernism was distrusted. And when it was used as decor, it was normally done half-heartedly or clumsily overdone.
All of which is why Bobby Kirkcaldy’s home would have looked to the average Scot like a Hollywood set. This was all good stuff. If the furnishings weren’t original Bauhaus or le Corbusier or Eames, they were pretty good copies. There was a wall filled with books. I had the uncharitable thought that Kirkcaldy the boxer must have told his interior designer to make him look smarter. Just like in the hall, the art on the lounge walls looked original. Most of it was modern and edgy — abstracty stuff — but there was something about that kind of art that appealed to me. Like the furniture, it was new. And for me, New was Good. Again, I put it all down to an overpaid interior decorator.
Bobby Kirkcaldy stood up when we came in. He had been sitting on a leather lounger by the big windows and when he got up and crossed the room to us, he did so with the same easy grace with which I’d seen him move in the ring. He had thick, dark hair and, unlike the old guy at my side, there wasn’t the usual evidence in Kirkcaldy’s face of a boxer’s career. His nose didn’t look as if it had ever been broken and there was only a hint of the high- cheeked angularity of a fighter’s face. He was wearing an open-necked shirt and lightweight trousers. The look was casual but had Jermyn Street all over it.
‘You Lennox?’ asked Kirkcaldy. He didn’t smile but there was nothing overtly hostile in his manner, either. Just businesslike.
‘I’m Lennox. You know why I’m here?’
‘To look into this nonsense that’s been going on. You’ve been hired by Willie Sneddon. To be honest, I think all this shite bothers Sneddon more than it bothers me.’ Kirkcaldy’s voice was light, almost gentle, but he managed to inject a hint of distaste when he articulated Willie Sneddon’s name. He spoke with a quiet confidence and had less of an accent than I had expected. When you saw him up close, as opposed to the distance a boxing stadium compels, there was an intelligence in the eyes. But there was something else that I couldn’t define. And it stopped me liking him.
I turned and looked at the punch bag who had shown me in, and then back at Kirkcaldy.
‘It’s okay,’ Kirkcaldy said. ‘You can talk in front of Uncle Bert. Uncle Bert has coached me since I was a kid.’
Uncle Bert looked at me expressionlessly. But, there again, he’d probably had the mobility to form an expression beaten out of his face years ago. I found myself silently questioning his qualifications as a boxing trainer, seeing as no one seemed to have taught him the meaning of the word ‘duck’.
‘Okay,’ I said. I looked around the room in the way you do when you’ve got to that point where you should have been invited to sit but haven’t. ‘Nice place. Like the paintings. I’m never sure where Abstract Expressionism ends and Lyrical Abstraction begins.’
‘These are neither,’ said Kirkcaldy. ‘I don’t trust “isms”. Political or artistic. I just buy what I like and what I can afford. And the only reason I can afford it is because of the fight game.’ He picked up that we were still
