‘How long have I been out?’
‘An hour. We’ve just arrived. We was looking for you anyway.’
‘Oh?’ I said. Then I saw Twinkletoes’ expression. It worried me. Anything other than a smile on Twinkletoes’ face worried me.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Lennox,’ said Twinkletoes. ‘It’s Davey…’
‘Davey Wallace? What about him?’
‘Someone gave him a doing,’ said Sneddon in an I-couldn’t-give-a-shit tone. ‘A really good doing.’
‘He’s in the Southern General, Mr Lennox,’ said Twinkletoes in a doleful baritone. ‘It’s not right. Not right at all. It’s egggree-jus, that’s what it is… fucking egg-gree-jus.’
‘Is he going to be all right?’
Sneddon shrugged.
‘How’d it happen?’ I tried to shake some of the fog out of my head. When I did, I kept seeing Davey’s eager, youthful face. Whatever had happened to him, I was responsible.
‘I need to go.’ I stood up but gravity objected.
‘I’ll drive you,’ said Twinkletoes as he caught my fall like I was a kid on skates for the first time.
‘My car…’ I said weakly. ‘It’s around the corner of the road. Parked by some trees.’
Singer pointed silently to himself and held out his hand. I handed over my car keys and nodded. It could have been my imagination, but these days there seemed to be less menace in his lurk.
By the time we reached the hospital, the sky had turned a velvety purple. At this time of year it never got truly dark. Glasgow’s Southern General Hospital had started off as cavalry barracks, then became the Govan Poorhouse, then a lunatic asylum, before being converted for its current use. It had somehow managed to maintain the charm of its previous incarnations and its jagged Victorian architecture was as welcoming as Castle Frankenstein.
The linoleum-floored corridors we made our way along were quiet and I did not hear distant cries of ‘It’s alive! It’s alive!’ echoing off the porcelain wall tiles. The strictly observed visiting times were over and we were confronted by a matron only slightly less forbidding than the one I had encountered at Craithie Court. She had the same singular eyebrow, with the added twist of facial hair on her upper lip that was in danger of becoming a Ronald Colman moustache. I wondered where they all came from and decided that perhaps Baron Frankenstein did have a part-time job here after all. I anticipated another frosty rebuttal, but Sneddon gained our admittance by handing the matron our special pass: a nice new, crisp, folding special pass with a picture of Her Majesty on it. Matron Karloff tucked the twenty into her apron and bustled off down the corridor, her ugly flat shoes squeaking on the linoleum.
Davey was in a room on his own. I assumed Sneddon was behind that and I was grateful to him, although I guessed that it had less to do with concern or feelings of responsibility towards Davey and more to do with keeping me sweet so I’d deliver everything I could find out.
Someone had done a real number on Davey. His head and jaw were bandaged, framing his face like a mask. And it was more like a grotesque mask than a recognizable face, puffed and swollen until the eyes had become slits between thick pads of bruised flesh. It looked like his nose had been broken but, thankfully, whoever had attended him in the hospital had made some effort to set it straight. His lips were split and the lower lip had ballooned up like Maurice Chevalier’s on a bad day. There were stitches in his upper lip.
‘Davey, it’s Lennox. Are you all right, son?’
Davey turned his head to me. His distended lips twitched and I realized he was trying to smile. That simple act caused a tidal wave of rage to swell up inside me.
‘Who did this, Davey?’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Lennox. I let you down.’ Davey’s voice was strained through clenched teeth and I realized that his jaw had been busted and wired shut.
‘You didn’t let anyone down. Who did this?’
‘I didn’t see them. They came up behind me and clobbered me. When I was on the ground they gave me this kicking. Then I passed out. That’s all I remember, Mr Lennox.’
‘Okay, Davey… okay. You take it easy. Anything else broken?’
‘Just my jaw… and some cracked ribs. The doc says I must have a steel skull. He says he doesn’t think there will be any permanent damage.’
‘That’s good, Davey. We’ll have you out of here and on your feet in no time. I owe you a bonus.’
‘You don’t need to do that, Mr Lennox. Just tell me that you’ll let me work for you again.’
‘Sure, Davey. Sure I will.’
‘Mr Kirkcaldy came to see me.’
‘Bobby Kirkcaldy?’
‘Aye… it was him what found me. He ’phoned for the ambulance and that.’
‘I see. Did he see who attacked you?’
‘No. He only came along later.’
‘I see.’
‘I lost my book,’ said Davey through the wired cage of his teeth.
‘What book?’
‘The one you gave me, Mr Lennox. My notebook that I wrote everything down in.’
‘Don’t worry about it, Davey. I’ll probably find it in the car or on the ground up there. It’s not important.’
‘I’m sorry…’ Now Davey’s voice sounded distant. He made a soft, detached groaning sound.
‘You rest, Davey. I’ll be back to see you tomorrow.’
‘Promise?’ he asked and sounded like a kid. In that moment I remembered that he was alone in the world. No parents. No brothers or sisters that he knew about. A Barnardo’s kid out in the world on his own. The thought restoked the fury in my gut. A fury that was directed in equal shares at whoever had done this to Davey, and at myself for having put the kid in that position.
‘I promise, Davey. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
We left Davey to sleep, and outside in the corridor I had as coherent a conference with Sneddon as I was capable of having. I told him to put men on watch on the Kirkcaldy house twenty-four hours a day. I asked if they could look around for Davey’s notebook, more to put the kid’s mind at rest than anything else. Given that Singer had followed me all the way out into darkest Renfrewshire without me spotting him on my tail, I suggested he be put on following Kirkcaldy. I wanted whoever clobbered Davey, and Sneddon was itchier than ever to find out what was going on with Kirkcaldy. He didn’t care about people getting hurt: he had invested in Kirkcaldy and didn’t want his money to get bruised.
We headed back along the gloomy, porcelain-tiled corridors towards the exit. My head hurt like a bastard and the lurching in my gut was turning into determined heaving. I stopped off in the washroom and only just made it to the cubicle before I vomited. After I finished retching I went over to the wash-hand basins and splashed cold water on my face. When I looked into the mirror I saw a wraith with deep blue shadows under its eyes set into a bleached face. No wonder the ladies found me so damned attractive. The harsh hospital lighting threw up the hard angles of my face: the sharp, high cheekbones and the arch of my brow. The faint scars on my cheek, the reminders of an encounter with a German hand grenade, seemed more noticeable. I smoothed my black hair back with the palms of my hands. A plastic surgeon had had to do a bit of tidying up after my adventure with German munitions and it had left me with taut skin that accentuated my features. One thing I got a lot, especially from women, was that they thought I looked a little like the actor Jack Palance. Women seemed to like my face. I’d been told I had a handsome face but it had a touch of cruelty in it. That’s why they liked it and that’s why I hated it.
‘You fucking coming?’ Sneddon was at the door of the washroom.
‘Sure,’ I said, sniffing and drying my face with a paper hand towel. ‘I’m coming. I’ve got work to do.’
I took one more look at the face in the mirror; it seemed to me it looked a little more cruel.
Singer drove me back to my digs in the Atlantic. Halfway there, I had to get him to pull over to the kerb so I could throw up again. I felt dizzy and sick, and had that feeling of unreality that comes with concussion. It wasn’t the first time I’d been clobbered on the head and it probably wouldn’t be the last, despite a doctor warning me that my skull had had just about all the punishment it could take.
It was just before eleven-thirty when Singer parked outside my flat. He helped me to the door. I thanked him and he nodded: we were bosom chums now. He went back out onto the street and climbed into the green Rover
