to face her.
‘Young Jack Collins, the debonair gad-about-town. I’m guessing that’s who you were with last night? I know he’s Small Change’s illegitimate son.’
‘I think you should mind your own business and stay out of other people’s,’ said Maggie. The words were hard but the tone was softening. Like an expert sailor changing tack, she had worked out she needed to approach this breeze carefully. ‘Listen, Jack’s a good kid and he treated Small Change…’
‘Like a father?’ I helped out.
‘Well, yes. There’s nothing improper going on.’
‘If you say so,’ I said. I didn’t have time for this. ‘I better see Lorna.’
It wasn’t a pretty sight. She had thrown up in her sleep onto the bed sheets and I had to help her to her feet and into the bathroom while I stripped the bed. It took me an hour to get her straightened out before I could leave. She cried a lot: the shame of the unaccustomed drunk. You didn’t see it much in Glasgow.
I got back to my digs about ten a.m. The day was off to a great start: as I walked up the path Fiona White came out of the main door. She eyed me up and down, taking in my creased suit and probably sickly-looking face. It would have done no good to explain that I was actually concussed rather than hung over and I raised my hat to her as she walked past without uttering a word.
Once I was freshened up again I drove up to Blanefield and knocked on Kirkcaldy’s door. There was no one home so I came back into town to the Maryhill address I had for his gym. It was in an old building in Bantaskin Street: a much bigger, less sophisticated and sweatier affair than the set-up he had in the basement of his house. Old Uncle Bert was there too; he showed a fidelity to his nephew that would have made Blackfriar’s Bobby look like a fly-by-night. Kirkcaldy was sparring with a padded-helmeted partner in the ring. Bert came over to me and was the most amenable I had seen him. Which still was on the hostile side of chilly.
‘We saw what happened to yon laddie of yours,’ he said through his nose. ‘That was bad. Bobby’s upset that the boy was looking out for him when he got the beating.’
‘I appreciate it,’ I said. ‘And I appreciate Bobby taking the time to call into the hospital to see him. Were you there when Bobby found him?’
‘Aye, we were both on the way back from here. The lad was lying by the car, all battered to fuck. Somebody must have belted his coupon from behind then kicked the shite out of him.’
‘You reckon?’
‘That’s what it looked like, poor kid. You want to talk to Bobby? He can’t really tell you any more than I can but you’re welcome to wait.’
I shook my head. ‘It’s okay. Tell him I called by to say thanks.’
‘I’ll do that.’
It was turning into an unproductive morning. I called around at Jimmy Costello’s. His two goons, Skelly and Young, were sitting at the bar when I went in and eyed me contemptuously, a look I was getting used to. Skelly was still wearing the marks of our recent tango. I asked Jimmy Costello if he had heard from Paul. He told me he hadn’t and I could see that he was telling the truth.
‘Why you asking?’ he said. ‘You got a lead?’
‘No, I’ve got a bump on the back of my head and I’m pretty sure it was your son who gave it to me. I tracked down Sammy Pollock but left my rear exposed, to coin an expression.’
‘Why would Paul do that?’
‘Maybe he’s not convinced that I really am just interested in tracking down Sammy. Do you know anything about a stolen jade statuette? Of some kind of oriental dragon or demon?’
‘No…’ I guessed that this was Costello’s automatic response to being asked about stolen goods so I pushed him. ‘Listen, Jimmy, it’s important. I think Paul and Sammy Pollock have bitten off more than they can chew. Now, do you really not know anything about a stolen jade figure?’
‘I swear, Lennox. If Paul knows anything about it then he’s never said fuck all to me. Not that that surprises me. We don’t talk much.’
I talked to Costello for another half hour and just went around in the same old circles. As I was leaving, I saw Skelly shoot me another filthy look. The bump on my head gave another, bigger throb and it crossed my mind that it maybe hadn’t been Paul Costello who had bushwhacked me. I crossed the bar and pulled Skelly clean off his stool. His loyal pal backed away from me.
‘You got a problem with me, shitface?’ I chose the route of diplomacy.
‘I’m not the one with the problem,’ said Skelly, pulling the tailoring from my grasp. ‘And I don’t want any trouble.’
‘So I have a problem… is that what you’re saying.’
‘I’m not saying anything. Like I said, I don’t want any trouble.’
‘Then just watch your manners when you’re around your betters, Sonny.’
He turned a sullen back on me. There was no fight in him, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t handy enough with a sap in dim light and from behind.
I left him to his sulk and ignored Jimmy Costello’s impatient glare. I was pushing my luck, I knew it, but I had a sore head and was in a bad mood and everyone I dealt with seemed to be either lying to me or hiding something.
A promise is a promise. I called in to see Davey at the lunchtime visiting hour. He was pleased to see me but I could tell he hurt like hell. I wasn’t far behind him. We talked and I joked with him and all the time I felt that old dark fury kindle itself deep in my gut.
After I left the hospital, I ’phoned Sheila Gainsborough and asked if I could meet her, either at her apartment or my office. It was important, I told her, and not something that could be discussed over the ’phone. I got my message across and she agreed to meet at her apartment. But I would have to give her an hour to sort things out. She gave me the name of a cafe around the corner from her building and said we could meet there. The decorum was unnecessary and ill-advised but I was too beat-up to argue.
I drove into the West End, found the cafe in Byres Road and took a table by the window. It was one of those Italian places, where they made an opera out of making a cup of coffee with a steam-hissing machine that sounded like it should be pulling the eleven-fifteen to London out of Central Station. At least the coffee was good.
Sheila Gainsborough arrived five minutes late. She looked flustered and apologized for the delay. She took her scarf off and everyone in the cafe made a big show of not staring at her. Staring would have been much less obvious than the clumsily stolen glances. A waiter who looked as if he’d come straight off the boat from Naples but sounded like he’d come straight off the ferry from Renfrew took her order for a coffee.
‘You have news?’ she asked urgently. Her cheeks were flushed and, despite my gloomy mood and aching head, the thought of how nice it would be to make her cheeks flush crossed my mind.
‘Like I said on the ’phone, Miss Gainsborough,’ I said quietly. ‘We should do this at your flat or my office. Like it or not, you’re a celebrity, and every ear in this place is flapping. You never know when someone’s a reporter or a copper.’
She took the point and we drank our coffee in haste and silence. Afterwards, we walked the few blocks to her apartment. Most of the dwellings in the area were tenements, townhouses or the occasional villa. Sheila Gainsborough’s place was a rupture in the grimy Victorian and Georgian facades: an Art Deco block that would have been about thirty years old. One of the interesting things about Glasgow was the richness and variety of its architecture: Victorian, slum, Art Deco, slum, Contemporary, slum…
It was a classy place. Sheila led me into a huge, bright foyer that made you feel you’d stepped straight into the mid-Twenties. A uniformed commissionaire, who had an ex-military bearing but was of a vintage to have fought Kaiser rather than Fuhrer, saluted us and we took the elevator to the top floor.
‘You want a drink?’ she asked, as she dropped her bag and scarf onto a chair in the hall. ‘You look like you could do with one.’
‘I could do with one, but it would probably finish me off.’ I moved into the lounge. Everything in the flat was clean and orderly. The furniture, like the architecture that housed it, was Art Deco and was simple and tasteful — in that subtle way that tells you simple and tasteful is more expensive. There was a huge picture window, unbroken except for a couple of widely spaced, thin, white mullions. It gave a view over the city towards the university and Kelvingrove.
‘Please…’ she said, impatiently gesturing for me to sit. I sat. I think if Sheila Gainsborough had told me to
