My guess is that Small Change was still alive when they made that ’phone call and they only killed him after they knew Furie was on his way. Which means they were pretty confident that they could reschedule the whole thing if they had to. That would suggest that they were very familiar with Small Change’s routine.’
‘So why does this mean that I’ve been holding back on you? Are you saying I had something to do with Small Change getting topped?’
‘No. But I am saying that this appointment book you asked me to look for has nothing to do with bare-knuckle fights. Big money bare-knuckle fights. And if I’m right, then you have more to worry about than whether the police put you in MacFarlane’s house for a meeting. Tommy Gun Furie was one of the fighters MacFarlane lined up for you. And right now his own lawyer is telling him he’ll be lucky not to take a short walk to a long drop through a trapdoor in Barlinnie prison. He’s going to tell the coppers everything he can to try to save his neck. Literally. And somewhere along the line your name is going to come up. The only way out of it is for us to find out who really did kill MacFarlane and why.’
Sneddon looked at me with a steady gaze: the steady gaze of a crocodile looking at an antelope.
‘Okay,’ he said at last. ‘There was some stuff I was trying to keep to myself. But it doesn’t get the pikey out of the frame. If anything, it points to him having done it. Small Change MacFarlane and me were in business together. We were fixing up fights. But not what you saw out at the farm — the usual bare-knuckle shite with a couple of fucking pikeys slapping each other around. Although you’re right that Small Change helped me organize those too. We had something different going on.’
‘What?’
Sneddon didn’t answer for a moment, instead seeming to look around to reappraise his surroundings. ‘I’ve seen the way people look at me in here sometimes. Even when I’m walking my dog in the street where I fucking live. They look away. Avoid looking me in the fucking eye. They think people like me, Cohen and Murphy are the scum of the earth. We scare them. But I’ll tell you this, it’s them that scare me.’ He paused when the waiter returned to our crimson cave to replace our empty whisky glasses with full ones.
‘You should see the so-called ordinary man in the street when people like me serve them up with what they want,’ said Sneddon when the waiter was gone. ‘They’re the fucking monsters. I have an interest in a whorehouse in Pollokshields, not far from MacFarlane’s house. Discreet. One of the girls got beaten up so fucking bad we thought she’d die. Cost me a fortune getting her treatment without it being official. You should have seen the fucker that did it to her. A wee, bald, fat cunt that looked like he wouldn’t say boo to a goose. But when he was in there with the girl he turned into some kind of fucking monster.’
‘You turn him over to the police?’ The question was out and stupid before I thought it through.
‘Aye, right. That’s just what we done. What do you think we done? Twinkletoes sorted him out with some transport. A fucking wheelchair.’
‘What’s this got to do with your deal with MacFarlane?’
‘Like I said, you have no fucking idea what ordinary people want. The worse it is, the more they want you to dish it up to them. You’re not going to believe this, Lennox, but I read a lot. History, that sort of shite.’
I shrugged. It didn’t surprise me: since I first encountered Sneddon, I had sensed a hidden, dark intelligence about him. The Smart King.
‘I read a lot about ancient Rome. There was no difference between the Caesars and Rome and the Kings and Glasgow. They even had a triumvirate. Three Kings. You can learn a lot from history.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Personally I think there’s no future in it.’
Sneddon didn’t laugh — not at my joke and not ever that I could recall. ‘I’ve read a lot about the Colosseum. It used to be packed right to the top. Ordinary people turning out to watch blood and death. The fucking crueller the better. Do you know they used to make fucking children fight with swords, to the death? Or that the comedy turn was to put blind people into the ring? They’d slash and hack each other to bits, but it would take a fucking age for one or both to die because they couldn’t see each other. And the public fucking loved it.’ He paused to sip his whisky. Silver-suited and manicured, against the crimson of the booth he looked like a clubbable Satan. ‘Nothing’s changed,’ he continued. ‘We started to draw in big money from the bare-knuckle fights. The more brutal the fight the bigger the crowd the next week. So we started to put on special fights. At special prices. Only regulars were invited to buy a ticket.’
‘What made these fights special?’ I asked, though some horrible ideas had already flashed across the screen of my imagination.
‘They was no-holds-barred. No weapons, but apart from that everything was allowed — kicking, choking, gouging, biting. It started off small then just got bigger and bigger. The more blood, the bigger the crowds. And the higher the ticket price.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s have it… what happened?’
‘Someone got killed…’ Sneddon shrugged as if a human being’s death was an inconsequence. ‘A pikey. Something happened in his head and there was fucking blood everywhere, from his nose, his ears… even his fucking eyes…’
‘Let me guess… he ended up catching a train…’ I shook my head. It had been there in front of me all the time.
Sneddon made his usual crooked mouth shape to approximate a smile. ‘You’re a smart fucking cookie, aren’t you, Lennox. You make all of the connections. Yeah… he was the pikey that got mashed by the train. So no one’s the wiser.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong.’ I put my glass down and leaned forward. ‘There’s a keen-as-mustard new pathologist on the job. Very keen on what they call forensic science. He worked out that your pikey fighter wasn’t some drunk caught on the rails. Even proved that he’d been in a fight before he died.’
‘So fucking what?’
‘So you’ve got a problem. Or another problem. The City of Glasgow Police are treating it as murder. Believe me, they’d much rather have chalked it up as an accident, but because of this sharp new pathologist they can’t.’
‘Fuck.’ Sneddon’s face hardened. Which was surprising, because there wasn’t much scope for further hardening. ‘I knew we should have minced the bastard. But I didn’t want Murphy knowing nothing about this.’
I nodded. Hammer Murphy, one of the other Three Kings, owned a meat-processing plant in Rutherglen. It was well known that several bodies had been disposed of through the plant’s mincer. The Three Kings had an agreement whereby Murphy, for a fee, provided the same service for Sneddon and Cohen. Not for the first time I considered vegetarianism.
‘You should have told me all of this at the start,’ I said. ‘It would have made things easier.’
‘Murder. Fuck. And for once it wasn’t…’ Sneddon shook his head self-critically. It was like watching a golfer who had missed what should have been an easy putt. The thought flashed through my head that murderers maybe have a handicap system too.
‘You say he was a traveller?’ I asked.
‘A pikey, aye… What about it?’
‘Well, that means there’s maybe no official records of his existence. No birth certificate, no war record, no National Insurance number. No paperwork means he didn’t exist officially and that makes it more difficult to tie him in with anything. I think you sit this one out.’
‘What about his family?’ asked Sneddon glumly.
‘They’re not going to go to the police, I’d say. It looks to me like they’ve already said their goodbyes.’
‘How the fuck do you know that?’ asked Sneddon. ‘You don’t even know who they are.’
‘When I called in at the Vinegarhill site there was a vardo — you know, a gypsy caravan — all dressed up with red ribbons. Deep red. That’s their colour for mourning, not black. Of course, it doesn’t mean it’s your boy. What was his name?’
‘Gypsy Rose Lee… How the fuck would I know? He was just a pikey.’
‘Go back to the fights. What was Small Change MacFarlane’s involvement in them?’
‘He set them up and ran the book on them for me. He took a percentage of the winnings and I provided the venue, and the muscle to collect unpaid bets.’
‘He supplied the fighters?’
‘Aye, kind of. He arranged for them to be supplied. The deal was he paid for that out of his cut.’ Sneddon sighed wearily. ‘It was Bert Soutar who found them for Small Change.’
