hands, but it was no good: the interior was so dark I could see nothing.
I straightened up. There, reflected in the dark glass, was a face next to mine, standing behind me. A battered, indeterminately old face that looked like it had been used as a punch bag for decades. The name ‘Uncle Bert’ formed itself in my head and I started to turn, but something that felt like steel slammed into my back, right above the pelvis. The pain exploded through my gut and I felt as if my kidney had exploded. The punch had caught me exactly where I was still tender from my encounter with Costello’s goons outside the Carvery.
I spun around and swung wildly at the old man. He blocked my punch with his forearm, and his fist, still feeling like steel instead of muscle and bone, rammed into my solar plexus. Every bit of air pulsed out of my lungs. I stopped defending myself. I stopped thinking. Once more, all of my being was concentrated on the simple effort of breathing. He pushed me back and to the side so I collided with the wall.
Uncle Bert took his time, holding me in place with one hand and pulling his other fist back to deliver a right that we both knew would send me sleepy-bye-byes. He had braced his legs to deliver the maximum power and I swung my foot up as hard and as swiftly as I could manage. My foot went through between his legs but my shin slammed into his groin. He doubled over and I grabbed his ears, hoisted him up and smashed my forehead into his face. The good old Glasgow Kiss.
I pushed him away from me. Blood was pouring from his nose and I fully expected him to crumble; but Uncle Bert was an old pro and came straight back at me. I scrabbled in my pocket for my sap and swung it at him, catching him on the temple. It sent him sideways but again, amazingly, his feet remained planted and he didn’t go down. I backhanded him with the sap. He went down on one knee and I kicked him in the face. He fell backwards onto his back. I staggered forward, pulling air into my empty lungs and bent from the pain in my kidney. All the hate and the rage was back: I stood to one side of him and raised my foot, aiming to smash my heel into his ugly, old battered face.
There was a shot. I staggered back.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I looked down at my body, then down at Bert Soutar sprawled on the ground at my feet. Neither of us was hit. When I looked up I saw Bobby Kirkcaldy, his face carrying the evidence of his defeat the night before, standing with a Browning in his hand. He’d obviously fired a shot into the air, but I now found myself looking at the business end of the automatic.
‘Against the wall, Lennox,’ he said, his voice still disconcertingly calm. Gentle. ‘Uncle Bert, you okay?’
Soutar got to his feet slowly, eyeing me with malice. I knew what was coming and so, clearly, did Kirkcaldy.
‘Leave it, Bert,’ he said. ‘We’ll do this in the garage, like we said.’
Soutar grabbed me by the collar of my suit jacket and pulled me from the wall. He took up position behind me and guided me with vicious shoves around to the back of the house. The drive arced round the far side of the house to a whitewashed outbuilding. It looked like it had, at one time, been a stables, but had since been converted into a garage. There was a dormer window above it suggesting that the attic had been the chauffeur’s accommodation. There were two huge double doors, and I reckoned you could easily have parked four cars inside it. I studied the structure carefully, for two reasons: the curiosity of the condemned man about his place of execution; and because I wanted to work out any possible escape routes well in advance.
Soutar kept the shoves going and I considered dancing with him again. He was a tough old bird, all right, but I’d do my best to snap his neck before his nephew got one off. I could always hope that Kirkcaldy was a worse shot than he was a boxer.
‘All of this because you fixed a fight?’ I called over my shoulder. ‘I’ve got to give it to you, Kirkcaldy, you take your petty larceny very seriously.’
‘Shut up and walk…’ Uncle Bert gave me another shove. It was beginning to become rude.
‘We’ve got a friend waiting for you,’ said Kirkcaldy, and laughed in a dark, vicious way. He went ahead of us and opened one of the doors into the garage.
Just as I had expected, there were two cars in the garage: the sleek, carmine droplet of Collins’s Lanchester and Bobby Kirkcaldy’s open-top Sunbeam-Talbot Sports. What a chump, I thought bitterly to myself. There I was thinking I was all smart and devious, stirring up Collins so he would lead me to Mr Big. Yep, I had had it all down pat, except that the delay in Collins leaving his office had been to give Kirkcaldy time to make the fifteen-minute drive from Strathblane to this place, and get himself settled in. All Collins had had to do after that was lead me by the nose. It served me right; I was beginning to believe my own advertising.
The garage was even bigger inside than I had guessed. The two cars took up less than half of the space. Jack Collins stood in the middle of the free area of floor.
‘I told you he’d follow me,’ he said with a contempt I could have found hurtful.
‘Okay, so you’re pissed off that I’m doing my job. But like I said outside, this doesn’t smell right to me. You’re going to too much trouble just to cover up a fixed fight. Why the artillery?’ I asked, nodding to the Browning in Kirkcaldy’s hand.
‘Maybe you’re right, Lennox,’ Kirkcaldy said. ‘Maybe there’s more going on than you can understand.’
‘Try me,’ I said. ‘I’m an understanding type. But first of all, indulge my curiosity as a fan… why throw the fight last night?’
‘What makes you think I threw it?’
‘Oh, come on. I was there. And I’ve seen you fight several times before. If you could flatten McQuillan the way you did, then Jan Schmidtke should have been a walkover. You threw the fight all right. Is your heart really as bad as that?’
‘As a matter of fact it is,’ said Kirkcaldy, in a matter-of-fact way. ‘Congenital defect. I’ve had it since birth but didn’t know about it. It’s only over the last six months that I’ve had problems with it. The quack says I’ve to take it easy, take the stress out of my life. Maybe I should start with you, huh, Lennox?’
‘So I’m guessing you made a killing on the fight?’ I asked.
‘Jack here arranged it all for us. It actually started off as Small Change’s idea. No really big bets. Nothing that would get noticed too much, but lots of them, spread out across all the bookies. And each bet placed by a third party who couldn’t be connected to Collins, far less me.’
‘Very sweet,’ I said. ‘But you weren’t the only ones in the know. Two young Flash Harrys tried to broker a big bet against you winning through Tony the Pole.’
‘That’s something I don’t know about,’ said Kirkcaldy as casually as he could manage. If he had been as poor at throwing a feint in the ring, then his prematurely terminated career would have terminated even more prematurely.
‘Who were they?’ I pushed my luck. Seeing as I was at gunpoint in an outbuilding in the middle of nowhere, where a shot would go unheard far less unnoticed, I felt I was just as well pushing it.
‘I told you, I don’t know anything about them or anybody else laying bets.’
I decided to move on before Kirkcaldy’s pants caught fire. ‘I’m sure your little scheme will have raked in a lot of cash. But not that much. Not enough for this kind of grief. And it doesn’t add up to something worth killing Small Change for.’
‘Small Change’s death has got nothing to do with us. Nothing at all. And it’s got nothing to do with the fight scam either.’
‘No… I believe you didn’t kill Small Change, but the fight scam does have something to do with his death. Maybe Small Change came up with the idea of you throwing the fight to start with, but when he did it was simply to get you out of the fight game with a little pension. You must have told him about your heart condition. But the real reason you needed to pull it off was because you needed to pay someone off quick. Someone who was going to give you the same treatment that Small Change got.’
Kirkcaldy didn’t say anything, but exchanged a look with Uncle Bert.
‘You see, Bobby, I’m a studious sort. I spend a lot of time up at the Mitchell Library expanding my mind. One direction I’ve expanded in is the traditions and customs of our travelling cousins. Take the ones up at Vinegarhill. Now, to start with, I thought they were just Irish travellers, but it turns out they’re Minceir, proper Romanies from
