long legs sheathed in sheer silk. Her throat was ringed with a necklace with pearls so big the diver must have had to bring them up one at a time. Earrings to match. She wore a small white pillbox-type hat and white gloves, but had a jacket that matched the skirt draped over the same forearm as a handbag that, in a previous life, had swum in the Nile or the Florida Everglades.
I stood up and tried to prevent my smile from resembling a leer. It probably just looked goofy. But Sheila Gainsborough was probably used to men smiling at her goofily.
‘Hello, Miss Gainsborough,’ I said. ‘Please sit down. What can I do for you?’
‘You know me?’ She smiled a famous person’s smile, that polite perfunctory baring of teeth that doesn’t mean anything.
‘Everybody knows you, Miss Gainsborough. Certainly everybody in Glasgow. I have to say I don’t get many celebrities walking into my office.’
‘Don’t you?’ She frowned, lowering her flawlessly arched eyebrows and wrinkling a fold of skin on her otherwise flawless brow. Flawlessly. ‘I would have imagined…’ Shrugging off the thought and the frown, she sat down and I followed suit. ‘I’ve never been to a private detective before. Never seen one before, come to that, other than Humphrey Bogart in the pictures.’
‘We’re taller in real life.’ I smiled at my own witticism. Goofily. ‘And I call myself an enquiry agent. So why do you need to see one now?’
She unclipped the sixty-guinea crocodile and handed me a photograph. It was a professional, showbizzy shot. Colour. I didn’t recognize the young man in the picture but decided in an instant that I didn’t like him. The smile was fake and too self-assured. He was wearing an expensive-looking shirt open at the neck and arranged over the collar of an even more pricey-looking light grey suit. His chestnut hair was well cut and lightly oiled. He was good-looking, but in a too-slick and weak-chinned sort of way. Despite his dark hair, he had the same striking, pale blue eyes as Sheila Gainsborough.
‘He’s my brother. Sammy. My younger brother.’
‘Is he in show business too, Miss Gainsborough?’
‘No. Well, not really. He sings, occasionally. He’s tried every other kind of business though. Some of which I’m afraid haven’t been totally… honourable.’ She sighed and leaned forward, resting her forearms on the edge of my desk. Her skin was tanned. Not dark, just pale gold. The cute frown was back. ‘It’s maybe all my fault. I spoil him, give him more money than he can handle.’ I noticed that she had a vaguely Americanized accent. I spoke the same way, but that was because I’d been raised in Canada. As far as I was aware, Sheila Gainsborough had never been further west than Dunoon. I guessed she had been voice-trained to sink the Glasgow in her accent somewhere deep and mid-Atlantic.
‘Is Sammy in some kind of trouble?’ I too leaned forward and frowned my concern, taking the opportunity to cast a glance down the front of her blouse.
‘He’s gone missing,’ she said.
‘How long?’
‘A week. Maybe ten days. We had a meeting at the bank — he’s overdrawn the account I set up for him — but he didn’t turn up. That was last Thursday. I went to his apartment but he wasn’t there. There was two days’ mail behind the door.’
I took a pad from my desk drawer and scribbled a few notes on it. It was window dressing, people feel comforted if you take notes. Somehow it looks like you’re taking it all that little bit more seriously. Nodding sagely as you write helps.
‘Has Sammy done this kind of thing before. Gone off without letting you know?’
‘No. Or at least not like this. Not for a week. Occasionally he’s gone off on a bender. One… two days, but that’s all. And whenever I’m in town — you know, not on a tour or in London — we meet up every Saturday and have lunch in Cranston’s Tea Rooms on Sauchiehall Street. He never misses it.’
I noted. I nodded. Sagely. ‘You said his account is overdrawn — have there been any more withdrawals since he went awol?’
‘I don’t know…’ Suddenly she looked perplexed, as if she’d let him down — let me down — by not checking. ‘Can you find that out?’
‘’Fraid not. You say you were supposed to attend the meeting at the bank with him?’
‘I’m a co-signatory,’ she said. The frown still creased the otherwise flawless brow. With due cause, I thought. Her brother sounded like a big spender. A high liver. If he hadn’t been trying to pull cash from his already overdrawn account, then he wasn’t spending big or living high. Or maybe even simply not living.
‘Then you can check,’ I said. ‘The bank will give you that information, but not me. Even the police would have to get a court order. Have you been to the police, Miss Gainsborough?’
‘I was waiting. I kept thinking Sammy would turn up. Then, when he didn’t, I thought I’d be better getting a private detective… I mean enquiry agent.’
‘Why me?’ I asked. ‘I mean, who put you in contact with me?’
‘I have a road manager, Jack Beckett. He says he knows you.’
I frowned. ‘Can’t say…’
‘Or at least knows of you. He said…’ She hesitated, as if unsure to commit the rest of her thought to words. ‘He said that you were reliable, but that you had contact with — well, that you knew people that were more the kind that Sammy has been mixing with.’
‘I see…’ I said, still trying to place the name Jack Beckett and making a mental note that if I ever did come across him, to thank him appropriately for the glowing character reference.
There was a silence. A taxi sounded its horn outside on Gordon Street. A river-bubble of voices rose up from outside and through the window I had left open in the vain hope it would cool the office. I noticed a trickle of sweat on Sheila Gainsborough’s sleek neck.
‘So exactly what kind of people was Sammy mixing with? You said he had gotten involved in less than honourable businesses. What do you mean?’
‘Like I said, Sammy isn’t really in show business as such. But he does do the odd singing job. He’s not great, if I’m honest, but good enough for Glasgow. He’s been singing in nightclubs and mixing with a bad crowd. Gambling too. I think that’s where a lot of the money has been going.’
‘Which clubs?’
‘I don’t know… not the ones I started in. There was one he went to a lot. I think he sang there too. The Pacific Club down near the river.’
‘Oh… yes,’ I said. Oh fuck, I thought. Handsome Jonny Cohen’s place.
‘You know it?’
‘I know the owner. I can have a word.’
‘Have you ever heard of the Poppy Club?’ she asked.
‘Can’t say that I have. Why?’
‘When I went to his flat there was a note by the telephone that said “The Poppy Club”. Nothing else. No number. I looked up the ’phone book but there’s no “Poppy Club” listed in either Glasgow or Edinburgh.’
I wrote the name down in my notebook. Reassuringly. ‘What’s Sammy’s full name?’ I asked.
‘James Samuel Pollock.’
‘Pollock?’
‘That’s my real name. Well, it was my real name. I changed it by deed poll.’
‘So you were Sheila Pollock?’
‘Ishbell Pollock.’
‘Ishbell?’
‘My agent didn’t think that Ishbell Pollock had the kind of ring to it that a singing star’s name should have.’
‘Really?’ I said, as if confused as to why anyone would be blind to the charms of a name like Ishbell Pollock. They had done a good job on her. A Glasgow club singer, one amongst thousands. But they had had great raw material to work with. Sheila Gainsborough had the looks — she certainly had the looks — and the voice to stand out from the crowd. She’d been talent-scouted. Groomed. Repackaged. Managed. She maybe had the looks and the voice but the name Ishbell Pollock and the Glasgow accent would have been dropped faster than utility-mark panties on VE Day.
