The Deep Dark Sleep

I wanted to find out more about Donald Fraser, and before heading back to my office I decided to telephone Jock Ferguson from a telephone kiosk on the corner of Blythswood Square. It was the regulation Glasgow ’phone box: its exterior inexpertly coated in thick red paint that was flaking where it had bubbled; its interior fuming with the regulation Glasgow call box odour of stale urine, forcing me to prop the heavy, spring-loaded door open with one foot. For some reason, Glaswegians had always been confused about how the word urinal differed lexically from telephone kiosk, bank doorway, swimming pool or the back of the raincoat of the supporter in front of you at a football match.

I was lucky and got Jock Ferguson at his desk. I asked him what he knew about Donald Fraser, which was nothing, but he said with a sigh that he would ask around. In turn, he asked why I was asking and I told him the truth: that Fraser was a solicitor in the city and wanted to hire me and that I just wanted to check Fraser’s bona fides before I took the job. Ferguson told me he would ’phone me back at my office later with whatever he could find out. He also made it plain that the next lunch I treated him to would have to be somewhere more upscale than the Horsehead Bar.

I walked back to my office. It remained unseasonably warm — and muggy, which seemed to be the only warm Glasgow did. Even in the middle of that summer’s heatwave, it had been as if the city had opened up its pores and sweated itself slick. Something in this mugginess, however, hung in my nostrils and chest; that old warning feeling I always got when a smog was on its way.

When I got back, the afternoon mail had been delivered. One envelope contained a single, plain sheet of paper with a list of names. No signature, note or anything else to show who had sent it. Isa and Violet were perhaps not as guileless as they appeared.

Of the names, I recognized only three, and one of those happened to be the name at the very top of the list. For a moment I hoped that the Michael Murphy heading the list wasn’t the one that immediately leapt to mind. I transferred the name along with all of the others to my notebook:

MICHAEL MURPHY

HENRY WILLIAMSON

JOHN BENTLEY

STEWART PROVAN

RONALD MCCOY

Five names. There had been five robbers involved in the Empire Exhibition job. But one of those five had been Strachan himself, and if the Michael Murphy on the list was the Michael Murphy I was thinking of, then I couldn’t see him having been one of that team.

During the twins’ visit to my office, Isa — or Violet — had left me a telephone number and I called it. It was Isa after all. I asked if the Michael Murphy on the list was Hammer Murphy; she told me she didn’t know for sure but it was possible. Her father had known Murphy.

‘What was your father’s involvement with Murphy?’ I asked.

‘Daddy knew all the Murphy brothers. I think they did some work for Daddy. Now and again. Mam said that that was before Michael Murphy became successful and important, in his own right, like. But Michael Murphy was round now and again. I don’t remember him being at the house, but there again I was only wee.’

‘And Henry Williamson?’ I asked. The name had leapt out at me as not being typically Glaswegian.

‘He was a good friend of Daddy’s. I never met him either, though. From what Mam said, Daddy had known him for years. Since the war. The First War, I mean.’

‘Your father served in the First War?’

‘Aye. He was a hero you know.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought your father would have been old enough.’

‘It was near the end of the war.’

‘And that was where he met Williamson?’

‘I think so.’

‘Was Williamson involved in crime too?’

There was a short silence at the other end of the telephone; I wondered if I had offended her by reminding her of the origins of her father’s wealth.

‘I don’t know. That’s the truth,’ she said. ‘I don’t think Mr Williamson was ever in prison, or anything like that, but I just don’t know. He stopped coming around after Daddy went away. But they saw each other all the time before that.’

‘Do you know where I can find him? Where he lives?’

‘Not really. All I know is that Da knew him from the war. But I don’t think he was from Glasgow.’

‘I see …’ I said.

I ran through the other names with Isa. A couple of them I knew, or realized I knew when she gave me some background information. All thieves and hardmen. I reckoned that there was a good chance, after all, that I was sitting with the names of the Empire Exhibition Gang in my hand. But could it really be as easy as that? In Thirty- eight, the police would have had exactly the same list of names, yet they never nailed even one of the robbers.

The only other name I had to ask about was John Bentley.

‘I never knew him either. Mam said that he was just someone she had heard Daddy talking about to the others.’

Before I visited Willie Sneddon, I ’phoned and made an appointment. With a secretary.

That’s what dealing with Willie Sneddon had turned into. Secretaries and appointments and meetings in offices.

Willie Sneddon was by far the most treacherous and dangerous of the Three Kings. Which was saying something when you considered that Hammer Murphy had not earned his nickname because of his joinery skills. But the thing that made Willie Sneddon more dangerous than anyone else was his brain. There were a handful of Willie Sneddons born in the slums of Glasgow every year or so: people who, despite the odds and the lack of stimulus, had the raw intelligence to clamber their way out of the gutter. More than half of them wouldn’t make it: Britain’s obsessive class-consciousness placing barriers in their way at every opportunity. The others would make it despite the odds stacked against them and become surgeons, engineers, self-made business magnates.

And a couple, like Willie Sneddon and Gentleman Joe Strachan, would use their brains to dominate and terrorize the city’s underworld. Sneddon had been too small-fry to come to Strachan’s attention; but, if Strachan hadn’t disappeared when he did, then the paths of the two would, sooner or later, have come together. In a this-town-ain’t-big-enough-for-the-both-of-us kind of coming together.

But the paths had not met, and Willie Sneddon had had a clear run at dominating the city’s underworld, which he had, much to the annoyance of the other two Kings, Murphy and Cohen. They had divided the city up equally, except that Sneddon’s share had been more equal than the others. He was the youngest of the Three Kings and had come much farther, much quicker, than the other two. And everyone knew that Sneddon’s climb to the top wasn’t yet over.

Like Strachan, Sneddon had been very careful to make sure that his only view of Barlinnie Prison was seeing it in the distance as he passed by in his Jaguar on the A8. He had had a few run-ins with the City of Glasgow Police, right enough, but hadn’t picked up any indelible blots on his copybook. His relationship with the oily lawyer George Meldrum, and his open-handedness with brown envelopes stuffed with cash, had ensured that the only bars he ever looked through were the ones he ran or from which he extracted protection money. There was even a rumour that he was tight with Superintendent McNab, through their mutual membership of the Orange Order and the Freemasons or God knows what other let’s-do-a-funny-handshake-to-prove-we-hate-the- Fenians secret society.

And Sneddon was rich. Almost inexplicably rich. He had more money than the other two Kings put together, more than anyone could fully account for. I, personally, never saw much of a difference between businessmen and gangsters, other than that I would probably trust a gangster’s word more. Sneddon combined the callousness of a gang boss with the greed and acumen of a business magnate and that, I guessed, was what made him a different kind of animal in the jungle. The apex predator, as zoologists called such creatures.

Things were changing fast for Sneddon. He had re-invested the majority of his ill-gotten gains into legitimate businesses. It had all started out as front, but then Sneddon had seen that although the benefits were fewer and the profits less than his illegal activities, the risks were much, much lower. So now he ran a successful and perfectly