The Deep Dark Sleep

a new standard lamp; and, in the corner, the Regentone radiogram that I had bought for fifty-nine guineas and had claimed was too big for my rooms. It all made me feel at my ease and itchingly restless at the same time. If anyone had stepped into that living room, it would have looked like a perfectly normal domestic scene with all of the essential elements of a perfectly normal family.

I was deliberately, inch-by-inch, easing myself into the gap left by a dead naval officer. I had no idea why I was doing it: it was certainly true that I liked the kids, really liked them, and my feelings for Fiona White were deeper than any I had felt for any woman, except perhaps one. But if I had felt sorted out enough, adjusted enough, to make a fist of a normal life, then why hadn’t I already left Glasgow behind and all of the dreck I’d mired myself in and, at long last, taken that ship to Halifax Nova Scotia?

My domestic idyll was interrupted by the ringing of the telephone we shared in the small hallway at the bottom of the stairs that led to my rooms. Fiona White answered it and then called me to the ’phone, a mildly disapproving frown on her face.

‘Hello,’ I said once she had gone back into the living room, closing the door behind her.

‘Lennox?’ It was a voice I didn’t recognize. It sounded like a Glasgow accent, but not as strong as most and a little bit fudged with something else.

‘Who is this?’

Only Jock Ferguson and a few others had my telephone number here. Anyone who wanted me knew to ’phone my office, or find me in the Horsehead Bar.

‘Never mind who I am. You’re looking for information on Gentleman Joe, is that right?’

‘You’re very well informed. And quickly informed for that matter. Who told you I was interested in Strachan?’

‘Are you looking for information or not?’

‘Only if it’s worthwhile.’

‘There’s a pub in the Gorbals. The Laird’s Inn. Meet me there in half an hour.’

‘I’m not going to meet you at short notice at The Laird’s Inn, The Highlander’s Rectum or The Ambush in the Heather. Just tell me what it is you have to tell.’

‘I’m not going to do that. I want paid.’

‘I’ll send you a postal order.’

‘You have to meet me.’

‘Okay. Tomorrow morning, nine sharp, at my office.’ I hung up before he had a chance to protest. I dialled Jock Ferguson’s home number.

‘What the hell is it, Lennox? The football’s about to come on. The international.’

‘I’ll save you and Kenneth Wolstenholme the trouble, Jock. Scotland will lead by one goal until the last fifteen minutes and then snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by letting three goals in in quick succession and you’ll spend the next two weeks saying “we was robbed” — like everyone else. Listen, Jock, who did you tell I was asking about Joe Strachan?’

‘Nobody. I mean, just the few other coppers I had to ask for information, like I already told you. Why?’

‘I’ve just had a call trying to lure me to the Gorbals, if you can use lure and the Gorbals in one sentence. He said he knew I was looking for information on Strachan and offered to sell me some.’

‘You’re not going, I take it?’

‘As you Glaswegians are fond of saying, I did not come up the Clyde in a banana boat. I’ve told him to call at my office tomorrow at nine. I doubt if he’ll show. I just wanted to know if it could have been someone you had spoken to.’

‘Maybe your clients have been talking.’

‘No. I thought about that but don’t see it happening. Thanks anyway, Jock.’

I hung up and went back into the living room.

‘You’re not going out then, Mr Lennox?’ Fiona White asked as I sat back down next to the girls.

‘Oh … that? No. I’m sorry about that. It was a business thing, but I don’t know how he got this number. I’ll deal with it tomorrow.’

‘I see,’ she said and turned back to the television. I could have sworn there was a hint of a smile as she did so.

I was right to have suspected an ambush. I got up and headed into my office early, but as soon as I stepped out of the front door of my lodgings I was grabbed by the throat. Except it wasn’t some thug that went for me but the lurking Glasgow climate. September was turning into October and something cold from Siberia, or worse still from Aberdeen, had moved into the city and collided with the warm air. Fog. And fog didn’t linger long in Glasgow before it became thick, choking, yellowy-green-grey smog.

Glasgow had been the industrial heart of the British Empire for a century. Factories belched thick smoke into the sky, and the greasy fuming of a hundred thousand tenement chimneys combined into a single, diffuse caliginous mass above the city. And when it combined with fog, it turned day to night and took your breath away. Literally.

I didn’t debate long about driving into the office. I generally took it that if I couldn’t see my car from the door of my digs, then driving wasn’t a great idea. The same went for the buses, which left the options of the subway, trolleybuses or trams. The trams were always the most reliable in the smog, so much so that queues of cars would trail along behind them as the only way of being sure to navigate through the miasma; although it often led to motorists finding themselves in the tram depot rather than where they thought they were going.

I walked along Great Western Road, keeping close to the kerb to make sure I didn’t wander off into the middle of the street, and eventually found the tram stop. I could see the indistinct outline of an orderly queue at the stop and, as was always the case in Glasgow, this collection of strangers were chatting among themselves as if they had known each other for years.

I was about four feet from the end of the queue, which was about as far as you could see in the fog, when I felt something jab painfully into the small of my back. I was about to spin around when a hand clenched itself around my upper arm and dug in. The smog clearly had an accomplice, after all.

‘Don’t turn around …’ I recognized the voice as the one I’d heard on the phone. The same odd mix of accent, but this time it was authoritative and calm. ‘If you see my face, I’ll have to kill you. Do you understand that?’

‘It’s not that complicated,’ I said. In the smog you were deprived of much of your vision and your other senses became keener, it seemed. I puzzled as to why I hadn’t heard him come up behind me.

‘You should have kept our appointment last night, Lennox. Now, we’re going to back away down the alley behind me and you’re going to keep nice and quiet and nothing untoward will happen to you.’

Untoward. The vocabulary and the accent were both all over the place. ‘All I want to do is to talk to you. No one need get steamed up or hurt.’

‘I’m assuming that is a gun you’ve got in my back,’ I said, ‘not a rolled-up copy of Reveille. Let me see the gun or I’m not doing anything.’

‘Nice try, Lennox. I lift the gun and you make a grab for it. I tell you what, I’ll pull the trigger and you watch a bit of your spine and maybe a chunk of liver fly off into the fog. Would that convince you?’

‘That would do the trick, for sure … but on reflection, I think I’ll take your word for it.’

It was more than ten years since the end of the war, but there were still vast quantities of guns circulating, particularly in Glasgow. The hard thrust I felt in the small of my back didn’t feel like a bluff, and my new best friend had the kind of quiet confidence that came from experience, so I decided to play nicely. Or at least play nicely for as long as it looked like I’d be able to walk away from our encounter.

He pulled me backwards and the vague outline of the tram queue was swallowed up again in the fog. We were in a side street now that was little more than an alleyway and he steered me backwards twenty yards or so before swinging me around until I was kissing brick. There were cobbles under our feet: Glasgow-black and slick, but which sounded under my heels. But not his. Like when he had come up behind me, he seemed to move silently.

‘Lay your hands flat against the wall, level with your head.’

I did what I was told, but tried to measure, from the sound of his voice, how far back from me he now stood.