The Deep Dark Sleep

If he wanted to shoot me in the back of the head, now would be the time.

‘You told me on the telephone last night that you had information worth paying for,’ I said. ‘I have to tell you I find your sales technique a little pushy.’

‘Keep the wisecracks up, Lennox, and we might just seal the deal here and now.’

‘Pushy but persuasive,’ I said, still trying to measure the distance. I decided this was probably a no-sudden- moves-situation. ‘Okay, friend, what’s this all about?’

‘You’re sticking your nose into this Strachan business. I want to know why.’

‘I’m naturally curious,’ I quipped, and he quipped back by slamming a fist into my kidney. The impact jarred my cheek into the wall and drove every drop of air out of my lungs. I dug my fingers into the wall as I gasped in the tarry, damp fug. He gave me the time to recover.

‘I’ll ask you the same question, Lennox, but if you smart-mouth me again, you’ll end up pissing blood for a month. Got me?’

I nodded, still incapable of speaking and sucking air into tortured lungs.

‘You’re going to drop the whole Strachan thing, you got that? You’re going to walk away from it for good. If you don’t, you’ll end up at the bottom of the Clyde yourself. Now, I want to know why you’ve been asking about Joe Strachan. What’s he to you?’

‘Work,’ I said through tight teeth. ‘That’s all. I was hired to.’

The pain in my side was intense and nauseous. My pulse throbbed hard and sore in my head. This guy knew what he was doing but I knew that if I played along and didn’t do anything stupid, I’d probably walk away from this.

But the truth was that this guy was pushing my buttons. All the wrong buttons. The kind of buttons that made me want to play anything but nicely. The kind of buttons that stripped away ten years of civilian life and took me back to a place no one wanted me to be.

‘Who hired you?’ he asked, forgetting to give the r a celtic roll. Whoever he was, he was working hard at hiding it.

I let go a long gasp, clutching my side where he had hit me, and started to bend sideways.

‘I’m going to be sick …’ I leant away from the wall and down, my hand braced against it. I heard a muffled step backwards. He was probably trying to work out if I was genuine or making a move. I leaned deeper and began retching. I could see his shoes: tan suede with soft soles; the reason I didn’t hear him behind me. His feet were planted square and resolutely: there was nothing tentative about this guy. If I made a move he’d be ready for it.

But I made it anyway.

I heaved against the wall with the hand I had been resting on it and thrust myself at him with the loudest scream I could manage: it was he who had to worry about attracting attention, not me. I saw he was about my age and well built, and definitely not Gentleman Joe, ghost or otherwise. Fixing my attention on the gun, I didn’t have a chance to take in his face. He moved swiftly to one side, anticipating my lunge, but I swiped at him with a fist that skimmed his jaw. He swung a foot that caught me across the shins and I went sprawling on the cobbles.

I rolled as soon as I hit the ground, depriving him of an easy target, but he didn’t fire. Instead, as I struggled to get up, I saw the gun arc through the smog in a vicious slash at my temple. I took most of the power out of the blow by blocking it with my left forearm and made an unsuccessful grab for the pistol with my other hand, at the same time slamming my heel upwards into his groin. I missed but caught him in the belly and he doubled. When it comes to a fight with a gun, possession is more than nine-tenths of the law and I made another grab for it. Instead of pulling against me, as most people would do instinctively, he pushed into me as I pulled and slammed the butt of the gun into my cheek, using my own force against me. We had obviously gone to the same finishing school. I felt something wet on my cheek and felt the world take a brief but perceptible wobble.

He staggered back to his feet and I saw him raise the gun to take aim. I was halfway to my feet too and dived to one side, again rolling several times before leaping up and running. I had lost all sense of direction in the smog, but as there seemed to be an upward incline beneath my feet, I guessed I was actually heading further up the side street, away from the main road. I was hidden in the smog now. But so was he, and, unlike mine, his shoes made no sound on the cobbles.

I sprinted blindly a few yards then stopped, pressing myself against the wall. I eased forward slowly, making as little sound as I could. I found a bricked-up doorway, pressed myself into it and waited for the first shot to be fired, hopefully in the direction of where I had been, rather than where I now was. But there were no shots.

I had only managed a swift look at his face, and when I had seen it, the features had been twisted into a snarl. I had gotten just enough of a view to see that he had dark hair and a hard, angular face. I was also pretty sure I had seen an ugly scar on his forehead. He wasn’t someone I had seen before.

I kept pressed into the recess of the bricked-up doorway, straining to hear any sound. In the smog, at the best of times, you can feel isolated, detached, as if someone had switched off the world and nothing existed beyond the four or five feet you could see. But I wasn’t alone: there was another wanderer out there, hunting me with a gun. At any second he could burst into my tiny circle of awareness and it would be down to who reacted quickest. By the same token, he could just as easily have been halfway to Paisley by now.

I waited, not moving, straining the smog with every sense and ready to spring at anyone or anything that came out of it. Nothing. I wiped my cheek with the back of my hand and saw it smeared red. I started to think about the man with the gun. About his fake accent and his handiness with his fists and a gun. If he had been a gangster, then he was one who’d had the kind of army training you only got in the commandos or the like. Three minutes became four, became five. I guessed he had slipped away, aware that coming looking for me in this murk was as dangerous for hunter as hunted. But I waited a minute more. He had been a cool one all right; the type that tends to have plenty of patience.

I was just about to start making my way back to the main street when I saw him. He just appeared in front of me, as if he had suddenly coalesced from the fog itself. He was more a shape than anything else and he didn’t see me pressed into the doorway.

He was moving slowly, scanning the smog-filled alley with his automatic, as if it were a torch. My doorway hiding place was just outside the arc of his vision. I slipped my hand into my jacket pocket, forgetting it had been months since I’d gone to work with a spring-handled leather blackjack in it. This was the kind of opposition you didn’t want to go up against with your bare hands. I weighed up my options, but in that split second of indecision, his form was swallowed up again as he moved further up the alleyway.

Waiting a few seconds after he passed, I crouched down, undid my laces and slipped my shoes off. Then, carrying a shoe in each hand, I moved as swiftly and as silently as I could back down the alley towards Great Western Road, leaving my dance partner still searching further up the alleyway. But I promised myself that we would dance again.

And the next time, I would lead.

I was properly shod by the time I got back to my digs. In the murk, Mrs White would not see me come up the path from the lounge window and I had hoped to slip unnoticed into my rooms to get cleaned up. As luck would have it, she opened the front door just as I got to it.

‘Mr Lennox …’ she said, shocked by my appearance. ‘What on earth has happened to you?’

‘This damned smog,’ I grumbled. ‘Pardon my language … I slipped on the kerb and smacked right into a lamppost.’ It was a perfectly credible excuse: there would be dozens of genuine accidents fitting that description that morning.

‘Come into the kitchen,’ she commanded, steering me with a firm hand on my elbow. ‘I’ll have to have a look at that.’

I was pretty groggy and went along with what she suggested. Pulling out a chair from the kitchen table, she eased me down into it. I winced as she did so.

‘Are you hurt elsewhere?’ she asked.

‘I fell after I hit my head … the kerb dug into my side. It’s mainly my cheek though …’ I hoped she bought it. Fiona White had seen me with various battle trophies, including on one occasion when they had been awarded to me by the City of Glasgow police. It was, I knew, her principal reason for wanting to keep her distance: all part of my qualifications as a shady character.

She made up a weak solution of antiseptic and boiled water and dabbed at the wound. I noticed the solution