But I might just pick up the gun again after the run.
After I had hung up my suits, I locked both cases, the gun and the cash in one, shut them in the wardrobe and went back down to the bar. I spent an hour and a half smoking, drinking bourbon — which was good, but clearly wasn’t of the calibre of the whiskey Macready had served me — and talked semi-drunken crap to the bartender. This was a better class of bar and bartender, so I made an effort to talk a better class of semi-drunken crap, and he did a pretty good impression of being interested. I had a great deal of admiration for bartenders and their unique skills.
I returned to my room before I started to see in plural, stripped down to my trousers and undershirt, washed my face, lay down on the expensive candlewick and smoked some more.
I must have dozed off. I woke up suddenly and had that wave of nausea you get when you’ve surfaced too quickly from a fathom of sleep. I sat up, swinging my legs off the bed, still not knowing what it had been that had woken me. My head was throbbing and my mouth felt furry. I heard it again: a knock at the door. Soft, but not tentative.
For a split second I thought about getting my gun from the case in the wardrobe, but elected for the sap that I’d slipped under the pillow. I couldn’t see how my chum from the smog could have traced me to the hotel.
‘Who is it?’ I slipped the chain from its housing and placed one hand on the latch, while the other hung at my side, weighted by the sap.
‘It’s me. Leonora Bryson.’
I opened the door and she stepped in. She was in her dressing gown.
‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Is something wrong? Has something happened?’
She closed the door behind her and, unsmiling, pushed me back into the room. As I stood there, she unfastened the gown and let it slip from her shoulders. She was naked underneath. The natural detective in me guessed we weren’t going to discuss the case again. Leonora Bryson’s body was a work of art in a way that made Michelangelo’s efforts look shoddy. Every part of her was faultlessly, firmly, shaped. I found myself staring at her perfect breasts.
‘I don’t understand …’ I said, still failing to make eye contact. I perhaps should have stopped staring at her breasts, but, having been presented with them, it somehow would have seemed churlish or unappreciative not to: like being in the Sistine Chapel and refusing to look up at the ceiling.
‘Don’t talk,’ she said, still unsmiling. ‘I don’t want you to talk.’ She closed the distance between us and fastened her mouth on mine, pushing in with her tongue, making her command redundant. I was totally confused by what was happening, but decided to go along with it. I’m obliging that way.
She pushed me down onto the bed and began tearing at my clothes, almost frantically. There was something wild about her and it infected me. It was more than passion: as we made love, her eyes burned with something akin to hatred and she raked my skin with her nails, pulled at my hair and bit into my face and neck.
It was wild, passionate sex, but I couldn’t help feeling that we could have done with a referee and a copy of the Queensberry rules at the bedside. After it was over, in the absence of smelling salts and a second in my corner to fan me with a towel, I lit a cigarette for both of us. She lay silent, smoking the cigarette before getting up abruptly, pulling on her dressing gown and leaving without a word.
I did nothing and said nothing to stop her leaving. Lying there dazed and confused, I guessed that I had just been used, and I had a pretty good idea why.
The thought made me feel dirty and cheap. Which is probably why I didn’t stop grinning until I fell asleep.
CHAPTER SIX
Walking into a bank with a gun is a bit of a Glasgow tradition. Nevertheless, it made me nervous.
I had a hire arrangement with a garage at Charing Cross Mansions, who supplied the van, at a discounted rate, for the wages run each Friday. Picking the van up early, I turned up at the bank ahead of the usual time and asked to access my safety deposit box.
While the wages run was potentially a target for armed raiders, and the bank itself had been hit for cash on more than one occasion, I knew that the safety deposit boxes here were the safest in Glasgow. Not because they had thicker walls, bigger locks or better security than anywhere else; the reason was much, much more convincing than that: at least two of the Three Kings had boxes here. If you were to turn this place over, being caught by the police was the least of your worries.
I deposited the gun and the cash-stuffed volume of Wells in the box and went back up to the ground floor to meet up with Archie, the retired policeman whom I had hired to do the run with me.
As usual, Archie was waiting right on time, talking to MacGregor, the bank’s Chief Clerk. Archie was fifty but looked older and walked with a slight limp: a souvenir of a falling through a factory roof while chasing some lead thieves. I assumed that the thieves had not been carrying the lead during their escape.
Archie was lean to the point of meagre and probably six-three, but a stoop took an inch or two off his height. An unruly horseshoe shock of black hair wrapped itself around his high-domed, bald head; he had large, watery spaniel eyes and continuously wore a tired, doleful expression. It had been this expression that had initially put me off giving him the job because it sometimes made him look lazy and unresponsive.
It had surprised me to discover that behind the dolorous mask was a mind sharper than you would expect from a Glasgow copper and a dry, dark Glasgow humour. He was also every bit as reliable as Jock Ferguson had promised. Jock had told me that Archie had always managed to give his superiors in the City of Glasgow Police the feeling that he was somehow taking the mickey, without them ever being able to put their finger on how he was doing it. That, probably more than anything, convinced me to hire him.
Originally, Archie did the wages run with me to eke out his police pension and the money he made as a shipyard night watchman, but he had lost the watchman job, the unions complaining about his harassing their members. It was a universally accepted fact along Clydeside that almost everything that could not be nailed down, and most that was, was likely to leave a Glasgow shipyard under a fitter’s raincoat or wheeled out in a barrow hidden amidst the throng of workers leaving the yards at shift-change.
Pilfering was endemic in the yards. Shipworkers’ homes in Clydebank were famed for their eclectic decor: often tenement slum chic combined with ocean liner salon, complemented with a battleship-grey colour scheme. Archie, the ex-copper, had misunderstood his brief as night watchman and had managed to stop hundreds of pounds’ worth of timber, paint and brass fittings from walking out of the yard. The management had not been able to forgive Archie for doing his job unacceptably well and he was let go. Since then, I had tried to give him whatever I could in the way of work, including the odd divorce witness job, and the Friday run was a regular fixture.
When I came back up to the main hall of the bank, Archie was talking to MacGregor, the Chief Clerk, who organized the run. MacGregor was the usual young fogey you found working in a bank — a twenty-five-year-old striving hard for middle age — and Archie made a point of befuddling him with humour at every opportunity.
Archie looked over to me with his Alastair Sim eyes as he signed the manifest log, his truncheon hanging from his wrist like a handbag.
‘There’s a bit of confusion here, boss,’ he said, without a hint of a smile. ‘Mr MacGregor here says the money is to go to the yard as usual, but I thought you said this week we were off to Barbados with it.’
‘Ignore Archie, Mr MacGregor,’ I said. ‘He’s having you on. Barbados has an extradition treaty, we’re off to Spain.’
‘This amount of money is no joking matter, Mr Lennox,’ MacGregor said to me over spectacles pushed halfway down his nose, yet another misguided affectation of middle-class middle-age. ‘You’ll telephone as usual to confirm delivery?’
I said I would and signalled for Archie to stand guard on the street while I loaded the back of the van with the sacks.
It was the usual, thankfully uneventful trip: me driving, Archie sitting lugubriously with the mail sacks in the back. We delivered the wages to the shipyard office and I ’phoned MacGregor to confirm delivery. On the way back, Archie sat in the front with me.
‘I know you’ve been hit hard by losing the watchman job,’ I said. ‘Listen, Archie, things have been picking up
