‘We just want to know who it is …’ said Violet.
‘… but we don’t want them to know we know,’ said Isa. ‘Then we’ll decide what to do.’
‘That could be tricky,’ I said. I thought of where this could all lead me and started to wonder if I should have made a bigger effort to be immoveable.
‘I’m an enquiry agent. I make enquiries. People tend to hear when someone’s asking questions about them. I suggest we take this one step at a time. Could I see one of the wrappers the money comes in?’
Isa obliged and handed me a paper band. It was plain, unmarked with a gummed closure.
‘This isn’t a bank’s,’ I said. ‘The only way to trace this money would be to have the police check the serial numbers, but I guess that’s not going to happen.’ I punctuated my sigh with an obliging smile. ‘Let me see what I can do. I’ll ask around.’
‘Thank you, Mr Lennox,’ they said simultaneously.
‘Do you have a photograph I can have of your father? I wouldn’t need to keep it … just long enough to copy it and then I’d return it to you.’
Isa, or Violet, shook her head. ‘We don’t have any photographs of Daddy …’
‘He never liked having them taken …’
‘Then, when he disappeared, the few photos there were of him also went missing …’
‘I see,’ I said. Ghosts didn’t steal photographs. ‘Can you give me a list of people your father associated with before he disappeared?’
‘We never knew anyone Daddy had dealings with …’
‘But there were the names we found …’
‘… behind the bureau …’
‘What names?’ I asked.
‘It was a list that Daddy had made …’
‘… years and years ago …’
‘… it had fallen behind the bureau …’
‘Mam found it when she was cleaning …’
‘It had some names on it …’
‘Would that help?’
‘Anything that could give me somewhere to start looking would help,’ I said, although I couldn’t imagine Gentleman Joe committing a list of his Empire Exhibiton robbery co-conspirators to paper.
I went across to my office window while their heels were still clacking their way down the stairwell. Gordon Street below and the entrance to Central Station opposite were both thronging with people. Because it was before noon, there were no parking restrictions on Gordon Street and there was a car pulled up directly outside the entrance to my building. A brand new Ford Zephyr, all black and Hire Purchase shiny. A smartly dressed man stood leaning against the wing smoking a cigarette. He wasn’t wearing a hat and I could see he had a full head of thick, dark hair. The suit looked expensive and must have been tailor-made to fit the shoulders that bulked beneath the material. He snapped away his cigarette and dutifully held open the door for the twins when they emerged from the doorway. So that was Violet’s husband, Robert. I could tell, even from the distance of four floors up, that this guy was ‘handy’, as my shady business chums would say.
I found myself wondering how much of Robert’s tailoring was paid for through the largesse of his wife’s anonymous benefactor and how much came from earnings that spared the taxman effort. I couldn’t see his face and therefore couldn’t tell if he was someone I’d come across in my dealings with Glasgow’s less salubrious social set.
After they had driven off, I sat at my desk frowning, without knowing what it was I was frowning about. Or maybe I did: I had spent a long time putting some distance between myself and the Three Kings. I still got the very occasional job from them, and it was difficult to refuse Willie Sneddon, Handsome Jonny Cohen or Hammer Murphy. Murphy particularly had a problem with anyone saying no to him, and had a temper that a psychopath would deem unseemly. It was blindingly obvious that this case, involving as it did the famous — or infamous, depending on your point of view of a sawn-off shotgun — Gentleman Joe Strachan, was going to suck me right back into that world.
But it wasn’t even that: there was more to the nagging in the back of my brain. I frowned some more.
Then I took the cash the twins had handed me out of the drawer and counted it. Then counted it again. I stopped frowning.
CHAPTER THREE
Three thousand miles and a wartime before, about the time that Gentleman Joe Strachan’s criminal career was already well underway, I had been an eager-beaver schoolboy in the prestigious Boys’ Collegiate School in Rothesay, New Brunswick, on Canada’s Atlantic coast, where Glasgow was far, far away. Mind you, no further away than Vancouver. One of the subjects at which I had excelled at school was History. Then, without pause or hesitation, I’d answered the King’s call and rushed to defend, against a small Austrian corporal, the Empire and a Mother Country I had left before I’d been toilet trained.
The funny thing about the reality of war was that you suddenly lost your enthusiasm for history. Watching men die in the mud, screaming or crying or calling for their mothers, blunted your appetite for memorizing the dates of battles or for learning the glories of past conflict. If the war had taught me anything about history, it was that there was no future in it.
That was probably why, despite there being an impressive wad of cash in my desk drawer, I put off delving into the history of Glasgow’s most audacious robbery and the colourful if dangerous character behind it. It was true, of course, that I really needed the list of names that Isa and Violet had promised me before my delving could have any clear direction, but the truth was I knew where I could get started and I was putting it off for a day or two.
The day before the twins had turned up, I had received a telephone call asking for an appointment to see me. The male voice on the line had had that accent that was normally associated with Kelvinside: nasally and vaguely camp, with the tortuously articulated vowels that over-compensated to hide a Glasgow accent. I had lived in the city for a couple of years before I’d worked out that
The voice spoke in multi-syllabically dense sentences and told me that it belonged to Donald Fraser, a solicitor, and that he would appreciate me calling out to see him at his office in St Vincent Street on ‘a matter of not inconsiderable delicacy’. More than that he was ‘unprepared to divulge telephonically’. I let it go and agreed to meet with him: as an enquiry agent, I had learned that some people desperately wanted to tell you their story — and their whole reason for contacting you was to tell you their story — but nevertheless needed time to open up; and they expected you to coax it out of them. I was rather good at it, and had often contemplated that my talents would have been equally well employed if I’d qualified as a doctor of venereal diseases. The truth was that I would probably have had to listen to less sordid stories.
In any case, I hadn’t pushed Fraser for more information. The other reason was that he was a lawyer in a firm whose name I recognized. Being an enquiry agent, the city’s lawyers were a key source of legitimate jobs. Mainly divorces, which under Scottish law required some upstanding member of society such as myself to testify that some other member of society had been upstanding when, where and with whom he shouldn’t have been.
After Isa and Violet left, I had a couple of hours before my appointment with Fraser. I picked up the phone and asked the operator for Bell 3500, the number of police headquarters in Saint Andrew’s Square, and asked to be put through to Inspector Jock Ferguson.
‘Fancy a pie and a pint?’ I asked him.
‘What is it you’re after, Lennox?’ I could hear the chatter of a typewriter in the background. I imagined a burly, ruddy-cheeked Highlander in uniform tapping away with two fingers, tongue jutting sideways from his mouth, frowning in concentration.
‘What do I want? The pleasure of your society, of course. And a pie and a pint. But don’t pin me down too
