‘I guessed as much,’ I said, thinking about the new blood splashed all over my office and the taxi below.
‘But of course,’ continued Fraser, ‘his loyalty to the Duke is phoney … everything he does is for his own purposes.’
The dark, grimy flank of the quayside and the brooding mass of the fifty-ton Stobcross crane loomed out of the fog and into view; the ferry was near docking.
Fraser reached into his coat and I did the same.
‘Take it easy, Lennox, it’s just this …’ he said, handing me a fat envelope. ‘There’s a thousand pounds in fifty pound notes in there. I want you to have it, Mr Lennox.’
‘Why is it everybody wants to shove vast sums of money into my lap? What’s the deal? What do you want from me?’
‘Like I said, I need you to protect me. Keep my name out of all of this. And more. I’m not so naive as not to know that I am a marked man, so I’m going to disappear for a while. I’m taking my family with me. Somewhere out of the country. But I want to come back. I want it to be safe for me to come back.’
‘I can’t guarantee that,’ I said, but pocketed the envelope. He owed me at least that much. ‘But I intend to take Strachan down, one way or another.’
The ferry docked.
‘Get into my car,’ I ordered Fraser. ‘And I’ll tell you what we’re going to do.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I had quite a bit of time to kill, so instead of going into the office, I went back to my digs. The net curtain twitched in the downstairs window as I opened the gate and walked up the path, but Fiona didn’t come to the door as I came in, so I went straight up to my rooms.
In the bedroom, I opened the top drawer of the chest and laid the Webley in it. Reaching under the bed, I eased up the loose board and retrieved a box of shells for the revolver and a small leather roll-case. I unrolled the case on the bed and took out a hunting knife, still in its sheath and a set of brass knuckles. I laid these in the drawer with the gun and shells. Next, I found both my saps and laid them in next to the other weapons. They would stay there until tonight. I stripped off my shirt and examined the dressing on my arm. It was fresh and clean, but I would double bind it tonight, just to have that little extra support.
Back in the living room, I sat down at the bureau and wrote three letters: one to Jock Ferguson, detailing absolutely everything that had happened over the past two weeks and giving him the lowdown on a few other aspects of my colourful career. The second was to Archie, instructing him to take over my business. The third was a short note to Fiona White. I stuffed the money that Fraser had given me into the envelope for Archie. In with the letter to Fiona White, I placed my bank safety deposit box key and a letter of instruction to MacGregor, the bank’s Chief Clerk, informing him that I had taken Mrs White into my confidence in
Once all the envelopes were sealed, I put them all into a larger brown envelope, on which I had written: IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH.
I had undertaken cheerier tasks.
I shut the envelope up in the bureau, but didn’t lock it, then went through to the bedroom and lay on my bed, smoking. Maybe it was because I was trying to fill my head with anything at all other than the night that lay ahead of me, but I started to think about home. Thinking about Canada was something I tried not to do too much, but now I indulged myself. I thought about the ‘Kennebecasis Kid’ as I always called that self I had been before the war: young, idealistic, blissfully ignorant of the crap life can throw at you. Stupid, probably. I thought about the killing I had done and the killing I had seen throughout the war. About how it had changed me into something I didn’t like.
All in all, I wasn’t too proud of what I had become during the war. I wasn’t too proud of most of what I had been up to since. It wasn’t that I was ashamed of myself in the way I would have been if I had become a white slave trader selling virgins into prostitution, sold drugs to school kids or played hockey for the Montreal Canadians — but I’d piled up the sins all right.
But even with all of my erring, sinning, fornication, drinking, brawling and shoving ex-commandos out of third floor windows, I was a choirboy compared to Gentleman Joe Strachan. Another thing I knew about myself was that I was bright. I had smarts enough for two, but even there I was left in Strachan’s shadow. He had made a career out of crossing, double-crossing, beguiling and confusing others with an ease and skill that was breathtaking. It was one thing I had found out about life, about people. We’re not all the same. There were always the manipulators and the manipulated, the singular and the unremarkable.
I even wondered whether it was true, after all, that Sneddon was Strachan’s illegitimate son, or if Gentleman Joe had somehow manipulated him, moulded him into the belief.
Maybe tonight it would be me who walked blindly into a trap of Strachan’s design.
There was a knock at my door.
I hadn’t heard anyone come up the stairs and I took my Webley from the drawer, draping a hand towel over the gun to conceal it. When I opened the door, Fiona White stood there, silent and awkward.
‘Fiona … come in,’ I said. ‘Excuse me for a moment …’ I went through to the bedroom and placed the gun back in the chest of drawers and pulled my shirt back on. When I returned, she now stood in the centre of the room, every bit as awkwardly as she had on the threshold.
‘Is there something wrong, Fiona?’ I asked.
‘The girls are at school …’ she said, as if I should understand what that meant.
And I did.
We spent the whole day together, mainly in bed, until the girls were due home from school. About noon, I made some coffee and she nipped down to her apartment to fetch some cold cuts for us to eat for lunch. She laughed and joked in a way I had never seen her before and the intimacy of it was even greater than the sex we’d had.
And, for a reason I couldn’t understand, or maybe I could, it made me very sad. It could have been that I really did not expect to see the next day dawn, or that I knew that even if I did, no matter how we felt about each other, our paths lay in different directions. But I laughed and joked too and bottled everything else up tight: my sadness, my fear, my hopes.
She kissed me when she left. A long, lingering kiss and she smiled again in a way that showed me the girl she had been.
I ate with her and the girls and everything was business as usual, except for the infrequent lingering glance we exchanged when the girls wouldn’t notice.
Fiona frowned, when I excused myself at eight-thirty.
‘Something I have to deal with,’ I explained. ‘Business I need to tie up.’
Collecting my stuff from my room, I strapped the knife to my right ankle, tucked the Webley into my belt, slipped the flat blackjack into my inside jacket pocket, the heavier one into one of my side pockets and the brass knuckles into the other.
That was the thing about a life of violence: it played havoc with your tailoring.
I parked the Atlantic in the city centre and hoofed it down to the waterfront, hoping that if I bumped into a copper, the fact that I was carrying a gun, knife, brass knuckles and two saps wouldn’t strike him as suspicious.
It was beginning to get dark by the time I got down to the Queen’s Dock. There was a night watchman just beginning his shift on the main gate and I walked past on the far side of the cobbled road, dodging the pools of lamplight. There was an open quay further along with several piles of crates to offer cover. I was over an hour early, but I reckoned Strachan would arrive ahead of time for his appointment with Fraser, just to scope out the location. I was applying the same logic that Provan and his buddies had applied eighteen years before. I tried not to
