Dead Men and Broken Hearts: A Lennox Thriller (Lennox 4) (21 page)

When the ten minutes was up, I got out and walked up to the door. The house sat dark and silent and I didn’t get an answer to my ringing of the doorbell. I was about to turn on my heel and put it down to Dewar getting confused about the time, given his agitated state of mind, but, on the ’phone, he had been so desperate for this meeting. It didn’t make sense that he wouldn’t turn up for it. I rapped on the door instead of ringing again. Still no answer.

There was no handle on the door; it was one of the new kind with a small Chubb cylinder lock with only a small brass lip curled below the keyhole with which to pull the door shut. I laid my gloved hand flat against the door and it opened with only a light push.

‘Mr Dewar?’ I called into the darkened hall. ‘Tom?’

Nothing. I roughly remembered the layout of the place from my visit with the potentially obliging Sylvia, but it took a few fumbling seconds before I found the wall switch and illuminated the hall. I closed the front door behind me, went into the living room and switched on the ceiling light.

Everything was just as it had been the last time – the only time – I’d been there. The three-piece suite still filled the room
with a showroom smell, the Bush television rented from RentaSet still watched from the corner with the glossy graphite-grey eye of its huge seventeen-inch screen; every item still coordinated shop-window perfect. But something was amiss in Hire Purchase Heaven: something I had noticed before wasn’t there, but I couldn’t work out what it was.

I went through to the
kitchenette
, again switching on the lights. It was then I realized what had been missing from the front room. It was there, on the floor: the chunky glass ashtray that had sat on the kidney-shaped coffee table and which I had thought looked like a lump of lava. It had been dropped on the linoleum-covered concrete but hadn’t smashed, instead snapping clean into two halves, white ripples of shockwaves from the impact running through the deep red glass like tree rings.

I leaned against the doorframe while I had one of my more inspired detective moments. In an instant I worked out, Sherlock Holmes style, exactly what chain of events had led to the ashtray falling and breaking. I did it by piecing together small clues: like the body of Sylvia Dewar lying sprawled on the kitchen floor, or the dark red, viscous puddle that bloomed on the linoleum around her now misshapen skull. And, of course, there was the hair, blood and other matter stuck to the cleaved glass ashtray.

Yep. I had it all worked out, all right.

While I was waiting for the City of Glasgow Police to turn up, I checked the rest of the house and found Tom Dewar upstairs in the dark of the front bedroom. He was staring out through the window with nothing much of an expression on his face, other than whatever it was he was staring at was making his eyes bulge. Which wasn’t surprising, as he had clearly decided to improve his point of view by stringing himself up from the ceiling light fitting, an extra length of electrical flex around his neck. Given that his bloated face and swollen hands were purple-black with post-mortem lividity, I didn’t bother checking for a pulse. He wasn’t going to share his troubles with me after all. And whatever those troubles had been, they were now most definitely behind him.

I remembered what Hopkins had said about dead men and broken hearts. Now I was finding them together in the same place.

I went back downstairs when I heard the trilling bells of approaching police cars and was at the front door to greet the uniforms as they arrived. The first copper was one of the many Highlanders who made up the force and he actually did ask me, ‘Are you the one who ’phoned us?’

I was about to point out that, of the three occupants of the
house, the other two were currently indisposed to using the telephone, but I couldn’t be bothered and simply nodded instead.

Jock Ferguson was on the scene within fifteen minutes of the first car arriving. I was glad to see him, as the uniformed Gaelic geniuses first on the scene had treated me with undisguised suspicion. I was, it had to be said, well used to coppers treating me with suspicion, but I had had a long day and I was bone weary and felt more than a little sick. I’d seen a lot of death – too much for one lifetime – but there was a difference when women were involved.

Towards the end of the war, just outside Bremen where we had encountered particularly fierce resistance, I had happened on the body of a woman defender. She had been one of the hundreds of women and kids that the SS had equipped with old rifles and too little ammunition and forced to fight the advancing Allies. The heroes of the SS had ensured the compliance of the women and kids by hanging behind and forcing them to advance, shooting anyone who tried to retreat. It was difficult to tell how old the woman was, anywhere between late teens and early thirties, but her muddied body had lain in a ditch, her rifle beside her, shot in the face and head. Her skirt was up around her waist and her underthings ripped. Indignity and humiliation before death. I had no idea which side had done it, and I didn’t care. It had been one of the many things I had seen that had convinced me that any ideas of fighting a noble war was a crock of shit; and that all of the systems and rules and codes by which we were supposed to live our lives came from the same crock. Seeing what happened to women and kids was the one thing I couldn’t take during the war.

And seeing a murdered woman in her kitchen had turned my gut.

Again I thought of how right Hopkins had been about the trail left behind me. In a day of big decisions, I made another, that the bodies of the dead woman in Germany and the dead woman in Drumchapel would mark the beginning and end of that trail.

I now knew that I didn’t just want to get back to Canada; I had to.

It hadn’t just been the sight of Sylvia Dewar sprawled on the kitchen floor, spilling brains and blood onto the linoleum, that had turned my gut: it was the knowledge that I could perhaps have stopped it happening. I couldn’t have stopped her fooling around with other men, but if I had said yes to Dewar’s request, if I hadn’t been blind to the desperation and mental anguish of a man who had attacked me in a back alley because he thought I was someone his wife was messing around with, then maybe I could have prevented this from happening. I tried to tell myself that I wasn’t a social worker or a marriage counsellor, but none of that helped when I thought of the broken ashtray and broken skull on the kitchen floor.

Jock Ferguson had me go through the whole story there and then. Well, when I say the whole story, I told Ferguson that Dewar had ’phoned me at my office and arranged to meet me at his home that evening. The reason for his call, I told Ferguson, was that he wanted me to investigate his wife’s alleged infidelity. I explained that I’d arranged to meet Dewar at short notice because he had seemed agitated and desperate on the ’phone.

Everything I told Ferguson was the truth. But not the whole and nothing but. I missed out the part about me having been at the Dewar home before and that my real professional interest
had been in their neighbour, Frank Lang. It wasn’t that I was trying to protect Connelly and his union as my client – after all, I’d spilled the beans to Hopkins who would be a greater concern to Connelly – I was aware that simply finding a body, or bodies, is a lot less complicated an involvement in a murder case than having any kind of entanglement or history with the deceased.

And I had a boat to catch in a month’s time.

By my reckoning, this was a straightforward case of murder-suicide and I should be able to walk away from it free and clear by giving a signed deposition for the inquest. I certainly wasn’t going to tell Ferguson about my plan to skip town in a month or so. That I would do nearer the time in a less professional and more boozy context.

As it turned out, it took two hours to satisfy Ferguson, and even then there was a hint of suspicion in his manner. After he was done, I had to give the whole spiel again to a plain-clothes constable who took it all down in longhand in his notebook, getting me to sign it when we were done.

I was just glad that Hopkins hadn’t been there to beat the truth out of me with doughnuts and a cup of Earl Grey.

‘Just stay in touch, Lennox,’ said Ferguson, and I braced myself for him telling me, like they always did in the movies, not to leave town. But he didn’t.

Before I climbed into the unfamiliar Ford Anglia, I had to ask the cops to move a couple of black police Wolseleys that were blocking me in. All the lights were on in the street now, dressing-gowned neighbours standing urgently cross-armed at doors, others peeking out through curtains at the police inactivity in the street.

As I turned the corner out of the street, I passed the last
ghoul hanging over her gate, scowling eagerly down the street at the knot of police cars. As I passed she scowled in at me. I nearly didn’t recognize her without her dog.

Bad dreams again. To be expected I told myself.

It wasn’t my pneumatic little redhead on duty at breakfast the next morning but her parsimonious little father instead, who tottered about bad-temperedly between the only two occupied tables and the kitchen. I was yet to see the mother working in the hotel. Leaving as much of my breakfast as I could without provoking the ire of the hotelier, I decided I would pick up something less fatty, like a half-pound of lard, on my way, and headed into the office early.

After the usual morning catch-up on cases with Archie, who had already built up quite a case on the pilfering store staff, I told him about what had happened the night before and my discovery of Dewar and his wife.

‘You don’t think there is any link between what happened and Frank Lang?’ Archie asked when I was finished.

‘No. Or at least not directly. I suspect that Lang may have been one of the troop of bedroom jockeys Sylvia Dewar went over the jumps with, but I doubt if he was the only one. Well, I know that for sure, having seen her manipulative skills with that guy in the Locarno.’

‘Race …’ said Archie flatly.

‘What?’

‘Race,’ he repeated. ‘A race of bedroom jockeys. Race is the collective noun for jockeys, not troop. Apes, mushrooms and kangaroos come in troops. Sometimes lions. But not jockeys.’

‘I’m indebted, Archie.’

‘I do a lot of crosswords,’ he explained.

‘What about enquiry agents?’ I asked. ‘Is there a collective noun for them?’

‘Private detectives? That’s one I don’t know. Probably a
snoop
. Do you have anything else on Frank Lang or has that line of enquiry gone completely dead?’

‘It was never alive,’ I said. ‘Frank Lang has no history to speak of. And Connelly is still holding something back. Lang was no government or police spy, but I do believe that he’s not who or what he said he was and he has infiltrated the union for some other reason.’

‘Then I can see only two possible reasons for someone going to so much trouble,’ said Archie. ‘Maybe Lang is spying on the union for some political party or group, or even for some foreign government, although that’s all too James Bond.’

‘James who?’ I asked.

‘A book the wife’s reading. About some super spy. Gives her something to do while I’m doing the crossword. Anyway, I don’t think your Frank Lang is a Russian spy, and I think it highly unlikely that the Milngavie Conservative Association use secret agents to infiltrate unions, so that leaves the second option, which is that Frank Lang is a common-or-garden fraud merchant.’

‘That’s where I’d put my money,’ I said. Archie had mirrored my own thought processes. ‘But maybe not so common-or-garden. Two years of building a back-story is a big investment of time and effort just to steal an address book with a few embarrassing names in it. This has echoes of long firm to it. Who do you know in the long firm racket?’

Archie paused to roll and light a cigarette. Like everything with Archie, it was done slowly and deliberately and as a diversion while he was thinking. As I waited, I thought about him taking over the business. Archie was smart and persistent, but
lacked drive and ambition. But he’d do well taking over the enquiry agent business; he’d probably be better at it than me.

‘I was in uniform, not CID,’ he said eventually, blowing a thin jet of blue smoke into the air and picking a shard of tobacco from pursed lips. ‘The City of Glasgow seemed to feel my talents were better employed dodging pish-filled beer bottles at Parkhead football stadium. More Old Firm than Long Firm. But I would have thought you had people in CID you could get the information from.’ Archie said it without looking at me, instead examining the shard of tobacco he now held up in the air between finger and thumb. I didn’t know if he was hinting that he knew all about Taylor, my bent copper, or if he simply meant Jock Ferguson.

‘Come on, Archie, you must know someone,’ I protested. It was a question Jonny Cohen would have been better placed to answer, but asking would be difficult, given the attention he was getting from coppers investigating the Arcades robbery.

‘Give me a minute …’ Archie picked up the receiver and dialled a number he clearly knew by heart. After a few minutes talking and scribbling in a notepad, he hung up.

‘It would appear I am better connected than I thought,’ he said, handing me the note. ‘Three names. The last two have done time for dishonesty offences and they’ve all been linked to long firm frauds. The name at the top … he’s never been done. No record.’

I read the name: Dennis Annan. ‘So how come he’s known?’

‘He’s never been caught, but he’s been questioned about several big frauds. He’s too clever … all of his scams are blind and double-blind stuff and he runs rings around the average flatfoot. Christ knows how you’ll find him though.’

‘But he’s in Glasgow?’

‘Glasgow, Edinburgh … anywhere he can run a scam. My contact says that he thinks Annan is originally from somewhere in the Borders.’

‘The Borders?’

‘Aye …’ Archie raised the two huge beetles of his eyebrows. ‘Not the usual starting point for a career con man. Maybe when he left Galashiels his head was turned by our fancy city ways, like wearing shoes and using cutlery.’