Dead Men and Broken Hearts: A Lennox Thriller (Lennox 4) (27 page)

‘So why did I kill Sylvia Dewar?’

‘Sylvia Dewar finds out about your affair with Pamela Ellis, gets jealous and blackmails you for a cut of the proceeds. She already has a previous conviction for dishonesty. You have to keep Sylvia quiet and prevent her from spilling the beans to
Ellis about you and his wife, so you cave in her head with the ashtray, making sure you don’t leave prints. Then Dewar comes home and, distraught, kills himself. You come back in the evening to find out why no one is talking about Sylvia’s murder, or maybe because you’re worried you’ve left something incriminating behind. Probably the business cards, but you can’t find them.’

‘Because they’re cunningly hidden in a wallet and an address book?’ I snorted.

‘I didn’t say it was my theory. And remember you’ll be playing to a Glasgow audience. Murder juries here are not used to the accused being sophisticated in his thinking. I have to tell you, I think Dunlop’s line could run …’

‘You really think this will end up in front of a jury? What about everything I told you today?’

‘We’re checking into all of that,’ he said. ‘But I have to tell you it’s not piecing together very well.’

‘Did you speak to the union?’

‘We talked to Paul Lynch. He had a pretty good stab at trying to disavow you, but Joe Connelly confirmed that they had hired you to look for Frank Lang and some missing items. What is it?’ Ferguson read the expression on my face.

‘Nothing … just I’m relieved. Connelly and Lynch were almost obsessive about meeting me in secret and I thought they would deny knowing me.’

‘Like I said, that little shit Lynch was thinking about it, but I reminded him of the penalties of obstruction, false information, that kind of stuff. Connelly is just pissed off that we were there at all.’

‘And the rest?’

‘The rest still isn’t too good. Pamela Ellis still denies having
hired you, even though I told her we were getting her ’phone records. And the Hopkins thing … well, I’ll talk to you about that later. We’re going to go out for some fresh air.’

‘So we’re travelling out of Glasgow …’ I said with dull malice.

A uniform came for me half-an-hour after Ferguson left. He was capped, coated and gloved and he handed me an army surplus greatcoat, one of those things with fabric so dense it could probably have stood up by itself. He led me down the cell passage to where Ferguson and Dunlop, also both in their outdoor wear, were waiting for me. Dunlop’s tent-sized raincoat emphasized his bulk.

‘We off camping boys?’ I asked gleefully and Ferguson shot me a warning look.

It was only just before six, but it was night outside. Despite the heavy army coat I felt the bite of the chilled air. I still didn’t have laces for the one-size-too-big boots and I struggled to keep them on my feet as I walked to the black police Wolseley. I felt something more than the chill in the air: a tightening in my chest warned me, as it always did, of a coming fog, and there was no sparkle to the streetlights or car headlights as they were dulled by something gathering in the dark air.

Sitting in the back of the police car between Dunlop and the burly uniformed constable would be tolerable providing our journey was short enough that I didn’t need to breathe till we arrived. Ferguson sat in the front. I was surprised that they
hadn’t handcuffed me and wondered just what, exactly, my legal status was. I hadn’t been charged yet, but I had been cautioned before giving my statement, and it was clear that Dunlop was trying to build a case against me that would stand up in court.

Maybe, I thought, I should ask for a lawyer.

‘Where are we off to?’

Ferguson twisted around in his seat. ‘The address you gave us in Ingram Street. It’s past office hours but, if the people you say operate out of that building really are who you say they are, then I wouldn’t think that they keep banker’s hours.’

As we made our way through the city, the fog that had dimmed the sparkle of the streetlights became thick and viscous, on the tipping point to becoming smog. By the time we pulled up in Ingram Street and got out of the car, across the street from the Art Nouveau frontage of the building in which I had met Hopkins, I could only see the street for one block in either direction, and approaching headlights only a block beyond that. I don’t know why, but I took a strange, sad comfort in seeing the smog close in, closing in my perception of the world with it. Sometimes, in the smog, you could imagine that the entire universe, the whole of reality, only extended as far as you could see, and that anything else beyond it, and any time before or after that moment, did not exist. It was a form of solipsism that, given my current situation, I found very comforting.

‘Another bad one,’ Dunlop muttered to Ferguson as we all decanted from the car, with me struggling not to lose an oversized, unlaced boot in the process.

‘Soon be a thing of the past,’ said Ferguson, ‘with this Clean Air Act coming into force. Won’t you miss that back in Canada?’ he asked, turning to me.

‘Me and my lungs both,’ I said, cheered by the thought that Ferguson could see a future for me that did not involve Italian hemp or a twelve-by-eight prison cell.

My cheer did not last long.

The uniformed copper grabbed a fistful of my coat sleeve at the wrist and led me across the road. A short, skinny man in his thirties waited for us outside the building, huddled against the gathering damp. He looked like some kind of mid-range clerk and Ferguson addressed him as Mr Collins, thanking him for coming along outside office hours. Collins had a heavy set of keys and let us in through the main door.

‘Isn’t there a buzzer too?’ I asked. ‘A sort of security system?’

Collins looked me up and down and it was clear he didn’t like what he saw. Despite there being three coppers to protect him, the sight of a dishevelled, unshaven and bruised desperado in a prison uniform clearly shook him. Before answering he looked at Ferguson, who nodded.

‘No,’ he said in a thin, wheedling kind of voice. ‘There is not.’

And there wasn’t. Nor were there any commissionaires on the empty desk, nor any sign of occupancy of the building on any level. I led everyone across marble to the cage elevator and pressed the button for Hopkins’s floor. When we came out there was no bustle of office types, no office furniture, no locked doors to rooms full of secrets.

‘Where did Hopkins question you?’ asked Ferguson. I appreciated his omission of the word
supposed
.

I led them into the room and put on the lights. No Hopkins. No table, no chairs, no foolscap notebooks, no maps on the walls.

‘Jock …’ I turned to Ferguson.

‘I checked this afternoon, Lennox. This building has been
empty for two months. It’s about to be refurbished for a new commercial tenant. And before you ask: no, the new occupants have nothing to do with national security. I don’t have many contacts in that area, but those that I do have say they’ve never heard of anyone called Hopkins operating North of the border.’

‘That doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist,’ I said and failed to keep the pleading out of my tone. ‘The very nature of that type of work means there’ll be lots of outfits and people operating independently of each other.’

‘True … but where I don’t have a lot of contacts in the security and intelligence services, I do have contacts in every police force in Scotland. And I can’t find any officers with the names Roberts or Lindsey in any Special Branch division. I’m sorry Lennox, but I don’t see where we go from here. Without Hopkins to support your story, there’s nothing to prove that this elusive Hungarian émigré group exists.’ He held his arms out and looked around the empty room. ‘No Hopkins.’

I looked around the room too. I had exactly the same sense of unreality I had had outside in the smog: a feeling that the empty building around me was all that was real, and my memory of Hopkins was some kind of illusion. I felt suddenly dizzy and wobbled slightly on my feet.

‘Are you okay, Lennox,’ asked Ferguson. I nodded impatiently.

‘When I was here Hopkins said something about them only using this building on a temporary basis. Maybe they’ve moved on to somewhere else.’

It sounded lame even to me and I could see a sad weariness settle into Ferguson’s expression.

‘If you didn’t believe that I met Hopkins here,’ I said, ‘then what was the point of going through this charade?’

‘Because I wanted to see if
you
believed it. Come on, Lennox, let’s go.’

I found my focus again and my mind raced as we made our way back down to the ground floor in the cage elevator. None of this made any sense to me, so God alone knew what it must have sounded like to a couple of professional coppers who had heard every hare-brained and half-assed story under the sun.

The elevator bounced to a halt and we stepped out onto the marble of the grand entrance hall.

I turned to Ferguson. ‘I need to get to the bottom of this, Jock. It’s all an elaborate set-up and I need to find out why and who’s behind it. Let me loose.’

Ferguson gave as small laugh. ‘No way, Lennox. If anyone’s going to get to the bottom of this case, it’ll be us.’

‘Listen, Jock …’ I jerked my head in the direction of Dunlop. ‘Your fat friend here has already made up his mind about me, and that means he’s not even going to start looking for an answer anywhere else. If you want answers, real answers, then let me go so that I can ask my own questions in my own way. Only then will we really get to the bottom of all of this.’

Dunlop grunted, which was appropriate for his physique. ‘Do you honestly think that we’re going to let you wander about free as a bird?’

‘If you want some proper answers, then yes. Let me go on police bail or whatever you have to. You can put a tail on me. I’ll give you hourly reports. Whatever you need. But a bunch of coppers flat-footing it all over the place isn’t going to clear this up.’

‘Maybe we think we already have got it cleared up,’ said Dunlop.

‘And that’s exactly what this Hungarian mob want you to
think, don’t you see that? I’m not a moron, Dunlop. Do you think that if I had killed Ellis, especially if it was premeditated, I wouldn’t have come up with something a lot less cockamamie than what I’ve told you?’

Dunlop smirked and shook his head.

‘Sorry, Dunlop. That was maybe too difficult for you to take in, the question having a double-negative in it and all.’

The fat detective took a step towards me but Ferguson checked him.

‘You have a point,’ said Ferguson. ‘But there’s absolutely no way we can release you until we’ve carried out more enquiries.’

I sighed, the fight out of me.

‘Let’s get back to the Square,’ said Ferguson. ‘There’s nothing more to be gained by hanging around here.’

Collins, who I now guessed to be some kind of letting or estate agent, let us out of the building, switching off the lights and shutting the door behind us. There was an urgent exchange between the policemen on the pavement, I guessed about the smog that had grown denser while we had been inside. Getting back to St Andrew’s Square was going to be quite an undertaking. Ferguson said something to the uniformed cop, who renewed his tight grip on my coat sleeve.

In that kind of smog, crossing the road becomes a job for all your senses. When taxis or buses have a habit of looming suddenly out of the murk, only feet away from you, you learn to listen out for the sound of approaching motor engines, hearing them long before you see a glimmer of headlights.

I was given my chance by the Whispering Death.

To be more precise, I was given my chance by the Number Thirteen Whispering Death to Clarkston. I acted on instinct
more than anything else. My police escort was leading me across the street when the trolleybus, its electric motor silent, surged out of a wall of grey-green smog. On seeing us, the driver sounded his claxon and the police constable pulled me back towards the pavement.

It was more an instinctive reaction – the fly’s impulse to pull against the spider’s web – than a conscious decision to escape. I yanked my arm hard, pulling the copper with me into the path of the trolleybus. He shouted something obscene and let go of my sleeve and I threw myself in the other direction, placing the trolleybus between me and the uniform, Dunlop and Ferguson.

I could hear Ferguson shouting behind me but I lunged forward. I tripped up over my own feet, made larger and more cumbersome by the unlaced army boots, and came down hard onto the cobbles of the street. I picked myself up instantly and ran headlong toward the other side of the road.

And right into the path of a taxi.

Fortunately, the cab was travelling slowly because of the poor visibility and I suffered no injury other than the slurs on my mother’s virtue bawled out through the window by the driver. One of my boots had come off and I kicked the other one free and ran on in my sock soles. It made my feet slip on the cobbles, but when I made it to the opposite pavement, dodging in front of the parked police car, I got full purchase and was able to sprint. There were shouts and the sound of running behind me and the blast of a horn told me that one of my pursuers had also run out in front of a vehicle.

Running full pelt in the smog had a certain edge to it, like playing Russian roulette. With only a three- or four-yard visibility, there was the constant risk of a bone crunching collision
with another pedestrian, a lamppost or an unpredicted wall. It also had its advantages: there could only be two of them after me, Jock Ferguson and the burly uniformed constable. I reckoned Shuggie Dunlop’s running range was even more limited than the visibility. They couldn’t see me now; I had become hidden behind a curtain of smog within a few yards, but unfortunately not before seeing the direction I took. That meant they wouldn’t have had to split up and each take a direction, and both Ferguson and the uniform would be heading this way. I thought about re-crossing the road and heading back the way I had come, but that was too obvious and there was always the chance that they were each taking one side of the street.

I took a random right into an alley and sprinted full pace, again hoping I didn’t tumble over an obstacle. I came to another alley, cutting across the first, so I took another right. Eventually I reached the gloomy, indistinct mouth of the alley and found myself in what I guessed was a bigger street, although it was difficult to tell in the smog-tightened pool of visibility. I took off again at random, eventually slowing to a trot, my stocking-soled feet silent on the pavement.