Dead Men and Broken Hearts: A Lennox Thriller (Lennox 4) (44 page)

‘I think you’re being paranoid,’ he said.

‘Oh I am that. I’ve been paranoid for over a week now. And it’s getting worse. I’ve even been getting this crazy idea that you didn’t identify yourselves as police officers because you wanted me to make a break for it and flush out your little Hungarian network. It’s got nothing to do with expatriates, has it?’

‘It has and it hasn’t,’ answered Hopkins. ‘I think I’d better explain.’

And he did.

I was driven back to Glasgow in a grey Rover with red leather seats that, after everything I’d been through, felt better than a woman’s touch. Hopkins explained about Lang and how he had infiltrated the Mátyás Network, as the Hungarian émigré organization was known.

Ferenc Lang had skipped out of Hungary at the end of the war and before the Iron Curtain had closed around him. If he hadn’t got out, Hopkins explained, Lang would have faced awkward questions about his Arrow Cross party membership. Then, when the Uprising had started to take shape, Lang had seen an opportunity to cash in on the situation in Hungary and get some of his cronies out amongst the others fleeing the coming Russian crackdown.

‘Does Jock Ferguson know any of this?’ I asked. My voice was drunk-slurry with tiredness.

‘Don’t be naïve,’ said Hopkins. ‘Do you really think that you were able to escape police custody without some collaboration?’

‘As a matter of fact, I didn’t. So Jock knew you wouldn’t be in the building in Ingram Street?’

‘I told you when we met that it was only a temporary arrangement. By the way, your associate Archie McClelland is in police custody. He assaulted the estate agent, Mr Collins, who is responsible
for the building. I don’t know what it is about you, Mr Lennox, but you seem to inspire great loyalty. I just wish the Crown had the same gift.’

‘The charges against Archie … I take it you can make them go away.’

‘I can, and I will. But only if you drop out of sight for a while. And forget what you’ve seen. There’s more going on here than you can begin to understand.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m a very understanding person. Let’s start with Mátyás. Why did he side with Ferenc Lang?’

‘He didn’t. Mátyás, whom you met, is the genuine article. But his network became infiltrated with Lang’s people.’

‘The chaff in the wheat,’ I said, recalling our conversation in Ingram Street. ‘But Mátyás set me up. Him and the girl.’

‘No they didn’t. That day at the station, the day Ellis was murdered in your office, they genuinely thought they were arranging for you to meet Ferenc Lang. Just like Ellis believed he had been summoned to an urgent meeting with you because you had found out what was going on and wanted to help him.’

‘So Magda and Mátyás really did get a call at the last minute to tell them Lang couldn’t make it?’

‘Yes. And asking that Magda meet with you to explain. I’m afraid the Mátyás network comprises writers and intellectuals. Lang had them believing he was a champion of Hungarian democracy and freedom. I’m afraid they’re simply not equipped for this kind of subterfuge. Nor, frankly, are you.’

‘I did all right,’ I said.

‘With the greatest respect, Lennox, you’re an amateur and you have no idea what is really going on.’

‘Really? Like Lang maybe not being a Hungarian fascist at all but really a Soviet intelligence agent?’

Hopkins smiled. ‘Now why would you think that?’

‘Because I don’t know that Andrew Ellis would have been too perturbed about rabid Hungarian fascists. He had a tough time getting into the army because of his membership of a Hungarian youth organization before the war. My guess is the army wouldn’t worry if he’d been a Boy Scout.’

‘So why, then, was he so opposed to Lang, if your theory is right?’

I fumbled about in my pockets until I found the corner from Ellis’s desk blotter. I handed it to Hopkins. ‘It’s got something to do with this, I think. NTS.’

Hopkins looked at the paper and shrugged. ‘Doesn’t mean anything,’ he said, rolling the window down and tossing the paper out.

‘If you say so …’ I said. I closed my eyes and let the motion of the car rock me to sleep.

Dead Men and Broken Hearts.

Hopkins could not have put it better. He had been right when he said that was what men like me seemed to leave behind.

There were two murder trials that year.

Dennis Annan stood trial for the murder of Sylvia Dewar. His defence lawyer pointed out that much of the evidence came from dubious sources. I just happened to be in the witness box when he pointed it out.

The judge told the jury that they were dealing with one death, that of Sylvia Dewar. He instructed them not to allow themselves to be influenced by the fact that the murder of Sylvia Dewar had driven her husband to commit suicide. The fact that he pointed this out immediately before they retired to consider their verdict perhaps had something to do with them returning before the Jury Room tea had cooled in the pot.

They didn’t bother trying Annan for the union fraud. He took the eight a.m. short walk to a long drop in Barlinnie jail just as the leaves were beginning to fall in Fifty-seven.

Joe Connelly somehow managed to come out of the whole thing squeaky clean and actually appeared as a witness for the prosecution. Whatever he was, Connelly wasn’t simply a political animal, he was an apex political predator. Shortly after, he
switched his allegiance from the Communist Party to Labour; and a couple of years after that actually got himself elected MP in some Ayrshire constituency where a mentally retarded donkey could have won, provided it wore a red rosette. His parliamentary career was, however, spectacularly short. It turned out that his heart had been as livid and puffy as his face, and he died of a massive heart attack a month after making his maiden speech.

The second trial was for the murder, in my office, of Andrew Ellis. Obviously, I appeared as a witness in that case, too. I had been prepared to describe, from the stand, my dramatic flight through the heather, my tussles with foreign agents and smouldering Hungarian brunettes. I would, I had predicted, stand heroically upright, pointing my resolutely accusing finger at Ferenc Lang and the two men I’d struggled with in the stairwell of my office building, immediately before finding Ellis dying.

I didn’t get a chance. A Hungarian national, an absconded merchant seaman, was arrested and tried for the murder of Andrew Ellis. He admitted the killing, but with a plea of diminished responsibility, and provided details that only the killer could know. He was a small, dark, unprepossessing man in his thirties. And I’d never seen him before in my life. He was about as guilty of Ellis’s murder as I was.

One of Hopkins’s innocents to the slaughter.

Except he didn’t go to the slaughter. His plea was accepted and he was declared unfit for trial and committed to the secure mental hospital in Carstairs. Case closed. No one asked me even to identify him, which I wouldn’t have. My guess was that he wouldn’t spend long weaving baskets and finger-painting: he would probably soon be repatriated to a Hungarian hospital ‘on compassionate grounds’.

No one mentioned Ferenc Lang, Mátyás, Magda, Tanglewood or any putative émigré group. Deals, no doubt, were being done, intelligence traded, lives bought and sold. Or maybe he had been sold back to the Soviets.

I asked a friend of mine who knew about such things what NTS could have stood for. The best he could come up with was
Narodny Trudovoi Soyuz
. He explained it was a Russian anti-communist organization that had worked with Hungarian insurgents, encouraging them to revolt. But the rumour was that the NTS was actually a double-blind Kremlin outfit, placing communist agents in the West in the guise of right-wing refugees.

There was a rumour, my friend told me, that the NTS had encouraged Hungarian dissident groups to act sooner, rather than later, so that the Soviets could crush the Uprising while the West squabbled over who owned a canal.

Maybe I was still being paranoid.

I had to put my return to Canada on hold, until after the trials. In the meantime, the Iron Curtain had once more been drawn around Hungary, saving the West the embarrassment of having to look at the consequences of its inaction and deafness to the desperate, final broadcast pleas for help while Hungary’s brief flame of freedom was snuffed out under tank tracks.

In the meantime, Suez emasculated Britain. Eisenhower flexed the US’s economic power and, faced with bankruptcy without American support, Britain caved in over Suez and Anthony Eden’s head rolled. Overnight, the great imperial power became just a little grey island off the coast of Europe.

What Hopkins didn’t know – or probably did – was that I helped Mátyás’s network over the next couple of months. Pamela Ellis met with me after the trial: she said she was sorry and I said it was okay and how I understood that Lang had put the
frighteners on her. We talked about the Mátyás network and I put her in touch with it. She had, it appeared, some money she wanted to put to work helping Hungarian refugees.

Over the months after the Uprising, the Mátyás network succeeded in getting a great many Hungarians into Britain, France, Canada and the US. Some were geniuses, just as Hopkins had described in his Hungarian Brain Drain theory, but there were a lot of plumbers and sailors, mechanics and goulash cooks in there too. Oppression, contrary to the beliefs of some, is something the ordinary want to escape from every bit as much as the extraordinary do.

At least I made one person happy: I went back to the car lot on Great Western Road and made Kenny the salesman’s month by trading the Atlantic in for the Talbot – after all, I didn’t have anyone else to spend my money on. Well, I had one person, and Kenny came close to ecstasy when I told him I also wanted to buy the six-month old, low-mileage Vauxhall Cresta he had on the forecourt.

‘For a friend,’ I had explained.

Kenny probably blew the commission on hair oil and breath mints.

Jonny Cohen was never charged with the Argyle Arcade robbery. No one was. But one of his ‘known associates’, as the coppers were wont to say, met with a tragic accident. Drowning. They fished him out of the Clyde not far from the Queen’s Dock, where I’d met with Jonny that day.

There was another, unexpected twist to my tale of dead men and broken hearts. I thought I’d heard the last of Sheriff Pete, the pale-faced loudmouth with the phoney American accent, the strange dark eyes and the mop of black hair.

I’d done exactly what Jock Ferguson had asked and kept out of whatever it was that was going on with him. After all, I had had a lot on my plate and Sheriff Pete had been the least of my concerns. I hadn’t seen the little creep since I’d given him the slapping for harassing the girl from the dance hall. But I had thought about him. I had thought about him a lot. About the earnest look on Jock Ferguson’s face. About Sheriff Pete’s boast that no one would forget his face or his name.

He had been right.

I looked again into those coal-black eyes; every time his face appeared on the TV news; every time I passed a news vendor’s stand.

They hanged him too.

The small, insignificant loser and Walter Mitty fantasist who’d been the butt of so many jokes in the Horsehead Bar had lived up to his promise of becoming a big name. Just like he said: a name no one would ever forget, in Scotland at least.

He’d managed that all right.

What I hadn’t known, but Jock Ferguson had suspected, was that that night I’d met him, Pete had already murdered four women. And he had gone on to become the most notorious multiple rapist and murderer in Scottish legal history. They hanged him in Fifty-eight for the eight murders they tried him for. Eight out of maybe as many as eighteen or nineteen killings.

The small man got the big name he had craved.

Peter Manuel.

The Beast of Birkenshaw.

Over the next six months, I ’phoned Fiona White three times. The first two calls had been made drunk and she hung up on me. I was sober the third time and we spoke for three or four
politely dry minutes. Her voice had been small and quiet and fragile on the ’phone, as if her fading out of my life was literal. I had had a list of things I wanted to say to her, promises I wanted to make, meetings I wanted to arrange, but somehow they too, faded to nothing.

It was in the summer of Fifty-seven that he came to the door of my new flat in Kelvin Court. James White. The last person I expected ever to see again. He asked quietly and politely if he could come in and talk to me. I decided to be very civilized and Canadian about it all and was polite back. He declined my offer of a drink and set down to business.

As soon as I had seen him on the doorstep, I’d guessed the reason for his visit. I could almost have saved him the effort of explaining that he and Fiona would be getting married and how that would be best for the girls and how he knew all about my past with her and they just wanted to put that behind them, they didn’t want any trouble and she didn’t want anything more to do with me …

Thing is, it wasn’t that. It wasn’t that at all.

He handed me a letter and I could see my name in Fiona’s handwriting on the envelope. White told me not to open it until he explained a few things, which he did, and something deep, deep inside me froze, then snapped.

Turned out I’d got it all wrong; turned out I wasn’t so expert on looking in on the lives of others as I had thought I was.

That night – the night after James White had been to see me; the night after I had sat alone in my flat when he had gone and read and reread the letter Fiona had written – that night I went out to get as drunk as it was possible to get, but somehow I couldn’t. It was as if I’d been inoculated against alcohol, against
all other feeling except the searing pain in my gut and chest. But I guess I was drunk after all without feeling it.

I picked up a girl. Or she picked me up. She was about ten years younger than me and pretty in a bottle-blonde, hard-faced sort of way. She told me all about her stupid life, her stupid job and her stupid friends and told me stupid things about me looking like the movie star Jack Palance and asked me what I did and was I married or did I have a girlfriend.