The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5 (11 page)

The husband indicated the pub with a nod and they both headed into it.

‘Did you no’ see who that wus?’ said Agnes, clearly awed.

‘Who?’ I shrugged.

Agnes looked at me as if I had said something profoundly stupid.

‘Frankie Findlay.’

‘Never heard of him.’

Agnes was now open-mouthed. ‘Frankie Findlay the comedian. You know, Frantic Frankie Findlay . . . Dinnae tell me yuv no’ heard uh Frankie Findlay.’

‘Oh . . .’ I feigned enlightenment, looking at the Bentley. I still had no idea who he was. There again, I was purposely ignorant of Scottish comedy. Scotland had much of which to be proud: it had been the birthplace and heart of the Industrial Revolution; it was a small country that had produced a truly disproportionate number of engineers, medical pioneers and inventors for its size. But that pride didn’t extend to comedy: I had seen enough Scottish comedians to know that, as a nation, they should have stuck to building bridges. Scottish music hall comedy, which had now filtered into radio and TV, was truly, spectacularly dire. Only one act I’d seen, a deadpan comic called Chic Murray, had had any subtlety or sophistication to it; the rest had been crass and moronic.

‘He’s been on the telly and everything,’ Agnes said.

‘Oh yes . . .’ The truth was that in that instant the name did become familiar: I realized I’d seen it somewhere before. ‘Frantic Frankie Findlay, you say.’

‘Aye . . .’ Another incredulous look. ‘That’s him.’

I didn’t take Agnes back to my place. The Forestry Commission had long been an accomplice of mine in matters romantic and, taking the scenic route back to town, I pulled into a forest track off the road, far enough to be hidden by trees but not so far as to risk getting the Alpine stuck. We went through the usual obligatories and preliminaries before Agnes yielded to the inevitable. As it turned out, it was all a bit of a disappointment.

As a horizontal dance partner, Agnes was nowhere near the same class as Irene; she was unresponsive and expressionless to the point of catatonia, and I had to resist the temptation in passion’s midst to check her for a pulse. I liked to think that my performances were worthy of some show of appreciation – in Irene’s case usually a couple of encores. I suppose at least Agnes had remained quiet throughout the proceedings, which was preferable to having her whisper Finlay Currie sweet nothings in my ear.

After we adjusted our dress, smoked our cigarettes and drove back into town, I dropped Agnes off near her digs. She had remained quiet, almost sullen, throughout the journey. The quiet treatment wasn’t anything unusual: a lot of women went like that afterwards. Some even cried, which did my ego no end of good.

I could never really understand why so many women felt guilty afterwards when we had both made the same choice, both done the same thing. I never forced my attentions on anyone, always retreating when the slightest resistance was met, and I always made sure when ascending the heights of passion that my chosen co-pilot had a licence and had already clocked up several hours of previous flight time. But the landings always seemed bumpy and a sense of shame, in varying degrees, seemed to seize them – Irene being the obvious exception. I supposed it was just another of those codes and double standards that women seemed to get the shit-end of – and the kind of thing I imagined philosopher–thief Quiet Tommy Quaid would have had a theory about.

As I drove home I thought about the over-oiled, slack-jawed comic with the flash Bentley. The name, that much to Agnes’s frustration I hadn’t recognized when she’d mentioned it, now sat picking away at a thread in some fraying corner of my brain.

When I got home I dug out the ticket stub the cleaner had found in Tommy’s suit. I had been right: when Agnes had told me the spivvy-looking comedian we saw outside the Drymen pub was Frankie Findlay, it had rung a bell. This bell. The ticket stub was for a show at the King’s Theatre, called
Frankie Goes Frantic!
and starring none-other-than. I had been right; but for some reason, the thought still picked away at the same frayed corner.

*

Another few days passed without any contact from the police and I found out that Quaid’s body had been released and the funeral would be the following Saturday. I decided I’d go along to see who made an appearance, hopefully without drawing too much attention to myself. I stopped strapping up my ribs and reckoned that whatever damage had been done had been superficial and was well on the mend, so long as I didn’t over-exert myself too much.

I got a call at the office from Irene, whom I hadn’t seen since before the night I got jumped. In two short sentences she explained she was free for an hour and she’d see me back at my flat. I thought she sounded strained on the 'phone and I agreed, but when we went up to the apartment it became clear that her urgency was of the good old sort and she was just seizing the opportunity.

We indulged in the kind of over-exertion I’d sworn to avoid, but I rose to the challenge and my ribs held out. The vigour with which Irene performed sex was a stark contrast to Agnes. Irene was a woman who knew exactly what she wanted and took it, which probably intimidated and riled most men, but which I always found attractive in a woman. She did, however, seem concerned about the livid bruising on my torso – perhaps only because it could have an effect on my performance – and listened patiently and with a show of interest, feigned or otherwise, while I sketched out what had happened, deliberately erasing Quiet Tommy from the picture and being vague about where exactly it had all taken place.

When I was finished, she smiled and suggested she could kiss it all better, but either her aim or her knowledge of anatomy was seriously off, because it wasn’t my ribs her lips made contact with. I over-exerted again.

When Irene was leaving, I noticed that, as she tucked her blouse into the waist of her grey check pencil skirt, she went over to the window and looked down, scanning the car park: something she had done a couple of times since she’d arrived.

‘Is everything okay?’ I asked.

She turned and looked at me blankly for a moment, as if she hadn’t understood me, then shook her head. ‘Aye . . . everything’s fine. Why wouldn’t it be?’

‘You seem jumpy.’

‘It’s just George. He’s been funny lately.’

‘You said that before. But you said you didn’t think he was on to us.’

‘Aye . . .’ She turned from the window. ‘It’s just that the other day I went shopping. He was supposed to be at work, but he was following me.’

‘Following you? You sure? I mean, you sure it was definitely him?’

‘Definitely.’

‘And did he know you spotted him?’

‘I don’t think so. But I’ve been watching my back since.’

‘And you haven’t seen him following you again?’

‘No. But it’s not just that . . . he’s been so moody recently. Snappy round the kids; almost sulky with me. I think he suspects I’ve been seeing someone, but he cannae prove it, even to himself.’

I lit cigarettes for us both. I didn’t say it, but Irene’s marital backstory was a complication I could do without – a potentially nuisancesome third dimension to our hitherto strictly two-dimensional relationship. I maybe didn’t say it, but I guess my expression shouted it: Irene finished her cigarette and left.

The next day was the day for the bank run. The ten-thirty sun was suddenly eclipsed and the office fell into shadow. Twinkletoes McBride – whose build could indeed best have been described as planetary – had come into the office and was standing by the window, blocking out the light.

Twinkletoes was dressed smartly, as he habitually was. He wore a dark blue serge Burton’s suit that I guessed had been made to measure – although he must have paid for cloth by the acre rather than the yard – and a copy of the
Readers’ Digest
jutted from his jacket pocket. Twinkletoes read the
Readers’ Digest
specifically for its ‘Improve your Wordpower’ section, committed as he was to learning every day a new word to mispronounce.

‘Good morning, Mr Lennox,’ he said amiably, but in a seismic baritone that probably caused china in Pollockshields to rattle on its shelves.

‘How’s it going, Twinkle?’

‘I am in the
very-table
pink, Mr L. And you?’ Twinkletoes was also courteous to a fault. I’d known him for years: long enough to know the queasy reason for his nickname. Before I’d offered him a job doing the security for wages and bank runs – his first legal employment ‘with insurance stamp and everything’, as he had gratefully pointed out – Twinkletoes had worked for Willie Sneddon, one of the Three Kings.

Unlike the other two Kings, Sneddon had the vision to see beyond his criminal activities. With Sneddon’s gradual legitimization, Twinkletoes had become largely surplus to requirements.

But before Sneddon had yielded to legitimization and the appeal of Rotary Club and the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce memberships, he had employed Twinkle in what could best be described as something between a pedicurist and a public relations role. Twinkletoes had been tasked with dealing with anyone who had earned Sneddon’s ire: those who’d been ill-advised enough to set up in competition to the crime boss, defaulters on debts, and anyone in the Sneddon empire who was thought to have a too talkative nature when in the company of the boys in blue.

Twinkletoes’s nickname (or
sore-brick-ett
as he would solemnly intone) had been inspired by his method of removing his victims’ shoes and socks and reciting ‘This Little Piggy’ as he set to work on their toes with a pair of boltcutters. It may not have seemed the most auspicious work history, but if there was one thing I could say with confidence about Twinkletoes, it was that he possessed an impeccable work ethic. In the past Twinkle may have been a merciless, inconceivably violent gangland torturer and thug, but at least he had been a
diligently
merciless, inconceivably violent gangland torturer and thug. And courteous.

And I knew I could rely on him.

The funny thing was it became very clear that Twinkletoes’s heart hadn’t really been that much in his previous work and I had been surprised by how grateful he had been when I had offered him a way out. As I had gotten to know him better, I found out that the thug with violence sewn into his fabric was also a devoted family man with two young kids he doted on. On the few occasions I’d been to his home, it had been the strangest thing to watch him with his children: in their presence, he became a child himself – a huge, lumbering, gentle infant, playful yet always protective. It was a sight that, for some reason, filled me with hope.

In our different ways, we were both committed to getting beyond the reach of the Three Kings. It had to be said that Sneddon, however, had not fully emerged from the shadows, and I knew better than to ask Twinkle what he got up to on his days off.

Archie ran through the usual procedures again for the bank run, but this time he made sure Twinkletoes got everything well and truly into his head. I generally left Archie and Twinkletoes to handle the bank transfers. Twinkletoes’s sheer physical bulk was enough both to the bank and to deter any would-be robbers, but I’d hired him for more than that: Twinkle was known – specifically known – to have been connected to Sneddon’s outfit, and that meant that the usual heist crews would think twice before having a go for fear of bringing the wrath of one or all of the Three Kings down on them. We hadn’t had as much as a sideways glance since we’d been doing the run, but the bank had picked up the business of another shipyard, meaning our payload had suddenly become that bit more attractive, and that bit more worth the risk. So this week, I joined the posse.

At Archie’s insistence, we had invested in a reasonably new Bedford van. Previously, we had hired a van each week for the run, but Archie put forward the case that wages runs had become the most lucrative part of our business and it would be cheaper in the long run to buy rather than keep hiring vans. It also allowed us to reinforce the doors, locks and cargo cabin of the van. I’d gone along with it, despite my concern that we would be using the same van all the time: hiring vans meant we could change them each week to further camouflage our activity.

Archie had brought the van in with him: it was kept at his house and he used it for other work when his antique Austin let him down, which it frequently did. There had been talk about Twinkletoes keeping it between jobs, but one thing I had found out about the Gallowgate giant was that he was really rather snobby about the cars he drove, or more particularly those seen parked on the street outside his tenement flat.

*

We arrived at the bank bang on time. Both Archie and Twinkletoes were armed with coppers’ truncheons: fifteen inches of iron-hard lignum vitae that, strictly speaking, it was illegal for us to carry, but to which the police turned a blind eye. It was more for show and to reassure the client: most bank robbers came armed with sawn-offs. Personally, I carried a concealed, lead-filled leather sap – a slim blackjack that sat nicely in my inside pocket without ruining the line of my suit.

We made the pick-up in the usual way. Twinkletoes, bless him, had a face that any self-respecting Neanderthal would have considered primitive. It was all brow and busted nose and over the years the other features had been jumbled about by repeated contact with fists, bottles and Christ knows what else. His bag-of-spanners face, combined with his intimidating physical presence, made him the ideal deterrent: so while Archie and I pass-the-parcelled the canvas cash bags into the van from the bank’s rear door, Twinkle stood guard, baton in meaty fist, watching the street and scowling passers-by over to the other side of the street. I could have sworn I even saw a couple of birds change flight path too.

Once we were loaded up, Twinkle climbed into the back of the van with the cash, hunching his massive shoulders and sitting stooped on the bench, his truncheon braced on his knees. I sat in the front and Archie drove.

As a trio, the difference in backgrounds was odd, funny almost. And as we had filled up the van with the heavy canvas-and-leather cash bags, I caught Archie, the ex-policeman, eyeing me and Twinkle in a way that suggested he sometimes worried that our not-too-distant pasts, plus the temptation of several thousand pounds in portable cash, might awaken the recidivists in us.