The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5 (12 page)

I think that the extra cash made us all a little jumpy – even poacher-turned-gamekeeper Twinkletoes had seemed edgy – and I was relieved when we made our first delivery of the day. My reasoning was that if anyone knew about our newly bountiful cargo, they would have hit us when we’d had a full load.

There was a strange Gothic beauty to the working Clyde – a beauty I daresay completely eluded the poor schmucks working in its yards and worksheds. But it was there all the same and I reflected on it as we headed out of the first shipyard. A forest of latticed iron cranes, interlaced with a web of cables and lines, bristled along the waterfront and pontoons, rising over and huddling around the dark hulks of forming ships, the ale-dark, oil-sleeked waters of the Clyde beyond. They looked like impossible, giant insects at work weaving and cocooning their offspring.

Twinkle banged on the panel that divided the cargo and driver’s cabins, and I slid open the door of the face-sized hatch between them – or it would have been face-sized if it had been anyone other than Twinkletoes on the other side.

‘What’s up?’ I asked.

‘I don’t mean to cause any undue
trepp-er-day-shun
, Mr Lennox, but there’s a blue works van behind us. It could be followin’ us . . . I think it was there before we made the first drop-off.’

I looked to Archie, who was already checking his side-view mirror. ‘I see him. Driver and front passenger. There could be others in the back but I can’t see. I’ll make a couple of unscheduled turns and see what he does.’

‘You keep an eye on them too,’ I said to Twinkle and left the panel open.

We were in the heart of the shipyards, the road flanked on one side by the river with its quays and cranes and on the other by soot-blackened worksheds. This was no residential area and Archie struggled to find a side street to deviate from his route. There were, however, entrance gates to the various factories and yards. I hoped that our chums were innocent workers and would turn off into one of them.

‘They still there?’ I asked through the hatch.

‘Aye,’ rumbled Twinkletoes. ‘They’re still there.’

Ahead of us, to our right, there was a break in the industrial architecture: a wasteground square of rubble and scrub grass with twisted fingers of rusted metal pointing to the sky, probably in accusation at the German pilot who’d cleared the site with a bomb more than a decade before.

I indicated the section with a jut of my chin. ‘If our chums behind are after our cash, that’s where they’ll do it. We’ll be out of sight for fifty yards.’ I turned to the hatch. ‘Twinkle, get ready to dance.’

Archie suddenly swung to the right and into the entrance to one of the yards. It had a gatehouse manned by a uniformed security man. Archie pulled up at the gatehouse and jumped out of the van. I followed suit, first telling Twinkle to stay put with the doors locked.

Archie and I watched the blue van make its way along past the stretch of waste ground. By the time we were out of our Bedford, it was too late to get any kind of look at the driver. The blue van didn’t slow down or show any sign of stopping. There was no hint that they had any interest in us whatsoever. Archie and I watched until it was out of sight. The security man, a tall, heavy man of about sixty, came over to us.

‘What d’you think you are doing?’ he lilted with a Highland accent. ‘You can’t be blocking the entrance like that – Oh, it’s you, Archie.’ He pronounced it ‘Erchie’. ‘What are you doing here?’

Archie obviously recognized the older man as a former colleague. The City of Glasgow Police compulsorily retired all its officers at age fifty-five; the pension was good, but most retirees ended up doing security work. Archie explained about the wages run and the van, and the security man went back to his gatehouse, picking up the 'phone. After a while he came back out and spoke to Archie.

‘I telephoned along to the next gatehouse – remember Harry MacTavish? He’s on the gate at the Merchiston yard now. He said he did see a blue van pass his gatehouse chust now but it drove on westwards. Could you not have been mistaken, do you think? I could telephone the station and get a car down.’

Archie didn’t answer for a moment, still watching the road. He was bareheaded and his bald scalp domed pale in the daylight. After a moment he said, ‘No need, thanks, Geordie.’ When the watchman returned to his gatehouse, Archie turned to me. ‘What do you think?’

I shrugged. ‘Just workmen going into one of the yards, probably.’

We got back into the driver’s cabin, ‘It’s all right, Twinkle,’ I said through the hatch. ‘False alarm.’

We were a couple of minutes late for the wages drop-off at the second shipyard. It was enough to have riled the pay-office manager – not that he was an undue stickler for punctuality, but that each wages office had strict instructions to 'phone the police if we were more than five minutes behind schedule.

The third drop was a shipyard further down the Clyde, out towards Dumbarton. As we drove, I noticed Archie checking the side mirrors.

‘See anything?’

He shook his head.

‘How about you, Twinkle?’ I asked through the hatch.

‘All clear, Mr L,’ he replied in his usual rumble and I could have sworn the metal of the van vibrated.

We reached the shipyard. I was still puzzled as to why I felt so relieved. It had happened before: some innocent motorist had just happened to follow the same route, or perhaps had lacked the confidence to overtake the slower-moving van. But there had been something different about that day. Something different about the feeling I’d got.

We made the drop and headed out the main gates and back towards the city. It was almost as if I could physically feel the lightening of our burden with the last of the cash delivered.

‘Mr Lennox . . .’ Twinkletoes’s baritone was infused with a warning.

‘It’s okay, Twinkle,’ I said, looking in the wing mirror at the blue van following us. ‘I see him . . .’

We were back into the outskirts of Govan, the Clyde’s dark industry still pushing sooty fingers through where people lived, repair sheds now grudgingly sharing the landscape with workers’ tenements. It was the same shit deal as Possilpark – drone hives huddled close to their place of toil; lives subordinated to industry’s need.

Not that I was paying much attention to the scenery: I was too preoccupied with the blue van following us. I could see Archie watching in his wing mirror too.

‘What do you think his game is?’ he asked. ‘He was tailing us earlier and must know we’ve offloaded the cash.’

‘Maybe we’ve got the dumbest armed robbers in Glasgow.’

‘Or maybe they’re casing us out – checking out our routine so they can plan when and where to hit us on a future run.’

‘Could be.’ I leaned into the hatch again. ‘Twinkle, can you see if you can get the registration number?’

‘Sure thing, Mr L.’ Twinkletoes’s voice rumbled in the cargo cabin.

‘What do we do?’ asked Archie. ‘I could detour a little again and see if they stick with us.’

‘Do it. See if you can lead them into somewhere they can’t pass us.’

‘You thinking of having it out with them?’ Archie’s tone suggested he thought it was a bad idea bordering on idiotic.

‘Maybe.’

‘And what if they’ve come tooled up?’

‘Then we put our hands up and let them rob an empty van . . . Twinkle, you set?’

‘Ready when you are, Mr Lennox . . .’

‘As soon as we stop, get out of the van.’

‘I thought I was to stay in here, no matters what,’ he rumbled doubtfully.

I sighed. ‘No, Twinkle, that’s only when there’s cash
in
the van with you. It’s empty now.’

‘Righty-oh, Mr L. My
faw-pass
.’

‘If our chums come after us, be ready to get handy. But if they’ve got guns, don’t do anything. There’s nothing for them to take.’

I checked the mirror again. It was still there, trying to skulk behind the scant cover of the car it had allowed to get between us.

Archie was scanning the soot-dark topography of tenement and cobble with his watery, Alastair Sim eyes. ‘I used to patrol here when I was in uniform,’ he said casually, as if being a beat bobby in Govan didn’t make being a Christian sharing the Colosseum with lions sound cosy. ‘There’s a street up ahead I can turn into. One way in, one way out.’

I reached into some Savile Row and pulled out the blackjack. I rested my other hand on the door handle. ‘Okay.’

Just as he’d done at the factory gates, Archie didn’t slow down or indicate we were turning and the tyres squealed in protest as we swung into the alley. The van tilted as it turned and for a moment I worried about Twinkletoes’s bulk shifting too suddenly and toppling us over. Archie slammed on the brakes and the Bedford slipped wetly on greasy cobbles. I was out before the van stopped moving. By the time I got around to the back, Twinkletoes had burst out of the rear door. The overhang of his brow had lowered even more over his eyes and he bared his teeth in a grimace. Again the police-issue truncheon looked small in his fist. Not for the first time, I was glad we were on the same side.

Archie was out too, flanking Twinkle on the other side. We stood with our backs to the van, its engine still running, watching the mouth of the alley.

Nothing.

‘Could they have gone past?’

‘Doubt it,’ Twinkle growled. ‘I was watching it till we made the turn.’

We stood for a few seconds more in expectant silence. I braced when I heard a motor, but it turned out to be a grubby coal truck – a moving darkness against a dark landscape – and it passed by the mouth of the tenement alley without stopping. I took in our brick and cobble redoubt. Banners of washday linen, hanging on lines looped between the windows, were the only brightness against Victorian tenements grimed black by a century of industrial toil; even the broken-paved street seemed sleeked with a sooty grease. It was a darkness that seemed to suck the light of the unreflected sun out of an otherwise bright day.

I realized we had attracted a small audience of children. Four boys and a girl, all maybe nine to eleven – although Glasgow kept its children small and they could have been older – stood mutely watching us, their faces, hands and clothes smirched from play in the grimy street, as if the darkness that surrounded them had already begun to claim them.

I turned to Twinkletoes, then nodded in the direction of the main road. He nodded and headed off to the road end, looked in both directions before turning back and shaking his head.

As Twinkle made his way back towards us, one of the kids who’d been watching us impassively made his way over to me. He wasn’t the biggest of the boys but was clearly the leader of the sad little group. Again I cast a nervous eye towards the road end: the last thing I wanted was for kids to get caught up in it if things went south.

Still no van appeared at the road end.

‘I got the number, like you said.’ Twinkle held up a small notebook. ‘SLR 882.’

‘You sure you got it right?’

‘Sure, boss. SLR 882.’

‘Good work. Thanks, Twinkle.’

I felt the tugging of small fingers on my sleeve and looked down. The boy’s face, topped with a sprout of unbrushed, black hair, was so pale that the dirt from his playing stood out like dark bruises.

‘Excuse me, mister . . .’ he said. ‘Are you the ice cream van?’

‘No, sonny,’ I said, smiling. ‘Sorry.’

‘You’re definitely no’ the ice cream van?’

I shook my head.

‘Oh . . . Well if you’re no’ the ice cream van,’ he said without changing tone, ‘then why don’t yous fuck off.’ A sharp pain jabbed through my ankle – the same ankle I’d injured the night of Tommy’s death – as he kicked me hard and ran off, he and his pals laughing raucously as they did so. He turned just before he and his pals were swallowed up by the black mouth of an entrance to tenement close. ‘Yah bunch o’ fannies!’

The loud roaring laughter of his playmates echoed in the china-tiled close.

‘Little bastard . . .’ I muttered, rubbing my bruised ankle.

‘From small acorns . . .’ said Archie.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said and climbed back in the van.

I couldn’t work out what would have been more suspicious: for me to go to Quiet Tommy’s funeral or if I stayed away. The truth was that the police had shown no interest in me – and very little in Tommy’s death, for that matter – and there was nothing to link me to the events of the night of his death.

But my paranoia was not totally unfounded: Quiet Tommy Quaid had, in his own words, been a craftsman; a craft which had been employed at one time or another by each of the Three Kings, and anyone else who had something they wanted liberated from the inconvenience of lawful ownership. There was always the chance that Tommy’s funeral could see a turnout of the great and bad from Glasgow’s underworld, which also meant the City of Glasgow Police would make the effort too. Liked as Tommy was by his opposite numbers in blue, the constabulary’s interest in his funeral would be more than a paying of grudging respect. The police would want to see who turned up; again, that interest wouldn’t have anything to do with how the thief had met his end, but what connections could be made between funeral attendees. There was also the chance that the odd outstanding warrant could be discreetly executed at the cemetery gates.

Given Tommy’s atheistic leanings, it didn’t surprise me at all that there was no church service, nor any clergyman at the interment. Someone had coughed up the funds, however, and Tommy was brought to his final resting place in the Glasgow Necropolis by the Co-operative’s finest. The polished and waxed coachwork on the Austin Sheerline hearse gleamed and sparkled in the bright July sunshine – the same sunshine that forced me to wear sunglasses and nagged me to take off my jacket. I couldn’t help but think that Tommy would have appreciated the weather’s complete lack of funereal tone.

I could tell from the cars lined up outside the cemetery that there was a good turn-out for Tommy: two Bentleys and a Jaguar, all new and polished to a mirror sheen, declared the regal presence of all Three Kings. A lot of Tommy’s former associates had clearly turned up, and the fundamental flaw in the whole crime-doesn’t-pay thing was highlighted by another Jaguar, two Rovers, a Daimler and an Armstrong-Siddeley Sapphire parked at the cemetery gates. Parked among them was a battered old Morris Oxford and a two-tone, light blue over cream Ford Consul. At the time, I had no idea that I would later have good cause to remember the Consul in the ice cream colours.