The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5 (16 page)

I hadn’t, of course, been totally truthful with Jennifer Quaid when I said I had nothing to go on. After all, I’d been with Tommy the night he had died; worse still, it had been me who had, albeit unknowingly, sent her brother to his death. And I knew about Mr McNaught. I was the only one who knew about Mr McNaught. I also didn’t tell Jennifer about the key I had to Tommy’s flat, or the ticket stub for the Frantic Frankie Findlay show.

I checked the address and directions to the lock-up again, slipped the keys back into my pocket, and headed out to where my car was parked in Argyle Street.

I drove towards Clydebank, following the course of the river. Again the shore bristled with loading cranes and just like on the shipyard wages run, there was no doubt I was in a landscape of labour, of industry. It was maybe because of the bank run experience, or maybe because of my post-McNaught paranoia, that I checked my rear-view mirror more than normal. Right enough, I became sure I was being followed. No blue van this time, and whoever was stalking me was taking more care about it. A lot more care.

About three cars back, there was a Ford Consul – one of the new models – the coachwork two-tone, light blue over cream. What troubled me was I was pretty sure I’d seen it before – or at least the same model and same colours – parked outside the cemetery gates among the Bentleys and Jags the day Quiet Tommy Quaid was planted for eternity.

I made a couple of turns, indicating well in advance, to see if the Consul would follow. It did. Unlike Archie’s evasions, I made sure the turns I made weren’t sudden or obvious and didn’t take me too far off course. After a couple, I lost sight of the Consul and headed back towards the riverfront. He was there again, further back, maybe four cars behind. He was good; better than me. This time, I was being tailed by a pro.

I reached the entrance to the lock-ups: serried ranks of large wooden storage sheds dark-varnished almost black. I knew they were rented out mainly to companies involved in shipbuilding, as well as tradesmen, a few private individuals and, as I now knew, the odd career thief. I drove past without turning in.

And when I did that, the Consul took the next turning off the main road and disappeared. Either I had been wrong and the presence of the car was a coincidence, or chummy had turned off to convince me that he hadn’t been tailing me after all. What bothered me was that if he
had
been following me, then he had decided to break off when he saw I didn’t turn into the lock-ups.

Which would mean the location of Tommy’s secret stash wasn’t so completely secret after all.

*

Sometimes it didn’t pay to be flash. My Sunbeam Alpine convertible was too conspicuous for surveillance work – and as I found out the night of the foundry job, it was even too flash to drive down Maryhill Road in the hours of darkness without attracting a copper’s attention. Probably in the hours of daylight, too. So when it came to dodging others who were surveilling me, driving about in it was a positive liability.

I decided to leave the lock-up until after dark. I stopped at a telephone box and called Archie at the office, explaining I had a couple of things to do and wouldn’t be back for the rest of the day. Truth was, I had lost my tail and didn’t want to pick it up again by going back and parking near the office.

I had places to go and people to see; what I needed was something less conspicuous for a few hours. I had a contact who ran a garage in Maryhill, and I arced up along the south and east sides of the city. They rented out cars to me on an informal basis, as and when I needed something inconspicuous. The Wishart brothers not only repaired, bought and sold cars, they had unravelled a mystery of physics that had eluded Einstein and his buddies: the reversal of Time itself. When a car left their garage, the cars they sold always had considerably lower mileages on the clock than when they had bought them.

Willie Wishart wore the suit and his brother Bobby the overalls, and when I arrived at the garage, Willie was laying it on with a trowel to a worried-looking young couple. I gestured to him that I’d wait in the ‘sales-office’: an ancient, battered old shed, the wooden clapboard looking like it was held together by the layers of creosote that had been lathered onto it over half a century. A sign above the door promised DOUBLE THE CAR AT HALF THE PRICE, which I had heard was a promise the Wisharts regularly lived up to: the cars they sold were often the welded-together undamaged halves of insurance write-offs.

The odd thing was that Bobby Wishart was an excellent mechanic and whenever I needed the Alpine serviced and tuned, it was the Wisharts who did it for me. When Willie finished with the customers, I told him I needed something reliable, but which would blend into the background. He gave me the keys for a black forty-eight Vauxhall Wyvern. It was inconspicuous and reliable all right, but I wouldn’t have wanted to have gotten into a car chase with it, given that the only thing it was capable of outrunning was a pushbike.

‘I’ll need it for a few hours,’ I told Willie. ‘Maybe overnight. Can you valet and wax the Alpine while it’s here? Garage it overnight?’

Willie said he would and I took the keys of the Wyvern.

I sighed when I climbed in behind the wheel. I had a bad feeling about where I was heading – and not just because I was going to Govanhill, which was enough to depress me at the best of times. Over the last three years I had made a real effort to stay on the vaguely legal side of the business. I had risked cashflow and physical wellbeing by turning down work from the Three Kings – other than the odd and mainly legal job. I knew only too well that my copybook was never going to be spotless, but I had done my best of late to keep my slips to smudges, rather than blots.

And now I had screwed it all up by getting greedy and taking part in a break-in for a complete stranger. But Quiet Tommy Quaid had been killed and that just wasn’t right, and I had to do something about it.

*

If there was one positive aspect of my previous life, it was that if I were ever in a fix, then I had a host of underworld contacts I could call on. It was something I tried to do less these days, but if I needed, I knew and could call on an array of thugs, gang lords, housebreakers, prostitutes, pimps, pickpockets, fraudsters, and even one professional killer. And I knew exactly who I needed to go to now.

A greengrocer.

Tony Grabowski – also known, for obvious reasons, as Tony the Pole – had been Scotland’s most successful post-war peterman. He was famed as an incomparable seducer of safes: they would yield themselves to his lightest touch, opening up for him and offering their treasures without resistance.

Like Quiet Tommy Quaid, Tony the Pole had always been very careful about with whom he worked; and also like Quiet Tommy Quaid – perhaps even more so – he had kept his own counsel wherever possible. Being tight-lipped was probably the best of all defences against detection and conviction and it had served Tony well: he had never once been caught. But the police had come close that one time too many, and devoted family man Tony had decided the risk of lengthy behind-bars separation from his wife and kids was too great: Scotland’s best safecracker had retired from the safecracking business.

But in going straight, Tony the Pole had made a fundamental error of judgement: he had become a greengrocer. In Glasgow.

Selling fruits and vegetables to Glaswegians was comparable to selling kryptonite to Superman or crucifixes to Dracula, so Tony the Pole supplemented his income by moonlighting as an illegal bookie and all-round fixer. It was low-key, low-risk stuff that boosted a carefully managed nest egg from his safecracking days.

I had called Tony after I’d 'phoned Archie, and we had arranged to meet at a greasy spoon transport café near his greengrocer shop on Cathcart Road. I hadn’t been to the café nor heard of it before, so I allowed extra time to find it and arrived about ten minutes early.

The café was in a new-looking large wooden shed-type building, painted an inappropriately cheery duck egg blue and tucked into the corner of a scrubby square of wasteland between darkly looming Govanhill tenement blocks. It looked to me like a cleared bombsite; I didn’t know if any bombs from the Clydebank raids had ever strayed this far, but truth was anywhere in Glasgow could have a naturally war-torn look, and it was clear that there had been tenements here. The sky was a bright, pale blue, paradoxically making the setting bleaker, as if someone had sketched the buildings in gritty charcoal on pale blue-coloured paper.

Part of the site had been roughly tarmacked to allow heavy goods vehicles somewhere to park, and I manoeuvred the Wyvern next to where four or five lorries sat.

In Glasgow, as with probably everywhere else, if you saw that long-distance drivers chose a particular transport caff to stop, then you were pretty much guaranteed a clean place and decent, if none too healthy, food.

I sat in the car and smoked while I waited for Tony, staring at the tenement gable end facing me. ‘Magic Moments’ played on the car radio and Perry Como’s mellow jollity seemed totally out of place here. The tenement gable bore evidence of its now demolished neighbour: like fossils impressed into stratified rock, the outlines of fireplaces, of wiring conduits, of floor and ceiling edges, even tattered rectangles of wallpaper, were etched in bas-relief. Six geometric impressions of the cramped living of long-gone families; six reminders that other families still lived that way in the remaining tenements on the other side of the gable wall.

I took the time waiting for Tony to go through the diary-cum-address-book Jennifer Quaid had given me. It didn’t take long: as I suspected, there weren’t many contacts related to Tommy’s professional life and most seemed to be women; there were no entries in the diary, even cryptic, alluding to jobs Tommy did. The first thing I’d done when I got the diary was to check the Sunday night we had gone to the foundry: the pages were reassuringly blank.

One name cropped up regularly in the diary:
Nancy
. Every week either on a Tuesday or Wednesday, sometimes at seven p.m., sometimes half an hour or an hour later. The name was written out full to start with, then just appeared as an
N
, each week. I guessed that ‘Nancy’ was the same one listed – without a surname – in the diary’s address section.

Another half a cigarette’s length later, I saw a small, stocky man approach across the lot on foot. He wasn’t wearing a hat and his bald head – the ring of remaining hair trimmed so short as to be almost shaven – gleamed bullet-like in the sunlight. I got out and waved to him.

‘Hi, Tony . . . whaddya hear, whaddya say?’ The Cagney line from
Angels with Dirty Faces
had been our way of greeting each other since our first meeting, Tony always getting a kick out of what he considered my ‘American’ accent.

‘Hey, Lennoggs, yah ould bazzdahrd. Vaht dayah hear? Vaht dayah zay?’ And there it was, Tony the Pole’s trademark: a blend of Glaswegian dialect and the thickest possible Polish accent. It was like listening to the love-child of Harry Lauder and Bela Lugosi. ‘Vaht aboot a vee cuppa govvee an’ a vee blether?’ He indicated the café.

‘My treat.’ I smiled. I liked Tony the Pole. He was continually cheerful and friendly, despite the fact that most of his family back home in Poland had been wiped out during the war; the ones who had survived now living beyond his reach behind a curtain of iron. What’s more, I trusted him.

‘Zere’s naw need furr you to pay,’ he beamed back. ‘Zizz vun vill be oan ze houze . . .’ He led the way into the transport caff. The air inside was thick with cigarette smoke and the odour of hot meat, more than half the tables and booths occupied. When we walked in, the cook and the female server behind the counter waved and Tony waved back.

‘On the house?’ I asked. ‘You mean . . .?’

‘Aye, Lennoggs . . . I own ze bazzdahrd. Greengrozzer bizzinezz iz a pile o’ shide. I’m keepin’ it going, but zizz iz verr money iz.’ As we passed a lorry driver seated at a table and bent over his plate of sausages, eggs and bacon, Tony slapped him on the back. ‘Hey, Boaby – hooz it goin’?’

There was an exchange of banter and we moved on, Tony the Pole joking, laughing and waving to customers in acknowledgement as we passed them: it was clear that the café had already built up a regular clientele and I guessed that Tony’s huge personality and good-naturedness played a big part. He led the way to a booth by the wall.

The inside of the café was spotless, the wood-panelling painted in pale pastel blues and greens and yet to pick up its final permanent nicotine glaze. The booths along the walls were fitted with Formica-topped tables and red leatherette benches; the free-standing tables and chairs in the middle of the café were of matching materials and design. The linoleum floor was clean and brushed and had picked up only a few scorch marks from ground-out cigarette stubs. I could see Tony hadn’t skimped on decor.

‘Lorry driverz iz bazzdahrds for everyzink tip-top . . .’ Tony read my mind. ‘Venn you dinnae get it right, venn ze food iznae up to zcratch, or ze place iznae clean enough, zay no’ come bagg. And ze toilets! You’d zink zay vuddnae be fussy, zat ze big hairy-arzzed bazzdahrds vould shide in a bucket, but naw – ze toilets muzz be zpottless. I’m delling you, Lennoggs, zey’re mehr vugging choosey zann Egon vugging Ronay. Vaht you vant? You vant bacon an’ eggs? Zome zquvare zauzage?’

‘No thanks, Tony, just a coffee.’

‘Okay-dokey . . .’ Tony turned round in his seat and yelled to the woman behind the counter. ‘Hey, Senga dahrlink . . . go an’ geez uzz two govvees . . .’ He turned back to me, smiling. ‘I’m taking it ziss izznae a zocial call . . . Vaht can I do vorr you, Lennoggs?’

So I told him. If there was one danger about Tony the Pole, it was that you told him too much: he was one of those people who invited confidence to the point of carelessness. There was something about the broad Slavic smile in the broad Slavic face, and the broader – and I suspected hammed-up – Slavic accent that broke down your guard and made you feel like spilling every bean you had ever had to spill. It was like when you were a kid talking to your favourite uncle – the one who was like your dad but not your dad and who you could tell things that you couldn’t tell your dad. If, that is, your favourite uncle was a bald, Glaswegian Bela Lugosi.