The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5 (19 page)

‘Did he discuss it with you?’

She shook her head. Mine was buzzing with connections and coincidences. We fell into an awkward silence. I guessed it was time to go.

‘What’s your interest?’ she asked as I stood up. ‘I mean, you don’t strike me as someone who is easy to read – maybe easier than Tommy to read, but that allows a lot of scope. I just don’t get how Tommy had the measure of you to the extent that he could predict you would come calling.’

‘He asked me to. Or he left instructions for his sister to ask me on his behalf. He felt I would make things right – what I’ve to make right and how is beyond me at the moment. I guess he thought he could rely on me.’

‘But why? I mean why are you doing it?’ She took what should have been an eye-watering gulp of gin but it didn’t even register. ‘Tommy’s gone. Dead. The dead have nothing to do with the living. You can’t let Tommy down because there is no Tommy to be let down any more; any debt you owe him died when he fell off that bloody roof. Or maybe you’re the spiritual kind.’ Another gulp. It really was time for me to go.

I didn’t answer for a moment; not because what she had said had annoyed or offended me, but simply because I didn’t have an answer for her, or for myself. I was fulfilling a duty to a dead thief: she didn’t know why I was doing it; I didn’t know why I was doing it. But Tommy Quaid had trusted me. He had known I would do it. Something about that made me feel better about myself.

‘I’m doing it for me,’ I said eventually. ‘I’m doing it because Tommy was my friend. It’s as simple and as complicated as that.’

Nancy Ross saw me – a little unsteadily – to the door. I knew she was going to do more drinking after I’d gone and I wanted to do something to stop her, to help. But there was nothing for me to do.

‘For what it’s worth,’ I said from the doorstep, ‘I think you’re right – I think Tommy Quaid was closer to you than any other woman, than anyone else, for that matter. I really am sorry for your loss.’

She nodded her thanks, curtly, tight-lipped, her eyes glazing with tears. I left her standing at the door with a gaping hole in her life and started to think about how I had felt after Fiona White had died. How I still felt.

I didn’t look back as I headed towards where I’d parked the car.

Maybe it was all Nancy Ross’s talk of secret policemen and clandestine searches, but when I climbed back into the Wyvern, I could have sworn I caught a glimpse in the rear-view mirror of a two-tone Consul flash past the road end behind me, travelling along Great George Street. Waiting a minute to see if it reappeared, I took a deep breath and shook my head to free it of its itch of paranoia. It didn’t make sense: I had swapped my Sunbeam convertible for the anonymity of the Wyvern – and that was a lot of anonymity. And I had expended a great deal of effort to make sure I wasn’t being followed.

Jock Ferguson, having been elevated to chief inspector, generally kept normal office hours these days, but I knew he sometimes worked on late into the evening. I decided to chance my luck and stopped at a telephone box and called to see if he was still at his office. He was, and agreed, somewhat reluctantly and wearily, to see me if I came straight away, as he was about to leave for the evening.

The itch in my head was still there as I drove all the way back across the city towards Glasgow Green, constantly checking my rear-view mirror. When I parked on Turnbull Street, outside the City of Glasgow Police’s St Andrew’s Square headquarters, the paints seemed to have dried on the sunset and I despaired at getting any cover when I went down to the waterfront storage sheds later.

I went in through the main entrance and had to wait while a huge Highlander constable tried to book in a tiny, very drunk tramp who refused to play nice. Despite it being early August, the small man was bundled in the uniform of trampdom: a stained mackintosh fastened around the waist with cord, and a mismatched, tattered cap. I sometimes wondered if tramps rejected coats they found complete with belts.

In my time in Glasgow I had seen a great many tramps and there were, broadly speaking, two kinds: the first was the drunk who, having found the bottom of the bottle had fallen through it into a life of sleeping rough and taking care of nothing other than finding the next drink; the second was the victim of circumstance who found him- or herself homeless and indigent but refused to lose their dignity. The clean tramps – the ones who used public bathhouses and sought casual labour, many of them ex-servicemen damaged by combat and still lost more than a decade later behind enemy lines in their home town.

This tramp was the former. He was filthy. Like the sandstone building he now stood in, Glasgow had ingrained soot and grit into every exposed exterior surface: into his pores, into every crevasse, fold and crease; in his hair and unkempt bush of beard.

And I had the misfortune of being able to smell him, even from a distance. He had clearly decided to mourn the passing of the late king by not taking a bath since His Majesty’s death. Approaching the desk, I passed by him that little bit too close and began to wonder if maybe it was Queen Victoria he was mourning instead.

The uniform behind the counter had a crown above his stripes, indicating he was a station sergeant. He watched the tramp impassively, elbows and stripes resting on the charge desk, with an expression of patience that a Buddhist monk would take a lifetime to achieve.

‘And you’re insisting this is your name?’ the Highlander copper lilted musically as he took his police cap off and placed it on the desk.

‘Aye. That’s my name, awright,’ the tramp said in a Glasgow accent as edged and harsh as the Highlander’s was rounded and gentle. ‘An’ I’m very proud of it. I’m a Teuchter, like yersel’. You know, a big thick-as-shite, hairy-arsed, sheep-shaggin’ Teuchter. That’s me.’

If the invective was intended to rile the constable, it failed. ‘And where do you come from?’ he lilted. ‘In the Highlands, I mean?’

‘Oh – eh . . . Skye. Aye, that’s it. Stornoway.’

‘Stornoway’s on Lewis, not Skye.’ Still no annoyance, no impatience.

‘Aye . . . that’s whit I meant. Lewis. That’s where wir clan is from. We’re very big up there. Oh, aye, very big. Very important. You should be mair respectful.’

‘Well . . .’ lilted the Highlander, ‘I’m from Harris and the station sergeant here is from Oban, and I can say that I have never heard tell of a clan of that name. Have you, Sarge?’

The stripes shook his head, his demeanour still one of weary uninterest. ‘You are aware that giving a false name to the police is an offence in itself?’ he said.

‘Are you callin’ me a liar?’ The small tramp straightened himself up, his face theatrically indignant.

‘So you’re sticking with this name?’ asked the constable.

‘I am!’ He stabbed a black stub of a finger on the charge ledger in front of the sergeant. ‘Whit’s mair, I insist you enter it thus!’

‘I see.’ The constable stroked his chin. ‘Hamish MacCuntypuss?’

‘That is my name, given to me by my dear old ma an’ pa,’ the tramp said with pride.

‘In that case, Mr MacCuntypuss,’ said the constable, ‘would you step in here for a moment.’ He led the tramp across the foyer and into a room off, closing the door behind him. I stepped up to the desk.

‘My name is Lennox,’ I told the stripes, somewhat abashed at the comparative blandness of my name. ‘I’m here to see Chief Inspector Ferguson. He’s expecting me.’

The station sergeant said nothing and, moving with studied weariness, picked up the receiver of his desk 'phone and dialled three numbers.

Across the foyer, from behind the closed door of the room into which the constable had taken the tramp, I heard several slapping sounds, followed by a cry, followed by a thud.

‘There’s a Mr Lennox here to see you, sir,’ the station sergeant said into the telephone, oblivious to the muffled sounds of violence. From behind the closed door, someone gave a high-pitched squeal. More slapping sounds.

‘You’ve to go straight up,’ the stripes said, replacing the receiver, still deaf to the sounds from the room. ‘You know the way?’

I nodded and he lifted up the table-top gate to let me through.

At that point the constable and the tramp came out of the room behind us, the policeman with the same calm demeanour, the tramp holding the side of his face, his cap askew and his gaze lowered, looking decidedly less sure of himself.

‘Hugh – otherwise known as Shuggy – O’Neil, Sarge . . .’ the constable said and the sergeant started to write in his ledger. ‘Drunk and disorderly and urinating in a public place . . .’

*

Ferguson was in his second-floor office. To get to it I passed several uniforms and plainclothes men and it was like an inventory of my time in Glasgow: the majority didn’t acknowledge me, some nodded a greeting; one was a detective I regularly bribed for information and he made a great effort not to look in my direction. Others – those who had crossed my path accompanied by Superintendent Willie McNab – viewed me with everything from vague suspicion to outright hostility. It was clear that these officers were unconvinced by my conversion to the righteous path; I reflected bitterly that they were probably the ones with the best measure of me.

Chief Inspector Jock Ferguson’s office was a lot smaller than you would have expected. It had a reasonable-sized window looking out onto St Andrew’s Square, but other than that was cramped and municipally bleak. Almost cell-like. For some reason it made me think again of what Tommy had said about us all being in prison, just some prisons were easier to see than others.

The other thing I noticed about it was it was painstakingly tidy. There was a pile of papers on Ferguson’s desk, but it was neatly arranged, fitting with the geometry of everything else – two phones, stapler, ashtray, a wire basket filled with buff folders – on the desk. There was an uncompromising order to everything. I knew that Ferguson had been stationed out in the Far East during and after the war, one of those unlucky buggers who didn’t get demobbed until forty-six. Some of these men, those who had had contact with the Japanese, had come back either hating them or bringing something of their culture back. Or both.

‘What can I do you for?’ asked Ferguson. He smiled, but I could see he’d had a long day and had no intention of allowing me to make it longer. He stood behind his desk, placing some papers into his briefcase. It was an attitude of departure and he made no sign of sitting back down, or inviting me to sit. ‘Is this to do with your
official
investigation into Quiet Tommy’s death? How’s his sister?’

‘I haven’t seen her since we last spoke. And yes, it has. Have you found Jimmy Wilson yet?’

‘No, we haven’t. But we’re not trying that hard, to be honest. He’s hardly Glasgow’s most wanted. Small-time warrant for a small-time crook. And we won’t be able to make it stick: we never do. Wilson’s like Quaid, smart as a rat. I’ll let you know if we do find him, though. That it?’

‘Not quite. I’m struggling to pin down any other contacts Tommy Quaid may have had. I wondered if you had any intelligence on known associates.’

Ferguson gave me a funny look. Suspicious, almost. ‘You’re asking the wrong source, Lennox,’ he said. ‘Tommy Quaid was a crafty bugger and kept his cards close to his chest. Our list of known associates is very short – that said, you’d be surprised who is on it. Like the odd shady enquiry agent.’

I didn’t like that. The one thing that I didn’t want Ferguson doing was putting any twos together with any other twos.

‘Why don’t you take a trip down to Newton Mearns,’ he said. ‘You and Handsome Jonny Cohen are also very chummy, or so I’ve heard.’ Another dig. ‘And from what we can gather, Cohen had a market for the skills Quaid had to offer. Jimmy Wilson too. A market for your skills too, if rumour’s right.’

‘Jeez, Jock, what’ve I done? Why the character assassination?’

He sighed, resting his hands on the now sealed briefcase on his desk. ‘It’s been a long day, that’s all. And, to be frank, I stuck my neck out for you – vouching for you for the bank run. It seems you’re back to keeping old company. I just hope to Christ that doesn’t mean old habits.’

‘Listen, Jock, I’ll never forget what you’ve done for me and I won’t let you down. I’d have kind of hoped you knew that. This isn’t about me and Jonny or any of the Three Kings. This is all about Tommy Quaid. I’ve been hired to establish whether his death really was an accident or not. Like you, I’m just doing my job.’

‘Okay,’ Ferguson said, but he still didn’t look convinced and that worried me. He made an open-handed ‘is that it?’ gesture.

‘Did you ever hear a rumour that Tommy had some kind of stash from his commando days?’

‘I heard something of the kind,’ said Ferguson, ‘but it’s all bollocks. There were a lot of burglars and safecrackers drafted into Laycock’s Special Brigade, Layforce, and then the commandos. The ones who survived the experience and came back home all have a stash of Nazi loot, if you believe the rumours.’

‘But you’ve never heard anything to suggest there might be some truth in it?’

‘Okay, Lennox, your time’s up. If you don’t mind . . .’ He moved around the desk.

‘Remember you said there was another case that you were surprised the fiscal didn’t order an inquiry on?’ I asked.

He sighed. ‘The boy in the station? What about it?’

‘Who was he?’

‘I dunno – just some kid. Depressed, I think. Well, you don’t chuck yourself in front of a train if you’re having a fit of the giggles.’

‘Do you have a name?’

Again, Ferguson indicated his suspicion with an arched eyebrow.

‘It came up,’ I said, weakly. There was no way I could justify my interest without telling at least part of the truth. ‘Quiet Tommy Quaid seems to have gotten upset about the kid’s suicide.’

‘Quaid? Did he know the boy?’

‘That I don’t know . . . until I get at least a name.’

The eyebrow arched again.

‘Honestly, Jock,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what connection there is, or if there’s a connection at all. Maybe Tommy simply read about the kid’s suicide and it provoked his
Weltschmerz.
’