The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5 (2 page)

Before Archie had come along, most of the work I’d done had been for the Three Kings, the triumvirate of crook monarchs who ran much that was legal and everything that wasn’t in Glasgow. Some of the waters I’d gotten into had been so murky that they made the Clyde look limpid. The war had messed me up – me and a million others – and more than once I’d found myself in a situation that had brought out the old demons. On a couple of occasions, the prison yard – even the hanging shed – had beckoned and I’d decided to straighten myself, my life and my business out. I’d hired ex-cop Archie and, between us, we had successfully steered the business away from providing services to the Three Kings.

But the Three Kings – Willie Sneddon, Hammer Murphy and Handsome Jonny Cohen – were not the kind of people who generally accepted no as an answer, so the price I had paid was still to do the odd job for the Kings ‘off the books’ – and very much out of Archie’s sight. Generally, I liked to think I had much in common with Mae West: we both tried to remain as white as snow, but had a tendency to drift.

So on that auspicious Friday morning of the eleventh of July, nineteen fifty-eight – as I stood staring out of my office window, bereaved, mildly hungover, generally pissed with everything, and morally overdrawn if not completely bankrupt – the stage was set for Mr McNaught’s entrance.

*

Archie had just left for a meeting with the Scottish and Northern Bank, around the corner from our Gordon Street offices and for whom we had been providing transfer security for two years. It didn’t occur to me at the time that McNaught’s arrival coincided with Archie’s departure, with just enough time for them not to pass each other in the stairwell. It wasn’t something that would have occurred to anyone: that no one ever saw Mr McNaught except me.

Of course, there was the distraction of the goings-on over at the station.

Even I didn’t see McNaught arrive, despite the fact that I had been looking out the third-floor window of my office when he must have come in through the street entrance below. I had been drawn to the window by the urgent trilling of bells from approaching police cars and an ambulance.

Our Gordon Street office was directly opposite Central Station, looking down on the ornate Victorian latticed ironwork of its entrance. Three police cars had arrived with the ambulance and had pulled up immediately outside the main entry. The coppers and the ambulance men, carrying a stretcher, had trotted off into the main concourse of the station. I was as subject to morbid curiosity as the next man – perhaps even more so – and I lit a cigarette and watched the comings and goings below.

Another police car arrived, this time with an inspector and driver, both of whom also disappeared into the railway station. It was another cigarette’s length before the ambulance men reappeared, their stretcher empty, and drove off in the ambulance, only to be replaced a minute or so later by a Black Maria police van. Two more coppers answered the question as to why the ambulance had left by taking out what looked like a black coffin from the back of the Black Maria. I knew it was a ‘body shell’, as the boys in blue called it – the rigid but lightweight container the police used to remove dead bodies to the mortuary, and made out of fibreglass because the effluent residue of the leaving of life could be easily hosed from it.

Obviously someone had died in the station. It could have been anything from a heart attack – from which, it seemed to me, every Glaswegian over the age of sixteen was at danger – or an accident involving a rail worker. I reflected that if it had been a typical accident on the rails, then they probably wouldn’t have needed the body shell: a couple of good-sized suitcases would have done the job.

Whatever the cause, someone’s light, an entire universe of experiences and senses, had been extinguished somewhere inside the station. And I would completely forget the incident by the end of the day.

A third police Wolseley pulled up and three men, two in uniform, one in plainclothes, got out. The plainclothesman was older – almost too old to still be in police service – but clearly senior in more than age as all the other officers obviously deferred to him. They headed in through the ornate entrance and disappeared from my view and interest.

When I turned from the window, McNaught was there, framed in my office doorway, watching me in lopsided silence. History was something that tended to be written as much in the faces of men as in books: McNaught’s face contained several volumes’ worth. With appendices.

Mr McNaught – he never did give a first name and I guessed his surname was about as genuine as Hemingway’s machismo – introduced himself as a ‘businessman’. He didn’t look the business type, although he didn’t look the criminal type either. But there was something about him that told you he was no stranger to violence: he had a build that made the Forth Bridge look flimsy and a face that some event had stripped of symmetry.

A decade or so after the war there were a lot of lopsided faces about, some deficient to the tune of an eye, some twisted into unintentional sneers by inexpert battlefield surgery. McNaught’s face wasn’t that bad, but it was worse than mine. I’d been left with a faint web of white scars on one side of my face from a German grenade that had landed not too close to me but conveniently close to one of my men, who had unintentionally shielded me from the brunt of the blast. A plastic surgeon had done his stuff on me but, nearly a decade and a half on, the scars were still visible if you got close enough. Whatever the plastic surgeon had done had changed my appearance, making the skin taut and emphasizing my cheekbones. The Jack Palance look, I’d been told. The unintentional result was a subtle transformation that, while it hadn’t robbed me of my looks, had given me a harder, crueller appearance. It was something that seemed to make me more attractive to women. And coppers.

McNaught, on the other hand, just looked a little fucked up. The odd thing was that neither half of his face would have looked wrong by itself or married to its mirror image, it was more that each cheek was at a different angle and location from its opposite number, like mismatched socks. A clue to the cause lay in the deep crease of a crescent-shaped scar that arced around the bottom of his right cheek. My guess was that McNaught had been that little bit closer to a shell, grenade or machine-gun burst but, unlike me, hadn’t had one of his men to run interference for him; the result being he’d lost flesh and a little bone on the right side of his face.

‘Sorry . . . I didn’t see you come in.’ I waved a thumb vaguely at the window as if he should know what had distracted me.

‘I’d like to hire your services,’ he said, after he had introduced himself, we had shaken hands and I’d invited him to take a seat. McNaught had a military bearing, all right; the kind who managed to stand at attention even when sitting down. ‘It won’t take up much of your time, but it will be financially very worthwhile for you.’

I smiled, which was something of a Pavlovian response with me to the stimulus of easy money. I took a second to weigh McNaught up: his accent was Scottish middle-class and his tailoring was very British: sharp, neat and completely and studiously devoid of style. He was one of those men you saw a lot after the war, wearing immaculately pressed tweed suits and immaculately polished burgundy brogues as if they were still in uniform. He also wore a lovat-green mac over his suit, despite it being a July afternoon. There again, in Glasgow, the concept of seasons could be at best abstract.

‘What can I do for you, Mr McNaught?’

‘I have a job for you. More correctly, my client has a job for you.’

‘Your client?’

‘I am an intermediary. A broker, if you like. I have been hired by a party who wishes to remain anonymous. They instruct and pay me, I instruct and pay you.’

‘Pay me for what?’

‘An idea. Or at least for you to secure that idea for them. It’s your business to gather information for clients; there’s a single, specific piece of information that is of great commercial value to my client. To
our
client.’

‘What kind of information?’

‘I’ll give you the details if and when we come to an arrangement, but what we’re talking about is basically a design for something. Something my client’s competitors have developed and that gives them an unfair commercial advantage. My client would very much like to obtain the details of this advantage.’

Again I studied McNaught, taking a moment to work out exactly whose army he’d been in.

‘It sounds to me like the
information
you’re talking about is more like secrets,’ I said. ‘They hang people for stealing those, in this country.’

McNaught laughed lopsidedly, the damage to his face restricting the movement on the right. It turned his smile into something ugly and disturbing. ‘You’re right, Mr Lennox, I’m asking you to steal secrets and get involved in espionage. But not those kinds of secrets nor that kind of espionage. What we’re talking about is purely
industrial
espionage. And, technically, industrial espionage isn’t illegal in this country.’

‘But what you’re asking me to do is of dubious legality.’

‘No it’s not. There’s absolutely no dubiety about it whatsoever – it’s illegal. Stealing industrial secrets may be no crime, but those secrets are, of course, kept under lock and key. The means of gaining access to those premises – breaking and entering – is a crime, even if it’s only intellectual property that ends up being stolen. I’m asking you to conspire to commit a crime, even if that crime is petty.’ He paused, leaning the ramrod he had for a spine back in the chair and taking his turn to study me. ‘From what I’ve been able to gather about you, Mr Lennox, bending the law shouldn’t present much of a problem. And that’s why you’re being paid a premium. I’m authorized to offer you a deal that compensates for the risk.’

‘How much compensation are we talking about?’

‘Two hundred pounds now, a further five hundred when the files are delivered to me. But I have to point out that once the two hundred pounds is paid, you are committed to delivering the files. Failure to do so could have
unpleasant
results. My clients may be respectable and conventional, but my associates and I are not. We have a reputation for delivering what we promise to deliver . . . and we take that reputation very, very seriously. If you say yes, you’re committed. If you cannot commit fully, then say no now and I’ll leave. Are we clear?’

The darkness of his threat was lost in the cosy glow generated by the idea of seven hundred pounds, at least three hundred of which would warm my back pocket. I nodded. He dipped a hand into his briefcase. When it came out, the hand was holding a satisfyingly thick bundle of banknotes, tight-bound with elastic bands. Homely as the reigning monarch might have been, I always felt an almost erotic thrill when I saw her face on a Bank of England twenty-pound note. McNaught sat the bundle on the desk between us; Pavlov rattled my dish and I smiled again.

‘So, for whom would I be working?’

‘You’re working for me. I thought I made that clear.’

‘Okay then . . . for whom are
you
working?’

‘I hope we’re not going to have a difficulty, Mr Lennox. You do not need to know – you should not know nor try to find out – who my client is. Like you, I’m self-employed. Another link in the chain, as it were. Or a buffer between my client and you. Between my client and everyone else, for that matter. All you need to know is that I represent someone who will benefit from the information you obtain.’

I nodded. ‘You realize that I won’t be visiting the premises myself? I have to hire a specialist contractor for that.’ Whenever entering somewhere without the convenience of a legally held key came to mind, so did Quiet Tommy Quaid. But I was going to be as tight-lipped about who I’d use as McNaught was about his client’s identity.

‘I assumed you would,’ he said, ‘and that you would have someone particular in mind. It has to be someone who’s good with heights and whose discretion can be relied upon. You’re being well paid for this, so I don’t expect you to cut corners.’

‘I won’t. The person I’m thinking about has worked for me before and he’s the best in the business. But it means I will have additional expenses. Shall we round it up to a thousand?’

McNaught’s hand reached out for the two hundred on the desk and the cosy glow began to dim.

‘Okay . . .’ I surrendered faster than a Govan girl on a Saturday night. ‘Seven hundred it is. How do I contact you?’

McNaught withdrew his hand and I again basked in the glow. ‘You don’t,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay in touch with you. I take it I can trust you to keep this business strictly to yourself and your
contractor
? Absolutely no one else.’

‘I won’t even discuss it with my associate here,’ I promised. ‘Heights?’

McNaught frowned. ‘Heights?’

‘You said whomever I hired had to be good with heights.’

‘Oh, I see. It’s your business, of course, but the best way into the premises is through the roof. It’s a large industrial complex and entry is through a skylight, six floors up and across pitched roofs. There is minimal security but a night watchman is based on the ground floor and does – or is supposed to do – an hourly walk around and checks the doors at ground level.’

‘I think that my guy would rather make his own plan. He’s a bit of a perfectionist.’

‘That is of course entirely a matter for you and him, but we have taken the liberty of surveying the building and the security arrangements. Just to save you time.’

‘Speaking of time, when do you need the stuff?’

‘Before the end of the month. That gives you enough time to plan and execute the break-in. But I will need to know when you plan to carry it out. The exact date and time.’

‘Sounds like someone needs an alibi.’

‘Again, that’s not your concern. All you need to focus on is getting your man in and out with the plans, ideally leaving little or no trace of his presence. I need to know which night you’re planning to go through with it. Exact times.’ Reaching again into his briefcase, he brought out a foolscap envelope, which he set next to the cash on the desktop. ‘In there you will find the address of the company, photographs and plans of the building and details of what you’re looking for and where to find it.’