The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5 (22 page)

‘Kill the light . . .’ he hissed urgently.

I did what he said, turning the flame on the kerosene lamp down low, but using the flashlight to find my way back to where Baines stood. I killed the flashlight too. ‘What is it?’

‘Someone’s coming . . .’ He opened one of the doors a crack and peered out. I could hear the sound of metal on cloth and guessed he’d taken the Webley from his pocket. I was not at all happy about that.

‘Can you see—’

‘Shhh!’ Another urgent hiss. He eased the door closed further, a vertical stripe of pale light painted on his face. I could hear footsteps outside the storage shed. Baines eased the door fully shut.

‘Looks like some night watchman or caretaker . . .’ he whispered. ‘If he sees the unlocked padlock . . .’

I felt my heart pick up pace. The idea of some elderly night watchman didn’t scare me, but the idea of him having his rounds, and his life, cut short by a blow from Baines did. My new chum struck me as the kind of man who dealt with peacetime situations the same way he had in the war.

The footsteps passed by without pausing. After a few seconds, Baines eased open the other door, again just a crack.

‘He’s heading off.’

‘I didn’t think they had a night watchman here,’ I said. ‘Are you sure he’s gone?’

‘He’s turned into the next row,’ said Baines. ‘Stick with the torch.’ He paused a moment, obviously thinking things through. ‘No, it’ll be quicker if you put the lamp on again. I’ll go outside and keep watch with the doors shut. If you hear me knock quietly, kill the lights again. And Lennox – remember what I said.’

‘I remember,’ I said. The truth was I was already concealing something from him.

Once he was outside, I went back to the far end of the shed and opened up a third box. Again there were papers on top of another small treasure, jewellery this time. That was no use to me or Jennifer. It was stolen stuff and, unlike the cash, potentially traceable. But maybe that was the deal I could strike with Baines: he takes any jewellery and gold he can find and I keep the cash for Jennifer.

I set the box down on the ground beside me instead of back on its shelf. I was about to head back for Baines, still unsure of how best to handle him, when I noticed a section of the lower wooden shelf, exposed when I lifted the box out, looked different from the rest. I couldn’t make it out with the kerosene lamp alone and shone the flashlight on it. Rubbing away dust with my fingers, I could feel a joint in the wood. I took out my penknife and, jamming it into the joint, wiggled and levered the section of wood up.

There was a large, oilcloth-wrapped bundle underneath, in the three-inch-deep space between the shelf and the floor. I pulled it out; unwrapping the oilcloth exposed a thick, expensive-looking leather folio case, embossed with the initials
FF
. I unzipped the folio case and could see it contained a thick, five-year diary and a buff foolscap envelope. I flicked through the diary and saw it contained entries for specific dates and times, each with a row of initials next to it. Nothing written out in full. I put the diary to one side and opened the envelope, tilting it so its contents, mainly photographs, spilled out. I picked up the first photograph, a large-scale print, and angled it to the light.

‘Christ!’ I said, despite the need to be quiet. The image burned me; seared every detail into my brain. I felt suddenly sick. Really sick to my stomach. I looked at the second picture and felt the same physical revulsion as it branded itself forever into my recall. A third picture. There were faces I recognized. Important faces. Powerful faces. What else I saw was beyond my recognition; completely beyond my belief. Things I could not accept existed.

My head spun. I still couldn’t believe what I had seen. I couldn’t believe it and I couldn’t understand what something like that was doing in Quiet Tommy Quaid’s possession. After four years of war and thirteen years of Glasgow, I thought I had seen everything, was beyond the capacity to be shocked: but what I had just seen had shaken my world to the core.

I didn’t want to look at any more of the photographs, but there were some other documents and I picked one of them up. It was a list of names and I guessed the names corresponded to the initials I had seen in the diary. Names, like some of the faces, I recognized.

I stopped breathing.

A strong arm had looped around my neck from behind and my throat and neck were caught in a vice of forearm and bicep. I had been so horribly transfixed by what I had seen that I hadn’t heard him approach. It was a professional job, a sleeper hold cutting off air and blood supplies to the brain. The kind of thing they taught commandos.

Through my panic I worked out that Baines had sneaked back in behind me and was now sealing the deal the way he had planned from the start. No Nazi treasure. No loot. What I had just seen had been the prize all along: the vile, evil, loathsome prize.

I was in a fight for my life, but half that life had already been squeezed from me. I grabbed and pulled at the arm crushing my neck, reached up to claw at the face, but my attacker knew what he was doing and had his face down and tight against my neck. I slammed my elbows backwards and into the body behind me, but he held me so tight that I couldn’t get enough steam behind the blows.

As I started to black out, the thought that struck me was that the arm gripping me was too heavy and muscular, the body to which it belonged too big and solid, for it to be Baines.

Sparks and flashes danced before my eyes for a moment. Then someone turned out all the lights.

I drifted from one darkness into another.

It took a few seconds for me to gather up the scattered pieces of my consciousness, a process confounded by the complete darkness around me. My first thought was that I was grateful to have a consciousness at all: a little bit more enthusiasm and that expert sleeper hold could have put me to sleep for good. And it
had
been expert.

I remembered that I was in Tommy’s storage shed and fumbled about for the flashlight. The next thing to fall into my mind was the memory of what I had seen: those images. As my brain slugged its way awake, I became aware I had something in my hand, something that wasn’t the flashlight. And my hand was wet. Sticky.

I called out Baines’s name, but there was no answer.

With my other hand I went to take my cigarette lighter from my pocket but couldn’t find it: someone had stuffed my pockets with what felt like banknotes and jewellery. Eventually I dug out my lighter and the small flame dazzled me for a moment, searing into the raw nerves of my oxygen-deprived brain. I could now see the thing in my other hand was the haft of a knife. A long, slender handle and blade created out of a single piece of metal. A Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife. A commando knife. And the wet stickiness on my hand was blood.

Using the meagre flame of my lighter, desperately relighting it every time movement snuffed it out, I eventually found the flashlight, about two feet from where I’d come to. I swapped the lighter for the flashlight and scanned the shed. There were streaks – red-black on the pale grey cement – stretching across the floor. I followed them with the beam of the flashlight until I found their source. Baines was lying propped up against the Austin A40, his back against the front tyre in almost exactly the pose he’d propped me up in to recover my breath after he’d ju-jitsued it out of me outside the warehouse.

Except Baines wasn’t going to get his breath back any time soon. Or ever.

Someone had put a knife through his neck, behind his windpipe, and sliced forwards and outwards. It was an old commando specialty for silencing guards. You did it from behind and they died unable to utter a sound. A quiet death. I guessed that the knife that had been used was the one I now held. And that the blood on my hands was Baines’s.

I heard the faint ringing bells of police cars, some distance off. More than one. And the sound was slowly increasing in pitch.

Getting closer.

Still groggy from having been strangled half to death, I struggled to make sense of my situation. When I did, it didn’t bring me joy. I almost felt admiration for the professionalism with which I’d been framed for Baines’s murder. My assailant had used a sleeper hold to make sure there was no injury with which to substantiate my claims of innocent unconsciousness. I was in the middle of a murder scene, my pockets filled with banknotes and jewellery, my hands and clothes covered in blood, the murder weapon in my hand.

The picture it painted was so convincing I almost believed it myself: me – Lennox – a known associate of Quiet Tommy Quaid and someone of dubious morals, and more dubious connections, had come with Baines to raid the dead burglar’s hoard. But there had been a thieves’ falling out and I murdered my accomplice. The police would surmise that I would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for some public-spirited – but anonymous – citizen who had made a 'phone call, probably reporting the sounds of a violent fight in the lock-ups by the river.

That was the way it had been meant to play, but it’s difficult to calculate just how much pressure to apply to keep someone out just long enough for them to be caught, literally, red-handed. Too much and your victim’s brain is mush, or they don’t come around at all. Thankfully, my assailant had erred on the side of caution, reckoning I’d still be out or just coming round when the boys in blue arrived.

I had only minutes, maybe even seconds, to get myself out of this fix. I went through Baines’s pockets, taking his car keys, wallet and lighter. I checked the lock-up as quickly as I could to make sure there was nothing else incriminating. Pocketing the commando knife, I took out my handkerchief and made sure anything else I touched didn’t pick up fingerprints. I rushed to the back corner to where the leather folio with the photographs lay. It was gone. Everything else lay where it had been, but the folio and its contents had been taken.

The bells were louder now and I reckoned the police had turned into the storage yard. I hadn’t time to wipe clean everything I had touched: something more dramatic was called for.

Again using the handkerchief, I unscrewed the cap from the Austin’s fuel tank, took some of the old newspaper and stuffed it into the tank. I tipped over the kerosene cans and one of the petrol canisters, letting them glug their contents onto the cement floor before using the two other cans to splash petrol all over the lock-up’s contents, including Baines’s body, the car and the paper stuffed into the fuel tank. I sat the remaining cans and kerosene bottles next to the Austin.

Running over to the doors, I eased one open and peered out. The police bells had stopped and I reckoned the policemen, now on foot, were making their way through the yard, checking each shed as they went.

Snatching the padlock from the shed door, I stuffed it into my pocket, not having time to wipe it down. I went over to the Ford Consul and put the key in the ignition without turning it. Further back in the storage site, about a couple of rows back, I could see the beams from police flashlights probing the spaces between lock-ups. It was now or never. I took the lighter I’d found in Baines’s pocket, lit it and tossed it into the lock-up.

‘Sorry, Baines,’ I said.

The spilled kerosene and petrol ignited. I slammed shut the door to prevent the flames lighting me up for the coppers to see and ran to the car; without switching on the lights, I turned the key in the ignition. In the silence of the night, the approaching policemen would have heard the engine and I slammed the gears into reverse, careening backwards the way we had come in. I saw the dance of flashlight beams as the coppers, maybe three or four of them, came running through the lock-ups.

I flew out onto the road, still in reverse, still with my lights out, reckoning that the chances of running into someone at that time of night were pretty remote. There were two empty police Wolseleys parked at the road end and I narrowly missed one. At that point the sky lit up as a huge bubble of flame surged from the lock-up and into the night sky. The car and the fuel cans had gone up.

My guess was that one carful of coppers would be dealing with the fire; but at least one would have by now been sent running back to the parked police cars and would be on my tail any time now. I kept the lights out and gunned the engine, ripping through empty streets and hoping to God I didn’t run into anything. I took several turns and detours, then headed back towards the city centre, slowing down to normal speed and switching on the lights.

I needed to get the Consul out of sight, and soon. There was a good chance that the police hadn’t gotten any kind of good look at the car, and wouldn’t have been able to report a make or colour – but there were so few cars on the roads at this time of night that it made it worth their while to stop any they saw. And I didn’t have a good reason for being in a car that didn’t belong to me, nor any kind of explanation for why I stank of petrol and kerosene.

The answer came to me a couple of blocks past the Tavern Bar on Finnieston Street, in the unlikely form of ‘Chic’s Car Cavalcade’. I drove past it twice, just to make sure it wasn’t guarded by a night watchman or vicious dogs on long chains. The way my luck had been going, Chic probably had his own team of commandos or paratroopers just waiting for an intruder like me to practise their strangulation skills on.

Security for most of the used-car stock, however, seemed to comprise a fence and a locked gate. No night watchman, no dogs, no commandos. There were a few cars parked outside the stock compound but out of immediate sight of the road, behind what I guessed was some kind of repair garage bay. I pulled the Consul into a space between two of the cars and switched off the lights.

I checked my watch. It was nearly two a.m. I reckoned that it would be at least six or seven before anyone turned up at the garage. Clambering over the bench seat into the back of the car, I lay down and tried to calm myself.

The smell of kerosene and petrol fumed nauseatingly in the car’s cabin and I opened the window a little. The pains in my neck, throat and ribs were singing from the same hymn sheet. And loudly.