The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5 (30 page)

‘What? Oh aye – Tommy paid me that night.’

Reaching into my pocket, I took out the envelope I had offered Jennifer Quaid, but which she’d refused. I handed it to Jimmy.

‘Jeez . . .’ he said when he opened the envelope. He held it open and tilted it for Davey to see.

‘There’s enough in there to keep you hidden here or anywhere else for long enough. Longer than it’ll take for me to get this sorted out, hopefully.’ I turned to Davey. ‘You married?’

He nodded.

‘Any kids?’

‘Not yet. We’ve one on the way.’ His face lit up. A life organized; a future planned. ‘Due in November.’

‘I suggest you take some of that cash, shut up the garage for a couple of weeks, and take your wife on a surprise holiday.’

‘I can’t—’

‘Just do what I say, Davey. McNaught is going to realize he’s missing two men and the last time he saw them was at your garage. He’s probably already been back there with reinforcements to find out why they didn’t come back with the song they were supposed to beat out of you. Given all that happened at the garage, I think it’s best if you dropped out of sight too. At least till I get something sorted out.’

‘What happened at the garage?’ Jimmy asked, frowning.

‘Long story,’ I said. ‘Davey can fill you in later. In fact, I think you should get your stuff together too, Jimmy, and make it a family affair. 'Phone your wife, Davey – tell her to pack some things. I’ll drop you off and you can drive back down and pick up Jimmy. I suggest the three of you get south of the border. As far south as you can.’ I handed Davey a card with both my business and home numbers. ‘Let me know when you’re settled, but when you 'phone, say it’s “Mr Hastings”. I’ll let you know when the coast is clear.’

‘I don’t know how to thank you,’ said Jimmy, gazing at the envelope of cash in his hands. ‘Tommy said you would help. He had a lot of faith in you.’

‘Yep,’ I said, sighing. ‘I know . . .’

After Davey Wilson had 'phoned his wife and we’d driven back into Glasgow, I dropped him off at his house. It was a small thirties bungalow in a quiet residential street: a place worked hard for, saved hard for; an ambition fulfilled. Like the garden outside the tearoom where I’d had lunch with Jennifer, Wilson’s little house was a badge of an ordinary, planned life. It repelled me and excited my envy at the same time.

Getting out of the car, Davey promised me that he would get his wife and head back down to pick up Jimmy as soon as he could.

‘You should think about Canada, too,’ I said as he got out. ‘You’ve got skills and it’s a great place to bring up kids. If you got accepted, you could maybe sponsor Jimmy – get round his past that way.’

He thought about it for a moment. ‘Aye . . . aye, maybe that’s no’ a bad idea. Thanks for all your help, Mr Lennox.’

In the softening light of evening, I watched him go through the gate and up the short path to the small, immaculately tended garden, and puzzled about what the hell he had to thank me for.

I was pretty sure that I’d convinced Davey of the need to get himself and his wife to safety, but I parked further up the street and waited the length of three cigarettes. It wasn’t just a lack of confidence in his resolve: I wanted to make sure no one else was watching the house, ready to follow them back to Jimmy’s hiding place.

To ease my impatience and my lungs, after the third cigarette I decided to go back and knock on the door, but I saw Davey and his wife come out of the front door, moving with the stiff urgency of the afraid. Davey was carrying two large suitcases, which he put in the trunk of the Ford parked outside while his wife locked up the house.

Despite both looking anxiously up and down the quiet residential street, neither of them saw me watching. I waited until the Ford had turned the corner and onto the main road, unable to get the thought out of my head that Davey and his wife had had a quiet, ordinary life where the future was planned and saved for. Then I had come along, and now they were on the run like criminals. I comforted myself that Davey’s brother had been the real agent of chaos, but the truth was it seemed to follow me around.

I started the engine and headed across the river to Tommy Quaid’s place, still unable to work out what Davey Wilson could possibly have to thank me for.

*

The night and my mood were both fully dark by the time I got to Tommy’s apartment building in Pollockshields. As I parked in the lamplit street of blond and bland Victorian sandstone villas and flats, it struck me that the last time I’d been there was the night Tommy had patched me up and re-suited me, after I’d been jumped outside the pub.

I parked opposite and looked across at the door of his dark-windowed ground-floor apartment, half expecting him to emerge from it.

Like I had outside Davey’s, I sat and smoked for a while, making sure there was no activity in or around the flat. When I got out of the car, I checked the street in both directions. Something tensed in my chest when I noticed a car with two men sitting in it, parked on the same side of the road as mine, a few spaces back. But I could see they were talking and laughing, making no effort to be inconspicuous, and seemed to pay me no heed. In any case, they drove off before I reached the door of Tommy’s flat.

I let myself in with the key Jennifer had given me. Everything was pretty much as it had been when I had last been there. Unlike the feeling I’d had seeing the flat from the street, once I was inside I had no sense of Tommy still being there, either in body or in spirit. The truth was he never really had been, even when he’d been alive, and I remembered the feeling of detachment and temporariness I’d had on that last visit.

As soon as I stepped from the hall into the living room, I knew someone had been there.

I didn’t know what it was that triggered the instinct, perhaps the slightest change in order, the kind of detail you remember but don’t know you’re remembering. It was nothing like the certainty with which I’d known that my own apartment had been gone through; and it wasn’t like the subtle invasion by shadowy agents of state that Nancy Ross, Tommy’s unlikely left-wing academic lover and unlikelier confidante, had described.

It was simply the feeling of recent occupation: that someone had been in the apartment since Tommy’s death.

Simultaneously the thought struck me that, for all I knew, they could still be there. Again I cursed my noble gesture of re-drawering Jonny’s Walther and Tommy’s commando knife. I didn’t have the guns I’d taken from McNaught’s goons, either: Twinkletoes had one and Jonny Cohen had taken charge of the other.

I went over to the window and eased back the net curtain, checking the street outside. There were no signs of anything odd and the car with the two men hadn’t returned.

I went through every room, checking there was no one around. I felt a jolt when I saw Tommy’s shaving kit in the bathroom, still looking like it was there temporarily and its owner would be back to pack it away any time. Except he wouldn’t.

I decided that I would tell Jennifer that I would help her clear the place out. Once everything was sorted out. If I were still alive.

I spent an hour searching the place. It was more than enough time to go through Tommy’s belongings and I was left with the same feeling of impermanence. As I expected, there was nothing there that would have given much of a clue about the apartment’s occupant, far less stolen documents.

I sat on the chesterfield in the living room, as if waiting for something to come to me. I
was
waiting for something to come to me: as I had searched through the flat, I had been nagged by the thought that I already knew something important, but I had forgotten it. Something here, in Tommy’s place. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t come to my recall, sitting tantalizingly just outside my reach.

I picked up the receiver of Tommy’s telephone and was surprised to hear the metallic burr of a connection. No one had yet thought to cancel the line. I made another mental note to mention it to Jennifer. I dialled Archie’s number and he told me that he had gotten all of the information I’d asked for on the trust that ran St Andrew’s School.

‘There’s one name that sticks out for me,’ said Archie. ‘You remember I told you about that priest I was warned off about when I was a beat bobby? Father Sean Sullivan – now Monsignor Sean Sullivan?’

‘Shit – he’s a trustee of the school?’

‘Makes you think, doesn’t it?’

After I rang off from Archie, I 'phoned Jonny Cohen. He asked me to hold on while he took the call in his study. Why a gangster who ran protection rackets, bookies, strip clubs and organized the odd armed robbery needed a study was beyond me, but I guessed he didn’t want to talk where he could be overheard by his family or Jennifer.

‘Those birds you left with us,’ he said when he picked up the extension. ‘I’ve had the vet look at them. The one with the broken wing is going to make it after all.’

‘I’m relieved to hear it,’ I said. And I was.

‘Aye,’ said Cohen. ‘But I wouldn’t be too relieved. He’s going to make it, but he’s probably not going to fly that straight from now on.’

‘Oh . . .’ I said. ‘And the other one?’

‘I think he’s maybe a canary – he’s been doing all the singing you wanted him to do. But best not go into that on the 'phone. Where are you?’

‘At our late friend’s place. I’ll come down right away.’

‘Oh the birds aren’t here,’ said Cohen. ‘We didn’t have the right . . .
cages
for them. But if you meet me here we can go to see them together.’

‘I’ll be right there.’ I hung up, ending our weirdly cryptic exchange. Cohen was right to be cautious, but anyone listening in would hardly have needed Bletchley Park to decode our meaning.

I sat for another minute in an empty flat that had been empty even when Tommy had lived there, willing whatever it was that had eluded me to come to me.

It didn’t, and I left the flat to its dark and emptiness.

*

The street outside was quiet and empty of people until two men came around the corner, laughing loudly and joking with each other. I guessed they’d had a few and were returning from a pub. I thought about the times Tommy and I had done the same. They were harmless but I decided to let them pass before crossing to where I’d parked.

It was only when they were directly in front of me that I recognized them as the men I’d seen in the car earlier.

By that time it was too late. I almost felt like expressing my admiration, it was all done so quickly and professionally: dropping the pretence of alcohol-fuelled jollity, one man grabbed my wrist and jabbed the pistol he’d drawn from his pocket into my ribs. The other wheeled round to the other side and grabbed my elbow, tight.

‘Now we’re not going to play silly buggers, are we?’ The one with the gun had a nondescript face and a nondescript English accent. ‘Play nice and no one needs to get hurt.’

‘You’re calling the shots,’ I said.

‘Now that’s a good boy . . .’ The Englishman smiled, and between them they steered me back towards Tommy’s flat.

*

Once we were inside, the Englishman kept his gun on me while his pal searched me, turning out everything in my pockets and setting it on the coffee table, including the two blue-tabbed keys: the one I’d let us into the flat with and the unmarked one for the lock-up that Jimmy had given me.

From the brief exchanges between them, I could tell the other man was a Scot, sounding like he came from somewhere on the east coast. It was the Englishman who addressed me, telling me to sit down on the chesterfield ‘nice and quiet’, with my hands on my lap where he could see them.

I knew I was in trouble: there was something about my two captors that was very cool, very assured, very professional; the casualness and familiarity with which the Englishman handled his gun, the quiet calm of both men. They were clearly in a totally different league from the muscle-bound goons at Davey Wilson’s garage, and certainly from the Victor McLaglen lookalike and chum who’d jumped me in the street. Maybe it had been one of these two, and not one of the goons Cohen now had on ice, who had killed Baines and put me to sleep in the lock-up.

I sized my opposition up: the Englishman had pale grey eyes filled with cold calm, and his hair was receding at the temples; the Scot was thinner and a little taller, with reddish blond hair. Neither was in any way remarkable in appearance and neither was too tall and, although both had an athletic look, neither was heavily built – but there was something about them that told you they could handle themselves.

Satisfied that I posed no risk, the Englishman put his gun back into his pocket and went across to the telephone.

‘We’ve got him,’ is all he said before hanging up. So there it was: a trap had been set and I’d sprung it by walking blindly into it.

The Englishman sat back down in the club chair opposite me while his taciturn Scottish chum leaned against the wall. Both watched me silently.

I smiled. ‘Well, this is cosy . . .’ I said.

The Englishman smiled back. ‘And it’s about to get cosier: the boss is on his way.’

I nodded, leaned back in the sofa and waited for McNaught to arrive.

*

We waited for twenty minutes. My two silent warders watched me unwaveringly and patiently, but without interest, without any sense of heat. It was all very matter-of-fact: they were doing a job, and they didn’t feel stretched by it or tense about it. It didn’t matter, because I was tense enough for the three of us.

Just like I had when Baines had made me drive to the lock-ups, I tried to think through what moves I could make; again it was a calculation that came out zero every time, no matter what scenario I ran through in my head.

I had no option but to wait until McNaught arrived. When he did, I guessed the rest of my life would be very painful, but very short. I would probably end up envying the quiet death of Thomas Quaid.

At least it would all be over. My life, I had often thought, had pretty much ended in the war. At least that was when the Kennebecasis Kid – the idealistic, ambitious youth from Saint John – had died. It was as if everything since had been on borrowed time; like I’d been a ghost in sharp tailoring overstaying its welcome.