The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5 (32 page)

Tarnish seemed to be on the level, but I was a long way off trusting him completely. As I talked he sat and listened intently, asking the odd question; the other two stayed in the background, still silent.

But I did tell Tarnish about the contents of the document wallet I’d held briefly in my hands. I told him about the photographs; about whom I’d seen in them and what they had been doing. And to who. I spared no detail and, as I talked, I could see Tarnish’s demeanour darken, and I heard Fraser, his subordinate, mutter a curse.

I described a lopsided face, then another that looked like Victor McLaglen.

When I was finished, Tarnish sat silent for a while. Then he asked me what the other blue-tabbed key was for. I explained that it was a spare key for the lock-up that had burned down.

‘And you have no idea where this red leather ledger is?’ he asked.

I shook my head. ‘My guess is that Tommy hid it somewhere. That’s why I came back here, but I knew he wouldn’t be that obvious.’

‘There’s always hiding in plain sight . . .’

‘No . . . I’ve been through everything. It’s maybe not here. There’s a good chance Tommy never had it – it was odd that I found everything else in one place. If he has left it behind thinking I’d work out where it is, then he’s overestimated my abilities as a detective.’

‘It would have been easier if Tommy had simply made a will,’ said Tarnish bitterly.

It was like an electric shock, but I tried not to show it. Tarnish’s offhand remark had dropped it back into my head: the
something
that had been itching in my head all the time I’d been searching Tommy’s flat.

Tommy had intended for me to find it. Me alone.

And now I knew where to look.

*

We sat talking for another half an hour. Tarnish told me that he, Fraser and Mayhew would do anything to avenge Tommy’s death, especially having heard the nature of what I had found in the lock-up. He seemed genuine, and told me that he was willing to work with me – but made it clear that he and his comrades might go about exacting revenge in their own way. I told him I didn’t have a problem with that, but they should leave the investigating to me. I hadn’t told Tarnish that I knew where Tommy had stolen the documents from. I also didn’t let on that I was now very late for an appointment with Jonny Cohen.

I gave Tarnish my card with my numbers on it; he told me he already had them; I guessed he had built up quite a dossier on me. We agreed to stay in touch.

All the time I had sat, patiently exchanging intelligence with Tarnish, I had to fight the urge to scratch two itches: the first was that insistent grain of suspicion, like grit in my eye, about Tarnish and his men. There was something about them that didn’t gel. It was maybe the way his men never spoke, always remaining subordinate and preserving the deferences and hierarchies of thirteen years past; as if Tarnish was their current, rather than former, commanding officer.

The second itch was, of course, to have them gone and out of the flat. All the time I spoke with Tarnish, I had used all of my willpower not to glance over at the bookcase.

‘It would have been easier if Tommy had simply made a will.’
With that comment, Tarnish had unlocked the memory that had lain just beyond my reach.

I remembered that night, after I’d been jumped by the two amateurs in the street and Tommy had strapped me up, standing by the bookcase with the Albert Camus novel
The Outsider
in my hand.

Tommy had said,
‘If ever anything happens to me, I’ll leave it to you in my will. Remember that.’

I had no good reason to offer Tarnish as to why I would want to stay behind in Tommy’s apartment. I thought of doing the whole shit-I’ve-left-my-car-keys-inside thing, but Tarnish and his boys were too long in the fang to fall for that kind of malarkey. And our new found all-pals-together goodwill was paper thin on both sides: I guessed Tarnish had the same grain of mistrust for me as I had for him.

So we all left together and I locked the front door.

‘I’ve got to talk to some people,’ I said. ‘Why don’t we meet here at eleven tomorrow morning?’ If the book was still there, it would still be there tomorrow morning. I could of course simply have driven around the block, parked and waited till I thought it was safe to sneak back into the apartment, but the truth was I hadn’t been too sharp when it came to spotting Tarnish’s surveillance. He’d said that there were only the three of them, but something made me suspect that Tarnish wasn’t the type to paint the whole picture. What I’d do was turn up half an hour early, pocket the book, and wait for Tarnish.

As we left, Tarnish explained they were parked around the corner and he rather pointedly watched as I went back to my car and drove off.

As I did, Quiet Tommy Quaid’s words echoed in my head:
‘Maybe, one day, this’ll be a book that will speak to you too.’

‘Where the fuck have you been?’ The normally affable and polite Handsome Jonny Cohen’s greeting wasn’t the most welcoming I’d had in my time in Glasgow, but neither was it the least. We stood in the marble-floored hallway of his house. You could almost have fitted Tommy’s whole flat into the hall alone and the contrast struck me, jarred with me, for some reason.

‘I got held up . . .’ I explained about Tarnish and goons with gut-aimed guns and how they’d been so insistent that I hang around that it seemed churlish to refuse. Cohen’s annoyance gave way to suspicion.

‘Do you believe Tarnish?’ he asked. ‘That he’s just here to find out what happened to Tommy Quaid and to get even for it?’

‘What other interest could he have?’

‘Maybe Baines was right. Maybe Tarnish and Quaid
did
lift something of value during one of their raids and Tommy stashed it away. These things did happen in the war.’

I shook my head. ‘This is all about those photographs I found. Those names. Tommy Quaid was killed because he tripped over this little ring of . . . Christ, I don’t know what you’d call them – child molesters – who also happen to be in positions of power.’

‘So Tarnish has agreed to help out?’ Cohen asked.

‘Yeah. Help out as an executioner. Speaking of which, thanks for keeping McNaught’s goons breathing. Where are they?’

‘One of my warehouses. In Clarkston.’

‘You said on the 'phone that Doc Banks fixed them up?’

‘Aye . . . as best he could. You really went to town on them.’

‘It was a tricky situation, Jonny, and they were both armed. I had to think on my feet.’ I looked along the hall, into the body of the house. ‘Can I see Jennifer before we go?’

‘Sure,’ said Cohen. ‘But make it quick. We’re already an hour behind because of your chat with Tarnish.’

*

It was a concrete-floored, corrugated-iron-walled warehouse filled with crates stacked four high. I didn’t ask Cohen what the crates contained, but I guessed that whatever it was was in a state of fluid ownership. In the corner nearest the doors, there was a flat-roofed, shed-like arrangement which obviously served as some kind of office. It was raised on a stilted platform; one wall was all windows and looked over the stacked merchandise.

A man in his late sixties came out of the office and down the steps to greet us. He was short and squat and leathery, his skin thick and dark under a shock of dense white hair, looking as if he’d spent his whole life outdoors. It was a look that sat oddly with the expensive suit.

‘Hiya, Yank,’ he said good-naturedly.

‘Hiya, Pops,’ I replied. Pops Loeb had been a gangster in his own right between the wars, when the slums of Govan rather than the semi-detacheds of Newton Mearns had been the centre of Jewish life in Glasgow. He was a tough old buzzard, but the rumour was that in his golden days his protection racket had been more protection than racket, and he had been a popular figure in his community. When the altogether more ruthless Jonny Cohen had become top dog, he had taken over Loeb’s operations more as a business merger than gang war. Cohen was clearly fond of Pops Loeb and had kept him close as an adviser; I got the impression that, these days, Loeb’s duties were light but his salary was considerable. Loeb had lost his wife to cancer young and his son had been killed in France on the retreat to Dunkirk, and Jonny Cohen had become the closest thing Pops had to family. Like Cohen, I liked Loeb: I always called him Pops and he always called me Yank, no matter how often I told him I was from Canada, not the US.

‘No one’s been sniffing around, Jonny,’ he said. ‘Your chums are through there . . .’

‘There’ was an area cleared of crates in the middle of the warehouse and McNaught’s two heavies sat tied to collapsible metal chairs. Twinkletoes McBride sat on a third chair facing them, smoking. Twinkle had his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up over forearms that looked woven from steel cable. He’d unbuttoned his shirt collar and loosened his tie and had slipped the deep red braces from his shoulders so they now hung from his waist. Seeing him like that sent a cold current through me: Twinkletoes McBride was not the kind of person you wanted to see ready for some hard physical work. Especially if you were sitting facing him, tied to a chair.

McNaught’s two men didn’t look too scared though. They sat limply, without tension, and I guessed that I’d missed the party: Twinkle had already gotten all he wanted from them.

The red-headed boxer type whose jaw I’d dislocated had had his face straightened and a bandage, looped around his head and face Humpty-Dumpty style, held his mouth tight shut. The side of his face that had taken the force of the blow was badly distended and swollen, and had started to bruise dark, which emphasized the large white wound dressing Doc Banks had applied.

He looked at me dully as I approached but didn’t seem to recognize me. I guessed that I’d clobbered him so quickly that he hadn’t gotten a good look at me, although he had been fully conscious before I left.

His pal, also with a bandaged head, showed no signs of recognizing me, either. That I could understand because I’d belted him as soon as he’d opened the door and this was the first time I’d seen him since. But as I watched him, I noticed the same lack of recognition when he looked at Twinkletoes, at Cohen, at his friend, at his knees, at the crates, at the floor. His egg had been well and truly scrambled. I’d scrambled it. And I felt like shit standing there, looking at him.

‘Much trouble?’ I asked Twinkletoes.

‘Nope. They was very
lock-way-shus
. Or this one was . . .’ He pointed to the redhead with the busted jaw. ‘I didn’t need to do nothing. By the time Doc Banks was finished resetting his jaw, he would have sold his granny down the Clyde. Doc gave them something after I’d finished with them. An injection to kill the pain and they’ve been as quiet as church mice since.’

Cohen tapped me on the elbow. ‘We need to talk.’

He steered me to the corner of the warehouse and the shed-type office. Pops Loeb and two of Cohen’s men sat smoking and arguing loudly but heatlessly about something. The air was blue-thick with tobacco smoke, mainly from the stump of stogie that Pops was chewing on. The walls were covered with various pinned-up bills of lading, delivery schedules, freight notes, and a calendar with a brunette spilling out of her bikini. There was a battered old sofa in one corner, on which the two younger men were sitting.

‘Could you give us a minute, boys, please? Maybe you could keep an eye on our guests and ask Mr McBride to join us? Thanks. Pops, you hang around.’ It was something that I’d noticed about Cohen before: he was invariably polite and courteous, even to his hired thugs. I’d often wondered if, during his time as a bank robber, the demand notes he’d handed bank tellers had had an apologetic addendum:
PS Sorry about the interruption to your routine. Thank you so much for the cash and your kind cooperation
.

‘The guy whose jaw you busted told Twinkletoes everything you need to know,’ he said when the two heavies had left. ‘He told us everything through gritted teeth, though. After Doc Banks stitched up his face and reset his jaw, he bound him up tight and told him to keep his teeth together until he gets to a hospital and has his jaw wired. Or whatever teeth you left him with.’

‘The other guy?’ I asked hopefully: maybe he had passed the time playing Grandmaster chess with Pops and his vacant look was simply the otherworldliness of the genius.

‘You could see for yourself. According to Doc Banks, he could peg out at any time. There could be bleeding in his skull. In any case, his brain’s mush. All it’ll take is for his ginger chum to point to you across a courtroom and you’re looking at attempted murder.’

‘I wasn’t trying to kill him. The opposite, in fact.’

‘Tell that to the judge, as they say.’

‘What do we know about them?’ I asked.

‘They’re a couple of heavies for hire from Edinburgh,’ said Pops Loeb. ‘According to your chum Twinkletoes, they’re ex-army and thick as shit – or at least judging from the one you didn’t lobotomize. They’re not police, government, or anything official.’

‘That doesn’t mean to say McNaught isn’t—’ Cohen broke off when Twinkletoes came in.

‘Close the door behind you, please,’ said Cohen. Twinkle did as he was asked and his bulk seemed to fill the small office shed. ‘Could you tell Mr Lennox what you got out of them?’

‘Aye – no problem,’ said Twinkle. Even the baritone of his voice seemed to fill the shed, reverberating in the wooden walls. ‘Both done time inside army and civilian prison. They’ve done a bit of bare-knuckle and occasional work as bouncers in an Edinburgh nightclub run by the Ferguson brothers. But they’ve also done their fair bit of putting people in hospital – aye, and maybes worse – for cash. Thon feller you talked about – the one with the fucked-up face – hired them directly. McNaught was the name he used with them as well. They’d never knew or heard of McNaught before, but he paid them silly fucking money. He admitted it was made clear from the start that murdering folk was part of the job, and that was why they was being paid so much. If they talked to anyone about it, they’d end up dead too. By the way, I got everything from the ginger-heid with the busted jaw. The other one isn’t
cum-puss-menttis
, if you know what I mean.’