The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5 (36 page)

‘It’s a long story. And not one you want to hear.’

I said no more and watched as Frantic Frankie Findlay took to the stage. As he did so, I felt a tidal wave of hate and anger surge up from deep within. For the moment, I forced it down. I also ignored Ferguson who I knew was still watching me, and not the stage.

Findlay’s act was all lamentably predictable, but nonetheless shocking as it progressed. He started with a few jokes from his stage act, the usual Scottish parochial line in humour; then – as tradition demanded at such functions – he settled into his ‘blue’ material. He cracked a few CID in-jokes that he’d clearly been briefed on, naming specific officers, joking about specific events.

After a while, he launched into the real meat of his act. And his audience certainly proved hungry for it, laughing almost maniacally at every gag. All the usual butts of all the usual jokes were there: sex-hungry and stupid young women; sex-starved and stupid older women; and, of course, the Irish, Glasgow Catholics. And Jews.

I could feel Ferguson become more uncomfortable with every gag, adding to impatience with me. Everyone else was lapping it up.

‘I can’t take much more of this,’ he said. ‘Let’s go to a pub and you can tell me how you knew Findlay was on that list.’

‘I have to stay, Jock.’ I turned to him, faced him straight-on. ‘You want me to tell you what I know and why I know it? Okay – I know Frankie Findlay was burgled that night because Quiet Tommy Quaid burgled him. Quiet Tommy Quaid burgled him and was murdered because of it. Tommy knew that Frankie Findlay was appearing at the King’s Theatre that night and that his wife, who is his manager and takes care of all of the money, would be there with him. Tommy knew there would be proceeds from Findlay’s latest stage tour and that he had the time . . .’

On stage, the man I was talking about was cracking jokes about ‘the Jews’ being upset because Hitler had sent them his gas bill. Men who had fought in a war that was supposed to have been all about ending that kind of hate roared with laughter.

‘ . . . had the time to break into the safe and get away with the takings and a pile of jewellery. Except that’s not all he found. There were two leather-bound books – a diary and a ledger – and a document folder. It was these he was killed for. The document folder was stuffed with pictures of men raping children.’

‘Where is this folder?’ asked Ferguson. His face was stone. We stood like an island in the middle of the tumult of raucous laughter and yelling, Findlay’s nasal voice microphone-amplified.

‘It’s gone. They got it back. And one of the books – a diary filled with the initials of those who took part in these sick, perverted parties. By the way, all of the kids involved came from St Andrew’s School, down on the Ayrshire coast. Findlay organized these little get-togethers and he kept a record of them, maybe for his own safety, maybe because he had ideas of blackmailing those involved. You see, they were –
are
– all very important people in the Scottish Establishment. Politicians, MPs, army . . .’

‘Police?’

I nodded. ‘Including your chum you’re having the party for here.’

‘Bob MacIntyre?’ Ferguson looked around the room, as if he suddenly had found himself in a strange land, surrounded by people he didn’t know.

‘It gets worse, Jock,’ I said. ‘One of the biggest of the bigwigs involved in this is Donald Arbuthnot.’

‘You are fucking kidding me . . .’

I shook my head. ‘You don’t have much of a chance of justice when one of the people who’s sexually assaulted you is the Solicitor General of Scotland. And you should know that Jimmy Wilson was there with Tommy Quaid the night he turned over Findlay’s place. Jimmy’s death was no accident.’

Ferguson cast an eye around the room, grabbed my elbow and steered me through the function suite, the entrance hall and into the street outside. The air, even Glasgow city air, felt clean and cool and quiet after the smoke and noise of the hall. He checked the side street we were in both ways to ensure he wouldn’t be overheard.

‘Jesus, Lennox, do you know what you’re saying?’

‘I know exactly what I’m saying. I saw some of those pictures with my own eyes and there is no way I’ll ever be able to unsee them. I thought I would never see anything worse than all the shit I saw in the war. Well, I did. If you’d seen those kids’ faces, Jock . . .’

‘You’re talking about hard evidence. You’ve got to get those pictures to me and I’ll—’

‘And you’ll what? These people run everything. They run
you
. That evidence will never see the light of day and if you get involved there’s every chance you’ll stop seeing it too.’

‘So why tell me?’

‘Because you’re a good man. Because you’re a good man more than you’re a copper, just the way Tommy was a good man more than he was a thief. Because you believe in the right thing. I’m telling you that the right thing here has nothing to do with the law. I’m telling you because I need you to turn a blind eye to what is about to happen. I’m asking you to abandon every instinct you have as a copper and let me handle this.’

‘Are you telling me blood is going to be spilt?’

‘I’m telling you not to ask me questions like that. But let me say, no innocent blood will be spilt.’

‘Fuck’s sake, Lennox . . . I’m a detective chief inspector in the City of Glasgow Police. You can’t seriously expect me to turn a blind eye to the kind of crime you’re talking about – or to you going off on some vigilante crusade.’

‘If you get involved right now, all you’ll be doing is warning them and they’ll get away with it. They’ll deal with you somehow. Maybe you’ll drive off a road and break your neck, or they’ll pin something on you that’ll ruin you. Everything you believe is turned on its head with this. If you got involved you’d have to forget everything you believe, everything you think you stand for. You’d have to stop being a copper.’ I took a long pull on my cigarette. ‘Go home, Jock.’

He made to protest.

‘Just go home. You got me into the smoker, that’s all I needed you to do.’

He started to walk up the side street towards Argyle Street and the cab rank.

‘One more thing, Jock,’ I called.

‘What?’

‘Are you much of a reader?’

He frowned at me in the lamplight, then shrugged. ‘Not a big reader. Some Nevile Shute, that kind of thing. Why?’

‘I have a book in my apartment:
The Outsider
by Albert Camus. If anything happens to me, I want you to have it. You’ll find it very informative, especially if you look behind the dust cover. Then you can decide where you stand.’

He stared at me for a moment, then nodded and headed out onto the main road.

I threw what remained of my cigarette onto the cobbles, ground it out with the pointed toe of my patent black, and headed back into the smoker.

During the war – or at least during my war – time had split into two types: there was the waiting and preparing for action, and there was the action itself. Sometimes the waiting was worse: you had time for fear, for outcomes imagined. When the time for action came, when you were finally thrown into the storm, the moment of commitment could be a moment of calm.

As I went back into the smoker, I had that strange moment of calm.

My war, like everyone else’s on our side, had been all about recovering held territory, and it was always easier to hold and defend than it was to retake and advance. I was ready to retake territory.

I went back into the smoke and the noise of the hall and caught the end of Findlay’s act. It was more of the same stuff. Anti-women, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, anti-Irish, anti-English. The great thing about the good old City of Glasgow Police, guardians of our lives and property, I thought, was that they really knew how to have a good laugh at a few Fascist funnies.

I checked out the location of the toilets. There was a hallway that led from the main function suite to the double doors of the fire exit. The Gents was off to the left of the hall.

I went back into the bar and decided to risk a Scotch, rather than an orange juice: I needed something to stop my gorge rising while Findlay finished his act. There was a CID copper at the bar: a detective constable I’d had dealings with in the past. As I leaned against the bar beside him, he looked me up and down with drunken, slow-motion contempt – which I rather took umbrage at, considering the last time I’d met him I’d handed him an envelope thick with banknotes in exchange for information. He was at the elision stage of drunkenness, where words slid into each other seamlessly and vowels stretched.

‘Whaddafuckyoodoinhere, Lennox?’

I told him I’d been invited along by Jock Ferguson. My new drinking buddy twisted his already ugly face into a gurn that suggested he didn’t hold Detective Chief Inspector Ferguson in much regard.

‘And of course I wanted to pay my respects to the great man: Chief Inspector MacIntyre,’ I explained.

The drunk detective again twisted his features in a kind of gurn and it took me a while to work out that this time it was in approval.

‘Aye? Thazzgood, thazzgood. BobbyMacIntyrezza goodbloke. Izzafuckin goodbloke. Zzuckingoodpolisman.’

‘Yeah. He’s really good with kids, or so I’ve been told . . .’

‘Oh aye?’ He raised his eyebrows sluggishly. ‘Wouldnaysurpriseme. Wouldnaesurprisemeatall,’ he said then squeezed his lips tight to suppress a belch. The belch must have been loaded because he suddenly looked surprised and headed off briskly but weavingly in the direction of the toilets.

I moved along the bar to get a better look at MacIntyre, the man of the moment, who sat at a front and centre table. I watched him through the ever-thickening air. He was over both sixty and six foot. He’d probably been well built once but it had turned to flab; the face pale and thick, his nose and lips fleshy, the cheeks and tip of his nose reddened with broken threads of booze-burst capillaries. He had his thinning grey hair trimmed close to a pink scalp that gleamed through. Everything about him spoke of a boozer, a glutton, a man who gave way to every appetite. I’d seen him before. I’d seen him outside Central Station the day Peter Manuel had hanged and seventeen-year-old Robert Weston had thrown himself in front of a train. I took a good long look at Chief Inspector Bob MacIntyre – a pale, pink, fleshy slug – and I wanted to stamp on him. And I would. But later: this wasn’t the time, nor the place.

Frantic Frankie Findlay had ended his act with a routine about the Pope and had quit the stage to enthusiastic applause. The heavy-built stripper and her accompanist retook the stage.

Findlay made his smug-faced way through the tables, stopping occasionally to shake hands and trade gags with his appreciative audience, before finding his way to sit next to MacIntyre at his table.

I watched them for about an hour. During that time a couple of coppers I knew came up to me and asked me with the same bluntness what I was doing there. I explained about being Jock Ferguson’s guest and that satisfied them for a while, but Ferguson was becoming conspicuous by his absence. I was on borrowed time.

Eventually, there was an explosion of laughter from the table as Findlay obviously cracked a joke and rose before heading off to the men’s room, leaving his companions still laughing. It had probably been one of his best gags: from what I could see a lot of Scottish humour revolved around toilets.

I waited thirty seconds or so then followed him in.

It was a large, bright, Victorian washroom, all white porcelain, mirrors and brass. Tonight its lustre was dulled by cigarette smoke and the stink of stale urine; the average drunk Scotsman viewed a urinal as a general guide rather than a specific target.

Findlay was at a urinal at the far end, bantering over his shoulder to a couple of drunk coppers who were on their way out. I paused at the wash-basins, the one area of the toilets that weren’t getting much trade that night, until the two coppers passed. When they did I picked up a folded towelling napkin and dried my hands, watching Findlay as he passed by behind me on the way out.

‘I really enjoyed your show tonight, Frankie,’ I said to his reflection. He stopped and looked at me. I was probably the only person that hadn’t addressed him as Mr Findlay that night.

‘Oh aye?’ he said. ‘That’s good.’ He started off again.

‘Yep. It wasn’t your best stuff though.’

He stopped again, looking affronted.

‘No . . . You didn’t tell that one . . . you know, the one about the kiddie-fiddler,’ I continued, throwing the towel into the basin and turning to face him. ‘I can’t remember
exactly
how it goes, but basically this kiddie-fiddler gets together with his child-raping buddies and they have these parties . . .’

All Findlay’s smug assurance washed from his expression and was replaced with alarm. I could tell he was about to make a break for the exit and his copper buddy. Two steps took me to him and I fastened my hand around his throat. His eyes bulged with terror as I pushed him backwards, unresisting, and into a cubicle. I heard voices coming into the washroom and I kicked the door shut behind us, snibbing it with my free hand. Forcing Findlay to sit on the toilet, my hand still tight around his throat, I reached into the waistband of my dinner suit and pulled out the Webley Jonny Cohen had given me. I pushed the barrel hard against his forehead and made a ‘not a sound’ face. The sight of the gun clearly terrified Findlay and he sat wide-eyed on the toilet.

‘We’re going for a walk,’ I said after a while, when I was sure the coppers had left the toilets. ‘If you make a single sound, or try to call for help, know that I’m prepared to hang for you. You got it?’

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t me. I didn’t do anything to those kiddies.’

I hauled him to his feet and slammed him against the side of the cubicle, ramming the barrel tip under his weak jaw. ‘I said have you got it?’

He nodded.

I opened the cubicle door, checked all was clear, and steered Findlay out to the washroom door. Checking the hall outside, I saw there was no one there, but it was at that stage in the evening that there was an increasingly steady stream from the function hall to the toilets, so I had to be quick. I marched Findlay along the hall, shoved the fire exit’s push-bar and bustled him out into the side street. It had taken only fifteen or twenty seconds and no one had seen us.