The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5 (37 page)

I closed the fire door behind us and steered Findlay, keeping the gun in the small of his back, to where I had parked the car. When I opened the trunk and indicated for him to get in, he hesitated just long enough for me to be grateful for the excuse to slash him across the side of the face with the butt of the gun. I shoved him backwards into the trunk, his knees folding. He started to cry like a woman, coiled up in the dark space and I slammed it shut.

I got into the driver’s seat. Before I started the engine I looked at the gun in my hand, trying to work out what the hell was going through my head. Things had taken a deadly turn: people were going to die, either us or them. I was in a game now where I needed to be armed, like tonight, where I needed to be guaranteed Findlay’s cooperation. So why had I gone in hunting for him in a hall full of coppers with an unloaded pistol?

*

I found the house in Langdyke Avenue with very little trouble: just as Jimmy had said, it was one of those big, block-like Victorian villas, sitting in a huge plot on the corner on the avenue, with a tall, primeval-looking monkey puzzle tree, the only one in the street, dominating the garden. There were no lights on when I arrived.

With a jab of the gun and a word of caution that, if he called for help, my silencing of him would be permanent, I bundled Findlay out of the trunk and to his front door. He fumbled with his keys and I took them from him and opened the front door.

It was an impressive place all right. The architect and the builders – who had probably built it for the family of some robber-baron shipyard owner – would never have imagined it falling into the ownership of a sleazy music-hall comic. The marble-pillared vestibule opened into a mahogany-panelled hall. Someone had cut down a forest or two to fashion the staircase at the far end of the hall. I had checked that Findlay’s wife would be out of town before pulling this stunt, but the baronial style and size of Findlay’s house caused me a second’s worry that he actually had a butler. But there was no sound; no Jeeves type appeared to see if we wanted tiffin in the drawing room.

‘Take me to where you keep the safe.’

He led me through to a wood-panelled study, two of its walls lined with bookcases filled with antiquarian-looking, leather bound books. Findlay didn’t strike me as a big reader and I guessed they had come with the house when he’d bought it. Findlay’s personal touches stretched to an oil portrait of himself and photographs of his yacht. No pictures of his wife, or anyone else.

The safe, predictably, was behind his portrait. I made him open it and rifled through its contents, but didn’t find what I was looking for. It didn’t surprise me: once bitten, twice shy.

‘Where are they?’

‘What?’

‘The photographs.’

‘What do you mean? The photographs are gone. That’s wha—’

I hit him again across the side of the face with the butt of the gun. His cheek split and started to bleed, spotting the crisp white of his dress shirt. He bent forward and took his pocket square out, holding it to his face with trembling fingers. He looked at me, his eyes wide with fear and glossed with tears.

‘Sorry to interrupt you,’ I said, ‘but I think you were about to embarrass us both by insulting my intelligence.’ I sat down in the button-backed leather armchair behind the desk, motioning with the gun for him to sit opposite me. I laughed a little. ‘Makes me feel like a bank manager, all this walnut and leather. Now, let’s straighten everything out. All this crap – Tommy Quaid dying and everything that has happened since – has all been about this sick little club of yours. These little parties you throw. All of you are pervert scum – but the rest were
important
pervert scum. You? You’re just an end-of-the-pier turn who’s had a bit of luck. The only thing you really share with the others is your sick sexual tastes. But you’re still the odd man out. You’re no Solicitor General, Special Branch copper or soon-to-be cardinal.’

There was a block of silver-trimmed walnut sitting on the desk. I flipped open the lid with the barrel of the gun, took out a cigarette and lit it with Findlay’s desk lighter. He sat watching me, still holding the white pocket square to his cheek. A dark red stain bloomed on the cotton.

‘You organized the get-togethers, but the real bosses of the group were Arbuthnot, MacIntyre and Sullivan. They’re untouchable, but you’re not. So, even though everything seemed nice and cosy for the meantime, you decided to take out a little insurance policy. You keep records of who, what, where and when and you keep photographs to back your records up. You maybe even have the idea that you could use them as a
lever
at some time in the future. Not blackmail as such, but maybe just a little extra force to put behind it if you asked one of the others for a favour. Am I right so far?’

Findlay nodded. His face was pale, oiled rat’s tails of hair hanging over his forehead.

‘And then Tommy Quaid comes along to relieve you of the month’s takings, but also takes off with the pictures and the diary. Your insurance policy. You’ve got to get them back, so all of this shit starts.’

‘They’ll kill me. They’ll kill you, too. You don’t know the connections they have—’

I held up a hand to stop him. ‘So where is it?’

‘Where’s
what
?’ His voice was pleading.

‘Tommy stole the pictures. The danger to you was that he would pass them on to someone who could expose you and the others. Mainly you. But the pictures have been retrieved, and I’m guessing by representatives of the others, not your boys. So we don’t have them, and you don’t have them. But they were prints. You still hold the negatives. The original film. You’re a belt-and-braces kind of guy, so I’m guessing that you kept them somewhere else. That’s why Tommy didn’t find them in the safe.’

Findlay looked at me pleadingly. ‘The negatives are all that are keeping me safe. MacIntyre and the others . . . you don’t know what they’re capable of.’

‘I’ve got a pretty good idea. But let me make this simple for you: you give me the negatives now or I’ll kill you.’ I pulled back the hammer on the Webley. Findlay held his hands up.

‘They’re on my boat. It’s moored out at Inverkip. I’ve got them hidden there.’

I nodded and eased the hammer forward.

‘Change into your sailing gear,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Your clothes for sailing – change into them.’

Racialist and misogynistic jokes must have been worth their weight in gold, judging by the dimensions and furnishings of Findlay’s place. Leaving the door open so I could keep an eye on him, I stood in the hall while he changed in his huge bedroom. He started to hang up his evening suit and I told him to leave it lying on the bed. He looked at me oddly: I didn’t know if he was just confused, or if he had guessed I was leaving a breadcrumb trail; a story to be read.

The walls of the hall were covered with photographs. It was an inflated ego given physical form: all the photographs were of Frankie Findlay at different stages in his career. Some were full-size front-of-house theatre posters and display cards; others were of him posing with bigger-name stars from England and the US. There was a small cluster of photographs from his time in the war. Findlay’s theatre of war had been just that: a theatre. As a member of ENSA – the Entertainments National Service Association – he had pranced about doing his routine on improvised stages before hordes of real servicemen.

There was one picture made me pause. It had been taken somewhere that saw more sun than Scotland. Frankie Findlay and three other men, all in khaki, all with lance corporal stripes, smiled at the camera. The youngest of the men, immediately to Findlay’s right, seemed strangely familiar to me, but I couldn’t place him. He was broad-shouldered, handsome and tanned, a Douglas Fairbanks-type pencil moustache lining his upper lip. He looked more the leading-man-actor type than a stage comic, and it itched at me that I couldn’t pinpoint who it was he reminded me of. I decided that I must have seen him play a part in something; some movie or TV show.

On its mount, the photograph was captioned:
Singapore, 1941
. The names of the men were listed; next to Findlay’s name was
J. P. Gresty
. I was still none the wiser.

I had just turned from the photograph when it fell into place who the handsome young man was. When Findlay came out of the bedroom, dressed in his sailing outfit, I grabbed his arm and pushed him close to the photograph.

I told him who I thought Gresty was. He told me I was right.

Before we left Findlay’s house, I made a 'phone call.

Inverkip, just south of Greenock, was an hour’s drive from Glasgow along the southern shore of the Clyde. I couldn’t stomach the idea of having to listen to Frankie Findlay’s pleadings or justifications, so he spent the trip in the trunk again. This time I tied his hands behind his back and used the canvas bag for the tyre jack as a hood. He had whimpered when I tightened the drawstring around his neck.

Like I had asked, he had changed into white slacks, a blue cotton shirt, a darker blue windcheater and canvas deck shoes. I didn’t know what his skills as a sailor were like, but at least he looked the part. I’d fixed his face up and the only discordant note in his nautical ensemble was the pad of gauze held on his cheek by surgical tape. Not once did Findlay ask why I had made him change into his sailing clothes, or why I’d made him leave his clothes scattered in his bedroom.

*

Inverkip marina was a forest of clinking white masts. I found Findlay’s boat at the berth he gave me. It was a thirty-footer and looked reasonably new. Parking at the end of the quay, I left Findlay in the trunk while I checked out the boat. I could see there was no one on board, although I was expecting company soon as a result of my telephone call from Findlay’s house.

I went below into the living cabin or whatever the hell they called it on a boat. Like Findlay’s study, it was all plush leather and polished wood and brass. An inlaid table was folded flat against the wall and a Tantalus-style double decanter sat above it on a railed shelf. Luxurious. But there was something about the room, about the set-up with the table and the decanter that seemed familiar. I felt sick when I realized I had recognized them from the background of the photographs. This had been one of the venues, maybe the only venue, for Findlay’s sick parties. For those children, frightened and vulnerable and uncomprehending of what was being done to them, it had been a polished, luxurious version of hell.

When I went back along the quay to where I’d parked the car, I checked that there was no one around before dragging the bound and hooded Findlay out of the Alpine’s trunk and onto the boat. Once he was in the cabin, I snatched the hood from his head.

‘Where is it?’ I demanded.

‘In the galley . . . I’ll show you.’ Still with his hands tied behind his back, he led me to the boat’s kitchen and nodded to one of the cupboards. ‘There’s an envelope taped to the underside.’

Crouching down, I reached beneath the cupboard and felt a packet fixed there. I was suddenly thrust forward, my head hitting the cupboard, as Findlay rammed the sole of his foot into my shoulder. A second kick caught me in the side of the head.

By the time I was on my feet and turned round in the cramped galley, Findlay was gone and heading up to the deck. I ran after him and saw him as he jumped from the boat onto the quay. He stumbled and struggled to keep his balance with his hands tied behind him.

‘Help me!’ he yelled as he started running along the jetty. ‘For God’s sake, somebody help me!’

It only took a matter of seconds for me to catch up with him and bring him down with another blow from the gun butt, this time to the back of his head. He was dazed and brought to silence. I held him down, my knee on his spine, pushing him into the wooden jetty. When I was satisfied no one had been around to hear his desperate cries, I hoisted him back to his feet and frogmarched him back to the boat. I rehooded him with the wheel jack bag and locked him in the toilet.

I retrieved the envelope from under the galley cupboard and took it through to the cabin, folded down the table and spilled the envelope’s contents onto its elaborately inlaid surface.

‘Son of a bitch . . .’ I muttered as I looked down on a small ledger type book, bound in red leather. Red morocco leather.

The strips of photographic negatives had each been carefully interspersed between its pages. On the right-hand page next to each strip was a numbered list: full names of who was on each frame of the negatives and the time and date the photographs had been taken. Whether the photographs had been taken secretly, or whether having pictures of their acts was part of their perversions, it provided a full record of who had done what and when.

There was the sound of footsteps on the jetty and I placed the gun on the table in front of me, sitting facing the steps down from the deck. It was who I was expecting.

‘Sit down, gentlemen,’ I said. ‘And we can begin the entertainment.’

*

Findlay, still hooded, gave a start when I opened the toilet door. I hauled him to his feet and led him through to the cabin, pushing him down into the seat.

‘I’ve some friends over,’ I said. ‘I’d like you to entertain them, do some of your act.’

‘What? Who’s there?’ asked Findlay from beneath his hood.

‘But first,’ I said, ignoring him, ‘let’s talk about this ledger with the negatives. This is the ledger you’ve had everyone searching for, when you had it all the time. Your insurance policy. A red morocco ledger. The ledger that Tommy Quaid stole from your safe. How come you’ve got it?’

‘I kept it separate from the other stuff, for safety, like you said. It was just the prints and the diary that went missing.’

‘But the ledger? Described exactly like this one. Tommy Quaid
did
take it from the safe.’

The canvas hood moved and I guessed Findlay was shaking his head. ‘My wife bought me the ledgers when we were on holiday. Two identical notebooks in red morocco. I told Arbuthnot, MacIntyre and the others that Quaid and Wilson had stolen the ledger with the negatives.’