The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5 (7 page)

‘Ah’m no’ on the phoan, but,’ she rumbled. I assured her that I’d call by the kiosk later in the week to make final arrangements.

*

I was back in my flat by twelve-thirty and, at exactly one p.m., my 'phone rang. I recognized the voice right away as belonging to my new friend with the lopsided face.

‘Have you fixed a schedule for what we discussed?’ he asked without preliminaries.

‘Next Monday, one a.m.,’ I said.

‘And you can rely on your associate to stick to that time?’

‘I can,’ I said. ‘I’ll be taking him there.’

‘Good. This is an important mission. I was hoping you would personally supervise it.’

‘How do I contact you to arrange delivery and payment?’ I asked.

‘You don’t. I’ll 'phone you again after that date to arrange collection of the information and payment of the rest of your fee.’ He hung up. I guessed we weren’t going to be close.

*

Tommy Quaid’s two-day-old, chicory-flavoured assault on my palate had haunted me almost as much as the kicking my ribs had taken, so after I’d spoken with McNaught, I fixed myself a proper coffee. I’d recently picked up a new recording at the record store in Sauchiehall Street and put the long-player of Brahms’ first piano concerto on the radiogram; I may have been accused of being a thug and worse at various times, but at least I was a cultured thug. While Leon Fleisher arpeggiated, I eased myself, stiff-backed, into the armchair by the window and read through the news.

There was nothing of any note: mainly the usual crap about the forthcoming Empire and Commonwealth Games – but as headbutting wasn’t a scheduled event, I didn’t expect a strong representation from Glasgow in the Scottish team. The only thing that caught my eye was a three-column-inches mention of the incident I’d witnessed from my office window while Mr McNaught had been making his unobserved way up the stairwell. Headed CENTRAL STATION ACCIDENT VICTIM STILL UNIDENTIFIED, it explained that the body was of a young male who had apparently wandered onto the tracks somewhere between the Broomielaw, where trains crossing the bridge over the Clyde began slowing as they approached the terminus, and the station platforms. The police had given no further details other than that the deceased was not a railway employee and that they were not treating the death as suspicious.

I closed the papers and drank my coffee, watching nothing through the lounge’s bay window.

For a sliver of a moment, I wondered why, if the dead man had been between the platforms and the Broomielaw, they had gone in through the main concourse and brought the body out the same way. That was all I thought about it.

At the time.

As we had agreed, a week later, an hour after Sunday had become Monday, Tommy and I met to do the foundry job.

At least I looked the part: I had dressed in a pair of dark cavalry twills, a black sweater the neck of which covered up my shirt collar, and a pair of rubber-soled, black suede desert boots. Examining the figure I cut in the full-length hall mirror, I couldn’t help but laugh: all I was doing was driving Tommy and keeping an eye out for night watchmen or strolling coppers, yet I’d dressed as some kind of Hollywood movie-version diamond thief. At least if we got caught I’d have a Cary Grant mugshot.

Leaving my apartment building as quietly as possible, I eased the Alpine out of the car park onto Great Western Road and headed west. At the best of times, Glasgow at one in the morning was a haunted-looking place; the streets blank and silent, blind between the pools of street-lamp light. Tonight, one-in-the-morning Glasgow was especially haunted-looking under an uncharacteristically cloudless sky. The third-quarter moon had withdrawn into a sliver of crescent, giving up the night to the sparkle of stars. The next full moon, Tommy had informed me, would not be until the thirtieth. ‘No point in putting on a shadow show,’ he had said in the pub when we had planned the break-in. ‘The full moon’s like a spotlight – you become a silhouette up there on a rooftop and you’d be as well doing a dance routine for the coppers. Always best to go on a cloudy, moonless night.’

The only car on the streets, I got all the way past the Maryhill canal locks without spotting a soul, but as soon as I turned into Maryhill Road I saw a copper on foot patrol watch me as I drove past. I gave a small wave and he saluted – driving a new Sunbeam Alpine in Glasgow gave me salutable status – but I still checked my side and rear-view mirrors to make sure his hand didn’t fall from the salute onto his notebook pocket. It didn’t and he walked on, continuing his patrol through Maryhill, where he’d find nothing else that night to salute.

Tommy’s instructions had been clear: I turned off Maryhill Road at Bilsland Drive and pulled over, leaving the parking lights on, a hundred yards from the junction. I scanned the tenement-flanked street on both sides and in both directions, but could see no sign of Tommy, or anyone else. A disconsolate-looking dog, some kind of black-and-white mongrel, trotted along the middle of the road and passed the car without looking in. I cricked my neck to watch it head back towards the junction, and also again to check for any sign of Tommy; there was still none. I was turning back to face front when the passenger door opened and Tommy dropped into the seat.

‘How the hell did you do that?’ I asked, genuinely impressed. ‘Where did you come from?’

‘Trade secret.’ Tommy grinned and tapped the side of his nose with his finger. ‘Speaking of trade secrets . . .’

I nodded and pulled out from the kerb. Tommy told me to keep heading along Bilsland Drive. Past the smoke-blackened brick of the railway arch, the tenements to our right gave way to the bush- and tree-edged Ruchill Park, dark and dense in the night. We passed the Elizabethan gables of the gatehouses of the infectious diseases Ruchill Hospital, the black silhouette of the hospital’s baroque tower, the highest structure in Glasgow, a darker looming against the starry sky.

Eventually, Tommy directed me into a dead-end street that, like almost all of its neighbours, was empty of cars. Empty except for a scruffy old Fordson works van, green paintwork and red wheels faded and grimy, garage livery on the side barely legible. From its styling I could see it was a pre-war model; from its condition I wondered if the war it had been pre- had been the one we’d fought with the Boers.

‘We can’t take your car to the job. It’s far too flash and we don’t want anyone remembering it or some keen-as-mustard new bobby noting down the number. Park between the street lights.’ Tommy pointed to a spot in the street where the car would be in the least light. I did what he asked, deciding now wasn’t the time to tell him about the patrolman saluting me on Maryhill Road. We got out and I locked up the Alpine.

‘I managed to borrow this.’ Tommy spoke quietly as he led the way to the parked van. Spoke and moved quietly: he seemed to be able to walk without sound, as if he made no real contact with the ground. ‘If we bump into any coppers, we can maybe convince them that we’re mechanics called out to an emergency breakdown.’ Scanning the dark eyes of early-hours tenement windows to make sure we hadn’t awoken curiosity, Tommy donned a pair of gloves before unlocking the van, reaching in and handing me out a dark-blue boiler suit and another pair of gloves. ‘Best put these on before you get in.’

He took out a matching pair of overalls for himself and wriggled into them.

‘I’m guessing from the gloves that the van owner isn’t aware he’s loaned you the van?’ I asked.

Tommy grinned, handing me the keys. ‘I’m sure he’d be fine with it – I just didn’t want to trouble him by waking him up and asking. I’ll get it back before it’s noticed missing in the morning.’

‘Isn’t this a risk?’ I asked as I got into the driver’s seat. ‘You said yourself the job itself’s reasonably risk free. It’d be a real pity to be pinched for stealing a van.’

Tommy shook his head. ‘We’re only ten minutes away from the ironworks so we’d be really fucking unlucky to run over a copper in the time it takes us to get there and back. And anyway,’ he made a sweeping gesture with his hands to take in the van, ‘who’d want to steal a piece of shite like this? The coppers wouldn’t give it a second look, even at this time of night.’

‘You’re the boss . . .’ I turned the key in the ignition and the Ford gave a rheumy cough, but didn’t start. I looked at Tommy meaningfully; he caught the meaning.

‘It just needs a bit of choke.’

I pulled the choke halfway out and tried again. The engine lurched into life and I three-point-turned the van and headed out of the street.

‘By the way,’ I said as we headed towards Possilpark. ‘Thanks again for the loan of the suit – I’ll get it back to you, but I’ll have it dry cleaned first.’

‘Thanks. How are the ribs?’

‘Fine.’

‘Any more ideas on why those monkeys jumped you?’

‘None.’

*

In nine minutes we were in Possilpark: an artificial settlement built with only one purpose, to house workers for the Saracen Foundry. The original works in the Gallowgate’s Saracen Lane had given the foundry its name, but demand had outstripped capacity and the decision had been made to find a dedicated out-of-city site. The fields and copses of the bucolic Possil estate had been bought, bulldozed and built over. Possilpark, a sprawling grid of four-storey red-sandstone tenements, now sat smirched greasy black by a century of smoke and soot from the massive, fourteen-acre foundry that formed its dark, smouldering heart.

‘Look at this place.’ Tommy’s thoughts obviously paralleled mine. ‘You notice there’s a pub on almost every third street corner? Mass anaesthesia. Keep the poor fuckers stupefied.’ He shook his head as if bemused. ‘Wait until this place goes bust – and it
will
go bust – then there’ll be generations of waste.’

There were tenements almost right up to the foundry’s main entrance on Hawthorn Street; but the huge site was surrounded at the sides and back by areas of waste ground, all rubble and bare earth, as if scorched by the foundry’s toxic presence.

The vast, arched double doors of the main entrance, like the gates of a prison, were flanked by two smaller but still huge gates; an ornate, stepped dome, something like a basilica, rose above the central doors. Everything wreathed in ornate ironwork. A high wall ran all the way around the foundry and the night sky above was pierced by the stretched spindles of tall, slender brick chimneys, one at each corner of the site and each topped with onion-dome ironwork, making the chimneys reminiscent of minarets.

‘It’s best we avoid passing the main gates,’ said Tommy. ‘Swing round next left and park at the side, near the back corner.’

‘You going in through the side entrance?’ I remembered McNaught’s layout plans had indicated the various gates and where the drawing offices were.

‘No, there’s a less-used gate at the rear.’

I followed Tommy’s directions.

‘Pull up here,’ he said eventually. To our right was the side wall of the foundry, an area of waste ground to our left. I reached down to switch off the engine but he laid a hand on my forearm to stop me. ‘Leave it running.’

I’d expected Tommy to swing immediately into action but instead he sat staring out through the windshield of the van, his expression as he looked at the dark brick shoulder of the ironworks suggesting he’d been presented with something alien, surreal. I’d seen that expression before, mainly in Glaswegian restaurants when vegetables were served.

‘You going in?’ I asked when Tommy still made no sign of moving.

‘I still think this is all very strange,’ he said eventually. ‘I mean, it just doesn’t make any sense.’

‘You want to pull out?’ I asked without rancour. If Quiet Tommy Quaid had a bad feeling about a job, I had to take it seriously. After all, I was on the job with him. An accessory. My flimsy disguise of boiler suit and car mechanic’s van wouldn’t stand up to even a Glasgow copper’s scrutiny. All they’d have to ask me to do was change a spark plug.

Tommy shook his head. ‘That would leave you in a fix. The bloke who gave you this job sounds like he doesn’t take no for an answer.’

‘I can handle that. I’ll tell him we were spotted and had to call off. I can arrange something for another time.’

Again Tommy stayed quiet for a moment. And again it worried me that he had to think it through: he had said himself it was as straightforward a job as he could get, yet his thief’s instincts seemed to be echoing in the pit of his stomach every bit as much as McNaught’s threat was in mine.

He took a sharp breath in and in a decisive gesture pulled on a tuque hat to hide his copper-coloured hair. ‘No . . . I’m just getting jittery in my old age. Wait here . . . leave the engine running, I don’t trust this rust bucket not to pack in if it’s switched off.’ He opened the door to get out. ‘It’s quarter-past one. I should be in and out in twenty minutes at the most. If I’m not, it means either I’ve had to duck down and wait it out because some bugger’s in my way, or because I’ve been nabbed. If I’m not back by twenty to two, drive around the block a couple of times, just in case I’ve had to take another way out. But no more than twice – if there’s still no sign of me by ten to two, then take off. Dump the car, but not within a mile of where yours is parked.’

‘Christ, Tommy,’ I said. ‘If you feel that we have to—’

‘Normal precautions. I usually fly solo, but when I work with someone else, we always plan it out like this. Things go south and sometimes you get separated, but it doesn’t mean one of you’s been pinched. You’ve no idea how often the polis use getting separated to get you to stitch yourself up or give away who was on the job with you. If I don’t make it back to the rendezvous, clear out and keep your head down. And you know what to do if you see a copper or anything else?’

‘Yep. Drive off and give two long blasts of the horn when I’m around the corner.’

Tommy nodded. ‘This time of night the sound’ll carry. If needs be, I’ll lie low for as long as it takes.’ He looked at me and smiled. ‘But don’t worry, Lennox, old chum. It’ll be a piece of cake.’

I watched him in the side mirror, walking close to the blackened brick flank of the foundry, a shadow becoming lost in a darker shadow. I switched off the parking lights but left the engine running, constantly scanning the street front and back for any sign of an approaching police car or foot patrol. There was something about the situation that put me particularly on edge and I couldn’t work out what. Maybe, I thought, it was just that it reminded me of those older, wartime playtimes in the dark. I fumbled beneath the overalls and found my cigarettes and lighter. After another check to make sure there was no one around to see the hand-shielded flare, I lit a cigarette and took a long, deep pull. It did a little, but not much, to relieve my nagging unease. All I could do now was sit it out.