Dead Men and Broken Hearts: A Lennox Thriller (Lennox 4) (2 page)

‘Do you have any children?’

She shook her head. ‘We tried, but we can’t.’

‘What about work?’ I asked. ‘How did Mr Ellis get into the demolition business?’

‘He was in the RAOC and then the Royal Engineers during the war. Bomb disposal to start with then demolition. Andrew always said that he spent half his time stopping things blowing up and then the other half making them blow up.’

‘Officer?’

‘NCO. He was a volunteer. He had been exempt from the call-up, but he wanted to serve so he volunteered.’

‘Because he was in a reserved occupation?’ I asked. A lot of Glaswegians had dodged the bullet of wartime conscription, sometimes more than metaphorically, because they worked in essential industries such as the shipyards or munitions.

‘No. No it wasn’t that. Andrew had to go through all of these panels and interviews when it came out about his family background.’

‘I’m sorry, what do you mean, “family background”?’

‘Andrew’s parents were Hungarian,’ she explained. ‘They changed their name to Ellis from
Elès
. They came over after the
Great War. That’s why he was so upset about all of this trouble in Hungary. Andrew has never thought of himself as anything other than a Glaswegian, a Scot. But when he volunteered to serve his country, he suddenly found himself being treated as a foreigner. Worse than that, they treated him as a potential enemy alien because Hungary was an Axis power.’

‘But he got in.’

‘Only by volunteering to train for bomb disposal. It was dangerous work and there was a shortage of volunteers.’

‘I can imagine …’ I said. I had myself had an encounter with a German grenade that had been some way distant, and with one of my men between me and it. The long-term result of this confrontation had been the faint web of pale scars on my right cheek, still visible every morning in the shaving mirror. The bomb boys got a lot more up close and intimate with munitions than I had been and it took a special kind of cool. Or stupidity. ‘And after the war he set up business using the skills he’d learned?’ I asked.

‘After he was demobbed, Andrew went to work for Hall’s Demolitions. That’s where I met him. I worked in the office, you see. He went straight in as an ordnance handler because of his war experience and was team boss in no time. But then, when old man Hall died, Andrew couldn’t work with his son so he went out on his own.’

‘And you went with him?’

‘I did all the paperwork when the business was small. I left when the business became established and we took on staff.’

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Ellis, but I have to ask: has your husband had any affairs in the past, or behaved with women in a way that has caused you concern?’

‘Never.’

‘So why now?’

‘Like I told you, he’s changed. He’s different …
preoccupied
, I suppose, like there’s something weighing on his mind. Almost like he’s haunted.’

I nodded. Haunted was a look that a lot of men who’d been in the war had. But it didn’t tend to be something that came on suddenly a decade later, like delayed shock.

‘Could he be worried about the business?’

She shook her head. ‘No, business has been good. Andrew’s got a lot of contracts from the Corporation. You know, clearing slums for new flats.’

‘I guess it’s a boom time for that …’ I said, and grinned. She either didn’t get the gag or chose not to, which I couldn’t blame her for – it was a pretty lame gag. But I did see that there would be a lot of demolition work available: Glasgow Corporation was in the process of blasting more Glaswegian real estate out of existence than the Luftwaffe had managed. The Future, apparently, was High-Rise. Hundreds of Glaswegian families now stood staring in slack-jawed amazement at toilets that they didn’t need to go
outside
to use. And that they didn’t need to share with five other families.

‘Could he be worried about something else? You don’t think there could be some kind of medical concern that he’s not telling you about?’

‘I doubt it. Andrew’s one of the healthiest people I know.’

‘I see,’ I said, and tried to work out how relative that statement was in Glasgow. I had grown to have a deep affection for Glaswegians, but remained confused by their lemming-like attitude to diet, cigarettes and booze. I was witness to a million slow-motion suicides by lard. ‘Well, I suggest that we keep tabs
on your husband for a while, Mrs Ellis. May I ’phone you at home to keep you informed?’

She scribbled down a number with a tiny green pencil in a tiny green notebook, tore out a page and passed it to me. ‘Please, Mr Lennox, make sure you only call when Andrew is at work.’

‘Of course. I will need a reasonably up-to-date—’

She anticipated my request by taking a photograph from her handbag and handing it to me. The dark-haired man in the picture had pale-coloured eyes, a strong jaw and the type of regular, well-proportioned features that should have made him handsome but instead somehow made him anonymous. Bland, almost. His look was not typical for Glasgow, but he was not the handlebar-moustachioed Magyar I had started to imagine. The main impression I got from the photograph was that this was the kind of face most people would take as that of a pleasant, honest man. But I had learned not to take honesty at face value.

Thanking her for the picture, I then questioned her further about her husband’s routine: the usual times he came home or went out, and so on. I took down the addresses of his business premises, his golf club, the number of his car. I dressed up with professional procedure the patent impertinence of snooping into another human being’s private life.

When we were finished I thanked Mrs Ellis and she thanked me and I walked her out into the stairwell. She thanked me once more and said goodbye. As she did so, she failed to hide the resentment and hatred in her eyes. At the end of it all, I was the man who, with a single bright, hard truth, could bring her marriage to an end.

Divorce work.

Sometimes I missed the plain honesty of gangsters, thugs and back-alley dealings.

I got out of bed, crossed to the window and opened the curtains. It was raining heavily on Glasgow. I tried to contain my shock.

I had recently read a short story by an American science fiction writer about space travellers stranded on a planet where it never stopped raining and who, unless they found ‘sun domes’, were driven to insanity and murder by the endless precipitation thundering down on them. I wondered if the author had ever spent a Bank Holiday long weekend in the West of Scotland.

‘Do you want a cigarette?’ I asked, looking out at a dull, rainy late-October Glasgow that looked pretty much the same as a dull, rainy early-August Glasgow. The seasons were mitigated here: by the Gulf Stream and by the sooty blanket of smoke belched out by the city’s tenements and heavy industry. Glasgow did not have a four-season climate. Unless you counted those times when we got all four seasons in one day.

Fiona White, my landlady for three years and lover for one, eased herself up onto her elbows, allowing the bed sheet to slip from her breasts before recovering it and them. She shook her head. She smoked rarely these days. Or smiled.

‘I’d better go. Back downstairs. The girls will be home in half-an-hour.’ Her daughters, Elspeth and Margaret, were due to return from school. This had become an afternoon ritual for us
every Tuesday and Thursday: an hour stolen behind drawn curtains. Fiona looked tired and her voice was dull: her passion spent and that hint of guilt or sadness or both that I had increasingly noticed in her tone. Fiona White was unlike almost all of the women I’d been with. For her, sex was something that belonged only within marriage; and that was exactly the way it had been for her until the German Navy had intervened and sent her husband to the bottom of the Atlantic, condemning Fiona to a life of stretched means and lonely evenings contemplating over too many sherries a future stripped bare of its promise.

Then I had come along.

As a way of trying to make far-apart ends meet, Fiona White had converted the family home on Great Western Road into two dwellings: upper and lower apartments accessed through the same front door. I had taken the upper flat. True, initially the attraction had been as much to landlady as accommodations, but I had remained respectful and had made no move on her. This was something that, at the time, had perplexed me. It reeked of rectitude and morality, character traits that I long assumed had gone missing-in-action during my war service.

My intentions towards women had not, it had to be said, been noted for their nobility. But Fiona White seemed to bring out an older me – or younger me, depending on how you looked at it. A pre-War, pre-Glasgow, pre-Fucked-Up me.

Thing was, I didn’t know what kind of Fiona White I brought out in her.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked.

‘I’m fine,’ she said, but in a tone that didn’t put my mind much at ease. She got up and began to dress. I watched her. She had the Celtic dark auburn hair and green eyes that you
saw a lot of in Glasgow, but her high cheekbones and firm jaw spoke of some other history. She was slim, and of late I had thought perhaps a little too slim, but what upholstery there was was in all the right places.

‘Don’t stand at the window without a shirt on,’ she admonished me. That was the tenor of our relationship; out of view and behind closed curtains.

I sighed and came away from the view of the wet and grey Glasgow weekday afternoon and sat on the edge of the bed, pulling on my shirt: pale blue with a faint gold stripe, French cuffs. My taste for expensive tailoring was, I knew, something Fiona both appreciated and resented. Another sign of her good old-fashioned, deeply-embedded, Calvinism. Not that I was complaining about all of that pent-up repression: what had surprised me – overwhelmed me – about Fiona was that taking her to bed had been like removing a high-pressure lid. Explosive.

But there again, our relationship had been full of surprises: like the way I had come to feel about her. Something nauseatingly honourable and deep. And I had tried so hard to keep all of my dealings with women as superficial and unembellished as possible.

As a culture, Scotland might have been more sexually repressed than a monastery with a view of a nudist beach, but I had, it had to be said, enjoyed a staggering amount of success with the opposite sex during my time in Glasgow. I put it down largely to the lack of sophisticated competition, the average Scotsman’s concept of foreplay generally being: ‘Come here a minute and grab hold of this …’

‘Will you be eating downstairs tonight?’ she asked me, becoming my landlady once more.

‘Are you
sure
you’re all right? You look tired.’ And she did.
Her face was paler than usual and there were shadows beneath the green eyes.

‘I told you, I’m fine.’ She forced a smile. ‘Do I set a place for you?’ It had become the custom for me to join Fiona and her daughters for the evening meal most days.

‘No, not tonight,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a job on. Following a wandering husband. I’ll probably be late.’

She nodded, and finished getting dressed.

‘Do you want me to make up some sandwiches and a flask for you?’

‘That would be fine, thanks, Fiona,’ I said with a smile even more forced than hers. Nothing illustrated the chasm that still existed between us more than her asking me if I wanted sandwiches and a flask. Fiona did not seem to be able to distinguish the role of enquiry agent from that of a night-watchman. She perhaps had a point.

She turned and headed out towards the landing. I took her by the elbow and turned her around, kissing her on the lips. She responded. Just.

‘Don’t tell me my irrepressible boyish Canadian charm is fading …’ I said.

‘Lennox,’ she said, easing herself back from me. ‘We can’t go on like this. It’s not right.’

‘What’s not right about it?’ I let her go. ‘I thought you were happy.’

She cast a glance towards the bed we had shared until a few minutes before.

‘This isn’t me, Lennox. I can’t be the kind of woman you’re used to.’

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ I protested, although I knew exactly what she meant.

Her look hardened. ‘Please do not swear at me. That’s something else I’m not used to. What I’m saying is that this isn’t right. It’s not right for me. I never wanted to end up …’ She left the thought hanging in a silence that stretched longer than it should.

‘You know how I feel about you,’ I protested.

‘Do I?’

I let her go. ‘What is this all about? What is it you want from me?’

‘Nothing, Lennox. Absolutely nothing.’ The expression in her face now stone-hewn. ‘I’ll get your sandwiches ready.’

Archie McClelland had the kind of face that Bassett hounds, undertakers and professional mourners would probably have described as unnecessarily lugubrious. A lanky six-foot three, Archie was tall for anywhere, which meant he was a giant in Glasgow, and he compensated for his height by perpetually stooping. He even stooped sitting down, as I could see through the rectangle of rear window of his ten-year-old Morris Eight as I pulled up behind it.

Archie had parked at the corner of the street, far enough from the Ellis home as not to be seen from the windows. He popped open the passenger door as I approached and I slid in next to him.

‘How’s it going?’ I asked. The gaze he turned on me was so doleful that I felt myself beginning to sink into clinical depression.

‘Dynamite came home straight from the office and hasn’t set foot outside since.’

‘Dynamite?’

Archie nodded his large high-domed head, his bald pate fringed with an unkempt horseshoe of black hair. ‘Dynamite
Andy the demolitions man. I have christened the subject of our surveillance thus.’

‘Thus?’

‘Thus.’

‘Do you often come up with nicknames for people?’

‘I find it does something to ease the mind-numbing tedium of my employment by you.’

‘I see. You could just get another job,’ I said.

‘I would miss the sparkle of our chats,’ he replied. Archie’s dry wit had probably been the undoing of his police career. That and his brains. A surfeit of wit and intelligence was an encumbrance in the police, particularly when it highlighted the deficit of both amongst your superiors. What had finished his career for once and for all, however, had been a fall through a factory roof while chasing burglars. That had not been one of his brightest moments.