Dead Men and Broken Hearts: A Lennox Thriller (Lennox 4) (3 page)

‘You get on home, Archie,’ I said. ‘I’ll take over. If lover-boy doesn’t go out by nine-thirty or ten, I’ll pack it in myself for the night.’

‘I bet Humpty Go-cart doesn’t worry about getting home for his jim-jams and Ovaltine. As a private eye you don’t set the example I had hoped for.’ He nodded a pale brow in the direction of the Ellis residence. ‘D’you think our chum is up to some kind of marital malarkey?’

‘Most likely.’

‘Doesn’t look the type to me, whatever the type is. At least from a distance. And if he has a fancy woman on the side, then she’s not exactly putting a spring in his step.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘He doesn’t look a cheery chappy, that’s all. Just an impression I get.’

‘Well, we’ll find out in time, hopefully.’ I opened the car door. ‘I’ll see you later.’

Archie gave an American-style salute.

I was just about to go when a thought made me lean back into the car. ‘Tell me, Archie, you wouldn’t have a nickname for me, by any chance?’

‘No sir,’ he said. ‘That would be disrespectful. No references to lumberjacking whatsoever.’

After Archie left, I moved my Austin Atlantic forward a few feet and filled the space vacated by his car. I sat for an hour as, with increasing frequency, greasy globs of rain smeared the windshield and made stars out of the streetlamps. I switched on the radio and listened to the baneful baying of a dying dinosaur: the death throes of the British Empire. The news was full of Britain’s humiliation as its last, fumbling attempt to remain at the centre of the world stage – its intervention in the Suez Crisis – stumbled on. And while one empire was dying another was flexing youthful muscles: Suez competed for radio time with the latest on the Hungarian Uprising. It was an inspiring beacon of hope in the gloom of Soviet domination, apparently. It was just unfortunate that the West chose to look the other way. Oh, Brave New World …

I drank some of the tea Fiona had made up for me; it tasted odd and tinny from the vacuum flask but at least it was hot. The Glasgow climate decided to lighten my mood by turning the tap up on the rain, which now drummed angrily on the roof of my Atlantic. It was going to be a long, damp night. I decided it was far too inclement for adultery and that I would maybe head home earlier than planned. But then, at a quarter before nine, the dark was split by the light from the Ellis’s front
door and I saw a tall figure, hatted, raincoated and stooped against the downpour, dash out and around the side of the house where, I knew, the garage held the family car.

Obviously the demolition business was good; the car that pulled out of the drive and onto the street was a maroon-coloured Daimler Conquest. Registration number PFF 119: the same number Pamela Ellis had given me and I had written into my notebook.

‘Whoever your squeeze is, I hope she’s worth it, bud,’ I said through the windshield and the rain, waiting until the Daimler had reached the corner when, without switching on my lights, I pulled out from the kerb and started to follow him.

One of the strange things about being an enquiry agent – a life into which I had carelessly stumbled – was that it was one of the few occupations that gave you a licence to be a voyeur. I considered my profession as sitting square centre between that of the anthropologist and that of the Peeping Tom. I was paid to watch individuals without them knowing they were being watched, and that gave me an insight, literally, into how some people lived their lives. There was nothing improper about the gratification it gave me: it wasn’t spying on the intimate, the furtive or the sordid moments that I enjoyed, it was the simple observation of the tiny details, the way someone behaved when they thought they were alone and unobserved; the small personal rituals that exposed the real person.

A Sauchiehall Street store – one of the big ones where the sales clerks acted superior despite the fact that they worked in a store – had once asked me to watch a female counter clerk whom they suspected of having pilfered from the till. It was strictly the smallest of small-time theft – a sixpence here and a shilling there – but over the months it had added up to a tidy sum.

I had followed the woman, too old to have been called a shop girl and too young to be called a spinster, through her dull
ritual of work and home, spying on her from behind clothes rails while she took payments and totalled takings; sitting in my car outside her tenement flat while she spent empty evenings and days off at home. I had gotten the idea that the store manager was looking to make some kind of example of her: a warning to others that theft would always be found out and punished. The store certainly had to pay out ten times as much to keep me and Archie on her tail as the alleged larceny was costing them.

It eventually became clear that we were backing a loser: we could find no evidence that she was taking from the cash till.

Then, one Saturday off work, she took the morning train to Edinburgh Waverley. I had followed her onto the train and stood within range at the far end of the third class-carriage corridor. She was a frumpy type, always dressed in grey and a difficult surveillance subject because she seemed instantly to merge into any crowd. One advantage I had, however, was that she clearly had no idea she was being followed and never once checked over her shoulder.

It was when we arrived in Edinburgh that I realized the store had been right about her. This woman, whose rituals and routines were as dull and ordinary as it was possible to be, had disembarked and then done something that was not at all dull and very out-of-the-ordinary: she had retrieved a suitcase from a left-luggage locker at Waverley and disappeared into the ladies’ toilets. While I waited for her to re-emerge from the ladies’, I took a note of the locker number and then positioned myself where I could watch the washroom door without the attendant suspecting I was some kind of pervert.

I nearly missed her. If she had not been carrying the same suitcase and had not returned it to the locker, then I would
not have recognized her as the same woman. It wasn’t that she had transformed herself from frumpy spinster to dazzling starlet; but she had donned an expensive and fashionable suit and high heels, had applied make-up to the otherwise perpetually naked face. The Glasgow shop attendant had become the image of a wealthy if unexceptional middle-class Edinburgh housewife. The suit she was wearing was clearly a label that a store clerkess could never aspire to, and I had realized instantly that I was looking at where the pilfered two-bobs and half-crowns had gone. It must have taken her years: years of watching women buy from her clothes she could never aspire to wear herself; years of constant reminding that everyone had a place and her place was behind the counter, not in front of it.

I realized that I could have confronted her there and then; that I could have demanded to know how she had managed to pay for the clothes, the shoes, the handbag, but there was something about what I had witnessed – its bizarre surreality – that made me want to watch her a little longer. My guess had been that this was all about a man and I decided to bide my time to see whom she met.

I had followed her on foot across Princes Street to a typically Edinburgh, typically snooty tearoom-cum-restaurant four floors up with a view of Edinburgh Castle. She ordered from a waitress who clearly knew her from previous visits and she sat contentedly eating scones, drinking tea and looking out across Princes Street Gardens to the castle. I knew then that there was no male companion, no secret tryst with a partner in crime or adultery. There was a peace and contentment about her that was fascinating and I knew I was watching her enjoy the single, complete, indivisible object of her larceny. This was what she
had stolen for. It made absolutely no sense and it made absolutely perfect sense.

I followed her from the tearoom. She window-shopped, she browsed, she strolled, but didn’t buy anything. Then, after two hours, she returned to the railway station, picked up the suitcase and performed her transformation in reverse. We both caught the same train back to Glasgow but I made no effort to keep tabs on her; I had seen all I needed to see.

Like I said, it was the oddest thing about my job: to be able to look into the corners of people’s lives and see what they thought no one else could ever be party to.

The funny thing was that when it came to making my report to the store, I didn’t include the details of her trip to Edinburgh. I didn’t tell anyone about it. It wasn’t that I lied to my client: I gave a full account of the observation Archie and I had carried out and the fact that we had found no direct evidence of theft or even discrepancies in the till receipts. I don’t really know why I kept a secret for someone who didn’t know I was keeping it. Maybe it was because I could understand why someone would go to such great lengths to be, for a few hours once every month or so, someone completely different.

And now I found myself observing another life.

I followed the Daimler at as great a distance as I could risk without losing it in the dark and the rain. Andrew Ellis drove out of Bearsden, and towards the city centre through Maryhill. Maryhill was the kind of place you drove through. Without stopping if you had any sense. It was a tough neighbourhood where a squabble over a spilt pint of beer could cost you an eye, a lung or your life, yet run-down Maryhill sat shoulder-to-shoulder with prosperous Bearsden; opposite ends of the Glasgow social spectrum
squeezed together. I dare say the city fathers had had it in mind to make the commute to work easier for burglars.

Ellis took a left off Maryhill Road and an alarm bell began to ring in my head. Not that there was anything wrong with his road skills, it was just that driving a Daimler into Maryhill was kind of like a Christian standing in the middle of the Colosseum and banging a dinner gong in the direction of the lions. I followed him in, not without trepidation. He took another left, then another, and a third that took him back out onto Maryhill Road. I let him take the last turn without following him, instead driving deeper into darkest Maryhill.

Now the alarm bells in my head were deafening. I had peeled off from his tail when he took the last left because his little manoeuvre had clearly been to check if the headlights in his rear-view mirror were there by coincidence or by design. It was a pretty fancy move for a run-of-the-mill Glasgow businessman to pull, even if he
was
on his way to see his piece of skirt on the side.

I pulled up at the kerb to give Ellis a few minutes before trying to catch sight of him again, although that was unlikely and probably unadvisable if he was on the lookout for a tail.

Mine was the only car in a grey-black tenement-lined street that had the picturesque charm of an abattoir yard. The gloom was punctuated every twenty yards or so by the insipid sodium glow of a streetlamp and I noticed, three standards down, a knot of youths in Teddy Boy gear gathered around the lamppost, smoking cigarettes with the expected dull indolence of adolescence. They turned their attention to the car, exchanged a few words and started to move in my direction. I decided now was maybe a good time to move on, in pretty much the same way as a wagon full of settlers in Cooke’s Canyon, on seeing
Apaches silhouetted against the hilltops, would have decided it was a good time to move on.

Despite patriotic chest-beating to the contrary, British engineering was not, it had to be said, a wonderful thing. Why the design and construction of an even moderately reliable automobile lay beyond the nation that had come up with the Industrial Revolution was a puzzle that I found myself addressing, in slightly more colourful language, as my Atlantic stalled in the middle of the three-point turn, leaving me stranded and straddling the cobbled street.

I glanced, as casually as I could, towards the advancing Teddy Boys. Five of them. I could handle myself pretty well – a little too well, to be honest – but the arithmetic was against me. As I slipped the column shift into neutral, turned the key off then on again, and stabbed with my thumb at the starter button on the dash, an image flashed through my mind of my scalp adorning the mantelpiece of a Maryhill tenement while the residents whooped and pow-wow-danced around the coal scuttle.

The Atlantic wheezed rhythmically, threatened to cough into life, but spluttered to a stall. I repeated the procedure, aware that the gang of young thugs was almost at my door. This time the engine caught. I put the car into gear and gave it some gas. Time to go.

The engine died again.

There was a tapping on the window. A long face with small eyes and bad skin was leaned in towards the glass. He sported a Teddy quiff that clearly needed more grease to maintain than the average ten-axle freight locomotive. I was outnumbered, I had no sap or any other kind of weapon with me. I decided to play nice, for the moment. I rolled down my window.

‘Nice motor, pal …’ The Teddy Boy’s small eyes glittered hard
as he spoke without removing the minuscule stub of a still glowing roll-up from his almost lipless mouth.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘Austin Atlantic A90, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right,’ I said. I noticed the others nodded approvingly at his superior knowledge.

‘Aye … that’s what I reckoned. I thought they was all for export to the Yanks.’

‘No … not all of them. I picked this one up in Glasgow. Second hand.’

‘You a Yank?’ he said, frowning at my accent in a way I didn’t like.

‘American? No. I’m Canadian.’

‘Canadian?’ He turned to his pals. ‘Hear that? He’s a Canadian …’ Then to me. ‘I got an uncle and cousins in Canada …’

‘Hasn’t everyone?’ I quipped. It was something that came up a lot when people found out I was a Canuck. Almost everyone in Glasgow had a relative who’d recently emigrated to Canada. Since the war, Glasgow had been haemorrhaging people and there were regularly round-the-block queues of hopeful would-be-immigrants outside the Canadian High Commission in Woodlands Terrace. As I smiled at my Teddy Boy chum and took in the grimy, wet gloom of a Maryhill street, I could understand the appeal of the Prairies.