Dead Men and Broken Hearts: A Lennox Thriller (Lennox 4) (7 page)

We turned into a narrow street that seemed to arc around then uphill. I wondered if Ellis was doing the same kind of elaborate stunt he had pulled in Maryhill and was taking odd turns just to check if I was following him. After about twenty yards, the Daimler stopped. We were now in a narrow street with only the odd parked car. I drove past and allowed myself to be swallowed up by the smog before pulling up after fifty yards or so at what I hoped was the kerb.

I switched the engine off and got out of the car as quickly as I could, straining to hear any sounds from the Daimler. I locked the Atlantic and found the pavement without tripping over it, then fumbled my way back to where Ellis had stopped. Smog in Glasgow is the most difficult thing to describe to someone who has never experienced it. The oily smoke that the city’s industry and tenement chimneys pumped into the sky seemed to be drawn back into the ground-hugging fog that soaked it up like a sponge. The result was something dense and
choking that took the lives of anyone too weak, too ill, too old or too young to resist its smothering blanket. Whatever the chemistry involved, the mix of soot, smoke and fog became something green-tinged and cloying. The simple act of walking became an experience of sensory deprivation where you existed in a tiny, arm’s-length confined universe. My unease in the smog was particularly acute: I had been jumped twice before by attackers using the dense fug as cover. These were, without doubt, the worst possible conditions for surveillance and I cursed Glasgow’s climate with more vehemence than usual.

The Daimler was parked and empty and I considered myself lucky to have found it. I peered through the miasma to try to estimate where exactly I was and which direction Ellis was likely to have taken. I found myself against a high, windowless wall and, running my hand along the brickwork as a guide, I tried to find a doorway.

I almost walked straight into Ellis.

He was standing at the foot of some steps that led up to an arched doorway. I realized that the masonry I had been following wasn’t the wall of a building, but a soil-retaining bulwark that divided the roadway from a terrace of buildings elevated above it. As I had followed the wall around the sweep of the street, I had been climbing to the same level as the buildings.

And now I was face-to-face with the man I was supposed to be shadowing. Stealth was my middle name.

Ellis turned and looked startled for a moment when he first saw me and I was pretty sure that I must have had the same expression on my face. But I was confronted with more than Ellis: I was faced with the fact that his wife had been right all along. Next to Ellis was a young woman with unfashionably shoulder-length black hair. Like the hair, her clothes were out
of fashion and looked old without being shabby. Her coat was too heavy for November in the west of Scotland, where the emphasis had to be on waterproofing rather than insulation, and the cut was something I hadn’t seen in Glasgow before. Perched on her head was a small toque-type hat that did not match the coat. None of which mattered, because she had the kind of smouldering dark beauty that made you want to look through the clothes rather than at them. Set above a classical architecture of cheekbone and jaw, her eyes were large and a dark, nutty brown; her full lips had been lipsticked crimson but otherwise her face seemed naked of make-up that she would not have needed.

She was a piece of art, all right. I found myself thinking about Pamela Ellis’s desperate wish to find out why her husband was acting so strangely, and her vague hope that there was something more, or less, than simple adultery behind his behaviour. But I had the answer standing right there in front of me: the kind of woman who would make Ellis, me, or any man with a pulse, act strangely.

‘What a night!’ I said to them both as casually as I could manage. ‘Sorry … I nearly walked straight into you. You can’t see your hand in front of your face in this muck.’

They both stared at me wordlessly, like a couple of entomologists studying a bug. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I detected a hint of suspicion in Ellis’s eyes. He looked past me in the direction I had come, as if he could see through the smog, and I wondered if he was trying to work out if my face and the headlights that had been in his mirror since Maryhill Road were connected. I thought about claiming to have lost my way and asking exactly where we were, but I decided it would be best to move on as quickly as possible.

Ellis had seen me for only a matter of seconds, but I could almost hear the click of the camera shutter in his memory. The girl’s too. There was something about the set-up I didn’t like; secretive rather than furtive, conspiratorial rather than adulterous. A subtle difference.

I walked on in the opposite direction to my car and into the smog, hoping that I would be able to find my way back. I reached a corner and another doorway, in which I sheltered while lighting a cigarette. I only began to make my way back after I had finished my second smoke. This time I approached much more slowly, ready to pull back if I heard voices, but when I eventually reached the steps, Ellis, the girl and the Daimler were all gone.

I made my way up the steps to the doorway of the building. The sandstone arch, like most stonework in Glasgow, was sooty black, but I could see that this was not a tenement or any other type of residence and the building probably housed some kind of offices. Perhaps the girl had not come from inside and this had been a randomly chosen meeting point, but I guessed that she lived not far from here. I found a brass plate next to the door and noted down a couple of the company names, simply to allow me to find the exact address in the telephone directory and find my way back when the smog had lifted.

I headed back to my car.

I sat for a moment and tried to work out what it was that was nagging at me about Ellis and the girl. It was something more than the way they didn’t gel as partners in extra-marital crime. I shook my head trying to loosen the thought from my brain, turned the ignition key and thumbed the starter button.

This time, I didn’t even get a splutter out of the engine, just a dull, dry clunk.

It took me an hour on foot to fumble my way to a rank of stationary taxi-cabs with drivers intent on staying stationary. It was only after a twenty-minute wait and a slight easing of the smog that one of the cabbies reluctantly agreed to take my fare.

The White flat was in darkness and silence when I got back and I went straight up to my rooms. It had been a confusing day and my head buzzed with unconnected thoughts like bees trapped in a jar. It was nearly two a.m. before I fell asleep.

I dreamed that night. It was the dream that I thought I had stopped having; the dream I used to have every night, for months and years after the war had ended. But it had been a long time since I’d last dreamt it, and I woke cold and afraid with the ghost of another man’s screaming echoing in the room.

A bad omen.

For some reason, I had become a member of the RAC earlier that year. Maybe because I liked watching their uniformed patrolmen wobble on their motorcycles as they passed because they were compelled, on seeing the bumper badge, to salute me. There were times I loved the British.

After I had breakfast, I checked out in the directory the address of the company names I had noted and used the hall telephone
to call the RAC. I gave the address in Garnethill, not far from the synagogue, where my Austin Atlantic sat broken down. I explained that I would take a taxi there right away and would be waiting for their patrolman.

As it turned out, a helmeted and goggled RAC motorcyclist was already at the Atlantic when I arrived. He saluted – which I appreciated – and asked me if I would ‘be so kind as to pop open the bonnet for me, please, sir’.

I did what he asked and tried the starter again while he disappeared behind the shield of the open car hood. Again a dull clunk. The RAC man came back into view, and, although he maintained his polite formality, something had shifted in his demeanour.

‘Is there a problem?’ I asked, innocently.

‘Would you mind having a look at the engine, sir?’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘But I gotta tell you that I know nothing about mechanics.’ I followed him to the front of the car and leaned in to look at the engine, succeeding in getting motor oil on my tie.

As I had said, I knew practically nothing much about engines, but I knew enough to be aware that spark plug cables were not meant to be neatly sliced in two.

I looked at the patrolman helplessly.

Fifteen minutes later, I had a new set of leads installed and was heading towards Bearsden.

Pamela Ellis was surprised and uneasy to find me standing on her doorstep and hastily ushered me into the house. I half expected her to stick her head out through the door and check the street in both directions to see if anyone had seen me.

I had seen the house often enough from the outside: an unremarkable
Victorian sandstone box with bay windows and a steep-pitched roof, typical of area and class, and the interior pretty much reflected the conformity of the exterior. In almost every way, the Ellis lounge was the opposite of the front room I had shared with hostess-with-the-mostess Sylvia. But both made a statement. Just as the Dewar home had been all about the modern and synthetic, about change and the Future, about melamine, Formica and polyester, the Ellis home was about solidity, tradition and continuity. The lounge Pamela Ellis showed me into was flock-wallpapered and furnished with solid reproduction furniture with the odd genuine antique. There was no space-age decor here, and above the fireplace was the expected Farquharson print with the expected sheep in the expected sunset.

‘I thought you would ’phone first, Mr Lennox,’ she said, still flustered, as she invited me to sit. ‘I’m afraid you’ve caught me on the way out – Wednesday night is my weekly bridge night. I never miss it.’ She looked at her watch. ‘The girls will be expecting me at eight-thirty.’

‘I won’t keep you, Mrs Ellis,’ I said. ‘But I have to tell you there have been developments. I felt we needed to talk as soon as possible and I knew that your husband would be at work.’ I broke the news to her that her husband had indeed, been meeting with another woman. There were tears – tight, restrained, Scottish tears – then composure.

‘Is she younger than me?’ she asked eventually.

‘Mrs Ellis …’

‘Is she?’

‘Yes. But I need you to listen to me, Mrs Ellis. I can’t explain why, exactly, but this still may all not be what it seems to be.’

‘In what way?’

‘I don’t think your husband really is having an affair,’ I said with less certainty than I had intended.

‘Are you telling me that my husband sneaks out to meet attractive young women because they really are demolition customers?’ She gave a small, bitter laugh.

‘I watch people all the time. It’s my job. And after a while you start to develop an instinct about the way people behave. The way they act when they’re around other people, the messages you get from a dozen little things. I don’t sense a romantic involvement between your husband and this woman. And it’s not just a hunch. Mr Ellis has been taking very special care not to be followed and last night, when I returned to my car, it had been hobbled so that I couldn’t follow him when he left. By the way, I’m afraid I’ll have to charge you for a set of jump leads.’

She shook the comment away irritatedly. ‘He’s hiding an affair. That’s why he was trying to shake you off.’ A thought seemed to take root and trouble her; she bit her lip and frowned. ‘That means he knows I’m on to him. That it was me who hired you to follow him.’

‘But that’s my point, Mrs Ellis … It’s as if he knows I’m tailing him, but he’s not sure why. Now that is confusing. Why would your husband feel he was being followed, if he’s not having an affair? And if he is going to such lengths to stop me from getting evidence of infidelity, then why hobble my car
after
I’ve seen them together?’

‘I’m confused, Mr Lennox. Did you or did you not catch Andrew with another woman?’

‘I saw him
with
a young woman. And yes, you’re probably right. I tend to shave situations like these with Occam’s Razor.’

She frowned.

‘It’s a variation on
if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck
,’ I explained. ‘But I just feel there’s something not kosher about the whole business. And, in any case, all I saw was your husband talking with a woman. In fact, I didn’t even see them talking to each other. It’s not enough to confront your husband with, far less start divorce proceedings.’

‘So if Andrew isn’t carrying on with this woman, then what on earth is it?’

‘Can you think of anything that your husband could be involved in that he would want to try to keep from you? From everybody?’

‘Not a thing. Like I told you before, Andrew is a very ordinary, very honest, very reliable man. He wouldn’t be involved in anything illegal or
funny
.’

‘To be honest, that’s also the description of a man who’s unlikely to be involved in an extramarital affair, although I have seen it happen. Are you sure there isn’t
something
that could explain all this subterfuge?’

She held out her arms in a helpless gesture.

‘Okay …’ I said. ‘Do you want me to continue tailing your husband?’

‘Yes. I need to know what’s going on.’

‘The way your husband is giving me the slip, it could be a costly business, not least in car parts.’

‘I have enough money to pay you for another week or so. After that Andrew will know that the money’s going missing. Can you find something out in that time?’

‘I honestly don’t know, Mrs Ellis, but I’ll do my best.’

Back in the car, I examined my oil-stained tie, dabbing at the
smudge with a handkerchief. It was a dark blue knitted silk tie and the stain wasn’t that noticeable, but I knew it was there. Going back to my digs to change the tie was, I knew, nothing more than an excuse to talk to Fiona away from the girls and hopefully get to the bottom of what the hell was going on with her.