The Long Glasgow Kiss (10 page)

All of which is why Bobby Kirkcaldy’s home would have looked to the average Scot like a Hollywood set. This was all good stuff. If the furnishings weren’t original Bauhaus or le Corbusier or Eames, they were pretty good copies. There was a wall filled with books. I had the uncharitable thought that Kirkcaldy the boxer must have told his interior designer to make him look smarter. Just like in the hall, the art on the lounge walls looked original. Most of it was modern and edgy – abstracty stuff – but there was something about that kind of art that appealed to me. Like the furniture, it was new. And for me, New was Good. Again, I put it all down to an overpaid interior decorator.

Bobby Kirkcaldy stood up when we came in. He had been sitting on a leather lounger by the big windows and when he got up and crossed the room to us, he did so with the same easy grace with which I’d seen him move in the ring. He had thick, dark hair and, unlike the old guy at my side, there wasn’t the usual evidence in Kirkcaldy’s face of a boxer’s career. His nose didn’t look as if it had ever been broken and there was only a hint of the high-cheeked angularity of a fighter’s face. He was wearing an open-necked shirt and lightweight trousers. The look was casual but had Jermyn Street all over it.

‘You Lennox?’ asked Kirkcaldy. He didn’t smile but there was nothing overtly hostile in his manner, either. Just businesslike.

‘I’m Lennox. You know why I’m here?’

‘To look into this nonsense that’s been going on. You’ve been hired by Willie Sneddon. To be honest, I think all this shite bothers Sneddon more than it bothers me.’ Kirkcaldy’s voice was light, almost gentle, but he managed to inject a hint of distaste when he articulated Willie Sneddon’s name. He spoke with a quiet confidence and had less of an accent than I had expected. When you saw him up close, as opposed to the distance a boxing stadium compels, there was an intelligence in the eyes. But there was something else that I couldn’t define. And it stopped me liking him.

I turned and looked at the punch bag who had shown me in, and then back at Kirkcaldy.

‘It’s okay,’ Kirkcaldy said. ‘You can talk in front of Uncle Bert. Uncle Bert has coached me since I was a kid.’

Uncle Bert looked at me expressionlessly. But, there again, he’d probably had the mobility to form an expression beaten out of his face years ago. I found myself silently questioning his qualifications as a boxing trainer, seeing as no one seemed to have taught him the meaning of the word ‘duck’.

‘Okay,’ I said. I looked around the room in the way you do when you’ve got to that point where you should have been invited to sit but haven’t. ‘Nice place. Like the paintings. I’m never sure where Abstract Expressionism ends and Lyrical Abstraction begins.’

‘These are neither,’ said Kirkcaldy. ‘I don’t trust “isms”. Political or artistic. I just buy what I like and what I can afford. And the only reason I can afford it is because of the fight game.’ He picked up that we were still standing and pointed to a sofa that hovered just clear of the polished wooden floor. I lowered myself onto it: there was a lot of lowering involved. Kirkcaldy certainly didn’t talk like the average street-to-ring pugilist and I started to suspect the books on the shelves weren’t just for show. There was a certain type of working-class Scot who, deprived of it in their childhood, treated learning and knowledge as if they were bullion. I thought I was above making snobby judgements; I’d just proved to myself that I wasn’t. It was clear to me now that the impression of physical intelligence Kirkcaldy showed in the ring was part of something bigger.

‘Do you know much about art, Mr Lennox?’ he asked, and sat down on the Eames chair opposite. Uncle Bert remained standing. It was probably force of habit: staying upright had cost him dearly in the past.

‘Some,’ I said. ‘I was interested in it before the war. Then it was kind of expected of me to get interested in the war. But I still like to visit the odd gallery.’

Kirkcaldy smiled and nodded. There was nothing to the smile in the same way there had been nothing to Sheila Gainsborough’s smile. ‘You know this is a lot of nonsense, don’t you?’

I shrugged. ‘It sounds to me like someone is trying to spook you before the big fight. There are a lot of people betting a lot of money, one way or the other, on this fight. And some of those people aren’t above dodgy dealings to protect their investment.’

‘It’s obviously somebody trying to spook me, but it’s not working. I don’t spook easily, and anyone who’s had anything to do with me would know I’d quit the ring before throwing a fight.’

‘Has anyone approached you about it? ’Phone calls, notes under the door, that kind of thing.’

‘No. Nothing. Like you say, just a spook job. Trying to put me off my preparation for the fight.’

I nodded and noted. Maybe it would get back to Sneddon that I had nodded and noted. This was a wild goose chase, just like the thing with Small Change’s appointment book. The only thing that surprised me about it was Kirkcaldy’s willingness to accept it was someone trying to queer him for the fight. Like Jonny Cohen, I got the impression this was about something else. I decided to run the idea past him.

‘Is there anything else – anybody with a grudge, or some dispute you’ve got going – that might explain this?’

He pursed his lips and thought it over for a moment. ‘No … I can honestly say I can’t imagine anyone doing this for personal reasons.’

‘I see,’ I said. It was interesting that he had to think about it before answering. As if he had never before considered the possibility. We talked for another half hour, during which I noted down each of the things that had happened, the dates, the times. Kirkcaldy gave me the information in a going-through-the-motions manner. I asked if I could see the car that had been splashed with red paint: it had been repainted. The noose had been thrown out as had, obviously, the dead bird.

‘What kind of bird was it?’ I asked.

‘What? I don’t know. A bird. A dove or a pigeon, I think. But I do know it was white. Pure white. So probably a dove.’

‘How did it die?’

‘I don’t fucking know.’ He became agitated and the Motherwell in his voice became more pronounced.

‘What will you do?’ he asked wearily.

‘Well, I’ve nothing to go on. You’ve no idea of who might have a personal grievance against you … There’s not a lot I can do other than watch your back for a while.’

‘I can watch my own back,’ he said and cast a meaningful look at Uncle Bert.

‘Well, if you don’t mind, I’ll keep an eye on things. Of course I can’t be here all the time, so if anything happens, you can get me on one of these numbers normally.’ I scribbled down my office and home number, as well as the number for the ’phone behind the bar at the Horsehead.

By the time I left Kirkcaldy’s place, the ship-iron sky had turned even darker and the air even more oppressive. It was damp-hot and I could feel the pressure like a band around my head. I had only been driving for a couple of minutes when the weather broke.

If there’s one thing Glasgow can do well – better than anywhere else I know – then it’s rain. There were a couple of bright, ugly flashes in the sky and the rain hit my windscreen before the deafening thunder rolled over me. It didn’t just rain – it was as if there was a pent-up fury driving the thick, heavy bullets of rain that rattled and drummed furiously on the roof of my car and mocked the best but feeble efforts of my wind-screen wipers. As I approached Blanefield and headed into Bearsden, I had to slow the car to an almost crawl, unable to see more than a few feet in front of me.

I had time on my hands before I met the Frenchman so I drove down to Argyle Street. The torrential rain hadn’t stopped but I was lucky enough to get parked a thirty-second dash away from the corner tearooms. I went in, shook the rain off my hat and moaned to the waiter I handed it to about the sudden change in the weather. There were only a couple of other tables occupied and I sat in gloomy silence. When I’d finished my lamb chop and mashed potatoes I drank a coffee and smoked, gloomily contemplating the rain through the window.

A fool’s errand. No matter how long I thought it over, the Bobby Kirkcaldy job remained a fool’s errand. Willie Sneddon was thrashing about in the dark trying to protect his investment. Other than sit outside Kirkcaldy’s house all night, there was very little I could do. And if it came to a twenty-four-hour surveillance job, then it would cost Sneddon dear. He’d be better getting Twinkletoes McBride to park himself outside. Or Singer. This was a muscle job. I was going to have to tell Sneddon so.

After I’d settled my bill at the cashier’s desk and collected my hat, I went back out into the rain. It had eased considerably, and with its easing it had taken some of the stale heat out of the air. But Glasgow was Glasgow again, dressed in rain and shades of grey.

It took me only a couple of minutes to get to the Merchants’ Carvery in the city’s business district. It meant that I was early and I decided to wait in the car until just before eight. The Merchants’ Carvery was Glasgow’s attempt at class: it sat looking out over a square of park in the middle of a grid of Georgian and Victorian terraces. As the Carvery’s name suggested, the city’s wealthy traders and industrialists had once occupied the surrounding houses; now most had been converted into offices. Sitting parked outside, I made a little wager with myself that I would be able to pick out Barnier when he arrived. As it turned out, the only people I saw going into the restaurant was a middle-aged couple. Both dressed in tweed.

The Merchants’ Carvery was one of those places designed, or more correctly decorated and furnished, to intimidate. A place you were meant to feel out of place. To me, it was overdone; way overdone. The plush red leather of the booths was just that little bit too plush and much too red. If the Carvery had been in Edinburgh, it wouldn’t have been quite so overdone.

I went in and handed my hat over again, this time to an attendant in a white waist-length jacket and pillbox cap. He was, without doubt, the most geriatric bellboy I’d ever seen and I worried that he would buckle under the weight of my fedora. I told him I was there to meet with Mr Barnier and he nodded towards a tall man standing at the bar with his back to me. It was going to take us an age to cross the lounge so I thanked my elderly hop and gave him a two-shilling tip: I reckoned that the weight of half-a-crown would tip him in more ways than intended.

‘Monsieur Barnier?’ I asked the man’s back and he turned to face me. Alain Barnier was not what I had expected. For a start he was tall and light-haired, not quite blond, with greenish eyes. To me he looked more like a Scandinavian or German than a Southern Frenchman. His skin tone wasn’t dark either, although I knew he had lived in Glasgow for at least a couple of years; but there again, no one could be as pale as a Glaswegian. Scots were the whitest people on the planet; and Glaswegians came in pale blue tints, except for those who had been burned scarlet by unaccustomed exposure to the big fiery ball in the sky that had, until a couple of hours ago, made a mysterious appearance that summer. Barnier was a striking man, handsome, with deep creases under his eyes that suggested a lot of smiling, but there was something a little cruel in his features. I estimated his age to be about forty.

Other than his slightly golden skin tone, there were a couple of other things that gave Barnier away as a foreigner. His clothes were expensive but not showy. And not tweed. His suit was extremely well-tailored in a pale grey, lightweight flannel, run through with a faint white pinstripe. It didn’t look like a British cut. Added to that, he was immaculately groomed and wore a neatly trimmed moustache and goatee beard that gave a point to his chin. My first thought was of a Cardin-coutured fourth Musketeer.

‘My name is Lennox, M. Barnier,’ I said in French. ‘We spoke on the telephone this afternoon.’

‘I was waiting for you. Drink?’ He beckoned to the barman with a casual authority that Scots find difficult. ‘Two cognacs,’ he said in English.

‘Please …’ he said, reverting to his native tongue and indicating one of the plush leather booths at the back of the lounge bar. We sat down. ‘You speak French very well, M. Lennox. But, if you don’t mind me saying so, you have a strong accent. And you speak slowly, like a Breton. I take it you’re Canadian?’

‘Yes. New Brunswick. The only officially bi-lingual province in Canada,’ I said, and was surprised at the pride in my voice.

‘But you’re not a Francophone yourself?’

‘That obvious?’

Barnier shrugged and made a face. He was French. I expected it. ‘No … not particularly. But you have a strong accent. I assumed English was your first language.’

‘Where are you from yourself, M. Barnier?’

The drinks arrived. ‘Toulon. Well, Marseille originally, then Toulon.’

I sipped the cognac and felt something warm and golden infuse itself into my chest.

‘Good, no?’ he asked. A smile deepened the creases around the eyes. ‘I supply it. It is one of the best.’

‘It tastes it. I had some of the bourbon you supplied Jonny Cohen. That was excellent too.’

‘Ah, yes … you mentioned you knew M. Cohen …’ Barnier looked at me over the rim of his brandy glass. ‘By the way, you rather annoyed my Miss Minto.’

‘Really?’ I said, raising my eyebrows and trying to look as innocent as I had been at sixteen when my father had interrogated me about some missing cigarettes and whisky. ‘We seemed to be getting on so well. I learned a new word – key lan – or is it two words?’

There was something in the mention that stung Barnier. He quickly hid it. ‘I can’t have you upsetting her. Miss Minto is a very …
determined
lady who is essential to the efficient running of the office.’

‘Why did she ask me if it was about the
key lan
. Am I pronouncing it right?’

‘She was referring to an item we’ve recently imported. Miss Minto probably thought you wanted to see me about it, that’s all.’

‘I’m flattered that Miss Minto thought I was rich enough to buy it.’

‘She didn’t. The item’s gone astray in transit. It’s more than likely been incorrectly crated and labelled, that’s all. Miss Minto probably thought you were from the insurance company.’ Barnier’s smile had dropped and his tone now suggested that the small talk was over. ‘What exactly is it you want from me, M. Lennox?’