The Long Glasgow Kiss (25 page)

‘You have news?’ she asked urgently. Her cheeks were flushed and, despite my gloomy mood and aching head, the thought of how nice it would be to make her cheeks flush crossed my mind.

‘Like I said on the ’phone, Miss Gainsborough,’ I said quietly. ‘We should do this at your flat or my office. Like it or not, you’re a celebrity, and every ear in this place is flapping. You never know when someone’s a reporter or a copper.’

She took the point and we drank our coffee in haste and silence. Afterwards, we walked the few blocks to her apartment. Most of the dwellings in the area were tenements, townhouses or the occasional villa. Sheila Gainsborough’s place was a rupture in the grimy Victorian and Georgian façades: an Art Deco block that would have been about thirty years old. One of the interesting things about Glasgow was the richness and variety of its architecture: Victorian, slum, Art Deco, slum, Contemporary, slum …

It was a classy place. Sheila led me into a huge, bright foyer that made you feel you’d stepped straight into the mid-Twenties. A uniformed commissionaire, who had an ex-military bearing but was of a vintage to have fought Kaiser rather than Führer, saluted us and we took the elevator to the top floor.

‘You want a drink?’ she asked, as she dropped her bag and scarf onto a chair in the hall. ‘You look like you could do with one.’

‘I could do with one, but it would probably finish me off.’ I moved into the lounge. Everything in the flat was clean and orderly. The furniture, like the architecture that housed it, was Art Deco and was simple and tasteful – in that subtle way that tells you simple and tasteful is more expensive. There was a huge picture window, unbroken except for a couple of widely spaced, thin, white mullions. It gave a view over the city towards the university and Kelvingrove.

‘Please …’ she said, impatiently gesturing for me to sit. I sat. I think if Sheila Gainsborough had told me to jump out the window, I’d have done it. She remained standing, clutching her hands in front of her. ‘Is this about Sammy?’ she asked anxiously.

I held my hands up. ‘Sammy’s okay. I saw him last night.’

‘Thank God he’s safe …’ she almost gasped. Tears of relief glossed her eyes.

‘I’m sorry, Miss Gainsborough, but I don’t think he is safe. I saw him last night and he was all right, but he’s in trouble. And he’s very scared.’

‘Then why in God’s name didn’t you bring him with you?’

‘Because, Miss Gainsborough, someone smacked me over the back of the head and put my lights out. Sammy and his girlfriend – and his handy associate – scarpered while I was counting sheep.’

Her face fell. I felt sorry for her, but there wasn’t a lot I could do to put a positive sheen on it.

‘I’m afraid that Sammy has gotten involved in something heavy,’ I said. ‘Something out of his league. You remember Paul Costello? The guy who was wandering in and out of Sammy’s apartment, seemingly at will?’

Sheila nodded.

‘I rather suspect it was young Mr Costello who put my lights out. They’re in this together. Whatever
this
is.’

‘I knew Sammy was getting in with the wrong sort …’ She frowned her cute frown again. ‘Where did you find him?’

‘Sleeping rough in a derelict farm cottage in the middle of nowhere’s back of beyond. I only found him because I spooked a girl he’s involved with – Claire Skinner – and was able to follow her.’

‘Sleeping rough?’ Her eyes glossed with tears again. ‘What do we do now?’

‘I keep looking. I think there’s a chance he’ll get in touch with you. He looked hungry and tired. My guess is he’ll need money. If he gets in touch, I need you to let me know. No matter what he says, you’ve got to tell me. Got it?’

‘I’ve got it.’

‘When I was out at the cottage, there was something odd. A statuette of a dragon. Looked like it was made of jade. Chinese by the look of it. Mean anything to you?’

She shook her head. ‘Do you think they stole it?’

‘I’m pretty sure they did. I don’t know if that’s why they think the devil himself is after them or not. I really don’t know, but it would be a good guess.’

‘Where on earth would they have stolen something like that from?’

‘I don’t know. But I maybe know someone I can ask.’

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

Surprising though it might seem, I was the bookish type. I read a lot. I would read almost anything, by anyone, on any subject. I only really drew the line, as I had pointed out to Devereaux, at Hemingway.

Glasgow was the kind of city that liked to make a show of its knowledge. The University was a collection of grand and imposing Victorian buildings but the most strident statement of the city’s erudition came copper-domed: the Mitchell Library sat imposingly right at the heart of the city and was all Corinthian pillars. The original design of the building hadn’t included the St. Paul’s style dome, but the City Corporation councillors had insisted on it. Now the Mitchell Library shouted to the rest of Scotland and the world, ‘See … we
do
have books!’

I waited in the main hall of the library. A smallish man with prematurely greying hair approached me.

‘Hello, Lennox,’ he said, and pump-handled my arm. Ian McClelland was an enthusiastic kind of person. His easy-going exuberance cheered me up every time I met him. Despite his impeccably Celtic name, McClelland was an Englishman, from Wiltshire, who had taken the usual upper-middle-class route of top public schools and Cambridge. He was probably the only person I knew who had any idea how to hold a fish knife. What the hell he was doing in Glasgow was beyond me.

McClelland was a political science lecturer and specialist on the Far East and we’d met at a university function. I had been conjugating verbs with a young female French lecturer at the time. The romance hadn’t lasted, but the friendship with McClelland had. He dressed like an academic but didn’t for some reason look like one. On more than one occasion I had had suspicions that McClelland, who had spent a lot of time out in the Far East, had been at one time or another and to one degree or another involved with the intelligence services.

‘How’s it going, Ian?’ I asked in library tones. ‘Corrupted any young female students lately?’

‘Only their minds, old boy. Only their minds. You said on the ’phone this is about a jade figure?’

We had attracted the frowning attention of a couple of academic types at one of the desks, bent over their research. McClelland steered me to another desk where he had laid out several reference books.

‘Yes,’ I said, once we were seated. ‘Ugly as sin. All fangs and big staring eyes. I think it was a dragon. It seemed to have cloven hooves, like a goat. It was maybe a demon. Here …’ I pushed the sketch I had done into his hands.

‘The dragon is a major folkloric figure in China.’ McClelland frowned as he examined the picture. ‘But what you’ve drawn here isn’t a dragon, it’s a
Qilin
. The hooves give it away. Giraffe’s hooves. You say this is made out of jade?’

‘Unless the Chinese make their gods out of green Bakelite.’

‘I can understand you thinking it was a dragon. There are a lot of jade dragons about. How tall did you say it was?’

‘About a couple of feet, give or take.’

‘Then it could be worth a tidy sum.’

‘How much?’

‘It’s impossible to say without seeing it. It depends on the quality of the jade – and that varies enormously. And, of course, it is frequently faked. If it’s real solid jade, then a thousand. Maybe two. Was it a deep emerald green?’

‘The light wasn’t good. I saw more its shape than anything, but it was green.’ I set my head to working again on what I had seen, but my head was still taking a tea-break. ‘No … maybe not emerald green. Paler. Milkier. Why?’

‘Imperial jade has a wonderful translucence and a deep emerald green colour. It’s rare and extremely valuable. But the piece you’ve described could be anything. Maybe not even jade.’ He caught my frown. ‘Not what you thought?’

‘Fifteen hundred quid isn’t enough for the kind of grief this thing seems to have caused.’

He shrugged. ‘Is it stolen?’

‘Let’s just say I’m trying to return it to its rightful owner in the hope it’ll get someone off the hook. A very big, very sharp hook.’

McClelland asked me if he could keep the sketch for a few days and I said he could. The mugginess in the air hit me when I stepped out of the stone-cooled interior of the library. I found a call box and ’phoned the hospital but the officious nurse on the other end of the line said she wouldn’t give me any information because I wasn’t a relative of Davey’s.

I spent the afternoon nursing my headache and pondered whether I really should get my head checked out. A couple of hours’ rest seemed to help it though, so I decided to skip it. I called police headquarters and got put through to Dex Devereaux.

‘Hey there,
Johnny Canuck
, how y’doin’?’ Devereaux’s American accent seemed amplified on the ’phone.

‘Fine. I wanted to ask you something. How much is each shipment Largo’s been sending to the States? I mean size or weight.’

‘We’re talking about forty pounds a shipment.’

‘That’s not a lot.’

‘In cash terms it is. Heroin is worth a hundred-and-fifty bucks a gram. That works out at nearly five hundred dollars per pound weight. Each forty-pound shipment Largo sends over is worth twenty thousand bucks. I don’t know what that is in limey money. The exchange rate I got was two dollars eighty cents for a pound sterling so work it out yourself. This stuff is literally worth twice or three times its weight in gold.’

‘So it would be reasonably easy to hide it in other stuff and lose it in a ship’s cargo manifest,’ I said, imagining a small rank of ugly jade demons.

‘I told you that already. It’s like the A-bomb. Small package but big punch when it hits the streets. What you got, Lennox?’

‘Maybe nothing … A hunch … that’s all at the moment. But I think part of Largo’s last shipment was stolen by some of the local boys. Amateurs who are scared out of their wits. It means I might be able to give you Largo
and
some of the dope.’

‘Lennox, if you’re sure about this …’

‘I’m not, Dex. I’m not sure of anything. Like I say, a hunch, and it would waste your time chasing it. If it turns out to be worthwhile, I’ll hand over everything to you and you can lead the local police by the hand to make the arrests. But I need to get someone out of the picture first. Thanks for the gen, Dex. I’ll be in touch.’

I hung up before Devereaux could pressure me any more. I was putting a picture together in my head and I needed to concentrate. I also needed time to follow up a few things.

There was one thing getting in the way of everything: Small Change MacFarlane’s murder. It nagged and nagged at me and I couldn’t work out why. I had all but accused Maggie MacFarlane of a bedclothes entanglement with Jack Collins, but I had no reason to imagine it as anything more than that. I somehow couldn’t cast Jack Collins as a smitten Walter Neff, and Maggie, although she was a satisfying piece of art, was no Barbara Stanwyck. I had asked Lorna, as subtly as I could, about insurance policies and a will. Both Maggie and, to a much lesser extent Collins, would benefit right enough, but the lion’s share went to Lorna. Under Scottish Law, Maggie, as the surviving widow, would have a reasonable case in challenging MacFarlane’s provisions but, according to Lorna who certainly was not free from suspecting her stepmother, Maggie had made no suggestion that she would.

But it all still bothered me.

I’m paid to stick my nose in. More often than not, I’m paid to stick it in where noses aren’t welcome. My most irritating habit was sticking my nose in where it wasn’t welcome when I wasn’t being paid for it. When I walked into the Vinegarhill camp, my nose had never felt so shunned. I was seriously concerned that it was going to be put out of joint.

I had performed an act of faith parking the car in Molendinar Street, trying not to think what odds Tony the Pole would give me against it being in one piece, or even being there, when I got back to it. The traveller camp was set up on a barren, grubby walled square, entered by a double iron gate, permanently open, next to the sugar works. There were a handful of modern touring, car-drawn caravans, but the vast majority were the traditional vardo or burton wagons: painted, horse-drawn jobs with arched roofs, that went hand-in-hand with everybody’s romantic image of gypsies. The rough humps of bender tents domed between some of the wagons.

There was no enticing odour of simmering goulash or impassioned violin-playing to accompany my arrival. These travellers did not hail from the Hungarian plain or Carpathian mountains, unless the Hungarian plain and the Carpathian mountains had a view of Galway Bay. And the most romantic thing I saw were two unleashed mongrels copulating over by the works’ wall. A handful of kids without shoes rampaged about the camp, and I was aware that a couple of young men had moved in behind me as soon as I had entered the yard.

That would normally be my cue to reach for my sap but, in a place like this with people like these, it would have been an inadvisable move. A painfully inadvisable move. Instead, I would have to talk my way out of here, like the cavalry captain with the white flag sent into the Indian encampment to parley. I strode across to where an older man leaned against a wagon, smoking a pipe. As I did so I passed a vardo wagon with the shutters drawn and deep crimson ribbons wrapped around the shafts and tongue.

‘I’m looking for Tommy Furie’s father,’ I said, when I reached the old man. ‘Could you tell me where I could find him?’

‘The
Baro
? What do you want with him? Who the fuck are you?’ The old man stopped leaning and took the pipe from his mouth. He spat a greeny viscous glob which splashed close to my shoe. Jimmy Stewart or Randolph Scott were never treated like this.

‘Like I said, I want to talk to him. And I’m pretty sure he’ll be very keen to talk to me. Now, do you know where I can find him or not?’ I was aware that the two youths had positioned themselves behind me, at either shoulder. The old man jerked his head in the direction of one of the modern-style caravans, the largest on site. I nodded and walked over to it, leaving my honour guard behind.

Sean Furie was a big man in his fifties. He was tall, and had probably been heavily muscled when younger, but had turned to fat. His full head of jet black hair was without a trace of grey and was oiled and combed back from a huge face. He and Uncle Bert Soutar had obviously gone to the same place for their nose jobs. The difference with Furie was that the tip of his nose was swollen and red and river-mapped with purplish capillaries. Romany rosacea, I decided to call it – the effects of bare knuckle and bare alcohol.

I told him who I was and what I wanted to talk to him about. I braced myself for his reaction, but it took me off guard anyway. Furie was remarkably soft-spoken and politely asked me into his caravan. There was a distinctive odour inside the caravan. Not dirty or unpleasant, just distinctive. The caravan seemed huge in comparison to the vardos I’d seen outside. It was wood-panelled and had a small kitchen, a lounge, and a room closed off by a door. I assumed the bedroom lay through there.

Sitting at the far end on a built-in sofa was a large, dark-haired, doleful-looking woman in her forties. We sat and, without word or glance, she stood up and left the wagon, squeezing past me to reach the door. It was an accustomed exit; it was clear that when Furie had business to do, the womenfolk left. He offered me a whisky and I took it.

‘I saw some ribbons tied onto one of the wagons as I came in. Red ribbons.’ I decided to be conversational. It often paid to ease into the main business. ‘Is that a celebration thing?’

‘You could say …’ Furie gave a bitter laugh. ‘We’ll have the same on this wagon soon. When they hang my boy.’

‘Oh … I see.’

‘It symbolizes death,’ explained Furie. ‘And mourning. Red and white are the Romany colours for mourning.’

‘Who died?’

‘I don’t know. It’s a Nachin family I don’t know.’

‘Nachin?’

‘Scottish gypsy. We’re Minceir, from Ireland. The travellers from England are called Romanichals and the ones from Wales are called Kale. But everyone here is either Minceir or Nachin.’

‘I see,’ I said. I lit a cigarette and offered him one, which he took but tucked behind his ear.

‘They’re going to hang my boy for something he never done, Mr Lennox,’ Furie said in his soft brogue. ‘It’s a fit-up, that’s what it is. Then you’ll see the red ribbons on this caravan.’

‘Tommy hasn’t even stood trial yet, Mr Furie, far less been found guilty and sentenced. If he didn’t do it, then they’ll find it difficult to prove he did,’ I lied.

‘Well, he never done it. But that’s just what you expect me to say anyway, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘You think that I’d deny it even if I knew he done it. We’re all liars and thieves, after all. Isn’t that right?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘But you was thinking it anyway, wasn’t you?’

‘As a matter of fact I wasn’t. I don’t know anything for sure. But there’s something bothering me about MacFarlane’s murder. Maybe your son is being framed for it, but if he is, who by and how?’

‘He’s a traveller. That’s all the reason they need.’

‘With the greatest respect, no, it isn’t. There’s much more to this than your son being the wrong type in the wrong place at the wrong time. What do the police say happened?’

Furie ran through it all. Tommy Furie had been one of the boxers whom Small Change MacFarlane had been involved with developing. Reading between the lines, Small Change had been organizing bare-knuckle bouts and running a book on them, and it struck me that there was maybe another reason behind Sneddon wanting me to find any hidden log kept by the deceased bookie. I wondered who had started the regular bouts out at Sneddon’s recently acquired Dunbartonshire farm. Sean Furie explained that his son had started to work as a sparring partner at a couple of the gyms and that Small Change had gotten him a number of legitimate ring fights. Small Change was notoriously tight with his cash and there had been a dispute over payment for a bout. Tommy Furie had complained to Small Change, several times, and in front of witnesses.

‘He was at the gym that night that MacFarlane was murdered,’ said Sean Furie. ‘It was one of his regular nights. He got a ’phone call at the gym telling him to go up to MacFarlane’s house to collect the money he was due for the fight.’