The Long Glasgow Kiss (4 page)

Singer, unsurprisingly, said nothing. But he didn’t nod or move or blink.

‘Someone grassed him up to the police for a robbery he did. But without the witness there was no evidence. But Singer didn’t kill the bastard. He cut his fucking tongue out. All of it. Kind of poetic, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah …’ I said. Singer’s face was still impassive. ‘Positively Audenesque.’

‘Anyway,’ said Sneddon. ‘I like having Singer around. D’you know the ancient Greeks liked to have mutes around at funerals? Professional mourners. Anyway, I look after Singer now, don’t I, Singer?’

Singer nodded.

‘And Singer looks after me. And my interests.’

I was acutely aware of Twinkletoes’ absence in the car on the way back into town, as if he had left twin voids of space and silence. I took a Player’s Navy Blue and offered the packet to Singer, who shook his head without taking his eyes off the road. He was that kind of guy. Focussed. I had forgotten exactly where I’d left the car, but Singer found his way to it first shot.

‘Thanks,’ I said as I got out of the car. Singer was about to drive off when, on an impulse, I tapped on his window. He rolled it down.

‘Listen, I just wanted to say …’ What? What the hell was it I wanted to say? ‘I just wanted to say that I’m sorry about the wisecracks I made … you know, about you not talking. I didn’t know about … well, you know … that was a shitty break …’ I fell silent. It seemed best considering I seemed to have lost the ability to string a coherent sentence together.

Singer looked at me for a moment, in that cold, expressionless way he had, then gave a nod. He drove off. I stood and watched the Humber disappear around the corner, wondering why the hell, after all of the other shit I had done and seen in my life, I had felt the need to apologize to a cheap Glasgow hoodlum. Maybe it was because what had happened to Singer had happened when he was a kid. It was the one thing I found tough to take: the crap that happens to kids. In war. In their own homes.

Not for the first time, I considered the colourful life I had forged for myself here in Glasgow. And the interesting people I got to meet.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

It’s funny: at the time, I didn’t think of the week after Small Change’s murder as ‘the week after Small Change’s murder’. I had other things to think about, other things to do. It’s often only in retrospect that you see the significance of a particular moment in your life. At the time it’s just the same old crap, and you just stumble along oblivious to the fact that you should be keeping a scrapbook, or a diary, or photographing the minutiae of your life; that at some time in the future you would look back and think, if only I’d known what the fuck was going on.

Obviously, I saw Lorna every day that week. And obviously I kept my hands out of her underwear – I am nothing if not a gentleman – and, anyway, experience had told me that the ardour of even the most enthusiastic of mattress companions diminishes with grief. Not with death; with grief. I’d learned during the war that death and violence tend to be powerful aphrodisiacs for both genders. Suffice it to say, I became the most solicitous and least lecherous of suitors.

To be honest, I had other distractions.

They say Eskimos have a hundred words for snow. Glaswegians must have twice that many for the different kinds of rain that batters down on the city year-round. In winter, Glasgow lies under an assault of chilled wet bullets; in summer, the rain falls in greasy, tepid globs, like the sky sweating on the city. Completely atypically, Glasgow was experiencing a dry and searingly hot summer. Half of the city’s population spent most of that summer looking up, squinting at the sky and trying to form the word
blue
.

I found the hot weather disconcerting. Usually any sunlight in Glasgow was mitigated by a sooty veil thrown up by the factories and tenement chimneys; but that summer there were disorientating moments when the sky cleared and the heat and the light reminded me of summers back home in New Brunswick. It was only ever a fleeting illusion, though, repeatedly shattered by the fuming, dark-billowing reality of the city around me.

At least I got to wear lightweight suits that hung better. When it came to material, the Scots had a year-round preference for tweed, the scratchier and denser the better. A Scottish acquaintance had once tried to reassure me that tweed from the Isle of Harris was less scratchy, explaining that this was because it was traditionally soaked in human urine. I could have been accused of being picky, but I preferred couture that hadn’t been pissed on by an inbred crofter.

I had spent three days getting all the gen I could on Sneddon’s fighter. Bobby Kirkcaldy had been born in Glasgow but raised in Lanarkshire, first in an orphanage and then by an aunt. Both his parents had died prematurely from heart attacks when Kirkcaldy was a child. Tragic, but not unusual: if cardiac disease had been a sport, then the entire British Olympic team would have been made up of Glaswegians.

Young Bobby Kirkcaldy had used his fists to fight his way up and out of the Motherwell slum that had been his adoptive home. To put his success in context, Motherwell was the kind of place anyone would fight like hell to get out of. I’d been able to track down a couple of businesses that Kirkcaldy had invested in and it was clear he was getting good advice on cashing in on his success when he eventually hung up his gloves. Either that, or he was as nifty with investment as he was in the ring. In fact, for someone approaching the height of his boxing career, he seemed to have his mind, and money, on other things.

My office was three floors up, across Gordon Street from Central Station, and by Thursday I had done just about all I could do on the ’phone and was going to take an afternoon trip out to see young Mr Kirkcaldy. I decided to drink a coffee and read the newspaper before I left. I like to keep up with things. I never knew when Rab Butler or Tony Eden would ask for my advice.

All the news was gloomy. Britain wasn’t the only nation struggling with the loss of an empire: the French were having the stuffing kicked out of them in Indochina by the Vietminh. There had been a clash of razor gangs in the Gorbals. A man had been run over by a train on the outskirts of the city. The police hadn’t issued a name. The only thing that cheered me up was an advertised assurance that, apparently, taking an Amplex chlorophyll tablet each day guaranteed breath and body freshness; obviously an attempt to break into an underexploited market.

I was in the middle of
Rip Kirby
when I got a pleasant surprise. A very pleasant, five-foot-three, blonde surprise. I recognized her as soon as she walked into my office, despite the fact that we had never met before. She dressed with an elegance that Glasgow didn’t stretch to. Cream silk blouse, figure-hugging powder blue pencil skirt, long legs sheathed in sheer silk. Her throat was ringed with a necklace with pearls so big the diver must have had to bring them up one at a time. Earrings to match. She wore a small white pillbox-type hat and white gloves, but had a jacket that matched the skirt draped over the same forearm as a handbag that, in a previous life, had swum in the Nile or the Florida Everglades.

I stood up and tried to prevent my smile from resembling a leer. It probably just looked goofy. But Sheila Gainsborough was probably used to men smiling at her goofily.

‘Hello, Miss Gainsborough,’ I said. ‘Please sit down. What can I do for you?’

‘You know me?’ She smiled a famous person’s smile, that polite perfunctory baring of teeth that doesn’t mean anything.

‘Everybody knows you, Miss Gainsborough. Certainly everybody in Glasgow. I have to say I don’t get many celebrities walking into my office.’

‘Don’t you?’ She frowned, lowering her flawlessly arched eyebrows and wrinkling a fold of skin on her otherwise flawless brow. Flawlessly. ‘I would have imagined …’ Shrugging off the thought and the frown, she sat down and I followed suit. ‘I’ve never been to a private detective before. Never seen one before, come to that, other than Humphrey Bogart in the pictures.’

‘We’re taller in real life.’ I smiled at my own witticism. Goofily. ‘And I call myself an enquiry agent. So why do you need to see one now?’

She unclipped the sixty-guinea crocodile and handed me a photograph. It was a professional, showbizzy shot. Colour. I didn’t recognize the young man in the picture but decided in an instant that I didn’t like him. The smile was fake and too self-assured. He was wearing an expensive-looking shirt open at the neck and arranged over the collar of an even more pricey-looking light grey suit. His chestnut hair was well cut and lightly oiled. He was good-looking, but in a too-slick and weak-chinned sort of way. Despite his dark hair, he had the same striking, pale blue eyes as Sheila Gainsborough.

‘He’s my brother. Sammy. My younger brother.’

‘Is he in show business too, Miss Gainsborough?’

‘No. Well, not really. He sings, occasionally. He’s tried every other kind of business though. Some of which I’m afraid haven’t been totally …
honourable
.’ She sighed and leaned forward, resting her forearms on the edge of my desk. Her skin was tanned. Not dark, just pale gold. The cute frown was back. ‘It’s maybe all my fault. I spoil him, give him more money than he can handle.’ I noticed that she had a vaguely Americanized accent. I spoke the same way, but that was because I’d been raised in Canada. As far as I was aware, Sheila Gainsborough had never been further west than Dunoon. I guessed she had been voice-trained to sink the Glasgow in her accent somewhere deep and mid-Atlantic.

‘Is Sammy in some kind of trouble?’ I too leaned forward and frowned my concern, taking the opportunity to cast a glance down the front of her blouse.

‘He’s gone missing,’ she said.

‘How long?’

‘A week. Maybe ten days. We had a meeting at the bank – he’s overdrawn the account I set up for him – but he didn’t turn up. That was last Thursday. I went to his apartment but he wasn’t there. There was two days’ mail behind the door.’

I took a pad from my desk drawer and scribbled a few notes on it. It was window dressing, people feel comforted if you take notes. Somehow it looks like you’re taking it all that little bit more seriously. Nodding sagely as you write helps.

‘Has Sammy done this kind of thing before. Gone off without letting you know?’

‘No. Or at least not like this. Not for a week. Occasionally he’s gone off on a bender. One … two days, but that’s all. And whenever I’m in town – you know, not on a tour or in London – we meet up every Saturday and have lunch in Cranston’s Tea Rooms on Sauchiehall Street. He never misses it.’

I noted. I nodded. Sagely. ‘You said his account is overdrawn – have there been any more withdrawals since he went awol?’

‘I don’t know …’ Suddenly she looked perplexed, as if she’d let him down – let me down – by not checking. ‘Can you find that out?’

‘’Fraid not. You say you were supposed to attend the meeting at the bank with him?’

‘I’m a co-signatory,’ she said. The frown still creased the otherwise flawless brow. With due cause, I thought. Her brother sounded like a big spender. A high liver. If he hadn’t been trying to pull cash from his already overdrawn account, then he wasn’t spending big or living high. Or maybe even simply not living.

‘Then you can check,’ I said. ‘The bank will give you that information, but not me. Even the police would have to get a court order. Have you been to the police, Miss Gainsborough?’

‘I was waiting. I kept thinking Sammy would turn up. Then, when he didn’t, I thought I’d be better getting a private detective … I mean enquiry agent.’

‘Why me?’ I asked. ‘I mean, who put you in contact with me?’

‘I have a road manager, Jack Beckett. He says he knows you.’

I frowned. ‘Can’t say …’

‘Or at least knows
of
you. He said …’ She hesitated, as if unsure to commit the rest of her thought to words. ‘He said that you were reliable, but that you had contact with – well, that you
knew
people that were more the kind that Sammy has been mixing with.’

‘I see …’ I said, still trying to place the name Jack Beckett and making a mental note that if I ever did come across him, to thank him appropriately for the glowing character reference.

There was a silence. A taxi sounded its horn outside on Gordon Street. A river-bubble of voices rose up from outside and through the window I had left open in the vain hope it would cool the office. I noticed a trickle of sweat on Sheila Gainsborough’s sleek neck.

‘So exactly
what
kind of people was Sammy mixing with? You said he had gotten involved in less than honourable businesses. What do you mean?’

‘Like I said, Sammy isn’t really in show business as such. But he does do the odd singing job. He’s not great, if I’m honest, but good enough for Glasgow. He’s been singing in nightclubs and mixing with a bad crowd. Gambling too. I think that’s where a lot of the money has been going.’

‘Which clubs?’

‘I don’t know … not the ones I started in. There was one he went to a lot. I think he sang there too. The Pacific Club down near the river.’

‘Oh … yes,’ I said. Oh fuck, I thought. Handsome Jonny Cohen’s place.

‘You know it?’

‘I know the owner. I can have a word.’

‘Have you ever heard of the Poppy Club?’ she asked.

‘Can’t say that I have. Why?’

‘When I went to his flat there was a note by the telephone that said “The Poppy Club”. Nothing else. No number. I looked up the ’phone book but there’s no “Poppy Club” listed in either Glasgow or Edinburgh.’

I wrote the name down in my notebook. Reassuringly. ‘What’s Sammy’s full name?’ I asked.

‘James Samuel Pollock.’

‘Pollock?’

‘That’s my real name. Well, it
was
my real name. I changed it by deed poll.’

‘So you were Sheila Pollock?’

‘Ishbell Pollock.’

‘Ishbell?’

‘My agent didn’t think that Ishbell Pollock had the kind of ring to it that a singing star’s name should have.’

‘Really?’ I said, as if confused as to why anyone would be blind to the charms of a name like Ishbell Pollock. They had done a good job on her. A Glasgow club singer, one amongst thousands. But they had had great raw material to work with. Sheila Gainsborough had the looks – she certainly had the looks – and the voice to stand out from the crowd. She’d been talent-scouted. Groomed. Repackaged. Managed. She maybe had the looks and the voice but the name Ishbell Pollock and the Glasgow accent would have been dropped faster than utility-mark panties on VE Day.

I wrote Sammy’s full name in my notebook. ‘When did you last see Sammy?’

‘Lunch at the Tea Rooms, a week past Saturday.’

‘What about friends … girls … people he used to hang around with? And you said he has been associating with a bad crowd. Can you put any names to them?’

‘He has this friend, Barnier. A Frenchman. Sammy mentioned him a couple of times. I
think
they were friends, but it could have been a business thing.’

‘First name?’

She shook her head. ‘Sammy always just called him Barnier. There can’t be that many Frenchies in Glasgow.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘They probably come here in their droves for the cuisine.’ We both smiled. ‘Anyone else?’

‘I was at his flat one day and he got a telephone call from a girl. They sounded intimate. All I got was her first name. Claire. But there were a couple of guys he knew who I really didn’t like the look of. Rough types.’

‘Names?’

‘Sorry. I only saw them once, waiting for Sammy outside the club. They had the look as if … I don’t know … as if they didn’t want to be seen. But they were a shiftless sort. Late twenties, one about five-eight with dark hair, the other maybe an inch shorter with sandy hair. The one with the dark hair has a scar on his forehead. Shaped like a crescent.’

I sat and looked at her, deep in thought. She looked back eagerly, obviously reassured that she had provoked some deep, investigative cogitations. What I was really thinking about was what it would be like to bend her over my desk.

‘Okay. Thanks,’ I said once the picture was complete. ‘Would it be possible for us to go to your brother’s flat … have a look around?’