The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5 (3 page)

I reached for the envelope but McNaught laid his hand on top of it.

‘If you open this and see where the job is, you are committed to taking it. Understand?’

I nodded. I didn’t pick up the envelope but I didn’t withdraw my hand either.

McNaught sat back. ‘If there’s anything you want to ask before taking the job, now’s the time to ask it.’

‘Are these plans kept under lock and key? If there’s a safe, then that could be tricky and, whatever you say, the cost would have to go up.’

McNaught shook his head. ‘No safe. The blueprints we want are kept in a draughtsman’s office on the third floor, stored in a plan chest. There’s always a chance that the chest will be secure, so your contractor should be able to deal with locks, although it shouldn’t be anything too challenging. I have to say that if the person you use is skilful enough, there is a good chance that not only will he get in and out without detection, but also it might be some time before the removal of the plans is discovered. Which would actually be preferable.’

‘Why not just photograph them? The plans, I mean,’ I added helpfully, and a little cleverly, I thought. McNaught’s expression suggested he didn’t share my opinion of my intelligence.

‘You read too many spy novels, Mr Lennox. Admittedly it would be one way of making sure no one would know that the ideas had been stolen, but all it takes is for your man’s skills as a photographer not to match his as a burglar and the photographs turn out blurry and unreadable – or for something to go wrong in the developing process. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. I always think it’s an idea to have as few links as possible. Anyway, like I say, it could be days, even weeks, before these original blueprints are noticed missing.’ He paused. ‘This really is a high-pay, low-risk opportunity, Mr Lennox. Seven hundred pounds for a single night’s work. If you’re not interested, then there are plenty of others I could ask.’

‘So why haven’t you?’ I saw a contradiction in what McNaught was saying: as far as I could see, I was an unnecessary link in the chain; a little asking around and he could probably have found and hired Quiet Tommy Quaid himself. And more cheaply.

‘Because most of them are criminals. This enterprise lies only partly on the wrong side of the law; criminals are completely on the wrong side of the law. Less reliable. And more chance of complications with the police.’

‘And I fit your picture of someone with a foot planted on both sides of the law, is that it?’

‘I’m asking you to do what your business card says you do. I just need you to bend the law a little to do it. So yes – I not only believe you have the skills needed to manage this perfectly, but that your door would not be the first port of call for the police, should they become involved. And I’m guessing you would only hire someone you can guarantee to keep their mouth shut should they be unlucky enough to be caught.’

‘That’s something I can absolutely guarantee.’ My hand still rested on the envelope and I looked questioningly at McNaught. He nodded and I lifted and opened it.

‘This looks like—’

‘The Saracen Ironworks. Yes,’ McNaught interrupted me.

‘What are these plans you’re stealing?’ I asked, confused. I had expected the layout of some top-secret laboratory somewhere. ‘The pattern for a 'phone box? I could sketch that out for you here and now.’ The red 'phone box had become, for those like myself not born in the sceptred isle, an icon of Britishness. Most red 'phone boxes in the UK had been cast at the Saracen Foundry. The romance of this particular cultural icon had faded for me over my years in Glasgow, mainly because of the locals’ custom of using them as public conveniences. I also reflected that only minutes before, as I had watched the police arrive at Central Station, I had been looking at the Saracen Foundry’s work in the shape of the station entrance’s elaborate cast iron canopy.

‘I’m sure you’re aware that the foundry produces more than fountains, bandstands and 'phone boxes,’ said McNaught. ‘The nature of the item we’re interested in is none of your concern. The details in there tell you what your man is looking for and where to find it.’

‘Okay.’ I shrugged. McNaught was right: it would be a walk in the park for Quiet Tommy Quaid. Security was light and the works were out of town and there wouldn’t be many coppers pounding the Possilpark beat. Possilpark was a part of Glasgow that had been created out of the green fields of some toff’s estate and built over with tenements exclusively used as housing for the foundry’s workers. Medieval serfdom had simply been replaced with a newer, post-Industrial Revolution version. At Possilpark’s heart and surrounded by a high wall, the foundry buildings themselves covered acres of land. I still was confused as to why an ironworks would be the target of industrial espionage – but as McNaught had pointed out, that was his and his client’s business, not mine.

Before he left, McNaught told me to be by my home 'phone on Sunday, ‘between thirteen hundred and thirteen-thirty hours’, when he or an associate would 'phone me to get the exact day and time the ‘mission’ would take place.

I nodded, but there was something about McNaught’s military way of phrasing things that seemed heavy-handed:
carrying out your mission
instead of
pulling off the job
;
between thirteen hundred and thirteen-thirty hours
not
between one and one-thirty p.m.
It was almost as if he had been trying too hard to paint a military background.

*

Archie returned about twenty minutes after McNaught had left. He told me all about his bank meeting with his usual lugubrious wit. We were being entrusted with an extra delivery on the wages run, he explained, and were expected to go at least three-handed – usually the runs were handled by the unlikely duo of Archie and Twinkletoes McBride. Unlikely because Archie was an ex-copper and Twinkletoes McBride was, well, Twinkletoes. If you put ‘ex’ in front of just about any criminal activity that involved extreme violence, then you’d get a snapshot of McBride’s curriculum vitae. But Twinkle had turned over a new leaf – mainly thanks to me, it had to be said – and his intimidating physical presence had proved a successful deterrent on the bank runs.

‘Anything new while I was away?’ Archie asked.

I told him about the excitement over at Central Station. Some kind of accident, I guessed.

‘Nothing else?’

I shook my head. ‘It’s been as quiet as the grave, Archie.’

I had a date, of sorts, that night. Or at least the early part of the evening.

My venturesome time as an officer in occupied Hamburg at the end of the war had presented me with unexpected entrepreneurial opportunities – the result being that I’d managed to stash away my little
Nibelungengold
hoard. Generally speaking, people didn’t have any kind of moral or legal problem with you making your fortune by playing the market – I could never grasp the difference between a stockbroker and a bookie – and that’s all I could be accused of doing in Hamburg: playing the market.

However, the particular market I had played had been on the dark side of black, and the military police and the local German authorities seemed to have had a problem with it – especially when a German associate of mine took a face-down dip in the harbour. It all ended with my hasty – and almost-but-not-quite-dishonourable – exit from military life.

My time in Glasgow since had also provided other earning opportunities I hadn’t wanted to be a nuisance to the taxman about. Altogether it had meant a very tidy sum had accrued in my under-a-loose-floorboard-beneath-the-bed bank account.

My plan had always been to use my Nibelungen Hoard to get back to Canada some day when I was less fucked up and my hands were that little bit cleaner. Before the war, I’d been someone else, somewhere else: the bright-eyed, idealistic Kennebecasis Kid growing up in Canada and careless privilege. After the war, a different Lennox was demobbed from the 1st Canadian Army, and Glasgow had been waiting for him, like an accomplice hanging about prison gates.

But, scathing as I was about the place, I’d grown fond of Glasgow. It was the kind of place and the kind of people that got under your skin, and it had remained my dark accomplice, our characters suiting each other. A match made somewhere other than in heaven.

Given that my Glaswegian sojourn had turned semi-permanent, I’d decided to place a chunk of my gains, ill-gotten and otherwise, into a stylish little place in a nineteen-thirties Art Deco apartment building – one of those redbrick and stucco deals – in Kelvin Court.

It was a bright and elegant flat with a largish lounge, two bedrooms, biggish bathroom and a separate kitchen. Most importantly, it had a dining room, which was the most significant social identifier in Glasgow: Glaswegians who unwrapped the newspaper from their fish suppers in a separate room considered themselves quite the cut above. French windows opened out from the dining room onto a narrow balcony and the whole place looked out over a tree-fringed square of car park and gardens to Great Western Road.

It was a nice place in a nice part of town and, sickeningly, my property ownership brought out more than a little petty bourgeois pride in me. But not bourgeois enough to stop me entertaining ladies there. I was discreet, but my social life had still attracted the disapproving attention of some of the other residents.

Which brings me to Irene.

After the war, after I had all of the bright-eyed, pre-war Kennebecasis Kid naivety kicked out of me, I generally saw things the way they were: all of the absurdity and crap we build into ways of living. It wasn’t as if I spent all my time looking for the emotional and psychological wreckage all around me, it was just that I couldn’t help tripping over it.

It was especially true in Glasgow when you saw life stories written before they’d been lived: seen the face of a passing teenage girl filled with the resignation of a sixty-year-old; or watching some tenement kid, happy and grimy from street-play, smile as his paper boat sailed on oil-sleeked gutter water towards a storm-drain, unaware of deep metaphorical irony. The fact was that the whole determinism or free-will hoopla just didn’t fly here in Glasgow: it was the kind of place your future was handed to you the second you were born. And it usually was crap.

The truth was that most were complicit in their own doom. You could never have described nineteen-fifties Britain – especially Scotland – as the most progressive of societies. They were all still there: all the fossilized ideas and forms, codes and systems that had been impressed into the British social consciousness. It wasn’t just a case of keeping people in their place, but getting them to keep themselves, and each other, in their place. It was how ships got built, how wars got fought, how the machinery of Empire was kept running. It was odd that no one seemed to have noticed that the Empire wasn’t there any more.

And one of the codes that still adhered was that relating to pregnancy. In Presbyterian Scotland, there was a prescribed and immutable chronology to pregnancy: conception and pregnancy followed marriage. If conception preceded marriage, then marriage had better follow in short order and well before birth, or mother and baby would soon part company.

There was something of that sort written in the history of Irene Christie.

Irene was a good-looking woman, and she knew it. Her hair was dark, nearly as black as mine, kept short and in a permanent so it curled at the nape of her neck and over her delicate ears. Her eyes were large and blue-green beneath the black arches of her eyebrows, her nose smallish and her lips promisingly full and lipsticked crimson. She had the kind of curvy hourglass figure that hinted that gravity would eventually do its work on the hourglass’s sand but at the moment it was a delight to behold.

Irene was very much the kind of woman I seemed to have leant towards of late. And I had done an awful, awful lot of leaning. She was undemanding – except to make the same kind of demands on me that I made on her – and she was wise enough to be beyond romantic foolery. The talk we made was almost exclusively small, but I had gotten the idea that Irene had started out an attractive girl who, not realizing she would mature into a beautiful woman, had seen her prettiness as a diminishing asset and had chosen to make the most of it while she still could.

Whatever the background, teenage behind-the-ballroom and back-row-picture-house fumbles had led to a fruitful exchange – but without a union to be blessed. So, pregnant and eighteen, Irene had married. Her husband, reading between the lines, or the sheets, had been the best of the bunch at the time, but was an unexceptional man of little ambition and less ability: a tradesman of some sort whom the socially ambitious Irene had mercilessly harried into better tailoring, a Bearsden bungalow and his own business.

Dragging her hapless and reluctant husband bumping up the steep steps of social advance had clearly fatigued Irene; she had chosen me to rub her aching muscles.

In a place and time – and of a class – where women were more often than not simply their husbands’ shadows, Irene was an independent woman. She drove her own car and, at the beginning, we would meet for a drink somewhere out of town where we’d be unlikely to meet anyone who might know either of us; but once we’d pretty much exhausted the few conversation topics of vaguely mutual interest, we decided Irene should just park her car around the corner and come directly to my place where we could get on with the business at hand.

As agreed, she turned up at my apartment at eight that evening.

‘I can only stay an hour,’ she said as way of greeting when I let her into the flat. ‘George thinks I’m at my sister’s so I better show face there later.’ She walked straight past me, along the hall and into the bedroom.

Irene was my kind of woman, all right.

I followed her in and was about to ask her how she was but the sudden presence of two tongues in my mouth at the same time made clear diction difficult. We fell onto the bed and did what we did best.

Sex with Irene was always explosive, almost violent. She navigated the male anatomy with an expertise probably matched only by the Flying Dutchman’s knowledge of the world’s seaways – and more than once she’d put her finger on a sequestered point on the map that I myself hadn’t known existed. It was almost perfect sex. Almost. The only negative aspect of it was Irene’s propensity for cheering me on. During the act of love, particularly approaching its climax, Irene had a tendency, well, to provide
instruction
. ‘Come on, Lennox! Come oaaaan! No . . . no’ like that . . . aye . . . like THAT!’