The Deep Dark Sleep

Five names. There had been five robbers involved in the Empire Exhibition job. But one of those five had been Strachan himself, and if the Michael Murphy on the list was the Michael Murphy I was thinking of, then I couldn’t see him having been one of that team.

During the twins’ visit to my office, Isa – or Violet – had left me a telephone number and I called it. It was Isa after all. I asked if the Michael Murphy on the list was Hammer Murphy; she told me she didn’t know for sure but it was possible. Her father had known Murphy.

‘What was your father’s involvement with Murphy?’ I asked.

‘Daddy knew all the Murphy brothers. I think they did some work for Daddy. Now and again. Mam said that that was before Michael Murphy became successful and important, in his own right, like. But Michael Murphy was round now and again. I don’t remember him being at the house, but there again I was only wee.’

‘And Henry Williamson?’ I asked. The name had leapt out at me as not being typically Glaswegian.

‘He was a good friend of Daddy’s. I never met him either, though. From what Mam said, Daddy had known him for years. Since the war. The First War, I mean.’

‘Your father served in the First War?’

‘Aye. He was a hero you know.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought your father would have been old enough.’

‘It was near the end of the war.’

‘And that was where he met Williamson?’

‘I think so.’

‘Was Williamson involved in crime too?’

There was a short silence at the other end of the telephone; I wondered if I had offended her by reminding her of the origins of her father’s wealth.

‘I don’t know. That’s the truth,’ she said. ‘I don’t think Mr Williamson was ever in prison, or anything like that, but I just don’t know. He stopped coming around after Daddy went away. But they saw each other all the time before that.’

‘Do you know where I can find him? Where he lives?’

‘Not really. All I know is that Da knew him from the war. But I don’t think he was from Glasgow.’

‘I see …’ I said.

I ran through the other names with Isa. A couple of them I knew, or realized I knew when she gave me some background information. All thieves and hardmen. I reckoned that there was a good chance, after all, that I was sitting with the names of the Empire Exhibition Gang in my hand. But could it really be as easy as that? In Thirty-eight, the police would have had exactly the same list of names, yet they never nailed even one of the robbers.

The only other name I had to ask about was John Bentley.

‘I never knew him either. Mam said that he was just someone she had heard Daddy talking about to the others.’

Before I visited Willie Sneddon, I ’phoned and made an appointment. With a secretary.

That’s what dealing with Willie Sneddon had turned into. Secretaries and appointments and meetings in offices.

Willie Sneddon was by far the most treacherous and dangerous of the Three Kings. Which was saying something when you considered that Hammer Murphy had not earned his nickname because of his joinery skills. But the thing that made Willie Sneddon more dangerous than anyone else was his brain. There were a handful of Willie Sneddons born in the slums of Glasgow every year or so: people who, despite the odds and the lack of stimulus, had the raw intelligence to clamber their way out of the gutter. More than half of them wouldn’t make it: Britain’s obsessive class-consciousness placing barriers in their way at every opportunity. The others would make it despite the odds stacked against them and become surgeons, engineers, self-made business magnates.

And a couple, like Willie Sneddon and Gentleman Joe Strachan, would use their brains to dominate and terrorize the city’s underworld. Sneddon had been too small-fry to come to Strachan’s attention; but, if Strachan hadn’t disappeared when he did, then the paths of the two would, sooner or later, have come together. In a this-town-ain’t-big-enough-for-the-both-of-us kind of coming together.

But the paths had not met, and Willie Sneddon had had a clear run at dominating the city’s underworld, which he had, much to the annoyance of the other two Kings, Murphy and Cohen. They had divided the city up equally, except that Sneddon’s share had been more equal than the others. He was the youngest of the Three Kings and had come much farther, much quicker, than the other two. And everyone knew that Sneddon’s climb to the top wasn’t yet over.