The Deep Dark Sleep

‘A Fairbairn-Sykes Fighting Knife, yes. Standard commando issue. The Canadian special forces were armed with a variation of it, the V42 Stiletto. An inferior version of it.’ I nodded to the knife and again felt my gut lurch. ‘What you have there is the world’s best close-quarters combat knife. And the guy who jumped me was an expert with it. Who was he, anyway?’

Jock fired a look at the Superintendent that wasn’t returned. ‘We don’t know. Yet.’

‘Let me guess, no ID?’

Jock Ferguson shook his head. ‘No ID, no driving licence, no labels or tags on his clothing to say where he came from … no cards, letters, chequebook.’

‘You any ideas?’ asked McNab.

‘He wasn’t local, I know that. He pretended to be, to start with, but he was English. And officer class. Listen, I was fighting for my life. It really was him or me. Am I going to be charged with his death?’

‘You’ve killed a man, Lennox. That’s a pretty big thing.’

‘I’ve killed plenty, Superintendent, but back then it wasn’t such a big thing at all.’

‘Well, we’ll have to submit a report to the Procurator Fiscal and you remain under caution. The evidence does seem to point to self-defence, like you said. But you can expect a lot of close attention over this. Some back alley razor gang killing is one thing, dropping well-dressed officer types onto the Gordon Street taxi rank is something else. You know the press is all over this?’

‘I can guess. How are you handling the “mystery man” aspect?’

‘We’re not. We’re just saying that the dead man has yet to be identified.’ McNab turned to the detective at the door. ‘Why don’t you get a coffee in the canteen, Robertson. Five minutes.’

After the detective had left, leaving me with McNab and Ferguson, I eased myself up on the bed. A copper like McNab reducing the number of witnesses to an interrogation was something that brought out the suspicious and nervy aspects of my character.

‘Listen, Lennox,’ said McNab, ‘I know you don’t go much for my way of doing things, and you know what I think about your involvement with the so-called Three Kings, but this is the hardest city on the face of the planet and you have to be hard to police it. But this whole thing you’re involved in is way beyond my ken. And I do not like things occurring inside the city boundary but outside my ken. It attracts unwanted interest.’

‘Such as?’

‘Special Branch.’ It was Jock Ferguson who answered. ‘What took place between you and our mystery dead man was text book SOE or commando stuff. It’s even been suggested that he was some kind of intelligence man.’

‘British Intelligence have taken to assassination attempts on Her Majesty’s loyal subjects? I doubt it. And if they did, it would have been done more discreetly than that.’

‘Well, it was professional enough for it to look like something specialist,’ said McNab. ‘And that means Special Branch are treading on my patch. And I don’t like anyone treading on my patch.’

‘But I take it you’ve told them that we all know what the link is? Gentleman Joe Strachan. That guy began by trying to warn me off the Strachan case, then he tried to remove me personally and permanently. This isn’t anything to do with the Empire robbery any more … it’s to do with whatever happened after the robbery. During the war.’

‘I still can’t buy that story about Strachan being an officer,’ said McNab. ‘And God knows I want to believe it wasn’t him we found at the bottom of the Clyde. But it just doesn’t make sense. He was a criminal on the run. And wanted for a policeman’s murder.’

‘That’s all true. But Isa and Violet seem convinced that their father was a war hero of some kind, while the official records show he was a deserter, an officer impersonator and paybook fraudster. But there are rumours that he traded off a spot in front of a firing squad for dangerous reconnaissance patrols. He also seemed to have regular contact with someone from his army days called Henry Williamson, who doesn’t seem to be connected to anything criminal in Glasgow.’

‘What are you getting at?’ asked McNab.

‘I really don’t know. There’s something nagging at me about it all. Let’s face it, there have been more than a few times we’ve seen the words with military precision used in headlines about robberies since the war. The one thing compulsory army service did was give your average crook the kind of discipline and training to make them all the more efficient at carrying out hold-ups.’

‘Hold on a minute …’ Ferguson laughed. ‘Last week we had a raid on a diamond merchant in the Argyle Arcades: one man with a fake pistol. He was caught because he thought the jeweller had activated some kind of automated dead-bolt on the door. What really happened was he kept pulling the door instead of pushing it. This despite the fact that there was a big brass doorplate engraved with the word PUSH. We’re not up to our eyes in master criminals or commando raiders yet, Lennox.’