The Deep Dark Sleep

‘I’m an enquiry agent. I make enquiries. People tend to hear when someone’s asking questions about them. I suggest we take this one step at a time. Could I see one of the wrappers the money comes in?’

Isa obliged and handed me a paper band. It was plain, unmarked with a gummed closure.

‘This isn’t a bank’s,’ I said. ‘The only way to trace this money would be to have the police check the serial numbers, but I guess that’s not going to happen.’ I punctuated my sigh with an obliging smile. ‘Let me see what I can do. I’ll ask around.’

‘Thank you, Mr Lennox,’ they said simultaneously.

‘Do you have a photograph I can have of your father? I wouldn’t need to keep it … just long enough to copy it and then I’d return it to you.’

Isa, or Violet, shook her head. ‘We don’t have any photographs of Daddy …’

‘He never liked having them taken …’

‘Then, when he disappeared, the few photos there were of him also went missing …’

‘I see,’ I said. Ghosts didn’t steal photographs. ‘Can you give me a list of people your father associated with before he disappeared?’

‘We never knew anyone Daddy had dealings with …’

‘But there were the names we found …’

‘… behind the bureau …’

‘What names?’ I asked.

‘It was a list that Daddy had made …’

‘… years and years ago …’

‘… it had fallen behind the bureau …’

‘Mam found it when she was cleaning …’

‘It had some names on it …’

‘Would that help?’

‘Anything that could give me somewhere to start looking would help,’ I said, although I couldn’t imagine Gentleman Joe committing a list of his Empire Exhibiton robbery co-conspirators to paper.

I went across to my office window while their heels were still clacking their way down the stairwell. Gordon Street below and the entrance to Central Station opposite were both thronging with people. Because it was before noon, there were no parking restrictions on Gordon Street and there was a car pulled up directly outside the entrance to my building. A brand new Ford Zephyr, all black and Hire Purchase shiny. A smartly dressed man stood leaning against the wing smoking a cigarette. He wasn’t wearing a hat and I could see he had a full head of thick, dark hair. The suit looked expensive and must have been tailor-made to fit the shoulders that bulked beneath the material. He snapped away his cigarette and dutifully held open the door for the twins when they emerged from the doorway. So that was Violet’s husband, Robert. I could tell, even from the distance of four floors up, that this guy was ‘handy’, as my shady business chums would say.

I found myself wondering how much of Robert’s tailoring was paid for through the largesse of his wife’s anonymous benefactor and how much came from earnings that spared the taxman effort. I couldn’t see his face and therefore couldn’t tell if he was someone I’d come across in my dealings with Glasgow’s less salubrious social set.

After they had driven off, I sat at my desk frowning, without knowing what it was I was frowning about. Or maybe I did: I had spent a long time putting some distance between myself and the Three Kings. I still got the very occasional job from them, and it was difficult to refuse Willie Sneddon, Handsome Jonny Cohen or Hammer Murphy. Murphy particularly had a problem with anyone saying no to him, and had a temper that a psychopath would deem unseemly. It was blindingly obvious that this case, involving as it did the famous – or infamous, depending on your point of view of a sawn-off shotgun – Gentleman Joe Strachan, was going to suck me right back into that world.

But it wasn’t even that: there was more to the nagging in the back of my brain. I frowned some more.

Then I took the cash the twins had handed me out of the drawer and counted it. Then counted it again. I stopped frowning.

CHAPTER THREE

Three thousand miles and a wartime before, about the time that Gentleman Joe Strachan’s criminal career was already well underway, I had been an eager-beaver schoolboy in the prestigious Boys’ Collegiate School in Rothesay, New Brunswick, on Canada’s Atlantic coast, where Glasgow was far, far away. Mind you, no further away than Vancouver. One of the subjects at which I had excelled at school was History. Then, without pause or hesitation, I’d answered the King’s call and rushed to defend, against a small Austrian corporal, the Empire and a Mother Country I had left before I’d been toilet trained.

The funny thing about the reality of war was that you suddenly lost your enthusiasm for history. Watching men die in the mud, screaming or crying or calling for their mothers, blunted your appetite for memorizing the dates of battles or for learning the glories of past conflict. If the war had taught me anything about history, it was that there was no future in it.