The Deep Dark Sleep

‘Naw. I got the feeling that the first four jobs were more than practice or to raise funds. I think he was testing us out, to see how we worked as a team; to see if he could trust us. It was only after that that he gave us the details of the Triple Crown. But there was a lot more weird stuff. Every time we met, it was up at the Bennie Railplane, and every time we had to turn up at different times so that we didn’t see each other without our masks on. I really didn’t see how we could keep it up. Even with the test jobs, we were all masked up and in the back of a van. We were told that anyone who took his mask off and let the others see his face would be shot there and then. And if you knew Gentleman Joe Strachan, you’d believe it. It was then that it started to dawn on me: the real reason for the masks and the codenames and not being allowed to talk to each other. Strachan and the Lad were tight; they knew each other; the rest of us were useful if we did what we were told, but if we started to talk to each other, we could maybe plan a double-cross. Divide and fucking conquer, that’s what it was.

‘But we were happy. We got a big slice each from the practice jobs and we had all seen how Strachan’s planning worked better than any boss we’d had before. And we knew that if we pulled off the Triple Crown, we’d never have to work again. But like I said, it was all pretty weird. For three months we had to meet up every Tuesday night and Strachan would drive us up into the fucking wilds and make us do all of these exercises and combat practice. Again, like in the army. Anyway, one night we were disturbed by this gamekeeper, who obviously thought we were night-time poachers. He approached us, waving his shotgun at us, but Strachan put on his army officer palaver and before you knew it this poacher was tugging at his forelock and calling him sir. But the Lad had been on lookout and, while Strachan was talking to the gamekeeper, the Lad came up behind him, completely silent, and cut his fucking throat. In the bat of an eye and without breaking his step.’

‘I see …’ I said, casting my mind back to a more recently deceased gamekeeper with a slashed throat. ‘What happened to the body?’

‘We took it back in the van. What happened to it after that I don’t know: Strachan and the Lad disposed of it, I suppose. But on the way back, Strachan stripped the body and left the keeper’s shotgun and all the clothes that weren’t blood-stained by the side of this fast flowing stretch of river. I said to Strachan that it didn’t make sense, that no one would believe that the gamekeeper had gone for a midnight dip in a dangerous stretch of river, never to be found. In any case, I says, it’s not like the sea … anyone drowned in the river would be washed up somewhere downstream.

‘Strachan says to me that that doesn’t matter. That the less sense it makes the more of a mystery the gamekeeper’s disappearance will be. Country people love a mystery, he says, and they’ll make up all kinds of stories about the gamekeeper running off with a woman or crap like that. No one will think about it being a simple murder because he disturbed someone in the woods.

‘After that, things got tense. Me and the other boys had been shaken up by the way the Lad had done the gamekeeper in cold blood. I started to think that maybe the loot from the big jobs would only be split two ways and the rest of us could end up taking a nap at the bottom of the Clyde.’

‘Did you do anything about it?’ I asked.

‘I’ll get to that,’ Provan answered me impatiently. ‘So we do the first two of the big three and everything goes to plan. But there’s no talk of a divvy-up of the takings. We’re told we have to wait until after the Exhibition Robbery. Then, says Strachan, we’ll get everything that’s coming to us.

‘But one of the other guys slips me a note. It’s got the address of a pub in Maryhill and a day and a time we’re to meet. Strachan is such a twisted bastard that I worry that it’s a set-up to test our loyalty or security or God knows what. But I go along anyway. I stand in the pub like a fucking lemon because I’ve got no idea what he looks like and he’s got no idea what I look like. I’m just about to leave when this bloke comes up and asks if I’m Mr Fox. I say I am and he tells me that he’s Mr Bear. Turns out he’s Johnnie Bentley. He tells me that he gave the same note to Mr Wolf and Mr Tiger, but he can’t tell if either of them are there yet.

Half an hour later we goes up to this fella sitting on his own nursing a pint. Right enough it’s Mike Murphy. Ronnie McCoy sees the three of us together and works out we’re his furry workmates. We leave the pub and sit in the bus stance for two hours talking everything through. Turns out that the other two have the same thoughts I did and reckon that we’re going to get shafted by Strachan and the Lad.’

‘So you decide to do some shafting yourself?’ I asked.