The Long Glasgow Kiss

Uncle Bert took his time, holding me in place with one hand and pulling his other fist back to deliver a right that we both knew would send me sleepy-bye-byes. He had braced his legs to deliver the maximum power and I swung my foot up as hard and as swiftly as I could manage. My foot went through between his legs but my shin slammed into his groin. He doubled over and I grabbed his ears, hoisted him up and smashed my forehead into his face. The good old Glasgow Kiss.

I pushed him away from me. Blood was pouring from his nose and I fully expected him to crumble; but Uncle Bert was an old pro and came straight back at me. I scrabbled in my pocket for my sap and swung it at him, catching him on the temple. It sent him sideways but again, amazingly, his feet remained planted and he didn’t go down. I backhanded him with the sap. He went down on one knee and I kicked him in the face. He fell backwards onto his back. I staggered forward, pulling air into my empty lungs and bent from the pain in my kidney. All the hate and the rage was back: I stood to one side of him and raised my foot, aiming to smash my heel into his ugly, old battered face.

There was a shot. I staggered back.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I looked down at my body, then down at Bert Soutar sprawled on the ground at my feet. Neither of us was hit. When I looked up I saw Bobby Kirkcaldy, his face carrying the evidence of his defeat the night before, standing with a Browning in his hand. He’d obviously fired a shot into the air, but I now found myself looking at the business end of the automatic.

‘Against the wall, Lennox,’ he said, his voice still disconcertingly calm. Gentle. ‘Uncle Bert, you okay?’

Soutar got to his feet slowly, eyeing me with malice. I knew what was coming and so, clearly, did Kirkcaldy.

‘Leave it, Bert,’ he said. ‘We’ll do this in the garage, like we said.’

Soutar grabbed me by the collar of my suit jacket and pulled me from the wall. He took up position behind me and guided me with vicious shoves around to the back of the house. The drive arced round the far side of the house to a whitewashed outbuilding. It looked like it had, at one time, been a stables, but had since been converted into a garage. There was a dormer window above it suggesting that the attic had been the chauffeur’s accommodation. There were two huge double doors, and I reckoned you could easily have parked four cars inside it. I studied the structure carefully, for two reasons: the curiosity of the condemned man about his place of execution; and because I wanted to work out any possible escape routes well in advance.

Soutar kept the shoves going and I considered dancing with him again. He was a tough old bird, all right, but I’d do my best to snap his neck before his nephew got one off. I could always hope that Kirkcaldy was a worse shot than he was a boxer.

‘All of this because you fixed a fight?’ I called over my shoulder. ‘I’ve got to give it to you, Kirkcaldy, you take your petty larceny very seriously.’

‘Shut up and walk …’ Uncle Bert gave me another shove. It was beginning to become rude.

‘We’ve got a friend waiting for you,’ said Kirkcaldy, and laughed in a dark, vicious way. He went ahead of us and opened one of the doors into the garage.

Just as I had expected, there were two cars in the garage: the sleek, carmine droplet of Collins’s Lanchester and Bobby Kirkcaldy’s open-top Sunbeam-Talbot Sports. What a chump, I thought bitterly to myself. There I was thinking I was all smart and devious, stirring up Collins so he would lead me to Mr Big. Yep, I had had it all down pat, except that the delay in Collins leaving his office had been to give Kirkcaldy time to make the fifteen-minute drive from Strathblane to this place, and get himself settled in. All Collins had had to do after that was lead me by the nose. It served me right; I was beginning to believe my own advertising.

The garage was even bigger inside than I had guessed. The two cars took up less than half of the space. Jack Collins stood in the middle of the free area of floor.

‘I told you he’d follow me,’ he said with a contempt I could have found hurtful.

‘Okay, so you’re pissed off that I’m doing my job. But like I said outside, this doesn’t smell right to me. You’re going to too much trouble just to cover up a fixed fight. Why the artillery?’ I asked, nodding to the Browning in Kirkcaldy’s hand.

‘Maybe you’re right, Lennox,’ Kirkcaldy said. ‘Maybe there’s more going on than you can understand.’

‘Try me,’ I said. ‘I’m an understanding type. But first of all, indulge my curiosity as a fan … why throw the fight last night?’

‘What makes you think I threw it?’

‘Oh, come on. I was there. And I’ve seen you fight several times before. If you could flatten McQuillan the way you did, then Jan Schmidtke should have been a walkover. You threw the fight all right. Is your heart really as bad as that?’