The Long Glasgow Kiss

Willie Sneddon coughed up my fee in full. I had gone up to see him with Singer and we had told him the whole story. Or I told him the whole story and Singer backed me up with nods every time Sneddon looked to him for confirmation. Sneddon took his losses on the chin, but made his displeasure clear when I told him what we had done with Kirkcaldy instead of handing the boxer over to him. But Sneddon was better off out of it: a few days later the papers were full of the discovery of Bobby Kirkcaldy’s body, which, they reported, had been subjected to a protracted and brutal assault. I braced myself for a visit from Jock Ferguson or, worse still, Superintendent Willie McNab.

There was a sudden outbreak of infectious amnesia in Glasgow: the witnesses who could place Tommy Gun Furie near Small Change MacFarlane’s place on the night of the murder recanted. The charges against Furie were dropped. I found myself wondering how many of the witnesses had been getting doorstep deliveries.

Against her injunction, I called around to May Donaldson’s later that week. I waited outside until she got home from work and I was sure she was alone. Her face darkened when she opened the door to me.

‘Lennox, I told you …’

‘Don’t worry, May,’ I said. ‘I’m not staying. I just came to give you this …’ I handed her a white vellum envelope. It was a nice envelope. Classy-looking. Her eyes grew wide when she opened it.

‘What’s this?’

‘It’s five hundred pounds. Consider it a wedding present. Another wedding present. You deserve a good start.’

‘I can’t accept this, Lennox. You know I can’t.’ She held the envelope out to me but I pushed it back.

‘Yes you can. It’s something I earned and I’m not happy about what I did to earn it. Don’t worry …’ I said, reading her look. ‘It’s not dirty money. In fact I was paid from the coffers of global law enforcement.’

‘Still, I really can’t take it …’ she protested, but with significantly less enthusiasm. ‘How do I explain this to George?’

‘Tell him you’ve inherited something from a relative you didn’t know about. I’ll send you a letter with my official heading on it, if you like.’

She looked at the envelope with the bulge of money pushing it wide. It looked like some split-open vegetable. A cash crop. ‘Lennox …’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘There is something I’d like you to do for me. Maybe I should come in and explain …’

I was waiting when Davey Wallace got out of hospital. The swelling had gone down but his face was still a dark spectrum of bruises. He walked slowly but gingerly, as if treading on hot coals. I guessed that anything but the gentlest footfall would jar through his cracked ribs. Somehow, he managed to grin his usual grin at me. That hurt more than if he’d swung a punch at me.

I held open the car door for him. He got in and we drove across the city. Davey told me that he didn’t want me to worry about him and that he would be ready to do work for me again in a couple of weeks. And he would have plenty of time, he told me: he’d been laid off from the yard.

I didn’t say anything. Instead I drove down to the river and parked on a scruffy patch of cleared bomb-site. I helped Davey to the water’s edge and we sat on a wall beneath the bristling black branches of shipyard cranes. A puffer belched blackly as it drifted past us.

We sat there for more than an hour while I talked, without a break. I talked about my home in Canada and about the war. I talked about when I’d been Davey’s age and everything I thought the world had held for me. I talked about things that I hadn’t talked about to anybody before, and I told Davey that. I talked about Sicily and Aachen, about the friends I’d seen die and the enemies I’d killed. About the bad things I’d done because you had to do bad things in war, and the bad things I’d done even when I didn’t have to do them. I laid out my life for him. And for me.

When I finished, I handed him an envelope. The same classy, vellum type I had given May. I told Davey about Saskatchewan, about open prairies and hot summers and snow as deep as your chin in winter. I told him he should quit watching gangster movies and watch more Westerns.

‘Two friends of mine are moving out there. May and George. They’ve got a huge farm out there and they’ll need someone to help out. There’s a ticket in there for you to travel with them and five hundred pounds in sterling. That goes a long way in Canadian dollars, Davey.’

‘Why are you doing this, Mr Lennox?’

‘Because you’re a good kid, Davey, and I was a good kid once. Or I like to pretend to myself that I was a good kid once. You deserve something better than this …’ I gestured to the black, oily Clyde, to the cranes around us, to the dark city behind us. ‘I’ve put a letter in there as well. It gives my folks’ address and details in New Brunswick. I wired my dad and he said he’ll stand as sponsor for you if immigration need it.’ I put my hand on his shoulder. ‘But you won’t. Canada wants good kids like you.’