The Long Glasgow Kiss

The cake may have been cut up equally, but somehow Willie Sneddon had managed to grab most of the icing. Of the Three Kings, Sneddon was by far the richest. No one really knew – but many suspected – how he had managed to amass just quite so much wealth. It was a quandary that had no doubt cost Hammer Murphy more than his fair share of sleepless nights trying to work out. Truth was that, if you knew Willie Sneddon, it wasn’t that much of a mystery. There was something dark, cunning and devious about his nature, even more than you would expect from your average crime lord. Sneddon was a wheeler and dealer. More than just a criminal, he was a criminal entrepreneur, always seeking out that extra angle; always trying to find some new way of squeezing a penny out of a situation.

I knew – although I never discussed it with him – that the bulk of Jonny Cohen’s money did not come from his clubs and other rackets. The main source of Jonny’s income came from large-scale criminal acts: robberies mainly, break-ins, long firm frauds, the odd bit of extortion. With Jonny Cohen – and Hammer Murphy, for that matter – the bulk of their earnings came from big hits which yielded large sums of cash. The big score. Willie Sneddon was in the same line of business, but everyone knew that he had so many other deals and rackets running at the same time that he had a steady, constant cash harvest. Added to all of this there was the other dimension of his activities: Willie Sneddon the businessman. Sneddon had displayed genuine acumen for legitimate business, even if it had been founded on stolen, extorted or counterfeited cash. Like most big league crooks, he had started a number of seemingly legitimate concerns, fronts through which to launder dirty money. Where Sneddon had distinguished himself from the usual robber barons was in the way he had been able to turn these fronts into genuinely successful and legitimate businesses.

But it never took much scratching to expose the brass crook under the gilt veneer. The fact was that wherever there was a shilling to be made, crooked or legit, Sneddon had the nose to sniff it out.

All of this meant that Sneddon, unlike the recently deceased Small Change MacFarlane, had been able to make it across the social Rubicon of the Clyde. And then some. The Sneddon residence, a large mock-baronial mansion on a plot of land so big it could have had its own Lord Lieutenant and council, was in the leafiest and most upmarket end of leafy and upmarket Bearsden. I knew that he counted a High Court judge, a couple of shipyard owners, and several other captains of industry amongst his neighbours. I wondered how the judge felt about sharing a laburnum and privet border with Glasgow’s most successful criminal. But there again, Willie Sneddon had attained the level of wealth and influence within the city where some of the people he had dealings with no doubt thought it bad taste to bring up some of the more dubious origins of that wealth.

And, of course, the odd brown envelope stuffed with cash would have helped. Glasgow was a city where anything could be bought. Even respectability.

I couldn’t put off seeing Sneddon any longer. He would be looking for news and the only news I had for him was that putting me on the Bobby Kirkcaldy case was a waste of time and that Maggie MacFarlane had confirmed that Small Change never kept a secret appointments diary.

It wasn’t raining. There was a more than half-hearted sun behind a milky veil of cloud and the air wasn’t heavy and oppressively humid as it had been. I got up, shaved, and dressed in a pale blue silk shirt with dark burgundy tie and a two-button two-piece: deep blue with a touch of mohair spun through it. It had no weight and hung well and had cost me an arm and a leg. Deep blue socks and burgundy Oxfords. I brushed the shoulders of the suit jacket, donned it, and straightened my tie in the mirror. I put on my new hat, a skinny-brimmed Borsalino, and checked myself in the mirror. Damn, this suit hung well. It seemed such a shame to bag it down with the weight, but I was expecting that I would, sooner or later, run into Costello or a member or two of his robust entourage.

I habitually carry a sap with me: six inches long, spring-steel with a lead ball on the end, all encased in stitched leather. But I was a slave to fashion and I didn’t want it bagging my suit. Fortunately I had a slimline equivalent: a nine-inch blackjack. Basically the same principle, but flattened out, only the width of a wallet and almost like a small version of a barber’s leather razor strop. It was an elegant-looking thing, slim and black, like something Chanel would have designed for Al Capone.