The Long Glasgow Kiss

‘What about you, Gramps?’ I turned to Soutar. Deep within the folds and creases and pads of puffed flesh, his eyes glittered hard and black. ‘What do you think? Do you think it’s someone trying to spook Mr Kirkcaldy? I mean, I’m asking you for your expert opinion.’

‘What the fuck is that meant to mean?’ he asked nasally.

‘I mean fight fixing. You know a thing or two about that. I was talking to an old amigo of yours … Jimmy MacSherry. He was reminiscing about the old days.’

‘Do you have a point?’ asked Kirkcaldy.

‘Just that Uncle Bert here has had a colourful past. Am I right in thinking that you were involved with a bookie? Rumours of fight fixing?’

‘You should mind your own business …’ Soutar hid the threat in his tone with the subtlety of a turd hidden in a teacup.

‘But it is true, isn’t it?’ I said, pushing my luck. ‘You got involved with a kid on the make. My guess is he became a bookie. Small Change MacFarlane?’

‘What the fuck has that got to do with anything?’ Kirkcaldy moved closer. It wasn’t a threat: he was preparing to stop old man Soutar in his tracks if he moved to have a go at me.

‘I don’t know.’ I shrugged. It was true. ‘Maybe nothing. MacFarlane’s dead and they’ve got his killer. But maybe something. And if there is, I’ll find out.’

I left them in the gym and made sure that I let myself out. There was something about the idea of taking the walk back along the hall with Soutar behind me that gave me an itch between the shoulder blades.

I walked back up to where the cars were parked. I could see Devereaux was still holding court with Davey, who continued to hang on every word.

‘Problem?’ asked Devereaux as I came up to them. He obviously had a talent for reading faces. Or minds. The FBI probably ran classes in it at Quantico.

‘Dissatisfied customer. I would appear to be over-delivering my service.’

We left Davey buzzing and I drove Devereaux back to his hotel.

‘Thanks for doing that, Dex,’ I said, as Devereaux got out of the car. ‘Davey’s got nothing. He’s stuck in a shitty home, with a shitty job with shitty prospects. You’ve made his year.’

‘You’re welcome, Lennox. He’s a good kid. But now you owe me.’

‘Anything I hear, you hear.’

‘Okay, Lennox. Look after yourself.’

I watched Devereaux, a huge man in a loud suit and a straw trilby, cross the street to the hotel. Whatever else the FBI taught its agents in Quantico, how not to be conspicuously American wasn’t part of the curriculum.

After I dropped Devereaux back at his Buchanan Street hotel, I parked and walked a few blocks to the Imperial Hotel. I wasn’t after another drink.

May Donaldson and I had an arrangement.

May was a divorcee. Glasgow was not New York or London high society and the Glaswegian view of divorce was less than sophisticated. It didn’t matter that she had been blameless: any divorce, for any reason, and in any class, placed a woman well and truly on the outside of Presbyterian respectability. May and I had done a few rounds together, it was true. But I liked to think that I had never actually used her. I also liked to think that Santa Claus really existed. I found May where I knew she would be, tending bar in the lounge of the Imperial Hotel. May had a knockout figure but a forgettable face, often wreathed with a kind of sadness or weariness. When I walked into the bar she was wearing a conservative white blouse and black skirt, the hotel’s required uniform. The aim was to put the title waitress rather than barmaid in the minds of patrons. May had poured me a bourbon before I reached the bar.

‘What’s up, Lennox? You got a job for me?’ she asked with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

‘Yep … but not the usual,’ I said. May did the odd job for me where she would turn up at a prearranged time and lie, fully clothed, beneath the covers in a hotel bedroom. Next to her would be a fully clothed middle-aged male. I would walk in with a member of the hotel staff and a couple of months later we would all speak of the event in a divorce courtroom as if it hadn’t really been the pantomimed sham that everyone knew it was. The British allowed divorce, but in a British way: bureaucratic, long-winded and more than a little shoddy. Which suited me fine. I had made a lot of money from staged infidelities to support divorce cases.

‘Oh?’ May looked at me with so much suspicion in her expression that she clearly thought I was going to offer to buy her mother for the white slave trade.

‘Don’t worry, nothing dodgy. I’m trying to contact a young woman who lives in one of the Corporation hostels. There’s a matron there who won’t let me in and I can’t park myself outside until she shows.’

May arched an already arched eyebrow.

‘It’s not what you think,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a missing person case and this girl is maybe the last one to see my guy before he disappeared. I’d like you to call on her and ask her to meet with me so I can ask her a few questions. If she can tell you where to find the guy then that’ll do just as well.’

‘When?’

‘When do you finish here?’