The Long Glasgow Kiss

Surprising though it might seem, I was the bookish type. I read a lot. I would read almost anything, by anyone, on any subject. I only really drew the line, as I had pointed out to Devereaux, at Hemingway.

Glasgow was the kind of city that liked to make a show of its knowledge. The University was a collection of grand and imposing Victorian buildings but the most strident statement of the city’s erudition came copper-domed: the Mitchell Library sat imposingly right at the heart of the city and was all Corinthian pillars. The original design of the building hadn’t included the St. Paul’s style dome, but the City Corporation councillors had insisted on it. Now the Mitchell Library shouted to the rest of Scotland and the world, ‘See … we do have books!’

I waited in the main hall of the library. A smallish man with prematurely greying hair approached me.

‘Hello, Lennox,’ he said, and pump-handled my arm. Ian McClelland was an enthusiastic kind of person. His easy-going exuberance cheered me up every time I met him. Despite his impeccably Celtic name, McClelland was an Englishman, from Wiltshire, who had taken the usual upper-middle-class route of top public schools and Cambridge. He was probably the only person I knew who had any idea how to hold a fish knife. What the hell he was doing in Glasgow was beyond me.

McClelland was a political science lecturer and specialist on the Far East and we’d met at a university function. I had been conjugating verbs with a young female French lecturer at the time. The romance hadn’t lasted, but the friendship with McClelland had. He dressed like an academic but didn’t for some reason look like one. On more than one occasion I had had suspicions that McClelland, who had spent a lot of time out in the Far East, had been at one time or another and to one degree or another involved with the intelligence services.

‘How’s it going, Ian?’ I asked in library tones. ‘Corrupted any young female students lately?’

‘Only their minds, old boy. Only their minds. You said on the ’phone this is about a jade figure?’

We had attracted the frowning attention of a couple of academic types at one of the desks, bent over their research. McClelland steered me to another desk where he had laid out several reference books.

‘Yes,’ I said, once we were seated. ‘Ugly as sin. All fangs and big staring eyes. I think it was a dragon. It seemed to have cloven hooves, like a goat. It was maybe a demon. Here …’ I pushed the sketch I had done into his hands.

‘The dragon is a major folkloric figure in China.’ McClelland frowned as he examined the picture. ‘But what you’ve drawn here isn’t a dragon, it’s a Qilin. The hooves give it away. Giraffe’s hooves. You say this is made out of jade?’

‘Unless the Chinese make their gods out of green Bakelite.’

‘I can understand you thinking it was a dragon. There are a lot of jade dragons about. How tall did you say it was?’

‘About a couple of feet, give or take.’

‘Then it could be worth a tidy sum.’

‘How much?’

‘It’s impossible to say without seeing it. It depends on the quality of the jade – and that varies enormously. And, of course, it is frequently faked. If it’s real solid jade, then a thousand. Maybe two. Was it a deep emerald green?’

‘The light wasn’t good. I saw more its shape than anything, but it was green.’ I set my head to working again on what I had seen, but my head was still taking a tea-break. ‘No … maybe not emerald green. Paler. Milkier. Why?’

‘Imperial jade has a wonderful translucence and a deep emerald green colour. It’s rare and extremely valuable. But the piece you’ve described could be anything. Maybe not even jade.’ He caught my frown. ‘Not what you thought?’

‘Fifteen hundred quid isn’t enough for the kind of grief this thing seems to have caused.’

He shrugged. ‘Is it stolen?’

‘Let’s just say I’m trying to return it to its rightful owner in the hope it’ll get someone off the hook. A very big, very sharp hook.’

McClelland asked me if he could keep the sketch for a few days and I said he could. The mugginess in the air hit me when I stepped out of the stone-cooled interior of the library. I found a call box and ’phoned the hospital but the officious nurse on the other end of the line said she wouldn’t give me any information because I wasn’t a relative of Davey’s.

I spent the afternoon nursing my headache and pondered whether I really should get my head checked out. A couple of hours’ rest seemed to help it though, so I decided to skip it. I called police headquarters and got put through to Dex Devereaux.

‘Hey there, Johnny Canuck, how y’doin’?’ Devereaux’s American accent seemed amplified on the ’phone.

‘Fine. I wanted to ask you something. How much is each shipment Largo’s been sending to the States? I mean size or weight.’

‘We’re talking about forty pounds a shipment.’

‘That’s not a lot.’