The Long Glasgow Kiss

Finding a place to park out of sight of the main road, under a dank railway arch, I sat for half an hour, smoking and listening to the steel sounds of the Clyde. It was quieter and cooler during the night, but the shipyards and repair docks never really slept. This was no man’s land, between the tenements and the docks. No one would come down here unless they had a reason. That was both good and bad for what I had planned. There would be very few people to spot my car tucked away from view; but those few people would either be up to no good, like me, or trying to catch the up-to-no-good. The last thing I needed was a patrolling bobby to happen across the Atlantic.

A train thundered over the rails above me and its rattles echoed damply in the arch. I put out my cigarette and took my stuff out of the trunk. Taking my suit jacket off, I pulled the turtleneck jumper over my shirt and I changed my shoes for the plimsolls. I unwrapped the charred corks from the newspaper and rubbed them all over my face. If that patrolling bobby were to catch me now, I’d have to convince him I was auditioning for a blackface minstrel show or face those three months in Barlinnie. Locking up the car, I pulled on my leather gloves and made my way out from under the arch. I ducked behind a bush and watched while an elderly dockworker cycled along the cobbled road that lay between me and the bonded dockside area. He pedalled so slowly that I wondered how he could remain upright with so little momentum carrying him forward. After what seemed an age, he disappeared from sight around the distant corner.

The streetlamps threw meagre pools of light onto the cobbles and I ran between them, bent over, across the road and down into the ditch on the far side. I was about three hundred yards away from the gates and the watchman’s shed when I took the wire cutters from the bag and snipped at the steel wire fence, folding it back like curtains and crawling through, hidden by the long, uncut grass.

I made my way along the inside of the fence, still keeping low because I would still be visible from the road until I reached the area where I remembered the Nissen huts to be. There was only one lamppost and the Nissens loomed darkly, with little to distinguish one from another. I didn’t want to use the bicycle lamp out in the open and it took me five minutes to find the sign Barnier and Clement. The front door was reasonably solid, but this was an office rather than a store, and the padlock that secured the door fell away with a sniff of the crowbar. I caught the padlock before it hit the ground and let myself into the Nissen.

Normally, I would have switched the lights on: a fully illuminated room attracts less attention than a torch flashing around; but out here in the dark of the warehouse area, switching the lights on would have been as inconspicuous as a lighthouse on a clear night.

The offices seemed pretty much as I had seen them when I had called and asked to see Barnier. I went over to the filing cabinets and was soon saying a little appreciative prayer for Miss Minto. Her filing was meticulous and easy to follow. It took me only twenty minutes to find what I was looking for: a ship’s manifest order and duplicates of a ship’s insurers claim form with a Lloyd’s Register stamp on it.

I smiled. The last thing Barnier would have wanted was for an insurance claim to be put in, but this had to be seen as a scrupulously legitimate business.

I laid the manifest on the desk and shone the bicycle lamp on it, running my finger down the list of items. There it was, as bold and innocent as could be:

ITEM 33a. 12 VIET KYLAN NEPHRITE JADE FIGURINES. CRATED. DESTINATION: SANTORNO ANTIQUES AND CURIOS, GREENWICH, NEW YORK, NEW YORK

Except there were only eleven now. KYLAN. When I had first turned up without an appointment, Miss Minto had thought I was there about the ‘key lan’. And they weren’t Chinese. They were Kylan, not Chinese Qilin. They were Viet, from French Indochina. Alain Barnier was an established importer from the Far East, exactly the kind of link that John Largo needed in his supply chain. Except now Barnier was a weak link. Taking notepad and pencil from my bag, I wrote down the details of the shipment, put all the paperwork back in the files and the files back in the cabinet.

I heard a sound outside.

I killed the light from the bicycle lamp and crouched down. Grabbing my sap from the bag, I scuttled under the lidded reception counter to the door. There was a small window next to it and, pressing myself against the wall, I stole a peek through the window. I saw the watchman’s back as he walked through the pool of light from the lamppost and out of sight. I waited for several minutes, straining my neck to watch through the window, before deciding it was safe to put my sap back in the bag, go back to the files and switch the lamp back on.