The staff-nurse at reception eyed me with the usual superciliousness as I explained that yes, I knew it wasn’t visiting time but no, I couldn’t come back later because my boss had insisted I was back in work that afternoon but I really did want to see my cousin. She checked the name again and told me to take a seat in the garden and they would bring her out to me.
I had expected a frail waif with pale skin coughing Lady of the Camellias-like into a handkerchief. Specifically a pale-blue one with lace trim.
Wilma Marshall was altogether more robust-looking. She was older than I had been told. Twenty-two or -three. She was brunette, about five-foot-one and as far as I could tell through the all-concealing dressing-gown had padding in all the right places. Her face was naked of make-up or lipstick and pretty, not anything outstanding, but I could see what Bobby had meant when he said she had a ‘touch of class’. But my guess was she had been little more than a diversion for Tam McGahern. One of the many he could enjoy by dint of his position.
I stood up and smiled as the nurse escorted her across the lawn.
‘Wilma,’ I said as they approached. ‘You’re looking so much better.’ She looked confused, as you would expect when faced with someone who clearly wasn’t the cousin she’d been expecting to see. But she let it go and said nothing to the nurse.
‘Thank you, nurse,’ I said and waited till she had gone out of earshot before asking Wilma to sit down.
‘What is it?’ Wilma spoke in a thick Gorbals accent and the ‘touch of class’ evaporated. Her brow creased and she bit her fleshy bottom lip. ‘I thought you people said you were going to leave me alone.’
Now I understood why she had played along: she clearly thought I was someone else.
‘We will,’ I said, riding the wave for as long as I could. ‘It’s just that we’ve got to be careful.’
‘I’ve told you everything I know. And I’ve said I won’t talk to anyone else about it.’ Her frown deepened. ‘Why are you here?’
‘I know you’ve told us everything, Wilma. And I know that it’s an ordeal for you to go through this again.’ I talked like a copper: instinct was telling me that was who she thought I was. ‘It’s just that every time we go through it, there might be something more you remember.’
‘What do you mean? What are you talking about?’ Her pale brow creased even more. I was asking the wrong questions. Whoever she thought I was or represented, it wasn’t the police. Her eyes narrowed with suspicion and then she looked over her shoulder to see where the nurse was.
‘Listen, Wilma,’ I said as calmly and authoritatively as I could. ‘It’s my job to find out who killed Tam McGahern. And to make sure you’re kept safe and protected.’
I could see all the alarm bells ringing in her head. ‘Who are you? What do you want? Are you from the police?’
‘I’m a friend, Wilma. I want to help you out. Like I said, it’s my job to find out who killed Tam. I just want to ask you a few questions about that night.’
‘How did you find me?’ Wilma’s expression shifted from suspicion to uncertainty to fear. ‘No one’s supposed to find me.’
‘I found your handkerchief in the flat above the Highlander. It was spotted with blood. I didn’t think of it then, but later I guessed that it might have something to do with TB.’
‘I can’t talk to you. You have to go.’ She was becoming more agitated.
I placed my hand on hers. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of, Wilma. No one else knows that you’re here. I’m not going to tell anyone about you. I just need to know who it was that shot Tam.’
‘I want you to go.’ Wilma stood up. ‘I didn’t see anything or anybody that night. I just hid until they were gone.’
‘That’s not what Bobby, Tam McGahern’s pet monkey, told me. He said you clocked them from the window. What is it, Wilma? Did you recognize them? Was it someone you knew from the Imperial?’
She looked around as if checking the rhododendrons for spies. ‘I can’t do this. Not now. I need to think. Come back later.’
‘Listen, Wilma, I know you’re scared. But I need to know what I need to know. And I can’t leave you in peace until you tell me who put you here and what it is you saw or heard that they want to keep quiet. Tell me and I’ll disappear. I promise. But if you don’t…’
Wilma frowned and bit her bottom lip again. ‘It wasn’t Tam.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t think it was Tam that was with me that night. It was Frankie. It was Frankie that got shot at the door.’
‘Wilma… it couldn’t have been Frankie who was shot. I had a run in with Frankie McGahern five weeks later.’
‘They thought it was a big joke.’ Wilma’s eyes glossed with tears. ‘They did it to me before. Swapped places. Pretended to be each other. It started a couple of months before that night. Tam would tell me to meet him at the flat above the Highlander but sometimes it was him, sometimes it was Frankie that turned up. But Frankie’d always pretend he was Tam.’
‘And you’re sure it was Frankie who turned up that night?’
Wilma nodded. ‘Big joke, eh? See if the stupid tart can tell the difference between the identical twins.’
‘But you could.’
‘Frankie was… he was different from Tam.’ She blushed and a tear ran across her cheek.
‘Wilma… are you absolutely sure about this?’
‘As sure as a woman can be. But I never said. They found stuff in his clothes that proved he was Tam. That’s what I couldn’t understand. I thought maybe I was wrong. So I played along with it.’
I stared out across the grounds of the sanatorium. Things started to fit together only to fall apart again. Frankie dead in the flat above the Highlander. Tam the one who picked a fight with me and ended up dead later that night in the garage in Rutherglen. Tam was a tough nut with a war combat record to more than match mine. If it had been him that night, then he had deliberately taken a beating to convince the world that he was Frankie. But why? Frankie was a nobody. Only the name Tam McGahern carried enough clout to build a crime empire. Something else struck me: Jimmy Wallace, the hanger-on Bobby had talked about, must have been in on it. He didn’t clear off until after the second murder because he knew. He knew it had been Frankie, not Tam who had died the first time around. The second killing had been Tam and it had signalled to Wallace that it was time he got lost.
‘Who brought you here, Wilma?’
A nurse walked by, looked at us, then at her pocket watch and frowned pointedly. Wilma looked agitated again. ‘I don’t know who they are, but they paid me money. Told me to keep quiet. They check up on me. You better go.’
‘Tell me exactly what happened that night.’
‘Not now. Come back.’
‘When?’
‘Visiting hours are three till four thirty tomorrow. Come back then. But I’m not promising anything. I just want out of this mess.’
‘What mess, Wilma?’
She shook her head, clearly very scared. I let it drop.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Wilma.’ When I stood up she looked relieved. I decided to temper her relief. ‘And Wilma… make sure you’re here. And no nasty surprises. I expect to be your only visitor. If I see anyone who looks remotely like a goon, then I’ll take the next train back to Glasgow and make sure anyone who wants to find you knows where to look.’
I left her sitting in the gardens. I knew there was a pretty good chance that Wilma wouldn’t be there when I went back the next day. But I couldn’t hang around the sanatorium and I guessed it would be difficult for whoever put her there to arrange her removal at short notice. And she was maybe scared enough to do what I had told her to do.
The last thing I needed was to kill twenty-four hours in Perth. Perth time counted five times longer than anywhere else. My elderly driver dropped me off at the hotel and I had a dismal lunch in the dining room. I was served a lamb cutlet which compensated for its lack of size by having a consistency so resistant to knife or tooth that it could have had industrial applications. I was halfway through the cutlet when a tall and solidly built young man asked with a broad smile and in an accent that was hard to place if he could join me.