‘On your way, Lennox,’ said McNab. ‘But make sure you stay easy to find.’
‘It’s good to know that an officer of your experience and rank is patrolling Glasgow’s streets, Superintendent.’
McNab glowered.
‘Goodnight, Mr McNab.’
I got back to my flat about ten thirty, poured myself a Canadian Club and watched the trams, the odd car and the throngs of pedestrians on Great Western Road. I was not happy. I’d given Frankie McGahern more of a slap than I should have: maybe he wasn’t the gangster his brother Tam had been, but he was connected enough and dangerous enough for me to have to worry.
But there was something else that was getting to me. Detective Superintendent Willie McNab. Twenty-five years’ service with the City of Glasgow Police, two sons in the force, prominent figure in the Masonic and Orange Orders. And a complete bastard of the first water. McNab had started his police career as one of Sillitoe’s Cossacks, the mounted gang-busters created in the nineteen thirties by the then City of Glasgow Chief Constable, Percy Sillitoe. Sillitoe was now, rumour had it, the head of MI5. In the post-war world of suspicion and mistrust, Sillitoe had become a persecutor of communists and foreigners instead of Glasgow razormen. But back in the late thirties, Sillitoe’s Cossacks had been as notoriously violent as the razor gangs they had fought.
So Willie McNab had begun his career fracturing the skulls of members of the Bridgeton Billyboys, the Norman Conks and the Gorbals Beehive Gang. Since then he had worked his way up to second-in-command of Glasgow’s detective force.
He wasn’t someone you routinely encountered patrolling the streets of Glasgow.
McNab had been there for a reason and the only reason I could think of was Frankie McGahern. Shit. The one thing I had spent the evening trying to avoid was getting involved in whatever gangland squabble was behind Tam McGahern’s death. Now I had been caught smacking his twin brother around.
I drank two more whiskies and lay on my bed smoking with the lights out and the curtains open, watching the shapes cut on the ceiling by the streetlamps and passing car headlights. I felt bad about the hiding I’d given McGahern. Not bad for him. Bad for me. And not because of the trouble it could bring. I felt bad because I had enjoyed it. Because that was who I had become.
Post-war me.
To start with I thought it had been a thunderstorm that had woken me up. I switched on the bedside lamp, checked my watch and saw that it was just before three a.m., and recognized the thunder as the flat-fisted thudding of a copper’s knock. I started to cough the rheumy cough that always came when I awoke, grumbled something obscene and unlocked the door. I didn’t get a chance to count how many of them were outside on the landing before the fist that had been knocking on the door knocked on my face, sending me crashing back into my flat and onto the floor.
The City of Glasgow Police has a history of recruiting from the Highlands. Highlanders tend to be tall and hefty, towering above the average Glaswegian, although their impressive physical stature tends not to extend to their intellects. Ideal qualifications for a copper. Highlanders also have a pleasant, lilting accent, and the red-haired bear who hauled me to my feet seemed to serenade me with foul oaths. Another copper twisted my hands behind my back and snapped shut the bars of a set of handcuffs. I felt sick from sudden wakefulness and the taste of blood in my mouth. The large frame of McNab filled my doorway.
‘What the fuck is this all about, McNab?’
McNab nodded to a plainclothesman, who swung an eight-inch sap at my head and my sudden wakefulness ceased to be a problem.
CHAPTER TWO
The large police cell I came to in had the regulation smell of disinfectant, musty blankets and stale piss. I found myself sitting on a chair, my hands still cuffed behind me. I was dressed in just my vest and trousers and either I had been caught in a sudden downpour on the way to the station or someone had thrown water over me to wake me up.
McNab sat on the tiled bunk of the cell. There was a younger, mean-looking cop standing beside me with an empty bucket. His big farm-boy face was ruddy from too much of his childhood spent in a Hebridean field looking into the wind. He was jacketless, had his sleeves rolled up and his collar loosened. As if anticipating some hard physical work. I resigned myself to a tough beating.
‘Exactly what is it I’m supposed to confess to?’ I asked McNab, but watched the other cop as he wrapped a soaked piece of cloth around the knuckles of his right hand.
‘Don’t play funny buggers with me, Lennox. You know why you’re here.’ He punctuated his statement with a nod at the younger cop and a fist slammed into the nape of my neck. There’s an art to beating a confession out of a suspect. The neck blow is an old favourite: it causes intense pain in the head, and for weeks after you’re reminded of it every time you turn your head, but it doesn’t leave a bruise that’s visible to a judge or jury. The wet rag around the fist further inhibits bruising. Mainly to the hands of the hard-working and underpaid public servant administering the beating. McNab said something, then waited till I shook the bells out of my ears before repeating it.
‘Why did you kill Frankie McGahern?’
I stared at McNab in confusion. ‘What are you talking about? He wasn’t dead. You were there. You spoke to him after he came round.’
Another nod. More lightning in my skull. Bells in my ears.
‘But then you came back later to finish the job. I’m surprised at you, Lennox. No finesse. You really did turn him into mince. We had a probationer puking all over the place. What did you use, Lennox? Just the tyre iron?’
I looked at McNab for a moment. He kept me fixed with small, grey eyes set in a too-broad face. I couldn’t tell whether he really believed that I had killed McGahern or not, but the beating I was getting suggested he thought I knew more than I was telling. Which was a problem, because I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. I told him so in fluent Anglo-Saxon and got it in the neck. Again. The pain made me feel sick and I fought back the urge to retch.
‘Your neck sore, Lennox?’ McNab stood up and took a position that suggested I was in for a game of doubles. I looked down at his feet. Brown brogues, polished. Heavy tweed trouser cuffs pressed knife-sharp. ‘Well your neck won’t bother you after they break it dropping you through the hatch at Barlinnie. That’s two murders we’re looking at you for. A matching McGahern pair.’
‘I didn’t know Tam McGahern at all, and I didn’t know Frankie until he introduced himself to me in the Horsehead Bar last night.’
‘What did he want?’
‘He didn’t say. Mainly because I didn’t let him say. But he did tell me it was my kind of job. Finding things out. I reckoned he wanted me to look into his brother’s death.’
‘That’s your kind of job is it, Lennox? Solving murders? I was under the impression it was ours.’
‘Some people can’t come to you. Frankie McGahern, for example. But whatever he wanted me to find out, I told him to take a long walk off a short pier. That’s why he was waiting for me outside. Hurt pride. What I can’t work out is what you were doing there. You must have been watching him.’
‘I don’t answer to the likes of you, Lennox. All that’s important is for you to tell us why you went back to McGahern’s place and finished the job you started.’
‘I don’t even know where McGahern’s place is.’
‘Oh no?’ McNab reached into some tweed and produced the card Frankie had given me. And I had forgotten about. ‘We found this at your place. In your jacket.’
‘I had Frankie’s card because he gave it to me in the Horsehead Bar. Ask Big Bob, the barman. Anyway, it doesn’t have his address on it. Just some garage-’
‘That’s where we found McGahern. In the repair shop of his garage. His head pulped with a tyre iron.’