‘She had a friend who went by the name Margot Taylor. Might even have been her sister. She worked for Arthur Parks in Glasgow and was up to the same kind of scam. You know, building a little business for herself. Parks was not as understanding, though. I gather she got a hiding and was chucked out.’
‘Sorry, the name doesn’t ring a bell.’ Helena sipped at her Scotch, the glass held in long, slender, crimson-nailed fingers. She had been a pianist, once. Rumour had it that she would sometimes play the piano for her ‘guests’ and they would be astounded to hear concert-hall-standard Bach and Mozart played in a brothel. Helena had been something of a child prodigy, but that had all been nixed when the Nazis had come to power. Helena and her older sister had both gotten out to an aunt in England just before the Anschluss. Her parents had planned to organize their affairs and follow. But when the border between Germany and Austria came down, all other borders became impenetrable for the remaining Gersons family. Helena had found out, after the war, that they had eventually made it out of Austria. But to the East. Auschwitz.
As soon as the war broke out Helena, her sister and her aunt had been arrested by the British authorities and interred on the Isle of Man as hostile aliens. Our paths had crossed immediately after the war.
We drank our drinks, smoked our cigarettes and talked about people we had both known for no other reason than to fill the quiet. Any other level of conversation would have taken us too deep.
‘I don’t work with clients any more. I just run the place. You know that don’t you, Lennox?’
‘I thought as much.’
‘One day I’ll sell this place and…’ She left the thought hanging and looked around herself at the walls. A beautiful bird in an elegant cage. There was a silence. She had taken us too deep. I picked up my hat.
‘Better go.’
‘Fine. It was good to see you.’ The temperature had dropped and she stood up and shook my hand like I was her bank manager.
I felt like crap when I hit the street and decided to walk back through the city to the station. As I walked I let scenes from my past play through my head. I was full of self-indulgent crap after seeing Helena again. I had a coffee in the station cafe before catching the four thirty train back to Glasgow. I wanted to get out of Edinburgh and back into Glasgow’s dark embrace.
The Glasgow train was quiet. The next scheduled service would have been full with office workers commuting back to Glasgow and the various stops along the way. I was still in that stupidly melancholic mood and I needed privacy to brood self-indulgently. One of the luxuries I afforded myself at my clients’ expense was to travel first-class. I found an empty compartment and settled into it, looking forward to an hour of solitary travel. Unfortunately a short, fat, balding businessman bustled in through the door in a plume of pipe smoke and piled his raincoat, newspaper, briefcase and himself onto the seats opposite.
‘Afternoon,’ he said.
I grumbled a response and he disappeared behind a fluttered wall of newsprint. At least it looked like I wasn’t going to be troubled with small talk. After a few minutes there was a great hiss of steam and the sound of the engine beginning to chug its way into motion and we were under way.
The world outside the window slid by slate-grey. I thought through everything I had on the McGahern killing. Unfortunately it didn’t take long. The businessman opposite had now folded his newspaper and set it on the seat beside him and began to read through a Country Life. He didn’t look like a shootin’ and huntin’ country type, more like a suburbanite. My idle curiosity cost me dear. He saw me looking at him and clearly took it as an invitation to strike up a conversation.
‘It’s good to get away before the rush,’ he said. He spoke with a Scots burr that was impossible to place as Glasgow or Edinburgh, working- or middle-class.
I nodded with a perfunctory smile.
‘Through in Edinburgh on business?’ he asked.
‘So to speak.’
‘Now, don’t tell me. Sorry, please indulge me for a moment. This is my little party piece: I guess people’s occupations and something about them from their appearances.’
‘Oh really?’ I said. Oh fuck off, I thought.
‘Yes… now you. You’re a challenge. Your accent is difficult to place exactly. I mean you’re clearly Canadian, not American. I’m guessing… and I could be wrong because your accent has become a little muddled… but no, I would say Eastern Canada. The Maritimes.’
‘New Brunswick,’ I said and was genuinely impressed. But not enough to continue the conversation.
‘Now, as to occupation…’ The little man with the little eyes behind his bank manager glasses was not to be put off by mere indifference. ‘What people do, that’s usually easy. But with you, I think we’re looking at something a little out of the ordinary.’ He paused and picked up his copy of Country Life. ‘Now here’s a question that always helps. I go hunting. Shooting mainly. There are two distinct types of people involved in the hunt. Or two distinct types of personality: the hunter himself and the stalker, who leads the hunter to the kill. Obviously sometimes the hunter stalks his own prey. But let’s pretend that we are after a deer, you and I. Would you see yourself as a stalker or a hunter?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said without thought. ‘Stalker maybe.’
‘Yes. Yes, that’s what I’d have you down as. Me, I’m a hunter, pure and simple. Mainly wild deer. Magnificent animals. Do you know what the most important quality in a hunter is? Respect for his prey. When I shoot a deer, I bring it down quickly. The trick is a maximum of two shots. To end life as swiftly and painlessly as possible. As I say, out of respect for the animal.’
I smiled wearily just as we passed through the blackness of the tunnel into Haymarket. The train stopped but didn’t pick anyone up. The engine exhaled a huge cloud of steam that drifted over the platforms. I felt isolated, trapped in this tiny capsule with the world’s most boring man.
‘It is remarkable, I think,’ he continued, looking out the window at a grey slideshow of Lothian scenery, ‘that we often turn out to be someone else. Not who we thought we were at all. Take me – I know what you’re thinking: an anonymous little man with no imagination and some kind of bureaucratic job.’
‘I-’ I started, beginning to feel uncomfortable with the drift of the conversation.
The strange little man cut me off. ‘It’s all right. That’s exactly who – what – I was. Or what I was destined to become. I am not an imaginative person. But what I didn’t realize was that, as a child, my lack of imagination wasn’t my only deficiency. You see, Mr Lennox, I found out at an early age that I didn’t feel things in the same way as others did. I didn’t get as happy as others, or as sad, or as frightened.’
I straightened in my seat. ‘How do you know my name?’
‘I’m not saying it particularly marked me out as being different,’ he continued, ignoring my question, ‘only I seemed to be aware of it, and my life would have followed a predictable course if the unpredictable hadn’t got in the way. By which, of course, I mean the war. But there again, you know exactly what I mean, Mr Lennox. You see, during the war, I discovered that my emotional deficiency was compensated for by an ability that others lacked. I could kill without compunction. Without thought or emotion or regret afterwards. I have a talent for it, you see. Just as some have a talent for music or art. My talent is as a killer. Something that is positively encouraged in the context of an armed conflict. I ended up being recruited into the Long Range Reconnaissance Group. I’m sure you’re aware of the group’s activity.’
‘Who are you? And how do you know my name?’ I started to stand.
‘Please, Mr Lennox. Sit down.’ With a movement so swift I almost missed it his hand darted into his briefcase. A very slender, very long switchblade snapped out of the knife handle. ‘Please, just sit down. And please be assured that, big and experienced as you are, any physical contact between us would have unfortunate consequences. I am very, very experienced with this thing.’