‘You got the weapon? There must be prints.’
‘No prints. You wore gloves.’
I gave a sigh. ‘We both know you don’t think I did it. And I know I didn’t. What’s this all about?’
‘Don’t tell me what I think.’ McNab grabbed a handful of my hair and snapped my head back. The sudden jerk sent another pulse of pain through my neck. He pushed his big moon-face into mine and bathed me in stale Player’s and Bell’s breath. ‘Why don’t you tell me what it was all about, Lennox? Frankie work out that it was you who killed his brother? Or is it about the money?’
I said nothing. McNab let go of my hair and I waited for the next blow. It didn’t come. McNab sat back down on the bunk and indicated the cell door with a nod of his head. The shirt-sleeved copper unwrapped his fist and left.
‘Tea break?’ I asked with a smile.
The heavy took a step back into the cell but slunk out when McNab shook his head. After he was gone, McNab unlocked my handcuffs. He took a packet of Player’s out and lit up, sitting back down on the bunk. We were getting pally.
‘I don’t like you, Lennox,’ he said without malice, as if commenting on the current weather. Maybe we weren’t getting pally. ‘I don’t like anything about you. The people you know. The way you stick your nose where it’s not wanted. I don’t even like the Yank way you talk.’ He picked up the buff file that had been sitting next to him on the bunk. ‘I’ve been looking into your background. Nothing fits with you. A Canadian. An ex-officer. Rich parents. Fancy private school. And then you turn up here. Why should someone like you want to live here and mix with the kind of people you do?’
‘I was born here. But brought up in Canada. My father was from Glasgow.’ I was out of wisecracks. I had a past that was best left buried and I didn’t like McNab rooting about in it.
The truth was that I’d been demobilized in the United Kingdom and handed a ship ticket to Halifax, Nova Scotia. But coming out of the war was kind of like coming out of prison and, as I stood blinking in the cold daylight, Glasgow was waiting for me, like a dark and brooding thug hanging on a street corner. And here I was, eight years later, in the Second City of the British Empire. Glasgow suited me: it offered a dense, dark comfort. The kind of city where you could hide in the crowds. Even from yourself.
‘There was a bit of trouble, as far as I can see,’ said McNab, thumbing through the file. ‘You came a ball-hair away from being court-martialled.’
‘I was honourably discharged.’ My mouth was dry and I felt sick. My neck and head throbbed. McNab was riling me and I wanted to smack his big, round, stupid face. But, of course, I couldn’t.
‘Only because they couldn’t nail anything on you. It’s funny… the army were reluctant to hand over any information on you, but when the Military Police found out that I was going to be able to nail you with something, they became very cooperative. The redcaps don’t like you much, do they, Lennox?’
‘What can I say? You can’t be popular with everyone.’
‘Something to do with the black market in the British Zone in Germany. Selling army medical supplies to civilians. Quinine to prostitutes for abortions, penicillin for syphilis and gonorrhoea. Nice business.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘Aye,’ continued McNab, ‘a nice business indeed. But the rumour is that you fell out with your German partner – who ended up floating face down in Hamburg harbour.’
‘That had nothing to do with me.’
‘Just like Frankie McGahern’s death has got nothing to do with you.’
‘Just like.’
‘And you say you never met Tam McGahern? Not even in the army during the war?’
I frowned. My confusion was genuine. ‘Different armies. Different wars, for that matter. I heard that Tam McGahern was a Desert Rat.’
There was a pause. McNab and I stared at each other. For such a big man, he was fastidiously neat. Crisp white shirt beneath the brown tweed, burgundy tie perfectly knotted. I was unshaven, sitting in a wet vest, trousers and no shoes. McNab’s neatness was a psychological weapon and the only way I could counter it was to focus on the angry red line where his perfect collar had rubbed the skin on his neck. There was such a thing as too much starch.
‘You asked me about money. What did you mean?’ I asked.
‘I ask the questions, Lennox. You answer them,’ he replied without anger. I laughed at the movie line cliche and managed to restore McNab’s anger. ‘Okay, smart-arse, the money that went missing when Tam McGahern was murdered. Several thousand if the rumours are to be believed.’
McNab dropped the butt of his cigarette onto the floor and crushed it under the toe of his brogue, twisting it into the concrete in a ‘tea break’s over’ kind of way. ‘Now I’m going to have to ask Fraser to join us again,’ he said, almost apologetically, which disturbed me more. ‘You’re not telling me everything. There’s more to this than you hurting Frankie McGahern’s pride. He came at you with a razor. And personally, not one of his boys. Frankie may not have been half the man his brother was, but he was still in charge of a sizeable team. For him to want to deal with you personally tells me that you two had something more going on. What you’re telling me doesn’t make sense.’
I could see his point. I had expected trouble with Frankie McGahern. But it had turned uglier than I had expected, quicker than I had expected. There again, in Glasgow, things turned ugly all the time, fast and for no good reason. McNab waited a moment for me to answer. When I didn’t he made his way to the cell door to summon back the fine farmer’s lad with the sore knuckles.
‘Wait…’ I said, not really knowing what to say next. ‘I’m giving you all that I’ve got. It doesn’t make sense to me either, but I’m telling you the truth. I didn’t have anything to do with either of the McGaherns before Frankie came up to me in the bar last night.’
‘I find that difficult to believe, considering the circles you move in, Lennox.’
‘I don’t move in any “circles”, Superintendent. My work means that I have contact with some characters – including some coppers, I have to say – that other people would cross the street to avoid. But Frankie McGahern was not one of my contacts. Nor was his brother.’
Another pause. McNab didn’t call in his thug. But he didn’t sit back down again either.
‘Anything more I tell you,’ I continued, ‘is just going to be invented to avoid a beating.’
Another copper appeared in the cell passage. I recognized him. I tried to suppress any expression of relief, but at that moment I felt like the last survivor of the wagon train when he hears the bugle call of approaching cavalry.
‘What is it, Inspector?’ McNab made it clear he was annoyed by the interruption. The detective in the hall looked pointedly at me, at my wet vest and naked feet, before answering.
‘I’ve spoken with Mr Lennox’s landlady, sir. She confirms that he arrived home about ten fifteen and didn’t leave again until we came and arrested him.’
The collar-roughened skin on McNab’s neck reddened more. There’s nothing more infuriating than being told what you knew all along but had conveniently and indefinitely filed in pending.
‘As far as she can tell…’ said McNab. ‘She would have been asleep.’
‘She says there’s no way he could have left the building without her hearing. Says she’s prepared to stand up in court and say so.’
McNab’s collarline blemish was subsumed into the general angry red that bloomed across his thick neck. He glowered at the younger detective for a moment before turning to me and telling me I could go.
Jock Ferguson was waiting for me in the reception area of the station. McNab’s reluctant release of me hadn’t extended to a ride home, and I was relieved when Ferguson handed me a shirt, my suit jacket and some shoes.
‘No socks?’ I asked and Ferguson shrugged.
Jock Ferguson was the more-of-a-contact-than-acquaintance-than-friend who had first told me about Tam McGahern’s demise. He was one of the cops that I had dealt with over the last five years. He was about my age, thirty-five, but looked older, as did many men who had passed from adolescence straight into middle age during the war. Maybe that was how I looked to other people. Ferguson was smarter than the average copper and knew it. Coppers generally like things to be simple and straightforward, and Jock Ferguson was neither. I got the feeling that he had always been something of an outsider in the force. The brains would have done that all right. I also recognized him as someone who was haunted by the person he had once been. Maybe that was why he bothered with me. I couldn’t work it out otherwise.