‘Mr Lennox?’ he asked in a baritone that must have rattled windows in Paisley. At least he was a polite killer.
‘Who wants to know?’ I asked, trying to work out how tall six cubits was. And a span.
‘Mr Sneddon sent me. Me and Twinkletoes is supposed to look after you. I tried to find you earlier but you wasn’t at home.’ He walked over to me and just kept getting bigger. He was an ugly son-of-a-bitch all right. It looked like he’d beaten up half the population of Glasgow using his face as a blunt instrument. He also had the scar that Bob had talked about: a long and deep crease in his cheek. I was impressed with the reach of the ambitious, and probably now deceased, Glaswegian that had put it there.
‘Please tell me you didn’t call at my digs?’ I imagined Mrs White opening the door and wondering why it hadn’t let the light in.
‘Naw… naw… I seen your car wasn’t there. Mr Sneddon told me to be discreet. I’m to let you know that we was watching your back and that if you need any help you’s just to shout like.’
I suppressed a smirk at the idea of discretion coming in a six-foot-seven, twenty-three-stone package. ‘I could have done with you today. You know anyone who drives an Austin 16HP?’
Goliath shrugged. This was impressive, given the size of his shoulders.
‘It’s just that I had a run in with someone in a 16HP. He’d been following me all day and I just assumed it was one of you guys.’
‘Naw.’
‘If you’re going to be watching my back, could you keep an eye out for it? Dark blue or black Austin 16HP.’
‘Nae problem, Mr Lennox.’
‘I’m going home now. I’ll be fine tonight.’
‘Okey dokey,’ Goliath said pleasantly in his Richter-scale baritone. ‘But I’ll follow you home. Just to make sure like.’
‘I take it you’re Semple,’ I said as I unlocked my car. ‘Mr Sneddon told me about you. What’s your first name, by the way?’
‘Everybody calls me Tiny,’ he said without a hint of irony. ‘Tiny Semple.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
There’s always a moment, when you first wake up in the morning, when you’re temporarily outside your life. Everybody gets it: that feeling of unattributable happiness or contentment or worry or despair. You lie there and think: there’s a reason I feel like this but I can’t remember what it is.
When I woke up the following morning my gut feeling lay more on the ‘different day, same shite’ side of the mood fence than ‘another day, another dollar’. Then, like comedy bricks falling on Oliver Hardy’s head, the crap of the day before fell piece by piece into my memory. I coughed my way through my first Player’s Navy Cut of the day without getting out of bed. I lay for a moment considering staying there for the rest of the day, or finding out, at long last, if that ticket to Halifax, Nova Scotia was still valid.
Against my better judgement I got up, washed and put on an expensive seersucker shirt, silk tie and my best suit. I didn’t shave but decided to go to ’Phersons and have a shave and haircut. It just felt like that kind of day: there was nothing like having your face scalded with a boiling towel to set you up for twenty-four hours of crap.
There had been a Sunbeam Talbot 90 parked outside my digs and as I passed it Twinkletoes McBride looked up from his Reader’s Digest and smiled amiably: obviously Tiny was being spelled, presumably resting up on top of a beanstalk somewhere. I got the impression Twinkletoes was grateful for the interruption: a whole page of the Reader’s Digest at one sitting would probably have given him a headache. It wasn’t just that Twinkletoes’s lips moved when he read: they moved when someone else was reading. I told him I was walking to ’Phersons for a haircut and asked if he could pick me up in half an hour.
’Pherson’s was in the West End, off Byers Road, so not far from my digs. I don’t know where the ‘Mac’ had gotten lost but no one ever talked about MacPherson’s, just ’Pherson’s. Truth was I really liked the place. A good barber’s in twentieth-century Glasgow was the equivalent of the Regency dining room after the ladies had withdrawn: a haven of maleness. I’d heard that the red-and-white barber’s pole was the symbol of the ancient barber surgeons: blood and bandages. It wasn’t. It was a big stripy dick that stated that this was a man’s realm.
’Pherson’s reeked of macassar hair oil, spiced unguents, aftershave and testosterone. Which was odd, because old man ’Pherson, a frail, birdlike man in his sixties whose hair was unnaturally black for his age – actually unnaturally black for his species – was himself as queer as a nine-bob note.
This was where I came once a fortnight, as they described two weeks in Britain, and had my hair cut and treated myself to the closest shave you could get in Glasgow apart from calling Hammer Murphy a bog-Irish Fenian fuckface from a speeding car immediately before emigrating to the other side of the planet. ’Pherson’s was also where I picked up my supply of prophylactics, known here as ‘rubber johnnies’. It was amazing the differences in expression here. I had once tried to explain to a Glaswegian that ‘blow-job’ was the American and Canadian expression for fellatio.
‘Oh aye,’ my conversational partner had said. ‘That’s what we call plating… or a gammy. Or a gobble.’
Rubber johnnies. Gammies. Gobbles. I was gradually to become schooled in the quaint charms of the Old World.
During the war I had seen for myself the way the shakes worked on a guy: fingers would tremble and knees would knock at the prospect of battle, but when the bullets started to fly you got too scared and too fired up to shake. It was like that with old ’Pherson: you’d watch the sliver of razor tremble in his thin fingers, feel his other hand’s tremulous touch on your face, then, miraculously, the blade would sweep smoothly and decisively across your pulled-taut skin.
’Pherson was giving me a trim, the scissors between cuts fluttering like a bird and snipping at the empty air, when I was aware of someone sitting in the barber’s chair next to mine.
‘We need to talk, Lennox.’
I looked at Jock Ferguson’s profile in the mirror before me.
‘Sounds official.’
‘It is,’ he said. ‘But it can wait till you’ve finished your haircut.’
Twinkletoes looked up from his Reader’s Digest and reached for the door handle as Ferguson and I passed his car, but I frowned a warning and gave a surreptitious shake of the head and he eased back in his seat.
It wasn’t Jock’s Morris that waited for us around the corner but a black police Wolseley 6/90 with a uniformed driver. This really was going to be official. Ferguson remained stone-faced and silent.
‘What’s this about, Jock?’ I asked.
‘You’ll see…’
I had worked out that Ferguson wasn’t going to return the favour of the Italian meal, and we drove across town towards Glasgow Green and the Saltmarket. When the driver dropped us off at the double-door front entrance of the Glasgow City Mortuary I realized that he didn’t have a fun day out planned.
It seemed that we were expected. Glasgow was a city of deficiencies, mainly vitamin, and the inappropriately cheery mortuary attendant who showed us down into the bowels of the morgue had the typical bow legs of someone who had suffered from rickets. It was a common look in Glasgow: a quarter of the population who had lived through the thirties looked like they were riding invisible Shetland ponies.
Glasgow City Mortuary had moved here between the wars and the white-tiled walls reminded me of a municipal bath house. We descended down a starkly lit, wide stairway and into a basement hall.
The smell of a mortuary isn’t what you’d expect: no stench of death, more like a mixture of carbolic soap and a faintly stale smell, as if the soap had been mixed with stagnant water. We entered a long, cavernous room. The temperature and Ferguson’s mood were both several degrees cooler than they had been at ground level. The cheery attendant with the chimpanzee swagger led us to one of the metal doors that were set in a row into the tiled wall. He slid out the tray and pulled back the white sheet that covered the body stored inside.