‘Were we wrong? Why couldn’t it work?’ I realized that, at that moment, I meant what I was saying. ‘My folks have money. I have some money saved. And God knows you must have a bit put away. You said yourself the last time I was here that you dreamed of selling up and starting a new life. We could go to Canada. Away from everyone and everything that’s gone wrong in our lives.’
Helena stood up and pulled her dress back over her body. The ice was back in her voice. ‘The main thing that’s gone wrong in our lives is us. Like I said, Lennox, you and I are both rotten. We blame it all on everything that has happened to us, but the truth is it was always there in us both. It just took a little bit of history to bring it to the surface. Forget what I said before… sometimes I talk nonsense. To keep sane. So why don’t you just tell me what it is that you want?’
Sometimes you feel more naked than others. I stood up and pulled on my clothes, feeling uncomfortable under her gaze.
‘Arthur Parks is dead.’
‘I know.’
‘I’m to find out who killed him.’
‘And what does that have to do with me?’ It was fully dark outside and the dying fire was all the light I had to see her face. But I sensed it set hard.
‘Okay, Helena, I’ll tell you all that I know and what I haven’t told my client yet. And it’ll tell you exactly what I think it has to do with you. Arthur Parks was murdered by someone connected to whatever happened to Tam McGahern, the tough spivvy-type you say you saw Sally Blane with.
‘This is the way I see it, or I’m guessing it… Tam McGahern sees he can’t expand his little empire beyond Glasgow. The Three Kings have him in their sights if he puts a foot wrong. It’s true that Tam McGahern may be a psychopath, but he’s also smarter than the Three Kings put together. And he’s seen that there are opportunities to be had in the big wide world outside Glasgow. So he comes up with a scheme… and here’s where it gets a little sketchy, because I’m not a hundred per cent on what the scheme was, but it’s got to do with the Middle East. So Tam decides to hook himself a few big fish. With me so far?’
‘Go on.’ Helena’s face was suddenly illuminated as she lit another cigarette.
‘So Tam conceives this honey-trap operation, gets together a handful of really classy chippies. Not the usual sort, girls with a bit of class and real lookers. He sets them up in a house in the West End, but my guess is that some of the punters who go there don’t even know they’re whores or that the house is a bordello. Tam was in the Desert Rats and Gideon, so he has an interesting network of friends, including, I think, Arthur Parks. So Tam gives Arthur a cut of the action in exchange for helping him set it all up – creaming off the best customers and sending them to the West End operation. Like I said, I think a few non-punters were also targeted by the girls directly. To start with I thought that this was all a trap-fuck-and-blackmail operation. But they are too selective in their targets. It’s a list of names, Helena. A list of names that McGahern needs to make his plan work. One of them is Alexander Knox, the plastic surgeon. Why they need him beats me. But the main target is John Andrews, the poor mug who marries Lillian not knowing she is really a prostitute and porn-film actress called Sally Blane. Andrews seems to be their main target because they need to use his importing business.’
‘What for?’
‘That I’m not entirely sure of. But I am sure it involves taking things in or out of the Middle East. Anyway, something goes wrong. Tam is targeted by someone who doesn’t like his enterprising spirit, so he fakes his own death by killing his brother. But his hunters aren’t convinced and they do both brothers. Tam exits stage left under his twin brother’s name. But Sally Blane, or Lillian Andrews as she now is, keeps the plan running. Part of that plan is to divert suspicion for the second McGahern death onto me, and then to frame me good and proper for the Parks murder.’
‘But that doesn’t make sense,’ said Helena. She kept the lights out.
‘Maybe they fell out. Or maybe getting rid of Parks, just like getting rid of Frankie, was part of the plan from the start.’
‘I still don’t see what this has to do with me, Lennox.’
‘Parks wasn’t the only one supplying names and helping set up the West End operation. Parks didn’t have the style for it. I got chatting to one of McGahern’s former lackeys, a nobody called Bobby who tells me that McGahern was cracked up on the woman who ran the shop for him. Molly. To start with I think that’s Lillian, but there’s talk of a foreign woman.’
‘Me.’
‘That’s what I don’t know. I hope to God it’s not, Helena. Because if it is, you’ve got yourself into some serious trouble. Whoever did Tam is a serious outfit. And I don’t think we’re talking about gangsters.’
‘You don’t seem to know what you’re talking about, Lennox. There are things you don’t understand. Will never understand.’
‘Are you saying it wasn’t you?’
‘What I’m saying is you don’t know as much as you like to think you know. About me. About anything.’
‘Then enlighten me.’
‘I think you’d better go.’ She stood up and switched the table lamp on. I blinked in the sudden light. Then I saw her face. And I saw in it something I’d never seen before. She looked pale, sad and drawn. But there was something in her expression that was sad and hard and resolute. She handed me my hat.
‘For what it’s worth, Lennox, it’s not me. I told you the last time you were here that I only saw Sally’s Glaswegian thug boyfriend once. Don’t let tonight fool you: I’m usually particular whom I fuck.’
When I woke up the next day I felt pretty crap. I went to ’Pherson’s for a cut and shave and arranged for Twinkletoes to meet me there. Before I went to ’Pherson’s I ’phoned Hammer Murphy. I needed his okay for what I was about to do.
‘What’s to do?’ asked Twinkletoes cheerfully as he strained the suspension of my Atlantic climbing into the passenger seat. I smiled back, trying not to think of how easily he would just as cheerfully have used his bolt-cutters to take me down a shoe size.
‘Danny Dumfries. That’s what to do.’
‘What the fuck you want with him? He’s one of Murphy’s monkeys.’
‘I want to talk to him. More exactly I want him to talk to me. I need you to ease the conversation. And don’t worry, I’ve cleared it with Murphy.’
‘Okay. Just give me a minute.’ Twinkletoes got out of the car, went over to his Sunbeam and took a couple of things out of the boot. He squeezed back into my car even more awkwardly. There was something long and solid hidden in the folds of his raincoat.
The incongruous golden gleam of six hundred quid’s worth of Jowett Javelin parked outside the bleak facade of the club signalled that we would find Dumfries inside. Officially it was a working men’s club and run by a committee. That meant the police could only call by invitation, which in turn meant that regulated licensing hours was as alien a concept as men on Mars.
The reality was that Dumfries’s club was somewhere between a twenty-four-hour boozer and a brothel. There were a couple of rooms in the back that working girls could rent by the hour. The sexual endurance of Scotsmen meant you could squeeze a lot of business into an hour.
As soon as we entered the club we were plunged into dimly lit gloom. The unventilated room was dense with cigarette smoke, a fume of cheap whisky and the sweat of men engaged in the serious physical toil of around-the-clock drinking.
It was quiet as well as dark. When my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I could see Dumfries standing by the bar with a couple of toughs whom I guessed to be employees. There was a neglected snooker table at the back and five or six expert drinkers sat scattered around the place, oblivious to all but the glasses in front of them.
Danny Dumfries was a small, dark but good-looking man in his late thirties, dressed with impeccable taste. Dumfries and his clubs fell loosely into the orbit of Hammer Murphy’s empire, but Murphy allowed him a little more independence than he did his other ‘contractors’. If Dumfries had been fully part of the Murphy operation, I couldn’t have brought Twinkletoes into his club. As it was I had had to get clearance from Murphy before pulling a stunt like this.