I tried the door but it was locked and no one answered my knock. Smails was out, probably assisting Richard Avedon on an Audrey Hepburn shoot. I decided to come back later.
Jimmy Frater and I had got to know one another through a chance meeting in a bar on a foggy night. I hadn’t been in Glasgow long and we both stank a little of the war. It was one of these evenings where light chat reveals a common history, which turns into a gloomy recognition of a similarly damaged soul. The difference between us was that Frater had somehow managed to drag his life back onto some kind of track. He worked for the authority that ran the Port of Clyde and had proved to be a valuable asset on the odd occasion.
I ordered a pint of heavy for Frater and a rye whiskey for myself while I waited for him to arrive. Frater, unlike me, was the dependable, solid sort. I knew I could rely on him being on time for our meeting.
‘You get a chance to look at those codes I gave you?’ I asked after he had arrived.
‘Tell me you’re not up to something illegal, Lennox.’
‘I’m not up to something illegal,’ I said. ‘I’d tell you that anyway, of course, but in this case it happens to be true. In fact if I’m right about these codes, then I’ll be handing the information over to the police.’
‘Okay,’ Frater said, but didn’t look entirely convinced. ‘You were right. All of these relate to CCI shipments from the port. Three different ships, each appearing several times, but different manifests.’
‘What was the cargo?’
‘Machine parts. Mainly agricultural. Two shipments were oil drilling equipment. The one thing all of the shipments had in common was their destination. Aqaba, in Jordan. That help?’
‘Kinda,’ I said. Truth was it was a big help: proof of the Middle East connection I suspected.
I drank a few more with Frater, who made his apologies and said he had to get back to his wife and kids. That suited me because I wanted to catch Smails that night. The other reason was that nothing depressed me more than success and happiness.
Ronnie Smails’s studio was still in darkness when I arrived back. I guessed that he lived above the premises, but the first-floor flat was also unlit. I tried the studio door again and found it still locked.
I waited until a Corporation tram rattled past and cast a look up and down the street before turning my attention to the panel of four small glazed panes in the door. I picked at the putty around one of them and it crumbled to the touch. I set about easing the pane out of the door with my penknife. Eventually it came away and I squeezed my hand through and un-snibbed the door. With the blinds down, I reckoned it was okay to switch the lights on.
Whatever Smails’s talents as a photographer, he was never going to char for me. The studio was filthy and looked as if it hadn’t been swept out in a couple of months. I looked through some of the display drawers and found a collection of photographs. Mainly wedding and portrait pics, some of which were ancient. Smails’s trade was less than brisk.
I went through to the darkroom. There were several prints hanging on the line. All of them portrayed what tended to happen after the wedding ceremony. This was Smails’s real business. The commonality between the photographs was that they all illustrated the act of physical union between two or several individuals. The other common factor was that, for some inexplicable reason, the men all had kept their socks on.
I rifled through a steel cabinet and found more of the same predictable fuck and suck shots. But these were posed, not surreptitiously taken blackmail photos. There was one set of photographs that did, strangely, make me a little homesick. It was the most creatively conceived of the scenarios: a Canadian tableau in which a Mountie and a trapper were showing a young lady partially attired as an Eskimo the true meaning of what it meant to spear a beaver. I felt a tear in my eye and had to resist the temptation to burst into a chorus of Oh, Canada!
I was about to put the photographs back when I realized that the Eskimo Nell was familiar. To be honest, I hadn’t really been examining her face so I took a closer look. She was really quite pretty and I was sure I had seen her somewhere before, but in a completely different context. I pocketed one of the photographs that showed something of her face and put the rest back in the cabinet.
I went through the rest of the place and couldn’t find anything that fitted with extortion. Switching the lights out, I climbed the stairs to the apartment above. Maybe there was a hidey-hole up there. Again the flat was in darkness and I flicked the light switch. Nothing. I had to fumble along the hall until I found a standard lamp. It flooded the hall and the rooms off with an insipid, jaundiced light. Smails had obviously opted for a design motif that could best be described as Early Shithole. The place was filthy and smelly and I doubted that this was anybody that McGahern would get involved with.
I was wrong.
I found Smails in the living room. This time there had been no torture, just simple execution. He sat on a grubby clubchair, a long-cold cup of tea on the side table next to him and a cigarette between his fingers that had burned down and scorched unfeeling flesh. A copy of Spick magazine had slipped from his fingers and onto the floor at his feet. Smails obviously made a big effort to keep up to date with what was current in his profession.
I examined him more closely. His face showed all the signs of strangulation. He had been choked to death with the same width of garrotte as Arthur Parks. Unlike Parks, Smails hadn’t had any information worth torturing out of him and he had been killed swiftly and silently.
He maybe hadn’t told his killers anything, but he was telling me exactly what I wanted to know: he was a small man with greasy grey hair long overdue a cutting and his eyes were open and staring, as they would have been in life. But Smails had obviously had some kind of congenital defect: his right eyelid drooped over the eye. Just the way Bobby had described the ‘greasy wee shite’ he had seen Tam McGahern talking to shortly before he died.
Smails had been my man. I was now certain he had taken the photographs for the blackmail operation but I knew a search of the place would be futile: the pics and the negs would be long gone.
Parks dead. Smails dead. There were two other contacts that Tam McGahern had had before his demise: the fat Dutchman and Jackie Gillespie, the armed robber. I wondered if they were both still breathing.
Remembering my experience at Arthur Parks’s place, I decided to get out quick, just in case the cozzers were on their way again, maybe this time without bells and flashing lights. I paused long enough to wipe down with a handkerchief the surfaces and handles that I remembered touching. My fingerprints weren’t on record, but they were all over the Parks place and I didn’t want my dabs to be the link between two murder scenes. I switched all of the lights off and slipped out into the street.
I had had the sense not to park the Atlantic directly outside, mainly because I didn’t want to scare Smails off if he had returned while I was still inside. I was just about to turn the key in the ignition when a taxi stopped outside Smails. Two women got out. I couldn’t see them too well but as far as I could tell they were reasonably well put together and I guessed that they were a couple of Smails’s ‘models’. One paid the taxi driver, while the other rang Smails’s doorbell. I had locked the door and hastily tapped the small glass pane into place. The brass at the door called over to her chum, obviously to tell the taxi driver to wait. She rang again and rapped on the door. As far as I could see her knocking hadn’t dislodged the pane. She gave up and climbed back into the taxi.
I followed them across town. I had noticed that they weren’t cheaply dressed and they certainly weren’t concerned about the cost of the taxi. The dark-haired girl I’d seen knocking at Smails’s door got off at the Saltmarket. I decided to stick with the taxi. It headed south and we passed Hampden Stadium and eventually stopped outside a tenement in Mount Vernon. The girl got out and paid the taxi driver. Bingo: she was none other than Eskimo Nell. And now I remembered where I’d seen her before. She was the woman I’d twice seen Lillian Andrews with. I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible but it was difficult with so few cars on the street.