Читать книгу The Quaker - Liam McIlvanney - Страница 14

The train rocked to a halt. Alex Paton looked up from his paper and wiped a little porthole in the window’s condensation. There was an advert painted on a gable at the far side of the platform – UNCLE JOE’S MINT BALLS KEEP YOU ALL AGLOW – and he knew at once where they were. This was Wigan. This was properly north, where you started to feel you were nearly home. He put aside his paper and leaned back against the headrest, closing his eyes. The station announcer’s voice was muffled by the glass. It was now, Paton reckoned, 1963 or 64. No man on the moon. His father still alive in the single end on Hopehill Road. Bloody England hadn’t yet won the World Cup. The doors slammed, the whistle blew, and the train hauled off on its journey north. By the time they rolled into Glasgow Central in three hours’ time it would be 1959.

It was always 1959 in Glasgow and Paton was always nineteen. The ten years since he’d left for London fell away and the old life came back. He was Swifty from the Fleet, even the way he walked came back. The train from Euston was a time machine. You knew, of course, that life carried on in your absence but it was hard somehow to credit it. Glasgow would always be Glasgow, the sooty city where time stood still. Although, three hours later, as he shook himself awake with the train approaching Central, it was clear that this was no longer true. They were passing the Gorbals. Or where the Gorbals once stood. Now the Gorbals was a great bald prairie of mud. A single gas-lamp stood like a stunted tree and behind it rose the high flats, storey on storey, towers crowding each other with their broad square shoulders. They seemed to block out the light. He had to press his cheek against the window and crane right up to see the hard flat top of the nearest tower.

He checked his watch: plenty of time. He was back in Glasgow to look at a job. He lived in London now and he did jobs mainly in commuter towns in the stockbroker belt. Kent. Essex. He was good at what he did and seldom short on offers. You had to be selective, though. Paton never worked with the same crew more than twice, and he never did more than three jobs a year. He preferred a small number of big jobs to a large number of small ones. He also preferred not to work in Glasgow. In fact, you could call that a rule – in so far as rules applied to his line of work. But big jobs had been thin on the ground just of late and this Glasgow thing had seemed worth a look.

Now, as he folded his paper he wasn’t so sure. They said the ones who lasted longest were those who kept their work and home life separate. Don’t shit in your own nest. But was it still your nest if you’d flown it ten years back? Maybe in that case what mattered was the length of people’s memories, whether or not they still remembered you.

In the compartment, passengers were pulling on raincoats and gathering their bags. Paton liked to travel by train. When he came back to Glasgow – which wasn’t often – he took the slow train, not the express. He liked the rhythm of the journey, the carriages filling and draining and filling once more as local people made their short commutes and the train climbed up through the accents of England, through Oxford and the Midlands, up through Lancashire and Cumbria. Then over the border, Dumfries and then home.

Home? Paton pulled his holdall from the overhead rack as the carriage clanked across the Clyde and shunted under the great glass canopy of Central.

They remembered him all right. When his phone rang last week it took less than a second to place the voice. Dazzle from Hopehill Road. Stephen Dalziel. They’d known each other since they were six years old. They lived in the same street, went through St Roch’s together, ran in the Fleet, tanned a few sub-post offices, shared their hundred days of borstal. ‘Hoosey,’ Paton remembered with a smile; that was what you called it; Daein’ hoosey. They got tattooed on the same day at Terry’s: a lion rampant on the shoulder for Dazzle; a wee swallow on the back of each hand for Paton. They hadn’t spoken in ten years but Paton could picture the dark-brown eyes, the yellow shine of Dazzle’s buzzcut, the purple acne scarring round the mouth. A job had come up, Dazzle told him. A job requiring particular skills.

Before the train had properly stopped, Paton had his arm through the pull-down window of the door, wrenching the handle.

He walked out briskly, the holdall tight to his side. The concourse was quiet. He left the station by the Hope Street exit and walked up Waterloo Street. At the junction with Pitt Street he flagged a cab and gave the driver the address of a small hotel on Argyle Street.

The sun was out for once, and the men on Bothwell Street had their jackets slung over their shoulders, hooked on one finger. It didn’t look too shabby, the old place, not when the sun was shining.

The desk clerk at the Parkside Hotel was a fat, pale youth with thinning Brylcreemed hair. Paton paid in advance, letting the clerk glimpse the crisp English banknotes in his wallet. A radio was playing in the back office and a vaguely cabbagey smell was coming from somewhere.

‘Up from London?’ the clerk said. The flesh of his neck bulged over the tightly buttoned collar. Paton wanted to reach over and flip the top button with his finger and thumb, let the pressure off those veins.

Paton nodded.

‘Long journey, sir.’ The clerk pursed his plump lips. ‘You’ll be tired.’

Paton nodded. He scooped his key from the desk and turned to go.

‘Could I arrange for something in the way of relaxation?’

Paton stopped. He bounced the key in his hand a couple of times. ‘What did you have in mind?’

The clerk saw that he’d made a mistake. His eyebrows dropped. A pink sliver of tongue came out and wetted his lips. ‘Something from the bar, perhaps. A wee reviver? Small whisky?’

Paton held the clerk’s wavering gaze. ‘I’ll take a rain check on that.’

His room was on the second floor. A bed, a desk, a spindly chair. A tiny etching on the wall showed the spire of the university through the trees of Kelvingrove Park. He crossed to close the curtains. He opened the wardrobe to the silvery jangle of coat-hangers and hung up his jacket and trousers and shirt and lay on the bed in his Y-fronts and vest. There were still two hours before Dazzle’s driver was due to pick him up. A walk in the park? A swift half in one of the teuchter pubs on Argyle Street? In the end, he dozed on the candlewick bedspread and studied the cornicing.

‘You’ll see changes, all right.’ They were driving through Anderston, heading west. The pillars of the new motorway bridge loomed up in the darkness. The driver had introduced himself as Bobby Stokes.

‘How do you know Dazzle, then, Bobby?’

Stokes frowned. ‘I don’t. Not really. I know him through Cursiter. Cursiter’s the muscle. You’ll meet him.’

They passed the Kelvin Hall on the left-hand side, the Art Gallery looming on the right.

‘So what’s the job?’

Stokes took his time overtaking a bus. Paton thought he hadn’t heard. Eventually Stokes said, ‘Better let Dazzle fill you in on that.’

‘I get it.’ Paton wound down the window to flick his cigarette-end. ‘You’re the driver.’

The driver took him to a tenement block in Scotstoun. Two flights up. Dazzle answered the door and showed them through to the living room where a great bear of a man in a brown leather jacket was squeezed into a chair at a round Formica-topped table. Paton and Stokes joined him. It looked like a card game without any cards.

‘You’ve met Bobby,’ Dazzle said to Paton. ‘This is Brian Cursiter.’

The big man put his hand out as if for an arm-wrestle. Paton shook it. There was a bottle of White Horse on the table and a stack of upturned tumblers. Paton reached for the bottle and filled out a measure of whisky.

Dazzle rose and went through to the kitchen, returning with a four pack of tinnies, McEwan’s Export. He passed them out.

Paton sipped his whisky, set his glass on the table.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Fill me in. What’s the mark?’

‘Glendinnings.’ Dazzle pulled the ring on his beer-can and the contents fizzed over: he clamped his mouth to the opening and slurped.

‘The auctioneer’s? They still on the go?’

‘What, you think the world stops because you’ve fucked off to London?’

The others laughed. Paton sipped his whisky and waited. Dazzle wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and started to explain the job. Glendinnings was an old-school auction house in the city centre. It was also, according to Dazzle, the agent for a forthcoming contents sale. Big house in Perthshire, one of the shooting estates. The owners had died; now the son in London was selling it off, lock, stock and barrel. There were some paintings that had the valuers excited – a Raeburn and an early Peploe – but the good stuff was the jewels. Diamonds, mainly. Pearls. Bit of gold. They had an insider, a girl in the office. Cursiter knew her. (At this point the big bloke tipped two fingers in a mock salute.) The plan was to hit the place a week from now, just after midnight on the night before the sale. The nightwatchman was sixty-something, ex-army, bad hip, walked with a limp. Sometimes the firm gave him a short-term deputy in the run-up to a big sale. The stones would be in the safe in the MD’s office.

‘What about access?’

Dazzle smiled and jerked his head towards Cursiter, who was slouching down in his seat and working his fingers into the ticket pocket of his jeans. In a minute he was holding up a Yale key between his thumb and forefinger. It looked like a pin in his massive hand. He snapped it down on the desk.

‘Basement door,’ he said, grinning. ‘We just walk in at midnight. No fuss. No drama. The night before the auction.’

Paton sipped his whisky.

‘Bath Street, right?’

‘Aye.’

‘So it’s central. Good chance of being spotted. Some busybody clocks a light.’

‘It’s all commercial, though,’ Dazzle said. ‘Round there. There’s nothing residential for five or six blocks.’

‘And the security’s just the two bodies – we’re sure about this?’

They all turned to Cursiter ‘That’s max. Could be just the old fella on his own.’

‘Do we have a plan of the building? Do we know the layout?’

‘Jenny’ll get one.’

Paton nodded. The others said nothing, they were waiting for the verdict. He twisted his whisky glass on the tabletop, turned back to Cursiter. ‘This your girlfriend?’

‘Who?’

‘Your insider. The secretary.’

‘She’s the cashier. No, she’s not my girlfriend.’

‘You’ve fucked her, though, right?’

‘Yeah. I mean, twice. Three times.’

Paton was nodding. ‘So they can link to you from her.’

‘Naw, that’s—’

‘And they can link to us from you.’

‘No! Look. It’s not like that. Nobody knows.’

‘Nobody knows what – that you fucked her?’

‘That’s what I’m saying.’

‘Explain it to me. What’s your name – Brian? Explain it to me, Brian. How did you meet her?’

Cursiter looked at Dazzle; Dazzle nodded. Cursiter planted his elbows on the table. ‘Jenny McIndoe she’s called. Nice lassie. She does the day-job at Glendinnings but works nights in a hotel out near Drymen. Used to have lock-ins. I took her upstairs a couple of times.’

‘When the bar was empty?’

‘What?’

‘You said nobody saw you. You took her upstairs when the bar was empty?’

‘Not empty. But nobody knew who I was. It was just mugs. Old guys from the village. Some hikers maybe. They didn’t know me from Adam.’

‘And you never met her outside the hotel?’

‘Never.’

‘Who said romance was dead? And how did she know you were in the market for information, Brian? Information about jewellery auctions. Since nobody knew who you were.’

Cursiter shrugged. ‘We got talking.’

‘Yeah.’ Paton drained his whisky. ‘That’s what I figured.’

The others were quiet. There was a scratching at the inner door, the high tragic whine of a lonely dog.

Paton smoked his cigarette. ‘She know what kind it is?’

‘What kind what is?’

‘The safe. What make.’

‘I don’t know. Does it matter?’

Paton looked round the table. ‘Well, you boys certainly know your business.’

‘Fuck you then.’ Cursiter reared back, one arm swinging loose behind his chair. ‘Mister Bigtime fucking London. You don’t want in? There’s the door.’

‘Hey, now. Come on.’ Dazzle was on his feet. Paton was grinning at the floor and shaking his head, stubbing his smoke out in the ashtray. He stood up, lifted his jacket.

‘Well, come on, Dazzle.’ Cursiter was pouring himself another shot. ‘We need this kind of attitude? We need this kind of shit?’

‘Nice meeting you fellows. Mr Dalziel: I’ll see you again.’

Paton was ruing it all. The trip from London, the hotel room, wasting time with these losers. Ice heist at an auctioneer’s? A sub-post office was more in their line. Screwing meters. Fucking bubble-gum machines. He shrugged into his jacket.

‘Hold on, Alex. Brian.’ Dazzle was pointing at Cursiter. ‘Number one: shut the fuck up. You’re not running this job: I am. Number two—’ he pointed at Paton – ‘Alex: hear the man out. You’ve come this far.’

Paton picked at something on the shoulder of his jacket. He shrugged, took his seat, reached for his smokes. ‘What’s the take, then?’

‘Big.’ Cursiter was still rankled, touchy. ‘Big. Don’t worry about that.’

‘They might be different things, friend. Your idea of big. My idea of big. You got a figure?’

‘Hundred grand. Minimum.’

They all looked at Paton.

Paton smoked.

‘We’d need another man.’

Dazzle frowned, looked around the others in turn. ‘It’s a four-man job, Alex. It’s all worked out.’

‘Is it?’ All the glasses were empty now and Paton stood up and moved them into the centre of the table. ‘Stokes is in the car, right?’ He moved one of the glasses to the edge of the table. ‘The rest of us go in through the basement door. We need a man on the door. In case someone decides to stick their nose in.’ He lifted another glass and smacked it down in the centre of the table. ‘We move down the corridor and deal with the watchman. Lover Boy here’ – Cursiter was the whisky bottle, and Paton slid it along the table a foot or so – ‘stays with the watchman. Or watchmen. That leaves Dazzle and me.’ Paton pinched the final two glasses between his finger and thumb and lifted them with a trilling click and placed them down at his side of the table. ‘We go on to the office. I do the safe. Dazzle’s spare, in case something comes up. Troubleshooter. But we need another man on the door.’

Dazzle looked at the other two with his eyebrows raised and Cursiter pouted and Stokes shrugged and Dazzle spread his arms. ‘Fine, Alex. Good. We get another man. Anything else?’

‘Aye.’ Paton moved the glasses back to their original positions. He sat down and reached for the bottle and filled his own glass. He pushed the bottle into the centre of the table. ‘The timing’s wrong.’

‘Timing’s not – there’s no leeway, Alex. Stuff only gets there the day before. It has to be the tenth.’

‘I don’t mean the date. I mean the time. We don’t go in at midnight. We do it in the morning. Before anyone arrives.’

Cursiter reached for the bottle and filled the glasses and waited for Paton to explain.

‘You don’t need all night to do a safe. Do it in half an hour if you can do it at all. We’re wearing boiler suits, toolbelts, we’re a crew of sparkies, plumbers, whatever. When it’s over we walk out the front door, to the van parked down the street. This way, we’re only over the railings on the way in, not the way out. Cuts down the risk.’

Stokes was playing with the zipper on his Harrington jacket, running it up and down. ‘So, you’re saying we wear masks? Is that the idea?’

‘No masks. We don’t need masks. We’re a crew of workies. We’re four guys in boiler suits. We’re invisible. We’re not trying to hide, we’re not skulking about looking dodgy, so no one’s paying attention. It’s like four cops: you remember the uniform, you don’t remember the faces or the hair or anything else.’

At this point the door handle clanged and the kitchen door swung open. The dog came skidding triumphantly into the room and stopped, its head raised, abruptly self-conscious, like a bull entering the bull-ring. It looked at the faces and trotted straight over to Paton and plumped its chin down on his thigh, twitching its brows. Paton drew his hand across the animal’s head, feeling the smooth curved cap of the skull under the fur, and flattened the ears. Then he scratched the loose skin under the dog’s jaw and the tail whacked against the carpet.

‘Looks like we’ve found the fifth man,’ Dazzle said.

Paton stroked the dog as he talked.

‘We need a van. We need walkie-talkies. We need boiler suits, workboots, toolbelts. Balaclavas. We need some sort of decal or paint job on the side of the van, Such-and-such Electricians or Plumbers.’

Dazzle was writing it down. He finished with a flourish and tossed the pen down on the table.

‘Right. Fine. We’ll get to it.’

‘Van’s the priority.’

‘Fine. We lift one on the night before the job. Easy.’

Stokes shook his head. ‘I like to know what I’m driving, Daz. How it handles. You don’t want surprises.’

‘So drive it around on the night. Get the feel of it. A van’s a van.’

Paton was still clapping the dog. He rubbed its belly and the creature emitted a high voluptuous whine. ‘Stokes is right,’ Paton said. ‘You don’t steal a van on the night before a job. Use your head, Daz. The owner gets up for a piss at 2 a.m., opens the curtains to check on his van. The van’s gone. He reports it stolen. Patrol car clocks it parked in Bath Street at six in the morning. We’re fucked before we start. You don’t do a job in a stolen van.’

‘What, then?’

‘We buy one. Now. Tomorrow. Give Stokes time to drive it, break it in.’

‘We buy it. We buy it?’ Cursiter was incredulous. ‘You’re that keen to go about buying vans, it comes out of your end.’

Paton looked at Dazzle. Dazzle shrugged.

‘You planning to walk home, are you?’ Paton turned to Cursiter. ‘After the job. Take a bus? Maybe wait for a taxi? We buy a van, it comes out of everyone’s slice. If the payoff’s what you say it is, it won’t make any difference.’

‘Aye but there’s other outlays, overheads.’

Paton waited. The other three exchanged a look. Dazzle spoke.

‘He means McGlashan.’

Paton had moved to London before John McGlashan took over from Eddie Lumsden. He knew who McGlashan was. He just didn’t see the relevance.

‘You’ve got your own arrangement there. That’s your business, you do what you like with your share. Dazzle: you call another meet in three days when you’ve got the gear ready, the plan of the building. Not here, though. We meet someplace else.’

Paton scooped his cigarettes from the table and stowed them in his jacket pocket.

‘Actually, hold on here.’ Cursiter’s big hand was raised. ‘We all kick in for the van but you don’t kick up to Glash?’

‘The van’s a necessity. It’s part of the job.’

‘McGlashan’s a necessity, mate. McGlashan’s a fucking necessity. Round here.’

‘I don’t live round here, Brian.’ Paton buttoned his jacket. ‘I live in London. Mr McGlashan will have to visit London if he wants to collect.’

‘He might do that,’ Cursiter said. ‘He might just do that. Everyone kicks up to McGlashan, fella. Sooner or later. Some way or other.’

Paton shrugged. The dog got up and trotted across the floor and lay down in front of the dead electric fire.

‘So you’re in?’ Dazzle’s chin lifted in challenge. Everyone looked at Paton.

Paton frowned. He’d been looking for a reason to say no and he couldn’t find one.

‘Kinda looks that way, doesn’t it?’

‘He-e-ey!’ Dazzle snatched up the whisky and twirled off the cap, but Paton clamped his palm across his glass.

‘One thing.’ He looked at each face in turn and then back to Dazzle. ‘Why’s McGlashan not moving on this himself? Why’s he leaving it to you boys?’

For a moment nobody spoke. Paton had the feeling they had discussed this question before he came, worked out how much to tell him.

‘He’s not been himself.’ It was Dazzle who spoke. ‘He thinks the polis are watching him. He’s been cagey. For months now. Everyone’s frightened to move. Do anything. Till this gets sorted out. This Jack the Ripper shit.’

‘But they’re not watching you?’

‘They’re not watching him, probably. He’s just paranoid. Anyway, who’d watch us, Swifty? We’re not a big enough deal. We’re the waifs and strays, mate. Slip through the cracks.’

Stokes turned to Paton. ‘The Quaker, they’re calling him.’

‘London, Bobby,’ Paton said. ‘I live in London. Not the moon. We get the papers down there.’

He removed his hand and Dazzle poured the shots and they all clinked glasses and drank.

Ten minutes later, he sat in the passenger seat of Stokes’s Zodiac, thinking it through. He liked to hole up after a job was done, get off the streets fast and go to ground for three or four days. The hotel was no good.

‘I’ll need a place,’ Paton said. ‘Somewhere quiet.’

Stokes nodded. ‘For afterwards, like? I know a guy can probably help. Want me to set it up?’

There was a black market in houses. Everyone knew this. Glasgow never had enough houses and the clearing of the slums had only made things worse. There was an underground trade in vacant flats in buildings slated for demolition. Families would scrape together a couple of hundred quid for the keys to a room-and-kitchen in a condemned tenement. They’d get a few months’ breathing space before the wrecking crews arrived, give them time to get something else sorted. That would be fine. A flat in a condemned block would be just the ticket.

He took Stokes’s number when they pulled up outside the hotel. ‘Set it up then, Bobby. I’ll be in touch.’