Dead Men and Broken Hearts: A Lennox Thriller (Lennox 4) Read Free

The main impression I got from the photograph was that this was the kind of face most people would take as that of a pleasant, honest man. But I had learned not to take honesty at face value.
    Thanking her for the picture, I then questioned her further about her husband’s routine: the usual times he came home or went out, and so on. I took down the addresses of his business premises, his golf club, the number of his car. I dressed up with professional procedure the patent impertinence of snooping into another human being’s private life.
    When we were finished I thanked Mrs Ellis and she thanked me and I walked her out into the stairwell. She thanked me once more and said goodbye. As she did so, she failed to hide the resentment and hatred in her eyes. At the end of it all, I was the man who, with a single bright, hard truth, could bring her marriage to an end.
    Divorce work.
    Sometimes I missed the plain honesty of gangsters, thugs and back-alley dealings.

CHAPTER TWO
     
    I got out of bed, crossed to the window and opened the curtains. It was raining heavily on Glasgow. I tried to contain my shock.
    I had recently read a short story by an American science fiction writer about space travellers stranded on a planet where it never stopped raining and who, unless they found ‘sun domes’, were driven to insanity and murder by the endless precipitation thundering down on them. I wondered if the author had ever spent a Bank Holiday long weekend in the West of Scotland.
    ‘Do you want a cigarette?’ I asked, looking out at a dull, rainy late-October Glasgow that looked pretty much the same as a dull, rainy early-August Glasgow. The seasons were mitigated here: by the Gulf Stream and by the sooty blanket of smoke belched out by the city’s tenements and heavy industry. Glasgow did not have a four-season climate. Unless you counted those times when we got all four seasons in one day.
    Fiona White, my landlady for three years and lover for one, eased herself up onto her elbows, allowing the bed sheet to slip from her breasts before recovering it and them. She shook her head. She smoked rarely these days. Or smiled.
    ‘I’d better go. Back downstairs. The girls will be home in half-an-hour.’ Her daughters, Elspeth and Margaret, were due to return from school. This had become an afternoon ritual for usevery Tuesday and Thursday: an hour stolen behind drawn curtains. Fiona looked tired and her voice was dull: her passion spent and that hint of guilt or sadness or both that I had increasingly noticed in her tone. Fiona White was unlike almost all of the women I’d been with. For her, sex was something that belonged only within marriage; and that was exactly the way it had been for her until the German Navy had intervened and sent her husband to the bottom of the Atlantic, condemning Fiona to a life of stretched means and lonely evenings contemplating over too many sherries a future stripped bare of its promise.
    Then I had come along.
    As a way of trying to make far-apart ends meet, Fiona White had converted the family home on Great Western Road into two dwellings: upper and lower apartments accessed through the same front door. I had taken the upper flat. True, initially the attraction had been as much to landlady as accommodations, but I had remained respectful and had made no move on her. This was something that, at the time, had perplexed me. It reeked of rectitude and morality, character traits that I long assumed had gone missing-in-action during my war service.
    My intentions towards women had not, it had to be said, been noted for their nobility. But Fiona White seemed to bring out an older me – or younger me, depending on how you looked at it. A pre-War, pre-Glasgow, pre-Fucked-Up me.
    Thing was, I didn’t know what kind of Fiona White I brought out in her.
    ‘Are you okay?’ I asked.
    ‘I’m fine,’ she said, but in a tone that didn’t put my mind much at ease. She got up and began to dress. I watched her.