The Long Glasgow Kiss Read Free

– instead I drove along Great Western Road and turned into Byres Road, taking a random right into a silent residential street lined with sandstone tenements and semi-detached houses, soot-stained darker than the night sky above them. The lights in my mirror held back as far as they could without losing me, but nonetheless followed my arbitrary route. Again completely at random, I pulled up outside a tenement, stepped out of the Atlantic, locked the door and walked with a sense of purpose into the tenement close.
    The car drove past. An Austin. One of the big jobs. Black or dark grey. The kind the police cruised around in. I saw a driver and passenger, but I couldn’t make out either figure other than that one of them had shoulders to make Atlas jealous. Small Change MacFarlane was a big enough fish all right, but I didn’t see why his case warranted so much attention. I didn’t see why I warranted so much attention from the police, given my tangential involvement. The car cruised around the corner and I heard the synchromesh get a grinding as it did a three-point somewhere out of sight. Stepping out of the shadows, I went back to my car and leaned against the wing, my arms folded, patiently waiting for the unmarked police car to drift around the corner. Sometimes I can be too smart for my own good.
    The Austin reappeared and pulled up next to me. It was a Sheerline; too fancy for the police. Something vast and dark unfolded from the passenger seat and cast an improbably large shadow in the lamplight.
    ‘Hello again, Mr Lennox …’ Twinkletoes McBride said in his earth-rumbling baritone and smiled at me. I straightened up from the wing of the Atlantic. This was interesting.
    ‘Twinkletoes? What are you doing here? I thought it was the police. Why are you tailing me?’
    ‘You’ll have to ask Mr Sneddon that,’ he said earnestly. ‘I’m sure he can elucidate you.’ Twinkletoes pronounced every syllable deliberately: ee-loos-ih-date .
    ‘Still reading the Reader’s Digest I see,’ I said amiably.
    ‘I’m improving my word power …’ Twinkletoes beamed. I imagined how much more interesting his expanded vocabulary would make the experience of having your toes lopped off with bolt cutters – Twinkletoes’ speciality as a torturer and the origin of his nickname. Or ehh-pee-thett as he would probably call it.
    ‘An expressive vocabulary is a true treasure,’ I smiled.
    ‘You’re not fucking wrong there, Mr Lennox.’
    ‘Mr Sneddon wants to see me now?’ I asked. I unlocked my car. ‘I’ll follow you.’
    Twinkletoes stopped smiling. He swung the back door of the Sheerline open. ‘We’ll bring you back to your car. Afterwards. If that isn’ae in-con-veen-ee-ent .’
    ‘Okay,’ I said, as if he was doing me a favour. But the thought did run through my head that I might return unable to count to twenty on my fingers and toes.
    Twinkletoes McBride may have been sadistic and psychopathically violent to order, but at least he was a friendly sort of cuss. The same couldn’t have been said of the driver of the Humber, a thin, meagre and nasty-looking thug with bad skin and an over-oiled Teddy Boy cut. I’d seen him before, lurking menacingly in the presence of Willie Sneddon. To give him due credit, lurking menacingly was something he did extremely well and it made up for his lack of conversational skills.
    We drove out of the city, west, passing through Clydebank and out along the road to Dumbarton. The only car on the road. The ugly tenements eventually gave way to open country and I began to feel uneasy. A free taxi ride from Twinkletoes McBride in itself was enough to make you wary, but knowing who had summoned your presence was enough to start the lower parts of your digestive anatomy twitching. Twinkletoes was one of Willie Sneddon’s henchmen. Willie Sneddon was the King of the Southside – one of the so-called Three Kings who ran almost all the crime worth running in Glasgow. Willie Sneddon was