Craig Russell’s novels have been published in twenty-five languages, four have been made into major films in Germany, in one of which he has a cameo role as a detective. He has won the CWA Dagger in the Library and the McIlvanney Prize (for which he has been shortlisted another twice), and has previously been shortlisted for the CWA Golden Dagger, the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger, and the SNCF Prix Polar in France. A former police officer, Craig Russell is the only non-German to have been awarded the Polizeistern - the Hamburg Police‘s Police Star.

When not writing, Craig Russell paints, cooks and reads, but not simultaneously.

By Craig Russell

Lennox series

Lennox

The Long Glasgow Kiss

The Deep Dark Sleep

Dead Men and Broken Hearts

The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid

Fabel series

Ghosts of Altona

And coming in 2019…

The Devil Aspect

CONSTABLE

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Quercus

This edition published in Great Britain in 2019 by Constable

Copyright Craig Russell, 2012

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-47213-097-6

Constable

An imprint of

Little, Brown Book Group

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK Company

www.hachette.co.uk

www.littlebrown.co.uk

For Wendy

CHAPTER ONE

‘Who, where or what is “Tanglewood”?’

It was a simple question and, given the circumstances, an entirely reasonable and necessary one. Neither I nor my soon-to-be-client were filled with dread at my utterance of those six innocent words.

The thing is, though, we should have been.

Nineteen Fifty-six, the year that was winding up, may have been a bad year for the British Empire but had, for me, been a good one business-wise. Not as lucrative as some of its predecessors, admittedly, but for the first time in years the buck I was turning was completely honest. It had been a full thirteen months since I had done any work for any one of the Three Kings, Glasgow Underworld’s answer to Caesar, Pompey and Crassus, and I hadn’t gotten into any real tangles.

The last tangle, however, had ended in a way that could have had me stretching a length of hangman’s hemp. An experience like that increased the appeal of the straight and narrow.

Since then, I had decided to keep a profile that was as legitimate as it was low. Most of the work I now did was gathering evidence for divorce cases, security work, or snooping about for companies or lawyers. Divorce in 1950s Scotland was a protracted, painful and Rhadamanthine process; meaning it offered a great opportunity for turning a profit. I had taken help on full time: Archie McClelland, the ex-City of Glasgow Police beat man, who did most of the court work for me. Courtrooms made me nervous, especially when some smart-ass lawyer started to call into question my credentials as a witness. Some things don’t bear a great deal of scrutiny. My past was definitely one of them.

The most important thing was that it had been quite a while since I’d found myself wrestling with a thug, looking down a gun barrel or fending off some Teddy Boy armed with a tyre lever, knuckleduster or switchblade. That was one thing I could say about divorce cases: bursting in on unfaithful husbands in flagrante with their secretaries meant that the only weapons you tended to find being waved in your direction pretty rapidly lost their ability to bruise.

‘I don’t know,’ Pamela Ellis said in answer to my question. ‘I don’t even know if Tanglewood is a who, a where, or a what.’

‘But you overheard him say it, so you must have heard it in the context of a sentence, something to give us a clue.’

‘All I heard Andrew say was the word “Tanglewood”. He was on the telephone and I heard him say “Got it. Tanglewood.” Then the person at the other end of the line must have been speaking – for quite a time – and then Andrew just said “okay” and hung up the receiver.’

‘And then he went out?’

‘Then he went out. He left a note on the hall table, by the telephone, saying he had been called out to a customer and he wouldn’t be back until very late, and that he would get something to eat while he was out.’

‘And you were where?’

‘In the lounge,’ she said. They had lounges in Bearsden. Not parlours or living rooms; lounges. ‘I had come back early and he didn’t know I was in the house. He came in through the front door, made the call on the hall telephone, then left again.’

I leaned back in my chair. Pamela Ellis was a woman loitering uncertainly on the threshold of middle age, as if undecided whether she should simply surrender to the thickening of waist and hip and answer the call of tweed and stout shoes. It was clear that she had once been pretty, and was still a handsome woman, but there was a weariness that seemed to hang about her. She had called into my third-floor office in Gordon Street without having first made an appointment. It was the kind of thing that I decided I should discourage by telling my secretary to send away anyone who turned up without an appointment. But I’d have to start by hiring a secretary.

‘And he came back when?’

‘Late. I stayed up for him and he didn’t get back till eleven. He’d been gone for over five hours.’

‘And how was he with you when he got home?’

‘Fine. Well, you wouldn’t expect him to be anything else.’

‘And you were fine with him?’

‘I tried to be as normal as possible . . . You know, as if I didn’t suspect anything.’

‘We don’t know yet that there is anything to suspect. Did he offer any further explanation for where he had been?’

‘He said it had had something to do with work. Someone needing an estimate. That’s what he’s been saying about all the times he disappears: that it’s to do with work.’

‘You do know, Mrs Ellis, that there is every chance that it is all exactly as innocent as that?’

‘I know. I want to believe that . . . and it really could be business. It’s just that he’s been so strange lately. Usually, when he gets home from work, he just relaxes. Sits and chats with me. I mean, demolition isn’t the kind of business you do out of office hours. The customers Andrew usually deals with are councils or building firms needing a site cleared. And he has salesmen to deal with most of that side of things anyway. But it’s not just him going out in the evening at short notice that’s worrying me, it’s the way he is when he’s at home, too; the way he’s withdrawn into himself. When he isn’t out, he’s so quiet. Sometimes he just sits for an hour, staring at the fire and saying nothing. It’s just not like him. He has this shed, you see, in the garden. He used to spend hours there, tinkering with stuff. If ever I go into it to borrow something, I always forget to lock the shed behind me. Andrew is always giving me rows about that, but now he’s hardly in there. Just sits moping by the fire. The other thing is that I can’t find any notes.’

‘Notes?’

‘Andrew is incredibly organized. Actually, that’s not true . . . he’s terribly disorganized and forgetful, so he writes everything down. Makes notes about everything – every meeting, every new client’s name, every appointment time or figure quoted. He uses notebooks mainly, but I’m always finding notes on scraps of paper. You see, that’s the thing . . . there’s nothing about these meetings and there’s never been any note referring to “Tanglewood”. I’m telling you, Mr Lennox, the fact that he is making such an effort not to put anything down is suspicious in its own right.’

‘When he goes out, is it always for five or six hours?’

‘Not always. Sometimes he’s only gone an hour. Other times it’s five hours. It never seems to be anything in between. There is one odd thing, though, about the longer disappearances . . .’

‘Oh?’

‘He takes a pair of heavy boots with him. I mean, he often takes wellington boots with him if he’s visiting a site, but not his heavy boots.’

I nodded, taking it all in. ‘Is there anything that you can think of that might be bothering him?’ I asked. ‘Preying on his mind?’

‘No, nothing that I can think of. He’s annoyed about all of this carry-on in Hungary at the moment. He listens to the news and it seems to make him worse, but there’s something more than that going on in his head.’

‘I think it’s safe to say that annoyance at current affairs doesn’t explain his behaviour being quite so odd,’ I said.

‘No. It doesn’t. Nothing does.’

‘So that’s why you suspect it could be another woman?’

She shrugged. ‘I just don’t know. I can’t think what else it could be.’

‘Listen, Mrs Ellis . . . far be it from me to try to talk you out of giving me work, but before you do hire me, you’ve got to think about where this may lead you. Let’s say your husband is carrying on an affair with another woman and we manage to prove that . . . what then? Do you want to divorce your husband if we prove he’s been unfaithful? It’s a messy, unpleasant business.’

‘You can take it to a divorce case?’ she asked, perplexed. She clearly had not thought the process through to its natural conclusion.

‘I can recommend a lawyer and I – or at least my associate, Mr Archibald McClelland – can appear in court to provide evidence of infidelity, should we find it. My point is that it is a huge step to take – and a difficult one. Sometimes, I’m afraid to say, ignorance really can be bliss. If you want to walk away from this now, I would fully understand.’

I always gave clients this opportunity to consider their options. Of those options, divorce was the toughest and messiest one. Divorce in Britain generally was a difficult and sordid affair, and particularly so in staunchly Presbyterian Scotland. At the end of the war, the divorce rate had rocketed, reaching an all-time record in Forty-seven. It was all the sad result of men coming back broken or bitter or altered and dropped straight back into a society that no longer made much sense to them. Sometimes there would be evidence – often living, breathing, nappy-wearing evidence – of a wife’s infidelity.

Ten years after the war was over, it was still claiming casualties, but casualties of battles fought in the divorce courts. I had a theory about it all – as I tended to have about most things. The Great Lennox Theory of Divorce Law was that the government and the law lords went out of their way not to modernize divorce laws that were woefully in need of reform; and the reason for their reluctance to make the process easier was some deep fear that the very fabric of British society was in danger of coming apart. They should have come to Glasgow, I had often thought, to see how threadbare and tattered that fabric was at the best of times.

Pamela Ellis thought about what I had said for a moment, frowning. Then, decisively, she said, ‘No. No, Mr Lennox, I need to know. I don’t know what I’ll do if you find anything. Maybe I’ll just confront him about it. Or maybe I’ll not say anything. But at least I’ll know. At least I’ll have found out for sure.’

I smiled. ‘That’s your decision, Mrs Ellis. Can you tell me some more about your husband, please? Personal history, habits . . . anything that might help me build a picture of Andrew Ellis.’

‘Oh, I don’t know . . . Andrew’s an ordinary kind of man, really. Someone I’ve always felt, well, comfortable with. I mean, that’s partly why I find his behaviour of late so disturbing. It’s so unlike him to be anything other than ordinary. He doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink much . . . he’s not much of a one for the pub. Work is everything to him. That and his home life . . .’ She choked on the last part and clearly struggled to keep a lid on her emotions. But she managed. Ten years of living in Scotland had shown me the Scots were world champions at keeping a lid on emotions.

‘Do you have any children?’

She shook her head. ‘We tried, but we can’t.’

‘What about work?’ I asked. ‘How did Mr Ellis get into the demolition business?’

‘He was in the RAOC and then the Royal Engineers during the war. Bomb disposal to start with then demolition. Andrew always said that he spent half his time stopping things blowing up and then the other half making them blow up.’

‘Officer?’

‘NCO. He was a volunteer. He had been exempt from the call-up, but he wanted to serve so he volunteered.’

‘Because he was in a reserved occupation?’ I asked. A lot of Glaswegians had dodged the bullet of wartime conscription, sometimes more than metaphorically, because they worked in essential industries such as the shipyards or munitions.

‘No. No it wasn’t that. Andrew had to go through all of these panels and interviews when it came out about his family background.’

‘I’m sorry, what do you mean, “family background”?’

‘Andrew’s parents were Hungarian,’ she explained. ‘They changed their name to Ellis from Elès. They came over after the Great War. That’s why he was so upset about all of this trouble in Hungary. Andrew has never thought of himself as anything other than a Glaswegian, a Scot. But when he volunteered to serve his country, he suddenly found himself being treated as a foreigner. Worse than that, they treated him as a potential enemy alien because Hungary was an Axis power.’

‘But he got in.’

‘Only by volunteering to train for bomb disposal. It was dangerous work and there was a shortage of volunteers.’

‘I can imagine . . .’ I said. I had myself had an encounter with a German grenade that had been some way distant, and with one of my men between me and it. The long-term result of this confrontation had been the faint web of pale scars on my right cheek, still visible every morning in the shaving mirror. The bomb boys got a lot more up close and intimate with munitions than I had been and it took a special kind of cool. Or stupidity. ‘And after the war he set up business using the skills he’d learned?’ I asked.

‘After he was demobbed, Andrew went to work for Hall’s Demolitions. That’s where I met him. I worked in the office, you see. He went straight in as an ordnance handler because of his war experience and was team boss in no time. But then, when old man Hall died, Andrew couldn’t work with his son so he went out on his own.’

‘And you went with him?’

‘I did all the paperwork when the business was small. I left when the business became established and we took on staff.’

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Ellis, but I have to ask: has your husband had any affairs in the past, or behaved with women in a way that has caused you concern?’

‘Never.’

‘So why now?’

‘Like I told you, he’s changed. He’s different . . . preoccupied, I suppose, like there’s something weighing on his mind. Almost like he’s haunted.’

I nodded. Haunted was a look that a lot of men who’d been in the war had. But it didn’t tend to be something that came on suddenly a decade later, like delayed shock.

‘Could he be worried about the business?’

She shook her head. ‘No, business has been good. Andrew’s got a lot of contracts from the Corporation. You know, clearing slums for new flats.’

‘I guess it’s a boom time for that . . .’ I said, and grinned. She either didn’t get the gag or chose not to, which I couldn’t blame her for – it was a pretty lame gag. But I did see that there would be a lot of demolition work available: Glasgow Corporation was in the process of blasting more Glaswegian real estate out of existence than the Luftwaffe had managed. The Future, apparently, was High-Rise. Hundreds of Glaswegian families now stood staring in slack-jawed amazement at toilets that they didn’t need to go outside to use. And that they didn’t need to share with five other families.

‘Could he be worried about something else? You don’t think there could be some kind of medical concern that he’s not telling you about?’

‘I doubt it. Andrew’s one of the healthiest people I know.’

‘I see,’ I said, and tried to work out how relative that statement was in Glasgow. I had grown to have a deep affection for Glaswegians, but remained confused by their lemming-like attitude to diet, cigarettes and booze. I was witness to a million slow-motion suicides by lard. ‘Well, I suggest that we keep tabs on your husband for a while, Mrs Ellis. May I ’phone you at home to keep you informed?’

She scribbled down a number with a tiny green pencil in a tiny green notebook, tore out a page and passed it to me. ‘Please, Mr Lennox, make sure you only call when Andrew is at work.’

‘Of course. I will need a reasonably up-to-date—’

She anticipated my request by taking a photograph from her handbag and handing it to me. The dark-haired man in the picture had pale-coloured eyes, a strong jaw and the type of regular, well-proportioned features that should have made him handsome but instead somehow made him anonymous. Bland, almost. His look was not typical for Glasgow, but he was not the handlebar-moustachioed Magyar I had started to imagine. 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 us every 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. She had the Celtic dark auburn hair and green eyes that you saw a lot of in Glasgow, but her high cheekbones and firm jaw spoke of some other history. She was slim, and of late I had thought perhaps a little too slim, but what upholstery there was was in all the right places.

‘Don’t stand at the window without a shirt on,’ she admonished me. That was the tenor of our relationship; out of view and behind closed curtains.

I sighed and came away from the view of the wet and grey Glasgow weekday afternoon and sat on the edge of the bed, pulling on my shirt: pale blue with a faint gold stripe, French cuffs. My taste for expensive tailoring was, I knew, something Fiona both appreciated and resented. Another sign of her good old-fashioned, deeply-embedded, Calvinism. Not that I was complaining about all of that pent-up repression: what had surprised me – overwhelmed me – about Fiona was that taking her to bed had been like removing a high-pressure lid. Explosive.

But there again, our relationship had been full of surprises: like the way I had come to feel about her. Something nauseatingly honourable and deep. And I had tried so hard to keep all of my dealings with women as superficial and unembellished as possible.

As a culture, Scotland might have been more sexually repressed than a monastery with a view of a nudist beach, but I had, it had to be said, enjoyed a staggering amount of success with the opposite sex during my time in Glasgow. I put it down largely to the lack of sophisticated competition, the average Scotsman’s concept of foreplay generally being: ‘Come here a minute and grab hold of this . . .’

‘Will you be eating downstairs tonight?’ she asked me, becoming my landlady once more.

‘Are you sure you’re all right? You look tired.’ And she did. Her face was paler than usual and there were shadows beneath the green eyes.

‘I told you, I’m fine.’ She forced a smile. ‘Do I set a place for you?’ It had become the custom for me to join Fiona and her daughters for the evening meal most days.

‘No, not tonight,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a job on. Following a wandering husband. I’ll probably be late.’

She nodded, and finished getting dressed.

‘Do you want me to make up some sandwiches and a flask for you?’

‘That would be fine, thanks, Fiona,’ I said with a smile even more forced than hers. Nothing illustrated the chasm that still existed between us more than her asking me if I wanted sandwiches and a flask. Fiona did not seem to be able to distinguish the role of enquiry agent from that of a night-watchman. She perhaps had a point.

She turned and headed out towards the landing. I took her by the elbow and turned her around, kissing her on the lips. She responded. Just.

‘Don’t tell me my irrepressible boyish Canadian charm is fading . . .’ I said.

‘Lennox,’ she said, easing herself back from me. ‘We can’t go on like this. It’s not right.’

‘What’s not right about it?’ I let her go. ‘I thought you were happy.’

She cast a glance towards the bed we had shared until a few minutes before.

‘This isn’t me, Lennox. I can’t be the kind of woman you’re used to.’

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ I protested, although I knew exactly what she meant.

Her look hardened. ‘Please do not swear at me. That’s something else I’m not used to. What I’m saying is that this isn’t right. It’s not right for me. I never wanted to end up . . .’ She left the thought hanging in a silence that stretched longer than it should.

‘You know how I feel about you,’ I protested.

‘Do I?’

I let her go. ‘What is this all about? What is it you want from me?’

‘Nothing, Lennox. Absolutely nothing.’ The expression in her face now stone-hewn. ‘I’ll get your sandwiches ready.’

Archie McClelland had the kind of face that Bassett hounds, undertakers and professional mourners would probably have described as unnecessarily lugubrious. A lanky six-foot three, Archie was tall for anywhere, which meant he was a giant in Glasgow, and he compensated for his height by perpetually stooping. He even stooped sitting down, as I could see through the rectangle of rear window of his ten-year-old Morris Eight as I pulled up behind it.

Archie had parked at the corner of the street, far enough from the Ellis home as not to be seen from the windows. He popped open the passenger door as I approached and I slid in next to him.

‘How’s it going?’ I asked. The gaze he turned on me was so doleful that I felt myself beginning to sink into clinical depression.

‘Dynamite came home straight from the office and hasn’t set foot outside since.’

‘Dynamite?’

Archie nodded his large high-domed head, his bald pate fringed with an unkempt horseshoe of black hair. ‘Dynamite Andy the demolitions man. I have christened the subject of our surveillance thus.’

‘Thus?’

‘Thus.’

‘Do you often come up with nicknames for people?’

‘I find it does something to ease the mind-numbing tedium of my employment by you.’

‘I see. You could just get another job,’ I said.

‘I would miss the sparkle of our chats,’ he replied. Archie’s dry wit had probably been the undoing of his police career. That and his brains. A surfeit of wit and intelligence was an encumbrance in the police, particularly when it highlighted the deficit of both amongst your superiors. What had finished his career for once and for all, however, had been a fall through a factory roof while chasing burglars. That had not been one of his brightest moments.

‘You get on home, Archie,’ I said. ‘I’ll take over. If lover-boy doesn’t go out by nine-thirty or ten, I’ll pack it in myself for the night.’

‘I bet Humpty Go-cart doesn’t worry about getting home for his jim-jams and Ovaltine. As a private eye you don’t set the example I had hoped for.’ He nodded a pale brow in the direction of the Ellis residence. ‘D’you think our chum is up to some kind of marital malarkey?’

‘Most likely.’

‘Doesn’t look the type to me, whatever the type is. At least from a distance. And if he has a fancy woman on the side, then she’s not exactly putting a spring in his step.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘He doesn’t look a cheery chappy, that’s all. Just an impression I get.’

‘Well, we’ll find out in time, hopefully.’ I opened the car door. ‘I’ll see you later.’

Archie gave an American-style salute.

I was just about to go when a thought made me lean back into the car. ‘Tell me, Archie, you wouldn’t have a nickname for me, by any chance?’

‘No sir,’ he said. ‘That would be disrespectful. No references to lumberjacking whatsoever.’

After Archie left, I moved my Austin Atlantic forward a few feet and filled the space vacated by his car. I sat for an hour as, with increasing frequency, greasy globs of rain smeared the windshield and made stars out of the streetlamps. I switched on the radio and listened to the baneful baying of a dying dinosaur: the death throes of the British Empire. The news was full of Britain’s humiliation as its last, fumbling attempt to remain at the centre of the world stage – its intervention in the Suez Crisis – stumbled on. And while one empire was dying another was flexing youthful muscles: Suez competed for radio time with the latest on the Hungarian Uprising. It was an inspiring beacon of hope in the gloom of Soviet domination, apparently. It was just unfortunate that the West chose to look the other way. Oh, Brave New World . . .

I drank some of the tea Fiona had made up for me; it tasted odd and tinny from the vacuum flask but at least it was hot. The Glasgow climate decided to lighten my mood by turning the tap up on the rain, which now drummed angrily on the roof of my Atlantic. It was going to be a long, damp night. I decided it was far too inclement for adultery and that I would maybe head home earlier than planned. But then, at a quarter before nine, the dark was split by the light from the Ellis’s front door and I saw a tall figure, hatted, raincoated and stooped against the downpour, dash out and around the side of the house where, I knew, the garage held the family car.

Obviously the demolition business was good; the car that pulled out of the drive and onto the street was a maroon-coloured Daimler Conquest. Registration number PFF 119: the same number Pamela Ellis had given me and I had written into my notebook.

‘Whoever your squeeze is, I hope she’s worth it, bud,’ I said through the windshield and the rain, waiting until the Daimler had reached the corner when, without switching on my lights, I pulled out from the kerb and started to follow him.