Free Dead Men and Broken Hearts: A Lennox Thriller (Lennox 4) by Craig Russell Page A

a sigh. ‘Like I said, I don’t move in those circles any more. And if you want my advice, I wouldn’t go about offering that kind of information for sale. Sell something like that to any of the Three Kings and you’ve sold yourself. And trust me, if they get their claws into a copper, they won’t let go and you’ll spend the rest of your career worrying about whether they’d trade you to get out of a tight spot.’ I let it sink in before continuing. ‘But get me something I can work with on the names I’ve given you and there’ll be a bonus in it for you.’
    ‘Okay,’ he said, clearly crestfallen. I could imagine his delight when he had happened to overhear that snippet. Cash registers ringing in his head. But what I had told him was true: thereare degrees of graft. What he was selling me could get him kicked out of the police; what he wanted to sell Cohen – or to get me to sell to Cohen – could get him kicked into prison.
    He hadn’t told me the name. But he had told me there
was
a name. What I was going to do with that information, I didn’t yet know.
    It wasn’t the only piece of information I had that I didn’t know what to do with: as I walked through drizzle back to where I’d parked, I thought about the Jowett Javelin I’d seen outside Fiona’s.

CHAPTER EIGHT
     
    I spent two days wearing out shoe leather and working up the telephone bill. The days were spent mostly on the union case, the evenings on Ellis.
    Now, I considered myself to be a self-contained, independent kind of character. Maybe not a loner, but someone who tries not to give too much away about himself. I kept a lot of stuff private and a lot of the people I knew didn’t know who else I knew.
    Even with that, it’s true that no man is an island. Each of us exists partly through others; the connections we make throughout our lives, good or bad, extending into a far-reaching web. A traceable web to one degree or another. Me included.
    Frank Lang appeared to be the exception to John Donne’s rule. If there was a committee or a reading group or a theatre association, then Lang’s name would be on the list of members or contributors. There were lot of threads spun in Lang’s web, right enough, but they just didn’t stretch very far.
    The calls I made and the people I visited confirmed the bare bones of Lang’s existence: he
had
been a member of the merchant marine, working as a ship’s cook; he
had
enrolled for evening classes through the Workers’ Educational Association; he
had
been on the membership lists of several societies andcommittees. The only thing was that no one I spoke to could really remember ever meeting Lang.
    Eventually I did manage to trace two merchant seamen who had served with Lang. I showed them the photograph and they both confirmed it was him and yes, they had seen him in the flesh. One of the sailors said that he had heard that Lang had emigrated years ago, Canada or Australia.
    And that was it: all I could find on Frank Lang.
    Archie had been sniffing around the Ellis case where the opposite of Lang seemed to be true. Andrew Ellis’s history was eminently traceable and transparent. A well-liked and well-respected member of the Glasgow business community, he had a reputation stretching back to the end of the war. No dodgy dealings, no grey areas, no skeletons in the cupboard. His case may have been the opposite of Lang’s, but it was just as baffling.
    When Archie came into the office on the Tuesday morning, he balefully confirmed that he’d been unable to dig up anything of note on Ellis.
    ‘The problem is our hands are tied,’ he explained. ‘I’m just nipping away at the edges here, Chief.’ Archie habitually called me
Chief
, despite me asking him not to. Probably
because
I’d asked him not to. ‘I can’t talk to his employees or customers, because that would alert him to the fact that his missus has put a couple of professional snoopers onto him. And he hasn’t answered the call of