Free The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5 by Craig Russell

garden shed set just inside – and I pressed in against the greasy, black brickwork. This had been on the plans and I knew it wasn’t the main rear entrance. Because the foundry covered a fourteen-acre site, it had many entrances for different purposes: the main gates were used for the bulk of the workers at shift change, as well as for larger lorries, but there were several smaller entrances for deliveries and access to specific worksheds. This, I knew, was a minor entry and the one Tommy had planned to use. According to McNaught’s timetable and confirmed by Tommy’s own surveillance, the night watchman didn’t occupy any of the gatehouses for any length of time but just called by to make sure each of the gates was secure. Another night watchman was on stationary duty at the main gates.
    The door of the watchman’s shed was open, but the interior was in total darkness, suggesting there was no one inside, so I eased forward, grateful that I had put on the rubber-soled desert boots. I was no Quiet Tommy Quaid, but I reckoned I could scale the metal gates without too much delay or noise, so I moved towards them.
    A second earlier and I would have been spotted. I was in front and slightly to the side of the gates when I heard a rumbling, rheumy cough from inside the shed, followed by a deep-throated racking before the concealed watchman spat out onto the cobbles. I could hear his breath wheezing before the cavern of his post glowed red for a moment as the tubercular watchman soothed his lungs with a drag on his cigarette. Fred Astaire would have admired my silent-tap sidestep as I dodged obliquely and into the wall beside the gatehouse. I would now only be a matter of feet from the watchman, separated by the gate edge and wooden sidewall of his shed.
    Again I’d been in very similar situations before, but if I were rumbled here I couldn’t resolve it with a Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife through a sentry’s windpipe. In any case, from the sounds of it, the night watchman had found a much more efficient way of suffocating to death.
    In Glasgow, elderly could begin anywhere from fifty onwards, but the stooped man who emerged from the shed looked as if he could remember the Relief of Mafeking, probably because his son had taken part. He had his back to me as he waddled out and I could see he wasn’t much over five foot tall but was nearly as wide. The shapeless jacket of dense, dark tweed he wore was separated from a flat cap of the same cloth by a roll of thick, pallid neck. His dark trousers were baggy, adding to the squatness of his figure. Standing there with his back to me, he looked as if paused in thought, his hand hanging at his side, the last half-inch of a roll-up cigarette pinched between thick finger and thumb. Taking a final draw from his meagre smoke, he flicked it away to bounce on the cobbles in a firework shower of red embers. He took a battery torch from a cavernous pocket and thumbed it on. Then, like the
Queen Mary
announcing its departure from dock, he let out a low, rumbling fart before continuing his waddling patrol of the foundry.
    Watching the old guy wobble back into the body of the works, it struck me that the owners didn’t feel unduly besieged by the forces of crime; if they had secret designs or patents, they sure didn’t seem to think they needed robust guarding.
    Once the elderly watchman was out of sight and earshot, I again examined the gate. If the shed was able to bear my weight, then climbing over the gate and coming down onto its roof was probably my best way in. I took a moment, though, to assess my options. For all I knew Tommy had found his way back to the van, only to find it locked up and empty. He certainly wouldn’t have appreciated my cack-handedly amateur efforts at breaking in. But those old instincts were jangling again, telling me that something wasn’t right. I thought back to Tommy’s own hesitation, and his question about whether or not I thought that everything