Craig Russell - The Deep Dark Sleep: A Lennox Thriller

THE DEEP DARK SLEEP

Also by Craig Russell

The Lennox Series:

Lennox

The Long Glasgow Kiss

The Jan Fabel Series:

Blood Eagle

Brother Grimm

Eternal

The Carnival Master

The Valkyrie Song

Craig Russell

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by

Quercus
21 Bloomsbury Square
London
WC1A 2NS

Copyright 2011 by Craig Russell

The moral right of Craig Russell to be
identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any
information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.

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

ISBN 978 0 85738 180 4 (TPB)
ISBN 978 0 85738 181 1 (HB)

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
businesses, organizations, places and events are
either the product of the authors imagination
or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or
locales is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Typeset in Swift by Ellipsis Digital Limited, Glasgow

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

For my mother, Helen

Gentleman Joe Strachan, it would seem, had slept the deep, dark sleep for a long time.

Gentleman Joe had slept the deep dark sleep while I had been up to my knees in mud and blood in Italy; while the Luftwaffe had growled high above him on its way to rearrange Clydebanks town planning; while Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had carved up Europe between them and had given an idea to Glasgows crime bosses, the Three Kings, about how they could do pretty much the same kind of carve-up with the Second City of the British Empire. The fireworks at Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki had also done nothing to disturb Joes slumber.

Even the constant toing and froing above him the propeller churning of the vast Clyde-built ships or insolent tugs had failed to stir him.

For the deep, dark sleep that Gentleman Joe slept was the undisturbed rest one only found at the bottom of the Clyde after somebody lullabied you to your final slumber with a solo for blunt instrument, tucked you up nice and cosy in some shipyard chains, and slipped you over the side of a midnight rowboat in the middle of the rivers deep channel.

But, as I say, I spent the war years as ignorant as everyone else about Joes repose. I just wish I had stayed that way.

I, for one, was someone for whom the whole idea of dredging up the past was particularly unappealing: being of that generation given especially colourful pasts courtesy of the little party thrown for our benefit in Europe and the Far East. My own history had been particularly gaudy, and I had to admit to adding more than a dash or two of extra colour myself over the years. I had once seen a movie about some guy who woke up in the middle of nowhere and couldnt remember who he was or where he was from and this lack of autobiography troubled him immensely. Me, I would have given a lot to have had that kind of amnesia.

The dredging up of Joe Strachans past had been literal rather than metaphorical. The River Clyde must have been about the busiest waterway in the world, mainly because wherever you were on the worlds seas any luxury liner, cargo ship, warship, tub or rust bucket you saw bobbing past carried the mathematical probability that it had been conceived and born on the Clyde. And that meant that the riverbed along the navigation channels had continuously to be kept wide and deep by a constant grime-dark procession of scouring dredgers.

So when a tangle of skull, bones, a few rags and a gold cigarette case were hauled up in a conveyor bucket through roiled waters to the surface of the Clyde, then it really had been a literal dredging up of the past; a past that would have been best left exactly where it was.

Dredger crews on the Clyde were a pretty phlegmatic lot; they had to be. Their haul was mainly the oily, silty muck that clogged the bottom of the channels and had an odour to offend a dung beetle; but it also included everything from fossilized tree trunks and giant elk antlers from a long-inundated ancient forest, to bedsteads, pieces of ships engine, aborted babies in weighted Gladstone bags, dumped murder weapons, and anything else that could be jettisoned from a passing craft.

The late Mr Strachans were by no means the first mortal remains to be recovered from the Clyde and they certainly would not be the last. But there was a significant difference between the floating corpses retrieved from the surface by the Glasgow Humane Society and the City of Glasgow Harbour Police, and those brought up from the river bottom by the dredger crews; and that difference was all about intent. For a body to sink and stay sunk involved ballast, usually pockets filled with stones or a wrapping of chains. The bodies the dredgers brought up were the bodies that had been meant to stay lost.

Like Gentleman Joes.

I could imagine the scene: the dredgers crew taking a moment to decide what to do as the still anonymous Joe beamed a bright skull grin at them from the greasy black mud of the bucket. There had probably been a debate about whether to toss the bones back into the river; there would certainly have been a tussle over the gold cigarette case. But my guess is that someone on that tub had been long enough in the tooth and had enough sense about him to think that the initials JS on a hunk of gold might just spell a lot of trouble. In any case, the decision was made to inform the City of Glasgow Police.

The initial discovery of the remains was something that had passed me by; me, and the vast majority of Glasgows population. It had only warranted a couple of lines of red print in a late news column of the Glasgow Evening Citizen. Significance, you see, is something that tends to attach itself to things or events after the fact. To accrue. The significance of the bones, their resting place, and the monogrammed cigarette case remained disconnected for a few days. After all, it wasnt uncommon for human remains to be found in the Clyde. More than a few tipsy fishermen or smog-blinded patrolling coppers had misjudged the long walk/short pier equation; capsized tugs and the odd shipyard launch disaster had also helped populate the rivers currents. And, of course, the citys enterprising underworld made full use of the rivers capacity for concealment.

As for me, I had a lot of other things on my mind in that September of Nineteen fifty-five. It was the end of the hottest Glasgow summer on record which, admittedly, isnt a big claim like being Yorkshires greatest lover, the cheeriest person in Edinburgh, or Aberdeens most generous philanthropist but the summer of Fifty-five had literally outshone the previous summer and temperatures had, according to the bemused local press, become hot enough to melt tarmac. Whatever the statistical truth about the temperature, I remember that Glasgow summer as sticky and acrid: the thick viscous air smelling like hot metal and the bright sky black-streaked with the dense granular smoke from the factories and shipyards. Whatever the weather, Glasgows element was carbon, and in the open street you felt like you were walking through the hall of a foundry.