The Deep Dark Sleep

I kept pressed into the recess of the bricked-up doorway, straining to hear any sound. In the smog, at the best of times, you can feel isolated, detached, as if someone had switched off the world and nothing existed beyond the four or five feet you could see. But I wasn’t alone: there was another wanderer out there, hunting me with a gun. At any second he could burst into my tiny circle of awareness and it would be down to who reacted quickest. By the same token, he could just as easily have been halfway to Paisley by now.

I waited, not moving, straining the smog with every sense and ready to spring at anyone or anything that came out of it. Nothing. I wiped my cheek with the back of my hand and saw it smeared red. I started to think about the man with the gun. About his fake accent and his handiness with his fists and a gun. If he had been a gangster, then he was one who’d had the kind of army training you only got in the commandos or the like. Three minutes became four, became five. I guessed he had slipped away, aware that coming looking for me in this murk was as dangerous for hunter as hunted. But I waited a minute more. He had been a cool one all right; the type that tends to have plenty of patience.

I was just about to start making my way back to the main street when I saw him. He just appeared in front of me, as if he had suddenly coalesced from the fog itself. He was more a shape than anything else and he didn’t see me pressed into the doorway.

He was moving slowly, scanning the smog-filled alley with his automatic, as if it were a torch. My doorway hiding place was just outside the arc of his vision. I slipped my hand into my jacket pocket, forgetting it had been months since I’d gone to work with a spring-handled leather blackjack in it. This was the kind of opposition you didn’t want to go up against with your bare hands. I weighed up my options, but in that split second of indecision, his form was swallowed up again as he moved further up the alleyway.

Waiting a few seconds after he passed, I crouched down, undid my laces and slipped my shoes off. Then, carrying a shoe in each hand, I moved as swiftly and as silently as I could back down the alley towards Great Western Road, leaving my dance partner still searching further up the alleyway. But I promised myself that we would dance again.

And the next time, I would lead.

I was properly shod by the time I got back to my digs. In the murk, Mrs White would not see me come up the path from the lounge window and I had hoped to slip unnoticed into my rooms to get cleaned up. As luck would have it, she opened the front door just as I got to it.

‘Mr Lennox …’ she said, shocked by my appearance. ‘What on earth has happened to you?’

‘This damned smog,’ I grumbled. ‘Pardon my language … I slipped on the kerb and smacked right into a lamppost.’ It was a perfectly credible excuse: there would be dozens of genuine accidents fitting that description that morning.

‘Come into the kitchen,’ she commanded, steering me with a firm hand on my elbow. ‘I’ll have to have a look at that.’

I was pretty groggy and went along with what she suggested. Pulling out a chair from the kitchen table, she eased me down into it. I winced as she did so.

‘Are you hurt elsewhere?’ she asked.

‘I fell after I hit my head … the kerb dug into my side. It’s mainly my cheek though …’ I hoped she bought it. Fiona White had seen me with various battle trophies, including on one occasion when they had been awarded to me by the City of Glasgow police. It was, I knew, her principal reason for wanting to keep her distance: all part of my qualifications as a shady character.

She made up a weak solution of antiseptic and boiled water and dabbed at the wound. I noticed the solution cloud pink when she dipped the gauze back into it.

‘I think you might have to have this stitched,’ she said, frowning. She came around in front of me and leaned in to examine me from that angle. Her face came close to mine and I could detect a faint scent of lavender and felt her breath on my lips. Her eyes moved to mine. She suddenly looked embarrassed and stood up in a businesslike manner; but there had been something in the look we exchanged. Or maybe there hadn’t. I was sore and groggy and confused as hell about a lot of things, not least Fiona White.

‘It’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘If you have a sticking plaster, that’ll do.’

‘I really think you should have it seen to. It’s in the same place …’ She let the sentence die.

‘As my scars? I know. They’re all healed up now, Mrs White. A scrape isn’t going to cause me any problems.’ I smiled at her and was rewarded with a stab of pain from my cheek and a trickle of fresh blood down to my jaw line. She tutted and reapplied the gauze pad. She lifted my hand onto the pad to hold it in place while she took a roll of sticking plaster from a drawer and cut three strips from it.