16
Colin ‘The Hitman’ Harris
The Portman bar was unimaginatively named after Portman Street where it sat on a corner in Glasgow’s rundown Kinning Park district. Like many of the pubs in the area it had thrived when heavy industry ruled. But those days were long gone. Now, the Portman was a miserable little drinking den full of dead-eyed regulars. Its floorboards were bare and scuffed, and its walls were yellow from nicotine even though the smoking ban had forced drinkers to puff out in the wind and cold for several years now.
The boozer was almost completely empty, but even so Connor barely noticed the bespectacled figure sitting at the bar reading the Daily Herald. He ordered himself a pint.
‘Are you not buying a beer for me?’
The reporter turned to size up his inquisitor.
A slim, middle-aged man wearing a blue pullover and casual trousers, best described as slacks, smiled back at him and offered his hand as a welcome. ‘Colin Harris is my name, and you must be Elvis. Actually, I’ll have a glass of Chablis, stopped drinking beer the last time I got out of jail, puts too much on the gut.’ With that remark he clasped the remains of his beer belly.
Connor screwed up his face and replied, ‘With all due respect I don’t think this is the type of establishment that sells wine, never mind Chablis.’
Harris burst out laughing and shouted to the ageing barmaid, ‘Hey, Mary, two glasses of my usual – in fact better make it the whole bottle.’
The large, tattooed barmaid produced an expensive bottle of Chablis.
Harris gave Connor a playful, but painful, dig in the ribs. ‘Les Preuses Chablis Grand Cru – about £160 a bottle. Don’t you know what they say about never judging a book by its cover?’
He had a point. Colin ‘The Hitman’ Harris looked nothing like Connor imagined, with his John Lennon spectacles and an almost sheepish demeanour which gave him an air of respectability you wouldn’t expect of one of Glasgow’s most feared gangland enforcers. Then again, Connor figured that was probably part of Harris’s success – the fact that no one would give him a second’s notice before it was too late.
Harris leaned fractionally closer and asked, ‘Do you want something else to go with your wine? A line, perhaps?’ The gangster asked as casually as if he was offering Connor a cigarette.
‘No thanks, alcohol is my only poison,’ the journalist replied. Connor had never tried cocaine or any drugs for that matter and he hated what it did to his fellow hacks on nights out. By ten o’clock, after several trips to the toilets, Connor could no longer hold anything resembling a meaningful conversation with his colleagues. He remembered seeing the tell-tale white powder in the nostrils of a once glamorous PR and couldn’t for the life of him figure out why a woman pushing sixty would need cocaine in her life.
Connor simply found drugs boring. He’d grown up with them, as his mum and uncles and their friends had all been cannabis smokers. He’d listen to their wild claims that dope was the only non-addictive drug then watch them get all antsy and narky when they didn’t have any. And, worst of all, he had to listen to the hash-heads talking shit. They thought they were so rebellious and daring because they lived their lives in a fug of dope smoke, evading the law, as if the law really cared that much about them. To them, everyone else was a ‘normal’. Thirty years on, Connor would have a quiet chuckle to himself at how the lives of the once young and trendy drugged-up ideologists had panned out. One uncle now made a living driving a taxi, the other a courier van, and one of his mum’s closest friends sold kitchen units.
They still got high every night, while Connor had gone on to enjoy a varied and interesting career without the need to get high. He eyeballed Harris and added, rather unnecessarily, ‘Personally, I think drugs are for losers, whether you’re loaded or living in a council house. You’re still a loser.’
Harris stared at Connor in silence. His own £250,000-a-year coke use was well known, although he’d kicked the habit long ago. Fortunately, he decided he quite liked the fact that Connor wasn’t afraid to speak his mind in front of him. Harris was surrounded by quite enough yes men. The gangster placed a hand on Connor’s shoulder and said, ‘You know, two years ago I’d have had you wasted for calling me a loser, but now I’m clean I know you’re absolutely correct. It saddens me to see people, policemen or prostitutes, hooked on drugs.’ Drug abuse may sadden Harris, but it had also made him immensely rich as one of the country’s biggest drug suppliers.
Connor felt he’d pushed his luck far enough and let Harris’s last remark pass without comment. After all, he was dealing with a man whose ruthlessness and violence were legendary.
Harris had once been charged with the murder of the son of Glasgow’s Godfather, Mr Ferguson, an ‘untouchable’. He had stood trial at the High Court in Glasgow accused of killing Ferguson Junior in what turned into one of Scotland’s longest running murder cases, only for the charge to be found ‘not proven’ – that unique verdict in Scottish law which means the prosecution have failed to convince the jury. But everyone knew Harris did it. Ferguson Senior promised to pay a million pounds if Harris was taken out. It was suspected he wouldn’t survive a week after walking free.
However, that was a decade ago. Ferguson Senior had died from old age and a broken heart, never having avenged the death of his son. Harris had survived and flourished. He’d become an unlikely publishing phenomenon after the release of his first of four autobiographies, based around his violent life. There was talk of a movie deal, too, as the public’s appetite for gangster stories seemed insatiable. Ironically, Harris’s books were all ghost-written by his former social worker turned true crime writer Ron McLeod, who liked to call himself Big Mac. Critics claimed that ‘writer’ was too strong a term for Big Mac. While the books would never be literary classics, the neds lapped them up, queuing for hours at book signings to meet their gangster hero. For many, Harris’s life stories were the first books they’d read since school.
But Scotland was still a small pond, in which writers struggled to scrape a living. His book earnings could in no way account for the top-of-the-range Jaguar XJ parked conspicuously outside the Portman’s door.
Connor followed Harris to a booth with torn red vinyl seats. Harris poked at one of the holes with his index finger and sighed, ‘This place has seen better days, but it was my dad’s favourite. And no one hassles me in here. I can’t be bothered with the young crew who want a scrap just so they can boast they took on Colin ‘The Hitman’ Harris.’ He winked. ‘Although I’d have done the same myself at their age. To be young and daft again, eh?’ His demeanour changed as he leaned over the table to face Connor. ‘Now, here are the rules of engagement. You can ask me anything you like, but some things I will not answer, in case I incriminate other people or, more importantly, myself.’
It was a strange opening salvo, for it was Harris who had summoned Connor and anyway there was only one question anyone, including the authorities, wanted Harris to answer: Did you kill Ferguson Junior?
Harris paused for a moment then plainly stated, ‘This serial killer you’ve been writing about, I need to meet him.’
‘Ha, join the queue.’
But Harris wasn’t laughing. Instead an eerie look had fallen over him, half calm, half volcanic anger. Connor suspected he’d just glimpsed the real Harris, the one so many of his victims had encountered.
When Harris eventually spoke again he had regained his composure. ‘No, you don’t understand. I really need to meet him. He just murdered my sister.’