My first stop was the Twa Dugs. I told George what I needed and he gave me an elastoplast, a beer and his promise that he’d get the mess cleared up.
“How did he find you?” I asked George as I sipped at the beer. The urge was to knock it down and get started on the next, but Duncan had laid his money down. That bought him my attention, for a while at least.
George shrugged.
“How does anybody find me? You ken what this town is like.”
I knew only too well.
Everybody knows everything when there’s money involved and nothing when there’s Polis in the frame.
I thanked George for the beer and headed for the Mitchell library.
I thought I’d had a headache to start with, but two hours at the microfiche taught me the real meaning of the word. But I found what I was looking for. Anne Gardner, 31, from Clarkston, was found dead in her flat on the twenty-second of February. The cause of death was listed as starvation but the Procurator Fiscal had delivered an open verdict… she’d been perfectly fit and healthy the night before, and had been seen tucking into a few beers and a curry in a restaurant off Sauchiehall Street. I found out more than I needed to know about her from the tabloid reports of her death, but I also found out where she had worked.
The office was in the old Merchant area in the town center. Not that many years ago this had been a place of dark dank tenements with hookers on the corners and winos in the alleys. Now it stood as a shining market of consumerism with Italian clothes shops, coffee bars and chrome and glass offices for people in expensive suits.
At this time of night it was mostly shut and locked down. What the suits didn’t know was that the winos and hookers hadn’t gone. They’d just changed their shift patterns. Down in the alleys at night the waste from the rich became the tit-bits of the poor as scavengers raked over the detritus of the day.
Nothing really changes.
The security guard at Carnegie Towers wasn’t keen on me until I showed him the quarter bottle of whisky I kept in my coat for such occasions. That loosened his tongue, and a fifty from Duncan’s pile made sure it stayed that way.
“I didnae ken the Gardner lassie,” he said. “But I was there the nicht the other two got deid.”
I handed him the bottle and let him talk.
“Everybody knew about the diet team,” he said. “They were making fools o’ themselves in the wee gym downstairs every night. Thirty and forty year old men trying to be boys again, and failing. The lass dying put a wee bit of a dampner on them for a while, but a couple of weeks later they were back at it as bad as ever.
“The night it happened two of them were down there, each trying to lift heavier weights than the other. The three of us were the only ones in the building and I was jist waiting for them to go before I could lock up and have a kip. They buggered that idea when they came straight out the shower and ordered fish suppers. They gave me a tenner to go get them and told me to keep the change but I was still pissed off later when they called down from the office.
“They wanted me to go up and get rid of a big white cat that was pestering them. I told them to fucking catch it for themselves.
“I didna hear a peep out of them after that.
“When I did my rounds at ten o’clock I found them baith, face down in their supper. The doctors said they’d starved. But whit dae doctors know? Everybody kens ye cannae starve while eating a fish supper. It’s jist no’ natural.”