Dead Men and Broken Hearts: A Lennox Thriller (Lennox 4) Read Online Free

than planned. But then, at a quarter before nine, the dark was split by the light from the Ellis’s frontdoor and I saw a tall figure, hatted, raincoated and stooped against the downpour, dash out and around the side of the house where, I knew, the garage held the family car.
    Obviously the demolition business was good; the car that pulled out of the drive and onto the street was a maroon-coloured Daimler Conquest. Registration number PFF 119: the same number Pamela Ellis had given me and I had written into my notebook.
    ‘Whoever your squeeze is, I hope she’s worth it, bud,’ I said through the windshield and the rain, waiting until the Daimler had reached the corner when, without switching on my lights, I pulled out from the kerb and started to follow him.

CHAPTER THREE
     
    One of the strange things about being an enquiry agent – a life into which I had carelessly stumbled – was that it was one of the few occupations that gave you a licence to be a voyeur. I considered my profession as sitting square centre between that of the anthropologist and that of the Peeping Tom. I was paid to watch individuals without them knowing they were being watched, and that gave me an insight, literally, into how some people lived their lives. There was nothing improper about the gratification it gave me: it wasn’t spying on the intimate, the furtive or the sordid moments that I enjoyed, it was the simple observation of the tiny details, the way someone behaved when they thought they were alone and unobserved; the small personal rituals that exposed the real person.
    A Sauchiehall Street store – one of the big ones where the sales clerks acted superior despite the fact that they worked in a store – had once asked me to watch a female counter clerk whom they suspected of having pilfered from the till. It was strictly the smallest of small-time theft – a sixpence here and a shilling there – but over the months it had added up to a tidy sum.
    I had followed the woman, too old to have been called a shop girl and too young to be called a spinster, through her dullritual of work and home, spying on her from behind clothes rails while she took payments and totalled takings; sitting in my car outside her tenement flat while she spent empty evenings and days off at home. I had gotten the idea that the store manager was looking to make some kind of example of her: a warning to others that theft would always be found out and punished. The store certainly had to pay out ten times as much to keep me and Archie on her tail as the alleged larceny was costing them.
    It eventually became clear that we were backing a loser: we could find no evidence that she was taking from the cash till.
    Then, one Saturday off work, she took the morning train to Edinburgh Waverley. I had followed her onto the train and stood within range at the far end of the third class-carriage corridor. She was a frumpy type, always dressed in grey and a difficult surveillance subject because she seemed instantly to merge into any crowd. One advantage I had, however, was that she clearly had no idea she was being followed and never once checked over her shoulder.
    It was when we arrived in Edinburgh that I realized the store had been right about her. This woman, whose rituals and routines were as dull and ordinary as it was possible to be, had disembarked and then done something that was not at all dull and very out-of-the-ordinary: she had retrieved a suitcase from a left-luggage locker at Waverley and disappeared into the ladies’ toilets. While I waited for her to re-emerge from the ladies’, I took a note of the locker number and then positioned myself where I could watch the washroom door without the attendant suspecting I was some kind of pervert.
    I nearly missed her. If she had not been carrying the same suitcase and had not returned it to the locker, then I wouldnot have recognized her as the same woman. It wasn’t that she had transformed herself from