Chapter Two

Tony had borrowed the motorcar to collect his parents and drive them to early mass at St Cuthbert’s. The Lombardis lived in a tenement flat about half a mile from Manor Park. Tony had left years ago to set himself up in a one-bedroom apartment in a modern block on Riverside. It was a remarkably tidy hide-away but too spartan to have much character, a far cry from a family home cluttered with religious effigies and ornaments and horsehair furniture.

Manor Park Avenue had been dismally traditional when Polly had first moved in and she had insisted on replacing the gilt-framed pictures and dark brown furniture with expensive, lightweight antiques. Dominic had co-operated and various vans would turn up unexpectedly in the driveway and a nice little Regency-style sofa or a pair of eighteenth-century walnut wing chairs would be carried into the house and arranged according to Polly’s wishes. Dominic had no study of his own, no office or den to retire to. He claimed the big public room at the front of the house when he wanted to take his ease with a cigar and a coffee pot and the newspapers or when he needed to entertain Mr Shadwell, the firm’s accountant, or Carfin Hughes, the lawyer, or other men to whom Polly was never introduced.

On Sunday morning Polly rose early. She had made love again on Saturday night but love-making, however energetic, never wearied her and she carried no guilt about it. She had recently learned to accept responsibility for guilt, to swallow and consume and forget about it, though not about the pleasure that preceded it. Sometimes she wondered if Tony was obliged to atone for what they did together or if his promises to the priest were as hollow as most of his other promises.

Soon after breakfast Babs and the children turned up.

Dominic opened the front door to his sister-in-law and called upstairs to Polly to inform her that ‘visitors’ had arrived. Polly left Stuart and Ishbel in Nanny Patricia’s care and hurried downstairs. Dominic had already lifted his nieces and given each a kiss. He kissed Babs too in a perfunctory sort of way then, leaving the sisters in the hall, padded back into the living-room to his coffee and his newspapers, and closed the door.

‘What the hell are you doing dropping in at this hour, Babs?’ Polly hissed.

‘Need t’ talk to you,’ said Babs.

‘About what?’

‘Things,’ Babs said. ‘Things, that’s all.’

Polly had changed a great deal since Babs, Rosie and she had shared a bed in the tenement in Lavender Court but she hadn’t shed the conspiratorial rapport with her middle sister for they were linked by experiences that Mammy and Rosie knew nothing about and, God willing, never would.

Polly directed Babs and the baby into the parlour then chased her nephew and nieces upstairs to the first floor playroom. The floor was littered with toys. Flanked by Stuart and Ishbel, Patricia was building a castle out of wooden bricks. Later she would dress the children and escort them to Sunday School at Manor Park Church where they would mingle with other well-to-do children and continue the process of social integration that their father insisted was good for them.

‘More for the fray, Patricia. Sorry,’ Polly said.

Eager as ever, Angus threw himself full-length on the carpet and gave Stuart a grin to remind his cousin that he was already superior in many important respects. Pert and pretty as daffodils May and June held hands, stared at Ishbel and by force of will tried to reduce her to tears. There was something vulnerable about her children, Polly knew, a gentleness that Babs’s brood instinctively exploited. Much as she loved her son and daughter Polly wished that they might be less polite and self-effacing and acquire some of the Hallops’ rowdy egotism.

Leaving the children to play, she went back downstairs to the parlour. Babs had unbuttoned her coat and blouse and was breast feeding April in front of the electrical fireplace. French doors opened out on to a flagged path and showed lawn and flowerbeds still rimed with frost, but the room was comfortably warm.

‘Do you want something, Babs?’

‘Like what?’

‘Tea or coffee? Have you had breakfast?’

‘Hours ago.’

‘Where’s Jackie?’

‘Sleepin’.’ She winced as April tugged her nipple. ‘That’s why I brought them with me. Give the poor guy some peace.’

‘You spoil him, you know.’

‘What if I do? He looks after us, I look after him.’ Babs brushed her daughter’s head in its fluffy angora wool cap. ‘I gotta question for you, Poll.’

‘Go on.’

‘Is Dominic in trouble with the law?’

Polly drew out a chair and seated herself. ‘What sort of trouble?’

‘I dunno,’ Babs said. ‘I was hopin’ you’d tell me.’

‘He’s in no trouble that I know of.’ The image of the squat little man and the long-legged blonde leapt to mind. ‘If he was, I’d probably be the last to hear of it.’

‘You could ask Tony.’

‘I could,’ said Polly. ‘But you know Tony; he won’t tell me anything. What makes you think there might be trouble?’

‘The coppers came round to the salon yesterday, not uniforms, detectives.’

‘How many?’

‘Just one – and his sister.’

‘His sister?’

‘They pretended they were lookin’ at motorcars,’ Babs explained, ‘but they were really lookin’ for Jackie.’

‘Did they find him?’

‘’Course they did. Saturday afternoon: where else would he be?’

‘Did they have a warrant?’

‘Said they had, but they hadn’t. Just a card, Jackie said, standard ID.’

‘Was she a copper too?’

‘What? Who?’

‘The sister.’

‘Nah,’ Babs said. ‘She was just camouflage.’

‘Were you there?’

‘Happens I was, with the kids.’

Polly wore a flowered housecoat and her bare legs were smoothly shaven. No matter how hard she tried Babs couldn’t emulate Polly’s style. She hadn’t the leisure for one thing, or the figure. One more baby, she would blow up like a balloon and any chance of becoming more like Polly would go down the pan forever.

Polly said, ‘Did the detective question you?’

‘Nah, Jackie wouldn’t have stood for that,’ Babs said. ‘I think he was lookin’ for somethin’ particular, though I don’t know what.’

Polly doubted if Dennis would leave incriminating evidence lying about the garage. Most of the salon’s important transactions were conducted between Tony and Dennis who was calm, sensible and pragmatic, at least when he was sober.

‘I take it the cop didn’t find anything?’ Polly said.

‘They don’t do the work there,’ Babs said. ‘They do the real work at a yard over in Govan. Everythin’ at the salon’s legitimate.’

‘Including parts?’

‘Parts?’

‘Spares.’

‘Oh yeah, the spares.’ Babs shook her head. ‘Don’t know about the spares.’

Babs was probably lying, Polly thought; there were precious few secrets between her sister and her husband. She wished she could say the same about her marriage. Between Dominic and her lay the whole Italian thing plus a clique of businessmen to whom nothing seemed to matter but pride and profit. She had only a vague notion how Dominic earned the huge sums that flowed into his accounts.

‘What do you want me to do, Babs?’ Polly said. ‘Talk to Dominic?’

‘God, no! Jackie would kill me if he thought I’d blabbed. I just wanted to share it with you, Polly. I admit that the sight of that damned busybody nosin’ round our yard fair put the wind up me.’

The baby tugged again on Babs’s nipple, her small, newly formed teeth sharp enough to hurt. Babs detached the infant from her breast. Tiny beads of perspiration lined the fringe of April’s angora wool cap but the effort of suckling instead of tiring her had made her more eager. She waved a tiny pink fist and staring up at her mother, whimpered for more. At that moment a wail floated down from upstairs. Polly heard a door open and the wail became louder. Feet thudded on the stairs. Patricia called out, ‘Stuart, Stuart, Angus didn’t mean it,’ but both Polly and Babs knew that Angus had meant it, whatever ‘it’ was.

‘I’d better push off,’ Babs said.

Ignoring April’s demands she hitched up her brassiere, tucked herself into the cups and buttoned her blouse. Polly had never been able to mother in that firm, unhurried manner. She was too yielding and forgiving for her children’s good. Any second now, for instance, Stuart would trail tearfully into the parlour and Angus, not contrite but cocky, would protest his innocence against any accusation of bullying that his cousin levelled against him.

Babs cradled the baby against her shoulder. April emitted a loud bark, breaking wind, and dribbled on to her mother’s hair.

‘Promise you won’t say anythin’ to Dominic, Poll.’

‘All right,’ Polly said. ‘But tell me if and when the coppers come back.’

‘Okay,’ Babs said. ‘Will you talk to Tony, see what he knows?’

‘I’ll try. I will. I’ll try,’ Polly said just as the door swung open and Dominic peeped into the parlour. He had his son, tear-stained, in his arms.

‘Ah, there you are,’ he said. ‘Staying for a spot of lunch, Babs?’

‘Is that an invitation?’ Babs asked.

‘Certainly not.’ Dominic laughed in a way that suggested he knew why Babs had called so early and that she wouldn’t linger now that the harm had been done. ‘But you can stay if Polly asks you.’

‘No, thanks,’ Babs said, flushing. ‘Maybe another time, uh?’

‘Any time you like,’ said Dominic and while Babs gathered her brood for departure, carried his son safely into the living-room and quietly closed the door.

*   *   *

After the death of her mother-in-law Lizzie Peabody felt more at home in the terraced cottage in Knightswood. Though small, it was a great deal more comfortable than any of the tenement slums in which she’d raised her daughters after their father, Frank Conway, had done a bunk. The only problem in living there was that she’d had to share it with Bernard’s mother. Old Mrs Peabody had been understandably resentful that her surviving son had picked a wife who was older than he was and who had arrived in Knightwood dragging a deaf daughter with her. The fact that Lizzie, Rosie and Mrs Peabody had managed to rub along for several years without much friction was mainly due to Bernard’s tact.

In the spring of 1933 old Mrs Peabody passed away in her sleep. Bernard was naturally upset. Rosie wept buckets and even Lizzie shed a tear or two and set about arranging a grand funeral tea in the Co-op halls for all Violet Peabody’s friends, a gathering of fifty mourners, mostly war widows, who consumed vast quantities of sandwiches and sausage rolls and flirted outrageously with Bernard and Reverend Jacks, the only gentlemen present.

For a month or so afterwards Bernard was very depressed. Then summer arrived, the patch of garden behind the cottage claimed his attention and at Lizzie’s suggestion he repapered and painted the back bedroom. Rosie abandoned the bed-settee in the living-room and moved into Mother Peabody’s bedroom, and the waters of Lethe closed quietly over Violet Peabody and before the year was out there was nothing much left to remember her by except a few ornaments and a nice little headstone up in the cemetery at Copplestone Road.

In the same year Lizzie’s mother also passed away – much less discreetly.

Gran McKerlie had been rehearsing her death for years, of course, walled up in a single-end on the top floor of a crumbling tenement in Laurieston with only Janet, Lizzie’s sister, to look after her. The building was one of many ancient tenements that the city council planned to demolish as soon as there was budget enough to replace them. Everyone looked forward to the day when the hammers would move in on Ballingall Street – everyone that is except Gran McKerlie.

In due course council inspectors arrived, then planners, then dapper little men with folders and briefcases accompanied by doctors from the Public Health department and Gran McKerlie was officially informed that her tenement was next for demolition and that she would be transferred to more suitable accommodation. On receiving this information Gran McKerlie went mad, not certifiably, carted-off-in-a-van type mad, alas, which would have solved everyone’s problem. Instead the old woman shook off the nine plagues of age, donned the armour of righteousness and, like something nasty out of Norse mythology, elected to go down fighting. Even after the chimneys were removed, walls demolished and the whole rat-infested neighbourhood was disintegrating about her ears Gran McKerlie refused to be intimidated by the ball-hammer that hung ominously close outside her window and remained fixed in the wooden armchair from which she had ruled the roost for so long. Perhaps she saw herself as the last relic of a golden age of hardship and squalor that Glaswegians would look back on with perverse and totally unwarranted affection: whatever the reason, Gran refused to budge.

First the council sent a constable to escort the old lady downstairs, then a second constable, then a sergeant, then two firemen, then a female Public Health official who patiently explained to Gran that a lovely ground-floor apartment awaited her in a refurbished tenement just around the corner in Moorcastle Street, that Janet had inspected the place and approved of it – which Janet had not – and that all Gran had to do to inherit this palace was permit the firemen to ease her out of her chair and carry her down the iron staircase into a waiting taxicab.

Gran’s answer was to growl, spit and whack the Public Health official’s shins with one of her walking-sticks, a response that finally reduced Janet to helpless tears. After further consultation a council vehicle was sent across the river to Knightswood to fetch Lizzie to come and reason with the thrawn old bat before civic authority was forced to live up to its stereotype and act like a heartless monster.

Lizzie duly arrived: Lizzie clambered up the iron staircase, squeezed past dapper gentlemen, past firemen and coppers, past the red-faced female health official and entered the smelly one-roomed flat where her mother lay in wait. The moment Lizzie stepped over the threshold Gran raised herself out of the invalid chair for the first time in twenty years and, with eyes bulging and a curious white froth on her lips, yelled, ‘Now see what you’ve done t’ me, Lizzie, you an’ your high jinks,’ and toppled forward on to the dusty floorboards, felled by an almighty stroke.

The reports to the Fiscal’s office exonerated police and council officials from blame and Gran’s body was released to the family just as soon as the tenement in Ballingall Street had been safely reduced to rubble. Dominic met the costs of the funeral and the headstone in Laurieston necropolis. He sent Polly round to the refurbished council apartment in Moorcastle Street to offer Aunt Janet financial assistance in the shape of a well-paid job in his warehouse. Janet would have none of his dirty money, his charity. She wouldn’t let Polly cross the doorstep, wouldn’t speak to Lizzie or any member of the Conway clan, was finished with the Conways for good and all, she said, and thereafter refused to answer letters or accept gifts even at Christmas and New Year. In 1936, Mr Smart’s wee grocery store, where Janet had worked for years, was sold to Sloan’s dairy chain. Janet was given a new white overall and an increase in wages and, as far as Lizzie or her daughters knew, continued to live out her lonely little life south of the river.

After a year or so Lizzie no longer felt guilty about what had happened to her mother and sister. She snuggled up to Bernard and thanked God for the way things had panned out, for daughters who had gone up in the world, for darling wee grandchildren, for a nice secure house and nice secure husband who, thanks to the influence of Dominic Manone, was now deputy manager of an estate agency in the leafy outer reaches of the city.

In the back of her mind, though, Lizzie suspected that there were still some dark things out there, nightmarish things, from which neither Bernard nor Dominic could protect her and that Rosie knew what they were and what they signified.

Bernard could have told her if only she’d thought to ask him. He knew only too well what the changes in their circumstances meant and what the cost might be in the long run for he’d wrestled with his conscience for weeks before deciding to accept the opportunity for advancement that Dominic had offered him. In a strange way he had been inspired by his stepdaughter Rosie who had lost her hearing in childhood. He reckoned that if Rosie had learned to cope with that handicap he could learn to cope with something as minor as a bruised conscience.

Rosie had acquired a variety of ways of comprehending. She could lip-read with astonishing accuracy, but how the words conveyed themselves to her brain not even Bernard could begin to understand. He was very close to Rosie, though, for every morning they walked the half-mile to the railway station at Anniesland Cross together and had developed an affectionate rapport.

On wet days they shared the shelter of Bernard’s black umbrella. On crisp, invigorating winter mornings with the sun just showing above the trees of Jordanhill, they would step out lively. But whatever the weather Rosie’s cheerful presence would send Bernard rattling off on the train to Breslin with a smile while Rosie, travelling in the opposite direction, caught the train into Glasgow for a day’s work in Shelby’s bookshop.

On that particular November morning, however, the sun failed to penetrate the fog that shrouded the suburbs, street lamps remained lighted and the houses seemed to be cut from thick grey flannel. City workers emerging from garden gates nodded to Bernard and touched their hats to Rosie and girl clerks and shop assistants fluttered gloved hands in greeting. Bowler hats and scarves, newspapers, lighted pipes, after-breakfast cigarettes, the minutiae of the weekday world, Bernard thought, the substance of days that would go ticking on and on, strangely fulfilling in their predictability.

Rosie raised her chin from beneath her scarf and said, ‘Do you ever wonder how much money our Dominic rakes in?’

Bernard turned to face her. ‘What makes you ask?’

She shrugged. ‘The fog reminds me of the old days.’

‘You are too young for’ – he broke the word into three parts – ‘nos-tal-gia. Don’t tell me you’re hankering after the Gorbals?’

She laughed. ‘Nuh, nuh. I was just thinking of Dominic’s boys, the street collectors. I wonder what became of Alex O’Hara, for instance, after Dominic changed his spots. Dominic has changed his spots, has he not?’

‘Why don’t you ask Polly?’

‘Hah!’

‘I don’t know if he’s changed his spots com-pleet-ly,’ Bernard said.

‘I can see what you’re saying.’

‘Sorry.’

‘But I do not hear an answer.’

‘I don’t have an answer, Rosie.’

The hub of the Manone empire was still the Central Warehouse in Govan. Dominic had financed Jackie Hallop’s motor showroom, no secret there. He had also bought into Lyons & Lloyd’s real estate agency and had installed a new manager, Mr Shakespeare, who was Bernard’s boss. Dominic owned stock in several Clydeside cafés and restaurants and supplied equipment for ice-cream factories and a bottling plant. The bulk of his interests were decidedly shady, however, and Bernard preferred not to know about them.

‘Does the Rowing Club in Molliston Street still belong to Dominic?’

Rosie definitely wanted an answer. He could always tell when she was trying to wheedle something out of him by the way she slurred her consonants. Why, he wondered, was she suddenly so interested in Dominic? Personally he preferred to forget the dreadful years in Lavender Court when squaring up to Dominic’s debt collectors had forced him to acknowledge that honesty and cowardice do not necessarily go hand in hand.

He hesitated, then signed with a firm, flat, emphatic slash of the right hand to terminate that line of conversation.

Undeterred Rosie continued to watch for an answer.

‘I believe he sold the club to John Flint when he gave up bookmaking,’ Bernard said at length. ‘Polly put pressure on him, I think.’

‘Does Polly have influence over him?’ Rosie said. ‘I know she is supposed to wear the pants in the Manone household but I do not think that is the case.’

Bernard could see the busy junction of Anniesland Cross up ahead. For once he was relieved to be nearing the railway station. He really did not want to be reminded that he, or rather Lizzie, had almost lost out to the gangs and that only the intervention of Dominic Manone, the biggest crook of all, had finally rescued the Conways from the contamination of the slums; Bernard still detected a sinister irony in that fact.

Rosie’s job in Shelby’s bookshop may have matured her but she would never have her sisters’ hard shell. He had constantly to remind himself that married or not the Conway girls were united and that by accepting Dominic’s offer of a post with Lyons & Lloyd he too had put himself beyond the pale.

Rosie stopped at the crossing that would carry them over the tramlines between buses and trade vans and the slow-moving drays that came down in convoy from the coal depot and the long horse-drawn carts from the timber yard that adjoined the canal. In the murky morning air the gasometer resembled a zeppelin hovering behind the railway bridge that spanned the Great Western Road. Bernard glanced at his wristlet watch and took Polly’s arm to steer her across the thoroughfare. She resisted, not petulantly but firmly.

‘Will you not tell me anything about Dominic?’ she shouted.

Bernard put his hand to his ear as a tram thundered past.

‘Can’t hear you,’ he mouthed. ‘Sorry.’

And that morning at the railway station, for the first time ever, Rosie refused to kiss him goodbye.

*   *   *

Oswald Shelby, Sons & Partners, Books, Rare Books, Bindings & Manuscripts, had been at the centre of the book trade in Glasgow for the best part of sixty years. Their premises in Mandeville Square, just around the corner from the Royal Exchange, occupied all five floors of one of the city’s neoclassical buildings. It was not the architecture that caught the attention of passers-by, though, but the two shallow windows in which were displayed a few of the many bibliographical treasures that Shelby’s had for sale.

Dressing the windows was a task that Mr Robert Shelby, the junior partner, had allocated to Rosalind Conway. Sometimes she would stack the spaces with leather-bound sets, on other occasions with just a few handsome volumes laid on velvet cloth. Price tickets were never attached, only a simple description of the items written on postcards in the clear copperplate script that Rosie had perfected. She enjoyed dressing windows and didn’t object in the least when cocky young stockbrokers or insurance clerks loitered outside to ogle her while she worked. She would give them a smile, sometimes a wink but always modestly ensured that she wasn’t giving them an eyeful of her knickers as well. Her main occupation was that of research cataloguer and she spent most of her time hunched behind a long table in an alcove at the rear of the ground-floor book room. She had received her training from Mr Albert Briggs who was almost as old as the building itself, though in recent years Albert’s eyesight had deteriorated to the point where he could hardly see print at all and Rosie did all the manuscript work and most of the typing.

Rosie had no brothers and had never known her father. The men who had most influenced her were not blood relatives, not Conways or McKerlies but Bernard, Mr Albert and, of course, Mr Feldman at the Institute where she’d been schooled. As a teenager she’d moped over Mr Robert Shelby and imagined that he would eventually fall in love with her but it didn’t take long to discover that love does not conquer all and when Mr Robert married an English debutante Rosie was more relieved than disappointed.

On the table were a pile of books that Rosie had lugged up from the basement last thing on Saturday, choice items from the library of the late Sheriff of Golspie. She laid out her sheaf of lined foolscap, filled the inkwells, renewed the blotting-paper and had just picked out a first edition of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France when the bell above the main door chimed.

‘That,’ said Mr Albert, ‘sounds like your young man again.’

Rosie frowned. Mr Albert, arms folded, calmly puffed his pipe. She didn’t have to ask how he knew who had entered the shop when he couldn’t see further than the tip of his nose for she had an odd, almost supernatural sixth sense when it came to picking up sounds that her ears could not hear.

‘Is it him?’ said Albert.

Rosie peeped over the partition.

‘It’s him,’ she said, trying to whisper.

‘Where’s Gannon?’

Gannon, now in his twenties, was the shop-boy. He should have been dusting counters and display cases and generally keeping an eye on the book room while Mr McAdam, the department manager, spent his usual twenty minutes in the water closet attending to a call of nature and completing the Glasgow Herald crossword. Gannon, though, was nowhere to be seen.

‘Your young man’s either a shoplifter,’ Albert said, ‘or he’s after somebody. Who could he be after, I wonder?’

‘Gannon perhaps?’ Rosie struggled to keep her voice down.

‘I doubt it,’ Albert said. ‘If anyone ever comes for Gannon it’ll be in a Black Maria. Now, do you want me to hoist my poor old bones…’

‘I will go and see what he wants,’ said Rosie. ‘If I cannot make out what he is saying I will come and fetch you.’

‘You’ll make out what he’s saying, I’m sure.’

Albert returned the pipe to his mouth, leaned back and folded his arms as Rosie darted out from behind the desk before Gannon could appear and spoil everything. She put on her best ‘Babs’ walk, chest out and hips swaying. Unfortunately she didn’t have Babs’s figure but she was more graceful than her middle sister and hoped that might compensate. She had met the young man several times before, which is to say that he was on his way to becoming a regular. There were a dozen like him, though not so attractive, men who would drop by to chat to Rosie and who made nothing out of her deafness. They were bookworms, however; clearly the young man was not. He seemed uncomfortable in the book room, as if fearful that the shelves might collapse or the stately glass-fronted cases crack if he trod too heavily on the carpeted floor.

‘Good morning, Mr MacGregor,’ Rosie said.

‘Ah!’

‘You are the early bird, are you not?’

A pinkish flush spread across his broad cheeks. He considered resting an elbow on the surface of a Globe bookcase but decided against it. He stuck his hands in his overcoat pockets and rocked on the balls of his feet. He wore black polished shoes with thick soles.

Rosie watched his lips move: ‘I’ve an hour to spare so I thought…’

‘What better way to spend it than browsing among old books?’

‘Aye – yes, that’s right.’

‘Oh, dear!’ said Rosie. ‘I was hoping you had popped in to see me.’

‘Oh, I did. I mean … I have.’

Rosie could do little to control the pitch of her voice. To compensate she had perfected the art of body language and could convey much by a wave of the hand or a tilt of the eyebrow. ‘Is there something in particular you are after?’

‘I’ve something I’d like you to look at.’ He fumbled in the pocket of his overcoat and drew out a brown-paper packet. ‘I wonder if it’s got any value.’

Rosie hid her disappointment and took the packet. What worthless ‘treasure’ had he unearthed from a hall cupboard or from his old grandmother’s dresser drawer, she wondered. She gave him a professional smile.

‘I am not a valuator. Mr Robert is our valuator.’

‘Still,’ the young man said, ‘I’d like you to look at it first.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, you never know. You might have seen it before.’

She felt a sudden stiffening inside herself. Last time they had chatted he had mentioned that he knew her brother-in-law, dropping Dominic’s name so casually into the conversation that she’d made little of it, just enough to prompt her to ask Bernard about Dominic’s present circumstances. She hadn’t forgotten the sort of men who’d hung about the Ferryhead Rowing Club, though Mr MacGregor didn’t look at all like one of Dominic’s runners. Besides if Dominic had an item – a stolen item – that he wanted valued she was the last person he’d send it to. She placed the packet on top of the bookcase and peeled off the brown-paper wrappings.

As soon as the little volume was exposed Rosie’s demeanour changed. She lifted the book carefully on the flat of her hand and opened it at the title-page.

‘Do you know what it is?’ Mr MacGregor said.

Although he was standing close by, she heard his question as a faint bumble-bee drone that had no meaning whatsoever. She did not ask him to repeat himself.

She studied the book’s title-page, turned the pages with her forefinger and examined the red and black type, red-ruled margins and stunning woodcuts.

He leaned closer, his lips almost brushing her ear.

‘Can you read what it says?’

‘Yes,’ Rosie answered. ‘Heures à la Louange de la Vierge Marie.’

She pronounced the French words badly but she didn’t think Mr MacGregor would notice.

‘What does that mean?’ he asked.

‘Hours in Praise of the Virgin Mary.’

‘Oh!’

‘It is a prayer book.’

She turned the book over and opened it at the back page.

‘Ex libris Augusti le Chevalier,’ she read aloud.

He pointed. ‘Is that a date?’

‘Fifteen hundred and twenty-five. Paris – for Geofroy de Bourges.’

‘Wow! It’s old, isn’t it?’

‘Not for a prayer book,’ Rosie told him. ‘An early date does not give it value.’

‘What’s it worth?’ Mr MacGregor said. ‘Approximately.’

‘I have no idea.’

She continued to turn pages, counting the woodcuts, checking seaming and pagination: no shaving of the margins, the binding tight: an almost perfect copy of a choice item. Even so, holding the little volume gave her a queer feeling that something wasn’t quite right about it.

‘It is valuable, though, isn’t it?’ the young man said.

She could sense his urgency; perhaps he was one of Dominic’s cronies and the choice little item had been stolen.

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Just wait right here.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To find Mr Shelby.’

‘For – what for?’

‘To make you an offer.’

‘An offer, but…’

She glanced up the length of the shop in the hope that Gannon or Mr McAdam had returned to the floor. She thought of calling out to Albert but Albert was too old and frail to protect her if the thief decided to cut up rough.

She kept calm and said, ‘I thought you wanted to sell it.’

‘No, I only want it valued.’

‘What for? Insurance?’

‘Look, just tell me – have you seen that book before?’

‘Never,’ said Rosie. ‘It is quite a rare item, I think.’

‘Are you absolutely sure nobody has ever shown you this book?’

‘You mean somebody like my brother-in-law?’

‘Your brother-in-law?’

‘Dominic Manone. He sent you, did he not?’

‘He’s the last person who’d send me,’ Mr MacGregor said.

For a moment Rosie thought he was about to snatch the prayer book from her hands and make a break for it. She pulled the volume to her breast and followed the movement of his lips anxiously.

‘Knew I shouldn’t have come,’ he murmured. ‘Rotten idea in the first place.’

‘Idea? Whose idea? Dominic’s idea?’ Rosie said loudly.

‘You’re going upstairs to telephone the police, aren’t you?’

‘I am going to show the book to Mr Shelby.’

He leaned against the bookcase and fumbled with the buttons at the breast of his coat. Rosie was suddenly afraid. She remembered O’Hara, Dominic’s persuader, his razors, his knives. The bluff young man with the curly fair hair and frank open face might be an up-to-date version of the same vicious breed.

She opened her mouth to shout for Albert, but no sound emerged, then she was staring at a card that had appeared in the young man’s hand. He held it out to her like a badge. It wasn’t a badge, however, just a card, open like a little pageless book. She saw the words City of Glasgow Police, red-letter stamping, a name printed beneath a signature: Kenneth Robert MacGregor.

‘Yuh – yuh – you’re a policeman,’ Rosie stammered.

‘Yes, I’m afraid I am,’ said Kenneth.

‘Thank God for that,’ said Rosie, and puffed out her cheeks in relief.