Dickov doesn’t answer. They have missed the point of the club entirely. Just yes or no please, Mr Dickov. After prompting he says perhaps, maybe, sometimes.
Mr Dickov was brought up by his grandparents, refugees from Bulgaria. Mr Dickov is Glaswegian but has retained some of their accent and conversational conventions. He calls children ‘darling’, pronouncing it ‘darlink’. Once he has made his fortune, which will be very soon, he will move to Florida and talk about how much he loves Scotland for the rest of his life. He will never come back. Maurice has inherited his grandparents’ habit of being from somewhere else.
Maurice is dismissed from the dock. In ten days’ time the police will raid the Gordon Club and find roulette wheels and blackjack tables. They’ll find eight thousand pounds in the safe, all in small bills, quite a lot of jewellery, stolen chequebooks and a number of blank passports. They’ll also find stag films and a projector in a box, under a folded bed sheet which had been pinned up to act as a screen. They will shut the club down for good, confiscate the money and passports and gambling equipment. The stag films will remain in the possession of a series of unmarried police officers until the films shred or melt from age. They’ve missed the point of the Gordon. Those senior police officers who were secretly members will know that. They could not confiscate the net of friendships and contacts made there. Dickov will be sad at the demise of the Gordon Club in some ways, but in others not. It has run its course, he feels, served its purpose. He is a pragmatist and he’s moving on.
When Dandy McKay, Dickov’s co-owner, comes into the court everyone cranes to see what he is wearing.
Dandy is small and chubby, clean-shaven, with a neat Tony Curtis haircut and very small eyes. His suit is a herringbone check in black and white, double-breasted, the old style. His shirt is a strange shimmery orangey-red colour. He sports a puce handkerchief in his pocket and has a small green carnation in his buttonhole. But the main event is the tie. The tie is a swirl of what to Dandy appears to be muted shades of blue and yellow. It is actually red and blue with flecks of green. Dandy is colour-blind but no one has ever dared to tell him. Dandy McKay runs Glasgow and he can wear whatever the fuck he likes. And this is what he likes. Hence the nickname.
Dandy turns in the witness box and sees the look he always sees on the faces of strangers: surprised and then averted eyes. The only people who ever ask him why he is dressed like that are children. Poor children, because that’s the only kind he ever meets, and what do they know about style? Dandy tells them he dresses like that because he is rich. Should they chance a supplementary question Dandy slaps them hard and tells them to fuck off back to their whore o’ a mother.
He is sworn in. He admits that he is the co-owner of the Gordon Club but if, as Grieve suggests, it is a gambling club, this is certainly news to him. He doesn’t take a lot do with the floor. He’s in the office mostly.
Dandy admits driving Lowe to Totten’s house. They picked the guns up from Mrs Totten and took them to Shifty Thomson’s house in Florence Street. They left them there for safe keeping. In what way was that safe? Well, says McKay, Mrs Totten has eleven children. You can’t very well leave guns in a two-apartment with eleven children. The men in the court think well of him for this. It’s very responsible and they’re not even his children. The women in the public gallery are too distracted by the thought of eleven children in a two-apartment to be impressed by Dandy’s civic-mindedness. They’re wondering how much Totten’s silk suit cost and where the pitch-and-toss money went. The statement distracts everyone so that the narrative disconnect between grey-faced Tony Lowe getting a gun to protect himself and then leaving it with Shifty Thomson is left unexplored.
McKay says that about a year or so later he drove Manuel to Thomson’s to pick up the Beretta. Manuel said he needed it for personal protection. No, Dandy never asked Manuel from whom or for why. He had a car and Manuel needed a lift so he took him there and back. Dandy doesn’t seem like a man who drives underlings around to be nice and M.G. Gillies delves for a motive. No, no money exchanged hands. Not even a fiver? asks Gillies, tired of being lied to about the money. McKay smiles and says he drove Manuel there in his Alvis Grey Lady. This is a huge luxury car, brand new. It is clear that McKay doesn’t need to chase grubby fivers for stolen guns. McKay’s inexplicable kindness is left unexplored.
Did McKay see Mr Manuel after that occasion? Yes he did. Manuel came to see him on the 10th of January this year at the club. The date is a few days after the Smarts were found dead in Uddingston, the day before Manuel was arrested.
‘Why did Mr Manuel come to see you on the 10th of January?’
‘He came to ask me for one hundred and fifty pounds. He said he wanted to leave the country.’
‘Did you oblige?’
‘No, I did not oblige. I saw Mr Manuel down the stairs of the club and he did not return.’
No one asks why Peter Manuel thought Dandy might give him one hundred and fifty pounds to leave the country the day before he was arrested.
No one asks about the identification parade the next morning either, which was held at Hamilton Police Station, when Peter Manuel picked Dandy out of a line-up and Dandy set about him–Not the face, Mr McKay, please! Not the face!
Dandy is the man who owns the club where all the witnesses worked. He is the man who lives in Florence Street in the Gorbals, where the guns were got and Mr Watt crashed his car and Manuel left Mr Smart’s Austin 35.
But no one asks these things, though everyone knows about them. They never come up.
While Dandy gives his evidence he looks straight at Manuel. Manuel is glad that no one can see his face from the press or public galleries. He keeps his eyes trained on McKay’s chin, hoping that distance makes it look as if he is meeting his eye. During a lull in the questioning, when Grieve and Leslie are discussing something or other in low whispers, McKay gives Manuel a twitch of a smile. Manuel feels sick when he sees it. If Dandy McKay wishes you ill, then ill will surely come to you. When Dandy holds his eye and blinks slowly Manuel knows he will die soon, one way or another, because Dandy has ordained it. And Manuel remembers the night in December, when Shifty and Scout took him and Watt to the Gordon. Manuel remembers that there is worse that Dandy McKay can do to him.
When he was arrested Manuel said he bought the Beretta from ‘a man’ inside the Gordon Club.
Dandy is thanked for his cooperation. He gets down from the stand. Unlike the other witnesses, he doesn’t scuttle guiltily through the witness-hall door. Dandy has decided to stay. He wants to watch from the witness seats but they are all full. Three different men half stand to offer him their chairs. Dandy takes the best one and orders the man next to him to leave as well. Dandy likes to spread out.
14
Tuesday 3 December 1957