Dead men and broken hearts

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‘Who, where or what is “Tanglewood”?’

It was a simple question and, given the circumstances, an entirely reasonable and necessary one. Neither I nor my soon-to-be-client were filled with dread at my utterance of those six innocent words.

The thing is, though, we should have been.

Nineteen Fifty-six, the year that was winding up, may have been a bad year for the British Empire but had, for me, been a good one business-wise. Not as lucrative as some of its predecessors, admittedly, but for the first time in years the buck I was turning was completely honest. It had been a full thirteen months since I had done any work for any one of the Three Kings, Glasgow Underworld’s answer to Caesar, Pompey and Crassus, and I hadn’t gotten into any real tangles.

The last tangle, however, had ended in a way that could have had me stretching a length of hangman’s hemp. An experience like that increased the appeal of the straight and narrow.

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