Strange Loyalties jl-3

by William McIlvanney

  ‘I’m not sure,’ John said. ‘Maybe that the four are feeding off the man in the middle? His loss of identity.’

  ‘Something like that,’ Mhairi said. ‘Anyway, I like it. And Scott never explained.’

  We all looked at it briefly.

  ‘It’s good to meet you,’ Mhairi said. ‘Scott talked about you a lot. Black Jack, he sometimes called you. Nicely, though. We miss him so much.’

  ‘So do I,’ I said. ‘Not that I had seen too much of him lately. But he was always there for me. Like money in the bank. Suddenly it’s the Wall Street crash. I feel a bit impoverished without him.’

  ‘He was special,’ John said. ‘The pupils talk a lot about him at the school. I think a couple of the sixth-year girls had vaguely thought they might marry him.’

  ‘We used to see a lot of him and Anna,’ Mhairi said. ‘Not so much lately. But he still came round himself.’

  ‘Anna,’ I said. ‘I tried to go and see her today. The house is up for sale. That was quick.’

  They looked at each other.

  ‘You know how bad it was between them before Scott died?’ John said.

  ‘I thought I had some idea. But maybe I underestimated drastically. I don’t know how you felt about the funeral, John. But I found that hard to take. I know Anna has to cope with it the way she can. But come on.’

  ‘I think I can understand what Anna did,’ Mhairi said. ‘I don’t know if it’s what I would’ve done. But then maybe I wouldn’t have had the guts.’

  I waited.

  ‘They were really separated before Scott died. They lived in the same house, right enough. But it was all over bar admitting it. What Anna felt must have been close to hate, I think. I think the funeral was a way to avoid hypocrisy as much as possible. She’s very strong-willed, Anna.’

  ‘So was Scott, Mhairi,’ John said. ‘He had a lot of charm with it. But if you ruffled the etiquette, you touched iron quick enough.’

  ‘What do you think went wrong between them?’ I asked.

  They both smiled and shook their heads.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Cancel the question.’

  ‘No,’ John said. ‘I suppose, knowing them as well as we did, we got a few pointers. But how do you referee that stuff? You just see them sometimes coming out of their privacy and you know the game’s changed.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Mhairi said. ‘You know what I’ve noticed? One of the signs is when a couple start to overreact to something in public. A subject comes up and they’re both going over the top. And you realise it’s not that they’re talking about at all. It’s something else. That’s just the excuse for a much deeper enmity. I think that’s when it’s bad. Because they’ve stopped trying to sort out the real problem. They’re just using it as fuel to fight about other things.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ John said. ‘Know when I noticed that with Scott and Anna? Know one of the first times? The private school discussion? Remember that?’

  Mhairi breathed out and shook her head.

  ‘Do I remember the Vietnam War? That was terrible. I thought Scott was going to get violent.’

  ‘He would never have done that. But he took words as far as they would go.’

  ‘Private school?’ I said.

  ‘It was Anna’s idea,’ Mhairi said. ‘She said she wanted David and Alan to go to a private school. It was one night they were in here. Just the four of us. I think Anna mentioned it in company deliberately, to see if she could get some support.’

  ‘Fat chance,’ John said. ‘I teach where I teach because I believe in it. It’s not just the money. That helps, though. The little there is of it.’

  ‘Oh, the three of us were agreed. But Anna still had the right to her opinion. But Scott was outraged. By the time he was finished, I was beginning to think maybe I agreed with Anna. Excuse me. But he was out of order that night.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I believe you. I think it’s a family characteristic.’

  ‘It was as if she was trying to undermine the meaning of his life,’ John said.

  Catriona and Elspeth entered the room like a Molotov cocktail, exploding in the middle of us.

  ‘Come on, girls,’ Mhairi said wanly.

  All right, Canute said: turn back, tide. They had devised a different game. This game was less complicated than the previous one, marked a distinct regression in subtlety. What this game was about was simply decibels.

  ‘Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah,’ Catriona sang. ‘Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah.’

  ‘Nyoo, nyoo, nyoo,’ sang Elspeth. ‘Nyoo, nyoo, nyoo. Nyoo, nyoo, nyoo.’

  The lyrics were a lot better than the tunes. Mhairi nodded to John.

  ‘Sh!’ John said, a man trying to blow out a forest fire. ‘What Mhairi and I were thinking. You and I could nip round to the pub. Have a blether there.’

  Mhairi smiled at me and nodded. I was grateful to them, not just because the shift would make communication possible but because I liked them and I didn’t want to repeat the brief vision I’d just had of shooting their children.

  ‘You sure you’ll be all right, love?’ John said.

  I could understand the question.

  ‘I’ve survived so far. I’ll get these two to bed. You won’t be too long?’

  ‘No. We’ll go to the Akimbo. Okay?’

  John kissed her and kissed the children. I thanked Mhairi and waved to Catriona and Elspeth.

  ‘Maybe we’ll see you sometime when the circumstances are less sad.’

  ‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘I think I would like that.’

  7

  Walking with John Strachan, I found myself surfacing too quickly from the depth of my preoccupation with Scott’s death into an ordinary evening. I felt a psychological equivalent of the bends. I couldn’t relate to what was going on around me.

  I seemed alien here. Yet I knew this town well enough. Our family had lived here for five or six years when my father — inveterate dreamer of unfulfilled dreams — had brought us to make another of those fresh starts of his that always curdled into failure by being exposed to too much harsh reality. But tonight the town didn’t feel familiar. Maybe I was seeing it not so much as the place where I was as the place where Scott wasn’t, an expanse of buildings that had lost my brother as effortlessly and effectively as an ocean closing over a wreck.

  Suddenly I didn’t want to sit in the Akimbo Arms, a pub I had known slightly, and be invaded by the anonymity of the town. I needed a place that would give me a stronger sense of Scott.

  ‘John,’ I said. ‘What you say we don’t go to the Akimbo? We could walk to where I’ve parked the car. And I’ll drive us to the Bushfield Hotel. I need a room for the night anyway.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I have the odd pint in there. It’s all right.’

  The Bushfield was a converted private house. It was mainly a pub but it had perhaps ten bedrooms as well. Katie and Mike Samson, who owned it, had known Scott well. I had spent a few sessions in there after hours, enjoying the singsong. The sweetly ample Katie had been very fond of Scott. Maybe Mike had liked him, too. But with Mike you couldn’t be sure. Tall and lean, he sometimes gave the impression that you might need a power-drill to find out what was going on inside his head. Together, they were tune and descant, Mike providing a slightly lugubrious undertow to Katie’s joy in things.

  I parked the car in front of the hotel and took out my travelling-bag. As John Strachan and I went into the hotel, Katie was crossing the hallway from bar to kitchen.

  ‘Have you got a room here for a wayfaring stranger?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, Jack,’ she said.

  She stood staring at me. I thought I understood what the stare meant. She was reaffirming the death of Scott in seeing his big brother. Scott would never again be standing where I was. Katie being Katie, as spontaneous as breathing, the thought brought tears to her eyes. She approached with her arms open and pulled me down into an embrace where breathing was difficult. The travelling-b
ag hit the floor. Just when I was going down for the third time, she released me.

  ‘You’re thin as a rake,’ she said.

  ‘That’s just muscular leanness, Katie.’

  ‘Don’t dodge. What have you been eatin’? Or what have ye not been eatin’, more like?’

  ‘I’m the worst cook in Britain.’

  ‘Ach, Jack. I heard about yer other bothers, too.’ She meant my marriage. ‘Trouble always travels in company, doesn’t it?’

  I tried to introduce John Strachan to her but she knew him already. She would. She treated even casual customers as if they were part of an extended family. She shooed John through to the bar to get a pint and took me upstairs to show me my room. It was freshly decorated and beautifully clean.

  ‘This is the best one,’ she said. ‘Some of the others are getting done up. Then there’s two fellas from Denmark staying the night. And a man from Ireland’s been here for nearly a week.’

  I didn’t unpack the bag. I told her I wanted to phone Glasgow. She wouldn’t let me use the payphone. She took me back downstairs to the kitchen. Fortunately, Buster the dog recognised me, although that didn’t always guarantee you immunity from threatening noises. She left me dialling Brian Harkness’s number.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hullo, Morag?’ I said. ‘It’s — ’

  ‘I know who it is all right. I’d recognise your growl anywhere. It’s Black Jack Laidlaw, the mad detective.’

  It’s nice to be recognised.

  ‘Where are you?’ she said.

  ‘I’m in Graithnock. I’m still in Graithnock.’

  ‘Whereabouts in Graithnock?’

  ‘I’m just booking into a wee hotel. I just got in there.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ she said. Morag had the kind of directness that often goes with authentic generosity. Kindness was such a natural thing with her she never bothered to dress it in formal clothes. ‘You’re forty minutes down the road from us. Get your bum in the car and get up here.’

  I didn’t take time to explain that that was a long forty minutes. The car would make it but not my head. I could hear over the phone the background noises of domesticity, like an old tune I could still remember but had forgotten the words. I didn’t want to take any contagion of gloomy obsessiveness into that nice place.

  ‘Well, I’ve still got a couple of people to see, Morag.’

  ‘Jack. Who do you think you’re kidding? You’ll sit in a room the size of a coffin and get pissed. Your habits are known. Come up here and get a decent meal and some company. Brian told me about your fridge. He said you could sell it as new. If you can’t look after yourself, let other people do it now and again.’

  ‘What it is, Morag,’ I said. ‘I just tasted whisky for the first time there. And, you know the way you can sometimes just tell right away? I really think I’m going to like it. So what I thought I would do, I’ll just stay with it for a while and see if I can acquire the taste. And it’s awkward to do that when you’re driving.’

  ‘You’re hopeless. You not coming up?’

  ‘Not the night, lovely wumman. But it’s in my crowded diary. How’s Stephanie and the mystery guest?’

  ‘Steph’s fine. The other one’s kickin’ like a football team. Listen. We’re going to feed you properly soon. Even if we have to put you on a drip. No escape. You want to speak to Brian?’

  ‘Please, Morag. He’s in, is he?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t swallow all that Crime Squad stuff about having to work late all the time. The fate of the nation hanging on a break-in in Garthamlock. I’ll get him. You watch yourself, you.’

  ‘Like an egg in a cake, Morag. Cheers.’

  ‘So Morag’s seductive tones didn’t persuade you?’ Brian said. ‘Actually, the way she’s goin’ on at me. D’you mind if I come down there? Can you get me a room?’

  ‘I’d change places any day,’ I said. ‘So how did it go today?’

  ‘You first,’ Brian said.

  I started trying to give him a brief outline and began to feel as if I was drawing pictures in the air with my finger. I found myself interpreting Brian’s silence as the sound of scepticism. Maybe obsessions are essentially incommunicable. What did I have to tell him? I visited an empty house. I found an abandoned painting. I met a schoolteacher and his wife and family. It was all as interesting in the telling as one of those childhood compositions: What I Did At The Weekend. Even to myself it seemed that I was not conveying my experiences so much as my symptoms. Brian’s response wasn’t a hopeful diagnosis.

  ‘Christ, Jack,’ he said. ‘What’s the point of what you’re doing?’

  ‘I’m not telling you,’ I said. ‘’Cause you’re not a nice man. Anyway, what about you?’

  I think Brian was relieved to get back to talking about the real world. Buster was looking at me from the floor as if he shared Brian’s opinion of me.

  ‘Meece Rooney,’ Brian said. ‘You know him?’

  ‘Meece? I know him.’

  ‘Well, you did,’ Brian said. ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘You mean he’s the one? On the waste ground?’

  ‘Meece Rooney. Listen. Somebody said he was supposed to have studied medicine. Would you know about that?’

  ‘Meece did about a month at university,’ I said. ‘Before he decided there must be quicker ways to fulfil yourself. If Meece was saying he studied medicine, he must’ve meant he had been reading the label on a cough-bottle.’

  I found myself shrugging. Grief can be selfish. I didn’t dislike Meece. I hadn’t disliked Meece. By the rule of thumb you sometimes applied to the troublesome people you dealt with, he wasn’t the worst. The thumb was almost up. He had been in my experience more victim than perpetrator. He was a fantasist who had decided to sublimate his fantasies in heroin. But if my brother’s dying was a sore thing, why not his? His death was someone’s mourning.

  ‘He was dealing, you know,’ Brian said.

  The thumb went down. It’s one thing to find your own way to hell. But when you start directing the traffic there, it’s different.

  ‘I’d lost touch with him,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know he was a dealer. It’s a natural progression, right enough. So what else have you got?’

  ‘Not a lot so far. We traced him to a bedsit in Hyndland. He was supposed to be living there with a woman. By the way, the pathologist’s report shows he had a broken arm recently. The neighbours aren’t saying a lot. We don’t even have a name for her yet. But she seems to have been on the stuff as well. Only thing is, she’s not there any more. And her clothes aren’t either. But one of the unwashed cups has lipstick on it. And the remains of a coffee that hadn’t even hardened.’

  ‘So you think she knows who did it?’

  ‘It looks that way.’

  ‘And evaporated for the good of her health.’

  ‘You’re a genius.’

  ‘I’m just thinking aloud. Don’t get smart-arsed.’

  ‘You taught me,’ he said.

  ‘No. That’s maybe what you learned but it’s not what I was teaching. But that’s interesting. At least it narrows the focus.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, with a junkie you’ve got problems, haven’t you? They’re good at keeping bad company. There’s a lot of that stuff out there. And their motivations are like mayflies. They can be born and die the same day. That can make a motive hard to trace.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘But the way Meece died looks planned. Breaking fingers one by one doesn’t smack of spontaneity. It might mean questions were being asked. Or just some special rites of passage into death. Either way, Meece’s murder was arranged. And the vanishing woman confirms that. She maybe knew it was going to happen or that it had happened. And whoever did it frightened her out of her life. And into another one.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So it’s a guess. But you’re looking to move towards official sources in their world. The big fear. What’s the biggest fear an addict has?�
��

  ‘No more of the stuff.’

  ‘Correct. Who’s god for those people?’

  ‘The man who gives the goods.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re looking for some lost soul who took a bad mood. I think you’re looking for more important people.’

  I didn’t know whether Brian’s silence meant awe at my forensic brilliance or just that he had fallen asleep.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Thanks for taking so long to tell us what we knew already.’

  We both laughed.

  ‘You might just about get a pass-mark at detective school for that lot.’

  We talked some more but that was enough of that. Brian’s reaction had punctured my self-absorption. Other people’s problems seem so much simpler than our own. Maybe I had enjoyed playing at detectives with Meece Rooney’s death because I couldn’t begin to understand Scott’s. I had been like a man in a real war who finds relief in playing chess. I had become involved in a case that for me was purely abstract. I didn’t want to be. I had my own worries. What did Meece have to do with me just now? He was Brian and Bob’s problem. It could stay that way.

  ‘Okay,’ Brian said. ‘Oh, by the way, Bob Lilley says when you’ve stopped taking the fits, we’d love to have you on this case with us.’

  ‘Aye,’ I said. ‘Tell him if he could take the odd fit, it would be a hopeful sign. It might prove he was alive. Tell him he could live in Madame Tussaud’s and nobody would notice the difference.’

  ‘I feel like a Valentine card,’ Brian said. ‘Passing on all these loving messages.’

  ‘Cheers,’ I said.

  I put down the phone rather noisily and Buster growled at me, his Dobermann ears erect.

  ‘Shut your face, Buster,’ I said. ‘The world’s queuing up to have a go at me and you’re at the end of the queue. I’ll see you after.’

  We stared at each other. One of the advantages of having big worries is that smaller problems seem irrelevant. It’s all a question of perspective. I felt as if I could give Buster a sorer bite than he could give me.

  8

  I imagined a party. That is not a difficult thing for me to do. It has always been a word liable to send my mind off in pursuit of its fabulous nature, like El Dorado.