The Papers of Tony Veitch

by William McIlvanney

  He seemed to be checking for a murmur at the instincts, then nodded and sat down.

  ‘Ah’ll take a pint of heavy.’

  ‘No draught here, Macey,’ Milligan said.

  ‘A glass of export then.’

  While Milligan told a waitress, Macey looked round in the blinky way he had, innocent as a tourist’s Kodak.

  ‘Whit’s these then?’

  He was referring to the etchings and paintings of Norman Ackroyd that hung round the walls of the lounge like black holes in which whispers of light and shape were conspiring to survive.

  ‘Macey,’ Milligan said. ‘These is art. I like them.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Whit’s his secret? All the people I know get put in the jile for stealin’ money.’

  Milligan laughed and Macey turned that naive face towards him as if he’d like to be included in the joke. Milligan wasn’t taken in but he appreciated the tradition in which Macey was working. Macey was a practitioner in the ancient Glaswegian art of the double-con. He was a master of the upturned palms and the kind of innocence that could pick anybody’s pockets of suspicions. A lot of the people he dealt with, Milligan thought, must have been home in bed before their self-congratulation went sour and they realised that Macey had been taking the mickey out the mickey they thought they were taking out of him. He was so simple he could have sold life-insurance in heaven.

  ‘Your export, Macey,’ Milligan said and paid.

  Macey wet his lips with the beer. Unlike a lot of touts, he never used alcohol as a way of getting his mouth out of reach of his misgivings. If you bought him two drinks, one would have to be a carry-out.

  ‘Whit d’ye reckon tae Danny Lipton, Ernie?’

  ‘It’s porridge, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Unless Danny can prove that somebody broke into his house and dumped the stuff there. We found enough loot to keep the Barras going for a fortnight?

  ‘Dampt shame, intit?’

  ‘He was careless, Macey. You should always fix your depot before you move. You don’t bring it home like the Christmas shopping.’

  ‘Ah know that. So does Danny. The polis are at his hoose that often, ye’d think it wis a sub-station. But the chance comes up fur a wee job, ye’re in there, aren’t ye? Professional instinct, intit?’

  ‘No, it’s not. Professional instinct’s when you go three stops past your first thought and then walk back. Danny didn’t do that. He jumped off while the idea was still moving. Right into Barlinnie.’

  ‘The Bar-L.’ Macey shuddered. ‘Gads.’ He had only been in Glasgow’s prison once. He had no plans for going back. ‘Hellish, though. He’s sich a nice big fella.’

  Macey was right. The only thing Danny Lipton had ever shown violence to was a window.

  ‘Ah wis speakin’ tae his wife the day,’ Macey said.

  ‘Big Sarah?’

  ‘She’ll miss ’im that much. Great relationship, ye know. Any time he’s no’ brekkin’ intae hooses, he’s doin’ up his own. ’S a fac’. Sarah aye says if Danny’s no’ in, she knows exactly where he is. No’ like some people’s men. She knows he’s just out screwin’.’

  Macey meant houses.

  ‘Ye back wi’ the wife yet?’ Macey asked.

  ‘No. But I soon will be.’

  Milligan recognised the tout’s pride in having an easy familiarity with the police. He supposed touting was a back door into the establishment, like the servant at the big house thinking he’s got the edge on all those who never even get in. The money often seemed secondary. But this was long enough to have been playing at equals.

  ‘Macey.’

  Macey reluctantly confronted the changed tone. Milligan reached into his inside pocket and passed something across for Macey to look at.

  ‘Whit’s this?’

  ‘Promotion,’ Milligan said. ‘You’re looking at D.C.I. Milligan there.’

  Baffled, Macey looked at a photograph of a young man the rawness of whose face was just about enough to make Macey look for the eggshell on his head. He was looking up from something he was reading and his expression suggested he had never seen a flashbulb before. Macey looked at Milligan from behind his own mask of innocence.

  ‘That must’ve been taken a few years back. Ye’re that young-lookin’, Ernie.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Tony Veitch, Macey. Tony Veitch.’

  The name almost startled Macey out of his performance but, being less than a world war, not quite. Watching him, Milligan suspected there might have been a response in there somewhere.

  ‘You know him?’

  Macey shook his head.

  ‘I’m looking for him. It’s my feeling that if he did what I think he did, I could be one of a crowd. Macey.’ Macey brought his eyes up from the photograph. Milligan indicated himself with his thumb. ‘I’m first. I don’t wait in queues. Follow?’

  ‘What’s it got to do wi’ me, Ernie?’

  ‘Macey. I had to take out a mortgage to buy you a drink in here. I don’t like wasting money. I know you’re in with the right people for this one. All you have to do is want to know. You better want. You drag your feet on this one, I’ll see you get plenty of time to drag them. You thought Barlinnie was bad, Macey? Barlinnie’s Butlin’s. Full of jolly redcoats. You want to try Peterhead? They’ve got a bit of that nick they just call the married quarters. You’re a nice-looking boy, Macey.’

  ‘Ah’ll do ma best, Ernie. What about money?’

  ‘C.O.D., Macey. C.O.D.’

  ‘There’s been talk about ’im. Ah don’t know the fella. But he’s disappeared, it seems.’

  ‘I know. All I’m asking is when they find him, I’m there first.’

  Macey handed back the picture, a small transaction observed from further along the lounge, nearer the reception area. There Lynsey Farren was surprised to have her dignified entrance interrupted by Dave McMaster. He grabbed her elbow and turned her back the way they had come.

  ‘We’ll go up the side way,’ he said. ‘Get a drink at the table.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked, as he led her into the side passage that ran parallel to the lounge.

  ‘Ah’ve just clocked something very interesting,’ he said.

  19

  When you opened the street door to the Glasgow Press Club in West George Street you were confronted with an old, stone, curving staircase, an act of contrition steep enough to take the wind out of most pomposity. Once you negotiated the locked door at the top (in Harkness’s case by getting Eddie Devlin to sign him in), you came into a small place articulate with that Glaswegian instinct for finding the off-hand remark which freezes pretentiousness in its tracks. It was a de-briefing room for the spy network the press runs on celebrities.

  Mainly, it was two places: the snooker room and the bar, which had a small, compact gantry and a scatter of tables. In either room, there was no problem finding someone to deflate you. Eddie Devlin was merely one of many always ready to oblige.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ he was saying. ‘Then we could run a society column for down-and-outs. Who’s getting off their mark with whom from the Salvation Army Mission. Have a series. Who was out of their mind with the bevvy on Custom House Quay last week. Which are the smart derelict buildings to be seen in these days. Hey. I could become the William Hickey of Caledonia Road. It’s a good idea, Jack.’

  Harkness was glad he had a pint of pain-killer. He knew he had made a mistake coming in here and he sympathised with Eddie. It was a moment he recognised from a case like this, one of the lay-by times when there was nothing actively they could do and Laidlaw was left going over the thing obsessively in his head. He was still on the lime-juice and soda, which couldn’t be helping.

  ‘Come on,’ Laidlaw was saying, staring through Eddie’s ridicule. ‘Just give him a mention.’

  ‘Where? In the dead derelicts column? We discontinued it, Jack. Doesn’t sell a lot of papers.’

  ‘A paragraph. One small paragraph.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he deserves it. Your mob invent fam
e. Like playing stocks and shares with people’s reputations. So invest a paragraph in Eck. This glamour crap gets me. Same in our job, Brian. Steal enough money from an institution and you’ll get the entire Crime Squad after you. Steal a widow’s last fifty quid and who cares? It’s only people. Eck deserves to be acknowledged.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he was there. But even playing it by your rules he still deserves it. I think he was murdered. That’s still news here, isn’t it? What’s happened to this city? It used to be the life of the streets was properly respected here. It got attention. What about Hirstling Kate? Or Rab Ha’ the Glesca Glutton? They were Eck’s kind of people.’

  Hirstling Kate had been a cripple who pulled herself along on her knees by means of spiked boards held in her hands. Rab Ha’, who was said to have eaten a calf at a sitting, had died as a vagrant in a hayloft in Thistle Street. Laidlaw had touched on one of Eddie’s hobbies.

  For the next few minutes Harkness was introduced to some other nineteenth-century landmarks of Glasgow, like Old Malabar, the Irish street juggler, and Dungannon, the barefooted porter of the Bazaar at Candleriggs. He heard a four-line rhyming sermon from the ‘Reverend’ John Aitken. He discovered that Penny-a-Yard’s job had been making brass chains for wall clocks. His favourite was Lang Tam, an imbecile beggar who inspired people’s charity by waving goodbye to the Paisley coach at Jamaica Bridge and waving hello to the same coach as it arrived in Paisley.

  The memory of those people who had found preposterous niches in a hard life, like kittiwakes nesting on a sheer cliff face, worked on Eddie, while Laidlaw argued Eck’s place in the tradition.

  ‘And another thing, Eddie. Whoever did this thinks they’ve caused about as much fuss as running over a stray cat. I want them to feel differently. It doesn’t mean a lot but I’d like to get them worried if I can. Who knows, it might help. You might put in an appeal for information.’

  ‘What’s the point? If it’s not an accident, it has to be rummy obliterating rummy. How many rummies do you think read the Glasgow Herald?’

  ‘I don’t know, it makes a good big blanket on a cold night. And you know what might help? If you could pass it on to the Evening Times.’

  ‘Right, Jack. Stop there. I’ve got no influence with the London Times. Look, I’ll see. All right? I’ll see.’

  ‘Thanks, Eddie. There’s another thing.’

  Eddie looked round his raised whisky the way the negro house-servant used to look round doors in old Hollywood films.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘You want me to do a piece on stray dogs.’

  ‘Not this week. Remember that stuff the paper ran a while back? On the vagrant thing. “Skid Row” idea.’

  Eddie nodded.

  ‘You think you could get me that to check through? Just in case. It’s probably hopeless. But just in case.’

  ‘You’re mellowing. You’re beginning to ask reasonable things.’ A man came over from the bar to their table. He was tall and very fat.

  ‘Five minutes,’ he said to Eddie. ‘I hope you’re fit.’

  ‘I’m not likely to be less fit than you, Stan,’ Eddie said. ‘Look at him. If they cleaned him out, he’d make a good garage. Pollokshaws Fats, the one-man crowd. You’ve got to wait in the bar while he’s making a shot.’

  ‘Gallows humour,’ Stan said. ‘Can I buy you boys a drink? I believe it’s customary at a wake.’

  The voice was appropriate to the remark, slow, deep and mournful, every sentence a small cortège. Laidlaw had barely touched his lime-juice and soda. Eddie and Harkness didn’t need anything at the moment.

  ‘Five minutes,’ Stan said.

  Eddie checked his watch. It seemed a typical gesture to Harkness. That broad face with its kindly inquisitive eyes always seemed to be slightly abstracted, thinking ahead. It was as if the pressures of the job had invaded his private life so that even his pleasures needed the adrenalin of having time-limits. He was a junkie for deadlines.

  ‘How about the lab tests?’ Harkness asked Laidlaw.

  ‘Oh yes. Guess what? Paraquat in the bevvy. That was Eck’s bottle we found, all right.’

  ‘Hey, maybe you’re not so daft. Mixing that stuff with the wine means premeditation, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Not just that. Two sets of fingerprints on Eck’s bottle. Only one of them Eck’s.’

  ‘And if it’s true that he didn’t share . . .’

  ‘Find the fingerprints, you find your man.’

  Eddie got up to take on Stan. He was smiling.

  ‘I’ve got it, boys,’ he said. ‘Go round the off-licences finger-printing people and you’re home alone. I’ll buy you a drink with my winnings.’

  Harkness stared after him, turned back to Laidlaw.

  ‘He’s got a point. If you’ve got two lots of fingerprints on the bottle, that’s got to be the other lot, hasn’t it?’

  Laidlaw refused to be dismayed.

  ‘Don’t take Eddie too seriously. That journalism makes you cynical. Not like police-work.’

  ‘No. But he’s right.’

  Laidlaw took his lime-juice and soda as if it was a wisdom-potion, and winked.

  ‘I would bet he isn’t. Cynicism’s just a failure of imagination. Those fingerprints are a solid investment. They’ll work for us. Well, where did you bestow your charms tonight?’

  Harkness had a drink.

  ‘I didn’t,’ he said. ‘I phoned Mary and we decided we wouldn’t be seeing each other again. I’m going to get married.’

  ‘You make it sound like a death-sentence.’

  ‘No. You know what it was? Mary sounded really happy about it. I thought she fancied me. I worry my arse off about telling her. And she takes it like a prezzy. Like Christmas was early.’

  Laidlaw was laughing.

  ‘You know what’s worrying me now?’ Harkness said. ‘I ask Morag to marry me and she hunts me. If she does that, I couldn’t take it. The equipment’ll shrivel up and fall off. After Mary went off the phone singing, I went and got bevvied. I’m going to have to leave in time for the last bus. Just leave the car.’

  ‘I’ll drive you to Fenwick,’ Laidlaw said.

  ‘You not staying at the Burleigh tonight? You going home?’

  ‘Well.’ Laidlaw had a clowning expression on his face, like Pagliacci. ‘More or less home. That’s where I’m going, if that’s what it is.’

  Harkness had a feeling about Laidlaw he had had before, an almost irresistible compassion for him. Laidlaw came on hard, could be a bastard, sometimes gave the impression that if God turned up he’d want Him to take a lie-detector test. But he so obviously cared about people, was so unmistakably hurt by what happened to them, sometimes through his doing, that he would have put a stone under pressure to feel things. Out of concern for him Harkness moved the conversation away from where they were headed.

  ‘I don’t want to sound cynical,’ he said. ‘But how is it those fingerprints are going to be use to us?’

  ‘Brian. Imagine it. You’re putting paraquat into a wine bottle. Some down the sides. Right? You wipe the whole bottle. Because you don’t want the bottle to look suspicious. Isn’t it true? Then you’re giving it to a wino. Who cares if your hand’s been on it? Where is it going to finish, anyway? In the Clyde? You’re going to be careless. You’re going to give it to him with panache. Oh yes, you are. If it’s Tony’s fingers on it, Brian, it’s Tony. If it’s somebody else’s, it’s somebody else. We’ve found the combination to this safe. I’m telling you. Hey. I like being bright. Don’t you? It’s good fun, isn’t it?’

  He was laughing. Harkness was pleased to see him arrogant again. Harkness believed that Laidlaw had certain small rights in that area.

  20

  There was a girl wearing white trousers, tight enough at the buttocks to let you count the pores. She gave the impression she was practising how to atomise. Every part of her body seemed to be making strenuous efforts to separate from every other part. Her eyes were closed. She had
a partner somewhere. The music had given up following her.

  She wasn’t particularly noticeable, except to one of the only two older men standing at the bar. They were probably no more than late thirties but the context and their mood made them feel like two face-lifts that fell. Poppies Disco wasn’t a haunt of theirs.

  ‘See that yin wi’ the white breeks on, Pat?’ one of them said.

  ‘Ah’ve got somethin’ in ma eye,’ Pat said.

  ‘Probably her left tit. She’s throwin’ them about all over the place.’

  Pat was conducting a delicate operation on his left eye. He teased his upper eyelashes carefully towards his eyebrow and rolled the lower rim of his eye up and down. He blinked a few times and seemed satisfied.

  ‘Ah feel like Methuselah’s daddy, Tam,’ he said. ‘This wis your idea, ya bam.’

  ‘Gets us the late drink, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Right enough. But they’re all that young.’

  ‘If they’re old enough to bleed, they’re old enough to butcher.’

  ‘Be your age. Where’d ye read that? The Gestapo Gazette? Ah’d be embarrassed tryin’ with wan o’ these. In case Ah couldny undo her nappy. When’s the go-go dancer on again?’

  ‘Ah thought ye wereny interested,’ Tam said.

  ‘That’s different, intit? The lassie’s just doin’ a job. Ye can kid yerself on an’ go hame. Her an’ you can both get a good night’s sleep. No problem.’

  Tam looked round the place. He liked the decor. The seats round the edges were designed as dice, the wall-lights as poker hands. The small stage the go-go dancer would come back to was a roulette-wheel. It appealed to his love of risk.

  ‘Fella that used to own this,’ he said. ‘He cut his throat.’

  ‘He musta felt like me. Know somethin’, Tam? There’s nothin’ can age ye more than seein’ all the cuff ye’ll never get near. Ah’m greetin’. Ah’m greetin’.’

  ‘Naw. He wis a poof,’ Tam said, as if that explained the inevitability of suicide. ‘Ye gonny dance?’

  ‘Ah thought ye wid never ask me.’