The Papers of Tony Veitch

by William McIlvanney

  It would be a kind of investigation, but my kind. Since I had been a policeman in Glasgow, the expression just about every superior had used to describe me, as if they were reading from my file, was ‘maverick’. It had become equivalent to some kind of rank: Jack Laidlaw, Maverick. Well, they were right. I was a maverick. They didn’t know how much. If I wasn’t fond of lawyers, I was less fond of policemen. For years I had been working against the grain of my own nature.

  How often had I felt I was working for the wrong people? How often had I felt that the source of the worst injustices wasn’t personal at all but institutional and fiscal and political? It was the crime beyond the crime that had always fascinated me, the sanctified network of legally entrenched social injustice towards which the crime I was investigating feebly gestured. ‘When a finger points at the moon,’ a Paris graffito had once said, ‘the fool looks at the finger.’ Maybe I had been watching fingers for long enough.

  All my prevarications had come home to roost, my personal harpies to foul my sense of my own worth and mock the work I had been doing. If I was a detective, let me detect now. It was time to put such skills as I had into overdrive.

  For I was faced with a death I had to understand. It was a death I had to investigate, not for police reasons, though perhaps with police methods. Investigator, investigate thyself. A man was dead, a man I had loved perhaps more than any other.

  Nobody had said ‘crime’. But that dying seemed to me as unjust, as indicative of meaninglessness as any I had known. And I had known many. For he had been so rich in potential, so much alive, so undeserving – aren’t we all? – of a meaningless death. I knew.

  I should know. He was my brother.

  The doorbell rang. The sound changed the meaning of my thoughts. It’s one thing to psych yourself up inside your own head, to threaten to bring experience to book in your own mind. It’s another to translate the mental vaunting into event, to bring the intensity of your feelings against the facts and see what results. It’s the difference between the gymnasium and the championship fight. The bell said, ‘Seconds out’. You’re on your own. The proximity of someone else only made it clearer.

  I padded barefoot to the door with shaving-soap round my ears and on my upper lip. In the doing of it, I had a small revelation: a dangerous world. This was how we lived now. The flat I had rented was in an old, refurbished tenement. When it was built, it had a door on the street that anyone could enter. Now it was different. The outside door was locked. You pressed a bell. Someone lifted a phone. If they knew who you were, they pressed a buzzer. You were allowed inside and came to their door. They checked you through a peep-hole. If you passed the test, they opened the door.

  This was a tenement on the edge of Glasgow, not the Castle of Otranto. Anyone who lived here couldn’t have much worth stealing. Maybe a video. We had become afraid of ourselves. There was a time a man or woman would have taken pride in being able to open the door to anyone. What was happening to us?

  Was even this relevant to my brother’s death? The way I felt, anything might be. I put my hand on the phone. Come in, strange world. And I’ll be watching you more closely than I ever have before. I lifted the phone.