Laidlaw

by William McIlvanney

  The betting-shop was busy. That was one reason why Lennie had difficulty locating Eddie in it. The other was Eddie. He was a natural member of any crowd, an identikit of middle age. He was one of those experience doesn’t sharpen into facial idiosyncrasy, just erodes into anonymity. Lennie didn’t find him. He found Lennie.

  ‘Punters is mugs,’ Eddie said at Lennie’s ear. ‘Aren’t they?’

  ‘The man wants you,’ Lennie said.

  Eddie turned and went. Lennie worked his way through the people in the shop and came up into West Regent Street very carefully, as if invisible cameras were tracking him. In the private office Eddie waited patiently while Mason sat staring at the glass-top of his desk. The room was chilly with silence. Eddie was glad Mason wasn’t thinking about him.

  ‘Eddie. A bad situation. It was Harry Rayburn’s boyfriend that murdered the girl from Drumchapel.’

  ‘That’s oor pigeon?’

  ‘No. But it could lead them to our loft.’

  ‘Harry Rayburn’s no’ directly connected wi’ us.’

  ‘But he has been. All right, he was pensioned off. But he didn’t hand his memory in at the pay-desk.’

  ‘You think Big Harry wid shop you? Where wid he find the guts? His hert widny fill a contact lens.’

  Mason didn’t mind Eddie’s questions. They were the measurements a good workman makes before he tackles a job. Eddie was a tradesman Mason respected, a competent fixer of things whose curiosity went no further than the necessary dimensions within which he would work. He brought no more tension to the job than a plumber would. He was a contented man, who did his work and took his wages, drank a bit and liked the television.

  ‘I don’t know. But his boyfriend might.’

  ‘He knows about you?’

  ‘I’m not sure. But there’s pillow-talk. Who knows what the big man didn’t say when that bastard was half-roads up his arse? His head could’ve unravelled like a ball of wool.’

  ‘It’s chancy,’ Eddie said.’

  ‘And I’m no punter. I’m a bookie. I want him taken out.’

  Eddie raised his eyebrows and lowered them. The point was taken.

  ‘Lennie’s away to find out where the boy’s hiding. I want somebody who can take advantage of the information.’

  Eddie was thinking.

  ‘The way I see it,’ Mason said, ‘it’s hard to care about what’s dead. Harry shouldn’t give us any trouble once the boy’s away. He’ll remember to be terrified again. Everybody does sometime. The only thing we need to guarantee is that nobody can ever connect the thing with us. Not the C.I.D., not Harry Rayburn.’

  Eddie waited for the clincher.

  ‘I want you to come up with somebody that’ll kill a man without asking questions. And without knowing too many answers. He’s never to have been connected with us in any way before. And it’s better still if he’s never done this kind of thing before. And he works on his own.’

  For the first time something other than bland acceptance flickered on Eddie’s face.

  ‘Apply care of God,’ he said.

  ‘The money’ll be good. But don’t talk prices till you’ve seen me.’

  ‘It’s a big order.’

  ‘It’s a big problem,’ Mason said. ‘Let me know what you think. You can draw up a list of possibles.’

  ‘Have ye got a bit o’ confetti?’ Eddie asked.

  Mason smiled. He liked Eddie.

  22

  Over here a minute,’ Laidlaw said.

  They were at Glasgow Cross. After waiting a little while, they managed to get across the street to the pedestrian area in front of Krazy House. Laidlaw stopped before the small grey building Harkness had always assumed was on the site of the old Tolbooth – a kind of midget tower with a small balustrade at the top and above that the figure of a unicorn.

  ‘How about that?’ Laidlaw said.

  Harkness was puzzled.

  ‘The inscription,’ Laidlaw explained.

  Harkness read the words carved on the stone: ‘Nemo me impune lacessit.’ He knew it was Latin but didn’t know what it meant.

  ‘No one assails me with impunity,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Wha daur meddle wi me? Did you know that was there?’

  Harkness shook his head.

  ‘I like the civic honesty of that.’ Laidlaw was smiling. ‘That’s the wee message carved on the heart of Glasgow. Visitors are advised not to be cheeky.’

  The message gained force as they went beyond the Cross. At that point the Trongate divides into two streets running east, the Gallowgate on the north, London Road on the south. The sense of a choice is illusory. Both lead to the same waste of slum tenements hopefully punctuated with redevelopments, like ornamental fountains in a desert.

  They walked along London Road and then into the area between it and Gallowgate, called Calton. Harkness felt what he always felt going east beyond the Cross, the sense of siege. Small shops and cafés had wire netting on their windows. Some pubs presented blank walls to the street with small, netted windows about ten feet above the ground. Bleak tenements mouldered among razed patches. And on the streets he saw too many of the walking wounded.

  Laidlaw had been checking on a few pubs as he went, looking for somebody he called Wee Eck. As they walked, Laidlaw was talking.

  ‘Little Rhodesia,’ he had said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘A lot of this is John Rhodes territory. A kind of separate state. He did the U.D.I. before Ian Smith thought of it.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘All right. But I wouldn’t go into any of these pubs and spit on his name if I were you.’

  The idea would have been much more bizarre to Harkness if he hadn’t been walking here when he heard it. It was the kind of place where someone alone would be very careful how he looked at people.

  ‘The rule of fear, is it?’ Harkness asked.

  ‘Not entirely. Although that’s a very intelligent response to have to John. But he’s more complicated than that. He does have certain rules. He’s not fair but he has a kind of justice. He could’ve been a much bigger crook. Only he won’t do certain things. So he’s settled for a level of crookery that still allows him the luxury of a morality.’

  ‘What kind of rules do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, too complicated for me to fathom. Only John and God know. And I think God’s pretty puzzled most of the time. Just trying to chat affably to John’s like walking through a mine-field. But I know the rules are there. I’ve caught the odd glimpse. Like I heard of a silly man who gave John cheek. And John took no steps.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘He was a civilian. John knows how special he is in that department. He knows a liberty when he sees one coming at him. And that’s just about everybody else. Another thing is, he never claims people in their houses. The wife and weans are sacrosanct with him. Sex is another thing. He’s about as permissive as John Knox.’

  ‘He sounds like quite a fella.’

  ‘Let’s hope you can find out for yourself. Crash helmets on.’

  They were at a pub which from the outside looked as inviting as a public toilet. The small windows, well above eye level, seemed suspicious of the daylight. The walls were rough grey plaster, obviously quite recently applied, not so much redecoration as refortification. The name along the top was from before, written in old-fashioned script, The Gay Laddie.

  ‘Do yourself a favour,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Don’t misinterpret the name.’

  There was no danger. They went into more than a place. It was a precipitation of a way of life, the area they had walked in filtered through the old-fashioned swing doors and stylised in one room. Physically, it was a shrine to the Thirties, when the Depression had spawned the razor-slashers and brought King Billy of Bridgeton to prominence. The dominant fixture was wood, from the long, stained bar to the tables spread around the place. Here, Formica hadn’t been invented.

  Just about as tangible as the furnishings, and sharing their unadaptable
solidity, was the atmosphere. Being new to the atmosphere, Harkness found himself trying to define it. The tension you felt had nothing to do with potential criminality, the fear of robbery or mugging. It was much more immediate than that. It came from knowing at once that you were in the presence of a lot of physical pride, a crowd of it, so that you sensed the need to move carefully, in case you bumped an ego. This room was the resort of men who hadn’t much beyond a sense of themselves and weren’t inclined to have that sense diminished.

  Harkness recognised a feeling he had experienced in other East-End pubs, and understood precisely where the tension came from. It came from the realisation that just by coming in you had shucked the protection of your social status. In this place your only credentials were yourself.

  Three young men at the bar were busy establishing theirs. Each had a tartan shirt, a battledress-style denim jacket, wide trousers worn high and rubber-soled boots. It seemed to be the uniform of their private army, which was at the moment occupying The Gay Laddie with that youthful aggressiveness that spends a lot of its time advertising for trouble. They weren’t talking, they were broadcasting, and their bodies seemed to take up more room than they needed.

  They were the focal point of the pub for Harkness. But Laidlaw saw them as peripheral, a bit of accidental tourism. Their careless provocativeness suggested to him they might have dropped in from a housing scheme on Saturn. He saw the heart of the place in the comparative quietness surrounding them, in the few others sitting at the tables and the one other man at the bar. He was someone whose name Laidlaw had never found out but he recognised him from the scar that ran down his left cheek and under the chin.

  Laidlaw went to the far end of the counter where it turned at an angle to the main stretch of the bar, beside the door to the snug. The barman had begun to polish a glass. He came slowly towards them, an ageing fat man with big forearms under the rolled-up sleeves.

  ‘Has John Rhodes been in today?’ Laidlaw asked quietly.

  The barman kept on cleaning the glass, not looking up.

  ‘Who’s lookin’ for ’im?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t piss me about, Charlie,’ Laidlaw said. ‘I didn’t come in here to see a bad cowboy picture. You know who I am.’

  ‘I know who ye are. But who’s lookin’ for ’im?’

  Laidlaw kept his silence until the barman eventually looked up, as if to make sure that Laidlaw was still there.

  ‘Maybe you should tell me the code,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Then we could talk ov that.’

  ‘There’s lookin’ an’ lookin’,’ the barman said, back at his glass. ‘Are ye Laidlaw lookin’ or are ye a polisman lookin’?’

  ‘Oh, I’m Laidlaw looking. A friend looking for a friend.’

  ‘Well, yer friend should be in the day. Whit’ll ye have?’

  Laidlaw bought Harkness the half-pint he wanted and took a whisky himself. The man with the scar went out. The barman nodded them through to the snug. It was empty. They sat down on the ribbed wooden seats. Laidlaw winked at Harkness and said in a voice hushed in mock reverence, ‘I think we’re getting an audience.’

  A few minutes later the man with the scar came in with a pint. He nodded and sat down apart from them. Laidlaw made no attempt to speak to him. Then a new man came in. Harkness observed him.

  Harkness reckoned him at five-ten-a-half, neither big nor small. He looked very firm but not very heavy. The suit wasn’t noticeable but nicely cut. His face was almost completely unmarked – only a line across the right eyebrow where the hair didn’t grow. He still had all his hair, black, in unfashionable waves. He would be about forty. Harkness added it all up and got the wrong answer.

  ‘John’ll be in in a minute,’ the wavy-haired man said and sat down beside the man with the scar.

  John Rhodes, when he came, was big and fair. His height surprised Harkness, in whose experience the hardest men tended to come in smaller sizes. He had wondered if it was because tall men already had an unearned status that made them not so keen on that instant hazarding of everything which finally defines the hardness of a man in the terms of the street. But John Rhodes refuted any theory. He was simply and categorically himself.

  The kind of attention the three young men in the bar were desperately paging, he took as his right. The essence of him was containment – the measured nod to Laidlaw, the look at Harkness, the brief gesture to the other two men, an ability to move with nerveless exactitude. The face was slightly pockmarked. The eyes were pleasantly blue.

  ‘Hullo, you,’ he said to Laidlaw and sat down across the table from them. ‘Ye’ll hiv a drink.’

  ‘A whisky for me,’ Laidlaw said. ‘With water.’

  ‘I won’t bother, thank you,’ Harkness said.

  The blue eyes turned on him like a blowtorch lit but not yet shooting flame.

  ‘He’ll have a pint,’ Laidlaw said. ‘He’s such a fierce drinker. When he says he won’t bother, he means he’ll just stick to the beer.’

  ‘Is he age?’ John Rhodes asked.

  Harkness began to wonder. As the wavy-haired man nodded through the door of the snug, Harkness realised that John Rhodes hadn’t been making a suggestion, just stating a fact. They were visitors to his territory. He made the etiquette. Harkness became conscious that he and the other two men were just witnesses at a special kind of confrontation. The tension was that of a contest. Harkness didn’t know the rules but he understood that he had already weakened Laidlaw’s position by breaking one of them. He resolved not to be an embarrassment again.

  The barman brought in the drinks and shut the sliding door as he went back out. Harkness felt surrounded. They drank in silence for a moment. John Rhodes was drinking port, Harkness thought.

  ‘You’ll be wondering why we’re here,’ Laidlaw said.

  ‘Ah thought ye might tell me.’

  ‘I think I will. You know there’s been a girl murdered.’

  ‘It wis in the papers.’

  ‘It’s about that then.’

  ‘I’m not guilty, your honour.’

  The other two men laughed and Harkness smiled. Laidlaw did nothing but wait.

  ‘It’s about that then.’

  ‘Ye’re repeating yerself.’

  ‘No. I’m just keeping my train of thought in the face of facetious interruption.’

  There was a silence. Harkness realised suddenly that the chilly core of it was ‘facetious’. It was a word John Rhodes didn’t know. That was why Laidlaw had chosen it.

  ‘All right, college-boy. Go on wi’ yer story.’

  Laidlaw had brought out his cigarettes and offered them round to no takers. He lit up his own.

  ‘When does the big picture stert?’ John Rhodes asked.

  The two men laughed.

  ‘John,’ Laidlaw said. ‘I could do without this. Especially when you bring your studio audience.’

  ‘The door’s just behind ye,’ John Rhodes said pleasantly.

  ‘Oh aye.’

  ‘If ye don’t like the cabarett, don’t come tae the pub.’

  What puzzled Harkness most was that the impasse had no bitterness about it. Laidlaw and John Rhodes sat looking at each other, assessing. Two things occurred to Harkness: how big the gulf between them was, and that the bridge that made it possible for them to cross it was a kind of respect. Inhabiting opposed moralities, they could still appreciate each other. They were two different qualities of force, but evenly matched.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ Laidlaw said, and finished his drink. ‘I won’t make the same mistake twice.’

  Before he could rise, John Rhodes had taken his glass from his hand and passed it to the wavy-haired man.

  ‘Don’t forget the watter,’ he said. ‘Touchy Jack Laidlaw. Come on. Ye had somethin’ to ask me.’

  ‘Like a favour,’ Laidlaw said. ‘But I was asking. Don’t get the impression I’m begging. It’s maybe the way I’m sitting.’

  The man came back through with the whisky and put it in front of Laidlaw. Jo
hn Rhodes was smiling at Laidlaw’s remark.

  ‘All right, Jack,’ he said.

  Laidlaw took the photograph and passed it across to John Rhodes, who looked at it carefully and nodded, smiling softly.

  ‘Know who she’s like,’ he said. He gave the photograph to the other two men. ‘D’ye know who she is like?’ They were puzzling over it. ‘Ye’ve seen oor Jeanie’s lassie?’

  ‘Oh aye. She is,’ the wavy-haired man said.

  ‘She’s very like ’er,’ John Rhodes said. ‘Only Karen’s fairer than that. She wis a nice-lookin’ wee lassie.’

  The man with the scar put the photograph on the table beside John Rhodes and Laidlaw let it lie there.

  ‘Seventeen,’ Laidlaw said. ‘An only child. She was all her mother and father had. All she did wrong was go to the dancing. And you should’ve seen her when we found her. Used her like a lavatory and then killed her.’

  Harkness saw John Rhodes looking back down at the photograph.

  ‘The reason I’m here, is this. There are a lot of other daughters in this city.’

  John Rhodes looked up slowly from the photograph.

  ‘We’ve got to take this man out as fast as possible. I know the polis aren’t your first love. But we’re both on the same side in this one. You hear things that we don’t.

  All I’m asking is if you hear anything that could help us, you let us know.’

  John Rhodes lifted up the photograph again.

  ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘Ah don’t mix a lot wi’ folk like that.’ He put the photograph back down. ‘The other thing is. Ah’ve never grassed on anybody in ma life.’

  ‘This isn’t a rival team, John. This is a different kind of operation altogether. This isn’t just another scuffler. There’s another thing. The polis are going to be stepping on everybody’s heels from now on. We won’t get back to normal healthy villainy till this is over.’

  ‘There’s nothin’ in it for me.’

  ‘Nothing but honour.’

  They were both smiling.

  ‘Ah’ve always had that.’

  ‘That’s not something you get to keep. You’ve got to earn it every day.’