Laidlaw

by William McIlvanney

  John Rhodes handed the photograph back to Laidlaw.

  ‘Ah’ll let ye know,’ he said.

  ‘I’m in the Burleigh Hotel this week,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Can I buy you all a drink?’

  ‘Nah. Ah’ve got ma reputation tae think o’.’

  The interview was over. Harkness gulped down the rest of his pint in case it wasn’t etiquette to leave it. He had pulled open the door of the snug, noticing the three young men still harmonising toughness, when Laidlaw said, ‘Brian.’ They left by the outside door of the snug.

  As they walked, Harkness said, ‘That was some weird conversation.’

  ‘One of John’s pastimes. Like hand-wrestling without the hands. It’s maybe that he’s got so good at the violence, he’s taken it on to a kind of mental plane. Like putting the head on somebody by Yoga.’

  They were coming back towards the Cross along Gallowgate. ‘The Happiness Chinese Restaurant’ hadn’t opened for the day yet. Harkness was still absorbing what had happened.

  ‘Sorry about that at the beginning,’ Harkness said. ‘Refusing the drink. Maybe you should’ve given me a book of rules.’

  ‘Forget it. He would’ve rewritten them anyway. I mean, I tried a bit of the hearts and flowers there. But how do you know what you’re doing with John? You’re liable to pluck a heartstring and find that’s what operates his right hook.’

  ‘The honour bit surprised me.’

  ‘Aye. That was a bit heavy, wasn’t it? I felt a bit like Baden-Powell with that. But he seemed tuned into it. Amazingly enough. Ah well. It’s Sarah Stanley visiting-time, D.C. Harkness.’

  ‘Wee Horrurs’ seemed to be doing a good trade in children’s clothes.

  ‘Do you think he can help?’ Harkness asked.

  ‘He can if he will. Nobody better equipped to find things out. An ear in a lot of pubs. But you can’t presume about which way he will jump.’

  ‘Where’s the car?’ Harkness asked.

  ‘What car?’ Laidlaw said.

  In the snug, John Rhodes said, ‘No’ bad, that Laidlaw. For a polisman.’

  ‘It’s that lassie’s father Ah wis tellin’ ye about,’ the man with the scar said. ‘Wi’ that mug in the pub.’

  ‘Ah know.’

  ‘None o’ our business, John,’ the wavy-haired man said.

  ‘Ye’re right it isny,’ the man with the scar said.

  ‘Ah decide that.’

  They sat quietly while he decided.

  ‘Ah want yese to find out everythin’ ye can aboot this.’

  ‘John!’ The man with the scar shook his head.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Ah’ll decide why efter. Ah want ye to find out. An’ don’t be hauf-herted aboot it. Ah want results. An’ Ah want them the day afore the morra.’

  They went out. John Rhodes finished his drink and went through to the bar. He gave the glass to the barman.

  ‘An’ see’s the paper, Charlie.’

  With the paper and a fresh drink, he went and sat at a table. It was closing time. The bar was empty except for the three young men. They were noisy with drink. It occurred to him they had done everything to get noticed except let off squibs. It was a neutral thought to him. That’s what boys were like.

  He read the article about Jennifer Lawson again. He hated that kind of thing. He hated the people who did it. He thought they should be put down, like rabid dogs. But that wouldn’t happen if they caught him. He would get some years in prison or some other place. Steal enough money and they would put you away for thirty years. Kill a girl and they would try to understand. He hated the dishonesty of it. Money bought everything, even the luxury of being able to pretend that everybody really meant well and evil was an accident. He knew different. He had had to, to survive.

  His rage came on him suddenly, as it always did, an instinctive reaction he relied on more than any other. Whenever the contradictions became too much for him, that terrible anger was waiting to resolve things into immediacy, confrontation. Its force came from his preparedness always to stand by what he was, at least. It also implied an invitation for everybody else to do the same. That at least, it seemed to him, would be a kind of honesty, for what he hated most were pretences, the lies that people get away with – the lie of being a hard man when you weren’t, the lie of being honest when you weren’t, the lie of believing in the goodness of other people when you didn’t have to face them at their worst. Now he saw the way the courts would handle this case as another kind of pretence. It shouldn’t be allowed. He would like to do something about that.

  Charlie was having a problem clearing the bar. The three young men still had some beer in their glasses.

  ‘Come on now, boys,’ Charlie was saying. ‘Ye’ll have tae go. It’s past time.’

  ‘Piss off,’ one of the young men said. ‘Ye sold us the stuff. Give us fuckin’ time tae drink it.’

  ‘Lock us in if ye like,’ another one said. ‘We’ll look after the place for ye.’

  They all laughed.

  ‘John?’ Charlie referred it to him.

  ‘Give the man a brek, boays,’ he said, still looking at his paper. ‘He’s got his licence tae think o’. Drink up.’

  ‘Oho,’ the first one said. ‘His master’s voice. Ah don’t see you drinkin’ up.’

  John Rhodes looked up at them. They were day-trippers, probably looking for a story they could take back to their mates like a holiday photo. They looked like three but they were really only one, the boy who had spoken first, the one in the green tartan shirt. The other two were running on his engine.

  ‘Ah work here,’ John Rhodes said. ‘Now on ye go.’

  He looked back at his paper.

  ‘Away tae fuck!’

  As soon as the one in the green shirt had said it, they all knew a terrible mistake had been made. There was complete silence for perhaps four seconds. Then John Rhodes’ hands compressed the paper he had been holding into a ball. That crackling was as frightening as an explosion. When he dropped the paper onto the floor, the courage of everybody else in the room went with it.

  He crossed very quickly to the doorway. The swing doors had been pinned back to let customers out. He went past them to the two leaves of the outside door, kicked them shut and pushed home the bolt. He turned back into the pub.

  ‘Ye want it, ye’ve got it,’ he said. ‘Now ye don’t get out.’

  It was already too late for the young men to negotiate the saving of face. He left them no room for that. All they could do was admit their terror to themselves. The shock of it had left one of them struggling for breath.

  ‘Charlie. Get a mop and a pail o’ watter. For Ah’m gonny batter these bastards up and down this pub.’

  ‘Now, John. Please, John,’ Charlie said.

  The incredible turn-around of the man they had insulted pleading for their safety finished them. One of them whispered, ‘Naw, mister.’ The one with the green shirt was trying not to admit it to himself. But he looked at John Rhodes and knew himself miserable with fear. With the dim light coming in from the small, high windows fuzzing his fair hair, and the blue eyes flaring, he looked like a psychopathic angel.

  ‘Please. Just let us go. An’ we’ll no’ come back,’ the one with the green shirt said.

  There was a pause while John Rhodes wrestled with his own rage. The complete, honest admission of their fear was what finally calmed him.

  ‘Apologise tae the man,’ he said.

  They said it in chorus, ‘We’re sorry’, like a lesson in recitation.

  ‘And we’re sorr—’ the one in the green shirt began.

  ‘Don’t apologise tae me,’ John Rhodes said. ‘As far as Ah’m concerned, ye’re jist on probation.’

  He nodded to Charlie. Charlie opened the door to let them out, although it seemed hardly necessary to him. They were so liquid with fear, Charlie felt he could have poured them out below the door.

  23

  As they settled themselves upstairs in the bus, Harkness was
still shaking his head and sighing quietly.

  ‘Well, think of it this way,’ Laidlaw said. ‘There are tourists and travellers. Tourists spend their lives doing a Cook’s Tour of their own reality. Ignoring their slums. Travellers make the journey more slowly, in greater detail. Mix with the natives. A lot of murderers are, among other things, travellers. They’ve become terrifyingly real for themselves. Their lives are no longer a hobby. Poor bastards. To come at them, you’ve got to become a traveller too. Think of this as a wee ritual exercise for opting out of tourism. A car is psychologically sterile, a mobile oxygen-tent. A bus is septic. You’ve got to subject yourself to other people’s prejudices, run the risk of a mad conductor beating you to death with his ticket-punch. Two twenties, please.’

  ‘Now have ye thought about this?’ the conductor said. ‘There’s still time tae get aff. We stop for tea at the end o’ this run. Ah usually like tae go berserk at least once before ma tea-break.’

  Laidlaw and Harkness laughed.

  ‘Ah’ll pit yer name in for a Ministry of Transport Medal then,’ the conductor said.

  When he was gone, Laidlaw said, ‘Of course, the Underground’s worse. Then you’re sealed off in a revolving tube with everybody else’s hang-ups. Like laboratory specimens.’

  Harkness shook his head.

  ‘And here was me thinking you just liked the view from upstairs on a bus.’

  ‘There is that,’ Laidlaw said. ‘I like sitting up at the front and playing at being the driver.’

  Laidlaw lit a cigarette.

  ‘Right. There are two basic assumptions you can make. Very basic. One is that it’s a fruit-machine job. Sweet mystery of life and all that. That there was no connection between the villain and the victim. Except a time and a place. The lassie was the victim of a kind of sexual hit-and-run job. All right. If that’s the case, we’ve got no chance anyway. It’s up to Milligan and his soldier-ants to take the situation apart leaf by leaf. Except that, for me, putting your faith in Milligan is just a fancy term for despair.’

  Harkness was niggled by the reference to Milligan but he let it go.

  ‘So for you and me to be any use at all, we have to take the second assumption. That there is a connection. What happened in the park didn’t just fall from out the sky one day. It’s got roots. And we can find these roots. So we’re going to make that assumption.’

  ‘Right. We’ve made that assumption,’ Harkness offered.

  ‘All right. We don’t know who the bloke is. He’s no help. We know the lassie, but she’s not saying much. But we know folk who knew her. And if she did have a connection with the bloke, there must be somebody around who knows about it. Must be. Who?’

  ‘Her family,’ Harkness said.

  ‘You didn’t see the father last night?’ Laidlaw asked.

  ‘No. Only the mother.’

  ‘I saw her yesterday. What’s left of her after Bud Lawson’s been mincing her ego for years. He’s an amazing monolith, that big man. The kind of father who eats his young to protect them from the world. If anything was going on with his daughter, he’d be the last to know. But if you could get the mother to talk, she might have something to tell. I’d like to try that. But first I’d like to know more, to have something to talk about. You’d have to know enough to be able to tease the rest out of her.’

  ‘Maybe that’s where Sarah Stanley comes in.’

  ‘I hope so. I was going to say her friends are the other obvious area. Except that they don’t seem to be there. One friend. Was that all you got last night, too?’

  ‘Aye. She said she was a very quiet wee lassie. Kept herself by herself, she said.’

  ‘One friend. Why aren’t there more of them? Or are there? She must’ve been a funny wee lassie, right enough.’

  ‘Well, if your theory’s going to work, a lot depends on wee Sarah Stanley.’

  ‘Aye. We’ll have to be very thorough with Sarah, I doubt. No marks in this wee test for ambiguous answers.’

  24

  It was Lennie’s first bookshop. Coming to and going from ‘Poppies’, he had seen it often enough before but had never gone in. Inside, it felt strange. The mustiness oppressed him. That people came in to buy this junk was unbelievable. He felt the discomfort that comes from being surrounded by what you don’t understand. His life was an attempt to play a single received role: Glaswegian hard man. Unfamiliar backgrounds made him forget his lines.

  The other two people in the shop didn’t help. There was a tall man with a soft hat and a briefcase at one of the shelves in the middle of the shop. He had his back to Lennie. The only other person was the old man at the desk, who looked up over his glasses as Lennie came in. They made Lennie feel like an actor who has wandered into the wrong play.

  He stationed himself at the shelf beside the window and hid behind a book. He picked a big one, the kind that would have been handy for doing press-ups, opened it and held it up without glancing at it. He was concentrating on looking through the window across the court to Poppies. It took a bit of concentration. It occurred to him that you could have planted tatties in the glass. He knew that Harry Rayburn was due to come out and he had left deliberately just ahead of him. Lennie shouldn’t have long to wait. Now and again he flicked a page.

  ‘They’re easier to read if you hold them the right way up, son.’

  Lennie turned to see a face like Walt Disney’s idea of a grandfather. He would have done for the old man who made Pinocchio.

  ‘Ah’m Chinese,’ Lennie said. ‘Okay?’

  But he turned the book round. The old man smiled and went on taking out books and putting them back in exactly the same place. He started to whistle, very tunelessly. The sound didn’t suit him. It was jauntily gallons.

  ‘Through the back.’

  Lennie couldn’t be sure at first that he had heard it. The old man was back to whistling aimlessly. Lennie thought he must have imagined it. But it came again, very low and quick, hidden in among his whistling.

  ‘They’re through the back.’

  Lennie looked at the old man. Now he was nodding while he whistled. Lennie looked round. The man in the soft hat was still standing in the same place, with his back to them. Lennie looked back at the old man.

  The old man’s mouth formed, ‘Okay?’ and he winked. Lennie shook his head. The old man wound himself up for more whistling and Lennie knew he was going to say something else. Lennie couldn’t understand it. It seemed the only way he could talk was by whistling. It was like a very special impediment. Now he was in full whistle.

  ‘The special stuff is through the back,’ the old man hissed, and was whistling instantly.

  Looking away from him, Lennie suddenly saw Harry Rayburn emerge from Poppies. Lennie watched the direction he was taking and calculated that he had just time to put this mental old sod in his place. He chose his cruncher and put the book back roughly.

  ‘Ye’re aff yer heid,’ Lennie snarled. ‘Even yer books is a’ secondhand. There’s no’ a new yin among them.’

  As he reached the door, the old man called quietly, ‘Away, ya ignorant get,’ and then nodded smilingly to the man, who had turned round.

  Rayburn was walking quickly. Lennie just managed to avoid getting knocked down as he crossed Argyle Street. Because the car blared its horn, Lennie dived into a shop doorway and counted five. When he looked back out, Rayburn was still walking. He had noticed nothing. Lennie smiled to himself and hurried until he was lying about twenty yards behind.

  Rayburn crossed Argyle Street and went into Marks and Spencer’s. Lennie panicked. He didn’t want to chance going in and meeting Rayburn. But he didn’t know how many doors the place had. He started sprinting round the building. There were three separate entrances. He spun like someone caught in a revolving door. He hesitated, and then ran back to the first door. Nothing there. He started running back to the second door, checked himself, and returned to the first. Still nothing there. He waited. A dread seized him that Rayburn was walking calm
ly out another door and out of sight. Lennie raced, his body arching like a bow. Nothing. He was beginning to run with sweat. What was he buying, the shop? He ran to the third door. There was still no sign of Rayburn. Lennie ran back. He was leaning against one wall of the shop quite close to collapse when Rayburn stepped out in front of him, carrying a plastic bag.

  Lennie straightened up. The rest was easy, except that Lennie, intent on watching Rayburn, bumped into an old woman and was detained by her until he almost missed Rayburn turning a corner, but he didn’t.

  Rayburn took him on an elaborate detour that brought them eventually to Bridgegate. Lennie could hardly believe it had been so close all the time. One moment Rayburn was walking past a derelict building and the next he wasn’t. It took Lennie a few seconds to realise he had gone in.

  Quietly, Lennie approached the building, keeping close to the wall. He stopped before the entrance and bent as if tying a lace, although his boots didn’t have laces. A young woman was looking in a second-hand furniture shop but she had her back to him. He eased the corrugated iron apart and slid in. The entry was damp and smelly. He listened. There was no sound from inside the building. He went all the way along the entry, listening, and there was nothing. He started up the stairs, very softly. He put his hand on the banister and it started to give. He pulled away as if it had burnt him. He waited again.

  The stairs were very unsafe. He made the first floor and waited a minute. There was still nothing. The further you went, the worse the stairs were. He halted where the state of the stairs worried him. Then, just when he thought he had made a mistake, he heard the voices. Low, urgent voices, very eerie. In a building where no one should be.

  Lennie buckled over to smother his giggle. Straightening, he looked up the well of the stairs. He barrelled his finger at the gloom and said softly, ‘Bang!’

  He was like a wee boy whose finger shoots real bullets.

  25

  ‘You might’ve rented a place with a more private entrance,’ he said.