Laidlaw

by William McIlvanney

  Some of it was transfering itself to him, like a virus. As an antidote, he tried to concentrate on the immediate problem. He wondered if he should have stayed downstairs. Perhaps Laidlaw had meant him to approach the problem frontally, declare who he was and ask the relevant questions. But if he had wanted that, there would have been no objection to Laidlaw’s coming himself.

  Harkness ordered another drink and hesitated over it. The place was very quiet. He had a nightmare moment of seeing himself sitting here till he was stoned and finding out nothing. For the past ten minutes or so he had been listening to the girl behind the bar talking to one of the waitresses, pathetically hoping that they would accidentally reveal all. ‘Alan?’ ‘You know. Alan that usually drinks in here. The one who goes with Jennifer Lawson.’ ‘Oh yes. That Alan.’ ‘Well. Tonight it seems he’s going to be at 14 Bath Street all evening. That’s where you’ll find him, he says. He’s not for moving. I met him in the street today and he was telling me.’ It would have gone something like that, just a nugget of natural conversation.

  As it was, Harkness had established strong eye-contact with the waitress. She was his best hope, he decided. But he would have to separate her from the barmaid. He smiled and the waitress smiled back. He finished his drink and very deliberately walked past the waitress and sat at an empty table.

  It only took half-a-minute for him to notice the barmaid nodding towards him and the waitress turning round. She lifted her tray and came over. She was smiling.

  ‘Oh, the wanderlust is on me,’ she said.

  ‘Well, some kind of lust,’ Harkness rehearsed in his head, and then dismissed it. That wasn’t the line. Something less chancy.

  ‘I just wanted to get you away from your mate,’ he said. ‘And to watch you walking.’

  He almost cringed himself but she was laughing. Harkness blessed again the strong practical streak in women that lets them forgive the corniness of the terms in which you declare your interest, just so long as you declare it.

  ‘Now that you’ve seen it,’ she said. ‘Do you just want to watch me walking back? Or can I get you something to drink?’

  ‘As long as I can get you something as well.’

  ‘Can I have it later?’

  ‘You can take it home with you if you want.’

  Waiting for her to come back, his mood lifted. This was something he enjoyed, something he was good at. He liked that intimacy of strangers you could achieve in chatting up a girl. Everything was new, nothing was mundane. Last week, with his car in the garage, he had discovered a pretty, dark-haired conductress in the Glasgow-Kilmarnock bus. She had been born in South America and now lived in Patna. That was unusual enough for a start. Their chat had been enjoyable enough to make him want to catch the next bus back. Instead, he had left with an address and the name of a pub in Ayr. He achieved as many moments like that as he could, a kind of Platonic intercourse. It was his revenge on the fact that he would never be able to get round to every woman in the world.

  While he was miming miserliness in getting out his money, he realised how much he liked looking at her, beyond the call of any duty. She was tall and slim. That had never been his favourite type but he decided he could change. Her eyes were a subtle colour. An interesting way to spend your life, he thought – fixing their colour exactly, like a Japanese artist painting the same flower till he died. Her mouth was neat in repose but beautifully wide when smiling. Her breasts were generous and firm. Her legs were strong and shapely. They could have been a dancer’s legs. He wanted to ask her about her legs but remembered he should be asking her other things.

  ‘Is there anything else you’d like to know? You don’t want to count my teeth?’

  The remark jolted him into laughter.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Well, I’m not sorry. I was just appreciating you. No crime in that. I think you’re great.’

  The confession opened a door, brought him where subterfuge couldn’t.

  ‘I’ve seen you in here before,’ she said.

  ‘When?’

  ‘A couple of times. You spoke to me once.’

  ‘You’re sure it was me?’

  ‘Definitely. I think you were a bit drunk. There were two other fellas with you.’

  ‘If I don’t remember you, I must’ve been drunk. What did I say?’

  ‘Just that I was the only one who was to be allowed to serve you. And some other things.’

  She smiled. Harkness had a vague memory of the occasion. Yesterday’s embarrassment was today’s gain.

  ‘You’ve been working here for a while, have you?’

  ‘About three months. I pack up at the end of this week.’

  ‘Just my luck. Why?’

  Harkness paused. The omens were propitious. The temptation to go on conversational walkabout with her was very great. He loved the bizarre lumber that you find in strangers’ lives, uncles with wooden legs, a fear of butterflies, and bus-conductresses from South America. She promised to be interesting. He resented the job, how it made you use people, including yourself. Instead of exploring who she was, he had to try and pick her pocket.

  ‘Actually,’ he said, mentally hissing his own fakery. ‘I was hoping to see a bloke in here tonight. See, I’m a salesman. It’s only sometimes I’m in Glasgow. And I meet him sometimes. He usually drinks in here.’

  ‘Who would that be?’

  ‘Alan,’ Harkness said, and hoped for the best.

  ‘Alan who?’

  ‘Well, that’s the thing,’ he said, wondering what was. ‘I’m murder with names. He gave me his name and address. And I’ve lost the thing. I promised to look him up too. The next time I was in. And this is it.’

  She was waiting. He shrugged in a way he hoped was charming – little detective lost.

  ‘Alan’s not a lot,’ she said. ‘There’s probably three of them in Glasgow. At least.’

  He decided to take a chance on enlarging what Sarah had told them.

  ‘He works at Abbotsinch. Ground Staff.’

  She was concentrating hard for him.

  ‘Oh. Yes. There is somebody like that. Alan. Wait a minute.’

  She went over to the girl behind the bar. Harkness watched them talking. Her expression as she came back across made him hopeful.

  ‘Alan McInnes?’ she said.

  ‘That’s the man.’

  ‘Aye. Alan quite often drinks in here.’

  Harkness waited, not wanting to disturb the moment. But she said nothing else.

  ‘But not tonight,’ he said with careful melancholy.

  ‘So it seems. Fiona says he said something about a party tonight. He was in on Saturday.’

  ‘A party on a Monday?’

  She laughed.

  ‘That’s what she said.’

  ‘The thing is,’ Harkness said, ‘I’ve only got tonight. Tomorrow I’m away.’

  She looked at him and understood. He knew by now that she wanted him to stay. She knew he was wanting to go. It was the test of her niceness.

  ‘Pretty free, is it?’ he said.

  She smiled.

  ‘Oh, I think they might let you in,’ she said, watching his reaction. ‘From what Fiona was saying. You want me to find out more?’

  ‘It’s just that I want to see him.’

  She nodded knowingly. When she went back to the bar and talked, Fiona laughed a lot but she didn’t. She came back and gave him a number in Byres Road.

  ‘Fiona thinks that’s the number. She’s not sure. She’s been there once for a party. But the name on the door is Lawrie. That’s not their name. The folk who had it before left the nameplate. It’s a student flat. More like a commune, I think. Alan said the party is an anti-Monday party.’

  ‘Thanks. Can I get you another drink?’

  ‘Not tonight.’

  ‘When do you finish?’

  ‘Tonight I’ll be out about a quarter-to-eleven.’

  He liked the way she said it without prevarication.

  ‘Too ear
ly for you, I think,’ she added.

  ‘Don’t underestimate me.’

  He nodded and she smiled. Somebody called her over.

  32

  Cities can turn their backs on you, just like people. Standing in the opening to Central Station near the Boots Dispensary, Harkness was feeling that. It was that middle of the evening time by which if you haven’t gone where you’re going or met whoever it is you’re supposed to meet, the city locks you out. Everybody seems installed in purposes. You’re left with a vagrant mood.

  Harkness was having his. His attention loitered about the quiet street, bumming animation from passing strangers. A young couple went past with their little girl between them. Every few steps they hoisted her off the ground by her hands. She cycled on air and giggled simultaneously, as if her legs were working her laughter. There were four taxis at the stance. Three of the men were out exchanging moods. The fourth had stayed in his cab, reading a paper and picking his nose.

  A woman in a long green evening-dress and a man in a monkey suit came round the corner towards where Harkness was standing. The man was decanting a careful laugh – ha, ha, ha. The woman looked at Harkness in a way that annoyed him, a manner that was its own red carpet, a face like a Barclay card. She went along the grubby station porch as if it was the portico of her plantation-house and she was Scarlett O’Hara. They went into the Central Hotel. There must be a function on. If they were anything to go by, a convention of twats, Harkness decided.

  It wasn’t the usual paper-seller. He was a stand-in and he was having a bad night. The last copies of the Evening Times seemed glued to his arm. He was getting impatient, probably because he wanted a drink and something to eat before tomorrow’s dailies came in nearer eleven.

  Across the street the door of the Corn Exchange opened suddenly and a small man popped out onto the pavement, as if the pub had rifted. He foundered in a way that suggested fresh air wasn’t his element and at once Harkness saw that he was beyond what his father called the pint of no return. His impetus carried him into the middle of the road, where a solitary car braked and honked. He waved with an air of preoccupied royalty and proceeded to negotiate the rest of the roadway with total concentration and in a zig-zag pattern of immense complication. The road, it seemed, was a river and he was the only one who knew the stepping-stones. The car drove on slowly, the three women in it looking out to watch the small man threading himself through the station entrance.

  Harkness turned back from following the small man’s lateral progression to see Laidlaw crossing the street. The difference between the slumped depression of the man he had left in the hotel room and the purposeful person coming towards him almost amounted to plastic surgery. Laidlaw stopped at the paper-seller. Being close enough, Harkness heard what he was saying.

  ‘I’ve been trying to see Wee Eck. No joy. You tell him I want to see him. Tomorrow. Wee Mickey’s, half-past one. Without fail. You’ve got the message?’

  Laidlaw had his hand on the man’s remaining papers.

  ‘Yer line’s on, sir. Ye’ve been clocked.’

  Laidlaw handed him some money Harkness couldn’t make out and took his papers from him. The man saluted and went away.

  ‘Who is this Wee Eck anyway?’ Harkness asked.

  ‘Just another tout.’

  ‘Not with the trouble you’re going to.’

  ‘He’s causing the trouble. I think he’s avoiding me. That makes me interested. He probably thinks it puts up the price. But it doesn’t do that. So what’s the word?’

  ‘Alan McInnes,’ Harkness said.

  Laidlaw was impressed. Harkness savoured the rest, giving it staccato, dramatic as a teleprinter.

  ‘He’s at a party. Byres Road. I’ve got the address. We should catch him there.’

  ‘Very impressive,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Oh yes. It is. I’ll tell them about that. You’re promising. In the meantime, all is forgiven. Come back at once.’

  Harkness nodded.

  ‘Let’s go then,’ he said.

  ‘Okay. But give me a couple of minutes. I need some antibiotics.’

  Harkness followed him into the station. Laidlaw put the papers in a litter-bin as he passed. He went to where the phones were set in their row of hardboard shells. He tried three before he found one that was working. Harkness stood apart and watched Laidlaw dialling, putting in the money and talking.

  On one of the benches along from Harkness the small man from the Corn Exchange was sitting. He had emptied stuff from his pockets onto the bench and he was chatting quietly to Glasgow. Harkness was catching most of it. ‘Always pay yer way. That’s the secret. The world doesny owe ye a livin’. Uh-huh. Here somewhere. Bound to be. Tickets, please. Uddingston, here we come. Make it in time for—’

  And then something that sounded like ‘The Deckman’. Harkness assumed that was the name of a pub and thought the man might be doing himself a favour if he lost his ticket till after ten. He turned back to watching Laidlaw. Laidlaw was bending down as if to get nearer the ear of the person he was talking to. Harkness understood that he was talking to children. He saw him wait while one went off and another came on. He watched his genuine laughter. It was the most vulnerable Harkness had ever seen Laidlaw. Depressed, he clenched. Happy like this, he looked defenceless.

  But as he came off the phone, his face showed nothing.

  ‘Byres Road it is then,’ was all he said.

  While they were travelling on the Underground to Hillhead, Harkness asked, ‘How many children do you have?’

  ‘Not enough.’

  They both laughed but Laidlaw didn’t refine it. Harkness remembered Laidlaw’s reputation for being something of a mystery. Milligan had called his house ‘The Shrine’ because so few people on the force had been there. To his own surprise, Harkness found himself mentally defending Laidlaw against the resentment that had been in Milligan’s voice. Harkness knew that if he repeated the question, Laidlaw would have to answer it. But Harkness chose not to, because he divined in Laidlaw’s casual parry the apparently accidental tip of a deep and deliberate defensiveness. The reason interested him, but he decided this wasn’t the time to try and discover it. With a concern for Laidlaw he hadn’t known he had, Harkness directed the talk away from even so small a revelation.

  ‘You think this could be it?’

  ‘It could be,’ Laidlaw said. ‘But I don’t think so.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You ask yourself,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Is it likely? A fella as open to suspicion as he seems to be hasn’t come forward to cover himself. What does that mean? I think it means he’s frightened in the most natural way. He knew the girl. He was fixed up to see her that night. To himself, he’s a suspect. So he hides. He admits nothing. But guilt’s a different proposition. Guilty, you work out what everybody thinks of you. You go through the card. You start to place deliberate bets. Because you’re working out the odds. This fella hasn’t made a move yet. We could find him as easily as this and he hasn’t moved. No. That won’t do. I smell red herring. So we have to go where the smell leads us.’

  ‘It could be him. He could be so petrified he can’t think what to do.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what. If Alan McInnes is at this party tonight, it isn’t him. That’s the way I bet. But it’s still important. He might tell us something.’

  In that careful balance between pessimism, the assumed defeat of contrived expectations, and hope, the discovery of unexpected possibilities, Harkness recognised Laidlaw.

  The number the waitress had given Harkness wasn’t the number. But they tried a few others and the music brought them to it – Led Zeppelin, Harkness thought. The door said ‘Lawrie’. They knocked several times before they got an answer.

  Laidlaw showed who he was and said, ‘We’re police. May we come in?’

  It was an amazing question. The girl who had opened the door stared at them, the glass tilting in her hand till the drink almost spilled. She was fairly fat, dressed in what looked like b
rocade curtains. Her broad, pale face was as innocent as a letter home to mother. But it was blotted slightly by her need to work out what she shouldn’t say. While she was busy reacting, a boy with long hair and a headband manifested vaguely behind her and disappeared back into the room at the end of the hall, which sounded like the passengers on a liner that is sinking.

  A moment later, a self-consciously brisk young man came along the hall to the door. The girl hadn’t spoken, still hadn’t come out of rehearsals. The best she had managed was not to spill her drink.

  ‘Yes. Can I help you?’

  Two things struck Harkness: the way so many people, taken socially by surprise, become receptionists; the silence that had occurred behind the young man’s back, as if the Titanic had sunk. Where they were was the iceberg. Laidlaw showed his card again, repeated his question.

  ‘What for?’ the young man said.

  He was wearing jeans that looked as if they had been dipped in a few paint-pots, and a cheesecloth shirt that had sweated itself to his nipples. He was shaky but determined. Harkness liked him.

  ‘We want to speak to a boy called Alan McInnes,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Is he here?’

  The girl had become a fascinated bystander. She was doing everything but take notes. The young man was out there in the middle of a crisis. It was his flat, his guest. He was trying to remember his rights. Harkness thought of his father. His father would have sympathised with this boy. So did Harkness.

  ‘What if he is?’ the young man said.

  Laidlaw shrugged.

  ‘Look, son,’ he said. ‘We just want to talk to him. If you don’t want to let us in, that’s up to you. This isn’t a raid. But I can make it one, if that’s what you want.’

  Faced with no choice, the young man took his time to make it. He was all right, Harkness decided.

  ‘I suppose you better come in,’ he said at last.

  They came in. The girl recovered enough aplomb to shut the door. A side room they passed smelled as if somebody had been burning joss-sticks. As they reached the main room, Harkness realised the music had only been turned down as far as it would go. In the stillness of the room you could hear it whispering. He heard the word ‘police’ muttered somewhere.