Laidlaw

by William McIlvanney

Eddie and Lennie laughed. Mason looked towards Lennie.

  ‘Yer only danger,’ Lennie said, ‘is he might hit ye wi’ his handbag. Or strangle ye wi’ that lassie’s knickers.’

  Minty stared at him. Mason explained what Lennie meant.

  ‘How much?’ Minty said to Mason.

  ‘Five hundred quid,’ Mason said.

  Minty shook his head.

  ‘It’s no’ much for that kinna work.’

  ‘How else are you going to make that kind of money, Minty? Take out life insurance?’

  ‘Two thousand’s nearer the mark for a job like that.’

  ‘What is it you’ve got, Minty? Cancer of the brain?’

  Minty took a sip of water, sat. He looked past the three of them. He seemed completely alone. They just happened to be there.

  ‘Anyway,’ Mason said. ‘How do I know you can do it? You must be weak.’

  Minty looked at Lennie.

  ‘Put your elba on the table,’ he said.

  Lennie glanced at Mason. Mason nodded. Lennie obliged and Minty took his hand and started to press it back towards the table. Lennie resisted but Minty’s stick of a wrist projecting from his jacket seemed charged with electricity. Lennie’s knuckles touched Formica. Mason looked at Lennie and shook his head.

  ‘Ah wisny ready,’ Lennie said. ‘Hiv anither go.’

  ‘Nae chance,’ Minty said. ‘Ah canny do it twice. Ah’ve got tae save those up. Ah don’t know how many Ah’ve got left. But Ah only need one mair.’

  Mason nodded.

  ‘A thousand,’ he said. ‘That’s your lot.’

  ‘Ye must want rid o’ somebody badly if ye’ll pay a thousand tae have him put down.’

  ‘Badly enough. Are you on?’

  ‘Ah’m on. But five hundred now. Five hundred efter.’

  Mason took out a roll of money with an elastic band around it.

  ‘That’s five hundred,’ he said.

  Minty smiled as he put it in his pocket.

  ‘Ye’ve been playin’ wi’ me, Mr Mason. Ye knew yer price all along.’

  ‘Business, Minty, business. It has to be done by the night at the latest. Lennie’ll be back in for you in five minutes. Go easy on that water. I want you sober.’

  Mason finished his drink. Eddie and Lennie took what was left of theirs in a oner. They all stood up.

  ‘You’re not hoping to hide, now, are you, Minty? I mean, you’ll meet your obligations.’

  ‘Ask around, Mr Mason. Ah’ve never been known to welsh.’

  ‘No. For if you did, cancer would be the least of your bothers. Your family would be joining you. One headstone would do the lot.’

  They left Minty sipping his water, like a temperance meeting of one. In the street, Mason breathed deeply.

  ‘That wee man makes any room a sick-room,’ he said. ‘You show him the place, Lennie. Tell him I’ll see him before eight o’clock in St Enoch’s car park. With the thing done. No later than. And he gets the rest.’

  They left him. Crossing to his car, Mason was stopped by an old man.

  ‘Ye hivny the price o’ a cuppa tea, sur. Ah hivny had a bite fur two days, son.’

  Mason gave him a fifty-pence piece. Going back into the lounge, Lennie saw Minty sitting quiet and still. And deadly, Lennie thought. He remembered the name he’d thought up for Minty last night. The cancer man. The name excited Lennie. Minty went out with him and the barman went across to the alcove to collect what had been left.

  38

  Harkness checked the time. It was just on half-past eleven. The room was a part of memory for Harkness but the memory wasn’t of another place. It was of a feeling, an ambience of vulnerability that reminded him of his mother. She had died of pneumonia in a mental hospital. But what stayed with Harkness was the time at home, before she went in, when he and his father had watched hopelessly as she unseamed in front of their eyes. Watching her had taught Harkness how much casual pain there was and undermined seriously for the first time his arrogant sense of himself.

  Now he felt recurring that awareness of the presence of someone in such a sensitised state that a snowflake might crack their skull. Laidlaw was lying on the bed facing towards the door. The curtains had been drawn. Harkness had closed the door very gently and Laidlaw’s eyes had opened. Harkness waited.

  ‘Hullo,’ Laidlaw said to the wall.

  ‘Hullo.’

  Harkness watched the body on the bed reassemble itself with difficulty. The effect was grotesquely clownish, accentuated by the pallor of the face, the inappropriately jazzy underpants and the fact that he still had one sock on. The rest of his clothes were scattered around, as if a drunk man had decided to go for a swim. He worked himself round until he was sitting on the edge of the bed. He picked delicately at the corners of his eyes.

  ‘How do you feel?’

  Laidlaw seemed to be deciding. He yawned and massaged his left armpit. Looking up, his eyes were wide and clear again. He nodded.

  ‘Thank God for the cavalry. The wee magic pills seem to have made it in time. I’m all right. Considering my head’s just been a few rounds with Ali.’

  Talk seemed to animate him. He got up and wandered about until his jacket found him. He found what he was looking for. His mouth milked the cigarette of an enormous drag. He came back and sat on the bed.

  ‘First the good news,’ Harkness said.

  Laidlaw laughed.

  ‘They’re still making that stuff out there, are they?’

  ‘The boyfriend’s name is Tommy.’

  ‘No second name?’

  ‘Not yet. The name means nothing to anybody else on the case.’

  ‘That’s the good news? What’s the bad stuff? I’ve been condemned to death?’

  ‘Not quite. The Commander wants to see you. A complaint went in about you from MacLaughlan’s. It must’ve been the gaffer you spoke to.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Right now.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘That’s what he said. It won’t take long.’

  ‘Long’s comparative. Two minutes of that stuff is a long time. I don’t need it.’

  He left his cigarette burning in the ashtray and went across to the sink to brush his teeth.

  ‘There’s more,’ Harkness said.

  Laidlaw turned his head towards him, frothing at the mouth. Harkness began to laugh. Laidlaw stared at him, then, turning towards the basin, caught his own face in the mirror – curled lip, dripping fangs. He snittered at himself and rinsed out his mouth.

  ‘You don’t liaise.’

  ‘I don’t what?’

  ‘You don’t liaise. That’s what he said. “He puts everybody’s back up.” That’s actually what he said.’

  ‘What does he think we’re dealing with? A traffic offence?’

  Laidlaw washed very thoroughly, soaping his torso as well. The body still looked youthful except that the stomach muscles had started to surrender. While he was shaving briefly, he said, ‘I should’ve been a lawyer, the way I wanted.’

  It was the first unsolicited statement about his past Harkness had heard him make. The self-containment of the man occurred to Harkness again. The more he talked, the bigger the silence at the centre of him seemed. He was a very private man, surrounded by fences and ‘Keep Out’ signs. Perhaps that was why so many rumours circulated about him. Harkness remembered another one.

  ‘Is it true that you failed university?’ he asked.

  Laidlaw had taken off his sock and was putting on a fresh pair.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘University failed me.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I took acres of fertile ignorance up to that place. And they started to pour preconceptions all over it. Like forty tons of cement. No thanks. I got out before it hardened. I did a year, passed my exams – just to tell myself that I wasn’t leaving because I had to. And I left.’

  ‘And joined the police.’

  ‘Not right away. I finished up here after a while.’

/>   ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know why.’

  ‘You’re very good at answering questions.’

  ‘I don’t like questions. They invent the answers. The real answers are discovered, before you even know what the question is.’

  ‘Aye, okay. But I mean even with simple things. Like I asked you last night how many children you have. You didn’t answer.’

  Laidlaw pulled on his trousers. He studied the buckle of his belt as if it was the problem.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But I couldn’t tell you without giving you what you didn’t ask for.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Laidlaw breathed deeply.

  ‘It means,’ he said, ‘that I’ve got three children by my marriage. It also means that I got a girl pregnant when I was twenty and I wouldn’t marry her. But I wanted to be a father to the child. I even offered to take it from her. She wouldn’t wear it. She had it adopted out. She wouldn’t tell me where. I understand her, but I don’t forgive her. What you feel is your own affair. But what you do with what you feel admits of judgment. I judge her hard for that. If she was dying in the street, I’d be hard pushed to put a pillow below her head. I have four children. But only three of them have me. That’s a hard thing to admit to somebody passing the time on the Underground.’

  Harkness was silenced. He had been watching Laidlaw draw protection from his clothes, socks, trousers, shirt and jacket, until the rawness of himself had grown a shell. Laidlaw shaped the big knot on his tie. He jutted his chin out and ran his hand along its edges, checking for bristles. He put his tongue across his teeth and showed them to himself in the mirror. He was no longer at home to visitors. What he said showed it.

  ‘There had been a funny phone-call for me when I got back to the hotel.’

  ‘Information?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just checking that I could still be reached here. We better keep in touch with the desk today.’

  Harkness nodded. Laidlaw smiled at him.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Time to face the bloody bureaucracy. While I’m doing that, I think you should check with Sarah Stanley. About Tommy. I’ll meet you in the Top Spot.’

  They went out, Laidlaw leaving the room like a litter-bin.

  39

  Coming round from Stewart Street, Laidlaw negotiated the traffic with an absent-mindedness that was almost suicidal. In his head he was still talking to Commander Robert Frederick.

  They had had these confrontations several times and always Frederick was at least as understanding as you could expect him to be, and always Laidlaw finished up depressed. The pair of them had the art of conjuring hopelessness together. They had managed it again. But at least Laidlaw had the melancholy satisfaction of feeling that he understood why, a little more clearly. Listening to Frederick’s advice, he had thought again of how much he disliked that room, the deodorised furnishings, the uncluttered desk, the smiling photograph, the ashtray that was never used. It was like a shrine to a God he didn’t believe in. It was the God of categories.

  The way Frederick spoke was the key. His speech had a rhythm that had often puzzled Laidlaw. Now he understood. It was dictation. Everything was for the files. What didn’t fit on paper was just a nuisance. He went by statistics and reports. He believed in categories. Laidlaw had never been able to do that. There wasn’t one category that he could accept as being significantly self-contained, from ‘Christian’ to ‘murderer’.

  It was a heavy thought, the kind that needed the help of everybody else to carry. He wondered if the depression he felt at times like these came from a seemingly irrefutable indication that there were those who would never share it. There were those for whom the divisive categories were cast iron. They would always be there.

  In the heart of such realisations was the seed of an enormous tiredness. It was almost enough to make him accept the categories. He could almost envy Frederick his neat divisions. Certainly, he could understand Frederick’s doubts about his validity as a policeman, even agree with them. Most of all, he could appreciate the Commander’s determination to have his neat divisions adhered to. If you went beyond them, it was simply harder to go on living.

  ‘You mentioned earlier about our different terms of reference. Well, I’m afraid in this job it’s my terms of reference that are going to apply. Even to you. They are as follows. You have until tomorrow. Everything you find out between now and then gets fed back to us immediately. Through Harkness. After today, you’ll get your assignments from me. A day at a time. Any questions?’

  ‘D’you mind if I go now?’

  ‘Please.’

  As Laidlaw was leaving, Frederick had said, ‘You know. It’s only when you actually appear in front of me that my hackles rise. At other times I can think of you quite calmly. Why is that?’

  Laidlaw had looked ruefully at him, taking in the reprehensible sterility of the room, had thought about it sadly.

  ‘I’ve got such a charming absence,’ he had said.

  At the top of Hope Street, the Top Spot presented a clutch of entrances. If you went left, as Laidlaw did, you came into a public bar. This was much used by policemen. It was a narrow bar and near the door a wooden partition came out from the counter, isolating a few feet from the rest, like the hint of a snug. That was where Laidlaw went, not being in the mood for fraternising. He needed some pain-killer.

  ‘An Antiquary and a half-pint of heavy, please.’

  He didn’t know the girl. He didn’t want to.

  ‘What’s up with you, Greta Garbage? You want to be alone?’

  He knew the voice. He had to smile. He turned into Bob Lilley’s big rosy face, a farmer in plain clothes. He took a mock punch at Bob’s stomach.

  ‘Aye, Bob,’ he said. ‘And how’s the man who gets the easy jobs? All right?’

  ‘Until you started insulting me again,’ Bob said. ‘I’d forgotten how much you did that. I must be missing you. So how was it?’

  ‘Like being beaten to death with medals,’ Laidlaw said. ‘What do you do when they accuse you of your virtues?’

  ‘Jack! You’re hallucinating again.’

  ‘Aye, maybe that. But don’t take bets.’

  The girl came with his drink and Bob took a White Horse. He toasted Laidlaw with it.

  ‘I leave you for a day,’ Bob said. ‘And you land yourself in it again. Will you not take a telling?’

  Harkness arrived, carrying a half-empty pint of lager.

  ‘How did it go?’ he asked.

  Laidlaw clenched his teeth and shook his head. He became aware for the first time that there were other policemen further down the bar. He could hear them laughing.

  ‘Take it easy, Jack,’ Bob said. ‘It’s natural.’

  ‘So is shite. But I don’t have to eat it,’ Laidlaw said.

  ‘Behave yourself, Jack.’

  ‘I’m telling you, Bob. I’m pretty near to packing it in.’

  ‘Is that all?’ Bob Lilley said. ‘I thought it was serious. You’ve been going to do that every week since I knew you.’

  Laidlaw laughed. Harkness realised how close Laidlaw and Bob Lilley were and was surprised. Laidlaw was less of a loner than he had thought he was. Milligan came up.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Did you shove a book down your trousers?’

  ‘Spare us,’ Laidlaw said.

  ‘Don’t take it so hard. Everybody’s been on the carpet. We’ve all had that experience.’

  ‘Milligan. You’re still waiting for your first experience. Send a cabbage round the world, it comes back a cabbage. What are you doing in the polis, Milligan?’

  ‘Come to that, what are you doing in it?’

  ‘Trying to counteract people like you.’

  ‘My God, Laidlaw. It must be wonderful to be you.’

  ‘I don’t know. I have to use the lavatory every day. And sometimes I get sore heads.’

  ‘No. I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Straight up. Especially after talking to you.’r />
  Harkness was concentrating on the bottles arranged behind the bar. He could hear the murmur of pleasant conversations all around him and Milligan breathing heavy in the middle of it. He remembered visiting the flat where Milligan lived alone, and the emptiness of the place, the sense that nobody lived there, made him angry at Laidlaw’s antagonism. He thought how Laidlaw improvised every situation into a crisis. It was an exhausting trait, if not for Laidlaw, then for him. Who wanted to be a batman to a mobile disaster area?

  ‘Does it never cross your mind,’ Milligan was saying, ‘that a bunch of us could give you a kicking you’d never forget?’

  ‘Fine. Then all you’d have to do is travel roped together for the rest of your lives. Because you’re right. I wouldn’t forget.’

  ‘Your time’s coming,’ Milligan said darkly as he went away.

  ‘Read any good gantries lately?’ Laidlaw said to Harkness.

  Harkness looked at him, none too friendly, and shook his head in disagreement with what Laidlaw had done.

  ‘I don’t know how much crime you solve,’ Bob Lilley said. ‘But you must cause plenty. You’re what they call extreme provocation. I’ll go down and pour oil on troubled Milligans. Do yourself a favour, Jack. Buy a muzzle.’

  He went away. Harkness felt like joining him.

  ‘For somebody who doesn’t believe in monsters,’ he said, ‘you do your best to try to make Milligan into one.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I think he’s trying to do that to himself. I’m just disagreeing with his efforts.’

  ‘Listen! Have you any idea of the kind of life that big man’s trying to cope with? He lives like Robinson Crusoe in that house of his. Nobody comes, nobody goes. His marriage is finished. His only relatives are in the cemetery. Give him a break!’

  ‘Which arm? No, fair enough. But just because you’ve got a wooden leg doesn’t mean you’ve got to go about battering all the two-legged folk over the head with it. His problems I can sympathise with. But not his reaction to them.’

  They drank, considering each other from opposite sides of an attitude.

  ‘What about Sarah Stanley?’ Laidlaw asked.

  ‘She says she’s never heard of Tommy. I managed to miss the gaffer. But she had nothing.’