Laidlaw

by William McIlvanney

  ‘If you don’t stop frightening me, Mr Rayburn,’ Laidlaw said very quietly, ‘I won’t hit you – I’ll make love to you.’

  It was like stopping a runaway horse with your pinkie. Harkness could see Rayburn’s presence go soft, filleted with one remark. The anger that had etched his face lost definition, and his features became blurred. The whole bias of the place had shifted. It was Laidlaw’s room. As Laidlaw walked into it, Rayburn moved backwards clumsily. Laidlaw gestured backwards at Harkness, who came in and closed the door.

  ‘Take off your hairy chest, Mr Rayburn, and sit down.’

  Rayburn disintegrated into the chair that Laidlaw offered him. Laidlaw leaned into him, almost whispering.

  ‘I’ve watched your act long enough, Mr Rayburn. It’s a bad act. And now I want my money back. I could knock you out with my eyelashes. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about. We’re here to talk about Tommy, Mr Rayburn.’

  Rayburn looked up, looked away.

  ‘I don’t know any Tommy.’

  ‘Mr Rayburn. I don’t think you understand. If you don’t answer the questions I’m going to ask, I’m going to jail you. Right now. Because if you don’t answer them, I’m going to assume you’re implicated in a murder.’

  Rayburn’s face attempted incredulity but Laidlaw’s face gave him nothing back.

  ‘You’re a homosexual, Mr Rayburn. For some time you’ve had a homosexual relationship with a boy called Tommy Bryson. Is that correct?’

  The silence was the time it took for Harry Rayburn to realise that the last thing he had left to hope for was never going to happen.

  ‘Yes.’

  It was the smallest word Harkness had ever heard.

  ‘His name doesn’t appear on the list of staff you gave us. But he works for you. Is that correct?’

  ‘No. No, it’s not.’

  ‘Mr Rayburn—’

  ‘He did work for me. But not any more.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Two or three weeks ago. He packed in. We broke up.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘None of your business.’

  ‘Mr Rayburn, I don’t want the details of your private life. Believe me, I don’t. You bowdlerise it any way you want. But give me the shape of what happened.’

  Rayburn shut his eyes, talked into his own despair.

  ‘He couldn’t come all the way out. A lot of people can’t. He still wanted to be straight. Heterosexual.’ He hated the word. ‘He wanted to try to make it with girls.’

  ‘And you haven’t seen him since then?’

  Rayburn opened his eyes. They looked like bruises.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Mr Rayburn. That’s not easy to believe.’

  Harry Rayburn looked up at Laidlaw evenly. His eyes had the calmness of complete despair.

  ‘Not much that’s happened to me is,’ he said. ‘At least not for me.’

  Laidlaw looked at him and accepted. There was no choice.

  ‘What’s his address?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘You better develop a memory quickly, Mr Rayburn.’

  ‘It’s Manley Gardens. But I’m not sure of the number. Fifty-something I think. It’s an old building.’

  ‘I know where that is.’

  ‘But he won’t be there.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He was going to England, he said. To try and sort himself out there. There’ll only be his mother in the house. His father shot the crow years ago.’

  ‘Thanks, Mr Rayburn,’ Laidlaw said. ‘You’re sure that’s all you know?’

  Rayburn nodded.

  ‘I hope so,’ Laidlaw said. ‘We’ll be back. In the meantime, I’ll try not to offend against your sense of civic liberty by taking the policemen out.’

  Turning to close the door, Harkness saw Harry Rayburn with his head in his hands, huddled as if he was in the middle of a private air-raid.

  Before they left, Laidlaw posted the other two policemen outside ‘Poppies.’

  ‘It’s worth a try,’ Laidlaw said in the car.

  ‘No,’ Harkness said. ‘He’s never going to buy that. He knows you’ve just moved them outside. Waiting to follow him.’

  ‘Knowing isn’t accepting,’ Laidlaw said. ‘A panicked elephant’ll try to thread itself through a needle.’

  45

  The bell had a sugary chime, a fingerful of schmaltz. It was an appropriately sentimental password to that land which defies geography, where domesticity has enchanted all things into stasis. The inside of the house was a carefully distilled negation of its exterior. Harkness had seen a few houses like this before, but only a few. It was, he suspected, what Mary’s parents were in search of. But they were novitiates.

  Crossing the doorway here, you passed a frontier into a defiant immutability. The sense of a shrine wasn’t due merely to the crucifix in the hall. It related to the muted atmosphere, as if a shout would be a sacrilege, to the almost uninhabitated exactitude with which each object had its placement. You felt as if the ornaments had been fixed upon foundations. Rudeness, anger, disorder didn’t happen here. The nearest thing to turmoil would be when the tea was stirred.

  The keeper of the grotto was older than they had expected – greying hair neatly done, glasses, a navy-blue twinset, imitation pearls. She had agreed she was Mrs Bryson, had listened to Laidlaw explain it was about Tommy, and had asked them in, glancing at their feet as if they might be muddy. In the living-room Harkness sat on the edge of his cushion, not wanting to crush its flowers.

  ‘Nothing’s happened, has it?’

  The gentleness of her voice was like a charm against the possibility of anything happening.

  ‘We don’t know yet, Mrs Bryson,’ Laidlaw said. ‘We just wanted to talk to Tommy. He isn’t in?’

  ‘But Tommy’s in London.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Her look chastised him gently for the insult to her motherhood.

  ‘Well, he’s somewhere down there. He hasn’t written since he left. You know what the young people are like nowadays. He said he was going to London.’

  ‘When did he leave?’

  ‘Oh. Let me see. Two or three weeks ago. But what’s happened? Is he in some kind of trouble?’

  ‘Maybe nothing’s happened. Very possibly nothing. What about Tommy’s father?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Where is he, Mrs Bryson?’

  It was over in a moment. Her concentration flickered and when her eyes went bland again, Harkness was left wondering if what he had seen in them could really have been that depth of hate. Perhaps more had been cooking here than the wholesome meals a growing boy would need.

  ‘I haven’t known where he is for about twenty years.’

  ‘He left you?’

  ‘He left us.’

  ‘Then Tommy knew him.’

  ‘Tommy was five months old when his father left. He couldn’t stand Tommy’s crying. So he went where he couldn’t hear it.’

  ‘And you don’t know where he is? And Tommy wouldn’t know?’

  ‘I know where he’s going. If he isn’t already there. R.I.P. Roast in peace.’

  It was a kept joke, a bitter fermentation with a phrase for phial. The venom of it in her gentle mouth was a shock, as if Santa Claus should come on like Lenny Bruce.

  ‘Mrs Bryson. Do you know Harry Rayburn?’

  ‘Rayburn, Rayburn. Oh. The gentleman Tommy used to work for.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I know of him. But that’s all.’

  Laidlaw stared at her, looked away.

  ‘Well. Do you mind if we look at Tommy’s room?’

  She hesitated.

  ‘Why? Look. I think you’d better tell me what all of this is about. Is Tommy supposed to have done something? What has happened?’

  ‘I don’t know what’s happened, Mrs Bryson. But I want to try and trace Tommy. For questioning about something. Anything I know about him mig
ht help. But I’m asking, you understand. I’ve no authority to oblige you to show me his room. It’s up to you. I want you to understand that.’

  After a moment she got up and they followed her. It was a small room. The walls were white and there was nothing on them, no mirror, no posters, no pictures. It seemed to Harkness like a monk’s cell, the room of someone very ascetic. It was what wasn’t there that defined it. It was just walls and furniture. There was no trace of a hobby or an interest. Nobody knew who lived here.

  Laidlaw bent down suddenly, opened a couple of drawers and closed them again at once.

  ‘What are you doing? Those are Tommy’s private possessions.’

  ‘All right, Mrs Bryson. All right. I’m sorry. Thank you for helping us. There’s nothing more you can tell us?’

  ‘Just what I’ve told you.’

  Laidlaw and Harkness looked at her. Her face told them that nothing more was going to come. Its prim sweetness was made of iron. Whatever you wanted to say, it had made its choices.

  ‘Thank you,’ Laidlaw said.

  They were in the car going back before either of them spoke.

  ‘What’s more sinister than respectability?’ Laidlaw said.

  ‘You think she knows where he is?’

  ‘What difference does it make? Torquemada couldn’t get it out of her.’

  ‘So what does all that tell us?’

  ‘Everything. Weren’t you listening?’

  Harkness changed up.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’m listening now.’

  ‘Bud Lawson is a monolithic Prod. Tommy is a Catholic. Jennifer’s in the cross-fire. Made to choose. She seems to choose but the lies she tells to everybody would suggest she renegued on her first choice. If Harry Rayburn’s telling the truth about Tommy trying to straighten out his deviations, well. Who else would he practise on but the girl he left behind. So he teams up with Jennifer again.’

  ‘It’s a wee bit speculative,’ Harkness said.

  ‘A wee bit. The second thing. Mrs Bryson has no curiosity. Some folk faint when they see the polis at their door. Mrs Bryson didn’t show much of anything. Because she was expecting us. She’d been rehearsing. Every time she asked what it was all about, I gave her nothing back. She didn’t get more frantic, she got more mechanical. Because once she knew we didn’t have him, she didn’t really have to ask. Either she knows what’s happened. Or she doesn’t care.’

  ‘God. Yet she would cover up for a sex murderer. Some sons do have them.’

  ‘I would hope so. I would expect my mother to do the same for me. Home is where they’ll hide you from the polis.’

  ‘Anything else?’ Harkness asked.

  ‘She says he left two or three weeks ago. ‘Let me see’? You take the mother of an only child, she knows to the hour when he left. Mrs Bryson doesn’t know because Tommy didn’t leave. His gear was still in the drawers. Who sets out on the great English adventure without a change of socks?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Tommy Bryson killed Jennifer Lawson. He’s still in Glasgow. Harry Rayburn knows where he is. So we’ll have to go back and be unpleasant to Mr Rayburn.’

  Harkness drove in silence for a moment.

  ‘Did you notice the pictures in his office?’ he said. ‘It just struck me. They’re pin-ups of men. Does it not make you sick?’

  ‘That’s evidence for the defence. When you think of the crappy attitudes like yours he’s had to cope with, he’s made not a bad job of surviving. You can almost admire him.’

  ‘I can’t help it. I just hate their guts.’

  ‘So that’ll worry us. Marlowe was a poof. And his farts were more articulate than most mouths.’

  They had to stop at lights. Across their windscreen some people passed outside a cinema – a boy and a girl clowning with each other, two men in conversation, a foursome involved only with themselves.

  ‘Maybe that’s why he killed her,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Maybe he was just trying to catch his daddy’s attention.’

  46

  What happened then took Harkness by surprise, not just by its speed but by the suddenness with which there was revealed to him the true nature of what they were involved in. When he thought of the case afterwards, the reel of sensations he ran most often in his mind began at the point when he and Laidlaw stepped out of the car at Poppies.

  He had thought they were just coming back from Mrs Bryson’s. It felt not greatly different from all the other things they’d done. But suddenly that simple action, coming at the end of the distance they had walked, the people questioned, the places gone to, the thoughtful talk, was like the last act of a conjuration. Using all the skill they had, they had demanded access to a secret. What Harkness was to realise was that the catch-clause in such a demand is that you have to give the secret access to you.

  The court was dark by now except for the lights of The Maverick. In that glow of other people’s pleasure they met one of the policemen they had left. It was the taller one. He walked out of shadow towards them and, behind the preoccupied voices coming from the pub, they talked like conspirators.

  ‘Harry Rayburn left, sir. But he’s back. Just a minute ago.’

  ‘Where did he go?’

  ‘To the Bridgegate. A condemned building. Number Seventeen. Don’s watching it now.’

  ‘We’ll be faster on foot. You stay with Rayburn. Phone the Division. But give us some time to ourselves first. I don’t want him frightened.’

  He said the last words on the run. Harkness caught up. An old woman ahead of them turned round in alarm and cowered into a doorway. Laidlaw was just managing to talk.

  ‘Knew we were coming . . . Tip-off to get away . . . Keep us talking.’

  Concentrating on breathing, Harkness thought that the last part of Laidlaw to die would be his mouth. People were pausing to look at them inquisitively, with that special Glasgow assumption of communal rights, as if they should stop and explain what it was about. They went along Argyle Street, down Stockwell Street and then cut off to the Bridgegate.

  The running changed Harkness’s sense of himself, put him outside his own preconceptions in the way that physical exertion does. The stance of forensic enquiry he had adopted towards the case was effectively penetrated. He wasn’t just a mobile head any longer. He was a confused bundle of tensions and stresses, aware of the problem of breathing, of the changes of surface under his feet, of tiredness tautening his legs. His perceptions weren’t a progression. They were fired fragments, coming at him like flak. A car making a U-turn at the end of the Bridgegate. The other policeman starting to run towards them. Somebody stepping out of the doorway of a derelict tenement. Somebody walking towards the tenement from the end of the Bridgegate. Laidlaw shouting, ‘Hey, you! Bud Lawson!’ The figure at the doorway disappearing back into the tenement. Bud Lawson running and reaching the tenement before them. Laidlaw shouting to the other policeman, ‘Watch the door!’

  The entry snuffed out the city. For Harkness, already dizzy with exertion, it was like falling down a shaft. The suddenness was overwhelming – a foetid smell and four men running in the dark.

  He was moaning for breath, Laidlaw in front. The stairs were blows that jarred him to the thighs. His lungs seemed hedged with thorns. A piece of railing clattered away from his hand. The four of them seemed labouring up a descending spiral stair, a murderous aspiration. That ended suddenly, grotesquely, in accident.

  The stairs gave way. The boy and Bud Lawson had reached the upper landing. Behind them the stairs collapsed. The noise battered their ears, halted Laidlaw and Harkness cringing like an act of God. The bouncing debris defined how far they could have fallen. The dust settled on them like a benediction, choking them. Between them and the landing a pit of black, about eight feet across. The landing itself was in blackness. But they knew what was going to happen there. A whimper like a trapped hare came to them.

  ‘Too late, polisman,’ Bud Lawson said. ‘He’s mine.’

  The voice terrifi
ed Harkness. It came brutally out of darkness, never to be denied. The gulf between them and it seemed impassable. The exhaustion Harkness felt was more than physical. It reached remorselessly into who he was and taught him futility. He had thought that what they were trying to do was a difficult thing, to locate and isolate whoever it was who carried about with him the savage force that had murdered Jennifer Lawson. Now it came to him as impossible, because that force wasn’t isolated. It had already multiplied on itself to create a twin, this moment of ravening viciousness whose spores were in each of them.

  ‘Bud Lawson!’ Laidlaw threw his voice across the space, grappling what was on the other side. ‘You don’t touch that boy!’

  The voice was an atavism, like Lawson’s. The ferocity in Laidlaw’s voice was a part of Harkness, just as he shared Bud Lawson’s rage. In the stillness he felt himself enclosed in their animal breathings, and the pathetic whimpering of the boy was like a plea against what Harkness himself was.

  ‘Ah’m gonny kill ’im.’

  ‘You dae. An’ Ah kill you. No question.’

  The voices were the same terrible force talking to itself.

  ‘Because o’ a rat like this?’

  It was a question, Harkness realised, the sound of something human. If Lawson had the certainty he claimed, the boy would be already dead. All he had to do was drop him over the edge like waste, if he was waste. Uncertainty had happened, and with it hope. Harkness listened to Laidlaw try to enlarge it into doubt.

  ‘What gives ye the right?’

  ‘Ah’m her feyther!’

  ‘You didn’t even know ’er.’

  ‘Shut up, polisman.’

  ‘No chance. You didn’t even know ’er. She hated you!’

  The following silence frightened Harkness because it meant that maybe Laidlaw had misjudged. And if he had, the boy was dead. But what came was Bud Lawson’s voice, humanised with pain.

  ‘How wid you know?’

  ‘I’ve had to ask a lot of questions. Not all the answers tell against that boy. Don’t kid yerself! She hated you. And she was right. Feyther? Feyther’s more than bairnin’ yer wife. Feyther’s more than you ever were.’