Laidlaw jl-1

by William McIlvanney

  Laidlaw left Bud Lawson with McKendrick in the waiting-room and went to check. In the long room the mortuary attendant was working against the background of the rectangular doors, like refrigerators in which three bodies could be stored. He nodded pleasantly as Laidlaw came up.

  The girl’s naked body lay on a metal table with raised edges. The man was washing it. Water sluiced down the runnels at the edge of the table. Laidlaw stood beside him, noted again the mole, as if it might have been make-up that would wash off. He was thinking of Mrs Lawson. The man was very deft, had an obvious expertise in washing dead bodies. Laidlaw remembered that his name was Alec and he liked bowling.

  ‘Been an attractive lassie,’ Alec said.

  ‘I have who I think is the father with me.’

  Alec waited for a moment longer.

  ‘Nearly there,’ he said. ‘Give me a coupla minutes to get her dressed. She had a bad time, eh? Any ideas?’

  ‘Somebody who was in Glasgow on Saturday night.’

  ‘I was visiting relatives in Edinburgh,’ Alec said. ‘Score me off your list.’

  Neither of them had smiled. The sounds remained completely separate from their expressions, a ritual form of words where there was no conversation.

  ‘Tell me when you want us,’ Laidlaw said.

  In the waiting-room Bud Lawson was still following the relentless parade of his own thoughts, like an Orange March nobody dare cut across. In the car he had briefly expressed anger at Laidlaw’s attitude of this morning, his insistence that it was too early to jump to conclusions. But now even Laidlaw had become irrelevant to whatever reactions were massing in Bud Lawson. He was going somewhere alone.

  When Alec came in, Laidlaw took Bud Lawson through to where the body was. It lay on a white metal trolley, neutered by wrappings that were like cheese-cloth and familiar to Laidlaw. No part of the person it had been was visible. It was already a parcel for the law courts.

  Laidlaw positioned Bud Lawson at its head. Alec was at the other side of the trolley. Even the head itself was tightly wrapped, a standard practice because the head had frequently to be opened in post mortem. The only loose part of the mummy-cloth was a triangular flap over the face. It was this that Alec lifted, like a window into death.

  The face was completely composed, the mouth held gently shut by the cloth beneath the chin. Her youthfulness was blinding. Framed in white, she was like an involuntary nun.

  Bud Lawson groaned and buckled. Laidlaw gripped him and was immediately shaken off. Bud Lawson straightened up. He stared down at his daughter. Nothing happened in his eyes. To Laidlaw watching, having seen so many reactions to the same fact in this same cold place, this was the strangest, because it was no reaction. It was like corpse confronting corpse. Bud Lawson stared at his dead daughter, looked steadily across at Alec and nodded once. And that was that.

  Laidlaw was glad when the formalities were finished and they stood in the street outside.

  ‘We’ll want a photograph,’ Laidlaw said.

  ‘Whit?’

  ‘Of Jennifer.’

  ‘See ma wife.’

  Bud Lawson was watching traffic pass in the street.

  ‘Well, would you come down to the Station with us now?’

  ‘Whit fur?’

  ‘There may be questions.’

  ‘Ah’m in nae mood fur questions. Ye can come tae the hoose if there’s anything tae ask.’

  ‘Well, let us run you home then.’

  ‘Ah don’t want yer bloody run.’

  Bud Lawson walked away. Laidlaw and McKendrick were left to report to the Central Division. Laidlaw, having checked that he wasn’t wanted for anything else today, gave Milligan the notes he had taken this morning and agreed to meet him at nine o’clock the next morning for the post mortem. He phoned the Commander and explained. The Commander was agreeable to Laidlaw’s going off. ‘It’s been a long weekend for you. Anyway, I’m calling the new D.C. — Harkness — in today. I’ll get him started. He’ll be working with you.’

  Driving home, Laidlaw put the day’s events in the left-luggage department of his mind. Tomorrow would be soon enough to collect them. He needed rest, a good sleep. Only one image wouldn’t be shelved, persisted: Bud Lawson’s reactionless face as he walked away, following his own compulsive thoughts like inaudible flutes. Laidlaw wondered where they would lead him.

  9

  Bud Lawson stood at the window, looking out on Duke Street. How often had Jennifer come towards this window from Fraoli’s café? She had always liked visiting Bud’s sister Maggie Grierson and her husband Wullie. In moving back and forward across this street she had grown up, lost the fairness of her hair and become dark, abandoned what Wullie called her ‘schoolboard specs’, changed her mind about what was her favourite pop-group (‘Mair often than Ah chinge ma semmet,’ Wullie said), developed breasts and secrecy. She had always said that this was where she would like to stay. ‘This is the real Glesca,’ Maggie had told her. Her absence from it now was not believable.

  In the room behind, Maggie Grierson sat looking at her brother through her tears. She knew exactly what he was seeing. Duke Street’s drab width had been her home for nearly forty years, and there was nowhere else she wanted to go. For her it had kept the quality of the old Glasgow, a sense of the street, a realisation that streets were places for living in, not just passing through. She knew a lot of the people in its three-up tenements. She knew who was never out the bookie’s, who drank in the Ballochmyle Bar, who ran up a lot of tick in Mulholland’s Dairy. The places in the street had become as familiar to her as her own furniture.

  But now it was all memories. It seemed to her it would always be closed, as it was today. From now on it would always be Sunday.

  She saw Bud looking down towards Gateside Street. Behind those tenements was the swing-park where Jennifer had often played. One summer evening she had come from there herself and knocked at the door of the Bristol Bar, where Wullie was having a pint. ‘It’s time to go home, Uncle Wullie,’ she had told him. Nine she would be at that time. The men had kept it up on Wullie for weeks.

  This house had been full of her. Their weeks revolved around her coming, and she always came. Growing up hadn’t distanced her from them at all. Remembering her worth and the hopes they had had for who she would be, Maggie found nothing outside herself that measured her feeling. Outside, there were only the shuttered fronts of the fruit shop where she had waited in the queue and the bakehouse opposite, where she liked to go for hot rolls on the mornings when she had stayed. There was only the walk up Cumbernauld Road to Alexandra Parade and the park where they’d often walked. There were only the few things of hers that Maggie had kept, like the smelling-salts she’d bought as a present for Maggie when she was seven, thinking it was perfume.

  Beyond that, there was only Maggie’s faith in Jennifer. Her inability to make anybody else but Wullie and herself see how much had been lost was a fiercesome bitterness. She cried again. Not even Jennifer’s own father had appreciated her. Looking at her younger brother, Maggie found no forgiveness for him. Bud was a mean-spirited man. He wouldn’t give you the kiss of life without counting the breaths you owed him. He had never fully accepted Wullie as a person because he had been baptised a Catholic, although Wullie hadn’t been in a church since he left school. When Bud had come looking for Jennifer this morning, he had been like the Gestapo checking a suspect. Ever since he had found out about that Catholic boy called Tommy, he hadn’t allowed her to stay the night with them, in case they were shielding her. They would have done, too. Telling them this afternoon, he had acted as if Jennifer had affronted him in getting murdered. He still looked more angry than sad.

  Wullie came in. Bud turned from the window. Maggie saw how Wullie didn’t look at her because he didn’t want to add to his pain by sharing hers. She thought what a decent man he had been all his life and how little was left for him. She regretted again that she had never given him children.

  ‘Did ye see Alec t
hen?’ she asked.

  ‘Aye. He’s a nice man, Alec. Ah mean, he disny know you fae Adam, Bud. But says he’ll run ye hame an’ pick up ither people on the road. Ah said we would get the bus. He’s waitin’ for ye.’

  Bud went out without saying a word. It took Maggie and Wullie more than half-an-hour to get ready. They hung about helplessly in an irrevocably empty room.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘We better get the bus.’

  They walked along to George Square. While Wullie was paying the driver, she noticed that the only empty seats were at the back. But a man near the front got up and said, ‘Here, missus. You an’ yer man sit there.’ He went to the back. He must have noticed that she had been crying. It was his way of showing sympathy.

  The house absorbed them into its gloom with a murmuring of hellos in the hall and a soft shutting of doors. Others were there already. Since they could find no form for what they were feeling, things that happened accidentally had become rituals. Because Bud Lawson had been in the kitchen when the first man arrived, that was where Wullie found himself, among the men.

  Maggie was shown into the living-room where Sadie sat among the women. Around her their sighs and headshakes were gentle, subversive, a comfort they must give in spite of her inability to receive it. Their clichés went on tiptoe. ‘Oh my Goad, is this no’ a terrible thing.’ ‘Ye canny believe it.’ ‘Ah don’t know whit the world’s comin’ tae.’ ‘Ah’ll make a cuppa tea.’ Sadie sat motionless, leaking tears, and whenever anyone crossed her vision she offered a placative smile. It was a strange event in the ruins of her face, that smile, given without discrimination, like someone in a road accident apologising to the traffic that has hit her. Maggie saw it as partly a condemnation of her brother.

  In the kitchen, interrupted only occasionally by the passing back and forth of a woman, the men were different. While the women were hunkered down with a fact, learning to live with it, the men were chafing against it. Their room was restless. One of them would always be looking out of the window or tightening one of the taps on the sink or footering with his cup. Wullie felt uncomfortable. He felt that this had nothing to do with Jennifer. It had only to do with Bud, and beside him Airchie Stanley, sitting and feeding off Bud’s silence.

  Someone had produced a bottle of whisky. Wullie thought it might have seemed inappropriate except that nothing was appropriate. Only a couple of glasses had been found. The rest used cups. Slowly the whisky had played upon their grouped moods until their anger found expression. It happened at first in isolated moments.

  Somebody said, ‘Folk like that shouldny be allowed tae live.’

  There were noddings. The silence was a fearsome unanimity.

  ‘Whit harm did that wee lassie ever dae anybody?’

  No harm at all, the silence said.

  ‘Even if they get ’im, some doactor’ll likely see tae it he jist gets jiled.’

  Their righteousness was total. These were rough men. Several of them lived with violence as part of their way of life. One of them might like to talk of the time he’d met a safe-blower or had a drink with a well-known criminal. But there were crimes and crimes. And if you committed certain of them — like interfering with a child or raping a girl — they emasculated you in their minds. They made you a thing.

  The kitchen became a place sterile of pity. Gradually they talked themselves out of being men. They were all vigilantes.

  ‘Ah only ask fur wan thing,’ Bud Lawson said. It was the first time he had spoken for over an hour. His eyes had no tears near them. They were clear and blank. ‘Jist let me hiv ’im fur five minutes.’ The cup he turned in his hands looked like a thimble. ‘Ah jist want tae hiv ’im in ma haunds. That’s all Ah want. An’ Ah’ll never ask fur anythin’ again.’

  All of them deeply wanted to grant his wish. Airchie Stanley thought to himself there might be a way.

  In the living-room the women still sat protectively round Sadie. For her there was nothing to do.

  10

  Harkness was glad of the interruption to his Sunday. It had been worrying him. Because he was on call this weekend, Mary had suggested they spend the day at her house, where he could be reached. She hadn’t mentioned it would be like paying a visit to a Christmas card.

  Lunch had been trying to converse with Christmas crackers. Her parents talked in mottoes. ‘Too many people worship money nowadays.’ ‘What you never had, you never miss.’ And Harkness’s favourite: ‘God helps those who help themselves.’ It was a while since he had heard that one and when Mary’s mother said it, he felt a brief shock of pleasure, as if he’d pulled a sturgeon out of the Clyde.

  Perhaps because they had a guest, they seemed determined to range far and wide among the problems of the world, obliterating each with a scattergun of prejudice. Vandalism was ‘spoiled children’. Africans had been ‘given too much power for their own good’. The unions were killing our society. Throughout the meal they passed clichés back and forth like condiments. Harkness gagged himself with food.

  After lunch, Mary’s mother was in the kitchen, cleaning up and putting clothes to steep in water. Because it was Sunday, she couldn’t wash them but steeping was all right. She had apparently read the small print from Mount Sinai. Mary’s father was reading the papers. Harkness was being shown the house.

  It was a nice place but it bothered him the way houses that have been made self-consciously attractive always did. The whole experience, the talk that had lost all awareness of its own arbitrariness, the carefully arrived at prettiness of the rooms, was like being trapped inside somebody else’s hallucination. And Mary’s coy retreats from his groping hands denied him something real to hold on to. He wasn’t far from jumping out of a window when the phone rang.

  Mary’s mother took it at once. Harkness wondered if that meant she had been lurking downstairs in the hall, waiting for Mary to call for help. It was his father phoning from Fenwick.

  Nothing was more likely to bring Harkness back to reality than that rough voice talking guardedly into the mouthpiece. His father was usually a very open man but on the phone he came over like MI5. He didn’t trust phones and it was only under protest that he’d allowed Harkness to have one installed. When you added to that his disapproval of Harkness’s being in the police, you could understand the reluctance with which he gave the message: Harkness was wanted at the office.

  Suppressing a cheer, Harkness expressed thanks and regret to Mary’s parents. He said he would try to look in afterwards. At least Mary’s mother didn’t come to the door with them.

  His car was conveniently parked on the Kilmarnock Road, facing into Glasgow. He wondered what was happening at the office. He hoped it was something important. This was his first weekend on the Crime Squad and he hadn’t wanted it to pass without his being called out. His year as a D.C. under Milligan in the Central Division had been interesting but Harkness wanted more. He wasn’t sure exactly what the more he wanted was, but he had applied for the job on the Crime Squad to see if it was there.

  His father hadn’t been pleased because it meant his son was all the more set on staying a policeman. His father had left school during the Thirties. He hadn’t found a permanent job till after the war. He remembered the way the police had treated strikers and hunger-marchers in the West of Scotland. He hated them simply and sincerely, and he couldn’t forgive his son for becoming one of them. With just the two of them in the house, they argued incessantly.

  But working, as now, he felt no doubts. He was twenty-six and physically strong and confident. He was effectively in use, like an engine firing on all cylinders. It wasn’t till he reached the Commander’s office that the engine stalled.

  ‘Harkness,’ the Commander said, and left it at that. It was offered like a classification, as if he was the first person ever to have called Harkness that and he was giving him time to get used to it. The Commander was looking through some papers. From where Harkness stood, he could see the woman and the two boys smiling their reassurance to
the Commander from the photograph on his desk. The Commander put down his papers.

  ‘There’s been a murder. In Kelvingrove Park. The body of a girl was found there today. Sexually assaulted and then murdered.’

  He spoke in spasms, like a teleprinter, and he seemed to be checking each statement as it came out of his mouth.

  ‘You’re a young man, Harkness.’

  That was true. He paused over the remark, seemed to find it unchallengeable.

  ‘A young man, but already an experienced one.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Harkness’s comment felt fatuous to himself but it was a way of saying ‘present’. The Commander gave the impression of talking to himself.

  ‘You’ll be working with Detective Inspector Laidlaw on this case. He’s one of our less conventional men. You may have heard.’

  ‘I know he’s said to be very good, sir.’

  ‘He can be very good. Not as good as he thinks he is, of course. But then nobody could be. You’ll begin working with him tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Thank you.’

  Harkness waited. The chief got up and walked up and down a bit. It was Napoleon-addresses-his-troops time.

  ‘There are one or two things I want to say to you. You will be working with Detective Inspector Laidlaw. Let me explain what that means. At least what it might mean, unless he’s changed his methods since last week. Which is possible.’

  Harkness began to be interested.

  ‘He’ll be going his own way. “Free-lancing”, he calls it. Which is a fancy word for a very simple thing. You’ll find Detective Inspector Laidlaw rather likes fancy words. See that you don’t get the habit from him. All that’s involved is that he — and, in this case, you along with him — will be separate from the main body of the investigation.’