Laidlaw jl-1

by William McIlvanney

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Maybe I was just trying to pass some of that post mortem off on you.’

  ‘Bad?’

  ‘There’s never been a good one. Especially when Milligan’s there. Peeing verbally on the corpse.’

  ‘What does Milligan have against you?’

  ‘Not half as much as I’ve got against him.’

  The waitress brought the food. She was a handsome woman with glasses. She was complaining that their rolls hadn’t been delivered yet.

  While he was eating, Laidlaw asked, ‘So what’ve you got?’

  Harkness passed the photograph of Jennifer Lawson across to him, and then a slip of paper with Sarah Stanley’s name, address and place of work.

  ‘That’s in return for the information you gave Milligan,’ he said. ‘And I found out in the office this morning who owns “Poppies”. A man called Harry Rayburn.’

  ‘Any form?’

  ‘Nothing we know about.’

  ‘You saw Bud Lawson last night?’

  ‘No, he was out. Mrs Lawson. But that was all we got.’

  Laidlaw went on eating. He was looking at the photograph on the table.

  ‘No pants,’ he said. ‘What does that mean to you?’

  ‘She didn’t wear any? Or he panicked. Didn’t even know he had them with him. Or a fetishist?’

  Laidlaw was nodding, still chewing.

  ‘The pathologist’s report’ll show that the vagina was brutally torn. No trace of sperm. But there were traces of sperm in the anus.’

  ‘That’s not such a wild variation.’

  ‘No. But you could see it as making her neuter in a way, couldn’t you? Also. The anal tissue suggests she was dead by the time he got there. It was his second assault.’

  Harkness felt sickened. He had been aware, while they talked, that the waitress had gone out to the front part of the place, where a small grey-haired woman took the cash and sold cigarettes and sweets. They were telling each other about their families. How John had got engaged and Kay was enjoying school and Michael wanted a dog. Their platitudes seemed to him so wholesome he could almost smell them, like home-baked bread. Beyond them, in the Gordon Street part of the precinct, people were walking past the window in the brittle morning air as if they were advertising ordinariness. This morning’s sense of the future was being polluted already, by what they were saying.

  ‘Hell,’ Harkness said. ‘It’s hopeless. How are we supposed to connect with something like this? How do we begin to relate to him?’

  ‘Because he relates to us.’

  ‘Speak for yourself.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Laidlaw said. ‘You resign from the species?’

  ‘No. He did.’

  ‘Not as easy as that.’

  ‘It is for me.’

  ‘Then you’re a mug. You’ll be telling me next you believe in monsters. I’ve got a wee boy of six with the same problem.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘If I did, I’d have to believe in fairies as well. And I’m not quite prepared for that.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  Laidlaw had finished eating. He sipped at his coffee.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘What I mean is, monstrosity’s made by false gentility. You don’t get one without the other. No fairies, no monsters. Just people. You know what the horror of this kind of crime is? It’s the tax we pay for the unreality we choose to live in. It’s a fear of ourselves.’

  Harkness thought about it.

  ‘So where does that leave us?’

  ‘As stand-ins,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Other people can afford to write “monster” across this and consign it to limbo. I suppose society can’t afford to do anything else, or it wouldn’t work. They’ve got to pretend that things like this aren’t really done by people. We can’t afford to do that. We’re the shitty urban machine humanised. That’s policemen.’

  Harkness was cultivating the demerara gently with the spoon.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Step outside that door. It’s a nice spring morning. Those people walking about out there. What they’re doing is different from this character’s way of living.’

  ‘They’re using a language!’ Laidlaw said. ‘Your way of life is taught to you like a language. It’s how you express yourself. But any language conceals as much as it reveals. And there’s a lot of languages. All of them human. This murder is a very human message. But it’s in code. We have to try and crack the code. But what we’re looking for is a part of us. You don’t know that, you can’t begin.’

  ‘Forgive me if I feel a bit sick with a part of us.’

  ‘All right,’ Laidlaw said. ‘You can even cry if you want. It clears the eyes.’

  Laidlaw lit a cigarette. He put the photograph and the piece of paper inside the small wallet that held his identification card. Harkness was watching him.

  ‘I don’t see how all that helps us much,’ Harkness said.

  Laidlaw smiled.

  ‘Not a lot, right enough,’ he said. ‘But there’s one important thing that follows from it. It keeps us from making the commonest mistake people make when they think about a murder like this.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘They see it as the culmination of an abnormal sequence of events. But it’s only that for the victim. For everybody else — the murderer, the people connected with him, the people connected with the victim — it’s the beginning of the sequence.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So here endeth the first lesson. You were asking how we can connect. That’s how. Milligan and his mob can reconstruct the crime if they want. We do something very simple. We just look for whoever did it. In the lives round him, what he’s done must make ripples. That’s what we’re looking for. We do it by talking to some people. Harry Rayburn for starters.’

  ‘We can begin by asking him if he’s seen a man carrying a pair of knickers and a placard saying “I am sexually insecure”.’

  Laidlaw looked at him.

  ‘That can be your question,’ he said.

  18

  The body of an eighteen-year-old girl was found yesterday among bushes in Kelvingrove Park. Police said the girl, Jennifer Lawson, had been sexually assaulted.

  ‘It was a particularly brutal murder,’ Detective Inspector Ernest Milligan said.

  Almost a hundred policemen carried out inquiries in the area and a murder HQ in a caravan was set set up near where the body was found.

  Detective Inspector Milligan warned people in the area that it was unsafe for women to be out alone after dark while the murderer was still at large.

  The dead girl was the only daughter of Mr and Mrs William Lawson of 17 Ardmore Crescent, Drumchapel.

  The cause of death is believed to have been strangulation.

  Matt Mason put The Glasgow Herald very gently on the table. It and the other two papers were like stains on the polished darkness of the wood, blemishes on his way of life. ‘TEENAGER BRUTALLY MURDERED — The Dance That Led to Death.’ ‘THE BEAST OF KELVINGROVE PARK.’ He forked a piece of bacon into his mouth and it couldn’t have tasted worse if he’d been a Rabbi.

  He rose and crossed towards the window. This was the only uncarpeted room in the house, because in a colour supplement he had seen a dining-room with a wooden floor, but walking on it he made very little sound. Though small and going heavy, he moved lightly. Roddy Stewart had sometimes joked about it, saying he could walk on snow without leaving footprints. ‘I came out the womb on tiptoe,’ Mason said.

  He stood at the window, a small, squat man, his hair thinning, it might have seemed from the worries of suburbia, staring out at an acre of garden. His eyes dismissed the pleasant morning, had a grudge against it. A day like this he could do without. Nobody sent for it.

  He watched a blackbird land on his big lawn, balance its beak like a nugget of gold and then take off, as if it didn’t care for his company. It must have been born and bred in this area, he thought, a Bearsden blackie. Everybody her
e was born with their nose in the air. It was only an overgrown village on the north-west edge of Glasgow, but getting from there to here had been a hard road — the North-West Frontier. Here he could believe that when the doctor held them up by the ankles and skelped their arses, they didn’t cry, they just coughed politely. The children probably played at tig with gloves on. He wasn’t one of them but he was here, in as big a house as any of them. And he was staying.

  He listened to Mrs McGarrity doing the housework. It occurred to him bitterly that this should have been the best time of the day. He liked coming in here to find the breakfast-things set on the sideboard, the hot-plate, the coffee, the dishes, like something out of a Ronald Colman film. It was his greatest vanity to sit here in the morning alone, as he had essentially always been, and confirm the size and solidity of what he had built, as surely as if he had laid each brick himself, from the half-baked dreams of a wee boy in the Gallowgate. Ragged, snottery nosed and hungry, he had never believed that was how he should be, and he had found his only available blueprint for a different kind of life in Hollywood films. From them, he had constructed this part of his life as deliberately as a set.

  He didn’t delude himself about how much credibility his performance in it had for his neighbours. He knew that a lot of the people around him found him vulgar and unacceptable. That didn’t bother him too much. He was anaesthetised from their attitudes by the possession of a very calm certainty. Like a secret withheld from those who were born to this kind of living, he knew precisely what it cost. The cost was lives. He knew because he had been obliged to take a couple. He hadn’t taken more because it hadn’t been necessary. The fact that if it were he was ready rendered him not very susceptible to other people’s sense of superiority.

  Moving back across the room, he sat down again at the large mahogany table, like a board-meeting of one. There were decisions he had to make. He took a clean cup and poured himself more coffee. Harry Rayburn was the past. Mason had only ever used him because he was Margaret’s cousin. He had been fairly dealt with, squarely paid. Now he was claiming more, involving Mason in something that could threaten his security. That was double-charging. That was foolish. It was as if he had forgotten who Matt Mason was. Fools tended to be foolish more than once, so he was dangerous.

  Like someone checking his notes, Mason inventoried briefly what he had, as if this were a normal morning. The house had to be worth more than forty thousand pounds. There was a housekeeper living in with them, doing everything except answering the phone. Margaret was still upstairs in bed, probably preparing to have a headache. Her hardest work was sitting under a hair-dryer. At one time her uselessness had bothered him, especially when he thought of Anne, who had died just when he was really beginning to make it. But now he took a certain pride in her. Not everybody could afford a wife whose only talent was bed. When he was angry, he could still call her a migraine with tits. But they were good tits. Then there were the businesses and Matt and Eric at the private school.

  He added it all up like a sum. The answer was a long way from the Gallowgate, too far ever to go back.

  He sipped at his coffee again and it was cold. He looked at the papers and to him they were like threatening letters. Threats weren’t to be yielded to but they were to be taken seriously. If Harry Rayburn had any sense, he would have handled this himself. But he had insisted Mason come into the game. Some game; it would be like playing tennis with a hand-grenade. Mason still wasn’t sure what he was going to do. But he knew whose court the thing would be in when it went off.

  Mason measured the problem calmly. The only connection he had now with Rayburn was that he had invested money in ‘Poppies’. But he hadn’t exactly advertised that in the Financial Times. The police wouldn’t be able to connect him with Rayburn. If Harry blew it and got himself sucked in as an accessory, what problem was that for Mason? That was Harry’s problem.

  He went out of the dining-room. Although he was using the phone in the room he called the study, he made sure Mrs McGarrity was upstairs before he closed the door. There were no phones upstairs. It was taken at the second ring.

  ‘Hullo.’

  ‘Harry? Matt Mason.’

  ‘God, am I glad you rang. I’m sweating blood here. I nearly phoned you. I’m sweating blood.’

  ‘All right. I’m not buying a ticket for the opera. Just tell me what you want.’

  Mason was intently trying to interpret Rayburn’s silence. He knew that in the right mood Harry could be dominated the way some women could. The quietness in Rayburn’s voice when he did speak made Mason think this might be one of those times.

  ‘I was trying to tell you last night. The person who killed that girl Lawson is somebody I know.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘It’s not somebody you know. There’s no point in telling you that.’

  ‘Fine. I’m delighted to keep it that way. Cheerio.’

  ‘Matt!’

  Mason had no intention of putting the phone down.

  ‘Matt. I know where he is. And I want to get him out of the city.’

  ‘So there’s plenty of buses.’

  ‘Come on. If you didn’t buy a ticket for the opera, I didn’t fucking buy one for the Pavilion.’

  Now that both had decided where they weren’t, they met across a silence. Mason felt the force of suppressed hysteria in Rayburn’s voice. If he pushed too hard, the shrapnel might go anywhere.

  ‘What is it you want?’ he asked.

  ‘I want your help.’

  ‘Just like that.’

  ‘Matt. I worked with you for a long time.’

  ‘You got a nice pension. A pub to be exact.’

  ‘I thought it was more than money.’

  ‘Nothing’s more than money.’

  ‘I mean I thought we were friends.’

  ‘And I thought you had brains. Harry, you’re talking like a Valentine again. You’re out of season.’

  Mason waited to see what adjustment of attitude he might have to make.

  ‘Matt. I need your help.’

  ‘It’s not my help you need. If you want your mate out of Glasgow, it’s Houdini and the Holy Ghost you want. One of them’ll never do it on his own. They’ll be searching the tea-leaves for that one.’

  ‘It’s not that hard, and you know it. Matt, I want your help.’

  ‘Sorry. I’m too busy looking after myself.’

  Mason was trying to close the door on the situation quite casually, but he was also waiting to see if Rayburn was forcing against it.

  ‘That’s what I mean, Matt. For your own sake, you’ll have to help.’

  Mason’s quietness was deep enough to put a corpse in.

  ‘It must be a bad line, this,’ he said.

  ‘No. You heard me right, Matt. You see, I told him things. A lot of things. The way you operate was one of them. He knows more about you than your mother. It wouldn’t be handy for you for the police to get hold of him.’

  Expletives geysered out of Mason’s mind but not one of them reached his mouth. He didn’t know if Rayburn was telling the truth but, essentially, it didn’t matter. The desperation to make that up was just as dangerous as the desperation to admit it if it were true. Either way, it had to be defused.

  ‘That would seem to be it, then,’ he said. ‘Why bother to ask when you can demand?’

  ‘You taught me, Matt. Start nice, you always said. As long as you know the heavy stuff’s in the post.’

  It was a nice time to get nostalgic — thanks for the memory.

  ‘You’re a good learner,’ Mason said. The tone was just about right, he thought — bitter but resigned. It should be enough to convince Harry that he couldn’t pretend to like it but he would accept it. ‘So you’d better tell me who he is and where he is. And I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘No, Matt. I don’t think I’d better do that.’

  ‘Listen. You just said I’ve got a stake in the game. So give me a hand.’

  ‘Later, Ma
tt. Later.’

  ‘I don’t understand that.’

  ‘There’s complications.’

  Mason felt the way the whole situation had turned till it rested in the palm of Rayburn’s hand. He sensed Rayburn’s awareness of his own power and decided at once that that was a very temporary state of affairs. He held his rage in check.

  ‘The thing is I can’t get him to move just now. He’s terrified out his wits. I think there’s only one thing real to him. And that’s her pants. He has them with him all the time. He just won’t move.’

  It occurred to Mason that some folk were just too delicate to be murderers. But he said nothing. If Rayburn thought he had all the cards, let him play them.

  ‘I’m going to try to get him to co-operate. But it won’t be easy. And what’s worrying me is, I maybe don’t have too much time before the police connect me with him. And that’s me not too useful. I mean, I’ll have to stay away. That’s where you come in. You’re my insurance, Matt. And I’ll be yours, of course. I just want you ready when I ask you. To get him out. I know he’ll be safe with you. Because I’ll be busy telling the police nothing. Won’t I? Matt?’

  Mason liked the nerve of Harry to try to maintain such a delicate web of pressures. But that was all he liked.

  ‘Okay,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks, Matt. I’ll be in touch.’

  Mason stood, forgetting to put the phone down. He wondered if perhaps Rayburn had got a wrong number, had thought he was talking to Pickford Removals, Ltd. He put the phone back.

  He looked round the room, seeing himself. Again he added up the sum of what he had achieved. This time he got a different answer. All of it equalled a dead man. It was as simple as that.

  19

  Poppies was in a court behind Buchanan Street, along with a couple of abstruse businesses and an anonymous second-hand bookshop. It was the most recent example in Glasgow of a pub with adjoining disco, recent enough for Harkness not to know it. He knew The Griffin and Joanna’s in Bath Street, Waves and Spankies at Customs House Quay. The pub here, The Maverick, was closed just now but the door to Poppies was open.