Laidlaw jl-1

by William McIlvanney

  She confirmed what her mother had told them. Yes, she had gone with Jennifer to the disco. But they had separated early on. No, she hadn’t seen who Jennifer left with. She had been very close to Jennifer at one time, but not so close lately. She told them what she knew about Jennifer. She remembered the time Mr Lawson had forbidden Jennifer to go out with the Catholic. Jennifer seemed to have got over it. She talked until Harkness lost concentration. There was nothing for them here. Then Laidlaw said something the harshness of which tuned Harkness in again.

  ‘The dancing seems to have changed a lot since my day, hen. Poppies isn’t a big place, is it?’

  ‘Naw. No’ bad.’

  ‘But you didn’t see the fella she left with? I don’t believe you, love.’

  Sarah looked up aggressively but her eyes flickered. It was as if the slightest gap had appeared between her expression and her feeling. Into it Laidlaw drove a wedge of words, and prised.

  ‘When I was there, lassies used to like letting their mates see that they had made a conquest. They kept tabs on one another. Jennifer would’ve let you see who was taking her home. You would’ve made sure that you saw him. She must have danced with him. You’re lying, love. Now why would you tell a silly wee lie like that? No reason except to hide a bigger lie. What is it you’re hiding, Sarah? What is it, love?’

  It was like opening a shellfish. Inside, it was mush. Her face went pulpy with tears. Harkness could hardly bear to look at her.

  ‘It’s the truth,’ she blubbered.

  ‘No, it’s not.’

  ‘Lea’e me alane!’

  ‘Like hell I will. With best friends like you, we could all be in terrible trouble. Jennifer’s dead. In fact, she’s as dead as I’ve ever seen anybody. Have you seen her, hen? Well, maybe I could arrange to show you.’

  ‘Ma daddy’ll murder me,’ she said through the tears.

  ‘No. That won’t do, Sarah. They’re all living that your father’s killed. But somebody did murder Jennifer Lawson. So why don’t you forget your own wee worries and tell the truth about her? The two of you were working some ploy together, weren’t you? Weren’t you? Weren’t you?’

  ‘She didny go tae Poppies.’

  The admission really broke the dam. She started to cry hysterically. Laidlaw gave her a handkerchief and waited while she soaked it.

  ‘All right. Tell us, love,’ he said.

  Jennifer had used Sarah as an alibi. She had a date with someone called Alan. Sarah couldn’t remember the second name. But she thought it was Macintosh or MacKinley. She had never met him. Since her father had stopped her going out with the Catholic, Jennifer had kept everything secret from her parents. Sarah didn’t think Alan was a Catholic but she wasn’t sure. Jennifer had told her that she met Alan in The Muscular Arms. It was where he almost always drank, she had said. Sarah had been too frightened of what her father would do to tell the truth before this, and because she only knew Alan’s first name she didn’t think it was worth getting into trouble about. She thought that if it was him they would get him anyway. He worked at the airport, she was sure. She was still sobbing quietly.

  ‘I’m sorry I had to do that, love,’ Laidlaw said. She offered him his handkerchief. ‘No. That’s all right. But you’ll have to learn the difference between domestic problems and the kind of thing we’re dealing with.’

  In the corridor the foreman passed them and nodded. When he saw Sarah, he doubled back and shouted.

  ‘Hey! Jist a minute, you two. Whit’ve yese been daein’ tae this wee lassie? She’s greetin’.’

  As the foreman was coming towards them, Harkness felt the wind of Laidlaw turning.

  ‘Stay there!’ Laidlaw was pointing at the foreman, who found himself stopping about three yards from them. ‘Save yourself the fucking journey. She’s greetin’ because I made her greet. Because I made her tell me the truth about a girl that’s dead. She canny greet. Now you go and oil your fucking machines or something. And don’t interfere with my job. It bugs me enough without folk like you shoving your Sunday Post sentiments in.’

  When they turned away, the foreman was doing a fair imitation of Lot’s wife. Laidlaw’s anger carried him into the street. They crossed the road and stopped.

  ‘Listen,’ Laidlaw said. ‘You’d better report in now. See Milligan. Rather you than me. You better use a burnished shield. The way Perseus did with the Gorgon. And get yourself something to eat. Pick me up at the Burleigh. Tell them about Poppies and Alan MacThingwy. And see what else they’ve got. Ach! This job would depress the hide off you.’ He looked across the street. ‘Still, that helps a bit, doesn’t it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That.’

  The workers were coming out of MacLaughlan’s. They were jostling and laughing. Somebody dropped a piece-tin and a neat inter-passing movement developed along the pavement before the tin was recovered. Harkness looked at Laidlaw, who was smiling.

  28

  Who needs rockets to go to the moon?’ he thought. ‘We can get there by motor.’

  The man with the scar drove past The Seven Ways and The Square Ring. They weren’t just pubs to him. They were part of his strange, personal horoscope, all those things that had helped to make him what he was. He didn’t think of them as he drove past. It was a long time since he had been in either pub but that didn’t matter. Six nights a week they went on manufacturing aggro and hangovers, churning people out into the streets just after ten, sustaining the confused climate that was his natural habitat.

  He had never questioned that climate, just learned to live in it. It was who he was. His eyes registered nothing but preparedness as he swung through the streets. The dereliction around him meant not pity or anger or affection, only the way he was going. Just as his face was dominated by its wound, a scar with some features round it, so his nature was a reflex response to what it had undergone.

  He didn’t park the car on the waste-lot but in the street beside it under a lamp-post. It was an action expressing habit not purpose, because it wasn’t dark. Some boys were hanging around. He flicked a ten-pence piece to the big one in the torn anorak.

  ‘Nae problem, mister,’ the boy said.

  But there was. He was going towards it. On the outside the tenement was scabby with age. But for him the inside was a series of familiar surprises. There was the neatly painted entry and stairs, the freshly varnished, flush-panelled door. Then it was the beautifully painted hall, the thick carpet, the bright paintings — like finding Ali Baba’s cave.

  ‘Hullo, Uncle.’ It was Maureen, in purple flared trousers and matching woollen top. ‘We’re goin’ tae the pictures.’

  ‘Good for you, hen.’

  She still called him uncle although she was thirteen now and knew he was only a courtesy relative. He liked that. He went on into the living-room to the final surprise the house contained — John Rhodes sitting at the fire, violence earthed in domesticity, insulated with a cardigan and slippers. John looked over his paper and winked by way of hullo.

  The man with the scar sat down across from him. He knew the rules. When the family were around, it was strictly no business.

  ‘How did the horses go for ye the day then, John?’

  ‘Backwards. Bingers galore. Were ye puntin’ yerself?’

  ‘Nothing Ah fancied. Saw the card in Matt Mason’s place.’

  John Rhodes looked up once from his paper and back down. The message was received. He didn’t want any references to what was on, even in code, while his family was still in the house.

  That suited the man with the scar fine. He wouldn’t have minded never getting round to business. This wasn’t a caper he fancied. He just sat enjoying the bustle of the two girls and Annie, John’s wife, getting ready for the pictures. He watched John sit bathing in the backwash of their busyness. Homeliness was no pretence with him. His family was the most important thing in his life. Everything else was just building fences round them.

  Maureen and Sandra kissed John goodbye an
d Annie said they wouldn’t be late and if he had to go out would he please make sure he put the guard on the fire. Maureen came across and kissed the man with the scar. She was a sweet girl who hated to see somebody left out of things.

  When they were gone, John read the paper a little longer. It was as if he was passing time until the lingering sense of his family’s presence had evaporated. The man with the scar waited. There would be no drink, because John didn’t keep it in the house.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘The word is that the man who did it is a friend o’ Harry Rayburn’s. A young fella.’

  ‘But Harry Rayburn’s a poof.’

  ‘That’s the word.’

  ‘Ye mean a boyfriend.’

  ‘It looks that way.’

  ‘Whit’s a poof doin’ wi’ a lassie?’

  ‘Maybe he’s ambisextrous.’

  ‘Ah canny stick poofs.’

  It was a chillingly simple remark. A vote had been cast. He was waiting. The man with the scar was hesitant. He knew the way he very much wanted the decision to go, but this was one election it wouldn’t be healthy to rig. He looked at John Rhodes staring at the fire, his face almost prissy with disgust. That was a savage primness. He had an anger more vicious than the man had seen in any other person. He had seen the hands that were loose on the chair beat one man blind. There had been no regrets.

  ‘Ah don’t know his name. But. He’s still in the city.’

  ‘Where wid he be?’

  ‘Ah don’t know.’

  ‘That’s no’ very clever.’

  ‘Christ, Ah’m no’ Old Moore’s Almanac, John.’

  ‘Ah know who you are. You remember who Ah am. You’re paid tae find out, no’ be a comedian. If Ah want a funny man, Ah’ll hire one. An’ don’t you apply.’

  ‘There’s a way tae find out, Ah think, but.’

  John Rhodes looked at him and smiled.

  ‘So don’t be shy.’

  ‘It’s Lennie Wilson’

  ‘Who’s Lennie Wilson?’

  ‘He’s jist a boay. A big, sully boay.’

  ‘They’re the best kind.’

  ‘He works for Matt Mason. The funny thing is, he’s workin’ for Harry Rayburn just now as well.’

  John Rhodes was nodding.

  ‘Uh-huh. So why should he be there? Except tae find things out for Mr Mason?’

  ‘That’s whit Ah’m sayin’.’

  ‘Aye. That looks like it. Ye think he knows?’

  ‘Ah think he should.’

  ‘Well. Whit a boy like that knows, he gives out like an information bureau. He’s our man.’

  ‘But.’

  John Rhodes waited. There was nothing he needed to bypass because there was nothing he couldn’t deal with. The man with the scar was being careful. Trying to get round John was as easy as passing a bull in a close. The man had an infinite respect for him. In a city where you could find a fight any time you wanted, and often when you didn’t, he had never seen anybody harder, faster or less afraid. But in a sense that was its own problem. John’s violence had never found its limits. And the man dreaded that, in looking for them, John would some time destroy everything they had. This might be the time.

  ‘We’re cuttin’ right across Matt Mason here, John. What for?’

  ‘If Ah cut across somebody it means they must be in ma road. Whose fault is that? Leave this Lennie Wilson till the morra. The night, you and Tam get this Lawson man into The Gay. Then come an’ collect me here. Ah want tae see whit he’s like.’

  The man with the scar still wasn’t sure what had been decided. But there was nothing to say. John Rhodes rose and gathered a pair of shoes that Maureen had discarded. He placed them neatly under a chair. The man with the scar went out.

  29

  The Burleigh Hotel was at the West end of Sauchiehall Street. The architecture was Victorian and very dirty. It had been cunningly equipped with curlicues and excrescences, the chief effect of which was to make it an enormous gin for drifting soot and aerial muck. It stood now half-devoured by its catch, weighted with years of Glasgow, its upper reaches a memorial to the starlings that had once covered the middle of the city like an umbrella of demented harpies.

  Braked by its draught-excluder, the big, glass-panelled door opened hesitantly, as if the place was coy about letting you in. The foyer was large, its sea-green carpet choking in a Sargasso of worn threads. It was hard for Harkness to imagine what might have done the wearing.

  He trekked across the carpet to Reception. The keyboard held more metal than an arsenal. The pigeon-holes were crammed with emptiness. He couldn’t see Laidlaw’s name upside down on the register. He pressed the bell. It buzzed harshly, as if it was out of practice.

  The woman who came out of the cubby-hole at the side was unexpected. A woman like her was always unexpected. She was mid-twenties, attractive, and she had that look of competence in being female that makes men count their hormones. She smiled once at Harkness and he wanted her to smile twice.

  ‘I don’t suppose you have a vacancy,’ he said, nodding at the keyboard.

  She had adjusted to the archness of his levity before he had finished speaking.

  ‘This is our quiet year,’ she said.

  ‘Actually, I’m looking for a Mr Laidlaw. Could you tell me his room number, please?’

  The second smile didn’t please him as much as he had expected, because he didn’t understand it. He had the discomfort you feel when you find yourself in an expensive restaurant without having checked your wallet.

  ‘You wouldn’t be Mr Harkness, would you?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Your secret’s safe with me,’ she mouthed, flicking her eyebrows. ‘The man’s upstairs. In the Residents’ Lounge.’

  Harkness hesitated, reluctant to give the moment up, waiting for something witty to come into his mouth.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘If your feet are sore, you can use the lift.’

  Harkness saw the lift as he turned, gridded in black iron like an instrument of torture. He remembered a miserable hour stuck in a lift in San Sebastian. His feet felt good.

  ‘You’re not going to take him away from us already, are you?’

  Harkness turned at the foot of the stairs.

  ‘Why? Would you miss him?’

  She laughed and concentrated on her desk. The gesture suggested to him that she was spoken for and left him with nothing to do but climb the lumpily carpeted stairs. The Residents’ Lounge was on the left.

  It was just a gigantic colour television with a room round it. The set was showing golf, Peter Oosterhuis shambling brilliantly round the course. Laidlaw sat with four others. A couple of them wore slippers. One had a glass of bottled beer from which he sipped as if it was medicine. The atmosphere was homely and genteel. They had brought their hearths with them. They were the travelling salesmen you never hear about in the jokes.

  Harkness slipped into the wicker chair beside Laidlaw. The cushion was pap and within seconds Harkness felt the chair begin to impress itself on him. Laidlaw raised his eyebrows and nodded. He was drinking a whisky and he held up the glass and looked a question at Harkness. Harkness shook his head.

  The man with the beer uncrossed his legs, crossed them the other way. In the stillness of the room it felt like an event. He was one of those men who believe that baldness is a state of mind. He had parted his hair just slightly above his armpits and trained the strands to climb like clematis. ‘Shot,’ he said. ‘Hm,’ the others chorused. Harkness thought that ten minutes of this could make you geriatric.

  He watched Oosterhuis drop a stroke to par and said to Laidlaw, ‘You like golf?’

  ‘Yes and no,’ Laidlaw said.

  Harkness said nothing. He wasn’t in the mood for riddles.

  ‘It’s a good game,’ Laidlaw said quietly. ‘But I suspect all professional sportsmen. Grown men devoting their lives to a game. They’re capitalism’s temple prostitutes.’

&nbs
p; Harkness said nothing. In their short acquaintance he recognised a trait in Laidlaw that was beginning to get him down. In certain moods, you could say hullo to Laidlaw and he’d have to analyse it before he gave you an answer. That could get wearing.

  Harkness was glad when Laidlaw suggested they go to his room. They went upstairs, padded along dim corridors, Harkness aware how hard it was to walk steadily on the shifting levels of the aged floorboards, like being on the deck of a tilting ship. The ghosts of old smells drifted at them as they went, unexorcised by Lysol.

  Room fifty-two was distinguished by nothing but a number. It looked as if it hadn’t so much been taken over as broken into — electric razor, towel, shirt on the bed, uncapped toothpaste in the sink, a suitcase disembowelled on a chair. Laidlaw lit a cigarette and sat on the bed. Harkness handed him the list from Milligan.

  ‘Rayburn’s workers,’ Laidlaw said. ‘That’s very neat. In alphabetical order, no less. Beginning at D and ending with T. It’s nice. But at the moment it’s about as handy as a telephone directory. Milligan’ll see them.’

  Laidlaw gave the sheet back to Harkness and concentrated on smoking. His mood was mufti. He wasn’t a policeman, just a tired man in a strange hotel room with somebody he’d only met that day. Harkness, with the expansiveness of spring still making him want to be other places, caught and shared the mood. It seemed that all they had in common was the futility of the day. At the Station Harkness had been struck by the busy purposefulness of what was going on. It had made him feel peripheral. To stop himself from blaming the feeling on Laidlaw, he tried to share it with him. He looked out of the window.

  ‘He’s out there somewhere,’ he said. ‘In the city. Maybe mixing with other people right now. Walking. Talking. But where?’

  Laidlaw got up and filled himself another drink. He took water from the tap.

  ‘Out of earshot of you, if he’s lucky,’ he said. ‘Don’t write your soap-operas in the firm’s time.’

  That was enough. Harkness was glad. His frustration had a focus. He was a fight just looking for a pretext. Laidlaw obliged.