Laidlaw jl-1

by William McIlvanney

  ‘A thunderstorm? I hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘No. I’m not presuming. It may hit you like a zephyr. But it comes out of me a bit differently. Anyway, I did say a wee baton.’

  He was silent. He was admitting to himself how much he cared for her, experiencing that lonely part of loving, the bit that you can’t say. It came to her as just brooding, not something particularly to be encouraged, especially in him. He could do that anytime.

  ‘Don’t sulk. I admit that when you’re on form I feel slightly surrounded. Like a city you were trying to sack.’

  ‘I knew I was getting through to you.’ He sighed.

  ‘You have your faith. I’ll have my instincts. When I touch you, I know the difference. When I hear you, it’s a private station. Nobody else I know is sending out those signals.’

  ‘It’s mainly static.’

  ‘That’s what makes me listen hard. Your lovely complications. They rivet me.’

  ‘Nice lady.’

  ‘How are the children?’

  ‘They’re all right.’

  They lay letting the children come between them. Jan wondered what they were like. She had an image of each but had never been able to check it against the reality. She wondered if she ever would.

  ‘How is the case going?’ she asked.

  Her drink was finished. She put her empty glass beside the bed.

  ‘It isn’t yet. Sexual murder’s so different. Everything you do stays somehow irrelevant, just a process you’re involved in. Even if we solve the case, I’ll feel worse than I did before. Lumbered with information I can’t ignore. And I can’t understand. As if I’ve been reading God’s mail.’

  He started to laugh. It struck him again how easy it was to laugh after making love.

  ‘It’s ludicrous. Just about the entire corpus of Glasgow police in frenetic pursuit of its own ignorance. Because even if we get him, what is it we’ll have found? We haven’t a clue. And the thing is I don’t believe there’s anybody can tell us what it means. It’s just that we have to do something. And then the courts’ll have to do something. Still. Who thinks the law has anything to do with justice? It’s what we have because we can’t have justice.’

  ‘Good night, Aristotle.’

  You had to shut the door eventually on that stuff, Jan decided, and give yourself some room just to be. She gave him her cigarette. He stubbed it out and then his own. He finished his drink and put the glass and the ashtray on the bedside cabinet. She blew ash from his stomach and he came under the covers. But he still sat upright, feeling the headboard bite into his back through the propped pillow and watching the lighter square of wall where the mirror had been before it was moved.

  ‘Maybe the only answer to a crime like this isn’t arrest and conviction. Maybe it’s for the rest of us to try and love well. Not amputate that part. Just try to heal the world in other places.’

  She had lain down again. Her hand had happened casually to come to rest between his legs.

  ‘Do you fancy trying to heal the world some more?’ she asked. ‘I’m not randy. Just full of self-sacrifice.’

  Laidlaw put out the light.

  ‘No chance,’ he said. ‘But you can watch me sleeping if you like. I’m a very sexy sleeper.’

  36

  To Harkness it sometimes seemed that every day was a separate evolution. He got out of bed speechless and breakfast was a thing of empty-eyed chompings and guttural grunts between him and his father, a kind of chimpanzees’ tea party. He progressed slowly, usually developing a brain about midday, and by evening he had re-evolved to polysyllables. Sometimes after midnight he was superman. That was why meeting Laidlaw at half-past eight in the morning was a bizarre conjunction, like a Neanderthal getting run down by a tractor.

  ‘We have to see Mrs Lawson. If it wasn’t Alan McInnes she saw, who was it? She uses Sarah Stanley as an alibi for her parents. She uses Alan McInnes as an alibi for Sarah Stanley. She was a complicated wee lassie. She probably went to the lavatory via Paisley. That big man has a lot to answer for. Imagine creating that depth of duplicity in your wean. So that she wouldn’t tell you the time of day in case you use it against her. Whatever game she was playing, it’s more involved than ludo. As far as our information takes us, there’s only one person, except for the man we’re looking for, who could possibly know about it. We have to see Mrs Lawson. In Mr Lawson’s absence. If that’s possible. I think he’s transistorised himself and crawled inside her head.’

  Harkness nodded. He consoled himself with the thought that Laidlaw looked terrible, with a right eye like a road-map. It was maybe the result of the time-warp caused by trying to rush to humanity this early in the morning.

  But Harkness had to admit it had an effect on him. Before they reached Drumchapel, he was having ideas.

  ‘See that place last night. In Byres Road. I’m just thinking about the big fella with the beard. I think you could catch them with pot if you went.’

  ‘Come on,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Every city’s got cancer. Who’s got time to clean their fingernails?’

  They were lucky because while they were waiting at a bus-stop near the Lawsons’, hoping a bus wouldn’t come and deciding how they would go about separating Sadie Lawson from her husband, they saw Bud come out of the house and go in the opposite direction from them. The house still had its curtains drawn. It was the woman from across the entry who answered the door. When she heard what they wanted, she said she had things to do in her own house.

  Sadie Lawson wasn’t so bad as when either of them had last seen her. The skin of both cheeks was abraded by her tears, but the tears had dried. She sat in a chair by the fire, which was cleaned and freshly set with coal but still unlit. The three of them sipped at the cups of tea the other woman had made before she went out. Mrs Lawson sighed a lot, waiting for them to approach her isolated grief.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Laidlaw said. ‘But I need to talk about Jennifer. Not for very long. I know it’s sore.’

  ‘It’s a’ right, son,’ she said.

  What she called Laidlaw was a status bestowed on herself by what she had been through. It gave her a kind of authority she had never had before and, exercising it, she simply started to talk without waiting for any questions. The way she spoke seemed at first to have the eerie irrelevance of a seance. But all the pieces cohered in a strange, hidden deliberateness. What she was all the time saying came to the one conclusion: how sorry she was to have sometimes supported Jennifer against Bud, to have sometimes gone behind his back, because this had been the result. She was to blame for some of it.

  Harkness found her calmness more harrowingly moving than her tears had been, because he thought it meant something more terrible. That people should suffer such grief as she had had was difficult to endure, but that their suffering should only teach them how to lie to themselves, that was unbearable. And, watching her, he couldn’t hide from the conviction that she was burying her daughter in a lie, that, even dead, Jennifer was not to be allowed herself. Mrs Lawson’s confession was a subtle deception. She was like somebody who claims to be throwing down bricks without thought and is building a wall.

  Her grief had developed a style and, genuine though it had to be, it had already acquired utility. Harkness realised that people often choose the guilts that they can handle. It’s a way of hiding from the truth.

  ‘Mrs Lawson,’ Laidlaw said quietly. She had paused. Harkness watched Laidlaw watching her and letting silence come like a cushion between what she had said and what he would have to say. ‘Jennifer didn’t go to Poppies on Saturday night.’

  The silence ran between them like a fuse. Harkness saw her head come up and the eyes widen in disbelief.

  ‘Oh yes. She said she wis goin’.’

  ‘Was it only her father she told lies to, Mrs Lawson? She never told you any?’

  ‘Whit d’ye mean?’

  ‘Jennifer told you she was going to Poppies with Sarah Stanley. She told Sarah she was going on a date with
a certain boy. She did neither. That’s two lies already, Mrs Lawson.’

  ‘Ah canny believe it.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘She even lied to me at the end. Wait till oor Bud hears this next.’

  She had started to cry.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Lawson,’ Laidlaw said. ‘But Jennifer’s dead. And there’s not too much her father can do to her now.’ He paused. She rocked slightly, shaking her head. ‘And we both know that Jennifer had good reason to be the way she was. We both know that.’

  She looked up at him. Her grief had become defenceless again and she looked frightened.

  ‘How d’ye mean?’

  ‘I’m talking about the Catholic boy she went with, Mrs Lawson. I’m talking about that.’

  ‘Whit Catholic boay?’

  ‘The one her father wouldn’t let her see any more. Did you know him?’

  She stopped on the question. It seemed to be asking her much more than Laidlaw had meant. She hesitated, looked away, then was suddenly refusing to turn back.

  ‘Ah don’t blame her!’ Her eyes took in both of them as she said it, the most direct look Harkness had seen her give. ‘Ah don’t blame her at all. God bless ma lassie. Ah don’t blame her at all. Ah blame maself for no’ standin’ up for her mair. Why should she trust us? We didny deserve ’er trust. Aye, Ah knew about that boay. The wan boay she wanted tae go wi’. And he widny let her. She trusted me up tae that time. But Ah couldny stand up for her. Ah never could. An’ she never forgave me, God love ’er, she never forgave me.’

  ‘Did the boy ever come to the house?’

  ‘Are ye wise enough? Bud widny have that. Airchie Stanley telt him it wis a Catholic. Sarah let it slip. And that was it. We never got tae see the boay. It’s a funny thing, intit? It wis at that Poppies place that she’d met the boay.’

  ‘Mrs Lawson,’ Laidlaw said. ‘What was his name?’

  She shook her head. ‘Ah don’t know. Ah never knew.’ She looked at Laidlaw steadily. ‘But Ah know who should know.’ Harkness watched her small crisis of daring with sympathy. It was her Martin Luther moment: here I stand. She wasn’t practised in courage but she found it. ‘Maggie Grierson! Bud’s sister could likely tell ye. Jennifer loved tae go there. Ah think it wis more her home than this was. Lives in Duke Street.’

  She gave them the number, and Harkness saw why it had been hard for her to tell them. The rest had been only attitudes and so could be renegued on. This was a fact which they would follow up and Bud Lawson could hear of it. She had said something that she would have to stand by against her husband. It must have been a long time since she had done that.

  The woman across the entry had asked them to fetch her before they left. While Harkness went for her, Laidlaw was still talking to Mrs Lawson, applying words like bandages. As they left, the woman was making her another cup of tea.

  On the bus back into the city, Harkness thought Laidlaw was looking worse. His nose had started to run.

  ‘What’s up?’ Harkness said.

  ‘I think it’s what I hope it’s not,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Migraine. If we ignore it, it might go away. Mrs Lawson did a brave thing for her, didn’t she?’

  ‘She’s probably regretting it just now.’

  ‘I hope not. It looks as if that boy could be the one. We’ve got to get his name. A Catholic who used to go to Poppies. That won’t stand up in court. Funny how Poppies keeps coming back in. But that was where she didn’t go.’

  Laidlaw put his hand up to his head.

  ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘That’s the early warning system. Like somebody playing croquet with my right eyeball. In ten minutes I’ll have a head like a Borough Band.’

  ‘Nothing you can do?’

  ‘I’m sorry. You’ll have to go to Duke Street on your own. If you get the name, check it off with Milligan. I’ll have to go back to the hotel. And get my pills. If I catch it fast enough, I can contain it. If I don’t, it can take me a day to recover. Dear oh dear.’

  Laidlaw spent the rest of the journey pressing his head as if he was trying to keep it from bursting. So much for rushing evolution, Harkness thought, but sympathetically.

  37

  As the man came into the lounge, the barman looked up from the racing pages of the Daily Record. The interruption was a relief. The card was full of three-legged horses.

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  He was big, padded with good living, a businessman in a lightweight suit. The Ambassador was on the South Side, commercial gentility. The big man was genteelly desperate.

  ‘Well, let me see. I’ll have a Bell’s. Oh, make it a double. Might as well. Hair of the dog, eh?’

  He took it over his throat in one piece, like an oyster. That must have been some dog, say a Borzoi. He closed his eyes and stood, listening to his nerve-ends harmonise.

  ‘Same again.’

  While he took that one and then another one, he talked excuses. The excuses weren’t for the barman, they were for himself. The barman hadn’t seen him before but he recognised him. He was trying to convince himself that what he was doing was still just a masculine convention, not yet a lonely compulsion. The way he took the drinks was too fast, as if he didn’t want to catch himself at it. He was caching them. By the time he left, the barman would have been feeling sorry for him except that his departure revealed again to the barman the small man who had been sitting beyond him.

  That was somebody the barman was really sorry for. There was always somebody worse. Minty had asked for water while he was waiting for friends. By the look of him, they could have been pall-bearers. Where he sat, he was surrounded by the box-plants that seemed to have tropical ambitions. The flowers spilled tendrils, encroached on the plastic seating that ran around the alcove.

  He was a small man, slight, his head already well on the way to becoming a skull. He looked cold and still as an icicle, thawing occasionally into the soft tapping of his forefinger on the table. The three men who came in went in single file, a little cortege, to the alcove.

  The barman followed them. Two of them ordered beer, the other one Glenfiddich. Minty stayed with water. They waited till the barman had brought them and gone back to his paper. Mason sipped his Glenfiddich, enjoying the feeling he got at such times that everybody was on the market and he knew their prices. He was in no hurry to bid. Waiting was good for them. He sneezed, looked at the flowers.

  ‘You seem to be partial to the flowers, Minty.’

  ‘No’ really. Ah’m just practisin’.’

  ‘How are you, anyway?’

  ‘Dyin’. Apart fae that, Ah’m fine.’

  ‘It’s cancer, I hear.’

  ‘That’s whit Ah hear, too.’

  ‘What kind of cancer is it?’

  ‘The kind that kills ye.’

  ‘They give you no hope?’

  ‘It’s fower-nothin’ wi’ two minutes to go.’

  ‘Well, it comes to us all. Our turn’s coming.’

  ‘Ye can have ma turn if ye want. Ah don’t mind waitin’.’

  Mason nodded as if Minty was doing well in his interview.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Eddie would have put you in the picture.’

  ‘Ah want tae hear it fae you,’ Minty said. ‘Matt Mason himself.’

  Mason looked round.

  ‘What’s he got that fan on for?’

  He made to signal to the barman.

  ‘Ah asked for it,’ Minty said. ‘Ah fever up a lot. Ye know?’

  Mason nodded.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a wee problem. A two-legged problem. You know that lassie that was found on Sunday. I know who did it. And I’d like him taken out before the polis get there. That’s it.’

  ‘Ye know where he is, then?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘An’ ye want me tae kill him.’

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  ‘Is he hard?’

  Eddie and Lennie laughed. Mason looked towards Lennie.

  ‘Yer only dan
ger,’ 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.’