Strange Loyalties (23 page)

‘Dan Scoular's view,' I said.

Frankie followed the direction of my look.

‘Aye. Big Dan loved that place. Looks nice from here, right enough. Not so good up close.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘Like the pictures ye used to look at in the children's books. Remember? Say, a farmyard scene. It always looked that nice. They never showed ye the henshit on the tail-feathers. Or the
sow eatin' anythin' that would stay still long enough. Yerself included.'

‘You just don't like the place, Frankie.'

‘Does the place like me?'

‘Maybe it has its reasons.'

Frankie selected a stalk of grass for chewing.

‘You mean what happened to Dan? That wasn't me. It was more likely that place that killed him. The values it gave him. They don't work in the real world. No heroes there. Maybe that's yer murderer there.' He nodded at Thornbank. ‘Maybe that's what killed him.'

‘We both know what killed him,' I said. ‘It's called Matt Mason.'

‘I don't know that,' Frankie said quickly.

‘Frankie!'

‘I don't
know
it.'

‘All right. That's even better.'

‘Better?' Frankie took his piece of grass out of his mouth, as if it tasted strange. ‘What do you mean?'

‘It means you can talk freely. You're not shopping anybody. You don't know enough to do that.'

‘Ah don't know enough to do anything. Ah've told you what Ah know.'

‘Just tell me about the fight, the people involved.'

‘Come on, Jack. Ah can't do that. It's not what Ah do. It's like you said in ma maw's. Ah've got ma sense of maself.'

‘Your sense of yourself? A good man died partly because of your sense of yourself. Bury it. An' don't invite me to the funeral.'

Frankie shivered. There was a slight wind combing the grass
gently. It wasn't enough to make it cold. The draught had to be internal. Frankie was looking at Thornbank.

‘You ever get that feeling?' he said. ‘That something's happened before. Ah've just had it. That first day. We sat here. An' Dan was tryin' to find out what was really goin' on. He wanted to know who the people involved were, too. Ah could've told him more.'

‘So tell more now.'

‘What's the point? He's dead.'

‘You're not. Are you, Frankie? Your obligation to him doesn't end with
his
death. It ends with yours. We gave your mother a goin'-away prezzie there, didn't we? Something to make her feel better. But it was just fancy wrapping-paper, Frankie. There was nothing inside. Why not put something real in it? Like respect for Dan Scoular.'

‘Ah wouldn't know where to begin.'

‘Anywhere.'

‘What are ye hopin' to do with it, like?'

‘I'm going to try and get Matt Mason.'

‘Jesus, you better be early up.'

‘Frankie. All o' that's my problem. All I'm asking. You tell me what a lotta people know already. That's all. You're not informin'. Christ, there musta been hundreds at the fight. Just give me a back-dated ticket, that's all. You won't be involved in anything that happens. In fact, the way Matt Mason feels about you, you might be taking out insurance.'

I think perhaps that thought swung it, like a quote from the book of self-preservation, which had for a long time been Frankie's bible. Staring at Thornbank, he started to talk. Maybe the town, seen as he must often have seen it in childhood from
places like this, was like a photograph from his past, reminding him of who he used to be.

He told me Eddie Foley had been involved in things in the capacity of fixer, as he usually was. Tommy Brogan had been Dan Scoular's trainer in Glasgow. Dan and Frankie had lived in Glasgow for a week before the fight, in the Burleigh Hotel, which was where Jan had worked.

‘Ah saw you there,' Frankie said. ‘Wi' a good-lookin' big wumman.'

‘When?'

‘While we were stayin' there. It was late at night. You came in wi' her and went up in the lift. You were well on.'

‘Well on? You must've mistaken me for somebody else, Frankie.'

‘Aye. Anyway, Ah would've said hullo, of course. But Ah didn't want to disturb ye.'

‘That was nice.'

My glibness belied my feelings. The thought of Dan Scoular and me sharing the same building that night was an eerie one. I had been within yards of a man whose death would affect my life, without ever meeting him.

As Frankie talked on, I didn't know what I could possibly do with the information. He described a disco afterwards and some kind of party at Matt Mason's house. All of these events were part of the most dramatic experience he had had, something that had cleft his life in two, and so, once started, he spoke of them in that compulsive, fragmentary way we speak of things when we know they have defined us but we're still not sure what the definition is. I had become an eavesdropper. Frankie's pain was Frankie's pain. I sympathised but there
wasn't much I could do about it. In any case, in the scale of things any price he was paying hardly compared with the price Dan Scoular had paid.

All I was trying to do was find pieces of the happening I could weld into a purpose of my own. It wasn't easy. The one thing that interested me so far was Eddie Foley. Eddie had always interested me. He was one of Mason's men unlike any of the others. He was a genteel criminal. In his gentility might be his vulnerability. While I was wondering about that, Frankie said something that interrupted my thoughts. He was talking about a woman in Mason's entourage who had apparently fallen very heavily for Dan Scoular.

‘What did you say her name was?' I said.

‘Melanie.'

‘What's her second name?'

‘McHarg,' he said. ‘Melanie McHarg. She went loopy for big Dan. Ah think she thought he was the answer to all her prayers. She used to speak to me on the quiet about him. Ah think she imagined he was her ticket to a normal life. See, Melanie's a funny one. Ye'd think the kinna life she's led, she'd know the story. But a wee bit of her still believes in Santa Claus. She's a romantic, Ah suppose is whit she is. Buys a Mills an' Boon book wi' every packet of heroin.'

‘She does drugs?'

‘Do weans like sweeties?'

‘Would she know Meece Rooney?'

‘Meece supplied her. Certainly at one time.'

‘You know her, Frankie. If she was in trouble, who would she go to?'

‘Take yer pick,' Frankie said. ‘Ah mean, don't get me wrong.
Ah like Melanie. Always did. But let's face it. She's not a house, she's a hotel. A lotta men've stayed there.'

‘But there must be somebody she would turn to.'

‘Might be Meece.'

‘Anybody else?'

‘Could even be Matt, Ah suppose.'

‘What if it couldn't be either of them?'

Frankie's very mobile head became still and, in its slow turning towards me, the instinct of chatter became the wisdom of silence. His wide eyes stared at me. A parrot had just turned into an owl.

‘What's goin' on here?' he said.

‘Meece Rooney's dead,' I said. ‘Melanie won't be turning to him. Matt Mason's the man that arranged the retirement. Melanie won't be turning to him. She was living with Meece. Meece seems to have been fiddling the accounts. They killed him and left him beside the river. Maybe for easy disposal. So who would she turn to now, Frankie? Who's left?'

Frankie seemed to be trying to see beyond the horizon. Maybe what he was looking at was the prospect of his own death.

‘Ah don't touch this,' he said. ‘That's it. Ah don't touch it.'

‘Frankie.'

‘You're not on. Ah don't touch it.'

‘Just give me a name.'

‘Ah'll give ye a name. Frankie White. Ah'd like to keep it off a headstone for a while yet. Come on. You know this man. You can go for him if you like. Maybe you'll get a medal for it. Me, Ah'll just get dead. Maybe Ah'm next already.'

‘Maybe you are. And if you are, I'm your best bet.'

‘Some bet. A three-legged horse in the Derby. Ah don't fancy your chances, Jack.'

‘You don't have to. I do. You silly bugger. What's to lose? You tell me, nobody else knows. It just gives me a better chance of stopping him. If I can't, you're where you are already. You're getting to bet with my money. Take the chance.'

He did.

‘You know Marty Bleasdale?'

He was a man from Newcastle who had been a social worker in Glasgow until dealing with the endless mayhem of other people's exploding lives had made him shell-shocked. He went rogue. I liked him. He seemed to have decided that he was a revolutionary caucus of one. He was half-crazy and wholly sincere. He lived on the edges of criminality because, as he had once told me, ‘villains are less dishonest than the rest of us.' He played in a jazz-band and sometimes worked at the Barras but where the eating-money came from wasn't entirely clear.

‘I know Marty Bleasdale.'

‘He's your possibility. Marty's a kind of one-man Samaritan Centre for a lot of people. He's helped Melanie before. She sees him as some kinda patron saint. Ah think because he never tried to screw her. She might go there.'

Frankie wasn't talking any more. Our heads had parted company, mine trying to work out how to get closer to Matt Mason, Frankie's presumably how to get further away.

‘Thanks, Frankie,' I said.

‘Oh, don't say that,' Frankie said. ‘Ah hate to hear a polisman sayin' thanks. It usually means ye've said somethin' that ye're gonny regret. Any chance of a lift?'

Outside his house, we sat a moment in the car.

‘Well,' Frankie said. ‘Ah can't wish ye luck. It's against ma religion.'

‘That's good,' I said. ‘With the kind of luck you would wish me, Frankie, I could be in terrible trouble.'

He smiled.

‘I hope your mother feels no pain,' I said.

‘Aye.'

He looked quietly terrified of many things. He had his reasons.

‘Honourable,' he said.

‘Sorry?'

‘Honourable. That was Melanie's word for big Dan. Honourable. The most honourable man she'd ever met, she said. Ah wonder what it means.'

‘I don't know, Frankie. I suppose it's one of those things it's up to other people to see in you. From where I'm sitting, maybe there's a bit of it in you at that.'

‘You couldn't point it out to me?'

We both laughed. I watched him walking up his mother's path, wearing his jauntiness like someone else's clothes.

I
n Graithnock I had to find a Clydesdale Bank with a hole in the wall. The introduction of the Autobank has allowed my life to inhabit an intermittent fantasy of solvency. I have always looked on money as if it were a species of bird unhappy in captivity. It never sings there. Before autobanks, my only technique for getting access to more money than I had involved mournful conversations with an understanding bank manager in Byres Road. Now, after each heartbreaking performance in which the applause took the form of an extended overdraft, I could forget the seedy realities of finance and for a time draw money when I chose. The notes that slid towards me assumed a proper meaninglessness. They might as well have been Monopoly money, part of a game in which I had marked the cards and drew only the ones I wanted. Collect £200. Do not go to jail.

My vulnerability being covered with money, modern society's figleaf, I went to a florist's. I bought a large bouquet of flowers of indeterminate genus. All I knew was they looked good to me. I went to a newsagent's and bought cigarettes, a newspaper and a box of chocolates. I found an off-licence and managed to get a bottle of Talisker. I put the flowers, the
chocolates and the whisky in the boot of the car. I drove to the Bushfield.

Katie was in the kitchen. When I went in, Buster and I exchanged our usual greetings. He growled at me and I told him that I hoped his third brain-cell arrived soon.

‘You two,' Katie said. ‘Ah think ye secretly love each other. Scartin' an' nippin' is Scots folk's wooin'.'

‘Aye. Don't call the banns yet anyway, Katie.'

‘Ye're early the day.'

‘I've got bad news for you,' I said. ‘Maybe ye should sit down. I go back to Glasgow tonight.'

‘Ah wish ye'd told me earlier,' Katie said. ‘We coulda put the bunting an' the streamers out. It's no' often we get something to celebrate in the Bushfield.'

‘It's all right, Katie. Ah know ye're just puttin' on a brave face.'

‘That's right,' Katie said. ‘The laughter's just hysterical. Actually, Ah
will
miss ye. At least, you're no' boring. A different mood for every minute. Ye're like that thing they used to say in “Monty Python”. “And now for something completely different”.'

‘We better square up here, Katie.'

‘How d'ye mean?'

‘That's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday night. And meals and everything.'

Katie turned another page of her magazine.

‘Jack, it's the first break I've had the day. It's the only break I'll get the day. Don't bother me wi' business. I'll see ye before ye leave. Also, I've got something special for ye to eat the night. Ah haven't worked out what it'll cost yet. Probably more than
the rest of what ye owe us put together. Ah'll see ye before ye leave.'

‘Okay,' I said. I turned at the door. ‘It wouldn't be Buster a l'orange, would it? That would really make my night.'

She stared up at me from her magazine.

‘More like char-broiled Laidlaw.'

I went up to my room and sat for a while. I looked again at my personal collection of Scott's paintings. ‘Scotland' reminded me somehow of my father. I think it was because of the suggestion in the picture that the public reality of Scottish experience was denied in private lives. For my father, the method he hated had been to translate the demotic of Scottish traditions into a bland standard English, losing most of the meaning in the translation. For Scott, the method had been what? To simplify the darker realities of our lives into bogus tourist images? To deny the truth of what we were in order to live more comfortably with lies? But wasn't that what we all did, what society taught us to do? Wasn't that perhaps what Scott and his student friends had done when faced with whatever truth was represented by the man in the green coat?