The Papers of Tony Veitch (16 page)

‘Why?'

‘Because he was there. But even playing it by your rules he still deserves it. I think he was murdered. That's still news here, isn't it? What's happened to this city? It used to be the life of the streets was properly respected here. It got attention. What about Hirstling Kate? Or Rab Ha' the Glesca Glutton? They were Eck's kind of people.'

Hirstling Kate had been a cripple who pulled herself along on her knees by means of spiked boards held in her hands. Rab Ha', who was said to have eaten a calf at a sitting, had
died as a vagrant in a hayloft in Thistle Street. Laidlaw had touched on one of Eddie's hobbies.

For the next few minutes Harkness was introduced to some other nineteenth-century landmarks of Glasgow, like Old Malabar, the Irish street juggler, and Dungannon, the barefooted porter of the Bazaar at Candleriggs. He heard a four-line rhyming sermon from the ‘Reverend' John Aitken. He discovered that Penny-a-Yard's job had been making brass chains for wall clocks. His favourite was Lang Tam, an imbecile beggar who inspired people's charity by waving goodbye to the Paisley coach at Jamaica Bridge and waving hello to the same coach as it arrived in Paisley.

The memory of those people who had found preposterous niches in a hard life, like kittiwakes nesting on a sheer cliff face, worked on Eddie, while Laidlaw argued Eck's place in the tradition.

‘And another thing, Eddie. Whoever did this thinks they've caused about as much fuss as running over a stray cat. I want them to feel differently. It doesn't mean a lot but I'd like to get them worried if I can. Who knows, it might help. You might put in an appeal for information.'

‘What's the point? If it's not an accident, it has to be rummy obliterating rummy. How many rummies do you think read the
Glasgow Herald?
'

‘I don't know, it makes a good big blanket on a cold night. And you know what might help? If you could pass it on to the
Evening Times
.'

‘Right, Jack. Stop there. I've got no influence with the London
Times
. Look, I'll see. All right? I'll see.'

‘Thanks, Eddie. There's another thing.'

Eddie looked round his raised whisky the way the negro house-servant used to look round doors in old Hollywood films.

‘I know,' he said. ‘You want me to do a piece on stray dogs.'

‘Not this week. Remember that stuff the paper ran a while back? On the vagrant thing. “Skid Row” idea.'

Eddie nodded.

‘You think you could get me that to check through? Just in case. It's probably hopeless. But just in case.'

‘You're mellowing. You're beginning to ask reasonable things.' A man came over from the bar to their table. He was tall and very fat.

‘Five minutes,' he said to Eddie. ‘I hope you're fit.'

‘I'm not likely to be less fit than you, Stan,' Eddie said. ‘Look at him. If they cleaned him out, he'd make a good garage. Pollokshaws Fats, the one-man crowd. You've got to wait in the bar while he's making a shot.'

‘Gallows humour,' Stan said. ‘Can I buy you boys a drink? I believe it's customary at a wake.'

The voice was appropriate to the remark, slow, deep and mournful, every sentence a small cortège. Laidlaw had barely touched his lime-juice and soda. Eddie and Harkness didn't need anything at the moment.

‘Five minutes,' Stan said.

Eddie checked his watch. It seemed a typical gesture to Harkness. That broad face with its kindly inquisitive eyes always seemed to be slightly abstracted, thinking ahead. It was as if the pressures of the job had invaded his private life so that even his pleasures needed the adrenalin of having time-limits. He was a junkie for deadlines.

‘How about the lab tests?' Harkness asked Laidlaw.

‘Oh yes. Guess what? Paraquat in the bevvy. That was Eck's bottle we found, all right.'

‘Hey, maybe you're not so daft. Mixing that stuff with the wine means premeditation, doesn't it?'

‘Not just that. Two sets of fingerprints on Eck's bottle. Only one of them Eck's.'

‘And if it's true that he didn't share . . .'

‘Find the fingerprints, you find your man.'

Eddie got up to take on Stan. He was smiling.

‘I've got it, boys,' he said. ‘Go round the off-licences finger-printing people and you're home alone. I'll buy you a drink with my winnings.'

Harkness stared after him, turned back to Laidlaw.

‘He's got a point. If you've got two lots of fingerprints on the bottle, that's got to be the other lot, hasn't it?'

Laidlaw refused to be dismayed.

‘Don't take Eddie too seriously. That journalism makes you cynical. Not like police-work.'

‘No. But he's right.'

Laidlaw took his lime-juice and soda as if it was a wisdom-potion, and winked.

‘I would bet he isn't. Cynicism's just a failure of imagination. Those fingerprints are a solid investment. They'll work for us. Well, where did you bestow your charms tonight?'

Harkness had a drink.

‘I didn't,' he said. ‘I phoned Mary and we decided we wouldn't be seeing each other again. I'm going to get married.'

‘You make it sound like a death-sentence.'

‘No. You know what it was? Mary sounded really happy
about it. I thought she fancied me. I worry my arse off about telling her. And she takes it like a prezzy. Like Christmas was early.'

Laidlaw was laughing.

‘You know what's worrying me now?' Harkness said. ‘I ask Morag to marry me and she hunts me. If she does that, I couldn't take it. The equipment'll shrivel up and fall off. After Mary went off the phone singing, I went and got bevvied. I'm going to have to leave in time for the last bus. Just leave the car.'

‘I'll drive you to Fenwick,' Laidlaw said.

‘You not staying at the Burleigh tonight? You going home?'

‘Well.' Laidlaw had a clowning expression on his face, like Pagliacci. ‘More or less home. That's where I'm going, if that's what it is.'

Harkness had a feeling about Laidlaw he had had before, an almost irresistible compassion for him. Laidlaw came on hard, could be a bastard, sometimes gave the impression that if God turned up he'd want Him to take a lie-detector test. But he so obviously cared about people, was so unmistakably hurt by what happened to them, sometimes through his doing, that he would have put a stone under pressure to feel things. Out of concern for him Harkness moved the conversation away from where they were headed.

‘I don't want to sound cynical,' he said. ‘But how is it those fingerprints are going to be use to us?'

‘Brian. Imagine it. You're putting paraquat into a wine bottle. Some down the sides. Right? You wipe the whole bottle. Because you don't want the bottle to look suspicious. Isn't it true? Then you're giving it to a wino. Who cares if your hand's
been on it? Where is it going to finish, anyway? In the Clyde? You're going to be careless. You're going to give it to him with panache. Oh yes, you are. If it's Tony's fingers on it, Brian, it's Tony. If it's somebody else's, it's somebody else. We've found the combination to this safe. I'm telling you. Hey. I like being bright. Don't you? It's good fun, isn't it?'

He was laughing. Harkness was pleased to see him arrogant again. Harkness believed that Laidlaw had certain small rights in that area.

 

 

 

 

20

T
here was a girl wearing white trousers, tight enough at the buttocks to let you count the pores. She gave the impression she was practising how to atomise. Every part of her body seemed to be making strenuous efforts to separate from every other part. Her eyes were closed. She had a partner somewhere. The music had given up following her.

She wasn't particularly noticeable, except to one of the only two older men standing at the bar. They were probably no more than late thirties but the context and their mood made them feel like two face-lifts that fell. Poppies Disco wasn't a haunt of theirs.

‘See that yin wi' the white breeks on, Pat?' one of them said.

‘Ah've got somethin' in ma eye,' Pat said.

‘Probably her left tit. She's throwin' them about all over the place.'

Pat was conducting a delicate operation on his left eye. He teased his upper eyelashes carefully towards his eyebrow and rolled the lower rim of his eye up and down. He blinked a few times and seemed satisfied.

‘Ah feel like Methuselah's daddy, Tam,' he said. ‘This wis your idea, ya bam.'

‘Gets us the late drink, doesn't it?'

‘Right enough. But they're all that young.'

‘If they're old enough to bleed, they're old enough to butcher.'

‘Be your age. Where'd ye read that? The
Gestapo Gazette?
Ah'd be embarrassed tryin' with wan o' these. In case Ah couldny undo her nappy. When's the go-go dancer on again?'

‘Ah thought ye wereny interested,' Tam said.

‘That's different, intit? The lassie's just doin' a job. Ye can kid yerself on an' go hame. Her an' you can both get a good night's sleep. No problem.'

Tam looked round the place. He liked the decor. The seats round the edges were designed as dice, the wall-lights as poker hands. The small stage the go-go dancer would come back to was a roulette-wheel. It appealed to his love of risk.

‘Fella that used to own this,' he said. ‘He cut his throat.'

‘He musta felt like me. Know somethin', Tam? There's nothin' can age ye more than seein' all the cuff ye'll never get near. Ah'm greetin'. Ah'm greetin'.'

‘Naw. He wis a poof,' Tam said, as if that explained the inevitability of suicide. ‘Ye gonny dance?'

‘Ah thought ye wid never ask me.'

‘Naw. Ye gonny?'

‘The first Canadian Barn Dance they play, Ah'm up like a shot.'

‘You know whit it is wi' you?' Tam said. ‘You feel out your depth. Ye see, Ah don't. Ah can see people here Ah recognise. Can you?'

‘Tam. Ah'm no' sure Ah recognise me.'

‘Look over there.'

Tam swivelled Pat's shoulders towards a corner of the room. Pat focussed on a couple. To him they were a woman with a man vaguely attached. Neither was speaking. She was a big, blonde woman that he wouldn't have had the cheek to claim seriously. He felt he wouldn't know what to say in the morning. She was somewhere he wouldn't have minded taking his holidays but he knew that she wasn't a place for him to live. Then he noticed the man. He looked as if they might have made him in Dixon's Blazes, a piece of heavy engineering, Pat thought. He looked as if he could arm-wrestle a crane.

‘Uh-huh,' Pat said. ‘Ye gonny show me somethin' else?'

‘That's Dave McMaster,' Tam said. ‘Ye've heard of Dave McMaster?'

‘Aye,' Pat said. ‘Ah just wish that big burd wisny wi' him. Look at her!'

She was staring ahead. Lynsey Farren wasn't liking having her enjoyment of this place compromised by Dave. It expressed so much of what she felt about him that she resented his willingness to let in outside air. He was bringing in cold draughts from the streets outside.

‘We have to sort this out,' he was saying. ‘One way or the other. We have to.'

She looked around. The energy took her breath away. She saw these young people dancing, bodies throwing themselves about, so careless, like casual conversation. They were a message that fascinated her because she could never quite understand it or imitate its tones, that unselfconscious declaration of self before departing into the dark. She imagined what boring jobs
they must go back to, if they had jobs, that girl with a face tallow in the strobe lights, that boy who looked like a seedy angel and sneered at himself.

They explained her flat to her. She had rejected her own taste and just bought kitsch because she felt that where she lived no longer mattered much, should be as anonymous as a railway station. Tony had taught her that. He had said, ‘Houses are ways of hiding from a more complicated reality, I think. They should have porous walls. The less they're you, the nearer they are to communal places. Like the best working-class houses.' These dancers reminded her of that, were all open doors.

She looked at Dave. He was drumming on the table, absorbed in his worries. She understood why she had finished up with him. Tony was the idea, Paddy Collins was the imitation of the idea, Dave was the fact. He couldn't walk into a room without his eyes asking what was the game here and his body saying he could play it. His vigour was a train you thought you'd better catch if you wanted to go somewhere. She had caught it. Though she didn't know exactly where it was going, she believed it was better than where she had been.

‘So what do we do?' she asked.

‘We try to help Tony. But Ah've got tae phone this Mickey Ballater the night. Ah give him a nonsense, right? Ah mean, Ah'll tell him where tae find auld Danny McLeod. That keeps 'im busy a wee while. But he's gonny phone back. An' he'll not be a pleased man. So then we have tae move intae the real game. Ah have to start doin' real tricks. Ah need your help. You've got to find out where Tony Veitch is. It's as simple as that.'

‘I'm sure Alma knows.'

‘Then you go and see Alma. The morra mornin'. Fair enough?'

‘I suppose I could. Milton will be at the golf. He always plays golf on Sunday morning. Sometimes has lunch at the club and plays again in the afternoon. I'm sure I can get her alone. Are you going to give Mickey Ballater my number?'

‘Ah'll have to. Ah'm goin' to let him phone me back. Ah give him that, he'll give me back some trust. It'll steal a few hours. We're gonny need them. See. You want to help Tony, what we've got to do here is play for time. Ah can get the right people to find him. An' still kid Ballater on. Ye understand?'