The Papers of Tony Veitch (22 page)

‘Christ, I hope we're not too late,' Laidlaw said again.

‘Perchance,' Harkness said.

‘Sorry?'

‘Nine letters. Perchance.'

 

 

 

 

28

T
here was no perchance about it. There is a mildly disturbing sense of activity that surrounds the discovery of a death in a city, like the buzzing of flies. It is a small distraction in normalcy. The longest running show on earth has come to town and that fascination with dangerous tricks that can dilate with a little wonder the most blasé eyes claims its craners for the riskiest feat of all.

What looked like the advance publicity for someone's last performance was waiting for them. They knew the signs. As they crossed Queen Margaret Bridge they could see ahead of them, at the corner beyond the bridge where you turn left into Kelvin Drive, three or four people standing. They had the unselfconsciousness of bystanders, a preoccupation like people in a painting. They were practitioners of a style that must have had its representatives at the crucifixion. One of them was pointing towards what Laidlaw knew was his destination.

‘No. No,' he said in that way we incant against events we fear have already happened.

That the event had by now hardened into itself he saw in the old woman's face looking out from the nearby window of a private house with nebby curiosity, as if misfortune was
lowering the tone of the neighbourhood, and in the parked cars he recognised as belonging to the police and in the uniformed constable who let them in.

The house had been impressive, a fact which worked against it now, just as an old fur-coat can look shabbier than second-hand nylon. The balustrade with thin columns that must have been a proud feature in the past was scruffy with lack of paint. The sagging balcony looked like the kind of place the upstairs residents would only avail themselves of to avoid a greater hazard, like a fire.

The inside of the building was what had made its outside begin to admit it wasn't what it had thought it was. One house had become eight flats. Laidlaw remembered where Gus Hawkins stayed and wondered about all the cities where the young and the unassimilated aging must be camping out in the compromised convictions of the past, seeding them with unfamiliar dreams, possibilities for which they hadn't been intended. As soon as he came in he had a strong sense of the place, could imagine strange laughters late at night, someone playing music alone.

It was where Tony Veitch had tried to live, a confusion of smells and sounds and eccentricities, a place where curry argued with fried eggs and, he could imagine, strange thoughts grew. Laidlaw wondered if coming here had been for Tony less of a hiding from things than where he had been. It was the kind of place Milton Veitch had perhaps never thought about. It was a houseful of communal loneliness.

They went up the stairs to where Laidlaw now knew they would find yet another demonstration of the final loneliness. The constable at the door had said, ‘Aye, that's right, sir. There's
a body upstairs. I don't know the name. But he won't be needing it any more.' Detectives were making enquiries of the other residents but apparently not many of them were in. Spending Sunday in a place like this would be like visiting your grave. Tony Veitch wouldn't have to do that again.

He was closer to blond than his photographs had suggested. Lying on the floor of the room that was both sitting-room and bedroom, he was dressed in jeans and tee-shirt, his feet bare. His head was turned sideways, eyes closed, as if he had suddenly passed out. He was a very good-looking boy. His right arm was stretched out over the record-player on the floor, his hand rigid above the turn-table. He looked like someone who had fallen asleep changing records. But he hadn't been changing records. Around his right wrist was a piece of metal that looked like an identity-bracelet. But it wasn't an identity-bracelet. The skin around it was black. The metal was just wire. He was plugged in to the socket.

‘That's not the only thing,' Milligan said. ‘He's got flex wrapped round the body. Wired up like a Trafalgar Square Christmas tree. He wasn't kidding. Don't touch. He's got enough electricity in him to light up Sauchiehall Street.'

Milligan was in control. He was enjoying it.

‘You've arrived in time for the funeral,' he said and winked at Harkness.

Harkness looked guiltily at Laidlaw and thought he seemed displaced in the busyness of the room where the others were searching, dusting for fingerprints. The body had just been photographed. Laidlaw was staring around as if he could find something here that nobody else had managed to.

What he was finding was a feeling he had experienced
before, that death is the end of small things, lets us absorb its enormity through trivial negatives, like infinity measured in inches. Maybe that was why some people were casual about it.

There was an empty cup on the mantelpiece with the crumpled wrapper of a chocolate biscuit beside it. The smallness of that cup, unfillable ever again by Tony Veitch, was big enough to hold his death. Laidlaw remembered finding one glove belonging to his father in a drawer soon after his death. It was one of a pair someone had given him for his Christmas. He had only worn them once since he belonged to a generation of men who seldom wore coats, let alone gloves, not out of any macho impulse but because coats had been a luxury for so long that they never got used to them. The accidental find in the drawer had held the irrevocable pain of his father's dying so that it seemed at the time there couldn't be much that was more poignant than a dead man's empty glove. The cup came close.

He looked again at Tony Veitch lying dead in a small bare room. He wished he could have spoken to him. But if he couldn't speak to him, Laidlaw wanted something.

‘Papers,' he said suddenly.

Milligan turned towards him from his energetic supervision of things.

‘Newspapers?'

‘Paper that you write on.'

‘Why? Should there be?'

‘The boy was writing all the time. There should be acres of paper here. Did you find any?'

Milligan looked at Harkness as if he was Laidlaw's keeper and should have better control of him.

‘You didn't know that about him?' Laidlaw said. ‘He's just a corpse to you, isn't he?'

‘He's just a corpse to everybody now,' Milligan said. ‘But I'll tell you what I do know. I know I
found
him. First. That's more than you did. Cock of the walk.'

‘That's something that puzzles me,' Laidlaw said. ‘When you know so little about him, how did you manage that?'

Milligan smiled and tapped his nose, pointed at Laidlaw.

‘I know this city,' he said. ‘Right to its underwear. That's why I'm a winner.' He turned to Harkness. ‘Squared things up with the wife today as well. We're getting back together. Everything's coming up roses.'

Harkness cringed, and heard his feeling expressed by Laidlaw.

‘You should get them to give you the boy's head for above your mantelpiece. A wee house-warming present for your wife.'

The others in the room were aware of the tension Laidlaw was generating. One of them defused it.

‘There
were
papers,' he said.

‘Where?'

He led Laidlaw and Harkness through to the bathroom. Small feathers of ash on the floor drifted about with the movement of their coming in. The lavatory-bowl was black with the ashes of burnt paper.

‘Looks as if he's been burning the Mitchell Library,' the man said.

Looking into the bowl, Laidlaw noticed that the few words which had survived were worn to meaningless smudges with the water, as accessible as runes.

‘There was nothing left?' he asked.

‘One sheet. It had fallen under the table.'

They went back through to the living-room and Laidlaw asked Milligan for the sheet. Milligan was glad he had asked. ‘Are you kidding?' he said. ‘You want it, you wait for it.

This is my show. I'll see about letting you have a photocopy when I'm ready. But you'll have to wait for it.'

Laidlaw stood staring ahead. Harkness was embarrassed for him.

‘Jack.'

‘We'll wait,' Laidlaw said. He was speaking loud enough for everybody to hear. ‘When you've got somewhere you have to go, you don't get put off by a dog barking at you.'

Harkness was speaking confidentially.

‘It's over, Jack.'

‘It's over for him. But not for us. The dead are our responsibility, aren't they? That's what the job says.'

Harkness was looking at him. Laidlaw's face looked as set as a death-mask.

‘Jack. You're over-reacting. Just because Big Ernie chewed you over.'

Laidlaw was lighting a cigarette. He lit it, looked at Harkness and smiled.

‘Like being savaged by a chihuahua,' he said.

He meant it. Their discomfort didn't matter here. Laidlaw looked again at Tony Veitch. That Laidlaw knew so little about the boy paradoxically made him more hurt. The fussiness of the others moving about the shabby room was mocked by that terrible immobility. The corpse compelled Laidlaw by its inaccessible nature, the way figures talking behind glass
can fascinate because they are unheard. He learned that incomprehensible image like a rune he must try to decipher. He stood staring at Tony Veitch, letting the haunting and mysterious stillness of that destroyed youth brand itself painfully on his mind.

 

 

 

 

29

T
he cottage was a very self-conscious act – rough white walls with horse tackle hanging from them and a Gudgeon sketch of the inevitable fighting cock. In Gudgeon's world did they ever just peck corn? The wooden furniture was rough enough not just to have been made by hand but possibly by foot. But Jan liked it.

She knew it was Tom and Molly's romantic sense of a country retreat, as relevant to the urban reality of their lives as a Christmas card is to Christmas. But liking them so much, she felt at home here. The place partook of their liberal niceness, meant no harm. Coming here any time she had days off from the Burleigh Hotel, she was grateful again that they gave her the run of the place. She must get them to meet Jack.

But, glancing at him, she wondered how the meeting would go. How badly he fitted in here wasn't a good omen. He was sprawled in front of the log fire, drinking what must have been at least his fifth whisky and reading a copy of
The Great Gatsby
he had picked up. His shoes were off. His shirt was open to the navel, showing the beginning of a paunch. His face was a small fury of concentration as he flicked back and forwards among the pages.

He belonged to the place the way a bird belongs to a roof, an accidental alighting, right at the time but incalculably brief. She wasn't at all sure that he would stay the night. He might get up at any time and go. He had done it before. At least, he had done before what made you know that what he was doing now you couldn't be sure.

He had no image of himself, she realised. That was why he was so out of place here. This was where Tom and Molly had very understandably built an alternative sense of themselves, like a cache of iron rations they could have recourse to if the going got too tough. But Jack had no such fortress. He often seemed still as raw as a cut umbilicus.

It worried her. She had known the way the car pulled up the kind of pressure he was under. Lately, she had seriously doubted how long he could go on. He was walking the edge of himself like a ledge. She remembered him once saying to her in bed, in that wild dispensation sometimes achieved there, ‘You know what I believe? There's no centre as such. The sum of the edges is the centre. You have to keep walking the edges.' But that was how you fell off. She sensed him teetering.

Tonight had been like a warning. He came in both bright and hurt. ‘How you doin', darlin'? Nice wee place ye've got. Phoo, I could sleep for a year.' He had taken to the whisky as if it was a swimming pool. His eyes had been like bruises, yet he wouldn't just present her with the pain. He had a meticulous sense of what he should cope with himself. She had felt the desperation in the lightness of his touch but had known he wouldn't come to her fully until he was sure he wasn't abusing her. He was determined to come as a gift, not an act of theft.

She thought, he's so complicated. And so was she. She thought of the tests, unconscious at the time, she had put him to. She had been harder on him than any Lady of Courtly Love, dropping her glove in the bear-pit and asking him to fetch it. She remembered how, meeting him at the beginning, she had been inviting him to pay for where she had been. She thought of the men she had known before, most of them leaving her wondering what past painful assignation with what forgotten bitch they were trying to memorialise on her. But that wasn't the way he worked.

It struck her like a secret that the essence of his nature was the desire to be kind. His anger came from the bafflement of that desire, because he hated to think that his kindness might be abused.

Another thing he had once said to her was, ‘Most people can't stand kindness. It compromises their sense of themselves. We all spend so much time working out how to be hard, we don't like the rules changed. Makes us feel guilty. As if kind people were cheating.'

She looked at him, assessing how he was now. His preoccupation was as complete as a child's. She tried to read again what he had given her. But it seemed so wild. Jack had tried to get her to read it soon after he came in. But she had managed to put it off by making him some chicken vols-au-vent. He had been insisting on making the food. Fortunately, she had dissuaded him. As a cook he belonged in the same league as the Borgias.

She finished reading it again and put it down. She took a sip of her glass of wine. She knew he was aware that she had finished reading. He looked at
The Great Gatsby
a little longer.