The Papers of Tony Veitch (24 page)

‘Oh, Jack,' Bob said. ‘Let's talk about the weather. You know they're going to alter this place? Call it “the Opera Bar”. You know, since the Scottish Opera took it over. How about that for a bit of fascinating chat?'

‘No, Bob. You're wrong. I don't grudge Ernie Milligan the case. So long as he got it right. But he didn't. What seems to have happened isn't what actually happened.'

Bob watered his whisky, sampled it and spoke to Laidlaw with an elaborate patience that suggested he was just keeping him humoured until the strait-jacket arrived.

‘Is that right, Jack? How do you make that out?'

‘Nothing he wrote suggests a murderer.'

‘Oh, Jack. Did Christie advertise? What do you want them to do? Leave signatures?'

‘On the bottle that killed Eck,' Laidlaw said. ‘Two sets of fingerprints. One of them's Eck's. The other lot don't belong to Tony Veitch.'

Bob was momentarily interested.

‘You've checked that off?'

Laidlaw nodded.

‘He gave a mate a drink,' Bob said. ‘Didn't he? They're sharers, winos. Who wants his liver to die alone?'

‘They said he didn't share. You remember that, Brian?'

‘Aye, that's right,' Harkness said.

‘That's what some of them said,' Bob said. ‘So maybe he had a special friend. Or somebody made a grab for the bottle. Thinner than a witch's tit, Jack. To establish the value of that, you'd have to fingerprint every rummy in Glasgow.'

‘Oh, I think we could make a shorter leet than that. And what actually ties Tony Veitch to the killings?'

‘Only the knife that did Paddy Collins and a tin of paraquat.'

‘There were no prints on the paraquat tin.'

‘So he wiped them off.'

‘And kept the tin in his flat. What sense does that make?'

‘Enough.'

‘No. Not quite enough.'

‘His prints were on the knife all right.'

‘They could have been put there easily enough. Only
his
prints were found in the flat. But there were plenty of smudges consistent with the wearing of gloves.'

‘Pimples, Jack. They don't alter the essential features of the case.' Bob smiled, as if he had suddenly remembered how much he liked Laidlaw. ‘Tell us, O wise one, what really happened. Eh?'

Laidlaw neutralised the facetiousness by taking the question seriously.

‘It's what didn't happen I think we should start from. Tony Veitch didn't commit suicide. At least, I don't think he did. He was manic to talk to the world. Suicide tends to amputate your larynx. I know how thin that is, Bob. I've done this job long enough to know the kind of somersaults the head can take. I know we often express our most intense feelings by
doing the opposite. The more desperate the talker, the more effectively he defines his own silence. The bit he knows he'll never be able to say. So maybe Tony Veitch went in the huff with the world. Because it wouldn't listen. Or killed himself just because of the distance between his ideals and the things he'd done. If he'd done them. It could've been like that. But I don't think so. I think somebody did him and set it up to look like suicide. And I think I know who did it. But I don't expect anybody else to agree with me.'

‘That's a relief,' Harkness said. ‘Who, though?'

‘Unfair to say. But I'm going to do a bit of scuffling myself today, Brian. Nothing too official, like.'

‘Jack. I'll come with you.'

‘No. I think I'm going to need you later on. If I get what I'm looking for. And I'll be in touch. But I'm going to hassle a few people first. And you shouldn't be involved in that.'

Bob was staring at Laidlaw.

‘Jack,' he said. ‘Maybe you shouldn't have gone on to the hard stuff. You seem to get pissed very quick. Maybe you're not used to it now.'

Laidlaw smiled and drank the whisky.

‘You going to get me another one?' he said to Bob,

‘I'll do that,' Harknes said and winked at Bob as he left.

‘Not for me, Brian,' Bob said. ‘They must be spiking it. Come on, you,' to Laidlaw. ‘You've been a mug. But you're trying to graduate to being a loony too quick. What's this you're talking about?'

‘It's what I'm going to do.'

‘Who you going to see?'

‘Some people.'

‘Stick the mystery up your arse, Jack. Tell me what you're going to do. I may have to go bail.'

‘Forget it. I'll stand by anything I do.'

‘Listen, bloody Robin Hood. You've got a career. If you do this, tomorrow you may not have.'

‘Naw. You listen. I've got a life. That's more than any career. And I wouldn't be able to spend it sitting beside myself if I let this pass. And this case isn't right. Some bastard's put it together like a Meccano-set. And I'm going to take it apart. Three people are dead. And their bodies are buried in lies. Not on! Not for me it's not. That's why I'm here, supposed to be. To arrive at whatever half-arsed version of the truth's available. And that's what I'm going to do. If I have to break in doors to do it.'

Harkness was back at the table. Laidlaw stood up, watered his drink and downed it.

‘Thanks, Brian. I'll be in touch.'

‘Jack,' Bob said. ‘Don't work so hard at getting it wrong. You'll get it wrong anyway. Everybody does.'

Laidlaw went out. Harkness sat down. Bob was staring blankly round the room. Harkness lowered his head, put his hand on his brow and studied the pattern of beads on the surface of his lager.

‘You think we should take up a collection for his widow?' he muttered.

‘I've worked out the way to beat Jack with words,' Bob said. Harkness looked at him.

‘Batter him unconscious with a copy of the Oxford Dictionary.'

 

 

 

 

31

G
us Hawkins was alone in his flat. He admitted Laidlaw to an atmosphere he remembered from his own brief time as a student. There was an old armchair near the window, with several books lying round it and on the arm an open paperback of
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
with heavy underlinings in biro. There was a can of export on the floor beside the chair. Sunlight shone on the open pages of the book, seeming to hackle that delicate fur the surface of cheap paper has.

It was a still life of studenthood, evocative of long hours spent alone, intense head-wrestling matches with the dead, endless arguments on which the world depended, cups of coffee at strange hours, time contracted to a pellet and dissolved to disappearance. Laidlaw remembered his own discovery that his mind was there and knew the poignancy of possibilities felt in this kind of book-lined womb before career or circumstances yank you out. The awareness made his impulsiveness pause, but only briefly.

‘You don't have a job in the summer?' Laidlaw asked.

‘I've managed to get part-time in a pub. You want a can of beer?'

Laidlaw did. Gus fetched him a can. Sitting back down to sip
his own beer, Gus waited. His eyes had lost their abstractedness of when he answered the door. His recovery from that state made it occur to him to explain it.

‘I didn't know who you were at first there. If something happens when I'm working, takes me a week to focus. I'm only even money to remember my name.'

‘I know what you mean.'

Laidlaw pulled the tag on his can and it made a small geyser of escaping gas.

‘I didn't know the polis drank on duty.'

That inflection of aggressiveness in his voice towards the police, something Laidlaw sometimes felt must be taught in the West of Scotland along with ‘choo-choo', disturbed the idle pleasure of the moment. Laidlaw's mind put on its working clothes. He took a drink.

‘Who's on duty?' Laidlaw said. ‘This is a discourtesy call. You've heard about Tony Veitch?'

Gus nodded.

‘We found his papers, by the way. Burnt to ash in a lavatory pan. Those papers interest me. He writes to his father, Lynsey Farren, you. But none of you keeps the letter. He writes reams of other stuff. It's all destroyed. Why is that? It's almost as if he was trying to say what nobody wanted to hear. What was it, I wonder?'

‘A lot of things, I suppose.'

‘You've read some of them, have you?'

‘Some.'

‘I mean, what were they about?'

‘Just trying to understand things, I think. Anyway, surely Tony destroyed them himself.'

‘You think so?'

‘What else could it be?'

Laidlaw took a drink and seemed nonplussed.

‘Anyway, he's dead,' Laidlaw said. ‘How does that strike you?'

‘As a fact.'

‘That's all?'

‘That's not enough? I mean, I can think of a couple of other people I wouldn't mind volunteering to take his place. But they probably wouldn't agree. So there we are.'

‘I thought you liked him.'

‘I did. But now he's dead.'

‘God preserve me from you as a friend.'

‘Your wish is granted.'

Laidlaw looked at him – so sure, so young. Laidlaw himself seemed to know less every day. If it kept on this way, he would die in the foetal position with his thumb in his mouth, but probably still looking apprehensively around him, his wonderment as strong as it was now.

‘How do you do that?' he said. ‘Be so unconcerned. So bloody unsad.'

‘There are bigger sadnesses about.'

‘Like what? You mean the Third World and capitalist oppression and that?'

‘Something like that.'

‘But pity for one precludes pity for the other, does it? What if I tell you I reckon Tony was murdered?'

Gus Hawkins looked at the open pages of Freud as if consulting his notes, glanced at the window, stared back at Laidlaw. A lot was happening behind his eyes but none of it was for release.

‘You think that?' he asked.

‘I feel sure he was. If he was, can you think of any contenders?'

Gus shook his head immediately.

‘Jesus Christ,' Laidlaw said. He was holding his beercan so tightly it buckled a bit and sent a small splash of beer on to the frayed carpet. He wiped it with a handkerchief as he went on. ‘You're a cracker. Brain of Britain. You answer a question like that off the top of your head. It's like talking to a computer. Or a balloon. And I think you're a balloon.'

Gus's shoulders went rigid under the sweater.

‘If you've finished your beer, I think you'd better go. In fact, whether you've finished or not. Don't sit and drink my beer and insult me.'

Laidlaw smiled at him slowly.

‘It didn't take long for the cosmic objectivity to turn personal,' he said. ‘A wee bit of the embourgeoisement there, Gus, eh? Fair enough. I've had enough spunk in my eye for one day, anyway.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘I mean you're a wanker. I noticed it quick. You offer a man a drink and then, before he can get it to his mouth, you dig him up about drinking on duty. What's that about?' Knowing he had put himself on his way out, Laidlaw saw no point in going quietly. ‘But a lot more than that. Tony's supposed to have destroyed his papers. That doesn't give you a tremor. Do you think that's likely? Did you know him? I never met him and I know that's hardly on the cards for him to do. You better lay into old Sigmund there. You're not exactly a great reader of the human heart. I doubt Tony wasn't either. He could've
got better friends in a lucky bag. Look at the people near him. You and Lynsey Farren. And his father. But at least those other two practise an honest selfishness. You've got to dress it up in a lot of sanctimonious theories. Why not admit it? You just don't give a shit. I've seen more compassion in a fucking wolverine. How do you manage to make love to your girlfriend, Gus? You put it together like an identikit from what you read in books? Do you? Because there can't be anything in the middle of you but theory.'

Gus looked at him steadily. The word he said was a small one but it seemed to grow as slowly as a glacier and, spoken, it filled the room with chill.

‘Cheerio.'

‘Oh, don't worry about it. I fancy doing something jollier. Like kissing lepers. Most of that beer's still there, by the way. You could maybe send it to the Third World.'

Laidlaw stood up. The rage he felt frightened him. His hatred for the prevarications people practised was hardly containable. He knew the sensible way to live was to leave this alone. But he couldn't leave it alone. He believed three people had been murdered. And nobody seriously cared who did it. It wouldn't do.

‘Your kind of intellectual sickens me,' he said, and had no idea what else to say.

He stood looking at the wall. Like a stag at bay, he was who he was, he was what he was, and nothing else. He saw no hope of proving what he suspected. He had half a vision and nobody else would begin to admit the possibility of the other half. He knew they were lying. It was all he knew. For the moment, it was all he cared about.

‘I know you,' he said. ‘Where you are. You're protecting your brother. And your friend can go die as he likes. It's not your business. But it is. It's everybody's business. There's no other business we
have
. How each of us dies matters. Eck Adamson is dead. I'll bury him proper. You better believe it. You'll help me or you won't. But I'll bury him proper. I mean, in my mind. He'll have a proper funeral in meaning. Or I'll cause so much trouble even I won't believe it. I don't want your brother, Gus Hawkins. Unless he did it, I don't want him. But I'll understand what happened. Yes, I will. You better believe it.'

Laidlaw himself couldn't see how until Gus Hawkins rose and put on a parka. He looked round the room, then at Laidlaw. It was a strange moment. Laidlaw felt that at last someone had heard not just the words of his anger but the pain behind them and was admitting that he shared it. They were in contact with each other.