The Papers of Tony Veitch (6 page)

‘You're still using him?'

‘Never to stop,' Milligan said. ‘I've got his balls in a vice. He's mine. He's in with Hook Hawkins. I've told him he's got to come up with something about Paddy Collins. I'm sure he can. He better.'

‘Just watch he doesn't make it up.'

Milligan laughed.

‘Be like ordering his headstone. Nah. Macey's not that simple. He'll do me a wee turn. I'm seeing him tonight. Guess where?'

Harkness shrugged.

‘The Albany.'

‘The Albany? You're kidding. That's a helluva place to meet a tout.'

‘Isn't it?'

‘Like asking him to advertise.'

‘Isn't it? He was going to renege. Couldn't believe it. Shouting down the phone. But I made him agree. I'll bet he had to wade through his actual excrement to get out the phone-box.'

‘Why?'

‘I want him feeling vulnerable. As if he's left his cover in the house.' Milligan winked. ‘You in a hurry?'

‘Aye,' Harkness said. ‘Jack wants me to meet up with him early.'

‘You going to get these dishes? I'll get ready. I want to be busy-busy today. Listen. I'll be in the Admiral late this afternoon, if you've the time. We could have a jar. If your guts have recovered.'

When they went down into the street, Harkness looked up at a sky like a dustbin-lid. It fitted his hangover. He was wishing he could share Milligan's joviality, when a long-haired young man in jeans, looking back, bumped into Milligan. The young man looked at Milligan without apologising.

‘Fuck off before I step on you,' Milligan said and started laughing.

Harkness remembered something Laidlaw had said about Milligan's laughter – ‘It's the sound of bones breaking.'

He settled for his hangover.

 

 

 

 

8

I
n the bar of the Gay Laddie, John Rhodes' favourite pub in the Calton, the beginning – and some said the end – of the East End of Glasgow, there was what felt like a crowd. There was Macey and Dave McMaster and Hook Hawkins. The rest of them were John Rhodes.

In spite of his experience, Macey never failed to be awed by John. It was nothing specific. It wasn't his size, which was considerable. It wasn't just the crazy lightness of his eyes, blue as a brochure sea. There was no external you could finally attach the feeling to. Perhaps it had something to do with the sense of accumulated past violence John carried, bad places been to and come back from. The effect his presence had on Macey was of conveying danger, as if his life was a matter of juggling with liquid oxygen. And always the feeling found itself relegated to recurring mirage by his easy naturalness.

Looking at John now, pouring four mugs of tea from the pot that Dave had brewed in the back, Macey was freshly aware of the combustible contradictions that were John Rhodes. Their presence here was part of them. They were meeting in the pub because John would allow no intrusion from the violent ways he made his money to disturb the home where his wife
and two daughters might as well have had a bank-manager as the breadwinner.

The thought of that strangeness was echoed by the strangeness of the place. It was about half-past nine in the morning and, slanting down from the high windows that were slits of glass reinforced with mesh, the shafts of light were constellated with motes and gave the still, quiet pub an incongruous solemnity, like a chapel with a gantry. The ritual of the tea completed, the high priest spoke.

‘Hook,' he said. ‘Tell me the truth. You know whit Cam Colvin's on about?'

Hook Hawkins appealed to the bar. His upturned head moved as if deliberately displaying the scar that ran down his left cheek and under his chin. Some said his nickname came from that, because it had been given to him by a man with a hook for a hand. Others said the name belonged to his brief career as a boxer.

Remembering his meeting tonight with Ernie Milligan, Macey had more reason than his natural curiosity for paying careful attention. He knew that Hook and Paddy Collins had once had a fall-out but he had never heard why. He wondered if it had been about something which wasn't really over. But he found Hook's performance convincing.

‘Honest to God. Ah don't know whit it's all about, John. Ah don't know.'

‘Paddy Collins is dead,' John said. ‘You don't know anythin' about that?'

‘We were mates.'

‘Ye weren't always mates.'

‘That trouble was all finished, John.'

‘Maybe Cam doesny think so. This Sammy's a friend of yours, Macey?'

‘Aye. Well, an acquaintance, John. A harmless boay.'

John looked at Dave McMaster. Macey regretted his last remark. He had only meant to make it clear to John that he wouldn't have been responsible for introducing a trouble-maker to any of the pubs John looked after. But he realised that he had made Dave's position worse by implying he was letting innocent people get molested. He hoped Dave wouldn't hold it against him.

‘But he's fine,' Macey offered as emendation. ‘No damage done. Except that the jacket looks like a tie-dye job now.'

But in certain moods John was as easily amused as an old Glasgow Empire audience on a wet Tuesday. He was still looking at Dave. Being looked at in that way, Macey thought, would be like standing too near a furnace. You would want to back off.

‘What's Mickey Ballater doin' up here? Who needs to re-import sewage? An' Panda Paterson? Ah've done shites that could beat him.'

‘He wis no problem, John,' Dave said. ‘But Ah didny want tae get involved wi' Cam without your say-so. That's serious business. That wis all.'

John was staring at him.

‘Ah hope so,' he said. ‘Minding a place means lookin' after everybody. Let wan wanker toss off in yer face an' they'll be organisin' bus-trips. Bein' cheeky in the Crib could get tae be a fashion.'

He sipped his tea. He wasn't really deciding anything. He was letting it be decided for him. Deliberation wasn't his forte.
Anger was. Sitting there, he was coaxing it out of its kennel, presenting it with fragments of what had happened like giving it the scent of a quarry.

‘Open-plan pub?' he said. ‘Oh, ah doubt that won't do. We'll have tae see which way he wants it. If that's how he's goin' to be, we might have tae make his rib-cage open-plan. Ah'll punch holes in 'im big enough for birds tae nest in.'

He looked at Macey.

‘Fix it up.'

‘When, John?'

‘Right now.'

‘For here?'

‘Naw. Let him choose. It doesny matter where. But be right back. Ah want tae see him right away.'

Macey left the tea that he had hardly touched and went for the door.

‘Macey. Maybe ye'd better make it near a hospital.'

John Rhodes smiled, an event as cheerful as the winter solstice.

 

 

 

 

9

G
lasgow has them like every city, the urban bedouin. With the disorientation of the alcoholic and the down-and-out, they shift locations but their vagrancy has trade-routes. Places are in for a season and then get abandoned, like spas where the springs have dried.

Laidlaw knew Eck well enough to have a very rough chart of his preferences. There were brief spells – in the past few years infrequent – when he vanished into what some said was respectability, a proper house. Certainly, he usually re-emerged wearing a coat that looked less like a dump with buttons, but not for long.

Outside those times, he was roughly predictable. Even disintegration can be routine. Winters had been Talbot House or the Great Eastern Hotel, a name that sat on the Duke Street doss-house like a top-hat on a turd. In easier weather, he had favoured the East End around Glasgow Green and the decaying, still unredeveloped area south west of Gorbals Street.

Harkness had been worried about Laidlaw since they set out on foot from the office. He knew Laidlaw's belief in what he sometimes called ‘absorbing the streets', as if you could solve crime by osmosis. Apart from being of dubious
effectiveness, it was sore on the feet. Sometimes the preoccupied conversation that went with it wasn't a very soothing accompaniment, like watching a hamster desperately going nowhere in a revolving cage.

‘Paddy Collins mentioned on Eck's bit of paper. Paddy Collins dead. What connection could Eck have with Paddy Collins' death? Did Milligan tell you anything else?'

‘No. Just that.'

‘Did he say anybody had been at the Vicky when he was there?'

‘Paddy's wife. And I suppose Cam.'

They were passing a phone-box.

‘It's weird. Wait and I'll try that number again.'

They went into the box and Laidlaw dialled it from memory. Harkness could understand why. It was the fourth time Laidlaw had tried it since they had started walking. This time it answered at the twelfth ring. Laidlaw's eyes were like a small boy's at Christmas. He nodded Harkness in to share the ear-piece as he inserted the money.

‘Hullo,' Laidlaw said.

‘Hullo?' It was a woman's voice.

‘Hullo. Who's speaking, please?'

‘Hullo, hullo?' She sounded elderly.

‘Who's speaking, please?'

‘Hullo. This is Mrs Wotherspoon. Who are you, son?'

‘Excuse me,' Laidlaw said, winking at Harkness. ‘I just want to check I've got the right number. What address is that you're speaking from?'

‘Address? This is a public phone-box, son. I was just passin' there an' I heard it ringin'. I'm on ma way to the chiropodist's.
Ma feet are givin' me laldy. It takes me about ten minutes tae pass a phone-box the way Ah walk. That's probably why Ah heard ye.'

Harkness was wheezing silently, his face red with suppressed laughter, and winking elaborately back at Laidlaw. Laidlaw looked as if he'd been given a stockingful of ashes for his Christmas.

‘Where is the phone-box, love?' he asked.

‘It's one of the two boxes at the corner of Queen Margaret Drive and Wilton Street. What is it, son? Ye tryin' to make contact with somebody? Can Ah help ye?'

‘Look, love,' Laidlaw said. ‘I'm sorry I bothered you. It's a wrong number. Thanks for your help.'

‘Not at all.'

‘I hope you get the feet sorted out.'

‘So do Ah, son. So do Ah. Ah've got feet here like two Mother's Pride loafs. Ta, ta, son.'

‘Cheerio.'

As they walked on, Laidlaw accepted Harkness's mickeytaking. But it didn't prevent him from quickly resuming his preoccupation.

‘Well, it's something,' he said. ‘That's that dealt with. Paddy Collins is incommunicado. “The Crib” is too general to mean anything to us just now. That leaves the Pollokshields address and the mysterious Lynsey Farren. We'll see what they yield after we check this out.'

Laidlaw and Harkness stayed north of the river at first. They checked part of the Green roughly, coming out past the strange, ornate façade of Templeton's Carpet Factory.

‘Some smashing buildings in the city,' Harkness said. ‘But you never notice them.'

Laidlaw agreed.

‘This job gives you tunnel vision,' he said.

They wandered weirdly. Harkness began to worry even more about Laidlaw. There was a compulsion in the way Laidlaw kept walking. It was ruthless. He stopped strange people, described Eck to them and asked them if they had seen him lately. Harkness was beginning to get embarrassed.

This wasn't what they taught you in police college. This was as cute as walking naked down the street. And yet, in some odd way, it was working. Nobody got alarmed. Harkness reflected that in Glasgow openness is the only safe-conduct pass. Try to steal a march and they'll ambush you from every close. They hate to be had. Come on honestly and their tolerance can be great.

One man typified it. He was small, with a gammy leg. He was carrying what looked like a poke of rolls. When Laidlaw stopped him, he nodded with instant wisdom into his questions.

‘Christ, aye. Big Tammy Adamson's boay. No problem. Ah can tell ye exactly. When Big Tammy sellt the shoap in Govanhill, Alec went tae sea. The Merchant Navy. As far as Ah know, he's still there yet. A nice big boay. Aboot six-feet two.'

‘Naw,' Laidlaw said. ‘Not the same fella.'

‘Well. He sounds awfu' like 'im. Good luck, anyway. It's the only Eck Adamson Ah know.'

‘Thanks,' Laidlaw said.

‘For what? Ah've enjoyed the chance tae rest ma leg. Cheers, boays.'

In their travels, they found a few isolated groups of derelicts and talked to them. One group round a fire directed them to
the south side of the river. The information was probably as helpful as a wooden compass. But they had nothing else.

They crossed the river by the Suspension Bridge. Nothing happened for a time. But after a lot more walking, they saw five people behind the Caledonia Road Church. It was a striking moment. They were four men and a woman in a difficult conspiracy. One man had a bottle and a deep argument was going on. Plato never had it harder.

Against the backdrop of the church, they looked small and yet they put it in perspective. Burned in the sixties, the shell of the building remains a monument to nineteenth century confidence, an eroding certainty about what God's like. They bickered stridently in its shadow like a rival sect.

‘Hullo there,' Laidlaw said, and for Harkness the remark turned the day into another wavelength. Laidlaw's attempt at conversation with them was like trying to communicate with a ship sinking in mid-Atlantic when you're on the shore.

‘Furraff,' one of them said, a small man whose face dereliction had made a gargoyle. ‘Furraff, is oors.'

The woman giggled, an eerily coquettish sound that belonged behind a fan. She looked at the small man with roguish appreciation, as if he had just produced one of his better epigrams. The other three were still ignoring Laidlaw and Harkness.