The Papers of Tony Veitch

by William McIlvanney

  He could catch nothing else. It was like eavesdropping on a riot. Eck’s desperate distress intensified and the doctor stepped forward.

  ‘The gentleman can wait in my room,’ he said.

  A nurse led Laidlaw to the end of the ward and showed him into a small place partitioned off from the rest. There was just enough room to lie down in. Laidlaw sat on the single bed.

  He looked at the back of his envelope, the last will and testament of Eck Adamson. He remembered reading about a cleaner who had worked in a lawyer’s office. On her deathbed she had regurgitated swathes of legal Latin. Eck was getting close.

  It was maybe fitting that what looked like being Eck’s last piece of information should come across like Linear B. As a tout, he had never been too useful. But Laidlaw had always liked him and once, in the Bryson case, he had helped Laidlaw more than he could know.

  Things had gone quiet beyond the partition and the doctor appeared. He shook his head.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said with that formal timing a foreign language can give.

  Laidlaw put the envelope in his pocket.

  ‘He was your friend?’

  Laidlaw thought about it.

  ‘Maybe I was about as close as he got. What did he die of?’

  ‘I can’t tell at the moment. Who is he?’

  ‘Alexander Adamson. He was a vagrant. In the winter he slept in doss-houses. Summer, wherever he could. I don’t know of any relatives. What an epitaph.’

  Laidlaw remembered one night finding Eck sleeping across a pavement grille outside Central Station. He was using the heat that came up from the kitchen of the Central Hotel. These were the obsequies to that bleak life, a few sentences between strangers.

  ‘It wasn’t bad for him at the end,’ the doctor said. ‘He died quietly.’

  Laidlaw nodded. Like a leaf.

  ‘I want a fiscal post mortem.’

  ‘Of course. It is procedure.’

  ‘Today? I would like it today.’

  ‘We shall have to see.’

  ‘Yes. We will.’

  On his way out to the car, Laidlaw looked in at casualty again. The boy with the bloodstained jacket was gone. A nurse showed him Eck’s things in a brown envelope: an empty tin with traces of shag, a stopped watch, seven single pounds and a grubby piece of paper. Unfolding the paper, Laidlaw read a handwritten statement in biro.

  The Puritan Fallacy is that there can be virtue by default. You do the right thing because you don’t know any worse. That is society’s Woolworth substitute for morality. True morality begins in choice: the greater the choice, the greater the morality. Only those can be truly good who have prospected their capacity for evil. Idealism is the censorship of reality.

  Ranged neatly beneath that statement were an address in Pollokshields, the names Lynsey Farren and Paddy Collins, the words ‘The Crib’ and the number 9464946 in black biro.

  Laidlaw’s first responses were practical. He noted that the handwriting was the same throughout and then that the written paragraph was in blue ink. It suggested to him that the bit of hand-woven philosophy had just happened to be on the piece of paper when the same person had added the other information. For the use of Eck?

  Certainly the first part had surely not been meant for Eck. Beyond perhaps an instinctively Pascalian response to the two-thirty, Eck had never evinced any interest in philosophy. But neither did the addresses seem to fit. Pollokshields, where the money grows, was hardly Eck’s territory. The number was meaningless to Laidlaw. Only ‘The Crib’ made any kind of sense.

  Then, like humanity supplanting professionalism, a slight chill came over Laidlaw as he held the piece of paper. Trying to locate where the feeling came from, he read over the paragraph again. Perhaps it was just that he sensed a dangerously distorted version of that Calvinist self-righteousness that forms like an icicle in the hearts of a lot of Scots. He wondered who had given Eck this strange message.

  Looking up, he had his gloom partly dissipated by the pleasant round face of the nurse, who was preoccupied in doing practical things. She reminded him he’d better do the same.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I need this. You want me to sign for it?’

  5

  Licensing laws can be fun. Without them, the arcane joy of after hours’ drinking would never have been known – that sense of membership of a very temporary club. There is a Yukon cabin romanticism to it, while real time slobbers like a toothless wolf at the locked door.

  It was that kind of atmosphere in the Crib, a strangely named pub not really suitable for children, where on a good night Behemoth would have been no better than even money.

  It was half-past midnight. Outside, the streets of the Saracen, a tough district north of the city centre, were quiet. Inside, five people had formed an impromptu pentagram and summoned forth an instant celebration of themselves.

  One of them was the regular barman, Charlie, who had moved here from a pub in the Calton. He was in his fifties and wise beyond his years. Although he had spent most of his life among violent men, his bulky body’s hardest fights had been with beer barrels.

  The secret of his unmarked face’s longevity was a delicate sense of hierarchy. Like a Glasgow Debrett, he knew the precise mode of address for any situation. There was the further safeguard of working for a man whose name could be worn like a livery made of armour. Being associated with John Rhodes of the Calton was a bit like having Securicor as a taxi-service.

  It was an advantage Charlie never abused. Even now, in the security of the locked pub, he measured his participation carefully, knowing how enjoyment leaves you open. He had drunk a couple of moderate whiskies and joined quietly in the chorus of one of the songs.

  It wasn’t that he knew his place so much as he knew where it wasn’t, which was hospital. This was Dave McMaster’s event. Charlie was content to listen to yet another of Dave’s stories.

  ‘So they’re along at the Barras, right? One of them’s dressed up as Santa Claus. A hundred-weight of cotton wool an’ Army surplus wellies. The ither yin’s got the toays, things like dinky cars an’ half-chewed bubblegum. Santa lures them in an’ his hander takes the money. All day they’re at it, an’ all the time they’re nippin’ intae the pub tae get mair central heating. Well. By about shuttin’ time they’re in again. Divvyin’ up. Only the helper’s doin’ a two-tae-me, wan-tae-you job on Santa. Santa gets slightly annoyed. Wallop! Can ye imagine it? A present from S. Claus. Then he’s tattooing his ribs wi’ the wellies. Swearin’ enough to set his beard on fire. Funniest bit wis when the bouncer threw him out. Santa’s lyin’ on the pavement an’ the bouncer’s shouting, “Ye’re barred, Santa! Ye’re barred.” The barring of Santa Claus.’

  Charlie shared the laughter but not the abandonment that went with it in the others. Charlie wasn’t just participating in the evening, he was understanding it. The other three were paying court to Dave.

  The girl was his. Every time he talked, her eyes ate him whole. She laughed at his jokes as if laughing was a contest. With her polite accent, her fancy clothes and her blonde sophistication, she belonged in the Crib like a virgin in a brothel. But then there had to be more to her than first impressions suggested. She had been around Dave for a month now. Whatever was turning her on to him, it couldn’t be his suave manners.

  Dave McMaster was a new version of an old type. Charlie had seen it many times, the tearaway with ambitions to have a reputation that went further than his friends, to promote violence from a hobby to a career.

  In a fight between two young rival Possil teams one night, Dave had gone berserk with a bayonet, scattering more than six of them. Charlie could imagine how he must have wakened up next morning to a reputation as demanding as a heroin-addiction. He had progressed from there but Charlie still had his doubts about him. Dave had come on fast. He was now right-hand man to Hook Hawkins, who among other things minded four pubs roughly in the Saracen area for John Rhodes, including the Crib. Dave was ambitious. What Charlie wonde
red was whether his ambition wasn’t too heavy for him.

  None of the others seemed to be sharing Charlie’s doubts. They were as critical as a fan-club. Besides the girl, there was Macey, a small-time break-in man, and a boy called Sammy that Charlie didn’t know. Probably Macey was trying to get his reputation to go further than it could on its own by giving it a tow from Dave’s.

  Sammy was a tourist, somebody Macey had introduced. He looked like a cousin from the country. His eyes were shining with appreciation of Dave’s toughness. He was probably the kind of gruesome simpleton who would have bought a ticket for a road accident. He desperately wanted to be one of them but he couldn’t help himself. He was so square you could have laid him out and used him for a table.

  He had tried to tell a funny story and it came out roughly like someone describing a golf-ball hollow by hollow. But he could sing, a light, sweet voice that didn’t deserve him. It had occurred to Charlie that Sammy should have stayed home in bed and just sent tapes.

  ‘It’s true,’ Dave was saying. ‘When they went to see him, he had a turning-lathe in the bedroom. Didny even know what it was for. Just stole it in case it might be valuable. First time he knew whit it was was when he heard the charge.’

  Their laughter didn’t measure the funniness of what was being said, just the authority with which Dave had said it. He had a confidence which could make an atmosphere where anything he said grew funny, although transplanted into a retelling it might wither into nothing. They were still laughing when the knock came at the street door.

  Dave made a face into the pause.

  ‘Check it, Charlie,’ he said. ‘Unless it’s somebody special, they’re bombed out.’

  Charlie went through and opened the door, keeping it on the chain.

  Through the gap, he saw Cam Colvin. There were two people behind him but Charlie couldn’t see who they were. He didn’t have to. Cam Colvin was enough. Charlie wished John Rhodes were here.

  ‘Mr Colvin. Can ah help ye?’

  ‘You can help yourself by opening the door. Unless you want your pub to be open-plan.’

  Charlie knew his duties, and they didn’t include standing up to Cam Colvin. Dave had said only to let him in if it was somebody special. Cam qualified. Charlie slid the chain.

  Behind Cam, Mickey Ballater and Panda Paterson came in. Mickey had been out of Glasgow for a while, was less well known than he had been, but Charlie had a long memory. Panda was named after his deceptively comforting appearance, a hulking heaviness topped by a roundly innocent face. He might be a teddy-bear but the claws were real.

  Charlie’s face showed none of his surprise at their presence. Neither of them was a Colvin man. Charlie, aware of the imminence of Paddy Collins’ death, could only suppose that they had turned up at the Vicky to prove their goodwill to Cam, like a retrospective alibi. But surely Ballater didn’t come up from England just to do that. Both of them had known Paddy Collins but that didn’t explain why they were here. Charlie didn’t like it. He had a fairly precise knowledge of which people belonged with which and strange groupings always upset him. They usually meant trouble. He locked the door and followed them through and went behind the bar.

  Cam Colvin stopped a little way from where the others were sitting. They saw a medium-sized man in a Crombie coat. All his clothes looked expensive but just a bit behind current fashions, as if he had been reading The Tailor and Cutter in a dentist’s waiting-room. His hair was slightly long but carefully cut. Charlie wondered if they knew what they were looking at.

  In the shifting league-table of professional Glaswegian hard men, established informally by those who know, in pub conversations and awesome anecdotes, Cam Colvin was currently at the top. The qualities most commonly cited as justifying his place there, like goals for and goals against, were his extreme viciousness and his absolute caution. He had a name for acting with brutal exactitude, like a paranoid computer.

  For him to threaten his way into a pub minded by John Rhodes didn’t indicate carelessness. It meant there was something very serious on his mind.

  ‘Cam,’ Dave said. ‘Charlie, get the man a drink. What’s it to be?’

  Charlie didn’t move. He knew who was giving the orders.

  ‘I’m looking for Hook.’

  ‘He’s not in the night, Cam. What’s it about?’

  ‘I didn’t say I was looking for you. I’ll explain it to him. Where is he?’

  The voice was light and flat and it made the talking clock sound effusive.

  ‘Not a clue,’ Dave said. ‘Ah don’t think he’s at home the night. Can ah give him a message?’

  Cam walked past Dave through to the other room. He came back into the doorway.

  ‘Put on the lights,’ he said to Charlie.

  Charlie did. While Cam was gone, Panda Paterson was studying the girl as if she was on the menu.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked her.

  ‘None of yer business,’ Sammy said.

  The sound of his voice shocked even him. It had happened by a kind of spontaneous combustion, an accident of the atmosphere. He had become so involved in his awareness of this place, which he had heard of, in the presence of Dave and the others that he had spoken somehow from his sense of them rather than himself. He was left looking round glumly as if trying to find whose voice had come out of his mouth. Panda was studying him like a culture.

  ‘Her name’s Lynsey,’ Dave said. ‘An’ she’s mine.’

  Panda looked at him.

  ‘Ye’re goin’ wi’ a male chauvinist pig, hen,’ he said. ‘You’re Dave McMaster.’

  ‘Ah know who ah am. Who are you?’

  Dave’s brash ignorance was one of the things about him that worried Charlie. Some day he was going to drown himself playing at Canutes.

  ‘Ah’ll have a pint of heavy,’ Panda said.

  Charlie was filling it out as Cam Colvin came back through. His face showed nothing. He looked at Dave.

  ‘Tell Hook I want to see ’im,’ he said. ‘Macey. You can bring me word. Where and when. But don’t be slow. Tell Hook that.’

  Panda Paterson took his pint from the bar. He crossed as if to join the others and began to pour the pint very carefully over Sammy’s head. Charlie suspected Panda was staging an exhibition for Cam’s benefit. Mickey Ballater’s face was impenetrable.

  It was a long, long time happening. It was an act of astonishing cruelty, far more sadistic than striking him would have been. The slower that gentle decanting was, the more fully it demonstrated Sammy’s abjectness. The others watched him pass from shock to a strangled anger to a smothered attempt to get up, to a terrible understanding of himself. He closed his eyes and became as still as a corpse. By the time Panda Paterson almost solicitously shook out the last dregs, Sammy’s shame was in poster colours. The others could hardly bear to look. Panda laid the glass gently on the table, as empty as Sammy’s sense of himself.

  Cam Colvin had been looking on disinterestedly, seemingly preoccupied with something else.

  ‘Tell Hook,’ he said and went out, followed by the other two.

  Dave didn’t let the silence settle.

  ‘Get him a cloth!’ he said contemptuously.

  It wasn’t clear where the contempt was aimed. While nobody else moved, Charlie brought a dishcloth and wiped Sammy the way a mother would.

  ‘Tae hell wi’ it, son,’ Charlie said. ‘Nothin’ wis the right thing to do. Ah would’ve done the same maself. That wis a catchweights contest. You could never be as big a bastard as he could. That’s pure bastard. When he wis wee, he wis showin’ old women half-way across the road. Leave it to John.’

  The humanity of Charlie’s voice began to thaw the room. The girl said, ‘Phoo.’ Macey touched Sammy on the shoulder.

  ‘Forget it, kid,’ he said, which was like throwing a strip of Elastoplast to a napalm victim. ‘So what was that about?’

  ‘Trouble,’ Dave McMaster said. ‘For somebody.’

  6

 
Ena had an old script ready for him getting back. It was the one where she was Rome and he was Attila the Hun. His share of the lasagna lay vandalised with absence, congealed in its own grease. The guests were gone, Ena hinting at a flowering of deep communication he had missed. With his last look at Eck’s dead face still fresh in his mind, he had trouble remembering his lines.

  She said the bit about his social poise. This time he was as suave as King Kong. She was so genteel she should be sewn on to a sampler. He was a monument to selfishness. Faced with concern like hers, everybody could die of frostbite. He had certainly done his utmost to make Donald and Ria hate him. With enemies like them, who needed friends?

  The vaudeville of mechanical insult over, Ena went to bed and Laidlaw half-filled a glass with Antiquary and topped it up with water. He went to the phone, hoping he would be lucky enough to get somebody he knew and got on with – not the easiest trick, he thought ruefully. He was lucky. The Duty Fiscal was Robbie Evans.

  ‘Yes, Jack. What news from the front?’

  Laidlaw told him about Eck.

  ‘You suspect more than natural causes?’

  ‘It just seems possible.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Poison?’

  ‘How could you tell? Isn’t that what he’s been doing to himself for years?’

  ‘Just as long as he did it to himself. There’ll be a fiscal p.m. anyway. I would just like to make sure it happens as soon as possible. Like this morning. He looked as if he might have been a fair time dying. If somebody did do him, any clues are going to be cold. I’d like to try for them before they get deep-frozen.’

  ‘We’ll see to that. Ruined your night, did it?’

  ‘Aye. It didn’t help Eck’s a lot either.’

  ‘You can phone for word tomorrow, Jack.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  He sipped some of his Antiquary and went up to check the children. After he had seen bad things, that was a compulsion with him. He remembered an occasion years ago when he was still in uniform, not in Glasgow, and he had been the one to arrive first at the scene of a murder. The victim was a homosexual who had been tortured by two young men he had picked up in a lavatory and taken to his flat. One of the young men was an apprentice butcher and for a finale, after the homosexual was strangled, he had cut him from groin to breast-bone and gutted him like a chicken. The butcher had said later, ‘He wisny normal.’