The Papers of Tony Veitch

by William McIlvanney

  ‘They should be used to him by now.’

  ‘Who gets used to Jack? You know what I mean. I like the man. I just wish somebody would give him a lorry-load of Valium for his Christmas.’

  Laidlaw brought Harkness’s lager and a whisky for Bob and sipped his lime-juice and soda. Bob decided to help Harkness.

  ‘Eck was murdered?’ Bob asked.

  Laidlaw nodded.

  ‘Pulmonary fibrosis. Suspected paraquat poisoning.’

  ‘Paraquat? Come on,’ Bob said. ‘If it’s paraquat, what makes you think it was murder? Eck had a thirst that wouldn’t have stopped at horse’s piss. As discriminating as a public lavvy. He would find it and drink it. That’s all. How can you say it was murder?’

  ‘It was something he said.’

  ‘Jack! You knew Eck. He made Pat the Liar sound like George Washington. You’re not serious. You can’t put any weight on that.’

  ‘I think I can. He said something about “the wine he gave me wisny wine”. I think somebody gave him a bad present.’

  ‘How do they know?’ Bob asked. ‘Did they find paraquat in him?’

  ‘No. It would’ve worked itself out by then, I suppose. I think he’d had it for a wee while. But it causes what they call proliferative changes.’

  ‘What is that?’ Harkness said.

  ‘I’m not sure. I think it means that even after the stuff’s gone, the damage caused goes on multiplying itself. I suppose it’s the exact nature of the damage that suggests paraquat. Not a nice way to go.’

  ‘You saw him?’

  Laidlaw nodded.

  ‘All right, Jack,’ Bob said. ‘So he had a bad time. You’re sorry, but sorriness is no kind of substitute for common sense. Get a grip, will you? Learn to settle for doing the things you can do.’

  ‘Right Bob,’ Laidlaw said. ‘I think I’ve had enough of the Police College notes from Brian already. You think I don’t know? If you want to commit the perfect crime, just a crime for the sake of a crime. What do you do? Wipe out a wino. Right? For two reasons: who cares? Indifference coming at you like a river. And you trying to swim up it. Second: to solve a crime, you check with neighbours, family, friends. Who’s a wino’s friend? Another wino. Like cross-examining an answering service. Neighbours? Pigeons. Family? If they’re not in the Eastern Necropolis, they’re keeping quiet enough to be there. You can depend on it. What was the sequence of events? Who the hell knows? As predictable as a pin-ball. And there’s always the feeling that it might just have been a fun crime. A fly-swatting job. It’s as if you’re jay-walking in Hope Street. In the middle of the road you find a fly with its wings torn off. You’re going to track down the culprit? I know, Bob. I know.’

  ‘Then why the hell don’t you accept it?’

  ‘Why the hell do you? I don’t know what you feel about this job. But it fits me as comfortably as a hair-shirt. All right, I do it. Because sometimes I get to feel it matters very much. But not if I’m just a glorified street-sweeper. Filling up Barlinnie like a dustbin. There have to be some times when you don’t just collect the social taxes. You arrange a rebate. If all I’m doing is holding the establishment’s lid on for it, then stuff it. I resign. But I think there can be more to it. One of the things I’m in this job to do is learn. Not just how to catch criminals but who they really are, and maybe why. I’m not some guard-dog. Trained to answer whistles. Chase whoever I’m sent after. I’m not just suspicious of the people I’m chasing. I’m suspicious of the people I’m chasing them for. I mean to stay that way.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So Wee Eck. If the law works for them, it should work for him. If he’d died in a penthouse, let’s hear you say the same. You know the life he had. Its patron saint was Torquemada. So the least he deserves is that we should care about his death enough to understand it. Like laying a wee plastic wreath on his grave. Grave? He won’t even have one. His body goes to the Anatomy Department at Glasgow University. I remember Eck telling me years ago he’d tried to sell his body to them for a fiver. Didn’t know that when you’re dead, your body belongs to your next of kin. So they get it free. He even lost out on that one.’

  ‘When did you join the vigilantes, Jack?’

  ‘Never. I’m not witch-hunting whoever did it. I just think some understanding is owed. The only healthy climate is the truth.’

  Harkness said, ‘So how do we get there, great white hunter?’ Laidlaw laughed.

  ‘Don’t ask awkward questions.’

  Bob said, ‘You could advertise: confessions wanted. I’d say it’s your only chance.’

  ‘I’d like to do something more practical,’ Laidlaw said.

  The attractive young waitress came up and took Laidlaw’s empty glass. She had long, straight black hair and the kind of eyes that always seem to see something just past your face, maybe the dandruff on your jacket. They were dark eyes that assumed your interest, letting you get on with staring at her if you must. She hovered – waiting to take an order or be discovered?

  ‘No thanks, love,’ Laidlaw said.

  The other two agreed. The waitress went away. There was a television personality being a television personality at a nearby table. The accompanying group were demonstrating the spontaneity of a studio audience.

  ‘Another lime-juice and soda,’ Laidlaw said, ‘and I’ll want to audition upstairs. There’s only so much of those the human head can stand. Anyway, we’ve got another call to make.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ Harkness said. ‘I was beginning to think your idea was to talk a solution to Eck’s death.’

  ‘We’ll grab something to eat and go out to Pollokshields.’

  ‘Jack,’ Bob said. ‘Take it easy.’

  ‘Ignore him,’ Laidlaw said. ‘He hangs about here a lot. I’ll tell the manager.’

  Bob came out with them. The waitress said cheerio almost to them. Outside, Glagow had had a change of mood. It still wasn’t warm but the sky had cleared. Harkness, his hangover gone, had that feeling that weather is subjective. Bob said he was going to the office, ‘Back to sanity.’

  Before they went over to Stewart Street for a car, Laidlaw hovered about the entrance to the Theatre Royal, looking at the billings.

  ‘Life should be more like the opera,’ Laidlaw said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You never die without a detailed explanation. If Wee Eck could’ve sung an aria in the Royal, we’d have no problem.’

  They were walking up to cross Cowcaddens Road. Harkness, momentarily dazzled by the brightness of the day, thought about it.

  ‘I was gee-ven the par-aaa-quat,’ he sang, ‘by Hec-tor McGob-leee-gin.’

  ‘Still,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Maybe it’s just as well he couldn’t.’

  11

  They had settled for the function suite of the Coronach Hotel. Just beyond the south-eastern edge of Glasgow, at one of the points where the city suffers natural erosion from the countryside, the hotel seemed well enough named. A coronach is a dirge.

  It belonged properly to the time before the Clayson Report relaxed the drinking laws, when only hotels had a seven-day licence and Sunday drinking was for what the law called bona fide travellers. Like a village pump in a place where the plumbing has been modernised, it stood as a slightly tatty monument to the old Scottish Sabbath, that interesting anomaly whereby the Kirk’s insistence on the observance of the Lord’s day of rest resulted in a country busy with Scotsmen transporting a thirst as heavy as luggage from one place to another.

  The Coronach was still a drinking hotel, but quieter, especially on Sundays. To ask for a room there was as naive as expecting to meet Calpurnia in ‘Caesar’s Palace’. The only acknowledgement that hospitality could go beyond the dispensing of drink was the function suite.

  It was called the Rob Roy Room, which meant that the carpet was MacGregor tartan and there were a couple of targes on the walls, framed in crossed claymores. Today its occupants were outlaws unromanticised by time.

  When Macey ushered in John Rho
des, Hook Hawkins and Dave McMaster, Cam Colvin was already installed. Two of the small tables had been placed together with chairs around. Cam sat at the head of one of the tables, sedate as a committee-man.

  John Rhodes and he were a conjunction of contrasting styles, like a meeting between shop-floor and management. Cam was conservative in a dark-striped suit and black shoes as shiny as dancing-pumps. The shirt was demurely striped and the tie was navy. John looked as if his tailor might be Oxfam. The light-brown suit was rumpled, the shirt was open-necked. He was wearing a purple cardigan.

  Cam registered nothing when John Rhodes came in. But the fuse was already lit in John’s blue eyes. Cam and he nodded at each other. Cam indicated the man who was sitting on his right.

  ‘This is Dan Tomlinson,’ he said. ‘He’s the manager.’

  Dan Tomlinson was a thin man in his fifties. He looked worried, as if he couldn’t remember whether his hotel insurance was up to date. Mickey Ballater was standing nearby and nodded. The only other man in the room, who had been trying to stare down the one-armed bandit beside the small bar, ambled across to join them.

  ‘Oh,’ John Rhodes said. ‘And Panda Paterson.’

  ‘Correct, John. Your memory’s good,’ Panda said.

  He extended his hand to shake and John Rhodes punched him in the mouth. It was a short punch, very quick and very measured, costing John nothing, the punch of a man in training, emerging from reflexes so honed they seemed to contain a homing device. It was only after it had landed you realised it had been thrown. It imparted awe to some of the others, as if thought was fait accompli.

  The effect was reminiscent of the moment in a Hollywood musical when the mundane breaks into a Busby Berkeley routine. Suddenly, Panda Paterson was dancing. He moved dramatically onto the small slippereened square of dance floor and did an intricate backstep. Then, extending his improvisation into what could have been called ‘The Novice Skater’, he went down with his arms waving and slid sitting until the carpet jarred him backwards and his head hit a radiator like a duff note on a xylophone.

  ‘That’s the price of a pint in the Crib,’ John Rhodes said.

  There was blood coming out of Panda’s mouth. He eased himself off as if to get up and then settled back, touching his mouth gently.

  ‘Ye’ve made a wise decision,’ John Rhodes said, watching him refuse to get up. ‘You’re right. Ah’ve got a good memory. Ah don’t know where you’ve been lately. Watchin’ cowboy pictures? Well, it’s different here. Whoever’s been kiddin’ you on ye were hard. Ah’m here tae tell ye Ah’ve known you a long time. Ye were rubbish then an’ ye’re rubbish now. Frightenin’ wee boys! Try that again an’ Ah’ll shove the pint-dish up yer arse. One wi’ a handle.’

  If you could have bottled the atmosphere, it would have made Molotov cocktails. Practised in survival, Macey was analysing the ingredients.

  John Rhodes stood very still, having made his declaration. What was most frightening about him was the realisation that what had happened was an act of measured containment for him, had merely put him in the notion for the real thing. He wasn’t just a user of violence, he truly loved it. It was where he happened most fully, a thrilling edge. Like a poet who has had a go at the epic, he no longer indulged himself in the doggerel of casual fights but when, as now, the situation seemed big enough, his resistance was very low.

  The others, like Panda Paterson, were imitating furniture. This wasn’t really about them. Even Panda had been incidental, no more than the paper on which John had neatly imprinted his message. The message was addressed to Cam Colvin.

  Macey understood how even at the moment of its impact John’s anger had maintained a certain subtlety. Neither he nor Cam needed confrontation. People could die of that. John had repaid an oblique insult. The move was Cam’s.

  He took his time. His eyes sustained that preoccupied focus they usually had, as if the rest of the world was an irrelevant noise just over his shoulder. He seemed so impervious to outside pressure, Macey felt he could have rolled a fag on a switchback railway. He looked up directly at John Rhodes.

  ‘You’ll need to work on your fishtail, Panda,’ he said. ‘It’s rubbish.’

  It was style triumphant. Everybody laughed except Panda Paterson, who stood up sheepishly. John Rhodes, like a bull lassoed with silk, sat down at the table. The others joined him. Dan Tomlinson brought drinks, port for John and beer for the others. Cam was drinking orange juice. Dan Tomlinson went out. The meeting was convened.

  ‘It was really Hook I wanted to see, John,’ Cam said.

  ‘So Ah heard. But Ah thought Ah would jist come along. Ah had a wee message to deliver.’

  He looked at Panda, who happened to be looking down.

  ‘What did ye want tae see Hook about? Ye seem to have been impatient.’

  ‘I still am.’

  Cam sipped his orange juice carefully, his calmness seeming to belie his own words.

  ‘Paddy Collins is dead.’

  He said it with a kind of innocent expectation of immediate response from the others, the way a king might await the alarm of his courtiers if he sneezed. But this was divided territory. John Rhodes was tasting his drink as if he had suddenly become a bon viveur from the Calton. Cam’s concern and John’s indifference created an impasse of neutrality in the rest. Looking at the table, Cam chose his line of thought as carefully as threading a needle.

  ‘Not that Paddy Collins matters much,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen better men in Burton’s window. But he was our Pauline’s man. He was connected. She’s in a state. Don’t ask me why. She’s like most women. Seems to keep her brains in her knickers. But that’s the way of it. And I don’t like it. Nobody shites on my doorstep. Or I wipe their arse with razor blades.’

  The words were a ritual exercise, like the noises an exponent of the martial arts might make preparatory to combat. He seemed separate from them at the moment, rehearsing the basic gestures of his nature, locating his will. He was distant, almost formal. But you knew he would soon be coming on.

  ‘Who do they think they are? Where do they live? Whoever killed Paddy Collins I’m going to find. There won’t be enough of him left to make up a tin of Kennomeat.’

  It was spoken quietly. Since he felt no doubts, the statement needed no force to assert itself. It occurred as evenly as breathing.

  ‘He was never able to tell me what happened. But somebody knows. Do you know anything, Hook?’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ John Rhodes said. ‘How wid he know anything?’

  ‘I’m asking him, John. I don’t want one of these fucking conversations by post.’ The pitch of his voice hadn’t changed. Only the swear-word was like an abstract signal of a quickening mood. ‘His mouth’s here. Let it answer.’

  ‘Aye, maybe,’ John said. ‘It depends whit the question means.’

  ‘John. What you do to Panda’s your affair. He’s not one of mine. He just happens to be with me. But don’t try to piss me about where I live. Somebody killed my brother-in-law. I didn’t choose him but that’s what he was. They’re going to have to join him. I’m asking a straight question. All it means is what it says. Does Hook get to answer?’

  Macey felt the axis of the room tilt delicately in favour of Cam. He watched John Rhodes judge whether he was letting too much happen, smile easily and nod to Hook.

  ‘But how wid Ah know anything, Cam?’

  Cam was watching Hook. ‘Tell him,’ he said to Panda.

  ‘Well, Ah’m livin’ quiet these days. But Ah do all right.’ He couldn’t resist tentatively trying to reinstate himself in their eyes a little, let them know he didn’t get his mouth punched every day. ‘We’ve got a few things goin’ for us.’

  ‘You’re not on This is Your Life,’ Cam said. ‘Tell him about Paddy.’

  ‘Well, Ah’ve kept in touch with Paddy back and forward. Paddy was a friend of mine.’

  He seemed to be offering loyalty as a compensatory quality.

  ‘Ye shouldny talk ill o’ the
dead,’ John Rhodes said.

  Panda was like a banana republic threatened by two contending major powers who don’t want direct conflict. He felt the pressure, began to speak in a deliberately neutral voice.

  ‘Last time Ah spoke to him, he was very chirpy. Reckoned he had money comin’. Somebody owed him. It was somebody he met in the Crib.’

  The others waited but that was all Panda had to say. He sat like someone who can’t remember the punch-line.

  ‘That’s it?’ John Rhodes said.

  ‘Not quite,’ Cam said. ‘Mickey.’

  Macey was interested in Mickey Ballater’s presence. Panda was a scavenger off other people’s reputations. It was easy to see why he was here. But Mickey Ballater was different. Macey was wondering about him.

  ‘Ah’m up here to see Paddy,’ Mickey said. ‘By the time Ah get up, he’s in the Vicky. There was somebody he talked about up here. Wis going to introduce me. Seemed a right oddity. Fella called Tony Veitch.’

  Cam was still watching Hook.

  ‘That’s the only two things Ah’ve got to go on,’ Cam said. ‘The Crib and somebody called Tony Veitch. Hook?’

  ‘Ah’m sorry, Cam. Ah’d help ye if Ah could.’

  ‘A minder should mind. It’s your job to know everybody.’

  ‘How can ye do that, Cam? Come on. A place like the Crib has a name, gets tourists. What counts is they should know me. Know Ah’m around.’

  ‘I want this Tony Veitch. It seems to me it might be the same one he met in the Crib. Hook, you were still friendly enough with Paddy, were you? There was that bit of bother.’

  ‘Years ago, Cam. A daft fall-out over a wumman. We laughed about it after. He musta told ye.’

  ‘I probably wasn’t listening. Women. The bastard. Anyway . . .’

  A stranger had walked into the function suite. He was a fairly big man around whom middle-age had set like a podium. Not much had happened to detract from his sense of his own importance, or if it had he had managed to forget it. His mouth was open in one of those smiles that suggest the joke is private.