The Papers of Tony Veitch

by William McIlvanney

‘Fair enough.’

  Charlie disappeared behind the door to close it. Laidlaw’s hand rested casually in the gap of the open door. Charlie’s face reappeared, wondering.

  ‘Leave a fella a chink of hope, Charlie.’

  Charlie went away. Hearing his feet move out of the corridor, Laidlaw kicked the door in, pulling the chain from the jamb. He stepped inside as Charlie’s head volleyed out to look at him. Laidlaw held his hand up.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I fell against the door. And your wee chain broke. Now that I’m in . . .’

  He closed the door and followed Charlie into the bar. Entering, Laidlaw found himself thinking suddenly that maybe Bob Lilley was right. Maybe he was losing his grip. This was no way to do it. Detective-work was a delicate symbiosis with the criminal world, a balancing of subtle mutual respects. You hoped to give small to get back big. It was a matter of not breaking a fragile web you were both part of, a repeated laying of the senses to different strands of that web to catch what was going, not the axeman cometh.

  The craziness of what he was up to ambushed Laidlaw there in the middle of the floor. He felt himself ahead of his own sense of what he was doing; not a place for a policeman to put himself. But he was there already. He couldn’t just walk back out. Instead, he rifled the room swiftly, like an expert housebreaker, taking only what he could use.

  The room was John Rhodes and Cam Colvin. There were others but those two were what this meeting meant. It had to be very serious business. That’s why the pub was shut. That was in his favour. He knew what they hadn’t wanted anybody to know. His crassness in breaking in had won him a prize that maybe outpriced their anger. He had perhaps done irreparable damage to his contacts in the long run but, the way he felt about everything, who needed the long run? People were waiting. He addressed himself to John Rhodes because the pub was his responsibility.

  ‘I was saying to Charlie there—’

  ‘Ah heard,’ John Rhodes said.

  Cam Colvin looked at the doorway, looked at Charlie. Charlie shook his head. Cam relaxed.

  ‘You’re getting clumsy, Jack,’ he said.

  ‘Aye,’ Laidlaw said. ‘I’m getting pills for it.’

  ‘Ye want tae change yer doctor,’ John Rhodes said. ‘They don’t seem tae be workin’. Polismen breakin’ an’ enterin’? Dangerous stuff.’

  ‘I fell. Did none of you see me? By the way, don’t frighten me, John. I hate to cry in public.’

  Laidlaw looked round them innocently. His expression was a parade behind which his mind was crouching, dreading its passing. But a face came into his vision that altered his feeling. Seeing Hook Hawkins, pale as unbaked bread and clearly wounded, whom he remembered from the Bryson case, Laidlaw remembered he was Gus Hawkins’ brother. They could have come out of the same placenta. The connection reignited Laidlaw’s compulsion to a flame that charred his misgivings about being here. He was going to the bone of this one. This case had come too quick to a corpse. Too many possibilities had been made mute, too many interconnections were unexplained.

  ‘Anyway,’ Laidlaw said.

  He found himself hoping more words were on the way. The word had declared he wasn’t interested in Rhodes’ strictures. He had taken over the room. Now he had to work out what to do with it.

  ‘Whit is it ye want?’ John Rhodes asked.

  He hadn’t a clue. But, blessedly, the man he had hoped to see was there. There was Macey, immobile with nerves, trying to act as if his face didn’t belong to him.

  ‘Macey,’ Laidlaw said. ‘I want you to come to the station with me.’

  Macey was brilliant. He swallowed his panic in one lump and did the classic accused Glaswegian’s act, palms up as if testing for rain. His face went round them like a begging-bowl. He turned it to Laidlaw still empty, an expression of the world’s lack of charity.

  ‘Gonny gi’es a brek?’ he said. ‘Whit’s this about?’

  Laidlaw understood the danger he had put Macey in. Plucking a tout from the company of other criminals like this could be like asking him to advertise in the paper. But Laidlaw improvised as expertly as Macey had. He stared at Macey with a stern, forensic expression.

  ‘There’s been a wee job done. I think it’s your M.O.’

  ‘M.O.? Whit’s that? A medical orderly?’

  Macey had got it right. In taking the mickey out of Laidlaw, he made the others feel him very much part of them. Their appreciation disarmed suspicion. Laidlaw maintained the role Macey had given him.

  ‘M.O. Modus operandi. Your way of working.’

  Laidlaw felt a certain aesthetic pleasure in how well they were working together. He thought of something else that must be making this look even more convincing to the others. They would know he had been involved in the Veitch case. His failure there would make them see this as his search for petty compensation.

  ‘No way,’ Macey said. ‘When did this happen?’

  Laidlaw hoped Macey wasn’t going to overdo it and make him forget his lines.

  ‘Recently.’

  ‘When’s recently.’

  ‘Recently’s recently.’

  ‘There ye are then. Ah haveny been workin’ fur ages. The boys here’ll vouch for me.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Laidlaw said. ‘And then we’ll get Bluebeard to alibi for Jack the Ripper. You coming?’

  Macey looked at John Rhodes.

  ‘On ye go, Macey. Ye better go.’

  As they were going out, John Rhodes said, as a final barb at Laidlaw, ‘See you in half-an-hour, Macey.’

  In the street, Macey couldn’t believe the injustice of the world. As they walked, his words were just articulated froth.

  ‘Mr Laidlaw. You off your head? Does Big Ernie know about this? Ah’m gonny see ’im. What a liberty! Ah mean, ye might as well give me an award on the telly. Tout of the year. Holy Jesus. That’s ma life you’re playin’ games wi’. These men don’t kid. First thing ye know, ye’ve got yer head in a poke to play wi’. Oh my. Ma hert’s gaun like a lambeg drum.’

  ‘Macey, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh, very good. That’s smashin’. Make all the difference on the headstone, that. No, that isn’t on.’

  ‘We got away with it.’

  Macey stopped and looked at him.

  ‘We think we did, Mr Laidlaw. But if we’re wrong, who’s gonny find out first?’

  Laidlaw took the point.

  ‘It was all right, Macey. Come on.’

  ‘Aye, Ah think it was. Ah think we’ve knocked it off therr. But two o’ that Ah don’t need, Mr Laidlaw. Ye know?’

  ‘Agreed, Macey. Never again. Look. I’m not as daft as you think. Well, probably not quite. There has been a break-in in Pollokshaws. Quite a big job. That’s what I was quizzing you about. All right? I’ll give you the details.’

  ‘So what are we doin’ here?’ Macey asked. ‘Ah mean, Ah hardly know you.’

  They were at Laidlaw’s car.

  ‘In you get, Macey.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘In you get. I’m not going to kidnap you. I’ve got nowhere to keep you.’

  While Laidlaw drove to the entrance to Ruchill Park, he told Macey about the break-in.

  They got out and climbed the hill to the small stone pillars of different sizes and sat there. Macey had been huffily quiet. Laidlaw had let him be. Some children were playing on the swings. Laidlaw gave Macey a cigarette, took one himself.

  ‘You told Milligan where to find Tony Veitch,’ Laidlaw said.

  ‘Ah didny say that.’

  ‘I’m saying it.’

  ‘Look.’ Macey threw the cigarette away, hardly smoked. ‘What is this? Ah speak to Big Ernie. That’s who Ah speak tae. All right? No offence, Mr Laidlaw.’

  Laidlaw knew how unacceptable what he was doing was. Trying to hone in on somebody else’s tout was a serious breach of the code, something that would get you lionised in the force to roughly the same degree as rabies. But Laidlaw suspected he had perhaps achieved professional ostrac
ism already.

  ‘Who told you where Tony Veitch was, Macey?’

  Macey was whistling under his breath, looking away, as if he had just happened to sit beside a loony in the park. ‘What’s that going on in the Crib? That’s a weird get-together.’

  ‘Some kinna bother.’

  ‘About Paddy Collins?’

  ‘Don’t know. Ah wisny listenin’.’

  ‘There’s going to be more serious bother, Macey. And you could be right in the middle of it.’

  ‘Well. It’s a way of life, intit? You know it’s trouble when trouble comes, don’t ye?’ Macey was smiling, looking away. Laidlaw’s left hand grabbed his lapel like a grappling iron, hooking him off his seat.

  ‘Listen, fuckin’ bawheid,’ Laidlaw said. ‘I’m on serious business. I don’t need the Chic Murray kit. You want to be a comedian, practise somewhere else.’

  Laidlaw slammed Macey back on to his concrete seat so hard he felt his coccyx might be a lump on his head.

  ‘You’re overheads in the shite, Macey,’ Laidlaw said. ‘You’re an accessory to a murder. That’s what you are. Clever tout. It’s up to you. You answer a coupla questions. Or I’m going to huckle you into the station right now. And get you charged. That’s the message.’

  Macey couldn’t help being interested. He had the tout’s bug-eyed sense of survival, as if the thyroid had gone berserk.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ Laidlaw said.

  The two of them watched a small red-haired boy argue with his black-haired friend about whose turn it was to push the swing. The black-haired boy won.

  ‘What are the questions?’ Macey said.

  ‘Actually, they’re more than a couple,’ Laidlaw said. ‘What’s going on in the Crib?’

  Macey watched the boy swinging as if his attention could put him back there.

  ‘Mickey Ballater,’ he said, and Laidlaw understood Ballater’s wound. ‘He claimed Hook. Thought Hook had been arsin’ him about. Cam and John are havin’ a council of war. But nothin’s been decided.’

  Laidlaw listened to the black-haired boy complain about the way his friend was pushing him, decided he didn’t like him.

  ‘Macey,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Were Dave McMaster and Lynsey Farren the first to tell you about Tony Veitch?’

  ‘Naw,’ Macey said. ‘Cam talked about him first.’

  ‘But only Cam?’

  Macey shifted a little, as if his conscience had piles.

  ‘Macey!’ Laidlaw said.

  ‘Big Ernie knew. He showed me a phota.’

  ‘What phota?’

  ‘Tony Veitch. He was readin’.’

  Laidlaw was briefly aware that Harkness had given Milligan the photograph and decided it didn’t matter much. There were more important things to find out about.

  ‘Who told you where he was?’

  ‘You know that.’

  ‘That’s right. I do. So here’s the real question, Macey. Who did you tell?’

  Macey underwent a small indulgence of retraction. He had said enough. It was finished. But he knew it wasn’t. Laidlaw waited.

  ‘I told everybody.’

  Laidlaw clicked his tongue impatiently.

  ‘Of course, Macey. It’s what you would do. But don’t waste my time. The crucial thing is. In what order did you tell them?’

  Macey didn’t know what had happened but he knew from the clarity of Laidlaw’s sense of it that he was about to explain what had happened. He felt himself no more than a part of Laidlaw’s understanding and he surrendered to it.

  ‘I told Big Ernie first,’ he said.

  Laidlaw understood. Of course, he did. He had his small vision of what had taken place. He had sought it so determinedly and now it was his. It wasn’t much but it was his. He had argued with the supposed reality of circumstances so heatedly that they had acknowledged he had a case. For the moment, he was only the second one who knew, not exactly, never exactly, but roughly what had happened.

  He let an approximation of the truth unravel in his head. Tony Veitch went into hiding from Paddy Collins. Paddy Collins beat up Lynsey Farren to find where Tony was. Dave McMaster killed Paddy Collins because he beat up Lynsey Farren. Dave McMaster killed Eck Adamson because he knew about Paddy Collins. Dave McMaster killed Tony Veitch because he needed a scapegoat. Mickey Ballater was a makeweight, although he didn’t know it. So were Cam and John, although they didn’t know it. As always, it was meaner than you would imagine. Private purposes, outside of wars, were the most lethal things in the world.

  And Tony Veitch had, in a way, died of his own innocence. He hadn’t known what was going on, the complexity of it. Those must have been some papers, a terrible attempt at uninhabitable compassion. Perhaps he had died of those papers, of the inadmissible evidence they represented, how we truly know nothing more than the need to connect but can’t find how to admit it.

  From his vantage point in Ruchill Park, Laidlaw looked out over the city. He could see so much of it from here and still it baffled him. ‘What is this place?’ he thought.

  A small and great city, his mind answered. A city with its face against the wind. That made it grimace. But did it have to be so hard? Sometimes it felt so hard. Well, that was some wind and it had never stopped blowing. Even when this place was the second city of the British Empire, affluence had never softened it because the wealth of the few had become the poverty of the many. The many had survived, however harshly, and made the spirit of the place theirs. Having survived affluence, they could survive anything. Now that the money was tight, they hardly noticed the difference. If you had it, all you did was spend it. The money had always been tight. Tell us something we don’t know. That was Glasgow. It was a place so kind it would batter cruelty into the ground. And what circumstances kept giving it was cruelty. No wonder he loved it. It danced among its own debris. When Glasgow gave up, the world could call it a day.

  Standing so high, Laidlaw felt the bleakness of summer on his face and understood a small truth. Even the climate here offered no favours. Standing at a bus-stop, you talked out the side of your mouth, in case your lips got chapped. Maybe that was why the West of Scotland was where people put the head on one another – it was too cold to take your hands out your pockets. But it did have compensations.

  Laidlaw had a happy image of the first man out after the nuclear holocaust being a Glaswegian. He would straighten up and look around. He would dust himself down with that flicking gesture of the hands and, once he had got the strontium off the good suit, he would look up. The palms would be open.

  ‘Hey,’ he would say. ‘Gonny gi’es a wee brek here? What was that about? Ye fell oot wi’ us or what? That was a liberty. Just you behave.’

  Then he would walk off with that Glaswegian walk, in which the shoulders don’t move separately but the whole torso is carried as one, as stiff as a shield. And he would be muttering to himself, ‘Must be a coupla bottles of something still intact.’

  Laidlaw turned back from the city to Macey.

  ‘One last question,’ he said.

  Macey dredged his eyes up from the ground.

  ‘Where do I find Dave McMaster?’

  Macey considered the possibility of not knowing and knew it wasn’t one.

  ‘Glasgow Airport,’ he said. ‘He’s covering that in case Mickey Ballater tries it.’

  ‘Macey.’ Laidlaw was looking at him very carefully. ‘You know I wouldn’t have done that. What I said. Taking you in. You know that. Don’t you?’

  ‘Do Ah?’

  ‘Sometimes you don’t like yourself,’ Laidlaw said. ‘You want a lift?’

  ‘Naw,’ Macey said, sitting where he was and rubbing the base of his back. ‘The last lift you gave me was enough for me.’

  Laidlaw felt small.

  ‘It’s a hard job,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, Ah know,’ Macey said. ‘Ah’m sorry for you.’

  Laidlaw was walking away. He paused, turned back towards Ma
cey.

  ‘There’s always a price,’ he said. ‘Imagine having to be felt sorry for. By somebody who’s forgotten what morality was.’

  35

  Come on, come on,’ Harkness was saying. ‘Some people have their work to go to.’

  The elderly woman on the crossing smiled and nodded and mouthed ‘Thank you,’ and Harkness felt guilty. It occurred to him that the small shopping-trolley she was pulling, which had crossed his vision like a mote, was full of her way of life. Why should he object to the time it took her age to trail it across the road? He blamed Laidlaw, as he waved to her and drove on as if he was pulling out of the pits.

  Lifting the phone had been like Frankenstein plugging into a generator. A dead day was suddenly crackling into life. The urgency in Laidlaw’s voice seemed to assume that his were the elemental concerns that nobody could deny. He had said, ‘Glasgow Airport’ like the loudspeaker in an old war film saying ‘Scramble!’

  Harkness was scrambling, was being a bit subjective with the traffic-lights. He found himself also v-signing a couple of people who were inconsiderate enough to object. The Laidlaw syndrome, he reflected. When he was in the mood, that man could galvanise a cemetery. Harkness prayed that Laidlaw knew what he was doing because nobody else was likely to.

  Dave McMaster? Harkness couldn’t work it out. They had seen him that once at Lynsey Farren’s. Maybe it was a joke. Getting out of his car in the car-park, Harkness thought it probably was. The glass frontage of the terminal building reflected a bland evening. As he crossed the walk-way over the shallow water, he saw the thrown pennies in their coats of verdigris. Life was small change.

  Then Laidlaw appeared towards him at the front of the building, sounding taut as a violin tuned for a hard one.

  ‘You ready?’ Laidlaw was saying. ‘There’s bound to be two of them. That’s guaranteed. They’re here for Ballater. So they’re carrying. All right?’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Harkness said. ‘My stomach’s still on the motorway. Who’s Ballater?’

  ‘Mickey Ballater. He’s done Hook Hawkins. They’re looking for him. Dave McMaster’s one. We’re going to get him.’

  Laidlaw was starting to walk.