The Papers of Tony Veitch

by William McIlvanney

  ‘Oh aye. Sammy. That’s the one that wears the McEwan’s brylcreem.’

  He described the incident in the Crib briefly to the others. They all looked across at Sammy, whipping him with their laughter. Sammy nailed his eyes to the bar in front of him, his hand too shaky to risk lifting his drink. Macey was fidgeting as if he wanted to get away, but he made no move.

  ‘What about yer train, Mickey?’ Simpsy asked.

  ‘It’s a five-minute job in the car tae get there, isn’t it?’ Mickey said.

  ‘Ah’ll go across an’ get it started,’ Simpsy said. ‘It sometimes takes the huff.’

  He went out.

  ‘Mickey.’ Macey seemed poised between the desire to ingratiate himself and the fear of offending. ‘You gettin’ a train at Central?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Mickey. Don’t tell them Ah told ye. But they’re after you. They’re out lookin’.’

  ‘Who are?’

  ‘Baith Cam Colvin an’ John Rhodes.’

  A taxi-driver had come into the bar. He was shouting that there was a taxi for Mr Olliphant. He crushed past them to consult with one of the barmen.

  ‘Ah thought they might be,’ Mickey said.

  ‘Ah know there’s some o’ them at Central an’ some at the airport.’

  Mickey was thoughtful.

  ‘Jesus, Mickey,’ Malkie said.

  ‘This is a bloody liberty,’ the taxi-driver was saying. ‘He definitely said Sammy Dow’s.’

  ‘This isny the only Sammy Dow’s,’ the barman said. ‘Maybe the one at Queen Street Station.’

  ‘Two minutes from a taxi-rank?’ the driver said. ‘Why would they phone a taxi from there? Give us a break.’

  ‘But they’re not everywhere,’ Mickey said and went across to the taxi-driver.

  The others watched him in discussion with the driver. The driver didn’t seem keen. But he accepted some notes and was pacified. He came over and picked up Mickey’s case.

  ‘Always do the unexpected,’ Mickey said and winked at Malkie.

  He was already on his way out when Macey spoke.

  ‘Be seein’ you, Mickey,’ he said.

  ‘Aye.’ Mickey didn’t look back. ‘If you’ve got the Jodrell Bank telescope, ye might.’

  The driver put Mickey’s case in the luggage compartment and Mickey got in the back. Before they could pull away, Simpsy had run across to them and tried to open the offside door of the cab. It wouldn’t open.

  ‘That door’s buggered, pal,’ the driver said.

  Simpsy contented himself with waving and mouthing something and Mickey didn’t bother to wave back.

  ‘Edinburgh road,’ the driver said through the opened glass panel. ‘We better take the Kingston Bridge.’

  In the back, Mickey was taking an unemotional farewell of Glasgow as they came off the sliproad and headed up to the Kingston Bridge. The lights of the city around him evoked no nostalgia. He was neutrally picking out areas that he knew when the driver braked suddenly. A car, which had overtaken them, was pulled up at the parapet of the Bridge, hazard lights flashing.

  ‘The mug canny stop there,’ the driver said.

  ‘Neither can we,’ Mickey said. ‘Shift!’

  ‘Ah’ll just see whit the problem is,’ the driver was saying and jumped out.

  In that moment Mickey knew. In the pretence of the taxi-driver the whole treachery crystallised. His own past violence was like a prompter in his head. His life might have been a rehearsal for this moment, he saw it so clearly, how the other car would pull up behind them. When it did, he tried to open the offside door of the cab to give himself space. It wouldn’t budge. In here he had no chance.

  He kicked open the other door and dived out, pulling out the knife as he emerged. The open door was less a shield than a weapon against him. He shut it with his body, backing against it.

  In the whipping wind above the bleak lights of the city he found the small space he was left with. The cars were parked tight, the taxi further out into the motorway than the others. To his right, Cam Colvin was waiting with two others. To the left there was John Rhodes with one hander.

  Mickey dived to his left. He feinted at Rhodes’ companion and, as the man moved back, swung at Rhodes who had started to come in. He struck Rhodes’ left arm, but with his right hand Rhodes caught the back of Mickey’s head and rammed his face against the concrete of the parapet. Mickey tried to struggle through the blood but already knew himself beaten. In an instant his long-nurtured sense of himself dissipated like a dream.

  Knowing himself about to die and, fighting against the nausea of unconsciousness, his thoughts weren’t of regret or fears for family but of the bitter images of his failure to be harder, of Macey looking innocent, the taxi-driver jumping out, Simpsy mouthing through the glass of the window, ‘Cheerio, Big Man.’ He had a flash of Cam’s face, cold as a talking statue, saying, ‘You didn’t take this place serious enough,’ before he was hoisted on to the parapet and fell.

  The sound of the body striking ground was so faint as to seem imagined. The banker’s card, fallen from his pocket when he pulled the knife, spun in the exhausts of the leaving cars like a plastic leaf.

  39

  It was half-past one in the morning and it was raining. Gus and Laidlaw were standing near the end of the queue for taxis outside Central Station. It seemed a suitable ending to an evening that had turned into a belated wake for Tony Veitch.

  They had improvised their way from pub to pub, disgorging opinions, feelings, odd confessions as they went. In the Wee Mann’s Laidlaw had worked out that the answer to one of Tony’s riddles was the pyramids. In the Virginian Gus had explained that the answer to the other was Tony himself. In Charlie Parker’s, chosen by Gus in the mood of a belligerent fifth-columnist, Laidlaw claimed to see the point of the riddles.

  ‘Eats an egg and tastes feathers,’ he said. ‘Is everybody else’s pupil,’ he said. ‘The bones of the many housing the bones of the few,’ he said. ‘Individual sensitivity,’ he said, ‘and the need for ordinary lives to be seen as the most important things in society. Maybe that’s what the papers were trying to say. Maybe the papers are what we should be trying to live with our lives.’

  In the Corn Exchange Gus cried a little, quietly, and Laidlaw struggled not to join him. They had attacked the city as if they meant to drink it dry, finishing up in Ad Lib after one in the morning, toying with hamburgers and slaughtering the house red. Now in that complicated drunken way, they had worked out that Gus was going to take a taxi to his flat, where Marie presumably thought he had emigrated, and Laidlaw would share it with him as far as the Burleigh Hotel.

  ‘Well,’ Gus said, wrapping the thought round him like the coat neither of them had. ‘Not be long now. There’s no place like home.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Not even home.’

  He didn’t bother explaining his cryptic wisdom.

  He couldn’t have faced articulating the irony against which his marriage had finally foundered, how Gina had kept the envelope on which he had written the phone-number for her, containing his address, had looked up his number and phoned the house several times, asking for him. Ena’s misunderstanding was nevertheless an accurate measurement of what had happened to them and they both knew it. They had agreed he had better move out. The thought of the possible effects on the children was like a future of endless guilt. The memory of the family he had come from made him feel he had betrayed his own past. The decision proliferated into a warren of problems in his mind. Tonight had been like an unsuccessful attempt to postpone them.

  But bleak as his moment was, the city wouldn’t leave him alone. Looking around him, he felt that maybe this was as near to home as he was going to get, the streets of this place. The queue was about the size of a small football crowd and in the smirring rain it should have been a formula for misery. But the place was jumping joyously.

  A small man was passing along the line, playing a mouth-organ and collect
ing money. He appeared to have found the instrument because he didn’t once deviate into a tune. He just made watery clusters of sound. When somebody asked for a request, he said, ‘Away tae hell. Ah don’t play tunes.’

  Reaching into his pocket to reward impertinence, Laidlaw took out a handful of coins, selected a couple and remarked philosophically to Gus, ‘Notice that, when you’re on the batter? Finish up with pockets like a street-bookie. See, you always buy with notes. Coins are beneath you. You become a whisky-millionaire.’

  The man was earning his money. His jaunty noise was the drunken pulse of the group. People were laughing and shouting, vivid rain-streaked faces and loud voices, a queue by Hogarth. A group of women had emerged to dance like maenads around the small man. The whole line was a weird, dynamic unity, like a centipede on LSD.

  A small, old woman standing behind Laidlaw tapped him on the shoulder. He turned round.

  ‘Son,’ she said. ‘This is the best queue I’ve ever been in in my life.’

  Laidlaw was laughing and he elaborately gestured her out of the queue to dance. Watching them jig sedately up and down the pavement, Gus drunkenly thought he was seeing something marvellous, a spirit so determined to enjoy life that it had an aesthetic of queues.

  Turn the page for the first chapter of the last book of the Detective Laidlaw trilogy.

  ‘A crime trilogy so searing it will burn forever in to your memory. McIlvanney is the original Scottish criminal mastermind’

  CHRIS BROOKMYRE

  When his brother dies stepping out in front of a car, Detective Jack Laidlaw is determined to find out what really happened. With his trademark corrosive wit, Laidlaw journeys through Glasgow’s underworld and into past. There he discovers much more than he bargained for about his brother – and about himself.

  £7.99

  Meet Jack Laidlaw, the original damaged detective. When a young woman is found brutally murdered on Glasgow Green, only Laidlaw stands a chance of finding her murderer from among the hard men, gangland villains and self-made moneymen who lurk in the city’s shadows. Winner of the CWA Silver Dagger Award.

  £7.99

  STRANGE

  LOYALTIES

  1

  I woke up with a head like a rodeo. Isn’t it painful having fun? Mind you, last night hadn’t been about enjoyment, just whisky as anaesthetic. Now it was wearing off, the pain was worse. It always is.

  I didn’t want this day. Who sent for it? Try the next house. I burrowed into the pillow. It was no use. A sleepless pillow. What was it they called that? Transferred epithet? My teachers. They taught me everything I don’t need to know.

  I got up and went on safari for the pain-killers. There weren’t many places they could be. The bedroom was unlikely. That left the sitting-room, the small kitchen, the hall and the bathroom. The hall was out. There was nowhere there to keep them, unless I had cunningly hidden them under the carpet. The places were the kitchen or the bathroom. Deductive reasoning. Lucky I was a good detective.

  After checking cupboards that held old razor blades and more dishes than I would ever use, I found the magic bottle. It was in the sitting-room behind the tiers of the change I hated keeping in my pockets. I got a glass of water and took two pills, feeling they wouldn’t be enough – like sending in two rookie policemen to quell a riot.

  I came through and sat in the sitting-room. As memory returned, I wished it wouldn’t, because I did it again. I started to cry. For about a month now I had been doing that. The day would begin with tears. Maybe other people did exercises. I cried. Nothing dramatic, no wracking sobs. Just quiet and remorseless tears. They wouldn’t let up on me. The good thing was they didn’t last long.

  After a few minutes they stopped. I wiped my face with my hand and stood up. At least today was the day I had decided I would start to do something about my tears. One of the two people I’d told of my intention had said I was crazy. But I’ve never said I was sane – just no more mad than anybody else I see around me. When we breakfast on reported mayhem and go to sleep having ingested images of national catastrophe like Mogadon, don’t anybody call me crazy.

  I ran a bath and lay in it as if it were a ritual of cleansing more than physical. Heal me, holy water, and prepare me for the things I have to do. I don’t think it worked but the hot water helped my head. As the whisky sweated out of me, the miasma round my mind drifted up and mingled with the rising steam like mist clearing.

  Maybe Brian was half-right. I wasn’t crazy. But maybe I was daft. We had a corpse. But did we have a crime? If we did, it wasn’t one you would find in the statutes. But then I didn’t believe in the statutes too much anyway. Mr Bumble got it wrong. The law isn’t an ass. It’s a lot more sinister than that. The law is a devious, conniving bastard. It knows what it’s doing, don’t worry. It was made especially to work that way.

  I’ve seen it go about its business too often – all those trials in which you can watch the bemusement of the accused grow while the legal charade goes on around him. You can watch his eyes cloud, panic and finally silt up with surrender. He doesn’t know what the hell they’re talking about. He can no longer recognise what he’s supposed to have done. Only they know what they’re talking about. It’s their game. He’s just the ball.

  I’ve been at trials where I had put the man in the dock and, fifteen minutes into the thing, I wanted to stand up and speak for the defence. ‘Listen,’ I’ve wanted to shout, ‘I caught this man on the streets. That’s where he lives. You lot ever been there?’ But they went on with their private party, listening to precedents like a favourite song, playing word games, applauding one another. Occasionally, the voice of the accused will surface among the gobbledygook, small and often wistful and usually sounding strange, like a Scottish accent heard in the midst of Latin. It’s a glimpse of pathetic human flesh, freckled and frail, seen through a rent in ermine robes, but quickly covered. Who’s this interrupting our little morality play? He doesn’t even know the script.

  Those judges, I thought, as the water cooled around me. I do a lot of my thinking in the bath. Maybe that was one advantage of having rented an apartment with no shower. They lived as close to the world as the Dalai Lama. Never mind having little understanding of the human heart, they often didn’t have much grasp of the daily machinery of the lives they were presuming to judge. Time and again the voice had quavered querulously down from Mount Olympus, asking the question that stunned: ‘A transistor? What exactly do you mean by that?’ ‘UB40? Is that some kind of scientific formula?’ (‘Not a formula, Your Honour. A form. An unemployment form.’) ‘An unemployment form? And what is that?’

  Did you have to check in your head at the door when you joined a club? Under those wigs, what strange heads mulled in port and pickled in prejudice?

  ‘Lawyers,’ I said to the ceiling above my bath. Who could trust them? They stuff their wallets with crimes and declare themselves the pillars of society. Their fees are often fiscal robbery but who can nail them but themselves? ‘A brilliant lawyer’ was a phrase I had often heard. That was all right if all you meant was an ability to play legal games. But what did that mean? Intelligence as a closed circuit. Intelligence should never be a closed circuit. Take them off the stage that is a law court, where the forms are all pre-set, and a lot of them wouldn’t know tears from rain.

  I suppose you could say I was getting disillusioned with my job. I got out of the bath and pulled the plug, wiping away any suggestion of a tide-mark as the water drained. That was a technique I had learned since being on my own. It made the bath easier to clean. (Laidlaw’s Handy Home Hints For Single Men: first edition in preparation.)

  I towelled myself. Naked, I didn’t like the softening belly. It wasn’t so bad with the clothes on. And besides, among others you usually pulled it in a little, put on the corsets of vanity. In the bathroom I just contemplated my navel and found it a bigger subject than I wanted it to be. Ah, those now gone days when I could eat a house and drink a brewery and still have a stom
ach like a plank nothing could warp.

  Intimations of mortality bulged under the towel. Time was I seemed forever. Time was time hardly was. My life was an unknown continent and I was its only explorer. And what had I discovered? Eh, well, eh, life is . . . Thingmy. Give me another few years and I’ll have it sussed. But how many years were left? These days they passed so quickly. It was as if you stopped to mend a fuse and when you looked up another year had gone.

  I remembered reading somewhere a theory about why time passed more quickly the older you got. The gist of it was this: when you’re ten, a year is a tenth of your life; when you’re forty, a year is a fortieth of your life. A fortieth is a lot less than a tenth. I was over forty. I didn’t try to calculate the decimal points. I just agreed with the principle.

  But it was strange. Awareness of my own mortality gave me a boost. A shot of psychic adrenalin pumped through me and blew the last remaining tendrils of mist out of my head. If you stayed true to your experience, you needn’t fear age. It was only bringing you closer to understanding. I had always wanted understanding. Let’s see if we could find it.

  I put on a clean pair of underpants. From small beginnings . . . I put a new blade in the razor. I squeezed shaving soap onto my palm from the dispenser. I soaped my cheeks, my chin, my upper lip. I had done away with the recent moustache. It made me look too much like a policeman – standard issue, along with the identity-card. I looked into the small round mirror like a porthole and a floating face stared back at me, bearded white. By the time I was as old as I looked in the mirror, I hoped I would have the wisdom to match the appearance.

  As I shaved the fuzziness of my face into definition there came into focus with my jaw the time ahead, hardening round the purpose I had given it. I had one week. It was a month since the bad thing had happened and it had taken me that time to win a week away from police work, at least from official police work. I had earned my busman’s holiday.