All the Colours of the Town

by McIlvanney, Liam

  The street was quiet. The Forester’s door cannoned shut and my heels knocked the tarmac as I crossed the street. The number was stencilled in orange on a white tile by the drainpipe. Twenty-six was the right-hand side of a squat ex-council semi. All sharp angles and tight red brick. A sentry-box porch with its canted roof. I crossed the garden – a blanket-sized pit of white chips – and thumbed the bell. It jangled woozily in the dimness behind the door and above my head a clacking noise, an odd hollow knocking, started up.

  I stepped backwards onto the path.

  Above the porch, on the slated upturned V, was an ornamental windmill. A tiny figure in a flat cap, wielding an axe. When the blades turned in the wind he bent to his work, chop-chop-chopping a block of wood.

  ‘I don’t want it.’

  I lowered my gaze to meet a pair of flat green eyes in a long joyless face. She wore black slacks and a yellow short-sleeved sweater, patterned with small perforations. The skin across the nose had a waxy tightness. She’d been a looker, no question. A breaker of hearts in the distant seventies. An unlit ciggy jiggled in her fingers.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Landscape gardening. Jehovah. Patio doors. Whatever it is you’re selling.’

  ‘Yeah? That’s too bad. I’ve come about Duncan.’ I told her who I was and who I worked for. When I dug a card out of my wallet and held it out she took it and dropped her hand to her side and kept her eyes fixed on mine. ‘There’s something I’d like to talk about,’ I told her. She flapped the card a bit as if she was drying it and held my gaze.

  ‘It’s about Duncan,’ I said again. ‘Could I maybe come in?’

  The living room was off the tiny hall. There was an armchair in the far corner, under an alcove, and a sofa along one wall. In the middle of the back wall a door led through to the kitchen.

  I sat down on the sofa. Mrs Gillies stood.

  ‘Go on and sit down,’ she said sourly.

  ‘Sit down yourself,’ I said. ‘You’re making me nervous.’

  I meant it as a joke but my mouth was sticky, my breath coming through in a turbulent rush.

  She perched on the armchair, knees tight together and at right angles to her body. She lifted a lighter from the alcove shelf and lit her cigarette. She kept the lighter gripped in her fist.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry to bring this all back. I know it’s not easy.’

  She blew smoke at the ceiling.

  ‘Excuse me.’ She rose quickly and stepped through to the kitchen. I thought at first I’d touched a nerve, but I could see her through the open door as she took the oven gloves down from a hook and opened the oven. A big orange casserole pot appeared on the hob. She lifted the lid and stirred the contents and put it back and slammed the oven door.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, without conviction, as she took her place on the armchair and lifted the cigarette from the ashtray. A thin grey reek – as of half-cooked meat – threaded itself into the room. It smelled like my mother’s stovies, those lukewarm slabs of tattie and carrot and square pale sausage I forced down every Sunday in the early eighties. I told her I might have some news, some fresh information on Duncan’s death.

  She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward to tap some ash. She recrossed her legs and stared out the window. She managed to contain her excitement. I pointed this out.

  She smiled pleasantly. ‘That’s because I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Right.’

  The room was hot. A bulb of sweat slipped coldly down my ribs. I asked for a glass of water.

  ‘There’s whisky, if you want it.’

  ‘I’ve got the car.’

  ‘I saw that.’

  I shrugged. I lifted my hand and brought finger and thumb together until they almost touched. She nodded and turned to the sideboard. When we were holding our drinks she crossed her legs and leaned forward.

  ‘What age are you?’

  I told her.

  ‘And your name is what again: Collins?’

  She reached for the card and we both said my name at the same time.

  ‘And you come from Glasgow, Mr Conway?’

  I told her I did.

  She cocked her head and pouted.

  ‘So tell me, Mr Conway from Glasgow. Why would you know anything about it? Why in hell’ – it was barely a whisper, the merest exhalation of breath – ‘why in hell would you think that?’

  ‘I’m a journalist, Mrs Gillies. I get paid to find things out.’

  She frowned. ‘And you’ve found out, what, exactly?’

  I put my glass on the floor.

  ‘I know one of the men who did it. At least, I’m pretty certain. Did you ever hear that a Scotsman was involved? Did you ever hear something like that?’

  ‘Mr Conway, are you here to tell me what happened to Duncan, or to ask?’

  There was something bad in the smell from the kitchen, a ribbon of foulness it was hard to ignore. I started again. ‘Mrs Gillies.’ The green eyes swung lazily round. ‘Mrs Gillies, a group of men beat your son to death. They hit him so hard for so long that he died. I want to find out what happened.’

  Maybe it was just timing; the meat was on the turn between raw and cooked. In ten minutes it would be all cooked through, the badness gone.

  ‘They weren’t trying to kill him. It was an accident, it was a fluke.’

  ‘A fluke? They hit him with bats. He had seventeen separate fractures. A punctured lung. They ruptured his spleen.’

  Her eyes narrowed. ‘I did the identification, mister. I know what he looked like. I know what they did to him. One of the animals still lives round the corner.’

  ‘I’m sorry. But then you know what I’m talking about. It was no accident. If they didn’t set out to kill him they didn’t go out of their way to make sure they didn’t.’

  The meat didn’t smell any better.

  ‘Would you mind if I opened a window?’

  She flapped her hand impatiently and turned her head to take another drag.

  I wrestled with the latch. It wouldn’t come.

  ‘Aren’t you a little, delicate for your line of work, Mr Conway?’ She rose and set her cigarette down and tugged up the sash with her thin bare arms. She sat back down and plucked her cigarette from the ashtray and held it beside her head, gripping her elbow in her hand. The smoke plumed up in a straight grey line.

  ‘If it was me,’ I said. ‘If it was my son who’d been bludgeoned to death, I think I might feel bitter. I might even want them caught, the guys who did it.’

  ‘The Christian thing is to forgive.’

  She looked at me with those flat green eyes.

  ‘Do you forgive them?’

  ‘What are you, a priest? What do you care?’

  A clock boomed portentously. I craned round. Against the back wall was a grandfather clock, ludicrously huge in the tiny room. I waited for the air to settle.

  ‘The men who did it. Do you know their names?’

  ‘Of course I know their names.’

  ‘You said one of them lived around the corner. Were the others local?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘And no one else was involved, that you heard of?’

  ‘No one else was involved. That I heard of or not.’

  I jumped in my chair. My heart buzzed and fluttered. It was my phone, wheezing and trilling in my shirt pocket. I dug it out and turned it off, but not before I’d clocked the number on the screen: Norman Rix.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  The spire of smoke wavered as the shoulders rose and dropped.

  ‘You’ve got the wrong end of something, mister. There was no Scotsman. You’re away the wrong road.’

  I slipped the phone back in my pocket. It hung there, fraught with the unappeased wrath of Norman Rix. I would have to talk to him later. I would have to have something to tell him. I tried again.

  ‘See, I think maybe you weren’t told the proper story.’ Her head drew sharply back, twisting around as if a hornet were c
ircling her nose. She reached for her glass. I pressed on. ‘I mean, I don’t think you know the full story.’

  The glass stayed where it was.

  ‘There was no Scotsman.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. Things were hazy, lots of confusion around. Thing like this? Rumours are started, people muddy the waters. It’s what happens with events like this. People speculate, they paint little scenarios.’

  ‘Mr Conway. You’re not listening. There was no Scotsman.’

  ‘But what I’m saying, there could have been. They could have been lying. Maybe they were covering up. Which people saw it? Maybe they got it wrong. Who were they?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Her beads clicked as she shook the question away. ‘People. They didn’t see any strangers.’

  ‘But how do you know they’re telling the truth?’

  She tapped her ash impatiently. Her head gave an odd little jolt and something fizzed in the flat green eyes. She stared right at me. ‘Because it was me. All right? Because I saw it all. From that window there’ – she gestured to the hallway. ‘I saw it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It happened right there in the alley. I saw it. There were three of them did it and I knew them all. And there wasn’t any phantom Scotsman. OK?’

  She stood up and turned to the table. ‘I need another even if you don’t.’

  I left my chair.

  ‘Saw it or watched it?’

  The glasses rattled. She turned, defiant and scared, and I gripped the skinny wrist.

  ‘You knew!’

  ‘He had it coming.’

  ‘You set it up!’

  ‘Running around with a prisoner’s wife. It’s not like he wasn’t warned.’

  ‘You set it up! Your own son!’

  I had backed her against the table. The bottles rattled and trilled. The front legs of the table were an inch off the ground. We stopped then, frozen in some dramatic dance-step. I wanted to laugh. The woodcutter chipped at his block for a frantic few seconds and then he stopped too. She shook her hand free and the table settled back with an outraged crash. She poured a shaky drink and gulped it. She poured another and then one for me. She sat down heavily, glared at me over the jiggling rim.

  ‘They were only going to scare him. That’s what they told me. Knock him about a bit. That woman was poison. She was pure poison for him. I wanted it stopped. I didn’t want–’ She stopped; her teeth knocked the glass as she threw back the rest.

  ‘You didn’t want him hurt?’

  ‘It’s not how it seems. Everyone knows that the wives – well, you can’t expect a woman of that age to live like a nun. But they’re discreet. They do it out of town. They go to the mainland. This was right in people’s faces. They couldn’t just ignore it. If I hadn’t told them where he’d be they’d have got him anyway. Someone would have put a stop to it.’ The two fingers that gripped her cigarette came to rest against her temple. ‘I thought I’d get it stopped before it got that far.’

  I finished my drink. The whisky was rough, flaring in my gut.

  ‘Even as a boy,’ she said. ‘He never cared for politics. He never ran with the Tartans. He liked clothes and girls and football. Normal stuff.’ She shrugged. ‘Normal anywhere else.’

  She stood up.

  ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, Mr Conway. The guy you’re talking about?’ She took my empty glass, cradled it to her chest. ‘He wasn’t involved.’

  *

  The air had freshened. The clouds had that swelling, bulbous look, like frozen explosions. The fat-cheeked squaddy wore a sneering, knowing expression as I gunned the engine and took the corner. I pulled up short. Right across the middle of the street, ten or twelve feet high, was a blind brick wall. The Peace Line. Something shocking and raw in its blank red expanse, like the stump of an amputated limb. I three-point-turned and retraced my route.

  I wasn’t driving anywhere in particular but I wound up at the river. I locked the car and went for a walk. In front of the Custom House the skateboarders were taking turns to grind the handrail down to the plaza. When I turned my phone on it rang straightaway. I didn’t recognise the number. At least it wasn’t Rix.

  ‘They seek him here.’

  ‘Hello, Peter.’

  ‘They seek him there. You’re not taking my calls?’

  I watched the skateboarders bump down the rail.

  ‘What do you want, Peter?’

  ‘Is this not supposed to happen when you’re on the way down? People stop taking your calls. I’d say you’ve got this a bit back to front.’

  ‘What do you want, Peter?’

  He spat a tiny laugh.

  ‘The fuck’s going on, Gerry? You’re in Belfast? What the fuck?’

  A fat adolescent boy waddled past. He had both hands clamped to a burger and was tearing a chunk with his teeth. He looked like he was playing the harmonica. His T-shirt said: I Hear U, I’m Just Not Listening.

  ‘I’m working on a story.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. You didn’t think to ask me about it? You don’t think I deserve at least that?’

  ‘You’ll get a chance to comment when the time comes.’

  ‘Oh I think I’ll do more than comment.’

  I let that pass.

  ‘I don’t know what you think you’re going to find.’

  ‘Yeah? See, I think maybe you do.’

  ‘You’re a real prick, Gerry.’ He was lighting a cigar: I could hear the struck match and the rapid puffs as he sucked it alight. He might have been blowing kisses. ‘What’s brought this on, anyway? This sudden urge to do your job. Why start now? Let me find your stories. Is that not how it works?’

  ‘Are we done?’

  ‘Is that not what happens? I find the stories and you write them? It’s a bit late in the day for editorial independence, I would have thought.’

  ‘Turn it up, Peter. I’m doing my job.’

  ‘Right, the job.’ Lyons’s voice tightened. ‘Let me ask you something. You do this piece. Assuming you get a story. Assuming it’s the biggest scoop since Woodward and Bernstein. You think you’re gonna walk into Rix’s job? You think I’ll let that happen? You do this story and I promise you, Gerry, you’re fucked.’

  ‘I’m fucked anyway.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The whole thing’s fucked. Papers is fucked. Nobody wants the fucking job.’

  ‘Yeah? You might want one sooner than you think.’

  ‘You might want one too, Minister.’

  We both chewed the air for a bit. I could hear him puffing on the big cigar. He smoked Romeo y Julietas, the long ones, Churchills. He looked like Fidel Castro when he smoked them. I looked like Groucho Marx.

  ‘You know what, Gerry? I’m more sad than angry and that’s the truth of it. How long have we known each other? What have I done? Have I said something that pissed you off? What’s eating you? Tell me what it is and I’ll fix it.’

  ‘It’s too late, Peter.’

  ‘It’s never too late. Where are you anyway?’

  ‘You mean right now? I’m, I don’t know. Down at the harbour. Near the big clock.’

  ‘Albert Square?’

  I looked for a street sign.

  ‘Yeah, I think so. I’m not sure.’

  ‘I once saw a lassie near there, chained to the railings. Shaven head, the full bit. Like something out of World War Two. It’s a serious town, Gerry. You want to watch yourself.’

  ‘Well, I’ll bear that in mind, Minister. Thanks for your concern. Can I go now?’

  ‘Listen to yourself, Gerry. Listen to the pair of us. What are we even arguing for? We’ve got so much to do together. Let’s sort this out. When the time comes – and we’re talking six weeks, two months tops – I’m going to need someone. Team leader. I’ve got my guys in place, more or less, but I’ll need a top man. Think about it. Pays a lot better than papers. You said it yourself, Gerry, papers is fucked.’

  I was glad I couldn’t see his face, the plausible tilt
of his head, the coaxing half-smile.

  ‘Good. First you’re getting me fired, now you’re giving me a job. Make your mind up, Minister.’

  His sigh was like a boot heel scraping on flint.

  ‘Naw. Gerry Conway. My mind’s crystal fucking clear. I’m the next First Minister of Scotland. I need a Director of Communications. What you need to decide is, do you want the job, or are you gonnae piss it all away on a nothing story? You let me know.’

  The line went dead.

  Back at the Grania, the bald desk clerk coughed as I passed reception. There was a message: a Mr Hepburn had called. I opted not to notice the question in his eyes.

  ‘He left this,’ the clerk said.

  ‘Good man.’

  It was a folded page of hotel stationery. ‘Conway’ it said on the outside. And inside, ‘Don’t be a stranger’, and below that a mobile number. I stuck it in my pocket and headed for the lift.

  Chapter Fourteen

  When the Skinners bought the Tribune I was tempted to resign. The night editor and the health correspondent earned a round of applause and two rounds of drinks when they loudly jumped ship at a meeting in the Cope. But the bows they took to milk the applause showed naked, white-fringed, liver-spotted scalps and the new regime would have culled them anyway. For a week or so the fourth floor crackled with sedition. Meetings were called at short notice; councils of war in the Cope’s upstairs lounge. There was lots of heckling and cinematically loosened ties. The Father of the Chapel, a sub called Bill, got up on a chair to smack his fist into his palm amid beery acclamations. We actually staged a walkout and for two days running the daily was eight pages short and packed with literals that had us spraying each other with shandy as we read them out in the Cope.

  Eric and Helen Skinner – they were brother and sister, not husband and wife – came from an ex-mining village in Ayrshire. They made their money in discount carpets before moving into papers. Their stable was mainly local: town and village weeklies in the Scottish Lowlands and the North of England. Their titles thrived. They worked to a formula. Hire a couple of hungry up-and-comers to gather local news. A jaded newsdesk staffer to put the thing together and bash out strident leaders. And then fill up the paper with agency rubbish – gossip, showbiz, sport. It worked with their other titles and now it would work with the Trib. Before the deal was even done, the newsdesk were dusting off their résumés. Questions were raised at Holyrood. Shadow ministers bandied portentous truisms about the importance of a vigorous press to a functioning democracy.