Laidlaw

17

St Andrew’s Parish Church looked bleak, a big, dark oblong locked and shuttered, like a warehouse for a commodity gone out of fashion. Harkness wondered if it was still in use. Even the trees along both sides of it seemed at first dead. But staring at their branches shaking gently, he could see the first buds of spring, small fists of green.

He was standing opposite the church in the green doorway of the police station — a red-brick building at the corner of St Andrew’s Street and Turnbull Street, housing Central Division and the Administrative HQ He had come outside to wait for Laidlaw because it was so pleasant, the kind of morning that made you want to take a holiday from who you were. It wasn’t a day for being a policeman, he decided. The air was a permit to do anything and it was valid for everybody.

He crossed the street and walked round the church in the sunshine. Coming back to the front of it, he saw two men crossing the street towards him. One was tall and wearing glasses. The other was short and stocky, going grey. He wore a reefer jacket.

‘Excuse me. Ye got a match, Jimmy?’ the smaller one asked.

Harkness noticed the unlit cigarettes in their mouths.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t smoke.’

‘Sensible fella,’ the tall man said.

The small man took the cigarette from his mouth. Harkness could see that his hand was shaking.

‘We jist got oot o’ that nick there,’ he said. ‘Dyin’ for a drag.’

‘There’s a café round the corner in the Saltmarket,’ Harkness said. ‘Get matches there.’

‘Aye. We should just about wrestle the price o’ one between us.’

Harkness was wondering about offering them the price of a cup of tea but they had already walked away. They weren’t begging, just indulging in the Glaswegian pastime of giving strangers bulletins on your progress. Harkness was pleased with the small exchange because they hadn’t recognised him as a policeman. He must mention that, the next time his father got on to the subject of how he was getting to look more like a policeman every day.

Turning away from them, he suddenly noticed something on the first small tree on the right-hand side of the church. It was a single red berry. His feeling of the moment took it as its coat of arms: secret growth to come. He was twenty-six. That wasn’t ninety. He rejected his father’s sense of him as somebody who had made a final choice. He thought of the somebody who had made a final choice. He thought of the atmosphere of assumptiveness that had oppressed him in Mary’s house yesterday. He wasn’t ready to be defined. He remembered the months he had spent in Spain and France when he was twenty, especially the long, lazy journey from Sitges to Paris.

It had been a good time, a seemingly endless ante-room to an infinite future. Standing in St Andrew’s Square, he got back the feeling he had had then. Everything was still possible for him. Meanwhile, he would hold his commitment to what he was doing lightly. And then he saw Laidlaw.

Laidlaw was walking up Turnbull Street towards the Station. Harkness had had Laidlaw pointed out to him, although they had never met. He recognised the deceptively tall figure, deceptive because the width of the shoulders acted against the height, making him seem smaller than he was, and the very positive features that gave the face clear definition even at a distance. The most striking thing about him was something Harkness had noticed every time he had seen him — preoccupation. You never came on him empty. You imagined that if a launch arrived to rescue him from a desert island, he would have something he had to finish before being taken off. It was hard to think of him walking casually, always towards definite destinations. Harkness remembered that he was one of them. Infinite possibilities would have to wait.

He crossed the street and stopped in front of Laidlaw. They were outside the door of the station.

‘Detective Inspector Laidlaw, sir? D.C. Harkness. Reporting.’

‘Hullo,’ Laidlaw said. ‘It’s bad for your back standing like that. What’s your first name?’

‘Brian.’

They shook hands.

‘Jack. Don’t call me “sir”. If I get your respect, that’ll be fine. But I don’t need your mouth’s. Have you had breakfast?’

‘Yes.’

‘I haven’t. We’ll go and get me some.’

They walked past the police station along St Andrew’s Street, turned up the Saltmarket and then walked along the Trongate towards Argyle Street. To break the silence, Harkness told Laidlaw about the two men who had asked him for a light.

‘No wonder they were in the nick,’ Laidlaw said. ‘If they didn’t know you were polis. I was just thinking it might be more discreet working with the Police Pipe Band. Where do you get your gear anyway? The Plainclothes Policeman’s Stores?’

It took Harkness a moment to absorb the remark. It seemed such a wanton intrusion of insult into a nice moment. Argyle Street was pleasant with sunshine and shoppers. Perhaps it was the contrast between the man who suggested they use first names and the man whose first remark was an insult. Perhaps it was the effect of the expansiveness he had been feeling before meeting Laidlaw. But something made Harkness respond not as a policeman, just as himself.

‘The jacket may not be too fancy. But it comes off fast enough.’

‘It might be a harder job getting it back on. Over the plaster casts.’

‘Any time you want to test your theory.’

They both stopped in the street and looked at each other. Laidlaw started to laugh and Harkness found himself joining in.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Laidlaw said. ‘That didn’t take long. Threatening GBH to your superior within five minutes. I’ll say one thing. I hate promotion-seekers. And you have just passed ze initiation test.’

They turned into the Buchanan Street Pedestrian Precinct. It was getting busy already. They walked among the flowers and the benches, a couple of which were occupied even this early. In Gordon Street they went into the Grill ’n’ Griddle. It was empty except for them. Laidlaw had eggs, toast and coffee. Harkness took coffee.

‘I’m sorry,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Maybe I was just trying to pass some of that post mortem off on you.’

‘Bad?’

‘There’s never been a good one. Especially when Milligan’s there. Peeing verbally on the corpse.’

‘What does Milligan have against you?’

‘Not half as much as I’ve got against him.’

The waitress brought the food. She was a handsome woman with glasses. She was complaining that their rolls hadn’t been delivered yet.

While he was eating, Laidlaw asked, ‘So what’ve you got?’

Harkness passed the photograph of Jennifer Lawson across to him, and then a slip of paper with Sarah Stanley’s name, address and place of work.

‘That’s in return for the information you gave Milligan,’ he said. ‘And I found out in the office this morning who owns “Poppies”. A man called Harry Rayburn.’

‘Any form?’

‘Nothing we know about.’

‘You saw Bud Lawson last night?’

‘No, he was out. Mrs Lawson. But that was all we got.’

Laidlaw went on eating. He was looking at the photograph on the table.

‘No pants,’ he said. ‘What does that mean to you?’

‘She didn’t wear any? Or he panicked. Didn’t even know he had them with him. Or a fetishist?’

Laidlaw was nodding, still chewing.

‘The pathologist’s report’ll show that the vagina was brutally torn. No trace of sperm. But there were traces of sperm in the anus.’

‘That’s not such a wild variation.’

‘No. But you could see it as making her neuter in a way, couldn’t you? Also. The anal tissue suggests she was dead by the time he got there. It was his second assault.’

Harkness felt sickened. He had been aware, while they talked, that the waitress had gone out to the front part of the place, where a small grey-haired woman took the cash and sold cigarettes and sweets. They were telling each other about their families. How John had got engaged and Kay was enjoying school and Michael wanted a dog. Their platitudes seemed to him so wholesome he could almost smell them, like home-baked bread. Beyond them, in the Gordon Street part of the precinct, people were walking past the window in the brittle morning air as if they were advertising ordinariness. This morning’s sense of the future was being polluted already, by what they were saying.

‘Hell,’ Harkness said. ‘It’s hopeless. How are we supposed to connect with something like this? How do we begin to relate to him?’

‘Because he relates to us.’

‘Speak for yourself.’

‘What do you mean?’ Laidlaw said. ‘You resign from the species?’

‘No. He did.’

‘Not as easy as that.’

‘It is for me.’

‘Then you’re a mug. You’ll be telling me next you believe in monsters. I’ve got a wee boy of six with the same problem.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘If I did, I’d have to believe in fairies as well. And I’m not quite prepared for that.’

‘How do you mean?’

Laidlaw had finished eating. He sipped at his coffee.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘What I mean is, monstrosity’s made by false gentility. You don’t get one without the other. No fairies, no monsters. Just people. You know what the horror of this kind of crime is? It’s the tax we pay for the unreality we choose to live in. It’s a fear of ourselves.’

Harkness thought about it.

‘So where does that leave us?’

‘As stand-ins,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Other people can afford to write “monster” across this and consign it to limbo. I suppose society can’t afford to do anything else, or it wouldn’t work. They’ve got to pretend that things like this aren’t really done by people. We can’t afford to do that. We’re the shitty urban machine humanised. That’s policemen.’

Harkness was cultivating the demerara gently with the spoon.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Step outside that door. It’s a nice spring morning. Those people walking about out there. What they’re doing is different from this character’s way of living.’

‘They’re using a language!’ Laidlaw said. ‘Your way of life is taught to you like a language. It’s how you express yourself. But any language conceals as much as it reveals. And there’s a lot of languages. All of them human. This murder is a very human message. But it’s in code. We have to try and crack the code. But what we’re looking for is a part of us. You don’t know that, you can’t begin.’

‘Forgive me if I feel a bit sick with a part of us.’

‘All right,’ Laidlaw said. ‘You can even cry if you want. It clears the eyes.’

Laidlaw lit a cigarette. He put the photograph and the piece of paper inside the small wallet that held his identification card. Harkness was watching him.

‘I don’t see how all that helps us much,’ Harkness said.

Laidlaw smiled.

‘Not a lot, right enough,’ he said. ‘But there’s one important thing that follows from it. It keeps us from making the commonest mistake people make when they think about a murder like this.’

‘What’s that?’

‘They see it as the culmination of an abnormal sequence of events. But it’s only that for the victim. For everybody else — the murderer, the people connected with him, the people connected with the victim — it’s the beginning of the sequence.’

‘So?’

‘So here endeth the first lesson. You were asking how we can connect. That’s how. Milligan and his mob can reconstruct the crime if they want. We do something very simple. We just look for whoever did it. In the lives round him, what he’s done must make ripples. That’s what we’re looking for. We do it by talking to some people. Harry Rayburn for starters.’

‘We can begin by asking him if he’s seen a man carrying a pair of knickers and a placard saying “I am sexually insecure”.’

Laidlaw looked at him.

‘That can be your question,’ he said.