Laidlaw

23

As they settled themselves upstairs in the bus, Harkness was still shaking his head and sighing quietly.

‘Well, think of it this way,’ Laidlaw said. ‘There are tourists and travellers. Tourists spend their lives doing a Cook’s Tour of their own reality. Ignoring their slums. Travellers make the journey more slowly, in greater detail. Mix with the natives. A lot of murderers are, among other things, travellers. They’ve become terrifyingly real for themselves. Their lives are no longer a hobby. Poor bastards. To come at them, you’ve got to become a traveller too. Think of this as a wee ritual exercise for opting out of tourism. A car is psychologically sterile, a mobile oxygen-tent. A bus is septic. You’ve got to subject yourself to other people’s prejudices, run the risk of a mad conductor beating you to death with his ticket-punch. Two twenties, please.’

‘Now have ye thought about this?’ the conductor said. ‘There’s still time tae get aff. We stop for tea at the end o’ this run. Ah usually like tae go berserk at least once before ma tea-break.’

Laidlaw and Harkness laughed.

‘Ah’ll pit yer name in for a Ministry of Transport Medal then,’ the conductor said.

When he was gone, Laidlaw said, ‘Of course, the Underground’s worse. Then you’re sealed off in a revolving tube with everybody else’s hang-ups. Like laboratory specimens.’

Harkness shook his head.

‘And here was me thinking you just liked the view from upstairs on a bus.’

‘There is that,’ Laidlaw said. ‘I like sitting up at the front and playing at being the driver.’

Laidlaw lit a cigarette.

‘Right. There are two basic assumptions you can make. Very basic. One is that it’s a fruit-machine job. Sweet mystery of life and all that. That there was no connection between the villain and the victim. Except a time and a place. The lassie was the victim of a kind of sexual hit-and-run job. All right. If that’s the case, we’ve got no chance anyway. It’s up to Milligan and his soldier-ants to take the situation apart leaf by leaf. Except that, for me, putting your faith in Milligan is just a fancy term for despair.’

Harkness was niggled by the reference to Milligan but he let it go.

‘So for you and me to be any use at all, we have to take the second assumption. That there is a connection. What happened in the park didn’t just fall from out the sky one day. It’s got roots. And we can find these roots. So we’re going to make that assumption.’

‘Right. We’ve made that assumption,’ Harkness offered.

‘All right. We don’t know who the bloke is. He’s no help. We know the lassie, but she’s not saying much. But we know folk who knew her. And if she did have a connection with the bloke, there must be somebody around who knows about it. Must be. Who?’

‘Her family,’ Harkness said.

‘You didn’t see the father last night?’ Laidlaw asked.

‘No. Only the mother.’

‘I saw her yesterday. What’s left of her after Bud Lawson’s been mincing her ego for years. He’s an amazing monolith, that big man. The kind of father who eats his young to protect them from the world. If anything was going on with his daughter, he’d be the last to know. But if you could get the mother to talk, she might have something to tell. I’d like to try that. But first I’d like to know more, to have something to talk about. You’d have to know enough to be able to tease the rest out of her.’

‘Maybe that’s where Sarah Stanley comes in.’

‘I hope so. I was going to say her friends are the other obvious area. Except that they don’t seem to be there. One friend. Was that all you got last night, too?’

‘Aye. She said she was a very quiet wee lassie. Kept herself by herself, she said.’

‘One friend. Why aren’t there more of them? Or are there? She must’ve been a funny wee lassie, right enough.’

‘Well, if your theory’s going to work, a lot depends on wee Sarah Stanley.’

‘Aye. We’ll have to be very thorough with Sarah, I doubt. No marks in this wee test for ambiguous answers.’