Laidlaw

29

The Burleigh Hotel was at the West end of Sauchiehall Street. The architecture was Victorian and very dirty. It had been cunningly equipped with curlicues and excrescences, the chief effect of which was to make it an enormous gin for drifting soot and aerial muck. It stood now half-devoured by its catch, weighted with years of Glasgow, its upper reaches a memorial to the starlings that had once covered the middle of the city like an umbrella of demented harpies.

Braked by its draught-excluder, the big, glass-panelled door opened hesitantly, as if the place was coy about letting you in. The foyer was large, its sea-green carpet choking in a Sargasso of worn threads. It was hard for Harkness to imagine what might have done the wearing.

He trekked across the carpet to Reception. The keyboard held more metal than an arsenal. The pigeon-holes were crammed with emptiness. He couldn’t see Laidlaw’s name upside down on the register. He pressed the bell. It buzzed harshly, as if it was out of practice.

The woman who came out of the cubby-hole at the side was unexpected. A woman like her was always unexpected. She was mid-twenties, attractive, and she had that look of competence in being female that makes men count their hormones. She smiled once at Harkness and he wanted her to smile twice.

‘I don’t suppose you have a vacancy,’ he said, nodding at the keyboard.

She had adjusted to the archness of his levity before he had finished speaking.

‘This is our quiet year,’ she said.

‘Actually, I’m looking for a Mr Laidlaw. Could you tell me his room number, please?’

The second smile didn’t please him as much as he had expected, because he didn’t understand it. He had the discomfort you feel when you find yourself in an expensive restaurant without having checked your wallet.

‘You wouldn’t be Mr Harkness, would you?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Your secret’s safe with me,’ she mouthed, flicking her eyebrows. ‘The man’s upstairs. In the Residents’ Lounge.’

Harkness hesitated, reluctant to give the moment up, waiting for something witty to come into his mouth.

‘Thanks,’ he said.

‘If your feet are sore, you can use the lift.’

Harkness saw the lift as he turned, gridded in black iron like an instrument of torture. He remembered a miserable hour stuck in a lift in San Sebastian. His feet felt good.

‘You’re not going to take him away from us already, are you?’

Harkness turned at the foot of the stairs.

‘Why? Would you miss him?’

She laughed and concentrated on her desk. The gesture suggested to him that she was spoken for and left him with nothing to do but climb the lumpily carpeted stairs. The Residents’ Lounge was on the left.

It was just a gigantic colour television with a room round it. The set was showing golf, Peter Oosterhuis shambling brilliantly round the course. Laidlaw sat with four others. A couple of them wore slippers. One had a glass of bottled beer from which he sipped as if it was medicine. The atmosphere was homely and genteel. They had brought their hearths with them. They were the travelling salesmen you never hear about in the jokes.

Harkness slipped into the wicker chair beside Laidlaw. The cushion was pap and within seconds Harkness felt the chair begin to impress itself on him. Laidlaw raised his eyebrows and nodded. He was drinking a whisky and he held up the glass and looked a question at Harkness. Harkness shook his head.

The man with the beer uncrossed his legs, crossed them the other way. In the stillness of the room it felt like an event. He was one of those men who believe that baldness is a state of mind. He had parted his hair just slightly above his armpits and trained the strands to climb like clematis. ‘Shot,’ he said. ‘Hm,’ the others chorused. Harkness thought that ten minutes of this could make you geriatric.

He watched Oosterhuis drop a stroke to par and said to Laidlaw, ‘You like golf?’

‘Yes and no,’ Laidlaw said.

Harkness said nothing. He wasn’t in the mood for riddles.

‘It’s a good game,’ Laidlaw said quietly. ‘But I suspect all professional sportsmen. Grown men devoting their lives to a game. They’re capitalism’s temple prostitutes.’

Harkness said nothing. In their short acquaintance he recognised a trait in Laidlaw that was beginning to get him down. In certain moods, you could say hullo to Laidlaw and he’d have to analyse it before he gave you an answer. That could get wearing.

Harkness was glad when Laidlaw suggested they go to his room. They went upstairs, padded along dim corridors, Harkness aware how hard it was to walk steadily on the shifting levels of the aged floorboards, like being on the deck of a tilting ship. The ghosts of old smells drifted at them as they went, unexorcised by Lysol.

Room fifty-two was distinguished by nothing but a number. It looked as if it hadn’t so much been taken over as broken into — electric razor, towel, shirt on the bed, uncapped toothpaste in the sink, a suitcase disembowelled on a chair. Laidlaw lit a cigarette and sat on the bed. Harkness handed him the list from Milligan.

‘Rayburn’s workers,’ Laidlaw said. ‘That’s very neat. In alphabetical order, no less. Beginning at D and ending with T. It’s nice. But at the moment it’s about as handy as a telephone directory. Milligan’ll see them.’

Laidlaw gave the sheet back to Harkness and concentrated on smoking. His mood was mufti. He wasn’t a policeman, just a tired man in a strange hotel room with somebody he’d only met that day. Harkness, with the expansiveness of spring still making him want to be other places, caught and shared the mood. It seemed that all they had in common was the futility of the day. At the Station Harkness had been struck by the busy purposefulness of what was going on. It had made him feel peripheral. To stop himself from blaming the feeling on Laidlaw, he tried to share it with him. He looked out of the window.

‘He’s out there somewhere,’ he said. ‘In the city. Maybe mixing with other people right now. Walking. Talking. But where?’

Laidlaw got up and filled himself another drink. He took water from the tap.

‘Out of earshot of you, if he’s lucky,’ he said. ‘Don’t write your soap-operas in the firm’s time.’

That was enough. Harkness was glad. His frustration had a focus. He was a fight just looking for a pretext. Laidlaw obliged.

‘Maybe Milligan’ll solve it,’ he said, ‘save us all the bother. And maybe power cranes can pick daisies.’

‘Why don’t you leave off Milligan?’ Harkness said.

Laidlaw, sitting on the bed again, looked up at him.

‘I didn’t know you cared.’

‘Oh, piss off!’

In the silence someone passed along the corridor.

‘Maybe you’d like to translate,’ Laidlaw said.

‘Yes, I would. I’m cheesed listening to you put the boot in Milligan.’

‘You’re hypersensitive.’

‘I don’t think so. I worked with the man for a year. I quite like him.’

‘Then you’re a slow learner.’

‘So teach me,’ Harkness said. ‘Maybe you could explain what it is you’ve got against Milligan.’

Laidlaw took a drink and nodded.

‘Maybe I could,’ he said. ‘But for one reason only. To further your education. Not to justify myself to you. Your opinion of me at the moment worries me exactly as much as dandruff would a chopped-off head. I don’t have to justify myself to you. I’ve got to justify myself to me. And that’s a bloody sight harder. And the next time you feel a fit of self-righteous loyalty coming on, why don’t you have it some place else?’

They looked at each other, about an eye-flicker away from fisticuffs.

‘Fine,’ Harkness said. ‘But you still haven’t said anything.’

‘Milligan has no doubt.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean if everybody could waken up tomorrow morning and have the courage of their doubts, not their convictions, the millennium would be here. I think false certainties are what destroy us. And Milligan’s full of them. He’s a walking absolute. What’s murder but a willed absolute, an invented certainty? An existential failure of nerve. What we shouldn’t do is compound the felony in our reaction to it. And that’s what people keep doing. Faced with the enormity, they lose their nerve, and where they should see a man, they make a monster. It’s a social industry. And Milligan’s one of its entrepreneurs. There’s plenty of them, but he’s the one that keeps crossing my vision. Like a big, fat, fucking mote.’

‘That’s a bit heavy for me.’

‘So that’s your problem,’ Laidlaw said. ‘You asked the question.’

Harkness stood absorbing it. It was the same as had happened with the golf, he thought. You threw Laidlaw a question as casual as a snowball and he answered with an avalanche.

‘It’s an impressive charge,’ Harkness said. ‘But where’s the evidence?’

‘Here.’ Laidlaw pointed to his head. ‘You’ve known him a year. I’ve known him a lot longer. I’ve seen him splash through other people’s grief like a child in the shallows at the shore. Just to make a pinch. I’ve seen him question a sixteen-year-old tearaway in a darkened street. Rib by rib.’

‘That’s sometimes the only way.’

‘Maybe. But when you start to enjoy it, it’s all over bar “Nearer my God to Thee”.’

‘He’s not so bad.’

‘He should be cordoned off. He’s exhaling fallout.’

Harkness sat down on the only chair, shaking his head, feeling the complexity of Laidlaw’s presence. He felt it was simpler than Laidlaw made it out to be, but he couldn’t prove it. They sat letting their mutual depression bleed into the silence.

‘Anyway,’ Laidlaw said at last. ‘Today’s proved one thing to my satisfaction. Whoever we’re looking for was known to Jennifer. And if she knew him, somebody else available to us must have known him. What did they say about Alan Whoever-he-is?’

Harkness had to bring himself back from a distance.

‘They want us to get hold of him and bring him in for questioning.’

‘That’s fair enough. We’ll start with “The Muscular Arms”. I think you should do that on your own. That’s a kind of kinder-garten place, isn’t it? Pop music and pimples. If somebody my age goes in, they’ll think it’s a raid. But you’ll be all right. Especially now you’ve changed your gear. See what you can find out. There’s somebody else I want to try and see. I’ll meet you at the Gordon Street side of Central Station. Say an hour. All right?’

Harkness nodded, wondering what Laidlaw would be like by then.

‘How will I recognise you?’ he said.

Laidlaw shook his head and smiled ruefully at the floor.

‘I’ll be the one stopping folk in the street and asking them if they could direct me to the nearest murderer.’

It wasn’t till Harkness was walking along the corridor that he realised Laidlaw hadn’t pulled rank throughout the argument. His anger began to turn again into liking for Laidlaw. He wasn’t sure that he was glad.

In the room Laidlaw took another drink. He was thinking, not for the first time, how a given context precipitated definition. Arguments created an assurance you hadn’t known you had. Left alone with himself, the doubts invaded him. Harkness wasn’t too wrong. Milligan was more than Laidlaw allowed him. But his actions had to be opposed — a thing devised by the enemy.

He sipped his drink. He wanted to phone, to find out how the children were. He wanted to hear their voices. But he would do it later. He couldn’t at the moment cope with the emotional traffic-jam involved in the simple act of phoning his wife. He was too sore.

Instead, he washed and dressed, a therapy designed to convince him that he was fit to handle whatever happened. It worked again. Cleaned and knowing how good he looked, he went downstairs. He crossed to the reception-desk and winked. The wink was an act of preposterous bravado.

‘How long will you be?’ she said.

‘Jan,’ he said. ‘Who knows?’

‘My God, you’re corny.’

‘The secret of my charm.’

‘You do remember the room number?’

He laughed. She smiled at his receding back.