Laidlaw

31

James Cagney and Van Johnson were in drag. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were, amazingly enough, dancing down a staircase. From the trunk of a tin tree, its sheets of metal nicely interleaved, there sprouted repetitious rainbows. On the ceiling the stars were permanently out. A girl was saying very quietly to her friend, ‘Twice he did it. Twice. I nearly jumped out of my knickers. You couldn’t believe it. In the middle of the British Home Stores. Twice.’

Although he knew and liked the Starlite Room of The Muscular Arms, Harkness felt disorientated in the place tonight. The cardboard cutouts of film stars depressed him like brochures of places he would never get to, especially Jane Russell in her spot above the Ladies. The snippet of conversation he had overheard seemed appropriately bizarre. The strangeness of things was assailing him.

It was the Laidlaw effect, he decided. One day of him was enough to baffle your preconceptions and make you unfamiliar with yourself. He was such a complicated bastard and in trying to adjust to his complications you rediscovered your own. Harkness remembered something he had read or heard somewhere: ‘You never put your foot in the same river twice.’ Tonight he believed it.

What it meant to him was that tonight he wasn’t the same policeman he had been yesterday. The job was different and so was he. He remembered hearing Milligan call Laidlaw an amateur. Harkness decided he knew now what Milligan meant though he didn’t agree with it. Milligan was a professional. He took wages for doing a difficult job as well as he knew how. He discounted Laidlaw because Laidlaw abjured some of the most obvious techniques of professionalism that people like Milligan depended on.

But there are two basic kinds of professional, Harkness saw in a moment of self-congratulatory illumination. There’s the professionalism that does something well enough to earn a living from it. And there’s the professionalism that creates a commitment so intense that the earning of a living happens by the way. Its dynamic isn’t wages but the determination to do something as well as it can be done.

Laidlaw was the second kind of professional. Harkness realised it was a very uncomfortable thing to be because, in their work, ‘well’ involved not just results but the morality by which you arrived at them. He thought of Laidlaw’s capacity to bring constant doubt to what he was doing and still try to do it. The pressure must be severe.

Some of it was transfering itself to him, like a virus. As an antidote, he tried to concentrate on the immediate problem. He wondered if he should have stayed downstairs. Perhaps Laidlaw had meant him to approach the problem frontally, declare who he was and ask the relevant questions. But if he had wanted that, there would have been no objection to Laidlaw’s coming himself.

Harkness ordered another drink and hesitated over it. The place was very quiet. He had a nightmare moment of seeing himself sitting here till he was stoned and finding out nothing. For the past ten minutes or so he had been listening to the girl behind the bar talking to one of the waitresses, pathetically hoping that they would accidentally reveal all. ‘Alan?’ ‘You know. Alan that usually drinks in here. The one who goes with Jennifer Lawson.’ ‘Oh yes. That Alan.’ ‘Well. Tonight it seems he’s going to be at 14 Bath Street all evening. That’s where you’ll find him, he says. He’s not for moving. I met him in the street today and he was telling me.’ It would have gone something like that, just a nugget of natural conversation.

As it was, Harkness had established strong eye-contact with the waitress. She was his best hope, he decided. But he would have to separate her from the barmaid. He smiled and the waitress smiled back. He finished his drink and very deliberately walked past the waitress and sat at an empty table.

It only took half-a-minute for him to notice the barmaid nodding towards him and the waitress turning round. She lifted her tray and came over. She was smiling.

‘Oh, the wanderlust is on me,’ she said.

‘Well, some kind of lust,’ Harkness rehearsed in his head, and then dismissed it. That wasn’t the line. Something less chancy.

‘I just wanted to get you away from your mate,’ he said. ‘And to watch you walking.’

He almost cringed himself but she was laughing. Harkness blessed again the strong practical streak in women that lets them forgive the corniness of the terms in which you declare your interest, just so long as you declare it.

‘Now that you’ve seen it,’ she said. ‘Do you just want to watch me walking back? Or can I get you something to drink?’

‘As long as I can get you something as well.’

‘Can I have it later?’

‘You can take it home with you if you want.’

Waiting for her to come back, his mood lifted. This was something he enjoyed, something he was good at. He liked that intimacy of strangers you could achieve in chatting up a girl. Everything was new, nothing was mundane. Last week, with his car in the garage, he had discovered a pretty, dark-haired conductress in the Glasgow-Kilmarnock bus. She had been born in South America and now lived in Patna. That was unusual enough for a start. Their chat had been enjoyable enough to make him want to catch the next bus back. Instead, he had left with an address and the name of a pub in Ayr. He achieved as many moments like that as he could, a kind of Platonic intercourse. It was his revenge on the fact that he would never be able to get round to every woman in the world.

While he was miming miserliness in getting out his money, he realised how much he liked looking at her, beyond the call of any duty. She was tall and slim. That had never been his favourite type but he decided he could change. Her eyes were a subtle colour. An interesting way to spend your life, he thought — fixing their colour exactly, like a Japanese artist painting the same flower till he died. Her mouth was neat in repose but beautifully wide when smiling. Her breasts were generous and firm. Her legs were strong and shapely. They could have been a dancer’s legs. He wanted to ask her about her legs but remembered he should be asking her other things.

‘Is there anything else you’d like to know? You don’t want to count my teeth?’

The remark jolted him into laughter.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Well, I’m not sorry. I was just appreciating you. No crime in that. I think you’re great.’

The confession opened a door, brought him where subterfuge couldn’t.

‘I’ve seen you in here before,’ she said.

‘When?’

‘A couple of times. You spoke to me once.’

‘You’re sure it was me?’

‘Definitely. I think you were a bit drunk. There were two other fellas with you.’

‘If I don’t remember you, I must’ve been drunk. What did I say?’

‘Just that I was the only one who was to be allowed to serve you. And some other things.’

She smiled. Harkness had a vague memory of the occasion. Yesterday’s embarrassment was today’s gain.

‘You’ve been working here for a while, have you?’

‘About three months. I pack up at the end of this week.’

‘Just my luck. Why?’

Harkness paused. The omens were propitious. The temptation to go on conversational walkabout with her was very great. He loved the bizarre lumber that you find in strangers’ lives, uncles with wooden legs, a fear of butterflies, and bus-conductresses from South America. She promised to be interesting. He resented the job, how it made you use people, including yourself. Instead of exploring who she was, he had to try and pick her pocket.

‘Actually,’ he said, mentally hissing his own fakery. ‘I was hoping to see a bloke in here tonight. See, I’m a salesman. It’s only sometimes I’m in Glasgow. And I meet him sometimes. He usually drinks in here.’

‘Who would that be?’

‘Alan,’ Harkness said, and hoped for the best.

‘Alan who?’

‘Well, that’s the thing,’ he said, wondering what was. ‘I’m murder with names. He gave me his name and address. And I’ve lost the thing. I promised to look him up too. The next time I was in. And this is it.’

She was waiting. He shrugged in a way he hoped was charming — little detective lost.

‘Alan’s not a lot,’ she said. ‘There’s probably three of them in Glasgow. At least.’

He decided to take a chance on enlarging what Sarah had told them.

‘He works at Abbotsinch. Ground Staff.’

She was concentrating hard for him.

‘Oh. Yes. There is somebody like that. Alan. Wait a minute.’

She went over to the girl behind the bar. Harkness watched them talking. Her expression as she came back across made him hopeful.

‘Alan McInnes?’ she said.

‘That’s the man.’

‘Aye. Alan quite often drinks in here.’

Harkness waited, not wanting to disturb the moment. But she said nothing else.

‘But not tonight,’ he said with careful melancholy.

‘So it seems. Fiona says he said something about a party tonight. He was in on Saturday.’

‘A party on a Monday?’

She laughed.

‘That’s what she said.’

‘The thing is,’ Harkness said, ‘I’ve only got tonight. Tomorrow I’m away.’

She looked at him and understood. He knew by now that she wanted him to stay. She knew he was wanting to go. It was the test of her niceness.

‘Pretty free, is it?’ he said.

She smiled.

‘Oh, I think they might let you in,’ she said, watching his reaction. ‘From what Fiona was saying. You want me to find out more?’

‘It’s just that I want to see him.’

She nodded knowingly. When she went back to the bar and talked, Fiona laughed a lot but she didn’t. She came back and gave him a number in Byres Road.

‘Fiona thinks that’s the number. She’s not sure. She’s been there once for a party. But the name on the door is Lawrie. That’s not their name. The folk who had it before left the nameplate. It’s a student flat. More like a commune, I think. Alan said the party is an anti-Monday party.’

‘Thanks. Can I get you another drink?’

‘Not tonight.’

‘When do you finish?’

‘Tonight I’ll be out about a quarter-to-eleven.’

He liked the way she said it without prevarication.

‘Too early for you, I think,’ she added.

‘Don’t underestimate me.’

He nodded and she smiled. Somebody called her over.