Laidlaw

44

Harry Rayburn was angry. In early afternoon he had managed to get Tommy to stop saying no to being taken from the tenement. He hadn’t agreed to go but his passivity was all Harry felt he needed. Tommy had stilled to the point of being just another part of that ugly room. Furniture you could move — it didn’t struggle.

Since then Harry had been trying to make contact with Matt Mason. He had phoned all the places he could think of, he had gone to his bookie shops, he had even in desperation gone to Bearsden, to be turned away by an elderly caricature of gentility calling herself the ‘housekaypah’ and playing at the Lady of the Manor. Working-class parvenus were the worst. Her voice was East End garrotted by Kelvinside. ‘Eh’m afrayd they’re both aht. Perheps yew could call again. No, Eh’ve no ideah when Mr Mason wull be beck. Perhaps yew’d care to leave a massage?’ ‘Yes,’ Harry said. ‘Fuck ’im!’

Perspiring and panicky, he came back to Poppies to begin phoning again and found it had closed on him like a trap. The policemen were very polite but he would have to wait in his office until he could be seen. He was raging but he soon gave up trying to vent it on them. You might as well try to get a reaction out of garden gnomes. ‘We’ve got our instructions, sir.’

He walked up and down the office, burning Mason in effigy and suing the police into abject apology. The threat to himself represented by their presence was made trivial by the danger to Tommy the delay was causing. It was hours now since he had seen Tommy, a lot of hours. Anything could be happening. Tommy would have expected some fulfilment of Harry’s promises by this time. He might panic. He might get out of the tenement himself, and that would be it. The state he was in, he wouldn’t last an hour in the street without doing something crazy. He might come walking in here.

The frustration of it was fierce, and the sense of persecution he felt reactivated all his past frustrations. There were plenty of those. They made up most of his life. The injustice of this moment connected up with all the other injustices, the sneers, the dismissive looks, the time three men had followed him into the toilet of a pub and left him unconscious there, for doing nothing more than being himself.

The effect of this latest insult was out of all proportion to its cause. It was like one glass of whisky to an alcoholic. It found its way so far into him that by the time they knocked at the door he was almost hysterical with rage. The two who had been here yesterday morning came in.

‘Not you again! What the hell is going on here? If you’ve got a lawyer, get him! I’m going to mince you for this.’

‘Oh daddy-mammy,’ Laidlaw said.

‘I’m telling you. You’ve got no official sanction for being here. You’ve encroached on my rights already. Now get out. You’re trespassing. Get out! Before I throw you out.’

‘If you don’t stop frightening me, Mr Rayburn,’ Laidlaw said very quietly, ‘I won’t hit you — I’ll make love to you.’

It was like stopping a runaway horse with your pinkie. Harkness could see Rayburn’s presence go soft, filleted with one remark. The anger that had etched his face lost definition, and his features became blurred. The whole bias of the place had shifted. It was Laidlaw’s room. As Laidlaw walked into it, Rayburn moved backwards clumsily. Laidlaw gestured backwards at Harkness, who came in and closed the door.

‘Take off your hairy chest, Mr Rayburn, and sit down.’

Rayburn disintegrated into the chair that Laidlaw offered him. Laidlaw leaned into him, almost whispering.

‘I’ve watched your act long enough, Mr Rayburn. It’s a bad act. And now I want my money back. I could knock you out with my eyelashes. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about. We’re here to talk about Tommy, Mr Rayburn.’

Rayburn looked up, looked away.

‘I don’t know any Tommy.’

‘Mr Rayburn. I don’t think you understand. If you don’t answer the questions I’m going to ask, I’m going to jail you. Right now. Because if you don’t answer them, I’m going to assume you’re implicated in a murder.’

Rayburn’s face attempted incredulity but Laidlaw’s face gave him nothing back.

‘You’re a homosexual, Mr Rayburn. For some time you’ve had a homosexual relationship with a boy called Tommy Bryson. Is that correct?’

The silence was the time it took for Harry Rayburn to realise that the last thing he had left to hope for was never going to happen.

‘Yes.’

It was the smallest word Harkness had ever heard.

‘His name doesn’t appear on the list of staff you gave us. But he works for you. Is that correct?’

‘No. No, it’s not.’

‘Mr Rayburn-’

‘He did work for me. But not any more.’

‘Since when?’

‘Two or three weeks ago. He packed in. We broke up.’

‘Why?’

‘None of your business.’

‘Mr Rayburn, I don’t want the details of your private life. Believe me, I don’t. You bowdlerise it any way you want. But give me the shape of what happened.’

Rayburn shut his eyes, talked into his own despair.

‘He couldn’t come all the way out. A lot of people can’t. He still wanted to be straight. Heterosexual.’ He hated the word. ‘He wanted to try to make it with girls.’

‘And you haven’t seen him since then?’

Rayburn opened his eyes. They looked like bruises.

‘No.’

‘Mr Rayburn. That’s not easy to believe.’

Harry Rayburn looked up at Laidlaw evenly. His eyes had the calmness of complete despair.

‘Not much that’s happened to me is,’ he said. ‘At least not for me.’

Laidlaw looked at him and accepted. There was no choice.

‘What’s his address?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘You better develop a memory quickly, Mr Rayburn.’

‘It’s Manley Gardens. But I’m not sure of the number. Fifty-something I think. It’s an old building.’

‘I know where that is.’

‘But he won’t be there.’

‘How do you know?’

‘He was going to England, he said. To try and sort himself out there. There’ll only be his mother in the house. His father shot the crow years ago.’

‘Thanks, Mr Rayburn,’ Laidlaw said. ‘You’re sure that’s all you know?’

Rayburn nodded.

‘I hope so,’ Laidlaw said. ‘We’ll be back. In the meantime, I’ll try not to offend against your sense of civic liberty by taking the policemen out.’

Turning to close the door, Harkness saw Harry Rayburn with his head in his hands, huddled as if he was in the middle of a private air-raid.

Before they left, Laidlaw posted the other two policemen outside ‘Poppies.’

‘It’s worth a try,’ Laidlaw said in the car.

‘No,’ Harkness said. ‘He’s never going to buy that. He knows you’ve just moved them outside. Waiting to follow him.’

‘Knowing isn’t accepting,’ Laidlaw said. ‘A panicked elephant’ll try to thread itself through a needle.’