Laidlaw

45

The bell had a sugary chime, a fingerful of schmaltz. It was an appropriately sentimental password to that land which defies geography, where domesticity has enchanted all things into stasis. The inside of the house was a carefully distilled negation of its exterior. Harkness had seen a few houses like this before, but only a few. It was, he suspected, what Mary’s parents were in search of. But they were novitiates.

Crossing the doorway here, you passed a frontier into a defiant immutability. The sense of a shrine wasn’t due merely to the crucifix in the hall. It related to the muted atmosphere, as if a shout would be a sacrilege, to the almost uninhabitated exactitude with which each object had its placement. You felt as if the ornaments had been fixed upon foundations. Rudeness, anger, disorder didn’t happen here. The nearest thing to turmoil would be when the tea was stirred.

The keeper of the grotto was older than they had expected — greying hair neatly done, glasses, a navy-blue twinset, imitation pearls. She had agreed she was Mrs Bryson, had listened to Laidlaw explain it was about Tommy, and had asked them in, glancing at their feet as if they might be muddy. In the living-room Harkness sat on the edge of his cushion, not wanting to crush its flowers.

‘Nothing’s happened, has it?’

The gentleness of her voice was like a charm against the possibility of anything happening.

‘We don’t know yet, Mrs Bryson,’ Laidlaw said. ‘We just wanted to talk to Tommy. He isn’t in?’

‘But Tommy’s in London.’

‘Are you sure?’

Her look chastised him gently for the insult to her motherhood.

‘Well, he’s somewhere down there. He hasn’t written since he left. You know what the young people are like nowadays. He said he was going to London.’

‘When did he leave?’

‘Oh. Let me see. Two or three weeks ago. But what’s happened? Is he in some kind of trouble?’

‘Maybe nothing’s happened. Very possibly nothing. What about Tommy’s father?’

‘What about him?’

‘Where is he, Mrs Bryson?’

It was over in a moment. Her concentration flickered and when her eyes went bland again, Harkness was left wondering if what he had seen in them could really have been that depth of hate. Perhaps more had been cooking here than the wholesome meals a growing boy would need.

‘I haven’t known where he is for about twenty years.’

‘He left you?’

‘He left us.’

‘Then Tommy knew him.’

‘Tommy was five months old when his father left. He couldn’t stand Tommy’s crying. So he went where he couldn’t hear it.’

‘And you don’t know where he is? And Tommy wouldn’t know?’

‘I know where he’s going. If he isn’t already there. R.I.P. Roast in peace.’

It was a kept joke, a bitter fermentation with a phrase for phial. The venom of it in her gentle mouth was a shock, as if Santa Claus should come on like Lenny Bruce.

‘Mrs Bryson. Do you know Harry Rayburn?’

‘Rayburn, Rayburn. Oh. The gentleman Tommy used to work for.’

‘That’s right.’

‘I know of him. But that’s all.’

Laidlaw stared at her, looked away.

‘Well. Do you mind if we look at Tommy’s room?’

She hesitated.

‘Why? Look. I think you’d better tell me what all of this is about. Is Tommy supposed to have done something? What has happened?’

‘I don’t know what’s happened, Mrs Bryson. But I want to try and trace Tommy. For questioning about something. Anything I know about him might help. But I’m asking, you understand. I’ve no authority to oblige you to show me his room. It’s up to you. I want you to understand that.’

After a moment she got up and they followed her. It was a small room. The walls were white and there was nothing on them, no mirror, no posters, no pictures. It seemed to Harkness like a monk’s cell, the room of someone very ascetic. It was what wasn’t there that defined it. It was just walls and furniture. There was no trace of a hobby or an interest. Nobody knew who lived here.

Laidlaw bent down suddenly, opened a couple of drawers and closed them again at once.

‘What are you doing? Those are Tommy’s private possessions.’

‘All right, Mrs Bryson. All right. I’m sorry. Thank you for helping us. There’s nothing more you can tell us?’

‘Just what I’ve told you.’

Laidlaw and Harkness looked at her. Her face told them that nothing more was going to come. Its prim sweetness was made of iron. Whatever you wanted to say, it had made its choices.

‘Thank you,’ Laidlaw said.

They were in the car going back before either of them spoke.

‘What’s more sinister than respectability?’ Laidlaw said.

‘You think she knows where he is?’

‘What difference does it make? Torquemada couldn’t get it out of her.’

‘So what does all that tell us?’

‘Everything. Weren’t you listening?’

Harkness changed up.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’m listening now.’

‘Bud Lawson is a monolithic Prod. Tommy is a Catholic. Jennifer’s in the cross-fire. Made to choose. She seems to choose but the lies she tells to everybody would suggest she renegued on her first choice. If Harry Rayburn’s telling the truth about Tommy trying to straighten out his deviations, well. Who else would he practise on but the girl he left behind. So he teams up with Jennifer again.’

‘It’s a wee bit speculative,’ Harkness said.

‘A wee bit. The second thing. Mrs Bryson has no curiosity. Some folk faint when they see the polis at their door. Mrs Bryson didn’t show much of anything. Because she was expecting us. She’d been rehearsing. Every time she asked what it was all about, I gave her nothing back. She didn’t get more frantic, she got more mechanical. Because once she knew we didn’t have him, she didn’t really have to ask. Either she knows what’s happened. Or she doesn’t care.’

‘God. Yet she would cover up for a sex murderer. Some sons do have them.’

‘I would hope so. I would expect my mother to do the same for me. Home is where they’ll hide you from the polis.’

‘Anything else?’ Harkness asked.

‘She says he left two or three weeks ago. ‘Let me see’? You take the mother of an only child, she knows to the hour when he left. Mrs Bryson doesn’t know because Tommy didn’t leave. His gear was still in the drawers. Who sets out on the great English adventure without a change of socks?’

‘So?’

‘Tommy Bryson killed Jennifer Lawson. He’s still in Glasgow. Harry Rayburn knows where he is. So we’ll have to go back and be unpleasant to Mr Rayburn.’

Harkness drove in silence for a moment.

‘Did you notice the pictures in his office?’ he said. ‘It just struck me. They’re pin-ups of men. Does it not make you sick?’

‘That’s evidence for the defence. When you think of the crappy attitudes like yours he’s had to cope with, he’s made not a bad job of surviving. You can almost admire him.’

‘I can’t help it. I just hate their guts.’

‘So that’ll worry us. Marlowe was a poof. And his farts were more articulate than most mouths.’

They had to stop at lights. Across their windscreen some people passed outside a cinema — a boy and a girl clowning with each other, two men in conversation, a foursome involved only with themselves.

‘Maybe that’s why he killed her,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Maybe he was just trying to catch his daddy’s attention.’