Laidlaw

46

What happened then took Harkness by surprise, not just by its speed but by the suddenness with which there was revealed to him the true nature of what they were involved in. When he thought of the case afterwards, the reel of sensations he ran most often in his mind began at the point when he and Laidlaw stepped out of the car at Poppies.

He had thought they were just coming back from Mrs Bryson’s. It felt not greatly different from all the other things they’d done. But suddenly that simple action, coming at the end of the distance they had walked, the people questioned, the places gone to, the thoughtful talk, was like the last act of a conjuration. Using all the skill they had, they had demanded access to a secret. What Harkness was to realise was that the catch-clause in such a demand is that you have to give the secret access to you.

The court was dark by now except for the lights of The Maverick. In that glow of other people’s pleasure they met one of the policemen they had left. It was the taller one. He walked out of shadow towards them and, behind the preoccupied voices coming from the pub, they talked like conspirators.

‘Harry Rayburn left, sir. But he’s back. Just a minute ago.’

‘Where did he go?’

‘To the Bridgegate. A condemned building. Number Seventeen. Don’s watching it now.’

‘We’ll be faster on foot. You stay with Rayburn. Phone the Division. But give us some time to ourselves first. I don’t want him frightened.’

He said the last words on the run. Harkness caught up. An old woman ahead of them turned round in alarm and cowered into a doorway. Laidlaw was just managing to talk.

‘Knew we were coming. . Tip-off to get away. . Keep us talking.’

Concentrating on breathing, Harkness thought that the last part of Laidlaw to die would be his mouth. People were pausing to look at them inquisitively, with that special Glasgow assumption of communal rights, as if they should stop and explain what it was about. They went along Argyle Street, down Stockwell Street and then cut off to the Bridgegate.

The running changed Harkness’s sense of himself, put him outside his own preconceptions in the way that physical exertion does. The stance of forensic enquiry he had adopted towards the case was effectively penetrated. He wasn’t just a mobile head any longer. He was a confused bundle of tensions and stresses, aware of the problem of breathing, of the changes of surface under his feet, of tiredness tautening his legs. His perceptions weren’t a progression. They were fired fragments, coming at him like flak. A car making a U-turn at the end of the Bridgegate. The other policeman starting to run towards them. Somebody stepping out of the doorway of a derelict tenement. Somebody walking towards the tenement from the end of the Bridgegate. Laidlaw shouting, ‘Hey, you! Bud Lawson!’ The figure at the doorway disappearing back into the tenement. Bud Lawson running and reaching the tenement before them. Laidlaw shouting to the other policeman, ‘Watch the door!’

The entry snuffed out the city. For Harkness, already dizzy with exertion, it was like falling down a shaft. The suddenness was overwhelming — a foetid smell and four men running in the dark.

He was moaning for breath, Laidlaw in front. The stairs were blows that jarred him to the thighs. His lungs seemed hedged with thorns. A piece of railing clattered away from his hand. The four of them seemed labouring up a descending spiral stair, a murderous aspiration. That ended suddenly, grotesquely, in accident.

The stairs gave way. The boy and Bud Lawson had reached the upper landing. Behind them the stairs collapsed. The noise battered their ears, halted Laidlaw and Harkness cringing like an act of God. The bouncing debris defined how far they could have fallen. The dust settled on them like a benediction, choking them. Between them and the landing a pit of black, about eight feet across. The landing itself was in blackness. But they knew what was going to happen there. A whimper like a trapped hare came to them.

‘Too late, polisman,’ Bud Lawson said. ‘He’s mine.’

The voice terrified Harkness. It came brutally out of darkness, never to be denied. The gulf between them and it seemed impassable. The exhaustion Harkness felt was more than physical. It reached remorselessly into who he was and taught him futility. He had thought that what they were trying to do was a difficult thing, to locate and isolate whoever it was who carried about with him the savage force that had murdered Jennifer Lawson. Now it came to him as impossible, because that force wasn’t isolated. It had already multiplied on itself to create a twin, this moment of ravening viciousness whose spores were in each of them.

‘Bud Lawson!’ Laidlaw threw his voice across the space, grappling what was on the other side. ‘You don’t touch that boy!’

The voice was an atavism, like Lawson’s. The ferocity in Laidlaw’s voice was a part of Harkness, just as he shared Bud Lawson’s rage. In the stillness he felt himself enclosed in their animal breathings, and the pathetic whimpering of the boy was like a plea against what Harkness himself was.

‘Ah’m gonny kill ’im.’

‘You dae. An’ Ah kill you. No question.’

The voices were the same terrible force talking to itself.

‘Because o’ a rat like this?’

It was a question, Harkness realised, the sound of something human. If Lawson had the certainty he claimed, the boy would be already dead. All he had to do was drop him over the edge like waste, if he was waste. Uncertainty had happened, and with it hope. Harkness listened to Laidlaw try to enlarge it into doubt.

‘What gives ye the right?’

‘Ah’m her feyther!’

‘You didn’t even know ’er.’

‘Shut up, polisman.’

‘No chance. You didn’t even know ’er. She hated you!’

The following silence frightened Harkness because it meant that maybe Laidlaw had misjudged. And if he had, the boy was dead. But what came was Bud Lawson’s voice, humanised with pain.

‘How wid you know?’

‘I’ve had to ask a lot of questions. Not all the answers tell against that boy. Don’t kid yerself! She hated you. And she was right. Feyther? Feyther’s more than bairnin’ yer wife. Feyther’s more than you ever were.’

‘Ah loved ma lassie!’

‘That’s not what I hear. She lied to you, she hid from you. She didn’t trust you because you gave her none. You wouldn’t let her be herself. You helped to make what happened to her happen.’

‘No!’

‘You helped! That’s all I’m saying. What rights have you? What right has any of us to touch that boy?’

‘Shut up!’

‘Never shut up. If you can’t stand the words, don’t listen. That’s what you’ve been doing all your life, isn’t it? Hiding! You’re a hider. You couldn’t face who your girl was. She was another person, a separate body. She would’ve been a woman. She would’ve wanted men. Catholics? It wasn’t Catholics you were against. Hate Catholics, hate people! You couldn’t stand for her to have somebody else. That’s what it was. What was it, did you fancy her yourself?’

‘Shut up, shut up!’

‘It’s just a question. I don’t know the answer. Do you? Well if you do, then kill him! He’s there, he’s helpless. You’re such a hard man, aren’t you? Except that you know you’re hiding. Kill him! So that you don’t have to face up to what’s really happened. Kill him! If you can’t take the risk of leaving him alive.’

There was silence. The silence built gradually into a terrible scream and the splatter of an enormous blow, the sound of bones fragmenting. Laidlaw jumped. The railing he caught came away but held long enough for his body to moor to the landing.

Harkness heard the metal rebound down the well of the stairs, measuring the depth of his awe. Then a surprised voice said, ‘Jesus Christ.’ It was a visitor from ordinariness, a beautiful sound from a place that to Harkness seemed miles away. The other policemen had arrived.

As they came up the stairs, Harkness demanded a torch. He shone it above him. It made an arbitrary patch of light in total darkness. It centre was Laidlaw. On his left was Tommy Bryson, a handsome, pale-skinned boy cowering away, the front of his light blue trousers dark where he had wet himself. On Laidlaw’s right Bud Lawson was slumped, his right hand cradled in front of him, a mess of blood and protuberant bone. The obscenely scabrous wall beside him, that served as a frame for all three, was blotched with red where his hand had smashed it. Laidlaw was buffer between them, blinking against the manufactured light, the mouth that had saved a man’s life curled in annoyance at the intrusion.

After some consultation, a door was broken off downstairs and used as a bridge to get them from the landing. As the small group came back out the entry into Glasgow, the torch that pointed their way flicked across some graffiti that nobody noticed. One legend in ballpoint read:

Arrest Hampden Park

put them all in the van

hell still be lose

hes the cancer man