Laidlaw

8

The High Court of Glasgow is at Jocelyn Square. It is an imposing building, its main entrance pillared and approached by wide steps, its side doors having carved above them ‘South Court’ and ‘North Court’. The suggestion is vaguely Grecian, implying the long and formidable genealogy of justice. On its right the Clyde that made the city flows tamely under bridges.

The Court confronts Glasgow Green like a warning. The Green itself is gated and railinged now, the city’s commemorative window-box of a once wilder place. From that green root the miles of stone have spread, north to Drumchapel, Maryhill, Springburn, Balornock and Easterhouse, south across the river to Pollok, Castlemilk, Rutherglen and Cambuslang, still part of the same confrontation between nature and law, the Green and the Court.

Adjoining the Court is a small, single-storey building, standing unobtrusively on a corner like a casual bystander. The lower parts of its walls are old weathered stone. The upper parts are red brick. It’s as if a workman were wearing spats. Above the doorway is the word ‘Mortuary’, discreet as a wink.

This is the police mortuary, the tradesmen’s entrance to the Court, as it were. Here are delivered the raw materials of justice, corpses that are precipitates of strange experience, alloys of fear and hate and anger and love and viciousness and bewilderment, that the Court will take and refine into comprehension. Through the double glass doors come those with a grief to collect. They take away the offal of a death, its privateness, the irrelevant uniqueness of the person, the parts that no one else has any further use for. The Court will keep only what matters, the way in which the person became an event.

To come in here is to be reminded that the first law is real estate, and people are its property. It was a reminder that always sickened Laidlaw. They stood in the entrance hall with its polished floor. A man was here to look at his dead daughter and they must ring a bell, request an audience. Laidlaw’s finger on the brass button jarred himself. It summoned him to make a fruitless choice: indulge in grief by proxy or imitate a stone. The shirt-sleeved, waistcoated man who came recognised him, unlocked the second set of glass doors and ushered Bud Lawson into calamity and Laidlaw into his own small dilemma.

Laidlaw left Bud Lawson with McKendrick in the waiting-room and went to check. In the long room the mortuary attendant was working against the background of the rectangular doors, like refrigerators in which three bodies could be stored. He nodded pleasantly as Laidlaw came up.

The girl’s naked body lay on a metal table with raised edges. The man was washing it. Water sluiced down the runnels at the edge of the table. Laidlaw stood beside him, noted again the mole, as if it might have been make-up that would wash off. He was thinking of Mrs Lawson. The man was very deft, had an obvious expertise in washing dead bodies. Laidlaw remembered that his name was Alec and he liked bowling.

‘Been an attractive lassie,’ Alec said.

‘I have who I think is the father with me.’

Alec waited for a moment longer.

‘Nearly there,’ he said. ‘Give me a coupla minutes to get her dressed. She had a bad time, eh? Any ideas?’

‘Somebody who was in Glasgow on Saturday night.’

‘I was visiting relatives in Edinburgh,’ Alec said. ‘Score me off your list.’

Neither of them had smiled. The sounds remained completely separate from their expressions, a ritual form of words where there was no conversation.

‘Tell me when you want us,’ Laidlaw said.

In the waiting-room Bud Lawson was still following the relentless parade of his own thoughts, like an Orange March nobody dare cut across. In the car he had briefly expressed anger at Laidlaw’s attitude of this morning, his insistence that it was too early to jump to conclusions. But now even Laidlaw had become irrelevant to whatever reactions were massing in Bud Lawson. He was going somewhere alone.

When Alec came in, Laidlaw took Bud Lawson through to where the body was. It lay on a white metal trolley, neutered by wrappings that were like cheese-cloth and familiar to Laidlaw. No part of the person it had been was visible. It was already a parcel for the law courts.

Laidlaw positioned Bud Lawson at its head. Alec was at the other side of the trolley. Even the head itself was tightly wrapped, a standard practice because the head had frequently to be opened in post mortem. The only loose part of the mummy-cloth was a triangular flap over the face. It was this that Alec lifted, like a window into death.

The face was completely composed, the mouth held gently shut by the cloth beneath the chin. Her youthfulness was blinding. Framed in white, she was like an involuntary nun.

Bud Lawson groaned and buckled. Laidlaw gripped him and was immediately shaken off. Bud Lawson straightened up. He stared down at his daughter. Nothing happened in his eyes. To Laidlaw watching, having seen so many reactions to the same fact in this same cold place, this was the strangest, because it was no reaction. It was like corpse confronting corpse. Bud Lawson stared at his dead daughter, looked steadily across at Alec and nodded once. And that was that.

Laidlaw was glad when the formalities were finished and they stood in the street outside.

‘We’ll want a photograph,’ Laidlaw said.

‘Whit?’

‘Of Jennifer.’

‘See ma wife.’

Bud Lawson was watching traffic pass in the street.

‘Well, would you come down to the Station with us now?’

‘Whit fur?’

‘There may be questions.’

‘Ah’m in nae mood fur questions. Ye can come tae the hoose if there’s anything tae ask.’

‘Well, let us run you home then.’

‘Ah don’t want yer bloody run.’

Bud Lawson walked away. Laidlaw and McKendrick were left to report to the Central Division. Laidlaw, having checked that he wasn’t wanted for anything else today, gave Milligan the notes he had taken this morning and agreed to meet him at nine o’clock the next morning for the post mortem. He phoned the Commander and explained. The Commander was agreeable to Laidlaw’s going off. ‘It’s been a long weekend for you. Anyway, I’m calling the new D.C. — Harkness — in today. I’ll get him started. He’ll be working with you.’

Driving home, Laidlaw put the day’s events in the left-luggage department of his mind. Tomorrow would be soon enough to collect them. He needed rest, a good sleep. Only one image wouldn’t be shelved, persisted: Bud Lawson’s reactionless face as he walked away, following his own compulsive thoughts like inaudible flutes. Laidlaw wondered where they would lead him.