Strange Loyalties

13

^‘Meece was dealing, right? But he was dealing funny. He was putting quite a lot up his sleeve. Literally. He was using more and more of the stuff and selling less. It looks as if the woman and him were stashing too much away in their own veins. Or maybe saving it up for a rainy day. Keeping a private account. The story is that when he came to pay off his suppliers, the books didn’t balance. They warned him.’

‘That could’ve been the broken arm.’

‘Right. It looks as if it didn’t help his memory tying a knot in his arm. So they closed the account. With a warning to all bad debtors.’

‘Where did you get this?’

‘Asking around. Ye know Macey? Ernie Milligan’s tout.’

‘Well enough. I test every penny he gives me with my teeth. But that sounds real enough. Though it’s nothing you couldn’t have guessed. No names yet?’

‘Not yet. Macey’s listenin’ for us.’

Like a visual aid to my understanding, Buster cocked an ear. Listening? You get it? Thanks, Buster. In contrast to what I was hearing, even he seemed an emblem of domestic cosiness, as if he were a dog stitched on a sampler: Buster, Sweet Buster. The kitchen was warm and pleasant with residual smells of cooking. We had both been well fed by Katie, who had forgiven the tetchiness of my morning.

When I had come in late, she gave me a cuddle and told me to sit down. ‘What you need,’ she said, ‘is a poultice for your stomach.’ She made me a good one. Doing the dishes had let me feel temporarily a part of her sweetly dishevelled orderliness, where preoccupations were put up like shutters and kindliness was lit like a fire.

In the brightness of the room I had rested from the darkness of my head. Phoning Brian had changed that. Now a chill wind was blowing in my ear from bad places where they broke your arm to encourage concentration and turned a life into garbage if it wasn’t serving their purpose. And I realised a part of me was still out there in the cold looking for something, picking among the waste.

‘You’ve got no information on the woman yet?’

‘Not yet.’

‘I’ve been thinking a bit about her,’ I said.

‘You mean how she managed to get away?’ Brian said.

‘If she did.’

‘I think we would have found her by now if she was dead.’

‘I don’t mean that. When you think about it. Let’s say they didn’t do her. That would be sloppy workmanship, wouldn’t it?’

‘Maybe they saw her as an innocent bystander. Maybe they knew she was too frightened to say anything.’

‘Maybe. But it’s not how I would bet.’

‘All right, master,’ Brian said. ‘What do guru say?’

I could imagine him smiling. He had me in a role that was familiar to him. It must have seemed like old times to be able to make professional fun of me. I quite enjoyed pretending I was back in what had passed for normalcy with me.

‘What if whoever did it was told to leave her alone? I mean, a good tradesman would’ve done the job right. He’s got his reputation to think of. That’s how you stay in business. Not leaving anybody who can lodge a complaint.’

‘So?’

‘So why don’t you think that way? That the head man’s got a soft spot for the woman. Something like that. That gives you another possible point of connection. It’s always the part that doesn’t fit that you should follow. Here’s an obvious, unimaginative pattern with one piece missing. Why? It shouldn’t be. If you’re prepared to kill one for money, what’s the difference with two? Just the price. Unless the instructions were specific that you shouldn’t.’

‘I gaze in wonder,’ Brian said. ‘Your fee’s in the post.’

‘Just a small deductive sketch I have dashed off,’ I said. ‘Like Leonardo doodling. It doesn’t help anybody, right enough. It doesn’t help you. And it certainly doesn’t help me.’

‘What about homeopathy?’ Brian said. ‘I know a homeopathic doctor in Ayrshire who’s supposed to be very good. That’s maybe the cure you need.’

‘Let’s try more conventional help first. This could take the place of the fee in the post. Fast Frankie White.’

‘What about ’im?’

‘I want to find the latest on him.’

‘I thought he was in London?’

‘So did I. But I’m not so sure now. You think you could check it out? And, Brian. I need to know where he comes from. Originally. That’s important. It’s Ayrshire. But where-abouts in Ayrshire?’

‘If you were up here, you could find the answer to the question for yourself. Instead of wasting your time down there. You would know the answer by now.’

I had wondered when he would get round to that. Knowing what was coming had the same effect as seeing the digits on a payphone register zero. I had to go.

‘Brian, use your loaf,’ I said. ‘If I was up there, I wouldn’t have known the question, never mind the answer. I better not cost these people a fortune. Tell Morag that I’m asking for her. And Bob Lilley that I’m not.’

I phoned Ena and we exchanged formalities briefly before she let me speak to the children. Moya was out (she often was out to me these days, even when she was in) but Sandra gave me a detailed account of the cat’s latest ailment and Jackie checked as usual on my whereabouts. I had once made a joke to Ena about his having a map in his room with flags to mark my movements but, when Ena suggested it would need to be an awful big map, I didn’t repeat the reference.

I tried to phone Jan at the restaurant. It was Betsy, one of her partners, who answered. When she knew it was me, her voice — always distant — more or less emigrated. The only thing Betsy and I had in common was a mutual dislike. She thought Jan was wasting her time with me and I thought everybody was wasting their time with Betsy. She spoke like an elocution class on trivia, elaborately enunciating triteness. She was one of a new breed of Glaswegian who thought the city was a taxi-ride between a theatre and a wine-bar. She enjoyed telling me Jan was out having dinner. I said that wasn’t much of an advertisement for their place. She begged my pardon. I asked who was having dinner with Jan. She had no idea. I asked if it was Barry Murdoch. She had no idea. I asked when Jan might be back. She had no idea. I asked, saying I was keen to find a question it wouldn’t be too hard for her to answer, what time it was. She hung up the phone. Maybe she had no idea.

I had an idea. The idea was Barry Murdoch — a big, suave phoney who seemed to have been born encased in a Porsche. Betsy had introduced Jan to him, presumably as an alternative diet to the unhealthy regimen of weekly traumas she was having with me — muesli for bacon and eggs. I had met him once in the restaurant and suggested afterwards to Jan, ‘Dress by Gucci, head by mail order catalogue.’ It was not a remark that had earned me maximum Brownie points.

Someone must have opened the lounge-door, for there were the sounds of talking and laughter suddenly heard and suddenly gone. It was like hearing a party in a strange house you were passing and wanting to go in. I needed a furlough. Thinking of Jan at dinner, I wanted to go to some strange place and maybe see a woman I had never seen before and discuss with someone I had never met the oddness of things. I was hungry for fun.

‘Buster,’ I said. ‘You fancy a night on the skite?’

He didn’t seem interested. I decided to go out. I had done what I could for Scott for the moment. John Strachan would be coming into the Bushfield later on. He had phoned twice during the day. Sanny Wilson might appear. But I had some time before that happened.

I stood up and put on my jacket. Before I could escape to whatever new and exotic experiences were waiting out there in Graithnock, Katie opened the kitchen door.

‘Sanny Wilson’s here to see you,’ she said.

I was back in the tunnel and excited about the possibility of seeing some light. The excitement didn’t last long. When I went into the lounge, I realised that Sanny Wilson was so well insulated with liquid from serious contact that he might as well have been a fish in an aquarium. His mouthings had much the same clarity of meaning.

He would be about seventy, a marvellously benign man with sweet, open-handed gestures that seemed to be an attempt to embrace the world. He had obviously loved Scott and generously included me, as Scott’s brother, in his affection. That was touching but it was not hugely helpful. We drank and talked for a while and what I gleaned, beyond the frequent repetition of the opaque statement that the man in the green coat had died again, could have been written on my thumbnail.

Still, he wasn’t a bad show to be with. He smoked with a great flourish of the hand, holding the cigarette between thumb and forefinger, the palm towards you. With each successive cigarette, his waistcoat looked more and more as if it had been tailored from ash. His soft hat assumed a jauntier angle on his bald head. He had a Dickensian turn of phrase, which tended to include words like ‘peregrination’ and ‘pharmaceutical’ and — my favourite — ‘clientiele’, spoken in what Sanny had apparently decided was a French accent. Only a Philistine would have resented his lack of direct communication. I had lost a source of information but I had found a pleasure to be with. You don’t ask Brahms to tell you the news.

I was still enjoying his recital when John Strachan came in. John was carrying a wrapped painting that turned out to be the five at table. Mhairi and he had decided I should have it, in memory of Scott. I liked that. John had also found a piece of paper in the waste-basket of Scott’s old room. Everything else seemed to have been cleared out. The new teacher had just emptied the last of the stuff from a drawer into the basket today. Most of it, John said, had been related to school administration. Only this one sheet had looked like something personal, though what it was John couldn’t understand. Glancing over it, I could see why. It was a strange piece of writing. It wasn’t just the crumpled nature of the paper that made it difficult to read.

I bought John and Sanny a drink and left them together while I took my treasure trove upstairs. I unwrapped the painting and looked at it and I read the piece of paper again. They yielded nothing much at the moment. I would have to study them more carefully.

When I came back down, John Strachan was already preparing to leave. I thanked him and Mhairi and we threatened to meet again. Sanny Wilson couldn’t last much longer. He was beginning to keel over, still mouthing polysyllables as he went, like a pedant dying bravely at his post.

I offered to see him home. Fortunately, he lived close at hand. It was an upstairs flat in an old tenement. Inside, it was a sad and lonely place. The bedroom had no lights.

‘Ah’ll fix that maybe tomorrow,’ Sanny said.

He was nodding off on his feet. But there must have stirred in him some instinct of dignity that was determined I shouldn’t take away the wrong impression.

‘I am,’ he said suddenly, ‘festooned with friends.’

I managed to get his shoes and his jacket off. The rest, he insisted, could stay as it was. I left him propped up in bed and made to leave.

‘Jack,’ he said. ‘Jack.’

I turned at the door and saw him in the light from the street lamp outside. He still had his hat on. He had a wonderful, dilapidated dignity, his hand making a vaguely papal gesture in the semi-dark, as if he were granting absolution to the world.

‘You are a gentleman,’ he said.

‘If you say so, Ah must be, Sanny. For you’re sure as hell one. Cheers.’

I was at the door when he spoke again. His voice was very tired.

‘Jack.’

I turned. Even as I looked, his head relaxed on the pillow and he went gently to sleep, breathing noisily. I was very quiet in closing the outside door.

At the Bushfield I by-passed the lounge. I didn’t feel like company.