Strange Loyalties

29

Hunting is largely waiting, I suppose, whether you’re hunting animals or people or understanding. I remember Tom Docherty telling me how he went about writing. It was in a letter, the only one he ever wrote me. He suffers from what he jocularly calls epistolary paralysis. That time he was living in Paris and experiencing the moody glooms.

‘Writing? Who needs it? When you write, here’s what you do. You go alone. You build your hide round yourself from whatever is available — broken relationships, gathered hurts, remembered joys, wilful routine. You wait. You try many different baits. You let everything escape — no matter how good it looks or what praise the catching of it would bring you — but the one you’re waiting for, the one you know you must get. You’re prepared to lose yourself rather than it. Meantime, you feed on whatever scraps there are to hand, iron rations of the self.’

I was thinking of him as I came back to the hotel. One of the pleasures of his presence in my life has been that he is a great completer of half-thoughts. You offer him a vague perception and he takes it from you, cleans off the gunge and gives you it back, having shown you how it works. He clarifies you to yourself.

Here he was, doing it again, even if he didn’t know it. For I saw in his description of where he had been a clarification of where I was. Eddie Foley was part of the bait. But what he was designed to catch wasn’t really the quarry I was after. I wanted Matt Mason all right. But he was just a stop along the route, not the destination. If we caught him, he was for Brian and Bob. He was what they were hunting. Let them take the credit.

I was waiting for something bigger, at least bigger in my terms. I was looking not just to catch whoever had snuffed out two lives but whatever it was that had snuffed out a lot of lives, though it might have left them still moving around. I wanted to locate the source of the defeat in David Ewart’s eyes, the remorseless hardness in Dave Lyons’, the avid self-interest in Anna’s. Had the death of Scott’s idealism been suicide or murder?

As I ate my lunch in the downstairs restaurant of the hotel, I also experienced an echo of the loneliness Tom had been writing about. There had been a message left by Brian Harkness that they had some leads on Marty Bleasdale. Instead of making me feel part of a team, the communication had left me feeling more isolated. I thought of Bob and Brian doing what they do and knew that they were pursuing ends different from my own. False proximity becomes a measure of real distance.

That feeling had been intensified by my call to Jan before I sat down to eat. I had phoned her at the restaurant and she was there and able to talk, though not for long. We agreed that we would meet at the Bona Sospira tonight for dinner.

‘How will I recognise you?’ she said.

‘It’s only four days, Jan.’

‘They’ve been long ones. Tell you what. Why don’t you just come as yourself? I hope you’ve worked out who that is by now.’

Had I? Maybe, in Tom’s sense, I had lost myself rather than lose the thing I was after — at least lost my comparatively familiar sense of myself. It wasn’t just time I had put between Jan and me but emotional distance as well. She obviously felt it. And so did I. I wanted very much to meet her but I wasn’t sure how fully we could meet. In examining the terms of Scott’s life, I had been examining the terms of my own. The price you pay for arriving at a personal vision is the loneliness of having to live with it. I had a suspicion that my bill was on the way.

I looked round the restaurant. I saw an elderly couple eating with dignified slowness, a family whose children were just managing to impose public standards on what was normally a domestic experience, what I assumed were three business women, an American couple nearby whose clothes suggested they had confused Glasgow with Miami. The apparent completeness of their involvement in ordinary things made me feel even more isolated and alien.

My hotel room didn’t help. I found myself opening drawers as if I might find there a clue to my identity, a personal equivalent of the Gideon bible. I found, appropriately enough, emptiness. I was reminded again of Tom Docherty. He has written a lot in hotel rooms. His theory is that they are such sterile and anonymous places that they make him write, if only to react against the void, to prove to himself that he exists. I looked at the hotel pen and the sheets of hotel paper. But I opted for the phone.

I phoned the BBC for the third time today. If Michael Preston were there, I was only a couple of hundred yards away. I could catch him before he escaped. But Mr Preston, it seemed, was still out on location somewhere in Glasgow. They couldn’t tell me where.

I switched to my secondary obsession, like a driver transferring to his emergency fuel-tank. Something Eddie Foley had said interested me. It had started up in my head the process of refining my raw determination to catch Matt Mason into the vague possibility of a method.

I phoned Edek Bialecki. Edek was a sound-recordist and a sound man. He had worked with the BBC for years until a general disillusionment and a very specific straitening of finances had encouraged him to move out into freelance. He worked for independent companies and sometimes contracted back into the BBC for particular jobs. His father had been a Polish prisoner-of-war in the early 1940s and had stayed on to marry a Scottish girl. Edek had three loves: his wife, his children, and machines. His wife and children sometimes struggled to keep up. Jacqueline kept his mania in perspective. She had once said to me solemnly, ‘The marriage is in trouble again. He’s seeing a new console.’ Jacqueline had also had an interesting effect on his speech. Edek had always been a terrible swearer and, after their marriage, it had led to rows until they found a compromise. Edek’s swearing was, as it were, put on a diet, allowed just the one indulgence. That was why he was sometimes referred to as Bloody Edek. Jacqueline was a woman of some will-power. You could have told that from her voice. One hullo was enough.

‘Hullo, Jacqueline,’ I said. ‘It’s Jack Laidlaw. Why are you not working?’

She was a freelance film editor.

‘Jack! You know another film editor that’s working, do you?’

‘I don’t know another film editor.’

‘They’ve probably all died off. If you’re looking for Edek, he’s working today. Praise the Lord.’

‘What is he doing?’

‘He’s at Black Cat. A studio discussion. But they won’t have started recording yet. Be setting up. They’re doing the programme this afternoon.’

‘I might try to get him there.’

‘Do that. The couch is still here, by the way.’

There had been a phase when I spent a few nights there, debating many aspects of the world with Jacqueline and Edek.

‘I’ll try it again some time.’

‘Good. If you give us some forewarning, we can buy a distillery. It took Edek three days to recover the last time. Cheers.’

Edek was at Black Cat Studios and able to come to the phone.

‘Hullo. Is that bloody you, Bloody Edek? Jack Laidlaw.’

‘You haven’t got the style for it,’ he said. ‘No sense of timing. So where’ve you been?’

‘I’m not too sure. Listen, Edek. Are you free over the weekend? Say, tomorrow and Sunday?’

‘I’m not working. Why?’

‘I’m not sure yet. I just want to know if I could call on you, if it was necessary.’

‘You mean professionally?’

‘That would be the idea.’

‘So what’s this about?’

‘I don’t know entirely yet. It might never happen. But I’m working on something. If it turns out the way I think it might, you could do me a right favour. Wouldn’t take more than a couple of hours. Are you game?’

There was a brief pause.

‘Here, Ah love mysteries,’ Edek said. ‘Are you a real detective, mister? Could Ah be helpin’ you to catch a criminal an’ everything? If Ah do it, can Ah get a gun home wi’ me? To play with. Just for the weekend.’

‘Thank you, Edek,’ I said. ‘Is that a yes or a no?’

‘Could be. Come on, Jack. Phone me once you know what it is you’re asking me to do. If it’s making a recording of a shoot-out, forget it. Those bullets ricochet. I’ll have to go here. Get in touch, will you? And, hey. What about sometimes getting in touch just to go for a drink or something? I like doing simple things sometimes.’

‘We’ll do that,’ I said. ‘So where do I get in touch with you?’

‘I’ll be at the house all day tomorrow. Bloody domestic bloody bliss.’

Talking to Edek hadn’t given my feeling of disorientation any significant point of connection with the things that were going on around me in the city. I was still left waiting for something to happen and I was still not sure what it was. But renewing contact with Edek gave me another idea.

He had introduced me to a woman who worked in the BBC. He and I had been in the Ubiquitous Chip when she came in. I had met her several times since, in there, and we had talked a lot. I phoned the BBC again and asked for Naima Akhbar. When she came to the phone, it took her a moment to locate me on her mental map. But the sounds of recognition sounded enthusiastic. I explained that I was trying to find out where Michael Preston was filming today. He knew my brother and there was a message I wanted to pass on. It was fairly urgent. Naima would see what she could do and call me back. I gave her my number at the hotel.

I lay on the bed and smoked a cigarette. I said, ‘Come on, come on, come on.’ Naima did. The phone rang.

‘Hello, Jack?’

‘Naima. Ya beauty. What’s the word?’

‘Sunny Drumchapel,’ she said. ‘It’s a programme on unemployment in Scotland. I got a look at the shooting schedule. This afternoon, it’s supposed to be Drumchapel. If they keep to the schedule. Which doesn’t always happen.’

‘What, in the streets? In a house?’

She gave me an address.

‘It’s a boy who’s unemployed. Michael Preston’s going to interview him. The schedule has them starting at two o’clock. They should be there by now. But these things take a long time to set up.’

‘Naima. Have I told you lately that I love you?’

‘You can tell me in the Chip some time.’

‘At great length.’

‘Uh-huh. We’ll see you there then. Take care.’

‘Thanks, Naima.’