The Papers of Tony Veitch

12

This should have been a Saturday but it didn’t feel like one to Harkness. This had to be the eighth day of some deformed week, a kind of thirty-first of June. It didn’t fit. Maybe the moon had blown a fuse.

They weren’t in the office. They weren’t preparing for a court case. They weren’t on surveillance. They weren’t on the streets soliciting information. They were in Pollokshields.

It was a part of Glasgow Harkness didn’t know too well, a place on the South Side to drive through sometimes on his way to work, trying not to let the houses bother him. All fur coats and no knickers, he had often told himself as an antidote to the envy that hit him here like lack of oxygen.

But it wasn’t true. The wealth was more real than apparent. Some of the huge yellow sandstone houses had been converted into flats, it was true. A few had become self-contained Pakistani villages. But the infiltration of some of the merely well off or even the poor was hardly enough to change the basic impression this part of Pollokshields gave.

The house they were visiting confirmed it. It was a turreted sandstone castle separated from the street by a low wall and a high hedge, like a soft-sell moat. The conservatory at the side was an interesting piece of architecture in itself, a domed colony of humid vegetation. Inside the house, Harkness had half-expected to be handed a catalogue. The wide hall had two abstract paintings and a small terracotta frieze set into the wall — some ancient punters naked among the leaves. The staircase looked a suitable place for losing a glass slipper. A stained-glass window guled the fawn carpet faintly.

The room they had been shown into was furnished richly in leather and wood, nothing more parvenu being permitted. There was so much space around that the armchairs they sat in felt to Harkness like stations on a steppe. Watching their host nursing a nugget of Chivas Regal in his hand, Harkness wondered why Laidlaw hadn’t taken one, obliging him to abstain as well. It wasn’t as if Laidlaw had never indulged on duty before.

Milton Anthony Veitch, as he had declared himself, was wearing his late forties as if anything else was merely apprenticeship. The hair was beautifully grey, fairly long and precisely cut, looking not just washed but professionally laundered. The slightly worn face was carried proudly, like a trophy. The lines were earned. As far as women went, Harkness imagined, he was still a runner. If any lady didn’t fancy him, that was her problem.

He was a big man but had stayed nearly trim. The weight was only now beginning to hang like slightly inferior tailoring. The way he was sitting in his real leather chair, the stomach bulged delicately. But that was a tasteful cairn, memorial to good times. Maybe he couldn’t make it happen everywhere any more, Harkness thought, but then he wouldn’t have to. Money would allow him to move through invented habitats and there he must still be special, an aging lion at Longleat. Harkness thought he wouldn’t like to be looking at his host down the wrong end of a business decision.

Milton Veitch had listened to Laidlaw explaining about Eck, Eck’s piece of paper, and his address on it. He sighed.

‘You have the piece of paper with you, do you?’

Laidlaw took it out, went over and gave it to Mr Veitch, came back and sat down. The time it took in this room, Harkness thought, a bus-service would have helped. Mr Veitch watched his drink, looked up.

‘Tony,’ he said.

‘Tony?’

‘My son. He wrote that.’

‘You’re sure, Mr Veitch?’

He smiled.

‘I think I would know his writing. Besides, I was privileged to receive a communication recently from him myself. A letter, in a manner of speaking. That script is very fresh in my mind.’

He rose and crossed to the door and called, ‘Alma.’ The woman who appeared, like most women, interested Harkness. He felt that this time Laidlaw, who said that studying good-looking women was one of the non-taxable perks of the job for Harkness, must be agreeing. She was tall, maybe late thirties. She clarified for Harkness why it was that older women interested him so much. It was very simple: she had been where he hadn’t been but where he wanted to go. As soon as he saw her, he saw a doorway he wanted to go through.

‘This is Miss Brown,’ Milton Veitch said to them, which was like pointing to Rheims Cathedral and saying, ‘This is a church.’

She smiled and Harkness’s head turned a somersault. It was a beautiful smile, slow and undeliberate and unselfconsciously strange. Harkness decided it was an Amazon of a smile and he knew what he wanted to be: an explorer.

‘She keeps house for me.’

Everybody in the room knew what he meant and Harkness was deeply disappointed. She could be so much more than that, he knew. He started to have misgivings about her.

‘Alma. Do we still have that letter Tony wrote me?’

‘Which letter?’

His look told her not to play games.

‘Which letter would it be?’

‘You threw it out. Remember?’

‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It was just to convince the police force that I know my own son’s writing. Maybe you’d better stay.’

He did the introductions and they all sat down again.

‘What was the letter about?’ Laidlaw asked.

‘A good question. A tantrum against fatherhood is about as near as I could get.’

‘Your son doesn’t live here?’

‘Not for a while, no. In fact, we don’t know where he lives at all.’

‘That’s only been for a week or more,’ Alma said. ‘Give him time.’

‘I’ve got no more time to give him,’ Mr Veitch said. ‘Not another day.’

They were looking at each other, the absent Tony forming a frost between them.

‘Does the letter have something to do with that?’ Laidlaw asked.

Mr Veitch noticed him again. He sighed.

‘It’s a long and largely unsavoury story. My son is a student at Glasgow University. Was. He was sitting his final exams recently and disappeared before he had taken all the papers. The letter was written to explain — I use the term loosely — his behaviour to me. Not so much a letter, really. More like a novel by post.’

‘But before that he hadn’t lived here anyway?’

‘In a flat in the city. The wild freedom of youth, I suppose. But since he left there we haven’t a clue where he is.’

‘You haven’t tried to trace him?’

‘Well, he’s patently all right. His letter was nothing if not full of the vigour of condemnation. I think he has at last found a way of expressing his rejection of everything I stand for. He’s been trying to get the message through to me for long enough. I deliberately didn’t contact the police. If he wants to disown me, that’s his right. He is over twenty-one. Just. Perhaps you could let Alma see your piece of paper? A corroborative witness, do you call it?’

Alma didn’t linger over reading it. Milton Veitch was watching her closely but she didn’t look at him.

‘It’s Tony’s writing, all right,’ she said.

‘The man who had it on him was a vagrant. Eck Adamson. He’s dead. Paraquat poisoning.’

‘Suspected,’ Harkness said.

Laidlaw ignored the footnote.

‘Did either of you know him?’

‘I run a rather large business. I don’t meet a lot of vagrants.’

Alma Brown shook her head.

‘He was a nice vagrant,’ Laidlaw said. ‘The other names. Paddy Collins. A small villain. Bit-parts only. No? I don’t suppose a pub called the Crib means anything?’

Both looked as if they had forgotten he was there.

‘No, you won’t have any branches in the Saracen, Mr Veitch. Lynsey Farren?’

That was the name that changed the thermostat. You could feel the room freeze slightly. Alma Brown looked involuntarily at Milton Veitch. It was like calling the name of someone who was in hiding. It blew his cover. He looked annoyed.

‘We both know Lynsey Farren,’ he said. ‘She’s Lord Farren of Farren’s daughter. Lady Lynsey Farren. I think she may know even fewer vagrants than I do.’

He said it as if that was the matter closed. Harkness doubted that.

‘But Tony knew her, I take it?’ Laidlaw asked.

‘Yes, he did. Our two families have known each other for years. Since Lynsey and Tony were children. But I really don’t think I want her bothered with whatever mess my son has got himself into. What has happened, by the way?’

I thought you’d never ask, Harkness thought.

‘It may not all come down quite to what you want, Mr Veitch. Paddy Collins was stabbed to death. That’s two corpses connected with this piece of paper your son wrote on. We don’t know what happened. But I think you’ll agree there’s a certain urgency in finding out. Eck and Paddy Collins are keeping quiet. What’s the Crib going to tell us? It would be like interviewing a football crowd. That leaves yourselves and Lynsey Farren. We’re talking to you and we’ll be talking to her. By the way, the telephone number on the paper is a public box in Queen Margaret Drive. Does that mean anything to you?’

His head was shaking first but hers caught up quickly.

‘Could I have Miss Farren’s address, please?’

‘I’m not entirely sure I like your manner.’

Laidlaw was looking down as if waiting for the irrelevances to pass. But Mr Veitch wasn’t going anywhere except towards a confrontation.

‘I said I’m not sure I like your manner.’

Laidlaw looked at him. ‘That’s all right,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m not sure my manner likes you. But it hardly seems relevant.’

‘Milton!’ Alma Brown was appealing to him. ‘Please. If something’s wrong with Tony, we must help. We must. Lynsey would want to help. She won’t mind being involved, will she?’

He conferred with his drink before giving them an address in East Kilbride, which didn’t seem to Harkness the likeliest place for the titled to live.

‘Does she work?’ Laidlaw asked.

‘There I do draw the line. She has her own business and I don’t think the presence of the police would help it.’

Laidlaw let it pass and Mr Veitch’s sense of himself seemed assuaged.

‘There are reasons for my reluctance to involve Lynsey,’ he said in the manner of a cabinet minister responding to a naive interviewer. ‘Lord Farren is an old man. He lives essentially in the past. The sordidness of much of what passes for life today passes him by. It would be nice if it could stay that way. If Lynsey were dragged into anything unsavoury, it would kill him. And Lynsey herself has had enough recently, I should think.’

Laidlaw was interested.

‘Why is that?’

‘An incident where the police were involved. A visitor to her flat who got nasty. Violent, I think.’

‘Do you know who or what happened, Mr Veitch? What was it about?’

‘I’ve no details, I’m afraid. I didn’t press the poor girl. Was there anything else?’

‘A couple of things. Do you know Tony’s friends or where he might be staying? Anyone he might get in touch with? Places he might go? Anything like that?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Alma Brown said.

‘No to everything,’ Mr Veitch said. ‘He’s been a stranger to me for years. I hope he keeps it that way.’

‘How will he be living?’ Laidlaw asked.

The question seemed to puzzle Mr Veitch.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Money. Hiding out somewhere. How can he get the money to live?’

Mr Veitch smiled.

‘He has his own money. My wife died some ten years ago. She left all of her money to her son. When he was twenty-one. Which perhaps explains the timing of his great rebellion. Like quite a few rebels, he presumably wants to do it in comfort.’

‘Do you have any photographs of him?’ Laidlaw asked.

‘Well, if we do, I don’t keep them next to my heart.’

‘I’ll find something,’ Alma Brown said and went out.

Milton Veitch added to his drink and sat back down.

‘You think Tony has done something terrible?’ he asked. ‘Been responsible in some way for what’s happened?’

Laidlaw shrugged.

‘Not necessarily. Not necessarily at all. But two people have been murdered.’ He glanced at Harkness, letting him know he didn’t need the intervention of purists at this point. ‘This is the only pointer we have. That’s all.’

‘You know,’ Mr Veitch was staring ahead. ‘I’m afraid it wouldn’t surprise me. It wouldn’t surprise me at all.’

His voice faded out of earshot as Miss Brown came in. She gave Laidlaw two photographs.

‘You can keep those,’ she said. ‘I have copies.’

Mr Veitch stood up. There was nothing to do but the same. Standing beside Mr Veitch in his light grey suit that looked expensive enough to be tailored from hand-stitched tenners, Harkness felt the way his shoes always looked when he was trying on new trousers — suddenly shabby.

‘Oh, a last thing,’ Laidlaw said. ‘I don’t know if you paid much attention to what Tony wrote on that bit of paper. But it seems to me worryingly interested in wrongdoing. Was that like Tony?’

‘Don’t ask me,’ Mr Veitch said. ‘I hardly knew him.’

‘Perhaps you shouldn’t take that too seriously,’ Miss Brown said. ‘Tony wrote an awful lot of things. He had masses of papers. We never paid them much attention. Perhaps we should have.’

‘But that letter was the only communication since he left?’

‘Once was enough. Believe me,’ Mr Veitch said.

As they all moved awkwardly out towards the door, Harkness felt the strangeness of these two people living together in this house, having conversations full of shadows. He thought it would take a house as big as this to accommodate the ghosts he had sensed in their relationship. He wondered if property did that to people, if big houses in some of the ghost stories he had read were really being haunted by the guilt of unjustly having while others were deprived. Certainly he couldn’t remember reading about too many haunted single-ends.

Sitting in the car, Laidlaw took out the photographs and looked at them, passed them to Harkness. They showed a fair-haired young man, unsmiling, with intense, startled eyes. One was in colour, taken with a flash, and he was looking up from something he was reading. The other was taken outside, black and white. Tony Veitch was in an overcoat, standing outside a house. He looked like a refugee who had just arrived wherever he was.

‘What do you see, Boy Robin?’ Laidlaw said.

‘A murderer?’ Harkness asked.

‘A mystery. That’ll do for just now.’

Laidlaw took the refugee, left Harkness with the reader.

‘Milton Veitch seems less vague about him,’ Harkness said.

‘Aye, he was in a hurry, wasn’t he? I wonder why. But I’ll tell you something. You know who casts the first stone? The guiltiest bastard in the crowd. You’ve got a son in the kind of bother he thinks Tony Veitch might be in, what do you do?’

‘How would I know?’

‘And how would I? But I would bet. I’d find him for myself. I’d need to know what happened. If wee Jackie grew up and got involved in this way, I’d have to know what I had done as well. Jesus, I could make a better father than him out of raffia.’

Harkness looked at him worriedly. Laidlaw was too vehement. Harkness had been working with him for over a year now. In that time he had seen an intensification take place in Laidlaw. Whatever forces were working themselves out in him, they were accelerating. Laidlaw was forty now but that anger against so many things that ticked in him like a geiger-counter was in no way mollified by middle-age.

Harkness thought he knew some of the pressures that relentlessly maintained the tension of his nature. He had been at Laidlaw’s house a few times and had seen that in the wreck of his marriage he was using himself as a lifebelt for his three children. Laidlaw’s insistence on staying during some important cases at the Burleigh Hotel in Sauchiehall Street could hardly be due to the comfort and cuisine to be found there. It was more due, Harkness was sure, to Jan the receptionist. When you added Laidlaw’s natural tendency to look for any storm in a port you had a recipe that might have blown the lid off a pressure-cooker.

‘Okay, Jack,’ Harkness said. ‘Where to? East Kilbride?’

‘She won’t be in. Back into the city, Brian. Anyway, even if she was in, we couldn’t outdrive a phone-call.’

‘What?’

‘Mr Veitch is phoning her right now. You can bet on it. Galahad is alive and well. And playing with himself.’

Driving, Harkness remembered something.

‘Here. Why no whisky again? This could get monotonous.’

‘I take water with my whisky,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Not condescension.’