The Papers of Tony Veitch

4

It was cool outside. Laidlaw took his bearings. The middle unit of the main building, the one in darkness, was administration. The unit on the right, nearest the gate, was medical. He went left.

Crossing the courtyard, he took the doctor’s point. It probably was a quiet night. It was all comparative. Laidlaw himself had a simple shock-absorber he used to enable him to cope with some of the things he had to look at. He remembered Glaister’s Medical Jurisprudence and Toxicology — a quiet name for the most harrowing book he had ever looked through. Talking reasonably about horrifyingly exotic deaths, reproducing good photographs of decapitation, strangulation, genital mutilation, its depiction of accidental and compelled brutality made the Marquis de Sade look like the tourist he was. Once you knew that’s where we live, you had to accept the need to face what you would rather not see.

Laidlaw accepted. He climbed the curving stair to the first floor. The blue board with white lettering said ‘Intensive Care Unit’. He went through the swing doors and found himself in a short, wide corridor, faced with another set of swing doors.

Immediately, a woman looked out from a side-room. Her face became a prohibitive notice, the professional’s annoyance at the clumsy intrusion of the layman. Laidlaw felt as if he had a camera round his neck. She came out, pointing herself towards him like a gun.

‘Yes?’

‘Excuse me. I believe you’ve just had someone brought in. He was asking to see me. My name is Laidlaw. Detective Inspector Laidlaw.’ He showed her his card.

‘Yes?’

‘I wondered if I could see him.’

She gave a short, monosyllabic laugh, like the barking of a distant guard-dog and as indicative of humour. She shook her head in officialese and offered that stern, condescending look that’s supposed to make the hordes of the uninformed flee for the longboats.

‘Are you serious?’

‘Trying to be,’ Laidlaw said.

‘This is an Intensive Care Unit.’

‘I didn’t think it was a café. And I’m in a hurry.’

She stared at Laidlaw, presumably reassessing him: not just your average idiot — Nuisance Grade One. In such cases it may prove necessary to provide a façade of minimal facts, preferably incomprehensible.

‘We’re preparing to use a ventilator. Dialysis may be required.’

‘Is he conscious?’

‘Not coherently.’

‘But conscious.’

‘For the moment.’

‘Well,’ Laidlaw said. ‘He wants to see me. It must be important to him. It’s what he wants and I assume he still has rights. So. If you don’t want me to go in, you’d better find a way to stop me.’

He walked past her. She caught up with him before he reached the double doors.

‘Wait here, please,’ she said and went in.

In a few moments she came back out and collected a hospital gown from a pile of freshly laundered ones neatly stacked on a shelf. She enjoyed watching Laidlaw trying to work out how it went. Having seen the right films, he managed to decide that it was worn back to front. She didn’t offer to help with the tie-strings, so he followed her with his hands behind his back, feeling he was infringing the Duke of Edinburgh’s copyright.

Once beyond the second double doors, she said, ‘Wait here, please.’

The room was dim. Down the right-hand side there was a row of glass-partitioned cubicles, from some of which came muted sounds. You got the sense that life was lived on tiptoe here. A couple of nurses moved almost soundlessly around, vestal virgins of this inner sanctum.

The god appeared to be technology. Across a television monitor ran three recurring serrated lines. In the middle of the room, like an altarpiece, was the only patient Laidlaw could see. He lay terrifyingly still, plugged into a ventilating machine, an aerated corpse. Watching him, Laidlaw understood something he had heard somewhere, that if such patients aren’t oiled and turned every two hours, they develop bedsores.

From where he stood now, Laidlaw saw the people in casualty as extras with delusions of grandeur. Their declarations of their nature seemed outrageously crude. Their stridency was apprentice stuff. This man bore witness to all of us without melodrama. He was honed to the act of breathing. He made no further claims, his humility was absolute. Pull a plug and he died.

Some sounds were coming from the first cubicle on the right. Laidlaw assumed that was where his man must be. Sure enough, the sister who had treated him like bacteria was now beckoning him into the cubicle.

Coming round the partition with some trepidation, he experienced the shock you feel when you see death engaged with someone you know. All the past confident moments count for nothing. You realise that you want death always to be anonymous. Otherwise, it’s got a fix on you.

He saw the confirmation of a suspicion that had already been forming. It was Eck Adamson. And if he wasn’t dying, Laidlaw was immortal.

A doctor came between Laidlaw and the bed. He was Indian, young and delicately handsome. His voice was a startlingly pleasant contrast to the gutturals of Glasgow, soft with the consonants and original with the intonations, a sari in Townhead.

‘Now you may see your friend, if you wish. We are about to put him on a ventilating machine. The thing which is the most essential at the moment will be to stabilise the breathing. If you can get through to him, you must see if you can learn what has happened.’

Laidlaw nodded. The first thing that struck him was that this was the cleanest context in which he had ever seen Eck. They made you nice for dying. Only the several days’ growth hinted at the kind of life Eck had come from; that and the eyes. Always jumpy, they had now gone completely over the top, darting crazily, as if Eck knew finally that the world was out to mug him. The doctor and nurses were waiting to relieve him of himself.

‘Eck,’ Laidlaw said. ‘It’s Jack Laidlaw.’

As he repeated it, Eck’s eyes passed him several times but kept coming back until they hovered on him, still mobile, but at least moving within the orbit of Laidlaw’s presence. They didn’t settle on his face but seemed to take in different parts of him, as if Eck was piecing Laidlaw together like a jigsaw. Eck was trying to speak.

‘Right,’ Laidlaw heard.

‘Right,’ he replied.

‘Right.’

‘Right.’

Eck’s head jerked in distress.

‘Write it doon,’ Laidlaw thought he was saying.

Laidlaw found an envelope in his pocket and took out a pen.

‘What happened to you, Eck?’

But he might as well have tried to talk to a teleprinter. Eck was receiving no messages. On the last of himself he was sending out information. His pain was obvious. The way he dragged the words out past it suggested they were very important to him. Listening, Laidlaw wondered why.

Eck was incoherent. He spoke like someone after a stroke, afflicted with that slow-motion glottal drunkenness that compounds the grief of physical trauma by rendering its expression of itself idiot. Out of the distorted mouthings, like a record played too slow, Laidlaw thought he could decipher one repeated statement. He wrote, more out of respect for the disintegrating identity he had known than because of any significance he saw in the words, ‘The wine he gave me wisny wine.’

He could catch nothing else. It was like eavesdropping on a riot. Eck’s desperate distress intensified and the doctor stepped forward.

‘The gentleman can wait in my room,’ he said.

A nurse led Laidlaw to the end of the ward and showed him into a small place partitioned off from the rest. There was just enough room to lie down in. Laidlaw sat on the single bed.

He looked at the back of his envelope, the last will and testament of Eck Adamson. He remembered reading about a cleaner who had worked in a lawyer’s office. On her deathbed she had regurgitated swathes of legal Latin. Eck was getting close.

It was maybe fitting that what looked like being Eck’s last piece of information should come across like Linear B. As a tout, he had never been too useful. But Laidlaw had always liked him and once, in the Bryson case, he had helped Laidlaw more than he could know.

Things had gone quiet beyond the partition and the doctor appeared. He shook his head.

‘I am sorry,’ he said with that formal timing a foreign language can give.

Laidlaw put the envelope in his pocket.

‘He was your friend?’

Laidlaw thought about it.

‘Maybe I was about as close as he got. What did he die of?’

‘I can’t tell at the moment. Who is he?’

‘Alexander Adamson. He was a vagrant. In the winter he slept in doss-houses. Summer, wherever he could. I don’t know of any relatives. What an epitaph.’

Laidlaw remembered one night finding Eck sleeping across a pavement grille outside Central Station. He was using the heat that came up from the kitchen of the Central Hotel. These were the obsequies to that bleak life, a few sentences between strangers.

‘It wasn’t bad for him at the end,’ the doctor said. ‘He died quietly.’

Laidlaw nodded. Like a leaf.

‘I want a fiscal post mortem.’

‘Of course. It is procedure.’

‘Today? I would like it today.’

‘We shall have to see.’

‘Yes. We will.’

On his way out to the car, Laidlaw looked in at casualty again. The boy with the bloodstained jacket was gone. A nurse showed him Eck’s things in a brown envelope: an empty tin with traces of shag, a stopped watch, seven single pounds and a grubby piece of paper. Unfolding the paper, Laidlaw read a handwritten statement in biro.

The Puritan Fallacy is that there can be virtue by default. You do the right thing because you don’t know any worse. That is society’s Woolworth substitute for morality. True morality begins in choice: the greater the choice, the greater the morality. Only those can be truly good who have prospected their capacity for evil. Idealism is the censorship of reality.

Ranged neatly beneath that statement were an address in Pollokshields, the names Lynsey Farren and Paddy Collins, the words ‘The Crib’ and the number 9464946 in black biro.

Laidlaw’s first responses were practical. He noted that the handwriting was the same throughout and then that the written paragraph was in blue ink. It suggested to him that the bit of hand-woven philosophy had just happened to be on the piece of paper when the same person had added the other information. For the use of Eck?

Certainly the first part had surely not been meant for Eck. Beyond perhaps an instinctively Pascalian response to the two-thirty, Eck had never evinced any interest in philosophy. But neither did the addresses seem to fit. Pollokshields, where the money grows, was hardly Eck’s territory. The number was meaningless to Laidlaw. Only ‘The Crib’ made any kind of sense.

Then, like humanity supplanting professionalism, a slight chill came over Laidlaw as he held the piece of paper. Trying to locate where the feeling came from, he read over the paragraph again. Perhaps it was just that he sensed a dangerously distorted version of that Calvinist self-righteousness that forms like an icicle in the hearts of a lot of Scots. He wondered who had given Eck this strange message.

Looking up, he had his gloom partly dissipated by the pleasant round face of the nurse, who was preoccupied in doing practical things. She reminded him he’d better do the same.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I need this. You want me to sign for it?’