The Papers of Tony Veitch

6

Ena had an old script ready for him getting back. It was the one where she was Rome and he was Attila the Hun. His share of the lasagna lay vandalised with absence, congealed in its own grease. The guests were gone, Ena hinting at a flowering of deep communication he had missed. With his last look at Eck’s dead face still fresh in his mind, he had trouble remembering his lines.

She said the bit about his social poise. This time he was as suave as King Kong. She was so genteel she should be sewn on to a sampler. He was a monument to selfishness. Faced with concern like hers, everybody could die of frostbite. He had certainly done his utmost to make Donald and Ria hate him. With enemies like them, who needed friends?

The vaudeville of mechanical insult over, Ena went to bed and Laidlaw half-filled a glass with Antiquary and topped it up with water. He went to the phone, hoping he would be lucky enough to get somebody he knew and got on with — not the easiest trick, he thought ruefully. He was lucky. The Duty Fiscal was Robbie Evans.

‘Yes, Jack. What news from the front?’

Laidlaw told him about Eck.

‘You suspect more than natural causes?’

‘It just seems possible.’

‘Like what?’

‘Poison?’

‘How could you tell? Isn’t that what he’s been doing to himself for years?’

‘Just as long as he did it to himself. There’ll be a fiscal p.m. anyway. I would just like to make sure it happens as soon as possible. Like this morning. He looked as if he might have been a fair time dying. If somebody did do him, any clues are going to be cold. I’d like to try for them before they get deep-frozen.’

‘We’ll see to that. Ruined your night, did it?’

‘Aye. It didn’t help Eck’s a lot either.’

‘You can phone for word tomorrow, Jack.’

‘Thanks.’

He sipped some of his Antiquary and went up to check the children. After he had seen bad things, that was a compulsion with him. He remembered an occasion years ago when he was still in uniform, not in Glasgow, and he had been the one to arrive first at the scene of a murder. The victim was a homosexual who had been tortured by two young men he had picked up in a lavatory and taken to his flat. One of the young men was an apprentice butcher and for a finale, after the homosexual was strangled, he had cut him from groin to breast-bone and gutted him like a chicken. The butcher had said later, ‘He wisny normal.’

At that time, Moya had just been born and Laidlaw had found himself checking up on her so often it felt like sentry-duty. Big bad world, I’ve got my eye on you.

Tonight they were fine. Moya, at eleven, slept almost smiling, as if she had a secret. It looked like a sensuous one. Her body was softening these days and her face withdrawing into thoughtfulness. The good problems were coming. At ten, Sandra looked younger than her age, still seemed to have ambitions to make it as a boy. In the box-room Jackie lay in his usual elaborate abandon, like an accident. He was seven. They were fine.

He came downstairs and took a header into his drink, filled out another. He wondered about reading something. But everything seemed a bit far from Eck lying dead in the Royal. He thought about Eck. He felt a small need to tell someone who might care. Everybody’s dying should matter to somebody. The more people who cared, the closer you came to some kind of humanist salvation. There was no other he could believe in.

He remembered that since he had worked with Brian Harkness they had talked to Eck a few times. Brian had met Eck on the Bryson case.

Laidlaw went to the phone. It was early morning already but he rang. It took a lot of ringing before Brian’s father answered. Brian wasn’t home. Laidlaw apologised. Brian’s father was a nice man who had met Laidlaw several times and who seemed to exempt him from his general dislike of policemen. He took the word about the death and said he would tell Brian the earlier time at which Laidlaw wanted to meet him. But he didn’t know Eck.

Laidlaw put down the phone and took Eck’s piece of paper from his hip pocket. Holding the paper, he remembered the money. For Eck to have seven pounds was as unusual as a win on the football pools. That number had to be a telephone number, three digits for the district. He dialled it. He let it ring fifteen times. There was no answer.

That not very surprising fact took Laidlaw’s depression further down. If the intensive care unit had seemed like rock bottom, this was potholing. The silence at the other end of the line had felt absolute, as if he had been trying to telephone God. That recurrent ambush of despair about how little we care for one another trapped him again and wiped out any sense of achievement he could imagine.

Everybody mattered or nobody did. He remembered as a teenager wrestling with lofty matters as if he was the first person ever to think of them, what he thought of as his wherefore-are-we-put-upon-this-earth phase, when he sometimes wandered around with a head like a billboard containing its caption of the day: Is There A God? What Is The Meaning Of Life? He could smile at it now but it was a rueful smile.

The truth was that some of the impossibilities he had come up against then still haunted him. He could recall giving up any belief in an overall meaning to living because any such meaning would have to be indivisible, unequivocally total, giving significance impartially to every drifting feather, every piece of paper blowing along a street.

Eck was like one of those pieces of paper. You couldn’t say the meaning of things was elsewhere and Eck was irrelevant. That was a betrayal. All we have is one another and if we’re orphans all we can honourably do is adopt one another, defy the meaninglessness of our lives by mutual concern. It’s the only nobility we have.

Laidlaw tried to reinstate his energy by declaring war, over his whisky, on all brutalisers of others, all non-carers. Yet the very thought embarrassed. He would have been such a compromised champion, a failure opposing failures. He admitted to himself that he wanted at this moment to phone Jan at the Burleigh Hotel and felt a double guilt. There was the guilt of being tempted to use Jan to soothe him now when he gave her so little of his life. There was the guilt of betraying Ena. The compromise of his own life, so hurting to others, appalled him.

But he couldn’t think of anybody else who would care about Eck enough to find out what had happened to him. Laidlaw had better try. Pathetically, it seemed to him, he could only think of small things to do. He would check the address and the names. He would phone that bloody number till somebody answered. He would get a post-mortem tomorrow.

At least tomorrow he could tell Brian, somebody who would know who was dead. It would swell the mourners’ roll by one. But the thought still left him with an angry sadness.