The Papers of Tony Veitch

9

Glasgow has them like every city, the urban bedouin. With the disorientation of the alcoholic and the down-and-out, they shift locations but their vagrancy has trade-routes. Places are in for a season and then get abandoned, like spas where the springs have dried.

Laidlaw knew Eck well enough to have a very rough chart of his preferences. There were brief spells — in the past few years infrequent — when he vanished into what some said was respectability, a proper house. Certainly, he usually re-emerged wearing a coat that looked less like a dump with buttons, but not for long.

Outside those times, he was roughly predictable. Even disintegration can be routine. Winters had been Talbot House or the Great Eastern Hotel, a name that sat on the Duke Street doss-house like a top-hat on a turd. In easier weather, he had favoured the East End around Glasgow Green and the decaying, still unredeveloped area south west of Gorbals Street.

Harkness had been worried about Laidlaw since they set out on foot from the office. He knew Laidlaw’s belief in what he sometimes called ‘absorbing the streets’, as if you could solve crime by osmosis. Apart from being of dubious effectiveness, it was sore on the feet. Sometimes the preoccupied conversation that went with it wasn’t a very soothing accompaniment, like watching a hamster desperately going nowhere in a revolving cage.

‘Paddy Collins mentioned on Eck’s bit of paper. Paddy Collins dead. What connection could Eck have with Paddy Collins’ death? Did Milligan tell you anything else?’

‘No. Just that.’

‘Did he say anybody had been at the Vicky when he was there?’

‘Paddy’s wife. And I suppose Cam.’

They were passing a phone-box.

‘It’s weird. Wait and I’ll try that number again.’

They went into the box and Laidlaw dialled it from memory. Harkness could understand why. It was the fourth time Laidlaw had tried it since they had started walking. This time it answered at the twelfth ring. Laidlaw’s eyes were like a small boy’s at Christmas. He nodded Harkness in to share the ear-piece as he inserted the money.

‘Hullo,’ Laidlaw said.

‘Hullo?’ It was a woman’s voice.

‘Hullo. Who’s speaking, please?’

‘Hullo, hullo?’ She sounded elderly.

‘Who’s speaking, please?’

‘Hullo. This is Mrs Wotherspoon. Who are you, son?’

‘Excuse me,’ Laidlaw said, winking at Harkness. ‘I just want to check I’ve got the right number. What address is that you’re speaking from?’

‘Address? This is a public phone-box, son. I was just passin’ there an’ I heard it ringin’. I’m on ma way to the chiropodist’s. Ma feet are givin’ me laldy. It takes me about ten minutes tae pass a phone-box the way Ah walk. That’s probably why Ah heard ye.’

Harkness was wheezing silently, his face red with suppressed laughter, and winking elaborately back at Laidlaw. Laidlaw looked as if he’d been given a stockingful of ashes for his Christmas.

‘Where is the phone-box, love?’ he asked.

‘It’s one of the two boxes at the corner of Queen Margaret Drive and Wilton Street. What is it, son? Ye tryin’ to make contact with somebody? Can Ah help ye?’

‘Look, love,’ Laidlaw said. ‘I’m sorry I bothered you. It’s a wrong number. Thanks for your help.’

‘Not at all.’

‘I hope you get the feet sorted out.’

‘So do Ah, son. So do Ah. Ah’ve got feet here like two Mother’s Pride loafs. Ta, ta, son.’

‘Cheerio.’

As they walked on, Laidlaw accepted Harkness’s mickeytaking. But it didn’t prevent him from quickly resuming his preoccupation.

‘Well, it’s something,’ he said. ‘That’s that dealt with. Paddy Collins is incommunicado. “The Crib” is too general to mean anything to us just now. That leaves the Pollokshields address and the mysterious Lynsey Farren. We’ll see what they yield after we check this out.’

Laidlaw and Harkness stayed north of the river at first. They checked part of the Green roughly, coming out past the strange, ornate façade of Templeton’s Carpet Factory.

‘Some smashing buildings in the city,’ Harkness said. ‘But you never notice them.’

Laidlaw agreed.

‘This job gives you tunnel vision,’ he said.

They wandered weirdly. Harkness began to worry even more about Laidlaw. There was a compulsion in the way Laidlaw kept walking. It was ruthless. He stopped strange people, described Eck to them and asked them if they had seen him lately. Harkness was beginning to get embarrassed.

This wasn’t what they taught you in police college. This was as cute as walking naked down the street. And yet, in some odd way, it was working. Nobody got alarmed. Harkness reflected that in Glasgow openness is the only safe-conduct pass. Try to steal a march and they’ll ambush you from every close. They hate to be had. Come on honestly and their tolerance can be great.

One man typified it. He was small, with a gammy leg. He was carrying what looked like a poke of rolls. When Laidlaw stopped him, he nodded with instant wisdom into his questions.

‘Christ, aye. Big Tammy Adamson’s boay. No problem. Ah can tell ye exactly. When Big Tammy sellt the shoap in Govanhill, Alec went tae sea. The Merchant Navy. As far as Ah know, he’s still there yet. A nice big boay. Aboot six-feet two.’

‘Naw,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Not the same fella.’

‘Well. He sounds awfu’ like ’im. Good luck, anyway. It’s the only Eck Adamson Ah know.’

‘Thanks,’ Laidlaw said.

‘For what? Ah’ve enjoyed the chance tae rest ma leg. Cheers, boays.’

In their travels, they found a few isolated groups of derelicts and talked to them. One group round a fire directed them to the south side of the river. The information was probably as helpful as a wooden compass. But they had nothing else.

They crossed the river by the Suspension Bridge. Nothing happened for a time. But after a lot more walking, they saw five people behind the Caledonia Road Church. It was a striking moment. They were four men and a woman in a difficult conspiracy. One man had a bottle and a deep argument was going on. Plato never had it harder.

Against the backdrop of the church, they looked small and yet they put it in perspective. Burned in the sixties, the shell of the building remains a monument to nineteenth century confidence, an eroding certainty about what God’s like. They bickered stridently in its shadow like a rival sect.

‘Hullo there,’ Laidlaw said, and for Harkness the remark turned the day into another wavelength. Laidlaw’s attempt at conversation with them was like trying to communicate with a ship sinking in mid-Atlantic when you’re on the shore.

‘Furraff,’ one of them said, a small man whose face dereliction had made a gargoyle. ‘Furraff, is oors.’

The woman giggled, an eerily coquettish sound that belonged behind a fan. She looked at the small man with roguish appreciation, as if he had just produced one of his better epigrams. The other three were still ignoring Laidlaw and Harkness.

‘Furraff,’ the small man repeated.

He moved towards Laidlaw in a way that was both threatening and touching, a vaguely remembered style still carried around like an unloaded gun.

‘I just want to ask you something,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Did anybody here know Eck Adamson? I know you.’ Laidlaw pointed at the man with the bottle. ‘I’ve seen you with him.’

They all paused. The man with the bottle stood swaying, drawing his dignity round him like an opera cloak. His irises had a furry look.

‘Ah know all there is to know aboot boats,’ somebody said. ‘Can make a boat speak.’

‘I beg your pardon, captain,’ the man with the bottle said. ‘You were addressing me?’

The formal politeness was a bizarre anomaly in his state of savage ruin.

‘Yes,’ Laidlaw said. ‘You knew Eck Adamson.’

The man seemed to be leafing through a mental engagement-book of fair dimensions.

‘I have that pleasure.’

‘Had. He’s dead.’

‘Greedy wee man,’ somebody said.

‘Bereft,’ the man with the bottle said. ‘Bereft.’

He took a drink and passed it to the woman. While the others drank, Laidlaw explained what had happened and asked the man if he knew where Eck might have been hanging out lately. Only fragments seemed to register.

‘One of our favourite spots,’ the man said and started to walk. Laidlaw and Harkness went with him while the others straggled behind.

They didn’t have far to go. He stopped on a waste lot where the ashes of a dead fire suggested an abandoned camp-site. The man was nodding. The others joined them.

‘Did anyone get in touch with him that you saw?’ Laidlaw asked. ‘A stranger.’

‘A young man perhaps. A benefactor perhaps.’

Harkness understood Laidlaw’s expression. The questions were probably no more than the spurs to creative fantasy in the man. He had the drunk’s disconcerting technique of hibernating between remarks.

‘Yes. There was a young man. John? David? Alec? Patrick?’

‘Thanks,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Do you remember his second names as well?’

‘We don’t use second names here.’

‘He wouldny share,’ the small man said.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Had a bottle. Wouldny share. Basta.’

Laidlaw gave the dignified man a fifty-pence piece.

‘Many thanks. At the moment I’m slightly devoid of funds.’

They dispersed as vaguely as fog.

‘Useful information,’ Harkness said.

They were standing aimlessly on the waste lot.

‘Let’s look,’ Laidlaw said.

‘What for? A visiting card?’

‘Anything. Just bloody look!’

They did. After a dusty half-hour, Harkness turned up a bottle in a niche of the wall and hidden with loose bricks. It was a Lanliq wine-bottle with a screw top. It contained something dark.

Lifting it gingerly by the neck, Laidlaw unscrewed the cork and smelt. It meant nothing he recognised. He looked at Harkness.

‘We’ve got to go in and get a car anyway. Let’s take it with us.’

‘Sure,’ Harkness said. ‘We might get something back on the bottle.’

‘But I’m not humphing this. We’ll get a taxi.’

It seemed a simple enough idea but it led to one of those impromptu moments of Glaswegian cabaret in which the city abounds. Having flagged a cab down, Laidlaw, with a sense of camouflage that was instinctive to him, gave a destination near Pitt Street. And things began immediately with a green car pulling out without warning in front of their driver.

‘Away, you!’ their driver bellowed. ‘Ah hope yer wheels fa’ aff.’

He was a man who looked in his late thirties with thinning, curly hair and he was obviously an extreme sufferer from that contemporary ailment, urban choler.

‘Bastards,’ he said, jerking his head as if he was riding the world’s punches.

He was one of those taxi-drivers who do up their cab like a wee house on wheels. There was fancy carpeting and instead of advertisements on the base of the fold-up seats he had pasted on pictures of a couple of Highland scenes, the Three Sisters of Glencoe and the Ballachulish Ferry before the bridge was built. He had woollen baubles hanging from the inside mirror and plastic footballers, Rangers and Celtic, over the dashboard-switches. It was like taking a ride inside someone’s psyche.

‘Ye fancy some music, boays?’

His eyes in the mirror suggested refusal might be a capital offence. They murmured non-committally and he switched on a tape.

‘Magic him, intae? James Last, eh? Ye need somethin’ soothin’ in this job.’

There was an almost full bottle of Irn Bru wedged upside down between the meter and the luggage-door. As he talked, it began to seem that its purpose might be more than a thirst quencher.

‘Tell you two places Ah’ll no’ go.’ He said it as if they had turned up especially to enquire about his taboos. ‘Not any more. Blackhill and Garthamlock. No chance. Know why? Garthamlock. Take a bastard out there. In the back wi’ the biggest Alsation Ah’ve ever saw. Rin-Tin-Tin wi’ elephantiasis. Get there, no money. Gonny set his dog on me. Ah steps oot the cab. Before ye could say Jack Robinson, he’s hit me the awfiest kick in the knackers. Oot the gemme completely. Ma balls were like wattermelons. Ah wis walkin’ aboot like a cowboy for a week, wasn’t Ah? But he wisny clever. Knew roughly where he stayed, didn’t ah? Couple o’ the mates an’ me pay a wee visit, wait for him. We played at keepie-uppie wi’ his heid. Don’t worry about it. Big guy. He wis squealin’ like a pig. Left his face like a jigsaw-puzzle. Wan o’ his lugs had nostrils by the time we stopped. Correct. This is a nice wan, boays.’

He turned up the music and hummed along with it briefly.

‘Aye, ye meet some fuckin’ lunatics in this job.’

In the mirror Harkness watched the driver’s eyes contemplate the incidence of insanity with a kind of cosmic dyspepsia. There was a certain relief in realising they were almost at their destination. He couldn’t hold in his laughter.

‘Aye. Ye learn to trust nobody. Some o’ them wid massage yer head wi’ a screwtop as fast as look at ye. The world’s a shambles.’

‘Your tip’s on the meter,’ Laidlaw said as he paid.

Harkness realised that Laidlaw was justified. Behind his distracting talk, the driver had followed an unnecessarily circuitous route. But the man looked at Laidlaw as if deciding whether to fight a duel with him.

He flicked on his ‘For Hire’ sign and took off. Harkness imagined him cruising round Glasgow like a mobile manic broadcaster, Radio Armageddon, meter ticking like a time-bomb.

‘We’ll get this to the lab,’ Laidlaw said and suddenly was laughing.

He pointed helplessly after the departing taxi, shaking his head. Harkness nodded, buckled beside him.

‘How about that?’ Harkness managed to say.

‘Like going over Niagara in a taxi.’

‘I wonder what happened in Blackhill?’ Harkness said.