I didn’t take time to explain that that was a long forty minutes. The car would make it but not my head. I could hear over the phone the background noises of domesticity, like an old tune I could still remember but had forgotten the words. I didn’t want to take any contagion of gloomy obsessiveness into that nice place.
‘Well, I’ve still got a couple of people to see, Morag.’
‘Jack. Who do you think you’re kidding? You’ll sit in a room the size of a coffin and get pissed. Your habits are known. Come up here and get a decent meal and some company. Brian told me about your fridge. He said you could sell it as new. If you can’t look after yourself, let other people do it now and again.’
‘What it is, Morag,’ I said. ‘I just tasted whisky for the first time there. And, you know the way you can sometimes just tell right away? I really think I’m going to like it. So what I thought I would do, I’ll just stay with it for a while and see if I can acquire the taste. And it’s awkward to do that when you’re driving.’
‘You’re hopeless. You not coming up?’
‘Not the night, lovely wumman. But it’s in my crowded diary. How’s Stephanie and the mystery guest?’
‘Steph’s fine. The other one’s kickin’ like a football team. Listen. We’re going to feed you properly soon. Even if we have to put you on a drip. No escape. You want to speak to Brian?’
‘Please, Morag. He’s in, is he?’
‘Yes. I don’t swallow all that Crime Squad stuff about having to work late all the time. The fate of the nation hanging on a break-in in Garthamlock. I’ll get him. You watch yourself, you.’
‘Like an egg in a cake, Morag. Cheers.’
‘So Morag’s seductive tones didn’t persuade you?’ Brian said. ‘Actually, the way she’s goin’ on at me. D’you mind if I come down there? Can you get me a room?’
‘I’d change places any day,’ I said. ‘So how did it go today?’
‘You first,’ Brian said.
I started trying to give him a brief outline and began to feel as if I was drawing pictures in the air with my finger. I found myself interpreting Brian’s silence as the sound of scepticism. Maybe obsessions are essentially incommunicable. What did I have to tell him? I visited an empty house. I found an abandoned painting. I met a schoolteacher and his wife and family. It was all as interesting in the telling as one of those childhood compositions: What I Did At The Weekend. Even to myself it seemed that I was not conveying my experiences so much as my symptoms. Brian’s response wasn’t a hopeful diagnosis.
‘Christ, Jack,’ he said. ‘What’s the point of what you’re doing?’
‘I’m not telling you,’ I said. ‘’Cause you’re not a nice man. Anyway, what about you?’
I think Brian was relieved to get back to talking about the real world. Buster was looking at me from the floor as if he shared Brian’s opinion of me.
‘Meece Rooney,’ Brian said. ‘You know him?’
‘Meece? I know him.’
‘Well, you did,’ Brian said. ‘He’s dead.’
‘You mean he’s the one? On the waste ground?’
‘Meece Rooney. Listen. Somebody said he was supposed to have studied medicine. Would you know about that?’
‘Meece did about a month at university,’ I said. ‘Before he decided there must be quicker ways to fulfil yourself. If Meece was saying he studied medicine, he must’ve meant he had been reading the label on a cough-bottle.’
I found myself shrugging. Grief can be selfish. I didn’t dislike Meece. I hadn’t disliked Meece. By the rule of thumb you sometimes applied to the troublesome people you dealt with, he wasn’t the worst. The thumb was almost up. He had been in my experience more victim than perpetrator. He was a fantasist who had decided to sublimate his fantasies in heroin. But if my brother’s dying was a sore thing, why not his? His death was someone’s mourning.
‘He was dealing, you know,’ Brian said.
The thumb went down. It’s one thing to find your own way to hell. But when you start directing the traffic there, it’s different.
‘I’d lost touch with him,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know he was a dealer. It’s a natural progression, right enough. So what else have you got?’
‘Not a lot so far. We traced him to a bedsit in Hyndland. He was supposed to be living there with a woman. By the way, the pathologist’s report shows he had a broken arm recently. The neighbours aren’t saying a lot. We don’t even have a name for her yet. But she seems to have been on the stuff as well. Only thing is, she’s not there any more. And her clothes aren’t either. But one of the unwashed cups has lipstick on it. And the remains of a coffee that hadn’t even hardened.’
‘So you think she knows who did it?’
‘It looks that way.’
‘And evaporated for the good of her health.’
‘You’re a genius.’
‘I’m just thinking aloud. Don’t get smart-arsed.’
‘You taught me,’ he said.
‘No. That’s maybe what you learned but it’s not what I was teaching. But that’s interesting. At least it narrows the focus.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, with a junkie you’ve got problems, haven’t you? They’re good at keeping bad company. There’s a lot of that stuff out there. And their motivations are like mayflies. They can be born and die the same day. That can make a motive hard to trace.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘But the way Meece died looks planned. Breaking fingers one by one doesn’t smack of spontaneity. It might mean questions were being asked. Or just some special rites of passage into death. Either way, Meece’s murder was arranged. And the vanishing woman confirms that. She maybe knew it was going to happen or that it had happened. And whoever did it frightened her out of her life. And into another one.’
‘So?’
‘So it’s a guess. But you’re looking to move towards official sources in their world. The big fear. What’s the biggest fear an addict has?’
‘No more of the stuff.’
‘Correct. Who’s god for those people?’
‘The man who gives the goods.’
‘I don’t think you’re looking for some lost soul who took a bad mood. I think you’re looking for more important people.’
I didn’t know whether Brian’s silence meant awe at my forensic brilliance or just that he had fallen asleep.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Thanks for taking so long to tell us what we knew already.’
We both laughed.
‘You might just about get a pass-mark at detective school for that lot.’
We talked some more but that was enough of that. Brian’s reaction had punctured my self-absorption. Other people’s problems seem so much simpler than our own. Maybe I had enjoyed playing at detectives with Meece Rooney’s death because I couldn’t begin to understand Scott’s. I had been like a man in a real war who finds relief in playing chess. I had become involved in a case that for me was purely abstract. I didn’t want to be. I had my own worries. What did Meece have to do with me just now? He was Brian and Bob’s problem. It could stay that way.
‘Okay,’ Brian said. ‘Oh, by the way, Bob Lilley says when you’ve stopped taking the fits, we’d love to have you on this case with us.’
‘Aye,’ I said. ‘Tell him if he could take the odd fit, it would be a hopeful sign. It might prove he was alive. Tell him he could live in Madame Tussaud’s and nobody would notice the difference.’
‘I feel like a Valentine card,’ Brian said. ‘Passing on all these loving messages.’
‘Cheers,’ I said.
I put down the phone rather noisily and Buster growled at me, his Dobermann ears erect.
‘Shut your face, Buster,’ I said. ‘The world’s queuing up to have a go at me and you’re at the end of the queue. I’ll see you after.’
We stared at each other. One of the advantages of having big worries is that smaller problems seem irrelevant. It’s all a question of perspective. I felt as if I could give Buster a sorer bite than he could give me.
8
I imagined a party. That is not a difficult thing for me to do. It has always been a word liable to send my mind off in pursuit of its fabulous nature, like El Dorado.