‘Bobby was a valued member of our team, one who kept us a bargepole’s distance from any whiff of fraud or tax evasion. So here’s to absent friends.’ He raised his glass in a toast.
They drank in silence. Paterson swallowed and wiped his mouth on his shirt cuff.
‘Okay if I have a biscuit now, boss?’ he asked.
‘Your dentist must love you almost as much as your doctor,’ Colvin muttered, rising to his feet. ‘I’m away for a pish. Don’t let me detain youse.’
After Colvin had left, Paterson ran a tongue around his mouth. ‘At least I’ve got all my own teeth, mostly,’ he commented, reaching for the plate in the centre of the table.
‘Anyone got any ideas?’ Ballater asked the room.
Menzies gave a loud sniff. ‘Would I be speaking out of turn if I mentioned that the boss has always had a thing for Bobby’s missus?’
‘That doesn’t exactly put him in a minority,’ Thomson said, keeping his eyes focused on the table rather than anyone seated around it.
‘But now he gets to play the knight in shining armour,’ Menzies went on.
Ballater spaced his words out when he answered. ‘Are you saying you think the boss did Bobby in? I’m not convinced that would work out well for us.’
‘We need to be doing something, though,’ Paterson said, crumbs spraying from his parted lips.
‘The Parlour’s the obvious starting point,’ Ballater concluded after a moment’s thought. ‘Pity we don’t have any current friends inside the crime squad — a few rounds bought at the Top Spot could be helpful.’
‘Way I hear it, John Rhodes has his finger in that particular pie.’
‘And we don’t get to Rhodes without going through his team first.’
‘Especially that big bastard with the face that looks like a join-the-dots painting.’
‘We’re not exactly midgets ourselves, remember.’ ‘Plenty of folk on the street we could be asking,’ Thomson said. ‘Word has a way of getting around.’
‘I dare say myths are being created as we sit here,’ Ballater added. ‘Soon enough we’ll have to turn colliers to dig up anything resembling the truth.’
‘My dad was a coal miner,’ Thomson said.
‘Let’s hope his son doesn’t have to take up a shovel or a pickaxe to find some answers.’
Thomson gave a thin smile as he patted his jacket pocket. ‘There’s only one tool I’ll need, Mickey.’
‘Are youse still here?’ Cam Colvin barked from the doorway, affecting incredulity as he wiped his hands dry on his handkerchief.
‘Just going, chief,’ Paterson apologised, rising to his feet. He reached out an arm towards one final biscuit before thinking better of it and following his three colleagues from the room.
7
After Milligan’s pre-lunch briefing, Laidlaw had felt the need not so much to clear his head as to exorcise the whole soul-festering hour. He’d jumped on a bus, no destination in mind, just staring from the top deck as the streets around him spun their endless small stories. He smoked cigarette after cigarette and thought of the Burleigh. If it was going to be his base camp for the duration, he needed to go home and pack some clothes. Ena wouldn’t be happy about it, but that was increasingly becoming the default setting regarding their marriage. It felt as though they were living through a phoney war, negotiations fraught, hiding the truth from their civilian children. There were three of them — Moya, Sandra and Jack; aged six, five and two. Whenever a case kept him out past their bedtime, Laidlaw would creep into their rooms to stroke their hair and remind himself a better world was possible.
It wasn’t so easy with Ena.
His thoughts shifted to the receptionist at the Burleigh. Her name was Jan, a well-upholstered woman with a steely stare that seemed to soften in Laidlaw’s presence. He suspected that male admirers would wonder if they could pass whatever test she seemed to be setting with those eyes. She knew he was a detective because Ben Finlay had once told her to expect a visit.
‘Nice to know I’m predictable.’
‘Ben seems to think you’re anything but.’
Laidlaw told himself that it wasn’t Jan that kept him returning to the Burleigh; it was the need to stay near the steady pulse of the city streets. Simshill was too far, too safe. The kids needed stories told to them, meals were required to be eaten as a family. He was no longer supposed to be a policeman.
‘You’ll burn out before you’re forty,’ Ena had once warned him.
Forty wasn’t too far away, either. He felt it encircling his thickening waist. His knees complained when faced with too many stairs. His eyes were under strain and he doubted he could chase a suspect the length of any street worth the name. Wiping condensation from the bus window, he looked out at a sky belched from the chimneys of the crumbling tenements, the same smoke that clung to the various civic buildings, once grandly Victorian but now in danger of being swamped by modernity. Old habitats were being demolished, shiny towering replacements planned, a motorway carving its way through the city. Forget the old certitudes; they would soon be crushed underfoot like a fag end beneath a platform-soled shoe. Laidlaw didn’t doubt, though, that the replenished housing stock would fail to do much for Glasgow’s ingrained problems. Behind new glazing and harling he’d be sure still to find poverty, loveless marriages, drunken aggression, sectarian bile, like angry tattoos hidden under a laundered shirt.
He was only vaguely aware of his surroundings as he got off the bus at its next stop and crossed the road to await another back into town. The attempt to erase the memory of the briefing wasn’t working. He was seeing Milligan standing in front of his attentive audience, never happier than when issuing orders and offering theories as if they were diamond-hard facts. A wall of black and white photographs acted as scenery to his soliloquy. One of them showed graffiti on the rear wall of the Parlour, left there by the Gorbals Cumbie, a teenage gang whose current leader was called Malky Chisholm. Chisholm was a college dropout whose ambition of becoming a social worker had led him to too close an association with the various groupings of feral young men. It had become like a drug to him, and eventually, having attempted to broker peace between the Cumbie and other gangs such as the Calton Toi, he’d been offered no choice but to take sides. The Cumbie had become his tribe and soon enough he’d been crowned their king. It helped that he was a gifted amateur boxer. A ‘square go’ held few fears for him — in a fair fight, he would almost always win. But he was cunning, too, meaning even unfair fights went his way.
Laidlaw was aware of a bit of history between Chisholm and Milligan. Arrests made; charges dropped. Milligan was strapping on a pair of blinkers to go with his boxing gloves, ready to enter the ring again.
‘What this graffiti tells me,’ he had pontificated for the benefit of the room, ‘is that the Cumbie are encroaching on Calton turf. A stabbing is one hell of a calling card, wouldn’t you agree?’ His eyes had fixed on Laidlaw as he’d said this, as if daring him to shake his head. What would have been the point? The crime squad office was hardly the forum in Rome, and Laidlaw doubted anyone gathered there would have looked good in a toga. Ever since Lilley and Laidlaw had returned from the mortuary, Milligan had been waiting for them to complain that their trip there had been a waste of time. Neither man had done so, purely to deprive him of that pleasure.
Lighting another cigarette, Laidlaw became aware of a stooped old-timer with rheumy eyes who had joined the bus queue behind him.
‘You should enjoy life more, son. Your face is tripping you.’