‘They should be used to him by now.’
‘Who gets used to Jack? You know what I mean. I like the man. I just wish somebody would give him a lorry-load of Valium for his Christmas.’
Laidlaw brought Harkness’s lager and a whisky for Bob and sipped his lime-juice and soda. Bob decided to help Harkness.
‘Eck was murdered?’ Bob asked.
Laidlaw nodded.
‘Pulmonary fibrosis. Suspected paraquat poisoning.’
‘Paraquat? Come on,’ Bob said. ‘If it’s paraquat, what makes you think it was murder? Eck had a thirst that wouldn’t have stopped at horse’s piss. As discriminating as a public lavvy. He would find it and drink it. That’s all. How can you say it was murder?’
‘It was something he said.’
‘Jack! You knew Eck. He made Pat the Liar sound like George Washington. You’re not serious. You can’t put any weight on that.’
‘I think I can. He said something about “the wine he gave me wisny wine”. I think somebody gave him a bad present.’
‘How do they know?’ Bob asked. ‘Did they find paraquat in him?’
‘No. It would’ve worked itself out by then, I suppose. I think he’d had it for a wee while. But it causes what they call proliferative changes.’
‘What is that?’ Harkness said.
‘I’m not sure. I think it means that even after the stuff’s gone, the damage caused goes on multiplying itself. I suppose it’s the exact nature of the damage that suggests paraquat. Not a nice way to go.’
‘You saw him?’
Laidlaw nodded.
‘All right, Jack,’ Bob said. ‘So he had a bad time. You’re sorry, but sorriness is no kind of substitute for common sense. Get a grip, will you? Learn to settle for doing the things you can do.’
‘Right Bob,’ Laidlaw said. ‘I think I’ve had enough of the Police College notes from Brian already. You think I don’t know? If you want to commit the perfect crime, just a crime for the sake of a crime. What do you do? Wipe out a wino. Right? For two reasons: who cares? Indifference coming at you like a river. And you trying to swim up it. Second: to solve a crime, you check with neighbours, family, friends. Who’s a wino’s friend? Another wino. Like cross-examining an answering service. Neighbours? Pigeons. Family? If they’re not in the Eastern Necropolis, they’re keeping quiet enough to be there. You can depend on it. What was the sequence of events? Who the hell knows? As predictable as a pin-ball. And there’s always the feeling that it might just have been a fun crime. A fly-swatting job. It’s as if you’re jay-walking in Hope Street. In the middle of the road you find a fly with its wings torn off. You’re going to track down the culprit? I know, Bob. I know.’
‘Then why the hell don’t you accept it?’
‘Why the hell do you? I don’t know what you feel about this job. But it fits me as comfortably as a hair-shirt. All right, I do it. Because sometimes I get to feel it matters very much. But not if I’m just a glorified street-sweeper. Filling up Barlinnie like a dustbin. There have to be some times when you don’t just collect the social taxes. You arrange a rebate. If all I’m doing is holding the establishment’s lid on for it, then stuff it. I resign. But I think there can be more to it. One of the things I’m in this job to do is learn. Not just how to catch criminals but who they really are, and maybe why. I’m not some guard-dog. Trained to answer whistles. Chase whoever I’m sent after. I’m not just suspicious of the people I’m chasing. I’m suspicious of the people I’m chasing them for. I mean to stay that way.’
‘So?’
‘So Wee Eck. If the law works for them, it should work for him. If he’d died in a penthouse, let’s hear you say the same. You know the life he had. Its patron saint was Torquemada. So the least he deserves is that we should care about his death enough to understand it. Like laying a wee plastic wreath on his grave. Grave? He won’t even have one. His body goes to the Anatomy Department at Glasgow University. I remember Eck telling me years ago he’d tried to sell his body to them for a fiver. Didn’t know that when you’re dead, your body belongs to your next of kin. So they get it free. He even lost out on that one.’
‘When did you join the vigilantes, Jack?’
‘Never. I’m not witch-hunting whoever did it. I just think some understanding is owed. The only healthy climate is the truth.’
Harkness said, ‘So how do we get there, great white hunter?’ Laidlaw laughed.
‘Don’t ask awkward questions.’
Bob said, ‘You could advertise: confessions wanted. I’d say it’s your only chance.’
‘I’d like to do something more practical,’ Laidlaw said.
The attractive young waitress came up and took Laidlaw’s empty glass. She had long, straight black hair and the kind of eyes that always seem to see something just past your face, maybe the dandruff on your jacket. They were dark eyes that assumed your interest, letting you get on with staring at her if you must. She hovered — waiting to take an order or be discovered?
‘No thanks, love,’ Laidlaw said.
The other two agreed. The waitress went away. There was a television personality being a television personality at a nearby table. The accompanying group were demonstrating the spontaneity of a studio audience.
‘Another lime-juice and soda,’ Laidlaw said, ‘and I’ll want to audition upstairs. There’s only so much of those the human head can stand. Anyway, we’ve got another call to make.’
‘I’m glad,’ Harkness said. ‘I was beginning to think your idea was to talk a solution to Eck’s death.’
‘We’ll grab something to eat and go out to Pollokshields.’
‘Jack,’ Bob said. ‘Take it easy.’
‘Ignore him,’ Laidlaw said. ‘He hangs about here a lot. I’ll tell the manager.’
Bob came out with them. The waitress said cheerio almost to them. Outside, Glagow had had a change of mood. It still wasn’t warm but the sky had cleared. Harkness, his hangover gone, had that feeling that weather is subjective. Bob said he was going to the office, ‘Back to sanity.’
Before they went over to Stewart Street for a car, Laidlaw hovered about the entrance to the Theatre Royal, looking at the billings.
‘Life should be more like the opera,’ Laidlaw said.
‘Why?’
‘You never die without a detailed explanation. If Wee Eck could’ve sung an aria in the Royal, we’d have no problem.’
They were walking up to cross Cowcaddens Road. Harkness, momentarily dazzled by the brightness of the day, thought about it.
‘I was gee-ven the par-aaa-quat,’ he sang, ‘by Hec-tor McGob-leee-gin.’
‘Still,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Maybe it’s just as well he couldn’t.’
11
They had settled for the function suite of the Coronach Hotel. Just beyond the south-eastern edge of Glasgow, at one of the points where the city suffers natural erosion from the countryside, the hotel seemed well enough named. A coronach is a dirge.
It belonged properly to the time before the Clayson Report relaxed the drinking laws, when only hotels had a seven-day licence and Sunday drinking was for what the law called bona fide travellers. Like a village pump in a place where the plumbing has been modernised, it stood as a slightly tatty monument to the old Scottish Sabbath, that interesting anomaly whereby the Kirk’s insistence on the observance of the Lord’s day of rest resulted in a country busy with Scotsmen transporting a thirst as heavy as luggage from one place to another.
The Coronach was still a drinking hotel, but quieter, especially on Sundays. To ask for a room there was as naive as expecting to meet Calpurnia in ‘Caesar’s Palace’. The only acknowledgement that hospitality could go beyond the dispensing of drink was the function suite.