Laidlaw looked at him. ‘That’s all right,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m not sure my manner likes you. But it hardly seems relevant.’
‘Milton!’ Alma Brown was appealing to him. ‘Please. If something’s wrong with Tony, we must help. We must. Lynsey would want to help. She won’t mind being involved, will she?’
He conferred with his drink before giving them an address in East Kilbride, which didn’t seem to Harkness the likeliest place for the titled to live.
‘Does she work?’ Laidlaw asked.
‘There I do draw the line. She has her own business and I don’t think the presence of the police would help it.’
Laidlaw let it pass and Mr Veitch’s sense of himself seemed assuaged.
‘There are reasons for my reluctance to involve Lynsey,’ he said in the manner of a cabinet minister responding to a naive interviewer. ‘Lord Farren is an old man. He lives essentially in the past. The sordidness of much of what passes for life today passes him by. It would be nice if it could stay that way. If Lynsey were dragged into anything unsavoury, it would kill him. And Lynsey herself has had enough recently, I should think.’
Laidlaw was interested.
‘Why is that?’
‘An incident where the police were involved. A visitor to her flat who got nasty. Violent, I think.’
‘Do you know who or what happened, Mr Veitch? What was it about?’
‘I’ve no details, I’m afraid. I didn’t press the poor girl. Was there anything else?’
‘A couple of things. Do you know Tony’s friends or where he might be staying? Anyone he might get in touch with? Places he might go? Anything like that?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Alma Brown said.
‘No to everything,’ Mr Veitch said. ‘He’s been a stranger to me for years. I hope he keeps it that way.’
‘How will he be living?’ Laidlaw asked.
The question seemed to puzzle Mr Veitch.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Money. Hiding out somewhere. How can he get the money to live?’
Mr Veitch smiled.
‘He has his own money. My wife died some ten years ago. She left all of her money to her son. When he was twenty-one. Which perhaps explains the timing of his great rebellion. Like quite a few rebels, he presumably wants to do it in comfort.’
‘Do you have any photographs of him?’ Laidlaw asked.
‘Well, if we do, I don’t keep them next to my heart.’
‘I’ll find something,’ Alma Brown said and went out.
Milton Veitch added to his drink and sat back down.
‘You think Tony has done something terrible?’ he asked. ‘Been responsible in some way for what’s happened?’
Laidlaw shrugged.
‘Not necessarily. Not necessarily at all. But two people have been murdered.’ He glanced at Harkness, letting him know he didn’t need the intervention of purists at this point. ‘This is the only pointer we have. That’s all.’
‘You know,’ Mr Veitch was staring ahead. ‘I’m afraid it wouldn’t surprise me. It wouldn’t surprise me at all.’
His voice faded out of earshot as Miss Brown came in. She gave Laidlaw two photographs.
‘You can keep those,’ she said. ‘I have copies.’
Mr Veitch stood up. There was nothing to do but the same. Standing beside Mr Veitch in his light grey suit that looked expensive enough to be tailored from hand-stitched tenners, Harkness felt the way his shoes always looked when he was trying on new trousers — suddenly shabby.
‘Oh, a last thing,’ Laidlaw said. ‘I don’t know if you paid much attention to what Tony wrote on that bit of paper. But it seems to me worryingly interested in wrongdoing. Was that like Tony?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ Mr Veitch said. ‘I hardly knew him.’
‘Perhaps you shouldn’t take that too seriously,’ Miss Brown said. ‘Tony wrote an awful lot of things. He had masses of papers. We never paid them much attention. Perhaps we should have.’
‘But that letter was the only communication since he left?’
‘Once was enough. Believe me,’ Mr Veitch said.
As they all moved awkwardly out towards the door, Harkness felt the strangeness of these two people living together in this house, having conversations full of shadows. He thought it would take a house as big as this to accommodate the ghosts he had sensed in their relationship. He wondered if property did that to people, if big houses in some of the ghost stories he had read were really being haunted by the guilt of unjustly having while others were deprived. Certainly he couldn’t remember reading about too many haunted single-ends.
Sitting in the car, Laidlaw took out the photographs and looked at them, passed them to Harkness. They showed a fair-haired young man, unsmiling, with intense, startled eyes. One was in colour, taken with a flash, and he was looking up from something he was reading. The other was taken outside, black and white. Tony Veitch was in an overcoat, standing outside a house. He looked like a refugee who had just arrived wherever he was.
‘What do you see, Boy Robin?’ Laidlaw said.
‘A murderer?’ Harkness asked.
‘A mystery. That’ll do for just now.’
Laidlaw took the refugee, left Harkness with the reader.
‘Milton Veitch seems less vague about him,’ Harkness said.
‘Aye, he was in a hurry, wasn’t he? I wonder why. But I’ll tell you something. You know who casts the first stone? The guiltiest bastard in the crowd. You’ve got a son in the kind of bother he thinks Tony Veitch might be in, what do you do?’
‘How would I know?’
‘And how would I? But I would bet. I’d find him for myself. I’d need to know what happened. If wee Jackie grew up and got involved in this way, I’d have to know what I had done as well. Jesus, I could make a better father than him out of raffia.’
Harkness looked at him worriedly. Laidlaw was too vehement. Harkness had been working with him for over a year now. In that time he had seen an intensification take place in Laidlaw. Whatever forces were working themselves out in him, they were accelerating. Laidlaw was forty now but that anger against so many things that ticked in him like a geiger-counter was in no way mollified by middle-age.
Harkness thought he knew some of the pressures that relentlessly maintained the tension of his nature. He had been at Laidlaw’s house a few times and had seen that in the wreck of his marriage he was using himself as a lifebelt for his three children. Laidlaw’s insistence on staying during some important cases at the Burleigh Hotel in Sauchiehall Street could hardly be due to the comfort and cuisine to be found there. It was more due, Harkness was sure, to Jan the receptionist. When you added Laidlaw’s natural tendency to look for any storm in a port you had a recipe that might have blown the lid off a pressure-cooker.
‘Okay, Jack,’ Harkness said. ‘Where to? East Kilbride?’
‘She won’t be in. Back into the city, Brian. Anyway, even if she was in, we couldn’t outdrive a phone-call.’
‘What?’
‘Mr Veitch is phoning her right now. You can bet on it. Galahad is alive and well. And playing with himself.’
Driving, Harkness remembered something.
‘Here. Why no whisky again? This could get monotonous.’
‘I take water with my whisky,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Not condescension.’
13
‘. . in this crowd deaf to its own cry of hunger and misery, revolt and hatred, in this crowd so strangely garrulous and dumb.’
Gus Hawkins was reading the end of the sentence again when the knock came at the door. He was eating a folded slice of bread and jelly, a Saturday lunchtime return to the comfort food of childhood, and drinking the last of his tea. His mother was clearing the table. His father sat in his armchair, a telly cataleptic. Gus made to get up.
‘Ah’ll get it, son,’ his mother said. ‘It’s likely Maggie from downstairs.’
But her startled ‘Oh’ as she opened the door made Gus look up to see his brother standing there, wearing his scar like an embarrassing admission in front of his mother of the kind of work he did. He gave her an operatic embrace and winked over her shoulder at Gus. His jollity was a smoke-screen.