‘Lookin’ for Mad Liz, boays?’ the singer asked. He pointed downwards. ‘She dwelleth in the nether regions. A right big cracker. An’ daft as a brush. The perfect combie.’
Laidlaw laughed and Harkness waved and they went in past the payphone in the hall. As they climbed the stairs, they heard the preoccupied conversation of the painters through the open door.
‘She’s no’ that mad that she fancies you anyway,’ the older man said.
‘Harry! They all fancy me. Ah carry a pocketful o’ stones tae throw at them. Ah’ve got tae protect maself. Why d’ye think Ah go hame a different road every night? Tae avoid all these birds in ambush.’
‘Ye couldny get yer end away at an orgy.’
‘Anyway, Ah don’t think yon was Mad Liz.’
‘The big blondie?’
‘Nah. Ah didny fancy her anyway. Like a prop-forward wi’ tits. Pa-ra-dee-pa-ra-rutin-dutin-beedle-be. .’
Flat 9 was up a final small stair to what had been part of the attic. Laidlaw knocked on the Yale-locked door.
‘Aye. Who’s that?’
Laidlaw made a face that meant he didn’t talk to doors and knocked again. There was something said that sounded like ‘Oh to hell,’ a pause, and the door opened.
‘Guthrie Hawkins?’
He grimaced. ‘Gus Hawkins.’
He wore only a pair of jeans. He was early twenties, with blue direct eyes that looked as if they wouldn’t have been intimidated by a regiment. His hair was black, cut rough and ruffled. He was fairly short but his bare torso was so blatant with power height would have been overstatement. When his eyes came up from Laidlaw’s identity-card they had grown a skin of distance.
‘What’s this about?’
‘It’s about Tony Veitch.’
‘Again?’ he said and smiled. ‘You going to wait there a minute, please?’ He closed the door on them.
When it opened again, he was carrying a v-necked sweater. He pulled it over his head as they came in.
The door opened directly on to the one-roomed flat. To the left of it hung a curtain of blue and white plastic strips, separating the cooker, sink and some cupboards from the rest of the room. There were three beds, two of them with cushions decorating their neatness. The third bed had signs of having been hastily made up, suggestive wrinkles showing beneath its coverlet.
But the essence of the place wasn’t in the sparseness of its furnishings. It was in what had grown in their interstices. The walls were a collage defying interpretation. Che Guevara was surrounded by Thurber cartoons, his handsome romanticism as decontextualised as a tragedian on a tube-train. There were various photographs and drawings obviously cut out of books: Marx, Camus, T. S. Eliot, Socrates, John Maclean pointing an admonitory finger at the world, Marlon Brando refusing to give Eva Marie Saint back her glove in On the Waterfront, Hemingway studiedly being Hemingway. There were prints of ‘Old Woman Cooking an Egg’, Pisarro’s ‘Peasant Digging’ and Breughel’s ‘Icarus’ with a typewritten sheet beside it containing Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’. There was a postcard from Pollok House showing ‘Adam Naming the Beasts’ and ‘Eve Naming the Birds’. Most conspicuously, there were books, the real furniture. They covered the place like a fungoid growth, having proliferated from the single three-tiered bookshelf into piles on the floor.
The images all around were like holes drilled in the drab walls, offering strange vistas. Together with the books, they were a denial not just of the room but of the city beyond it, a refusal to have vision circumscribed by circumstances.
Laidlaw felt immediately two things: that just by standing here he was closer to Tony Veitch, could take the pulse of his comprehensible strangeness, knew a little better where he came from; that he was looking at a lost part of himself. He stood among the complex and incompatible idealisms of youth and remembered having been there. Remembering that, he had the grace to be aware that he was alien. Middle-age was a foreign country here. This was a shrine to youth, where compromise was like a profanation.
The girl emphasised the feeling in him. She had pulled on jeans and T-shirt. She had mules on her bare feet. Her recent vulnerability was her embarrassment now. Her breasts seemed too conspicuous, as if she knew the three men in the room were too aware of them. The intense privacy of what she had been involved in had been made public before she was ready. Her shyness was an indictment. Laidlaw felt guilty.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry we disturbed you. I’m Jack Laidlaw. This is Brian Harkness. We won’t be long.’
‘That’s all right,’ Gus Hawkins said. ‘This is Marie.’
Laidlaw liked him at once. Considering the varieties of embarrassment and aggression and deceit the arrival of the police gave rise to, Laidlaw liked the cool directness of the boy’s response. Gus leaned back on his elbow on the bed they had been making love on, and wore his preposterous health like an aureole. He knew whatever happened he could handle it.
Marie put out two chairs for them and sat on the third remaining chair. Gus gestured them to sit down. Laidlaw admired his style and, admiring it, couldn’t resist trying to disconcert it.
‘You said “again”,’ he said.
‘Sorry?’
‘When I mentioned Tony Veitch. You said, “Again?” Who’s been asking about him?’
‘People.’
‘I’d worked that out. What people, though? You see, it could be important. You could be withholding vital information.’
Gus Hawkins held out both hands, palms up, wrists together. Laidlaw and Harkness managed not to smile.
‘Naw,’ Gus Hawkins said. ‘Don’t take me away. Just friends at the uni. There seems a lot of fuss about Tony. So what’s he done?’
‘As far as I’m concerned, he’s disappeared. We’d like to find him.’
‘I don’t know where he is.’
‘No ideas at all about where he might go?’
‘I’ve checked them all. D’you think I wouldn’t?’
‘Well, maybe you could tell us something that might help us to find him.’
Gus sat up on the bed and clasped his hands, elbows resting on his knees. He stared at the floor for a time and looked up, seeming to have made a decision.
‘You want a cup of coffee?’
‘That would be great,’ Harkness said.
‘I’ll get it,’ Marie said.
‘Would you, love? Thanks. Okay, I’ll tell you what I can.’
Laidlaw wondered why.
‘Did you know he was going to take off? I mean, did he give any indication of it?’
‘Not really. Not any more than at any other time. He could’ve shot the crow at any time during the last year or so, Tony. He had become allergic to the uni.’
‘So how did it happen?’
‘Well, I’d given him the place to himself for the week of the finals. I’ve just finished Junior Honours, right? I look in a couple of times during the week. To see if I could help. Like Anglo-Saxon vocabulary or something. Or check references for him maybe. Last time I saw him was on the Thursday night. He seemed all right. Bit of a zombie, the way everybody is at the finals. Your head standing in for a filing-cabinet. But he was all right. Reckoned he had done pretty well so far. Then Saturday.’
He shook his head. His eyes rediscovered the puzzlement he must have felt then.
‘I come in on Saturday morning. The door’s not even shut. It’s lying open. I push it. And it’s like coming aboard the Mary Celeste. I knew there was something wrong. I mean, there was no reason why he should be here. It wasn’t that. It was just — the room hadn’t been left, it had been abandoned. There was a full cup of coffee sitting on the floor. A couple of drawers hanging out where he had emptied them. About half-a-dozen books scattered round the floor, all open. I looked in the cupboard and his travelling-bag was gone. And that was it. Never seen him since.’