‘It’s a bad time to be bothering you with questions,’ he said. ‘Forgive me. But there’s things I want to ask.’
‘No, no, son,’ she said. ‘You carry on. You’ve yer work to do.’
‘If Alec was poisoned. And I think he was. Can you think of anybody who might have wanted to do that to him?’
She shook her head.
‘Ah canny believe it, son. Oor Alec? Ah mean, Ah’m no’ talkin’ as some daft, dotin’ sister. But you think about it. He wis that busy bein’ bad to himself, he hadn’t the time to make a lot of enemies. Ah canny see it.’
‘He didn’t say anything to you that might have suggested he was in trouble?’
‘Son. Ye know the kind of life he led. God bless ’im. He wis only here when he couldny stand it any more. He wis always welcome. He knew that. But he couldn’t forgive himself for whit he’d become. So every second blue moon Ah saw him. Ah always tidied him up and gave him whit Ah could. Ma mither would’ve wanted that. She wis a kind wumman, mamither. Woulda bought extra cheese if she’d knew there wis a moose in the hoose.’
‘But Eck must’ve raved a bit. Coming to you like that. I mean, he must’ve been coming when he was out his mind with the drink. Otherwise, he couldn’t have faced it. Because of his own guilt, I mean. I know what I’m like on that stuff. I’ll talk for a week. So what did he say the last time?’
‘You’re right, son. You are right. He talked till the clock wis dizzy. It didny know a.m. from p.m. That last time? Wait a minute. He said he had a benefactor. That was the word. Some rich boy. Name of Veitch.’
Laidlaw and Harkness were sharing the same held breath. Laidlaw’s voice came out on tiptoe.
‘Anything else?’
‘Ah’m no’ sure. Some woman he talked about.’
‘Lynsey Farren?’ Harkness said.
‘Whit kinna name is that, son?’
They took that as a very definite no. She couldn’t remember her name or anything else about her. Harkness’s disappointment couldn’t understand why Laidlaw stayed so gentle. He couldn’t have been more solicitous to his mother. He thanked her and took the dishes back through to the kitchen, was going to wash them. She was offended.
‘Ah’m affrontit enough. A man makin’ the tea,’ she said. ‘Ye’ll not be doing the dishes in my house.’
Laidlaw surrendered. He respected where she came from too much to argue. She was one of a species he recognised.
They were decency’s martyrs, who would treat death itself with an instinctive politeness, the unofficial good, uncalendared. You wouldn’t find their names in any book of fame but Laidlaw believed they were the best of us because they gave off their good, quite naturally, in actions. They weren’t dedicated to God or high political principles or some idea but to an unforced daily generosity of giving, a making more bearable for others and themselves. And they were legion.
Everybody, Laidlaw thought, must know many of them. He himself was in debt to countless of them, aunties and uncles, strangers chatted to in pubs, small miracles of humanity witnessed, unself-aware. Recently, on a trip back to Ayrshire, he had caught up again with another, Old Jock, an ex-roadman in his seventies who lived uncomplaining with his wife on a pittance of pension, spending more on his budgies than he did on himself. His modest Calvary had been forty years on the roads for barely enough to feed his family and him, coming home on black winter mornings from a night spent spreading grit, his hands bulbous from overuse and skinned with the cold. He had taken it as no concern of anybody but him. It was what he did. Laidlaw remembered him admitting, almost embarrassedly, that he had never clenched a fist against anyone that he could remember in his life.
Faced with people like Jock, or Jinty Adamson, Laidlaw was reminded that he didn’t want the heaven of the holy or the Utopia of the idealists. He wanted the scuffle of living now every day as well as he could manage without the exclusive air-conditioning of creeds and, after it, just the right to lie down with all those others who had settled for the same. It seemed to him the hardest thing to do.
Jinty herself, he thought, was a hard case. How else could she have stayed so innocent? She demonstrated her hard innocence now. In the middle of her grief her head was still sifting details, trying to remember.
‘Baker,’ she said. ‘Not Baker. Brown. That wis the woman’s name. Her name was Brown. Alec wis goin’ between her an’ him. That boy Veitch. She lives in a big house. She knew where the boy was stayin’, right enough. But she only kept in touch through Alec. Some problem wi’ her man, Ah think.’
They thanked her again and left her alone with her television, like the Lady of Shalott with a distorting mirror.
26
‘Friends, I’m not proud of it. But I can admit it now. I neglected my children. I beat my wife. Drink was my God. Until I found Jesus. Let him come into your life, friends. Behold. He knocks at the door. Will you let him in?’
‘Behold’ was the give-away for Macey. He didn’t like words like ‘behold’. To him they were people talking in fancy-dress, acting it, playing at who they weren’t. Macey knew who the speaker was. He was Ricky Smith from Govan, a man who had been known to knock at a couple of doors himself, usually with a claw-hammer.
There weren’t many people in the Buchanan Street pedestrian precinct. A few of them had paused in the vague vicinity of Ricky, the way they might have for a sword-swallower or an amateur Houdini disentangling himself from ropes. Other people’s sin was one way to brighten a dull Sunday.
Macey had chosen a bench a bit apart and to the side of Ricky, so that he wouldn’t be recognised. Salvation wasn’t what he needed just now, at least not Ricky’s brand. It interested him to hear a version of a life he knew about.
‘Friends, name a sin I haven’t committed, a bad thing I haven’t done.’ Fellatio with an Alsatian, Macey thought. ‘When I look back on my life, I’m disgusted with myself. I can hardly believe my own sinfulness.’
Ricky was overstating it, Macey thought. He had been bad enough, wouldn’t have done too well in the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme. He had punched a few faces, treated wee Mary as if marriage was a fight to the death and he was for surviving, finally behaved as if he had hidden something he had to find at the bottom of a bottle and couldn’t remember which one. He hadn’t been a nice man.
Macey was glad for him now. Ricky looked a lot better, though his face had that slightly dessicated look a lot of reformed bevviers had. They were like people who’ve had to amputate a part of their own nature to survive and the infected part was where unthinking pleasure was. It was certainly better for Ricky to be battering people’s ears than anything else.
But why did found-again Christians all have to claim they’d been Genghis Khan? Macey looked at the three people who were with Ricky, a woman and two men. They were scanning the faces of the bystanders with a fierce attentiveness, like showmen gauging the effect of the performance. For Macey they had a look he recognised among do-gooders, an intensity that never quite connected, an openness like an iron grille. They were reaching out to shake hands with life, but they kept their gloves on. They kept glancing at Ricky in a proprietary way, as if they’d found the authentic wildness of evil and seen it turn to good.
As far as Macey was concerned, Ricky didn’t really qualify. If they had got a few others to stand up there, Macey would have converted on the spot. But he didn’t expect to see John Rhodes or Cam Colvin or Mickey Ballater or Ernie Milligan taking Ricky’s place. And they were who Macey was trying to deal with in his mind.
‘We have a choice,’ Ricky was saying.