Some choice. If he told Rhodes or Colvin or Ballater, and Milligan got to hear of it, he wouldn’t be seeing Jean and the baby for a while. He couldn’t face that Peterhead. But if he told Milligan and the others got to hear of that, he might not be seeing Jean and the baby at all. He didn’t fancy being the packing for a concrete stanchion. That’s what Cam had done with Vince Leighton. Macey had never told anybody he knew that. Some information you kept to the grave or it became one.
Macey had no illusions about his status in this situation. He remembered a nature film on the telly where he had seen a small bird that hopped about an alligator’s mouth, getting the pickings from its teeth. Or was it a crocodile? Same difference, if the jaws shut at the wrong time. Macey saw himself as the small bird. The jaws were the criminals and the police.
Macey just wanted to survive. He had nothing against this Tony Veitch but he had nothing particularly in favour of him either. Everybody was at it. If those were the rules, you better be at it yourself. Macey saw himself as a middle-man. He didn’t invent the conditions; he just worked out how to survive in them.
‘Friends, when will you make your choice?’
Macey stood up and walked away. He had made his. He would have to put it into operation with care. When you were jay-walking among juggernauts, you had to pay attention.
27
Opening on Sunday evenings was an experiment for the Tea Tray. It wasn’t working.
Harkness, who had been here a few times with Mary, could understand why. Its customers weren’t exactly night people. It was a place for morning coffee, afternoon tea, for making small rituals out of the boredom of lives which were ‘successful’ without ever having found the self-doubt to examine the terms of that success. The voices he had heard here seemed to him to go round and round the same pre-occupation — family, friends, possessions — like well-kept poodles being taken for a walk. It always gave him a quiet dose of the creeps, Madame Tussaud’s with words.
The place had been Alma Brown’s choice. Having eventually contacted her in Pollokshields, they had found her talking as if the phone was bugged. After much devious finagling, she had fixed a time later than they wanted and a place more boring than Harkness imagined anybody could want.
It reminded him mysteriously of a couple of rugby clubs he had been in, places of raucous masculinity measured by the gullet, where the sexual ravings had a distinctly hysterical tone to them. The connection, he decided, was that this place was the female counterpart of those ones, cliché calling to cliché and wanting to mate in mutual unawareness. He thought, not for the first time, that he must be a people’s liberationist. (His mind avoided the word ‘libber’ because where he came from to lib meant ‘to geld’.) This was as good a place as any to set up his standard.
It was quiet. Two well-off ladies in late middle-age were massaging each other’s egos over the coffees, listing which of the other’s dresses each liked best. The only other people were Harkness and Laidlaw. Harkness was leafing through the Sunday Mail. Laidlaw, with the Observer, had done the sport, the arts and the news skimpily in that order.
‘Maybe the fish is articled to the Church,’ Laidlaw said. Harkness looked at him.
‘Nine letters.’
‘Thought you’d been putting bennies in your coffee.’
Alma Brown came in. They had only seen her before in the context of Veitch’s house in Pollokshields, where she had learned to fit. Here she looked slightly vulnerable, a woman who must have been in her late thirties and still looked almost gawky with her own sexuality. She was flushed with haste or nervousness and when she opened her coat as she sat down the front of her black wool dress was distractingly busy. Harkness caught Laidlaw glancing at him and remembered Laidlaw saying once, ‘How many times is that you’ve fallen in love today? It’s been a quiet one.’ Harkness ordered more coffees.
While they waited for the coffee to come, she went through a protective routine of checking her handbag for cigarettes and gold lighter, putting them on the table, laying the bag on the floor beside her chair, placing her silk scarf over the back of the chair. Harkness and Laidlaw declined one of her cigarettes, which were menthol. Like inhaling cottonwool, Laidlaw felt. He took one of his own.
‘Well,’ she said to Laidlaw when she was ready. ‘What is this about?’
‘D’you know Eck Adamson?’ Harkness asked.
Something very small happened, no more than a stutter in her coffee-spoon, and a little coffee shipped into the saucer.
‘Eck? What’s that short for?’
‘Alec. Alexander.’
‘Alec Adamson. No. Who is he?’
‘Was,’ Laidlaw said. ‘He’s dead.’
She made to lift the cup and didn’t bother. It was very full and her hand didn’t seem too steady. Laidlaw drank from his.
‘What’s the Eck short for?’ he said. ‘Some case this. It’s more full of liars than the House of Commons. Maybe we’ll find out the truth about Tony Veitch in time to put it on the headstone. Drink your coffee, Miss Brown. It’s all you came to do.’
The atmosphere at their table belied the place. Harkness was having a familiar feeling. Why was it that sometimes just making contact with Laidlaw was like trying to shake hands with a hedgehog? It was happening again. Laidlaw seemed bent on pursuing his career as a kind of interior desecrator, going about Glasgow laying quite pleasant rooms with wall-to-wall tension. He was doing a good job this time. She stared at her coffee for a while before looking at Laidlaw.
‘I think you’d better explain that remark.’
‘Certainly. You were in the room when I mentioned Eck yesterday at Pollokshields. And he still comes as a surprise to you. I’m not saying he’s the most memorable name in the world, but under the circumstances I would have thought you would remember. Eck Adamson knew you but you didn’t know him. How does that come about? Was he watching you through binoculars? You know nothing about Tony since he disappeared but Eck was an intermediary between Tony and you. Miss Brown, you talk such convoluted crap you must have a tongue like a corkscrew.’
After tapping her cigarette ineffectually against the base of the ashtray, she dropped it in, still smoking. The small bit of stage business seemed to give her the time she needed.
‘Uh-huh,’ she said. ‘You can have my coffee as well. It costs too much for me.’
‘Maybe we’ll meet at the funeral,’ Laidlaw said, putting out her cigarette for her.
She had taken the scarf from the back of her chair but she didn’t stand up.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Nothing, I hope. But somebody’s looking for Tony. Judging by the way he’s going about getting the information, it’s not to give him a provident cheque. Tony’s been mixing with a lot of rough people. The kind who could kill a man on the way to the cinema. And still enjoy the picture.’
Harkness could see her eyes trying to back off from the implications of what Laidlaw was saying.
‘Why?’
‘Maybe he did something they didn’t like.’
‘But what?’
‘Or maybe he’s got something they want. Like money. Tony does have a lot of money. Doesn’t he, Miss Brown?’
She stared at him, nodding.
‘Money can get you anything. If you’re careless enough with it, it’ll get you dead.’
Harkness thought she was going to cry. Her eyelids flickered as if she had a mote. She let the scarf fall into her lap and seemed to be looking for something. He reached down and gave her the handbag. But after she had ferreted there it wasn’t a handkerchief she came out with. It was a grubby piece of paper which she handed to Laidlaw. Opening the two folded sheets out, he skimmed them quickly.
‘Milton threw it out,’ she said. ‘But I salvaged it. It feels like a part of Tony to me.’
Laidlaw passed it to Harkness and, while he read it, she was talking a gloss.
‘That’s what Tony’s been through. Only he understates it. .’