Beached on their mutual exhaustion, they saw their clothes like part of the shipwreck. Her pants were beside the fire. Her skirt hung strange from a chair. Her blouse was crumpled surprisingly small. His trousers and underpants were the one truncated garment, like lined shorts. Her brassiere lay far away in an odd place. They both realised he was still wearing his shirt. The fire was mottling their legs.
He gave them both cigarettes and they smoked, adjusting the heat by moving away from it. They were as natural as cats. His arm around her felt as if she had been born with it there. When he threw the stub of his cigarette in the fire, she knew what would happen. She felt his arm go limp. He was asleep. She put her own stub away, gave him some minutes.
‘Jack,’ she said. ‘Jack darling.’
He didn’t move.
‘Jack.’ Her voice was touching him as softly as her hands had. ‘Let’s go to bed.’
His eyes opened like a doll’s. He stared at the ceiling.
‘Jan! You all right, darlin’? What’s the problem?’
‘No problem. I think we should go to bed.’
He sat up slowly.
‘I think we should.’
He stood up not too steadily. His shirt was like farce, a pretence of concealment that hid nothing. She lay back on the floor and laughed, being honestly naked.
‘Oh aye,’ he said sleepily. ‘Nice to furnish amusement.’
He put the meshed fireguard in front of the fire. He stood vaguely doing nothing, threatening to fall asleep on his feet. Then he took Tony Veitch’s message she had been reading, folded it lengthwise and put it in the inside pocket of his jacket that was over a chair. He was handcuffing himself to tomorrow, even though he was drunk.
‘It’s bed then, lovely,’ he said.
She lay looking at him. The fierceness of her love for him was more than he could find ways to avoid, she knew. He was going to settle for her, she decided. She understood his grief for the failure of his family. She would give him time to get over it. She stood up, knowing how right she looked naked.
‘Right, Jack Laidlaw. We’re going to bed.’
He nodded long enough to suggest senility.
‘And all your worries can wait till tomorrow.’
‘Aye, right enough,’ he said as he put out the light. ‘They’ll be there all right. They get delivered with the milk.’
30
Harkness passed the photocopied sheet across to Bob Lilley. Bob shook his head and retired behind his whisky like a drawbridge.
‘No thanks,’ he said. ‘Not interested. I don’t even understand that stuff. The bit I’ve looked at reads like a cerebral haemorrhage. So the boy’s head burst. I don’t have to poke among the pieces. I get enough of that.’
They were downstairs in the Top Spot. They were a wake of three but seemed unable to agree on the identity of the corpse. Bob was utterly and finally in dismay with Laidlaw, wondered if he was contemplating a dead friendship. Harkness wasn’t sure how much of his respect for Laidlaw could survive this. Laidlaw seemed to be mourning the still-birth of some understanding he had almost achieved.
Even their appearances suggested different events. Bob and Harkness were spruce. Bob looked healthy and dependable in his checked shirt, neat tie and hacking jacket. Harkness wouldn’t have been out of place at a disco. Laidlaw looked hellish, his face raw with sleeplessness, his eyes strained, as if he’d spent the night trying to decipher Tony Veitch’s garbled message.
Bob fingered his glass and looked pointedly away from their table, seemed trying to associate himself with the normalcy of the others in the bright room. He whistled infinitesimally under his breath. What hurt him most was what he suspected was the motivation for Laidlaw’s dissatisfaction. He wished Jack would leave it alone. He dreaded having to discover that Jack had come down with that mean jealousy of colleagues that was familiar to him in some other policemen, something Bob had always been sure he was immune to.
‘You should read that more carefully, Bob,’ Laidlaw said.
With reluctance Bob abandoned his fascinating study of the wall on his left-hand side.
‘Why, Jack? Why should I do that?’ He pointed at the sheet lying on the table. ‘That’s just a production. Like a bloodstained knife. Or a button off a jacket. Not even an interesting production. We don’t even need it, because the case is as tight as an earwig’s arse. That. Is just a piece of addled brains, Jack. That stuff offends me, that’s all it does. Nothing else. I’m not interested in his wanky theories about why he did it — just that he did it, the bastard. And I’m just grateful that he didn’t get round to people who were slightly less expendable than those two. No offence to auld Eck but he’d had his whack. And made an arse of it. He was just finishing his apprenticeship drinking paraquat, wasn’t he? And Paddy Collins was just pollution. They should’ve given Veitch a civic reception for that one.’ He lifted the sheet and let it fall back on the table. ‘But don’t ask me to take an interest in that shite. Look. If I find somebody disembowelled, I don’t have to take the entrails home in a bag to study them. That’s not my job. And it’s not yours either.’
‘That’s not the writing of a murderer.’
‘Jesus Christ.’ Bob looked at Harkness and smiled, as if humour were aloes. ‘How the hell would you know that?’
‘Because I can read.’
‘Can you? Very good. Me, I’m still attacking the Beano with one finger. Come on. I may not be as clever as you, Jack. And I’m certainly not as clever as you think you are. Who is? But I’ve glanced at that bit of paper. He was as daft as a brush. And you know it. He could’ve done anything.’
‘No. I don’t think so. If he was daft, he was daft in the one direction. John-the-Baptist-daft. A wee one-man religion. A do-it-yourself martyr. Poor bastard.’
Bob finished his whisky slowly. The glance he gave Harkness was a small act of collusion, a signal that he was going to say what was in both of their heads.
‘Jack. I think everybody but you realises there’s something funny happening here.’
Laidlaw looked up at him slowly and assessingly.
‘Nothing you’ve said justifies your refusal to see this case as closed.’
‘So what does that mean?’
‘It means there has to be another reason.’
Laidlaw looked at Harkness, who happened to be studying the table at the time.
‘And you’re decorating it with a lot of fancy rationalisations.’
‘What reason would that be, Bob?’
Their eyes were a steady confrontation.
‘I’m not sure. But I’ll tell you what I think it is. I know you don’t get on too well with Big Ernie. But he’s a good polisman. And he did the job. Before you. And I think you better just accept that, Jack. Put your wee hurt pride away. It’s getting in the road of your brains.’
‘Bob. Come on.’ Laidlaw looked again at Harkness. ‘Brian?’
Harkness shook his head at him.
‘Jack. The case looks clean to me.’
‘I think you should watch the area you’re moving into, Jack,’ Bob said. ‘This job would make a saint go sour. And you were never that to begin with. But I’ve always thought you were at least generous.’
‘What makes you think I’m not?’
‘The way you are just now. Your head’s trying to see round corners. Just to steal the scone off Ernie’s plate. What’s that about? And another thing. I know you’ve just been reprimanded by the Commander. Again. And I know why. And you deserved it. You knew about Tony Veitch before Ernie did. You knew about the possible connection and you didn’t pass it on. That’s a liberty, Jack. That’s what that is.’