She looked at Laidlaw, relieved that he had got there without the pain of having to tell him.
‘I did not know this. When I do, I am too afraid to get out.’
‘So who’s the husband?’
‘Mickey Ballater.’
‘You picked a beauty.’
‘I did not pick.’
‘No, I know, love. So that’s the story. That’s why Ballater’s been looking for Tony Veitch?’
She nodded.
‘Maybe he found him. Trickey Mickey. I wonder. Paddy Collins was demanding money from Tony Veitch? And Ballater was the way of getting it out of him?’
‘But Tony disappears. I felt glad. Tony was nice.’
‘Do you know if Mickey Ballater found where Tony was?’
‘He tells me nothin’.’
‘Did he ever mention Eck Adamson to you?’
‘No.’
‘When was it Ballater came here?’
She thought about it.
‘Friday.’
‘Did you get the impression he had only just arrived in Glasgow?’
‘He comes at night. Next day he says he will get his things from left luggage. He brings this.’
She nodded towards the travelling-bag.
‘He’s due back for it, is he?’
Her renewed fear was sufficient answer.
‘Is he carrying?’
She didn’t understand.
‘Does he have a weapon on him?’
‘He has a knife.’ She crossed her arms, trying to remember on which side he wore it. Her left arm gave up first. ‘On the left, I think.’
‘Think hard. I would like to keep on breathing.’
‘It is the left. I think.’
‘Thank you. If it’s the right, my favourite flowers are gladioli. If he’s threatened you with it, you should remember. No?’
‘Does he need to?’
She pulled up the sleeves of her blouse. Both arms had bruises that obviously dated from different times but were almost in the same place. He wasn’t even an inventive sadist. Having begun, she warmed to her rancour. She pulled her blouse up from the waist. There were three of what looked like cigarette-burns on her belly like small, not quite extinct volcanoes. Laidlaw added them to the debit column of his anger.
‘I’m sorry to be so personal, Gina. But he must have made his strange kind of love to you.’ He waited but she just stared at him. ‘So he must have touched you there.’ He pointed between her legs. ‘Which hand did he use?’
He noticed how she put him down in her estimation, as if he were some kind of voyeur. Prudishness grows in strange places.
‘His right hand,’ she said.
‘So he carries on the left. You have a phone?’
‘In the bedroom.’
Laidlaw wrote something on an envelope he took from his pocket, passed it to her. It was a telephone number.
‘When you let him in, you go into the bedroom. You phone that number. Ask them to send a couple of men right away.’
‘And you?’
‘I’ll be trying to keep him here.’
‘But if he kills you? What do I do?’
‘Well, I’ll probably have lost interest by then. I think you might say you’ll be on your own. You could maybe jump out a window or that.’
‘I have a child sleeping.’
‘Should be all right. Even Mickey Ballater’s shiteyness must have limits. Have it away on your toes with the wean. Anyway, Gina, I didn’t volunteer for God. I’m just trying to work it out as I go along. Maybe-’
The outside door had opened. Of course, Laidlaw thought, he’s got a key. As he moved behind the door of the sitting-room he was mentally thanking Gina for keeping him posted. How could she be so stupid as to let him talk about letting Ballater in without mentioning that she wouldn’t have to? His stomach went delicately molten. His hands had a familiar divining-rod tremor to them — there’s violence here, but where exactly? He shook his head distantly at her pleading expression. He had given what he could give. It was Laidlaws in the boats first. Otherwise nobody would be saved. The outside door had closed and the feet were coming along the hall. Laidlaw made a double-handed, crossed-arm wiping gesture — you’re on your own. In a moment of terrified inspiration, Gina lifted the paper from the white-tiled table beside her chair and pretended to be looking at it. As the door opened, Laidlaw realised she was holding the paper upside-down. It seemed a stupendous error at the time.
But Ballater walked into a room he had pre-decided.
‘Uh-huh,’ he said. ‘Ah’m for the off. Everything ready?’
But caution came in after him like a double-take. He stopped unnaturally, not because he had a specific reason for doing so but because he didn’t know what was wrong. Laidlaw reckoned it was the cup beside the other chair. He didn’t give himself time to refine the thought. He took two strides across the room and battered Ballater in the back, knocking his face against the wall.
‘Get out, Gina,’ Laidlaw shouted.
Ballater had fallen against the wall and Laidlaw grappled him, trying to reach his left inside pocket. There was a moment of quiescence in Ballater when Laidlaw thought he had done it. Through cloth he felt something hard then he felt something harder. It was Ballater’s elbow in his stomach. Laidlaw retched breath and as he subsided Ballater erupted with an elbow in his face. Laidlaw staggered several paces back against the door, slamming it shut.
Fear gave him panoramic vision. He saw that Gina had got out. He saw that the room was a lot smaller than it should be. He saw a bird scudding past the window. He saw a slim white chair against the wall beside him as more than something to sit on. He saw the knife in Ballater’s hand, looking as long as Excalibur. He saw the birth-mark as a core of rage that shouldn’t have been his problem.
A few swift thoughts went past like the carriages of a train he was too late to catch. This was a crazy job. He hoped the G.P.O. was on form. He had done it wrong again. He had over-rehearsed. If he hadn’t been so determined to get the knife he could have knocked Ballater out. Come on, come on. Perhaps they could talk about this.
‘Wait, Mickey. Wait a minute! You know who I am?’
His own voice sounded crazy to him, wild and irrelevant, like somebody insisting on introductions before he was murdered.
‘You’re the wan that’s gonny get it.’
‘I’m polis, Mickey.’ Beyond his own control, his card was thrown on the floor. ‘You’re tryin’ to kill polis.’
The card lay between them in a way that neither understood, seemed to build an invisible fence. While Mickey paused fractionally, as if going back inside himself far enough to make the jump, Laidlaw took the chair in one fluid nervous movement as compulsive as orgasm and fired it at Mickey. Its trajectory, as it happened, was almost enough to make him believe in God, but once completed wasn’t quite. One leg of the chair caught Mickey glancingly above the right eye. He went down. The knife went to the wall like an intention. Laidlaw scrabbled across and picked it up.
While Laidlaw stood gasping, holding the knife, Mickey sat gasping, without the knife. Both of them were bewildered.
‘What’s this about?’ Mickey said.
‘That’s what I’d like to know,’ Laidlaw said.
He noticed blood seeping through the left-hand side of Mickey Ballater’s shirt. The blood puzzled Laidlaw because it wasn’t the result of their scuffle.
33
Sometimes you believe them, sometimes you don’t. Laidlaw had believed him for the moment. He had only found out where Veitch was when it was too late. Anyway, all he had wanted was the money. The rest would have been up to Cam Colvin. And Ballater was a knife man, subtle as a road accident. Why would he arrange to make it look like suicide? You might as well expect a gorilla to take up origami. Tricky Mickey, Mickey, maybe, but broad tricks, painful slapstick, not the theatrical cunning Laidlaw thought he saw behind the corpse of Tony Veitch trussed in electricity.
That body haunted him, seemed to mock Laidlaw’s private law of gravity, whereby hard truths must be seriously pursued till they surrendered their full meaning. So the fact that Ballater was being held for possession of an offensive weapon and that Gina was safe for the moment to indulge again the normal pains life brought her gave Laidlaw no respite from the feeling in him. That past moment was already like a booster rocket, falling into irrelevance. It had only served to kick him further into the manic orbit he was following, fuelled on his compulsion to find what everybody else said wasn’t there.