She was crying quietly.
‘So tell me now. Who gave you the bad time that night here?’
‘It-’ Her words were drowning in phlegm. ‘Paddy Collins.’
Laidlaw nodded, having established that she wanted to tell the truth.
‘You’d been with him before Dave McMaster. Was that why he got vicious? Because you had gone with Dave?’
She shook her head.
‘It wasn’t that.’
Laidlaw waited. It hurt him to look at her but it would have hurt him more to leave her alone. The way he felt, that other hurt could be terminal.
‘I had told him about Tony’s money. When Paddy and I were still together. That night he thought I knew where Tony was. He said. He said. If he couldn’t get me, he could at least cut his losses. He could make money from it. He wanted to know where Tony was. He was trying to make me tell him. But I didn’t know. I didn’t know. I’m glad I didn’t. He hurt me so badly I think I would have told him. But I didn’t know.’
‘Who knew about what Paddy did to you?’
‘Dave and Tony knew. That’s why Tony killed Paddy Collins. I know that’s why he killed him. Tony had always said, since we were small, he wouldn’t let anybody harm me. Tony could be wild. You’ve never seen anybody as wild as Tony could be.’
‘Maybe I have. Just possibly.’
‘No. You didn’t know him. No, you see. When you came the last time with the other man. I tried to protect Tony. I told you nothing because I didn’t want him hurt. I knew he had done it for me. He still loved me, you know. How could I do anything but protect him when he did it to protect me? He loved like an angel. That was his problem. I think I lost his letter because I was ashamed to keep it. He loved you so much you felt guilty at how much less your own love was. If you’d met him you’d know what I mean. Even when I realised he’d killed that sad old man, I could never have helped to turn him in. I don’t know why he did that. Maybe because the old man knew about Paddy Collins. He must have been desperate by that time. I found out from Alma where he was. And we tried to help him. But we were too late. I wish we could have been sooner. I wish we could have been sooner.’
Laidlaw was staring past her at the unconscious support she was giving to his own suspicions.
‘Who’s we?’
‘Dave and I.’
‘What did you do to help?’
‘We told Macey. So that he could tell the police.’
‘Why didn’t you tell the police yourselves?’
She hesitated. He found her discretion pathetically touching, as if she thought Laidlaw didn’t know.
‘Well, some of the people who know Dave wouldn’t have liked it.’
Laidlaw knew for sure now. It only remained to confirm it.
‘If only we’d been sooner,’ she said.
She sat staring into lost possibilities. Laidlaw wondered if there were people who would never get it right, regretting the wrong things, bestowing their compassion like a lead weight thrown to a drowning man. He stood up and crossed to the bedroom door. He knocked and pushed the door open. Mr Veitch was there before the door had opened half-way.
‘I think you should take her home now,’ Laidlaw said.
‘My God, thank you very much. You’re sure we have your permission?’
Laidlaw looked at him. Mr Veitch was sneering, his main concern to reinstate himself. The end of his nose was limbo. If he travelled beyond it he’d fall off the edge of the world. Laidlaw thought, not for the first time, that there must be those who, if a dying man told them the secret of all life and swore at them at the same time, would only remember that he swore.
‘You’re a deeply compassionate man,’ Laidlaw said.
‘Don’t you know that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit?’
‘I don’t know,’ Laidlaw said. ‘I think maybe clichés are.’
He crossed towards the door. On the way he touched Lynsey Farren gently on the head.
‘Good luck with you,’ he said.
He let himself out, thinking that there was more pain ahead for her.
34
The Crib was closed. That was a strange fact, about as likely as the sun not turning up. Two men were standing staring at the shut door. One of them looked round bemusedly, then up at the sky, as if checking he had the right universe. As Laidlaw approached, they had started to move off. One of them was saying, ‘Mebbe they’ve drapped the bomb an’ we haveny noticed.’ Laidlaw let them go round the corner. He thumped on the door. Nothing happened. He did it again.
The door opened slightly, still on its chain. It was Charlie the barman, who used to work in the Gay Laddie. He knew who Laidlaw was.
‘Yes?’
His face was as welcoming as a turned back.
‘Charlie. I’m looking for somebody.’
‘Yes?’
‘Is there anybody in?’
They could both hear the voices from where they were. ‘Well.’ Charlie was trying lines inside his head. ‘There’s a wee staff-meeting on.’
Laidlaw wondered what was on the agenda: whose turn it was next week to pick up the bodies?
‘That’s why we’re not open yet. Who is it you’re lookin’ for?’
Laidlaw smiled, gave Charlie a look that told him not to be naughty.
‘I just can’t remember his name, Charlie. But I’d know him if I saw him. Any chance I get in?’
Charlie’s eyes stared over Laidlaw’s head. He looked distant, as if receiving telepathic messages.
‘Ye want tae wait a minute?’
‘Fair enough.’
Charlie disappeared behind the door to close it. Laidlaw’s hand rested casually in the gap of the open door. Charlie’s face reappeared, wondering.
‘Leave a fella a chink of hope, Charlie.’
Charlie went away. Hearing his feet move out of the corridor, Laidlaw kicked the door in, pulling the chain from the jamb. He stepped inside as Charlie’s head volleyed out to look at him. Laidlaw held his hand up.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I fell against the door. And your wee chain broke. Now that I’m in. .’
He closed the door and followed Charlie into the bar. Entering, Laidlaw found himself thinking suddenly that maybe Bob Lilley was right. Maybe he was losing his grip. This was no way to do it. Detective-work was a delicate symbiosis with the criminal world, a balancing of subtle mutual respects. You hoped to give small to get back big. It was a matter of not breaking a fragile web you were both part of, a repeated laying of the senses to different strands of that web to catch what was going, not the axeman cometh.
The craziness of what he was up to ambushed Laidlaw there in the middle of the floor. He felt himself ahead of his own sense of what he was doing; not a place for a policeman to put himself. But he was there already. He couldn’t just walk back out. Instead, he rifled the room swiftly, like an expert housebreaker, taking only what he could use.
The room was John Rhodes and Cam Colvin. There were others but those two were what this meeting meant. It had to be very serious business. That’s why the pub was shut. That was in his favour. He knew what they hadn’t wanted anybody to know. His crassness in breaking in had won him a prize that maybe outpriced their anger. He had perhaps done irreparable damage to his contacts in the long run but, the way he felt about everything, who needed the long run? People were waiting. He addressed himself to John Rhodes because the pub was his responsibility.
‘I was saying to Charlie there-’
‘Ah heard,’ John Rhodes said.
Cam Colvin looked at the doorway, looked at Charlie. Charlie shook his head. Cam relaxed.
‘You’re getting clumsy, Jack,’ he said.
‘Aye,’ Laidlaw said. ‘I’m getting pills for it.’
‘Ye want tae change yer doctor,’ John Rhodes said. ‘They don’t seem tae be workin’. Polismen breakin’ an’ enterin’? Dangerous stuff.’
‘I fell. Did none of you see me? By the way, don’t frighten me, John. I hate to cry in public.’
Laidlaw looked round them innocently. His expression was a parade behind which his mind was crouching, dreading its passing. But a face came into his vision that altered his feeling. Seeing Hook Hawkins, pale as unbaked bread and clearly wounded, whom he remembered from the Bryson case, Laidlaw remembered he was Gus Hawkins’ brother. They could have come out of the same placenta. The connection reignited Laidlaw’s compulsion to a flame that charred his misgivings about being here. He was going to the bone of this one. This case had come too quick to a corpse. Too many possibilities had been made mute, too many interconnections were unexplained.