Laidlaw nodded. The first thing that struck him was that this was the cleanest context in which he had ever seen Eck. They made you nice for dying. Only the several days’ growth hinted at the kind of life Eck had come from; that and the eyes. Always jumpy, they had now gone completely over the top, darting crazily, as if Eck knew finally that the world was out to mug him. The doctor and nurses were waiting to relieve him of himself.
‘Eck,’ Laidlaw said. ‘It’s Jack Laidlaw.’
As he repeated it, Eck’s eyes passed him several times but kept coming back until they hovered on him, still mobile, but at least moving within the orbit of Laidlaw’s presence. They didn’t settle on his face but seemed to take in different parts of him, as if Eck was piecing Laidlaw together like a jigsaw. Eck was trying to speak.
‘Right,’ Laidlaw heard.
‘Right,’ he replied.
‘Right.’
‘Right.’
Eck’s head jerked in distress.
‘Write it doon,’ Laidlaw thought he was saying.
Laidlaw found an envelope in his pocket and took out a pen.
‘What happened to you, Eck?’
But he might as well have tried to talk to a teleprinter. Eck was receiving no messages. On the last of himself he was sending out information. His pain was obvious. The way he dragged the words out past it suggested they were very important to him. Listening, Laidlaw wondered why.
Eck was incoherent. He spoke like someone after a stroke, afflicted with that slow-motion glottal drunkenness that compounds the grief of physical trauma by rendering its expression of itself idiot. Out of the distorted mouthings, like a record played too slow, Laidlaw thought he could decipher one repeated statement. He wrote, more out of respect for the disintegrating identity he had known than because of any significance he saw in the words, ‘The wine he gave me wisny wine.’
He could catch nothing else. It was like eavesdropping on a riot. Eck’s desperate distress intensified and the doctor stepped forward.
‘The gentleman can wait in my room,’ he said.
A nurse led Laidlaw to the end of the ward and showed him into a small place partitioned off from the rest. There was just enough room to lie down in. Laidlaw sat on the single bed.
He looked at the back of his envelope, the last will and testament of Eck Adamson. He remembered reading about a cleaner who had worked in a lawyer’s office. On her deathbed she had regurgitated swathes of legal Latin. Eck was getting close.
It was maybe fitting that what looked like being Eck’s last piece of information should come across like Linear B. As a tout, he had never been too useful. But Laidlaw had always liked him and once, in the Bryson case, he had helped Laidlaw more than he could know.
Things had gone quiet beyond the partition and the doctor appeared. He shook his head.
‘I am sorry,’ he said with that formal timing a foreign language can give.
Laidlaw put the envelope in his pocket.
‘He was your friend?’
Laidlaw thought about it.
‘Maybe I was about as close as he got. What did he die of?’
‘I can’t tell at the moment. Who is he?’
‘Alexander Adamson. He was a vagrant. In the winter he slept in doss-houses. Summer, wherever he could. I don’t know of any relatives. What an epitaph.’
Laidlaw remembered one night finding Eck sleeping across a pavement grille outside Central Station. He was using the heat that came up from the kitchen of the Central Hotel. These were the obsequies to that bleak life, a few sentences between strangers.
‘It wasn’t bad for him at the end,’ the doctor said. ‘He died quietly.’
Laidlaw nodded. Like a leaf.
‘I want a fiscal post mortem.’
‘Of course. It is procedure.’
‘Today? I would like it today.’
‘We shall have to see.’
‘Yes. We will.’
On his way out to the car, Laidlaw looked in at casualty again. The boy with the bloodstained jacket was gone. A nurse showed him Eck’s things in a brown envelope: an empty tin with traces of shag, a stopped watch, seven single pounds and a grubby piece of paper. Unfolding the paper, Laidlaw read a handwritten statement in biro.
The Puritan Fallacy is that there can be virtue by default. You do the right thing because you don’t know any worse. That is society’s Woolworth substitute for morality. True morality begins in choice: the greater the choice, the greater the morality. Only those can be truly good who have prospected their capacity for evil. Idealism is the censorship of reality.
Ranged neatly beneath that statement were an address in Pollokshields, the names Lynsey Farren and Paddy Collins, the words ‘The Crib’ and the number 9464946 in black biro.
Laidlaw’s first responses were practical. He noted that the handwriting was the same throughout and then that the written paragraph was in blue ink. It suggested to him that the bit of hand-woven philosophy had just happened to be on the piece of paper when the same person had added the other information. For the use of Eck?
Certainly the first part had surely not been meant for Eck. Beyond perhaps an instinctively Pascalian response to the two-thirty, Eck had never evinced any interest in philosophy. But neither did the addresses seem to fit. Pollokshields, where the money grows, was hardly Eck’s territory. The number was meaningless to Laidlaw. Only ‘The Crib’ made any kind of sense.
Then, like humanity supplanting professionalism, a slight chill came over Laidlaw as he held the piece of paper. Trying to locate where the feeling came from, he read over the paragraph again. Perhaps it was just that he sensed a dangerously distorted version of that Calvinist self-righteousness that forms like an icicle in the hearts of a lot of Scots. He wondered who had given Eck this strange message.
Looking up, he had his gloom partly dissipated by the pleasant round face of the nurse, who was preoccupied in doing practical things. She reminded him he’d better do the same.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I need this. You want me to sign for it?’
5
Licensing laws can be fun. Without them, the arcane joy of after hours’ drinking would never have been known — that sense of membership of a very temporary club. There is a Yukon cabin romanticism to it, while real time slobbers like a toothless wolf at the locked door.
It was that kind of atmosphere in the Crib, a strangely named pub not really suitable for children, where on a good night Behemoth would have been no better than even money.
It was half-past midnight. Outside, the streets of the Saracen, a tough district north of the city centre, were quiet. Inside, five people had formed an impromptu pentagram and summoned forth an instant celebration of themselves.
One of them was the regular barman, Charlie, who had moved here from a pub in the Calton. He was in his fifties and wise beyond his years. Although he had spent most of his life among violent men, his bulky body’s hardest fights had been with beer barrels.
The secret of his unmarked face’s longevity was a delicate sense of hierarchy. Like a Glasgow Debrett, he knew the precise mode of address for any situation. There was the further safeguard of working for a man whose name could be worn like a livery made of armour. Being associated with John Rhodes of the Calton was a bit like having Securicor as a taxi-service.
It was an advantage Charlie never abused. Even now, in the security of the locked pub, he measured his participation carefully, knowing how enjoyment leaves you open. He had drunk a couple of moderate whiskies and joined quietly in the chorus of one of the songs.
It wasn’t that he knew his place so much as he knew where it wasn’t, which was hospital. This was Dave McMaster’s event. Charlie was content to listen to yet another of Dave’s stories.
‘So they’re along at the Barras, right? One of them’s dressed up as Santa Claus. A hundred-weight of cotton wool an’ Army surplus wellies. The ither yin’s got the toays, things like dinky cars an’ half-chewed bubblegum. Santa lures them in an’ his hander takes the money. All day they’re at it, an’ all the time they’re nippin’ intae the pub tae get mair central heating. Well. By about shuttin’ time they’re in again. Divvyin’ up. Only the helper’s doin’ a two-tae-me, wan-tae-you job on Santa. Santa gets slightly annoyed. Wallop! Can ye imagine it? A present from S. Claus. Then he’s tattooing his ribs wi’ the wellies. Swearin’ enough to set his beard on fire. Funniest bit wis when the bouncer threw him out. Santa’s lyin’ on the pavement an’ the bouncer’s shouting, “Ye’re barred, Santa! Ye’re barred.” The barring of Santa Claus.’