Strange Loyalties (22 page)

I had a glimpse of the little deals she must have worked out between the pressure she was under and the demands made on her by her former standards. It would be all right to have a drink late morning if her sons didn't see her.

‘I don't usually do this,' she said. ‘Just sometimes.'

No doubt the way my presence reopened hurts in her had helped to make this one of the sometimes. She sipped her drink. I thought she had forgotten what I said. But she hadn't.

‘I sometimes think nobody else notices what is happening,'
she said. ‘You ever get that feeling? It's like the rest of the world is mad. It carries on regardless. Did I tell the police? What planet did you come from? They did a lot for Dan, didn't they? Anyway, enough people in Thornbank told the police. This village knew what had happened. And this village loved Dan Scoular. I sometimes think they loved him to death. They encouraged him to try and stand for more than one person can stand for. And he died of it. I don't blame them. They've done their best. And they'll forget. I won't forget.'

The fixedness of her eyes was hypnotic.

‘You want to know what I did? The more nothing happened, the stiller I became. I became very, very still. Because I understood something. If they could do that to my man, they could do it to my sons.' She put her finger to her lips. ‘Sh. Don't move. They've been telling you lies. How safe it is out there. It isn't safe. Bad animals out there. And nobody can control them. They move when they choose. And they do what they want. That's true.'

She nodded at me confidentially. Some might have thought she was the one who seemed mad. But she wasn't mad, just too sane to play along with the rest of us. She had wakened from her sleep-walk to recognise the minefield we call normality. She had found a way to admit to herself the prolonged terror of living. Some people never do.

‘So I've been here. In this house. And I do the necessary things. I look after my sons. I make the meals. I wash the clothes. But it's like keeping house on the edge of that cliff Dan went over. That phone-call. That was Gordon. I knew him before Dan died. He's been wanting to know if he can help. I don't know if anybody can help. I know I have to go on living.
But I haven't worked out how to do it yet. It's as if something more has to happen. Or it'll be like leaving Dan unburied.'

‘I'm sorry,' I said.

‘I don't want another mourner,' she said. ‘I think I want a champion. Someone who'll get justice for Dan Scoular.'

‘Well, I don't know that I qualify. But I can try.'

She almost smiled.

‘That would be something,' she said.

She took another mouthful of her drink. She was alone. I had become just a looker-on.

‘Is there somewhere in Thornbank I can get a meal?' I said. ‘Even champions have to eat.'

‘I'm sorry. Not here. Another time it would have been. But not these days. The Red Lion. They do pub lunches. That's where Dan did his training.'

‘Okay,' I said.

I stood up.

‘This,' she said. She held up her glass. ‘It's all right. This isn't permanent. It's just that I know I have to face what's happened. I can't hide from it. And this sometimes helps. But it's only for the time being.'

I believed her. I know I face my own despairs by letting them take place. I don't deny them with displays of determined nonchalance. They're too real for that. Deny grief and it becomes a sapper, shallowing your nature. You have to go through sadness as you would go through the Roaring Forties. You batten down and let the bad winds blow. They will bring you to yourself.

‘I believe you,' I said.

I left her waiting for the weather to clear.

I
had lunch in the Red Lion. Before eating, I stood at the bar with a tomato juice. I was becoming a connoisseur of soft drinks. The place was fairly dilapidated. There were maybe half-a-dozen people in. The talk seemed to be of imminent closure. The barman, whose name was Alan, had a face like a Christmas tree, every vein a fairy-light. He had decided he would have to sell out to the brewers. He couldn't understand where all the takings he used to have had gone. I thought he might look in the mirror for a clue. He was drinking doubles. But then again maybe I was just jealous.

He was talking to a man called Wullie Mairshall. I knew because at one point the man said, ‘This isny Simple Simon talkin'. This is Wullie Mairshall.' The barman said, ‘Thanks for pointin' that out. Ah wis gettin' confused there.'

The talk of closure became talk of the mess Thornbank was in, became talk of Dan Scoular. His name was mentioned with a reverence I couldn't imagine any living person managing to justify. But sainthood is always posthumous. The still breathing Frankie White appeared to be in no danger of canonisation. An outbuilding Dan Scoular had used as a gym was still being preserved as he had left it, it seemed. The barman was adamant
that it would stand as a monument to ‘the big man' as long as he was still owner.

I had ordered beef olives, potatoes and vegetables. When the food came, I sat at a table by a window, taking a glass of exotic soda and lime to wash it down. Wullie Mairshall deputised as a waiter. He brought me condiments and cutlery in a paper napkin, with the suave injunction, ‘Dig in, big yin.' When I did, I realised the food was very good. Whoever was responsible for the falling-off of trade in the Red Lion, it wasn't the cook.

I didn't eat alone. The meal, the menu apart, was my mental version of a Roman banquet. First you eat with them, then you give them the thumbs down. The companions of my mind were Dave Lyons and Matt Mason. They sat with me at table, whether they wanted to or not. I studied them. It was them or me, I had decided. Or rather it was them or what Betty Scoular and Mrs White and Scott stood for. I was just the champion of their cause, as Betty Scoular would have it, since nobody else had bothered to turn up. Let's make an arena. I would.

I had solved one half of a mystery. I would go the whole way, however I could. I had discovered the surrogate man in the green coat. His name was Dan Scoular. I would find the real one. Do not bet against me. But discovery is not merely knowledge, it is obligation. Matt Mason had killed Dan Scoular. All right, I didn't know that this was true. But I believed it.

If I had belief in the fact, without proof of the fact, what could I do? I couldn't plant the evidence that would establish the apparent proof, as some of my less scrupulous colleagues might have been prepared to do. That isn't what I do. It isn't
what I do because it leads to madness. To pretend that subjective conviction is objective truth, without testing it against the constant daily witness of experience, is to abdicate from living seriously. The mind becomes self-governing and the world is left to chaos. That way, you don't discover truth, you invent it. The invention of truth, no matter how desperately you wish it to be or how sincerely you believe in the benefits it will bring, is the denial of our nature, the first rule of which is the inevitability of doubt. We must doubt not only others but ourselves.

So I would doubt my own conviction for the moment. But I would find a way to test it. It is not enough to think the truth is there. It needs the breath of our acknowledgement to live. I had to find out how to give it the kiss of life.

The original commission I had given myself – to know what lay behind my brother's death – had clarified itself into a double purpose: to find the man in the green coat and to nail Dan Scoular's killer. It looked already as if circumstances had combined them and events were beginning to fit the shape of my compulsion. Maybe that's what compulsion does for you.

The name of Matt Mason kept coming up. He was suspected twice: of Dan Scoular, of Meece Rooney. He was a ubiquitous man. People as busy as that can sometimes get careless. Their sense of detail may blur. Also, if he had done these things, he was their deviser, not the person who physically carried them out. This meant that, with every action he was responsible for, there were witnesses beyond himself. If I could rifle their knowledge, unlock it with threat or fear, I could come at him. I wanted that.

I had two possible sources of access. One was the
information Brian Harkness and Bob Lilley might have. The case they were working on must have taken them into various areas of Matt Mason's life. The second source was Fast Frankie White. There had to be more that Frankie could tell me.

In trying to fulfil the other half of my self-determined task, I could think of only one way forward. It went through Dave Lyons. So that's the way I would go. Whatever the man in the green coat meant, I was convinced he knew. The man in the green coat was a message from Scott's life that I had to understand. Others had given me such fragments of its meaning as they could: Sanny Wilson, Ellie Mabon, David Ewart. But they were like people who have learned by chance some incidental phrases of a code. Put them together, they didn't make a meaning. But Dave Lyons knew the code entire. Anna understood it as well, I suspected. But if she did, she had learned it second-hand. She merely kept its secret in trust for someone else. Who? Scott was dead. It could only be Dave Lyons.

He was the one I had to get to. He had been present when a secret had begun to be kept. It was presumably a secret shared by four. ‘It was something that happened when he was a student,' Ellie Mabon had said. David Ewart had thought of the four of them being out that night in Glasgow while he was in Rutherglen. The next morning, he believed he had looked at the suicide of youth, the death of idealism. Of the four who might have been present at that death, one was dead himself. Another was just a name. Another wasn't even a name. That left Dave Lyons.

I didn't expect him to tell me all that he knew. He was too well prepared for me, too well fortified. There was no way I could prove that he must know about the man in the green
coat. But there was also no way for him to deny that he knew Sandy Blake and the anonymous English student. If I could find them, I might find people who were worse at lying than Dave Lyons was. It was unlikely that I would find anyone who was better at it.

Mental incantations over. It was time to see if I had found a way to conjure forth the truth. Let's begin.

I crossed to the battered pay-phone in the bar and looked up the phone book beside it.

‘Hullo,' Frankie said.

‘Hullo, Frankie. It's Jack Laidlaw.'

‘Yes. You saw the lady in question?'

Frankie was sounding more like the old Frankie, the man I had grown to know and distrust.

‘I did. I need to speak to you again.'

There was a pause during which I could imagine Frankie trying on different reactions.

‘Ah. That could be tricky.'

‘Why? You're still there, aren't you?'

‘Well, yes. But.' His voice went down to the basement, where things are kept that not everybody knows are there. ‘What it is. Ah've got a couple of cousins here. Tae see ma maw. Know what Ah mean?'

‘Frankie. I don't intend to burst in with a warrant. We won't be surrounding the house or anything like that.'

‘Still an' all. They might twig who ye are. Could be embarrassing. Ah'd rather they didn't meet ye. No offence.'

I was tempted to invite him to the Red Lion. But he had a point, I grudgingly admitted to myself.

‘Tell you what I'll do, Frankie. I'm in the Red Lion. I'll
drive down to your place in ten minutes. I'll wait outside. You come out or I'll come in. Okay?'

He was in a one-way street. It wasn't where he wanted to be but it was where he was.

‘Okay,' he said.

I
didn't have long to wait at Frankie's house. He was out before I could turn off the engine. As he came down the path, I could see he was himself again for the moment. He was wearing slacks and an expensive-looking suede jacket. The cravat was colourful. As he climbed into the car, his aftershave almost nipped my eyes. At least it wasn't Aramis.

‘Where to, man of discretion?' I said.

‘Anywhere. As long as it's outa here. Ah don't think we should do the motorcade through the village. If they see me, it won't be ticker-tape they're throwin'. Turn left down here.'

The tension suited him. It was his natural habitat. Indoors, he had seemed drained, uncertain of himself. Now he was alive with energy, glancing round all the time, tapping his hand on the top of the dashboard as he leaned forward. It was because, I think, Frankie needed a role. This one was the big-time crook revisiting his small-town background, where he was misunderstood and unappreciated.

‘Straight on,' he said. ‘Jesus. I hate coming back here. Not just the thing about Dan. It was always a pain. Like standin' in front of one of those mirrors at the shows that makes ye look wee. Head for the hills.'

It didn't take long for us to come out into the countryside.

‘Dan used to do his roadwork along here,' Frankie said. ‘Him runnin', me on the bike.'

Training for a fight seemed a bad purpose to which to put such gentle country. It was soft farmland, greening richly towards summer. When I die, I thought quite cheerfully, this is where they bring me, back to Ayrshire. And don't cremate me. Let me fertilise a place I love.

‘That's Farquhar's Farm,' Frankie said. ‘See that wee hill there? We used tae sit on the top of it for a rest. Big Dan did it the first day we were out on the roads. An' it became a habit with us. Every day for a fortnight. We'd sit there an' talk.'

On instinct, I drew in at the gate to the field. As the engine died, I worked out where the instinct came from. I was going to try and get Frankie to tell me what he wouldn't want to tell me. The place might help. If he had any ghost of loyalty to Dan Scoular, this could be where it haunted.

‘We'll get some air,' I said.

I climbed over the gate into the field and Frankie followed me, being careful about his slacks. I walked to the top of the hill and sat down. Frankie sat beside me after spreading a handkerchief on the grass. Thornbank was visible from here.