Strange Loyalties (24 page)

I looked at the faceless one again. The sense of Scott's guilt had occurred to me forcefully in the Red Lion earlier today. Now, staring at the painting afresh, the element of guilt seemed to me so obvious. I remembered what John Strachan had said the first time I saw the five at supper and was wondering what their strange conclave meant. ‘Maybe the four are feeding off the man in the middle.' Also if, as I had decided, it was a pastiche of ‘The Last Supper', what else could it mean but guilt? It was an echo of the primal treachery, betrayal of God. Scott had been an atheist. But that Christian symbol
could have a humanist reading. In his terms, it could mean treachery against people, the denial of kinship with others. Was it belief in the necessary shared humanity of all of us that had been sold for thirty pieces of silver? Who then was Judas? Or, given the same face on each plate, were they all Judas?

I was looking at a public confession of private conspiracy. Scott had wanted that there should hang, in the house of friends he believed in, an admission of guilt. Anyone could see the painting, though not anyone could understand it. What he couldn't find the means to declare directly in his life, whether through fear or coercion from others or the addiction of habit, he had acknowledged here in code.

I could read some of the code now. The bearded men were no longer so well disguised. The stem of the flower that bloomed to the head of a serpent was held in Scott's hands. His was the creativity that gave not sustenance but poison. The man with the ring was Sandy Blake, the healer who could dispense sickness as well as health. Did the double masks of tragedy and comedy belong to the unknown man? Had he become an actor? They had been watching television at Dave Lyons' party. Had he been what they were watching? Had the apple of knowledge been bitten by Dave Lyons? If so, maybe I could get him to share some of that knowledge with me.

I rose from the bed where I had been lying and straightened out the coverlet. I gathered the dirty clothes I had worn since Monday and put them in one of the plastic bags I always keep in my travelling-bag. I put what was for washing at the bottom of the travelling-bag. I emptied the pockets of my leather jacket and put it in next. I would be wearing the blazer. Maybe it would help Dave Lyons to believe that I wasn't fresh off the
farm. I put the rest of my things on top and zipped the bag half-way along. Why do clothes always expand between unpacking and repacking?

I lifted the paintings and carried them carefully down to where the car was parked in the forecourt of the Bushfield. I slid the paintings in beside the flowers and the whisky and the chocolates. I retrieved David Ewart's ashtray from the back seat and put it in the boot as well. I closed and locked the boot.

I collected my travelling-bag from upstairs and put it in the back seat of the car. I made sure the car was locked. When I went up to my room for the third time, I noticed the bottle of the Antiquary beside the bed. It was over half-way gone. But then so was the week it was designed to see me through. It had kept faith with me. Had the beautiful, dark woman?

I took the glass from the circular metal holder above the washhand-basin. I poured out a modest measure of whisky – purely for ceremonial purposes, you understand. I ran the water till the feeling on the back of my hand matched the word on the tap. I topped up the whisky with water almost to the brim. I set the glass on the bedside table, wiping its base first with a towel. I took the bottle down to the car and put it in the glove compartment.

Sitting on the bed for the last time, I lifted the glass and toasted the distance gone, the distance to go. While I did that, I resolved that I wouldn't go back to my flat tonight. Firstly, I couldn't face it. That place was a cottage-industry that manufactured loneliness. I wanted the sense of people around me, even if I didn't know who they were. Secondly, I knew there were people I needed to talk to in a neutral environment.
The flat wasn't it. I might have to aggress on their lives. When you do that, you don't let them know where you live. The fox doesn't advertise its earth. I would book into a hotel. It wouldn't be the Burleigh, because for me it was ghosted with Jan's presence, not to mention Dan Scoular's. I didn't need that. I would book in somewhere else. I rose and rinsed the glass and put it back in its holder.

I went downstairs to get change from the bar. Two men who, I suspected, had been introduced by the emptiness of the place were talking football. Mike was on duty. We exchanged a few words. He was a man more pleasant than he knew how to show. I went to the pay-phone in the foyer.

I remembered the number of the Grosvenor Hotel. Some of the staff there knew me. Since splitting with Ena, I had been a few times, just to be not in the flat.

‘Oh, Mr Laidlaw,' the woman said when I stated my case. ‘Hold on.' Then, ‘Listen. We've got a nice corner room. It's like a small suite. How about that?'

That was fine. I tried to put a face to the voice and I thought I succeeded. Her kindness made me feel welcome. I phoned the restaurant. It was Jan who answered.

‘Hullo, busy woman,' I said.

‘Jack? How are you?'

‘The better for hearing yourself.'

‘Where are you?'

‘I'm in Graithnock. But I'm coming to Glasgow tonight. I wondered if I could see you. Later on.'

‘Not tonight, Jack. It's impossible.'

‘Tomorrow? Dinner?'

When you love somebody, even their silence talks. Her
pause was telling me I was no longer a personal necessity, just a social possibility.

‘Yes. All right. Let's do that. Listen. Will you phone me at the flat tomorrow? I've got to rush now. We're just getting organised here.'

‘I'll do that.'

‘Great. Take care.'

‘You too.'

When love begins to leave, one of its exits is through the mouth. Words that were endlessly prolix with the need to try and share everything become as cryptic as an exchange between sentries guarding closed borders. The omens were bad. One week, Jan had said. It sounded as if the jury was in early. Maybe Betsy, counsel for the prosecution, had done a good job. Maybe, to be fair, I was simply indefensible.

I phoned Brian Harkness's number. It was Morag who answered. While she kidded me, I put my banter on remote control. Talking to Morag, what I was really doing was that thing we do when our own relationship is foundering. I was envying Morag and Brian their ideal partnership. You know your sense of them is false but you can't help it. You keep wondering: what the hell's wrong with me? How can all those sleek cats be in there in the warmth, purring at each other, and I'm still out here in the cold, freezing my arse off on this wall and mewing at nothing? I recovered sufficiently from my self-pity to become briefly practical. I gave Morag the names of Melanie McHarg and Marty Bleasdale. I told her what I knew about them. I asked her to tell Brian I would be at the Grosvenor tonight and maybe he could call me there.

I phoned Ena but there was nobody at home. Putting down
the receiver, I had a vision of a dread future, with myself as the phantom phoner, haunting other people's lives for news of the real world.

Katie's special meal helped. It was coq au vin. Seemingly, that first night in the Bushfield, one of my unremembered confessional moments had related to coq au vin as one of my favourite dishes. It was good, except that she had overplayed the onions a bit. If there's a heaven, there will be no onions there.

With good eating done and dishes washed and an awareness of something ending, I tried to pay Katie for my keep. She wouldn't consider it. I think it was a kind of present from her to Scott. I had suspected it might be this way. I resorted to Plan B. I collected the day's purchases from the car and gave her the flowers and the chocolates. As I carried them in to her, I was embarrassed by my lack of originality. But I think the very corniness of it perhaps touched her. She was pleased and we embraced in the kitchen. It wasn't a long embrace. Buster, with undiminished acumen, assumed I was attacking her and barked like a pack of fox-hounds. I left her putting the flowers in water. I took the Talisker through to Mike. He thanked me.

On the way out, I stopped at the pay-phone. I rang Troon. Dave Lyons' voice answered. I put the phone down. He was in.

I
t was a fortress, wasn't it? There were no electronically controlled gates or invisible seeing-eyes, at least as far as I could make out. You turned through the gate off Marrenden Drive and there it was among its trees, very large in weathered sandstone. It was, on the face of it, more accessible than my small flat with its double doors guarding nothing but the debris of a dishevelled life.

But the sense of openness was illusory, I felt. It wasn't just that I could detect the signs of an elaborate security system. It wasn't just the leaded windows that seemed more a way of looking out than seeing in. It was the awareness of strange proliferation in the building. There were outcrops and oddnesses around its edges. I wondered what shapes the rooms were and what might be in them. Two dozen paces through my flat would have told you all. Here, I suspected you might still not know where you were once you were in. It would have unexpected shadows and secret places. I thought of ghosts, not supernatural beings, just those self-projected creatures of the mind, old deeds that can haunt us more the more we deny them. No wonder ghosts traditionally frequent big houses, it occurred to me. There's more room for guilt there.

I pulled the bell. It was a woman who answered. She was wearing a skirt and blouse. Her deferential air suggested I might have more rights here than she had. This was where she worked. I had started to explain what I was doing here when Dave Lyons appeared behind her.

‘That's all right, Janice,' he said. ‘I'll get this.'

I nodded to him and he stared at me. He waited, looking over his shoulder to make sure that Janice had gone. He looked even more authoritative than he had looked in Cranston Castle House. He would. This was his territory.

‘What are you doing here?' he said.

‘I just want to speak to you.'

‘But I don't want to speak to you. Where did you get this address?'

‘The same place I got the phone-number.'

Something occurred to him.

‘Did you just phone there? Not long ago.'

‘That's right.'

‘And hung up.'

‘Well, I didn't think you would invite me down if you knew it was me.'

‘Oh, you're right. You're very careless for a policeman. That was a nuisance phone-call. Risky thing to be doing.'

‘I'll deny everything. Come and get me, copper.'

‘What an arsehole,' he said. ‘Move your car. If that's what you call it. It's blocking my driveway.'

I tugged my forelock.

‘Aye, zur,' I said. ‘Right away, zur. After we've talked.'

‘We've talked all we're going to,' he said. ‘You've spoiled a lunch for me already. You're not going to waste my evening.
I've had more meaningful conversations with the talking clock.'

The door was open but it wasn't open. The doorway might as well have been filled with reinforced glass. I wasn't getting in.

‘It won't take long,' I said.

‘Get lost,' he said and was closing the door.

‘Does your wife know about you and Anna?' I said.

Now the door was really open. He looked as if he couldn't believe the garbage someone had dumped on his doorstep. I think I shared his feeling to a degree, but to a very precise degree. What I had said was a malignant thing to say. But in handling such potentially toxic material in my own nature, I had a couple of protective thoughts, like rubber gloves. First, I would never have used such knowledge beyond this conversation with him, though he wasn't to know that. (And the expression on his face told me this was knowledge, it was no longer guesswork.) Second, I wasn't yet convinced of his right to moral outrage at my remark. But I still felt like averting my head from the smell of my own behaviour.

‘Come in,' he said. ‘I'd ask you to wipe your feet but how do you wipe the rest of you?'

Maybe that was fair enough. We crossed a wide hall with a wooden staircase leading up from it. The windows at the bend on the stairs were filled with stained glass. He took me through a large, open, wooden door, which he then closed. I assumed this was where he had come from when Janice answered my ring.

We were in a kind of personal trophy-room. There were a couple of small silver cups, maybe for golf. There was a piece of Caithness glass and three sombre certificates that were
awards of some sort for industry. A careful arrangement of photographs on the wall showed groups of confident-looking men enjoying the importance of their own company. A leather-topped desk dominated the room. I had met its brother in Edinburgh. The desk-lamp was lit, its narrow beam focused on sheets of paper. I felt the intrusiveness of my presence in this man's preoccupations.

‘I suppose you'd better sit down,' he said.

I sat in a leather swivel-chair near the outer edge of the desk. He crossed to the small window and put his hands in his pockets, looking out. I noticed an antique-looking vase resting on top of a bookcase. I thought its pattern was as complicated as the interweaving lives I had stumbled among. Now that I had breached his sanctum, I experienced a reluctant awe at having invaded the private recesses of another person's life. He was still looking out of the window. There wasn't much to see out there except the obstructing branches of a tree. But he seemed to be able to see far, for he began to describe the view.

‘I'm going to marry Anna,' he said. ‘I tell you that so that you'll understand what the information means. That your seedy investigations have found out. This isn't some hole-in-the-corner affair we're talking about. You're playing around with people's lives here. Linda. My wife. She can't have any children. Anna and I are hoping to have a family. But I care about Linda. She's not too strong emotionally. Anna has agreed to give me time to prepare her for all this. It'll help Linda if I leave her on my own terms. If Anna's not involved. We can do it amicably. I need a little time to do that. To arrange things. I'm asking you not to interfere with that. For my wife's sake. That's all. I can
understand how you feel. Anna being Scott's widow. But Scott wasn't exactly a saint himself, you know.'