The Papers of Tony Veitch (10 page)

He conferred with his drink before giving them an address in East Kilbride, which didn't seem to Harkness the likeliest place for the titled to live.

‘Does she work?' Laidlaw asked.

‘There I do draw the line. She has her own business and I don't think the presence of the police would help it.'

Laidlaw let it pass and Mr Veitch's sense of himself seemed assuaged.

‘There are reasons for my reluctance to involve Lynsey,' he said in the manner of a cabinet minister responding to a naive interviewer. ‘Lord Farren is an old man. He lives essentially in the past. The sordidness of much of what passes for life today passes him by. It would be nice if it could stay that way. If Lynsey were dragged into anything unsavoury, it would kill him. And Lynsey herself has had enough recently, I should think.'

Laidlaw was interested.

‘Why is that?'

‘An incident where the police were involved. A visitor to her flat who got nasty. Violent, I think.'

‘Do you know who or what happened, Mr Veitch? What was it about?'

‘I've no details, I'm afraid. I didn't press the poor girl. Was there anything else?'

‘A couple of things. Do you know Tony's friends or where he might be staying? Anyone he might get in touch with? Places he might go? Anything like that?'

‘I'm sorry,' Alma Brown said.

‘No to everything,' Mr Veitch said. ‘He's been a stranger to me for years. I hope he keeps it that way.'

‘How will he be living?' Laidlaw asked.

The question seemed to puzzle Mr Veitch.

‘What do you mean?'

‘Money. Hiding out somewhere. How can he get the money to live?'

Mr Veitch smiled.

‘He has his own money. My wife died some ten years ago. She left all of her money to her son. When he was twenty-one. Which perhaps explains the timing of his great rebellion. Like quite a few rebels, he presumably wants to do it in comfort.'

‘Do you have any photographs of him?' Laidlaw asked.

‘Well, if we do, I don't keep them next to my heart.'

‘I'll find something,' Alma Brown said and went out.

Milton Veitch added to his drink and sat back down.

‘You think Tony has done something terrible?' he asked. ‘Been responsible in some way for what's happened?'

Laidlaw shrugged.

‘Not necessarily. Not necessarily at all. But two people have been murdered.' He glanced at Harkness, letting him know he
didn't need the intervention of purists at this point. ‘This is the only pointer we have. That's all.'

‘You know,' Mr Veitch was staring ahead. ‘I'm afraid it wouldn't surprise me. It wouldn't surprise me at all.'

His voice faded out of earshot as Miss Brown came in. She gave Laidlaw two photographs.

‘You can keep those,' she said. ‘I have copies.'

Mr Veitch stood up. There was nothing to do but the same. Standing beside Mr Veitch in his light grey suit that looked expensive enough to be tailored from hand-stitched tenners, Harkness felt the way his shoes always looked when he was trying on new trousers – suddenly shabby.

‘Oh, a last thing,' Laidlaw said. ‘I don't know if you paid much attention to what Tony wrote on that bit of paper. But it seems to me worryingly interested in wrongdoing. Was that like Tony?'

‘Don't ask me,' Mr Veitch said. ‘I hardly knew him.'

‘Perhaps you shouldn't take that too seriously,' Miss Brown said. ‘Tony wrote an awful lot of things. He had masses of papers. We never paid them much attention. Perhaps we should have.'

‘But that letter was the only communication since he left?'

‘Once was enough. Believe me,' Mr Veitch said.

As they all moved awkwardly out towards the door, Harkness felt the strangeness of these two people living together in this house, having conversations full of shadows. He thought it would take a house as big as this to accommodate the ghosts he had sensed in their relationship. He wondered if property did that to people, if big houses in some of the ghost stories he had read were really being
haunted by the guilt of unjustly having while others were deprived. Certainly he couldn't remember reading about too many haunted single-ends.

Sitting in the car, Laidlaw took out the photographs and looked at them, passed them to Harkness. They showed a fair-haired young man, unsmiling, with intense, startled eyes. One was in colour, taken with a flash, and he was looking up from something he was reading. The other was taken outside, black and white. Tony Veitch was in an overcoat, standing outside a house. He looked like a refugee who had just arrived wherever he was.

‘What do you see, Boy Robin?' Laidlaw said.

‘A murderer?' Harkness asked.

‘A mystery. That'll do for just now.'

Laidlaw took the refugee, left Harkness with the reader.

‘Milton Veitch seems less vague about him,' Harkness said.

‘Aye, he was in a hurry, wasn't he? I wonder why. But I'll tell you something. You know who casts the first stone? The guiltiest bastard in the crowd. You've got a son in the kind of bother he thinks Tony Veitch might be in, what do you do?'

‘How would I know?'

‘And how would I? But I would bet. I'd find him for myself. I'd need to know what happened. If wee Jackie grew up and got involved in this way, I'd have to know what I had done as well. Jesus, I could make a better father than him out of raffia.'

Harkness looked at him worriedly. Laidlaw was too vehement. Harkness had been working with him for over a year now. In that time he had seen an intensification take place in Laidlaw. Whatever forces were working themselves out in him, they were accelerating. Laidlaw was forty now but that anger
against so many things that ticked in him like a geiger-counter was in no way mollified by middle-age.

Harkness thought he knew some of the pressures that relentlessly maintained the tension of his nature. He had been at Laidlaw's house a few times and had seen that in the wreck of his marriage he was using himself as a lifebelt for his three children. Laidlaw's insistence on staying during some important cases at the Burleigh Hotel in Sauchiehall Street could hardly be due to the comfort and cuisine to be found there. It was more due, Harkness was sure, to Jan the receptionist. When you added Laidlaw's natural tendency to look for any storm in a port you had a recipe that might have blown the lid off a pressure-cooker.

‘Okay, Jack,' Harkness said. ‘Where to? East Kilbride?'

‘She won't be in. Back into the city, Brian. Anyway, even if she was in, we couldn't outdrive a phone-call.'

‘What?'

‘Mr Veitch is phoning her right now. You can bet on it. Galahad is alive and well. And playing with himself.'

Driving, Harkness remembered something.

‘Here. Why no whisky again? This could get monotonous.'

‘I take water with my whisky,' Laidlaw said. ‘Not condescension.'

 

 

 

 

13

‘. . . in this crowd deaf to its own cry of hunger and misery, revolt and hatred, in this crowd so strangely garrulous and dumb.'

Gus Hawkins was reading the end of the sentence again when the knock came at the door. He was eating a folded slice of bread and jelly, a Saturday lunchtime return to the comfort food of childhood, and drinking the last of his tea. His mother was clearing the table. His father sat in his armchair, a telly cataleptic. Gus made to get up.

‘Ah'll get it, son,' his mother said. ‘It's likely Maggie from downstairs.'

But her startled ‘Oh' as she opened the door made Gus look up to see his brother standing there, wearing his scar like an embarrassing admission in front of his mother of the kind of work he did. He gave her an operatic embrace and winked over her shoulder at Gus. His jollity was a smoke-screen.

‘How's the best wee ma in Britain? Aye, Da. Ah've got a mate with me, Ma. We're here to talk to Mastermind there.'

‘Jimmy! Ah thought ye'd forgotten the address.'

What should have been anger became laughter in her mouth by the alchemy that enables mothers to transmute their children into what they believe them to be.

‘No chance. This is a mate up from Birmingham. Mickey Ballater.'

Gus looked at the big man who stepped in behind his brother. Whatever he did in Birmingham, he wasn't a bank-clerk. Gus's mother shut the door.

‘Come in, son. Come in. Mickey, is it? Ah'll make a cuppa tea. We're just finished. Gus comes every Saturday fur his dinner. Then Ah know he's gettin' at least wan good meal in the week. Ah don't know why he canny stay here a' thegither. But that's the young yins nowadays.'

‘Ah know whit ye mean,' Mickey Ballater said.

‘Ma. Don't bother wi' tea. We're on our way somewhere. We were passin' an' we jist came in to settle an argument. Ah told 'im ma brother's a genius. He would know.'

Gus realised that his brother was improvising desperately, didn't know what to say next. Hook Hawkins noticed that the doorway to the balcony was open and continued talking.

‘Look, we'll no' disturb ma Da's telly. We'll nip out on the balcony. Okay, Gus?'

He went out onto the balcony, followed by Mickey Ballater.

‘Fair view, innit?' he said.

‘No' bad at all.'

Gus put down his book slowly. He looked at his mother and couldn't be sure whether her expression was what she really felt or a determined cover-up. It seemed to suggest her older son was an awful wag. Gus crossed and stepped out onto the balcony.

Three was a crowd out there. It was thirteen storeys up and Mickey Ballater seemed impressed.

‘Never seen the Gorbals from this high up. Seen it from doon there, right enough. Surprised how wee it is. When Ah wis in among it, Ah thought it went on forever. Ah suppose this is progress, eh?'

Gus said nothing. Half of his head was still dealing with Aimé Césaire's
Return to my Native Land
. He hadn't worked out how he came to be standing on the balcony of his parents' house with his brother and another heavy. He was waiting to catch up with events.

‘Gus,' Hook said. ‘Mickey wants to ask you about Tony.'

‘Tony who?'

‘Come on, Gus. Tony Veitch.'

‘Tony Veitch? What's this about?'

‘Tony Veitch,' Mickey said.

‘What's he to you?'

‘Money,' Mickey said. ‘That's what he is. Just money.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘He owes me money.'

‘Tony owes you money?'

‘Ah've come a long way,' Mickey said. ‘It's gettin' to feel longer. Ah didn't do it for nothin'. He owes me money.'

Gus saw his father still watching television, his mother clearing up. The programme was an old film on BBC2, a grey actor talking nonsense to a grey actress listening nonsensically. It was the kind of film about which the clever Sunday papers would find something clever to say, like ‘a delicate sense of period' or ‘survives in spite of itself'. It was just crap, a lot of people making what money they could in the way they knew best.

Gus felt angry. Why was his father watching it? He had had a life more harrowing than any of their melodramas. And he hadn't once seen what had happened to him shown on that screen. Gus saw his parents in cameo, peripheral to this moment, peripheral to their own sons, frozen into decoration. He resented it. His anger spilled over.

‘What's this about?' he said to his brother.

‘Mickey's just askin' a question,' Hook said. ‘Where's Tony Veitch?'

‘Naw.' Gus was staring at his brother. ‘What's this about?'

‘Where's Tony Veitch?' Mickey said.

Gus didn't look at him.

‘I'm talking to my brother,' he said. ‘What's this about?'

‘Gus,' Hook Hawkins said. ‘People are lookin' for Tony.'

Gus looked at his parents a moment.

‘Why don't you organise gang-fights in the kitchen?' he said. ‘You bring a hoodlum to ma mammy's house?'

‘Listen,' Mickey said.

‘Naw. You listen.' Gus Hawkins looked like a bomb that might soon explode. He was staring at Ballater. ‘This is where good people live. We don't need you.'

A signal went off in Mickey Ballater's head. He remembered a chip-shop in the Calton. He had been young and hard and drunk, and he had casually insulted a small, middle-aged man. He had said for the titillation of bystanders, ‘Somebody in here's fartit. It wis you!' pointing at the small man. The small man had said nothing, paid for his chips and gone out.

Mickey Ballater had forgotten he said it by the time he came out the door, when he forgot everything for several minutes. He worked out later that the small man must have hit him
from the side as he came out, presumably with a gib-crane he had handy. Since then, Ballater had understood that the fiercest man is the one who has had his incomprehensibly private values encroached upon. Attack a mouse in its hole and it will try to nibble you to death.

This was no mouse. He saw one of an endlessly repeated species, the young who haven't found their limits yet and wonder if you could help them. Gus Hawkins was puffed out like a cockerel with his own aggression. He had started before Mickey had even thought of it.

Mickey knew that steel to steel the boy had no chance. Six days a week, Mickey would kill him. But this was one of those seventh days – wrong time, wrong place. It wasn't why he had come. So he had recourse to a feeble gesture.

‘Wait a minute!' he said.

Gus Hawkins waited. Mickey found it useful that Hook Hawkins intervened.

‘Listen, you,' Hook said.

‘Jim!' Gus said at once. ‘Don't give me your routine. I'm your brother. In my book you're just a liberty-taker. We're where you come from. Don't try to frighten us. I'll put up with you. But I really don't need his nonsense. He doesn't behave, I'll show him a quick road down.'