The Papers of Tony Veitch (32 page)

Maybe Brian was half-right. I wasn't crazy. But maybe I was daft. We had a corpse. But did we have a crime? If we did, it wasn't one you would find in the statutes. But then I didn't believe in the statutes too much anyway. Mr Bumble got it wrong. The law isn't an ass. It's a lot more sinister than that. The law is a devious, conniving bastard. It knows what it's doing, don't worry. It was made especially to work that way.

I've seen it go about its business too often – all those trials
in which you can watch the bemusement of the accused grow while the legal charade goes on around him. You can watch his eyes cloud, panic and finally silt up with surrender. He doesn't know what the hell they're talking about. He can no longer recognise what he's supposed to have done. Only they know what they're talking about. It's their game. He's just the ball.

I've been at trials where I had put the man in the dock and, fifteen minutes into the thing, I wanted to stand up and speak for the defence. ‘Listen,' I've wanted to shout, ‘I caught this man on the streets. That's where he lives. You lot ever been there?' But they went on with their private party, listening to precedents like a favourite song, playing word games, applauding one another. Occasionally, the voice of the accused will surface among the gobbledygook, small and often wistful and usually sounding strange, like a Scottish accent heard in the midst of Latin. It's a glimpse of pathetic human flesh, freckled and frail, seen through a rent in ermine robes, but quickly covered. Who's this interrupting our little morality play? He doesn't even know the script.

Those judges, I thought, as the water cooled around me. I do a lot of my thinking in the bath. Maybe that was one advantage of having rented an apartment with no shower. They lived as close to the world as the Dalai Lama. Never mind having little understanding of the human heart, they often didn't have much grasp of the daily machinery of the lives they were presuming to judge. Time and again the voice had quavered querulously down from Mount Olympus, asking the question that stunned: ‘A transistor? What exactly do you mean by that?' ‘UB40? Is that some kind of scientific formula?' (‘Not a
formula, Your Honour. A form. An unemployment form.') ‘An unemployment form? And what is that?'

Did you have to check in your head at the door when you joined a club? Under those wigs, what strange heads mulled in port and pickled in prejudice?

‘Lawyers,' I said to the ceiling above my bath. Who could trust them? They stuff their wallets with crimes and declare themselves the pillars of society. Their fees are often fiscal robbery but who can nail them but themselves? ‘A brilliant lawyer' was a phrase I had often heard. That was all right if all you meant was an ability to play legal games. But what did that mean? Intelligence as a closed circuit. Intelligence should never be a closed circuit. Take them off the stage that is a law court, where the forms are all pre-set, and a lot of them wouldn't know tears from rain.

I suppose you could say I was getting disillusioned with my job. I got out of the bath and pulled the plug, wiping away any suggestion of a tide-mark as the water drained. That was a technique I had learned since being on my own. It made the bath easier to clean. (Laidlaw's Handy Home Hints For Single Men: first edition in preparation.)

I towelled myself. Naked, I didn't like the softening belly. It wasn't so bad with the clothes on. And besides, among others you usually pulled it in a little, put on the corsets of vanity. In the bathroom I just contemplated my navel and found it a bigger subject than I wanted it to be. Ah, those now gone days when I could eat a house and drink a brewery and still have a stomach like a plank nothing could warp.

Intimations of mortality bulged under the towel. Time was I seemed forever. Time was time hardly was. My life was an
unknown continent and I was its only explorer. And what had I discovered? Eh, well, eh, life is . . . Thingmy. Give me another few years and I'll have it sussed. But how many years were left? These days they passed so quickly. It was as if you stopped to mend a fuse and when you looked up another year had gone.

I remembered reading somewhere a theory about why time passed more quickly the older you got. The gist of it was this: when you're ten, a year is a tenth of your life; when you're forty, a year is a fortieth of your life. A fortieth is a lot less than a tenth. I was over forty. I didn't try to calculate the decimal points. I just agreed with the principle.

But it was strange. Awareness of my own mortality gave me a boost. A shot of psychic adrenalin pumped through me and blew the last remaining tendrils of mist out of my head. If you stayed true to your experience, you needn't fear age. It was only bringing you closer to understanding. I had always wanted understanding. Let's see if we could find it.

I put on a clean pair of underpants. From small beginnings . . . I put a new blade in the razor. I squeezed shaving soap onto my palm from the dispenser. I soaped my cheeks, my chin, my upper lip. I had done away with the recent moustache. It made me look too much like a policeman – standard issue, along with the identity-card. I looked into the small round mirror like a porthole and a floating face stared back at me, bearded white. By the time I was as old as I looked in the mirror, I hoped I would have the wisdom to match the appearance.

As I shaved the fuzziness of my face into definition there came into focus with my jaw the time ahead, hardening round
the purpose I had given it. I had one week. It was a month since the bad thing had happened and it had taken me that time to win a week away from police work, at least from official police work. I had earned my busman's holiday.

It would be a kind of investigation, but my kind. Since I had been a policeman in Glasgow, the expression just about every superior had used to describe me, as if they were reading from my file, was ‘maverick'. It had become equivalent to some kind of rank: Jack Laidlaw, Maverick. Well, they were right. I
was
a maverick. They didn't know how much. If I wasn't fond of lawyers, I was less fond of policemen. For years I had been working against the grain of my own nature.

How often had I felt I was working for the wrong people? How often had I felt that the source of the worst injustices wasn't personal at all but institutional and fiscal and political? It was the crime beyond the crime that had always fascinated me, the sanctified network of legally entrenched social injustice towards which the crime I was investigating feebly gestured. ‘When a finger points at the moon,' a Paris graffito had once said, ‘the fool looks at the finger.' Maybe I had been watching fingers for long enough.

All my prevarications had come home to roost, my personal harpies to foul my sense of my own worth and mock the work I had been doing. If I was a detective, let me detect now. It was time to put such skills as I had into overdrive.

For I was faced with a death I
had
to understand. It was a death I had to investigate, not for police reasons, though perhaps with police methods. Investigator, investigate thyself. A man was dead, a man I had loved perhaps more than any other.

Nobody had said ‘crime'. But that dying seemed to me as unjust, as indicative of meaninglessness as any I had known. And I had known many. For he had been so rich in potential, so much alive, so undeserving – aren't we all? – of a meaningless death. I knew.

I should know. He was my brother.

The doorbell rang. The sound changed the meaning of my thoughts. It's one thing to psych yourself up inside your own head, to threaten to bring experience to book in your own mind. It's another to translate the mental vaunting into event, to bring the intensity of your feelings against the facts and see what results. It's the difference between the gymnasium and the championship fight. The bell said, ‘Seconds out'. You're on your own. The proximity of someone else only made it clearer.

I padded barefoot to the door with shaving-soap round my ears and on my upper lip. In the doing of it, I had a small revelation: a dangerous world. This was how we lived now. The flat I had rented was in an old, refurbished tenement. When it was built, it had a door on the street that anyone could enter. Now it was different. The outside door was locked. You pressed a bell. Someone lifted a phone. If they knew who you were, they pressed a buzzer. You were allowed inside and came to their door. They checked you through a peep-hole. If you passed the test, they opened the door.

This was a tenement on the edge of Glasgow, not the Castle of Otranto. Anyone who lived here couldn't have much worth stealing. Maybe a video. We had become afraid of ourselves. There was a time a man or woman would have taken pride in
being able to open the door to anyone. What was happening to us?

Was even this relevant to my brother's death? The way I felt, anything might be. I put my hand on the phone. Come in, strange world. And I'll be watching you more closely than I ever have before. I lifted the phone.