William McIlvanney - Strange Loyalties

His was one of the bleakest spirits I had so far met. He had done some boxing at one time and something in him was still waiting for the final bell. The staple diet of his life was keeping his body fit. A treat would be using it against someone else. I remembered Frankie White telling me that he had trained Dan Scoular. That must have been a strange convergence for the big man: welcome to the planet Mars.

He lived on the way out to Rutherglen. We put a car at each end of the street before we drew up at the door. It was a reconditioned tenement but the street door still opened without mechanical control. One floor up, the nameplate said ‘Brogan’, nothing else, as if telling the world not to get personal. Bob Lilley knocked at the door. The footsteps that came towards it were light. He opened up and took in the three of us, face by face.

‘If it’s for the Policemen’s Fund,’ he said, ‘Ah gave.’

‘Can we come in?’ Bob said

‘Well, Ah don’t know anybody that’s found a way to stop your lot from doin’ that yet.’

He walked along the hall into the living-room. We closed the door and followed him. He was in his stockinged feet. I was surprised again at how comparatively small he was. His reputation exuded size. Seen now, he was quite small and neat, like a frame on film before it is projected. The projector was his preparedness for violence.

He stood in the middle of the floor and looked at us. I saw him in his habitat. It was a very tidy room. The newspapers were in the elasticated newspaper-rack. The glass coffee-table had nothing on it. On the sideboard there was one large, framed photograph of an elderly woman. I assumed it was his mother. It was certainly someone who would never speak to strange men in pubs. It was a room where nothing would happen except what he decided, until today. The television, which he had perhaps turned down before he came to the door, was showing sports results. It broadcast a routine that was no longer audible.

‘Yes?’ Tommy Brogan said into the silence.

‘We’re here to arrest you for murder, Tommy,’ Bob said and gave him the official caution, word perfect.

Tommy Brogan looked at the television as if he was checking an especially interesting result. He looked at Bob.

‘Ye wouldn’t happen to have the name of the murderee on ye, would ye?’

‘Meece Rooney,’ Bob said.

‘Meece Rooney? What kinda name is that?’

‘Put your shoes on,’ Bob said.

‘This is crap,’ Tommy Brogan said. ‘Ah don’t even know the man.’

‘We’ll show you photos,’ Bob said. ‘Get ready, Tommy.’

‘Who told ye this?’

‘We just know.’

‘No. You don’t know. Because it never happened. Ye’re makin’ a bad mistake here. Ye’ll finish up lookin’ pretty pathetic.’

‘Not quite as pathetic as Meece. Come on.’

‘Well, it’s your funeral. Ah’ll come with ye.’

‘That’s nice,’ Bob said.

Tommy Brogan made as if to move and then paused. He assessed the three of us. He seemed to be making a decision. His look to me was saying something like, ‘If it wis just one against three, Ah would win. But there’s more of ye out there, isn’t there?’ The moment tremored on a dangerous silence. He stirred and crossed the floor and sat down to put on his shoes. The unfulfilled possibility he left behind him opened a chasm in my preconceived sense of things. It was a dizzying prospect. I would have thought there was no choice but to come with us. But he had, however briefly, imagined an alternative. In that realisation I glimpsed the terrible logic of his life. Faced with nothingness like stone, he was always tempted to paint on it in blood the violent shape of his will.

When he went through to the bedroom to get ready, Brian went with him. Bob and I looked at each other. I walked about the room.

I was angry. The anger came from a disproportion between the offence and the reparation. This was all? Those wilfully damaged lives, those invented deaths were to be paid for so casually. A small, unfeeling man would put on his shoes and jacket and be chauffeured to jail. In his indifference to what he had done, he enraged me even more than he had in the doing of it. This wasn’t enough. Something more, a black angel whispered in me. I hoped he came out of the bedroom fighting. But he walked calmly back into the room wearing a sports jacket, with Brian after him. He went to the television and switched it off and turned and smiled at us. The bright images of a football game fused into black behind him. As casually as he had darkened the lives of others, he would accept the darkening of his own. I understood he was in prison already. What more could we do to him but exchange one cell for another? Perhaps there are those who cannot be punished more because they are their own punishment.

The message from Macey was that Chuck Walker was in a bar with the sophisticated woman. Macey would be waiting outside. He had told us where to meet him. Driving there, with Tommy Brogan handcuffed in one of the cars behind us, I barely noticed the day. The sense of anti-climax in me was like inertia. The unexpected reawakened me.

Macey wasn’t there. The three of us got out of the car to look around. Bob went and told the other policemen to stay in their cars. While Brian and Bob and I were standing in the busy street wondering what to do next, Brian suddenly said, ‘There he’s!’

I thought he meant Macey. Some distance away I saw Macey’s sharply dressed figure signalling to us among the people. It was a few seconds later that I noticed what Macey’s signals meant. Chuck Walker was in the street with a tall, blonde woman. They were an interesting couple, the lady and the rottweiler. They were nearer to us than Macey was. They were coming towards us. Even as we saw him, he saw something else.

It must have been an amazing image for him, like glancing sideways in a mirror and seeing a skeleton’s head. He had already passed the first police car when he looked casually into the second and saw Tommy Brogan in the back. Then he saw us over the heads of the crowds in the street. He spun and noticed the other car. He turned back towards us and then he wasn’t there. There were the people jostling in the street and there was the woman among them, still unaware of the suddenness with which relationships can end. Seeking to avoid bumping the passers-by, she was holding up the expensive plastic bag, which presumably contained something they had shopped for — instant memento.

We were trying to force our way through the mob and the other policemen had come out of the cars and there was no sign of him. We were separated and moving around aimlessly when I looked through the window of a café. I saw the man behind the counter looking around him. Something had happened he didn’t understand. I went in. The place was busy and some of the people at the tables had the same ruffled appearance as the owner, as if a sudden wind had blown through the place. I stared at the owner. He was frightened. He looked towards his back shop.

As I went through there, I heard the sound of a door being kicked open. Locating the sound, I saw the outline of Chuck Walker. His shoulders almost filled the doorway. He had his back towards me. Ahead of him was nothing but high wall. As he turned back, I thought I might just live long enough to regret that all he had had in front of him was wall.

As he rushed me, his body filled my vision. I knew what I wanted to do but that isn’t always a great help. The punch I tried to throw was deflected like a gnat. He hit me in the stomach and then something, his fist or his forearm or his elbow, jarred into my neck. I fell through the doorway back into the space behind the counter. He was on top of me and he had a knife. I stayed very still. I saw the mole on his cheek. I saw the gargoyle malevolence of his face, the eyes lit eerily as if a torch were under them.