William McIlvanney - The Papers of Tony Veitch

Laidlaw ignored the footnote.

‘Did either of you know him?’

‘I run a rather large business. I don’t meet a lot of vagrants.’

Alma Brown shook her head.

‘He was a nice vagrant,’ Laidlaw said. ‘The other names. Paddy Collins. A small villain. Bit-parts only. No? I don’t suppose a pub called the Crib means anything?’

Both looked as if they had forgotten he was there.

‘No, you won’t have any branches in the Saracen, Mr Veitch. Lynsey Farren?’

That was the name that changed the thermostat. You could feel the room freeze slightly. Alma Brown looked involuntarily at Milton Veitch. It was like calling the name of someone who was in hiding. It blew his cover. He looked annoyed.

‘We both know Lynsey Farren,’ he said. ‘She’s Lord Farren of Farren’s daughter. Lady Lynsey Farren. I think she may know even fewer vagrants than I do.’

He said it as if that was the matter closed. Harkness doubted that.

‘But Tony knew her, I take it?’ Laidlaw asked.

‘Yes, he did. Our two families have known each other for years. Since Lynsey and Tony were children. But I really don’t think I want her bothered with whatever mess my son has got himself into. What has happened, by the way?’

I thought you’d never ask, Harkness thought.

‘It may not all come down quite to what you want, Mr Veitch. Paddy Collins was stabbed to death. That’s two corpses connected with this piece of paper your son wrote on. We don’t know what happened. But I think you’ll agree there’s a certain urgency in finding out. Eck and Paddy Collins are keeping quiet. What’s the Crib going to tell us? It would be like interviewing a football crowd. That leaves yourselves and Lynsey Farren. We’re talking to you and we’ll be talking to her. By the way, the telephone number on the paper is a public box in Queen Margaret Drive. Does that mean anything to you?’

His head was shaking first but hers caught up quickly.

‘Could I have Miss Farren’s address, please?’

‘I’m not entirely sure I like your manner.’

Laidlaw was looking down as if waiting for the irrelevances to pass. But Mr Veitch wasn’t going anywhere except towards a confrontation.

‘I said I’m not sure I like your manner.’

Laidlaw looked at him. ‘That’s all right,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m not sure my manner likes you. But it hardly seems relevant.’

‘Milton!’ Alma Brown was appealing to him. ‘Please. If something’s wrong with Tony, we must help. We must. Lynsey would want to help. She won’t mind being involved, will she?’

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?’