William McIlvanney - The Papers of Tony Veitch

‘Who told you where Tony Veitch was, Macey?’

Macey was whistling under his breath, looking away, as if he had just happened to sit beside a loony in the park. ‘What’s that going on in the Crib? That’s a weird get-together.’

‘Some kinna bother.’

‘About Paddy Collins?’

‘Don’t know. Ah wisny listenin’.’

‘There’s going to be more serious bother, Macey. And you could be right in the middle of it.’

‘Well. It’s a way of life, intit? You know it’s trouble when trouble comes, don’t ye?’ Macey was smiling, looking away. Laidlaw’s left hand grabbed his lapel like a grappling iron, hooking him off his seat.

‘Listen, fuckin’ bawheid,’ Laidlaw said. ‘I’m on serious business. I don’t need the Chic Murray kit. You want to be a comedian, practise somewhere else.’

Laidlaw slammed Macey back on to his concrete seat so hard he felt his coccyx might be a lump on his head.

‘You’re overheads in the shite, Macey,’ Laidlaw said. ‘You’re an accessory to a murder. That’s what you are. Clever tout. It’s up to you. You answer a coupla questions. Or I’m going to huckle you into the station right now. And get you charged. That’s the message.’

Macey couldn’t help being interested. He had the tout’s bug-eyed sense of survival, as if the thyroid had gone berserk.

‘How do you mean?’

‘You know what I mean,’ Laidlaw said.

The two of them watched a small red-haired boy argue with his black-haired friend about whose turn it was to push the swing. The black-haired boy won.

‘What are the questions?’ Macey said.

‘Actually, they’re more than a couple,’ Laidlaw said. ‘What’s going on in the Crib?’

Macey watched the boy swinging as if his attention could put him back there.

‘Mickey Ballater,’ he said, and Laidlaw understood Ballater’s wound. ‘He claimed Hook. Thought Hook had been arsin’ him about. Cam and John are havin’ a council of war. But nothin’s been decided.’

Laidlaw listened to the black-haired boy complain about the way his friend was pushing him, decided he didn’t like him.

‘Macey,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Were Dave McMaster and Lynsey Farren the first to tell you about Tony Veitch?’

‘Naw,’ Macey said. ‘Cam talked about him first.’

‘But only Cam?’

Macey shifted a little, as if his conscience had piles.

‘Macey!’ Laidlaw said.

‘Big Ernie knew. He showed me a phota.’

‘What phota?’

‘Tony Veitch. He was readin’.’

Laidlaw was briefly aware that Harkness had given Milligan the photograph and decided it didn’t matter much. There were more important things to find out about.

‘Who told you where he was?’

‘You know that.’

‘That’s right. I do. So here’s the real question, Macey. Who did you tell?’

Macey underwent a small indulgence of retraction. He had said enough. It was finished. But he knew it wasn’t. Laidlaw waited.

‘I told everybody.’

Laidlaw clicked his tongue impatiently.

‘Of course, Macey. It’s what you would do. But don’t waste my time. The crucial thing is. In what order did you tell them?’

Macey didn’t know what had happened but he knew from the clarity of Laidlaw’s sense of it that he was about to explain what had happened. He felt himself no more than a part of Laidlaw’s understanding and he surrendered to it.

‘I told Big Ernie first,’ he said.

Laidlaw understood. Of course, he did. He had his small vision of what had taken place. He had sought it so determinedly and now it was his. It wasn’t much but it was his. He had argued with the supposed reality of circumstances so heatedly that they had acknowledged he had a case. For the moment, he was only the second one who knew, not exactly, never exactly, but roughly what had happened.

He let an approximation of the truth unravel in his head. Tony Veitch went into hiding from Paddy Collins. Paddy Collins beat up Lynsey Farren to find where Tony was. Dave McMaster killed Paddy Collins because he beat up Lynsey Farren. Dave McMaster killed Eck Adamson because he knew about Paddy Collins. Dave McMaster killed Tony Veitch because he needed a scapegoat. Mickey Ballater was a makeweight, although he didn’t know it. So were Cam and John, although they didn’t know it. As always, it was meaner than you would imagine. Private purposes, outside of wars, were the most lethal things in the world.

And Tony Veitch had, in a way, died of his own innocence. He hadn’t known what was going on, the complexity of it. Those must have been some papers, a terrible attempt at uninhabitable compassion. Perhaps he had died of those papers, of the inadmissible evidence they represented, how we truly know nothing more than the need to connect but can’t find how to admit it.

From his vantage point in Ruchill Park, Laidlaw looked out over the city. He could see so much of it from here and still it baffled him. ‘What is this place?’ he thought.

A small and great city, his mind answered. A city with its face against the wind. That made it grimace. But did it have to be so hard? Sometimes it felt so hard. Well, that was some wind and it had never stopped blowing. Even when this place was the second city of the British Empire, affluence had never softened it because the wealth of the few had become the poverty of the many. The many had survived, however harshly, and made the spirit of the place theirs. Having survived affluence, they could survive anything. Now that the money was tight, they hardly noticed the difference. If you had it, all you did was spend it. The money had always been tight. Tell us something we don’t know. That was Glasgow. It was a place so kind it would batter cruelty into the ground. And what circumstances kept giving it was cruelty. No wonder he loved it. It danced among its own debris. When Glasgow gave up, the world could call it a day.

Standing so high, Laidlaw felt the bleakness of summer on his face and understood a small truth. Even the climate here offered no favours. Standing at a bus-stop, you talked out the side of your mouth, in case your lips got chapped. Maybe that was why the West of Scotland was where people put the head on one another — it was too cold to take your hands out your pockets. But it did have compensations.

Laidlaw had a happy image of the first man out after the nuclear holocaust being a Glaswegian. He would straighten up and look around. He would dust himself down with that flicking gesture of the hands and, once he had got the strontium off the good suit, he would look up. The palms would be open.

‘Hey,’ he would say. ‘Gonny gi’es a wee brek here? What was that about? Ye fell oot wi’ us or what? That was a liberty. Just you behave.’

Then he would walk off with that Glaswegian walk, in which the shoulders don’t move separately but the whole torso is carried as one, as stiff as a shield. And he would be muttering to himself, ‘Must be a coupla bottles of something still intact.’

Laidlaw turned back from the city to Macey.

‘One last question,’ he said.

Macey dredged his eyes up from the ground.

‘Where do I find Dave McMaster?’

Macey considered the possibility of not knowing and knew it wasn’t one.

‘Glasgow Airport,’ he said. ‘He’s covering that in case Mickey Ballater tries it.’

‘Macey.’ Laidlaw was looking at him very carefully. ‘You know I wouldn’t have done that. What I said. Taking you in. You know that. Don’t you?’

‘Do Ah?’

‘Sometimes you don’t like yourself,’ Laidlaw said. ‘You want a lift?’

‘Naw,’ Macey said, sitting where he was and rubbing the base of his back. ‘The last lift you gave me was enough for me.’