William McIlvanney - The Papers of Tony Veitch

The truth was that some of the impossibilities he had come up against then still haunted him. He could recall giving up any belief in an overall meaning to living because any such meaning would have to be indivisible, unequivocally total, giving significance impartially to every drifting feather, every piece of paper blowing along a street.

Eck was like one of those pieces of paper. You couldn’t say the meaning of things was elsewhere and Eck was irrelevant. That was a betrayal. All we have is one another and if we’re orphans all we can honourably do is adopt one another, defy the meaninglessness of our lives by mutual concern. It’s the only nobility we have.

Laidlaw tried to reinstate his energy by declaring war, over his whisky, on all brutalisers of others, all non-carers. Yet the very thought embarrassed. He would have been such a compromised champion, a failure opposing failures. He admitted to himself that he wanted at this moment to phone Jan at the Burleigh Hotel and felt a double guilt. There was the guilt of being tempted to use Jan to soothe him now when he gave her so little of his life. There was the guilt of betraying Ena. The compromise of his own life, so hurting to others, appalled him.

But he couldn’t think of anybody else who would care about Eck enough to find out what had happened to him. Laidlaw had better try. Pathetically, it seemed to him, he could only think of small things to do. He would check the address and the names. He would phone that bloody number till somebody answered. He would get a post-mortem tomorrow.

At least tomorrow he could tell Brian, somebody who would know who was dead. It would swell the mourners’ roll by one. But the thought still left him with an angry sadness.

Harkness woke up into a problem of his own. It had become his constant companion lately, the ante-room to every day. When was he going to get married? Finding an answer was complicated by the second question which always came attached to the first, like a Siamese twin: who was it he was going to marry?

Wearily, he went through his early morning programme of thoughts, what he did instead of press-ups. He was fed up scuffling around. He wanted to get married. He fancied Morag. He fancied Mary. He didn’t want to give up Morag. He didn’t want to give up Mary. He wanted to get married. He was fed up scuffling around.

His present situation confirmed it. He was lying on a couch in his underpants with a blanket over him. The couch was an insomnia-machine. It was cunningly constructed so that one arm clamped your head at a right angle to your body while the other etched a moquette pattern on your calves. His feet stuck out beyond the blanket and the big toe of his right foot, turned black when he stubbed his foot playing mid-field for the Crime Squad, seemed to accuse him of pretending to be younger than he was. He was twenty-seven already. His toenail looked like falling off. What next?

He had worked out where he was. At first he had thought it might be a girl’s place. He had gone to the disco at ‘Joanna’s’ last night. (What was he trying to do, find a third possibility?) But then he recognised the inimitable decor of Milligan’s poky flat, a kind of waiting-room baroque.

The walls were dun and featureless, the furniture was arranged with all the homeyness of a second-hand sale-room and clothes were littered everywhere. It wasn’t a room so much as a suitcase with doors.

There was the spatter of something hitting a frying-pan in the tiny kitchen and then Milligan’s voice cheerfully kicking ‘My Way’ to death.

Harkness smiled. When he had worked under Detective Inspector Milligan in North Division before going to the Crime Squad he had become familiar with the infectious breeziness of Milligan, as if the world was a parade arranged for his benefit. Thinking of the tension of Laidlaw’s nature, Harkness thought he could understand why his present superior and his past one disliked each other. Their natures were a mutual contradiction.

Milligan padded through, wearing a dark blue towelling Marks and Spencer’s bathrobe. It looked old enough to have been bought in their Penny Bazaar. He was laying the table. Always slow to come to the surface, Harkness thought he should at least show willing. He opened his mouth to speak and it came out distorted by a yawn, something like ‘Narrgh’.

‘Can I quote you on that?’ Milligan said. ‘You were well on last night. What did you do? Fall into a vat?’

‘Drowning my problems.’

‘What problems? Your only problem is you don’t have enough.’

Seeing Milligan bursting out of his acres of towelling, his rumpled hair going grey, his big face looking as if it had taken as much of life’s pounding as Beachy Head, Harkness felt suitably naive in the matter of problems. He was looking at a broken marriage, a stalemated career and a quality of survival that would have whistled through an air-raid.

‘I keep thinking I have,’ he said modestly and got up. His feet were frozen. ‘Thanks for taking me in last night.’

‘I thought you might have an extra bird with you. Like a carry-out.’

Going through to the bathroom, Harkness washed himself and used Milligan’s only remaining blade, which was like shaving with a hacksaw. When he was dressed, he asked if he could use the phone.

‘If they haven’t cut it off.’

He phoned his father to see if there were any messages. It annoyed him that he hadn’t been there to talk to Laidlaw about Eck. He assured his father he would be in plenty of time to meet Laidlaw. He thought of phoning Simshill but, seeing five-to-eight on his watch, he let it go.

Breakfast was a penance. The ham and eggs were doubtless good but he had only been able to clean his teeth with his forefinger and the crap still in his mouth made everything taste like feathers. Milligan’s ferocious brightness didn’t help.

‘I think I’ll get married,’ Harkness said more or less to himself across Milligan’s monologue.

‘Why not do something more sensible? Like playing Russian Roulette.’

‘You don’t recommend it?’

‘I hope you’re not proposing. Just because I’m good at making breakfast. Actually, I’m spoken for. Wife and me are thinking of patching it up. True. I was with her for two or three hours last week and I didn’t feel like hitting her once. It must be love. She still hasn’t filed for a divorce, you know. It’s a sin. Once I’ve been there, I spoil them for everybody else.’

‘When’s this happening?’

‘Give it time. She’ll surrender. The kids are driving her daft. Use the house like an adventure playground. They need a father’s firm foot. Be a pity to leave my wee, snug bachelor-pad, mind you.’

‘You could force yourself.’

‘This could be the last time you get to crash down here. And that’s only the beginning. I’m going to show these bastards how a real polisman operates. I’ll embarrass them into promoting me.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘You know Paddy Collins?’

‘In the Victoria Infirmary? The stab-victim.’

‘Stab-victim? He’s got more holes than Haggs Castle. They didn’t know whether to bandage him or play a round on him. He’s been a dead man for days. They were just waiting for him to admit it. Last night he admitted it.’

‘You know who did it?’

‘No. But I will. I was with him a few times, but he never recovered consciousness. You know who he was?’

‘Paddy Collins.’

‘Aye. And Hitler was a housepainter. His name’s just Paddy Collins, but you know what his connection is? Cam Colvin’s brother-in-law. You know what that means?’

‘Paddy Collins might not be the only dead man.’

‘This could really be something big.’ Milligan’s blatant enthusiasm disconcerted Harkness, like someone offering guided tours of the mortuary. ‘Imagine it. I saw Cam’s sister at the hospital. She’s really into the grief-stricken widow routine. She’s had days to rehearse it. She’s getting good. Great, isn’t it? Her man’s always been a bigger shit than two tons of manure. Nasty to birds, nasty to blokes. Living off Cam Colvin’s reputation. Anybody who knew him would’ve voted him the man most worthy to be a corpse. But put him on a hospital bed and shove a tube up his nose, and it’s bring on the angel choirs. She’s going to make it seem like the end of the world. And Cam’s not going to like that. He’s going to want to give her a shroud to dry her tears. With somebody inside it. He can’t let it go.’