Laidlaw Read online

  Also by William McIlvanney

  The Laidlaw Investigations

  The Papers of Tony Veitch

  Strange Loyalties

  Other novels

  The Big Man

  Remedy is None

  A Gift from Nessus

  Docherty

  The Kiln

  Weekend

  This edition published by Canongate Books in 2013

  This digital edition first published in 2013 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © William McIlvanney, 1977

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  First published in Great Britain in 1977 by Hodder and Stoughton Ltd

  Published in Great Britain in 2013 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE

  www.canongate.tv

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 0 85786 986 9

  eISBN 978 0 85786 997 5

  Typeset in Perpetua by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  1

  Running was a strange thing. The sound was your feet slapping the pavement. The lights of passing cars batted your eyeballs. Your arms came up unevenly in front of you, reaching from nowhere, separate from you and from each other. It was like the hands of a lot of people drowning. And it was useless to notice these things. It was as if a car had crashed, the driver was dead, and this was the radio still playing to him.

  A voice with a cap on said, ‘Where’s the fire, son?’

  Running was a dangerous thing. It was a billboard advertising panic, a neon sign spelling guilt. Walking was safe. You could wear strolling like a mask. Stroll. Strollers are normal.

  The strangest thing was no warning. You wore the same suit, you chose your tie carefully, there was a mistake about your change on the bus. Half-an-hour before it, you had laughed. Then your hands were an ambush. They betrayed you. It happened so quickly. Your hands, that lifted cups and held coins and waved, were suddenly a riot, a brief raging. The consequence was forever.

  And the meaning of everything was changed. It had no meaning or too many meanings, all of them mysterious. Your body was a strange place. Hands were ugly. Inside, you were all hiding-places, dark corners. Out of what burrows in you had the creatures come that used you? They came from nowhere that you knew about.

  But there was nowhere that you knew about, not even this place where you came and stood among people, as if you were a person. You could see who people thought was you in the mottled glass. His hair was black, his eyes were brown, his mouth wasn’t screaming. You hated his ugliness. There was a green bottle with what looked like a fern inside it. There was a nose with enormous nostrils. On the black surface there were cloudy streaks where the wipings of a cloth had dried. A man was talking.

  ‘See ma wife, son.’ He was speaking towards where you should be standing. ‘See when Ah go in here the night? Be like The Sands of Iwo Jima. Ah’ve been away since yesterday mornin’. Met an old mate yesterday after ma work. Christ, we had a night at his place. One half borrowed another, ye know? Ah wis helpin’ him to get over his wife. Died ten year ago.’ He was drinking. ‘Ah think Ah’ll go out an’ get knocked down. Give me an excuse.’

  You used to think things like that could be a problem, too. You cried when you broke a vase your mother liked. You hid the pieces in a cupboard. You worried about being late, offending somebody, things you shouldn’t have said. That time wouldn’t come again.

  Everything had changed. You could walk for as long as you liked in this city. It wouldn’t know you. You could call every part of it by name. But it wouldn’t answer. St George’s Cross was only cars, inventing destinations for the people in them. The cars controlled the people. Sauchiehall Street was a graveyard of illuminated tombstones. Buchanan Street was an escalator bearing strangers.

  George Square. You should have known it. How many times had you waited for one of the buses that ran all through the night? The Square rejected you. Your past meant nothing. Even the black man on the black horse was from another country, a different time. Sir John Moore. ‘They buried him darkly at dead of night.’ Who told you his name? An English teacher who was always tired. Yawner Johnson. He told you interesting things between yawns. But he hadn’t told you the truth. Nobody had. This was the truth.

  You were a monster. How had you managed to hide from yourself for so long? Some conjuring trick – to juggle smiles and nods and knives and forks and walks for the bus and turning the pages of a paper, for twenty years to make your life a blur behind which what was really you could hide. Until it came to introduce itself. I am you.

  George Square was nothing to do with you. It belonged to the three boys walking tightrope on the back of a bench, to the people waiting in the bus-queues to go home. You could never go home again.

  You could only walk and be rejected by the places where you walked, except the derelict tenements. They were big darknesses housing old griefs, terrible angers. They were prisons for the past. They welcomed ghosts.

  The entry was dank. The darkness was soothing. You groped through smells. The soft hurryings must be rats. There was a stairway that would have been dangerous for someone who had anything to lose. At the top a door was broken. It could be pushed closed. Some light came in very dimly from the street. The room was very empty, some plaster from the ceiling on the floor.

  It was strange how little blood there was, just some dark flecks on the trousers, so that you could imagine it had never happened. But it had happened. You were here. The body had been like leprosy. You were the leper, a contamination crouched and rocking on its haunches.

  The loneliness was what you had made of yourself. The coldness was right. You would be alone from now on. It was what you deserved. Outside, the city hated you. Perhaps it had always excluded you. It had always been so sure of itself, so full of people who didn’t open doors tentatively, who had a cocky walk. It was a hard city. Now all its hardness was against you. It was a mob of bitter faces turned towards you, it was a crowd of angers all directed against you. You had no chance.

  Nothing to do. Sit becoming what you are. Admit yourself, the just hatred of every other person. Nowhere in all the city could there be anyone to understand what you had done, to share it with you. No one, no one.

  2

  Laidlaw sat at his desk, feeling a bleakness that wasn’t unfamiliar to him. Intermittently, he found himself doing penance for being him. When the mood seeped into him, nothing mattered. He could think of no imaginable success, no way of life, no dream of wishes fulfilled that would satisfy.

  Last night and this morning hadn’t helped. He had finally left Bob Lilley and the rest still on the surveillance in Dumfri
es. On the strength of solid information, they had followed the car from Glasgow. By a very devious route it had taken them to Dumfries. As far as he knew, that was where it was still parked – in the waste lot beside the pub. Nothing had happened. Instead of catching them in the act of breaking in, three hours of picking your nose. He had left them to it and come back to the office, gloom sweet gloom.

  It was strange how this recurring feeling had always been a part of him. Even when he was a child, it had been present in its own childish form. He remembered nights when the terror of darkness had driven him through to his parents’ room. He must have run for miles on that bed. It wouldn’t have surprised him if his mother had had to get the sheets re-soled. Then it had been bats and bears, wolves running round the wallpaper. The spiders were the worst, big, hairy swines, with more legs than a chorus-line.

  Now the monsters were simultaneously less exotic and less avoidable. He was drinking too much – not for pleasure, just sipping it systematically, like low proof hemlock. His marriage was a maze nobody had ever mapped, an infinity of habit and hurt and betrayal down which Ena and he wandered separately, meeting occasionally in the children. He was a policeman, a Detective Inspector, and more and more he wondered how that had happened. And he was nearly forty.

  He looked at the clutter on his desk. It was as if on the desert island of his feeling this was all that chance had left him to work with: the two black-bound books of Scottish Criminal Law and Road Traffic Law, the red MacDonald’s, establishing precedents, and the blue book on stated cases, the telex-file on British crime, the folder of case-reports. He wondered how you were supposed to improvise fulfilment out of that lot.

  He was aware of the neatness of Bob Lilley’s desk across from him. Did neatness mean contentment? He glanced over to the pin-board on the wall facing the door: shifts, departmental memoranda, a photograph of ‘The Undertaker’ – a con-man Laidlaw liked – overtime payments, a list of names for a Crime-Squad Dinner Dance. ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruin.’

  Guilt was the heart of this kind of mood, he reflected, and it surprised him again to realise it. The need to be constantly sifting the ashes of his past certainly hadn’t been inculcated in him by his parents. They had done what they could to give him himself as a present. Perhaps it was just that, born in Scotland, you were hanselled with remorse, set up with shares in Calvin against your coming of age, so that much of the energy you expended came back guilt. His surely did.

  He felt his nature anew as a wrack of paradox. He was potentially a violent man who hated violence, a believer in fidelity who was unfaithful, an active man who longed for understanding. He was tempted to unlock the drawer in his desk where he kept Kierkegaard, Camus and Unamuno, like caches of alcohol. Instead, he breathed out loudly and tidied the papers on his desk. He knew nothing to do but inhabit the paradoxes.

  He was looking through the Collator’s Report when the phone rang. He looked at it for a moment as if he could stare it down. Then his hand picked it up before he wanted it to.

  ‘Yes. Laidlaw.’ The hardness and firmness of the voice was a wonder to the person crouched behind it – a talking foetus!

  ‘Jack. Bert Malleson. You did say anything of interest that came up, you wanted to know. Well, I’ve got Bud Lawson here.’

  ‘Bud Lawson?’

  ‘Remember a case of severe assault? It’s a while ago now. But it was in the city-centre. It was a Central Division case. But the Squad was in on it. In the lane between Buchanan Street and Queen Street Station. The victim almost died. Bud Lawson was suspected. But nothing was proved. There was a connection. Some kind of grudge.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, he’s here now. Seems a bit strange to me. He’s reporting his daughter missing. Because she didn’t come back from the dancing last night. But it’s only a few hours. I’m wondering about that. I thought you might want to speak to him.’

  Laidlaw waited. He was tired, would soon be home. This was Sunday. He just wanted to lie in it like a sauna-bath, scratch his ego where it itched. But he understood what Sergeant Malleson was wondering. Policemen tended not to see what was there in their anxiety to see what was behind it. Zowie, my X-ray vision. But perhaps there was something in it.

  ‘Yes. I’ll see him.’

  ‘I’ll have him brought up.’

  Laidlaw put down the phone and waited. Hearing the noise of the lift, he brought Bob Lilley’s chair across in front of his own desk and sat back down. He heard the voices approaching, one frantic, the other calm, like ravaged penitent and weary priest. He couldn’t hear what they were saying. He wasn’t impatient to find out. There was a knocking. He waited for the inevitable pause to pass. What was he supposed to be doing, hiding the dirty pictures? The door opened and Roberts showed the man in.

  Laidlaw stood up. He remembered Bud Lawson. His wasn’t a face for forgetting. Angry, it belonged on a medieval church. Laidlaw had seen him angry in outrage, demanding that they bring out their proof, as if he was going to have a fist-fight with it. But he wasn’t angry now, or at least he was as near to not being angry as was possible for him – which meant his anger was displaced. It was in transit, like a lorry-load of iron, and he was looking for someone to dump it on. His jacket had been thrown on over an open-necked shirt. A Rangers football-scarf was spilling out from the lapels.

  Looking at him, Laidlaw saw one of life’s vigilantes, a retribution-monger. For everything that happened there was somebody else to blame, and he was the very man to deal with them. Laidlaw was sure his anger didn’t stop at people. He could imagine him shredding ties that wouldn’t knot properly, stamping burst tubes of toothpaste into the floor. His face looked like an argument you couldn’t win.

  ‘Sit down, Mr Lawson,’ Laidlaw said.

  He didn’t sit, he subsided. His hands were clenched on his knees, a couple of smaller megaliths. But the eyes were jumpy. They were trying, Laidlaw decided, to keep track of all the possibilities that were swarming through his head. In that moment Laidlaw was sure Bud Lawson’s concern was genuine. For the first time, he admitted Sergeant Malleson’s suspicion explicitly to his mind, in order to reject it.

  With that realisation, Laidlaw felt a twinge of compassion for Bud Lawson. He remembered the pressure they had put on him before, and he regretted it. So Bud Lawson was a mobile quarrel with the world. Who knew the grounds he had? And doubtless there were worse things to be. Whatever else was true, he seemed to care about his daughter.

  Laidlaw sat down at his desk. He brought the scribbling-pad nearer to him.

  ‘Tell me about it, Mr Lawson,’ Laidlaw said.

  ‘It might be nothin’, like.’

  Laidlaw watched him.

  ‘Ah mean Ah jist don’t know. Ye know? But Sadie the wife’s goin’ off her head wi’ worry. It’s never happened before. Never as late as this.’

  Laidlaw checked his watch. It was half-past five in the morning.

  ‘Your daughter hasn’t come home?’

  ‘That’s right.’ The man looked as if he was realising it for the first time. ‘At least when Ah left home she hadn’t.’

  Laidlaw saw a new fear jostle the others in the man’s eyes – the fear that he was making a fool of himself here while his daughter was home in bed.

  ‘How long ago was that?’

  ‘Maybe a couple of hours.’

  ‘It took you a while to get here.’

  ‘Ah’ve been lookin’. Ah’ve got the auld motor, ye see. Ah cruised around a bit.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Places. Jist anywhere. Around the city. Ah’ve been demented. Then when I was in the centre anyway Ah remembered this place.’ He said it like a challenge. ‘An’ Ah came in.’

  Laidlaw reflected that something like a stolen bicycle would have been more concrete. Bud Lawson had got away ahead of the probabilities. What he needed wasn’t a policeman, it was a sedative. The main purpose of what Laidlaw was going to say next would be lay therapy.

  �
�You’d better tell me it from the beginning.’

  The man’s confusion funnelled through a filter onto Laidlaw’s pad.

  Jennifer Lawson (age 18). 24 Ardmore Crescent, Drumchapel. Left the house 7.00 p.m., Saturday 19th. Wearing denim trouser-suit, yellow platform shoes, red tee-shirt with a yellow sun on the chest, carrying brown shoulder-bag. Height five feet eight inches, slim build, shoulder-length black hair. Mole on left temple. (‘Ah mind that because when she wis wee, she worried aboot it. Thocht it wid spoil her chances with the boys. Ye know whit lassies are like.’) Occupation: shop-girl (Treron’s). Stated destination: Poppies Disco.

  It looked neat on paper. On Bud Lawson’s face it was a mess. But Laidlaw had done all he could. He had been a pair of professional ears.

  ‘Well, Mr Lawson. There’s nothing we can do at present. I’ve got a description. We’ll see if anything turns up.’

  ‘Ye mean that’s it?’

  ‘It’s a bit early to declare a national emergency, Mr Lawson.’

  ‘Ma lassie’s missin’.’

  ‘We don’t know that, Mr Lawson. Are you on the phone?’

  ‘Naw.’

  ‘She could’ve missed a bus. She wouldn’t be able to inform you. She could be staying with a friend.’

  ‘Whit freen’? Ah’d like tae see her try it?’

  ‘She is an adult person, Mr Lawson.’

  ‘Is she hell! She’s eighteen. Ah’ll tell her when she’s an adult. That’s the trouble nooadays. Auld men before their feythers. Ah stand for nothin’ like that in ma hoose. Noo whit the hell are yese goin’ to do aboot this?’

  Laidlaw said nothing.

  ‘Oh aye. Ah might’ve known. It’s because it’s me, isn’t it? Ye wid jump soon enough if it wis somebody else.’

  Laidlaw was shaking his head. His compassion was getting exhausted.

  ‘Ah refuse tae be victimised. Ah want some action. D’ye hear me? Ah want something done.’ His voice was rising. ‘That’s the trouble wi’ the whole bloody world. Naebody bothers.’

  ‘Here!’ Laidlaw said. His hand was up. The traffic stopped. Laidlaw was leaning across the desk towards him. ‘I’m a policeman, Mr Lawson. Not a greaseproof poke. You put your philosophy of life on a postcard and post it anywhere you like. But don’t give it to me.’