From where he stood now, Laidlaw saw the people in casualty as extras with delusions of grandeur. Their declarations of their nature seemed outrageously crude. Their stridency was apprentice stuff. This man bore witness to all of us without melodrama. He was honed to the act of breathing. He made no further claims, his humility was absolute. Pull a plug and he died.
Some sounds were coming from the first cubicle on the right. Laidlaw assumed that was where his man must be. Sure enough, the sister who had treated him like bacteria was now beckoning him into the cubicle.
Coming round the partition with some trepidation, he experienced the shock you feel when you see death engaged with someone you know. All the past confident moments count for nothing. You realise that you want death always to be anonymous. Otherwise, it’s got a fix on you.
He saw the confirmation of a suspicion that had already been forming. It was Eck Adamson. And if he wasn’t dying, Laidlaw was immortal.
A doctor came between Laidlaw and the bed. He was Indian, young and delicately handsome. His voice was a startlingly pleasant contrast to the gutturals of Glasgow, soft with the consonants and original with the intonations, a sari in Townhead.
‘Now you may see your friend, if you wish. We are about to put him on a ventilating machine. The thing which is the most essential at the moment will be to stabilise the breathing. If you can get through to him, you must see if you can learn what has happened.’
Laidlaw nodded. The first thing that struck him was that this was the cleanest context in which he had ever seen Eck. They made you nice for dying. Only the several days’ growth hinted at the kind of life Eck had come from; that and the eyes. Always jumpy, they had now gone completely over the top, darting crazily, as if Eck knew finally that the world was out to mug him. The doctor and nurses were waiting to relieve him of himself.
‘Eck,’ Laidlaw said. ‘It’s Jack Laidlaw.’
As he repeated it, Eck’s eyes passed him several times but kept coming back until they hovered on him, still mobile, but at least moving within the orbit of Laidlaw’s presence. They didn’t settle on his face but seemed to take in different parts of him, as if Eck was piecing Laidlaw together like a jigsaw. Eck was trying to speak.
‘Right,’ Laidlaw heard.
‘Right,’ he replied.
‘Right.’
‘Right.’
Eck’s head jerked in distress.
‘Write it doon,’ Laidlaw thought he was saying.
Laidlaw found an envelope in his pocket and took out a pen.
‘What happened to you, Eck?’
But he might as well have tried to talk to a teleprinter. Eck was receiving no messages. On the last of himself he was sending out information. His pain was obvious. The way he dragged the words out past it suggested they were very important to him. Listening, Laidlaw wondered why.
Eck was incoherent. He spoke like someone after a stroke, afflicted with that slow-motion glottal drunkenness that compounds the grief of physical trauma by rendering its expression of itself idiot. Out of the distorted mouthings, like a record played too slow, Laidlaw thought he could decipher one repeated statement. He wrote, more out of respect for the disintegrating identity he had known than because of any significance he saw in the words, ‘The wine he gave me wisny wine.’
He could catch nothing else. It was like eavesdropping on a riot. Eck’s desperate distress intensified and the doctor stepped forward.
‘The gentleman can wait in my room,’ he said.
A nurse led Laidlaw to the end of the ward and showed him into a small place partitioned off from the rest. There was just enough room to lie down in. Laidlaw sat on the single bed.
He looked at the back of his envelope, the last will and testament of Eck Adamson. He remembered reading about a cleaner who had worked in a lawyer’s office. On her deathbed she had regurgitated swathes of legal Latin. Eck was getting close.
It was maybe fitting that what looked like being Eck’s last piece of information should come across like Linear B. As a tout, he had never been too useful. But Laidlaw had always liked him and once, in the Bryson case, he had helped Laidlaw more than he could know.
Things had gone quiet beyond the partition and the doctor appeared. He shook his head.
‘I am sorry,’ he said with that formal timing a foreign language can give.
Laidlaw put the envelope in his pocket.
‘He was your friend?’
Laidlaw thought about it.
‘Maybe I was about as close as he got. What did he die of?’
‘I can’t tell at the moment. Who is he?’
‘Alexander Adamson. He was a vagrant. In the winter he slept in doss-houses. Summer, wherever he could. I don’t know of any relatives. What an epitaph.’
Laidlaw remembered one night finding Eck sleeping across a pavement grille outside Central Station. He was using the heat that came up from the kitchen of the Central Hotel. These were the obsequies to that bleak life, a few sentences between strangers.
‘It wasn’t bad for him at the end,’ the doctor said. ‘He died quietly.’
Laidlaw nodded. Like a leaf.
‘I want a fiscal post mortem.’
‘Of course. It is procedure.’
‘Today? I would like it today.’
‘We shall have to see.’
‘Yes. We will.’
On his way out to the car, Laidlaw looked in at casualty again. The boy with the bloodstained jacket was gone. A nurse showed him Eck’s things in a brown envelope: an empty tin with traces of shag, a stopped watch, seven single pounds and a grubby piece of paper. Unfolding the paper, Laidlaw read a handwritten statement in biro.
The Puritan Fallacy is that there can be virtue by default. You do the right thing because you don’t know any worse. That is society’s Woolworth substitute for morality. True morality begins in choice: the greater the choice, the greater the morality. Only those can be truly good who have prospected their capacity for evil. Idealism is the censorship of reality.
Ranged neatly beneath that statement were an address in Pollokshields, the names Lynsey Farren and Paddy Collins, the words ‘The Crib’ and the number 9464946 in black biro.
Laidlaw’s first responses were practical. He noted that the handwriting was the same throughout and then that the written paragraph was in blue ink. It suggested to him that the bit of hand-woven philosophy had just happened to be on the piece of paper when the same person had added the other information. For the use of Eck?
Certainly the first part had surely not been meant for Eck. Beyond perhaps an instinctively Pascalian response to the two-thirty, Eck had never evinced any interest in philosophy. But neither did the addresses seem to fit. Pollokshields, where the money grows, was hardly Eck’s territory. The number was meaningless to Laidlaw. Only ‘The Crib’ made any kind of sense.
Then, like humanity supplanting professionalism, a slight chill came over Laidlaw as he held the piece of paper. Trying to locate where the feeling came from, he read over the paragraph again. Perhaps it was just that he sensed a dangerously distorted version of that Calvinist self-righteousness that forms like an icicle in the hearts of a lot of Scots. He wondered who had given Eck this strange message.
Looking up, he had his gloom partly dissipated by the pleasant round face of the nurse, who was preoccupied in doing practical things. She reminded him he’d better do the same.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I need this. You want me to sign for it?’