The voice was light and flat and it made the talking clock sound effusive.
‘Not a clue,’ Dave said. ‘Ah don’t think he’s at home the night. Can ah give him a message?’
Cam walked past Dave through to the other room. He came back into the doorway.
‘Put on the lights,’ he said to Charlie.
Charlie did. While Cam was gone, Panda Paterson was studying the girl as if she was on the menu.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked her.
‘None of yer business,’ Sammy said.
The sound of his voice shocked even him. It had happened by a kind of spontaneous combustion, an accident of the atmosphere. He had become so involved in his awareness of this place, which he had heard of, in the presence of Dave and the others that he had spoken somehow from his sense of them rather than himself. He was left looking round glumly as if trying to find whose voice had come out of his mouth. Panda was studying him like a culture.
‘Her name’s Lynsey,’ Dave said. ‘An’ she’s mine.’
Panda looked at him.
‘Ye’re goin’ wi’ a male chauvinist pig, hen,’ he said. ‘You’re Dave McMaster.’
‘Ah know who ah am. Who are you?’
Dave’s brash ignorance was one of the things about him that worried Charlie. Some day he was going to drown himself playing at Canutes.
‘Ah’ll have a pint of heavy,’ Panda said.
Charlie was filling it out as Cam Colvin came back through. His face showed nothing. He looked at Dave.
‘Tell Hook I want to see ’im,’ he said. ‘Macey. You can bring me word. Where and when. But don’t be slow. Tell Hook that.’
Panda Paterson took his pint from the bar. He crossed as if to join the others and began to pour the pint very carefully over Sammy’s head. Charlie suspected Panda was staging an exhibition for Cam’s benefit. Mickey Ballater’s face was impenetrable.
It was a long, long time happening. It was an act of astonishing cruelty, far more sadistic than striking him would have been. The slower that gentle decanting was, the more fully it demonstrated Sammy’s abjectness. The others watched him pass from shock to a strangled anger to a smothered attempt to get up, to a terrible understanding of himself. He closed his eyes and became as still as a corpse. By the time Panda Paterson almost solicitously shook out the last dregs, Sammy’s shame was in poster colours. The others could hardly bear to look. Panda laid the glass gently on the table, as empty as Sammy’s sense of himself.
Cam Colvin had been looking on disinterestedly, seemingly preoccupied with something else.
‘Tell Hook,’ he said and went out, followed by the other two.
Dave didn’t let the silence settle.
‘Get him a cloth!’ he said contemptuously.
It wasn’t clear where the contempt was aimed. While nobody else moved, Charlie brought a dishcloth and wiped Sammy the way a mother would.
‘Tae hell wi’ it, son,’ Charlie said. ‘Nothin’ wis the right thing to do. Ah would’ve done the same maself. That wis a catchweights contest. You could never be as big a bastard as he could. That’s pure bastard. When he wis wee, he wis showin’ old women half-way across the road. Leave it to John.’
The humanity of Charlie’s voice began to thaw the room. The girl said, ‘Phoo.’ Macey touched Sammy on the shoulder.
‘Forget it, kid,’ he said, which was like throwing a strip of Elastoplast to a napalm victim. ‘So what was that about?’
‘Trouble,’ Dave McMaster said. ‘For somebody.’
6
Ena had an old script ready for him getting back. It was the one where she was Rome and he was Attila the Hun. His share of the lasagna lay vandalised with absence, congealed in its own grease. The guests were gone, Ena hinting at a flowering of deep communication he had missed. With his last look at Eck’s dead face still fresh in his mind, he had trouble remembering his lines.
She said the bit about his social poise. This time he was as suave as King Kong. She was so genteel she should be sewn on to a sampler. He was a monument to selfishness. Faced with concern like hers, everybody could die of frostbite. He had certainly done his utmost to make Donald and Ria hate him. With enemies like them, who needed friends?
The vaudeville of mechanical insult over, Ena went to bed and Laidlaw half-filled a glass with Antiquary and topped it up with water. He went to the phone, hoping he would be lucky enough to get somebody he knew and got on with – not the easiest trick, he thought ruefully. He was lucky. The Duty Fiscal was Robbie Evans.
‘Yes, Jack. What news from the front?’
Laidlaw told him about Eck.
‘You suspect more than natural causes?’
‘It just seems possible.’
‘Like what?’
‘Poison?’
‘How could you tell? Isn’t that what he’s been doing to himself for years?’
‘Just as long as he did it to himself. There’ll be a fiscal p.m. anyway. I would just like to make sure it happens as soon as possible. Like this morning. He looked as if he might have been a fair time dying. If somebody did do him, any clues are going to be cold. I’d like to try for them before they get deep-frozen.’
‘We’ll see to that. Ruined your night, did it?’
‘Aye. It didn’t help Eck’s a lot either.’
‘You can phone for word tomorrow, Jack.’
‘Thanks.’
He sipped some of his Antiquary and went up to check the children. After he had seen bad things, that was a compulsion with him. He remembered an occasion years ago when he was still in uniform, not in Glasgow, and he had been the one to arrive first at the scene of a murder. The victim was a homosexual who had been tortured by two young men he had picked up in a lavatory and taken to his flat. One of the young men was an apprentice butcher and for a finale, after the homosexual was strangled, he had cut him from groin to breast-bone and gutted him like a chicken. The butcher had said later, ‘He wisny normal.’
At that time, Moya had just been born and Laidlaw had found himself checking up on her so often it felt like sentry-duty. Big bad world, I’ve got my eye on you.
Tonight they were fine. Moya, at eleven, slept almost smiling, as if she had a secret. It looked like a sensuous one. Her body was softening these days and her face withdrawing into thoughtfulness. The good problems were coming. At ten, Sandra looked younger than her age, still seemed to have ambitions to make it as a boy. In the box-room Jackie lay in his usual elaborate abandon, like an accident. He was seven. They were fine.
He came downstairs and took a header into his drink, filled out another. He wondered about reading something. But everything seemed a bit far from Eck lying dead in the Royal. He thought about Eck. He felt a small need to tell someone who might care. Everybody’s dying should matter to somebody. The more people who cared, the closer you came to some kind of humanist salvation. There was no other he could believe in.
He remembered that since he had worked with Brian Harkness they had talked to Eck a few times. Brian had met Eck on the Bryson case.
Laidlaw went to the phone. It was early morning already but he rang. It took a lot of ringing before Brian’s father answered. Brian wasn’t home. Laidlaw apologised. Brian’s father was a nice man who had met Laidlaw several times and who seemed to exempt him from his general