The Papers of Tony Veitch. William McIlvanneyЧитать онлайн книгу.
He sounds awfu’ like ’im. Good luck, anyway. It’s the only Eck Adamson Ah know.’
‘Thanks,’ Laidlaw said.
‘For what? Ah’ve enjoyed the chance tae rest ma leg. Cheers, boays.’
In their travels, they found a few isolated groups of derelicts and talked to them. One group round a fire directed them to the south side of the river. The information was probably as helpful as a wooden compass. But they had nothing else.
They crossed the river by the Suspension Bridge. Nothing happened for a time. But after a lot more walking, they saw five people behind the Caledonia Road Church. It was a striking moment. They were four men and a woman in a difficult conspiracy. One man had a bottle and a deep argument was going on. Plato never had it harder.
Against the backdrop of the church, they looked small and yet they put it in perspective. Burned in the sixties, the shell of the building remains a monument to nineteenth century confidence, an eroding certainty about what God’s like. They bickered stridently in its shadow like a rival sect.
‘Hullo there,’ Laidlaw said, and for Harkness the remark turned the day into another wavelength. Laidlaw’s attempt at conversation with them was like trying to communicate with a ship sinking in mid-Atlantic when you’re on the shore.
‘Furraff,’ one of them said, a small man whose face dereliction had made a gargoyle. ‘Furraff, is oors.’
The woman giggled, an eerily coquettish sound that belonged behind a fan. She looked at the small man with roguish appreciation, as if he had just produced one of his better epigrams. The other three were still ignoring Laidlaw and Harkness.
‘Furraff,’ the small man repeated.
He moved towards Laidlaw in a way that was both threatening and touching, a vaguely remembered style still carried around like an unloaded gun.
‘I just want to ask you something,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Did anybody here know Eck Adamson? I know you.’ Laidlaw pointed at the man with the bottle. ‘I’ve seen you with him.’
They all paused. The man with the bottle stood swaying, drawing his dignity round him like an opera cloak. His irises had a furry look.
‘Ah know all there is to know aboot boats,’ somebody said. ‘Can make a boat speak.’
‘I beg your pardon, captain,’ the man with the bottle said. ‘You were addressing me?’
The formal politeness was a bizarre anomaly in his state of savage ruin.
‘Yes,’ Laidlaw said. ‘You knew Eck Adamson.’
The man seemed to be leafing through a mental engagement-book of fair dimensions.
‘I have that pleasure.’
‘Had. He’s dead.’
‘Greedy wee man,’ somebody said.
‘Bereft,’ the man with the bottle said. ‘Bereft.’
He took a drink and passed it to the woman. While the others drank, Laidlaw explained what had happened and asked the man if he knew where Eck might have been hanging out lately. Only fragments seemed to register.
‘One of our favourite spots,’ the man said and started to walk. Laidlaw and Harkness went with him while the others straggled behind.
They didn’t have far to go. He stopped on a waste lot where the ashes of a dead fire suggested an abandoned camp-site. The man was nodding. The others joined them.
‘Did anyone get in touch with him that you saw?’ Laidlaw asked. ‘A stranger.’
‘A young man perhaps. A benefactor perhaps.’
Harkness understood Laidlaw’s expression. The questions were probably no more than the spurs to creative fantasy in the man. He had the drunk’s disconcerting technique of hibernating between remarks.
‘Yes. There was a young man. John? David? Alec? Patrick?’
‘Thanks,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Do you remember his second names as well?’
‘We don’t use second names here.’
‘He wouldny share,’ the small man said.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Had a bottle. Wouldny share. Basta.’
Laidlaw gave the dignified man a fifty-pence piece.
‘Many thanks. At the moment I’m slightly devoid of funds.’
They dispersed as vaguely as fog.
‘Useful information,’ Harkness said.
They were standing aimlessly on the waste lot.
‘Let’s look,’ Laidlaw said.
‘What for? A visiting card?’
‘Anything. Just bloody look!’
They did. After a dusty half-hour, Harkness turned up a bottle in a niche of the wall and hidden with loose bricks. It was a Lanliq wine-bottle with a screw top. It contained something dark.
Lifting it gingerly by the neck, Laidlaw unscrewed the cork and smelt. It meant nothing he recognised. He looked at Harkness.
‘We’ve got to go in and get a car anyway. Let’s take it with us.’
‘Sure,’ Harkness said. ‘We might get something back on the bottle.’
‘But I’m not humphing this. We’ll get a taxi.’
It seemed a simple enough idea but it led to one of those impromptu moments of Glaswegian cabaret in which the city abounds. Having flagged a cab down, Laidlaw, with a sense of camouflage that was instinctive to him, gave a destination near Pitt Street. And things began immediately with a green car pulling out without warning in front of their driver.
‘Away, you!’ their driver bellowed. ‘Ah hope yer wheels fa’ aff.’
He was a man who looked in his late thirties with thinning, curly hair and he was obviously an extreme sufferer from that contemporary ailment, urban choler.
‘Bastards,’ he said, jerking his head as if he was riding the world’s punches.
He was one of those taxi-drivers who do up their cab like a wee house on wheels. There was fancy carpeting and instead of advertisements on the base of the fold-up seats he had pasted on pictures of a couple of Highland scenes, the Three Sisters of Glencoe and the Ballachulish Ferry before the bridge was built. He had woollen baubles hanging from the inside mirror and plastic footballers, Rangers and Celtic, over the dashboard-switches. It was like taking a ride inside someone’s psyche.
‘Ye fancy some music, boays?’
His eyes in the mirror suggested refusal might be a capital offence. They murmured non-committally and he switched on a tape.
‘Magic him, intae? James Last, eh? Ye need somethin’ soothin’ in this job.’
There was an almost full bottle of Irn Bru wedged upside down between the meter and the luggage-door. As he talked, it began to seem that its purpose might be more than a thirst quencher.
‘Tell you two places Ah’ll no’ go.’ He said it as if they had turned up especially to enquire about his taboos. ‘Not any more. Blackhill and Garthamlock. No chance. Know why? Garthamlock. Take a bastard out there. In the back wi’ the biggest Alsation Ah’ve ever saw. Rin-Tin-Tin wi’ elephantiasis. Get there, no money. Gonny set his dog on me. Ah steps oot the cab. Before ye could say Jack Robinson, he’s hit me the awfiest kick in the knackers. Oot the gemme completely. Ma balls were like wattermelons. Ah wis walkin’ aboot like a cowboy for a week, wasn’t Ah? But he wisny clever. Knew roughly where he stayed, didn’t ah? Couple o’ the mates an’ me pay a wee visit, wait for him. We played at keepie-uppie wi’ his heid.