Strange Loyalties (33 page)

‘Marty's over in the corner.'

‘You do us a favour, Ricky?' I said. I gave him a tenner. ‘You get somebody behind the bar to bring us a pint of Eighty, a whisky and water, a gin and tonic and whatever Marty's drinking? And one for yourself.'

‘You want table service now?'

‘Just this once, Ricky. And a drink for whoever brings them over?'

‘I'll put it to the committee.'

Marty was brooding over a whisky that was dark enough to be a Jack Daniels. None of the young people had claimed the seats at his table, perhaps because the battered authority of his presence discouraged them. With his rough face and the eccentric pony-tail, he looked like somebody who had come to his own terms with experience and might act unpredictably out of them. We sat down with him.

‘How's Melanie?' I said.

‘Not so good,' Marty said. ‘She's in the toilet. Doin' repair work. She had a bad time?'

‘Threats were made. But they won't be carried out.'

‘Ah hope not.'

‘Melanie's going one place, Marty,' I said. ‘Matt Mason's going another. Never the twain shall meet.'

‘Ah don't know. Malice can wait a while. An' it's got long arms. You're goin' to have to use the tape.'

‘Maybe not. We'll see.'

A young man arrived with the drinks. While we were sorting them out, Melanie came out of the toilet. She was dressed in
her jeans and jacket again. She was carrying a couple of plastic bags which she offered to Edek. The small plastic bag contained Edek's microphone and transmitter, which he put in his leather shoulder-bag. I took the larger plastic bag and looked inside. It contained the dress and the coat.

‘Why not keep these?' I said.

‘What?'

‘You looked good in them. You like them?'

‘Yes. They felt good to wear.'

‘Then keep them. They might remind you of the day you did something really brave. Said, to hell with being a victim.'

Edek looked at me.

‘I'll pay,' I said.

‘Not out of police funds,' Melanie said.

‘Out of the pocket, Melanie,' I said. ‘It's not a bribe. It's a gift. Personal. All right?'

She smiled and nodded. Taking the bag back, she put it on the floor beside her chair. There came a brief, good time like a furlough from the front. Melanie was just about due to go for her flight and the excitement of where she was going softened the bleakness of where she had been. In spite of herself, she became animated. It was good to see. Marty's worries for her seemed to relax. She said she was glad to have confronted Matt Mason and to know the truth of the recent past. It might make the future less haunted. When Marty gently chivvied her about catching the flight, I saw, as she glanced round the room, a glimpsed fragment of the girl she must have been – interested in everything, nervous as a thoroughbred mare. We all stood up with her. We said our goodbyes. She embraced me.

‘You're some Melanie McHarg,' I said. ‘You did it all. The rest of us have just been on the sidelines. Good luck.'

‘The odds are against me, aren't they?'

‘The odds are against us all. So what?'

Then she said a nice thing to me. It was about time somebody did.

‘Why weren't you the first policeman I ever met?' she said. ‘It might have made a difference.'

I found an envelope in my pocket and wrote my name and number on it. I tore off the piece of paper and gave it to her.

‘You're in trouble,' I said, ‘you ring. Over there or back here. If it's just talk you need, we'll talk. If things are getting heavy, we know ways to get heavier. Don't be afraid.'

‘An' what about me?' Marty said.

‘If you could just learn to behave yourself, Marty, you would do us all a favour.'

He pouted a kiss at me.

‘While Ah'm waitin' for you, Jack. I will. I promise.'

As they were leaving, Edek looked at me. He nodded towards Marty.

‘Does that mean what Ah think it means?'

‘I don't think he was serious.'

‘Ah know, Ah know. But –'

‘Yes. That's Marty's tendency. He just deals with it on his own terms. The way he does with everything else. Anyway, who stole your scone? You've been very quiet. What are you thinking?'

‘I'm thinking,' Edek said, ‘that I'm glad I'm a sound recordist.'

‘Explain the mystery of your utterance, wise man,' I said.

‘I'll explain all right,' Edek said. ‘You're going to do
yourself in, Jack. That stuff at that house today. You think you can handle that and stay yourself? No chance. Ah don't even want to go near it. I want to do my job and have a pint and be with Jacqueline. Maybe climb the odd Munro at the weekend. You ever tried hill-climbing? You should. Each Munro is over three thousand feet. That's high enough for me. You like risk too much.'

‘What's the risk?'

‘The risk is to you. You're spending your life in a contagious diseases unit without inoculation. What have you got in your life to counteract the bad things you live among? No marriage. No structure to your life. Why do you do it?'

I began to wonder if he had been talking to Jan. I was glad that Bob and Brian came in.

‘Officialdom is with us,' Bob said. ‘Shall we go?'

I nodded. Edek was still looking worried about me as we left. I didn't realise I was about to find out why.

O
edipus lives. I had spent a week demanding that the malefactors come forward and show themselves. I hadn't thought that I might be one of them.

Brian Harkness had an address for Tommy Brogan and one for Chuck Walker. But Chuck Walker might be a problem. He was a younger man, in his thirties, and where he was on a Saturday afternoon could be a lot of places. He might be at the football. He liked gambling. He might be with one of the women who had discovered the expertly concealed secret of his attractiveness. He had been involved with many women, usually briefly. I had wondered about that. I had sometimes thought that his girlfriends had all been determined to prove once and for all that romantic love really doesn't exist, so that they could get on sensibly with their lives. If that was what they wanted to learn, they had come to the right teacher.

‘I've put Macey on him,' Brian said in the car. ‘If he can find him, he's going to phone in with the word. I hope it's not to tell us he's part of a football crowd.'

‘That would be all right,' Bob said. ‘He would be in the stand. These days, Chuck sees himself as above the terracing.'

‘Right enough,' Brian said. ‘Macey's word is that he's
involved with a high-tone woman. He'll be drinking daiquiris next.'

‘In a pint dish,' Bob said.

‘Then I hope he's had a few by the time we get to him. Might make him easier to handle. I don't fancy one to one with him.'

‘We've got the two back-up cars.'

‘That's right. If one car just stuns him, we can always knock him out with the other one.'

Tommy Brogan should be easier to locate. He had the social life of a leopard. Wanting only the company of his nearest and dearest, he lived alone. He had been briefly married but announced his equivalent of a Muslim divorce suddenly one night in a pub by dismantling a man who spoke to his wife: ‘I batter thee, I batter thee, I batter thee.' His wife's punishment was to be banned from his company forever, which was a bit like exiling someone to the Riviera.

His was one of the bleakest spirits I had so far met. He had done some boxing at one time and something in him was still waiting for the final bell. The staple diet of his life was keeping his body fit. A treat would be using it against someone else. I remembered Frankie White telling me that he had trained Dan Scoular. That must have been a strange convergence for the big man: welcome to the planet Mars.

He lived on the way out to Rutherglen. We put a car at each end of the street before we drew up at the door. It was a reconditioned tenement but the street door still opened without mechanical control. One floor up, the nameplate said ‘Brogan', nothing else, as if telling the world not to get personal. Bob Lilley knocked at the door. The footsteps that
came towards it were light. He opened up and took in the three of us, face by face.

‘If it's for the Policemen's Fund,' he said, ‘Ah gave.'

‘Can we come in?' Bob said

‘Well, Ah don't know anybody that's found a way to stop your lot from doin' that yet.'

He walked along the hall into the living-room. We closed the door and followed him. He was in his stockinged feet. I was surprised again at how comparatively small he was. His reputation exuded size. Seen now, he was quite small and neat, like a frame on film before it is projected. The projector was his preparedness for violence.

He stood in the middle of the floor and looked at us. I saw him in his habitat. It was a very tidy room. The newspapers were in the elasticated newspaper-rack. The glass coffee-table had nothing on it. On the sideboard there was one large, framed photograph of an elderly woman. I assumed it was his mother. It was certainly someone who would never speak to strange men in pubs. It was a room where nothing would happen except what he decided, until today. The television, which he had perhaps turned down before he came to the door, was showing sports results. It broadcast a routine that was no longer audible.

‘Yes?' Tommy Brogan said into the silence.

‘We're here to arrest you for murder, Tommy,' Bob said and gave him the official caution, word perfect.

Tommy Brogan looked at the television as if he was checking an especially interesting result. He looked at Bob.

‘Ye wouldn't happen to have the name of the murderee on ye, would ye?'

‘Meece Rooney,' Bob said.

‘Meece Rooney? What kinda name is that?'

‘Put your shoes on,' Bob said.

‘This is crap,' Tommy Brogan said. ‘Ah don't even know the man.'

‘We'll show you photos,' Bob said. ‘Get ready, Tommy.'

‘Who told ye this?'

‘We just know.'

‘No. You don't know. Because it never happened. Ye're makin' a bad mistake here. Ye'll finish up lookin' pretty pathetic.'

‘Not quite as pathetic as Meece. Come on.'

‘Well, it's your funeral. Ah'll come with ye.'

‘That's nice,' Bob said.

Tommy Brogan made as if to move and then paused. He assessed the three of us. He seemed to be making a decision. His look to me was saying something like, ‘If it wis just one against three, Ah would win. But there's more of ye out there, isn't there?' The moment tremored on a dangerous silence. He stirred and crossed the floor and sat down to put on his shoes. The unfulfilled possibility he left behind him opened a chasm in my preconceived sense of things. It was a dizzying prospect. I would have thought there was no choice but to come with us. But he had, however briefly, imagined an alternative. In that realisation I glimpsed the terrible logic of his life. Faced with nothingness like stone, he was always tempted to paint on it in blood the violent shape of his will.

When he went through to the bedroom to get ready, Brian went with him. Bob and I looked at each other. I walked about the room.

I was angry. The anger came from a disproportion between the offence and the reparation. This was all? Those wilfully damaged lives, those invented deaths were to be paid for so casually. A small, unfeeling man would put on his shoes and jacket and be chauffeured to jail. In his indifference to what he had done, he enraged me even more than he had in the doing of it. This wasn't enough. Something more, a black angel whispered in me. I hoped he came out of the bedroom fighting. But he walked calmly back into the room wearing a sports jacket, with Brian after him. He went to the television and switched it off and turned and smiled at us. The bright images of a football game fused into black behind him. As casually as he had darkened the lives of others, he would accept the darkening of his own. I understood he was in prison already. What more could we do to him but exchange one cell for another? Perhaps there are those who cannot be punished more because they are their own punishment.

The message from Macey was that Chuck Walker was in a bar with the sophisticated woman. Macey would be waiting outside. He had told us where to meet him. Driving there, with Tommy Brogan handcuffed in one of the cars behind us, I barely noticed the day. The sense of anti-climax in me was like inertia. The unexpected reawakened me.

Macey wasn't there. The three of us got out of the car to look around. Bob went and told the other policemen to stay in their cars. While Brian and Bob and I were standing in the busy street wondering what to do next, Brian suddenly said, ‘There he's!'

I thought he meant Macey. Some distance away I saw Macey's sharply dressed figure signalling to us among the people. It
was a few seconds later that I noticed what Macey's signals meant. Chuck Walker was in the street with a tall, blonde woman. They were an interesting couple, the lady and the rottweiler. They were nearer to us than Macey was. They were coming towards us. Even as we saw him, he saw something else.

It must have been an amazing image for him, like glancing sideways in a mirror and seeing a skeleton's head. He had already passed the first police car when he looked casually into the second and saw Tommy Brogan in the back. Then he saw us over the heads of the crowds in the street. He spun and noticed the other car. He turned back towards us and then he wasn't there. There were the people jostling in the street and there was the woman among them, still unaware of the suddenness with which relationships can end. Seeking to avoid bumping the passers-by, she was holding up the expensive plastic bag, which presumably contained something they had shopped for – instant memento.

We were trying to force our way through the mob and the other policemen had come out of the cars and there was no sign of him. We were separated and moving around aimlessly when I looked through the window of a café. I saw the man behind the counter looking around him. Something had happened he didn't understand. I went in. The place was busy and some of the people at the tables had the same ruffled appearance as the owner, as if a sudden wind had blown through the place. I stared at the owner. He was frightened. He looked towards his back shop.