‘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.
37
Oedipus 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.