‘Mr Rhodes thought you might take a splash,’ he explained.
‘Mr Rhodes is well informed, but I think I need a breather. It’s like all the air’s been sucked out of this place and replaced by testosterone.’
‘You’re not waiting for Chick?’
‘While every ear in the place listens in?’ Laidlaw shook his head and polished off the dregs in his glass. The same row of faces stood at the bar as he made his exit. He blew each of them a kiss.
It wasn’t quite raining outside, but dusk was falling, the headlights of cars and buses picking out pedestrians shuffling home from work or shopping. Their world was not his and they wouldn’t thank him for sharing. He wondered if Glasgow would always be like this. Change had to come, surely. Jobs couldn’t keep vanishing, the gangs becoming more feral, people’s lives more fraught. But then a young mother trundled past pushing a pram, transfixed by it as if she had just invented the world’s first baby. To her, Laidlaw didn’t exist. To her, nothing mattered except the new life she was nurturing and nothing in the world was off kilter as long as that nurturing continued uninterrupted.
‘Hope springs eternal,’ he found himself saying out loud. He remembered his old school pal Tom Docherty. They’d spent many a night as students quoting poetry and exchanging the names of cult authors, usually in the Admiral pub, usually between games of darts or cards or dominoes. But Laidlaw had quit his course after one year and he didn’t know where Tom was. His brother Scott might know, but Laidlaw didn’t really know his whereabouts either. Like Tom, Scott had dreamed of becoming a writer some day, either that or an artist. The last news Laidlaw had had was that he was teaching in their old home town of Graithnock. An address or phone number would be simple enough to find, but something had stopped him thus far. His feeling was, Scott hadn’t made the effort so why should he? The old Scots word ‘thrawn’ came to mind. The two brothers had always locked horns, maybe too similar to one another for their own good. It hadn’t helped that Laidlaw had joined the police — switching sides, as Scott, always the first to the barricades, would have put it.
The taxi that drew to a halt in front of him seemed more of a private chauffeur service, no money changing hands as the passenger stepped out onto the pavement.
‘Perks of the job?’ Laidlaw asked conversationally, receiving a glower in response. ‘I’m the man you’re here to see,’ he explained. ‘Always supposing you’re Chick McAllister.’
‘We not going in?’ McAllister enquired. He was tall, early twenties, with thick waves of hair falling over his ears and neck. The amount of denim he wore reminded Laidlaw that he should buy shares in Lee Cooper.
‘This won’t take long,’ Laidlaw informed him. ‘In fact, you should have told your driver to wait. All I’m wanting to ask is, did you stab Bobby Carter to death a few nights back?’
McAllister’s mouth opened a fraction in disbelief. ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’
‘You knew he was seeing your old girlfriend.’
‘They’d already split up, though.’
‘And how did you feel about that?’
‘Mr Rhodes said I had to talk to you, but I’m thinking maybe that’s a bad idea.’
‘What’s your role in the organisation, Chick? You don’t look like muscle and you’ve no visible war wounds, so I’m guessing supply side. A busy night at Whiskies must be the jackpot, eh? Is it just dope, or do you flog pills as well?’
‘I’m not doing this.’ McAllister turned to go.
‘Don’t make me have to give you a bad report when I talk to John Rhodes.’
McAllister pivoted to face him. ‘I never touched Bobby Carter. I hardly knew the guy.’
‘But you’d seen him around? At Whiskies? With Jenni?’
‘I told her he was no good for her and for once she took my advice.’
‘Ever meet her dad?’
‘She took me home once. Her mum was there but not her dad.’
‘Who else knew about Jenni and Carter?’
‘Word has a way of getting around.’
‘Did Carter’s boss know?’
‘Definitely.’
‘Carter’s wife?’
McAllister shrugged. ‘Bobby Carter spread himself a bit thin where women were concerned. That was one of the things I told Jenni.’
‘What else did you tell her?’
‘That he was trouble.’
‘Trouble how?’
‘He worked for Cam Colvin, didn’t he?’
‘And you work for John Rhodes. Two cheeks of the same arse, no?’
McAllister’s face reddened with anger. Laidlaw watched and waited, but he could tell McAllister was not a violent man, unlike most of the drinkers the other side of the Gay Laddie’s door. He was a drone, and Laidlaw was not in the market for drones.
‘Nice talking to you,’ he said, crossing the road and heading to the nearest bus stop.
Laidlaw waited until it had just gone six before heading to Central Division, arriving at the crime squad office to find it deserted, only the warm fug indicating that bodies had inhabited its space until recently. Browsing the murder wall, he saw that an identikit photo had been added next to pictures of Springburn Park. A note indicated that that the identikit matched a description of a man seen in the park just prior to the knife being found. Laidlaw couldn’t help but give a humourless chuckle. In his experience — and here was further proof — such photos looked like everyone and no one. You could turn most of them upside down and they’d make as much sense. Instead, he focused for a moment on the photo of Monica Carter, remembering again the pathologist’s words about Cam Colvin, and Colvin himself placing a hand on her elbow as she spoke to the reporters. Looking around, he saw a copy of that evening’s paper dumped in a waste-paper bin and lifted it out. There she was on the front page, Colvin right next to her, their hips almost touching.
Crossing to his desk, he started sifting the piles of paperwork. He read the notes made by Milligan on first visiting the family home. The place was in the midst of renovation and redecoration and consequently fairly chaotic, but Milligan felt obliged to state that ‘normally it would be a welcoming and very pleasant environment’, as if he were an estate agent pitching to sell the place. The three Carter children had been present in the living room along with their mother. Mrs Carter was praised for her ‘surface calmness’. The daughter, Stella, had offered the visitors tea. In ‘difficult circumstances’ the family were ‘doing their level best’ and their cooperation was ‘total and appreciated’.
‘Christ, Milligan,’ Laidlaw muttered to himself, ‘you’re not writing Mills and Boon.’ He tossed the report to one side and started looking for information on Cam Colvin and his men. There was a whole folder’s worth, detailing the usual litany of maimed and feral childhoods, broken homes and early transgressions that would come to be leveraged into criminal careers, any alternatives seemingly unobtainable. Spanner Thomson’s father had been absent throughout his childhood and his mother had been too fond of the bottle and one-night stands. Truancy, shop-lifting and borstal eventually became the youngster’s CV, followed by gang affiliation and a position of trust in his friend Cam Colvin’s outfit. Colvin himself was slightly different. He was following in the family business, both his father and paternal grandfather having spent more of their adulthood inside prisons than outside of them. Then there was the incident involving the blade embedded between his shoulder blades, which had proved no mean calling card.
The autobiographies of Panda Paterson, Dod Menzies and Mickey Ballater were not dissimilar, except insofar as Ballater had achieved decent grades at school and stuck it out, leaving for a job in manufacturing until lured by the easier money presented by gangland life. He’d been questioned by police many times but never formally charged, putting him on a par with Cam Colvin himself, the other members of the gang having served a variety of short sentences during their careers. An occupational hazard, they would doubtless call it.