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strip of Elastoplast to a napalm victim. ‘So what was that about?’
    â€˜Trouble,’ Dave McMaster said. ‘For somebody.’

 
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    6
    E na 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.
    â€˜Yes, Jack. What news from the front?’
    Laidlaw told him about Eck.
    â€˜You suspect more than natural causes?’
    â€˜It just seems possible.’
    â€˜Like what?’
    â€˜Poison?’
    â€˜How could you tell? Isn’t that what he’s been doing to himself for years?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜We’ll see to that. Ruined your night, did it?’
    â€˜Aye. It didn’t help Eck’s a lot either.’
    â€˜You can phone for word tomorrow, Jack.’
    â€˜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 almostsmiling, 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