Naming the Bones (17 page)

Murray closed the book and slid it beside the rest. The whole operation had taken less than fifteen minutes. If he left now, he might get clear of the building without meeting anyone. He shouldered the weight of his bag and slipped out into the corridor, locking the door on his office.

Murray was at the top of the spiral stairwell when he heard Fergus Baine’s laugh echoing up from the floor below. Loud with a false note of heartiness, the kind of chuckle an inquisitor might give before the final turn of the screw.

‘Shit.’ Murray hesitated, caught in a stab of shame. He could still make a getaway back to his office or up onto the floor above, but now Fergus was upon him the whole foolishness of hiding became clear. He had to face the professor sometime. He started down the stairs, forcing his feet into a brisk rhythm. If he was lucky Fergus would be in a hurry and they could pass each other with a sober nod of recognition.

‘His later work is technically far superior, of course.’ Fergus conceded a point to whoever he was talking to. ‘But it lacks the fire in the belly of his early stuff.’

‘It’s not often I hear you extolling passion over technical expertise.’

Fergus laughed again and Murray stopped dead, caught by the last voice, the only voice he wanted to hear.

Rachel was wearing a white silk blouse that buttoned and tied at the neck. There was something provocative about its double-fastening, as if it had been designed to be unpicked. Her grey linen trousers were snug at the hips, flaring down to open-toed sandals. Her toenails were painted pink. All her focus was on her husband. She touched his arm as they turned the corner. It was a simple gesture and Murray wondered if it was his foreknowledge that made it seem a move beyond collegiate.

‘Murray.’ Fergus’s voice lost none of its heartiness, none of its hint of the inquisition. ‘I’ve been hoping to catch up with you.’

Rachel met Murray’s eyes. He felt himself colour.

‘Fergus, Rachel.’ He forced a smile.

Doors were opening in the corridors above and below, noise building as students began to crowd out from classes. Rachel frowned. ‘I’ve got a third-year tutorial group due in sixty seconds.’

For a split moment he despised her. ‘Sure, see you later.’

Fergus squeezed her arm, a mirror of the way she’d held him. ‘See you at home.’ The professor watched Rachel until she reached the landing and when he turned away it was as if he still held her in his eyes, her slim figure disappearing into the black corridor of his pupils. ‘On your way out?’ Fergus smiled as if there had been no five a.m. phone call. No drunken demand to talk to his wife.

Murray had a ridiculous urge to mention he’d bedded Audrey Garrett. Instead he said, ‘I just dropped by to collect some books.’

‘Of course, you’re abandoning us.’

‘Temporarily, I’m sure you’ll cope.’

Fergus gave a slow smile.

‘Yes, I’m sure we’ll manage.’ The staircase was crowded, Murray and Fergus a dam in the ascending and descending streams of students. ‘Shall we get out of here?’

The professor turned and started to walk down towards the exit without waiting for Murray’s reply.

It had rained in the short time he’d been indoors and the air outside was fresh, the flagstones drenched black. The wind tumbled the kinetic sculpture in the courtyard as they crossed the quadrangles together, Fergus setting the pace. It was going to rain again soon. Murray glanced, as he often did, at the wrought-iron bench dedicated to a twenty-one-year-old student he’d never known. It was too delicate to sit on, but it drew the eye.

Fergus asked, ‘Book going well?’

‘Yes, fine.’

The professor’s suit was almost the same cold stone shade as Rachel’s linen trousers. Murray wondered if they had bought them together, on their honeymoon in Italy, the Mediterranean sparkling blue on the horizon behind them. He imagined Fergus in a white hat, Rachel in a summer dress, and felt jealousy hot in his stomach.

They cut down an outside staircase, into a smell of damp and ancient mortar roused by the shower, and entered a broad tunnel. Fergus’s footsteps sounded hollow against the cobbles. A porter pushed a trolley laden with boxes through a large archway and they stepped aside to let him pass. Fergus nodded, a country squire passing a tenant on the road. The porter returned the greeting, but the professor had already turned his attention back to Murray.

‘In a rush?’

‘Not really.’

‘Good. Walk me to the car and tell me what you’ve been up to.’

Fergus slowed to a stroll.

‘I’m making progress.’

‘Excellent. Any thoughts of putting a research student on the trail, see what they might dig up for you?’

‘I prefer to do the research myself. It’s slower, but at least that way I feel I’m covering all the bases.’

‘Yes.’ Fergus sighed. ‘I suppose those days have passed. Did I ever tell you I knew him?’

‘Rachel said you might have.’

The foolishness of the statement rose like bile in his throat. He waited for the professor to ask where they were when she’d mentioned it. But he gave a dry smile and said, ‘Good to know she thinks of me when I’m out of sight. Drunk, of course. Archie, that is, absolutely legless. I’m afraid I didn’t rate him much. Never managed to get to grips with the poetry either, too fey for my tastes, too Romantic.’

‘Where did you meet him?’

‘In a pub after some poetry reading or other.’ Fergus laughed. ‘Where else? To me he epitomised all of the clichés of the working-class poet. Drunken, unwashed, boorish, predatory towards women. At least Dylan Thomas had genius on his side. Lunan? Well . . .’ He grinned at Murray. ‘Sorry, I never got the hang of revering the dead. I didn’t intend to slight your hero.’

‘I’m not sure hero is the right word.’

Fergus shrugged. They were almost at the end of the car park now, the bays next to the anatomy building before the path swept down and away from the bounds of the university. He pulled his car keys from his pocket and
the lights flashed on a black BMW. ‘Let’s just say you’re keen to give Lunan his place in history.’

It was the same car that Rachel had driven him home in. Murray took in its solid curves, realising he had half- expected Fergus to be driving the Saab which had tailed them down from the reservoir. His voice sounded vague to his own ears. ‘I want to bring his poems to a wider audience.’

‘And you think biography is the best way to do it? The life rather than the work?’

‘The life and the work.’

‘Maybe. After all, the life destroyed the work.’ Fergus opened the driver’s door and leaned against it. ‘I know I said I didn’t like Lunan’s poetry, but I can recognise he had ability. The problem is he pissed it up against the wall.’ He levelled his gaze and Murray knew that if this were a lecture, whatever came next would be the key point, a statement to be underlined and regurgitated in the exam. ‘It happens sometimes to self-starters. They burn out, as if the effort of pulling themselves up by their boot straps was too much to sustain.’ Fergus turned his mouth down at the corners in a parody of a sad smile. ‘They do something foolish – sabotage their own hard work – and then, of course, they’ve got no real support when they get into difficulties, no access to the old-boy network.’ He grinned. ‘They’re on their own, and that can be rather lonely. Whatever one’s occupation, it’s always important to have allies.’ He gave Murray a parting smile, ducked into the BMW and slammed the door. Murray went to turn away as the engine started, but then the window slid down and Fergus spoke again. ‘One last thing.’

Murray turned back.

‘Yes?’

‘Whatever went on between you and my wife, it’s over now. Understand?’

‘Yes.’

‘I knew you would.’

The BMW swung out from its parking space and Murray walked towards the sloping pathway home. Fergus passed him on University Avenue. Neither of them waved goodbye.

Chapter Thirteen

GEORGE MIEKLE HAD
lost none of his gruffness. The bookfinder nodded down at the pavement with the gravity of a funeral director presenting a newly embalmed corpse to its relatives.

‘That tells you all you need to know about Edinburgh’s road maintenance. Nigh on forty years it’s been there.’

Murray could make out the name
Christie
etched roughly into the concrete. He took out his mobile phone, lined up the camera function and snapped. It looked shit, the letters lost in the greyness of the concrete and the damp morning. Done well, it could make a nice image for the book. His brother would know how to capture it. He pushed the thought away.

‘Were you here when he did it?’

‘I was, yes.’

‘And Christie?’

‘Christie? No, she wasn’t there.’

Meikle turned and started to walk down the street. Murray took another useless shot with his camera-phone, and then followed, jogging a bit of the way before catching up with the bookfinder.

‘Archie obviously thought a lot of her.’

‘Aye, he did.’

The older man spoke without looking at him, his face set straight ahead. Murray supposed this was what fishing was like, flinging out your line, watching it drop into the deep waters, and then waiting patiently for a pull on the lure.

‘So what did he do? Wait till the workies were away, and then fire in with a stick?’

Meikle gave him a curt nod.

‘That’s about the size of it.’

They walked on in silence, the older man setting the pace. A bus disgorged its passengers onto the street and Murray forced his way through the waiting queue, muttering a mantra of ‘Excuse me’, ‘Sorry’, ‘Excuse me’. Meikle had drawn further ahead and Murray had to negotiate a squad of draymen unloading a beer lorry, before he drew level.

‘Can you spare time for a coffee?’

To his own ears he sounded like a desperate adolescent trying to set up a first date, but Meikle glanced at his watch.

‘I’ve got thirty minutes before I’m due back. There’s a place over the way, if you’re not fussy about hygiene.’

Meikle stepped into a queue of traffic stalled by a double-parked delivery van. Murray hesitated then hurried after him just as the delivery driver pulled away. The van tooted its horn and Murray raised an open palm in a gesture that was part command, part apology.

Meikle was already climbing the entrance steps to the café. Murray followed him into a broth of hot fat, hamburgers and chips. His bowels shrank, as if giving him due notice of what would happen if he dared eat anything. A motherly waitress in a blue tabard leant against the counter chatting to an old man who sat alone over a cup of rusty-looking tea. ‘Naw, hen,’ the old man said, ‘I’m sweet enough.’ They both laughed, and he repeated it, ‘Sweet enough’, though it wasn’t much of a joke the first time. The aisle was almost blocked by a toddler strapped tight in its buggy, like a dangerous criminal under restraint. Its mother sat at a table next to it, reading
Heat
. A milky coffee congealed in front of her, beside a plate of chips smothered in tomato ketchup. She pressed a chip into the redness, with a gesture that suggested a lifetime of stubbed-out cigarettes, and placed it in the child’s outstretched hands. The toddler squeezed it into puree and let it drop. The woman muttered, ‘For fuck’s sake, Liam’, and started to pick the mess from his jacket.

Meikle tucked himself into a plastic bucket seat at one of the free tables and set his elbows on its Formica surface.

‘Twenty-five to, the clock’s ticking.’

Murray shifted a scattering of white sugar with the edge of his hand, a snow plough piling through a fresh fall, and set his tape recorder on the table.

‘I wanted to ask you about Christie.’

‘I thought it was Archie you were interested in.’

‘It is, but Christie’s a big part of his story. What did you think of her?’

‘I didn’t think anything. She was his girlfriend, his bird as we used to call them, that was all. I guess you could say she was the Yoko Ono of the group.’

‘She split you up?’

‘We were pals, not bloody civil partners.’

The waitress ambled over, leaned her bottom against the opposite table and asked what they wanted. Murray noticed the home-made UDA tattoo on her wrist as she wrote their order on her pad. She gave the table a half-hearted wipe, and sugar grains rained onto Murray’s lap. Meikle waited till she had gone and then said, ‘Not that I’ve anything against gays.’

Murray tried to dust himself down, but some of the grains were caught in the trouser-folds around his groin and he gave up.

‘Of course not.’

‘It’s just that I’m not one, so mind you don’t put otherwise in your book.’

‘Message received and understood.’

The woman with the magazine put a chip into her own mouth and the toddler let out a pterodactyl caw.

Meikle said, ‘And don’t put any of that “doth protest too much” stuff in there either. I’m just setting the record straight.’

‘Straight as a die, George.’

The older man gave him a stern look that turned to a laugh. The waitress smiled as she set their coffees on the table between them.

‘Somebody’s happy, anyway.’ She took the bill from her pocket and placed it between the cups, asking, ‘Whose shout is it today then?’ as if they were seasoned regulars.

Murray pulled his wallet from his jacket and handed her a five-pound note.

‘Quite right. I bet your dad shelled out enough on you over the years, eh?’

Murray said, ‘He’s not . . .’

But she had already counted his change onto the table and was making her way to a trio of workmen in fluorescent waistcoats.

‘Nosy besom. See she’s serving the Diet Coke men quick enough, anyway. No waiting around for them, eh?’ Now that his venom had been spent, Meikle softened a little. ‘Christie was all right as far as I was concerned. I mean, you wouldn’t have expected Archie to go for someone run of the mill. She was a good-looking girl. Didn’t say much, but nice to have around. Good wallpaper. I called her Yoko because after she came on the scene Archie and me saw less of each other. That’s the way it is with some guys once they hook up. They don’t hang out with the lads any more. Maybe it’s no bad thing. I spent too much time hanging out with the lads over the years. Look where it got me.’