At a Glasgow train station there are „knots of people looking up at the series of windows where train departures were posted. They looked as if they were trying to threaten their own destination into appearing“.
In a pub, two barmaids, one „made up as colourfully as a butterfly“, while the other, older „had been pretty“. Now, „she was better than that. She looked mid to late thirties and as if she hadn´t wasted the time“.
A drunk with „an instinct for catastrophe“, „circulating haphazardly, trying different tables“, settles for one where three men are sitting. „Two of them, Bud Lawson and Airchie Stanley, looked like trouble. The third one looked like much worse trouble“.
Detective Jack Laidlaw, describing the aggressive father of a missing girl: „One of life´s vigilantes, a retribution-monger … Laidlaw was sure his anger didn’t stop at people. He could imagine him shredding ties that wouldn´t knot properly, stamping burst tubes of toothpaste into the floor. His face looked like an argument you couldn´t win.“
(The three Laidlaw-novels by William McIlvanney are all available in excellent German translations at Antje Kunstmann-Verlag)