by Dave Duggan
‘No, no. Here. Listen. She stood there, a bit of a Ninja thing on her …’
‘I’d like to have seen that.’
‘ … and she took a stance. A shooter’s stance. Aimed squarely, I’m guessing, at you.’
‘She threatened to shoot me?’
He stopped for the first time, then, as if he was going to withdraw something. Instead, he ploughed on.
‘She pointed her finger at me and gave me the full lasers and said “when you see him, tell him to watch his back”.’
‘Ah, for fuck’s sake, that’s aul “Ninja pyjamas” talk. Hot air.’
‘Didn’t feel hot to me. Felt bloody cold in fact, with the sleet lashing around us.’
‘And we’re cops right? So you didn’t say anything to her?’
‘I’m telling you now, amn’t I? What was I going to do? I’m out in the freezing night, half-dressed, beside my boss, in her underwear? Your shooter headed off back into her room. Or someone’s room. I have no idea where she went.’
‘Did anyone else hear her?’
‘No.’
‘So you’re telling me that I should watch my back because a woman I had a … a runabout with is upset and threatening me?’
‘She’s no ordinary woman. If there is such a being. She’s an ace shot and my section head knows her from working at the training college. She says Amy Miller used to eat recruits for breakfast.’
‘And was your section head still wearing your suit jacket when she told you this?’
‘Fuck off, Slevin. I’m doing you a favour.’
We both smiled again. I shook his hand.
‘Sound. I’ll keep you informed. Or you’ll hear the news yourself. “Detective gunned down in drive-by shooting.”’
He stopped smiling, shrugged and walked towards the lift.
I left the building and went out through the small pedestrian gate, onto the Strand Road. A City Council vehicle was half-mounted on the pavement opposite, as workers hooked strings of Christmas bulbs onto lamp-posts. I lit a cigarette and jogged across a junction, past the pizza place and the Chinese restaurant. I sprinted across the road, dodging traffic in both directions. I was still running when I reached the riverside railings, only their fixedness preventing me from plunging into the water.
I got over Christmas, by hiding under the duvet and covering shifts for colleagues with kids. The snow came with the new year. I watched its gentle benediction on the surface of the river from the open window of my apartment. It made more easeful viewing than the crime scene 8x10s I brought from the office.
Sharon gave me a hard look on her return from leave, so I packed away my boxes and my files. I took down the plexi-glass display board and put all the material from it, together with the crime scene photos, a memory stick of video images and the murder book, into one archive box. I wheeled the plexi-glass display panel back to the conference centre and parked it in a rack along with nine others, silently waiting for their call to display the grisly evidence of future crimes and our paltry efforts to solve them.
Hammy passed by as I worked.
‘Good man, Slevin. New Year’s resolution in action, I see. Take a break from the early Spring cleaning and give me ten minutes of your precious time.’
Sharon came up to me.
‘I see The Sheik got to you before I did. Stack your boxes in that alcove near my desk. I’ll get them back to Maydown.’
‘Thanks, Sharon. Happy New Year.’
‘Yeh. And thank you. For putting a pre-Christmas brick in that gob,’ said Sharon, nodding in the direction of Goss and Doherty’s empty desks.
Detective Inspector Omar Hamilton, my boss and our Sheik, according to Sharon, didn’t offer me thanks when I sat before him.
‘Ah, my man Slevin, the pugilist. You were lucky the Christmas intervened. Everyone goes a bit loolah at Christmas, though, Detective Slevin, I’m suspecting it’s year round with you.’
‘Sir?’
‘Ah, yes. The innocence of the permanently guilty. Lovely, Slevin. Your unique talent for the ineffable, the unknowable and the unseeable. There’s a squad room of detectives out there and not one of them saw you clout Goss. Not even Sharon’s all-seeing eye caught it.’
‘Sir, if no …’
‘Slevin, spare me. I saw Goss’ bake. More ravaged than normal and that’s saying something. Even his sidekick, Doherty, seated opposite him, saw nothing, claiming he was engrossed in writing up the report on the snuff-film killers they had just brought down, fair play to them. I might be persuaded to put them back on the Todd Anderson case. They get results.’
‘Sir, if I may, I don’t think …’
‘Perfectly true, Slevin. Maybe you actually don’t think. Or what’s worse, maybe you think too much. The old detective’s curse, eh? I don’t see what’s in front of me. The victim is dead. Then who the fuck killed him?’
‘Sir, myself and Hetherington …’
‘Yes, yes. Hetherington, the hair. Slevin, the gun. That was last year’s mantra. You and your buddy need a new surah for a new year.’
‘Happy New Year, sir.’
‘I’ll ignore that. You haven’t hit Hetherington, have you?’
‘No, sir …!’
‘That’s not an accusation, mind you. It’s an opinion. It is my opinion, however, that you did punch your colleague DS Goss, and that, in a room full of detectives, no one saw you do it, proof, if ever I needed it, that you are very much a shaman as well as a shamus. Okay. Let’s move on, as no one, not even Gob Almighty Goss, is pressing charges. Allow me to offer you an astrological item. I predict that you will not punch DS Goss or any other detective in this coming year. Does that prediction seem sound to you, Slevin?’
‘Perfectly, sir.’
‘Now, what I can’t predict is whether DS Goss or DS Doherty, or someone acting on their behalf, won’t punch you. Even though Goss says he slipped on ice in his driveway and lost a tooth, which, he says, was already shaky, to the side of his car, I can’t predict what may follow there. I do know that conditions remain icy. Goss and Doherty, ace detectives as they are, bear grudges. I’ve seen it over the years. They found each other in the old force, realised they had a vibe and have been playing on it ever since. It is my opinion that they have a list. And that you’re right at the top of it.’
‘Sir, are you telling me that I’m under threat?’
‘If that’s your opinion, Slevin, fair enough. We are the police, after all, so being under threat is part of the deal. And for what it’s worth, I’d say your opinion was a fair one. One you could act upon, watching-your-back-wise. Let me give you a verse from one of my mother’s favourite surahs. That’s a chapter, for the non-Koranic among us.’
‘I know what a surah is, sir.’
‘Ah, Al-Quran is on the reading list at Maghaberry Prison. Of course. “O you who have believed, remember the favour of Allah upon you when armies came to attack you and we sent upon them a wind and armies of angels you did not see. And ever is Allah, of what you do, Seeing.” Seeing, yes. Unlike the selectively blind that occupy this floor and further afield. My old friend Cossie Cosgrove gave me a tinkle. Said you took the soup with him at that conference.’
‘No, sir. He had the soup. He slobbered a cascade of it down his suit and didn’t bat an eye-lid’.
‘Not likely. In my opinion. Cossie is fastidious. In the extreme. And he’s as assiduous as a lioness gnawing off her lower leg to escape a trap.’
‘May I ask a question, sir?’
‘Ever the politesse, eh Slevin? And if I don’t answer, will you thump me?’
‘I don’t thump the good guys. Sir.’
‘Give us all a break, detective. Are you sure you even know who the good guys are? Ask your question.’
‘Why is IS Officer Cosgrove interested in me?’
‘Because y
ou are who you are. Because the constable you killed, Edwin Norris, trained with him. Because his advice on the scheme to bring you and the other three desperadoes into the service was ignored. Because he is a political, “small p”, policeman, who feels more should be thought of him.’
‘And he’s a friend of yours?’
‘Don’t lecture me about my friends. You’re still seeing Dessie Crossan. No, don’t object. I know. Or, let me say, that it is my firmly held opinion that you are still meeting Dessie Crossan, despite IS Officer Cosgrove’s express order not to do so. That’s another reason why he’s interested in you.’
‘Why doesn’t he just pull me in, investigate me, charge me with something, then suspend me?’
‘You’re getting value for money here, Detective. Lots of questions. You had lunch with Cossie at that conference. Who’d you have the dinner with?’
‘The Chief Constable, a Doctor Randolph … Rankin, I think, and a Yankee professor.’
‘A cosy party, with the CC at the head of the table and yourself providing the whiff of cordite and sulphur to season the veg. As long as you’re eating at the same trough as the CC, Cossie’ll play you handy. Which takes us back to our business, murder cases that are open and unsolved, especially Todd Anderson’s.’
‘Todd Anderson is not special, sir. Todd Anderson is dead.’
‘He’s beginning to look like no more than a dead end. He’s of interest to our CC and he’s on our “to do” list. So do, Slevin, do.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘And, just before you go, you know how I said Cossie will be circumspect with you? Up to a point. Not everyone in IS is so sensitive. You may have encountered his two favoured buckos. Farm boys in waxed jackets, with fists as hard as dead-blow mallets.’
‘Daffy Duck and Goosy Gander.’
‘I’ll ignore that too, even though it’s good. Mind how you go, in the ice and snow. As the poet said. And with Cossie’s farm boys.’
I shouldn’t be talking to you.
The feeling is mutual.
You remember two boys we did time with?
Lots of boys, and women, did time.
Some of them, well, us, are out now and might be a bit confused.
I never thought you were confused. I thought you were stupid,
which is mad, and the brains you’re supposed to have.
You remember a boy I shared a cell with? Never shut up. And
his handler, who worked his levers, with his hand up his
back-passage?
I wondered when you might get to them.
Big Mouth and Pip Squeak, I called them.
Comrades all. You got the mouthy fella moved. They’re both
out this while. The main thing for fellas like us is to keep the
head right.
You know where they are?
Listen, they’re around, like the rest of us. And they’re asking
about you.
So you told them about me.
Didn’t need to. You’re in the papers. I heard their heads aren’t
right. How’s yours?
They’re asking about me. As in, ‘how’s the form?’, like.
No. They’re asking about you, as in, they remember.
NINETEEN
I packed the Todd Anderson murder book and one large archive box of files, evidence reports, photos and small artefacts. I brought the dead man home.
I bought a heavy-duty staple gun, staples, paint to create a white-board wall, a 4-inch and a 2-inch brush, markers and masking tape. I moved two bookshelves into the guest bedroom. I boxed up mythologies, anthologies, concordances of great texts, compendiums of fables, encyclopaedia of beliefs, religions, myths and tales.
I was scared. It was not a time for oracles. It was a time for facts.
Two empty walls joined one another at a sturdy right angle, opposite the windows, overlooking the river. I clustered the television, the mauve sofa and its companion chairs closer to each other, where they huddled in front of a view of trees that cast harsh shadows onto the sheen of the river. I left the music system in place, one speaker high on each newly-painted wall. I turned off Freddie Hubbard, on the jazz channel I usually played at night. I put on Turkish Sufi music, playing low. I entered a period of active meditation.
As the sufis chanted, the drums beat and the ouds thrilled and resonated, I stapled documents and scraps of papers onto the left wall: photos; timelines; the skeleton on the stone; forensic notes; my colleague’s bullet points.
I cleared the low table of learned journals and I put them, along with the books, in the guest bedroom. I focused on the dead man, in the murder book, lying open as a wound on the low table.
I put my palm to the right, whiteboard-painted wall. The paint was dry, because I opened all the windows and freshened the room with the breath of the snow outside. The wall was as white as polar vastness.
I took a marker and began to write the key points of the Incident Report. The outline of the dead man’s case built a column to support my meditations. Then I composed Venn diagrams, pert circles with names inscribed from the Murder Book. I searched for overlaps, crossings, connections, little spaces where the dead man’s name and at least one other came together in a droplet of new information. I was convinced I was missing something.
The air in the room heated up. Outside the snow lay a gauze across my view of the river, which nonchalantly accepted the flakes as holy hosts dissolving on the tongue of a faithful communicant. I pored over the Chronological Log and I dabbed highlights from it onto the wall, breaking it down, name by name, time by time, once again searching for the moment when one instance slid across another.
I fidgeted through my colleague’s profiles of suspects. They were thin and few. I stapled their meanness to the wall. I considered messaging the Gang Unit, then dismissed the thought. Whatever they were up to, I didn’t want to draw the Gang Unit into my search. The drum beat and the rising thrill of the ney flute brought me back to the crime scene photographs, much-thumbed 8x10s I stapled to the wall. I stared ball-bearing eyes at them: the dead man sprawling; the blood on the red and white scarf, tacky enough to touch, even in black and white.
I pondered the murder method. A single gun-shot to the back of the head. I considered the gun. The gun, not found. I considered the missing gun. The gun I used? The room grew cold. I closed and locked the windows. I shivered. Ice formed round my heart in the shape of a chilling question I had dreaded to ask, even though I knew it could not be so: did I shoot the dead man?
I looked for myself in the Venn diagrams. I scanned the dead man’s profile. I was not there. There was no DNA connection, because there was no DNA evidence. Every crime scene bears traces and I couldn’t find a trace of myself. I was not in the Venn diagrams. I was not in the dead man’s Murder Book.
I knew the murder method was universal. The projectile in the cranium. There was no purchase there for me. I recognised that the murder method was a dead end. The dead man’s end.
The ouds thrummed. The sufis chanted. I went to the guest bedroom and scoured the boxes and the piles heaped on the guest bed. I lifted Rumi’s verse in translation. I read ‘We are born of love. Love is our Mother’.
I wondered why the dead man’s mother didn’t come to get him. My colleagues said the dead man’s family were devastated and keen to move on. I questioned the chance of that.
I returned to the phone logs and the digital traces of the dead man’s life. The word ‘innocuous’ rose up in my mind. I worked on, using the humility offered by the poetry and the music of the sufis to underscore my nightly investigations. I ate takeaway food: pizza and chow mein from nearby outlets. I piled the empty cartons and containers. I vowed to take them down to the waste bins outside, but instead, I constructed angled skyscrapers in futuristic urban models. I brewed my favourite
coffee, a Yemeni blend from Amran.
I returned to the Murder Book, again and again. Patterns of words, images, lists and annotations rose up as I turned the pages in a slow rhythm to the thump of the hand drum and the breathy chants of the sufis. There were redactions, black as mascara tracks, across every page. They proliferated in the pages from my colleagues’ reports of their visit to Manchester. I tried to peer under them. I tried to lift them, prising them with my nail. I got down on my hands and knees to peer beneath them. There was nothing to see. I was looking in the wrong place.
The phone logs offered no overlaps or crossings, no further details to add to the Venn diagrams. They whorled and spiralled across the right hand wall, like the trial pieces of the stone artists who carved Newgrange’s monumental kerbstones. Whorls and spirals spun inside my head. The music played. Nights ran into nights. I spent short zombie-days at work, then returned to long nights at home. Still I looked, but did not find. I grew more afraid and confused, because if I could not find who killed the dead man, then I could not prove I didn’t. My mind weakened at the thought. The phone logs blurred in front of my eyes. The strips of redaction darkened. The whorls on the wall spun. I drank more coffee. I piled food cartons higher, creating tilting and tottering edifices. I opened the windows and breathed the freezing air.
I unearthed the video files. I needed a grander view, a wider angle, greater perspective. I brought a projector from work. I got a king-sized white sheet from the linen cupboard. I stapled it to the wall, covering the Venn diagrams and the arcing lines that connected the dot-dash-dot of my chronologies. They peered through the sheet like ghosts.
I ran the video files. Bigger now on the screen, softened by the light cotton, the images were warmer and clearer. They heated me up. I drank coffee and chewed pizza. I had seen all the images before. The highlights of games; the goals scored; the dead man celebrating; the crowds; the CCTV footage from cameras in carparks, pubs, city streets, shopping centres and gyms; the personal videos uploaded on LifeShoot and other social media sites. The dead man laughing, blowing a kiss, enjoying a beach kick-about with other young men and women. Alone at the wheel of his car, then at the table-for-one in his favourite Italian restaurant, La Toscana.