Lies of the Land

by Chris Dolan

  She looked at her fellow spinners. She was definitely pedalling faster, with more resistance, than the older super-fit woman. Young Tricia was glancing over at her, smiling, but surprised. Now that she was conscious of actually going hell for leather Maddy realised she was overdoing it. Her heart was racing and she was wheezing for breath.

  “Doing good, Maddy,” the trainer said. “Keep it up.”

  “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  “Excellent. Just do it after the class.”

  A couple of the women from the running group were in Mario’s Plaice after, and Maddy joined them, happy to have her mind taken off her tiredness and queasiness. They had all ordered tea. Maddy had been looking forward to a black pudding roll, maybe even a quick fag after. But she ordered tea too. Probably sensible, a big jag of caffeine while her heart was still thudding might be a bad move.

  “We’re having a wee session a week on Sunday night in the baths bar. Come along, Maddy.”

  “What’s the occasion?”

  “Doing the women’s 10K that afternoon.”

  “If ever there was an excuse.”

  She was beginning to warm to these people, laughing and prattling happily. “Do I have to do the race too to come along?”

  “Course not.”

  But then they started talking injuries – Achilles tendonitis, shin splints – and she got bored. If she went along after their race she’d just feel guilty. The fat lass at school with a note from her mum to excuse her from sports. Which made her think she’d better call in on Rosa. At lunchtime she was meeting Doug Mason, another promise she was beginning to regret. She told the running ladies she’d try to make it along, excused herself, paid, and walked up through Hillhead, keeping well away from the Botanics and Kelvingrove.

  DS Amy Dalgarno had been right. There was another side to Mrs Marion Miller. The swagger was gone, the unholier-than-thou smirk. Where Clare Crichton had been wan, dazed, Miller’s tears streamed down her cheeks, the perfect hair and make-up mussed and streaked.

  “Is he going to die?”

  Coulter answered. “I’m afraid we don’t know that yet, ma’am.”

  “He’s in the best of hands, Mrs Miller,” Dalgarno offered.

  “Mrs Crichton said you phoned her?” Coulter remained firm.

  Marion sat on the same seat as before, big enough to hold two of her. “Bill was right. She did go mad.”

  “How mad exactly is that?”

  She dabbed her eyes, aware now that her make-up was running, trying to fix it but only making it worse. “Clare’s ill. Has been for a long time. She takes these turns.”

  “What kind of turns, Marion?” Dalgarno asked.

  “I don’t know. Flies off the handle. Shouts and screams. The way Bill described them it was like some kind of fit. Scary.”

  “And you think she took one of these … turns yesterday?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did she say on the phone? When you told her?”

  The woman winced, remembering. “I should never have done that. I just thought … it would be easier for everyone. Best to just tell the truth. Get it out in the open.”

  “What did she say?”

  “I didn’t give her much time. I said I was sorry. There was nothing any of us could do about it. It just happened. Then I hung up.”

  “Mrs Crichton was silent throughout all this?”

  “Completely. No sniffing or gulping. She knew. I’ve told Bill that, several times. She knew.”

  “How would she know?”

  “I don’t know. Bill’s not as good, not as practised, at keeping secrets as I am. I think maybe Clare sensed that something was going on. Maybe put two and two together. I wasn’t sure. Just a feeling. But yesterday on the phone, I didn’t think she was surprised. It’s so hard to tell with her. She’s … strange.” Dissolving into tears again, she said, “I should have told Bill I was going to phone her. I should have warned him!”

  She got up and began pacing the space between the back of the chair and the huge window with five bays. The room was so large that when she was right over at the window Coulter felt as if he almost had to shout. “Mrs Miller. You have to see the situation you’re in here. Your husband has been murdered, and now your boyfriend is critically ill in hospital.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” A glimmer of the old brash Marion. “It’s clear now, isn’t it? Bill and I had nothing to do with Jules’s murder.” She gave into the tears. “I’ve been so stupid!”

  “In what way?”

  “I was glad. Happy. About everything. Yes, even my husband’s death. I was even glad you suspected us, Bill and me, of having something to do with it. This was my chance, at last. Of course I knew we were guilty of nothing. But you threw us together. And I thought, this is it, this will bring everything to a head. Bring Bill and me together. Get everything out in the open. And it was working. Like a charm… Until I told her. I should never have spoken to that crazy bitch!”

  Miller was still at her window as they walked down the path. Was she watching them? Making sure they were leaving? The woman confused Coulter. He bought her distress, and her astonishment, at Crichton’s accident. She seemed genuinely convinced that Clare Crichton was capable of just about anything. But was that her plan? Point the finger at her rival?

  “I know we’re supposed to keep perspective,” Dalgarno said. “Don’t make judgements. Until yesterday I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.”

  “But now?”

  “This is going to sound prissy. But I think she’s morally bankrupt.” Dalgarno smiled at her own phrase. “I sound like some old-time minister. But really. She doesn’t blink an eyelid when her husband dies. Not even a tear for the way he died. She just sees it as a chance to get one over on Clare Crichton. Then phoning her? For why? For sheer pleasure, I reckon.”

  “But does she have a point? Is Mrs Crichton angry, deranged, enough to kill?”

  “In a fit of rage? She charges up the stair after him. Sees him sitting there. Can’t stop herself.”

  “None of this explains the gun and the bullet.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t have to. Maybe it’s unconnected with what happened yesterday morning, inside the house.”

  “Someone, somewhere, had Bill Crichton next on the list? And was beaten to it?” Coulter opened the car door, but didn’t get in. “We need three – no, four – things. Clare Crichton’s full medical history. Did JCG Miller ever have a client that dealt with guns?” He glanced back at the vast landscaped garden. “And the results of those soil tests.”

  “And the fourth?”

  “A drink.”

  “Some hope.”

  Maddy was asking the same kinds of questions. Rosa busied herself making a sandwich for them both. She was used to her daughter thinking out loud and knew not to ask too much, just make the odd remark to show she was listening.

  “They think there might have been traces of soil on the second gun too. Maybe from the gloves the killer was wearing. That would suggest the killer had set out to shoot Crichton. Didn’t know that he’d fallen.”

  “Or maybe it’s just soil from the Crichtons’ own garden? Do you have to walk across it to get to where they found the gun and the bullet?” Rosa didn’t look up from her sandwich-making.

  “There’s a path but yes, it’d be quicker to cross the little front lawn. I don’t suppose anyone intent on killing has much respect for victims’ gardens.”

  “You want provolone?”

  “What? Oh. Please.”

  “Your cousin Nicola says provolone is a southern cheese, but I told her they have it in Elba too.”

  “Right… According to Coulter the first gun at least was from a stolen cache. Sounds like the second one too.”

  “There you go. A little half glass of wine with that?”

  “Go on.”

  She had her foibles, Rosa, but by God she made a good sandwich. All those years throwing chips in a poke, was she d
reaming about a little Italian bistro where she could make panini and crostini and sandwiches like this? Home-made pesto, a dash of puttanesca, it tasted like heaven. It tasted like girlhood holidays in Elba.

  “You been in touch with Dante?”

  “There’s nothing more I can do for him, Mamma.”

  “Of course there is. You’re an expert.”

  “I’ve done what I can.”

  Rosa sniffed, disappointed at a di Rio’s lack of concern for one of the famiglia.

  “Can’t you, for once, trust my professional judgement?”

  “I usually do, bella.”

  “No you don’t,” Maddy tried to make it sound light, jokey. “You like to disapprove. You know you do.”

  “Ay!” Rosa waved the remark away. “Without me, you’d be dead.” One of Rosa di Rio’s favourite ripostes.

  “The wife.”

  “What?”

  “The wife of the crazy fellow who got himself thrown out a window. The gun just appeared in the middle of the night? With two police on watch? It’d be easy for her to open the back door and put it there.”

  Her old mamma was right. So it would.

  Maddy was having a second glass of wine an hour later with Doug Mason. Walking from her mum’s to the bar she’d smiled at the idea that maybe Doug was the very man she could practise with before Louis got here. He’d be only too happy to oblige – at least, she hoped – and she couldn’t care less what he thought of her bingo wings and love handles. But it was a very different-looking man who was waiting for her in The Belle on Great Western Road. Casually dressed, to the point of unkempt, he looked drained, and she told him so.

  “This is my devil-may-care weekend look.”

  “It’s good. I like jaded and scruffy.” She chinked his glass. “You must be getting worried at JCG. The male of the species there seems to be near extinct.”

  Mason smiled, but Maddy realised she had misjudged. This wasn’t the Doug Mason she’d woken up next to a week ago. The wisecracking, the innuendoes, all gone. Death acts like caustic soda, stripping away the veneer, the masks we don to face the world. One of his bosses was murdered a week ago, the other’s life was hanging by a thread. “Sorry. That was insensitive.”

  “I’m a solicitor,” he kept smiling. “Can hardly complain about insensitivity.”

  “You liked him didn’t you? Bill.”

  “Yeah. I did. He was smarter than Jules ever gave him credit for. It was Bill, not Julian, who kept the company going, making us feel like a team.”

  “He was working yesterday morning. You must have seen him, just before…”

  “I said hello when I got in. Didn’t really speak to him after that.”

  “What do you think, Doug? Would he kill himself?”

  “If you’d asked me yesterday, I’d have said absolutely not. What makes anyone take their own life?”

  “In Bill’s case, circumstances?”

  “He told us all, the day before yesterday, about him and Marion.” Doug managed another smile: “The look on poor Debbie’s face! She’d never heard the like.” The smile faded. “Must admit, though, I was pretty taken aback myself. I mean, your best friend? Talk about shitting on your own doorstep.”

  “And yesterday morning. Did he seem any more upset, or depressed, than before?”

  “As I say, I never really talked to him. But he was searching for something. We could all hear him opening drawers and filing cabinets, swearing to himself in his own office. Then he was in Julian’s doing the same thing. Then back to his own again. Debbie kept asking what he was looking for. He just said ‘nothing’.”

  Doug asked if she wanted another glass of wine, but she declined. They sat for a while longer, trying to talk of other things – Louis, Doug’s love life (less colourful, if he was telling the truth, than Maddy would have guessed). But they were both probably thinking the same thing. Bill Crichton goes into work, searches madly for something, doesn’t find it, and rushes home. Ten minutes later he’s at death’s door. Were the two things connected?

  “I’d better get going,” she said, draining her wine. Mason’s face fell. Had he thought they’d spend more time together? More likely, Maddy thought, he just needed company of any kind. She had no reason to rush away, except that tragedy and mystery affected her in a different way – she needed to be alone, to think, to let the gloom inside take over. Like when you’re sick, pulling even a clammy sheet over you helps. The answers to dark questions lie in dark places.

  “Why on earth don’t we have the soil analysis yet?” Coulter was getting grumpy now. Wasn’t everything supposed to be more efficient these days? All those computers grinding away day and night, researchers and managers and IT specialists. The entire Scottish police had just been reorganised into one national force, the fanfare promising prompt, joined-up responses to every crime. It seemed to the inspector that the more technology and management the slower everything got. Crawford Robertson, newly promoted under the new regime to deputy chief constable for the whole of Scotland, was on his case as much as he’d ever been. Coulter needed answers before his next meeting with the boss.

  “They had to send them to some place in Aberdeen,” DS Russell told him.

  “The James Hutton Institute,” Dalgarno clarified. “They emailed an interim report on Friday. But now they’re checking the gun and bullet left at Crichton’s house, so it’ll be a day or two yet. If there are traces of soil they’ll have to compare them.”

  “And what about the stolen guns?”

  Again, it was Dalgarno who had the information. Russell stared out the window of the meeting room as if he already knew. “Firearms team can now confirm that the Glocks definitely come from the stolen case of six. They’d already been looking in the Glasgow East area. Fits a pattern apparently.”

  “What, we’ve misplaced guns before?!”

  “From police arsenal but also from other sources, a lot of them ending up in the east of the city.” She tapped her screen. “Here. Anywhere between Springburn and Shettleston.”

  “Which would include Fulton’s building site.”

  “Where in these areas have they turned up?”

  “Under-the-counter sales in dodgy pubs. A Colt Cobra snubnose was used in a shop robbery eighteen months ago.”

  “Then ask the robber where he got the gun, no?”

  “They never caught him. Or them, rather. Two of them, probably young. Shopkeeper put up a spirited fight, as they say, and the robbers ran. He managed to wrangle the snub-nose off them, though.”

  “Great. John, find out what you can about gun dealing in Springburn pubs. Go to them. Go to them all. Give me a name, a clue, anything. Who’s selling who Glocks on a weekly basis!”

  Russell and Dalgarno got up to go. “What’s the latest on Crichton?” Coulter asked.

  “Far as I know he’s still under the knife.”

  “Poor bastard.”

  “Poor bastard my arse,” said Russell, leaving. “Whether he was pushed or jumped, we’re going to find out that he deserved it. Mark my words.”

  Coulter would have loved to disagree with his sergeant. That’s how the dynamic worked between them. Russell reached for an early conclusion while his boss played a waiting game. Usually the latter strategy worked better. But in this case, Russell might very well be right.

  Crichton, by all accounts bullied by Julian Miller, starts an affair with his partner’s wife. Greedy wife. Things get out of hand, Julian is killed. Coulter doubted very much that Bill Crichton himself pulled the trigger, although he had – as Russell liked to point out – both the opportunity and the motive. Neither he nor Marion Miller could prove their whereabouts last week. He’s a lawyer, he knows how the bad guys get guns. Still, Coulter couldn’t imagine the scene. Eyeball to eyeball, in cold blood? Could Marion shoot someone? Her husband? With Crichton by her side? Slightly more possible. Whatever, Crichton finds he can’t stand the heat. His girlfriend spilling the beans to his wife was the last straw. Agitate
d, confused, he takes a sudden leap… Maddy Shannon could make a case out of that.

  Except she wouldn’t. She doesn’t buy it. Dan McKillop would be more likely to go for it. Then everybody would be happy. The fiscal, Maxwell Binnie himself. Deputy Chief Constable Robertson. The newspapers. Maybe even Marion Miller, if she was the genuine femme fatale. Crichton takes the blame, snuffs it or lies in a coma for years, unable to speak up for himself. Mrs Miller walks away with the insurance money, and the company.

  Maddy had decided to hop on a subway at Hillhead, go into the office and do some digging. COPFS was quiet. No Dan or Max. Manda was quietly working on something down the corridor and they said they might go for a drink when they were both finished. In her own office Maddy searched for another mobile number for Morag Boyd, but couldn’t find one. She’d drive out later and knock on the woman’s door again. She opened every file she could find that mentioned JCG Miller. Looking for anything that might connect the company to the guns trade. Any case they had defended where someone had been shot, or threatened. But there was too little to work on.

  Then she noticed a cross reference between JCG Miller and the old petrochemical criminal negligence case she’d spent years working on.

  Ten years ago the multinational corporation took local advice from JCG over an inquiry by the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency. From the little she could see in her own files it was all straightforward. Toxic leakage had been detected in groundwater in North Lanarkshire. She managed to find articles on the Web relating to the case. Polychlorinated biphenyls – substances used apparently in coolants for electrical goods – had been found, albeit in low levels, in a stream adjacent to an open landfill site. JCG’s advice – in a report that was delivered to, among others, Forbes Nairne, before he was a lord – seemed fair to her, simply stating the law as it stood on dumping and outlining the responsibilities of both Petrus Inc. and Costello Laboratories, a local company, now defunct, but at the time partially owned by Petrus. Julian Miller himself had seemingly prepared the report and he had been careful not to show prejudice towards either the environmental agency or the multinational.