Lies of the Land

by Chris Dolan

  Coulter phoned home and was glad when Kiera answered. Martha could handle his absence, even on Saturday nights, these days, but when one of the family was round it made him feel better.

  “I’ve done as much as I can here. I’ll be home soon.”

  “No problem, Dad. I’ve set Netflix up for you and Mum. We’re halfway through ep one of True Detective.”

  Coulter only understood half of what that all meant, but was aware of a certain irony. He got his coat, checking out the window to judge the weather. A smirry night, his favourite kind. A good night to walk home, an hour of thinking, or better yet, not thinking, just walking. But it wasn’t to be.

  “Sir.” WPC Morrison came in and stood by the door. “There’s someone downstairs I think you’ll want to see.”

  The someone in question was a studenty-looking young guy, waiting for him in an interview room. The lad’s hair was gelled back, cut into the bone at the sides – Coulter’s father would have approved.

  “Mr Daniels. You want to talk to me about Zack Goldie?”

  The boy looked worried. “I’m not sure I should be doing this.”

  “Whatever it is, son, believe me, you should.”

  “Zack’s a friend. I really like him.”

  “But?”

  “This is hearsay. I could be landing him in a whole bunch of shit he doesn’t deserve.”

  “But.”

  “Zack’s a really chilled guy. But like a lot of guys like that, when he does blow a gasket…”

  “Sparks fly?”

  “Listen personally I’ve never seen him do anything really crazy. Can this remain confidential, between you and me?”

  “I can’t promise that, Mr Daniels.”

  “Gabe.”

  “Gabe. But if what you want to tell me amounts to nothing, there’s no reason why Zack should know you ever spoke to me.”

  “Okay,” but the lad didn’t look convinced. “I first knew Zack at uni. But we still hang out sometimes. Some other people don’t like him, have tried to warn me away from him.”

  “We’ve heard he can have a bit of a temper.”

  “Oh. Right. Well that was it really.”

  “Can you give me any particular examples, Gabe?”

  “Like I say, I’ve never seen it for myself. But I know that he did once walk into a party, already tooled up. He’d brought a kitchen knife. Apparently he just came into a busy room and said to this guy, ‘I’m going to kill you tonight.’”

  “Who was this?”

  “Guy called Josh. Josh Callaghan. Not really one of my crowd.”

  “I take it he didn’t kill him?”

  “No. Josh is a big guy, you know? But he’d seen Zack lose it before so he got out of there quick style.”

  “And why did Zack pick on Josh Callaghan?”

  “Way I heard it, it was a stupid reason. Zack’d been kicked out of uni for dealing weed. His parents hired some lawyers to defend him and Zack was pretty sure that’d do the trick. When it didn’t, when the lawyers failed … and Josh was studying law.”

  “He took a dislike to lawyers?”

  “Big time.”

  “And it was enough that Josh was studying law for Zack to want to kill him?”

  “He wasn’t really going to kill him, man. Sir. He just wanted to noise him up. But when I heard about the Miller murder…”

  “That was over a week ago, Gabe.”

  “And I’ve been trying to figure out ever since whether I should tell you or not.”

  “You did the right thing. Finally. And, yes, it’s highly unlikely Zack had anything to do with what happened to Julian Miller. But the incident with Josh, it wasn’t the only time Zack lost it?”

  “I’ve heard he’s done a few crazy things like that. But always just talk, you know? When he’s had a drink, a smoke.”

  Coulter got up. “I’ll get you a car home, Gabe. But we’ll need to take your details first.”

  “Is that necessary?”

  “’Fraid so, son.”

  Maddy took her mum to morning Mass. Years ago she’d read a book, couldn’t remember its name. By Marina Warner? Warner had been a young intellectual leftie atheist when, on holiday in Paris, she’d wandered into Sacré Cœur or Notre Dame and was suddenly reduced to tears looking at a statue of the Virgin Mary. The rest of the book questioned why the image had such an effect on her.

  Sometimes Maddy felt the same thing. The forgiving face of Christ in the Stations of the Cross, the picture of Our Lady. They were in Rosa’s favourite church, Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception. Maddy disliked the name – out to deny women their sexuality, the whole whore/Madonna thing. But the rhythm of the prayers, the small congregation murmuring, the holy pictures and the faint smell of incense, all seeped under her skin. In a place like this you could too easily forget all the other stuff – the hierarchy, the crazy rules about sex and sexuality, the secrecy. In the hands of the wrong people it led to catastrophe. Like two boys dead in a park.

  But now all she could feel was a kind of longing. Probably for childhood, the nuns at school, all the lovely stories and picture books about saints and angels. The old certainties. She remembered being at a do somewhere and talking to an older man refusing a drink. “I keep away from alcohol to stay closer to God,” he’d said. Maddy had had a few already and couldn’t stop herself from saying, “I drink to keep away from Him.”

  Sometimes she should keep her big mouth shut.

  After delivering Mamma safely home she went back to her own place and dug deeper still into old Petrus files. There was nothing she hadn’t read twenty times in the last week.

  Taking Mamma to church made her feel more receptive to Dad. God knows why. Packie Shannon had, to put it mildly, an idiosyncratic relationship with Catholicism. When Maddy was growing up he had supported her mum by bringing Maddy up in the faith, going most Sundays to Mass with them. But his boredom, and occasionally his irritation, was plain to Maddy even when she was very little. Once in a while, when he’d had a skinful, he’d come home at night and rant about priests being in the pay of oppressors and imperialists.

  He had similar contradictions about the chip shop. On the one hand he was canny, fiscally precise and scrupulous about takings, declaring his tax to the penny. But he’d regularly seethe about the small-mindedness of petty capitalism and the bourgeoisie. Packie Shannon was the only Catholic atheist reactionary socialist in the world. Later, when Maddy began reading up on politics she laughed at her dad being the very embodiment of dialectical materialism, busily sowing the seeds of his own destruction.

  “Hi Dad. Can’t see me making it over to Ireland in the near future. Very busy here.”

  Phoning was out of the question. Talking one-to-one had been mutually proscribed since he and Mamma split up. Over twenty years ago now. Bloody hell. Rosa would see meeting him as an act of high treason on Maddy’s behalf. There had been virtually no communication between father and daughter for a year or two. Then there had been the odd furtive phone call, but they always ended badly, either with Maddy railing at him all over again for abandoning them, or Packie slagging off her mum. More silence, then for a while Dad wrote her letters.

  That was when he was playing his trump card against Rosa, going off to live in Italy. Her country. Gleefully mounting his own emotional imperialism, colonising Rosa di Rio’s most treasured sense of self. Those letters had been surprisingly tender, but they came just when Maddy, a rookie fiscal, was trying to amputate her entire past. Thereafter there had been stabs with new technologies. Emails, then short, mostly droll, texts for a bit. And now he’d discovered Facebook.

  “Mamma’s fine.” She’d always made a point of referring to Rosa. Partly to keep him somehow part of the family, but more to keep the punishment fresh and bitter. Feck knows when she’d get a reply – Dad seemed to check Facebook once a week at best. Perhaps he’d already moved on from it. Maybe he’s already sending her Snapchat or Instagram messages. Packie would love being ahead of his
daughter technologically.

  She decided to reward herself with an afternoon glass of wine and an email tête-à-tête with Louis. Closing down all her Petrus files she remembered that one of the judges involved along the line was Forbes Nairne. That was good news. It would give her an excuse to pop in on him and talk professionally. Dan McKillop was good at playing the networking game. Maddy would take a leaf from her colleague’s book. And who knows, Nairne might even help her find a connection between Petrus and the Miller case.

  Halfway through describing to Louis – in veiled terms, no names: email trails might prove compromising in the future – her thoughts to date on Miller and Crichton, the protesting ladies and Fulton Construction, Samantha Anderson phoned. She’d be in the West End this evening, if Maddy fancied meeting for a drink.

  There was no way she could avoid it – her job, the little social life she had, her time alone, all seemed to involve alcohol. Ten years ago she hadn’t worried about it. Yes, she was younger, but it seemed now that hardly a day passed when there wasn’t a new set of guidelines or an expert putting the fear of death into everyone. Dan McKillop told her recently that he couldn’t care less. “Better than dying of fuck all.” Maddy wished she could share his insouciance. If it were true, that you could drink and smoke and eat to the point of dropping dead, she’d sign up for it. But that wasn’t what usually happened. Usually you got a stroke or a heart attack or cancer. Dying was one thing; being half dead for years terrified the bejesus out of her.

  Not enough to stop her nodding when Sam, at the bar in the Chip, said, “Large one?”

  “He might as well have not bothered going home,” Sam said, once they’d found a seat. “Stuart. The night we were round at your place. Turns out that once I’d gone to bed, he went out for a walk. Some walk! He walked right back into town again.”

  “From Bearsden?”

  “Stuart likes walking, but at two in the morning?”

  “He told you this?”

  “My brother did. He drives in every morning early to work and thought he’d passed Stuart on the way. Before six in the morning! When I asked Stuart he admitted it.”

  “What made him do that? Must be, what, five miles or something?”

  “He said he just started walking. No destination in mind. Suddenly realised he was at the top of Byres Road.”

  “What did he do then?”

  “Says he turned around and walked right back home again.”

  Maddy remembered the story of her great-grandfather. He’d walked from poverty-stricken Elba all the way to Scotland. Set up the café in Girvan and, two years later, walked all the way back to Italy to collect his family. Stuart’s journey was hardly as epic.

  “He’s not coping at work.”

  “Sorry. I always forget. What does Stuart do again exactly?”

  “He’s a project manager in facilities management.”

  “Ah.”

  “No, I haven’t a clue what he does either. Manages, I suppose. He’s always worrying about staff, and sales, and reading spreadsheets. I sometimes think he’s not sure what he does.” Sam finished off her glass, when Maddy was less than halfway through hers. “He’s always so … distant. He never was a great talker, Stuart, but now he hardly says a word. To anyone. I used to think he was the strong silent type. He was the strong silent type.” Maddy found that hard to imagine: had there once been a prototype Stuart, leaner, pre-baldy, made of sterner material that had deteriorated over time? “But the strength seems to have gone. When he’s not staring at reports, or walking round in circles, he … well…”

  “What?” Maddy asked.

  “He cries. He cries all the time, Maddy.”

  Maddy wondered why Samantha Anderson was telling her all this. She hardly knew the woman. As far as she could remember she’d spoken more to her in the last week than at any time before. Sam gave her a sad smile.

  “I’m sorry. I know what you’re thinking. Because I don’t know who else to tell. Not my ‘friends’ such as they are. That’s all about how well we’re all doing. How perfect our families are. Are you on Facebook, Maddy? It’s horrible. It’s one big boasting billboard. I can’t tell my ‘family’. We don’t have kids. I have one brother. In London. We send each other Christmas and birthday cards. End of. Stuart has a sister and a brother, but they all hate each other. And certainly not anyone at work – we don’t even talk about what’s happened to Jules and Bill.” Maddy poured half of her glass into Sam’s. Sam immediately drank it. “So. You. I have no idea why. You remind me of a … priest or something.”

  Maddy laughed. “That’s just the Italian name.”

  “No. I don’t mean priest. I mean confessor. Do you get female confessors? I hope you don’t mind me saying but there’s something, I don’t know, kind of wounded about you, Maddy. That makes it okay to confess to.”

  “You mean someone worse off than yourself?”

  “Not worse, no. But wounded, and coping.”

  Maddy didn’t know how to react. Considered one way, this woman, whom she hardly knew, was happily drinking her wine and insulting her. Even if she didn’t mean to. Put on the professional face – that seemed her only option.

  “What time did Stuart get back from his walkabout?”

  Sam was surprised at the question. “I have no idea. I got up late, hung-over. He was back when I went downstairs. Mid-morning?”

  “At work, Sam. You ever come across a company called Abbott’s?”

  The woman looked deeply disappointed at Maddy changing the topic. What had she expected? A counselling session? Three Hail Marys and absolution? Perhaps she’d hoped Maddy would respond in kind and spill out admissions of her own, the two of them getting drunk and crying, hugging each other. Bugger that.

  “No.” But Samantha Anderson didn’t even think about it.

  February. In Glasgow that’s the cruellest month. No sunlight since November. The challenge of Christmas. You’ve survived January and you need, you really need, light and warmth. February gives you nothing. It’s the Limbo month. Four weeks of purgatory. Everybody goes a bit crazy. But, walking back alone to her empty flat, try as she might to cut Sam some slack, Maddy’s heart just hardened. She couldn’t reciprocate Sam’s kindred spirit. And she liked her husband less.

  The doctors had decided to put Bill Crichton into a medically induced coma.

  “Just what we need,” Coulter moaned.

  “What is it?” Russell asked.

  Amy had just returned from the hospital, taking off scarf and hat and gloves. “You shut down all brain functions with anaesthesia. Crichton has intracranial hypertension – trauma caused by the fall. The brain heals better if it’s allowed to rest. At least that’s the theory.”

  “But it might not work?”

  “No.”

  “How long for?” Coulter sighed.

  “A Dr Boergmann told me of a case where the patient was kept in a coma for six months.”

  “Six months!”

  “Did it work?”

  “I didn’t ask. But apparently that’s unusual. Depends on how long it takes the swelling to go down. He hopes no more than a few days.”

  “Even then we don’t know what state he’ll be in.”

  “He might not even survive, sir.”

  Russell picked up the phone. “I’ll get Zack Goldie to come in.”

  “No. I’d like to see him in his natural habitat.”

  Russell groaned. “Waste of bloody time.”

  “Who I do want brought in are these protesting women from Belvedere.” Coulter looked at his screen. “Morag Boyd and Cathy Maguire. I’ll ping you over the details.”

  “Where did you get them from?” Russell asked, suspicious. Rightly so. Coulter was reading from a long email from Maddy Shannon. Stuff she should have told him days ago. She tried to make it sound like she’d chanced upon the pair of them – something about researching another case. Coulter didn’t believe it, so no chance Russell or Dalgarno would. Was he going to h
ave to rein Maddy in? For her own good, as well as keeping colleagues off his back. But she was good at this. She might go about things the wrong way, but it was like having another – keen, talented – officer on the case. Unpaid.

  “Oh, stuff’s coming thick and fast, John. HOLMES, beat reports, you know…”

  Then again, it nettled him that she didn’t trust him. She could easily have talked over her hunches, given him the names and the information he needed and let him, the detective inspector, do his thing.

  “You got any further with East End gunrunning?” He turned the tables on Russell.

  “Going over again this evening. Uniforms are asking around too.”

  “That’s our best lead. Track down those guns, we get our killer.”

  Two easy steps. If only.

  Zack Goldie lived with his mum and dad. Or rather, he lived in his parents’ granny flat, the top floor of a massive Victorian villa in Dowanhill. He was clearly under instructions not to change anything. There must once have been an actual granny, the hallway and living room old-fashioned. A telephone table in the hall, with a phone and a chair. Antimacassars on the backs and arms of a sturdy three-piece suite in the room. Family photographs, many of them in black and white, in frames on the mantel and little tables in each corner.

  “I knew one day it’d come back to haunt me.” Zack sat down, looking out of place on the floral-patterned sofa. DI Coulter and DS Dalgarno remained standing. “And it wasn’t because he was studying law.”

  “Why then, Zack?”

  “Because, at that point in my life, I was a psycho. Not literally,” he said quickly. “I’d flunked uni, was drinking, on snow—”

  “Cocaine,” Amy said to no one, but for Coulter’s benefit. Which rankled. He knew that one.

  “Just a couple of months. Did one or two stupid things like that. Now everyone’s got me down as some kind of gangsta.”

  “So why pick on Josh?”

  “Because he’s an arsehole? Will that do, Officer?” When it clearly didn’t, Zack sighed deeply. “You know how there’s people in your life that bug you? But they’re friends of friends or whatever, so you just put up with it. When you’re in tailspin, drinking and snorting, suddenly you can’t hide it any more. Callaghan always acted the big man. I just wanted to scare him I suppose. Did that a couple of times back then.”