Lies of the Land

by Chris Dolan

  “I wish I was there with you.”

  “No you don’t. There’s a storm coming. They say it’s going to dump more than six inches of snow on us.”

  “Great. I love snow.”

  “Not in this city.”

  They talked idly about nothing in particular, like an old married couple chatting in one kitchen instead of two. But he had bad news for her: he didn’t think he could make it over to Glasgow in the next few weeks after all. She was disappointed, of course she was, but she couldn’t help feeling a bit of relief too. Just the hassle of it all, getting the house ready, getting work out the way, organising interesting activities for them both. She felt a physical pang of not being able to touch him. Only now that the visit was in doubt did she realise that she was as horny as hell and had been really looking forward to the sex. To hell with interesting activities, she could shut shop and the two of them go at it like bunnies night and day.

  “Some kind of virus,” he was saying. “Half the force is down. Once you get it it seems to take about a month before you’re back on your feet. And the work is building up as it is.”

  From that point on the conversation took a darker turn. His story sounded right, but when you’re halfway across the world, how could she know, for sure? She felt guilty about deciding to check the net later, see if there were any reports of viral outbreaks in New York City. Maybe he just didn’t want to come over.

  They both tried to steer away from it, but the always to be avoided but inescapable relationship discussion had decided it was going to get them. Dump itself on them, and a damn site more than six inches’ worth.

  It was like driving at night-time, you followed a narrow beam of light that only showed you a few yards up the road, no notion of what was all around you. Then you ended up somewhere with no map of the journey you’d just made. Out of the blue, it seemed, they were talking about difficulties between them, bringing up old squabbles, blowing them out of proportion. Even the possibility of breaking up. How did they get here, and so swiftly?

  “What are you saying, Louis? That we take a break?”

  “What are you saying, Maddy? But maybe we should consider it.”

  “How the fuck can you take a break from a relationship which is one long, three-thousand-mile break as it is?”

  She remembered a line from an old Gerry Rafferty song: “Talked all night and left it all unsaid.” But that wasn’t the problem with these kinds of rows. It was not knowing what the other person was saying. Reading between the lines where maybe there really was only blank space. Not knowing what you were saying yourself. Reinterpreting your own words, suddenly attaching meaning to moods and thoughts that had meant nothing half an hour ago. Becoming suspicious of every word.

  She was exhausted at the end of it. Couldn’t remember what she had said. Some of it wasn’t nice. Voices had been raised but she couldn’t say exactly over what. At other times they had soothed each other, but that only served to irk them both more. Which of them was the soother and which the soothee? Louis had been the calmer of the two, she thought. Maybe too calm. Maybe not seeing the importance of this discussion. Maybe he didn’t think it was all that important. Maybe it had always been a more casual thing for him.

  When they had first met each other, nearly five years ago, they had fallen together like pieces from a flat-pack kit. It had surprised and delighted them both. Before, they had been stiff, odd-shaped bits of wood with no purpose. Suddenly they were a comfortable sofa bed, a solid set of matching bedside tables. She’d thought they still were, despite all the downsides, the lack of bodily contact – or rather the intermittent lack followed by a superabundance of it. She opened the wine.

  How flimsy relationships are! Shoogling on a base of a rocky conglomerate of assumptions, hopes, promises, feelings; the lies of the land again. And how quickly it can all subside. Two hours before switching off his face on the screen they had been laughing and joking. By the end of it she had heard herself saying: “I’ll give you a week. A week to think about it.”

  “Okay,” was all he’d said.

  She was scouring the house searching for a cigarette in a pocket or bag somewhere, then, as if the fates had decided to take her out to play with tonight, Mad Packie was on Facebook. “I’ll be over in Glasgow in a week or so. Can we meet, Flutterby?”

  Jaysus Murphy.

  In the morning she phoned Cathy Maguire. Her voice an accurate representation of her mental state: rigid, harsh, a brittle shell to protect her emotions. The two women agreed to meet at the far end of the Belvedere site. The minute she’d made the arrangement she wished she hadn’t.

  She drove, her body rigid too, so much so she could feel the strain in her neck. Keeping blinking to a minimum – she’d be dammed if even a passing motorist spotted watery eyes. There’s staying strong, and there’s white-knuckling it. Think about the case. Not him.

  For as long as she could remember work had been her therapy. In primary school she’d burrowed her head deeper in spelling exercises and times tables when Mamma and Dad started arguing. In secondary she got her head round subjects that baffled her when there were problems in her personal life: fallouts with friends, weight gain, boys. From university on, the law was her escape, her therapist. Hunt down the bad bastards who smudged the world with their greed and cruelty and stupidity. Somehow it felt like revenge, too, on her parents, her body, her disappointments. Now here she was, beginning to feel indifferent about the murder of Julian Miller and Bill Crichton’s little accident. Rich, self-satisfied lawyers – why the hell was she going out her way to find justice for them?

  What in God’s holy name had happened last night? A standard Skype session had turned into a car crash. Not that any of it was new. They’d simply voiced problems, fears, she’d had since day one. She’d suspected Louis had them too, now she knew for sure. And they’d allowed those doubts to take over. Like a sudden wind had ripped off the top of their house; something you couldn’t see, couldn’t touch, control, was blowing them apart. It wasn’t a fair fight.

  She couldn’t contemplate the possibility of a rival, a real flesh-and-blood woman within Louis’ reach. No, it was merely the configuration of any relationship, magnified by distance and a bloody great ocean. Where they had got to, where they were going. Both late to this romance it felt time was running out, yet the ache she felt now was as intense as a first love affair. But what truly annoyed her was that she had handed him all the power. Take a week to think about it? What the feck had got into her? She’d forgotten that love affairs involve power.

  Lovers like to believe that power and control belong to the cold worlds of work, politics, probably the lesser relationships of other people. Your own love life was all trust and passion and mutual understanding, no leader, no follower. It’s not true. And now she’d handed him on a plate every scrap of dominance and influence. She didn’t think he’d manipulated the situation – she prayed he couldn’t have – to get to precisely this point, win the strategic high ground. Surely to God he wasn’t relishing it? Maybe still hadn’t even realised that she was now a plaything in his hands.

  She was at Belvedere before she knew it. She spotted Cathy Maguire on a street corner, up a little hill, looking down over the site. She was with someone else. A man, but he had his back turned, lighting a cigarette or on his phone. She couldn’t see how to drive into that street so she parked by the temporary fencing surrounding the site, some way away from them.

  Louis wasn’t emotionally unintelligent. He was a cop – the workings of the human mind and emotions were his domain. He must understand the impossible situation he’d placed her in; how much he’d weakened her. Yet no sympathetic email or text had arrived. No wee note to level the playing field between them. She’d said she’d give him a week. She wasn’t going to revoke that now. But come on, if there was anything between them, if he was a caring man, he’d ease her passage through that eternity-long seven days. If he doesn’t, and soon, she might be taking a decision of her
own first.

  Cathy Maguire and Kenny Boyd must have thought she was a nutjob: so lost in her thoughts, head down, she almost barged into them before seeing them.

  “So tell me, Miss Shannon,” Cathy didn’t give her time to recover. “Are you here to help us, or frame us? Maybe you still don’t know yersel’.”

  The woman was right. What was she doing here? What did she hope would come of it?

  “I just want to get to the truth, Cathy.”

  “The truth will oot?” Just like Maddy’s nonno used to say, but his Scots-Italian accent made the idea sound less cynical. “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.”

  “You just make that up?” Kenny asked, more bewildered than impressed.

  “Aldous Huxley.” Cathy informed him. Kenny didn’t seem to recognise the name.

  Though they were only a few feet above the flattened ground of the site below them, it felt like they were standing on the summit of a small mountain. Cold northerly gusts blew their coats and hair, chip pokes and general litter tumbled around their feet. Cathy pointed out across the valley below like a general surveying the battlefield.

  “See? The site extends right up to our gardens. And underneath it, the dump. Right on our doorsteps.”

  “It’s a windy day,” Kenny said, not looking at Maddy. “On a still day, you can smell it. Specially in the summer.”

  “Where’s Mrs Boyd today, Kenny?” Maddy asked.

  “She’s wi’ Jason.”

  “That’s your son?”

  “Tell her, Kenny.”

  Kenny looked long and hard over the view before him. Past the site, over condemned tower blocks, towards Glasgow University tower and the distant spires of the affluent Park area.

  “He’s got a tumour on his spine.”

  “I’m sorry.” So it was Morag and Jason she’d seen at the Royal Infirmary the night of Bill Crichton’s accident. “How is he?”

  “How do you think?” Cathy snapped.

  “Touch-and-go,” Kenny said, turning to her for the first time. “They’re going to operate.”

  “When?” Maddy asked.

  “Soon. Sooner the better.”

  “You see now?” Cathy almost shouted. “They’re still poisoning us!”

  “You think Jason’s tumour has something to do with the dump?”

  “My dad died of emphysema. Three months ago. Cancer rates in this area are sky-high. Emphysema, liver damage, disability in babies, all of them way higher than the national average. Naebody’s counting any more, not officially – you’ve all lost interest in us – but I can assure you that things haven’t got any better since they were supposed to have decontaminated and sealed it up for Fulton here.”

  “There must have been a lot of disappointed people round here since the case failed.”

  “Well you’d know. You had a hand in it.”

  “Not me, Cathy. I was collating the Petrus case – Costello Laboratories were just a footnote in that process. And Fulton started building long after we’d stopped pursuing the matter.”

  “Hear that, Kenny? We’re a footnote. Wee Jason’s in italics at the bottom of a page.” She turned to Maddy. “Some old geriatric judge takes it up his hump tae not sour his sherry with our wee lives. Disappointed hen? Oh, much, much, more than disappointed.”

  “I can understand people being angry at everyone involved. Including JCG Miller.”

  “Oh here we go. Back to the mental murderers of Glasgow East.” She stared, furious, at Maddy, then turned to Kenny. “What chance did they have anyway, the lawyers? Up against multi-internationals, the entire petrochemical lobby?”

  “Hang on, hang on.” Maddy was confused. “Against Costello and Petrus?”

  “That bastard Tom Hughes. Ruthless. Greedy thug. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d done Miller in just for trying. Just for speaking to us at all.”

  “Sorry, Cathy, are you telling me that Julian Miller represented you?”

  “Hear that Kenny – Miss Shannon doesn’t seem to know much about us at all. Who’d have guessed.”

  “But I thought – we thought… Christ.”

  Coulter and Russell stood facing each other like kids in a playground. Amy, between them, wondered if she should chant “Fight, fight!”

  “I gave you the job of going through Miller’s and Crichton’s files, John!”

  “And I gave them to the legal boys, to HOLMES, and left a copy on your desk!”

  “How could you not have noticed that they were representing the protestors?!”

  “I’m a fuckin’ policeman, not a lawyer. How come your pal Maddy Shannon didn’t know till now? She’s all over this like a case o’ hives. Can’t an assistant depute procurator fiscal tell the difference between defence and prosecution?”

  That stumped Inspector Coulter, but he stood his ground. It was Amy who broke the deadlock. “Isn’t the question – if you men don’t mind me saying – not how we or COPFS didn’t know, but why nobody at JCG Miller knew. Or told us.”

  Coulter stepped back. Russell rolled his shoulders as if, being the second to move away, he’d won the fight.

  “Julian Miller was dead before he could tell us. Bill Crichton can’t speak. And, anyway, they did tell us – in the files and records. Which you,” he wasn’t going to let Russell get away with this, “were the responsible officer for!”

  “You’re forgetting that they lost the Fulton file.”

  “And then there’s that Abbott one,” Amy said, trying to help. “And there’s someone else who could have told us. Tom Hughes. Why wouldn’t he mention that JCG Miller were on his side?”

  Amy was the only one of the three being professional here, Coulter thought. He and Russell were acting like a couple of badly trained pit bulls; she was calm, thinking it through.

  “Get him in here!” Once you start shouting, it’s hard to stop.

  Now he’d have to go and pass the news of this blunder up the line. Blunder? Catastrophe. Crawford Robertson will go nuts. The deputy chief constable will lose no time in pointing out that, while Detective Sergeant Russell was at fault, he, Detective Inspector Coulter, is where the buck stops.

  Why is that? Why doesn’t it stop at Robertson? Go all the way up the line. Not that he’d actually say that, of course. And anyway maybe it did. The DCC had committees, boards, councils to report to. And the press loved hauling him over the coals. Geez, this was going to be one hell of a meeting.

  Having phoned the site, Amy and John Russell made their way into the city centre. Tom Hughes was in Fulton Construction HQ today.

  “Shysters,” Russell said. “JCG Miller. All lawyers. Do anything for money.”

  He was still smarting from the row with Coulter. Face still flushed, but a hangdog slouch to his gait. Amy could see he knew he’d screwed up big time.

  “That’s where we should be looking. The Millers, the Crichtons – mark my words, Amy, this is going to turn out to be a sleazy wee tale of greedy lawyers and greedier wives. I’m beginning to feel sorry for Hughes and his mob. They know we’re wasting our time and theirs.”

  And that did indeed seem to be the way Hughes looked at it. He led them into his office. Russell had been to the HQ before, Amy hadn’t. On the second storey of an old red sandstone Victorian building in Wellington Street. A bit crumbly on the outside, not much better inside. But it was clearly a bigger company than she’d realised. Twenty or more staff here alone she reckoned.

  “What now?” Hughes barked.

  Russell kept his voice meek and soft. “Sorry, Tom, I know this must be a hassle. But listen, we won’t keep you long. It’s just something … that we realised a while back, but I never got round to asking you. The lawsuit that was brought against you and Costello Laboratories—”

  “First, it wasn’t a lawsuit as you call it. It was a report, and the law said it was all in order. Second, if there had been an actual lawsuit it would have been brought against Costello, or one of their holding companies, not us. T
hey were responsible for decontamination, not us.”

  “According to the report,” Amy said, “or what I’ve seen of it, decontamination was a specialist job for Costello, but the final sealing was part of Fulton Construction’s contract.”

  “A technical detail.”

  “Anyway,” Russell gave Amy a warning look, then smiled again at Hughes, “what we wanted to confirm with you is that JCG Miller were acting against Fulton Construction.”

  “Correct.”

  “I’m just surprised you never mentioned that.”

  “You never asked. And I assumed,” Hughes was beginning to put two and two together, “that you lot had done your homework.”

  “We did notice,” Amy stepped closer to Hughes, and away from Russell, “that Fulton have had JCG Miller on your books as advisers for nearly ten years. Since before the decontamination issue. Isn’t that unusual, sir? Your own solicitors acting against you?”

  “You know, hen, you need to brush up on your law. There’s nothing illegal in that. Or even unusual. They have lots of clients, we have lots of clients. Glesga isnae that big a place. Sometimes you find yourself playing for the other team against your pals.”

  “Thank you for your co-operation, Mr Hughes. Though, if I may say, this isn’t a game.”

  Hughes glowered at her.

  “Cheers, Tom,” Russell said, rushing out, “Sorry to bother ye.”

  The magic hour, at this time of year flaxen and filmy, brews slowly into a thick greeny light. The slightest hint of aurora borealis over Glasgow’s splintered skyline. The air a cold draught of hills and wilderness just beyond the stone and concrete of the city. Depending on your state of mind, it’s either dreamy or nightmarish.

  WPC Morrison was back on duty in Bill Crichton’s room. Police work can be dull, but this was driving her mad. She wondered if Clare Crichton was just ahead of her in the breakdown stakes.