by Chris Dolan
Running late this morning, she’d brought her car in, so she knocked off early and drove the now familiar route out to Belvedere. So familiar that she could check her text when it pinged on the passenger seat beside her. Louis: “So. Are you? Okay.”
The trouble with text is that you can’t read the tone. She hadn’t answered him since this morning. Was this little nudge from across the pond a worried one, or just narky? She didn’t want him to think she was being huffy, playing hard to get. The answer to his question couldn’t be texted. She wasn’t okay, that was for sure. What was less sure was precisely why. He’d have to wait until tonight. She didn’t want to video chat: she was too raw, her thoughts too tangled, face-to-face wouldn’t end well. She’d write a considered, nuanced email.
CD on the car was playing the Blue Nile “A Walk Across the Rooftops”: “Flags caught on the fences…” She remembered there was an old packet of fags in the glove compartment, maybe one or two left in it. She tried to lean over and rummage for it, but decided that the looking was about to kill her far more quickly than the nicotine would, and gave up.
The sun stayed high enough in the sky for the schemes of the North East to look less desolate and jagged. She parked a little back from the site and walked over before calling on Cathy and Morag. Work on the new houses was slacking off as evening approached, just half a dozen or so men bricklaying, mixing, pouring concrete. The late winter sun shone low on the horizon, the colour of condensed orange juice, throwing the shadows of the half-built walls long and thin across the ground. Like the shadows of gravestones.
The earth itself, gouged and agitated under her feet, was treacly brown and so rich looking it might nourish vines and fruit trees. The only thing that grows naturally round here is breeze block and concrete.
What was it hiding – if anything? She knew for certain there was a potent cocktail of nasty substances down there. She’d read a list two pages long of what Costello had buried – you’d never guess, the soil in the evening sun looked healthy and fresh. She’d also seen the files that guaranteed that everything had been properly disposed of, decontaminated, sealed. SEPA inspectors, and lawyers for both Costello and Fulton were persuaded that everything had been done to the proper legal standards.
So where were all these cancers and ailments that Cathy and Morag had told her about coming from? Had somebody, somewhere, cut corners? Then again, maybe people round here had to lay blame somewhere. Glasgow’s statistics were shocking – even more so in areas like this. The figures the women had quoted sounded not much worse than the norm. Some of it could be explained – deprivation, poor education, mistrust of everyone in the system, from GPs to consultants to procurators fiscal. Violence, certainly – Glasgow’s murder rate was still nearly twice as high as London’s for heaven’s sake. Poor diet, smoking, drinking – it all fed into the general malaise of a city that was once worked to death’s door. Then even the work was taken away.
The Glasgow effect. There are areas in Liverpool, Manchester that are every bit as deprived – of employment, services, access – yet life expectancy was five years longer or more. Even people like her – middle class, educated, employed, nice house, regular holidays – could expect to live five years less than their counterparts in Birmingham or Newcastle.
She’d read that one cause of heart attacks in middle-aged men and women was a sense of lack of control. Middle managers were far more likely to keel over in their mid fifties than their bosses or juniors. Responsibility without power. The feeling of being a cog in a mysterious, rusty machine. She thought about Stuart Anderson, all those spreadsheets and objectives and outcomes, appraisal meetings where the boss had all the power, including handing over a P45. So he ends up stravaiging all over town with a glaikit look on his face. Whole chunks of Glasgow were like that, blamed for eating badly, drinking and smoking, not working. An entire conurbation given the boot, and as a result losing its identity, rendered powerless. A patient of early-onset dementia, triggered by depression, fear, insecurity. It was one of the reasons she’d campaigned for independence – any change could only be for the good. Glasgow, the city of Civic Alzheimer’s.
Maddy nearly jumped out her skin when she turned around. Cathy Maguire was standing right behind her.
“What you doing, hen? Practising mindfulness? I hear it’s all the rage up the West End.”
“You gave me a fright. Never heard you come up.”
“Aye we’re a’ ghosts out here. I take it you want to ask more questions?”
“If I knew what they were. Just thought I’d come over for a chat.”
“A chat. A wee cosy chat. Isn’t that lovely.” Cathy turned and walked down the street, away from her house. “Well you can come along to the Canal if you want.”
Cathy strode on, keeping ahead of Maddy, crossing over the north edge of Belvedere, in through houses that probably predated the 1970s scheme Cathy and Morag lived in: low-rises, the cladding either hanging dangerously or completely disintegrated. Behind them lay nothing, barren land strewn with old tyres and litter and the carcass of an ancient play park. Except for the Canal – a perfectly square, squat, public house standing alone, as dead and red in its brick as Mars in the dark sky. Although there was a door, and an old brass plaque bearing the name, the place still looked as though it had its back to you. Four even walls, all of them rear ends.
It was just as box-like on the inside. Lit by bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling, there was a simple bar, sparse gantry, and five or six tables with old classroom chairs around them. At the nearest to the door sat two elderly men playing cards. They nodded to Cathy and took no interest in Maddy. At the far end sat Kenny and Morag Boyd. Cathy went to the bar and spoke to the young male bartender; Maddy joined the Boyds and sat down.
“You all right?” Morag smiled at her. She looked less worn out than the last couple of times Maddy had seen her. Kenny said hello but without looking at her. He had the one-thousand-yard stare of the battle weary soldier, eyes fixed on something no one else could see.
Above their heads old paintings and photographs were hung, on three of the four straight walls of the bar. A pictorial history of the area. First, above Morag’s head, a little hamlet on the side of the hill, like something out of Walter Scott. Then the coming of the canal. There were several of those, its construction, barges sailing on it, some with passengers, others with coal and timber. Over where the men were playing cards soundlessly, the hamlet had become a village, probably not long before Glasgow had swallowed it whole. The city we have become, Maddy thought, history and progress, poking and prodding the hills and vales. Glancing back at the hamlet above Morag it looked so pretty and tranquil. But those were hard days too, life expectancy just as short, brutal and greedy lairds and landowners. It was a short and inequitable journey for most folk, then as now, from walking and digging the earth to being put under it. Cathy plonked two bottles of fizzy wine on the table, and the young barman set out four glasses.
“A celebration. To bid farewell to old Tom Hughes. May he rot in hell.”
Kenny and Morag smiled and held their glasses out for Cathy to fill them. Maddy had the car but thought she should join the toast with one glass.
“A double celebration. Eh, Morag?”
“Aye. To Jason.” Morag turned to Maddy to explain. “He goes in tomorrow.”
“Here’s to him.” Maddy raised her glass and drank.
“Dinna worry,” Cathy said, her smile mocking, “we won’t go on about you being more interested in the deaths o’ lawyers and businessmen than a wean from the schemes.”
“Cathy. I just don’t know what to do. We’ve been through the file presented to Lord Nairne. Maybe you have a strong case for the legal limits of toxic waste and how they’re disposed of and sealed. But as the law stands, everything at Belvedere was done properly.”
“That site still leaks,” Morag said. “It was bad enough when Costello’s was here, but it’s got worse since.”
“There’s simply no proof of th
at, Morag.”
“They didn’t look at the evidence. Not properly. Those lads from the uni were certain of that.”
“What lads?”
“We were worried that SEPA weren’t being shown everything. That Costello, or Petrus, and Fulton were only showing them part of the decontamination process.”
“So we took,” Cathy picked up from Morag, “pictures ourselves, and got students from Cally to take measurements, and photies of their own.”
“Glasgow Caledonian?”
“The uni, aye,” Morag said.
“Do you have these students’ names or anything?”
Cathy shook her head. “They were in their last year. One was Australian—”
“Jake … Jake something.”
“And the other Polish. Darius. Darius Mozos?”
“We’ve tried to get in touch with them. They’ve gone back home. Cally gave us some contact details, but they’ve never responded to us.”
“Does the university have a record of the work they did for you?”
“No. We employed them,” Morag said, “or rather, we gave them what wee bit of cash we could. It wasn’t part of their course or anything. They just happened to be students interested in waste disposal. Put it on their CVs.”
“What about their research? Was that in the file JCG Miller put together?”
“It was supposed to be. But we’ve always doubted it.”
“Did you keep a copy – of their research?”
“Yes. But Miller’s kept that for us, along with everything else.”
“We thought it was safe,” Cathy said, “but then they told us they couldn’t return it to us.”
“Some mumbo jumbo about legal reasons,” Kenny said suddenly, until that point seemingly on a different planet from where this conversation was taking place. He took out his mobile. “I’ve only got a few photies of the photies.” He hunched over his phone for a moment, then turned the screen to Maddy.
At the corners of the lead and concrete seal under Belvedere, black sludge and reddy-brown gunge oozed out and seeped over the surface.
“See? How could they have passed that?”
“Without even commenting on it, or asking for more tests?”
“Everything done to the proper standards? My arse.” Said Cathy.
“Could you text that photograph, and anything else you’ve got, to me Kenny?”
In all the files she had looked at, Maddy had never seen that image.
Coulter was letting Harkins stew in his own juices for a while. DS Dalgarno, after she’d explained that Mr Gavin Hood, consultant spinal neurosurgeon, was likely to take Bill Crichton off his coma-inducing drugs tomorrow, sat down across the desk from her boss and smiled.
“And even better news.”
“What, better than being able to talk to a man who is more than likely to be severely brain-damaged?”
She put a printout on his desk. “CM International. Based in Holland, suppliers, globally, of construction materials. Including soil. This is Forensic Services’ report. Fulton bought several tons of their soil and topsoil three months ago. It matches all the traces on the murder weapons and at the crime scenes. But,” Amy’s smile widened further, “does not match any of the other samples we’ve taken, including from the Millers’ and Crichtons’ gardens.”
Coulter didn’t appear quite as excited by the news as she was. “So. We can narrow down the search to anyone who has been near Belvedere, including”, he mimicked Amy’s enthusiasm, “the victims, everyone who works there, who lives near there and, for all we know, the victims’ spouses and extended families. Not that much further forward, are we?”
Amy nodded, deflated.
“Ignore me, Amy. I’m sorry. You’re right. We’ve been waiting for this for ages and, yes, it does narrow things down. I’m becoming a right old grump, amn’t I? And maybe we’ll even get something out of Bill. Always look on the bright side, eh?” Coulter watched Amy nod and get up to go, still a bit punctured.
He and Russell paid another visit to Joe Harkins. The desk sergeant said he hadn’t asked formally for a solicitor. He still had his own mobile so it’s possible one might turn up yet.
“He’s not worried,” Russell reckoned. “If he had anything to do with this he’d have been on the blower in jig time.”
Coulter wasn’t so sure. Guilty men, if their strategy is to look as innocent as possible, often didn’t request a solicitor. Until it was too late. A big mistake, trying to look as if there’s nothing to worry about.
Back in the interview room, Joe Harkins was indeed trying to look as unflustered as possible, lying back on his chair, pretending to take forty winks.
“Mr Harkins. Thought we should bring you up to date. First, your fingerprints are on the packet of cigarettes.”
“I said they’d be, didn’t I?”
“Unfortunately found under the body of your murdered boss.”
“Also, the soil, we can now confirm, found at all the crime scenes comes from Belvedere construction site.”
“Where you are security man and general gopher,” Russell added in.
“What,” Harkins put on a mock-shocked face, “the soil on my gear comes from the place I work? My, my, you boys are fair storming ahead here, eh.” The sneer on his face wasn’t quite enough to hide the man’s disquiet. The long wait, left all on his own, was working. Coulter put his face closer to Harkins.
“Let me be plain. Right now, Harkins, you are the only suspect in the frame for a double murder and just possibly culpable homicide.”
“So arrest me then.”
“Oh we will. Everything in good time, Joe, eh? Unless of course, you give us a name. Who did you sell or give the guns to? ’Cause without that name, we can only assume that you kept them yourself. The case against you is looking very spick and span.”
Harkins turned his face away. Coulter walked over and held the door open for John Russell. “Sleep well, Mr Harkins.”
Maddy parked at her house and walked over to Epicures, arriving just as Coulter was arriving. Midweek, late evening, the café was quiet. They sat at a table and the waitress, asking their order, lit the tea light candle that sat, in its decorative little holder, between them. Although all the occupied tables had one they both squirmed a little.
“That looks truly nasty,” Coulter said, peering at the picture Kenny Boyd had sent to her phone.
“Problem is,” Maddy said, “without any provenance it’s not much use to us.”
“Meaning it could be a picture from anywhere in the world.”
“Sadly.”
“Do you think it is? Are the Boyds and Maguire calculating enough to try and pass off phoney pictures?”
“Or desperate enough. It’s possible.”
“I know it’s possible, Maddy. But what is your opinion? Professional and personal. You know them, and you know the background.”
“I don’t know Kenny. He has a wall around him six foot thick and six miles high. At least whenever I’m around. His missus, Morag, she seems more saddened than anything. She’s so exhausted and worried about her son I doubt she’d bother trying to pull something like that.”
“And Cathy Maguire?”
“She’s the leader of the gang, I’d say. Bright. Energetic. More sussed?” Maddy looked at the photo on her phone again. “But I think it’s the real deal.”
“We’ll do what we can to try and track down these students.” Maddy had told him about them when she phoned to meet him. “But it could take a long time. Too long.”
They were brought their coffee by the manageress. Despite being a regular, Maddy had never really spoken to her but found the woman fascinating. Mid thirties maybe? Glam, but in an interesting way. Fifties-style bright red lipstick and Marilyn Monroe hair, her smiley down-home manner a striking counterpoint to the brash look. You felt she might at any moment break out into an Imelda May sassy rockabilly song. The woman clearly interested Alan Coulter too. Over macchiato and espresso they dis
cussed the case, going round in circles. Until Coulter said what he was inevitably going to say. “You have to stop hanging around Belvedere with the locals, Maddy. If me and my lot eventually manage to do our jobs, you are the best person to have in court.”
Maddy sighed. “You telling me I’m interfering with the investigation, Inspector?”
“You know damn fine you are.”
“Yet I keep bringing you vital information.”
“Do you?” He nodded at her phone. “If that leads anywhere it’ll take months. We don’t have months Maddy. We know Harkins sold on a case of six Glocks. Two have been used, and one left to goad us.”
“You think the other three are going to be used?”
“It’s at least a possibility.”
“Maybe the killer just couldn’t get a case of three. And anyway, I’m over there and talking to Cathy and the Boyds about another matter all together.”
“Petrus. And you’re increasingly convinced, and trying to convince me, that your old Petrus case is connected to the murders. It’s all too muddy.”
“Maddy.”
“What?”
“It’s all too muddy Maddy. Life’s too short not to enjoy a little assonance wherever you can.”
Coulter rolled his eyes. “I don’t know the technical ins and outs of the procurating business, but if I were Maxwell Binnie I’d be getting jumpy. A man who later throws himself, or is pushed, out a window comes to your house, asking you to lie for him. Possible suspects are giving you – personally – potentially crucial evidence. Employees of one of the dead men were in your house the night one of them was killed. Need I go on?”
No. He needn’t. Maddy knew this case had slipped from her finger. And that all her work on Petrus might quite possibly be handed over to Dan McKillop, or Manda, for them to take the limelight. Why was her life always so embroiled, problematic? Was it because she was a single woman, out and about, in a city that felt, especially among the middle classes, like a village? A hamlet on the hill. She knew people, she talked out of turn. Her curiosity was as deeply embedded as her impetuousness.