Potter's Field

by Dolan, Chris;

  Potter’s Field

  by

  Chris Dolan

  For my brother Paul, who helped with this as he’s helped with so much else throughout my life

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  Copyright

  The days were centuries long, the air like parchment. The town endured in its valley, like the rocks on Monte Capanne – patient, dry, waiting, spring sun, autumn sun, a little rain, the odd wind, nothing changed for more than a moment.

  So many generations have made a living here; too many. The earth is red and sore from being forced, overworked, tugged at; the hillsides rudely naked since the vines failed and the soil became bitter. There’s so much past there’s no room left for any future.

  There’s a man walking towards a village. He doesn’t know it for sure yet, but his future doesn’t lie here. There are two boys playing outside the house the man is heading for – a plain cottage overlooking the sea behind. On an island this size, the sea – the only means of escape other than hot earth being laid over you – is never far away.

  One of those two boys will only ever know this island; the other will discover a whole new world. But he’ll bring his island with him. He’ll wear it like a shell. Wherever he goes that house by the sea will be with him – the house and the heat and his brother and the man who has arrived at the gate now and stretches out his sure and dependable father’s hands.

  Potter’s Field

  I

  A peep of a breeze sounds through the cherry trees and showers Maddy in pink blossom. This morning Kelvingrove could be the Tuileries; the Jardins du Luxembourg. A sky as fresh as a mermaid’s breath, and greens so light you feel the sun might be shining from under the grass.

  “Hey, Maddy!” Even Bob or Billy or whatever his name is, gleams crisp and sharp in his dark, smart uniform. Spring actually living up to its name is so rare you want to celebrate it. Cry off from work, put on floral summeries, and open a bottle of something as sparkling as the morning air. Lie under that huge cherry blossom on the hill and let the petals smother you pink.

  Instead – this…

  “Couple of parcels for you this fine morning.” Detective Inspector Alan Coulter has a face that belongs to a rural parish minister. Fifty going on thirty without a line to show for the endless stream of horrors that unwinds daily before him; no furrows for the hours, years, spent with squat, squashed spirits. Not even a pucker for the strain of family life. Maddy keeps walking towards the centre of everyone’s attention, a square fenced off like a boxing ring, police tape bunting in the sun.

  “Heels, stockings and jacket? Respect.” Coulter has teenage kids who if nothing else keep him linguistically in vogue. “Takes more than a cloudless sky and a tropical sun to impress a lassie frae Girvan.”

  Maddy smiles at Alan, but actually she’s just misjudged. An image of herself comes into her mind: a kid’s drawing. A big black line around her, scrawled crayon picking her out from the background. Beyond the line – brightness, airiness, shops opening in the distance, the street outside the park coming to cheery life. Inside the line, a weariness of limb out of kilter with the buoyancy of the new day. Her tongue’s dry from last night’s smoking. A not-quite headache, from the fourth G&T, that will eventually surface. Clothes too tight and black, doleful instead of sexy, heavy for an unexpected morning like this. Shoes all wrong.

  “We don’t get these chaps moved soon,” Alan’s smile is like an invitation to a trip to the seaside, “I’ll have to put sunscreen on them.”

  “Nobody wants to go to the pathologist with a big red nose.”

  They’d managed to get a van into the park and Maddy went behind it to get kitted out. Except there is no behind it – a park with a van in it is still a park. She looked over towards the taped-off space to see who was about. About fifteen folk already suited up; Adams one of them. “Keep telling you, Miss Shannon – you should wear trousers.”

  Bruce Adams, Crime Scene Manager. No matter how airborne a morning can be, or how loathsome the crime, Adams brings a humdrum ordinariness to it all. She looks at him now and is struck again by the dull fleshiness of him. Unfortunately, however, he’s right – she should wear trousers to crime scenes. With trousers, you can slip on the lower part of the spacesuit no bother. A skirt you have to howk up, where it ruffles and annoys. And in plein air too. Twenty or so guys – crime scene photographers, forensics, tecs, Uniforms – pretending not to watch, and women opted between sympathetic smiles and faces like torn-scones. Maddy’s not a professional; not like them.

  WPC Amy Something helps her out. “It’s a bad one,” she says tenderly.

  Walking towards the cordon – bunched-up skirt adding two bulging inches to her backside – another peep of wind loosened more blossom from the trees. She looked up, and a beetle fell on her face instead of petals.

  Thankfully, there was no public audience this morning – this corner of Kelvingrove well chosen for its seclusion. The river slunk along quietly below, rhododendrons, delirious with joy, danced around them, enclosing them in a private little theatre.

  “Hup!” Alan Coulter encouraged her over the tape. Her skirt now up at her waist, heels slurping into dewy grass, she tottered gracelessly towards the centre of activity. Backs bent in diligent work, the odd flare of a camera flash as ineffective in the sun as a kid’s torch, the scratch of Biro on notepad, mobiles ringing their silly rings. Everyone moves back for the Fiscal, as she steps centre stage.

  There are these moments in life. Moments you suspect will change everything, will be pivotal in some way. The egomania of the religious would have you believe that the world has been set up in precisely this way to get a message solely to you. It hasn’t, and the moment will probably prove to mean nothing in particular. As if you had misread the signs, lost an opportunity

  Two bodies. Lying side by side, about a foot and a half apart. Limbs splayed, lying slapdash where the boys had been dumped. Blossom-confetti decorating them like some satanic wedding ceremony. Heads twisted away from one another. Sixteen, fifteen, years old? “Neds,” said Adams, and Maddy walked round the vile pietà away from him. She took her phone out.

  There was something in the scene that held her. Banal enough if you’re used to this line of work – the peaked caps, the trainers, the lanky limbs and hunched shoulders. She sees rangy boys like these every other day in the courts, with not much more life in them. Only this time, in those brutally crushed faces, in the montage of limbs, Maddy felt the thick black line between her and the world dissolve. Springtime ended here, in this grim little patch of hell. Her protective layer, her outline, was stripped away. She was fully in this place.

  The boys’ hands almost touched. The fingers of one stretched flat as if he’d just let go, or was pulling away from, the half-folded fingers of the other. Maddy looked up at the fathomless blue and smiling sky and, stupidly, tried to make sense of it all.

  “No ID,” Detective Sergeant John Russell said.

  “Chaps come out without their credit cards, did they?” There was only the simplest form of irony in Adams’s quip. Russell, somehow managing to leer at the dead boys – just the unfortunate geography of a trampled face – watched his boss, Coulter, search around in the mud as if he might find a “This Murdered Boy Belongs To…” tag.

  “Anyone recognise them?”

  Everyone glanced down at the faces. DI Coulter laughed. Not at the poor kids’ violent end – below the eyes, which were shut, there were only clumps of bruised flesh, glints of protruding bone – but at the stupidity of his own question. The boys were dressed in the uniform of the defeated. Not ev
en hair colour was an indicator, so shorn were they both. Lads like them gave nothing away. Except, sometimes, their lives.

  Dr. Graeme Holloway squatted beside them. Maddy had phoned him on her way here. He touched them gingerly with gloved hands. “Had their teeth knocked out, both of them.”

  “A fight?” wondered Coulter. “They do it to each other?”

  Holloway shrugged. It wasn’t fighting that killed them. A bullet hole each, plain as daylight, in the side of the head. “Executed.” Holloway pushed one head to the side, a child looking for slugs under stones.

  “Maddy.” Adams approached her, the fixed grin, the opaque eyes. “Don’t let us detain you.”

  Procurators Fiscal don’t usually attend the crime scene. They can, but it suits everyone all round if they stay away till the police have done their job and committed it all neatly. But this wasn’t a usual crime, even for Glasgow, and Maddy not your run-of-the-mill Fiscal. On paper, she was in charge of the case from the get-go right through till a killer was sentenced; or the deaths of two nonentities were filed and spiked. On paper.

  She was standing, staring – listening, but taking little in. She had no need to. Procurators Fiscal view the crime scene and then leave the various police departments to their jobs. On paper, she was in charge of the case, and would be, all the way through from this morning until the sentencing of the killer, or the deaths of two nonentities were filed and spiked. On paper. Cops don’t like paperwork.

  “One of them’s got a T-shirt on,” she said.

  “Yes, well, they both have.” Crime Scene Managers could make the PF’s life hell, particularly uppity lady ones that got under your feet at the start of an investigation. Adams tolerated Maddy, which impressed female fiscals more junior than herself. He was deemed to be good-looking, in an old-fashioned way: squared hair, bristly short at the back, classic suits, tall enough. Too predictable and fixed for Maddy’s tastes.

  “A T-shirt with something written on it,” Maddy said to Coulter. “Might help.”

  Dr. Holloway heaved the corpse in question up at the shoulder – an ambitiously big boulder to explore under. A once black-and-white striped shirt, muddied and bloodied. “L then an E, I think.”

  “Le Coq Sportif,” Maddy told him.

  “Le what?”

  Alan Coulter liked Maddy, but not enough to give her the limelight. He got in first: “Sports gear make.”

  To be fair, Coulter knew more about street-culture than Maddy ever would. “Favoured by, as Mr. Adams here calls them, Neds.”

  “So. They’re wearing what you’d be expecting them to wear.” Adams smiled at Maddy: “Thanks, anyway.”

  She was outstaying her welcome, but couldn’t help wondering, louder than she’d intended to, “Don’t different tribes use different makes?”

  No one responded, and Maddy began to back off from the scene. She could stay if she wanted to. Demand notes. Shadow Coulter and Adams and Russell all day long if it came up her hump. The power of the image, though, the two teenagers splayed mute at her feet, was beginning to fade. It wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t already know. It’s a world where two dead-end kids could die and nobody’d bother much. Those two hands, stretched towards each other, was a Da Vinci touch, a stroke of visual genius in an otherwise ham-fisted sketch. Walking away, her sling-back heels turning to clumps of mud, Maddy noticed another detail. The eyebrow of one of the victims. Thick young hair, snicked à-la-Beckham. Maddy turned her head away, hoping not to cry.

  “Hey!” Distracted, Maddy was unzipping her suit, loosening the hood, before she’d stepped back over the tape. Adams was good at his job – small thing like that could sink an investigation before it’s even begun. A fallen hair, confusing the forensic evidence. A broken nail. It also confirmed the prejudices of all those present about Procurators Fiscal. Post-Grad nancies who couldn’t cut the mustard at a proper law firm. Pen-pushers who understood nothing about crime investigation.

  The fourth floor of the Procurator Fiscal office is open-plan, made immune to spring or snow by layers of impregnable beigeness. Maddy exchanged the odd nod and half-raised hand as she walked the gauntlet of desks and phones to her glass-walled cubicle at the far end, trailing mud and cherry blossom behind her. Izzy, Manda and Dan tinkled keyboards like toy pianos, the cumulative sound like static. Izzy was in the fish-tank marked “M Shannon Principal Depute” before Maddy could close the door.

  “Crown have adjourned the Petrus case till next year.” Izzy was already reading from her pad as she sat elegantly down at the other side of Maddy’s desk. “Complications. Even more collating, organising, classifying and cataloguing files for us.” She flicked over to the next page. “And… Two new hospital deaths – neither of them look suspicious to me – and a domestic disturbance. Dan’s looking into that now.” Izzy closed her notepad and looked expectantly at Maddy. “Well?”

  Isobel Kinloch, one of Maddy’s PF Deputes, wasn’t referring to this morning’s surprise flowering in Kelvingrove. Murders aren’t that much of a talking-point in here. Maddy Shannon’s reputation as the Fiscal’s living soap opera was much more interesting. And Maddy traded on it too often to complain when she wasn’t in the mood.

  “The test?”

  Maddy cringed. “Shit. Did I do the test?”

  Last night was Thursday, and Maddy was the one who’d insisted on going out. Just a drink, a bite to eat. Anything to remind her she was still alive. Maddy’s section in the Fiscal’s office, after all, was called the Solemn Team. She, Dan, Izzy, Manda, and one or two others that were constantly changing, had the happy task of dealing with all the murders, attempted murders, culpable homicides, the City of Glasgow had to offer. All suspicious deaths in hospitals, homes, prisons. Folks dropping suddenly in the streets, in the comfort of their own living rooms. Negligence cases – professional, corporate and personal. Suicides.

  This had been a specially tough couple of weeks. Gathering and arranging court papers for the infamous Petrus case – an industrial criminal negligence claim. To date, the petro-chemical multi-national was accused of causing three deaths, two cases of cancer and a mental breakdown.

  Maddy Shannon had made it a rule of her section that Thursday, six o’clock, signalled the official commencement of The Weekend. She would lead her posse across the bridge o’er the Clyde, first to a fancy cafe, Barga, to make them feel modern and chic and European, and then, inevitably, on to sloshing beer in the Scotia or the Vicky, like twenty-three generations of PFs before them. Somewhere in the midst of this process they had been diverted to the bar at the Tron theatre, where the victim – Bert? – happened to be innocently drinking.

  “Matt,” Izzy reminded her.

  Izzy, long and narrow on the seat, gleamed like a little sunshaft that had snuck its way indoors. Yellow hair that looked advert-soft, pretty pastel dress fluttering over reedy limbs. The girl’s skin was so delicate white you could see the veins. They curled vaguely up from her calves and her arms, disappearing suggestively into her dress. An uninvited sexuality, present nowhere else in the girl’s physique or demeanour. “Did he pass?” Izzy closed her notepad.

  Maddy, in the presence of this gentle sigh of femininity, felt heavy. Like the mud on her shoes had entered her veins.

  Maddy could be a difficult boss. She could get obsessive, work mad hours and expect everyone to do the same. She could go off at tangents – start acting like a detective in cases when, really, proper collating would do the trick. She’d suddenly run off down the exciting, undiscovered path of a new case, leaving the Dans, Izzies, and Mandas to finish off older, duller work. She got away with it by making herself public. By being the office party-girl, though – as Mama was forever reminding her – she was ten to fifteen years older than her fellow-partiers. Also, her single status was a matter of concern – the human bit of the boss, the sensitive spot that made staff and colleagues feel useful. They could console, plot with her, match-make.

  “Well, he passed the intelligence tes
t.”

  “I’m not talking about intelligence.”

  “Talked about rotifers.”

  “Rotifers?”

  “Tiny fish-like creatures apparently. They can be celibate for 70 million years.”

  “Good grief.”

  “Know how they feel.”

  This Matt guy had been going on about desire. Maddy said she was all for it. “It’s the Italian in me. Proper women should be desperate with want at all times.” That’s when she signalled to Dan, and whispered to her young excited underlings that she was going to do “The Test”.

  It was an old double-act she and Dan had perfected years ago. When the victim went to the loo, Dan was given the nod. It worked best when there was someone present who’d never seen it done before. Last night there had been some trainee. Izzy had explained the system to her.

  “Dan follows him in. To check on him .”

  “Check what?”

  “You know. Check him out. For Maddy.”

  The girl was still mystified.

  “If he’s up to it… . “Oh for God’s sake – to see if he’s well-endowed!”

  The newbie was dutifully scandalised and exhilarated, the rest all whooped with laughter. “What if the guy catches Dan looking?”

  “They never do – Dan’s an expert,” Manda explained. “Years of practice.”

  Maddy, sitting repentant now behind her desk, felt a flush of disgrace rising in her cheeks. Izzy sat back in her chair. “So? We never heard the final adjudication.” Maddy opened her mouth to speak, but, thankfully, the phone rang. She quickly agreed to see the boss straight away and got up from behind her desk.

  “Maddy! Tell me.”

  Maddy had headed Dan off last night. When he came out the gents, she moved quickly, diverting him out the door of the Tron bar. There was still warmth in the air, the swelter and noisy mess of the east end. Maddy scrabbled in her bag for her ten-pack and lighter. The setting sun had lodged itself between two tall buildings, an old red sandstone bleeding thickly in the light, the other all chrome and steel and glass, disappearing into its own glint. The laughter from inside the bar, the nicotine hit… Forget about corpses and estate agents; her city had better things to offer.