Potter's Field

by Dolan, Chris;

  “You don’t really look, Dan, do you?”

  “Might.”

  But now Izzy wasn’t going to budge from the door until Maddy told her.

  “Minnow. Told Dan to throw him back.”

  Leaving the cubicle, she caught sight of herself in the glass – dark, a shadow of a woman. And smaller shadows floating around her. Two dead boys.

  At the far end of the open-plan blankness, she stood and waited for the lift to come. She looked back down towards her section. Dan, impeccably dressed, on the phone, businesslike. Manda bent over her keyboard, fingers flashing, like she were gutting fish. Izzy, back perfectly straight on the chair, only the single document she was working on on her desk.

  For all the nights out, the imprudent pranks, the gossip, they worked hard. Their profession was the centre of their lives. Some of that early missionary zeal, the decision to get paid less in the service of the Fiscal rather than make a mint in private practice, never left them. It burrowed itself in deep, under the jokes and the attitude. Companies killing off their employees in order to make a few quid more; negligent professionals letting unimportant people down; youngsters executed and dumped behind park bushes… somebody had to do something.

  They felt the horror and meanness of every case, though they worked hard not to show it. Worked hard to make sure the police didn’t cut corners but conducted investigations properly, found the right culprit. And once they had him, she and Izzy and Dan and a hundred others in this building like them, toiled night and day, to collate, precognose, present, prosecute, prove. Get the bastards behind bars.

  Maxwell Binnie – the Procurator Fiscal. All the rest of them were Principal Deputes, Senior Deputes, Deputes. To prove he was the Procurator, his chair was higher, so visitors to his office had to peer up at him. He was in his fifties, tall, one of those men who grow better-looking with age. And authoritarian – he spoke to senior staff like Maddy as though they were trainees.

  “Take me through it, Miss Shannon.”

  “Unexplained violent deaths. I’ve ordered the bodies to be removed for autopsy.”

  “Bullets to the head, I believe?”

  “Both from the same gun? We can’t tell if the victims were held down, if they struggled. I recommend we inspect organs for drug and alcohol content – were they insensible at the time of death?”

  “Risk of HIV or hepatitis infection?”

  “High I’d say. These two wouldn’t have been sipping Merlot and nibbling Camembert.”

  “Age?”

  “We’ll find out. Seventeen? Younger?”

  “How long do you need the bodies signed over for?”

  “Long as possible.”

  Binnie jotted on his pad, like a dissatisfied school teacher. “Who’s handling the case?”

  “DI Coulter.”

  “C Division. Crawford’s little gang. Good. I think you’ll find Crawford will allow a little more PF activity than normal. We both sit on The Consultative Steering Committee on Delinquency and Crime. If these victims turn out to be under sixteen – even if they’re not – we’ll have to report to the Scottish Executive and the Press on it.”

  Maddy groaned inwardly. Binnie was clearly going to be on her back throughout the whole case.

  At the afternoon session in Division A’s incident room, disinclination fugged the air the way smoke did up to the ban last month. Scotland of all places leading the way in health and bad habits. The butt end in the ashtray, Maddy knew, was her. Bad form, a PF worming her way into a briefing. Inspector Coulter hadn’t explained his reasons for inviting her, no reason on earth being good enough. Probably he wasn’t even sure himself.

  “If it’s unhelpful, I’ll go…”

  “Nice to have a lady in our midst,” Adams smiled. Which couldn’t have pleased DS Amy Something, or the incident room co-ordinator, Trisha. The rest were men: four CID personnel, two of whom she recognised, the other two giving her the narrow-eye treatment. In the corner, the cheery Uniform from this morning – neither Billy nor Bob, she remembered now. Patterson. Patterson Webb. A cruel fate, ending up a Glasgow polis with an Edinburgh advocate’s name. Then there was Simon, another Uniform she’d worked with before. Okay guy. They were waiting on Doc Holloway (all the jokes had been used up a very long time ago) and – Holy of Holies – Chief Constable Crawford Robertson himself. Why on earth would he make himself available at such an early point in an investigation? It was like turning up at a party without knowing it had a Grand Lodge theme. Another plain-clothes detective – who had the perfect disguise of looking more violent, boorish and stupid than your average hit man – entered late. Coulter got the meeting started, turning to DS John Russell.

  “Okay. Re-cap. John?”

  “Bodies found at 7.20 AM this morning, April 30 2005, by a jogger with a mobile. Pat – Constable Webb – was at the scene by 7. 30. DI Adams informed at that time, Crime Scene protocol in effect by 8.00.”

  “The jogger?”

  “One James Docherty. Saw nothing else. Just the bodies, and he didn’t take too close a look at them.” Russell put his notes down. “Too busy spewing.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Was taken up to the Western. We have all his details. Merchant City address. Works at home – something in graphics.”

  Russell sat down, and Coulter walked to the middle of the room. “The park’s being finger-tipped?”

  “Half the force there with tweezers,” Russell replied.

  “Door-to-door?”

  “The other half are ringing the bells of every house from Bentinck Street to Park Gardens.”

  “Extend it. Byres Road to Charing Cross. The path along the river – any other early-morning runners or cyclists out? If the victims made their own way to the park, or were brought – did anyone see them?”

  Russell nodded, and wrote the instruction down.

  Holloway finally arrived, in the company of another overweight middle-aged man, John MacDougall. All that was missing now was Maxwell Binnie to make up the four-ball. Maddy felt a sense of solidarity with the policemen around her. Suits like Binnie and Robertson were bad enough, but at least they had worked their way to the top. Political appointments like MacDougall just drove everyone mad. The Highlander – there was no mistaking that: he wore his accent and Island air like battle medals – had been appointed by the Scottish Executive to look into the problem of teenage delinquency. The School Czar the tabloids called him. Everyone in this room, though, suspected him of being just another overpaid senior manager, out to make their work harder.

  “I hope you don’t mind me listening in, gentlemen. I’ll be as quiet as a mouse here at the back.”

  They did mind him listening in. He made Maddy feel downright popular. Holloway reported only what everyone at the park this morning already more or less knew: two teenage boys, shot point blank in the side of the head. Holloway guessed .38s by the size of the holes and the charring.

  DS Russell – always happier to contribute when the big boss was around – reported that he’d got a check put on the Missing Persons list. Somebody, somewhere would miss the boys sometime. The other CID officers of varying ranks selected their areas of enquiry. One had links into the gang scene; another the crack-cocaine/heroin market; a third the sectarian wars.

  Maddy picked up her bag. They half-waved back. If there was any further information, they were waiting until she was safely out the way.

  The morning’s sweetness had curdled, the sky a simmering grey gruel. Maddy, heading west, waded against the flow of Sauchiehall Street shoppers. She’d worked till ten on Monday, had taken enough files home on Tuesday to bury an elephant, gone in early Wednesday and worked late last night. She could afford a little time on a Friday afternoon to tidy up her flat before the estate agent came.

  Her route took her past the southern edge of Kelvingrove. There was nothing to connect the tranquil greenery, the perpetually dormant bowling greens, with the little corner of horror deep in the park’s belly
. Boards outside shops blurted the deadening news. “Bodies Found in Kelvingrove’”.

  Glasgow spreads like a stain, weeping along the least line of resistance in every direction, between mountains, down valleys, draining into the sea. But there’s a secret geometry to it, a nervous system that makes death in the west felt and feared as keenly in Easterhouse or Giffnock. Today’s double portion was pretty much on Maddy’s doorstep. An incursion into her heartland.

  At Lorraine Gardens she admired the street, as she always did, before opening the door. She’d been here for ten years, the only house she’d ever owned. The HQ of the private Maddalena Shannon, hybrid woman. A Mediterranean kitchen – terracotta tiles, colour-washed dresser, pots, pans and dried peppers hanging round the hob – that somehow looked absolutely nothing like a Mediterranean kitchen.

  “White’s the problem,” Dan had said. He’d run his hand over the paint daubed straight onto the plaster, to give that Mexican adobe look. “Blue-based white doesn’t work in the north. Looks great in Andalusia, looks like dogs’ piss in Glasgow. What you need’s a yellow-based white.”

  She’d salvaged from her childhood bedroom in Girvan a saccharine picture of Christ The Shepherd. Golden-locked boy in a soutane stroking a lamb. The irony hadn’t come off. The whole house was a botched blend of attempted modernity and beefy auction-house furniture. She’d considered making a move, selling up, finding somewhere new. Roddy Estate Agent looked around the flat and said: “Declutter. One little word, one big task. But worth it.”

  Inspecting each room in turn, he’d propped himself up against the door jamb as if the vision before him might overpower him. He had the smile of a man consoling a bereaved but distant acquaintance. “Get rid of the books. Only leather-bound volumes sell a property.”

  Unread books, in other words. Hyndland had changed. When she had arrived, she’d sneered at the dusty pretension of the place. Lecturers, doctors and dentists with clapped-out bangers rusting between Doric pillars in driveways. Art collections clustered behind unwashed windows. Patched elbows and unkempt haircuts reading on threadbare sofas. The violin and piano practices of a screech of Gails, Robinas and Leos. Maddy had shaken her head at it all, yet here she was, a decade later, mourning its passing.

  It was Roddy’s area now. His soft-top silver sports car not conspicuous anymore outside her window, winking between SUVs and Beamers. At 36, Maddy was Old Hyndland while Roddy talked interactive tellies and surroundsound. Maddy blamed footballers. Once, they stayed safely out of the way in the southside and Bothwell. Since they’d started migrating from warmer climes they preferred the liveliness of the west end. She’d spoken the thought out loud to Roddy Estate Agent, and immediately wished she hadn’t.

  “Bulgarians, Hungarians, Australians.” Roddy had rapped on her theme. “I’ve sold houses to Czechs, Latts, Poles, Danes and Swedes. Organised mortgages for Spaniards, Germans, Portuguese, Uruguayans and Geordies. Makes you wonder why our teams aren’t doing better than they do.”

  “Cause they’re all too busy poncing up their west end flats?” suggested Maddy. And putting them out of her price range. Still, they looked nice, the thick-locked and dark-curled foreign footballers, outside the cafes.

  Roddy scanned his eyes over her bedroom like a client making up his mind in a Bangkok brothel, his gaze resting for a moment on the open-topped Moroccan laundry basket, tastefully bedecked with a pair of yesterday’s knickers.

  “Roddy,” she’d said pleasantly. “Could you do me a favour? Could you get yourself to fuck out my house? Thanks.”

  She had been the PF in charge of a murder last year. A woman a little older than herself who had taken a knife in the stomach from a husband who had been kind and faithful for fifteen years. Moving house, apparently, had pressed the hitherto unknown button in his brain.

  Maddy was walking the house with a cardboard box and a bin bag. Roddy had put her off the idea of moving in the near future but, bless him, he was right about the decluttering. Ornaments, pictures and old CDs that might fetch some charity shop a tenner were going in the box. Old letters and junk mail, general crap from ten years of living alone, in the bag.

  She sat at her favourite window, the bay looking out onto a copse of trees heavy with themselves. She remembered one of her first cases. A twelve-year-old girl, snatched on a street between home and school and left all but eviscerated in a wood forty miles into the Lomond Hills. Maddy had spent nights then in this very seat at the window, weeping violently. But no tears would come now for these boys. Their hands reaching out for each other. Boys like that never reach out for one another, do they?

  Walk twenty minutes in any direction from this house and you’d be in their world – Wyndford, Yoker, Ruchill. Twenty minutes to the next galaxy. Young feral males addicted to destruction, the sons of earlier feral, destructive males. They were hard to cry for. That in itself should have made her cry.

  Jim Docherty came in from the kitchen and handed his wife a fresh-brewed coffee in a white china-bone mug. “Sure?”

  “Any more caffeine,” Alan Coulter said “and I’ll need beta-blockers. I trust you’ve recovered from the shock?”

  “Take up jogging they said. Do you the world of good.” Docherty half-laughed and shook his head. A man in his late thirties, John Lennon specs, baldness disguised by a no. 1 haircut. Below an ironed shirt and smart trousers he wore a stained pair of slippers.

  “Must be nice, working from home.” Actually Coulter thought it must be hell. The flat was an expensive Merchant City job, so cramped for space that the bedroom was on an open mezzanine above their heads. For some reason – although there was no sign of ruffled sheets or underwear lying on the floor – Alan felt it was embarrassing.

  “Yeah, it is. No rush-hours. Everything you need to hand.”

  The room they were in served as lounge, dining area and study, as well as bedroom overhead. There’d be a bathroom off the narrow hall outside and a tiny kitchen somewhere. Place would have cost them a fortune, though. Being ground floor, it didn’t even have a view, and there was a pub right next door, which must be noisy at night.

  “Are you a runner yourself, Mrs….?”

  “Elaine. No. Gym girl.” Elaine kept glancing up at the mezzanine too. Perhaps feeling the same embarrassment, or worried that it wasn’t properly tidied. Coulter thought he detected a wistful glance – as if she’d like nothing better than to crawl back into bed. She didn’t look as if she could muster the energy to even get to a gym.

  “You’re a graphic artist, Jim?”

  “Not quite. Or rather, I am, but it’s not what I currently do. My business partner is the artist – I do a bit of touching up, a veneer job for the clients.”

  “Who are?”

  “We produce high-quality brochures, specs, ads, portfolios, whatever, for a range of clients.” He had gone into business auto-pilot. “Anybody from the Council to big companies and political parties, to smaller stuff like indie bands, community organisations.”

  “And this company of yours is called…?”

  “Sign-Chronicity.”

  On the easel at the moment was a series of coloured blocks intersecting at angles; amidst them could be made out a rough impression of a couple about to kiss, a figure behind them scowling.

  “Who’s that for?”

  “Community radio station. Local kids making a soap opera based on their real lives.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “Moves around. The station sets up for a month in various deprived areas, puts on a few shows, including a soaptype drama, then moves on elsewhere.”

  “Where have they been recently?” Sergeant Russell had finally found his voice. He seemed, till now, to have been stupefied by the modern art paintings on the walls – semi-blank canvasses, or montages of dirty greys and browns – and the languorous slouching of Elaine.

  “I’ve no idea. We just do the posters. Elaine here sometimes gets involved.” He smiled towards her, but she didn’t smile back. “Elaine�
�s a designer.”

  “Yeah? What do you design?”

  Mrs. Docherty answered Coulter’s question as if she could hardly remember herself. “Play areas. Parks. Common rooms—”

  “Always for youngsters?”

  “I seem to have ended up doing that most, yes.”

  “Who advised you to take up jogging, Mr. Docherty?” Russell asked.

  “Martin. Martin Whyte.”

  “Your business partner?”

  “He’s out every morning without fail.” Docherty was smiling, swirling the coffee in his cup, but there was something reluctant in his voice. “Half an hour, morning and evening. An hour or more, Saturdays and Sundays. If I was as fit as him I’d not have been the one to find those kids.”

  “Sorry – how’s that?”

  “I don’t go fast enough to pass anything without noticing.”

  “You weren’t running alone yesterday?”

  “No. Well, yes, when I found the bodies. I was trailing way behind Martin. When I saw the kids, he must have been a half a mile up the road.”

  “Did you inform us of this at the time?”

  “I’ve no idea what I garbled into the phone that morning.”

  “Tell us more about Mr. Whyte.”

  When she was a rookie junior, Maddy could get the office to herself in the mornings. Hung over or not, the taste of reckless kisses, whether sour or sweet still on her mouth, she could shuffle her shoes off, tie back her hair with an elastic band, and get down to work. Now it was a race to see who could be at their desk first, showered and groomed, arranging power-breakfasts. Izzy was there already, at 7.05. Dan had been in and gone again. Manda would make up for them by arriving at least an hour late.