Potter's Field

by Dolan, Chris;

  On this island, men have been taken away to die in wars they never understood or cared about. They’d died in fields, on foreign mountain tops. At sea, in boats that needed repair. His father had taken bullets in his leg in Africa, thirty years ago when he wasn’t much more than a boy. Ettore himself, only a year ago, had just escaped death at Austrian hands at Caporetto. A flesh wound he thanked God for, as the army had sent him home and had never recalled him. Those who escaped fighting for king or prince or government stayed at home and kept up the battle with the earth.

  They had kept on tugging at the soil, pouring their lives into it, because Elba had given them good things. Rich times when no one came to demand their lives in battle, when the sea was calm and abundant, and the earth green and moist. Any day now, Ettore’s little patch of land might send through more shoots. Any day now he might be able to feed his boys, his wife, more heartily.

  But the big war that had half the men of the world shooting each other, dying in holes in the ground, in planes that singed the sky, was ending. Any day now, friends and family who had survived would return. And look for work on Portoferraio harbour, where there was hardly a day’s shift for Ettore already. Any day now, the ground might cease to give him anything at all.

  Ettore remembered childhood meals composed of wild berries from the bushes further up the hill. Those bitter little pills still managed to live when the grapes and the olives and even the beet had died. Berries and thistle-leaves, water from the well – that was their dinner, and breakfast. Perhaps a small fish his father had pleaded with a fisherman not to throw back in. Things had got better since, but the pendulum seemed to be swinging back again. It looked so beautiful, his island, but a fickle, mean little heart beat under its surface.

  “Ettore. Where would we go?” Antonella wasn’t happy as far away as the other side of Campo Nell’Elba.

  “Where Roberto and Vincente and Vito and Tonio and the rest of them went.”

  Milan and Rome and Spain and France. More, of late, as far as England. The Benedetti family over by Nisporto were getting mail back once a month or more from Scozia.

  “Where’s Scozia?” Carlo had asked him one day.

  “Near America,” his mother had intervened, though Ettore didn’t think that was right.

  “Let’s give it another year,” Antonella will say tonight, if he speaks about blessings and worries and plans. Ettore didn’t want to go. His home ground was like a dying, miserly old man, hanging onto its last few paltry possessions. But the view down over the sea! The warm little house, his friends up in the village, Vittore and Carlo laughing in the sun…

  If they left, Ettore would be the first not to make a life for his family in San Piero dell’Elba, with its little stream lingering carelessly through their field and slice of hillside. For all Ettore knew the Di Rios went all the way back to those Greeks and Etruscans. Settled men, happy to stay on their island home, run back to it the moment peace was declared. Yet there was Tommaso making a living for himself in London. Sending money back to his family. He said there was more work there, and all over Inghilterra, and in this Scozia. A man can either stay and watch his sons grow weak on a diet of memories and pride, or he can come out fighting, find another way to live.

  Carlo came out of the house and walked towards him. Ten years old and already only a head or so shorter than Ettore. But thin, so thin. Even when he clenched his muscles, his limbs weren’t much broader than pine-tree twigs. A new decade was looming. What would be right for Ettore di Rio and his family in the 1920s? He didn’t really believe in God – why the hell should he – but he prayed anyway for guidance.

  Carlo remained quiet by his side – even when six year old Vittorio came running up shouting and singing and spinning round and around like a swallow at dawn. Older brother and father looked at him with serious faces, until at last the child broke Ettore’s troubled mood. Ettore laughed and Carlo chased Vittorio back down the hillside, the two of them arms akimbo like swooping hawks.

  Matt or Bert – the guy she’d done the test on – was in the same coffee shop as Maddy and Rosa.

  “Why do they have to give you such big cups?” The coffee her mother had was officially a medium latte but was the size of a soup bowl. “On the Continent you get a nice dainty little cup.”

  On the Continent. Holidays in Italy as a kid – where she would have been very unlikely to have been in many cafes – and one holiday in France. Eight years ago, in a mad last bid to save their marriage, she and Packy had gone to Paris for four days. The way she referred to the Quartier Latin ever since you’d think she nipped over every second weekend.

  It had been a tough week. Petrus had continued to give Maddy the run-around – reports that obscured proper information, complaints about her department’s approach. A negligence case that had been pending for months finally went her way, Wednesday afternoon. Then on Friday morning she had to lift tough Tony Kennedy off his knees on a mortuary floor.

  Names changed things. Sy Kennedy. A punctured-sounding name. But it gave Victim A, “Eddie”, a history, flesh, a direction down some inevitable path that led to being murdered in a park on a sunny spring morning. Numbers made the equation different too. Fourteen. Sy Kennedy was only fourteen years old.

  “Nonno’s party’s only a month away, Maddalena.”

  The celebration of her grandfather’s Big Adventure. The Di Rio family’s very own Holiday of Obligation, the sacrificing of chickens for cacciatore, whole yields of peppers for home-made ciabatta luscious and slippery, entire legs of Parma ham, vats of imported Ligurian wine and extended family gossip. Maddy looked forward to it every year.

  The guy – Matt – had spotted her. He smiled and gestured he’d come over in a minute. Maddy got out her phone.

  “Can’t you sit for a minute without talking to somebody who’s not here?”

  “Dan,” Maddy said, smiling at Rosa, “guess who I’m looking across at?”

  “Your mother. You told me.”

  “No no. I’m looking past her.” Rosa looked round, mystified and annoyed.

  “Let me guess – any one of a string of guys who you profess interest in but about whom you’ll do nothing.”

  “Matt… Thingy. From the Tron. Did you really look?”

  Dan sighed. “A slightly under-proportioned male.”

  “Grazie, collega.”

  She put away her phone. Her mother glared at her, and Matt nodded over again. But he looked a little anxious at the smile she gave him, and got deeper into conversation with his male friend, glancing up at her furtively. “What was that about?” Rosa demanded.

  Maddy changed the subject back to Nonno’s party. Dan was right, though – she was as bad as her mum, endlessly playing a role. Lusty Latin lover, always ready with a wink and a suggestive one-liner. It was becoming pathetic; a parody of the woman she imagined she’d be when she was a child.

  Jim Docherty was the business side of Sign-Chronicity and lived in an arty pad in the Merchant City; Martin Whyte was the artist, but lived in pebbledash land in East Kilbride. Not even any pictures on the wall.

  “You don’t work from home, Mr. Whyte?”

  “Got a studio in Glasgow. WASP.”

  “At the Briggait. I know it,” DI Alan Coulter said, easing into the interview.

  “Where were you this week?” DS John Russell said, going straight for broke.

  “You know where I was. You phoned the office, my mobile, sent emails and text messages.”

  “You weren’t keen on replying.”

  “I was busy.”

  Russell flicked through his notes. “At… Artizan plc?”

  “In London. They deal in paper, inks – all the stuff we use. I go down twice a year.”

  “Must be important if you can’t return a call from the police asking about a murder.”

  “Tell us about the morning of the sixth.” Coulter decided going for broke might be easier after all.

  “I met Jim at quarter to seven.”
>
  “Mr. Docherty tells us you were very keen on him jogging. Why’s that – get lonely out there alone?” Russell really wasn’t taking to Martin Whyte.

  “Jim was out of condition. He was sluggish around the office. He was the one that suggested I get him running.”

  “Go on.”

  “We met at the bridge at Kirklee. It’s easy to park there. That’s where I always start. We spoke for a minute or two and then went into the park to start running.”

  Russell brought out an OS map of the area around Kelvingrove. “Could you trace your route, Mr. Whyte?” Russell laid the map on the coffee table, and the three men moved closer round it. “We came in at this gate here, ran down onto the river.” He traced his finger along the lines of the path. “Crossed over it here. The Ha’penny bridge. Then I normally do a little loop round this green here—”

  “Why?”

  “Because I like it. and the entire run takes exactly half an hour.” He went back to the map: “We came up here, alongside Garrioch Road, kept going southwards. Around… here, I lost sight of Jim. I’d been keeping the pace down, encouraging him along, but he seemed to be doing fine, fitter than I’d expected, and I kind of forgot about him. Sped up into my old rhythm.”

  “And here,” Coulter pointed at the map, “is where he found the bodies.”

  Alan Coulter’s phone rang. He walked out into the hallway, keeping one ear open for Whyte’s replies.

  “You must have run right past them,” Russell continued.

  “S’pose so.”

  “How much ahead of Mr. Docherty were you?”

  “Couldn’t have been much. Three minutes? Five or six at the most.”

  “How could you not have seen two dead bodies?”

  “I don’t know. I know that route so well, my mind’s on my work mainly.”

  “Mr. Docherty saw them.”

  “Jim was out of breath. He stopped. Unluckily for him, just beside the rhododendron bushes.”

  Coulter stepped back in the room looking a different man to the one who had left a moment ago. Both Russell and Whyte clocked it, and moved a step back from him. Coulter took a minute to study Martin Whyte closer. Reassessing him. Lean, small, scrubbed. Fingernails short and spotless, clean chinos, ironed shirt, neatly cropped black hair.

  “Jim said you run twice a day. The same route?”

  “Usually. Why? I sometimes change – just for variety.”

  “Did you run the same route the night before you and Jim went out?”

  “Can’t remember offhand. It’s possible.”

  “Do you live alone, sir?”

  Whyte matched his new formal manner. “I do.”

  “When was the last time you had your hair cut?”

  A pause, then, “Monday.”

  “This Monday? Three days ago?”

  Russell stiffened. What had Coulter learned on the phone? Not a DNA match with Whyte – forensics would take longer than that. Did Whyte have previous? Whyte himself didn’t react in any visible way, but stood staring at Coulter.

  “Where were you last night?”

  “Here. Working.”

  “Alone?”

  Maddy wasn’t too keen on Semi Monde. Up-market, Ibiza-chic drapes and hefty furnishings, background trip-hop, teeming. Glasgow trying to imitate what it thinks Reykjavik or Prague might be like. Age range from barely legal to verging on creepy (Maddy knew which end of the spectrum she was on). Not out-and-out gay, but pretty fruity, though the sex is all show. No one’s quite as rich, or glam, or gay, as they’re trying to make out. The conversations are about bosses and holidays and last night’s telly.

  So when she spotted Alan Coulter at the door searching for her she was relieved – she’s better these days at professional woman than party girl. Until she caught the look on his face: a picture of hunched misery. Only something deadly serious could bring Alan to a place like Semi Monde. She walked past him out the door into the damp calm of the street.

  “Sorry,” Alan said, arriving by her side, keeping his gaze on the opposite side of the street. “Maybe this could have waited till morning.”

  “Clearly not.”

  “Had to tell somebody.” Coulter turned around, not towards her, but until he was staring in the window at the laughing, noisy, overdressed customers of Semi Monde. “There’s another one. Found this morning. Same deal. Beaten up. Bullet to her head.”

  “She? Same age?”

  Alan nodded. “Not very old anyhow.”

  “Cross on the lips?”

  “Don’t know yet.”

  He was looking in the window, but he was seeing corpses. “Who the hell goes around executing fourteen year-olds?”

  II

  The girl lay on a gurney, Maddy, Coulter and the pathologist assembled round her, like a macabre nativity scene. She was covered up to her neck in crisp white cloth.

  “A week,” said Dr. Erina Niven. “Entomology will give us a pretty accurate time, but I’d say we’re several generations of blow-fly down the road. The warm weather may have speeded things up. And unfortunately she’s been got at.” Niven glanced down at the girl’s covered side. Maddy looked up enquiringly at Coulter. “Foxes,” he whispered, guiltily.

  The face was swollen, discoloured, but still there remained something of the real girl that had inhabited this battered casing. Her hair was pulled tightly back into a pony-tail which bounced, childlike, as the pathologist – an older woman Maddy had never worked with before – pulled the sheet further down her neck. The mortuary wheezed around Maddy. A place of death yet with its own deep, slow breath. The stale gurning of machines, air-con, struggling lighting, sounded like a repressed growl.

  Dr. Niven displayed the girl’s neck and shoulders like a magician’s trick. “No cuts to the lips or jaws. Bullet to the left hemisphere splitting the parietal.”

  Maddy tried to keep looking only at the eyes. Closed, like a statue’s. The girl had been found, like Sy and Micky, amongst flowers.

  “No signs of struggle?” Coulter asked.

  Niven shook her head and covered the girl up again. “Very close range.”

  “What age?”

  Niven sighed and stared at the covered shape of the girl. “She could be as young as fourteen.”

  Alan Coulter put his hand gently on Maddy’s back as they walked out of the room.

  “I could come with you.”

  Coulter handed Maddy an envelope – more details of a crime that wouldn’t normally be in the Fiscal’s hands at such an early stage. “Whyte’s in the station, Maddy. You’d better stay away. For the good of your case.”

  There were a couple of decent pubs near the mortuary still open but neither of them suggested a nightcap. They stood out in the street, the air spiky cool under a merry sky of stars. Maddy fingered the ten pack in her jacket pocket. “No news of the other boy?”

  Coulter shook his head. “Nobody’s got a clue who he is.”

  “No one else reported missing?”

  Coulter shook his head. “Doesn’t match any missing person report the length and breadth of Britain.”

  She didn’t feel tense. Nausea and gloom were natural after a visit to the morgue. If anything, she felt lax, disconnected. She’d been part of the Solemn Team for years now, up to her oxters in murders and corpses. But Sy, and now that poor girl… and only a quiet graphic artist in the station to explain it. Whyte a murderer? Not from what Coulter had told her of the man. Hardly sounded like the demon who was turning so much young flesh into dull putty. An unassuming professional from suburbia. No record. Likes jogging. “All you have on him, Alan, is a careless shortage of alibis?”

  “Damn sight more than that. He ran right past the boys’ bodies!”

  “Probably another dozen joggers did the same.”

  “Ran past the scene of the crime the night before.”

  “What – casing the place?”

  “Maybe.”

  “From what you’ve told me, he doesn’t sound like the typ
e who could strong-arm two sturdy teenage boys into being shot.”

  Coulter and she were genuine friends – but this kind of thing would always divide them. How the Prosecution look at a crime, and how the police look at it. Once they had a suspect they convinced themselves he was their man.

  “He was out running again the night the girl died. He has black hair—”

  “Jesus Alan! That puts me and half of Glasgow into the frame!”

  “ – Which he got cut just before the police came calling. He works with kids. His partner’s wife designs playgrounds.” Coulter looked away. He hated falling out with Maddy. She didn’t understand that you needed something in the bank; some sense of forward motion. A suspect gave you some kind of bearing, some in into the murders. Coulter and Russell and everyone involved in the case needed Whyte.

  “But why, Alan? Why kill kids? Does he buy drugs?”

  “Not that he admits to.”

  “Does he kerb-crawl? He’d have to be into both boys and girls—”

  Coulter shrugged - you couldn’t out-guess the mess of some folks’ lives in this city. Sy Kennedy was no angel. Shoplifter. Seemed he pocketed almost anything he passed – hi-fi equipment he had no use for, jewellery which, when he couldn’t flog it, he threw in bins, women’s clothes, ornaments, stuff he didn’t need. He ran with the Young Team; was a nightmare in school. For fourteen years old, nothing hugely criminal, but heading that way. Sent to Lochgilvie House for problem kids. What else he and Micky X got up to was anybody’s guess.

  “We’ve no reason to suspect that Sy or that poor lassie in there got up to anything that’d lead to their murder,” Maddy said.

  “You have to admit, Maddy – chances are she won’t have lived the life of a saint.” Coulter started buttoning up his trenchcoat. It was hardly cold enough for a coat let alone button it. They walked aimlessly towards town. “No point in shutting avenues off – he’s the only lead we’ve got.”