Potter's Field

by Dolan, Chris;

“The words garden and path spring to mind.”

  “You do your job when it comes to you,” he snapped.

  “Because I’m shite at doing yours? Thanks. Only trying to help.”

  They stopped at a corner. She caught him eyeing the reports he had given her, regretting it now. She clutched them tighter. To hell with him. She marched off up a side street that brought her no closer to home. He waited for a moment and went off in the opposite direction.

  It was still warm enough to open the living room window, the night breeze moving the leaves in the trees. She put on Art Pepper, made a pot of tea and took her briefcase to the chair. “You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To.” She closed her eyes. Pepper’s sax stirred up autumn leaves on Girvan streets. There had been a jukebox, in the family shop, kept up to date by Nonno until dad took over in the 70’s. He never changed it.

  Nonno had two themes in his selection. Big Songs – Gigli arias, Mario Lanza, Presley. Big blowsy orchestrated ballads with overblown lyrics that, nevertheless, made you weepy in an empty shop. She could still hear Nonno belting out those daft big songs, his voice nowhere near as good as he liked to think, frightening off the already remote possibility of sit-in customers.

  Way better than Presley or “My Way” were the cooler, jazzier selections. Sinatra: Under My Skin. Tony Bennett. Sarah Vaughn. Ella. Bobby Darin. Nowadays she liked instrumental jazz even better. When Coltrane’s sax rumbled deep down low, she could smell hot oil; when Dizzy Gillespie peeped at the top of his range, she could feel the cold west coast wind cooling her down behind the fryers. Getz rolling out a stately samba was the sound of the Atlantic from her girlhood bedroom.

  She glanced at her notes on the Petrus Case – new evidence about their dumping practices. Cutting corners on safety. The storage walls of the dump not thick enough, the shaft not deep enough, the sealing shoddy. A third man had died, allegedly, at their hands. Forty-two-year-old father of three. A second woman had contracted a horrible skin disease. Four Petrus employees were claiming their cancers were caused by working close to the dump. One of those cases that’d take years.

  She tore open Alan’s envelope. Micky X was still resisting identification in grand style. Sy, the police were convinced, could only have met him through Lochgilvie House for problem kids. Nobody on the staff recognised the boy, and none of their recent past pupils had gone missing, but they agreed that a home for disruptive youngsters attracts a lot of visitors to the lanes and closes nearby. So much for the System coming to the rescue. If Sy had never been sent there, neither he nor his pal would now be the silent subjects of a massive murder hunt.

  Star Eyes hummed lazily on the CD. The shadows of trees outside brushing in tempo. Maddy, dozing off, found herself repeating a childhood mantra. “Now I lay me down to sleep…” She let the file slip from her lap and her mind into a sad blue dream.

  The killer – or killers, if there was more than one of them – had a penchant for good weather and pleasant surroundings. This time, the back garden of a Bearsden mansion. A staunch sun shone steadfastly, toughing it out up there no matter what little horrors lay below.

  “Back garden” turned out to be something of an understatement. Acreage, grounds, fields – simply making it plural to gardens would be a better description. Maddy had passed the top of this street hundreds of times, along the main artery from Glasgow out west towards the Lomond Hills. She knew there were fair-sized piles up this way – but nothing as grand as this.

  She had left her car in the street, walked up a driveway to a large porch and a main door built for a race of giants, eight foot high and reinforced with iron brackets. The hallway was castle-like, staircase vanishing up into the gloom high above. Through a door on the ground floor she could see a little old lady being interviewed by DS Russell and Sergeant Patterson Webb. If you’d passed her at the shops you’d have considered helping her with her bags and discreetly bunging her a couple of quid. Russell stood leaning against a marble fireplace as high as he was tall, wide and deep enough to roast a pig in. All the rooms and the hallway were panelled in dark wood nearly up to the level of Maddy’s shoulder. Alan Coulter came out of another door at the back of the house, a massive slab of wood nearly half a foot thick.

  “There might be a lot of coffee in Brazil,” she smiled, “but there can’t be a whole lot of mahogany left.”

  If he had any bitter after-taste from their little street argument last night, he didn’t show it.

  “Time of death of victim – a week last Friday. Five nights before the murders of Sy and Micky.” He kept his voice even, the tone light. You’ve got to watch your step with information like that. Get it wrong and everyone would go home to bed and never get up again. They walked out into the garden via the back door. Coulter kept talking, giving information. “The hair we found at Kelvingrove? Not even bloody human. Dog.”

  “It’s taken all this time for Forensics to distinguish between a human hair and a dog’s?!”

  The house might have been big, but the garden was ridiculous. She was following Alan down off a little raised terrace bordered by intricate iron filigree, onto wooden decking which twisted past a little pond onto a wide, flat lawn. “They’ve known all along. But, I don’t know, a report went missing somewhere, and in a meeting lines got crossed… Basically, all this time we’ve been assuming we’re dealing with human evidence. They’ve known for a week we’re not.”

  They walked across the grass – Maddy wised-up for once, wearing flattish shoes – and still it took a minute or two before she could even see Coulter’s colleagues. Amazing that ten, maybe twelve, experts of various sorts, plus uniforms, could get lost in someone’s garden. “So my reasoning last night – about Whyte getting his hair cut was—”

  “Was perfectly reasonable, given the information you understood you had.”

  They smiled at one another. Truce. A new day and a fresh sun. As he led the way towards Bruce Adams and the rest, Maddy noticed that grand as the gardens were, they didn’t look quite as pristine as she guessed they once did.

  “Think your woman back there could afford a better gardener.”

  “I imagine they don’t stay long – if they keep tripping over corpses.”

  Adams, Crime Scene Manager, looked up, hearing their approach. Maddy didn’t have to feel self-conscious about being here – a PF’s presence at a murder scene was required. And, as well as the sensible shoes, she’d been at her girl-guide best this morning and put on a proper pair of light trousers. At the patch at the end of the garden where the girl had been found, Bruce Adams smiled at a wayward pupil who’d done her homework for once. “You can suit up inside if you like. Amy’ll give you an overall.”

  “No need. I’ll just stay here and listen to what you experts tell me.”

  Adams turned abruptly away. Maddy wondered at her own contrariness. Heels, skirt and stockings, and she puts on a crime scene jumpsuit; flat shoes and proper trousers and she decides not to. No wonder the police despaired of PFs.

  The far end of the garden was lined with a knotted row of hydrangea and then a column of tall, narrow trees, standing to attention like soldiers on guard. “Corsican pine,” Adams said proudly – and probably incorrectly, Maddy thought. The girl’s body had been found between the bushes and the trees. No surprise, really, that it had lain there for a week and a half without being found. Even if the place was tended to by a part-time gardener. A Mr. Ian Lennon. He had been working on the beds at the top of the garden, and the fencing to the west side. Only came down here for a stroll while he was having his tea.

  When he found her – he yelled. No wonder. Nine warm days, barely covered by earth. He ran into the house, shouting on Mrs McKay to phone the police. Now, only a few broken twigs, some crushed blue petals and the slightest impression in a patch of soft earth were all that testified to the girl’s intrusion into private property.

  “You’d have thought the ground would be soaked in blood,” Adams said to Coulter. The two men, who usually made a p
oint of keeping their distance from each other, stood together nodding and wondering. Could the execution have happened elsewhere? Or was she dragooned here, to be executed? The same questions they still hadn’t answered about Sy and Micky X. “Pathology reported no sign of a blow powerful enough to have knocked her out.”

  Maddy moved back towards the path. It led to a set of concrete stairs. There was a door in the green wooden fence at the bottom of them. Alan Coulter came up towards her. “She was probably brought in this way.”

  Through the gate lay, not a back lane as Maddy had expected, but another road. It took her a couple of minutes to see the full picture in her mind’s eye. Bearsden and Drumchapel backed on to each other. Of course they must do – she’d just never thought about it. Mrs McKay’s palace of a house was one of a row, all of them with gardens sloping down to this frontier road. On the other side, an expanse of green belt, No-man’s-land. Beyond that, the backside of a dowdy clump of Council housing. Drumchapel and Bearsden, two extremes of Glasgow life, not quite facing each other, their backs turned in a huff. As if no travel or trade ever took place between them.

  “Except at night,” Coulter said. “And then it’s the Drum boys running home with Bearsden silverware under their oxters. That’s what Mrs. McKay says anyhow.”

  Ian Lennon had been brought to the garden to go over his precise movements the night before last. Coulter and Russell found him at a flower bed beside a shed at the side of the house, getting on with some digging while he waited.

  He looked like he’d been gardening his own face. Big bruised mushroom of a nose half-buried in stubble black as earth. Lips as cracked as a month without rain, furrows like tractor tracks on his forehead. According to his files he was fifty-six. He looked, and sounded, like some ancient ogre from a mile below the earth’s crust. Coulter thought better of making any jokes about cauliflower ears. Russell had already interviewed him down at the station, the night the girl had been found, but – despite the colourful history they had dug up on the unusual creature – had got nothing crucial from him. Judging by how his side-kick was cowering behind him now, Coulter got the impression he didn’t want to aggravate Lennon in any unnecessary way. The policemen perched themselves on a flimsy B&Q garden bench. Lennon carried on weeding.

  “Why were you in prison, Mr. Lennon?” Coulter asked.

  “Isn’t it manners to go in for a few insincere niceties first?” Lennon had a faint Northern Irish accent. “Like Good morning, Mr. Lennon, how’s the weedin’ goin’?” His vocal chords sounded as though they were located somewhere in his feet.

  Coulter smiled. “Fraid I know nothing about gardening. What were you in prison for?”

  Lennon found a clump of weeds to dislodge behind him, so that he had to turn away from his inquisitors. Coulter interpreted the move as defiance rather than dissimulation or anxiety. Lennon stuck his hefty arse a tad too directly at the visiting detectives. “You’ve got the file. You tell me.”

  “Gun-running. Arrests under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. General violence.”

  “So why ask?”

  “I wanted to look you in the eye while you told me.”

  Lennon swung his arse out further. “No’ doin’ very well then, are you?”

  “You work here Tuesdays and Fridays. The kid you found – she was killed a week last Friday.”

  “I wasn’t down that end of the garden.”

  “Did you kill her?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know who did?”

  “No.”

  “She was just lying there when you walked past.”

  “Aye.”

  “Not much blood. We reckon she was killed elsewhere and taken there. Not long before you found her.”

  “Could have worked out as much myself.”

  Russell was being unusually quiet. Not doing his normal jutting in on Coulter’s questions, heading off down totally different lines of enquiry. Lennon must really scare him. It wasn’t just the bashed-up face, the big gardening arms and hands, the impressive case history. It was the air of settled intelligence, a more than physical sense of force.

  “How did you get this job?”

  “Through prison. Parole suggested it. I like places without people.” He looked back into the expanse of the garden. “When I was wee they used to send me to my uncle’s to work on his farm. Feckin’ hated it. Every day of every summer from the age of eight to sixteen. But I learned a bit about growing stuff.”

  “You were in Saughton. Ever come across a Tony Kennedy?”

  The gardener shook his head. “When was he there?”

  “You must have overlapped. Two, three years back?”

  “There are over a thousand in Saughton. Half of them could be called Tony Kennedy for all I know.”

  “What about the canal, Lennon? Kelvingrove Park. Ever go up there to get away from it all?”

  He turned back to his digging. Coulter could read nothing from his movements – not deception, or pity. He had skin thicker than tree bark. Coulter stood up to go. Russell jumped up, too, eager to get away from the man’s slow brutal energy.

  Maxwell Binnie dragged out his meeting with Maddy to bridge the gap until the start of his Steering Committee on Delinquency.

  “I’m suggesting that we keep the press only minimally informed.”

  Binnie drummed his desk with his sterling silver fountain pen. Maddy doubted he could actually write with it. “Tough one – they love it.”

  The tender age of the victims made for good copy; the brutality of the executions, gruesome headlines. “The hunt for Micky X has become a national quest. Just what editors like.”

  Maddy nodded. Especially the editor of the Record – a personal pal of Binnie’s, and a man her boss liked to be on the right side of. The press were an important part of a career plan.

  The tabloids were “doing their bit,” searching Britain and beyond for the name and family of the murdered boy. They were “working” with organisations for the homeless, drop-in centres and Childline. In fact, all they were doing was keeping the story on the front pages. And trying to force a return of the death penalty – this time for child-killers.

  “Their coverage could lose us the case before we even have a suspect.”

  Binnie nodded vigorously, but Maddy knew he’d do nothing about it. He checked his watch, and ran his fingers through his thick, attractively graying hair. Time for his next meeting.

  We’re all too used to the deaths of kids who live on the edge of things, she thought going down in the lift. They’re forever falling into canals, or under cars. Drinking or OD-ing themselves to death. As for someone actually setting out to kill the youngsters, maybe the good and decent folk of Glasgow who’d had their cars broken into once too often, who had put up with cheek in the street, might even feel a guilty touch of sympathy.

  Her mother knew not to come out with such sentiments in Maddy’s company. The sun hung stubbornly to the edge of the evening sky as Maddy made her way to Sarti’s. Rays slanting through sandstone, glass, chrome, granite. Glaswegians became Milanese for the night – strolling, chatting, hanging jackets over their shoulders. Maddy entered the cool and candlelit restaurant, and found there had been no need to hurry. Mama was not alone.

  It wasn’t unusual for Rosa to pick up a companion. She hated being alone, even for the ten or fifteen minutes she sometimes had to wait for Maddy. But the young priest from church the other night was a bit much. Maddy just didn’t get the curate thing. In her experience they were testosterone-free zones. Generally pleasant enough, good-willed, if smug. Too dull to be either the perverted villains of modern mythology, or delectable forbidden fruit.

  “Maddalena. This is Father Jamieson. He’s kindly agreed to help advise us on a little service for Nonno’s party.”

  “Please, Rosa, if you insist on the ‘Father’, make it Father Mike.”

  To be fair to priests, there was really nothing they could say these days that didn’t sound like a comedy l
ine. He stood up to shake her hand.

  “Hi.” Maddy wasn’t going for either the “Father” or the “Mike”.

  “It’s a privilege meeting your family,” he said to Rosa. Then to Maddy: “Your grandfather, Maddalena, is an extraordinary person.”

  Maddy had occasional doubts about her own profession. It could be too easily corrupted; the law in general was no longer held in high esteem, and lawyers in desperately low esteem. But what must it feel like to be a Catholic priest these days? The majority of folk around you didn’t even believe in the premise on which you built an entire career. At best, you were an irrelevance; at worst, a madman. Have to hand it to them – there’s some kind of courage in facing a disinterested or openly hostile public each morning.

  “He is, Father, I know.”

  “I had assumed it was his birthday we were celebrating, but your mother told me the extraordinary story.”

  Nonno and his Great Adventure. It wasn’t all that uncommon, but it never failed to impress. The rest of the family, even two generations down the line – besmirched now by bog-Irish peasant blood the colour of peat – benefited from a little reflected glory. There must be a trace of the grit and courage and perseverance in them all.

  “What an example he is! Not often you hear of that kind of courage and bravery.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Father. Look closely enough and you find little examples of heroism everywhere.”

  “You’re right, Maddalena. The problem is, we don’t celebrate them. And we do have to look very hard to find them. Stories like your grandfather’s should be brought to our attention. Put in the newspapers. Published—”

  “I’ve often told Maddalena,” Maddy could mouth the words with her mother, “she should write his biography.”

  “Memoirs of an Ayrshire Chip Shop Dynasty.”

  “I agree with your mother, Maddalena,” Maddy found it breathtaking – the man was half her height, a decade younger, yet he spoke to her like a wise old teacher. “I think you should, too. What a role model your granddad could be.”