“He had the opportunity. Alibis?” Robertson asked, while Russell shifted in his seat. Any talk of Lennon, Coulter noticed, seemed to unnerve his junior.
“Lennon’s a loner – he never has an alibi. At least no corroboration. When he’s not alone in his house, he’s at the back of somebody’s garden somewhere. He doesn’t make appointments, just turns up and works, calling in once a month to get paid. Consequently, none of his employers know when he’s around and when he’s not. He knew Sy’s father in prison. Governor at Saughton said they often sat together at meals, but claims he can’t remember him.”
“Motive?”
Coulter remained silent. Robertson met him directly in the eye. “So basically we have the same problem with both the Lennon and the designers theories? No sniff of a halfway decent reason for shooting three kids.”
“Lennon had no more reason to kill the Mullholland girl than Whyte did the boys,” Russell nodded gravely.
“I think,” Coulter said quietly, knowing that his opinion didn’t count for as much as it should, “that Ian Lennon is capable of things Whyte could never be. He knows a dark side of this city that Whyte has no notion exists.”
Maddy stood next to Jackie Mullholland as the mortuary assistant brought in the gurney. The woman was proof of chaos theory, a splat of ill-fitting mismatched clothes, Medusa hair, involuntary movements and sounds. She had black rings under her green eyes, looked as if she hadn’t slept in months. Smoker’s skin, but a young, red, un-lipsticked mouth, long artistic fingers.
The mortuary assistant was a young man, very professional in his bearing. Apart from the earring – but that was probably a generation thing. Anyone ten years younger than her probably wouldn’t even notice. Jackie Mullholland stared at him as he stepped back, towards the door. Maddy took hold of the sheet.
She felt, as she held the cover down, that she was doing something pornographic. Leeringly exposing something private. The girl had been tidied up for her mother. Jackie hopped from one foot to the other, glanced at the dead child, then at Maddy, then somewhere unknown, unthinkable. Maddy kept holding the sheet down off the fading face, the greenish tinge of death like makeup. Jackie glanced down again, and her eyes flared momentarily, her fists clenched. You could see her fighting for breath. She gave Maddy this strange little nod – almost eager, like a child in a class with the right answer.
When, with Frances covered again, Jackie followed Maddy to the door, her presence was somehow lighter. There was less of her. The wild hair and edgy movements, the little coughs and red lips, all muted, washed away by uncryable tears.
Alan Coulter sat in the little cubicle sectioned off from the rest of the noisy office by sheets of thin cardboard. He had his daily “to do” list in his hand. Progressing well for midway through the morning – phone calls, reports, meeting with Robertson, all ticked.
He was a rule-bound creature. His kids told him, regularly. Maddy once said it. Not disparagingly, he didn’t think. A man who followed orders, in his personal and professional life. Martha needed rules as much as he did – maybe, way back, when they first met, it was one of the things that brought them together. Certainly now, with her ill-health, she needed order, regularity. Any departure from the daily routine developed over years of being parents, could start up one of her headaches. Holidays, social engagement, kids’ school outings, his own long and unpredictable hours were all potential crises.
Sy Kennedy, he thought, might have been a rule-follower, of sorts. Micky too. At school Sy was a wild kid, but his final hours suggested he was disciplined, biddable. He had met someone, as arranged, agreed to be taken to a deserted patch of park at dawn. It was just a question of whose rules you followed.
Frances Mullholland on the other hand was probably a breaker of everyone’s rules. A genuinely feral kid. Everything they knew about her school life bore that out: constantly in trouble, cheeky with teachers, excitable and unstable. “Thick as two short planks,” one teacher had confided in them. “Mad as a March hare,” said a neighbour. The sort of thirteen-year-old girl that could go missing for a week and a half and no one thought it strange. Friends thought she was with other friends. Family didn’t seem to care much. Someone gave that lassie a rule and her instinct was to smash it, scream blue murder at it.
He’d switched his mobile to vibrate only for the meeting with the boss. It buzzed against his leg now – one of the strange new experiences modernity has brought. Not work: everyone knew he was here. He sighed – one of the kids wanting something. Then again, could be Maddy, suggesting a drink. More likely, Martha in a panic, or – it was always possible – ill.
“Coulter here.”
A pleasant surprise. Jenny Tate from the Press Office. And with some info. “Came across it almost by chance.” She was going to read whatever it was out over the phone, but he told her he’d come down. In this job you had to savour these moments.
Maddy was walking back from the High Court, enjoying the fresher turn the weather had taken.
Work in the law and you’ll know that anything can happen on the High Street. A worn thoroughfare spiralling through Glasgow’s history, it runs from the Cathedral to the Gallowgate where smugglers and cut-throats and reivers and chicken-stealers used to get hanged. The official border of the East End, until Yuppies moved in around Bell Street and the fringes of Bridgeton and the Saltmarket. Now there was old crime and new crime combined. Wide boys mugged naive owner-occupiers; fatcats sold upmarket drugs behind juice-bar counters. All the same, you don’t expect, as a highly esteemed PF Principal Depute, to get knocked to the pavement by a shabby middle-aged man jumping off a bus.
“Sorry,” Coulter mumbled. “I was going to get off at the next stop when I saw you.”
Maddy, having got over the shock of a detective falling out the sky directly onto her, thought the situation quaintly old-fashioned. People used to jump off buses all the time, in the days when they were open-backed.
“Driver had kept the door open, seeing as how it’s sunny.”
“You should have arrested him.”
“I’ll phone ahead, catch him further down the line.”
Even with Alan, Maddy was never quite sure if policemen were joking or not. They were scarily zealous about rules. He took a hold of Maddy’s arm. They had become quite close colleagues, friends even – but never to the point of physical contact before. Coulter’s mind was clearly very far from social niceties, however. Something was exciting him, and it wasn’t the touch of Maddy’s flesh.
A door in that stretch of the High Street could have led into almost any kind of establishment – cappuccino bar, piano bar, trendy club pointlessly open in the afternoon, old-fashioned tea shop. As luck would have it, it was one of the more traditional hostelries. Invisible veil of cigarette smoke as you went in; whisky and flat beer fumes mingled with human smells that made you regret the smoking ban – sweat and farts and feet. It was quiet, though, despite the pub being half full; folk murmuring, keeping their voices down. They could clock a polis and a lawyer in seconds flat.
“D’you want to go somewhere else?” Coulter looked around.
“I’d have thought this was right up your street.”
“Bit manky even for me.”
“Get us in a drink. I get the impression you have something urgent to say.”
He moved towards the bar, and flinched. “Shit. I’m going to have to order a couple of fizzy waters. In here.” But he went about the unsavoury business like a man.
“How’s Martha?” she asked when he came back, unscathed if a little flushed in the cheek.
“Having a bad week.”
It was seldom, it seemed to Maddy, that Martha had a good week. “Sorry to hear that. Right. What?”
Coulter produced from under his jacket an A4 envelope.
“Did you have that stuck in your belt?” He did; Maddy burst out laughing. “What – instead of a six-shooter?”
Coulter smiled, humouring her, and took out the contents of
the envelope. A newspaper, which she recognised as being old, the paper too limp to be today’s. “You know what Potter’s Field is?”
“The field bought with Judas Iscariot’s thirty pieces of silver’
He looked at her, astonished. “Is it?”
“Is this a trick question, or did a sudden need for Biblical trivia come over you? Judas, on a guilt trip after the event, took the silver back to the temple, but even the high priests wanted nothing to do with the blood money – that’s probably where the phrase came from now I think about it.”
“What’s any of this got to do with potters or fields?”
“They put the money to good use. Bought a field from the local potter… Do potters have fields? Well, this one did. And they made it into a graveyard for paupers and strangers.”
“That’s the connection.”
“To what?”
“Is that where the story ends?”
“Story, Inspector? This is divinely inspired doctrine. Didn’t Judas then hang himself from a tree in that same potter’s field? Don’t quote me on that bit.”
“How d’you know all this?”
“Convent education. That and shining my shoes so highly the boys can see the reflection of my knickers. I’m pretty sure this is the strangest conversation I’m going to have all day, Alan.”
He put the paper in front of her. An odd size of page; unusual typefaces. The headline didn’t mean anything to her. “Signs of the Times”. Not a front page scoop. She checked the top of the page – page 16, New York Times, January 2005. She found the article hard to read, the light being dim, Alan staring at her, male drinkers glancing at her from all corners. Slowly, however, she got the gist.
Potter’s Field was also the name of a graveyard in New York. Deceased paupers and unidentified bodies were buried in the cemetery run by the city – an astonishing number of unclaimed cadavers and lonely deceased buried every year. Like the high priests’ field of blood. Coulter was getting impatient waiting. He tapped a paragraph towards the end of the piece. Typical flatfoot, ignoring the outer layers of information, gagging for the quick hit of hard facts.
In the last decade there has been a series of distressing killings. Seven young men, or boys, murdered in as many years, one as young as eleven years old. Only two were identified by family members. The killings might not have been connected – simply the sad reflection of a violent city in violent times – were it not for another gruesome link. Each of the victims had knife-wounds across their mouths. Pathology indicated that the wounds were inflicted either just prior to or moments after the victims’ deaths. The actual causes of death vary from case to case. Four were shot – summarily executed. Two were stabbed through the heart, and a sixteen-year-old black youth was beaten to death. Only one of the victims was Caucasian.
Commanding Officer Casci of Brooklyn Court Section told The Times last year: “The only elements that link the murders are the age of the victims and the wounds received to the face. Each of the individual cases is being kept open and will continue to be kept open until a perpetrator for these brutal crimes is behind bars.”
Officer Casci went on to say that they are working on gangland connections. The knife-cuts across the lips are probably a warning, or punishment. An “Omerta” sign out of Mafia film lore. However, two of the victims are thought to have been involved in “wilding” – kids high on drugs and alcohol running amok through Central Park and other civic spaces, attacking anyone they meet. Many “wilders” caught in the past have turned out also to be drug dealers. Major narcotic cartels are thought to be behind…
“So my Omerta thing wasn’t so daft after all.”
“Excuse me?”
“Dan McKillop wasn’t convinced by my gangland revenge theory.”
Coulter pulled the paper away and put it back in the envelope. “These are your copies. There are five other articles in the envelope about the same murders.”
Murders, exactly like at least two in her own city, but in New York. Seven of them over ten years. That strange brew of emotions bubbled up inside her – disgust, a sinking feeling; but at the same time, a rising of hope you get with the discovery of new information. She and Coulter sat quietly, their brains working overtime, eyes exchanging knowing, wondering, glances. Like a pair of addicts, ashamed of themselves while lusting for more.
“Hey, maybe we’ll get a dirty weekend in the Big Apple out of it,” she said at last.
Seven kids dead. Joking was all a respectable person could do. Coulter got up to take the glasses back to the bar. Maddy took the New York Times back out of the crushed envelope. There was a picture of Potter’s Field, looking rather attractive, expensive even. A serious-looking authority figure – mid forties? – was labelled Officer Louis Casci. A sad looking young black boy, Derrick Braithewaite, was one of the few named victims of the New York murders.
III
The original plan was to send Coulter off to New York – economy travel, second class B&B in some no doubt naff part of Queens. But the Kelvingrove and Bearsden murders were becoming a national and media obsession and, by extension, the whole issue of delinquency. John MacDougall, chair of the Committee on Youth Crime and Delinquency was forever being interviewed, consulted, invited to conferences. He had already spent a week each in New York, Boston and Washington, and accepted an invitation from Gracie Mansions to return to New York later in the year. The Committee feared that sending a mere working copper over, B&B or nay, might smack of a junket. Which is how New York ended up footing the bill and sending Commanding Officer Louis Casci to Glasgow instead. Maddy watched him, standing leaning on a fence, a look of utter disbelief on his face. Casci and Coulter, she thought, were near enough interchangeable. Louis maybe four or five years younger than Alan, thicker-haired in that Italian way, bit stouter. But they were about the same height, had the same unearned youthfulness about them, a kind of innocence despite their shared profession. Both were easy men to be with.
“Are those real?”
Maddy had taken over the weekend tour guide shift – Martha wasn’t well, so Alan couldn’t come out to play; Rangers were at an end-of-season climax and John Russell had got himself an away-ticket. Commanding Officer Casci of Brooklyn District clearly wasn’t important enough for Crawford Robertson or any other top brass to spend quality time with. Alan had asked her to steer clear of talking shop – the poor Yank could do with a break.
“Of course they’re real!” she laughed.
Louis had nodded politely at the exhibits in the Burrell Collection and Pollock House. But he clearly wasn’t really as interested in pre-history or early modern painting as he’d claimed when she’d suggested the trip. Driving back through the park grounds, though, the man nearly had a fit.
“Holy fuck – what is that?!”
Maddy had stopped the car and let him get out, intrigued by the American’s mouth-gaping awe. “Highland cattle.”
“What?”
“They’re just hairy cows.”
“They’re yaks for chrissakes. Or bison or something. They’re Scottish?”
Maddy remembered being overawed by a simple olive tree in Liguria – the weird, neanderthal way it curled round itself, like a gnarled, bad tempered little man – to the ill-concealed boredom of a handsome young Lothario who didn’t hang around much after that. Wasn’t only Americans who became wide-eyed babies abroad. “You’ve never seen these before?”
Who would have thought that the one truly surprising and inspiring thing about her country would be Highland cattle? Next time she gets to go on a conference somewhere, forget the pipes and clarsach CDs, the Gray and Vettriano postcards, the Colin Baxter landscapes. A couple of plastic-framed photos of hairy cows and she’d be Miss Popular.
They were deep in the heart of the residential south side of the city, but the scene in front of them was like something out of Brigadoon. Pity Casci hadn’t been around the last few weeks. The heatwave had passed its climax and was guttering out. Maddy liked th
ese kinds of days better. The heaviness taken out of the air; everything softer, still warm enough and a hint of sea-spray even in the metropolis. Casci managed to pull himself away from a Beatle-mopped heifer that seemed just as mesmerised by him.
“She’s never seen a New York cop before,” Maddy grinned as they walked back towards the car park.
“So. Procurator Fiscal – you’re like a prosecuting attorney, yeah?”
“Right now I’m just a friend of a friend who’s showing you the delights of our humble little city. But, since you ask, a Fiscal’s much more important than any old common or garden prosecution lawyer.”
At the car, she got in, but he stood by the door. He leaned down to talk in to her. “Take me to Kelvingrove?”
“Surely DI Coulter took you?”
“I’d like to see it again.”
“Okay.”
Casci got in the car, pulling his legs almost up to his chin. He looked out appreciatively at the woodlands in the middle of a grimy city, well-tended lawns on one side, prettily boggy fields on the other. The breeziness of the modern Burrell ahead; solid Scottishness of Pollock House behind. “That’s where you’re different from us,” he said, still looking around. “You go to great lengths to hide the misery and the shit.”
They were halfway through a thali for two at Mother India’s Cafe – Louis lapping up the contents of every cute little dish – when the waiter brought a distracted-looking Coulter to their table.
“That looks good. I’ll just ask for an extra plate and cutlery, shall I?”
“Back off, buddy. This is a meal for two.”
Coulter smiled, but Maddy saw he was pissed off. She asked the waiter to keep the dishes coming, from now on enough for three. Coulter sat down, dragging his chair back from the table, separating himself from his companions by a matter of inches.
“So. You two had a nice day?”
“You ever seen Highland cows? Jesus.”
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