“I heard you were up at the murder scene.”
“How d’you know that?”
“We keep an eye on the place. You were spotted.”
“Impressive. Perp revisiting the crime scene sort of thing?”
“Sort of.”
Casci and Coulter, Maddy decided, were too alike to get along. One at a time, they were calm, easy company. Double them up and the effect was mutual suspicion. Coulter looked directly at her. Perhaps more accusingly than he meant.
“I like to get a feel of SOC,” Casci said. “You know what I mean?”
“And…?”
“We okay to talk in front of the prosecution?”
“Have either of you talked about anything else all day?”
“No.”
“That’s not true, Louis. I told you about potato scones and Iron Brew, and the Scottish Colourists, and Highland Cattle.”
“Big fuckin’ hairy things. Jesus.”
“Could we forget the cows, please! Did you feel anything of interest, think of anything?”
Casci pushed aside his dish. “You know, I think I did. Five of my seven victims were killed in out-of-the-way places—”
“Aren’t most people?”
“Only two taken out on city streets. In the middle of the night. A third in a derelict building. One in Central Park, in a kind of hidden recess behind trees, not unlike your Kelvingrove scenario. The most recent, on a river bank, south of the city.”
“That leaves two?” Maddy asked.
“One on an island, upstate. And, curiously, a girl found in a rich man’s garden. You asked what I felt was different, Alan….” When they had got to the clearing in the rhododendrons this afternoon, Casci had fallen silent. He wasn’t the most garrulous of men anyway, but he had gone particularly quiet, pacing out the little patch of grass like a prisoner in a cell. “Today reminded me of a couple of my murder scenes. Not just it being out of the way.” He stopped to take a sip of his Indian beer. “In fact, you’ll have noticed that there are better-hidden spots right close by.”
Maddy looked to Coulter, wondering if he had noticed. She hadn’t, until Casci had pointed them out. There were gaps deeper in the rhodos, away from the track that both Whyte and Docherty had run along. The killers could have taken Sy and Micky closer to the river, further away from the road and any tracks.
“It’s as if the killer liked the spot. The thought’s occurred to me before. Down by that river bank. On the island. Next to a Japanese garden area in Central Park. Or the garden the girl was found in – like yours, it was the best garden around.”
Coulter was normally an enthusiastic eater; but he had balanced a forkful of spiced courgette all the time Casci was talking. “Hang on. You mean a hired hand, a practised killer, takes his victims to less than perfectly safe places, just because he likes the look of them?!”
“Or because he likes the feel of them.”
Derrick Braithewaite was the most recent of the victims; body found August 10 2004. Driven in a large 4x4 on Highway 9D to a drop-off point between the villages of Cold Spring and Beacon, around fifty miles north of New York City. From there, Derrick was taken on a rowing boat to tiny Bannerman Island a few hundred yards out. There’s an old castle on the island, with a caretaker. The caretaker doesn’t live there, but crosses over on his boat every morning. Derrick was shot in the back – as if he were an escaping convict, or slave, gunned down. A .38 bullet penetrated his lung and his spleen, a second lodged in his stomach. He took a long time to die. Maybe he’d had just enough energy to call for help when Jim Tickell, the castle caretaker, arrived around 7.30 the following morning. But he couldn’t get enough volume behind his cry, or his windpipe was too full of blood. Whatever, Tickell didn’t hear him. Braithewaite wasn’t found until the day after that, Wednesday; time of death estimated at 12.00 midday, Tuesday 9th.
Hopefully, he had been unconscious. If not, he shivered through seven hours of damp and darkness, heard Tickell arriving, and a group of reconstruction volunteers working on restoring parts of the old castle. He’d have heard the rush-hour traffic across the narrow stretch of water, and heard it again, lunchtime. He’d have drifted in and out of consciousness. Would have seen the sun rise along with his hopes of being found, and watched it disappear again behind clouds, a summer shower falling unexpectedly and heavily. Wiping away all forensics, footsteps, fibres.
“There’s a connection for you,” Casci said, suddenly breezy. “Bannerman Castle. Not really a castle at all, actually, but an arsenal.”
The evening streets had an end-of-term easiness about them; it was after ten but there was still a glow in the sky, a lilac blush in the air they were breathing. Students called to each other across Woodlands Road, arranging trysts in bars up town, exchanging information about parties. Coulter, Casci and Shannon – they sound like a law firm, Maddy thought – took up the whole width of the pavement, each enjoying their own space. Anyone passing would have taken them for a bunch of old friends. A couple and a brother-in-law maybe, out for a quiet drink on a warm night.
“The island’s real name is Pollopel. Old Indian name. It’s called Bannerman after the castle which, according to the stuff at the visitor centre, is built with turrets and walled garden and moat in the old Scottish baronial style.”
“Why?”
“The original Bannerman – so the story goes – was the only MacDonald to escape those other guys at that place.”
Maddy laughed. “I hope your criminal investigation details are a little more exact, Officer Casci. The Campbells? Glencoe?”
“That’s them. He was called Bannerman, because he saved the MacDonald banner. Carried it over thistles and shit, Campbells showering him with bullets or spears or whatever. Even escaped those crazed Highland cows.”
They turned into University Avenue, the big limes and horse chestnuts on Kelvin Way turning their heads slowly in the night breeze, silver birches silent. Three people laughing – minutes after hearing how Louis had seen a sixteen year old lying dead in a hollow of earth and rocks and tree-roots, executed on a barren island. Maddy glanced, ashamed, up at the trees. Then corrected herself: mustn’t beat yourself up for laughing. If there was a heaven up there somewhere, maybe Derrick was in it, laughing too, the worst of it over.
He remained unidentified for more than six months. They couldn’t match any missing person’s details to him. Finally, with no leads as to who murdered him and no family or friends to inform, they buried him in Potters’ Field. Almost as soon as they had, Cheryll Braithewaite arrived from Canada.
“She’d been searching for her son for months,” Louis said, kicking an imaginary stone on the pavement. “Family were Barbadian with cousins in Toronto.”
Cheryll, raising Derrick, his two young sisters and little brother, on her own, on the salary of a sales assistant in a Bridgetown travel agent, had managed to save enough to send him to Canada to enrol in an engineering course. Thanks to a perfectly innocent family misunderstanding – the Canadian cousins hadn’t expected him until September, just before college started – Cheryll didn’t even know he was missing until a month after he was dead. The last place she’d thought of looking was in New York. Derrick had flown directly from Grantly Adams airport to Toronto. The Braithewaites had no connections anywhere in the States.
“Derrick was the exception.” Casci wheezed, the hill through the university taxing his beefy build. “On a number of counts. The only Bajan. The other black males were Haitians.” He regained his breath as the hill slipped back down towards Byres Road.
“Sure, he’d been running with a few of the bad boys in the ‘hood’ back in Bridgetown. One of the reasons Cheryll wanted him out. But nothing serious. Also, he came from a family who, though not exactly rich, could afford, and cared enough, to have him exhumed and given a decent burial.”
“Back in Barbados?” Coulter asked.
Casci shook his head. “Couldn’t afford that. But a better district of that heavenly metr
opolis, Potters’ Field. And the proper C of E rigmarole. A few cousins down from Canada. A nice headstone.”
They had names for only two of the other black victims. “Henri-Charles Lespinasse and Ti-Guy Plissard. Both New Yorkers from the Haitian community, sons of known and convicted criminals. And both with impressive records, for a fifteen and a seventeen year old.”
“I thought everyone in Potter’s Field was unidentified.”
“Plissard and Lespinasse, too, for a month or more. Families like that don’t go to the authorities, not even to collect their dead.”
Of the seven victims mentioned in the New York Times, Louis Casci reckoned two were completely unrelated to each other or the rest. There had been dozens of unidentified young cadavers buried in Potters’ Field since the first of his cases, nearly a decade ago. The Times said that seven of them had been slashed around the mouth.
“Not so. One – older than the others, maybe as much as twenty – had been slashed around the lips and cheeks all right. But he’d been slashed to pieces everywhere else as well. As manic a knife-attack as you’ll come across. That doesn’t match up with the cool professionalism of the others. Cut only around the mouth, and after being shot. Or, in Plissard’s case, being stabbed in the heart.”
The other case Casci discounted was the only girl – to this day still unclaimed and unidentified. Like Frances Mullholland, found shot in a rich man’s garden in Staten Island.
“Shot in the head, and then slashed. But on the hands as well as the mouth. For me, she doesn’t fit the bill.”
So, five New York victims: Braithewaite, Lespinasse and Plissard. A fourth, unidentified young black boy; around seventeen, dressed more in Jamaican garb than Haitian. Killed in parkland in Queens, six years ago this month.
“And the fifth’s the Irish kid?” This was the one Coulter wanted to know about.
They were standing at the end of Ashton Lane, throngs of summer revellers all around them, heading for the bars where you could stand outside on the cobblestones, lean on upturned barrels, sip and talk and watch the night thicken. Maddy knew Coulter wouldn’t join them for a drink. He’d jump on the Underground here, get back to Martha and the family.
“Goodman Lane.”
“That’s an Irish name?” Coulter looked askance.
“Well it ain’t Haitian. Goodman – named after Bono.”
Coulter stared at him, confused.
“The lead singer of U2?”
Coulter was none the wiser. Maddy helped him out: “Forgotten your Latin? Bono, meaning good.”
A large group of young people, babbling some language incomprehensible to any of them, washed around him, hiding Coulter from view for a moment.
“Not an IRA supporter was he? Goodman.”
“Goody was too spaced-out, lobotomised by crack, jellies, uppers and downers to know what day it was never mind foreign political movements.”
Coulter nodded and turned away, looking lonely.
“His old man knew, though,” Casci kept talking. “Bernard Lane. Laundered IRA cash through a club he ran, supposedly for aficionados of songs from the old country.”
Coulter searched in his pocket for the Underground fare. “Let’s chat about that tomorrow. Have a nice night.”
You told me again, you preferred handsome men. She’d always liked that line. Maybe Janis Joplin got the choice more often than Maddy. Anyway, Maddy found her definition of “handsome” shifting these days. Certainly a young Leonard Cohen – even an old Leonard Cohen – would have fitted the bill. An old fantasy she’d forgotten about: deserted Greek island, retsina and black tobacco, a white-walled room with one small, single bed. She and Leonard in it. Dawn beginning to bloom outside; the hot, sad smell of jasmine and juniper. But for me you’d make an exception.
Louis Casci was a reasonably impressive catch. Italian-American, hot-shot in the NYPD; tailored, clear-featured, powerful-looking. Exotic; at least, until he took his clothes off. Few people can retain exoticism in the buff. Common humanity wipes away most traces of singularity. Flaws make us all familiar – the paunches and scars, knock-knees and bald bits, the blemishes. Our bodies make us nobodies.
But for a while there last night, the magic had worked. For once she had hit upon precisely the right combination of drink and food, jokes and conversation. It all went smoothly. One more Semillon spritzer in Bar Brel after Coulter’d gone off. Then, at Louis’s clever suggestion, a coffee in Tinderbox. The two of them rediscovering their Italian-ness together. Her joking about Italian immigrants to Glasgow thinking they were in New York.
“Didn’t they realise they hadn’t crossed a great big ocean?”
“Story is, they got to Liverpool, bought tickets for the boat, were sailed round the Isle of Man a hundred times and booted off in Glasgow.”
That old chestnut; she didn’t believe a word of it. She did, of course, believe in Nonno’s Great Adventure, but didn’t mention that to Louis Casci. They tried out together their limited language skills in Italian. They walked through cool midnight air. He might as well crash at her place, they agreed – her floor couldn’t be any more uncomfortable than the cheap hotel he was staying in. A G&T in the sitting room. Left unfinished… .
She hadn’t felt awkward and she didn’t back off. She didn’t mind when he shed his shiny, tailored skin and became just another forty-something man; had he been beautiful all the way through she’d have felt plainer and inferior. She was delighted at – emboldened by – his ordinariness.
She was a little darker-skinned than him. Somehow that helped. Helped her fade into the night, the unlit sheets. It was warm enough to keep the window open and that made her think of films set in New Orleans or LA. They slid easily together, she and Officer Casci. They could both do with losing a few pounds, but she felt lithe and strong, graceful even, in a solid sort of way. When their eyes met – and neither went in for too much of that – they smiled. No one was pretending to be overwhelmed; no one’s life was changing.
The incident room is never deserted, not even on a Sunday. At the very least, there’s the HOLMES supervisor, or one of the deputies, at the door. There are usually one or two indexers, too. Kids almost, same age as Coulter’s eldest two, squeezing every last penny out of overtime, desperately trying to get on the house market merry-go-round.
It’s hard to find a place to think. Too much going on at home, what with Martha and everything… He didn’t have an office any more, just a “station” in an open plan, a “hot desk”. The relative emptiness of the HOLMES Room was the best he could hope for. After a few sociable comments – the Old Firm and weather, a bit of shop-talk – he got past the supervisor. A geeky indexer was gawking at his computer screen, totally uninterested in him.
Coulter hated HOLMES. It turned policing into accountancy – a career full of folders and files and passwords and permissions, instead of leads and labyrinths and the intellect. They didn’t trust detectives to think any more; they’d rather that was done by machines. He even hated the name – Home Office Large Major Enquiry System. The bad Sherlock acronym was cringeworthy enough, but they couldn’t even get it right. Large Major? The whole approach was a way of restricting professionals; a form of social control. You couldn’t speak to anyone – not a witness, or a victim, or a self-confessed gangster, or a psycho in prison for smashing folks’ heads – without getting the go-ahead from the HOLMES supervisor, who inherited his authority from The Computer. They were all in thrall to it, even on a Sunday morning like this; its ghostly whirr, the banks of terminals where there used to be walls and whiteboards and real writing. The flashing cursors.
There’s info in there – Coulter was staring blankly at a screen that, equally blankly stared back – on every serious crime in the country in the past twenty years, and a goodly number of crimes worldwide from Asia to the Americas. He pressed a key, expecting nothing. Millions upon millions of little pieces of information, floating around in cyberspace, coming together at the touch of a button. Amon
gst them, his own little current cases: The Kelvingrove Executions (password Red Rhoddo); and the Bearsden Garden Murder (Tall Trees).
He’d spent a month now, talking again and again to Sy Kennedy’s family, his friends, schools, neighbours. Ditto Frances Mullholland. He, Alan Coulter, personally, in the company of DS Russell, or WPC Dalgarno, or some other colleague, had spoken to residents as far as six streets back from the addresses of the known deceased, and a mile and a half around their places of death. Yet the “Statements” with his name against them were a drop in the ocean. The guy at the door, the HOLMES Supervisor, had told him that so far there had been over 3,000 statements taken, on the Sy and Micky X case alone. Nearly the same for Operation Tall Trees. Every bobby on every beat, it seemed, had a little bit more data to throw into the HOLMES’ den. The system had a hunger for any kind of information.
Three thousand pieces of information – and not the slightest sniff of Micky X. A perfectly healthy young man is found dead, in the company of a pal about whom they now knew almost everything, and yet there’s nothing to link him to some kind of lived life. Not to a parent, or to an uncle, not even a school or borstal, a football team. Nada. HOLMES droned and hissed, whispering to itself, like it was keeping something back. They gave it everything they could – Micky’s height, weight, snicked eyebrow, Coq Sportif gear, estimated time of death, estimated time of arrival in Kelvingrove. Zilch.
Who was the little shit?
He called up the image of the victim’s face. Coulter felt that he knew him. That face, even in death, was local, he was sure of it. The cut of the jaw, that particular shade of pinkish skin, the scraggy neck. A wee Glaswegian hard man if ever he saw one. The gear, the expression of sour guardedness, even in death. Maddy Shannon reckoned that his hand was stretching out, looking for Sy’s, reaching out for a final human contact. Coulter disagreed. Micky was pushing Sy away – solitary to the bitter end.
She’d almost forgotten. The Sunday before Nonno’s party; she’d agreed to go to Mass with her mother, so that they could speak to Father Jamieson. Make arrangements.
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