Potter's Field

by Dolan, Chris;

  She helped him from the kitchen to the living room. He was ready now to meet his public – all the people who had come to celebrate his anniversary. Di Rio cousins and Benedettis, the Cochranes who had lived across the road for three generations, two priests, local Labour Party hacks, several old fogies Nonno had picked up. Even a Shannon or two apart from herself. Cousins who had sided with Rosa over the separation. Louis Casci took Nonno’s other arm.

  The hall door had been left open – it was a grey but warm day, people coming and going all the time between kitchen and garden. Maddy glimpsed out at the Girvan coast. She saw the land of her childhood for what it really was: another dreary town, half empty, the wind rattling the Closed signs, the sea damp and dull and cross.

  “So, hey, Mr. Di Rio,” Louis said, “eighty years since your family came to live in Scotland. That’s quite something.”

  “No no,” the old man protested. His voice was still steady, and he spoke like a man thirty years younger. “Eighty years since I came here. Eighty-five since the first Ayrshire Di Rios.”

  Maddy glanced at Louis. He couldn’t be expected to see the importance in the difference between those five years.

  “Maddalena tells me you’re over here about those boys’ murder. Terrible thing.”

  Father Mike Jamieson saw his chance to get away from a particularly talkative Bennedetti aunt. “A life as long as yours, Nonno – you must have seen many wonderful and terrible things.” The poor man couldn’t help it. Every word he uttered irked Maddy to the bone. It wasn’t the brat-priest’s place to call him Nonno. And he didn’t need to talk so loud – Nonno wasn’t so deaf. Nonno looked the young priest in the eye. “And you men of the cloth should dwell more on the good than the bad.”

  It was a peculiarity of both sides of Maddy’s family to privately condemn all things religious but keep up a public front. The Irish side were even worse. “The trouble with being a young man is everybody wants you to die for them. The Church,” he glanced mischievously at the embarrassed Fr. Mike. “Country. Powerful men. Women. Young men’s blood is like nectar to them all. Can’t get enough of it.”

  Uncle Gerry came and stole Nonno from them – some old friend had arrived. Mike, undeterred by the old man’s treatment of him, kept by his side. Louis and Maddy stood in the doorway looking in on the opening of another present.

  “How come your family were here five years before he was?” Louis asked, perplexed.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “It’s going to be a long day.”

  But Maddy didn’t feel like delving into the past. It was such a crucial tale – events that took place more than half a century before her birth had forged who she would become. She changed the subject. Now wasn’t the moment. She didn’t want to think about the trials of youth, about families being ripped apart. About what makes one young man survive into successful beloved old age and another get shot before he’s barely out of puberty.

  She led Louis out to the garden. Her childhood home was a big rambling townhouse that Nonno should have sold years ago but had neither the heart nor the energy. We all hang on to things for too long, Maddy thought. That’s why she should be selling her own flat. Stop getting too attached to things. Places. Louis was a hit with the Aunties, laying out food on trestle tables for a garden picnic. Fell over themselves offering him home-made treats and too much wine. Mama had made her little bruschette and savoury chouquettes with cheese and strips of Parma ham. Auntie May and her daughter Lizzie, in true Irish style, had heated up a mountain of chipolata sausages and little tasteless pastry puffs. The Italian aunts, on the other hand, were using Louis as the current judge in a lifelong cooking competition.

  “It’s juliennes of chicken breast rolled around spinach and slices of mushroom.”

  “Delicious.”

  “Aubergine with balsamic vinegar and sun-blushed tomato. You’ll need a fork, Louis.”

  “Tortellini salad. I got the recipe from a friend in Siena. You ever been to Siena, Louis?”

  “Never been to Italy.”

  “Away!”

  Maddy watched Nonno through the window. Too tired to talk now, but smiling benignly at old friends and great-grandsons and, despite his supposed anticlericalism, sitting next to Monsignor Connolly.

  “Tiramisu, Louis?”

  Slowly, the harem of portly ladies bearing cholesterol and sugar waddled off to muster the family for lunch. That would take an hour, minimum. Louis and Maddy sat outside, the sky brightening.

  “Nonno made his money from fish and chips. Very English, no?” He was still curious about her family background, but had picked up that she wasn’t going to talk about the personal stuff.

  “The fish is pesce alla milanese. The chips are Belgian, Nonno says. His father had seen other Italians put the two together in London. The story goes that when Benny – that’s my great-grandfather – first tasted the combination he screwed up his face and swore it’d never catch on. A year later, they were selling shedloads of the stuff.”

  She sipped her wine and looked out over the fence at the sea, calm and stretching into infinity. “Great granddad Ettore was fighting the Austrians in the Alps when he was sixteen. Nonno there was helping his dad set up in business at the same age. By the age of ten he had walked through half of Europe. What were you doing at sixteen?”

  Louis shook his head and smiled. “Kicking about the streets smoking shit and talking more shit. Christ, I couldn’t even wash my own shorts and socks.”

  At least he wasn’t getting killed in parks or rich folks’ gardens. This could be her last day ever with Commanding Officer Louis Casci. Don’t go spoiling it with depressing thoughts. She’s proud of her family today. They’re the soul of hospitality; all of them genuinely grateful to Nonno for what he had created for them. Teachers, married ladies, mums and dads, business people and professionals. Not a bad crop from a grudging piece of dry earth on a distant island most of them had never visited.

  It was a year now since they had left their two boys at the base of the hill, the sea whispering in the background. Carlo would be eleven, Vittore eight. Please God they were fine, stronger – the way boys are able to grow and fill out on a handful of berries, a few leaves of cabbage. The way Ettore had.

  Paris had been big and noisy and the night seemed to fall earlier than anywhere else, and lift later. But Ettore and Antonella were speaking French well by the time they got there and could talk to all the strange people they met there – a circus of rich and poor and happy and sad, talkative and taciturn. But none of it was any preparation for England, a land so unreal and faint, that it felt like they were living through a story.

  The language sounded like it was spoken though cotton wool – muffled, like everyone had a cold or wooden teeth. It was spoken in a steady drone and reflected the appearance of the place. Fixed and pale. Ettore got the impression that no day quite got started. The sun never burned away the clouds; they just faded and drifted down from the sky, until the whole world felt thin and watery. Like you were looking at it through a veil. And it was cold. Not the same kind of cold you got high up in the Aosta valley, or in Grenoble. A softer coldness. Wetter. It could be dry for days and your clothes warm but somehow you felt damp inside.

  For the first week, he watched Antonella stare at this bland new world. He felt a little separated from her – as if the muslin of the air, the cotton wool of the language, had gotten between them. The light here made her fade somehow. He worried that he too might peter out. Until they met Mario from San Piero. Meeting a friend from home reanimated them, put laughter back in his wife’s eyes and a smile on his own lips. The three of them talked about chasing hogs and racing along the beach, the big boats moored at Portoferraio. They talked about friends and family – di Mambros and Rossis and the folks at Procchio and up at Campo nell’Elba. Mario and Ettore swore at that bitch of the land that hadn’t given them enough to stay and prosper. They complained about the wars the old country was forever asking them
to die in, and then they remembered good times, and kind neighbours, and their own families still there.

  They took to meeting in pubs – places with huge walls, a ceiling so high you could barely see it, and great shiny bronze beer pumps and pictures of horses, women sitting at tables. Every time it would take Antonella a good hour and a few warming sips of the men’s porter to feel comfortable. The war wasn’t long over and Londoners welcomed them as friends who had helped topple Kaiser Bill. The three of them huddled in snugs and talked for hours. Antonella remembered lots of little stories about Carlo and Vittore. Mario talked about Maria Grazia, the Sansoni girl from the farm just north of Procchio. He had promised he would return to her with expensive wedding gifts. Now, he confessed, he was about to marry another girl.

  “Molly’s Irish. Mama will be happy – she’s a better Catholic than anyone in Elba! Well… not in every way.”

  And they all laughed, including Antonella, though she and Ettore were sad for Maria.

  “She’ll have forgotten me, eh? Gino was just waiting for me to go.”

  That was true, and Gino Romani did make his move not long after Mario had left. But Maria flatly refused him. Just as she had refused every other boy – and there were many. Maria Grazia was pretty. She was still waiting patiently for Mario, secure in the unshakeable belief that he was working his way back to her.

  “Raise your glasses, my friend. To Gran Bretagna! This is the place to make money!”

  Ettore and Antonella got jobs within a couple of days of arriving in London. Both of them with the tram company – he labouring out in the roads, on a gang, lifting and straightening and replacing rails; she in the depot making the chrome and copper of those magnificent vehicles shine even brighter, so that they’d glow in the fog. They found digs in a street beside a big park, near the centre of town. They had never seen so much green in a city before.

  They met after work, when Mario wasn’t around, in a little coffee house run by an Italian from Lombardy. They were amazed at how Mario made his money – shipping in Italian foodstuffs. Ettore couldn’t believe English people would pay good money for Italian food. Pasta and oil and tuna fish – the things they had escaped from. The café-owner served plates of white fish in batter with slices of fried potato. Such an easy dish to prepare, and the inglesi couldn’t get enough of it. The two of them sat long together rather than return to their dingy digs, as dusk fell and London looked even more dream-like than ever.

  “I’m getting used to it here,” said Antonella. “We could find a way to live in this country. You don’t get hot and sweaty, and the people are well-mannered, don’t you think, Benny?” She had taken to calling him by the name they used in London for him. “The warm rain and the soft earth. I think anything could grow here.” Her eyes shone with emotion. “I think Vittore and Carlo could grow up strong and healthy in a place like this.”

  He looked at her in the silky light. She was a different colour here – more olive-skinned in these dimmer days than brown. Her hair looked downy and her eyes softer. She had lost weight over the journey. Both of them had. It was like she had lived another short lifetime: returning to girlishness when they first set off, and becoming a woman again here in England. She seemed curvier, leaning against the table, sipping her coffee. He looked around, stretched out and quickly touched her breast. She glanced about, anxious, then laughed.

  “You won’t be able to do that soon. Once we have our boys back.”

  But not quite yet. There was an opportunity, Mario had said, to open a cafe and eating-place just like this. But not here in London. There were already too many of them. Mario had a friend further north. A fellow with money and contacts. They should go to him. One last lap of the journey, to a place Ettore had heard talked about and could never quite imagine. Scozia.

  Coulter had called in as many of his team as he could muster on a late Sunday afternoon. Russell, piqued at being torn away from post-match pub analysis. Pat Webb and Amy Delgarno – who Coulter had managed to co-opt full time – had been about to sit down to family dinners. Trisha and Gordon, the HOLMES co-ordinators, were both happy to come in. Two other CID bods, Barclay and Turner, were on duty anyway.

  Patterson Webb was the one who’d been searching for a paper trail for Micky. He was hacked off that McKillop had got ahead of him. “Another couple of days, I’d have had the same information. Who’s this Sunail Whatsisname?”

  Coulter shrugged. “Education department. Friend of McKillop’s.”

  “Gay Mafia,” Sergeant Webb muttered. He and his indexing boys were coming up trumps now, searches responding at last to the name Paul Pacchini. As well as HOLMES, they were trawling various sites they had special access to: HMSO Census, Glasgow City, Social Work Department.

  “An eleven year-old Paul Laird left Taylor Primary in 2000. His father, or at least the guy living with his mother, was called Pacchini – quoted on forms as second next-of-kin. The local secondary was notified that Paul Laird wouldn’t be joining them from primary, but there’s no mention of where he did go.”

  “Taylor Primary? That in Govan? Did Sy Kennedy go there?”

  “No. Holy Cross.”

  “2001. That would make Pacchini or Laird around fourteen now. Sounds about right. No other mention of him?”

  “This could be him.” Pat Webb swivelled a computer screen so that Coulter could see it – official papers, peppered with the name Pacchini.

  “A Giorgio Pacchini was arrested for possession of class B drugs two years ago. In Manchester. Mentions that he’s ‘at present’ guardian of a son. Doesn’t give the boy’s name. Report’s a year old.”

  “What sort of a show are they running down there?”

  “I’ve traced Giorgio back to Glasgow.” It was Amy Dalgarno’s chance to shine. “Sure enough, there’s another drugs charge. Just possession, of cannabis. The thing was dropped – Giorgio seems little more than a dope-head, not a dealer.” She handed Coulter a file of print-outs. “Look at the page I’ve earmarked, there, you’ll see there’s a request to Social Work to check on the accused’s son. This time named Paolo, not Paul; Pacchini, not Laird. Riverdale Street. Catchment area for Taylor Primary.”

  Coulter looked through the heap of pages. Amongst the computer guff – addresses in blue, endless lines with flèches, parentheses, backslashes and underlines – were little glowing embers of precious information.

  “The mother kind of evades the system, I’m afraid. A problem these days – some women changing their names on marriage and others not. In her case, I suspect, using both, throwing us off the trail. Can’t find any marriage reference for Giorgio.”

  “Common-law marriage.”

  “No such thing.”

  “Bidey-in, well.”

  “My guess is she did a runner before Paul or Paolo left primary school.”

  “He and his dad stay here in Glasgow for a few months, then they go to Manchester.”

  “Why?” Coulter leaned against the window, the glass giving a little behind his back. He came off it – the office was seven stories up. “The mother can’t have eluded the system altogether.” But there was a note of doubt in his voice. He picked up Amy’s file. “Father still in Manchester?”

  Patterson Webb shouted across from his computer screen, reading from an internet document. “Giorgio’s no longer with us, I’m afraid. Snuffed it. Car accident, end of 2004. Seems he was drunk, wandered out onto a main street…”

  “And the kid?”

  “Paul or Paolo’s faded away from the paper trail. Why nobody checked back on previous reports, I don’t know, but there’s no mention of a kid in the documentation of his father’s accident.”

  Coulter shuffled through the papers. “Died nearly two years ago. Paul – or whatever you call him – has been living off his wits since he was twelve?!”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Or someone else is looking after him.”

  “His mother?”

  They all looked up at the inc
ident board. At the picture of Micky – possibly now, Paul – dead in the park. Dark hair. Could have Italian in him right enough. But was he rough enough to survive the streets for two years? Maybe. Product of an alky da and a broken home? Absolutely.

  Where did he get the new tracksuit from, though? The money for the haircut, the snicked eyebrow, the trainers? Somebody was looking out for him.

  Maddy felt she was inside some film scenario. She’s in a hotel lobby with her New York cop, saying good night, engine still running in her yellow sports car outside where two black-cloaked priests sit waiting on the shagpile seat coverings.

  “The old one’s like something out of Lord of the Rings.”

  “Sauron or Gandalf?”

  Louis shrugged. “You mean good or bad? Guys like him, it’s hard to tell the difference.”

  “It’s the young priest I can’t take,” Maddy said.

  “I know – the enthusiasm of youth. Drives you crazy.”

  She looked at him, all offended. “Don’t include a young thing like me in your grumpy old man act. That’s it – you’re getting your goodbye peck now, and no nightcap.”

  A jokey hint. She had no idea if he intended spending his last night of junket with her. At least she hadn’t heard of him going to shops to buy presents. No significant other then. No kids. Either that or he was a mean bastard.