Oak and Stone

by Dave Duggan

  Karen was beside me again.

  ‘Hold onto the gun. Shine the torch on the wall, there,’ I said. ‘And keep down.’

  ‘Easy, Sergeant,’ Karen said, as she ran the beam along the wall. ‘Two shots. Neat as nipples.’

  ‘Lovely, Karen. If there’s going to be more, now’s the time for them.’

  I raised myself so I could see out of one of the unbroken side windows. The road was empty. There was nobody walking the riverside path. The river itself was as wide and flat as an asphalt airstrip. Sea gulls returned to sleep on the railings in random clusters, bowed heads facing the trees in the park opposite. I saw only hulking silhouettes and blackened backfill there.

  ‘Two shots, then. Long range. Probably from the park,’ I said.

  ‘I should have gone home or stayed in a hotel.’

  ‘No, you shouldn’t. I’d never have slept. Are you okay?’

  ‘Yeh, fine. I’m not hit or anything.’

  ‘Me neither. It was all in here. Nothing in the bedroom. She didn’t intend to hit us.’

  ‘She?’

  ‘They. He. Whoever did this.’

  ‘You know who shot us.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  We were side by side on the floor. I could feel her breath on my cheek.

  ‘Fair play to you, Eddie. My farm boy hasn’t a hope when it comes to entertaining a cutty on a date.’

  ‘See, I wasn’t sure, but you’re definite this is a date?’

  ‘What else could it be? A thriller, and all. No sex, but what could be better, if not getting shot at?’

  ‘Put the torch on your face.’

  She did.

  ‘I knew you’d be smiling. You have a great smile, Karen.’

  ‘You’re smiling too. What kind of buck eejits are we?’

  We kissed warmly. It was familiar and exciting.

  ‘You’re not going to tell me who did this?’

  ‘No. And you’re not going to tell anyone it happened.’

  ‘Hang on now. We don’t report this?’

  ‘No. Not yet. Give me a day.’

  ‘It’s someone from your old days. No. Not with a long range rifle and night-sight. Jesus, Eddie, it’s the Army.’

  ‘Look. Give me a day, will you?’

  She took a while and then she said,

  ‘Okay. Do you think it’s safe now?’

  ‘Yes, as far as I can judge. Stay down. Let’s get dressed.’

  We crawled and bummed back into the bedroom and got dressed on the floor. I saw Karen’s legs scissors the air as she lay on her back, pulling up her slacks. Once again my heart bumped over a speed ramp and I remembered the solace at the back of her neck as I lay asleep, curled up behind her.

  We crawled back into the living room. Karen kept the torch low. I turned off the floor switches on the standard lamps. Karen led off then, pushing the torch in front of her. I followed the soles of her shoes and bumped into her as she turned onto the ceramic tiles of the kitchen. We were well into the windowless room, before we got on hands and knees. I closed the kitchen door and turned on a light. We crouched behind the centre worktop and waited, but no shot ran out.

  ‘What time is it?’ Karen whispered.

  ‘It’s okay. I think we can talk. The shooters are in the park.’

  ‘Now there’s more than one!’

  The fact that she didn’t know it was Amy Miller was a relief, because it meant that she didn’t know about me and Amy at the conference. That was important, if I wanted another date with Karen. And I did. Next time with sex and no shooting.

  ‘You think we could do this again? I mean the food …’

  ‘Aye, but let’s eat out next time. In public.’

  ‘Are you hungry?’

  ‘Yeh, a little bit. Must be all the excitement. You promised me fried rice. What time is it?’ she asked again.

  The kitchen wall clock showed 6.10.

  ‘Breakfast time.’

  Karen cut peppers, an onion and some garlic, then fried them gently. She brewed coffee. I poured orange juice. I salvaged the leftover rice and mixed some oil through it. I beat two eggs together, added paprika and fried an omelette. The kitchen smelled like a freshly warmed samosa. Karen cut up a slice of ham. Again we worked in silence, though it was hard to rekindle the domestic peace of the night before.

  I combined everything into the fried rice and, when it crackled in the pan, I whipped it off onto plates I’d set to warming in the grill oven. We ate the small portions in forkfuls loaded briskly into our mouths. The pop-pop of the percolator restarted as we stacked plates beside the sink.

  ‘You’ve got a day,’ Karen said. ‘That means, you tell me something tonight. Basically, I want an assurance that it won’t happen again. That whatever message this was about has been delivered and that the correspondence is closed.’

  I raised my coffee cup in agreement.

  ‘Did you sleep alright?’

  ‘Great. Until I woke up in a shooting gallery. I took a while to nod off with that plank of yours nestled against my sacrum, but once it went away quietly, we both got over to a deep sleep.’

  ‘Don’t you worry. That plank never really goes away. It’s always on call.’

  ‘Good. It is over, isn’t it? The shooting?’

  ‘Yes. It’s over.’

  ‘You see, with the farm boy I started to feel old, well, not really old, just my age. And I don’t want to die just yet. I’ve got things I want to do.’

  ‘What are they, Karen?’

  ‘Oh, you know, ordinary things. Like staying alive. I’ll head into work a bit early. Get a head start on the three from the fire.’

  ‘Let me know what you get, especially any IDs.’

  ‘Will do. What are you at today? The Todd Anderson lead you mentioned?’

  ‘If I can get to it, with other things, you know, the fire and the Kalame Savane report. I’ll have Hammy and Sharon on my back. Maybe I’ll go in early too.’

  ‘Won’t be that early. It’s seven now. The clock’s ticking everywhere.’

  ‘Yep. I’ll get this stuff. You head on.’

  Karen lifted off her stool, stepped close to me, leaned in and kissed me on the cheek.

  ‘Thanks, Eddie. What hope has a poor farmer got, no matter what price he gets for his hoggets, when he’s up against a desperado like Eddie Slevin?’

  I couldn’t resist. I grabbed both her arms and pulled her to me and kissed her paprika lips.

  ‘Thank you, Karen,’ I gasped, letting her go, half-wondering if I shouldn’t, because she didn’t immediately step away. That brief moment, me seated on a high kitchen stool, she standing between my thighs, lasted the eternity that is the greatest boon enjoyed by the living.

  I spent two hours clearing the material off the walls, lightly scrubbing my Venn diagrams into soapy whorls and then drying the surfaces to pristine whiteness. I re-arranged the chairs, brought my bookcases, books, and journals out of the guest bedroom, which I left ready for any guests who might come, but not want to share my bed. As I worked through those pleasant hours, I was convinced that only Karen Lavery would ever do that.

  I confirmed there were two bullets in the wall. I decided not to dig them out, but let the open-shelved bookcase cover them. I strategically placed Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and Ó hÓgáin’s Encyclopaedia of the Irish Folk Tradition in front of them. I would always know where those bullets were.

  Then I made two phone calls, one each on separate, disposable phones. First I called Dessie Crossan. He laughed at the notion that he would know anything about the shooting, but agreed to get his nephew, a glazier, to call me to do an emergency job. Then I phoned Tony White and we had a long conversation. He wasn’t laughing. He said he would talk to Amy Miller. I said to tell her that I got the me
ssage and that I didn’t need anymore. What I needed was assurance, just like anyone else.

  TWENTY TWO

  Tony White contacted me. He was brief and to the point.

  ‘All clear. Messages passed. End of communications. No sweat.’

  I wasn’t sure about the ‘no sweat’, but I was glad I didn’t have to worry about Amy Miller any more. I composed a brief message to Karen.

  ‘Windows sorted. No repeats. Talk soon.’

  I wanted to say more, but I was back in work mode and facing into the floods rising round me. I wanted to get moving on the Todd Anderson case.

  I concluded the Kalame Savane papers and passed them to Sharon.

  ‘I hope she gets off,’ Sharon said.

  ‘Me too. Out of our hands now anyway. Is Hammy at the fire scene?’

  ‘No, he’s upstairs. Rumblings and moves. Big wigs getting themselves all lined up. More dark suits than a Mafia funeral. Extra scones brought in. He told me to tell you to contact’ – she scanned her laptop – ‘Richard Arbuckle, from the Press Office.’

  ‘Fuck that. I’m busy.’

  ‘Watch your tongue, Detective. DI Hamilton says it’s urgent and I’ve told you, so you can piss off back to your desk and act like a fucking underling. Richard Arbuckle, Press Office, awaits your call.’

  Such was the radiance of her grin that I saluted her and smiled.

  ‘Sharon, you’re in danger of becoming the best thing about this job.’

  I phoned the Press Office and got Arbuckle. Despite my efforts to brush him off, he was more persistent than me. He clinched it by saying that the CC had pointedly directed that I be included in the TV package he was producing. He wanted two hours walkabout at midday. I agreed to half an hour at four, in Fiorentini’s Café.

  Dessie Crossan’s nephew, the glazier, contacted me and I gave him the entry codes for my building and the alarm codes for my floor and apartment. I would have to change them later. He said he’d get the windows boarded up by the end of the day. He said that getting new panes might take time and he asked if I wanted bullet proof glass. I ignored that and told him the triple glazing would be fine. He knew he had me where he wanted me, by using him and not an official police-vetted glazier, so there was no point urging him to get on with it.

  I printed off three head shots of the man in La Toscana I was keen to talk to about the Todd Anderson case. There was a note of his name, phone number and other contact details in the murder book, as Goss and Doherty had interviewed everyone in the restaurant on the last night that Todd Anderson had eaten there. There was nothing in their three terse lines. He was noted as ‘not relevant – no follow-up.’ I wasn’t so sure, perhaps because I was looking for things way beyond the basics of the Todd Anderson case. I was looking for patterns and recurrences, echoes and ghosts. I was searching for sense. I put the details in my phone. Larry Mahon, 2b Craft Village.

  There was a brief hiatus on the fire investigation while the Forensic people worked on the three bodies. I aimed to use it to get in contact with Larry Mahon. Now I had someone to ask, I could work on the questions I wanted answered. I decided the desk and the office hubbub were no help for that, so I headed out, telling Sharon I’d be back in ten minutes. She nodded without looking at me. She was used to my smoke breaks.

  I sat on a bench in front of the city council offices and watched the river flowing to the sea, in the opposite direction to the clouds above, driven inland by an earnestly cold wind. I lit a cigarette, zipped my wind-cheater to my throat and looked at the photos of Larry Mahon. I remembered his brother Gerald, dead an age since. Gerald’s attempted escape from a courthouse and the hail of bullets he died in were legendary. I was young enough then to have heroes and Gerald Mahon was one of them. He still is, in a more critical way. Thinking about him brought me to the time when I first joined up and did more than riot and cause street bother for the police. It was because of Gerald Mahon that I first handled the gun. Still, I wasn’t sure what talking to his brother would tell me, except that it might take me closer to my own past and maybe to Todd Anderson. I had the two firmly locked together.

  When I got back, there was still no word from Forensics on the fire-dead and no sign of Hetherington, so I gathered my photos, checked my gun and ID and prepared to go to La Toscana to ask about Larry Mahon, when Hammy’s voice sounded from the door of his office.

  ‘Slevin, before you slipe off for another fag, give me a minute of your priceless time.’

  His tone was headmaster-stern. He continued in the same condemnatory way when I stood before him.

  ‘Winds of change, Slevin. Winds of change. They don’t often blow into these doldrum zones, but even we’re experiencing a bit of a stir in the riggings and, as seems to be the case with most of the shite around here, you’re in the middle of it. The Police Federation have storm-sails brimming, with gales blowing, since that bomb on the Braehead Road killed that misfortunate woman. Remember? And my pal Cossie tells me, unofficially of course, of your on-going dalliance with Dessie Crossan, so the upshot is that your mentor, the CC, is getting some gyp, usual stuff, questioning her judgement and leadership and all that. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a push against her from the politicos inside and outside the service.’

  ‘She wants me on a TV thing the Press Office are doing.’

  ‘Aha! So, she’s pushing back. Fair play to her. Make sure that goes well. Give them the full smile, the washed face, the convicted man so thoroughly rehabilitated he’s now catching the baddies himself. Just don’t go too near specifics, especially on the Todd Anderson case.’

  ‘Will there be a Task Force sir? On this fire incident?’

  ‘A Task Force?’

  ‘Some kind of combined effort, across departments? Joined-up policing?’

  ‘Way above your pay-scale, Slevin. I wouldn’t worry your febrile head about that. But, for your information, there’s a Focused Response Group set up since this morning. Us, the arson crowd and the gangers.’

  ‘And you’re at the head of it, sir?’

  ‘Well, I am the senior officer, yes. And chair. What’s your interest in this, Slevin?’

  ‘Purely professional, sir. I’m glad we’re – you’re – at the helm.’

  ‘Enough of the shite. I’m putting Hetherington as our lead in the field on …’

  ‘But, sir …’

  ‘… he’s young, I know, but you’ve taken him as far as you can. It’s time for him to shoulder some more responsibility. Winds of change, Slevin. Winds of change, they blow and blow.’

  I felt the blow, but I stayed calm.

  ‘Can I ask, sir, if you might know an operative, someone called Dalzell?’

  ‘Dalzell?’

  ‘Or Beresford, perhaps?’

  ‘Which is it, Slevin? Are we talking about the same man? You’re febrile head’s more fevered than even I thought.’

  ‘He uses two names, sir. Maybe others. He’s from Manchester, early-retired as a cop, maybe, now, a P.I. …’

  ‘Hold on, hold on. What’s this all about?’

  I almost blurted it all out then. It’s about Todd Anderson. It’s about me. It’s about a gun. It’s about where I am and where I’m going.

  Hammy continued.

  ‘Get on with your work and keep your nose out of things that don’t concern you. If you don’t attend the next psycho appointment, I’ll suspend you. And, no, I don’t know a Dalzell. Or a Beresford.’

  I knew he was lying. He has a ‘tell’ I’ve seen before. He runs his left palm over the stubble on his head when he tells a lie. There, he did it right in front of me. I was confused and even more fearful than the night I crawled on shattered glass across my living room floor.

  I messaged Karen.

  ‘I owe you a fiver. It’s a Focused Response Group. How smart are you!’

  The wind blew me alon
g the quay, all the way to the shadow of the shopping centres, then turned up Orchard Street, keeping close to the city walls. The mossy stones wept their winter glaze, as the early morning frost thawed. Straggly stems of buddleia poked out like aimless radio aerials and hardy tufts of ragged grass clung to crevices in the hope of Spring warmth.

  At the junction with Carlisle Road, I thought about sitting in a café, reading a newspaper and playing the role of the man who knows exactly where he is and what he’s about. I didn’t think I could pull that off, so I lit another cigarette, cupping it between my palms, trying to protect it from the biting winds of change and the late February chill, and I walked towards the disappointment I sensed awaited me at La Toscana.

  Yes, the staff, busy with their preparations for the lunch service and the dinners planned for that evening, recognised Larry Mahon as a solitary diner, one who still came to the restaurant, unlike Todd Anderson, who they judged to have been a lovely man and a great loss to the city.

  No, they couldn’t say if the two men knew each other or if they socialised together.

  No, they couldn’t say if they left together on the night Todd Anderson was last seen alive, before he made his way, shot dead, to the penalty spot, via the old chiller, where he lost his shoe.

  TWENTY THREE

  I arrived for my press appointment at Fiorentini’s at ten minutes to four, entering via the backdoor. I looked down the café and saw customers in twos and threes at tables, while a small TV crew set up in space cleared before the street-facing window.

  Gino was stirring oil in the chip fryer.

  ‘New cop drama for the telly? I never saw you as a screen idol, Eddie, but nowadays, telly’s so crap, who knows? I’d say you’d be more suited to the horror meself.’

  ‘Good afternoon, Gino. See when you get done stirring that oil and trying to get a stir out of me, would there be any chance of a cappuccino and a jam doughnut? And, see your man with the dodgy side-parting, down by the window, hasn’t a clue what he’s doing? He’s one of ours. Tell him I’m up here, ready when he is.’