Langley gritted her teeth as the memory played out behind her eyes. He’d called her over: younger then, streaks of dark hair slicked back on his head.
‘Yes, sir,’ she’d said. ‘Can I help you?’
‘Aye, you can, as a matter of fact.’ Mannion was grinning broadly.
She remembered taking her notebook out.
‘What are you doing?’ said Mannion with feigned surprise, his companions smirking by his side. ‘I want you to get your tits out, never mind your fucking notebook.’ They all laughed, as did the straggle of customers in the bar.
She remembered reaching for her radio.
‘What are you going to do? Call for your mates? What for?’ He looked round the table. ‘Did you hear me welcoming this fine young police officer to the neighbourhood, Sammy?’
‘Aye, you were right polite, Mr Mannion, so you were,’ replied a large, young man to Mannion’s left.
‘See. No crime here, lassie.’ He’d taken a long draw on his cigar, then snarled, ‘If I was you, I’d get back to London Road and tell old McCutcheon I’m asking for him.’
‘Inspector McCutcheon?’ She remembered just blurting this out for something to say, all the time conscious of the blush spreading across her face.
‘Tony Two Tickets.’
‘Why do you call him that?
‘Use your powers of detection to work it out. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m a busy man. Fuck off!’
She remembered the shame of it all. She’d turned on her heel and left the pub as quickly as her feet would carry her. She stumbled down the street for a few yards until happening upon a close doorway. She shirked inside and leaned against the wall, desperate to catch her breath.
As Amelia Langley stared at Mannion’s image, these memories were as clear as the day they had happened. She’d experienced many more harrowing times as a police officer since. But only one of them stuck in her mind the way that encounter had. As it turned out, Tommy ‘Two Tickets’ McCutcheon was so named because two was the number of seats Mannion bought him for every home game at Ibrox.
She turned her thoughts to Finn. Good-looking – darkly handsome, they’d have said a few years ago. Still did, probably. He was charming, funny, but ruthless. She shuddered at the crimes this man had committed. But still she couldn’t help liking him. There was something alluring about his politeness, his grin. He would never have behaved towards her the way Mannion did.
She remembered the night he’d saved her.
A young cop had been first on the scene the night Finn’s son had been murdered. The woman reminded her of herself twenty years before. She’d walked into carnage: blood, bone and death. Langley had done her best to comfort her youthful colleague.
She could see Finn’s face when he arrived at the pub in New Street. The acrid smell of spent cordite still in the air, mixed with blood, death and powdered masonry. They’d had to keep him back, but he’d broken through far enough to take in the horrific sight. He looked utterly bereft, all of the swaggering arrogance gone. It was replaced by the devastation felt by a grieving, broken parent.
The next morning she’d heard about the huge bouquet of flowers that had arrived at the police office in Paisley addressed to the young PC who had been first at the scene.
I’m so sorry you had to witness what you did last night. Thank you for doing your job. Alexander Finn.
It was an act of kindness that had cost him nothing. But to Amelia Langley it revealed the human behind the mask she’d known had been there for so long. The flowers had long since withered away – gifted to a hospital ward at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley. But she knew that the man who cared enough through his own grief to think of another human being was still there. If she were to succeed, Amelia Langley knew she must somehow reach that person.
20
He looks older. I’m surprised by it. I don’t know why. Two years have passed, so why wouldn’t an old man look older?
The clock is ticking in the familiar room. It smells the same, looks the same, but something has changed. He just stares at me.
‘Are you going to say nothing?’ I ask.
He sighs and lowers his head. ‘What do you want me to say?’
‘“Hello” would be nice.’
‘Hello.’ This is flat. His face remains expressionless.
‘I thought I should come and let you know I’m back.’
‘I already know. I only have to switch on the news to see that.’
I know he’s disappointed, angry with me. But he doesn’t understand.
‘If I hadn’t come back, things would be worse.’
He laughs, the first time a smile has crossed his face since I arrived.
‘In your mind, things are always better when you are in control, yes?’ The very question is a condemnation.
Suddenly I don’t know what to say to the man I’ve known for so long. The bond I thought we had seems broken. I know he knows about my life. I know he knows about the things I’ve done. I suspect he knows more than I think. But he’s always been there for me; like the angel on the shoulder of the boy in the cartoon I read when I was a boy. I decide to leave, but he gestures to me to sit back down in that peculiarly dismissive Italian manner, a command rather than a request.
‘You should never have returned. Now you are damned. Do you realise this?’
I decide to fight back. ‘So, I’m damned for protecting my family, my friends?’
‘Yes, how is that going?’
I’m surprised by the way this modern phrase sounds coming from his old cracked lips. ‘I don’t know yet,’ I reply.
‘Maybe ask Dusky. He is a friend of yours, yes?’
Though his eyes bore into my soul, I give nothing away, though I am surprised.
‘May I tell you about a man I once knew?
I nod my head. I know he’s going to tell me, regardless.
He sits back on his chair and closes his eyes. ‘He was young, but like you he had great responsibility placed upon his shoulders, despite his tender years . . .’
Sixty-one years earlier
Calabria, Italy
The street in the small village is in ruins. Shop windows have been smashed, rubble and glass strewn on the parched ground like hard tears. Young children cry, a stray dog howls, though none of them can know what has happened this day.
An old woman in widow’s weeds wills herself up off the dusty road. Her face is pinpricked by dots of red blood where grit and glass have cut deep into her skin. Tears fall down her wrinkled brown cheeks. She’s lived through many summers, but not one like this.
The car is in the middle of the road. Until a few moments ago it was polished to a black silk-shining splendour. Now smoke and flames have eaten away at the paintwork; the explosion has removed the roof, blown twenty feet in the air, landing twice that length away down the cluttered calamity of the cobbled road.
The widow was flung on her back when the car carrying Don Alessandro was destroyed. Her heart is breaking, not just because of the shock of it all but because she knows how her life will change. All life will change. Every one of those who live in the village and miles around will share suffering as it sweeps through their community like a scythe through summer grass. The baker who bakes the best bread you will ever taste, brown-crusted and so soft inside; the butcher who proffers fine fleshy cuts and his beautifully cured ham and sausages; the suntanned woodsman who cuts the logs to keep the chill of the winter’s night at bay; the fishmonger who drives his narrow winding way to the port every morning, long before the cock crows, to buy the best of the catch; the fat, fabled hotelier with his white shirt and tails. Oh yes, he has tales that spring from his loose lips as the striped waistcoat stretches across his ample belly. Dino in the café, who stays open longer than he should to chat to the old men who reminisce over the sweet red wine that runs like frothing fresh blood from the old oak casks he keeps in the cellar; the mother with her baby held tight to her breast, the child searching out her
nipple, not for food but comfort. The men idling in the sun do so no more, for they too know. Their chairs are cast aside, eyes blank with fear. Now there is no thought of a good hand of cards, or the cleft between the breasts of Maria, who serves them beer on the warmest days. All talk of football and tales of war are out of their heads, banished by the aching pain in their hearts. For this is worse than war. This they know.
The mayor looks out of the wide waste of his window and faints away. He knows that life for him can never be the same. His home, his friends, the fine food on his flush table, his lush, languid life of ease and plenty; this is now as nothing. All gone in an instant of flash, thunder and flame. Like the wrath of a vengeful deity who has, for reasons known only to infinite wisdom, abandoned them.
A young man, dark robes of the seminary flying behind him like wretched withered wings, sweeps round the corner, as would a whisper on a warm wind. He stops; the scene before him is like a still life. It will remain in his head, just like this, painted in something more lasting than ink and oil, for the rest of his life.
Those standing in the street eye him sadly. The men remove their threadbare, sun-bleached caps, while the women lower their heads and feel the sap of a mother’s musing rising in their chests; for each one, young and old, would mother this dark-clad youngster now.
He falls to his knees as a carrion crow caws in the distance. He cries out, not in the prayer one might expect but in despair. Despair and prayer, they sound so alike, for they are brothers.
If seconds change lives, then an instant can last an eternity.
*
As I listen I try to gauge what he means. What has this tale, well told, to do with me? I ask him and he shrugs.
‘Take from it what you will. I would have hoped the meaning would be self-evident, no?’
‘The man in the car – it’s me, isn’t it?’
He shrugs again. ‘Only if you want it to be.’
‘The boy – the young priest – what happens to him?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Oh.’
‘When does life’s story play out to its end? When can a tale be told?’
The atmosphere, the story, all this has confused me. My head is addled enough by worry over my children, irritation at my wife, troubled times, my mother’s obsession with egg, chips and beans. I came here expecting guidance, a listening ear. Instead, all that I face in the wood-panelled room is cold detachment and riddles.
‘If I die the way the Don does . . . Well, I’ve deserved it for being stupid or careless. In any case, your church has been pardoning men like him – like me – for hundreds of years. All of our sins washed away by penitence. You know that.’
Again, the Latin shrug, but he holds my eye. ‘And see how much the world has gained from it, all this penitence.’
‘So you don’t believe what you’ve been telling me all this time? Great!’
‘When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’
‘First epistle to the Corinthians.’ I remember it from nowhere.
‘I’m pleased you were listening all that time ago. The question is, did you really understand?’
As always, I shake his hand warmly. But I leave with more questions than answers. Is this the way it’s always been? I’m not sure. But the story he told has unsettled me. I know he’s a wise and clever man, but was this some kind of warning?
21
The Waterstones in Glasgow’s Argyll Street was busy. For some reason, this surprised Joe Mannion. He supposed it was because he thought the delights of the Internet – gaming, and streaming movies and TV shows – would have taken the place of the printed word. But the bustle in the store was proving him wrong.
He browsed the shelves of children’s fiction. He didn’t have a clue what to choose for his granddaughter, but when he saw the picture book about a cat on a small island he felt that would be something she’d like. He was determined that she would have a better start in life than he’d had. He was equally determined that his grandchildren, unlike his children, would do something with their lives – go places, get away from Glasgow. He’d been too caught up with climbing the ranks of the city’s criminal underworld to oversee the upbringing of his offspring, and that disturbed him.
As he took a seat in the store’s café, he was pleasantly surprised to see so many young people. Beside him a fresh-faced father was reading a book to his daughter. Despite the distractions all around, the little girl looked absolutely wrapped up in the story. He felt more than a twinge of guilt.
Then he looked up to see Sammy Sloane weaving his way through the bibliophiles. If Mannion felt out of place in this palace of words, Sammy looked it. In fact, by the expression on his face, his henchman could just have landed on another planet. His mouth was agape, as he gazed with great puzzlement at the bookshelves and those staring at them.
‘Over here!’ Mannion called, in tones he wouldn’t have deployed in the Iron Horse.
Sammy waved his hand and wound his way through the tables in the direction of his boss. Sloane was behind a young woman with a pushchair. She was desperately trying to negotiate the small spaces between seats, tables, bags and other obstacles, in order to find solace in a rest and a cup of coffee. She looked stressed, no doubt worn out by the ordeal of shopping in the city centre with a baby. The rush to buy for Christmas had arrived, and her story was doubtlessly being repeated across the world.
‘Give the lassie a hand!’ Mannion shouted. At first Sloane looked confused, until he realised that he was supposed to help the woman with the pushchair. So, noisily, he began to clear her way to an empty table. He achieved this by pushing at chairs and flicking at bags with his large right foot.
‘Hey,’ said one middle-aged man when Sloane unceremoniously booted his large rucksack under his table. ‘Watch what you’re doing!’
The big gangster leaned across the table and replied quietly. ‘Shut the fuck up, or I’ll ram that rucksack as far up your arse as it will go, right?’
The man blanched at this, placing his book firmly in front of his face, between himself and Sloane like a shield.
‘There you go, darling,’ said Sloane, sliding a chair way from a table to allow the young mother to take a seat.
‘Thank you,’ she said with a smile, as she fussed over the child, who stared up at the tall Sloane with wide eyes.
‘How’s it going?’ He waggled his fingers at the baby in an approximation of what he felt children might appreciate. To his dismay, the baby’s face crinkled and she burst into floods of tears.
With a grimace, Sammy Sloane decided to move on, heading to where Mannion was seated.
‘Top marks there, Sammy. Easy seen you’ve no weans.’
‘Me and Denise, well, she’s got a deformed womb . . .’
‘Do I look like a gynaecologist? I’m trying to relax, here.’
‘Aye, on that subject, why here, gaffer?’
Mannion lowered his voice. ‘The spotlight’s on us, Sammy. Who knows who’s listening to what? Let’s be honest. This is the last place anyone would think to find you and me.’
‘We’re safe back at the Horse, surely?’
Mannion shrugged. ‘Are you sure? You know what they bastard cops are into now. They could have a satellite tracing us, for all we know. Bugs in the wall, all sorts.’
Sammy Sloane raised his eyes heavenwards. ‘Are you taking the piss, big man?’
‘Naw! You see it all the time. Have you never watched CSI Miami?’
‘Nope. We’re having a lot of bother with our dish right now. Aye, and you can’t get Sky to answer the bloody phone, neither.’
Mannion was going to point out the irony, but realised it would be lost on Sloane.
‘So, what’s the scoop, boss?’
‘You heard about our buddy, yes?’
‘Aye, tragic, so it was. He wasn’t the worst, big Dusky, man. I hate they Alb
inos!’
‘Try and keep this as abstract as you can, Sammy.’ Mannion moved his eyes to and fro to remind his companion that they were in public.
‘Aye, right, boss. No, it’s a right tragedy, so it is. See they workplace injuries and that. Worst ever, so they are.’
Mannion sighed. ‘And what makes you think it was our friends from the east, eh?’
Sloane looked confused, as he narrowed his eyes at Mannion. ‘The Edinburgh mob? Nah, they’ve got enough on their plate over there without worrying about us, Joe.’
‘Further east,’ said Mannion, showing his displeasure.
Sloane thought for a moment. ‘Oh, you mean the Albinos.’ He hesitated. ‘Who else would it be?’
Mannion leaned forward and lowered his voice. ‘First off, they’re Albanians – how many times? Secondly, take a wild guess.’
A waitress arrived at the table with a small notepad in her hand. ‘What would yous like?’
‘Just a flat white for me, dear,’ said Mannion.
Sloane licked his lips. ‘Can I get a large chocca mocca, aye with a big swirl o’ thon cream, darlin’.’
Mannion raised his eyes as the waitress took the order and bustled off. ‘Your man knows,’ he said pointedly.
‘What man?’
‘Our man from the mill town.’
‘Eh?’
‘The man that’s just come back from his holidays!’ Mannion’s face was taking on a red hue now.
The tip of Sloane’s tongue appeared between his lips, as he scrunched his eyes, deep in concentration. ‘Any more clues, boss?’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ said Mannion under his breath. ‘Who do we know who’s just come back after being away for a while?’ He nodded, hoping this would jog Sloane’s memory.
Suddenly, the penny dropped. ‘Got it! Big Zander.’ Sloane smiled broadly.
‘See, if I’d wanted to tell half of Glasgow, I’d have put it on a billboard, Sammy.’
‘Sorry. Ach, you know me – I’m a man of action, not good at this secret service stuff.’
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