Potter's Field

by Dolan, Chris;

  “Braehead Revisited.”

  Mike didn’t seem to get the joke.

  He allowed Rosa to persuade him to stay for a glass out of the new bottle Maddy ordered. The sharpish, tingling Alto Adige must have been recommended by a waiter – her mother knew nothing, and cared less, about wine. In her day she had been a soft-drinks connoisseur; could distinguish at a glance Irn Bru from Iron Brew, Tizer from Cherryade, which bottle got threepence back and which six. Her interests had never extended to fine wines.

  She was playing a fine game with the little priest. Somewhere between a charmingly mature Sophia Loren and a devout, ageing Italian Bernadette. She wasn’t coming on to the poor guy, just trying to impress him. She had developed a slightly saintly smile Maddy had never seen before, and a vaguely earthy line of chat.

  “Maddalena’s thinking of moving house, Father. I think trying to stay one step ahead of all the ex-boyfriends.”

  “I’ve told you, Mama. I’m not moving any time soon.”

  Fr. Mike, though, was more interested in the boyfriends than the housing market. “Who’s the lucky man these days, Maddalena?” He sounded like an old favourite uncle who’d been unavoidably out of touch since school days. And a girl doesn’t want to disappoint a prodigal uncle, so averagely endowed Matt was, on the spur of the moment, promoted to Boyfriend.

  “Matt. Short for Matthew…?” Father Mike was trying to confirm if the Boyfriend was of the Catholic fold.

  “Don’t think it’s short for anything, Father. His mum was a Matt Munro fan I believe.” That was maybe pushing it too far. A look of doubt darkened Mike Jamieson’s eye. But he nodded tolerantly while Maddy happily made up more nonsense, the term “spiritual atheist” catching his professional attention.

  “Now what might that be?”

  “I think he doesn’t have beliefs as such. He’s prepared to let anything he’s learned or come to accept, be challenged. Believers, by definition, can’t allow their doctrines to be questioned.”

  They both knew she was talking about herself. Bad move. She sounded like the worst kind of pompous, half-educated lawyer, and it allowed Father Mike to embark upon a long and boring proclamation of the nature of Christian knowledge. Probably, the man was quite clever. But it didn’t stop her mind wandering to Alan Coulter. Out there right now on the trail of Sy’s and Micky’s and the little girl’s killers. She told the priest a few gruesome details not even the worst tabloids had printed. “Now there’s knowledge. The facts of our broken little lives. Corroborated, Father, by dead flesh, broken bones, scarred lips.”

  He didn’t deserve that. He was only doing his job. Maybe even he’s right. We need some kind of religion. Mystical, political, whatever. A sanctuary in which to house our vulnerable humanity, a tabernacle that, if not good in itself, at least keeps the evil out.

  Far from motoring hard on the heels of killers, Alan Coulter was bored out his wits at an evening meeting of the Scottish Executive’s Consultative Steering Committee to investigate the growing problem of delinquency. That committee, if Coulter was getting the fascinating history right, had taken it upon itself to set up a practical, applied arm in conjunction with the police. Chief Constable Crawford Robertson had of course managed to wangle his way onto this shiny new quango. They were meeting in the evening, Robertson said, “because we’re all busy men and women and this coming-together of minds is of a vocational nature, not part of our nine-to-fives.”

  Coulter had to attend because he was the Senior Investigating Officer in both the Kennedy and Mullholland cases. The only thing that made the boredom tolerable was counting the scapegoats. The Scottish Minister for Education and Young People blamed the telly, the papers, and the parents. The Shadow Scottish Minister for Justice blamed the “liberal establishment” and computers. Only MacDougall the Czar from the Islands seemed to have trouble thinking one up. He had a reputation for being a hard but fair history teacher, then Heidie in schools from Caithness to Lanarkshire. The kind kids feared and loved in equal measure. Modern life was hard, he said in his sing-song voice. “My heart goes out to Simon Kelly and his family. An atrocious waste of life.”

  Robertson quickly got things back on track. “But the sad fact is we will doubtlessly discover that Master Kennedy and his mystery companion were, to a degree at least, architects of their own downfall.”

  Some worthy Coulter couldn’t place agreed wholeheartedly: “It’s the society which allows that process to take place that we must tackle.”

  Coulter automatically wanted to rebel against whatever these talking suits said, but he knew there was a grain of truth in it. Sy and Micky X hadn’t been picked up off the street and executed for nothing. They’d been involved, somewhere down the line, with their killers, or with their killers’ line of business.

  Whatever, the Island school master, the Assistant Chief Constable, the Fiscal, this whole damned meeting, were all getting in the way of Alan Coulter catching one, or maybe two, sets of murderers. Martin Whyte, sitting in the station at this very moment, needed speaking to. Jim Docherty needed speaking to again. Ian Lennon. The kids’ school teachers, pals… it all urgently demanded his attention. He stood up halfway through Maxwell’s Binnie’s tuppence worth of outrage.

  “It is of the utmost urgency and consequence, moving forward, that we ascertain the identities of both the boy in Kelvingrove and the girl.”

  The room fell into silence as DI Coulter shut his briefcase, and marched to the door.

  Coulter didn’t believe in gut instinct. He had a hunch, though, that that was why his marriage was outwardly perfect, privately problematic. Not because he lacked the intuition to know when Martha needed company, or wanted left alone. But because he didn’t believe there was any such intuition to lack in the first place.

  Most policemen’s hunches were, to be generous, simply reasonable deductions from the available information. More grudgingly, they were wildly inaccurate guesses that totally ignored that information. Female intuition was also bollocks; attributed to any woman who happened to be proven right about something, and ignored when she wasn’t. DI Alan Coulter had a tendency to state the truth as he saw it, too bluntly and too often. And that from a man who suspected that the very idea of the Truth might be bollocks too.

  So, looking at Martin Whyte sitting in front of him and Russell didn’t do anything to Coulter’s waters. He didn’t get a sinking feeling, or a tingle. There simply wasn’t enough reason to keep the guy longer than was necessary.

  “Should I have a lawyer?” Whyte asked, almost as a matter of interest.

  “If you want one.”

  He shook his head. “Carry on.”

  “Sign-Chronicity did some work for Lochgilvie Home.”

  “Couple of years ago now.”

  “Tell us about that,” Russell said.

  “Really, it was Elaine’s project. We did some signing and publicity. She upgraded their outside spaces, helped the pupils design a common room and a play area outside.”

  “When Sy Kennedy was attending.”

  “I never knew that.”

  “The Home’s director says you involved the kids in your project,” DS Russell was forever getting hunches. He trusted them more than he did statements, interviews, productions.

  “We wanted their suggestions.”

  “Who did?”

  “Elaine and I, mainly.”

  “You talked, apparently, to Sy himself.”

  “Did we? I’m sorry. I really don’t remember.”

  Coincidence? Like Whyte’s company name – synchronicity. A man runs past a murder scene several hours before the murder takes place. Then he runs past the victims the next morning. The bodies are spotted by his business and running partner. He has no one to corroborate his alibi the following week for another, possibly related, murder. Through further investigation – and with no help from Whyte – the police discover that he might actually have met these boys.

  Coulter watched Whyte coolly – innocently? – sippin
g his tea and remembered his daughter Lauren’s theory of the Six Degrees of Separation. Everyone is connected to everyone else on the planet within six moves, if only you knew where to look. Whyte is connected to a Masai tribesman, though he doesn’t know it. His uncle, maybe, lived next door to the father of a Church of Scotland minister who went to college with a boy who became a missionary and went to Nairobi, where one day an envoy from the tribal chief arrived…

  In a city like Glasgow it took only three moves. Less. Nothing remarkable in coming across, though work, a pair of lads and then running past them in a park two years later…

  Russell was staring hard at Whyte, trying to discern the elusive pattern, the blueprint he needed to connect the graphics artist to the killings. Coulter wanted to say that if you stared at anything too long, you just lost all perspective. Like a kid saying the same word over and over again until it becomes meaningless, a nonsense sound. Stare at anyone’s life long enough and you’ll see chance, luck, absurdity.

  The fact was that their clincher piece of evidence, the clue that made both Russell and Coulter sure they were on a path leading somewhere, had gone. You can’t keep a man in jail ’cause he might have patted a dog sometime. The hair wasn’t Whyte’s. No motive for him killing anyone could be found. Nor could a weapon, or any previous record, or nefarious connections…. Nothing but coincidence, and the cold feeling that Whyte gave off. A hunch.

  Maddy sat in the middle of a den, hemmed in by walls of cardboard boxes. She’d been preparing to move for weeks – collecting all the boxes and bags she’d thought she might need. Do as Roddy Estate Agent said: declutter.

  Years of Stuff. But it was pictures of Sy – alive and dead – and Micky X that she held in her hands. Both of them lying beaten and dead on the mortuary table; smiling family snaps of Sy. A broken and bloodied mannequin come to life.

  At the time the earlier photograph was taken, Sy hadn’t had his Number One haircut. He’d preferred the front worn a little longer and gelled down. Half the kids that traipsed through the courts in front of Maddy sported this fashion. It gave them a just-hosed look, as if they had been driven with a cattle prod through a car wash. A sheen of metallic wax on their greased-down hair, their glossy skin. Sy was smiling a little inscrutably. Just at the edges of the crop you could see Sy’s living room, a leg and a shoulder belonging to a man. The smile might be shy or forced, or just one of those insincere grins anyone would put on for a family snap.

  Micky X was the taller and darker of the two; the one with the snicked eyebrow. Having seen Sy photographed alive, Maddy could imagine his pal better. Pathology was sure that the unidentified victim was a good year older than the Kennedy boy. Micky, she guessed, was the harder of the two – physically, and possibly mentally. Sy’s face was all angles. Micky looked more complex, somehow.

  Maddy could hear the two of them. Sy would have one of those skinny voices, as lean and tapering as his long sallow arms. His speech full of expletives, vocal jerks, a time-lapse effect to both his talking and his living. Micky would be the quieter one. That husky vocal texture you get in Southern Italy. You probably had to strain to hear him at all. And she could imagine their movements. Sy’s histrionic, eye-catching; Micky’s slow and unsure. She couldn’t pretend to herself that she would have got on like a house on fire with either of these youngsters in life.

  She put the photos down. The whole point of getting stuck into decluttering was to rid herself of those two shiny, spectral boys. But she kept them near as she began sorting through her piles of books and CDs and stuff.

  Putting books and domestic miscellany in boxes is like filing away old dreams. Bits of previous Maddy Shannons that had left evidence of themselves in corners of cupboards. Books she’d loved but couldn’t remember much now. Old CDs, vinyl. Maps of Europe with red lines drawn on them, an earlier Maddy’s plans for a Big Adventure of her own, in the family tradition. A time in her life when dreaming seemed closer to the surface than it did now. She felt a pang of loss, putting item after item in a box destined for the city dump. She had beached up in a duller reality than she’d meant to. Like an object in water that had floated to the surface, too lightweight to return any deeper.

  Victor Jara records. Billy Bragg. The Levellers. A leftwingery she had forged for herself; that was hers and not a version of Packy’s. Georges Brassens. Durruti Column. The Manics. She remembered an anti-Fascist concert in Rome. Only seventeen. Candles, matches and lighters being held aloft – before Barry Manilow got his grubby hands on the idea. A glow of hope mingling in the southern dark, rebellion curling up into the air with the black scented tobacco smoke. Beautiful hazel-eyed young people in the musky night. Maddy’s Left – freedom and passion and grappa. Not Packy’s rantings. Not the new left that seemed to have more rules than her old parish priest in Girvan.

  Her phone rang. She tripped over a box of unmarked videos, stepped on and broke an old framed photograph of Uncle Dan. Dad’s side. Mad guy, spent half his life in prisons. All she remembers is a laughing giant of a man who used to swing her around the beach at Girvan; the scratchiness of his beard, the smell of smoke.

  She limped halfway out the room towards the hall and the nearest phone, just as it stopped ringing. She heard her own voice, trying to sound friendly, inviting people to phone back. Whoever it was didn’t leave a message.

  She still had a photo in her hand. Who would have thought that Micky X – the bigger, harder, cleverer-looking of the two – would have been the one to have reached out to take little Sy’s hand?

  Elaine Docherty didn’t go in for the languorous look this time, either because her husband was out or because Russell was accompanied by WPC Amy Dalgarno. Or maybe he and Coulter had just caught her at a bad time before.

  “You have no memory of Sy Kennedy?”

  “I’m sorry. I really don’t. If he was at the meetings I held at Lochgilvie he never said much, I’m sure.”

  “Did Mr. Whyte spend more time with the pupils? Could he have met Sy separately?”

  “I have no idea. We saw the boys on separate occasions.”

  Russell caught Elaine glancing up at the mezzanine floor where the king-size bed was. For a second he had a vision of himself and Elaine tussling naked together. Elaine clocked it, he was sure. So did Dalgarno. He looked away, faltered, the flow of the interview lost.

  This wasn’t a development he’d been keen on anyway. Elaine was never a murderer. A nice case had been piling up against Whyte. Coulter was dismissing it out of hand – just because he couldn’t make all the pieces fit. Coulter reminds Russell of a woman shopping – sees what she wants, then spends the whole day looking for something better, ending up where she started off.

  Amy was showing Elaine the photographs of Sy Kennedy.

  “You recognise him?”

  “Yes. From the papers.”

  Russell put a photograph of Micky X on top of the one of Sy, trumping Dalgarno. “What about this boy?”

  Elaine shrugged. “All those kids look like him nowadays.”

  “You have no memory of seeing these two boys together?”

  “At Lochgilvie, I never had a clue who was an inmate, who was staff, or family. Just a bunch of unruly, untalkative young guys. I felt quite threatened, actually.”

  Maddy hated going into the meeting rooms for the public. Windowless. Painted a cold blue. Hardbacked school chairs. Couple of cheap prints on the wall. One of the bridge over the Clyde – which you could have seen in the flesh had there been a window. Another of a dolphin. Who took these design decisions?

  Maddy nodded at Anne Kennedy, sat hunched over the desk, as if she were reading runes hidden in the grain of the polished wood. Tony Kennedy stood in a corner staring at a poster claiming Strathclyde Police had cut crime by 17% in the last quarter. Sy’s parents in together, and each of them utterly alone.

  “My deepest commiserations.”

  When the woman was younger, Maddy thought, before the shittiness of her life had turned her bones to r
ubber, she would have been tall, hazel-haired, straight-backed. Proud looking probably. If she pushed back her shoulders the way Mama always told Maddy to do, that long face of hers might even look aristocratic. Tony was small, a bird-like quality to him. Like his owner died or got fed up with him, let him free to flit off and fend for himself.

  “When can we have him back?”

  Maddy had seen every response to bereavement possible. Wives who could hardly speak, sometimes for months. Young children bored, or intrigued, by death. People pretending to feel more than they really did. Tony Kennedy’s voice was even, but she knew he was in as black a place as his estranged wife. And Maddy was going to make things worse for them. “Has nobody explained this to you?”

  “Got legal aid. They said you won’t let him go?” Anne Kennedy looked up at Maddy as though she were gazing on the countenance of some terrible potentate.

  “I’m afraid I can’t release Sy’s body.”

  “Why not?!” The dad lost his evenness of tone for a second; Maddy could feel the furor coming off him. The jaw held tight, specks of saliva at the corner of the mouth. How else could you feel when someone, for no reason you can imagine, takes your boy along a canal path, shoots him dead, then carves up his face?

  “Defence – if and when there is one – must have pathology access to victims. For evidence. I’m afraid we have to keep Sy in the mortuary a while longer.”

  “You keep us from burying our boy so when you find his killer you can cut Sy up all over again to help get the bastard off?”

  Fifteen years’ experience and seven years studying, yet Anne Kennedy, probably without a Standard Grade to her name, had summed the situation up more accurately than Maddy could.

  “How long d’you keep him for?” Tony ventured out of his corner, but immediately looked exposed, frightened. “What if they don’t catch anyone for months? Years?”

  “If, after three months, the police are nowhere nearer to making an arrest, then the Fiscal have it in our power to release the body. Please God we won’t have to wait that long.” Evoking God gave authority to the law’s unpalatable and confusing rules and regulations. “When a suspect has been apprehended, I’ll be working much closer with you. My name’s Shannon. I’ll be compiling the case against your son’s killer or killers.”