But Paris wasn’t the end of the journey
“So why didn’t you stay?”
Because the trek hadn’t ended. They had the name of a cousin – Mario, from San Piero – who was waiting for them in London. That was the land of work. Pinerolo was beautiful; Grenoble was healthy. Paris exciting. But Inghilterra was where a dream could come true. They had two boys waiting for them to carve out a new life. Across the water lay a land where hard-workers could build something solid. They didn’t need to discuss it: Ettore and Antonella just knew they had to cross the water, take the last bend in the road.
Maddy threw her keys into the top drawer of a tallboy that had temporarily served as a hall stand for ten years, went into the living room and slumped down in the chair by the window.
What constitutes a bad day? She wasn’t sure any more. Anne Kennedy and Jackie Mulholland had pleaded with her all week to release their children’s bodies. But she didn’t have the power to let Sy or Frances go. Or Micky X, had anyone come looking for him. The police needed time to find a suspect and let his or her people do their own pathology. Just one of the less pleasant tasks a senior PF had to do as a matter of course.
Things wouldn’t be so bad if her own boss didn’t put his fat carcass in the way of her career plans. She had hoped that by now – all the necessary exams passed with flying colours – she would be given the chance to present in court a case she had precognosed. The Petrus brief, for example. But Binnie, a man of humble Glaswegian origins, was in thrall to over-enunciating Edinburgh advocates. He wasn’t talking too hopefully about the Kelvingrove or Bearsden cases either. “A triple murder, Maddalena? I’m not sure we should be experimenting with such an important matter. We’ll get you in court sometime soon. Promise.” Like a sleazy old friend of the family offering sweeties. She even clocked his eyes glancing at her bum as she left his office.
He was jealous of Maddy’s fast-track career; the publicity she would attract if she were to win a big case. She got up, poured herself a glass of red from last night’s half-empty bottle, and put on Ella singing Ellington. The smoky sound of late-night New York. Louis was being treated by police department boys to a night on the town. If that doesn’t have him running back to Brooklyn quick style, nothing will. They hadn’t repeated their night of love in nearly a week. Maddy didn’t think she was upset by it. She hadn’t detected any sign of indifference in Louis. They had met for a cosy lunch, he had phoned. They just needed the co-incidence of being together in the evening, and professional schedules simply hadn’t allowed for that.
She felt more anxious at being left out of the loop on the Sy and Frances cases. Not even Louis told her much of where the investigation was going. She could push for more information but that wasn’t advisable. Waiting on the sidelines wasn’t where Maddy di Rio Shannon liked to be.
She wondered if she should get herself a cat. For company on an evening like this. Just then she glimpsed a fox skulking in the trees outside. A pussy cat wouldn’t last a week, even in the leafy west end. She took the Herald out of her bag to catch up on the latest outrage to public safety, headlines screaming panic-stricken. Normally, a new high-profile crime took the heat off an ongoing case. But on this occasion, it only made matters worse. A group of kids had gone berserk in some godforsaken town in Lanarkshire. Ella’s soothing voice sounded like it came from a different universe, not Louis’s city where even worse things happened.
An elderly couple had been walking down the street around dusk. A flock of teenagers – fifteen or twenty-five of them depending on whether it was a broadsheet or tabloid report – had settled at a corner. When the couple approached, some of the gang shouted jokes and obscenities at them. The man, father and grandfather, ex-merchant navy and voluntary youth worker, checked them.
He told them to behave themselves. The youngsters all retreated into themselves, murmuring their insults and laughing quietly. All except one: a tall gangly boy of fifteen stepped up towards the old man and told him to fuck off.
The man stood his ground; the boy advanced. They argued, the man calm and the boy agitated. But the old man became increasingly outraged, his own language getting more offensive, which made the boy quieter, meaner, more determined. The woman kept pulling on her husband’s sleeve. The gang behind the lead boy split: some stepping back from the affray, a few leaving the scene altogether. But a small band stood staunchly behind their leader.
“For a generation we’ve let this plague fester!” Pat Lovell, the newly appointed Minister for Education and Young People, told the media.
The front pages and TV bulletins were covered with pictures of John and Moira Baxter, and furry images of gangs of youths.
“We’ve stood by and done nothing,” said the First Minister for Scotland. “In the name of charity and goodwill, we’ve watched our children become lost and angry.” Even the soft-spoken Schools’ Czar MacDougall felt compelled to fall into line. “We’ve made ourselves, society, vulnerable to that anger. It’s time we found a response.”
Conservatives and Labour alike called for a curfew. The leader of the Tories called for special phone lines. Labour propsed new radical school discipline measures. A parents’ charter. There were appeals in public phone-ins for special police powers, amendments to the stop-and-search laws.
The incident took place in an old Lanarkshire mining town, Stratheaton, under a red evening sky, raw and chapped. It ended badly. Whether John Baxter hit out first, as the youngsters and one onlooker claimed, or the ringleader did, wasn’t the point. As far as the papers and the Youth Crime Committee were concerned the old gentleman had put up with enough abuse already. Wasn’t he protecting his elderly and infirm wife? Whoever struck the first blow, the old couple were rounded on. John Baxter received severe bruising over 70% of his body from kicks and punches and being hit by some unknown implement. Moira Baxter was nearly as badly bruised but, probably because of a previous medical condition making her bones more brittle, her leg and her arm were both broken. She died in hospital the following night.
John MacDougall, the Youth Crime committee convener, proposed that a national debate be initiated in the press. “And amongst ourselves. In school staff rooms. In churches. Round the family table. We should examine our consciences with regard to how we treat our children. How we let them dress when they’re going to school. The hours that they keep. The programmes they watch and the computer games they play. This tragic situation is as much our fault – as teachers, politicians, parents – as it is theirs.”
Other, more ferocious, politicians managed to change the tone of the argument about the death penalty. The tabloids, until recently, had been demanding capital punishment for child killers. Now it was calling for the return of the birch and, without quite saying so, even suggesting death for young offenders themselves.
She met Dan on the stairs to the office. He always climbed them to keep fit; Maddy was only there today because the lift was broken.
“Keeping fit for Louis?”
“Wheesht. How’s court Number Two?”
“All the fun of the fair. Not helped by tirades like this,” he waved his Scotsman.
He and Izzie had been assembling a case for months against a known cartel of drug dealers operating in slum estates in the north of the city. They had been using teenagers to push the stuff on the streets. One young man had died in a shoot-out. “You can see the jury suddenly switching their attention from the real bad guys to the kids they use up front. Nobody under the age of twenty’s got a hope in hell in any court in Scotland now.” He paused at the door of their office. “Your Micky X fellow. I was thinking about how you can lose a kid entirely from the system.”
“Go on.”
He yawned. “I took statements from a girl in a case last year. Took me some time to find her. She wasn’t on any school roll, and she wasn’t living in the house where she was officially supposed to be resident. She had moved. Simple as that. She and her mum had been living with her granddad, so the name on t
he door and on the electoral register didn’t change. The girl’s school was supposed to send stuff onto her new school, but either they forgot, or it got lost in the post. Whatever, it meant that she could play truant for the rest of her scholastic life – no school or authority were on her case anymore.”
“It’s that easy to slip out of the system?”
“The system’s pretty keen on losing certain types of folk, it seems to me.”
“But to find a Micky or a Minnie you’d have to go through every school roll for pupils who left to attend another school—”
“And see if they ever arrived.”
Maddy opened the door. “That could take forever.”
“I don’t know,” said Dan. “You might be lucky. Micky was with Sy Kennedy, so there’s probably some connection with one of the schools Sy attended, or at least some school or home in the area.”
“The area being the whole of Glasgow.”
“Or West Central Scotland. I’ve got a new contact now in the Education Department. Sunail. Dark, slim, very well groomed. Anyway, I asked him, en passant, about Micky. He checked the records. Nearly a thousand kids moved out of schools in the last four years. And that’s just the primaries. My guess is Micky’s never been in the secondary system, at least not in Glasgow.”
“A thousand!”
“You can discount over seven hundred straight away. At the push of a button Sunail managed to confirm that at least that many re-enrolled immediately in other city schools. The problem arises with the three hundred who left to go further afield.”
“Three hundred’s still a lot.”
“Little Miss Negative. Eighty or so went abroad. Or returned abroad. Let’s discount them for the moment, though we may need to go back to them later.”
“Micky doesn’t strike me as a jet-setter either.”
“Subtracting all those Sunail can account for, we’re left with around sixty-odd who left to continue their schooling elsewhere in the UK. Sunail has ways of following them up. It’ll take him into next week.”
“This isn’t like you, Dan.”
“What? Being punctilious and exhaustive in my research? Thank you, Boss.”
“You’re forever telling me to stay away from cases until they’re properly ours.”
“We gotta clean this city up.” His American accent was woeful. .
Coulter was pleased to see that Casci wasn’t enjoying himself delivering his little lecture. All the key people involved in both Red Rhoddo and Tall Trees had been assembled to hear him speak. The entire divisional CID, senior uniforms, press department boys, top brass from neighbouring constabularies, even a Met head honcho up for the day.
“I hasten to add that there’s not a specific Haitian gang problem. The Haitian community are law-abiding respectable folk for the main part, but those that are involved in crime tend to link up with various forms of Yardies, or other such African-American criminal organisations.”
His audience were happy enough to be there, if quickly bored by what he had to say. It was a change of routine sitting listening to someone who did your job in another country. In New York of all places. There had been lots of jokes about Hill Street and Kojak, and some less geographically accurate stuff about Dirty Harry and Sam Spade.
Louis showed photographs of victims, crime scenes, bullet holes in foreheads. He gave brief details of the background to the killings of Ti Guy Plissard and Henri-Charles Lespinasse, and two other still unidentified young, probably Haitian, victims. He retold the sad, mysterious story of Derrick Braithewaite found dead on Bannerman Island.
“Then we have a female victim. I had discounted her case from being related in any way to these others. But the fact that you have a similar situation here—”
“Not necessarily related,” interrupted MacDougall, who had become an annoying fixture at every internal police meeting with more than three people at it.
“That’s correct, sir. I’m merely pointing up that a young female was found executed, and in a garden. I’m not even convinced she’s connected to other New York cases. As for your situation here, it’s not my place to comment.”
“Nonsense,” Coulter said. “You’re obviously a highly respected detective, working one of the toughest beats in the world. We have you here, we might as well get the benefit of your experience and insight.”
Casci eyed him as if the statement might have been intended as a veiled insult. He gave a quick run-down of the Goodman Lane case, the possible Irish link with Ian Lennon. Then he treated his audience to a selection of the theories thus far explored by the NYPD – turf wars, vengeance killings, silencing junior members of gangs, racial discord.
“I’ve left a sheet at the door. It has my contact details in New York. Please get in touch if anything new comes up over here – anything at all. There are a couple of web addresses on it. For Potters’ Field, internal NYPD stuff, and a public noticeboard I put up asking for information about the mysterious deaths of these young people. Thank you all for listening.”
As the room cleared, Casci took his time collecting his papers, and Coulter loitered, until they were both alone. “The turf wars theory,” Coulter asked. “Do you go for it?”
“Black mobs traditionally took over Mafia interests from Harlem Central. They came into conflict with the old Irish territory around Queens. The city’s nowhere near as cleanly carved up as it used to be, but there are protection rackets and vice rings that are broadly speaking black and Bronx-based, and white mobs with similar operations to the south and east of them.” Louis stopped to arrange his documents correctly. To Coulter he looked more like an academic, with his shiny briefcase and colour-coded folders, than a working policeman. “We know that Lane’s father ran protection for bars and shady businesses. He gave some of that money to the Irish Republican cause.”
“Which Lennon collected from him.”
“Strictly speaking, all we know is that Mr. Lennon had some contact with Lane and Lafferty and Burton. Also with Gotzone.”
Coulter nodded solemnly, trying to hide that he was lost in all these names and new information. “Possible connection with Basque terrorists.”
“Leaving that aside… White and Irish interests collided with the black gangs a few years back. Couple of months of mayhem.”
Both men fell silent for a moment, Coulter working out the implication. “Lespinasse, Plissard and Goodman Lane being fallen footsoldiers?”
Casci nodded.
“Why didn’t you tell them that, here a moment ago?”
“You’re the guy on the ground, Alan. Those fucking senior blow-outs are nothing but methane sources.”
Coulter laughed and walked towards the door of the conference room. “Do you think Lennon’s our man, Louis?”
“Even if by some chance he wasn’t – that there’s another guy that links your victims with mine – Lennon’s ass is worth locking up for a long long time.”
“Difficulty is, Lennon’s visits to the States don’t always coincide with your killings.”
“As far as we can tell.” Casci clicked his bag closed and followed Coulter to the door. “I’m not saying he personally pulled every trigger, wielded every knife.”
“Want to grab some lunch?”
“Can’t. Sorry.”
“Meeting Ms Shannon?”
Casci half-nodded. Coulter smiled. “Why didn’t you mention these turf wars to me before?”
“Only takes a minute to spot the ball-breakers and the jerks. Got to spend some time to know the stand-up guys.”
Coulter went back to his desk feeling the holder, somehow, of a consolation prize.
Barlinnie – despite laws and rules and regulations, prisoner support groups and charities, an enlightened approach to the penal system – might still just as well be in Siberia or Burundi. It breathes horror into the most upstanding of souls. To Coulter and Russell it’s a regular visit. Yet, as they entered, both had to work not to betray their dread. The cold and the echoes, the elec
tronic doors, brutal bars. The pretended normality of conversations with the sequence of prison officers they meet the deeper into the building they go. Eventually they’re led into a room that’s a triumph of barrenness and where a small man is sitting waiting for them.
Jim McArthur is incidental. Not only to this particular case, but in general. Coulter thinks as he sits across from him, that the man must know it. How life has just nudged him about, knocking him into jail and barely noticing it: life had been concentrating on something else at the time. McArthur gets out every now and then and, with perfect comic timing, like a man slipping on a banana skin, two minutes later he’s back inside. There’ll have been a theft, a fight, an implication, but nobody is really quite sure why Wee Jim’s in jail, least of all Jim himself.
“You were in Saughton with Ian Lennon, Jimmy. Did Lennon know a Tony Kennedy in prison?”
Jim McArthur shrugged, non-committal.
“Did you know Kennedy?”
Another shrug. “Came across him.”
“Did they do any business together, Lennon and Kennedy?”
“Could have.” McArthur wasn’t playing with them. He didn’t know how to. He wasn’t looking for some kind of deal. Small, bald, stubby-fingered, he had learned that deals didn’t exist for him.
“What kind of business, McArthur?” Russell was showing everyone he wasn’t a patient man. “Did Lennon involve any of the inmates?”
McArthur paused, then shrugged. “When people got out. They got messages to do.”
“What kind of messages? Information? Letters? IOUs?”
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