“Sorry. I don’t follow.”
“He helped Jackie out in the streets.” It took a moment for it to dawn on Maddy. “Darren was his own mother’s pimp.”
The only person she couldn’t see was Lennon himself. Not until court. She thought of her job as a kind of puzzle. She had to get to know everything about a man she wasn’t allowed to meet. Like a piece kept deliberately back from a player. If she was to nail the killer, win the game, she had to discover his psychology, his motives, habits, reasoning, through every other piece on the board.
Helena Mackay was every inch a Bearsden widow. “All the money is tied up in the house. Actually, I’m one of the deserving poor.”
The house was like a mini Doge’s Palace – sell off a couple of the Tiffany lamps on the marble mantel, the fancy porcelain on the Queen Anne table, and you could rectify Helena’s shortage of readies, and wipe out poverty in half of Easterhouse.
“I’ve only been on holiday once in the last four years. And that was a bus trip to Torquay.”
“You can afford a gardener.” Maddy smiled sweetly.
“Only because he comes cheap.”
Helena’s contribution to charity and the health of the nation was her interest in the penal system. Along with several other women in the area she sent Christmas and birthday cards to inmates and their families, visited prisoners, and baked cakes to raise money for their children.
“Of course I used to be a lot more active, but I don’t get around so easily any more.”
She had even campaigned for prison reform in her time. “You know those men were still slopping out their own cells until a year ago?” Maddy was beginning to thaw. Especially when the old woman was honest enough to offer the reason for her concern. “When Ronnie was arrested I remember thinking that death would be immeasurably preferable.”
Maddy had read all about Mr. Ronald MacKay.
“He was innocent.” Helena said. “I say it so often it must sound pat. False even.”
Mrs. Mackay’s husband, managing director of a precision tools company wholly owned by a much larger corporation, had been jailed for seven years for embezzlement, back in the mid eighties. He was only in his early fifties, but he didn’t survive his time inside. The case caused a little flurry of tabloid outrage because the money that went missing wasn’t profit or takings, but donations his workforce thought they were making to a Third World charity.
“You told the police,” Maddy changed the subject, flicking though her notes, “that Ian Lennon was not one of the prisoners you visited.”
“That’s correct. As I said, I haven’t been visiting for some time now. However, all my gardeners are rehabilitated prisoners. They’ve come recommended to me by my associates in the WPRC.”
Women’s Prison Reform Committee. Helena used to be its treasurer – clearly her comrades didn’t believe that the crimes of the husband tainted the wife.
“You must be very trusting. Mr. Lennon looks rather fierce in his photographs.”
“That’s only because you now associate that face with a series of dreadful crimes.”
Maddy hated being lectured on her job by amateurs. Especially when they were right.
“Otherwise, Mr. Lennon’s face, while not, I admit, particularly attractive, is that of a common man who has had, like many, a hard life.”
The thaw Maddy had felt began to freeze over again. Common man!
“You might even have said, given other information, that his is a kindly face. If you were told, for instance, that he had grandchildren whom he took to the park, you would say that he was gruff but kindly.”
“But he doesn’t. Take grandchildren to the park. He’s been a hit man, an enforcer.” Maddy bridled at Helena looking down at her over the top of her glasses. “Mr. Lennon came running in here, the day he found Frances Mullholland’s body. You don’t keep it locked?”
“Never. He lets himself in each time he comes to make himself coffee and fill a pail of water. I usually go out to say hello after an hour or so. That’s what I did that day, then came back in here and went on writing letters.”
“And when he came in shouting?”
“My hearing’s not what it was. But I heard him eventually. When I got into the hall, Mr. Lennon was coming out of the kitchen. He was very pale. He asked me if it would be all right to use my phone.”
She and Maddy were sitting in the drawing room, a huge bay window looking out onto the small lawns that bordered the driveway. The old lady glanced out fearfully, as if the lawn could at any moment erupt into blood. “I’ve lived in this house most of my life… and now, suddenly, I despise it.”
“But you still don’t suspect Ian Lennon in any way?”
“I didn’t say that, my dear,” said Helena Mackay getting up.
At the front door, Maddy stuffed her notes back into her bag, and remembered something. “Just a thought. Your WPRC stationery, you don’t happen to remember who designed it?”
“I should. I dealt with them at the time. Strange name…”
“Sign-Chronicity?”
“That’s them. Very Freudian.”
“Jung actually. Synchronicity.” You have to put these posh old biddies down every now and then.
Maddy went to her car – the yellow sports looked comfortable in a big broad driveway. She didn’t know why she’d asked about the stationery. Lateral thinking maybe. But it had paid off. No one at the police had made the connection.
She was like a gladiator waiting for the lions to be released. Through the frosted glass, two big, black hulking creatures, howling not barking. Crazed with blood lust. She imagined their fangs, their drool, the red light of movie death in their eyes.
A small, slight figure loomed behind them, shouting at them to be quiet. The man managed to negotiate a place for himself between them and the door, and opened it just enough to speak to Maddy. He smiled happily.
“Miss Shannon?” he said. “Are you afraid of dogs?”
“I’m afraid of those dogs.”
One of the beasts managed to bulldoze the little man out the way, and take a mad leap at Maddy.
“Heidi, no!” screamed the man. The creature knocked her off her feet, and covered her in drool.
“She’s a big baby.”
Walking up a hall with one bouncing dog trying to slabber you to death and another playing with your feet was an art Maddy hadn’t acquired. Which dog was it, Maddy asked herself, whose hair turned up on the body of Paul Pacchini? The one clinging to her for dear life, or the one that thought her shoes were biscuits?
“Heggie! Go on outside now.” Their owner opened a back door and both dogs ran out into a neat little garden, then stopped and turned to see if Maddy was following them out to play. Colin Ross just managed to close the door in time. “Heidi. Heggie. Stay out there!”
“Nice names.”
“Short for Heidegger and Hegel. German philosophers. Coffee?”
Come the revolution, Mr. Ross will have pride of place in front of the firing squad. She shook her head.
“You’ll want to know about Ian Lennon. We were introduced to him by the previous owners here. We’ve told the police all this. A rough diamond, I know, but we’ve always found him terribly pleasant. Perhaps even a bit of an idiot savant.” French accent and everything. One brief blow to the back of the head… “The Hendersons – the folks in here before us – emigrated to Australia. I believe she had some connection with the prisoner-rehabilitation world and that’s how Ian Lennon came to—”
“Do you have an address for them?”
“The Hendersons? No.”
“You told the police that Mr. Lennon was here on the morning of the fifth of May.”
“The day before the Kelvingrove murders, yes.”
“He wears an overall to work?”
“Yes. I told the police that too.”
“The police asked you about a visit you got, maybe two, three years ago, from a Mr. Kennedy?”
“They did. We won
dered afterwards. Kennedy – that’s not the father of the murdered boy?”
“Your wife said that you and Mr. Kennedy spoke in private, but she never knew about what.”
“Carolyn doesn’t take much interest in the garden. I do all the cutting and pruning and mowing and planting—”
“The garden?”
“That’s why that Kennedy chap came to see me. Gave me a note from Ian Lennon, some advice on gardening. We had just moved in back then and the garden was at a crucial stage.”
“You’re joking. You still have the note?”
“Sorry.”
Maddy’s mobile rang. She went out into the hall, listening to her voicemail and called back: “Thank you, Mr. Ross. I’ll let myself out.”
He wished he was better at taking time off. In the mornings, when Martha wasn’t having one of her bad turns, it would be nice to sit down at the table, take his time over toast and tea, chat to Jenny and Beth; Ben, when he was up from London. Stable, successful kids. Well, maybe not Ben.
Beth handed him a cup of tea. “For mum.”
He stopped at the door. “Do you think we’re part of the problem? When she’s sick, nobody challenges her. We all just accept it. It’s like we encourage her to be sick.”
“Just take up the tea, dad.” Beth took the cup back out of his hand. “I’ll take it.”
Midweek was a drag. He drove to work on autopilot, worrying about Lennon out on bail, and protected now by a big-wig lawyer, paid for by Charlie Dempsey. Either Young Charlie had more to do with these murders than met the eye, or someone was hiding behind him. Whatever, it meant that the perp was out on the streets, and could steal away. Coulter had brought in the PF, but there were still too many loose ends, too much that could go wrong. He wouldn’t be able to relax until the bad man was behind bars. And by then he’d be stressed about the next case.
The Pacchini thing worried him. They had managed to find someone who remembered the kid from his schooldays. A mother of a pal at the time – though the son could barely remember him at all. The parents were off their heads, the woman had said. Not bad or vicious, just disorganised.
Too many worries, crowding in on each other. He arrived at the station without managing to think any one of them through, and was faced straight away with a new one. Or perhaps he was being negative. An opportunity. He didn’t have to say much to Maddy, other than “Yes” and “Okay” and “Well done”. Nobody had picked up on Whyte and the Docherties’ connection with Helena Mackay. Maddy had been nice about Sign-Chronicity designing the old woman’s charity stationery – but he knew she’d enjoyed her scoop.
“We keep finding all this stuff out about you,” Russell was strolling around Jim and Elaine Docherty’s main room, used to it now, “which you could easily have told us.”
Jim Docherty was following him around, glaring. Elaine sat at the computer, poised to type, but looking up at the three men.
“Now look here – yes, we once did do some work for the Women’s Prison Reform Committee. And, yes, we have a couple of letters on file with Mrs. MacKay’s name on them. But how you could expect us to make the connection with the house where a girl was killed—”
Coulter could see both Russell’s and Docherty’s points of view. Follow one logic and there’s little to stop you accusing Whyte and the Docherties of perjury, perhaps aiding and abetting. Possibly even murder itself. Take the other route, and you have three innocent people, who just happened to be there or thereabouts. As innocent as anyone in any city could be. We all rub along, cheek-by-jowl, one step away from being shot in a park, or connected to someone shot in a park. You ride the subway along with all sorts, work next door to strangers; you’re never aware of the shadow that tells you death is approaching.
Jim Docherty and Martin Whyte run past dead bodies. Then it turns out that they worked in a home where one of the victims had once lived. They were caught drinking in a pub owned by a gangster who is helping the man accused of triple murder. Now they know a woman who knows a man who has a dog whose hair was found on a corpse in Kelvingrove Park. The Theory of the Six Degrees? Ask the right questions and Coulter himself, Russell, Maddy Shannon, anyone in busy Cadogan Street out there, could be connected to the murders. On that basis you could arrest the whole city.
“0 2 report. Day off. Scotch pasta. Nuff for 2. CU.”
She’d had to teach him text language. Louis came from what was supposed to be the world’s most modern, out there, edgy city. Actually, he seemed to have stepped out of some quaint sleepy village. She’d never been to New York, but her idea of it now, thanks to Commander Casci, was a place stuck somewhere in the early 1970s.
She stopped at her car. It would be easier to take the bus from her place to the office but the thought of all that human contact so early in the morning was too much to bear. She reread Louis’s message. He had sent her several since leaving last week. Scotch pasta. Too many Mob movies had made Maddy assume that Italians in America sat around eating bolognese in string vests listening to Puccini. Not Louis. He had moved away from his roots, geographically and culturally. Preferred sushi, fajitas, burgers. He associated pasta with Scotland now. Apparently there was enough for two, and he was inviting her around… then he must be alone. The message made her both happy and sad.
She texted back. “2 many carbs. Working. Got2Go. Soon. X’
She walked back to her car and listened to her voice messages. Only one, from Mama. Maddy knew even before she had spoken, just by the rhythm of her breath, she was upset. Maddy was all familied-out after last week; wanted to stay clear of every relation for a month at least. Family problems in particular held a dread for her, and she knew that tone of her mother’s so well.
“Maddalena. I’d rather talk to you in person. But… Nonno’s taken ill.”
How ill was anybody’s guess. Rosa’s sense of drama could make a slight cold sound life-threatening. At Nonno’s age, though, a cold might very well be.
If Shannon lost the case against Lennon it wouldn’t be all her fault. Coulter knew he hadn’t given her nearly enough to nail him. “The boy’s mother has to be somewhere!”
All they had was a paper trail, and a pretty tattered one at that. Taylor Primary, the last school in Glasgow to have a record of a Paul Pacchini, had been merged with another school. Nearly all the staff had moved on. They finally managed to track down a teacher who took Pacchini’s class in Primary 4. Pleasant enough boy, was all she could remember.
The old head mistress had only the vaguest recollection of either the boy or his parents. “Don’t think I ever met the dad. The mother, so far as I can recall, didn’t make much contact with the school either. Small woman? Young – if it’s the person I’m thinking of. Must have had Paul when she wasn’t much more than a teenager herself.”
They had tracked down a name and a few scant details. The mother’s name was Belinda Laird. From East Kilbride originally. She’d had Paul at a respectable 19, and was married soon after. The entire family had, it seemed, trod lightly through the world, hardly disturbing the air. Until the husband ended up dead drunk, literally, on the streets of Manchester. And the son behind the rhododendron bushes in Kelvingrove with a bullet through his head. As paper trails go, this one ended badly.
Strange, Coulter thought, how the likes of Martin Whyte and Elaine Docherty bump into everything during their short stay on this earth. They’re like pinballs, colliding and bouncing everywhere, rebounding, making their mark. The Pacchinis, on the other hand, could live entire lives without anybody noticing. Belinda and Giorgio Pacchini hadn’t stayed in one part of the city for any length of time, so that didn’t help. Teachers, shopkeepers, neighbours, publicans and barmen in Govan, Toryglen and Pollokshaws had all come across them, if tenuously.
“I think they maybe took drugs,” one ex-neighbour told WPC Dalgarno.
“What kind of drugs, sir?”
“Oh I don’t know. A funny smell from their house. They looked like the types, you know?”
> Neither George or Belinda ever worked, at least not legally, from what they could tell. So maybe they were dealers after all. Little Paul, or Paolo as some people remembered him, took a page out of his parents’ book and applied the rule of Look, Don’t touch, to life in general. Never a member of a football team or swimming club, library…
“I’m off to grab a sanny.” Coulter yawned. But, slipping on his jacket, despite the lasting warm spell, Amy Dalgarno came in waving a piece of paper. “Dundee. Belina Pacchini, née Laird. She’s living in Dundee. The Hilltoun—”
“The Hilton?!” Patterson Webb asked incredulously.
“Hilltoun, Patty,” Russell said. “An area in Dundee where you don’t tend to find a Hilton. She moved up there three years ago. I’ve requested her to come down to Glasgow.”
Coulter came back into the centre of the room. “Did you tell her why?”
“No. But I can’t be certain the Dundee force will be as sensitive as we are.”
“Make damn sure they are.”
The hospital had a wonderful view of the Necropolis. Nonno had taken sick on the train to Glasgow. A couple of times a year Rosa came to fetch him so that he and a couple of his old cronies could meet up in the home where one of them had been plonked by his family.
“A stroke, the doctors said. I think quite a bad one.” Rosa put on a calm voice, but Maddy could tell from her eyes she was frightened. Stone angels near the top of the hill fluttered directly across from the window of the fifth floor ward.
“The fact he hasn’t stirred at all worries them.”
Every now and then you got a glimpse of the old Rosa di Rio, chip shop queen of the Ayrshire coast. Tough, practical; coping alone to the point of martyrdom. It must have been rough, the drama on the train, a collapsed old man, a crowd of people, a screeching ambulance…
Maddy turned towards the bed. Nonno lay out flat, sheets pulled up tight; his breathing virtually undetectable. Monsignor Connolly came striding along from the far end of the corridor, footsteps like a sergeant major’s.
“Sorry for your troubles, Missus Di Rio.”
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