The Big Snow

by David Park

  For the first time that he could remember, Gracey arrived for work before him and was sitting in their room, staring at the powdery grave of grey ash and cinders. Swift didn’t know what to say, so he lifted the empty coal bucket and shovel with the intention of taking it outside to fill. Gracey didn’t look at him but instead lifted the poker and smoothed the mound of ash flat.

  ‘What do you think you’re doin’, Detective Constable Swift?’ he asked, as the acrid smell of the disturbed ash stirred into the room.

  ‘Filling the coal bucket, Sergeant Gracey.’

  ‘And why would you be doin’ that when we’re about to go out?’

  ‘Where’re we goin’, Sarge?’

  ‘To see the McGraths. And have that photograph with you. The car’s out the front. I assume you’re up to drivin’ and not likely to run us off the road,’ Gracey said and when Swift clanked the bucket down and turned to go, he heard Gracey call his name. He turned to face him. ‘God help me, Swift, you better be right about this,’ Gracey said, then repeated, ‘You better be right.’ Swift didn’t say anything but nodded to show he understood.

  The snow on the roofs of the tallest buildings was the first to vanish, sliding and slipping into a melted wash and polish of tile and chimney, while the snow on the streets had started to blotch and frazzle, looking in places like the congealed white of an egg being fried in a pan. Almost all the city’s main roads were now clear, although the shadowed web of side streets was still thickly wedged with compacted snow that would need several more days before it raddled into slush. Gracey sat as he always did in the car, holding the passenger strap the way a traveller might on a London tube and while they drove he didn’t speak, so the only sounds were the throaty turn and labour of the cold engine and the fine slur of water under the wheels. Parts of the city had started to look like the manged coat of some polar animal, a mosaic of the frayed and threadbare, meeting thicker sections of pelt. And it had become an older landscape, shrinking and tightening into its own memory, with the perfectly preserved history of feet and criss-cross of wheels, the snakeskin tread of tyres, frozen like fossils. The paw marks of dogs and cats, the frittery scurry of pigeons; all were printed on the yellowing scree of parchment.

  Swift glanced at Gracey and wondered what he read in the world outside but his face was expressionless, angled to the glass, and for all his size it was only the thin wheeze of his breathing that defined his presence. The sound of his breathing, the whispery slur and spray of water under the wheels. Swift shivered at a sudden stab of memory. It was the sound of his mother and father talking in the bedroom below his, their voices at first like the fine fistle of paper and then snaking into his room on the rising tongues of argument. His mother’s persuasion, her insistent pleading – it felt that they lodged inside his head and wouldn’t ever disappear, or be touched by something that would warm and thaw them into nothingness. He shivered again.

  ‘If you’re that cold, turn up the heater,’ Gracey said, turning to look at him. Swift turned it up just as they passed the front of a bakery and, as if caused by his action, a line of snow loosened itself from an upper ledge and flurried like a run of notes into the air. There was the whine and wail of an ambulance behind them and he steered the car to the side of the road to let it pass. ‘Another friggin’ broken leg,’ Gracey said. ‘Soon half this bloody city’ll be in plaster. I wouldn’t be surprised if they run out of the stuff – they’re running out of just about everything else. Ever break any bones, Swift?’

  Swift squirmed, imagining a truncheon breaking his grip on the steering wheel but when nothing happened, answered, ‘Collar bone once. Fell out of a tree.’

  ‘What do you call a policeman sittin’ in a tree?’ Gracey asked. Swift glanced at him and said he didn’t know. ‘Special Branch. You should have known that, Swifty.’ Gracey shifted in his seat, then said, ‘It’s a joke, son, a joke. Your trouble Swifty is you take things too seriously, take everything too personally. Bad habit.’

  The rest of the journey was silent apart from when Gracey pulled on the strap to raise one of his buttocks off the seat and farted, then said, ‘Excuse the French.’ Swift tried discreetly to wind down his window a little, as soon as he thought Gracey wasn’t looking, then when they arrived at the McGraths’s street started to fill Gracey in on their characters, but Gracey tapped him on the back of the head, saying, ‘I know the pair, son. Know them better than I know you. And there’s more chance of you crackin’ your face with a smile than Ma McGrath spillin’ the beans. But now he’d sell his granny for the price of a drink.’

  ‘You know about them?’

  ‘The whole world knows about them.’

  ‘Then why haven’t they been done?’ Swift asked.

  ‘Some people think of them as social workers. Anyway, Swifty, who knows when you might need a wee homer yourself?’ Gracey chuckled at his own joke and squeaked the glass clean with the back of his hand. ‘Without the McGraths there’d be even more bastards out there than there are already.’

  At Gracey’s order he parked the car right outside the house. Swift saw the net curtain twitch before he’d the engine switched off but it took McGrath a couple of minutes to open the door and when he did it was to reveal only a sliver of himself. Gracey pushed it open and as it swung backwards it clattered against McGrath, so when they gained their first full view of him he was holding a hand to his head like a plaster.

  ‘Take it easy, take it easy!’ he complained. ‘There’s no need for brutality. No call for it.’

  ‘Shut your hole, Ernie, you’re givin’ me a headache,’ Gracey said, walking past him into the living room and looking round it as if he had come to serve a condemned notice. ‘Where’s the lovely wife, then? Out buying new knittin’ needles?’

  ‘She’s gone to stay with her sister. Down south.’

  ‘Now isn’t that convenient. She’s not doin’ a wee family favour, is she? Well, that’s a pity, Ernie, for it leaves you holdin’ the baby, if you’ll forgive my unfortunate turn of phrase,’ Gracey said, looking about as if he intended to sit down but then changing his mind and taking up a position in front of the fire.

  McGrath slumped into an armchair whose headrest was worn threadbare and black. ‘What’s goin’ to happen to us?’ he asked, rubbing his head again.

  ‘That depends, Ernie, doesn’t it? Depends on you, really. Some men don’t mind prison too much – they get used to it after the first couple of years. Pissin’ in a pot isn’t the worst thing in the world.’ Gracey picked a newspaper off the table and flicked his eyes over the back page. ‘You’d have plenty of time for readin’, that’s for sure.’

  ‘What is it you want?’ McGrath asked.

  ‘Not very nice of Arlene to clear off like that, leavin’ you on your tod, leavin’ you to carry the can all by yourself.’

  ‘What is it you want?’

  ‘It’s very simple, Ernie. You just look at a photograph and tell me if it’s the boy who came to make the arrangements for Alma Simons, and I’ll be inclined to think that missin’ wife of yours is the villain of the piece.’ Swift went to take the photograph out of his pocket but Gracey shook his head.

  ‘I don’t know now,’ said McGrath, his eyes skittering round the room.

  ‘It’s OK, Ernie, you take your time. It’s an important decision. Five years is a hell of a long time to go without a drink – for that’s what you’ll get if I stick you up before a judge. And I’d say that before you got out you’d just about be ready to drink that piss out of the pot.’

  ‘OK, OK, but you’ll do your best for me?’

  ‘You have my word: Swift here is my witness and he’s as straight as they come. Detective Constable Swift, show Mr McGrath the photograph.’ Swift handed it to him and watched as he took the briefest of glances before handing it back, as if unwilling to hold it any longer.

  ‘That’s the fella. That’s him.’

  ‘That’s very good, Ernie, very helpful of you,’ Gracey said. ‘Now my
young colleague will just take a wee statement from you, and then there’ll be no need for us to trouble you any longer and we’ll be on our way.’

  When it was done and they were back in the car Gracey told him to stop at the first phone so that he could get a couple of men over to arrest McGrath and get him to the station. ‘We don’t want him doin’ a runner over the border, well, not yet, anyway,’ he said. Swift couldn’t help himself, couldn’t keep it in any longer. ‘So you think it was Newburn who killed her?’ Gracey let go of the strap and turned his head to look at him. ‘No, Swift, son, I don’t think that at all. And if you hadn’t got your head full of sweety mice you wouldn’t be talkin’ like that. Why would Newburn kill her? Sounds like he’s gone to a great deal of trouble to set up his little love-nest. The perfect arrangement: what would he want to kill her for? My money’s still ridin’ on Linton. And I know all you great detectives like to have a motive, so I’ll give you one, Swifty. Linton found out about the baby, about her sugar daddy and it did his spastic little head in and he topped her. Why would Charlie, who is a man of some property in this city, want to damage what he’d invested his time and money in? That’s not how a businessman thinks. Shag rent – that’s not a tap he’d be rushin’ to turn off.’

  Swift hated every word that came out of his mouth. He wanted to press his foot to the floor and drive his passenger into the nearest wall. He tried to steady himself by staring at the road ahead and gripping the wheel tightly. ‘Maybe it was the other way round and he found out about Linton, that she was planning to go away. Or maybe it was because she wouldn’t get rid of the baby – Newburn’s baby. Maybe he saw her as a threat to him, of his wife finding out.’ He fumbled the gears, then had to brake as he got too close to the car in front.

  ‘Hell of a lot of maybes in there. And for such a great man for evidence you don’t have much to back any of it up,’ Gracey said, pushing his feet instinctively to invisible brakes. ‘He’s in the frame, all right. Burns and John Thomas are round at Graham’s now with a photo out of the Tele and with a bit of luck she’ll be able to identify him as a visitor. So we’ll have a link between them that’ll back up McGrath’s statement, but we have nothin’ that’ll place him at the murder scene on the night in question.’

  ‘But the marks on his cheek,’ Swift stuttered. ‘And he was the one who came to the house that time I was upstairs.’

  ‘Marks on a cheek are a careless shave and you didn’t see who that visitor was, did you?’

  Swift shook his head and wished he was lying on her bed, about to drift slowly into sleep, drift into sleep and not hold back. ‘Are we going to pick him up for questioning?’ he asked as they drove along the embankment. The river was a skein and sparkle of ice over the black water below. He felt Gracey’s hand resting on his shoulder and heard him telling him to park the car, so he pulled in opposite some trees which thrust their bare, knotted branches over the railings of Ormeau Park.

  ‘Listen, son,’ Gracey said. ‘Maybe you and me got off on the wrong foot and whether it was your fault or mine hardly matters. Now, I’m prepared to say you did some good work, even if you went about it all wrong, and I’m prepared to say you’ve showed more spunk than I gave you credit for, but you’re still wet behind the ears and there’s a hell of a lot of things you haven’t got a hold of yet. There isn’t a stick of direct evidence that says Newburn killed her. This is a beaten docket, son, believe me.’

  ‘But what about him trying to arrange an abortion for her? We’ve got him on that,’ Swift urged.

  ‘Pissin’ in the wind there, Swifty. It’d come down to his word against Newburn’s and that’s a contest you aren’t going to win. A soak with form against one of the city’s leadin’ lights.’

  ‘But we could bring him in, turn the heat on.’

  ‘Listen, son, stop takin’ this so personal. It’s a fuckin’ beaten docket. You don’t turn the heat on a man like Charlie Newburn – this isn’t some back-street hood. This is a man who has friends, who has influence. Lawyers, people in high places. Him and the judge, half the jury, they’ll be in the same lodge – Orange, Masonic, it doesn’t matter. The only heat’ll be burnin’ the arse of you, of us. He probably plays golf with the Inspector General for frig’s sake.’

  ‘So he just walks away from it?’ Swift asked, staring at the river, where the ice was being broken by a widening thread of black water.

  ‘His name’s in the frame and we can talk to him, but we need more if we want to make anything stick and right now we don’t have that. I’ve got people working on it, lookin’ into things, but the question you have to ask yourself is if it’s worth the shite that’s goin’ to stick to us if we get it wrong.’

  ‘He killed her,’ Swift insisted.

  ‘You don’t know that. I don’t know that. And just maybe, Swift, I don’t want to know it, either.’

  ‘Can I go back to the house? Will you let me have the key again?’

  ‘If you want, but what for?’

  ‘Because there’s something there that he came back for, something he was prepared to risk going back for.’

  When they drove back to the barracks Burns was there with the news that Mrs Graham thought she recognized Newburn but couldn’t be sure. She hadn’t seen him the night of the murder and didn’t remember seeing or hearing a car arriving at or leaving next door. Gracey greeted the news with a shrug and, as he sank into his chair and started to remove his shoes, repeated as if to himself, ‘Beaten docket,’ then told Swift to get the kettle on. While they drank the tea Swift listened to their slurps and Burns’s moans about having to spend time with Graham, and watched him throw a piece of yellow printed paper on to the table. Gracey squinted at it over the rim of his mug, then asked what it was. ‘Another tract,’ Burns said. ‘I’ve got a whole pocketful of them. Next time I think it’s Swift’s turn to be saved.’

  ‘Maybe Swift’s saved already,’ Gracey said, and, without Burns seeing, turned his head to wink at him.

  Swift spent the rest of his afternoon investigating a break-in at a church hall. Nothing had been stolen because there wasn’t anything of value to steal, but there’d been some vandalism and things thrown about. It was probably the work of children and he had to work hard at generating any interest or enthusiasm for the job. After it was done he returned to the barracks and wrote it up. There was no sign of Gracey, and Burns had gone off to collect his suit from Nugent. He sat in the office with the fire smouldered almost to nothing and listened to the voices rippling through the station. It was getting dark but he didn’t put on the light. Soon his shift would be over. He tried to think things through clearly, to lay them out in straight lines, but it all seemed to defy his efforts and tangle up again. There was the sound of men’s laughter, the type of laughter that came with a shared joke. He listened to it fragment into tiny echoes through the corridors and warren of rooms and felt the weight of his loneliness. All his life it seemed that he had sat in places like this and listened to something that conspired to exclude him. He glanced round at the buckling shelves of manila files; each seemed to whisper words that he couldn’t quite grasp and each was a tightly bound secret that would never be made known to him. Once, after it was all over, he had tried to ask his father about it, about his mother’s breaking voice which he couldn’t get out of his head, but the words that he would have had to use were too terrible in his head and it felt that if he were to give then shape, something would break and tear into more pieces than could ever be put together again. Sometimes when he looked at his father he couldn’t help but wonder whether what had been done was right or wrong. He didn’t know, but it seemed important to know, important to be brought inside the truth, even to know that it was done in love.

  His thoughts started to darken and shadow his mind. He stared at the sunken embers of the fire and it seemed to him in that moment that only her love could save him, but that very thing had been torn from him by Newburn’s hands. He could have saved her if only he’d known, if only s
he had let him. None of the others knew how to do anything but take from her, but all he wanted to do was give her his love. His love and his protection. There was only one way left to do that and he wouldn’t let her down the way all the others had let her down. He remembered the photograph of a child on a swing, happy in the perfection of the moment, her smile carrying her through the silent, trembling air. A beaten docket. He shook his head in denial of the words. Somewhere a chair scraped across a floor. Out in the corridor, where the walls were the colour of slime in a drowned boy’s hair, footsteps bruised the tiles.

  He waited until they had clacked into silence, then went to the black wooden box and smoothed the grain of the wood with his hand. The key was in Gracey’s top drawer. It felt small and cold in his hand. He opened the box and lifted out the Webley .38, letting it nestle and balance in the palm of his hand, looking at it as if it was something he had never seen before. Ignoring the brown leather holster, he slipped it into the pocket of his jacket, then locked the box and returned the key. The door of the office opened and Swift stumbled back against the table in the middle of the room. The light was switched on, blinking the room into yellow light.

  ‘Scare you, Swifty?’ Burns said. ‘Think it was the Bogie Man come to get you?’ He was wearing a suit made out of the green tweed. ‘Well, what do you think?’

  ‘Very nice,’ Swift said, angling himself away from Burns’s gaze but when he glanced back at him, he saw that his colleague’s attention was fixed only on his new suit.

  ‘It’s dead-on, isn’t it?’ Burns said, holding out his arms stiffly in front of him as if waiting to be handcuffed. ‘I knew it would make a cracker suit as soon as I saw it. Thon Nugent knows his stuff; fits like a glove. Listen, Swifty, if you like I’ll keep my eye out for you and if anything comes along I’ll give you a shout. You can never look too good in this job.’

  ‘You’re all right,’ Swift said. ‘Thanks anyway.’