The Trinity (15 page)

So just as the sailor reaches the last step and stands alone on the sidewalk as the rest of his party trails behind, Lee fires what is supposed to be just one shot, but his recalled anger has him do it in four, firing the gun faster than the victim can react. The first shot strikes him in the shoulder, the second in the stomach, and the third and fourth in the face and in the forehead. The young man collapses on the sidewalk, the remains of his head splattered against the cement stairs. Rodgers can see the blood coursing from the body and spreading to the gutter. Everyone coming in and out of the club drops to the ground, their arms covering their heads. No one looks to see where the shots are coming from.

Rodgers calmly walks away and finds an agitated Hinckley, who was only expecting to hear one shot. They walk in between the buildings and hurriedly out into the next street. Each young man walks to opposite ends of the block. The sound of sirens fills the air, joining the commotion and panic and screaming coming from the next block.

Crowley has kept his window cracked open to listen for the gunshots. His glee turned to anger and later fear as he heard the gun continue its firing. He was almost afraid to pick Rodgers and Hinckley up; he was sure someone could see the flare of the gun as it was fired so many times. His anxiety subsides as he approaches Hinckley; no one is giving him a second look.

He picks up Hinckley and says nothing as they traverse the block and see Rodgers waving his arms vigorously, drawing attention to himself, drawing looks from spectators in passing cars and those few pedestrians still on the sidewalk, exiting the pubs in drunken bemusement or melancholy.

Crowley decides to drive on but changes his mind. He can’t risk Rodgers being caught. Crowley realizes it will be some time before they try something like this again. He will need to introduce a certain sort of discipline into this Trinity. He might have to replace Rodgers.

Because of his indecision, Crowley has to slam on the brakes. His tires squeal as the car skids past Lee, who runs up to the car and flings the door open.

He is out of breath as he takes his seat. “I shot that nigger good! If you could have only seen it, Father Crowley! I shot that nigger good!” He claps his hands loudly in a swiping fashion, the left hand going up while the right hand goes down. “Damn! I shot him good. I didn’t want to shoot nobody, but damn, I shot that nigger good! He was a real son-of-a-bitch, and I fixed his ass good.” Rodgers feels more powerful than he has in his entire life, and a vague memory enters his mind, a remote recollection of rabbit hunting as a young adolescent early one winter with just a dusting of snow on the ground. There is a small forest behind his house of poplar and pine. He shot a rabbit as he chased it through the woods, a younger rabbit, male and small. The first shot, in the leg, only mangled it, and the rabbit was still alive, running on its three remaining legs. Instead of killing it instantly, he continued to maim it, shooting off the legs one by one, and then the ears, and then the nose. He felt like a god as he controlled the rabbit’s remaining moments. With a powerful scream that echoed in the grove of trees, he shot the rabbit completely and the snow on the immediate ground turned to pink.

That’s how he feels tonight—like a god. He thinks of Thor from Crowley’s speeches on Norse mythology. He feels like a giant, a great and mighty ancient giant, deciding who remains on this earth and who doesn’t.

Crowley listens to Rodgers’s exuberance, and then chastises him. “Listen,” he says, his teeth starting to clench, “we agreed on one shot. No one can tell where one shot came from, but you decided to wake up the whole city of Dundee and draw them a sonic map with your gunfire. I still can’t understand why the police haven’t pulled up behind us, you idiotic child. We have come too far and are going to go further; we don’t need you to desecrate our sacred mission, to turn the hands of progress back any further than they’ve already fallen. I would be very careful, if I were you… You better hope no one saw you.” Crowley says this in a calculating matter, glancing at Rodgers inside the rearview mirror, waiting for his reaction.

“Nobody saw nothin’.” Rodgers’s excited mood turns somber, and the joy and pride he felt just moments ago vanishes. “They was all too scared to look my way. They just ducked and covered their heads. I don’t think they knew where what was coming from. So I shot that nigger. I shot that nigger good.”

They drive on to Crowley’s house in silence, the A92 black and only scarcely lit by a smattering of oncoming headlights. Crowley constantly looks in the rearview mirror, waiting for sirens to approach, but the receding landscape remains black and silent all the way to his farmhouse. He is satisfied that no one saw them take flight; no one saw Rodgers scramble out of the cemetery. If the note was placed where Hinckley said he put it, he knows the Tayside Police are reading it by now. He hopes there is a silent cheer from the heart of the white officer who reads the note.

 “Sweet Mary, mother of God,” says the freshest-faced of the two young constables who are the first to arrive at the steps of the club where the sailor lies dead, his blood reflecting the streetlights and the moonlight straining through the clouds.

“Sweet fucking Mary, mother of God.” He vomits profusely into the gutter, taking care that his throw-up doesn’t taint the evidence; only his shoes and the cuffs of his trousers are spoiled. He continues to wretch amidst the confusion, the hysterical and shocked passersby who witnessed the brief carnage, and the sound of sirens coming from all directions asserting their gravity upon what had been a typical and cheerful Friday evening.

The ambulance arrives as the constable wipes his mouth with the back of his sleeve. The taste of the take-out curry from four hours previous is still with him, but now it is not so appetizing.

The ambulance’s arrival is pointless. No one else is injured, and the young sailor is long past mortality. Still, they check his pulse and his breath before closing his eyes with rubber-gloved hands. The young constable tapes off the scene while his companion takes statements from witnesses. No one saw anything—no suspicious looking people, no shooter. It is quickly surmised that the victim is an American from the base in Lutherkirk.

“Did he have any enemies?”

No.

“Did he have a go at it with some of the lads in the club?”

Again, no. He had spent the evening with his friends drinking and dancing with the three local girls who are still hugging each other tightly on the sidewalk, the fog of their breath intermingling before it rises into the damp and cold and crystal night. They are interviewed. They are too intoxicated and upset to give any information, but what they say is still recorded by young police officers with damp notebooks.

The inspectors arrive after a quarter of an hour, having been yanked from sleep or drink by frantic calls or pages. The one in charge, Chief Inspector Holliday, is a veteran of many Dundee crimes, but nothing like this. A Pakistani murdered the previous month, and now this. His instinct tells him the two are related.

He is a very obese man, and his obesity is driving the department to retire him this coming spring, still at the tender age of forty-nine. He isn’t sure what he will do with his time or how he will supplement his pension, which won’t keep him in the comfort that he has grown accustomed to. He has dreamed of spending his twilight years on the lonely and peaceful Isle of Skye, miles away from the urban decay that has crept into Dundee. He envisions himself stretching out his pension living a simple life alone in a cottage on a treeless and windswept shore on a cliff overlooking the sea. He longs to spend his retirement days fishing and reading and drinking and maybe even find a nice shepherd’s daughter or widow with whom to pass the time. He could lose the weight and prolong his career and increase his pension; a loss of about three stone would make him more acceptable in the brass’s eyes, but he’s never been one for discipline. He’s more of a connoisseur of comfort, an aficionado of ample food and endless pints after the end of the working day or working night.

On this night, he had been at his desk late, surrounded by cartons of Chinese take-out, writing a report about the Pakistani, leaving the case unsolved, chain smoking all the while. He received a hurried tap on the shoulder from someone in uniform and drove the short distance across the city center to the scene, where he now stands in his dirty shirt and wrinkled tie underneath a fluorescent yellow police-issue raincoat. He is short of breath and wheezing as he studies the scene. He sees where the bullets ripped the body—an uncommon sight in a country where guns are a rarity and even the police patrol the streets unarmed.

“An American?” he asks the nearest uniformed constable.

“Yes, from up on the base.”

Holliday nods and lights a cigarette from a white box. He offers them to the patrolmen, but they all refuse.

Holliday studies the huddled Scottish girls and the shocked and confused friends of the dead American. His instinct tells him they have nothing to offer him, no information that could be relevant to this crime of intentional brutality. He stares at the club and down the sidewalk and then across the street. He rests his gaze on the cemetery.

“He shot from there.” Holliday points to the darkened cemetery. “I want that taped off, too, and the grounds combed.” More uniformed officers arrive and they walk across the street with more yellow police tape and flashlights. It isn’t long before they shout and beckon Holliday over. He waddles across the street and sees the envelope tacked to the tree. He gingerly rips it down. He doesn’t open it there; he doesn’t want to risk the contents getting wet from this damp night. He drives back to the station and proceeds upstairs to the long and low office. He sits at his desk and carefully opens the envelope. He has long assumed that nothing can cause him alarm; he feels he has seen it all in the course of his twenty-plus years of police work, but his imagination could never take him to something like this, and the contents of the letter anger him. He takes it personally. Someone was murdered in his city, and on his watch.

He reads:

This is the beginning of a war. We are out to get rid of the lesser races, any non-white, they don’t belong in Scotland. We will continue until they have returned
back to their native lands. Scotland is for the Scots, not for blacks or Asians or foreigners of any kind. The purge will continue unless our demands are met.

Signed,

The Eastern Scotland Trinity

of the Great White Brotherhood

He recalls hearing something of a hate crime just before Christmas, up in Lutherkirk, a note being left and signed by this same group. Each victim has been a black American, someone from the base. He checks the computer, a new piece of equipment that intimidates him, and searches the United Kingdom for hate groups, hate crimes, especially violent hate crimes, but he finds nothing related, just random acts of broken glass and football hooliganism. No murders.

He dances his fingers through the worn out Rolodex on his desk and dials Constable Robertson in Lutherkirk. The reason is twofold.  First, Holliday is looking for information about the incident that occurred the previous month, if anything unfolded in that investigation. Robertson is embarrassed, but no, he has found out nothing. He interviewed the mother of every school-age boy in his village, he has interviewed every young adult that lives on the dole, and he has interviewed anyone who might be angry enough to hate so much, and he has uncovered nothing. Everyone in the village has an alibi of sorts, and no inclination of racism. There is a dislike of Americans that has long existed, but nothing based on race.

The second reason Holliday calls Robertson is to ask him to inform the Americans about the passing of the sailor. Someone will have to claim the body after the autopsy and make all the arrangements.

Robertson asks the inspector if he has a hunch who the murderer may be.

“I suspect they’re American. If you ask me, they must be American. Theirs is known to be a racist lot… There’s no Klan in Scotland, and our lads don’t go in for that sort of thing, carrying guns and wearing hoods, but I could be wrong. I’ll be in touch. I think we need to talk to the Americans and tell them there is a racist targeting their sailors and we can’t rule out that it’s one of their own. It could be some local lads, gone over the edge a bit. There have been some hard cases in Arbroath, but nothing like this; they’ve only been stealing cars and smoking hash. I can’t rule out one of our own, but this whole thing feels American to me; I can feel it in my stomach. If you can, ask the Americans if anything suspicious has happened on the base—you know, tension between the blacks and whites living in the barracks. Anything would be helpful.”