Quintin Jardine: Stay of Execution

The big Scots detective stood in silence, because there was nothing to say. He was a mature man, over the crest of the hill that leads into middle age, and he had known his share of life’s inevitable sadness; indeed, if truth be told, more than his share. Yet the place in which he stood affected him in a way that he had not experienced before. He had seen it on television, and he had read of it, from the awful beginning and through the grim weeks and months that had followed, but nothing had prepared him for the actuality of it. It was vast, yet no greater than he had expected. There was no sepulchral silence about it: even on a Saturday the traffic rushed past nearby. And yet there was a sense of something all around, something that with very little imagination could have been the echoes of the screams of three thousand souls.

A voice broke into his meditation. ‘By sheer evil chance, I was on my way here when it began to go down,’ his companion said, quietly. ‘After the first plane had hit, I saw people standing, staring at it, like they didn’t believe it. Some of them even had camcorders. They stood there filming, like it was some movie special effect or whatever, and they’d got lucky. They were the tourists, though. Our guys, the New Yorkers, most of them were running for their very lives.’

Mario McGuire looked to his right, towards his host rather than at him, for the man seemed to be staring at a point in the distance, an imaginary screen on which the scene was being re-run. He wondered how often he had seen that movie, in the light of day and in the dark of night, and how many more times he would see it in the rest of his life to come.

‘Not you though,’ he said, respectfully. ‘Not your people; they ran into it.’

‘And twenty-three of them didn’t walk out. I knew every one of them, from John d’Allara to Walter Weaver: four sergeants, two detectives and seventeen patrol officers. But, aah, the fire-fighters. .’ He looked down, then up, then away, as if he was composing himself. ‘New York Fire Department lost three hundred and forty-seven people, of all ranks. Twenty-three fire chiefs died here, you know. Those people even killed the Department chaplain.’ When, finally, he glanced at McGuire, the look in his eye seemed to say that however well he knew the facts, however often he recited the names of the dead, aloud and in his head, he was still having trouble making himself believe in its raw, terrible truth.

Inspector Colin Mawhinney, commander of the 1st Precinct, New York Police Department, which takes in Manhattan Island’s financial district, looked to be in his early forties. He and his guest were of equivalent rank in their respective forces, and although the Scot surmised that he was the younger by a few years, he wondered how quickly he would have risen through the ranks in a body almost twenty times larger than his own.

Everything about the New Yorker looked classy. His hair, more grey than black, was cut close, to fit neatly inside the uniform cap that he held respectfully in his hand. His uniform was immaculate, and his shoes shone as brightly as its badges. McGuire, on the other hand, was in plain clothes, and more specifically, a lightweight Italian suit: he was glad that he had packed it, since New York was much warmer in October than it had been in April on his last visit, ten years before.

He had expected to be taken to the site of the World Trade Center, although privately he had hoped that it would not happen. He had been there before, as a brash young tourist, and had taken the elevator to the top, accompanied by his trembling girlfriend of the time, a nurse called Rachel. Her face had become a blur in his past, but the rest of that day had not. It had left him with the belief that the WTC was one of the genuine wonders of the modern world, and despite the warning shot of the first terrorist attack on the edifice, or perhaps because of it, that it was invulnerable. And so he recognised the look that he had seen in Mawhinney’s eyes; for he suspected that it had been in his own.

The visit had been obligatory, though, right there on the programme for the first day of his official visit. Before September Eleven, one or two of his hosts might have called him, jokingly, a visiting fireman, but not since. That term had gone from the lexicon of Americana, and instead he had been received as plain Detective Superintendent McGuire, divisional CID commander. The formalities had been completed at the beginning, on his arrival a day earlier: the Scot had been received at One Police Plaza by the head of the Patrol Bureau. There had been a photo-call, at which he had handed over a cheque for eighty-one thousand dollars, the proceeds of a series of fund-raisers run by the Edinburgh police force’s NYPD Friendship committee, in aid of fallen officers’ families. Then, after a tour of the headquarters building, he had been turned over to Inspector Mawhinney for the rest of his stay.

That morning, they had followed a parade up to Ground Zero from Battery Park, where the patrol car had dropped them. The procession formed itself into ranks behind a red fire tender, decorated on either side by hand-painted banners asking God to bless America. The people themselves, young women and children just outnumbering the elderly, wore no mourning clothes. They were casually dressed, and many carried placards displaying the names and images of their loved ones. They were led by an Irish band of drums and bagpipes, its members wearing green kilts and feather-plumed bonnets. It played no laments along the way; the tunes were stirring. There were no tears among the marchers, no overt displays of grief; instead they smiled and held their heads high. Their message was one of defiance, and more, of pride in what they had given overcoming the sorrow for what they had lost.

At first McGuire had hung back, fearful of being taken for a ghoulish intruder, but Mawhinney had drawn him forward, joining the tail of the parade. ‘We’re both cops, Superintendent,’ he had said. ‘We’re welcome here, I assure you.’

‘I’m in plain clothes, though.’

The American had released what was almost his first smile since their introduction. ‘You could be wearing a Sioux war-bonnet and you’d still look like a cop.’

They had processed in silence, the precinct commander drawing salutes from the patrol officers who lined the route, and returning them with military sharpness and with a nod of recognition. McGuire had served in uniform long enough to be able to judge a senior officer’s popularity from the body language of those under his command, and he read more than respect among Mawhinney’s men and women: he read a degree of reverence.

The route was short, less than a mile; it reached an assembly point. The band played ‘Amazing Grace’, and photographs were taken by the marchers, of the site and of each other. Then they dispersed, drifting back towards the southern tip of Manhattan, to the point from which they had set out, leaving the two policemen to make their way down into the great crater.

‘How long have you been precinct commander, Inspector Mawhinney?’ McGuire asked, as they stood, looking up and around, aware that high above, several dozen people were looking at them from a roughly built viewing gallery. He thought that, as a survivor of the horror, the man might be having difficulty just being there, and he sought to change the mood.

‘I’ve been down here for almost five years now,’ the American replied. ‘And let’s drop the formality, uh, before we run into a problem over who should be calling who “sir”. I moved here from the 34th Precinct, up at the north end of the island.’

‘Was it a big contrast?’