Stay of Execution

10

Cold had come to New York City, down from the Arctic, banishing fall for the rest of the year. Mario McGuire had been completely unprepared for the change, but Colin Mawhinney had found him a heavyweight over-jacket from his precinct storeroom. The big Scots detective was quietly pleased by the experience of standing at the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Broadway with the letters ‘NYPD’ emblazoned across his back.

He looked around at the sea of neon, bright even in the morning light. ‘Times Square, the centre of the universe,’ said his escort. ‘Tacky, isn’t it?’

‘It’s Piccadilly Circus, mate,’ McGuire retorted. ‘Different shape, overall bigger, but the same idea.’ He pointed along 42nd Street. ‘You’ve even got theatre land going off it, just like in London they have Shaftesbury Avenue.’

‘Do you have anything like this in Scotland?’

‘We light up Edinburgh and Glasgow for Christmas. But we’re too fucking mean to pay the electricity bill for a whole year.’ He glanced up at the banner rolling around a building on the other side of the wide street, headlining the morning’s news stories. ‘Ach, that’s not quite true. The castle’s floodlit all year round, and damn nice it looks, but we don’t have any of that stuff. Wouldn’t be appropriate for my city. Wouldn’t look right.’

‘Edinburgh’s that staid, then?’

‘She’s not as po-faced as she used to be, but compared to this she’s still a tightly corseted old lady.’

‘Sounds attractive,’ said Mawhinney. ‘I really am looking forward to seeing it. Will I enjoy it, do you think. . as a cop, as well as a tourist?’

‘As a cop you might well be bored. At your rank, in uniform, you’d spend a lot more time in the office than out on the street. The upside is that when you were out, your equipment belt would be a few pounds lighter.’

For a moment the American looked puzzled, until he caught McGuire’s meaning. ‘Ah yes, being unarmed. Do your guys have a problem with that?’

‘We’d have a bigger problem if we were told that we had to be armed all the time. A lot of my friends would quit if that happened.’

‘But how do you get by as an unarmed force in the twenty-first century?’

‘We’re not an unarmed force, Colin. We have more firearms at our disposal than ever before. They’re just not routinely deployed, other than at sensitive sites; airports in the main. We’re as lethal as you lot when we have to be, but we don’t give guns to ordinary uniformed patrol officers.’

‘Doesn’t that put them at risk?’

‘No more than they’ve ever been: not yet, at any rate. Gun crime is a problem, I’ll admit. We have a law in Britain banning the private ownership of handguns, but it was passed to keep them out of the hands of nutters, people who might suddenly go crackers and shoot up a street without warning. It was never thought that it would reduce the incidence of guns in street crime, for one obvious reason. . criminals don’t obey the law.’

‘Mmm,’ Mawhinney murmured. ‘Interesting.’ He motioned with his hand. ‘Come on, let’s walk up Seventh towards Central Park and watch how our officers handle street patrol. You’ll see plenty of them: we believe in a strong visible presence. As a result, Manhattan is one of the safest tourist places in the world.’

‘Oh, aye? And what about the rest of New York?’

The American grinned. ‘Just don’t get off the subway at the wrong station at night, that’s all I’ll say. Let’s walk, Mario. If we’re meeting Paula for lunch at noon on your last day in town, we’ve just got time to get there. If she’s researching the deli business, she has to see the Carnegie.’