Free The Trinity by David LaBounty Page A

the world—especially Americans, and especially black Americans. She telephones Robertson upon hearing the broken glass, upon hearing the baby scream. She suspects some sort of domestic disturbance, not an act of racist intimidation.
    Robertson hangs up the phone and sleepily dons his uniform from the previous day, grabbing his fluorescent orange raincoat with the word POLICE emblazoned on the back. The night damp and frosty, he kisses his wife’s red and puffy and barely awake face and promises a quick return.
    He walks from one side of High Street to the next, passing his still and sleepy office. The empty street is illuminated by sporadic streetlamps whose lights can be seen twinkling in the moisture-laden air through the low fog that provides a blanket over the entire village.
    “Bollocks,” he says to himself. His hands are thrust deep into his trouser pockets, the collar of his raincoat turned up to protect his ears as he walks almost hurriedly in his awkward gait, slightly bowlegged with his right foot angling out.   “Nearly bleeping fucking Christmas and I’ve got to tend to some damn Yanks.”
    The Americans don’t really bother Robertson in the political sense, but he grows irritated when he has to police them. He is paid for by the Tayside government, not the U.S. He feels the Americans that live and wander and drink off base are like children ignored by their parents and left without a babysitter: apt to do treacherous and irresponsible things.
    Robertson’s approach to the Beasley house is telegraphed by his shoes walking on broken glass and the sound of a baby crying heard through the jagged hole in the living room window. The house is dark save a light from a small lamp on the kitchen table, where Beasley and his wife sit. The wife is trying to breastfeed the baby but the baby can’t and won’t and all it does is continue to wail quite strongly for such a new child.
    Robertson whispers loudly through the broken window, though the immediate neighbors are quite awake. “You there,” he says, indicating Beasley with a point and a wave of his hand intended to bring him outside.
    Robertson already knows that a black couple lives in the house, a semi-detached property belonging to his wife’s uncle, who owned many of the properties rented to the Americans in the area, all furnished meagerly in the thrifty Scottish fashion with furniture bought at estate sales and resale shops. Robertson notes the tattered and worn upholstery. He rolls his eyes and thinks of his wife’s uncle, the cheap bastard.
    Beasley comes outside in his stocking feet, wearing Navy sweatpants and a Navy sweatshirt. He doesn’t look at Robertson but keeps his head down as he tries to step between the shards of glass. He hands Robertson the rock and the note before the constable can inquire into the situation. Robertson squints his eyes and reads the note from the light of the kitchen.
    Immediately he thinks of the scruffy looking youths he sees loitering around the city center on his shopping trips to Dundee: young and small and thin men wearing boots and black leather jackets and shaved heads with iron crosses around their necks. He recalls that they’re called skinheads, and he fears their influence has spread north to his quiet piece of the Earth. He suspects nothing different and he asks Beasley some obvious questions.
    “Any idea who did this?”
    Beasley shakes his head while sniffing his nose. His eyes are teary. The tears start to freeze at the corners of his eyes.
    “No enemies, no friends on the base that you’ve rubbed the wrong way?” Robertson continues while staring into the night and through the broken window at the quiet girl trying to nurse a still crying baby.
    Beasley shakes his head. Robertson believes he knows nothing. The constable turns his head slowly, nearly 360 degrees, in the hope of seeing a bald-headed leather-clad youth in combat boots traipsing through his village, hoping to solve this crime, this