by Dave Duggan
‘There’s nothing going on here.’
He was out of hearing, when Amy said,
‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that.’
I smiled. The gift I gazed upon grew more fascinating.
Amy continued in the same vein.
‘Status update. I’m not married or in a relationship. You?’
I thought of Karen and intermittent mornings spent laughing and bashing each other with rolled-up sections of the weekend newspapers.
‘No. Neither.’
‘Okay. How do we do this then?’
‘You promise not to shoot me?’
‘You’re not a wild animal, are you?’
‘I can be. There’s a time and a place for everything.’
Her smile broadened and she handed me a card.
‘Phone numbers on that, including a personal one. Call, if it feels right. And then we’ll see. I have a chair and a whip too. Part of the WART kit.’
‘Sounds like a great job. Maybe I should apply for a transfer.’
‘Tony wouldn’t have you. He says you’re too smart for your own good and would only cause bother.’
‘An astute character assessment.’
‘That’s why he’s the boss.’
The WART vehicle grumbled into life beside us and Amy gave a yelp. Tony White’s arm waved out of the passenger side window and Amy shouted ‘Coming’ before leaning forward and touching her fingers to my arm. No more than a touch, but it lit me up like a furze blaze in summer.
The side panel of the van slid open and a colleague’s arm reached for Amy, who hoisted herself upwards, slamming the door behind her. The WART van, bearing my new flame-thrower, eased into the convoy of police vehicles nosing along Butcher Street.
There, on the edge of The Diamond, high above the vehicles and the metal barrier, a banner flew, illustrated with various motifs, one of them a skeleton, deep in thought, seated upon a rock.
SEVEN
It is my experience of the world that gifts come at a price. In this case, the price became deferral and delay as the Todd Anderson case itself took fire and blazed from a reservoir of ice. That night I dreamed of Amy Miller, contoured onto a lounger made over in ocelot fur, a sniper’s rifle across her thigh and a smile that said ‘game time’ on her lips. I woke to a phone call from Hetherington.
‘They found Anderson’s other shoe. I’ll pick you up in fifteen minutes.’
I stood on the Strand Road, behind my river-facing apartment block, in fragile sunbeams unconvinced they were shining on the right place. I climbed into the saloon Hetherington pulled up in and neither of us spoke. The morning would tell us what we needed to know.
We drove along the Buncrana Road, still shaking off its night feel. A dog walker scooped and bagged her Labrador’s leavings into a lavender, plastic hand-glove. Two teenage girls, their school stockings hiked to perfectly matching pitches on their calves, walked briskly to a bus-stop. A milk van came to a sliding stop with a squeal of brakes and a rattle of crates at a side junction. Hetherington took us to the Skeoge Road, where he turned the car into a square of low industrial units, all shuttered down except for one marked Chill Express, before which two police land rovers were parked and a clutch of crime scene officers passed equipment to each other.
Hetherington parked and told me what he knew.
‘Your mate Karen Lavery caught this one early. And got the night desk to contact me. She reckons we should see it.’
Karen had not phoned me directly. I had not seen her since she told me she planned to date the farmer.
She was at the back of the unit when I entered. Only one strip light was working, so gloom and cold gave Chill Express whatever grim atmosphere it could. Karen shone a torch into the cavern of a half metre deep chiller unit that ran the length of the back wall. It was as grimy as the inside of a bath left too long in the rain and contained one item: a shoe. A two-tone, brown and white Oxford Spectator, very soiled. Karen got straight to business.
‘Vice have been watching this place for a while. Then there was a tip off from PS(S) about a cross-border move. Then nothing. So Vice got access, found it empty and called me to do a sweep. On the off-chance. I saw the shoe and remembered the Anderson case. I locked the scene down and brought in a crew.’
‘Great, Karen. Great. Thanks. You look good.’
‘Thanks. Yeh. New hair do.’
A lifted bob, higher on one side, highlighting the perfect form of her left ear and the serene gaze from her brown eyes.
‘The new man?’
‘You didn’t call.’
‘I … if …’
‘What I mean is, I’m not sitting around waiting for you to call. Either are you, but I thought after what I told you that day …’
‘Let’s talk about the shoe. It’ll be easier for both of us to start there.’
She blew a short gasp between her cheeks, ruddy in the chill air.
‘Oxford Spectator. Italian made. See the manufacturer’s name. Borini. Or something. Soiled, but looks in good condition. I’ll bag it and compare it with the one we got from Anderson’s corpse. If it’s a match, and a tenner says it is, then your story works – that his body was kept chilled for a while before being transported to the football pitch.’
‘Nothing else here? Fingerprints? Blood? Tissue? Fabric?’
‘Still checking. The team arrived just before you. Don’t worry, we’ll give the chiller the full treatment.’
‘What was it used for?’
‘Food, most likely brought here in bulk, maybe repackaged and probably off-loaded to small independents. Sandwiches, wraps. They might even have made up stuff here. Not sure yet. Everything was stripped out of it, except this brute. Too big to move.’
‘Does it work?’
‘Yep, when you switch it on.’
We both smiled at that. Maybe we were back on song.
‘Who owns it?’
Hetherington joined us and answered my question. He’d spoken to a Vice Squad detective, as we came in.
‘A letting agency, Property Max, handles it. Vice have spoken to them and will send me their notes. We can follow up, if we think it would help us.’
‘Do that. Get a list of renters and, from them, a list of clients and suppliers. Do the same for all the units in this square. Someone may have seen something when Anderson’s body was stored here …’
‘Before he was killed?’
‘He was killed and then brought here.’
‘Hold on Slevin, we haven’t found any blood. No fabric. No tissue. Nothing.’
‘He was naked and in a clear plastic bag.’
Karen and Hetherington looked at each other. The cold in the industrial unit deepened. The single strip light fizzed a hornet’s warning. She had seen me act the shaman before, the one who pulled stories and visions out of the air. Hetherington, the sceptic who hadn’t known me long, made to speak and I cut him off.
‘He was stripped, held, shot, put in a plastic bag, almost a tarpaulin, stored here, then dressed and moved. They lost the shoe then. And they burned the plastic. We’ll never find that.’
The fact that I knew what I was talking about because of events in my past didn’t put Hetherington off.
‘Are you reading this from a file, sir? From something you haven’t shown me?’
‘Ah now, DC Hetherington, you must know all about your superior’s famed extra-sensory perceptions.’
Karen could get away with such scoffing. She’d been there when my images and stories had borne fruit. She was there the day I placed a shooter in the trees, for the murder of a taxi driver, when strong evidence pointed to a gunman on the street. Uniforms climbed the tree and found a cigarette paper and tobacco grains from which forensics were able to lift fingerprints, fresh and strong enough to guarantee a conviction.
>
And if she scoffed and I smiled, as I did, was I in love with her?
‘Wrap up here, Kenneth. Check for any further details with Vice on the way out. I’ll see you in the car in a minute.’
He didn’t like being dismissed and I knew I would have to make it up to him, but I needed a word with Karen.
‘You still seeing visions then?’ she asked.
‘Don’t overdo it, Karen. Intuitions. Hunches. Notions. Myths.’
‘Aye, They still keep you awake at night?’
‘I … sometimes …’
‘The ones with your mother?’
‘Karen …’
‘Half our bother, Eddie. You can’t be helped.’
‘I’m grand. You?’
‘Good, actually. Good, yeh.’
‘Sorry I didn’t …’
‘Neither did I, so we’re quits.’
‘The farmer treating you right?’
‘I’m taking it handy. We’ll venture a weekend away, see how he manages out of his wellies.’
‘It’s all about the footwear, isn’t it? Get me what you can from the shoe and we’ll take it from there. And good luck. With the weekend and all.’
Karen smiled, so serenely, I almost reached for her, but how could I do that with Anderson’s shoe lying upside down in the grimy chiller, Hetherington drumming his fingers on the steering wheel outside and the vague sense that I was being unfaithful to Amy Miller bilious in my stomach?
I was right. Hetherington was drumming his fingers on the steering wheel and gasping like a spawning salmon about to attempt the final weir. He had us underway even before I’d snapped my seat belt closed.
He drove us out of the industrial park, onto the link road and along the Buncrana Road towards town, in a righteous huff of which any spotty-faced, acne-ravaged teenager would be proud. I used the time to reflect on meeting Karen again, wondering if I should attempt to pick up with her once more. I admitted to myself that whatever I happened to be good at, sticking with relationships wasn’t included.
My reveries were broken as a radio message crashed in.
‘Pennyburn shops. Officers requiring urgent assistance. Respond, if in vicinity.’
Hetherington staccatoed back.
‘Hetherington and Slevin. Serious Crime Team. On Buncrana Road. Will attend. Five minutes.’
He put on the siren, overtook the car in front and sped down the wrong side of the road, raced through the roundabout at the Sports Complex and reached 80 km per hour on the straight that followed. I sat upright, faced ahead and felt good. His huff was being put to positive use.
When we reached the traffic lights at the Pennyburn shops, a uniform directed us to take a left and Hetherington swung our saloon like a doll on the end of a rope. I felt the g-force almost take me out the door. Hetherington slammed on the brakes just behind a police Land Rover, got out immediately and galloped off. I sat still, slowly undid my seat belt and concluded my musings about Karen with the thought that, as she had indeed been right about Germany winning the World Cup, maybe she was right to move on. When it comes to love, going back is likely a folly.
I stepped into a wrecking yard of vehicles on a busy street, with a carnival of on-lookers huddled in fear-filled clutches. There was a parade of shops, emptied of customers. I became a piece in a jigsaw of cars, a bus, a bicycle, a van and people, all tossed together by accident and collision. A tumult of images rose within me.
A double-decker bus, pulling away from the stop, new passengers on board, moving to climb the hill in the direction of Shantallow. A blind spot on the driver’s-side wing-mirror. A bicycle overtaking and crossing onto the opposite side of the road. A collision. A van coming down the hill swerving, avoiding the bicycle. The van smashing into a parked car, bumping it forward to rear-end a delivery truck. A road traffic accident.
I exhaled heavily. I saw an ambulance arrive and park half on/half off the pavement outside a Chinese take-away. Paramedics leapt out and made for the prone figure on the ground. It was curled in the foetal position beside the shattered front wheel of the bicycle, which was twisted like a slice of squeezed orange fruit.
Further key figures emerged from the scene. There was Hetherington beside a uniformed officer, one of two uniformed personnel first on the scene. The uniform was gesticulating with both hands, a dervish in near-frenzy.
A large, black SUV came down the hill and pulled up on the pavement beside the bank. Four men got out, led by a large man in a blue jacket. I recognised him from the toilet with the abandoned keyboard. The men walked towards the red van and then I saw Martin’s brother, the man who had given me the note-filled wallet. The man in the blue jacket spoke to him. The other three formed a phalanx around them.
Buttoning my jacket against the breeze, I skirted the ambulance and walked behind the people outside the take-away, the sports-goods shop, the mini-market and the off-licence. And stopped. I let Hetherington and the traffic officer see me. I gestured up the hill, pointing at the traffic officer and indicating a turn about fifty metres away, that could provide a diversion for cars. Hetherington nodded and spoke to the uniform once more, who then ran up the hill, mouthing into his radio and gesturing to drivers to stop and turn off. Car horns began to blare on both ends of the mêlée, as a small bus pulled up behind our saloon. A transport company inspector and two other men, one of them a mechanic, got off the bus.
I walked to the Travellers, gathered outside the bank and stood in front of the man who gave me Martin’s wallet.
‘You got a bit of bad luck there. The fella on the bike coming at ye.’
There was a pause and a perceptible tightening of the group, even though no one seemed to move. The man in the blue jacket spoke.
‘Don’t mind him, Mick. Bloody cop.’
Mick. Now I had the name.
‘The wallet, Mick. Martin’s wallet, he got when he was twenty one, I gave the money to the Hospice. They were glad of it. You know, helping people dying.’
Mick said, ‘It’s alright, Vincent.’
I had another name. The man in the blue jacket was Vincent.
‘I could do nothing. I was coming down the hill, handy-like, slowing for the lights. I seen the bus pull out, then your man on the bike cem round flying. I swung in away from him and clipped the black Golf there. An aul’ tip, no more.’
And the black Golf bumped into the back of the delivery truck, so that both its front and rear ends were damaged. The streetside rear light of the truck was broken. The owner of the black Golf, a young woman, was seated on the step of the mini-market, crying. An older woman held a bottle of water to her lips.
‘There was no one in the Golf or the truck when they were hit. No one was hurt there,’ I said.
The car horns stopped blaring. More uniforms arrived. They began to move people along and tape off areas. An officer approached us. I showed her my badge.
‘Slevin. Serious Crime Team. Do what you can to clear the path. Thanks. Then please come back to me.’
She held my gaze for a moment, not sure if I was genuine. She might ask me to verify my ID. She might call me in. She might ask me to move along. She might mistake me for one of the Travellers. I put extra gravel in my voice.
‘Thank you, Constable McLaren,’ I said, reading her name badge.
She nodded, still unsure, then gathered the onlookers in front of the bank with a comprehensive sweep of her arms, then moved them around the corner and behind the police cordon.
‘If Vincent and the lads could move back – maybe one of them stay with you, Mick – then we could get cleared up and get on with it.’
‘Yer man on the bike, is he okay?’
‘The ambulance crew has him.’
‘Wasn’t me that hit him.’
‘I know. Look, you can see the way he fell. The way you ended up.’
One of the younger men was taking a video of the scene. I was about to ask him to stop when I realised he wasn’t alone. All around me people were using devices to take photographs and videos of vehicles, their orientation to one another and the damage done to them. A hum of voices rose, such as might be heard around a hive as it prepares to swarm.
‘You’ll have to make a statement, Mick. One of the Traffic cops’ll do it. There’ll be no bother.’
He looked at me. I read, ‘yes, there’ll be no bother, because I say there’ll be no bother’ in his eyes. He turned to Vincent and the others. I couldn’t hear what he said to them.
I turned to the scene on the street. Hetherington and a senior traffic officer I could only see from behind were talking to the transport inspector. The passengers were being led off the bus involved in the crash and brought onto the smaller bus. The driver, the inspector and the mechanic stood back on the pavement. The small bus reversed, then drove off, to complete the route. The stricken cyclist, now on a gurney, was wheeled onto the ambulance, which took off immediately.
The hum around me reached a peak and a man, the driver of the delivery truck, called out, ‘what the fuck are yeez going to do about this?’
The officer I’d spoken to clasped him by the arm and led him back towards the Chinese take-away, where she passed him to a colleague, who took out a notebook and began to take notes. The onlookers attention turned away from us and towards the delivery driver.
Mick finished talking. Vincent and two other Travellers climbed into the SUV and drove back up the hill. A uniform unhooked the tape and let them through. Constable McLaren came up to me and said,
‘Why are they leaving the scene?’
‘They have nothing to do with it. This man, Mick, was driving the red van. He’ll tell you what happened. How’s the cyclist?’
‘Busted up, but conscious. Lucky enough.’
‘The truck driver?’
‘Calmed down. Not a big deal for him. The car driver, her father is with her now. They only live round the corner. She dropped into the shop on her way up to town. She’ll be okay.’
