Oak and Stone

by Dave Duggan

  ‘One last one,’ I said. ‘The passengers leaving the train at 22.23.’

  I watched it again and still found no one of interest. Whoever dropped the folder could have gotten off anywhere.

  ‘Now run all the clips from my device. On that screen there.’

  I knew I was in danger of wearing out Jake’s cooperation, but I wanted to see them again to confirm three things. One: it was Dalzell impersonating me. Two: I couldn’t make out the number plate on the car or be sure of the make. Three: I couldn’t tell if Dalzell was alone or if he had a driver. Maybe our technical department could help, but I wasn’t sure I would show these clips to anyone.

  ‘Thanks, Jake. You have my number. Use it if the Man in the Hat ever comes back to you. I know you’re confused, but let me reassure you. I know him, so the file is not “Lost Property” anymore. We know where it is.’

  I retrieved my phone and retraced my route along the river bank, beside the rail-line, over the Peace Bridge, still illuminated like a fairground, and along the riverside walk to my apartment building, encountering walkers, singly or in twos or threes, and confirming that no one was following me.

  The halo of magnolia light across my papers greeted me wanly. I turned on the heating and set it at 30 degrees. I filled the kettle and set it to boil. I took a tall latté glass and, using a long spoon, I coated an inch of the bottom with a honey made by bees who only visit jasmine plants. Then I took a bottle of Bushmills Black Label, glugged a mouthful and poured another glug on top of the honey, stirring until the kettle spouted steam and clicked off. When I topped out the glass with boiling water, I stirred steaming gold, aromatic warmth. A summer illusion.

  I turned off the light and sat in darkness at my desk. I closed the window and felt the room heat up. My reflection, layered into the glass and the near distance beyond, occluded the road, the path, the railings, the river and the oaks on the opposite bank.

  The eyes in my reflection flared and The Morrigan, great goddess of war and doom, stared back at me, from ice-white eyes set deep in bloody sockets, in a stare as cold as the night outside. I drank the hot whiskey as quickly as I could, welcoming the heat-burn in my mouth and the spirit-burn in my gullet.

  It was no surprise to me that my phone was tapped. I understood it as part of my job and my particular circumstances. I was perplexed to discover Dalzell had access to my phone calls. I knew it was Dalzell, just as I know I am Eddie Slevin.

  It was a surprise that The Morrigan would appear to me. I lifted Jung’s Symbols of Transformation. I read aimlessly and without profit. I closed the book, finished the whiskey and went to bed, flicking the heating off as I passed. I was warm again, my brain over-heating. Might I sleep? And dream? About The Morrigan, the dead footballer, Dalzell and my mother dancing around a funeral pyre, flames and smoke rising through cold, inky air?

  TEN

  I hardly slept, so when Goss approached my desk the next morning I was in a daze, the same set of personal expense claims in front of me since I’d come in at half seven.

  ‘You and me, Slevin. We’re on.’

  He moved fast for a man of his age and bulk. The office clowns had it that the retirement age kept being pushed back because we needed Goss. He was the oldest and the best detective in the unit. And he knew it. He was a status-freak, constantly tending to the pecking order, keeping people in place with spiked barbs, objections, huffs and exclusions. Hammy flared every now and then and wanted rid of him. Until he looked down the ‘cases closed’ list, which Goss topped every quarter, and he regained his cool. The fact that my name appeared in second place on that list irked Goss and I wondered if I might find out why, as I juggled myself into my holster, keys, phone and jacket.

  Sharon, the unit administrator, stopped me with a raised finger, as I passed her desk.

  ‘Claim forms, Detective Sergeant Slevin. Overdue again. You said you’d get them to me this morning. Don’t make me come after you.’

  She was grinning, her lean, tanned cheeks framing teeth as white as a recently bathed polar bear. I gave her a small salute and trotted to the stairs.

  Goss had a saloon revving in the yard and I climbed in beside him.

  ‘It’s not far. We could walk, but we might need this after. One dead. Street drinker. One of his mates did it.’

  Younger officers, such as Hetherington, claim that the reason Goss tops the ‘cases closed’ list is a combination of bullying, dodging and status-management that ensures he only lands handy ones. He seemed to have pulled it off again.

  ‘How are you surviving without your boy? I’m glad to see the back of Doherty for a while meself. Gives me a break from his chatter. That’ll no be a problem with you, Slevin. You’re as tight-lipped as all the guilty. Do you think they’re sharing a room, your boy and Doherty?’

  We were hardly out of the yard and he’d managed to tell me to keep quiet, that I was a criminal and to suggest that, as the squad room view was that Hetherington was gay, he would seduce Goss’ partner, the voluble Detective Sergeant Doherty. Hammy had sent them both to Manchester to see what they could stir on the Anderson case.

  ‘Hammy only sent Doherty to hold your boy’s hand. I hope that’s all he’s holding. What the fuck use is Doherty in Manchester? The English’ll never understand a word he says. He doesn’t speak their language. You cold at night without your boy?’

  Goss was a poisonous plant I needed to nip at bud level.

  ‘A couple of things before we properly start. I don’t sleep with Hetherington. Who he sleeps with is his business. Doherty speaks perfectly good English and is an experienced detective. Now where the fuck are we going?’

  ‘Ah, time of the month, is it? Victoria Market car-park. Behind the electricity sub-station.’

  ‘Pull in.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Pull in. Here.’

  We were almost at the lights at the Clarendon Street junction. They went green as Goss stopped. The driver behind us blared his horn. I got out.

  ‘You were right about one thing. We could walk.’

  I slammed the door on Goss’s ‘what the fu...’.

  I turned left and strode towards the river, crossing the road at a run. I made it to the river-side path and clasped my hands to the metal railings. The water below me churned and beckoned. I didn’t roar, though I could have. Two young mothers, pushing buggies, passed behind me. I didn’t want to wake the babies.

  It was warmer than overnight, the kind of weather that makes us think summer will go Indian in September. I rubbed my palms together, lit a cigarette and began to walk, admiring the fine figures and brisk pace of the buggy pushers. I grinned thinking that maybe I should get one. A fine figure? A buggy? A baby? A complete set? My grin widened and the women smiled as I passed them and gave them a small, but gallant salute.

  When I reached the carpark, crime scene officers were already active and Goss stood, fists clenched by his sides, in front of the electricity sub-station.

  I showed my ID, ducked under the police tape and headed directly for him.

  ‘One dead, you tell me.’

  He turned on his heel and I followed him behind the squat concrete building. The smell of stale liquids – wine, beer, urine, sweat, blood – came at me like a malodorous slurry. Two crime scene officers, one taking photographs, occupied themselves around a prone body. I saw a middle-aged man, with a good build, lying in the foetal position. Were it not for the jagged wound over his left eye and the ooze of sticky blood under his head, you might think he was asleep. It’s always hard to guess the age of a street drinker, but I put the victim no older than forty. I took a couple of steps backwards to get a wider view of the scene. When Goss turned to speak to me, he was surprised I was not beside him.

  ‘Forensics reckon … Get the fuck over here, Slevin.’

  ‘Thanks, officer. You’re grand there. Just speak up.’<
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  If the two crime scene officers noticed anything, they didn’t say. The one with the camera was nearest to me. He broke the grim silence congealing round me and Goss.

  ‘I heard forensics – she’s just gone, ‘cos she got another call – I heard her saying he was here all night.’

  ‘Shut up and take your pictures. If you did your own job instead of trying to do mine, we’d all be better off.’

  This was getting out of hand. If Goss was shouting at crime scene officers, I had gotten far enough under his skin. I looked at the body again. Any one of the bottles on the ground could be the murder weapon.

  ‘I’ll keep in touch with forensics, keep them focused. See what these bottles turn up,’ I said.

  The technician at the victim’s side, checking for clues around the wound and on the ground, looked up at me.

  ‘Don’t worry about us, Eddie,’ he said. ‘We’re fully focused.’

  Then he stood up and continued.

  ‘It’s you two schoolgirls who need to stay in the game. There’s a dead man here. And whoever killed him is away. So let’s start again and see if we can do something for this unfortunate soul.’

  Goss walked over and spoke, less raucous now.

  ‘Do what you have to. Full cover. Bag all the bottles. Photograph the shards. Dust everything. Any ID on him? Envelopes with an address?’

  ‘Nothing. We don’t know who he is.’

  ‘We’ll check the hostels, the shelters and the flop-houses. Some of his drinking buddies will sweat it after a couple of days,’ Goss continued.

  ‘Do you want me to follow up on that?’ I asked.

  Goss took two steps, almost lunging, and was in my face when he spat his reply.

  ‘I want you to fuck off and stay well out of my fucking way.’

  Did he really bump my shoulder as he passed me? Yes, he did. And he barrelled, shoulders hunched forward, back to the car and drove off.

  ‘You’ll be walking, Eddie,’ the technician said.

  ‘Suits me. Tell me what you’ve got, Mervyn.’

  The badge on his uniform named him Mervyn Campbell. I didn’t recognise him, but he knew me.

  ‘A member of the public made the first call, apparently. The scene was secure by the time us two got to work. Uniforms were already here. Karen Lavery. She did her bit and we got on with ours. She reckons it’s a single blow to the head, probably with one of the bottles there. A bludgeon job.’

  ‘Speculate, Mervyn.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve been at a hundred scenes.’

  He paused to wonder if he could speculate. His scientific training made such a notion alien to him, so I nudged him.

  ‘You know more than me and Goss most of the time. What do you think happened here, Mervyn?’

  ‘There’s no mystery. A crowd of drinkers, late in the day. They start rowing and fighting. Gets out of hand. Someone had something more stimulating than cheap wine, fell out with this poor soul and got lucky – or unlucky – with his first blow. Everyone scattered. Half of them won’t remember what happened.’

  I didn’t argue with him. What would be the point in coming back to him with my view that the whole thing is a mystery and that only by revealing it piece by piece, moment by moment, death by death could I hope to stay in the game?

  I gave it one more try, in the dingy space behind the electricity sub-station, with the dead man curled like a dust mite, drowned in piss and beer.

  ‘What do you make of his clothes, Mervyn? The suit is new, the shirt too. The shoes look good too. It looks to me like …’

  ‘An outfit. Yes. Second-hand, but new, if that makes sense.’

  ‘Perfect, Mervyn. Perfect. Can we have a close-up of the tie please? That crest there, below the knot.’

  The technician with the camera stepped in and took the shot, then showed it to me on his camera. He was more comfortable speculating than Mervyn was.

  ‘They do that, you know. At the hostels. They get donations of clothes and kit them out. Might be his birthday or something.’

  The outfit seemed more gift than charity. The gold on the tie set off the dark blue of the suit. The socks, shirt and tie, all a lighter blue, worked well together. I saw a country wedding, in a fine hotel, with ruddy-faced men wondering when they could unbutton their waistcoats and shirt buttons, alongside firm-flanked women, resting at angles to one another, their bird-plume hair fascinators dancing above their heads.

  ‘Show me the tie. There.’

  I looked closely at the back of the camera. He’d taken four shots, up and down the length of it. The cloth was sunshine-gold and the symbol of an arm holding a red crucifix ran up and down in beaming rows.

  ‘It’s a Donegal county tie. A GAA one. Yeh, that’s the county colours there,’ I said.

  I stepped nearer to the corpse and bent down. The smell came at me like a puddle of urine pushed by a squelchy mop along a corridor. Flies buzzed and took note of my nearness, then regrouped and prepared to land.

  The man was freshly shaved, lightly tanned and pimple-free. By looking away from the wound site, I could see the remains of a handsome face, with the classic red traceries of a drinker. A globule of blood rested in the hollow of his neck and discoloured the top of his light blue shirt, just where the knot of his tie twisted towards his left shoulder. Gold cloth. Red crucifix held by a short right arm. It was the Donegal county crest.

  ‘Did Donegal win the All-Ireland this year?’ I asked.

  ‘They beat Dublin in the semis. They’re up against Kerry in the final.’

  The photographer had more than speculation. He had information. I stood up and faced him.

  ‘When was that? The semi-final?’

  ‘I don’t know. ‘Bout a week ago. Yeh. Maybe a fortnight.’

  ‘Send that photo, the tie, to Goss. I’ll message him. Our friends across the border might know something. They might have a “missing person” report.’

  ‘You’re speculating now, Eddie,’ said Mervyn. ‘Goss won’t like you wasting his time.’

  ‘It’s worse than you think, Mervyn. Me and Goss got off on the wrong foot this morning. I gave it another go, until I confirmed that Goss only has one foot. The wrong one.’

  The photographer said ‘Goss has a false leg?’

  ‘No, Frank,’ said Mervyn. ‘The Detective Sergeant thinks he’s a bollocks.’

  ‘That all?’

  Frank, the photographer, sent the tie images to Goss, while I composed and sent him a message.

  ‘Victim possible Donegal connection. See tie image. Recommend advise PS (South). Missing person?’

  Then I walked round the sub-station and into the car-park. Might the air be fresher? The weather-dampened sandstone of the City Hotel opposite glowed dully in the morning light. Trucks approached the roundabout and the lights, brakes oozing air to slow them, then they grunted forward in the daily round of traffic’s endless musical chairs. No one gets off. No one ever gets to lie down. Except the dead man. I thought about a cigarette, just as Mervyn came up beside me.

  ‘You don’t remember, but we had a drink at a Christmas do in the hotel there. Last year. Old Danny Gormley thought it would be a good idea to bring technical officers and detectives together. Everyone was shocked to see you there. You didn’t do ‘social’, was the story. And you know, what with your …’

  ‘Background and all that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Karen Lavery brought me. She thought it would do me good.’

  ‘Ah. She’s a …’

  ‘Terrific forensics’ officer.’

  ‘That too. Remember when you solved the one with the shooter in the tree. You had us climbing and searching. We wouldn’t have done it only Karen said we should. We thought you were thick. Then we found the cigarette butt and got a lead.’

/>   ‘And a conviction.’

  ‘She always says, ‘Follow the evidence, Mervyn. Gather it and don’t ever be surprised where it takes you.”’

  ‘Sounds the job to me. Do you want a cigarette?’

  ‘Naw. I bought you a pint that night …’

  ‘Good man, Mervyn,’ I said, as I lit up.

  ‘… and I asked you a question you didn’t answer. I’m going to ask you again. This time no pints in front of us. Why the fuck did you come into the cops?’

  ‘You asked me that before?’

  ‘Yeh, over there, in the hotel bar. That technicians’ Christmas drinks do.’

  I remembered the heaving crowd at the bar. The sense that I was off my head to be there, me the raw recruit, the political ex-prisoner, the sour crab in the apple barrel, a pint in my hand and a gentle sway about me, because it wasn’t the first pint, with another one arriving from Mervyn, bearing a question in tow.

  ‘Why the fuck did you come into the cops?’

  Curiosity, yes. Disquiet, definitely. Distrust, certainly. Disbelief, no doubt. Disdain, perhaps.

  I don’t remember what I said to him. In all likelihood something very unsatisfactory, because he was asking me again, on a late August morning, as we stood apart from our work for a brief moment, the traffic trundling through the roundabout, the gulls beginning to gather and the dead man awaiting pick-up and despatch.

  ‘I suppose I just wanted the answers. To the mystery, like. I mean, I wanted to find out. And it sort of fitted with what I was doing before.’

  ‘They put you up to it.’

  ‘They? Who?’

  ‘The leadership.’

  ‘No. No one put me up to it, Mervyn.’

  ‘So all that running around, causing mayhem, you just reckoned that set you up to be a cop?’

  ‘Don’t exaggerate, Mervyn. Yes, I was running around, near enough from when I was fourteen. Feral kids? I was one of the originals. An anti-social pain of the highest order.’

  ‘It was a short enough journey from corner boy to guerrilla, then.’

  ‘Easy now, Mervyn. Opinions vary. One man’s guerrilla is another man’s ape and all that. I had a couple of near misses, survived the streets, grew up, politics moved on around us. I saw dead people, mates and others. I got jail, but I always fancied camping. So I got inside the tent, when they opened the flaps again.’