Oak and Stone

by Dave Duggan

  I reviewed the compilation of images in the restaurant. His last night. A lone man quietly eating, waiting-staff coming and going, brief words and gestures exchanged. Diners at other tables, varied: couples; family groups, with teenagers busy on tablets; two business men; a quartet of women, easy and comfortable together; occasionally another lone man nearby. Then, in one startling image, the dead man rose from his seat and carried the tall, wooden pepper mill across to another solitary’s table. They exchanged nods and words. When the dead man moved back to his own table I paused the projector and enhanced the image.

  The chants of the sufis rose, the finger drums sped up. I searched once more and found the living man on another night, eating at the same table. He didn’t speak to the dead man. Again I found him. I logged him four times in the space of three months before the dead man was found sprawled in a bloody mess across the penalty spot at the country end goal. Dates and times. Details. Did they exchange glances? Did they talk to each other?

  I took down the sheet, switched off the projector and viewed the images on my laptop. I deftly clipped all the images from La Toscana into their own file, then I viewed them in sequence, running them as a slide show. I tagged sections, focusing on the living man. Again I clipped and pasted until I had a set of head-shots of this living man. Again I focused and enhanced. I drank more coffee. The sufis sang. The ouds raced. The Venn diagrams spiralled on the wall, Catherine wheels spinning on a fence dressed with fireworks. The lists oscillated and reverberated feverishly in front of my eyes, so that a darkening formed at their centre, a darkening that shaped into the two eyes of The Morrigan, louring under her wrathful brow. The darkening then took flight, hovered above me. The Morrigan’s brow mantled me as she passed over me, dropping red spittle, rancid as a fruit bat’s, before sweeping out the open window, where she hovered in the snow that choked the air above the river. I walked to the window. The Morrigan dissolved into the snow, the dark becoming light. As she faded, she pointed a gun at me and repeated, in a hiss,

  ‘I am the shelter at your death.’

  A ghost beam crossed the snow fall then, before vanishing into the white-flaked air. A woman running away, then diving headlong into the water. I shrieked.

  ‘Ma!’

  I wiped my hand across my brow. The fruit-bat spittle was my own sweat. I sat at the laptop. The head-shots of the living man beamed from the screen. The low chanting of the word ‘Allah’, the racing ney flute, the thrumming oud and the resonant tombak drum crescendoed around me. I stared. I saw. I stood. I raised one arm above my head, palm to the ceiling. I raised my other arm, palm to the windows, the snow and the river, fending off The Morrigan. I breathed with the sufis’ chant. I stepped into the middle of the room. I know this living man. I saw the overlap and the crossing. I spun slowly, slowly. The music rose. I whirled slowly, in a trance of snow-blind seeing. I danced with the dervishes. I know this man.

  I was hesitant to call what I had ‘a lead’. I had no idea what I would learn when I spoke to the man who shared the pepper mill at La Toscana with Todd Anderson. I felt I was reaching for something just within my grasp, but so far beyond it, that my wrist strained and my fingers popped their joints, as I twisted myself to clasp a future, free of this case.

  And everyday, there was more work to do, by following Hammy’s diktat that I do, do and do. I got lucky with the Laotian Bride Killing. Colleagues joked that I landed a classic Goss and Doherty closer and that those two would hate me even more now. I wasn’t sure that was possible.

  I checked the summary note on the front of the Laotian Bride Killing file.

  The victim, Eric Whittle, was divorced by his first wife after three years of marriage. She sold him her portion of their house and moved to England. He was 35 years of age. He went to Laos, where he married a local woman, Kalam Savane, from the city of Vientiane. She was 14 years younger than Eric Whittle when they set up home in his house off the Culmore Road. She spoke no English at that time. They were married four years, when Kalama Savane killed Eric Whittle by stabbing him in the chest.

  There was a pile of crime scene photographs, but more important to the case were the images taken by one of the uniformed officers who responded to a neighbour’s call. Three calls from different neighbours were logged, all voicing concern at the noise coming from Eric Whittle’s house, tucked into the apex of a small crescent of dormer bungalows, just on the northern side of the border.

  The key image taken by one of the responding constables shows Kalama Savane standing in front of a cooker in the kitchen. She is wearing a thinly-strapped night-dress and pink fluffy slippers. There is a livid red weal across her left temple, shaped like the letter C in reverse. There is bruising on her right shoulder. Her eyes beam terror and anger straight into the lens of the officer’s phone. In her right hand, Kalama Savane is holding a seven inch fish fillet knife, lacquered blood-red beyond the hilt. Her left palm is across her mouth. The colour quality of the images is poor, but the vivid red on her hands and on the knife blazed the truth of what happened. Another image elaborated the story: Eric Whittle, crumpled on his hunkers beside the worktop island, a blackened steel wok inches away from his right hand.

  It was one of the easiest cases I had ever worked on, yet I drew no pleasure from it. I felt cheated. Why couldn’t I have things this easy with the Todd Anderson case? Where was the murder weapon there? Where was the killer? Here, I gathered the victim, the murderer and the weapon in a deftly-staged tableau that left no doubt as to the tragic story of the death of Eric Whittle, even without Kalama Savane’s plaintive murmur.

  ‘I kill him. I kill him. I say “no more”. He beat me hard. I say “no more”.’

  I did a final rewrite and edit of the Case Summary and put it together with materials I had gathered. Sharon would collate the medical, forensic, personal and immigration papers already to hand.

  I had solved and closed another case, but that didn’t settle me. The night-work on the Todd Anderson case left me exhausted. Even with something I could act upon, I grew more unnerved.

  TWENTY

  Despite having a lead on the Todd Anderson case and closing the Eric Whittle killing, I had no sense of a thaw. On a slow mid-morning, with the office full of surly, report-writing detectives, a miserly light came through the windows. Outside, grey clouds clustered and heaved, threatening more snow.

  DI Omar Hamilton came out of his office and marched directly over to me.

  ‘Where’s Hetherington?’

  ‘He’s … I’m not sure …’

  ‘Get him out of the bog. I saw him here five minutes ago. You and him are on. I’ll follow with Karolina and Josh, when he turns up. She says he’s away having his legs waxed. I’m not sure. Maybe Polish lads do that, but a muck savage like Josh, from the glen behind Broughshane, I doubt it. You heard me, Slevin. You’re on. Now.’

  ‘Yes, sir. On where? On what, sir?’

  ‘The fire at Mobuoy Road. You must watch the news, even if you’re not across police business.’

  ‘I thought the fire team caught that.’

  ‘Get up, Slevin. Get moving. ‘Course they did. It’s a fire. And the Gang Unit are on it too. Now they’ve found three corpses, they get to call us in, the real cops.’

  ‘Three dead, sir?’

  ‘No need for the echo, Slevin. Dead, with their hands tied behind their backs. Get Hetherington. Get out there. First response. And don’t make any moves ‘til I get there. You’re boots on the ground, that’s all. My boots. Move, for fuck sake.’

  I got up and watched my boss trot back to his office. There’s nothing he likes more than a spat over territory. He’s a sparrow in a flight of sparrows. And that makes tits of the rest of us.

  I walked down the corridor, past Sharon, who was in conference with a boss from Administration and Management Support.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘I’ll be late with the Kalama Sa
vane papers. Sorry. We’re on the Mobuoy Road fire. Three murdered.’

  I walked on and thumped on the door of the Gents.

  ‘Button up, Kenneth. We’re on. You’re driving.’

  We took a saloon from the pool. Hetherington needed no prompting to fire the lights and sound. I scanned my phone for updates from Hammy or from anyone else. Nothing but old news. The archipelago of dumps, landfills, toxic lakes and despoiled marshes on either side of the mouth of the river Faughan, where it enters the river Foyle, is a rancid blight surrounding the city’s industrial hinterland. Efforts to cap, detoxify, divert, reclaim and recycle the material in the sodden dumps rise and fall like the tides that flush about them. Methane and other gases spew into the air and ignite by chance, by lightning and by human hands.

  Me and Hetherington were pell-mell for a blaze in an old aircraft hangar that housed thousands of sacks of domestic waste that had bypassed the recycling process and ended up piled high in fetid bales that tottered and keeled over, like drunken pensioners. I looked at newly-arrived pictures of the fire-scene. The stacked bales reminded me of the take-away food containers in the corner of my apartment, stacked as my own personal megalopolis; Todd Anderson Towers.

  ‘Who’s in charge out there?’ asked Hetherington.

  ‘Hammy.’

  ‘Hammy? He’s not even out there.’

  ‘That’s why he’s sending us. We’re his John the Baptists.’

  ‘For fuck sake, we haven’t a clue …’

  ‘Never said a truer work, Kenneth. Never said a truer word.’

  Hetherington drove in silence, as the rising arc of the Foyle Bridge took us to its summit. Seaward, we could see venomous plumes of black smoke, their grey-purple fringes flaring with the most noxious gases. I turned my head and looked upriver, glad of the serene cityscape, smiling to note that the snow had ceased and that I had some respite from The Morrigan’s accusing eyes.

  Hetherington weaved in and out of the traffic as we descended the bridge to the east bank roundabout. He’d seen the plumes of smoke too.

  ‘Looks like half the countryside has gone up,’ he said.

  ‘There’s nothing new on the system. The fire, some photos, that’s it. Hammy says they found three bodies, with hands tied behind their backs.’

  ‘Any IDs on them?’

  When we saw them we knew there would be no immediate identifications made of the bodies. Their charred remains lay desiccated as bog sculptures in parallel lines, hardly wider than three stripes on a football boot, on portable biers provided by the ambulance service. We were in a temporary tent five hundred metres upwind of the fire site, surrounded by medical and forensics vehicles. I didn’t hear Karen Lavery come up behind us.

  ‘The dogs found them, about an hour ago,’ she said.

  ‘The dogs?’

  ‘Yes, Detective Slevin. The Fire Team bring in the hydrocarbon dogs as standard procedure in cases like this. WART handles them.’

  No one laughed or even smiled.

  ‘What do we know?’ asked Hetherington.

  ‘Let’s wait until Hammy gets here for the initial forensics. Save Karen repeating herself, because he’ll want it from the horse’s mouth,’ I said.

  ‘Thanks for your consideration, Detective Slevin,’ said Karen, grinning coldly. ‘The bodies were retrieved at the north east end of the building. A gas pocket. Maybe cylinders, maybe methane rising from the rotting waste, blew up and took the wall away, sucking in air. The dogs went crazy when things settled. You’ll see some of my crew working their way through the debris. They’re wearing fireproof kit and breathing apparatus. You can approach, but not too close. And that’s all you’re going to get from this thoroughbred for now.’

  She left the tent and Hetherington thumped his right forefinger into my chest.

  ‘You’re doing it again, Slevin. You’re cutting across me. Every time I open my mouth, you jump in and push me back. Like you’re afraid of what I might say.’

  ‘Kenneth, untwist the old knickers there, as our boss might say.’

  ‘You’re a bullshitter, Slevin and I’ve had enough of your bullshit to do me a lifetime.’

  ‘If you can’t see how I’m trying to protect you from wading into something that will drown you, then God help you. Hammy said not to do anything until he landed and that’s what we’re here to do. Nothing.’

  ‘Yeh, nothing. Nothing that will incriminate you.’

  ‘For fuck sake, Hetherington, you’re blaming me for this!’

  The charcoal stick figures lay at our feet. I noticed for the first time that the ligatures behind their backs were not melted plastic or leather. Could they be metal?

  A technician, in white scene-of-crime dungarees, came into the tent and reversed quickly when she heard our raised voices.

  ‘Beresford was right. He said I shouldn’t trust you,’ said Hetherington.

  ‘Worst thing you ever did that, going to Manchester. What did you come back with, only doubt and speculation, none of which helped us with the Anderson case? Your mate, Beresford, is filling your head with fog. You need to blow Beresford out of your nose and clear your brains.’

  ‘I need to get rid of you. And the only way I’ll do that is to get rid of the Anderson case. And that means getting the gun.’

  ‘You’re the hair man, remember? That’s what Hammy said.’

  ‘The hair’ll come good, don’t you worry. Have you actually done anything about the gun? Beresford asked me and I said I hadn’t a clue. He said that only goes to show.’

  I didn’t tell him about not returning the call from the Dublin Forensics’ lab.

  ‘Only goes to show what exactly?’

  ‘That you can’t be trusted. You’re not fully in. You’re hanging on the edge, looking backwards.’

  Hetherington’s Beresford was my Dalzell, though Hetherington didn’t know that. It suited me to keep it that way.

  ‘So, your mate Beresford, what, you message him? Skype? Facetime him everyday? How’d you keep up?’

  ‘I saw him last week.’

  ‘You were in Manchester?’

  ‘Here. He has other irons in the fire apart from the Anderson case.’

  That stunned me. I didn’t want that man anywhere in my vicinity, no matter what he called himself, Beresford or Dalzell. But I did need to know what he was pumping at Hetherington. And what he was sucking out of him.

  ‘I thought you were going to introduce me to him next time he was around.’

  ‘He asks about you. And I’d say he knows more about you than he lets on. He says I should watch my back around you. I tell him I always do.’

  ‘And I suppose you tell him all about our cases, all about our work, our jolly badinage and everything we get up to and everything we’ve got, though it’s precious little enough when it comes to Todd Anderson.’

  ‘He knows IS are investigating you. He knows you’re the CC’s pet. He knows you’re not to be trusted.’

  ‘And he is? Have you any idea who he is and who he works for?’

  ‘He works for us, which is more than I can say about you.’

  ‘Careful, Kenneth. You’re beginning to sound like one of those conspiracy nuts we were warned about at the Training College. Or maybe you missed that module. So he works for IS then, your mate Be …’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘And he doesn’t work for the CC?’

  ‘Look, Slevin, we’re a big operation. Somehow, this Anderson case, there’s more to it than just a bullet in the head and a dead man. And Beresford is helping me get it sorted.’

  ‘Or he’ll help you get a bullet in the head too.’

  ‘No, Slevin. That’s your style. Bullets in the head and the guns that fire them. Or is it just the one gun?’

  ‘Beresford has put a bullet in your head already, the fucker
, one that addled what little brain you have.’

  ‘No need to worry about me, Slevin. I’ll be alright. I can stand my ground. No one is after me. There’s legions on your tail.’

  Loud voices and footsteps sounded near the tent and the light changed around us as shadows massed outside. Hammy’s voice rose loudest in the hubbub.

  ‘I sent two go-boys ahead of me. Where the fuck are they? We need to get a grip here.’

  I saw Hetherington’s eyes flicker towards the moving shadows as he tottered on his toes. The footsteps outside headed in the direction of the burning shed.

  ‘Go on, Kenneth,’ I said. ‘Stand your ground and trot after the boss. Don’t forget to tell him all about your mate, Beresford. See how our superior rates your judgement in making time to pass information to an uncredited nosey-parker.’

  Hetherington moved past me to an exit flap, leaving just as my former Training College mate, Tony White, entered. He was dressed in crime-scene blue overalls, with his unit designation WART, printed on the back. I called as Hetherington’s shadow passed within a few feet of me, outside the tent.

  ‘Ask your mate Beresford if he wants to meet me for a sticky jam doughnut. I heard he likes them.’

  Tony laughed and said, ‘You getting your order in for break-time, Slevin? I saw your leader process by. How come you’re not running after him?’

  ‘There’s a better class of corpse to commune with in here, Tony.’

  We both looked down at the three charred remains, no more than seared strips of charcoal and beef biltong.

  ‘Why is WART here, Tony?’

  ‘We do the dog-handling for the arson crowd. Bit of a side-show from the main job. The hydrocarbon dogs are specialist and we all overlap in Lisburn, so my crew went in today and found these souls. First row of the day is heating up over there, about who ordered the bodies to be moved. Thankfully it was the Chief Fire Officer on site, and not one of us cops. He judged that something of their bodies had to be preserved and that was more important than preserving the crime scene.’