The Rising The Rising (Inspector Devlin #4)

by Brian McGilloway

  I was sitting at the window in the back room with a mug of tea, looking at the cherry tree at the top of our garden, its bare branches springing in the light wind. Debbie came in and stood beside me.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Penny has something to ask you.’ She waited a beat for me to speak, then continued. ‘She wants to go to a disco on Wednesday night.’

  ‘She’s eleven,’ I said.

  ‘The school is running it. She wants to go with all her friends.’

  ‘I think she’s too young.’

  ‘There’ll be a boy at it. Someone she likes.’ Debbie smiled as she told me this.

  I thought I felt something crack inside me. My stomach twisted so forcefully I had difficulty in swallowing my mouthful of tea.

  ‘She’s too young for boys,’ I stated.

  ‘Wise up, Ben,’ Debbie said, laughing lightly. ‘She’s eleven. I’d be more worried if she didn’t like boys.’ It was a mother’s logic. ‘I told her she’d need to ask you.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ I said, aware of the fact that, having enlisted her mother’s support, Penny had ensured that the decision had already been made. ‘I’m going out for a drive,’ I added, ignoring Debbie’s look of concern.

  I pulled up to the laneway that led to Martin Kielty’s house. A number of squad cars were parked haphazardly along the roadside and a single fire tender still stood at the end of the lane, though the fire was now extinguished.

  An ancient oak demarcated the line between Kielty’s property and Quigley’s and it was here that I laid the two bunches of flowers I had bought. I stood in the silence, conscious of the sharp scent of burnt wood carried downwind from the barn, and whispered a prayer for the two men, and asked their forgiveness for my having failed to save them.

  ‘You should be home.’

  I looked up and saw Harry Patterson at the entrance to the old barn, his bulk exaggerated by the blue paper Forensics suit he wore.

  ‘I couldn’t settle,’ I explained as I approached. Patterson and I had got off to a bad start when he took over as Super. Over the course of the year since, we had established an uneasy sort of truce, led in part by his decision to move to Letterkenny and leave me in Lifford with responsibility for an almost defunct station.

  ‘We’ve only got in this morning. There were traces of accelerant all over the barn. The bloody thing kept re-igniting.’

  He glanced past me to where the flowers I’d laid rested at the foot of the oak.

  ‘You heard about the old man, then,’ he said.

  ‘I spoke to his wife. I couldn’t ask about Kielty though.’

  Patterson waved aside my comment. ‘I spoke to her myself after I saw you. She was the one who called the fire in; said they were woken by loud bangs just before three. She confirmed seeing Kielty here earlier that night. She also saw an old blue car outside the cottage around 8.45. Old-style Volkswagen Beetle with an orange door, apparently.’

  I nodded. ‘That should be easily traced.’

  Patterson nodded. ‘We also got reports of a white builder’s van here around 2 a.m. Milkman saw it – tinted foil on the windows of the rear doors, peeled off on one side. We have bulletins out on both.’

  I nodded absent-mindedly and turned towards the barn.

  ‘Is he still in there?’

  The charcoaled remains of the roof rafters crunched under our feet, and the dry air, coupled with the unmistakable stench of burnt flesh, made remaining inside the barn difficult.

  The body lay to the rear of the building, in the corner. The medical examiner, John Mulronney, was squatting beside it as we approached. The upper torso and face were severely damaged by the fire, the features impossible to distinguish. The lower part of the body, though scorched, had not been burned quite as deeply. The clothes had been burnt away and the charred shreds scattered beneath the body. It was evident that, regardless of identity, the victim was male.

  Mulronney used a long thin piece of wood, more commonly used for throat examinations, to angle the head. He did not acknowledge our presence until he had finished.

  ‘He’s dead, obviously,’ he said, standing up. ‘It appears he was stabbed in the chest. There’s a deep wound near the sternum. Might have killed him before the fire – might not. Hard to tell.’

  ‘Any gunshot wounds?’ Patterson asked.

  Mulronney shook his head.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘As much as I can be,’ he said, a little irritably. ‘Why?’

  ‘The old couple heard shots,’ I explained. ‘That’s what brought me here in the first place.’

  ‘No gunshot wounds that I can see,’ he repeated. ‘Unless the state pathologist finds them.’

  ‘Anything else?’ I asked, as we started to move back out into the freshening air.

  ‘Nothing obvious; the state pathologist will check his lungs to see whether or not he was alive when the fire started.’

  We stepped away from the ruins and I took out my cigarettes and passed one to Mulronney. One of the fire crew, still sifting through the debris, shouted to us.

  ‘Put those bloody things away. We’ve just got this out.’

  I raised my hand in apology and pocketed the packet. It had been an impulsive act anyway, for I certainly didn’t feel like smoking.

  ‘You’ll need dental records to confirm ID,’ Mulronney said, placing his unlit cigarette in his breast pocket and making his way back to his car.

  To our right, outside the door of Kielty’s cottage, sat a Kawasaki motorcycle, the helmet hanging from the handlebar. As we approached, Patterson gestured once more to the flowers I had brought.

  ‘You’d have saved your money if you’d seen inside,’ he said.

  The hallway of the cottage was lit by an arc light, and trapped smoke from the barn still swirled through the lamp’s illumination.

  I followed Patterson through a doorway to our left, into a room I took to be the living room. Against the right-hand wall sat an old threadbare sofa. A stained hearthrug took up most of the middle of the floor, and on it stood a small coffee table. On its surface lay scattered a mixture of syringes and spoons and the stub of a candle, squatting amidst thick veins of hardened wax. A number of empty beer cans, bent double, lay on the floor. One had been cut open; the metal of its base scorched into a rainbow pattern through frequent heating. Also on the floor lay a mobile phone, its screen and casing cracked. A group of Forensics officers had marked each of these objects and a photographer was moving around taking shots.

  I went into the next room, a bedroom. The wall was papered in a pattern of large pink roses, the boarded-up window framed by tattered pink satin curtains. The only furniture in the room consisted of a stained mattress against one wall and a single shelf running across the centre of the opposite wall. On the shelf lay an empty cigarette packet and several broken filters. Beside that was the empty foil wrapping of a condom. As I moved around the room, I could feel the resistance as my feet pulled against the stickiness of the carpet.

  The back room was a small kitchen. An assortment of crockery was piled up in one of the cupboards. The worktops were empty, save for a block of knives, the uppermost one absent. On the floor by the sink, arranged in order, were several empty vodka bottles and a black bin bag, spilling beer cans onto the floor. The room stank of stale water and the sweet yeasty smell of beer.

  ‘Look at the state of this place,’ Patterson said, surveying the room with disgust. ‘Imagine thinking your kid was living here, sticking some filthy skag needle in their arm.’

  I glanced around him, grateful that I was unable to imagine my own children in such a place.

  ‘Have we any next of kin for Kielty yet?’ I asked.

  ‘Your pal, Hendry, is meant to be working on it,’ he said. ‘I’m surprised he hasn’t been in touch – he was asking about you earlier.’

  I patted my pockets and realized I had left my phone in the car. Sure enough, when I went out to retrieve it,
Hendry had left a message for me. He had located Kielty’s girlfriend, in Plumbridge.

  Chapter Four

  I met Jim Hendry and a young female officer, whom he introduced as WPC Tara Carson, just over the border. He had offered to take me to Plumbridge, a small village a few miles out of Strabane. Patterson had initially been reluctant for me to go. Finally he relented, sensing that I felt I should be the one to see Kielty’s partner, having been witness to his death. Before leaving, I contacted Burgess in the station and asked him to send one of our uniforms, Paul Black, to come to the barn to assist the Scene of Crime team.

  On the way to Plumbridge, Hendry, having asked in his own gruff way about the fire and my injury, filled me in on all he had learned about Kielty.

  ‘Drugs Squad know him fairly well. He’s a low-grade dealer. Or he was. Word is he was trying to make a name for himself. Operated mostly over here until the paramilitaries warned him off. He’s done time twice – first for aggravated assault when he was eighteen, then for burglary when he was twenty-two. He broke into an old woman’s house outside Donemana. Threatened her with a syringe full of his own blood. Took over four hundred pounds she had in her mattress. The woman was so terrified she wouldn’t leave the house again. She died from heart failure a few months after, though they could never link it to Kielty’s break-in. He’s stayed out of trouble since then.’

  ‘Until now,’ I said.

  Kielty’s girlfriend’s house was at the end of a row of terraced houses. A lone hydrangea bush, its spiky branches bare of leaves, sat in the centre of the small front lawn, the thin skin of the petals translucent in the weak sunlight.

  From inside the house I could hear the raised voices of an American daytime chat show. The front door was white PVC with two narrow panels of frosted glass, through which we could see someone moving about. Hendry rang the doorbell then stepped back. We could see a figure approach the door, heard the grate of the key in the lock.

  The girl who answered looked around eighteen. She was soft-featured, with a rounded face framed by brown hair cut in a long bob. Her eyes were clear and bright green, her nose thin and her full lips parted, as if she were expecting someone else. She smiled quizzically as she shifted the weight of the baby girl she held in her arms from her left to her right shoulder. The baby must have been no more than a few months old.

  ‘Yes?’ she said. A question, not the statement of greeting common in the North. I thought I could discern an English accent.

  ‘My name is Detective Inspector Jim Hendry,’ Hendry said. ‘We’d like to speak to you about Martin Kielty.’

  Her expression remained one of mild bemusement.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ she asked, then shushed the baby who had stirred at the sound of her voice.

  ‘Might be best if we come inside,’ Hendry said, nodding gently towards the house next door. An elderly woman’s face peered at us through the front window, without even a pretence of subtlety.

  I smiled at her and she scowled in return.

  Kielty’s girlfriend introduced herself as Elena McEvoy. She brought us into the living room and invited us to sit as she laid the baby in a Moses basket. She wore a dress patterned with roses, and as she sat she swept her hand beneath her to ensure the dress covered her legs. There was a sense of dignity and decorum to the gesture which made me reassess my original assessment of her age. She rested one hand on the edge of the basket, which she rocked gently as we spoke.

  ‘What’s she called?’ Tara Carson asked, looking in at the infant.

  ‘Anna.’

  ‘She’s beautiful. What age is she?’

  ‘Three months,’ Elena McEvoy replied, smiling at her with pride.

  Hendry looked at me and winked.

  ‘So, is something wrong?’ McEvoy asked. Clearly she was used to policemen calling at her home. Her question also told me something about the body in the barn. If it was her boyfriend, then she was used to going days or nights without seeing him, for she did not seem to connect our presence to his absence. Nor, it appeared, had she reported him missing.

  ‘There was a fire, at a property outside Carrigans, over the border,’ I explained.

  She stared at me levelly, holding my gaze, one hand resting lightly on her knee, the other still rocking the basket.

  ‘We believe the property belongs to your boyfriend, Martin Kielty? Is that right?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Was anyone hurt? Is Martin OK?’

  ‘I’m afraid we’ve found human remains at the scene. We haven’t been able to identify the victim yet. We were hoping that you might be able to tell us where Mr Kielty is.’

  Her expression did not change, though I noticed a shift in the rhythm of the rocking. So too did the child, for she mewed mildly, causing McEvoy to lift her. She stood, swaying gently from side to side, whilst regarding me over her daughter’s shoulder.

  ‘I don’t know where he is. He hasn’t come home.’

  ‘When did you last see him, ma’am?’ Hendry asked.

  She shook her head. ‘Thursday, sometime. Late afternoon, maybe.’

  ‘Yet you haven’t reported him missing,’ Hendry commented.

  She glanced at him. ‘He’s often away for a day or two at a time.’

  ‘We suspect that your partner was involved in drugs,’ I said, finding it hard to place this woman alongside a drug pusher. ‘Is that the case?’

  She nodded, her mouth a thin defiant line.

  ‘Would you have any reason to believe that someone might want to hurt Mr Kielty?’ I asked. ‘That’s not to say that he has been hurt, of course. It’s too early to tell.’

  ‘He was assaulted in the pub a month or two ago. Told he’d have his knees done. He was terrified.’

  Though not terrified enough to stop selling drugs, I thought. ‘Where was that?’

  ‘Doherty’s,’ she said. ‘In Strabane.’

  ‘I know it,’ I said. ‘Was there any follow-up on the threat?’

  ‘He was sent a Mass card with a bullet in it a week or two after it,’ she continued. ‘That terrified me.’ She shuddered involuntarily and rubbed away the shiver in her arms. Having been at the receiving end of such a threat myself in the past, I knew the effect it could have.

  ‘Any idea who might have sent it?’ Hendry asked, glancing at me. The threat was one commonly associated with the paramilitaries during the height of the Troubles.

  She shook her head. ‘Martin binned it, said it was nothing.’

  ‘He should have contacted us,’ Hendry said.

  ‘As if you’d have done anything. They signed it the Rise or something.’

  ‘The Rising?’ Hendry asked. He nodded lightly at me to let me know he would explain later.

  McEvoy nodded once, curtly. ‘That sounds like it.’

  ‘That’s very useful, ma’am,’ Hendry said.

  ‘Anyone else your partner would have dealt with who might be able to help us?’ I asked, sensing that our interview had reached a natural conclusion.

  ‘He mentioned someone called Lorcan Hutton,’ McEvoy answered, her jaw set. Hutton was a well-known pusher on both sides of the border, though he had settled in the South. I’d had experience of Lorcan Hutton before, though would never have considered him to be violent. Then again, violence and drugs tend to be easy bedfellows.

  We asked a few more questions regarding Kielty’s movements. McEvoy was unable to tell us anything more about the threat made to him. She did not know where he might have kept lists of contacts or phone numbers; he had his mobile with him, she said. I suspected it might have been the one I’d seen lying broken on the floor of his cottage. McEvoy denied using drugs herself. As she spoke, she smoothed down her daughter’s hair softly with one hand. The child in turn gripped her mother’s dress in her small fist, twisting the cloth in its grip.

  ‘Does Martin have any other family?’ I asked. ‘Any blood relatives?’

  ‘His mother lives in Derry. In Galliagh,’ McEvoy said. I could tell from her tone
that their relationship was not a good one.

  ‘We’ll need to contact her.’

  She nodded sharply, tossing her head a little to the left.

  Finally, I asked for a photograph. I needed to put a face to Kielty’s name. Plus, of course, he was still technicelly a missing person. Elena McEvoy went into the next room and I heard the sliding of a drawer. She returned with a single colour photograph of Kielty reclining on a bed, smiling, his infant daughter comfortable in the crook of his arm.

  ‘This was only taken a few weeks ago. I hope it’s OK,’ she said.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I replied. Then added, ‘I’m afraid I’m going to need the name of Martin’s dentist too.’

  Her face twisted with revulsion as she realized the implication in what I had said.

  Back in the car I called Patterson and reported back. He promised he would have someone go out to Kielty’s mother while I retrieved the dental records. When I finished the call, I asked Hendry about the group he had named, The Rising.

  Ten minutes later, in his office, he handed me three photographs. The first image focused on a youngish-looking man pictured coming out of a house, his thick head covered in a bennie hat, his fists shoved in his coat pockets.

  ‘Charlie Cunningham,’ Hendry said.

  I flicked to the next image. An older man, the shape and size of a club bouncer, his hair cropped short. He had a spider’s-web tattoo on his neck.

  ‘Tony Armstrong. Did time for shooting a policeman during the Troubles.’

  Another picture. This time the man was in his forties I guessed, his head completely shaven. His brow was heavy over hooded eyes and he was looking directly at the camera. I thought I recognized him.

  ‘Jimmy Irvine.’ He tapped the picture. ‘All three are ex-paramilitaries. All three have done time for murder. All are hardliners pissed at the political process. Fed up with being told they had to stand down, the war was over.’