The conversation reached an abrupt conclusion with the arrival of Harry Patterson accompanied by a handful of Guards in fluorescent vests. He had clearly been shown the flyers.
‘What’s this bullshit?’ Harry barked as he approached us.
‘Here we go, lads,’ Armstrong said, smirking to the others. He underestimated Harry Patterson if he believed he could intimidate him.
Harry squared up to Armstrong, their faces inches apart.
‘Take this crap and clear off back over the border. If I see this bollocks around here again, I’ll lock the lot of you up.’
‘On what?’
‘A whim,’ Patterson said quietly, his forehead almost touching Armstrong’s.
Armstrong lingered for a few seconds, as if to show his men that he was unafraid of Patterson, though perhaps he also recognized that Patterson was just the type of Guard who would have them held for the night on a whim, for he gathered his flyers, dropped them into a bag that had lain at his feet and began to move away. The others followed, their recalcitrance intended to imply that they weren’t obeying Patterson’s command.
‘Prick,’ Patterson said. ‘What the hell does he think he’s at, handing out this shit here?’
‘Jim Hendry told me the Drugs Squad in the North thought this crowd were responsible for attacks on dealers over the border. He suggested we look at their head man, Jimmy Irvine, for Kielty.’
‘I’ll follow it up and see what I hear,’ he said. ‘Ask around. If yer man shows his face on this side again, lift him. The same for this character Irvine too.’
He moved back into the crowd again. ‘Let’s move back, men. Make sure there’s no trouble on the way out.’
Over the course of the next twenty minutes, more pockets of people broke away from the crowd and wandered back down from Hutton’s house. Some of them looked a little bemused by the whole activity, some others seemed to have been fired up by it and spoke animatedly to those around them. It was as I was removing my Garda overcoat before getting back into my car that one such group passed by. As I slammed the door, I looked out through the windscreen. One member of the group caught my eye as he passed and nodded. A narrow face, brown, untidy hair, darkened glasses; he was past my car and had disappeared into the dissolving crowd before I could catch a second glance. The man’s identity played at the edges of my mind all that night, but I was unable to place him.
Monday, 5 February
Chapter Nine
I slept late and it was almost ten thirty by the time I made it to Letterkenny, where Kielty’s post-mortem was being completed. In fact, I hadn’t even had time to contact the station to let them know that was where I would be.
When the state pathologist, Dr Joseph Long, had finished his examination, I went in to speak to him. In the adjoining room the charred remains of Martin Kielty – for identification of Kielty had been confirmed – now lay on a trolley, shrouded in a stained green scrubs sheet. The assisting technician was washing down the steel table on which the post-mortem had been conducted. The dental records I had left at the hospital matched the corpse and, said Dr Long, with no possibility for visual or fingerprint identification, and a lack of hospital records in Letterkenny, would have to suffice for identification evidence.
‘The body was very badly burned,’ Dr Long stated, washing his hands at the sink. ‘Cause of death though was a knife wound. There was one stab wound, above the eighth rib on the left-hand side of the sternum. The blade passed through the lung causing fatal haemorrhaging. There was no evidence of respiration of soot or ash, as one would expect from a victim in a fire. Nor is there evidence, in the less badly damaged skin, of vital reaction to the burns. He was dead for some hours before the fire started.’
‘No gunshot wounds?’ I asked.
Long shook his head. ‘None.’ Mulronney had been right.
I wondered again where, then, the gunfire had come from. Perhaps the Quigleys had been mistaken.
‘What about time of death?’
‘Very difficult to say. Liver temperature would be unreliable in a corpse as badly burned as this one. I’ve taken a sample of the vitreous humour to test potassium levels, but even with that, it’ll still be an estimate.’
‘The fire was reported after 4 a.m. It certainly wasn’t burning at two thirty – we have a witness. Kielty’s phone hadn’t been used since ten fifteen the evening previous.’
‘That sounds like a reasonable time frame,’ Long suggested. ‘I’ll not be able to narrow it down any further than that for you anyway.’
‘Anything else?’
‘I’ve taken swabs from the victim’s skin. The severity of the burns would suggest that he was coated in an accelerant of some sort. Again, when I know more, I’ll send on the information to your superintendent.’
I didn’t spend any longer than necessary breathing in the stench of the embalming fluids in the autopsy suite. Excusing myself, I headed out to the car park for a smoke. As I leant against my car, I breathed an inward sigh of relief. Kielty had been dead before the fire started; he had not moved as he lay in the flames; I could not have saved him. I realized too, though, with a sudden shock of sadness, Sam Quigley had given his life in attempting to rescue someone who could not have been saved. Still, whoever had killed Kielty and set the fire in the barn was also responsible for the death of Quigley. And I could do something about that.
Kielty had been selling drugs out of his house in Carrigans. I suspected that he was working with – or for – Lorcan Hutton, of whom there was, as yet, no sign. On Friday evening, Kielty had arrived at his house at 8.30 p.m. The blue car pulled up at 10 p.m. when Nora Quigley looked out. Kielty last used his mobile phone around that time too. By 2.15 a.m., the car had gone and a white Transit van was there instead.
By 4 a.m., the barn was burning, with Kielty’s body inside, soaked in accelerant. The thought reminded me that I had to chase up the Forensics report from Patterson.
Burgess was holding his usual spot at the front desk, a paperback novel sitting in front of him, its spine bent backwards, and a sloppily filled mug of coffee adding to the collection of coffee rings on the desk.
‘Good afternoon, Inspector,’ Burgess said when I came in. ‘Nice of you to join us.’
‘Always a pleasure to see you, Sergeant,’ I said. ‘Learning to read, I see.’
Burgess snorted. ‘That part-timer, Black, wants to know, should he go back out to that house again? He sat outside it for most of his shift yesterday helping the Forensics.’
I’d forgotten that I’d asked him to go out to assist. ‘Where is he?’ I asked, eager to find out what, if anything, Forensics had uncovered.
‘He’s doing a border checkpoint. Superintendent Patterson asked for “increased Gardai visibility”. For the benefit of the press, what with this whole thing with The Rising going on.’
Paul Black was standing at the end of Lifford bridge, his squad car parked in the middle of the road, while he waved through car after car. I parked outside the old customs post and watched him for a moment and noticed that the only vehicles he stopped were those being driven by young, attractive women. I supposed he was showing some initiative. I parped the car horn a few times and he reluctantly pulled himself away from the small Tigra he had stopped and ran over to join me.
‘You’re doing good work there, Paul. So long as all our drug dealers are good-looking young women, the streets of Lifford are safe with you.’
‘What?’ He looked at me blankly.
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘How did it go yesterday, Paul?’
‘Fine,’ he replied, though I notice his leg had started jittering up and down. ‘The Forensics team were there for most of the day.’
‘What did they find?’
‘The murder weapon – a kitchen knife.’
‘Where?’
‘In the shed, close to where the body was. The blade had been cleaned. The handle was plastic and had melted in the fire.’
‘Anything of use
from it?’
‘It was taken from Kielty’s house.’
I nodded. I remembered that one had been missing from the set in the kitchen of the cottage. ‘Anything else?’
‘A lot of fingerprints. A couple of hundred apparently. They’re going to have to run through them to cross reference them or whatever you call it.’
‘Any of them useable?’
‘I dunno,’ he said.
‘Any bullet casings? I was called out because of reports of gunfire.’
He shook his head.
‘What else did they find?’ I asked with growing exasperation.
‘Someone started the fire deliberately. They found traces of accelerant near the back of the barn, and a few melted plastic bags with traces of dope and stuff. And they found a few melted containers they said might have had petrol in them.’
The presence of an accelerant was in keeping with what Dr Long had said following the post-mortem. The containers exploding would probably also have accounted for the reports of gunfire.
‘Though they said there wasn’t much,’ he added, his jittering becoming more exaggerated.
‘Much what?’
‘Drugs. They found traces just. Lots of bags, but only traces of coke, like he’s had his stash there at one stage. They reckoned the coke was high purity though – really good stuff. If you like that kind of thing.’ He squeezed his two hands between his legs as he spoke.
‘Are you all right?’
‘I need a slash and I’m the only one on the border,’ he said.
‘Jesus, go into the Customs post and go. It’ll not matter if you’re off the checkpoint for five minutes.’
‘I just thought – the Super sent me out. I thought it was important.’
‘I’ll keep an eye,’ I said, rolling down my window and lighting a smoke. ‘Make sure no undesirables slip through.’
It was while I was sitting in the car, enjoying my smoke, that Joe McCready phoned me to say that a body had been found on the beach at Rossnowlagh.
Chapter Ten
A bracing wind, heavy with the scent of salt water, had risen somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. It thudded across the heavy-bodied waves that had washed the corpse of Peter Williams onto the beach. A local doctor, acting in the role of medical examiner, was carrying out a superficial examination of the body before confirming death. I watched the breakers rush the shoreline and waited for Caroline and her estranged husband, Simon, who were making their way back from Dublin.
For once, there were no Scene of Crime Officers or journalists present. There appeared to be no crime involved in the death of Peter Williams, beyond the wasted life of a young man who, perhaps in a drunken stupor, had fallen into the darkness and plunged several hundred feet into the Atlantic Ocean below. The headland from which he had most likely fallen was already shrouded in a pall of rain.
An American couple, attracted to the Atlantic coast on the promise of good surfing, had found the body an hour earlier, as they came back to shore after a day on the boards. They were currently in the Sandcastle Hotel, in the company of the Garda Joe McCready, who had accompanied me to the site.
As the doctor, a locum from Sligo, stood up, I approached him. ‘Storm coming,’ he said, nodding out towards the darkening sky on the horizon.
‘Anything unusual, Doc?’ I asked, handing him a cigarette, then taking one for myself.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Apart from a fifteen-year-old fella falling off a cliff. Are you sure the parents want to see him?’
I glanced down at the body. Were it not for the clothes, positive identification would have proven difficult. I recalled my last view of him, nestled in the back seat of his grandparents’ car, beside Caroline’s father. His hair had been soft and blond, his features, like Caroline’s, small and neat, his eyes pale blue, his mouth slightly crooked when he smiled. It was one of the most disturbing things I had ever done to look at him now. He was, naturally, taller than I remembered, but his build was impossible to discern by the bloating the seawater had caused, and his skin had swollen and wrinkled, leaving his face distorted. One of his eyes had been removed from its socket, presumably by a sea animal, and chunks of flesh had been torn from his cheeks and neckline.
‘Crabs,’ the doctor commented, following the line of my gaze. ‘It could have been worse.’
‘Could it?’ I asked.
‘I worked in Derry for a while,’ he stated. ‘We had jumpers going off the bridges almost every other week. You get used to it.’
‘I hope not,’ I said.
The doctor nodded past me. ‘You might want to stop them,’ he suggested with a flick of his head.
I turned around to see Simon and Caroline Williams emerge from the Garda car that had collected them when news of the body’s discovery broke. They slowed as they approached us and could glimpse more clearly their son lying on the sand.
I strode up the beach towards them, my arms outstretched in a futile attempt to block their view. Caroline walked slightly ahead of her husband, her arms gathered around her. Her face was drawn and pale, her eyes red-rimmed. She looked at me without speaking, her expression one of pleading, both for news that her son had been found, and also partly the hope that he had not.
‘I’m so sorry, Caroline.’
She fell against me, her fists bunched against the side of her face, her thin shoulders hunched in tight knots. Simon continued walking towards the body, seemingly having not heard what I said.
Still holding Caroline, I reached out and put my hand on his arm. He turned towards me and away from his son’s body, his eyes glistening with both anger and sheer terror.
‘Might be best not to, Mr Williams. Remember him how he was, eh?’
He looked at my hand where it rested on his arm, and stared levelly at me until I let go. Then he moved past me and stopped.
His cry seemed to die in his throat, as if the sight before him had taken the wind from him. Despite my best efforts, Caroline broke from me and rushed down to her son, stopping a few yards short of the body, her arms hanging at her sides. Simon stood above the corpse, his hands covering his mouth. Caroline inched forwards towards her son and dropped to her knees. She reached out and touched her son’s head, her hands barely making contact with his hair. I gradually became aware of a low keening noise building in strength over the rush of the noise of the waves beating against the beach. Finally Caroline opened her mouth and a single, savage shriek of pain seemed to tear itself from her and hang suspended in the air.
I approached them slowly. The Sligo doctor had muttered his sympathies and was making his way up the beach towards the hotel. I nodded to him as he passed, and said I would be up in a while. Simon now knelt on the sand beside Caroline, gulping for breath against the wind, his face smeared with his tears. I knelt to the other side of her and put my arm around her shoulders. Despite her husband’s proximity, she leaned against me and I waited with them, while the thick grey Atlantic rushed up the beach towards us under purpled twists of clouds.
Simon placed his two hands in front of his face, as if in prayer.
‘I’m afraid . . . I’m afraid to touch him,’ he said.
‘It’s OK,’ I said.
‘He’s my boy and I can’t touch him.’
I could think of nothing to say to the man. I knew that Simon had had little time for Peter as a child, indeed had not seen him in almost a decade. Despite my professional and human urge to console a bereaved parent, I found it difficult to look at Simon without the memory surfacing of the injuries he had inflicted on his wife and his emotional neglect of his son.
‘I saw him born,’ he said, turning towards me, his expression almost one of pleading. ‘I had to see him . . . you know.’
I nodded silently, placing my hand on his shoulder. He turned to face Caroline, shrugging away my hand as he did so.
‘This is your fault,’ he said.
Beyond us, a breaker rose briefly, then exploded against the shore, flecking the body of P
eter Williams with its foam.
Soon after, Peter’s body was removed by the undertakers to be transferred to Sligo General Hospital for a post-mortem examination. I had asked for toxicology tests to be run; while the boys with whom Peter had been camping had admitted that some alcohol had been taken, I wanted a more accurate assessment of how much he’d taken before he died.
For our part, we moved up to the hotel, where the manager had provided us with a room and a supply of tea and sandwiches. Simon had spoken little on our way up from the beach.
When we got inside, the heat made the sweat break on my face, even while my skin remained numbed from the wind. Caroline had stopped crying and busied herself pouring tea. Simon stood to one side, speaking into his mobile phone, telling a partner or family member about the discovery. He had not changed much in the past decade. He was a small, squat figure – five eight maybe – carrying excess weight around his gut. He had thinning, sandy hair brushed over to one side to cover his increasing baldness. His arms were heavy, his fingers’ stubbiness accentuated by gold rings. He wore glasses with reactive lenses that even now, under the lights of the hotel conference room, were slightly darkened. He returned my gaze without discernible emotion as he continued his conversation on the phone.
‘That was unfair – what he said to you. It’s not true,’ I said, taking the cup of tea that Caroline offered me.
She looked at me, her eyelids dropping slightly. ‘He’s upset. He doesn’t mean half of what he says.’
I waited for her to say something else, but she simply sipped her tea. She sat upright, her legs crossed at the ankles, her shoulders rounded as if she was physically regressing into herself.
The air in the room had taken on an unusual quality, the light seeming to have stilled and greyed. In the distance we heard the first heavy rumbling of a thunderstorm. The windows stippled with heavy drops of rain, which ran grimy steaks in the fine dusting of sand on the glass.
Simon concluded his conversation by snapping his phone shut, then came over to where we were sitting. He stood above us.
The Rising The Rising (Inspector Devlin #4) Page 5
