Trespass

by Anthony J. Quinn

  ‘She had a family. If it was an accident, they deserved to hear the truth. At least her clan would have got her body back. Now they’ve hunted me down, demanding answers. They won’t stop until they find out the truth. That’s why I had to ring Alistair and ask for his help.’

  ‘You should have been brave and ignored the gypsies. They wouldn’t have dared harm you. Look at you now, a farm of land to yourself, no money worries, a healthy herd of pigs, enough distractions to happily occupy you in your old age, but that wasn’t enough for you.’ The voice turned ugly. ‘You had to delve into the past and sort out your guilty conscience. Now you’re going to choke on it.’

  ‘That’s enough of your threats,’ growled Reid. ‘Go back to wherever you came from, and do your threatening there.’

  ‘Your conscience is a disaster, Reid,’ the visitor hissed back. ‘A disaster that will destroy us all. There is no point talking to you any more. Persuasion is useless, utterly useless, like asking a brick wall to come to its senses. You’re just a thick-headed farmer, who doesn’t realize his life is in great danger.’

  Reid stared at the visitor’s empty hands. ‘What do you mean in great danger?’

  The pig hung between them, its slitted eyes rolling back, its mouth gaping.

  ‘Trust me; the foundation has spent all day plotting ways of getting rid of you.’ A long-simmering hatred welled in the visitor’s voice. ‘We thought of stabbing you, strangling you, poisoning you in your bed, even chopping you into pieces and feeding you to your pigs. But we decided all these measures were flawed.’

  Reid’s expression did not falter; rather it hardened, his brows furrowing.

  ‘The foundation has decided there should be no violence for the sake of violence. There’s been enough killing in this bloody country.’

  A look of relief passed across the old man’s features. He waited for more words of reassurance from the visitor.

  ‘Is there anything else you want to ask me, Sammy, before I go?’ asked the figure.

  The gentle sound of the pig swaying from the rope was the only noise as the two men stared at each other. Reid looked troubled, glancing at the carcass as though it might do something terrible at any moment, something that might sweep away his fragile confidence. ‘Why dishonour my brother’s uniform?’ he asked. ‘Why kill a harmless pig and lure me up here?’

  The visitor advanced towards Reid, and the bales shifted, wobbling slightly, an unsteady raft in a sea of darkness. Reid stepped to one side, and immediately the bales underfoot sagged and gave way. He sank to his knees, a look of surprise etched on his face. Arms groping, he tried to stride towards safety, only to wade deeper into collapsing hay. Too late, he realized that the visitor had cut the binder twine holding the hay in place. He leaped clumsily towards the visitor, but more bales crumpled beneath him, falling to the concrete floor below.

  Reid swung his arms, and grabbed on to the pig’s lifeless body, pulling it with him as he slipped further. For a teetering moment, the beast seemed to lead the old man in a macabre dance, its dainty trotters guiding his shuffling feet through thin air. Reid sank deeper and the dance turned into a wrestle, the uniform slipping further from the pig, exposing more of its hairless belly and its rows of tiny teats. Reid clung on, but the dead animal seemed to lose interest in the old man, the ropes tightening and swinging it back up to the rafters. Reid gave a final agonized shout of ‘murderer’, his empty arms flailing in the air, before disappearing in a cascade of hay.

  The visitor leaned forward in time to see Reid’s hunched backward flight; his face crushed-looking even before his body slammed on to the floor. Afterwards, he clambered down and knelt by the old man’s body. Wisps of hay fell all around them, grass seed and dried flower heads shaken out in their masses, lit up by the security lights in the yard, filling the air in a golden, spinning cloud. However, they were too late to cushion Reid’s fall. Blood was crawling from the old man’s skull in the shape of a rat’s thickly coiling tail.

  He checked Reid for signs of life and was relieved to find that he was dead. Relieved not for his sake but for Reid’s. He did not like dealing with a botched murder, his victim writhing and begging for release. He preferred his prey to either die or escape cleanly. That way no effort was wasted on his or his victim’s part. He peered down at Reid’s hooded eyes. A dead farmer on his dying farm, blinded and choked by his conscience, his body sprawled upon the hay he had diligently baled last summer. The past and its guilty secrets were disappearing a piece at a time.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Daly opened his throbbing eyes to the sound of his mobile phone. He was not sure how long it had been ringing or how much time had passed since he lost consciousness. The intruders were still standing over him, but their mood had changed. They were peering down at him with gazes of cold indifference.

  ‘Better answer that, Celcius,’ said the leader with a dry chuckle. ‘You’re a busy man today and we don’t want to detain you any further.’

  Daly crawled to his feet, wincing with the pain in his ribs and face. He fumbled for the phone as the intruders backed away. It was Commander Sinclair, his voice radiating confidence and firmness of purpose.

  ‘I’ve good news for you, Daly.’

  ‘Yes?’ Daly spoke thickly, his mouth hurting. He kept it short; afraid he would gag on the blood trickling down his throat. Whorls of pain tightened every muscle in his chest and made his breathing difficult. He glanced up and saw the intruders slip down the stairs and leave the house.

  ‘I don’t like leaving my detectives at the mercy of Internal Affairs,’ explained Sinclair. ‘The longer this inquiry lingers the greater the shadow of suspicion on you. I’ve told the panel I want you to lead this investigation and they’ve agreed. On one condition. You attend a psychologist every week.’

  ‘Of course.’ Daly’s brow perspired with the effort of speaking. His cheek filled with clotted blood. He turned it over in his mouth, as though it were a fine wine, wondering which blow had inflicted the damage.

  ‘You don’t sound overly enthused.’

  ‘Believe me, I am. I’m invigorated to have your confidence.’ Daly leaned back against the wall. He stared into the emptiness of O’Sullivan’s house, reluctant to move. ‘What about their report? When will I see it?’

  ‘First it has to go to the relevant authorities.’

  Daly wanted to ask who they were but a stab of pain in his side silenced him.

  ‘Listen, Daly, you don’t have to prove your innocence to me, just that you can still do your bloody job. Forget that this inquiry ever happened in the first place or that a report has been written about you. Put it down to bitter experience, or whatever.’

  It sounded to Daly that the panel had decided he was harmless rather than entirely innocent. He took some painful steps into the landing. ‘Can we talk about this later?’

  To Sinclair’s ears, the constriction in Daly’s throat must have sounded like suppressed emotion. ‘Of course, Daly.’

  He eased himself down the stairs, grimacing all the way. His body felt like a private cargo of pain he had to nudge gingerly from step to step. He was hopeful of making it back to his car without passing out.

  Before finishing the call, Sinclair gave him a final warning. ‘No nasty surprises this time, Daly. I don’t want you getting entangled in the private lives of your prime suspects. For my sake, if not yours.’

  Too late for that, thought Daly, surveying the trashed rooms of O’Sullivan’s house. He tried O’Neill’s phone again. He got through this time and told her to meet him with some support officers at Ryan’s Corner.

  ‘Could you ID O’Sullivan if he’s there?’ asked Daly.

  ‘Yes, of course. Has Sinclair put you back in charge?’

  ‘He’s just given me an ultimatum.’

  ‘Which is what?’

  ‘See a psychologist and get back to handling cases or else languish on court duty for ever. There wasn’t room for negotiation.’

  �
�There seldom is where the internal inquiry panel’s concerned.’

  ‘Anything to report about the search?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Fine,’ he grunted. ‘We’ll meet at Ryan’s. Bring some support.’

  Seated in his car, he glanced in the overhead mirror and suffered the dreadful surprise people experience when they barely recognize themselves after an accident. His eyes, nose and mouth certainly felt swollen and tender, and his fingers had probed the sore points, but none of that prepared him for the bruised and puffy visage staring back at him with the lop-sided grimace of a bare-knuckle fighter. He tidied his hair, and wiped away some of the blood from his nose and mouth. He tried to crack a smile from his grimace, but his swollen lips hurt too much. His veneer had gone, the thin surface layer hiding the battered, ugly interior, the troubled man beneath. Tasting something hot and liquid in his mouth, he opened the door and began spitting and retching. He vomited up at least a cupful of blood. The effort left him feeling feeble but renewed. He wiped his mouth again and started the engine. He drove slowly, waves of pain rolling in quick succession through his bruised body. He changed gears awkwardly, wincing as the car bounced over speed ramps.

  In spite of his injuries, he was able to drive straight to the bar. His body felt crushed but his will was not. If anything, he had grown more intense, graver, as if he had glimpsed the darkness of the boy’s predicament in the empty rooms of O’Sullivan’s mansion.

  ‘What the hell happened to you?’ said O’Neill, looking at him with alarm.

  ‘We’re not the only people on O’Sullivan’s trail,’ he told her. ‘I’ll explain later.’

  ‘Hold on, you should get yourself checked over.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said, keen to press on.

  However, she dashed back to her car and returned with some painkillers, which she made him swallow. He grimaced at the effort.

  Bouncers were carrying a young man through the doors as they hurried up to Ryan’s Corner, a run-down-looking hotel next to a waste site, one of the few establishments in the county that still catered for traveller functions. Worse for wear, the youth hung face down in their grip, his arms and legs dangling as though he were paddling in shallow water. Daly saw that his knuckles were bruised and bleeding.

  After dealing with the drunk, the bouncers turned to Daly with a contemptuous look of familiarity.

  ‘Been celebrating already?’ one of them asked, blocking his way.

  Daly had to show them his ID before they believed he was a police officer. He no longer looked like a detective, he realized: his face was a passport to a different world entirely, the dangerous world of travellers and drunken fist fights.

  Rather than risk inflaming the crowd, Daly stationed a cordon of officers at the doors while he and O’Neill stepped inside. The air had force, warm and spiky, vibrating with the over-amped sound of the wedding band. O’Neill followed Daly’s slightly hunched figure as he struggled to walk normally with his injuries. The crowd was not so much drunk as in the lull between successive states of intoxication. What Daly and his colleague saw differed little from a typical Irish wedding, the united families using alcohol as a form of validation, each round of drinks a rosy endorsement of the newly married couple’s compatibility. The younger members of the bridal party were moving erratically on the dance floor, out of tune with the music, but full of belief for the lyrics, which were almost indecipherable above the band’s deafening instruments.

  Daly and O’Neill moved more deeply through the crowd, feeling a hostile mood take hold before them, the frozen stares and whispered asides from the tipsy guests, red-faced children turned away by their parents, the bubbling voices slowly quietening. They walked back towards the fringes, to accommodate the crowd’s wariness. Daly’s bruised face and shambling figure stamped him as a man not to be crossed, the sort of face that the guests were all too familiar with at the end of the night, drunk and vicious, beyond all reasoning. The band stopped playing and the only sound from the guests was the mutter of suspicious voices and isolated bursts of laughter.

  They found O’Sullivan resting his weight against the bar, overweight, dark-haired and jovial, his tie loosened and his gold cufflinks shining amid the rows of empty drinks. In his slightly dishevelled way, he was Daly’s picture of what a gypsy patriarch should look like – a father celebrating his daughter’s wedding – rather than the mastermind of a daylight abduction. He gave Daly a strange dazed grin when the detective introduced himself and O’Neill, and then his face darkened when they told him the reason for the visit.

  O’Sullivan looked genuinely disturbed at the accusation that he had kidnapped a child. He picked up his pint, as if to take a drink, but then returned it to the beer-stained bar. His thick fingers gripped it so tightly Daly thought the glass would break. O’Sullivan had been a bare-knuckle fighter in his youth, and legend had it he could punch the bark off trees with his unprotected fists. However, he did nothing but simply stare at O’Neill as she explained the charges.

  ‘Let me get this straight. You’re accusing me of stealing a child?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why would I be doing that?’ The weathered bronze of his face looked rubbery with alcohol, but his voice was clear and not slurred. He waved extravagantly at the packed crowd. ‘Don’t you think I’ve enough bloody kids? Christ almighty, we’re up to our elbows in them.’

  Someone laughed obscenely. A young man got to his feet, seemingly to remonstrate with Daly, but swayed and fell back to his seat.

  ‘A ten-year-old boy is missing,’ said Daly. ‘Eyewitnesses say he was put in the back of your van.’

  ‘How the fuck do you know it was my van?’

  ‘Your registration number was noted.’

  ‘I’ve been in the bar all afternoon. Everyone here can vouch for me.’

  ‘What about the van? Where has it been all afternoon?’

  ‘I took it,’ said the young man who had earlier struggled to his feet. ‘I drove it to collect the McGinns from court.’

  Daly showed him a photograph of Jack Hewson. ‘This is the child who went missing. Recognize him?’

  He looked stunned. ‘I didn’t kidnap anybody.’

  ‘But was he in the van?’

  ‘I’m saying I didn’t touch him.’

  ‘Yet you saw him in the van?’

  ‘Yes. But no one forced him to come along.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  He looked nervously at Daly, trying to think of an answer; it was fear the detective saw in his eyes rather than guilt.

  ‘If he wasn’t forced into the back of the van and you didn’t touch him, how did he get there in the first place?’

  The young man thought for a while and then shook his head. ‘No idea.’ His dark eyes were drenched in defiance, and something more vulnerable, too, a tiny chink of alarm, which Daly’s questions had managed to place there. Daly wanted to widen the chink a fraction more, but he needed time, and that was something he did not have in abundance.

  ‘You’re suggesting he ran away by jumping into the back of your van,’ said Daly.

  He nodded.

  ‘Where’s the van now?’

  He threw Daly the keys. ‘It’s parked round the back. You can check it out for yourself.’

  Daly called in a dog team and more officers, but held back on arresting either O’Sullivan or his son for the time being.

  ‘Before we check the van, we need to ask you some important questions,’ said Daly. ‘The boy came here in the van with you, and then what happened?’

  The young man shrugged. One of the male officers lunged forward to handcuff him, but Daly grabbed the officer by the shoulder and handed him the van keys. ‘Go back outside and tell the other officers everything is under control,’ he said. ‘Then get a team to search the van and the grounds.’

  He sent O’Neill, who was also itching to arrest the son, to check the hotel’s CCTV footage for any sign of the boy. Daly also felt strongly the
urge to swoop in and arrest the suspects, but it was a sign of inexperience in a detective, and ran the danger of postponing a possible breakthrough. There were important questions Daly had to ask first. It was imperative that he focus the minds of O’Sullivan and his son, as they wavered between confusion and anxiety, helping them steady their nerves and recover their lucidity in spite of their intoxication. It was a game of patience and restraint, in which everything could be lost or won.

  O’Sullivan turned to his son with an angry look. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this boy sneaked into the back of the van?’

  ‘I thought he was a nephew or cousin of the McGinns. I didn’t know the wee fucker was running away.’ A viciousness twisted his thin lips. ‘All day I’ve been tripping over nephews and nieces I never knew existed. How was I to know who the hell he was?’

  A desperate look was etched on O’Sullivan’s face. ‘Look, Inspector. My son’s been that busy bussing people back and forth that his brain is mush. He had no idea the child wasn’t one of ours.’

  ‘OK, but right now, I need to know where he is.’

  A tense silence fell upon the travellers. They glanced at each other, searching for hints as to what to do next.

  ‘What are you going to do if we can’t tell you?’

  ‘I just need to find the boy and return him to his parents, safe and sound.’ Daly stared meaningfully at them. ‘Right now, you’re the only people who can help me do that.’

  O’Sullivan took out a hanky and wiped his forehead, which was sweating profusely. ‘You’d better follow me, then,’ he said.

  He led Daly through a side door and down a long corridor with the deliberate gait of a drunken man pretending to be sober. Walking reminded Daly of his injuries. The painkillers had failed to dampen the ache in his ribs and face. His lips felt raw, throbbing constantly. He followed O’Sullivan with his head down, clumsy as a bullock led by a nose ring. All that kept him going now was his determination to prove that he was a competent detective capable of rescuing a missing child.