Someone You Know

by Brian McGilloway

  Lucy had to stop herself from commenting on the irony of such a comment. Kay had been arrested in Limavady after several years of abusing one of his neighbour’s sons. He had first assaulted the child while babysitting for the couple when the wife went into labour. The abuse had continued for eight years. Kay had served less than half that in prison as punishment.

  ‘Karen Hughes was murdered, Gene,’ Lucy said. ‘Black dog hairs were found on her clothing. You have a black dog, don’t you?’

  ‘Half the town has black dogs.’

  ‘But not a record for sexual assault as well,’ Lucy retorted.

  Kay straightened himself, regarded Lucy coolly. ‘You’re a smart one, aren’t you? I’d nothing to do with whoever was killed. I never killed no one. The only person I’ll ever be hurting is myself someday if you people don’t leave me in peace.’

  ‘It would be really helpful if we could maybe get a strand of your dog’s hair,’ Lucy said. ‘To compare with the strands we found.’

  ‘Don’t you need a warrant for something like that?’ Kay asked.

  ‘We could get one,’ Lucy agreed.

  ‘Although, making us go for a warrant suggests you’re reluctant to help with our inquiries,’ Fleming added. ‘It might look like you have something to hide.’

  ‘I don’t want her hurt,’ Kay said. ‘I won’t have anyone hurt Mollie.’

  Lucy said nothing.

  At Kay’s mention of her name though, the dog itself appeared at the door of the kitchen, yawning lazily, its tongue lolling to one side. Mollie crossed to Lucy and sniffed at her legs, the dog’s tail offering a desultory wag, then falling limp.

  Lucy reached into her pockets and pulled on a glove. Bending down, she held out her hand. Mollie approached tentatively, sniffing at the latex of the glove before tasting it with a quick lather of her tongue. She moved closer to Lucy, allowing Lucy first to rub her hand across the dome of the animal’s head, then to bury her hand among the thicker fur at the top of her spine. Lucy rubbed vigorously at the fur, as if petting the dog, then checked her hand. A few black strands of hair clung to the glove.

  ‘Do you consent to our taking these for testing?’ Lucy asked.

  Kay nodded, once, curtly. He took a last drag from his cigarette then threw the butt into the hearth, before dropping down and calling the dog to him. As he kissed its snout, Mollie licked at the tobacco rich air of his breath.

  ‘Thank you,’ Lucy said. She pulled off the glove inside out to trap the hairs, then placed it in an evidence bag.

  ‘We’ll be in touch,’ Fleming said. ‘And of course, if you think of anything else, do let us know.’

  Lucy opened the front door and stepped out. The group of youths had grown larger now and had moved directly across the road. They stood beneath the street lamp opposite, without words. One of the youths, at the centre of the group, regarded her coldly. He was tall, wearing a black T-shirt beneath a badly worn leather jacket. ‘All right, love?’ he called, winking at her, to the amusement of the rest who stood around him.

  As she reached the car, Lucy recognized another of the youths, standing at the outer edge of the group. He wore a grey woollen hat pulled down low over his head, covering his scalp completely. He had thick black eyebrows, both of which had a stripe shaved down their centre. Lucy started to raise her hand, then thought better of it and stopped.

  ‘Someone you know,’ Fleming asked, when she closed the door.

  ‘Gavin Duffy,’ Lucy said. ‘He’s in the residential care unit. His father was Gary Duffy. He hung himself about a month ago. Gavin’s grandparents asked he be moved closer to them.’

  ‘Gary Duffy? The Louisa Gant guy?’

  Lucy nodded. Louisa Gant had been a nine-year-old girl who vanished in 1998. The girl herself had never been found. Lucy and her father had moved out of Derry by that stage, though she recalled the case for the child had gone missing the day the Good Friday Agreement had been finally signed, her vanishing a coda to news reports filled with images of bleary-eyed politicians heralding the beginning of a new future for Northern Ireland and Blair’s sound bite about the ‘hand of history’. Lucy remembered sitting with her father, watching events unfolding. Then, at the end, Louisa Gant was mentioned.

  Her remains had never been found, but, within a few days, the police investigation changed from missing persons to murder. The reason Lucy remembered it so clearly was because during one of the press conferences covered by the TV news on the case in subsequent weeks, it was her mother who read a statement about the investigation in her newly appointed role as Chief Superintendent. It was the first time Lucy had seen her in months.

  Despite not recovering the child, police charged local man, Gary Duffy, with her murder in 1999. Following a tip-off from an informant, police had discovered one of the girl’s chunky black shoes in Duffy’s garage, the pirate motif decorating its strap distinctive. The shoe had been badged with the girl’s blood. Though he claimed innocence, Duffy had been tried, found guilty and imprisoned. He had been released on parole only a few months previously. And had committed suicide soon after.

  ‘The young lad’s found himself some new friends already,’ Fleming said.

  ‘So it seems,’ Lucy said, glancing out again at the group, her stare being held by Gavin’s all the way to the corner of the street.

  Chapter Eleven

  Before finishing for the day, Lucy drove back to Gransha Hospital to see Karen’s mother, Marian Hughes.

  She’d met her once before when Karen had been taken to hospital eight months earlier after cutting her wrists too deeply. Lucy had been visiting Robbie on her evening off when the girl cut herself while having a bath. Lucy had helped dress her while waiting for an ambulance to take her to hospital.

  Karen had apologized over and over for spoiling their evening. Her face had paled, her lips bloodless beneath her small teeth.

  ‘What were you thinking?’ Lucy had asked.

  Karen had shrugged, her head tilted to one side.

  ‘You could have killed yourself,’ Lucy said. ‘Or is that what you wanted to do?’

  Karen shook her head, her hair falling across her face as she did so. Lucy pushed it back with one hand, her other helping Karen keep the pressure on the towel they had wrapped around the wound. The broken pieces of a safety razor lay on the floor, the blade she’d removed from it glinting darkly beneath the sink.

  ‘I can usually control it,’ Karen said. ‘My hand slipped is all.’

  Lucy knew girls from school who’d hurt themselves, understood only too well the impulses that drove them to it. So, she’d said nothing more, but simply put her arm around the girl, pulled her closer to her, stayed like that until the ambulance arrived.

  Marian Hughes had turned up at the hospital later that evening. She’d already been drinking before she got there, her breath warm and ketonic in the closeness of the room in which Karen sat while her arm was stitched.

  ‘Should someone not have been watching her?’ the woman had asked.

  ‘Karen was having a bath, Mrs Hughes,’ Robbie explained.

  The woman shook her head, muttering to herself, as she sat by the girl. ‘Someday you’ll do it for real,’ she said to Karen; her first words to the girl since her arrival. ‘Some day you’ll actually manage it and give us all peace.’

  Karen had stared at her arm, watching the doctor as he worked, never once lifting her head to look at the woman.

  ‘Someone should have been watching her,’ the woman repeated to the room, looking from face to face in hope that one of them would agree with her. The doctor coughed embarrassedly and kept working.

  Marian Hughes looked considerably older now, the drinking having taken its toll. Her hair, brown though streaked with grey, was tied back from her face accentuating the sharpness of her features. The skin of her cheeks, taut against the bone, was waxy in appearance save for threads of burst veins. She sat in the chair next to her bed, wearing a hospital gown and pink slippers, while Lucy
and a doctor spoke to her about Karen’s death. She was sober now, but clearly the days of drying out seemed to have left her in a daze of sorts, for if she understood what Lucy had told her, Hughes showed little sign of it until Lucy stood to leave.

  ‘So, did she kill herself or not?’ she asked, looking up at her with vacant eyes.

  ‘No, Marian,’ Lucy said. ‘Someone killed her.’

  The woman nodded her head. ‘That’s what I thought.’

  ‘Can you think of anyone who might have had reason to hurt your daughter, Marian?’ Lucy asked.

  The woman pursed her lips, her brow knotting briefly as she considered the question. Finally she shook her head.

  ‘Were those Social Service people not watching her?’ she asked.

  ‘They were,’ Lucy said. ‘She’d been missing for a few days now.’

  ‘Why wasn’t I told?’

  Lucy glanced at the doctor. ‘You were here, Marian. You weren’t really in a fit state to receive the news.’

  ‘I should have been told,’ Marian said. ‘She never told me nothing.’

  Lucy glanced again at the doctor who shook his head lightly. She laid her hand on Marian’s arm. ‘If you do think of anything, Marian, will you let someone know? They’ll get word to me.’

  As Lucy left the room, she heard the woman address the doctor who had remained with her. ‘I told her that would happen. She was always cutting at herself. I warned her about that.’

  Before leaving Gransha, Lucy walked across to the low block where her father was resident. She hadn’t seen him in a few weeks and was shocked to see how frail he looked. He lay in the bed, his wrists strapped to the side bars. His pyjama jacket had pulled open revealing the curve of his chest, his hair white and tangled as it rose and fell with each breath. He smacked his lips as he slept, his eyelids not quite closed, his breath wheezing in his throat.

  The skin below his left eye carried a yellowed bruise, while a small stitch bulged on his lip. The wooden chair next to his bed creaked as she sat, causing him to open his eyes.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s Lucy, Daddy.’ She stood and leaned across him to kiss him on the forehead, his skin clammy beneath her lips, the air between them foul with the funk of his breath. ‘What happened to your eye?’

  The man shook his head, then lifted his right arm ineffectually pulling at the limits of the strap. ‘I can’t remember.’

  Lucy nodded, sitting again next to him, her hand resting on his.

  ‘I was thinking of the fountain. In Prehen,’ he said suddenly.

  ‘There was no fountain in Prehen, Daddy,’ Lucy said softly.

  His eyes flicked across to stare at her. ‘On the lane. The cottage on the lane. You used to climb onto my shoulders so you could see it.’

  ‘Jesus.’ Lucy remembered now. A lane ran along the back of the housing estate, between it and the woodland. It had been the coach track from the big house at the top of the park, once owned by the Knox family. Legend had it that their daughter’s lover had shot the girl as she passed in their coach driving along this lane in the seventeenth century. He’d intended to kill her father.

  Near the bottom of the lane was a cottage, surrounded on all sides by a dense laurel hedge. The owners had a fountain in the middle of their garden. When Lucy was a child, she’d been unable to see above the hedge. Her father used to lift her, swinging her up onto his shoulders, holding her fast by the ankles as she craned up to see the fountain. That achieved, she would cling to him, resting her chin against the thickness of his hair.

  For a second, she felt a rush of warmth towards him that was instantly dispelled by the memory of what her father had done. Had he, even then, already embarked on an affair with a teenaged girl? She pulled her hand quickly from his and sat back in the seat, recoiling at the thought of what she had learnt about him the previous year.

  ‘I was thinking of the fountain,’ he said. ‘Is it still there?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Lucy managed, barely trusting herself to speak.

  ‘Will you help me to see it? If I can’t see over the hedge any more?’

  ‘I need to go,’ Lucy said, swallowing down the tears and the bile that burned at her throat. ‘I’ll see you before Christmas.’

  Chapter Twelve

  She joined a tailback on the roundabout at the end of the Foyle Bridge, just outside Gransha and could see, by the flashing blue lights on the Limavady Road, that a road traffic accident had happened that would see the road closed for a while. She considered driving across to offer help, but she’d had a long day and the last thing she wanted was to get caught up in something on her way home. Instead, she drove up the dual carriageway, into the heart of the Waterside, planning on cutting through Gobnascale and down the Old Strabane Road to Prehen along the back road bordering the old woodland.

  She was just reaching the junction of Bann Drive with Irish Street when a youth thudded onto the bonnet of her car as he careened across the road in front of her. He righted himself quickly, glancing into the car, long enough for Lucy to see his face. Then he set off, eight other youths in pursuit.

  Lucy grabbed her phone and speed-dialled the residential care unit as she pulled out onto the road, steering one-handed. It was Robbie who answered.

  ‘Lucy, it’s g—’

  ‘Robbie, is Gavin there?’ She spoke over him.

  ‘What? No, he’s out. What’s wrong?’

  ‘I think I’ve just seen him being chased by a gang. I’m going after him.’ She cut the call immediately.

  She could still see the gang running after him along Irish Street. Suddenly, Gavin, about twenty yards in front, sprinted across the road, weaving his way around cars coming in the other direction. The gang in pursuit split, some continuing on the same side of the road, others following him across to the opposite pavement. Lucy sped up, angry that being in her own car, she didn’t have a siren that might help scare the gang away.

  Up ahead, Gavin darted off the pavement, slipping through a gap in the wooden fencing to his right and into the car park area at the front of the River City Apostolic Church. The building itself was a basic single storey affair, with a set of steps to the front and little other external ornamentation that would mark it out as a place of worship. By the time Lucy pulled to a stop opposite it, the youths who had been pursuing Gavin had gathered in a scrum at the front steps of the building. Gavin was lying on the ground at the centre of it taking a beating from a dozen Nike shod feet.

  Ignoring the oncoming cars, Lucy sprinted across the street, calling out to the gang to stop. Some pack instinct, though, seemed to compel them for none paid her any heed. She reached the outer edge of the scrum and pulled the youth nearest to her backwards, away from the melee. He spun, raised his fist and slashed at her, but she’d anticipated it and slipped to the side. Quickly, she gripped his flailing arm and twisted it sharply back, against the joint. The youth screeched, following the direction his arm was being tugged to alleviate the pain. Lucy tucked her leg behind his and pulled him off balance, onto the ground.

  ‘Police,’ she shouted. ‘Disperse, now.’

  One of the others had turned to see what had happened to his friend and swung a kick wildly in Lucy’s direction. It glanced off her side. He lifted his boot a second time, aiming to stamp rather than kick. Lucy deflected the kick, bringing herself in close enough to him that she could grab his jacket and pull him away from Gavin.

  ‘I’m the police,’ she shouted at him.

  The boy stared stupidly at her for a moment then helped his mate to his feet and ran.

  Lucy turned to face the rest of the gang, but the numbers were winnowing out. Two boys continued to kick and stomp on Gavin, who had curled himself almost into a foetal ball by this stage, his hands up over his head, the blood marking his face black under the street lights. They took a final kick, then both turned and ran. One spat at Lucy as he did so.

  ‘Fenian bitch,’ he shouted.

  Lucy f
ollowed them a step or two as they ran, then gave up. Several cars had stopped on Irish Street now, the occupants staring at her. One man was standing out of his car, a mobile phone raised, recording what had happened.

  A second man was just getting out of his car. ‘Are you all right?’ he called, coming across to her. The mobile phone man continued to film even this.

  Lucy grunted thanks for his help and they both went across to Gavin. The boy still lay on the ground, but had brought his hand down from his face. His head was closely shaven, just as Lucy had remembered it from when she had last seen him. In addition to assorted grazes and cuts, a bruise was forming on his cheek. His mouth was slick with blood when he looked up at her. She could tell that he was dazed and was trying to work out how he knew her.

  ‘Gavin. It’s Lucy. Robbie’s ... friend. Can you hear me OK?’

  He looked around him, staring wildly at the man who had come to help. ‘Who’s he?’ he said, then tried to turn and lift himself up a little. Lucy and the other man gripped him around the trunk to help him up, earning only a shriek of pain from him as they did so.

  ‘His ribs could be broken,’ the man said. ‘He seemed to be taking quite a beating.’

  ‘What happened, Gavin?’

  ‘I don’t know. I never seen them before. I was just walking home and they chased me,’ Gavin said. ‘I never said nothing to them.’

  ‘That wasn’t the crowd I saw you with earlier?’

  Gavin shook his head. ‘Nah. The ones you saw me with are my friends. I don’t know who that crowd were.’

  ‘They maybe saw this,’ the man said, pulling the lapels of Gavin’s jacket back to reveal the blood-spattered green and white hoops of a Celtic football top. ‘Not the right colours for this part of the town, son.’

  ‘I can wear what I want,’ Gavin snapped, then turned and spat a bloody globule of saliva onto the ground.

  ‘This man is only trying to help, Gavin,’ Lucy said.

  ‘I don’t need help,’ the boy replied. ‘I need to go, or your boyfriend will be looking for me. He’ll probably phone the cops.’