Border Angels
Page 24
Then, at the lough shore, the swell of restless waves broke the spell. The stony shore was full of surging sounds. He was reminded that the inner torment of the mind could never be soothed completely. Removing the picture of Lena from his wallet, he let it fall into the churning waves.
He toiled back up the lane to the cottage. Wanting to make himself invisible, he jumped into his car and headed south. He weaved in and out of the narrow roads that crisscrossed the border until he pulled up at the entrance to the ghost estate at Foxborough Mews. The rows of empty houses had proved such an effective refuge for people with unresolved lives.
Two men in safety helmets and high-visibility vests stood in front of the estate, poring over a map. One of them was Michael Mooney. He looked pleased to see Daly. Grinning, he walked over and shook hands with the detective.
“Your investigation was very valuable to us, Inspector,” he said. “Thanks to you, the regeneration association will be able to continue in spite of the harm Jack did.”
“How come?”
“Jack was the unfortunate victim of a blackmail plot organized by a gang of ruthless Croatians. He compromised his position of trust and misused peace funds, but he was a desperate man forced into a corner. That’s the story I’ll be reporting to the auditors. Greta Fowler is an important witness.”
“Sounds like an exercise in damage limitation.”
“The association will escape without too much discredit, which will be very disappointing to some, I’m sure. Unionist politicians would have seized on the story like dogs jumping on a prize bone. There’s a new round of peace funding in September. We have our application submitted already.”
“And what will you do with the money? Build more homes to be peopled by ghosts?”
“Who knows? Young men need to be kept busy; otherwise they’ll turn to guns and bombs. Don’t you know that the devil makes use of idle hands?”
A thundering roar interrupted their conversation. Before them, a gray haze shimmered over the houses. Not fog but the dust of collapsed buildings. A line of bulldozers devoured the first row of unfinished houses, plowing them back into the boggy earth.
“What’s happening?” asked Daly.
“These bulldozers are rescuing the housing market,” said Mooney without a trace of sarcasm. “The country has thousands more houses than it could ever fill in twenty years. When homes aren’t being built, the economy goes into free fall. This destruction is the price that has to be paid for prosperity and stability.”
“It seems scandalous.”
“These are scandalous times.”
A bulldozer surged over a fresh mound of rubble. Daly took a last look at the homes, all clean and freshly painted and hopeful, but with little to offer prospective buyers other than crippling debt and a lifetime of worry. Ireland was a country where everything had grown out of proportion, even greed. The bricks and mortar of Foxborough Mews formed part of a straggling fault line that ran the length of the country, north and south, through scattered villages, moribund towns, and along new dual carriageways empty of traffic. A line of ghost estates that stretched like a yawning crack, threatening to drag the entire nation’s finances under the surface.
“Please God, let us never see empty houses like these again,” Mooney said with a sigh.
“These houses will always exist,” replied Daly. “They’ll haunt people’s dreams for a hundred years.”
A cloud of bluebottles rose from the ruptured sewers, buzzing a final farewell in their faces.
Acknowledgments
I thank my agent, Paul Feldstein, as well as Otto Penzler and Rob Hart at MysteriousPress.com, all the folks at Open Road Integrated Media, and the Northern Ireland Arts Council for its support and funding.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 Anthony Quinn
Cover design by Mauricio Díaz
978-1-4804-3601-5
Published in 2013 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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