Brian McGilloway - The Nameless Dead (Inspector Devlin #5)

by Brian McGilloway

  We moved back down, Joe Long acknowledging us with a nod of his head as we came into the room again. He flitted away a fat-bodied fly that had lifted from the corpse.

  The living room was untouched since our arrival. The books lay scattered across the floor, some still lying atop others, as if whoever had left them there had simply swept them from the shelves.

  ‘What do you think they were looking for?’

  ‘Could be cash,’ Patterson said. ‘Seems a bit deliberate, mind you. Nothing obvious is missing, unless there’s something we’re just not seeing.’

  ‘The other option is that Sean Cleary did this.’

  Patterson nodded. ‘Revenge for his father? It’s possible.’

  ‘There was no mention of powder or blood on his hands, though,’ I said.

  ‘He could have been wearing gloves,’ Patterson suggested. ‘Contact the North and ask them to look again.’

  ‘What about the weapon? If O’Hara was shot with a shotgun, Cleary would’ve needed to get rid of it somewhere.’

  ‘Maybe he has,’ Patterson said. ‘We’ll search the area if Dr Long here confirms shotgun.’

  I moved back into the office area again, although, as with the other room, nothing was obviously amiss. The newspaper was open at a crossword. The page before it had been cut out, the edge rough with scissor cuts.

  Joe Long stood up, pulling off his latex gloves.

  ‘What’s the damage, Joe? Shotgun?’

  Long shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t know. There’s definitely pellet dispersal, but the pellets aren’t typical of shotguns. Get young Doherty out there to take samples. You can work the body then bag it and send it to Letterkenny General. I’ll examine it there.’

  We spent the remainder of the afternoon searching the house, checking the grounds and the outlying land near the house, and interviewing neighbours. Yet by five o’clock we were no closer to recovering the murder weapon or developing any clear leads on who had shot Seamus O’Hara.

  There were, however, two significant items unearthed among the mess on the living-room floor. The first was a small carriage clock, lying under the piles of books. The casing at the back had opened and the battery had spilled onto the floor. It had stopped at three twenty-three. To check that the clock had been working before being knocked down, I pushed the battery back in long enough to see the red second hand twitch to life.

  It had come to light because one of the forensics team had been sent in by Michael Doherty to dust down the books on the floor, lest O’Hara’s assailant had removed their gloves to search through them. The books were aged, mostly pertaining to Donegal or environs. Many were fishing records and charts. It was during this process that I noticed that one of the larger volumes on the floor was an Ordnance Survey of Donegal. I picked it up from the top of the tottering pile where it had been set and began flicking through it, looking for the map of Islandmore. Sure enough, the page for that area had been removed. I believed I knew where I had last seen it: inside a plastic folder held by Lennie Millar.

  ‘Anything interesting?’ Doherty asked, coming into the room.

  ‘I think we’ve found the source of the tip-off to the Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains.’

  Doherty nodded. ‘And I think we might have got lucky out here,’ he said, gesturing that I should follow him.

  He led me out to the kitchen where the broken glass from the floor lay.

  ‘I found blood on the broken glass,’ he said. ‘I want to take it back and run it through the system. It could be the assailant smashed the window and cut himself in the process. We might hit a DNA match.’

  ‘Good work. How soon will you know?’

  ‘If it’s someone on the system, tonight or tomorrow. I’ll be in touch as soon as I know.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  McCready and I met with Harry Patterson that evening in the station. Burgess was still there when we arrived.

  ‘I followed that information up for you, Inspector,’ he said. ‘I got the run-around all afternoon. There were a load of companies and investors involved; then the whole lot collapsed. The bank had to take the properties from the builder then auction them off. A company registered in London now owns the estate. I can’t get a name on who runs it unless I file an official request through the UK police. Do you want me to?’

  ‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I think I know another way to find out. Thanks for checking for me.’

  ‘Anytime you’re ready, Inspector,’ Patterson called from the doorway of the main office. I followed him in and sat down. This had been Olly Costello’s office for all the years I had served under him. Patterson had chosen to make Letterkenny his headquarters, but had ensured that the office remained empty for his use when he was in Lifford.

  The scene-of-crime team was continuing to work the house, he informed us, but had already provided a preliminary report on their initial findings. Forensics had come back on the weapon, Patterson having made it clear he considered this a priority.

  ‘Not a shotgun, apparently,’ Patterson said, reading through the report. ‘The pellets were actually shrapnel-like pieces of bullet casing. He reckons it was a dodgy gun, probably fitted with a silencer.’

  ‘The same as the one that killed Sean Cleary?’

  ‘I’ve contacted the North for their ballistics report on the Cleary gun. But it seems likely.’

  ‘Date of death?’

  ‘Considering the state of the body, the pathologist thinks around two days.’

  ‘Putting it at the same day as Sean Cleary, too.’

  ‘So the question is, who died first? Did Cleary do O’Hara then have his own gun used against him in the playground?’

  ‘The clock in O’Hara’s living room was stopped at 3.23,’ I said. ‘Considering he’d been in bed and had the curtains pulled, I think we can assume it was a.m. rather than p.m.’

  ‘So, what have we got so far?’ Patterson asked, leaning back in his seat, his fingers steepled in their usual position on his belly.

  ‘We know that Cleary’s interview went out at 6 p.m. By eight o’clock that evening he was at Jimmy Callan’s house. He left there within a few minutes, though we do know that they argued. He was collected from O’Hara’s house at 10.25 p.m. We’ll need to get someone back out to Bryant to double-check there were no details missed.’

  ‘Like what?’ Patterson asked.

  ‘Like whether Sean Cleary looked like he’d just shot someone,’ McCready commented, then remembered to whom he was talking. He apologized quietly and lowered his head.

  ‘We know that at 10.25 p.m. Cleary was on his way to Strabane. He wanted to go to a pub on the Derry Road. Then, in the course of a phone call, he changed his destination to the playground on Beechmount. The kid in the factory grounds, Burke, spotted him there at 10.30 p.m. He was dead by 2 a.m.’

  ‘What we really need to know is if O’Hara was dead before or after that,’ Patterson said. ‘Did he die as a result of Cleary’s encounter with whoever he met in the playground, or was he already dead by then?’

  ‘We also need to find Jimmy Callan. We know Sean Cleary was with him before he went to O’Hara. They both wind up dead and then Callan vanishes the following morning in a bit of a panic.’

  ‘I’ll put out an alert on his whereabouts,’ Patterson said.

  ‘The one problem with all this,’ I said, ‘is that the Commission can’t prosecute anyone for the killing of Sean’s father anyway. No matter what they find out there, nothing can come of it. Millar has made that abundantly clear in all the interviews he’s given. Yet we have Sean Cleary and Seamus O’Hara both connected to the dig and both murdered. And the diggers being petrol bombed on the night of the killings. Why would someone try to block an investigation that can never go to court anyway?’

  ‘What connected O’Hara with the father, Declan Cleary?’ Patterson asked.

  ‘Cleary disappeared in ’76, by which time both bridges onto the island had gone. To get his bod
y onto the island, whoever killed him would have needed a boat. Either O’Hara helped the killer bring Declan Cleary across, or, when he was out at the nets, he saw something he shouldn’t have.’

  ‘Why would he have helped take him across? He wasn’t connected with any of the paramilitaries during the Troubles.’

  ‘He was a smuggler back then. Chances are, if the money was high enough he’d have done it.’

  ‘And regretted it now, if he was the one who contacted both Cleary’s son and the Commission.’

  ‘Find out what connected Cleary and Callan in ’76, too. The rumour was Declan was killed for touting on Callan’s young lad, Dominic. Why would Jimmy Callan have thought Declan Cleary had information on his son? Were Declan and Dominic friends? Do a bit of digging.’

  ‘What about the Commission? We’re not allowed to examine the Cleary killing,’ McCready said.

  ‘The original one, we’re not. But this is the son’s death we’re looking at, not the father’s. Or, more correctly, it’s O’Hara’s we’re looking at,’ I said.

  ‘Leave the Commission to me,’ Patterson said.

  As we were leaving, Patterson stopped me. ‘I heard you getting Burgess out there to run down info on Islandview?’

  I began to offer an explanation but he waved it away.

  ‘The DPP have been in touch. They’re dropping the Peter O’Connell file. They say there are too many peripheral issues to make a prosecution likely. They’re not taking it any further. Maybe give your vendetta with Morrison a rest for a while, until we get all this other stuff to bed, eh?’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Despite Patterson’s suggestion that I lay off Morrison, his comment had simply reminded me of the alternative way to identify the owners of Islandview. The company Burgess had identified was not local, yet Paul O’Connell had gotten a key from somewhere, as had Sheila Clark. Whoever was behind the company must live close by.

  I knew where I would find O’Connell. Many of the fellas Vincent Morrison had running the drugs around the borderlands for him were also employed legitimately in some of Morrison’s legal ventures, thus allowing him to pay them an apparently legal wage and therefore to provide legal assistance when they needed it. O’Connell was no exception. Appropriately enough, he was a stable boy for Morrison’s horses.

  Morrison’s home sat on a ten-acre site just beyond Porthall. To reach his house I had to drive along a quarter-mile driveway bordered by fields through which his horses cantered. It was from one such horse that my own daughter, Penny, had fallen and injured her skull.

  As I pulled up to the front of the house, a two-storey redbrick affair with faux columns standing either side of the doorway, I knew Morrison was in and that he would already be aware that I was there. I glanced up at his security camera as I made my way to the door. Unsurprisingly the door opened before I even had a chance to ring the bell.

  Morrison himself was a slight man, a little shorter than I and significantly trimmer. He still sported his moustache, though his hair had thinned somewhat since the first time we met.

  ‘Inspector Devlin; it’s always a pleasure. How’s your lovely daughter? Still well, I believe.’

  Morrison’s son was a classmate of Penny’s and one of her friends. I had tried many times to weaken the friendship between them, until the depth of the young boy’s concern for her in the aftermath of her accident forced me to accept the sincerity of the friendship.

  ‘Fine thanks. How’s John?’

  ‘A teenager. But, what can you do, eh? Is this a business or personal call?’

  ‘Always business, Mr Morrison,’ I said. ‘I wanted to talk to you about Peter O’Connell.’

  ‘Surely Peter’s parents might be more use to you. I’m just his employer.’

  ‘I’m well aware of that.’

  ‘He told me you let him crawl through shit the other night. That was nasty.’

  ‘I didn’t do anything; he choose to walk through shit to get back his stash. It tells me something about how much he fears his employer that he’d do that rather than have to tell him he’d flushed away his drugs without any sales.’

  Morrison laughed lightly. ‘I hadn’t considered it from that angle, but now you mention it, that’s true.’ He seemed vaguely satisfied at the suggestion.

  ‘I wanted to make him an offer, but I suspect you’re probably the better person to talk to.’

  Morrison began to protest again. ‘As I said, his own father—’

  ‘I want to know who owns the unfinished houses at Islandview. I know they’re tied up in all kinds of legal stuff, but I need a name. If O’Connell has a key to one of the houses, you know who he got it from.’

  ‘And what would Peter get from this?’

  ‘We’ll not press charges,’ I said. It was a gamble, but I suspected that no one had gone so far as to inform O’Connell yet that the DPP wasn’t pursuing a case anyway.

  ‘That’s an offer worth considering. You might need to let me put that to Peter himself. Obviously I know nothing about whatever arrangements he has going on at night, but I could appeal to his better nature in assisting the local gardai.’

  ‘That would be very civic-minded of you,’ I said. ‘He can contact me through the station,’ I added, going back to my car.

  I had barely made it out of the driveway when my mobile rang. The caller’s number was blocked.

  ‘Devlin here,’ I called into the hands-free on the sun visor.

  ‘This is Peter O’Connell. You wanted to know about Islandview?’

  ‘How did you get this number?’

  ‘Mr Morrison gave it to me,’ O’Connell said. I didn’t want to guess how Vincent Morrison had managed to acquire my mobile number.

  ‘He said you’d drop charges,’ he continued.

  ‘That’s right,’ I called. ‘I need to know where you got the key to the house in Islandview.’

  ‘The man who owns the estate. Niall Martin,’ O’Connell said.

  ‘Where does he live?’ I asked.

  ‘Wait a minute . . .’ I heard muttering, a rub of static as O’Connell covered the phone with his hand, presumably asking Morrison. It was clear that, whatever arrangement had been made with Martin for access to the house, it was not O’Connell’s doing.

  ‘He lives in the big house, the mansion . . . the manse, on Liskey Road in the North,’ he corrected himself, his words an echo of those I could hear Morrison speaking in the background.

  ‘Thank your boss,’ I began, but the connection had already been cut.

  My interest in Niall Martin was simply in finding out more about Sheila Clark. It was not only the initial lack of sympathy she had shown Christine Cashell which had annoyed me. More importantly, Christine and I had both heard someone hurting a crying child. Clark lived in close enough proximity and I was fairly sure she was lying about there not being a child in her house.

  I called Letterkenny station and requested they send me down anything they had on either Niall Martin or Sheila Clark. It would be morning before it would be through, the desk sergeant told me. I decided to hold fire on visiting Martin until I knew a little more about him. Morning would be time enough.

  Wednesday, 31 October

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The information I had requested was waiting for me when I arrived at the station. There was almost nothing on Niall Martin, beyond a speeding fine in the early nineties. Sheila Clark was different, however. She was on record as having worked in Letterkenny General as a paediatric nurse. She was in her early sixties now, and so retired. As I scanned her details, though, something stood out. She had worked in St Canice’s Mother-and-Baby Home for four years from 1974 to 1978, which meant that she had worked there at the same time as Declan Cleary.

  The last listed address for her had been in the late 1990s, then she herself seemed to have disappeared.

  I was finishing reading through the notes when Burgess loomed into view.

  ‘The super wants you in Letterkenny. F
orensics work on the O’Hara shooting is back.’

  The forensics technician, Michael Doherty, was sitting outside Patterson’s office, waiting to go in when I arrived.

  ‘Anything of interest?’ I asked, sitting next to him.

  He stifled a yawn. ‘Quite a bit,’ he said. ‘Enough to stop me getting to bed last night, at any rate.’

  Patterson’s door opened and, clicking his fingers, he beckoned us in, gesturing to a flask of coffee and a set of cups and saucers sitting on the table. He handed us copies of the postmortem report. I sat and read through the notes quickly.

  ‘He was already dying,’ I concluded, closing the report. Patterson reclined in his seat, watching me. ‘The cancer would have killed him in weeks, apparently.’

  ‘So it’s not quite so bad, then,’ Patterson muttered. ‘If he was dying anyway.’

  O’Hara had been suffering from terminal pancreatic cancer. The disease had spread to such an extent that he would have been in severe pain and would, in all likelihood, not have survived to the new year anyway.

  ‘The cause of death was bleeding out from the multiple gunshot wounds. Depth of wounding suggests low caliber or, more likely, a silenced weapon.’

  ‘Which fits in with our findings yesterday,’ Doherty said. ‘We got a match on the ballistics from the Sean Cleary shooting. It was the same gun.’

  He opened the folder he had with him and laid out images of the broken window pane in the back door of O’Hara’s house. ‘I also found quite a bit around this door,’ he began. ‘The glass is lying inside the house, as we’d expect,’ he pointed out. ‘So the assailant struck it from outside.’

  ‘Otherwise it would be a break-out,’ Patterson joked. Doherty smiled thinly, then continued.

  ‘As I mentioned yesterday,’ he said, ‘I found traces of blood on the broken glass. The bulk of it was small drops,’ he said, pointing to a small circle of blood smeared to the right of the image.