Unti Lucy Black Novel #3

by Brian McGilloway

  “Jenny was always like that. Ever since I met John, she’s been nagging at me. That’s why we don’t visit. He doesn’t like her.”

  “Just because he doesn’t like your sister shouldn’t stop you from seeing her.”

  “It’s not . . . it’s complicated,” she echoed. “John likes being with me. He likes going with me wherever I go.”

  “Everywhere?”

  Fiona shrugged.

  “What if you want to go out with friends for the night?”

  “I, ah . . . I don’t . . .” She cleared her throat. “I don’t really have friends. My friends are his friends.”

  “Were they yours first or his?”

  Fiona stared at her. “I know what you’re doing. You’re the same as Jenny.”

  “Jenny’s concerned for you, Fiona. She cares about you.”

  “So does John.”

  Lucy waited a beat. “Did he tell you that before or after he split your lip?”

  The girl stared at her, the water running down her face, dripping from her chin onto the rise of her chest. Lucy noticed something at the curve of the top of her costume. She moved toward the girl, who backed away slightly.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” she said. “You have a bruise showing on your chest.” The mark was still partially red at the center, purpling around the edges. It was no bigger than a ten pence piece; the tip of a finger. Lucy guessed there would be four corresponding concentric marks around it where John had gripped her. She worked hard to keep her tone even, so as not to betray the building anger she felt at the sight of the injury.

  Fiona glanced down, then tugged at the collar of the swimsuit, pulling it over where the upper edge of the bruise had shown.

  “I walked into the wardrobe door, at home,” she said, quickly.

  “You know that’s why they choose places like that,” Lucy said. “Somewhere that no one will see the injuries.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Fiona said. “I had an accident. I’m clumsy. John tells me that all the time. I’m so clumsy I’d fall down the stairs if he wasn’t there to look out for me.”

  “Is that what he says? They do that. Make themselves feel big, powerful. Disempowering you to make themselves feel in control.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Fiona said, turning and grabbing the towel from the hook where she had hung it.

  “There are ­people who can help, Fiona. If you want. You don’t have to put up with anything.”

  “I’m not putting up,” she said. “You’re imagining things.”

  “I can help you,” Lucy said. “If you want help, I can help you. Not because I think you’re weak, or vulnerable. But because I don’t like seeing ­people being hurt.”

  Fiona stared at her. Her mouth worked silently, as if she was trying to formulate some objection or denial, but could find nothing adequate to convince either herself or Lucy.

  “I’m not telling you what to do,” Lucy said. “I’m offering you help if you want it. I don’t really have many friends either, so I’m in no position to comment on anyone else.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  LUCY ENDED UP waiting in the foyer for Jenny to get showered and changed. Fiona told her that she had to go on and to tell her sister that she would call her later, something which they both knew was untrue even as the girl said it.

  She waved and smiled mildly as she moved through the automatic doors out into the car park. Only then did John appear. He’d been leaning against the outer wall, speaking with someone on his mobile. Or at least having given the impression that he had been, perhaps to justify hanging around outside, waiting for Fiona.

  As the ­couple walked to the car, he spoke earnestly at her, his head turned toward her, her own bowed. At one point he draped his arm across her shoulders, but she sidestepped out of his embrace.

  Jenny appeared from the changing room. “Has she gone already?” she asked, the flush rising from her throat into her face.

  “She said she’d call later,” Lucy said.

  Jenny snorted disparagingly. “She will, my arse. Is Sleeping with the Enemy with her?”

  Lucy nodded, trying not to smile at the name.

  Jenny cracked a brief smile of her own at Lucy’s discomfort. “Listen. Sorry you’ve been dragged into all this. Dermot thought he was being helpful last night calling for you. She was in such a state when she arrived. I should have known it wouldn’t last for long.”

  “Has he hit her before?” Lucy asked, shouldering her bag. They moved out into the evening air. The few scraps of cloud in the sky were high and thin, reflecting the lowering sun along their gilded edges. The air felt cool compared the humidity of the leisure center.

  “I don’t honestly know,” Jenny said. “As you can probably tell, we’ve lost contact a fair bit.”

  “Since he came along?”

  “Fairly much. At first they would visit us together. They were inseparable, the way you are in the first flush of love. I could tell our kids annoyed him, but he tolerated them. Then she started to cancel visits, always with some excuse: she wasn’t feeling well; John was tired after work; he’d an important meeting that had overrun.”

  “What’s he do?”

  “He works for the Council.”

  “He looked familiar,” Lucy said. “I can’t place him, though. What’s his name?”

  “John Boyd. He was in all the papers at the start of the year. As part of the City of Culture celebrations, the council had promised to clean up the city center. All the abandoned buildings?”

  Lucy nodded.

  “The recession has closed down so many businesses there were all these empty buildings, making the place look rundown. He came up with the plan to put false fronts on them. Barricading up the old broken windows with wooden boards with nice bright windows painted on them.”

  Lucy laughed. “I’ve seen those.”

  “In fairness, they do work,” Jenny admitted begrudgingly. “The place looks better. Even if a dick like him was behind it.”

  “Does he not trust her to go out on her own?”

  “She doesn’t go out on her own. She’d her phone off last night when she was in our house. Do you know how many missed calls she had from him when she turned it on again? Ninety-­three!”

  “Maybe he felt guilty,” Lucy reasoned.

  “He felt out of control,” Jenny retorted. “She was out of his control for an hour and it must have driven him nuts.”

  Lucy nodded. “Look, I’m not sure what good I can be. The pattern is so familiar it’s infuriating. Unless she presses charges, though, we can’t touch him. And if we tried to, you can be sure she’d back him up. She had . . .” Lucy paused, unsure whether telling Jenny would do any good. In the end, she reasoned that Fiona’s sister had a right to know. “She had a bruise on her breast. A grip mark. I’d bet there were more. When I asked her about it, she said she walked into a wardrobe.”

  “Bastard! A wardrobe this time? It was the cupboard last night. She’ll be running out of doors soon,” Jenny hissed. “Why doesn’t she—­? How can she be so weak?”

  Lucy held up her hand. “I understand how you feel, Jenny. But, much as I’d love to nail his balls to the wall myself, there’s nothing you can do, except be there for her and support her. It’s all part of the pattern. She’s not being weak; he will have systematically made her feel that she needs him to be worthwhile. What she really needs is someone to be nonjudgmental with her. When she starts to see through his bullshit, she’ll maybe look to break away from him a little more.”

  THE HOUSE WAS quiet, the rooms dark when Lucy got home. Increasingly, she found herself creating excuses to stay away from home in the evenings. She found the silence oppressive. She’d friends at work, Tara being the obvious one, but none of them visited her at home, nor she them. She’d always t
ried to keep work separate from home life, not least having seen the impact it had on her own family growing up. The problem was, increasingly she was beginning to wonder if she had much of a life at home. Even with Robbie, her partner, she realized that she went to his rather than him coming to her home. And even those visits were becoming further and further apart.

  She turned on the television in the living room, if only to create noise in the house, a pretense of activity. The news was full of images from Belfast where loyalist protestors continued to riot after a parade was refused permission to pass a nationalist area of the Ardoyne. First flags, now parades. The newscaster was commenting on how it was a return to the bad old days, that these issues had been reignited. Lucy shook her head. The issues had always been there, just below the surface. Like love, the first flush of peace was idyllic, such a contrast to what had gone before, that you were prepared to overlook the flaws; indeed were blind to them. The real test was always going to be the long haul: the ability to face the imperfections and still decide that it was worth sticking with, that the good outweighed the bad.

  Strangely, the trouble had not reached Derry. In fact, as a result of local dialogue and accommodation, the twelfth of July parades had gone through the city without incident, as part of the bigger Culture celebrations of the year. While the bonfires burned across the rest of the North, Derry had danced to its own unique tune.

  Thursday, 19 July

  Chapter Eighteen

  LUCY WOKE JUST after eight, feeling rested for the first time in months. Her arms ached pleasingly from the exertion of swimming the night before.

  She’d nothing for breakfast in the house, having left the groceries she bought with Doreen, so stopped at a café, before heading on to the Strand Road station where she and Tom Fleming were to meet Chief Superintendent Burns to update him on the developments with Kamil Krawiec.

  Burns sat back in his seat as they explained the process by which they had identified the man, pushing his hand through the loose sandy curls of his hair as he listened.

  “So, we know that the victim was in the Foyle Hostel years back. Where has he been since?”

  Fleming shrugged. “No one seems to know. He may have crossed the border, he may have gone over to England looking for work. We’ll continue to ask around.”

  “And you have a positive ID on the man from the river?”

  Lucy nodded. “Stuart Carlisle. Our difficulty now is that, while Mr. Carlisle didn’t make it to his own cremation, someone else did. We need to identify who it was and why they were cremated in that manner.”

  “Hugger-­mugger,” Fleming said, smiling to himself.

  “How were the bodies swapped?”

  It was Lucy’s turn to shrug. “Presumably, it was something to do with the Duffys, but they’re denying it. The son was the one driving the body to Belfast. It might be worth checking when the ser­vice ended here and what time he arrived in Belfast for the cremation. See how much of a gap there was between the two. If we can show that there’s an unusually long lag between his leaving Derry and arriving in Belfast, we can put some pressure on him.”

  Burns nodded. “Very good. Look, I know your hands are full enough, but we need help processing interviews over this bin death. We put out a request for information last night and we’ve had hundreds of calls. The team is stretched beyond breaking.”

  “Can uniforms not help out?” Fleming asked. “We’ve our own work to do.”

  “With all due respect, Tom, neither of your guys are going anywhere—­either the one who wasn’t cremated, or the one who was.”

  “The one who was cremated had a mark on one of the plates recovered from his ashes. The pathologist reckoned he’d been struck with a hatchet.”

  “Jesus!” Burns held up his hand. “Look, don’t tell me. When you have a name, we’ll open a case. Most of the uniforms have been drafted up to help police with this nonsense in Belfast. Derry’s so quiet at the moment, we’ve a skeleton force working.”

  “We’re victims of our own success,” Fleming added. “I blame the heat; it’s making ­people fractious. If it was pissing down, half of them would stay off the streets.”

  “Regardless,” Burns said. “DS Gallagher will pass you on names and numbers of callers. Maybe do a quick first interview over the phone, see if any of them are worth following up on with a face-­to-­face. We can handle those interviews ourselves.”

  LUCY KNEW THAT, considering the time difference, it would be unlikely that United Surgical Specialists would be open. However, when she checked their website for a contact number, she saw that their European offices were based in Dublin.

  Part of the reason that the Celtic Tiger had been so ferocious was the policy of the Irish government to offer huge corporation tax incentives for American firms to use Ireland as their European bases, bringing with them thousands of jobs. It had been claimed that some major American companies had paid only two percent tax in Ireland. It was no huge surprise, then, to find that USS were based there, too. However, it took three calls before the receptionist in United Surgical Supplies finally answered the phone and, when she did, she put Lucy on hold.

  Despite the earliness of the hour, the heat was building and opening the windows in Lucy’s room offered little respite. Maydown station, where she was based, had been built during the Troubles. The windows in the rooms had been designed to sit high up on the walls, well above head height, to reduce the opportunity for a sniper outside the compound to target anyone in the rooms beyond. Their size, no more than one foot from sill to frame, also meant that, in the event of a rocket attack or explosion, there would be a reduced chance of being injured by falling glass. The drawback to such security measures was that it created a heat trap in the rooms. She opened her polo shirt collars as wide as they would go and leaned back in her chair, the phone resting between her chin and chest, stretching her arms above her to ease the aching she felt from her swim the night before.

  Eventually, she began flicking through her notes from Tony Henderson regarding his great-­uncle’s funeral ser­vice. Henderson had said that it started at 1 p.m. He’d had a hospital appointment that afternoon, so hadn’t gone to Belfast with the remains. Ciaran Duffy had said he went straight from the funeral parlor to Belfast, stopping only for a few minutes in the shop at the foot of the Glenshane. She knew the place, a petrol station with a restaurant attached, positioned just as the road began the incline up through the mountains, then back down into Dungiven and on to Derry.

  “Sorry for keeping you. Your call is important to us. How can I help you today?” the woman at the other end of the phone intoned suddenly. Lucy imagined her sitting at the other end of the line, reading a magazine or surfing the net as she spoke.

  Her enthusiasm waned as Lucy explained the purpose of her call.

  “If he was cremated, how can you not know who he was?” the woman asked, her voice nasal.

  “We believe someone swapped the body that was to be cremated with one that wasn’t. We’ve identified the man who was meant to be cremated but wasn’t. We’ve yet to identify the man who wasn’t to be but was. If that makes sense?” she added.

  “Uh-­huh,” the woman said, unconvinced. “Well, I don’t see how we can help. We simply provide the implants. We’ve no idea who the intended recipients are. You’d need to contact the hospital who used it.”

  “I hope to,” Lucy said. “If you could tell us which hospital the implant was sent to. I have the batch number, if that’s any use.”

  She read the number off twice, having to repeat it the second time to allow for the broadness of her Northern accent.

  “I’ll have to come back to you, Sergeant,” the woman said. “I’ll be quick as I can.”

  She hung up. Lucy lifted the receiver, then dialed Tony Henderson’s number. She explained that she needed to know when the ser­vice for his great-­uncle had concluded.

>   “It started at one o’clock,” he said. “I had an appointment at half past two and I was just on time, so, allowing for the travel time to the hospital, I’d say it was two when it ended.”

  “Perfect,” Lucy said. “Thanks.”

  “Listen,” Henderson said. “Just when you’re on the line. Will this whole business screw with the will and that? The sharing of his, you know, his estate and that.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so,” Lucy said. “So long as the death certificate was issued, his burial, or lack of, is irrelevant, I’d imagine.”

  “Brilliant,” Henderson said.

  Lucy called All Hallows again and asked to speak with Frank Norris. After a moment, she recognized his voice when he answered.

  “Mr. Norris? DS Black. We spoke yesterday about the Stuart Carlisle cremation.”

  “I remember. I’ve been thinking about it all night. You know, we could get shut down if ­people think we cremated the wrong body. ­People here are squeamish enough about the whole cremation thing without something like this.”

  “Maybe it’s a fear of being burned alive,” Lucy suggested.

  “Because that’s so much worse than being buried alive, is it?” Norris snapped.

  Lucy laughed. “That’s true. Mind you, there’s always a chance of getting out if you’ve been buried alive, I suppose.”

  “What I’m saying is, I’d appreciate it if anything that needs to be done about this can be done, I suppose, discreetly.”

  “I’ll do my best, Mr. Norris. The reason I’m calling is: you wouldn’t happen to know what time the Carlisle coffin arrived with you, would you? I’m trying to ascertain when exactly the swap was made.”

  “Swap?”

  “The person in the coffin was obviously not Stuart Carlisle. All I can think is that someone swapped the body.”

  “Why? To avoid funeral costs?”

  “To hide a murder, possibly.”

  Norris groaned. “Jesus, it just gets worse by the minute. No offence, DS Black, but every conversation I have with you is taking years from my life.”