Unti Lucy Black Novel #3

by Brian McGilloway

  “You called me?” Lucy said.

  The girl nodded. “I’m Grace.”

  “Lucy Black. You think Kamil was killed here?”

  The girl nodded. “I found something downstairs. Look.” From her back pocket she pulled out a folded picture. The light was so meager, Lucy could barely make out what was on it, until the girl pulled out her phone and, turning on the flash on the camera, illuminated the image for her. It was a picture of a man, woman, and two children. It was badly worn, as if through years of being handled. She was fairly certain that the man in the picture was Kamil Krawiec.

  “It’s Crackers, isn’t it?” Grace asked.

  “I think it might be,” Lucy agreed.

  “I told you I could be a cop,” the girl said. “Follow me.”

  Chapter Twenty-­Three

  AS THEY MOVED out of the room, Lucy pulled out her own torch and illuminated it. Within its circle, she could see that, regardless of how well the exterior of the building had looked, the bank had been ransacked inside. The fluorescent tube lights had been pulled down and lay smashed on the carpeted floor beneath their feet. The silvered plastic fittings that had housed the lights were shattered and hung from the ceiling. Lucy swept the torchlight across the ceiling above her, examining the polystyrene tiles, stained brown with watermarks, which had been smashed through, the cavity above them empty. As she picked her way down the corridor, she saw that a thick trench had been made in the wall to her left, just above door level. The cement and broken stonework lay on the ground next to her as she walked. They passed a second office, as badly trashed at the other, Grace nimbly picking her way along the corridor in front of Lucy, moving with the ease of familiarity.

  “What were you doing in here anyway?” Lucy asked.

  The girl didn’t turn her head. “I came in out of the rain.”

  “It hasn’t rained in weeks,” Lucy said.

  “It usually does,” the girl countered, clearly keen not to further explain her presence in the building.

  They reached a third office to the left, just before the staircase leading down, and Lucy swung the torch beam in to scan the room quickly. It was tidier than the other two, a lot of the rubble and trash pushed against one wall. A stained mattress lay on the floor, next to which, catching the torchlight in their foil, lay several opened condom wrappers. Lucy guessed at the nature of business conducted in the bank office now.

  As she turned to the stairs again, she realized the girl was looking at her, as if daring her to react.

  “That’s not a Derry accent, Grace,” she said, instead. “I’d guess Belfast.”

  “Lisburn,” the girl corrected her.

  “So what brought you to Derry?”

  The girl waited a pause, then turned and led her down the steps. “Watch your feet, the carpet’s pulled near the bottom and you can fall. Trust me.”

  “Spoken from experience?” Lucy said.

  “I was in care,” Grace said. “In Belfast. My mum couldn’t control me and my stepfather made her put me in care in case I infected any of their new kids with my being a fucker.”

  “What about your dad?”

  “He was killed in a bombing at an army barracks in 1996.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Was he a soldier?”

  “Bread man,” the girl said. “Delivering their bread for the day. They stopped their cease-­fire for one year and that’s all it took them to kill my daddy.”

  Lucy tried to think of something to say, but couldn’t.

  “Fuckers. Anyway, when my ma remarried, the new one didn’t like me. Thought I had too much to say for myself.”

  “Did you?”

  The girl twisted to glare at Lucy, then broke into a smile. “Probably. They put me in care a few years back. Once I was sixteen no one really gave a shit enough to come looking for me.”

  “And what age are you now?” Lucy asked. She knew, with all the other demands on Social Ser­vices, a child going missing near the age at which they could choose to leave care anyway wouldn’t warrant any massive effort in searching. Still, if she was still young enough, Lucy could contact them.

  “Eighteen,” the girl said, defiantly, so that Lucy could not tell if she was being truthful.

  They reached the bottom of the steps and moved through a doorway from which hung the remains of a door. The space into which they stepped had once housed the cashier area. To one side stood a row of cashier desks behind a security screen of bulletproof glass, spiderwebbed now, with cracks where someone had tried their best, repeatedly, to break through. As with upstairs, several trenches ran along the walls, the rubble and cement dust carpeting the reception area.

  “That was all recent,” the girl said. “The holes in the walls. It wasn’t like that a fortnight ago.”

  “Was that the last time you were in here?”

  The girl nodded.

  The last time it had rained, Lucy reflected. Grace was evidently plying her trade outdoors in the good weather.

  “What is it, anyway?” the girl asked, nodding to the gaping space.

  “Someone has stolen all the pipes and cabling, I think,” Lucy said. “They must have realized that no one would see them doing it, what with the false fronts on the windows. Why do you think Kamil died in here?”

  “I’ll show you,” Grace said, leading Lucy across. Near one wall was a pile of rubble. “I found the picture here, last night,” she said. “Just over to that side.”

  Lucy shone her torch across the pile of shattered stonework. Only then did she notice the dark brown splotches among the cement dust, the spatter marks that, in places, had managed to make it as far as the wall several feet behind.

  She looked again at the picture in her hand. There was a stain on it, which, absurdly, reminded her of Tony Henderson’s paint-­encrusted fingerprint on the image of Stuart Carlisle which she had shown him when asking him to identify his great-­uncle.

  She turned the picture over. The white back still carried the faint outline of several dark brown fingerprints.

  “That’s blood, isn’t it?” Grace asked.

  “That’s blood,” Lucy agreed.

  Chapter Twenty-­Four

  WHEN LUCY CALLED Fleming’s mobile, the number was initially busy so she called straight through to Strand Road to tell Burns what she had found. Grace watched her as she did so, waiting.

  “I need to split before the cops come,” she said, when Lucy hung up. “The rest of the cops.”

  Lucy nodded. “I understand.”

  The girl waited a moment. “Is there a reward of something? For finding this?”

  Lucy stuck her hand in her pocket and pulled out two bills, a twenty and a five. She hesitated a beat, then handed the girl both.

  “Go and buy some food. And a place to stay for the night,” she said.

  “Right,” the girl said, without conviction, then turned and took the steps two at a time, holding her phone as a torch.

  “And thanks,” Lucy added.

  She stopped at the turn of the steps and looked down. “See you around,” she said.

  Lucy’s own phone began to ring. It was Fleming.

  “What’s up?”

  “The girl’s on her way out. Let her go. I think she’s found the kill site down here.”

  “We’d best tell Burns,” Fleming said.

  “I already have. Your line was busy.”

  “It was City Center Initiative with the registration number we wanted,” he said. “Wait a mo.” She heard grunts as Fleming, she guessed, helped Grace climb back out through the windows.

  “Lucy said there was a reward.” Lucy heard the girl’s voice, tinny through Fleming’s mobile.

  “Tom,” Lucy called, but to no avail. She heard the rustling of movement and Fleming came back on the line a moment later.

 
“I gave her a few pounds for her help,” he said.

  “She already got twenty-­five from me,” Lucy said.

  Fleming chuckled softly. “The little shite,” he said, admiringly.

  THE FORENSICS TEAM came in through the main doorway on Waterloo Place, after Lucy had helped push out the wooden boards from the inside. The sudden bloom of light filling the room dazed her a little. She could see now the sheer quantity of cement dust motes floating in the shafts of sunlight and realized, with concern, that she had been breathing them in for some time.

  With the benefit of the increased light in the room, to which the team added further by removing all the window boards as well, there could be no doubt that the stains she had seen were indeed blood.

  Tara Gallagher stepped into the room a few minutes later, accompanied by another DS with CID called Mickey, whose surname Lucy had been told numerous times and had promptly forgotten on each instance. Tom Fleming followed behind, looking a little flushed, the heat, and exertion of climbing up and down the Walls, telling on him.

  “Well done, you,” Tara said. “Scooped everyone to the site.”

  “How did you find it?” Mickey asked. “It’s a bit off the beaten track.”

  “A tip-­off.”

  “More like just a tip,” Tara said, glancing around at the state of the place. “Who would have been in here in the first place?”

  Fleming wandered across from where he had been standing examining the holes in the wall. “Stealing pipes and wiring,” he said.

  “Who? The tipster or the victim?” Mickey asked.

  “I’d say the victim,” Fleming said. “Martin Kerrigan said that Kamil had thin cuts on his hands. That would be consistent with pulling out cables and pipes. Kamil was a builder by trade; the trenches cut in the wall are fairly precise.”

  “Maybe that’s what he’s been doing these past few months? Metal thefts?” Lucy said.

  Fleming shrugged. “He’d not be the first,” he said.

  Lucy reddened. During a previous case, they’d encountered a metal theft team who had stolen railings off the grave of Mary Quigg. Lucy had broken the fingers of one of the thieves during his arrest. Her only regret was that she’d not managed to stand on his other hand before she’d been pulled off him.

  One of the Forensics team padded down the steps, pulling down his face mask, revealing himself to be Tony Clarke with whom Lucy had spoken earlier.

  “Looks like some of the local hookers are using the rooms above,” he said. “The number of used johnnies lying about up there.”

  “I’m sure it’s not the first time clients got screwed in a bank,” Fleming said. Lucy guessed he had already figured out the use to which the building was being put to by Grace.

  “How did they get in?” Mickey asked. “The front was sealed tight.”

  “The window on the upper floor runs level with the City Walls. The board had come loose. You can climb in fairly easily,” Lucy explained.

  “Why bring him in here to kill him, though?” Mickey asked. “It’s a lot of effort.”

  “It is private,” Tara said. “No one’s going to interrupt.”

  “Especially if the beating was prolonged,” Lucy said. “The PM showed over one hundred impact points. Plus, Kerrigan said he’d been kneecapped.”

  Fleming was watching where the CSI team worked. They had cordoned off the area around where the blood could be seen and were following each other’s steps across small raised platforms to avoid unnecessary contact with the scene. “I think he was tortured,” he said, finally.

  “Why?”

  Fleming looked around. “Why would he be down here? If he’d been in here for sex, he’d have been in the upstairs room. Maybe he had a falling out with one of the team working with him. Whatever it was, they wanted him to suffer. Breaking both his legs? Beating him with hammers and leaving him in a bin to be crushed? They could have left him sealed in here; no one would ever have known any different.”

  “Until one of the whores found him,” Mickey said.

  “Girls,” Lucy said sharply. “Not whores.”

  “Regardless,” Fleming agreed. “It means they didn’t want him found near here.”

  “Not while he was still alive at any rate,” Lucy said.

  Fleming’s phone began to ring and he took the call. At first Lucy thought he was unable to hear what was being said, that perhaps the mobile signal inside the building was poor, for he asked the person at the other end to repeat themselves three times.

  “You’re sure of that,” he said finally. He listened to the response then, thanking the caller, hung up. He stared at Lucy, his expression bewildered.

  “I got them to check the registration number of the car seen in the alley that CCI pulled off the CCTV cameras for me,” he said finally. “It belongs to Terry Haynes.”

  Chapter Twenty-­Five

  FLEMING WAS UNSETTLED the whole way back to the PPU, tapping out an impatient rhythm on his knee with his fingers as they drove.

  “Are you okay?” Lucy asked, looking over at him.

  He shook his head, then turned and looked out the window. “Terry helped me the last time I dried out,” he said, finally. “He had slipped himself years back and gave up sponsoring until he got himself right. I knew he’d taken on a few recently, supporting newcomers and that.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lucy said.

  Fleming continued staring out the window. “It is what it is. If he’s involved in some way then . . . you know. I just . . . Terry helped ­people who were drinking. He knew what it was like himself. Once you’ve been through that, you know how it feels. He was almost evangelical.”

  “So you don’t think he could he have killed Kamil?”

  Fleming shrugged. “If he’d slipped and was drinking heavily again, I suppose he could be capable of anything. I’ve known Provos and UVF men who were great AA sponsors, just not particularly good ­people. But I thought Terry was one of the good guys, you know.”

  Lucy nodded, watching ahead as the traffic thickened and their journey slowed. “Just because it was his car, doesn’t mean it was he who killed him,” she said.

  “But it doesn’t mean it wasn’t either,” Fleming said. “Lucy, I’m not going to let my friendship with Terry blind me from the evidence,” he added. “If he did kill Kamil, he’ll have to answer for it.”

  Lucy said nothing. She’d not wanted to offend Fleming, but at the same time, she needed to be sure that he was looking at the case objectively.

  Fleming glanced at the dashboard clock. Lucy was surprised to see that it was pushing 4:45.

  “Can you drop me off at home?” Fleming said, finally. “I’m going to call around a few ­people and see if anyone knows where Terry might be.”

  Lucy nodded. She realized that she had planned to call at the Social Ser­vices residential care unit in the Waterside at some stage to speak with Helen Dexter. She could do so now, once she’d dropped Fleming home. That she hadn’t before was partly due to Doreen Jeffries not wishing the girl to think that she suspected her in the theft of her jewelry until the fingerprinting had been completed, but, more importantly, Lucy knew it was because she herself was reluctant to face Robbie. They had dated for some time, before she broke off with him over an errant kiss he shared with a colleague of his at a Halloween party. They had made up on the night he was injured after an explosive device went off under her car. While they had slept together on occasions since, Lucy couldn’t help feeling that something had changed. Not least, her nagging doubt that what had once been affection for Robbie on her part had now changed into guilt for what had happened to him.

  SHE COULD SEE his outline through the frosted glass pane of the care unit’s front door as Robbie hobbled toward it, his newly acquired walking stick betraying his identity.

  “Oh, hi you,” he said when he saw her, open
ing the door wide to allow her in. He inclined toward her and pecked her on the cheek. “I didn’t know you were coming up.”

  “How are you?”

  Robbie nodded. “Okay. Same as usual. Still sore.”

  Despite the passage of nine months, Robbie was still experiencing pain in his leg. The surgeon had managed to save it, though the lower half was composed more of metal pins and plates than bone at this point, he’d joked.

  “I thought the Bionic Man felt no pain,” Lucy said. “And he can jump really high.”

  Robbie smirked unconvincingly. “Come on in. Social or business?”

  “Business,” Lucy admitted. “Are you sure you’re okay? You usually humor even my worst jokes.”

  He smiled mildly. “My leg’s sore, is all.”

  “How about a massage?” Lucy said. “Business should only take a few minutes.”

  Robbie managed a more sincere smile at that. “It might help. It depends how long it lasts.”

  “Play your cards right and you never know,” Lucy said. “Is Helen about?”

  “She’s in her room. What’s up?”

  Lucy shook her head. “Maybe nothing. Did you know she was working for Doreen Jeffries?”

  Robbie nodded. “She’s been going out to her for a while. I thought it was a good thing for her to do. The two of them have got quite close. I think Doreen likes the company. Helen’s thriving on the trust, especially after how the charity shop ended up. Why? What’s happened?”

  “While Doreen was on holidays someone stole her jewelry.”

  “And you think it was Helen?”

  “I don’t want to. Nor does Doreen. But whoever got into her house did so without having to break in.”

  “They had a key?”

  Lucy nodded. “Doreen said she gave Helen her key.”

  “She did. It was a really big thing for her.”

  “What was a big thing?” a voice said. Lucy looked across to where Helen Dexter stood in the doorway of the corridor leading down to the unit’s bedrooms.

  “Someone broke into Doreen’s house while she was on holiday.”