Death on the Line: A Northern Irish Noir Thriller (Wilson Book 7)

by Derek Fee

  Hills leaned over the two policemen. ‘You boys have been making a fucking nuisance of yourself today. People are complaining that they’re being harassed going about their business.’

  Graham and Davidson looked at each other. ‘Strange that, Peter,’ Graham said. ‘People are complaining about the police doing their duty.’ He turned to Hills. ‘Even if you get your news from the local rags, you’ll be aware that we’re looking for the mother of a child who died recently in the Royal Victoria. I don’t suppose you’ve seen Gillian McAuley lately?’

  ‘Never heard of her.’ Hills stood back.

  ‘She’s not one of yours then?’ Davidson asked.

  Hills smiled. ‘One of my what?’

  Graham pushed the drink that Hills had bought out of his way. ‘One of your girls, word on the street is that you’re Davie’s chief pimp.’ He watched as the red colour rose from Hills’ neck up his face. Then he remembered where they were and how dangerous it was to bait a bear. Graham’s phone rang and he took the call. ‘We’ll be there now.’ He stood up and looked back at the full glass of beer on the bar. ‘Thanks for the drink. I’m sure that we’ll be seeing you around. And if you do see McAuley on your travels, tell her that we’re looking for her. She, or someone else, made a right mess of that wee boy.’

  Davidson looked at Graham and saw that something had happened. He kept his mouth shut. He and Graham pushed their way past Hills and went out onto the Shankill Road. They both sucked in a large breath of polluted air. It felt better than the air they had been forced to breathe in Hills’ company.

  Graham started walking. ‘We’re wanted back at the station. Gillian McAuley’s mother is waiting for us.’

  ‘I was wondering when a relation would make an appearance.’

  Graham was already kicking himself in the arse. That was where he should have started.

  ‘By the way, back there in the bar, that wasn’t the way to win friends and influence people,’ Davidson said. ‘People like Eddie Hills and his boss know where we live.’

  Graham realised that he shouldn’t have said anything about the condition of the child. ‘Fuck Eddie Hills and his boss, I think we’re going to be seeing a lot more of them boys.’

  As soon as Graham and Davidson had left, Hills took a mobile phone from his pocket. He punched in some numbers and waited until Best answered. ‘I think we need to solve the problem soon.’

  There was no reply at the other end just the noise of the connection being broken.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Wilson was brooding and it was a condition that he was neither used to nor pleased with. It was always frustrating when you knew that you had your man in your sights but lacked sufficient proof. First, he was going to have to prove that Walter Hanna, and possibly his son, had been at the location where Kielty had been murdered and McDevitt shot. Secondly, he was going to have to put the murder weapon in the hand of a member of the smuggling gang. After that it would be up to the Public Prosecution Service to make sure that the law exacted the maximum penalty for the murderer and his co-conspirators. But that was a long way down the road. Wilson stood up and walked to the whiteboard that O’Neill had prepared. He scanned the photographs of the area where the murder had taken place. There wasn’t a CCTV camera within miles. This wasn’t Belfast. It was a rural area where vehicles could disappear down roads that only locals knew and used.

  Gibson joined Wilson at the board. ‘A penny for them.’

  Wilson continued looking at the board. ‘You’d be overpaying.’ He wasn’t about to divulge his inner thoughts to Gibson.

  Wilson turned and made the wind-up sign to Browne and O’Neill. ‘Tomorrow’s another day, maybe we’ll take a run at Mr Keenan tomorrow. As long as we can locate him, of course.’ He turned to Gibson. ‘I’ll leave that pleasurable task to you, Sergeant. Make sure that we know where to find Keenan tomorrow morning. ‘He turned back to the whiteboard and removed Keenan’s photograph.

  Wilson’s car arrived back in Belfast at a quarter past five and he ordered the driver to take him to the Royal. He needed to see how McDevitt was getting on. Browne and O’Neill both used the stop at the hospital to slip away. Meanwhile Wilson texted Graham and asked him to meet him at five forty-five at the station.

  McDevitt was seated at the side of his bed having what passed for his tea. Wilson could see that the one-egg omelette and limp salad leaves were not to McDevitt’s liking. Despite his displeasure with the meal, McDevitt was gradually returning to something like his old self, albeit a very pale and wan imitation of the original.

  ‘You’re looking good.’ Wilson sat on the bed.

  ‘I’m signing myself out tomorrow.’ McDevitt ate the omelette in a couple of mouthfuls and pushed the plate away.

  ‘No you’re not. Stephanie went to some lengths to get you a room in this hospital and you’ll stay here until they say that you’re well enough to leave.’

  McDevitt put on his bold child face. ‘The editor of the Chronicle came to visit today. He gave me the impression that he would have preferred to run with my obituary.’ He picked up three copies of the Chronicle that were lying on his bed and spread them out, front pages showing. ‘They’ve turned me into a crusade.’ He looked over at Wilson. ‘Must be a bit uncomfortable for you.’

  Wilson took the photograph of Keenan out of his pocket and showed it to McDevitt. ‘Do you recognise this guy?’

  McDevitt stared at the photo. ‘He was on the road with Hanna, all pally-wally. Shaking hands and slapping backs, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Do you know who he is?’

  ‘Never saw him before in my life.’

  ‘But you recognised Hanna?’

  ‘My researcher at the Chronicle dug up a group photo of the mid-Ulster UDR. That’s how I knew him when I saw him in Aughnacloy. He hadn’t changed much.’

  ‘What exactly happened in the field?’

  McDevitt sank back in his chair. ‘I saw a guy get out of a lorry and slip into the fields. I was concentrating on the head boys in the middle of the road. Kielty had a bit more sense than me. He knew that we should have gotten out of there immediately, but I slowed him down. Then we were running away from the road and I heard the shots, then nothing. I’m responsible for the poor old bugger’s death.’

  Wilson placed his hand on McDevitt’s shoulder. ‘Don’t beat yourself up. You weren’t the one who pulled the trigger. They could have let you go. There was no need for the shooting. You’re pretty sure Walter Hanna didn’t fire the shots?’

  McDevitt nodded.

  Wilson reflected silently. ‘How many men did you see.’

  ‘Four men got out of the lorries but there might have been more.’

  Wilson was silent for a moment. They knew that Hanna and Keenan were present. Hanna would certainly have taken along at least one man. Keenan might have brought along one of his men. Assuming that neither Hanna nor Keenan was the man who slipped into the field, that meant one of the gang had been the killer. He’d have to turn his focus onto them and add Hanna and Keenan as accessories before and after the fact. If he found the killer, and he could prove that they were all there in pursuit of a criminal enterprise, they’d all go down.

  ‘Are you on this one too?’ McDevitt showed Wilson the article in that morning’s paper about young McAuley.

  This time it was Wilson’s turn to nod.

  McDevitt tossed the paper on the bed. ‘When I was growing up there weren’t paedophiles, or parents who defiled their children or battered them to death. Now, it seems to be par for the course. I’m assuming the boy was battered to death.’

  Wilson nodded again. ‘They were always there. We just didn’t hear about them and most of them were never brought to justice.’ He thought about the boys in Dungrey who were peddled to paedophiles by those operating the orphanage. ‘And to make matters worse we colluded by turning a blind eye. By the time we woke up, most of the really bad ones were already in the ground. But don’t kid yourself that we’re deal
ing with a new phenomenon.’

  ‘I need to get out of here, Ian. I need to run with these stories.’

  Wilson felt the need to climb down off his soapbox. ‘For God’s sake, Jock, you’ve been shot. It’s a traumatic event. It won’t be just your body that’ll need to heal.’ He thought about his own recovery from the injuries he sustained in the bomb blast. ‘In a few weeks you’ll wake up in the middle of the night bathed in sweat. The man with the gun will be there in your mind and he’ll still be looking to kill you. Take my advice, stay here until your body is fully healed and as soon as you get out find the name of a good clinical psychologist. Let someone else have the glory of the front-page byline.’

  McDevitt looked dejected and Wilson knew better than most the frustration of sitting in hospital. ‘You’ve survived, man. You should spend every day of the rest of your life thanking whatever god you believe in for that fact.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I need to be back in the station. I’ll drop in tomorrow and you better still be here. In the meantime, I’ll send along an officer from the station to take a statement. Remember what I said about healing.’

  He took another look at McDevitt before leaving the room. He wasn’t sure that the message had been received.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Margaret McAuley didn’t read the Chronicle. In fact Margaret McAuley never even listened to the news. She had had a stroke two years previously and although her body had recovered, her brain was still traumatised by the event to the extent that when she heard bad news, and most news reported by the media these days was bad according to Margaret, she started to get palpitations. She shunned the media in favour of soaps, where she knew that the drama wasn’t real. Therefore, she was dumbstruck when one of her neighbours informed her that her grandson had died in hospital and the police were looking for her daughter. She had lost contact with her daughter four years previously and had no intention of involving herself in Gillian’s life again since she put most of the blame for her stroke on her daughter. Gillian had been a devil of a child before becoming a devil of an adult. It had taken her several hours to pluck up the courage to don her coat and make her way to Musgrave police station. There, they had pointed her in the direction of a DC Graham, who was in charge of the search for Gillian and could be found in Tennent Street station. Eventually she had reached the station and was told that DC Graham would be informed and that she should wait.

  There was only one woman seated in reception when Graham and Davidson entered the station. Graham received a nod from the desk sergeant and he went directly to the woman. He recognised her immediately from the picture of her daughter. As they say in Ireland, ‘she would never be dead while her daughter was alive’.

  He leaned over her. ‘Mrs McAuley, Detective Constable Graham, this is my colleague Detective Constable Davidson, would you please follow me.’

  The woman got up slowly and followed Graham. He noted that her gait was slow and that she had a limp in her right leg. Given that her daughter was twenty-five, Margaret McAuley should be in her fifties but she looked older. Her hair was already grey and the fine features on her face were pallid.

  She saw the way he looked at her. ‘I had a stroke two years ago.’

  ‘Take your time.’ He led her to the ‘soft’ interview room and put her sitting in an easy chair. ‘I’m sure you’d like a nice cup of tea.’

  Davidson slipped noiselessly out of the room and gave the order to the desk sergeant, who pointed in the direction of the dispensing machine.

  ‘How can we help you, Mrs McAuley?’ Graham sat across from her.

  ‘Have you found my daughter?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Graham said. ‘Do you know where she is?’

  ‘I haven’t seen Gillian in four years. But if you find her, I’d like to talk to her.’

  Graham could see tears in the woman’s eyes. He had two daughters himself and there wasn’t a day that passed that he wasn’t afraid that they’d end up like Gillian McAuley.

  Davidson returned with three plastic beakers contained watery-looking tea. He put them on the coffee table and sat down beside Graham.

  ‘I’d like to see my grandson,’ she added, before Graham had an opportunity to speak.

  ‘I’ll see if we can arrange that but it might take a while. He’s not a pretty sight.’

  Margaret McAuley looked into the distance. ‘She was always a very wilful little girl. Her father was off before she was five and I was never able to control her.’ She returned to gaze at the two policemen. ‘I saw the way the officers at Musgrave station looked at me. You see Gillian as a prostitute and a junkie, but she’s also a human being and a very frail one. She was into the boys, the fags and the drink long before she should have been.’ She began to cry. ‘I failed her.’

  Graham pushed a beaker of tea in her direction. He had no intention of drinking his own. Since the dispensing machine was installed in the station, the cafeteria had become increasingly popular. ‘We’ll find her and when we do we’ll contact you immediately.’ He took out his notebook and pen and passed them to her. ‘Write your address and phone number on the back page.’

  She took the notebook and pen from him and took some time to write her address and phone number. She passed the book back to Graham. ‘I do love her. I just wasn’t a very good mother.’

  Graham and Davidson looked at each other. They had sat through scenes like this many times before and, although they were inured to the pain, they knew it was only by the grace of God that they would avoid sitting where Margaret McAuley was sitting today.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Wilson knocked on Chief Superintendent Davis’s door at six o’clock precisely. He had spent fifteen minutes being briefed by Graham on the fruitless search for Gillian McAuley. Like Graham, he was bothered by the fact that there was apparently no sign of the woman anywhere in Belfast. She wouldn’t be the first parent who had cut and ran after abusing her child. Women who had given over their lives to drugs rarely had a heightened sense of maternal duty. He wasn’t in a position to decide who should, or shouldn’t, have children, but he knew that the process should definitely not end with a broken body of a child lying on a stainless steel table in a morgue. The question was where would they go from there and he was as lost for an answer to that as Graham and Davidson were. His mind was still on the search for McAuley when he pushed in the door of Davis’s office. He was not best pleased to see Superintendent Grigg sitting close to Davis on the couch in the visitors’ section of her office. They quickly closed off a conversation that was obviously not for his tender ears. Neither of them looked particularly happy.

  ‘Ma’am,’ Wilson said as he entered. He wondered whether Grigg would expect a greeting or a salute. In any case he wasn’t about to get either.

  ‘Ian, come and join us.’ Davis shuffled herself a little away from Grigg, who busied himself by examining some interesting papers on his lap.

  Wilson sat in a chair facing the couch. ‘I didn’t realise that Superintendent Grigg would be attending the briefing.’ It was the minimum reference he could give to the presence of the officer from HQ.

  Davis gave him a stern look. ‘Superintendent Grigg will be briefing ACC Nicholson this evening. I assume that you’ve just arrived from Aughnacloy.’

  ‘I passed by the Royal to check on McDevitt.’ Wilson noted that Grigg had put away his papers and was staring at him. ‘The investigation is proceeding. We have identified a prime suspect or I should say a number of prime suspects who were in the vicinity of the crime at the time. At this time, there is a certain amount of difficulty in identifying the actual shooter, but I hope that in time we will rectify that situation.’

  Grigg straightened himself. ‘We are no further on than we were yesterday. I thought that the first seventy-two hours were the most important in any murder investigation and we have already passed that point.’

  Wilson was tempted to ask Grigg the name of the television programme that had given him that information on
murder investigations, but he kept that point to himself. ‘We’ve collected and analysed whatever evidence was present at the scene. We’ve identified the weapon and confirmed that it was used in several sectarian murders during the 1970s and 80s. We’ve identified the prime suspects. Unfortunately there is a distinct lack of the necessary evidence to haul any of them in.’ Wilson was fighting for control. He looked at Davis and saw her eyes blinking rapidly. It was either a ‘tell’ that she was nervous or an attempt to send him a message in eye semaphore. Whatever it was it had the desired effect. He decided to be diplomatic.

  ‘Perhaps if we assigned more officers to the case?’ Grigg said.

  Normally Wilson would have jumped at the offer. ‘Boots on the ground’ was the accepted answer when an investigation stalled, but it would not be the solution in the Tom Kielty murder case. ‘Thank you for the offer, but I think we may be able to manage with our current resources. There are two issues, first we need to prove that the suspects were at the crime scene and secondly we need the weapon. Neither of those issues will be solved with additional resources. The uniforms,’ he knew that he was baiting Grigg, a departure from his decision to be diplomatic, ‘I mean uniformed officers, have carried out a house-to-house in the village but have come up empty. It appears that everybody sleeps exceedingly well in Aughnacloy.’