Gallows Lane (Inspector Devlin Mystery 2) (3 page)

‘Remarkable,’ I repeated.

‘Great work, boys,’ he continued. ‘Let’s get it all back to the station for the papers.’

I began to move in the same direction as Patterson and Colhoun, but Costello gripped harder on my elbow.

‘Why aren’t you watching Kerr?’ Costello continued.

‘I got a call out to come here,’ I replied, already offended by what I sensed was my imminent exclusion.

‘Kerr is your priority, Benedict. Understood?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said, but he had already begun to hobble back towards the main group, leaning heavily on his walking stick.

As I drove away from the scene, trying not to look as embarrassed as I felt, I realized that, while Costello was right that the find looked good for An Garda in general, it also looked very good for him personally. And I realized that he had achieved the success he wanted for his retirement.

When I got to Porthall, I discovered that Kerr had never checked into the B&B. The owner told me she saw him being dropped off. He had waited until I drove away, then turned and begun to walk back up the road along which I had just driven.

As I indicated to pull out on to the road, I spotted the remains of his umbrella, all the spokes broken, discarded on the grass verge outside the woman’s house, hunched like a metallic spider.

By the time I got back to the station the celebrations had begun. Someone had been to the off licence and had bought crates of beer and Costello was standing in the reception area with two bottles of Bushmill’s whiskey which he was serving to those around him. As I passed he caught my eye and gestured towards a new poster on the wall behind him, inviting applications for Superintendent posts. He nodded as he handed me a drink. I took a proffered glass of beer and retreated to the storeroom at the back of the station’s main area.

During a previous murder investigation my team had been given the use of the storeroom to coordinate things. Until then, we had all shared one large open-plan space, except for Costello who had his own office to the west of the building. After the case had concluded, the room had remained as a spare office.

I sat there, pretending to smoke an unlit cigarette and sipping at the beer while I flicked through the notes Costello had given me on Kerr. I have never really taken to whiskey in the way expected of an Irishman and could not differentiate between brands and ages in the ways I knew some of my colleagues could. But then, I had never really taken to drinking at all. At times this made me feel a bit of an outsider among the other men in the station who frequently went to the pub together after work. On the other hand, it suited my family life just fine.

I was studying the burn marks on the desk when the door of the storeroom opened and Caroline Williams came in, two bottles of beer in her hands.

‘Want some company?’ she said, smiling, beers held aloft.

‘Sure, what’s up?’ I said, moving a chair towards her so she could sit.

Caroline and I had been partners for a few years now and, though we were colleagues, I couldn’t say for certain that we were friends. She was a private woman who’d suffered more than once in her relationships with men and maintained a distance between her home and professional lives. It was a quality I admired in her, and knew I would do well to emulate on occasion myself.

‘That’s my question. What’re you doing in here on your lonely ownsome?’

‘I’m just going over some stuff about this guy Kerr.’

‘It was some find,’ she said, handing me one of the bottles which I took and placed on the desk. ‘Patterson and Colhoun. It’s really something.’

‘Remarkable,’ I found myself saying, again. ‘Almost unbelievable.’

‘Why?’ Williams asked, pausing mid-drink.

‘It’s kind of a stretch for those two to find their desks of a morning, never mind something this big.’

‘Do you think maybe you’re a bit annoyed we didn’t find them? Detective branch and all that?’ she asked, raising her eyebrows.

‘No . . . maybe. I don’t know. I can’t put my finger on it.’

‘Hey, if it’s good for the station, it’s good for us. Forget about it.’ She drained her beer and nodded towards the untouched one she’d brought in for me. ‘You gonna drink that, partner?’ she said, then burped and grinned.

The following morning broke in a spectacular sunrise. The last drifts of mist, hanging like cannon smoke along the base of the hills behind Strabane, were dissolving and the heat had thickened sufficiently that all the men in the station were in their shirt sleeves by nine-thirty.

Williams and I were standing in the station’s kitchenette making coffee. Patterson and Colhoun had yet to turn up for work, and many of the others who had were suffering the effects of the celebrations of the night before. Even Williams had joined in. The atmosphere was hushed and fragile, the air heady with the smell of breath mints, and something stronger beneath it.

Our conversation was cut short by Burgess struggling towards us, his face ashen. ‘A body’s been found,’ he said. ‘Out at Paddy Hannon’s new development.’

*

Paddy Hannon was a home-grown success story. His family had owned a struggling dairy farm just outside Castlefinn. When Paddy first took over the business he hit on the idea of cutting out the supplier and shops and selling his milk himself Famously he visited every house in all the villages peppered around the immediate border area, leaving each household a free pint of milk. Several days later he revisited each and offered to deliver milk to them three times a week at shop cost. Within six months he had employed thirty workers and bought four milk floats. Within three years he had bought out his original supplier. Then he moved into property and his personal fortune soared. Yet he never lost his doorstep manner and for each house he sold, he would visit the new occupants with a bottle of champagne and a basket of fruit to welcome them to their new home. Perhaps unsurprisingly he had twice won Donegal Person of the Year, an honour more hotly contested than it sounds.

When we arrived at the building site, we found Hannon, trudging through the quagmire of mud which covered the area. Despite the growing heat, the ground was still sodden from the storm a few days earlier. A crowd of workmen were standing outside one of the completed houses at the top of the field.

Paddy shook hands with each of us, then led us towards the house. Meanwhile, a patrol car of uniforms arrived and immediately went about positioning crime scene tape around the perimeter of the field.

‘Fucking shocking, Ben,’ Paddy repeated several times. ‘A complete mess. I’ve never seen so much blood.’

‘What happened?’ Williams asked.

‘One of the lads went into the house to use the toilet. Found the body lying in the sun room. Blood everywhere. Poor fella’s not right yet.’

‘I take it no one lives in these houses yet?’ I asked.

‘No,’ Paddy said. ‘They’re nearly finished. Still some painting needed and a bit of joinery.’ Then he added as an afterthought, ‘Jesus, we’ll never sell them now.’

The house was the second detached townhouse in from the far end of the estate. The external paintwork looked all but finished and the windows and doors were already in place. A grey shale path had been laid around the building and we followed Paddy Hannon along this. When we came around the back of the house, a crowd had already gathered. On the west side of the building was a sun room with French doors, one of which was wide open. Paddy Hannon had not exaggerated: there was blood everywhere.

The victim’s body lay beneath the French doors, one hand stretched out as if towards the handle. The girl’s face – for she was female – was covered in blood, her brown hair matted and stuck to her face with thick clots, her lips crusted with cement dust. She was clearly an adult but, because of the state of her face, her age was difficult to guess. She was naked from the waist down, yet strangely she wore a green light cardigan and a vest top beneath, both heavily stained with her blood. Printed on the vest was the picture of a smiling girl and the words ‘Claire, 2006’. Her legs were heavy and pale, marked with a number of bruises. I followed a trail of blood into the kitchen and there found her trousers and underwear, lying discarded on the floor beneath the skeletal kitchen units.

I went back into the sun room. A newspaper lay on the concrete floor, its pages opened at a picture of a topless glamour model, smiling jauntily.

Williams squatted beside the body, softly stroking the girl’s hair with her gloved hand. She looked up at me, her eyes damp.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked.

‘Someone beat her to death,’ she said simply.

Williams’s opinion was seconded by John Mulrooney, our local doctor, who officially pronounced the girl dead. We stood outside the house, looking in at the body as the Scene of Crime people started to take photographs and dust for fingerprints. Williams went and sat in the car for a few minutes to regain her composure. She clearly recognized the marks a man’s fists leave on a defenceless female body.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ Mulrooney said, shaking his head. ‘No, actually that’s not true. I have seen something like it: the injuries are what you’d expect on a hit-and-run victim. As bad as that.’

‘What killed her?’ I asked.

‘Pathologist will know for sure. I’d expect massive internal trauma. Possibly fractured skull; there’s yellowish residue around the nose and ears, though it’s difficult to tell with all the blood. That came from her nose, I think, which is broken.’

‘Any ideas who she is? Age? Anything?’

‘Mid-twenties, I’d say. I don’t recognize her, though. Not a local.’ He spat dryly on to the ground and shook his head in disgust.

Above us a pair of buzzards circled, scanning the surrounding fields for mice, the piercing mew of their cries at once terrifying and beautiful.

When Williams returned to the scene we questioned the man who had found the body. Robert McLoone’s hands shook as he tried to smoke the cigarette I gave him. He looked back towards the house continually as he spoke, as if in the hope that what he’d seen might not be real. When he finished his smoke, he rubbed the back of his neck with his left hand, nervously.

‘I went up the house, like,’ he explained. ‘To shit, like. You know? We all do. There’s nothing wrong with it, you know,’ he added with concern.

‘Don’t worry, Robert,’ I said. ‘You aren’t in any trouble. No one thinks you did anything wrong. But we need you to walk us through what happened. All right?’

He rubbed furiously at his neck, looking at me sideways, as if to gauge the validity of my comment, then nodded.

‘Now, why did you go to that particular house? Why not one of the ones further down the site?’ I asked.

‘That one’s plumbed, like. The bog flushes.’

I nodded. ‘Okay. So, you went to the house. What then?’

‘I went in, like.’

‘Was the door open?’ Williams asked. ‘Unlocked? Anything disturbed outside?’

McLoone thought for a second. ‘No, I used the key, so it must have been locked.’

‘And where was the key?’

‘Under the brick, like. It’s always there.’

‘Did you not see anything as you unlocked the door?’

‘I don’t remember. I was caught short, like. In a bit of a rush. I mustn’t have done, though. Otherwise I wouldn’t have gone in.’

I nodded agreement. The body was so close to the doors that he probably wouldn’t have seen it and may not have noticed the drops of blood trailing into the kitchen.

‘When I went in and saw her I nearly puked, like. Came straight out again and phoned the Guards.’

‘There’s a newspaper lying in there. Is that yours?’

Aye,’ he said, blinking at me, his face devoid of expression.

*

The key was still in the door when we went back up. I asked Paddy Hannon about the brick McLoone had mentioned. Beside the opened door lay an upended breeze block.

‘We leave the key there,’ Paddy explained, ‘under the brick. For the workmen to come in and out – so I don’t need to keep opening the house every time one of them wants to take a shit.’

‘Who would know about this?’ I asked.

‘Me; the estate agent; everybody working for me, fairly much. And subcontractors. And I guess anyone who’s ever bought a house off me; I leave keys like that in all my builds. In case the owners want in to measure up windows and the like. A goodwill thing, you know.’

While we were speaking, one of the Scene of Crime officers emerged from the house, squinting in the sunlight. He wore a blue paper forensics suit, with plastic coverings over his shoes. He approached me, holding aloft a transparent evidence bag containing something flesh-coloured.

‘Found this, sir. Near the sink unit. Seems fairly new.’

I took the bag and examined it. Inside was an unrolled, but unused, condom. ‘Jesus, that’s a first,’ Paddy said. ‘I’ve seen all sorts in new builds before, but never an
unused
johnnie.’

I grunted in return. Any fingerprints?’ I asked the SOCO.

‘Too many to use. Dozens of different sets. We haven’t checked the condom, sir. Do that back at HQ.’

*

It didn’t take long to identify the girl. By the time we returned to the station, Burgess had already contacted all the local Gar da stations and Northern Ireland police stations across the border, looking for missing persons reports. By lunchtime we believed we had a name: Karen Doherty.

Her sister Agnes had reported her missing in Strabane earlier that morning. She now stood with us, outside Letterkenny General Hospital, having identified the girl. My counterpart in the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Inspector Jim Hendry, had accompanied her. He had stood quiet beside her, his hand resting lightly on her arm, as her sister was revealed to her. Karen had been cleaned up before being identified, her face now strangely serene, despite the brutality of her death. The morgue attendant had held the covering sheet just below her chin so that Agnes had been unable to see the bruising which covered the rest of her body. Only one bruise blossomed on her cheek.

Karen’s hair had been rinsed clean and pulled back from her face, revealing a high forehead. Her features seemed slightly out of proportion; her nose was long and thin, her mouth small, her lips thin and pale. Her eyes were closed when we saw her, her face wiped clean of all cosmetics.