Gallows Lane (Inspector Devlin Mystery 2) (8 page)

‘I’ve got a call from the Assistant Chief Super requesting information on Webb’s “arrest”. Arrest! As soon as she heard he was being questioned the word was clear and unambiguous: set him loose.’

‘How has Webb got clout with the ACS?’

‘He doesn’t. She got her orders from above.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Quite. So I don’t know what Patterson put his foot in, but I’m left to wipe it off our shoe, Benedict.’

‘That’s quite a metaphor, sir,’ I said.

‘Don’t be facetious. What did his missus want?’

A prowler, she said.’

Anything?’

‘It was James Kerr, sir. I recognized the description.’

‘Why is he still here? I thought I told you to get him back over the border.’

‘I tried, sir – he’s not doing anything wrong.’

‘Did you get him yesterday?’

I nodded. ‘He said he wants to see someone and then he’s on his way. Promised me he’d hurt no one.’

A promise from an ex-con? I think you’ve gone soft, Inspector.’

‘I think he’s on the level.’

‘Then what was he doing at Webb’s house?’

‘My guess is Peter Webb is the man he wants to see.’

Costello put his head in his hands and stared at his desk. ‘Please get rid of him before my day gets any worse.’

‘Just think,’ I said, standing up. ‘In a few weeks’ time you’ll be able to forget all about this, sir.’

‘Get out, Inspector,’ he growled, without looking up.

That afternoon I took a little unofficial time off and collected Penny from my wife’s parents who were watching her and Shane. I drove her into Letterkenny in the Garda car, even sneaking on the siren along the dual carriageway with minimal persuasion from my daughter, who, I suspect, found it a little infantile.

We stopped along Judge’s Road below the County Courts and walked down to the pet shop. Twenty minutes later, we were coasting back towards Lifford, a tiny brown and cream hamster snuggled in the cup of Penny’s hands, her face alive with wonder and curiosity. If only all relationships in life were so easily maintained and all demands so easily fulfilled.

I was dropping Penny back round with her granny and unloading a cage, water bottles and bags of straw when Burgess’s voice cackled through the static of the radio. The owner of the corner shop in the Dardnells had phoned in to say someone had been asking questions about Peter Webb – someone suspicious. Burgess thought it might be linked to the prowler.

*

Christy Ward was originally from Derry and had been a member of the Republican movement during the seventies. He had lost a friend during Bloody Sunday and strangely, while that event generally proved to be a recruitment agent for the Provos, it served to sicken Christy to the extent that he packed up and moved into Donegal where he invested his finances in a tiny cottage which he turned into a shop as well as his home. He had never married and, although rumours circulated that he was a closet homosexual, his proclivities had never become clear and he had remained a bachelor.

Christy still worked in the shop despite being in his late sixties. He had been affected severely by arthritis and waiting for him to pick change from the cash register was so interminable that most people just gave up and told him to put it in the charity box. The more unChristian suggested that Ward’s illness got suddenly worse when a customer required substantial change. I knew this to be untrue for several times I had seen him placing the monies into the Foyle Hospice collection bucket he kept on the counter.

When I got to the shop he was sitting on a stool at the front door, a cigarette clasped in the clawed hand his disease had twisted almost beyond use. He looked up at me from his seat, shielding his eyes from the glare of sunlight with his other hand.

‘Christy, how’re you doing?’

‘Surviving, Ben, surviving. How’s the care – Debbie and the kids?’

‘They’re great, Christy, thanks. You’ve had a visitor, I believe.’

He nodded, dragging a last smoke from the smouldering butt of his cigarette, before he crushed it against the leg of his stool. Then he told me what had happened.

Around three o’clock, while I was buying a hamster in Letterkenny, a middle-aged Englishman had come into the shop, ostensibly for a bottle of water. He stood at the counter, pressing the bottle to his forehead which was beaded with sweat. Despite the heat, he wore a crumpled grey woollen suit.

‘A scorcher of a day,’ he stated, handing Christy the water bottle, smeared with his sweat.

‘’Twould be worse if it were raining,’ Christy replied, holding the bottle by the top to scan it into the till.

The Englishman stared at him through his sunglasses which he did not remove. His face was flushed and red, perhaps from the heat, though Christy said it had the appearance of a heavy drinker’s. When Christy returned his stare the man smiled, then glanced around the shop, as though taking its inventory.

‘Perhaps you can help me,’ the man said.

‘Oh aye?’

Aye,’ he said, in a manner that left Christy wondering if he was mocking him. ‘You wouldn’t know anything about those guns that were found, would you?’ As he spoke, he removed a roll of euro notes from his pocket. He placed a twenty-euro note on the counter to pay for the water, which cost just over one euro.

‘Which guns would those be now?’ Christy asked, reaching for the note. As he touched it the Englishman placed a finger on to it, pinning it to the counter.

‘The guns found the other day.’

‘You a journalist too?’ Christy asked.

‘Aye.’ The man was looking at the sweet counter now, selecting a bar of chocolate.

‘Well, you’re scooped. All the rest of them have been and gone.’

The man stopped and looked at him across the counter. ‘I’m doing some follow-up work,’ he said, lifting a bar indiscriminately and placing it on the counter.

Christy pointed the man in the direction of Paddy Hannon’s field and the twenty-euro note was duly released.

‘Thank you, sir. Keep the change,’ the man said, lifting a packet of picture postcards of Donegal from the display by the door as he left and wafting it in front of his face as if the warm, dead air it generated might bring some relief from the heat.

Christy shuffled back from the rack where he had shown me the type of card the man had taken.

‘Journalist my arse. I’ve seen enough journalists and enough Englishmen to know a Brit when I see one. He wasn’t army though – but I’ll bet this shop he’s Special Branch.’

‘Are you sure? He couldn’t have been a photographer or a feature writer maybe?

‘No – his hands weren’t writer’s hands. They were dirty with oil, and his nails bitten tight. He had a scar down his neck. I’m telling you, Inspector: Special Branch. Sure he didn’t even have a fuckin’ journalist’s notebook.’ He shook his head incredulously at the paucity of the man’s disguise.

That evening the heat intensified soon after seven. Just eating dinner was an effort which caused my skin to prickle and my shirt to cling to my back with sweat. The brilliant blue of earlier had gone and the sky was a watercolour, high clouds turning the dome white. Just after sunset, heavy thunderheads shifted in from the West, carried over the Donegal hills from the Atlantic. I had showered to cool down and was sitting out back with a coffee and a cigarette when the first heavy thuds of rain splattered on the dusty grass. The temperature dropped almost instantaneously with a torrential downpour that struck the skin like needles and hammered off the roof of our garden shed.

I went into the kitchen and stood at the door as I finished my smoke while Debbie tutted behind me and complained about the smell. Eventually, the pleasure of the smoke robbed, I flicked the butt out into a flash puddle that had formed at the back door, where it extinguished with a fizz.

‘How’s Costello been since?’ Debs asked, stretching Clingfilm over a bowl of fruit salad she had prepared for the children’s lunch the next day.

I told her about my conversation with him and the implicit threat that by questioning the integrity of the find, I could cause problems for myself when the superintendent interviews came up. ‘What should I do?’ I asked. ‘If I report Patterson, it’ll look like I’m grassing him in, just to get myself a foot-up. If I don’t, he’s a cert for promotion.’

‘Do what you always do, Ben. Drift!’

‘I don’t drift,’ I argued, with little conviction, sitting at the table watching her work.

‘Your life is about drifting. That’s not a criticism. Things always work out for the best – just don’t get in the way of them.’ She patted my head, then turned back to finish her work. ‘Now – on more important issues. How about a foot rub?’

Before I went to bed I finished my letter of application for a Superintendent position and placed it in an envelope which Debbie said she would post the following morning. Then I went upstairs to check on the children. Shane had recently developed a habit of sleeping on his side, one leg stretched through the bars of the cot and twisted back around a bar. I quietly said a prayer of thanks for him and Penny as veins of lightning threaded the sky and the windows shuddered with the first thunderclap. I thought of James Kerr sleeping rough and said a prayer for him too. As it transpired, he was not the one who was in need of my prayers that night.

The rivers were flooded the following morning. The Finn in particular, which flows along the border between Clady and Donegal, a few miles south of Lifford, was twisting with an unusually fast current under the bridge linking the North to the South. The rain had cleared just before dawn and the air had a clean quality that hurt your lungs when you first breathed it. The temperature was lower than the day before but the sun was rising high and sparkled off the river’s surface as if on broken mirrors. Already the moisture off the ground was starting to dry and the tarmac road surface steamed with evaporation.

At the top of Gallows Lane, an estate agent called Johnny Patton had gone out to show a prospective client a property. The prospective client was, in fact, Johnny’s boss’s wife, and the only part of the property she wanted to see was the bedroom ceiling. Johnny was enjoying a post-coital cigarette, standing at the back bedroom window surveying the garden in wonder and exhaustion when he noticed something hanging from the oak tree at the end of the garden. Closer inspection brought a phone call to the Garda and the discovery of Peter Webb’s corpse.

The body was still hanging when I arrived on site. A SOCO photographer took pictures of it from various angles, before one of our officers appeared with a stepladder, climbed the tree and loosened the rope.

Finally Webb’s body was lowered from the branch and several officers simultaneously rubbed the cramp from their necks, having spent the past half hour looking upwards.

Webb’s muscles were stiff and his face contorted and rigid. His skin was tinged blue; his tongue swollen. His eyes, wide behind his glasses, were strangely reminiscent of marbles, smoky blue and unfocused.

‘That’s strange,’ I said.

‘What?’ asked Black, one of our uniformed Guards.

‘He’s wearing his glasses. Suicides tend not to.’

‘How do you mean? People wearing glasses don’t commit suicide?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘People committing suicide generally don’t wear glasses.’

‘Is this an intelligence thing?’ he asked, looking at the body as if trying to gauge Webb’s IQ.

‘He means when someone wearing glasses wants to commit suicide, they normally take their glasses off,’ Williams explained with some impatience.

‘Why?’ Black asked, thereby verifying a previous assessment of him I had made which suggested he would never progress out of uniform, despite possessing the inquisitive nature of a child coupled with the attendant propensity for wonder in things newly learnt.

‘It’s like going to sleep. You don’t wear glasses when you go to sleep.’

I waited for him to reply ‘But I don’t wear glasses at all’ but surprisingly he just looked at me, then back at the body.

‘Maybe they don’t want them to break,’ he said.

‘Maybe,’ I agreed.

Costello arrived ten minutes later, though he struggled to walk up the incline of the garden to where we were standing. He gripped my arm as I spoke, like an elderly relative who requires support.

‘It appears fairly cut and dried, sir: suicide. The ME was here already; said the same thing – pending the autopsy.’

‘I’ll never understand suicide, Benedict,’ he said sadly. ‘It’s so . . . unnatural.’ He patted my arm and turned back towards his car. ‘Break the news gently to the wife, Ben. Make sure she knows we’ll do everything we can to help her.’ I nodded. ‘Thank God he didn’t do it when he was in custody,’ he added, shaking his head and walking away.

Mrs Webb did not cry when we broke the news of her husband’s death. Her entire body stiffened and she sat erect in the hard wooden chair in her kitchen, her mouth a thin white line, nodding curtly as if too much movement would cause her reserve to crack and her tears to flow. She listened while Williams softly assured her that we would do anything we could to help her, and shook her head when she was asked if she needed us to call a friend or relative to be with her. Then her eyes fluttered slightly and she wiped at them as they began to fill.

‘I’ll call someone in a while,’ she said, then turned to me. ‘Did he suffer, Inspector?’ she asked.

I generally believe that people who take their own lives must be suffering so much in life that the pain and fear of death hold nothing worse and I told her this. ‘Can you think what might have caused this distress, Mrs Webb? Did your husband give any indication that something might have been bothering him to the extent that he might harm himself?’

‘No, nothing,’ she said, clutching a tissue in her right hand. ‘Though he was very upset about the . . . you know . . . the stuff found on the land. The guns and such. I think he felt bad about that.’

‘Why?’ I asked, before I had time to think. Inwardly I cursed myself but at least I’d stopped short of telling her that we suspected the items hadn’t even belonged to him.

Fortunately, she misread my question. ‘Well, he was racked with guilt. I’d no idea he was doing those things – drugs and that. It’s incredible . . . sometimes you don’t even know the person you’re married to . . .’