Oak and Stone

by Dave Duggan

  ‘Even though it’s mostly waffle. As he noted himself. His family left Irish Street when he was seven and moved to a nice, detached house on a sizeable plot in Prehen. Most of his running around was down on the adjacent golf course and in the woods behind their spacious family home.’

  ‘And you read my personal file too.’

  ‘Of course. Bishop Street area. School drop out. ‘RA, late version. Intelligence Officer. Prison. 12 years. O.U. Degree. First class. Doctorate from Queens. Political uptake into Police College when the dissidents, most of them anyway, went political, in the last big turnaround. Top 3 in the class. Beat all the grammar schoolers and the ones with degrees in psychology and forensic science. Six months in HQ, then the Serious Crime Team here. Already an impressive clearance record.’

  ‘Good man. Such diligence is to be admired and feared in the young. Now then: task one, after you move your desk. Not too close to mine and don’t block my meagre view out of the window.’

  I pulled out the plastic sheath containing the business card Dalzell had given me in the café and passed it to Hetherington.

  ‘See the skeleton image in the corner? Find out what you can about that. Don’t contact the fella on the card.’

  ‘Is this something to do with the Todd Anderson case?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He looked at the card, then put it in his pocket and got out. After the slamming of the rear passenger door the only sound was the engine ticking as it cooled; the sound of a lone cicada in a rainforest, underscored by my breathing, a light wheeze – a flutter of diaphanous wings – sounding in it. I got out too and went for a walk on the river bank, thinking about how Denis Green knew about the marks on Todd Anderson’s neck. Hammy was probably right. One of the ground staff told him. Who put the body there, and why, wouldn’t be so easy to figure.

  I had an image of piles of papers, folders and sticky notelets, topped with a steaming dog turd on my desk, Goss and Doherty standing together, antiseptic handwipes writhing through their hands, then tossed at my waste-paper bin, missing it, to lie like disconsolate, back-broken seagulls under my feet.

  There was a pile of papers on my desk, but no steaming dog turd. My imaginings are always worse than my realities. Hetherington moved his desk, so it sat angled to mine, on the downside of the window that gave us a view of the Technical College, some trees beside a doctor’s surgery and, on a clear day, a glimpse of the arcing bridge we had driven over earlier.

  The office was empty and quiet, except for the background hum of computers and the ceaseless rumble of deep-seated electrics that drove heating, light and surveillance. Even Sharon was not at her desk. She usually ate lunch there, a tub of healthy grain, nuts and protein her colleagues scoff at and envy in equal measure.

  There was a purple stickey-notelet pinned to the top of the new pile of paperwork Goss and Doherty had deposited.

  Possible witness? Teenage girl. Mother phoned. Donna Bradley. Expects a return call.

  There was a phone number. Something to get on with, at least.

  Underneath the notelet was a one page memo from Hetherington. Laid out formally in perfect Police College style, it showed crisp reproductions of variations on the skeleton image, above a set of bullet points, written in the kind of English senior officials in the Attorney General’s office use. I knew this because my own solicitor had shown me their correspondence over the years. As I ran my fingers down the neat column of black dots, scanning Hetherington’s pointed prose, I speculated that maybe he had a law degree. I would get Sharon to pull his personnel file for me.

  The memo he sent me was headed by an image of the skeleton I’d seen on Dalzells’ card and on the ocelot’s ID badge, followed by clipped bullet points.

  Order of the Cross and Bones. Website defunct.

  Origins among orders of Knight/Crusaders. Oscure. Contested.

  Modern manifestations, across Europe, largely weak.

  Local manifestations?: City crest - De Burgo; Noman knight?; contested; unrelated?

  Reference: Cross and Bones: a triumph of faith and service, Beresford/Dalzell, London, 1908

  Christian, evangelical, Bible-based, liberal (?)

  Not listed in Hazlitt’s Register of Religious Sects.

  Secret?

  I liked the question mark after ‘liberal’. It smacked of the circumspection of the academic. I viewed the image of the identity bracelet from the ocelot’s neck. The skeleton looked up at me once more. The figure was morose, yet almost smiling. I expected it to raise a bony hand and give me the finger, like Dalzell.

  Hammy’s decision to give me and Hetherington the Anderson case meant I took on the urgency as well as the responsibility. As long as I was tagging along behind Goss and Doherty, I could go at my own pace, but now that I was “lead” on it, I would have to get active. So the first thing I did was put the Anderson case files on the floor, simply so I could see everything else on the desk and decide what to do with it.

  When I began the doctorate, in prison, I was given a bigger desk, a proper set of bookshelves and a decent laptop. The screws started calling me The Nutty Professor, but by that time the heat had gone out of the prison protests and we just stayed out of each other’s way, except for necessary contact. That suited me and them.

  A small red lamp with a round base and a bendy hose pipe to the shade threw light across my pages. I left the cell lights off, as if to further corral myself into smaller and smaller spaces. My subject was mythology. I wanted to see how cultural cross links were made. How had it happened that the same basic stories, the same archetypes, ranged across the stories of the world, from China, across Asia, into Europe and Africa, through the Americas and Australia and back to China again. I was at the centre of it all, in my prison cell, under the light of my squat red lamp.

  My supervisor, an anthropologist from Queen’s University called Dervock, said I was taking on too much, that I needed to focus and get things pinned down. I agreed with him and got on with what I wanted to do, which was to read and hide away under the light from my little red lamp and lose myself in the full glare of the old myths: warrior, hero, wanderer, vanquished, lover, old man, dead.

  Now, as I gathered case files and scraps of notes, arranged in piles, I composed an email to Hammy, copying in Hetherington and Sharon, our administrator. No bullet points for me. Not my style. I’m more ‘dry academy’ than ‘diligent police’.

  ‘Pursuant to your decision, Detective Inspector Hamilton, to appoint me as detective-in-charge of the Todd Anderson case, as of today’s date, I note:

  Detective Constable Kenneth Hetherington is to assist me. Detective Sergeants Goss and Doherty have passed all the files to me. I will follow up on the lead on a possible witness; a teenage girl, via her mother. I am making summary notes on cases and matters currently before me, which I will append to the files I currently hold, before passing them to Sharon for your attention and re-allocation. I trust to the support of all the team, in particular, Detective Sergeants Goss and Doherty, as the investigation develops.’

  I read over the draft message once more and thought that it was at least one step above Hetherington’s memo and that all my years composing paragraphs for scholarly publications such as The Journal of American Folklore, International Cultural Studies, Framework: Inter-disciplinary Methods in Mythologies and The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquarians of Ireland had not been a complete waste of time.

  One by one I pulled the case files towards me, the ones I intended to hand back to Hammy. I reviewed them briefly as I composed a summary note, another clipped paragraph.

  ‘The Skeoge Road Drugs’ Ring: Continue liaising with Vice. Application for surveillance pending. Waterside Brothels: Coming to court. Four charged and in custody. See it through proceedings. Creggan knee-capping: Fits pattern of past year. Incidence decreasing. See Porter/UU research paper included here.
Victim co-operating. Brother in Leeds. Likely to flit?’

  The last pile, the fourth, contained an assortment of documents, memos, scribbled notes and press cuttings that might have been filed as Miscellaneous except the term wasn’t broad enough. I lifted a strip torn from a local paper on which Hammy had scribbled the words ‘You got anything on this?’ above the headline ‘Big Cat Terrorises Park’. I read through it and found nothing I didn’t already know. I tossed it onto the pile of papers on the floor beside me. I was following a skeleton, a filigree of air and bones that felt vacant and replete at the same time.

  I re-read my draft email, tidying punctuation. I smiled at the last line. ‘I trust to the support of all the team, in particular Detectives Goss and Doherty, as the investigation develops.’

  I could see the Hammy grimace as he read it.

  ‘Bullshit, Slevin. Covering-your-back bullshit of the highest order,’ he would think, almost proud of me.

  A muffled thunder of feet along the hessian carpet, overlain with bantering voices, announced the return of my colleagues from lunch. I hit ‘send’ just as Hetherington flounced into his chair.

  ‘Germany beat Croatia 3-0. Bechtimme got two. He’s hot.’

  So lunch had been spent in a bar, watching the World Cup midday game.

  ‘This desk okay?’ Hetherington continued.

  I nodded and said,

  ‘Take these three piles and put them on Sharon’s desk.’

  ‘Does she know …’

  ‘I sent her an email.’

  I understood his reluctance to put anything on top of Sharon’s desk. It was an oasis of clarity not seen anywhere else in the building, only ever covered by papers she expressly put there to work upon and removed immediately the work was completed. Hetherington lifted the stack of case files, sped across the room to the administrator’s desk and dropped them on the pristine surface. My own desk almost reflected Sharon’s now, except for miscellaneous scraps which I shuffled together and stuffed into a light, card folder I then stashed in a drawer on my right side, on top of my shaver and an old copy of The Journal of Nordic Myths, which included a short essay I’d written: ‘Odin and the myth of the hero-god’.

  ‘Thanks for the memo on the skeleton. You’re good with the bullet points. I like that. Here, take that lot.’

  I directed him to the pile on the floor beside me.

  ‘Bullet points only. Leads obviously. Motives. Opportunities. And the note on the top? Phone the lady and book us in to talk to her daughter.’

  I held on to the Murder Book, marked ‘Todd Anderson’. Then I left the room, just as Sharon arrived at her desk, a livid gasp escaping from her lips, when she spied the paperwork piled high there. I was down the stairs, en route to Fiorentini’s café, just before she linked the pile to me.

  FOUR

  The skeleton image on the ocelot’s necklace was a dead end. I phoned the owner, a woman used to dealing with police as hirelings. She sounded like a TV royal.

  ‘I’m the last of my particular strain. We’re long here. And elsewhere. Forms of itinerant merchants, law-givers and imperial factotums in Ireland and across the old empire. I suspect there are scions of the family currently being dubious in Doha and Dubai; shellacking in Shanghai and Singapore and belligerent in Baghdad and Bahrain.’

  When I asked about the ocelot, she told me the cat was with new owners in the Cotswolds.

  ‘And the significance of the skeleton image on the ocelot’s ID bracelet?’ I asked.

  ‘Significance? It’s a … what do they call it now … a logo’, she said, a sneer in her voice. ‘I’ve seen it on crests and badges. I’ve seen it on embroidered cushion covers. A trifle macabre, but then some members of the family …’

  She let that tail off, then changed tack.

  ‘You must realise, DS Slevin, that we’ve been here or hereabouts for a very long time. There is a map of the city from 1603. You’ll have to go to Dublin to see the original. I have a copy, if you’d like to see it. You’ll find us there. But no damned cat, with or without a skeleton ID badge.’

  I declined the offer to view the map at the owner’s home or in Dublin and accepted I was at a dead-end. I turned my attention to the mother who had phoned. We followed up on the appointment Hetherington made.

  ‘You lead with this, Kenneth. In the door first. Pen and the notebook in hand.’

  ‘But I’m only backing you up, sir. You’re supposed to …’

  ‘I read your personnel file. You’ve led before.’

  ‘You read ...’

  ‘I asked Sharon for it. She hates you after you put all that paperwork on her desk. It was on the office cameras.’

  ‘Come on. You should have told Sharon.’

  ‘I did. I took it square. I told her you did it at my behest and that I accepted full responsibility. Still, I’d stay out of her way for a while, if I was you.’

  ‘I’ve just understood what the word ‘devious’ means, Detective Sergeant Slevin.’

  ‘You heard the boss. DI Omar Hamilton is of the opinion that we work in a sieve and that we have to fatten ourselves so we don’t fall through the holes and lose our jobs.’

  ‘Or our lives.’

  ‘Those too. And on that cheery note, when you leave the barracks, salute the uniforms, turn right along the Strand Road and go into the Bog, via William Street.’

  ‘I know the city …’

  ‘You served time in the back of a Pig. You rode shotgun as part of a front-line four. You’ve even been shot at.’

  ‘Once.’

  ‘Pellet gun.’

  ‘Unconfirmed.’

  ‘These are end days, Kenneth Hetherington. That’s been the hummable tune of recent years. That the shooting is over.’

  ‘It has lessened. Especially since we got boys like you locked up. Sir.’

  ‘Easy now, kiddo. You weren’t even in long trousers when I went down. Hey, wait up now. You come from a long line of cops. One of your ancestors might have been involved at that time.’

  ‘You have cops among your ancestors too.’

  ‘Yep. RIC. Way back. Boer war days. Pre-revolution, you might say. Mouldering in the grave now. That’s it, right turn here and drive through the ghosts of the soldiers, the rioters, the volunteers, the young hooligans and their Mas, dashing home with their shopping.’

  ‘Armoured cars and tanks and guns.’

  ‘You could sing it, kiddo. But not now. Turn left and head for the Wall and then up to Creggan. We’ll sneak up on Rosemount, a rear assault, as if we were predators, not community servants.’

  ‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t cheer, sir. Let me ask you directly. Why are we driving through streets inhabited by people, currently holding a modestly firm ceasefire, some of whom would like to kill us?’

  ‘Get real, Hetherington. You could say that about cops on streets in any city.’

  ‘This isn’t any city, sir.’

  ‘You’re right, Detective Constable Hetherington. This is home.’

  Hetherington briefed me, as he rang the doorbell to the Bradley house. I hoped this could be a live lead.

  ‘Donna Bradley, Environmental Scientist at the Council. Divorced. One daughter. Teresa. Not mute, just doesn’t speak. Sounds like she’s away with the fairies.’

  ‘She’d not be alone there. She doesn’t speak at all?’

  ‘She writes notes apparently. And she’s football mad, like I told you,’ he said, nodding at the football in my hands.

  I stood well back from the front door, bouncing the new Globall Lite World Cup Special I made Hetherington detour to buy. A twitch in the curtains upstairs told me we’d been spotted.

  I bounced the ball, tossed it in the air and headed it upwards twice. The upstairs curtain flicked closed. When the front door opened, Donna Bradley invited us in and gave me a
look which mixed an estimation of me as an impertinent boy lacking in professionalism and a charlatan seeking to charm her daughter away.

  She got us settled in the front room, as thumping teenage footsteps brought Teresa downstairs to sit before us on a dining room chair, one of two framing a circular pine table already graced with place mats, emblazoned with tropical fish, big enough for dinner plates.

  ‘Hello, Teresa. Your Mammy says you’re doing well at school. Soon be the holidays now. You’ll get a break then. Plenty of time to play, eh?’ Hetherington began.

  Neither of us have children. His day may come. Mine is past, I reckon. I wondered should we have brought a female colleague with us. I felt inept. I saw sweat beading on Hetherington’s neck. He gamely ventured one more effort.

  ‘Your mother told us you’d be home now, so that’s why we called round. Just a few questions, to help us, if you can. Here.’

  He pulled out his ID card, as if it was a wonder. He’d already shown it to Teresa’s mother when we arrived.

  ‘This is me. Not a great photo. What do you think? But it’s me alright. Detective Constable Hetherington. And he’s Detective Sergeant Slevin.’

  Then, in whisper,

  ‘He’s the boss, really.’

  Donna Bradley looked at me as if to say ‘you could have fooled me’. I smiled at her and stood up. The wooden floor sounded an unhealthy thwack when I bounced the ball on it. Donna winced. Teresa leaned forward on her chair. I walked past the fireplace to the open window which framed a street scene of summer childhood bliss. Cars roasting in sun-light. A skipping rope twirling. A pram with a broken wheel trundling by, pushed by the bearer of a mop of blond curls. A squeal rang out, then a chase of footsteps. A door slammed closed. A voice called ‘S’mantha! Your tea’s nearly caul’.

  I turned back to the room. Hetherington sat forward on the sofa, his elbows resting on his knees. Perhaps he was waiting for me to show my ID again. We had declined the offer of tea. He was lost as to what to do with his hands, so he put them under his thighs, which he clenched and pushed down as if he was a flower press.