Borderlands

by Brian McGilloway

  The room looked freshly painted, a lavender tint; the carpet and bed linen were light green. A poster of someone called Orlando Bloom had been tacked carefully to the wall behind the bed. The wardrobe was packed with clothes, neatly arranged and hung according to type and size. I spotted the corner of a paperback on the floor, peeping out from the overhanging bedspread. I recognized the author as one whom my wife Debbie read. Flicking through the pages absentmindedly as I looked around the room, I noticed that Angela had been using a strip of passport photographs as a bookmark. The strip showed the half-faces of two girls, grinning in from the white border on either side. One of them was Angela. In the final picture their faces touched lightly and Angela was no longer smiling, yet seemed all the more content. It saddened me to see her so alive. I held the pictures up to Sadie and asked her who the other girl was, but she simply shrugged her shoulders and asked if I was finished. I replaced the strip of pictures, careful not to lose the page, before I realized the futility of the gesture.

  In the corner of the room there was an old CD player and a plastic rack with a dozen or so discs sitting under a freestanding mirror. Most of the bands I either did not know or had heard of only from Penny. Strangely, I noticed in the middle a CD by the Divine Comedy, whom I had seen perform in Dublin a few years previously. It seemed a little incongruous amongst all the boy bands. I asked Sadie about the CD. Again she shrugged and moved into the hallway, making it clear that she did not wish for me to remain in her daughter's bedroom. I thanked her and offered my condolences again as I made my way downstairs and outside to arrange for Johnny Cashell to identify the body.

  He was still standing in his front yard when I left the house, picking the last remaining deadheads off a florabunda rose bush. The heads themselves were heavy and brown, hanging low. He broke them off with his hand, clasping fists full of dead petals.

  "I am sorry, Mr Cashell." I said, shaking his free hand. "There is one other thing. Can you tell me what Angela was wearing when last you saw her?"

  "Jeans, probably. A blue hooded thing her ma bought her for her birthday, I think. 'Twere only last month. Why? Don't you know what she's wearing?"

  As a father myself, I could not deprive him of his assumption that his daughter had retained some vestige of dignity in death. I opened my mouth to speak, but the air between us was brittle and sharp with the scent of decaying leaves and I could think of nothing adequate to say.

  When I returned to the station, Burgess, our Desk Sergeant, told me that I was wanted immediately by the Superintendent. Costello - or Elvis to everyone who spoke of him (though not to his face) - was famous in Lifford, having served here, in and out of uniform, for almost thirty years. It was suspected that he knew many of the family secrets that most people preferred to keep buried. It meant that, in the village, he was universally admired but secretly mistrusted. However, he never knowingly used the information he had gathered unless absolutely necessary, and he excused many ancient crimes on the grounds that if they had not merited punishment at the time, how could they do so now? By rights he should have been stationed in Letterkenny, which is the centre of the Donegal division, but following his wife Emily's mastectomy several years earlier, he had requested and been granted permission to use Lifford as his headquarters.

  His nickname came not only from his surname, but also his Christian name, Oily; more than once, Gardai called to public-order disturbances had been greeted with a drunken chorus of "Oliver's

  Army", despite the fact that his name was actually Alphonsus. The name stuck to the force in Lifford in much the same way that Elvis stuck with Costello. He never said it, but I think he was secretly pleased by the nickname, taking it as a tacit sign of affection, recognition of his position as an institution of sorts.

  "Cashell is a Cork man," he said now, straightening his tie in the mirror hung behind his office door. His position meant that he was the only person in the station to have his own office, while the rest of us shared rooms. In fairness, Elvis had been careful not to rub our faces in his perks: the furnishing was perfunctory, not expensive.

  "Really?" I asked, unsure of his point.

  "Yes. Moved here when he was three. A lot of us suspected at the time that they were travellers, but his family rented out towards St Johnston. He got placed in Clipton Place after he got Sadie pregnant the first time. Didn't fit in too well to begin with."

  "Apparently not," I said. "Drove the neighbours on one side out with the noise, drove the neighbours on the other side out with a claw hammer."

  "For which he was cautioned. Still, this is a terrible thing to happen. How did he take it?"

  "As you would expect. He seemed shattered. I thought one of the daughters was going to tell me something, but the rest of the family closed tight."

  "Years of mistrust, Benedict, learnt at the dinner table." Costello is also the only person I know who refers to me by my full Christian name, as if it would be unmannerly of him to do otherwise. "Leave them a day or two and try again. Maybe when fewer of them are about."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Have you a jacket?" he asked, nodding at the informality of my jeans and jumper — one of the few perks of being a Detective.

  "Not with me."

  "Nip home and get changed. You're doing a press conference at five. RTE'll be here, and the northern stations, so look sharp." I had reached the door when he added, "They haven't found her clothes yet, Benedict. I've requested the Water Unit to search the river in the morning. The PSNI have said they'll help. It'll be an early start."

  The press conference was the first that I had done and, while probably quite low-key in comparison with other such events, it was daunting to face the banks of lights, cameras and microphones. Costello read a prepared statement, then invited questions. My role, I had been told, was to sit there so he could identify me for the cameras. That way, justice would not be faceless, he said, without a hint of irony. I was also to handle any operational questions which Costello couldn't answer, though I was told not to go into specifics. It was strange hearing our voices echo back at us with a slight delay, almost mocking the fact that, despite all that we said to reassure the public, we had no idea who had killed Angela Cashell, how she had been killed or, more worryingly, why someone would kill a fifteen- year-old girl and dump her naked body on a river bank.

  Penny and Shane were granted a maternal dispensation to stay up past bedtime to watch Daddy on TV. They almost fell asleep, though, during the main report, which was on the US President's announcement that 50,000 troops were to be sent to supplement the 60,000 already stationed in the Middle East.

  When the brief article on the Cashell murder was finally aired, it was sandwiched between a report on the rising price of housing and a story about a drug trafficker who had been murdered in Dublin. The newscasters expressed more sincere concern about the house prices than the death of the unnamed dealer.

  As I placed Shane in his cot, I heard a knock on the door, and a few seconds later the sound of Debbie inviting a visitor in. I peered out through our bedroom window and saw our neighbour Mark Anderson's pick-up truck parked in the driveway. Mark actually lived over half a mile away, but he owned all the land bordering our house, fields in which he grazed his sheep and cattle. He was an odd, socially awkward man, and I was surprised to see him. The only time he had called on us before was to appeal for leniency after I arrested his son, Malachy, who had been caught peeping in Sharon Kennedy's bedroom window from the tree outside her house. Her husband had felled the tree that same evening.

  When I came back downstairs Anderson was sitting in the living room, perched so close to the edge of the sofa he looked as though he would fall off. He stood up when I came in and I smiled and extended my hand. "Happy Christmas, Mark," I said. "Good to see you."

  He did not reciprocate my smile or greeting but said simply, "Your dog's been annoying my sheep."

  "Excuse me," I said, moving over to where Debbie was sitting.

  "Your dog's been
worrying my sheep. I saw it."

  Our dog is a six-year-old basset-hound called Frank, which I bought for Debbie on our fifth wedding anniversary when it seemed we could not have children. Four months after we bought him, Debbie found out she was pregnant with Penny, and so Frank became very much my dog. Now that Penny was older, she too had become attached to him. At night we kept him locked in a shed we built for him, and I told Anderson as much.

  "I know what I seen," he said. "Anything happens to any of my sheep, I'll put a bullet in the mutt. I've warned you."

  Penny, who had stopped watching the TV at the start of the conversation, now stared up at Anderson open-mouthed and panic-stricken.

  "There's no need for threats, Mark. Frank's a good dog and I don't think he'd be annoying your sheep. I'm sure you're mistaken, but we'll keep an extra careful eye on him." I winked at Penny conspiratorially. She tried to smile back, but did so without confidence.

  "Well, don't say I didn't warn you. If that dog's in my field, I'll kill it," he repeated, then nodded, as though we had had a conversation about the weather, and bade us a happy Christmas.

  When he left, Penny sidled over to me and tugged on my trouser leg. "Is he gonna hurt Frank, Daddy?" Her voice cracked as she spoke and her eyes reddened.

  "No, sweetie," Debbie said, and came over and lifted her in her arms. "Daddy'll make sure that Frank stays inside every night, then nothing will happen to him. Isn't that right, Daddy?" she said, looking at me while hugging Penny into her and swaying lightly from side to side.

  "That's right, sweetheart," I said. "Frank will be alright."

  Chapter Two

  Sunday, 22nd December

  The following morning I took Debbie and the children to early Mass, where Penny insisted we say a special prayer for Frank, and the entire congregation prayed for the repose of the soul of Angela Cashell and for comfort for her family in their tragedy. Yesterday's snow flurries had cleared and the sky was fresh as water, the wind sharp, the bright winter sun deceptively warm-looking as we sat in church, staring out. Strangely, the roses in the gardens at the front of the church were budding again despite the lateness of the year. As I stopped to admire them on our way out, Thomas Powell Jr approached me.

  Powell was someone I had known when I was young, at school in Derry. He was my age, but where I was stocky and carrying extra weight around the gut, Powell was lean and tanned and carried only the aura of good health, achieved and maintained through prosperity. He was the husband of a girl I had also known when younger, and the only son of one of the richest men in Donegal, Thomas Sr. The old man had been a highly influential politician in his time, and rumour had it that the son would soon follow suit. It was about the father that Thomas wished to see me.

  "Devlin. Anything on the old man?" he asked, shaking my hand in both of his, a gesture which was strikingly disingenuous.

  "What old man?" I asked.

  "My father, of course. I'd assumed you'd know." He smiled with some bewilderment.

  "Sorry, Thomas. Did something happen to your father?"

  He seemed irritated. "I thought they'd have told you. I phoned your station this morning. About the intruder."

  "I haven't heard, Thomas. Where was this?"

  "His room in the home: Finnside. He woke in the middle of the night, Wednesday, and swore there was someone in his room. Look, we told the guy who answered the phone. He said it would be investigated."

  "I'm sure it will, Thomas. We're a bit up to our eyes with this Cashell girl's death. Was your father hurt?"

  "No."

  "Was anything taken?"

  "No. But that's not the point. Someone was in his room."

  I could see Powell beginning to get annoyed so, having promised to follow it up at the earliest opportunity, I excused myself.

  As I turned to leave, I caught sight of his wife, Miriam, standing in the vestibule of the church, talking to Father Brennan but looking over at us, seemingly distracted. Her eyes caught mine and something shivered inside me and settled uneasily in my stomach. She smiled lightly and returned her attentions to the priest.

  As there were only three days till Christmas, I had promised Penny a trip to Santa's grotto and I wanted to get on the road to Derry as soon as possible. The events of the day before had made me all the more resolved to spend time with my children; I couldn't help seeing their faces when I thought of Angela. Although it was my day off, I had my mobile phone with me and as we drove from the churchyard its urgent ringing startled me.

  It was Jim Hendry. He was calling to tell me that Strabane police were holding Johnny Cashell for attempted murder. As I drove across the bridge to Strabane in the beautiful December sunshine, I was able to look down and see frogmen from both sides of the border taking turns at searching the murk for anything that might help us catch his daughter's killer.

  On the northern side of the border, a local government agency, tired of traveller encampments clogging up car parks and industrial estates, decided to provide the travellers with their own area. The agency chose a site off the main road and miles away from any other housing developments and then, showing a severe lack of understanding of the term "itinerant", built twenty houses for the traveller families to live in. Needless to say, the travellers parked outside the houses and lived in their caravans as they always had. However, someone systematically stripped the brand new houses of anything that could be sold, making a neat profit and leaving the estate looking like a terrorist training ground. For several months afterwards, the less reputable local builders made a huge and completely illegal profit, buying cut-price piping and slates and putting them into new houses.

  It was unusual, Inspector Hendry told me, when I drove over to Strabane that morning, for the police to have to go into the camp - the travellers normally resolved disputes in their own ways. That morning had been different, apparently.

  From what could be gleaned from various witnesses, it seemed that Johnny Cashell and his three brothers had walked from his home to Daly's Filling Station in Lifford at 11 p.m. the previous evening, just as the nightshift staff came on, and there they each filled ten- litre jerry cans with petrol. The four of them then sat in McElroy's Bar until 2.30 in the morning, drinking Guinness and Powers whiskey. While most of the other drinkers in the bar smelt the fumes coming off the four jerry cans in the corner, no one asked about them or reacted in any way to imply that such an occurrence was unusual; not even when Brendan Cashell went to the bar and bought a single packet of John Player cigarettes and four disposable lighters. Many of the regulars looked at Johnny with a mixture of pity and suspicion. No one mentioned Angela's name, though some patted him on the shoulder as they passed by, and a few, including the publican, stood him a drink. Others were more circumspect, perhaps wary of being seen to take sides, in case at a later date it transpired that Johnny himself had been involved in some way in the murder of the blonde-haired child.

  The Cashell brothers walked the half-mile to Strabane from Lifford, each carrying a can of petrol, and were spotted around 3.30 a.m. crossing the bridge above the point where the rivers Finn and Mourne merge into the Foyle. What they did for the next hour is unclear, but they entered the traveller camp at 5 a.m., just as the first tendrils of grey crept into the pre-dawn sky.

  Once there, they doused as many of the houses and caravans as they could with petrol, then they each took out cigarettes and disposable lighters, lit their smokes, and then the houses and caravans around them. The four brothers did not run away, but rather sat on the massive boulders which had been placed at the mouth of the encampment to prevent any more caravans from entering. Johnny listened dispassionately as screams began to shudder through the flimsy metal of the burning caravans.

  A passing taxi driver radioed for the police and fire engines and watched while Johnny and his brothers cheered as one traveller family after another stumbled from the burning caravans, screaming and crying. Then Johnny spotted one person in particular - a thin boy who looked no more than
twelve or thirteen, with hair so blond it was almost white. Johnny was seen shouting at him. Then he and his brothers ran after the boy, who scuttled like a rabbit through the bushes behind the encampment and across the fields beyond, his bare back luminous in the moonlight.

  It was not clear who realized the Cashells' culpability first, but by the time the police arrived, someone had beaten Johnny's brothers so badly that they were unidentifiable. The youngest, Diarmuid, had been rushed to Altnagelvin hospital. A female taxi-driver had described how she had watched two of the travellers, barefoot and bare-chested, yet seemingly oblivious to the winter night (or, perhaps, heated by the flames and the adrenaline of the situation) grab Diarmuid by his straggled hair and throw him to the ground. As he cowered against the boulders blocking the entrance to the estate, they took turns kicking and stomping on him with enough force to shatter his teeth and his jawbone, which soon hung loose and useless as a dead man's.

  Frankie Cashell was dragged to the ground by the jacket his wife had made him wear and, though he cursed her when it gave the travellers something to grab, the padding buffered most of the kicks he received to his trunk so that, although his skull was fractured, his ribs were only bruised.

  The third Cashell brother, Brendan, was set upon by a number of women, one of whom bit off one of his ears. By the time the police found it later that day, spat into the bushes beyond the smouldering wreck of a caravan, it was beyond saving.

  Johnny himself, bleeding profusely, had been found lying in the field across which he had reportedly pursued the traveller boy. The boy had turned on Johnny, pulling a knife on him. Only when Johnny was in the ambulance did it become clear that he had received only a superficial wound, and so he was arrested as soon as he was discharged from hospital and taken to Strabane. Hendry had heard all about it that morning when he arrived for work. Recognizing the name from our exchange the day before, he contacted me.