Downstairs, Caroline’s mother, Rose, offered us tea before we started home. I noticed, sitting alone in the corner, a cup in one hand, his Garda cap hanging on his knee, Joe McCready.
‘I’ll only be a minute,’ I said to Debbie who was standing with Rose, offering her condolences.
McCready stood up when I approached him and appeared relieved to have someone to talk to.
‘Inspector,’ he said.
‘Good to see you, Joe,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’
He looked around and blushed.
‘I felt . . . it was my . . . not my duty, but . . .’
‘I understand,’ I said. ‘Above and beyond the call of duty though, Joe.’
‘I could say the same to you,’ he said, smiling.
‘Caroline’s my friend,’ I explained as I took out my cigarettes and offered him one. Smoking in a stranger’s house is frowned upon on almost any occasion except a wake. I had noticed when I came in a number of the other mourners smoking. Most of them, granted, were elderly men, smoking yellowed twists of Rizla paper loosely filled. I offered one of my own smokes to McCready, but he shook his head.
‘I don’t, thank you, sir,’ he said.
‘Clean living for a Guard,’ I commented, lighting my own. ‘Married?’
‘Nearly, sir,’ he smiled.
‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘When’s the big day?’
‘December, sir.’
‘How does . . .?’
‘Ellen,’ he prompted.
‘How does Ellen feel about you doing this?’ I said, gesturing around the room, though I meant being a Guard.
‘Oh, you know,’ he said. ‘The same way your wife does, I imagine.’
I stopped myself from telling him that that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
‘We have a slight problem, sir,’ McCready said.
For a second I assumed he was still speaking about his forthcoming marriage and I demurred from responding.
‘The pathologist’s report,’ he muttered, glancing around.
‘Let’s step outside,’ I said. Debbie scowled at me when she saw me leave the room, though I gestured to her I would only be a moment.
‘What’s the problem?’ I asked, once we had stepped out into the garden. The rain was falling heavier now, in thick swathes that washed up the street, hammering off the roofs of the cars, splintering off the glistening pavements beneath the street lamps. Already one of the drains across the road had flooded and a stream of overflow water rushed alongside the kerb and bubbled in the drains. We stepped in tight against the front of the house, sheltered from the worst of the rain by the eaves.
‘The pathologist has put time of death as Saturday night,’ he stated. ‘I went to the post-mortem. She said Peter died at some stage between Saturday night and Sunday morning.’
‘So he couldn’t have sent the text message to Caroline on Sunday night.’
‘Exactly. I’ve been thinking about it. I put pressure on Murphy and Heaney. I asked had he been drinking and told them that when we found him, dead or alive, the truth would come out. Then this message comes. Do you think one of them was trying to throw us off the scent?’
Despite the clichés, McCready was right. Someone wanted to stop our searching in Rossnowlagh.
‘Anything else come up?’
He glanced around him, then leaned closer to me. ‘She thinks he killed himself on purpose.’
‘Why?’
‘There are no injuries on his hands. She suggested that there should have been laceration, or bruises where he tried to stop his fall, if it had been an accident. Even drunk, she thought, he’d still have tried to break his fall. She reckoned his injuries were more consistent with someone who had jumped rather than fallen.’
‘That’s speculative,’ I argued.
‘Isn’t most pathology?’ McCready countered.
‘Maybe. To be honest, his mum told me that he’d been depressed recently. His GP had prescribed him antidepres-sants.’ I was reluctant to betray Caroline’s confidence, but at the same time McCready had obviously invested heavily in the investigation into Peter’s death. ‘They’d argued before he left home. She said he’s been out of sorts quite a bit recently.’
‘It’s a bit extreme – jumping off a cliff, though.’
I nodded as I stubbed out my cigarette and blew the last stream of smoke upwards against the rain.
‘Will I cancel the tox reports? The pathologist said she’d have them done as soon as she could.’
‘Leave them for now. But I guess we accept that Peter Williams killed himself and leave it at that.’
‘What about the text about Dublin? One of the boys must have sent it.’
I nodded. ‘God knows why, though. Maybe they wanted to give Caroline a bit of hope. Who knows what goes on in a youngster’s mind?’
‘When the tox report comes through, I’ll send you on a copy, sir,’ McCready said, fitting his cap back on his head.
The journey home took almost an hour longer than it should. The roads were flooded most of the way, especially around the Gap, where streams had washed smaller rocks down the mountainside and onto the hard shoulder. The car steered light, and on bends slid towards the centre of the road, even at low speeds. The rain battered against the windscreen and, when we stopped at traffic lights, thudded off the roof.
A wind was rising, coming in from the west, and the forecasters had issued gale warnings overnight. I’d phoned ahead and told my parents we’d be delayed. As a consequence, they decided to stay with us that night rather than risk driving home in a storm.
By one o’clock we were home. Several thick pockets of wind had buffeted the car sideways along the final stretch of road before Lifford, the elms lining the road thrashing to and fro with the gathering gale.
Wednesday, 7 February
Chapter Thirteen
The night had done little to ease the storm, which continued to blow the following morning. Despite the large black umbrella I carried, the lower halves of my trouser legs were dark with rain by the time I made it into the church, at the back of the small procession which heralded Martin Kielty’s final journey.
The priest spoke, during his sermon, about Kielty’s love for his child, and the pain of his passing for his mother, Dolores. I could see the woman in question, standing in a pew near the front of the church. Kielty’s sister sat beside her, her arm around her shoulder, her head pressed against her mother’s, both of them crying openly. By contrast, and strangely separate from these two, in the front pew, sat Elena McEvoy. She wore a black trouser suit and white blouse. Around her neck she had tied a polka-dotted kerchief, twisted to the side. Every so often her hand ran up through her hair and flicked it to one side, and I could see the profile of her face, her eyes clear and dry. On the seat beside her, her daughter slept in a curved baby carrier, her dummy bobbing among the bundle of blankets.
After Kielty’s body had been carried out of the church again, and most people forsook the drive to the cemetery, scattering instead to escape the rain, I saw Elena approach Kielty’s mother. They did not kiss or embrace, and I guessed that Kielty’s mother had not approved of her son’s girlfriend.
McEvoy said something, about which the older woman began to protest, but McEvoy gestured towards the baby who was exposed to the rain, beneath the thin fabric hood of her seat, then she turned and strode over to one of the black funeral cars.
Despite the damp, under the cover of the porchway, I managed to light a cigarette, and watched as the remainder of Kielty’s family shuffled through the storm into the other car. A heavyset undertaker approached them when he saw them moving, and held his umbrella above their heads.
At one o’clock I made it to the local radio station, 108 FM. The car park was full, so I had to park in the estate across the road. In running across the road at a break in traffic, my umbrella was blown inside out, the spokes snapping against the wind. I made it to the front door and pressed the buzzer. The se
curity man sitting at the reception desk was speaking with someone on his phone and the concept of multitasking seemed to escape him, for he left me standing in the rain until he had finished his call. Indeed, it was only because the water dripping from my hair was marking the sign-in book on the front desk that he offered me a bunch of paper towels he had sitting on the desk beside him to dry myself.
‘Wet one out there,’ he said, in case I hadn’t noticed. ‘What are you here for?’
‘I’ve been asked to speak about drugs. The Afternoon Show.’
He leaned back in his seat and pointed to a small room to the left.
‘The other man is in there already. Get yourself a cuppa before they take you into the studio, if you’ve time.’
I thanked him and handed him back the wad of wet towels, then went down the corridor to the room he had indicated. The other man was standing at a tea urn, his back to me, making himself a cup of tea.
‘Jesus, what a day,’ I said.
‘It’s to get worse,’ the man replied, turning to face me. ‘Good to see you again, Inspector.’
In the time it took me to formulate my response, I not only placed the man’s face, but also realized that I had seen him a few days earlier, nodding at me as he walked past on his way back from the protest outside Lorcan Hutton’s house. ‘Vincent Morrison?’ I hadn’t intended it as a question.
Morrison had been the owner of a haulage firm that was involved in the smuggling of military software to Eastern Europe and of illegal immigrants back to Ireland. Despite his involvement in a variety of criminal enterprises, the only thing we’d managed to get him on was fuel laundering. The last time I had seen him, he was standing outside Derry courthouse on the day of his trial. Since then he had shaved off his moustache, which made his face thinner and more youthful-looking.
‘What are you . . . are you part of The Rising?’ I managed finally.
‘Not quite. I’m a spokesman for the Portnee Community Association. We’re supporting The Rising in their anti-drugs stance. I’ve become something of a community activist these past few months, Inspector.’
‘You’re kidding me,’ I said. ‘That’s quite a career change. Have you moved into drugs now instead of smuggling people?’
He smiled and looked past me. The presenter of the programme, a young man with a mullet hairstyle whom I had seen presenting on regional TV, was standing in the doorway, staring from one of us to the other, presumably having overheard my final comment. ‘Are you two here to speak?’ he asked. ‘Which one of you is the Guard?’
‘That’ll be him,’ Morrison said, gesturing towards me with his polystyrene cup. ‘We’ll pretend he didn’t make that last statement, eh? Defamation of character and all that.’
We were led into a small, stuffy studio. The presenter took his seat behind the main console, and we were directed to a pair of seats on the other side of the desk, positioned around a single microphone.
In order to be heard clearly, we both had to lean towards the microphone in a manner that resulted in our sitting so close together our knees touched under the desk.
‘This is cosy, isn’t it?’ Morrison observed.
‘I imagine this must have been about the size of your cell. Am I right?’ I asked, smiling. I was aware of the rising panic of the presenter, Laurence Forbes, who sensed that his interview might be headed in a different direction from the one he’d intended.
‘We’ll just wait for the news to end, then we’ll start. I’ll come to you first, Inspector Devine, if that’s OK?’
‘Devlin,’ I said, a little embarrassed. I cleared my throat. ‘My name’s Devlin.’
‘Devlin,’ Forbes repeated, nodding. ‘And you’re Mr Morrison?’
‘Indeed I am,’ Vincent Morrison said. ‘Mr Morrison.’
I heard the producer’s voice over my headphones and Forbes held up his hand to let us know we were about to go on air. Just as he closed his fist and the light above the door turned red, Morrison muttered into his headphones: ‘My boy’s just dying about your Penny.’
The comment was so incongruous that I convinced myself that I had misheard. Still, it took me a moment to realize that Forbes was speaking to me.
‘Inspector?’ he repeated.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Could you repeat that?’
He looked at me quizzically. ‘I said, good afternoon, Inspector. I was afraid your headphones were playing up.’ He pulled a face and rolled his hand in the air, encouraging me to start talking.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘They’re working fine. I can hear perfectly.’
‘Maybe we’ll start by discussing the drugs problem on the border then,’ he suggested.
I ran through the spiel I had already rehearsed. There was no problem as such. The border region has always had some low-level drugs movement, though nothing too extreme. Dealers around the border tend to be small-time crooks. The difficulty was that the people who could help the police were too often those using the product these people were selling and who wanted to ensure that their supplier remained free to keep supplying.
Forbes turned to Morrison. ‘If there’s no problem, as Inspector Devine says, why does the border area need an organization such as The Rising?’
‘Well, I should point out that I’m not part of The Rising. I represent the community of Portnee. We believe that The Rising is taking a stand against drug dealers that needs to be taken,’ Morrison said. ‘We are simply a group of residents and parents, looking to voice our concerns about the availability of drugs in our schools and towns. The drugs problem in Ireland has moved out of the cities and into the rural areas, now. Our concern is that this has been, and continues to be, allowed to happen.’
‘I don’t think it’s a case of allowing it—’ I started, but Morrison continued unabated.
‘I suppose when there is a vacuum, something moves to fill it. For too long now, we feel there has been something of a vacuum in the policing of drugs in this area. We aren’t suggesting that groups like The Rising should replace the police. As a community group though, we appreciate the opportunity to express our frustration in a focused, non-violent manner. As Inspector Devine says,’ he continued, smirking, ‘we all know who these people are. We need them to know that they are no longer welcome in our community.’
Before Forbes could say anything, I interjected. ‘If I can come in there; the reservation that An Garda has about such things is that groups like this can drive people underground. Recently a protest was held outside the house of an individual to whom we wished to speak regarding recent activities in the area – though I stress at this point that the individual concerned is being sought only to help us with our inquiries. We have yet to locate that individual, perhaps because he has gone into hiding. We would prefer that such people are in the open where we can monitor them.’
‘Monitoring them doesn’t deal with the problem,’ Morrison countered. ‘The Inspector mentions a protest. The man in question was named as a suspect in the murder of a drug dealer. He himself is a drug dealer.’
‘Allegedly,’ Forbes stressed. ‘We have to be careful about what we say on air.’
‘I don’t want such people living in my community,’ Morrison said.
‘Your community,’ I commented. ‘I understood you lived in Derry, Mr Morrison.’
‘I live in Portnee, outside Lifford, not far from yourself, Inspector,’ Morrison said, smiling. ‘Sure our children are even in the same class at school. So, it is very much my community.’
His comments took me so much by surprise that I had little to say in response. Forbes, clearly sensing this, thanked us both and wrapped up the interview before hitting a button on his console which started a Johnny Cash number.
‘Thought it was appropriate,’ he commented, looking for us to share his assessment of his own sense of humour. ‘Thanks, gents, that was . . . umm, interesting,’ he added.
We left the studio without speaking. Only when we reached the front door and paused before lau
nching out into the rain again, did we acknowledge that the other was still present.
‘Big disco tonight, isn’t that right?’ Morrison said. ‘The kids’ll love it.’
‘What the fuck are you at?’ I asked. ‘That bullshit about community. What’s the angle?’
Morrison shrugged, as if unaware of my meaning. ‘No angle. I want my kids to grow up somewhere nice. Your crowd are doing fuck all to deal with drugs around the borders. I joined a peaceful community group. I did my time, no complaints. I believe in fresh starts, so I’m prepared to let it slide.’
‘I don’t believe a word of it.’
‘That’s up to you. Sorry about the “Devine” thing – I couldn’t help it.’ Then he winked and stepped out into the rain, his hands in his pockets, as if impervious to the elements that raged around him.
Chapter Fourteen
By the time I had finished up some paperwork back at the station in Lifford and made my way slowly through the flood-water that was threatening to make our road impassable, it was already past dinner time. Penny was in our room, trying on clothes while Debbie offered advice and Shane squatted on the rug, playing with his dinosaurs.
When I came up the stairs Penny ran out to meet me, her eyes almost disappearing in the breadth of her smile.
‘What do you think?’ Debbie prompted, nodding towards Penny. I realized she was dressed in her best clothes for the disco. She wore jeans and a top her granny had brought her from their holidays. I noticed that her cheeks were slightly rouged, her neckline broken with a thin silver cross on a necklace we had bought her for her confirmation. She looked prettier and older than I had ever seen her before and both of those realizations made my heart constrict in my chest.
‘You look lovely, sweetie,’ I said. ‘You’d best get changed though – you can’t go to the disco; it’s raining too heavily.’
‘What?’ Debbie asked, before Penny could even formulate the same response.
‘It’s too rough out. Maybe next time,’ I said. ‘Let’s watch a movie together instead.’
The Rising The Rising (Inspector Devlin #4) Page 7