by Chris Petit
‘Will you look at this bloody car. Now the demister’s up the spout. Who’d want to live here if it was the last place on earth? Terrible weather, dreadful people, and hardly a boy to be found that doesn’t make you feel guilty for wanting him. Christ, what’s this?’
He slowed down. Three men were standing in the middle of the narrow road carrying shotguns and wearing masks. One of them waved the car down. Cross held his breath as Donny opened the window a crack.
‘What the fuck are yous boys playin’ at?’ Donny asked, his accent broader.
‘Where are you goin’, Donny?’
‘Driving a couple of innocent Christians to the station. Should you be wavin’ those guns around?’
‘On you go,’ said the man, with a laugh.
Cross looked at Westerby. The bizarre incident had shaken them both.
‘Now what was that all about?’ said Donny, who turned to Cross. ‘I’m glad you kept your mouth shut. I thought for a minute those fellows were there for you.’
Cross and Westerby laughed with nervous relief. It was the first reference Donny had made to Cross’s Englishness. Nor had he asked what they did.
The seething crowd outside Dundalk station was a shock after the emptiness of the last day. Donny stuck his head out of the window and asked if the Belfast train was delayed and was told that it was the Dublin service that had been disrupted. Everyone had been bussed from Lurgan.
Cross insisted on paying for the lift, after pointing out that Tony would have charged three times what he was offering. Donny accepted reluctantly and gave them his card, looking almost tearful at their departure.
‘Be sure to ring me, pet, when you’re coming back,’ he said to Westerby, who had to arrange to collect the car.
They waved Donny goodbye while a cluster of people behind them negotiated with a taxi driver.
‘Thirty pounds to Dublin,’ the cry went up and the crowd grew larger with people waving notes.
The station finally cleared when the grumbling Dublin passengers were herded back on to the buses in search of their elusive train.
Theirs, when it came, much later than announced, sat there, its failure to depart unexplained. No doubt the rest of the journey would involve the usual stubborn delays bereft of information, thought Cross. It was like a metaphor for the whole country. In the face of such opacity it was easy to see the attractions of a hard line.
He woke, briefly unable to work out where he was or why Westerby was opposite him, staring out of the window at a featureless field. Both the train and the rain had stopped, he noticed before drifting off again, this time to dream of walking back to the barn, past peat bags full of old bones. Then Westerby was shaking him awake. Donny was right about her eyes.
‘You were shouting,’ she said, looking concerned.
He remembered the flies swarming round his head. He was embarrassed about dreaming in front of Westerby and went into the corridor for a smoke.
‘Why do you think Mary Ryan was killed?’ he asked on his return.
Westerby hesitated before answering. ‘Any reason at all?’
‘Any reason.’
‘Because she was meant to be,’ she said in a strange, tight voice.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t know. It’s the only way I can put it. For some reason someone wanted Mary dead. Mary as opposed to someone else.’
‘So it was personal?’
‘Not altogether. I don’t think Mary necessarily knew her killer.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I don’t know, I really don’t. But there’s something about her death that seems quite chosen.’
They went over all possible reasons for killing Mary Ryan, until they started to sound like schoolchildren reciting their tables.
‘You end up going round in circles,’ Westerby announced after half an hour of exasperation.
The train slowed, stopped, moved forward again with a jolt, shuddered and came to a halt a few yards further on.
‘Unless . . .’ she said.
‘Unless what?’
Since she had volunteered the information that Mary had been deliberately selected to be killed, Cross had felt that she was on the edge of some discovery. He watched her forming her thoughts, with a look that he could not identify.
‘What if the deaths all belong? What if they’re all connected?’ she asked, carefully emphasizing each word.
‘How? Even trying to link two cases doesn’t work, beyond the odd tenuous connection.’
Westerby was shaking her head, clearly ahead of him.
‘We’re looking for patterns where there aren’t any. Logically, if Mary Elam and Mary Ryan were murdered by the same man, you’d expect them to have been killed in the same way. What I’m saying is that all these deaths somehow belong together.’
‘Don’t tell me Breen’s killer murdered Mary Elam.’
‘But there are similarities between Breen’s and Mary Ryan’s deaths, and between hers and Mary Elam’s. Look at what was done to Mary’s eyes and Breen’s wrists, and to those poor animals. Take those as the starting point.’
Cross now recognized her expression as one of dread.
‘So,’ he said, with a feeling of a man lowering himself into icy water, ‘what you’re saying is, instead of narrowing everything down, broaden it out and ask: what if the deaths are all somehow connected?’
Westerby nodded slowly.
‘It did occur to me that— Oh, I don’t know. It’s just I remember a man from Special Branch moaning about not being allowed to get on with the job of getting rid of terrorists. “We know who they are,” he kept saying. They all say that. But afterwards, I kept thinking how his remark made sense: everything here is terribly local, like when we walked into that bar last night and we were immediately strangers. What’s odd about all these killings is that none of them feels local.’
It was true. The elements of Irish crime, whether ordinary or sectarian, were usually simple and on the whole the authorities did know who ‘they’ were, even if they could do nothing about it.
The train staggered and started to move forward again, the carriages creaking and protesting. He looked across at Westerby, who was lost in fierce thought.
‘I’m sure it’s like when I was at the sex abuse unit,’ she said. ‘The cases always turned out to be a nightmare, but the elements involved were usually very simple in the starkest possible way.’
‘The complications occur because there are too many different ways of things turning out,’ said Cross.
‘Like that game where you have to get all the different colours on the same side of the cube: it looks simple but it’s almost impossible to do, like this bloody country. You’d think someone would have worked out a way of getting the orange and green to fit together like they’re supposed to.’
‘Maybe it’s the same with our murders. Perhaps they link to this idea of things being both complicated and frighteningly simple at the same time. Not unlike the journey we’re on now.’
Westerby laughed. ‘Exactly. The whole thing becomes such a distraction that you end up missing the point. The point of this trip was Molly Connors, and what she told us was quite straightforward, but it’s easy to forget that in among—’
‘Donny’s and Mooney’s and breakdowns and gunmen in the middle of the road.’
‘And endless train journeys and roadblocks.’
They laughed, glad of a moment’s light relief. What a bizarre sequence of events had led to this detour, Cross thought: a series of connections and half-connections that could not have been guessed at the outset.
‘What’s the straightforward version of these killings, then?’ he asked, serious again.
Westerby puffed out her cheeks, exhaled and then laughed.
‘I didn’t say it was that straightforward!’
‘OK. Where do you want to start?’
‘Let’s start with Willcox, saying for the sake of argument he’s our man. He owns t
he lock-up where Mary Ryan was killed and has possible connections with the Shankill murderers. Let’s say for the moment he’s acting alone, though it’s possible Breen and Mary Ryan were killed in front of an audience. What do we know about Breen that would make him a suitable victim for Willcox?’
‘He goes back a long way. He was an active republican which is enough to put him on most death lists.’
‘Say the original plot to blow up Breen was a loyalist one, and Willcox a part of it. Then a couple of years later he learns Breen is Mr Berrigan, resident of Donegal.’
‘We’re still stuck with why anyone should want to freeze him.’
‘We’ll get side-tracked if we get into that.’
Cross was surprised by how abrupt she sounded. Mary Elam, she suggested, was a possible Willcox victim because of her association with the Strathaven.
‘What about Warren?’ Cross asked.
‘Warren was asking questions and digging up stuff on McKeague, who was a loyalist extremist. Enough maybe to bring him to the notice of Willcox. Was McKeague killed before Breen disappeared?’
‘Yes. A month or so before.’
‘McKeague was killed by the INLA and Breen was INLA—’
‘So the attempt on Breen’s life could have been a reprisal.’
‘Though there’s another argument that McKeague was got rid of by his own side. If that’s the case and McKeague was killed by the UVF, where does that leave us?’
‘Then Willcox was involved in McKeague’s death. Which means that Warren could have put himself into the frame by asking too many questions, and turned himself into a target.’
There was more rain waiting in Belfast. Back in the city, Cross felt a vague depression settle. They shared a taxi and went to Westerby’s first. When they got there she invited him in for a cup of tea as neither of them had had anything since breakfast.
Her flat was several storeys up, on the top floor of an enormous Victorian house, under the eaves. She called out as they went in but there was no reply. While she made tea in the kitchen, Cross looked around at the main room, which was sparsely furnished, suggesting that she hadn’t lived there long. It felt like a student flat, with its simple furniture and rows of books. He noted the volumes of psychology. On a long table stood a computer. It was the first time he had seen one in a private home.
‘Is the computer yours?’ Cross asked.
‘Martin’s.’
He wondered who and where Martin was, as he stared at the machine. He felt useless in the face of technology. Even the new press-button phones made him clumsy.
‘Do you understand them?’ he asked.
Westerby came through with tea and biscuits on a plate.
‘Computers? Up to a point. The biscuits are only digestives, I’m afraid. Shopping, you know.’
They sat on pine chairs at a round wooden table. Westerby warmed her hands on her mug, then got up to turn on a gas fire. She seemed comfortable in her own space, more than at work, and easy about Cross being there. He felt awkward. The last twenty-four hours had been strange. She had put on fresh lipstick at some point, which made him feel old.
‘If you can spare me tomorrow,’ she said, ‘I could take a copy of the files and put all the data we have on that beast over there.’
Westerby nodded towards the computer and said that it might pick up patterns they had missed.
‘Maybe dates, locations. Maybe the advertisements. We haven’t talked about those. Perhaps they’re some sort of link between each death.’
Cross wondered why they had not examined the advertisements more closely before. It was always the same. Only at a certain point in an investigation did things fall into place, and then floating elements suddenly attached themselves to facts.
‘If the killer is advertising these murders by placing quotations in the papers, what’s his reasoning? Do you think he wants us to know?’
Westerby thought hard.
‘Yes and no. If he was killing out of a compulsion and wanted to draw attention to the fact then he would develop a consistent signature. A way of killing that says: this is me. After leaving the quotation on Breen, you’d expect him to continue with the others. Instead he seems to be disguising himself as he goes along. I think he’s leaving traces of clues in the hope that someone will pick up on them.’
‘Why?’
‘To show that he’s cleverer than us.’
‘Then we’re not talking about Willcox, are we?’
Westerby laughed at the idea of Willcox as mastermind.
‘Maybe he’s just the executioner and not the brains,’ she said. ‘I’m sure we’re dealing with a smart man. My father – the shrink – once said that most murderers want to get caught. The desire for punishment is as great as the need to kill. That may be hooey for all I know, and we may be pushing this thing so far out that we’re trying to walk on water, but my feeling is this one is different.’
‘He has no intention of getting caught.’
Cross wasn’t sure even as he said it. Westerby was moving too fast for him. He frowned while she traced patterns on the table with her finger.
‘Most killers you come across, sir, they’re not exactly the jack of spades, are they?’
‘No.’
‘Well, I think this one is an ace.’
Cross was still contemplating what she had just said, again wondering if they weren’t overstretching the argument, when the front door opened. He didn’t know what to make of the sight that greeted him. It was human, but beyond that he wasn’t sure. Westerby, seeing his expression, burst out laughing. Cross looked again and realized that the stranger was covered from head to toe in mud. Westerby, still laughing, introduced them.
‘Martin’s been playing rugby. All weekend, by the look of it.’
‘Football. The rugby season’s over. Excuse me if I don’t shake hands.’
He padded off towards the bathroom, leaving Cross with no idea of what he looked like. He wondered when it had started to rain. Deidre had said on the telephone the night before that it had been clear and dry. He sighed. He supposed he had better be getting back.
35
THE next morning Westerby collected the files on the various cases, copied them and took them home and logged every possible detail and variation she could think of, from dates of birth to national insurance numbers. A thought occurred while she was doing this and she took half an hour to track down Francis Breen’s dentist. She learned that when Breen had last attended, just before his disappearance, he’d had a full set of teeth. It was unlikely, given his dental record, that he’d lost them between then and his death. Westerby put down the phone, wondering what had happened.
She worked all day, apart from pausing for a stale sandwich. The phone rang only once. It was Martin to say that he was going out for a drink after work.
By the time she was finished it was dark. She had a headache and her shoulders were stiff. She looked again at her analysis and shook her head, wondering what to make of it.
Cross was still in his office when she rang. He thought she sounded tired.
‘I think you’d better come and have a look, sir. It’s too weird to explain on the phone.’
Westerby didn’t answer the door when Cross rang. Instead she stuck her head out of the window and threw down the keys. The offhand familiarity of the gesture surprised him. It was like a scene from another relationship – not theirs – he thought as he stuck out his hand and caught the keys cleanly, which cheered him up.
Westerby answered the upstairs door looking neat and fresh, her skin rosy from a hot bath. She smelled of soap. She pointed to the computer, which was still on.
‘I’ll show you what I’ve got.’
The screen glowed green as she scrolled through the material.
‘I tried the obvious things like grouping addresses according to postal codes and telephone exchanges to see if anything emerged. I thought maybe the killings were particular to one part of the city. I used Breen’s
old address for this, by the way. But apart from the bodies ending up in our area, there was nothing there.’
Cross noticed her hair was still damp from her bath.
‘I noted the approximate times of death, but they were too random. I checked the dates of each killing for patterns. Possible. Breen was found on the first of February, Mary Elam on the first of March. Both Fridays. Mary Ryan was found on the twenty-seventh of May, a Monday.’
‘So the murders took place around the weekend. What about Warren?’
‘I’ll get to him in a minute. They also took place around the turn of the month.’
Sensing Cross’s gaze, Westerby turned and looked at him quizzically before continuing.
‘The victims are all Catholic. I know that’s obvious, but it’s just as well to remind ourselves.’
‘Warren as well?’
‘Warren as well, though Mr Warren is turning out to be a bit of a problem. For a start, his date of death was in the middle of the month and there’s no advertisement to go with it.’
‘The rest have?’
‘I re-checked. Exactly a week before, in the case of Breen and Elam, and ten days before with Ryan. There is the other Psalm I found ages ago when I phoned you at Breen’s farm – Psalm 22, verse 16: They pieced my hands and my feet – which I thought might relate to Warren, but I can’t see how it does. The dates are all wrong.’
‘What else?’
‘There is one other thing. I don’t know what to make of it. There is a pattern, almost two, in fact.’
He wondered if she was spinning things out because she had too little to go on. Then, seeing the gravity of her expression, it occurred to him that the knowledge in her possession was making her hesitate, even a little afraid.
She pressed the keyboard and a set of numbers came up on the screen. Cross looked at them: 49, 42, 21.
He looked at Westerby and shrugged.
‘Ages of the victims,’ she said.
He looked at her blankly.
‘The computer seems to think it’s important. Breen, Elam and Ryan’s ages are all divisible by seven.’