Yield Up the Dead

by Derek Fee

  Duane knocked on Nolan’s office door and marched in.

  ‘Come right in,’ Nolan said looking up from the papers on his desk. ‘Never heard of waiting to be invited to enter. I don’t suppose you can even spell the word “decorum”. Sit down and tell me how things went in Belfast?’

  Duane sat in the chair in front of Nolan’s desk. ‘Interesting. I liked this Wilson guy. But I have no idea what I’m doing there. I don’t suppose you’d like to enlighten me.’

  Nolan put aside the papers he had been examining. ‘We’re giving technical support to our colleagues in the North. Nothing more, nothing less.’

  ‘Bullshit. From what I’ve seen they’re well capable of finding out if there’s someone in Ballynahone bog. And if they do find that there’s someone there, they’re equally capable of digging him up. Why are we interested?’

  ‘The answer to that question is certainly beyond your pay grade and probably beyond mine.’

  ‘This Evans guy was a nobody. Why should anyone have bothered to kill and bury him? Nobody seems clear on that one.’

  ‘So you don’t think that any of our usual suspects might be involved?’

  ‘I cannot come up with a single reason as to why the IRA would want to assassinate some low grade would-be politician. My being involved in digging this guy up is not a good use of our resources.’

  ‘Let’s just humour our political masters,’ Nolan said.

  So that’s where it’s coming from, Duane thought. The people upstairs think that there could be some political fall-out from finding out who murdered Evans, either some fall-out or some advantage. He would have to protect his balls on this one

  ‘Keep me informed,’ Nolan said picking up his papers.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Wilson held a morning briefing on the investigation into the disappearance of Sammy Rice as soon as he arrived at the squad room. His newly recruited detective sergeant had shown up and the squad was now complete. As soon as he had brought the team up to date on the examination of the warehouse and the discovery of the bloodstains he motioned for Browne to join him in his office.

  ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ Wilson began when they were seated. ‘Finding Sammy Rice is the priority. But our friends at HQ have given us the responsibility of looking into the report in the Chronicle about Alan Evans being buried in Ballynahone bog. It’s a bloody diversion and it threatens to derail the Sammy Rice issue. So, I’m putting you in charge of the search for Sammy. That doesn’t mean that I’m to be kept out of the loop. It just means that I’ll probably be concentrating on the Evans case. That is if there is an Evans case.’

  Browne nodded. ‘I’ll read up the murder books and get on to the forensics service to speed things up on getting the DNA from the blood samples.’

  ‘The work in Ballynahone probably starts tomorrow. The powers that be have asked for help from the Garda Siochana and one of their guys, DCI Jack Duane, will be helping to oversee the operation on site. But as far as HQ is concerned we’re in charge. I’ll be back and forward from Ballynahone during the week. You have Harry and Peter to help you. Get them out on the street. Someone knows what happened to Sammy. On your way!’

  Browne left the office and went directly to his desk in the squad room. It was the place that had been occupied by his predecessor, Moira McElvaney. He was still mulling over his conversation with Nicholson. He didn’t like the role that Nicholson was asking him to play. It was a huge feather in his cap that he had succeeded in getting a job working with one of the best detectives on the Force. He had no doubt that if Wilson discovered that he had accepted to spy on him, he would be shown the door. He pulled over the murder book of the Grant case and started to read.

  Wilson switched on his computer and settled into the administrative work that he hated so much.

  Two hours later he was happy to turn from his computer when his phone rang.

  ‘How’s my best friend?’ McDevitt’s voice was jaunty.

  ‘Piss off,’ Wilson said. ‘Your quest for the front page has screwed up my investigation into the disappearance of Sammy Rice.’

  McDevitt laughed. ‘They’ve given you the job of finding Evans.’

  ‘If Evans isn’t in Ballynahone bog at the place you said he is, I suggest you take an extended holiday in Bora Bora.’

  ‘What about lunch in the Crown?’

  ‘I’m not about to let you pump me for the price of a pint and a packet of crisps.

  ‘I was thinking about two pints and a packet of pork scratchings, my treat.’

  ‘You’ve run out of steam on the story.’ Wilson felt sorry for McDevitt. He’d gone with what he had without thinking how he was going to follow up. He knew that McDevitt would give his right arm for an interview with Duane on his plans for Ballynahone. The involvement of the Garda Siochana would be big news.

  McDevitt was silent for a moment. ‘I need something to continue the story. If there’s no follow up, I’ll be given two column inches on page five.

  Wilson took pity on McDevitt. ‘We’re sectioning off the area indicated in your story. We’ll bring in some ground-penetrating radar and see what we can find.’

  ‘And you’re in charge?’

  ‘So they tell me.’ He looked at his watch. It was just coming up to midday. Maybe there was time for a pint after all. ‘I might think about that drink.’

  McDevitt coughed. ‘Something’s just come up. We’ll have to take a rain check.’

  ‘You little bastard, that’s the last time I’m going to give you a lead for your damn front page.’

  ‘I owe you one.’ The line went dead.

  Wilson was smiling as he put the phone down. He hadn’t given McDevitt anything that the press office wouldn’t have given him. And he would drag a quid pro quo out of the little journalist at some point. In the early afternoon, he received an email from Duane indicating that the ground-penetrating radar crew would be on-site the following morning. He forwarded the email to both Nicholson and Davis. The response from Nicholson was immediate. He was to be at Ballynahone the following morning to supervise the operation. This was a PSNI operation and must be demonstrated to be so. Davis was copied in the correspondence and didn’t bother to add anything.

  Wilson was contemplating leaving for the evening when Browne knocked on his office door and entered.

  ‘The result of the DNA tests from forensics,’ Browne said holding aloft two pieces of paper.

  Wilson held out his hand. He scanned the two sheets. The first was the result of the DNA test on the larger bloodstain. The DNA string had been identified but no match had been found. The second sheet was the result of the smaller stain. The DNA string had been identified and a match had been found. The small bloodstain belonged to David Best.

  ‘Who’s David Best?’ Browne asked when he saw that Wilson had finished reading.

  ‘That would be one Davie Best, the number two man in a criminal gang run by a man called Gerry McGreary.’ Wilson knocked on the glass wall of his office and motioned Harry Graham to join them.

  ‘The small patch of blood in the warehouse belongs to Davie Best,’ Wilson said as soon as Graham entered the office.

  Graham whistled softly. ‘And the larger patch of blood?’

  ‘They’ve got the DNA but no match,’ Wilson said.

  ‘No sign of Sammy’s blood then,’ Graham said.

  ‘That’s not what I said. There’s no match for the second bloodstain. The question now is, do we have a DNA sample from Sammy?’

  Graham took the papers from Wilson and scanned them. ‘I can’t believe that we don’t. Surely to God Sammy has been banged up at some point and a DNA swab taken.’

  ‘That’s what we need to find out,’ Wilson said. ‘Harry get on to records and find out if Sammy was ever lifted. If we don’t have his DNA, do we even have his fingerprints?’ He tried to remember if Sammy had ever been brought in during his time. He was a “usual suspect”. He must have graced the station at some point. ‘
I’m away to Ballynahone tomorrow morning to start the search for Evans.’ He turned to Browne. ‘You and Harry pick up Davie Best. Harry knows where he can be found. Bring him here and put him in an interview room. Keep him there until I get back. That should be sometime tomorrow evening. Don’t tell him what it’s about and if he insists on having a solicitor present, that’s not a problem. Don’t issue a caution. We can do that when I arrive. Rory, get on to forensics and get a set of the photographs that were taken at the warehouse.’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ Browne said.

  ‘Now, off home the pair of you,’ Wilson said. ‘Tomorrow’s going to be a busy day.’

  He watched the two men go to their desks before leaving the office. He hadn’t noticed much electricity between them. Certainly nothing like the bond that had existed between Harry and Moira. Still, it was early days. He decided that he would have to organise a drink to incorporate the new arrivals into the culture of the squad. Rugby had taught him that a team was only as strong as its weakest member. And he needed a strong team. The old team had its strengths but also some weaknesses. He thought back to his old sergeant, George Whitehouse, who had been a decent copper who had been corrupted by his allegiance to one side of the sectarian divide. The problem was that George wasn’t the only copper who had been corrupted in that way. The proof of that corruption lay much closer to home for Wilson. But policemen were people, and in his experience people tended to be flawed. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Davie Best had been in that warehouse. What was he doing there? Why was his blood on the floor and more importantly whose blood was on the floor close to his? He wanted so much for the larger stain to belong to Sammy Rice. The stain was so large that the person the blood belonged to was either dead or in hospital. They had checked the hospitals when Sammy had disappeared. He was left to draw the obvious conclusion. It was entirely possible that Sammy had joined the ranks of the “disappeared”. With that thought, he picked up the papers with the DNA strings and looked at what might be Rice’s DNA. Somehow he was going to have to get a sample of Sammy Rice’s DNA for a match. But how?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Richie Simpson’s good intentions about the preservation of the £2,000 he’d received from McDevitt were in the toilet. He had fallen into bad company early in the day and by six o’clock he had lost count of the number of drinks he had consumed and the amount of bullshit he had talked and listened to. Several times he tried to make an escape but there was always an unfinished drink on the table. He ended up in the corner of the Auld Sash. The company was good and there was a lot of talk about his former, and recently deceased, boss, Jackie Carlisle. The stories about Jackie varied from praise to condemnation giving truth to Oscar Wilde’s pronouncement that “the Irish are a fair race, they never say anything good about each other”. Simpson had a recollection of buying several rounds and his drinking companions had responded with backslapping and renditions of the “Protestant Boys” and “The Sash My Father Wore”. By eight o’clock the crowd had dwindled to a couple of hard drinkers. Simpson had never classed himself as a member of the drinking fraternity and somewhere in the recesses of his brain was the knowledge that tomorrow he would wish himself dead. But this evening that knowledge was buried so deep as to be irretrievable. Drink talk about what Simpson and his drinking companions had done for the preservation of Ulster escalated into bragging about the deeds for which they had been responsible. Simpson kept pace but brought his colleague to silence when he asked ‘Have any of you killed for Ulster?’ He looked around the silent company. The patrons of the Auld Sash were up for a bit of drinking, singing and moderate bragging but no one in his right mind was going to admit to murder. There were far too many loose tongues in Belfast. And right now, one of those loose tongues belonged to Richie Simpson.

  Jock McDevitt was slaving over a hot computer. His publisher was bombarding him with emails asking when she could have the first chapters of his book on Maggie Cummerford. His contract with the publisher committed him to produce a book with a minimum of eighty thousand and a maximum of one hundred thousand words. He was used to hammering out articles of a couple of thousand words, so an average of ninety thousand looked like how the Himalayas might look to a hill walker. His desk was littered with reports on Maggie’s mother’s death at the hands of a group of women from the Shankill. She had been dropped on her head continually until her skull had cracked open like a coconut. Maggie had sat outside the room while her mother was callously murdered. It was the start of the road that would lead young Maggie to vengeance and the murder of three of her mother’s tormentors. He looked at the word count at the bottom of the screen of his computer. He was about to hit the ten thousand-word mark. Only another eighty thousand to go, he thought, and five weeks in which to produce them. The production schedule for the book had been reduced from the usual one year to three months to catch the attention of the fickle public. His mobile phone played the tune from The Magnificent Seven indicating that a text message had arrived. Could he afford to look at the message and interrupt the flow of his thoughts? Could he afford not to? He was still a journalist after all. The job at the Chronicle was his bread and butter. The book was supposed to be the icing on the cake, if it ever saw the light of day. He picked up the phone and looked at the message. It was from one of his touts. He had informants on both sides of the Peace Wall who fed him information.

  Richie Simpson is in the Auld Sash running off at the mouth. Talking about killing people. Could be something useful. Get here quick. Worth £20?

  McDevitt typed a quick positive answer, closed his computer and rushed out the door.

  Only two men had the staying power to listen to Simpson’s ramblings. His diction was almost impossible to follow and his convoluted stories incomprehensible. His companions had long ago given up listening to him and concentrated what energy they had on soaking him of whatever money he had left. McDevitt plonked himself down beside Simpson much to the dismay of the companions who realised pretty quickly that McDevitt was intent on extracting the golden goose from their company. Simpson proved to be a happy drunk rather than an aggressive one. McDevitt had dealt with more than one drunk during his career and he carefully manoeuvred Simpson away from the pub. He had to support him as they walked the short distance to his old Mercedes. He opened the passenger door and shoved Simpson inside praying as he did so that he wouldn’t be cleaning a flood of vomit from his prized vehicle before the night was out.

  ‘I’m a bit bolloxed.’ Simpson had a stupid smile on his face.

  ‘You don’t say.’ McDevitt had interpreted drunk-talk before so he made sense of Simpson’s slurred speech. ‘I hear you’ve been talking about killing people, Richie.’ McDevitt belted Simpson into the passenger seat.

  Simpson made a gun out of his hand by pointing his index finger and cocking his thumb. ‘Bang, bang, killed both of them.’ He started laughing hysterically then put his index finger to his lips. ‘Shhh, nobody knows.’

  ‘Who did you kill, Richie?’ McDevitt asked.

  Simpson put his face close to McDevitt’s. ‘Shhhh. Not a word, mind.’ Simpson’s eyes were blank and staring.

  McDevitt knew he was in a race against time. Richie Simpson was minutes if not seconds from oblivion.

  “Come on, Richie boy.’ McDevitt lifted up Simpson’s head. ‘Who did you kill?’

  Simpson smiled. ‘Wouldn’t you like to know,’ he slurred.

  In that moment, McDevitt knew he had lost the race. Simpson’s head rolled back against the seat and his mouth hung open. He was dead to the world. McDevitt slapped his face in a vain attempt to bring the comatose man around. ‘Fuck you, Richie,’ McDevitt shouted. He was now stuck with the drunken man in his car. Simpson was a relatively large man and McDevitt was slight which meant that there was no possibility of getting a dead-weighted Simpson out of the passenger seat. McDevitt closed the passenger door and moved to the other side of the car. He climbed behind the wheel and started the car. He had a m
ountain of work at home and he had just wasted valuable time on a waste-of-space like Simpson. He would be forced to leave the bastard locked in his car for the night. He was not looking forward to what he might have to clean up in the morning.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  When the sun shone on Ireland it was one of the most beautiful countries in the world. Wilson had commandeered a Land Rover for the day and was already skirting the Northern Shore of Lough Neagh when the sun burst through the clouds from the east and turned the lake into a shimmering mass. It was a fine morning to be alive and out of Belfast but Wilson would have preferred if the task of the day didn’t have the feeling of a futile exercise. He would have preferred to be awaiting the arrival of Davie Best at the station. He had withdrawn Best’s record and had spent the evening reading about the life and times of Davie Best. He was aware that Best was going to be no pushover. Best had been brought up hard on the backstreets of the Shankill. He had been arrested at fifteen for demanding money with menaces but was released when the victim refused to give evidence. There was a catalogue of arrests between the ages of fifteen and eighteen but the salient point was that Best never served a day. He entered the British Army at the age of eighteen and served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. As soon as he left the army, he joined Gerry McGreary’s criminal gang and had risen through the ranks to become his McGreary’s right-hand man. There were rumours that Best had been involved in beatings and possibly even murder but there was no evidence. One thing was certain. Davie Best was no stranger to killing. It was almost ten o’clock when the Land Rover turned off the A6 and moved along the narrow road that led to Ballynahone bog. A roadblock had been set up on the lane manned by a local uniform. He removed the barrier and allowed the Land Rover through. The area on the Chronicle’s map was already cordoned off. When the Land Rover arrived at the site, Wilson saw that a considerable number of people were already there and a large van was parked to the side. A group of four men dressed in white overalls with the logo of some company or other on the back were setting up a grid with steel poles connected with yellow tape. Standing beside the parked van was the substantial figure of DCI Jack Duane. Wilson climbed out of the Land Rover and walked over to Duane. ‘What time did you people arrive here?’