Crame looked a little more hopeful. ‘That’s what the lads said: they told me you were that kind of man. They say you used to be with the Brothers, Paddy. Is that right?’
Patrick hissed a short breath. ‘I had a misspent youth, same as you, but that’s not what we’re talking about. I can’t promise anything, but if I get the chance, I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Ah Jesus, thanks Patrick. I knew you’d help me out.’
‘She’s on her own, is she, your ex-missus?’ Maguire took out a pen and paper to write down the details. ‘I mean, I’m not going to show up and find some hairy-arsed ape waiting to pound on my head, am I?’
Monday 1st September 9.10 am
Leaving his partner, Quinn drove up to Doyle’s Corner before heading west on the North Circular Road. Crossing the Royal Canal at Dalcassian Downs, he skirted the southern lip of the Botanic Gardens and turned off for the lower section of the cemetery.
He found Eva’s car parked just beyond the bridge. Pulling up behind it, he sat for a moment, not quite sure what he was going to say to her. If her bed hadn’t been slept in, she’d either been sitting up all night or she’d been here since after Paddy phoned her. Either way, the implications were not good. He had to think carefully about how he was going to handle the situation. Eva was not irresponsible – it wasn’t in her nature – but she was grieving still, and she’d left Jess and Laura alone. Quinn was beginning to wonder if he might have to think about getting someone a little more qualified than Pat Maguire to talk to her.
Sitting there, he thought back to last night, and what he had been doing at the Garda Club. He remembered how warm he had felt in Keira’s arms. He told himself that it didn’t matter; he told himself that for now, at least, he had to forget about it. He could deal with his guilt later: what mattered right now was Eva’s state of mind. He still loved her – he had always loved her – and deep down somewhere under all the grief, he believed she still loved him.
That was enough; what had happened last night did not change anything. It had been a moment; ill-timed, no doubt, but he told himself that nothing was ruined, nothing was lost. Eva didn’t ever have to know.
Nobody did.
He’d never intended for it to happen, and if he’d still been living at home, it never would have done. He only agreed to move out at all because things had got to the point where the atmosphere was so bad that it was affecting Laura and Jess.
So many things had happened: just a year since Danny’s death, and a week after that Maggs had been charged with murder.
It was then that Eva had started wearing the Sacred Heart. Quinn hadn’t allowed it to faze him. He knew why she was wearing it: it was nothing to do with Maggs – and all to do with Danny. It was God and heaven and everything like that: the kind of things people turn to when they are trying to make sense of a child’s death.
It was true, though, that she didn’t believe that Maggs had killed Mary Harrington. She’d said as much before the trial; she’d talked about the day they’d met, and how in her opinion Quinn had marked Maggs’s card as early as back then.
It was as if, with her son gone, she had to revisit the past constantly. She talked about school the day Jimmy ‘the Poker’ had been flashing the Polaroid around. Maggs had been just thirteen then, and everyone had been laughing at him: not just the kids but some of the teachers as well, behind his back. Eva was the only one who had stood up for him.
She had stood up for him in her living room in Glasnevin more than twenty years later, when she had reminded her husband that they had had no physical evidence and that the confession had been forced from his lips. He stared at her car, reading and re-reading the licence plate as if he had to convince himself that the car really was hers.
What was he going to say to her? How would she be when he showed up and she came to her senses and realised that she’d left her daughters alone to be with her dead son.
‘Gentle, Moss,’ he muttered. ‘Just make sure you’re gentle, lad; that’s all.’
Locking the car, he made his way towards the far corner of the cemetery, the thicket of trees, the railway line and the canal waters beyond.
He stopped in his tracks and stared. She wasn’t there. There was no one at the grave; no one sitting on any of the benches. In fact, there was no one around at all. Quinn couldn’t understand it. He looked for her; he almost called her name. Perhaps she was on the towpath somewhere. Then another grim thought occurred to him, and he revisited the ashen face of the drowned woman he had seen earlier.
He was a few yards from his son’s headstone when his phone started ringing. ‘Quinn,’ he said, holding it to his ear.
For a moment, there was nothing but silence. Quinn was only half-concentrating. He was staring at yesterday’s flowers and, beyond the grave, the railway line where trains thundered along, and, further on still, the dark waters of the Royal Canal.
‘This is Detective Inspector Quinn,’ he repeated.
‘Tick-tock.’ A strained, rasping voice: no kind of voice at all. ‘Tick-tock, the mouse and the clock. Tick-tick-tock. The clock’s gonna stop.’
The line went dead, and Quinn stood holding the phone.
*
He was rooted to the spot, the voice still sounding in his head. His wife’s car was parked by the bridge, and yet she wasn’t there. He could feel sweat forming on the palms of his hands; he could feel the knot of tension, which had been with him all day, tighten.
He moved closer to the grave: there was something odd about it, something out of place. He realised that some of the flowers looked flattened, trampled almost. The stems broken; petals strewn on the ground. He could make out footmarks in the grass. It had rained so much, and for so long, the ground was mush, and the marks were indelibly imprinted. There was something about them that disturbed him. They were too close to the stones; they were facing this way and that: he picked out some made by a woman’s shoe and others made by a man’s.
He heard the voice in his head again. Suddenly, cold sweat washed over him like a wave: all at once, he understood what had happened.
Hearing someone on the path behind him, he turned quickly and saw an elderly woman carrying a bunch of flowers. He waved to her, fumbling in his pocket for ID. ‘I’m a policeman,’ he called. ‘Please, would you stand still?’
Looking slightly bemused, she stopped dead. Quinn reassured her with a smile. ‘Look, I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I know you’ve come to visit someone, but I need you to turn around and go back the way you came.’
He needed to call Doyle, but first he had to secure the scene. From the back of his car, he took a roll of blue and white tape; walking towards the bridge, he wound it across the gates. Once he was inside the gates, he tied the tape to the railings, then retraced his steps, trailing the tape, until he’d created a flexible handrail all the way to Danny’s grave. He started again from the headstone, working his way back to the gate until he’d established a corridor. All the time he was working, he was trying to get his head round what had happened: a voice disguised; a clock ticking. He felt cold now like he’d never felt cold before.
Monday 1st September 9.21am
On the fifth floor at Harcourt Square, Doyle fetched a cup of coffee from the machine and carried it back to his desk. Murphy was yet to leave for Naas. She’d been sidetracked by a phone call from one of the outlying police stations: a priest had been found dead in his church, and the locals needed someone from the Bureau to attend. She’d put off briefing the new unit until midday and made an initial assessment before passing the notes to a colleague. She was stuffing the files into a briefcase when the door opened and a lad from the post room came in.
‘Is Inspector Quinn about?’ he asked her.
Murphy noticed that the lad was carrying a white envelope. ‘Is that for him? I can take it.’
Then she noticed how he was holding it: he had the ends of the envelope against the flat of his palms, and was barely touching the surface. Quinn’s name in
letters cut from a newspaper.
Walking past with his coffee, Doyle stopped dead. He peered at the envelope, then at Murphy. Finally, placing his cup on her desk, he took a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and spread it flat on the desk. The other detectives had picked up on the silence and, one by one, they looked up.
‘Put the envelope down on the hanky,’ Doyle instructed.
The lad from the post room did as he was asked. Taking a letter opener from the inspectors’ office, Doyle slit the top. Inside was a single Polaroid photograph: a picture of a dark-coloured stone on a patch of sand. Doyle squinted. Murphy raised an eyebrow, and the other detectives began to gather round.
‘Sarge?’ Murphy said.
Picking up the phone, Doyle dialled Quinn’s mobile.
*
He arrived at the cemetery with Murphy in the passenger seat. He had the flashing blue light on the roof of the car. Quinn got up from where he was leaning on the wing of his own car. ‘Stay here, would you, Keira?’ he asked. ‘When scene-of-crimes arrive, phone me. I don’t want anyone in the cemetery until I’ve had a chance to look again properly.’
‘OK,’ she said.
‘Tell them the scene is secure and cordons are in – the inner ones, anyway. Get someone over here to establish an outer cordon.’
Looking into his eyes, she nodded.
Quinn spoke as he and Doyle made their way to the grave. ‘Tell me about the picture, Doyler,’ he said.
Doyle walked with his hands in the pockets of his coat and his collar up. ‘What’s to say? It’s a Polaroid: a patch of sand with a stone on it. It looks like it was taken on a beach somewhere, and it came in an envelope with your name on it.’
‘Handwriting?’
‘No, it was cut-out letters. Posted here in Dublin.’
Quinn stopped for a moment with his hand on the sergeant’s arm. ‘The grave,’ he said. ‘There was a scuffle or something, I’m sure of it. You can see it in the footmarks; you can see it on the grave itself.’ His eyes were suddenly hunted. ‘She’s been abducted, I know it.’
His face like stone, Doyle gazed beyond the patchwork of graves to the open ground and the trees, where the railway forked. ‘Who in the world would abduct a copper’s wife? Do you realise what you’re saying, Moss? You’re a Guard, for God’s sake! Who’s going to do that?’
‘I don’t know,’ Quinn replied. ‘But someone sent me a photo, and something went on at Danny’s grave. Just now, whoever it was rang to tell me the clock is ticking.’
He considered the grave again. One arm across his chest, elbow cupped, and a finger to his lips, he studied the way the broken stems of carnations were scattered around the headstone. They were fresh flowers; they’d been put there less than twenty-four hours before, and the damage could not be put down to the rain. Going down on his haunches, he studied the layer of tiny white chippings he and Eva had spread so evenly. Here and there, they had been shunted into a ridge. He looked again at Doyle. ‘Someone was lying on the grave.’
Frowning deeply now, Doyle bent beside him.
‘See the way the flowers are flat and some of the stems are broken?’ Quinn said, gesturing. ‘Look at the pebbles, Doyler. Look at the prints: the heel of a woman’s shoe and the sole of a man’s. See how one is facing the other. See how close they are.’ He could feel a pulse begin to thump at the side of his head. ‘She came here to see Danny, and either he followed her or he was here already, waiting.’
Eyes pinched, he studied every stone, every green stem, every separate petal. He could see something sparkling about halfway up the grave. Taking a biro from his pocket, he picked up a piece of chain from among the stones. It was just a couple of links, but they were twisted, the metal stretched out of shape. He knew what they were; knew exactly where they’d come from. The necklace she’d been wearing yesterday: whoever had taken Eva had ripped it from her throat thirst.
Monday 1st September 9.30 am
She was in a hole somewhere; she didn’t know where. She was covered with boards, and on top of that with carpet or linoleum, maybe. She was bound hand and foot. Like ice, the sweat clung to her clothes. In turn, her clothes clung to her, damp and chill, sucking the heat from her body. She was listening, trying to work out where she was. She thought she could hear water dripping. Water; water. She desperately wanted water. But no, it wasn’t water, it was the faint sound of a clock. ‘Tick-tock, tick-tock’: as she lay there, it seemed to grow louder. And then she heard another sound: a footstep. She could feel it reverberate through the floor. Was somebody there?
Lying perfectly still, she listened, but the seconds became minutes and she heard nothing more. If someone was there, they were not moving now. Nevertheless, she had the feeling that something was watching her: a silent spider in the corner of the web, where she was trapped like a fly.
She lay on her side with her knees bent and her arms behind her back. Her hands and feet were so numb from lack of blood she could not feel them. Her right cheek was frozen; there was no sensation at all. Damp ground beneath her. She could smell water; she could hear trickles of water: water was all she could think of. But there was no water; she couldn’t get to water. Her throat was so dry it felt as though it would crack. She had no idea where she was or how long she’d been there. Some kind of building; the shadows of walls; a partial roof. She’d watched him tear up floorboards before he’d covered her eyes.
He had carried her from her son’s grave and laid her in the boot of his car. Darkness, confinement; she’d been restricted not just by the bonds but by her very surroundings. She had smelled petrol; she’d felt the weight shift, the whine of the engine, and all she could think about was Jess and Laura.
She could’ve screamed at the horror, the desperation, the fear. But black tape was stuck to her mouth and she could barely part her lips.
She could part them a little now, though, and she was trying to draw the tape into her mouth so that she could grip it between her teeth and bite a hole in it. She could breathe, but only just – through her nose. He hadn’t left her to suffocate; he’d left her to dehydrate. Water: she swore she could hear it, and smell it in the earth against her face. Rainwater; rain falling, rain across the city. Daylight now; it had been dark when he brought her here, but now light edged the boards that covered her.
Jess and Laura; Laura and Jess. Why had she left them alone? What if he’d gone back for them?
For a few moments, the horror threatened to swamp her, but somehow she got a grip of her emotions and told herself that the girls would be all right: they’d wake and find her missing and then would phone their father.
She told herself she had to remain calm, she had to think, she had to try and get out of here. She bitterly regretted leaving the house and driving so far so that she could be with her son: but there had been too many people, so many people coming to pay their respects. All she had wanted was a moment where she could try and explain what had happened – and why it had happened – between her and his father.
She wanted to tell Danny how losing him had cut her in two and how she didn’t know if she could ever be whole again.
She knew he would understand. She knew she should never have left his sisters by themselves.
She should never have pushed his father away; it was selfish, she knew that now. There were four of them; she wasn’t alone in her grief. But she was a mother, and only a mother knows.
Danny would understand, she knew he would. Please God if she could only get the chance to explain, his sisters would understand too.
Monday 1st September 9.30 am
Back at Harcourt Square, Quinn was in his office with the door closed, poring over the Polaroid photograph they were about to send to the lab.
On the other side of the desk, Superintendent Frank Maguire sat with his arms folded, and Doyle hovered with a little box of snuff in his hand. The phone rang and Maguire picked it up. He cast a quick glance Quinn’s way and then cleared his throat.
‘
Yes, sir,’ he said, ‘that’s what we think: Inspector Quinn’s wife from Glasnevin Cemetery.’ Again he squinted at Quinn. ‘Yes, sir, he’s right here. I know, sir: unprecedented.’ Covering the mouthpiece, he spoke to Quinn. ‘Tom Calhoun,’ he said, and passed him the phone.
‘Hello, commissioner.’
‘Moss, how are you? Look, this is outrageous, I mean absolutely outrageous. If your wife has been abducted, we will find her, I promise you that. Frank Maguire will have every detective in the country at his disposal.’
‘Thank you, sir. I appreciate your concern.’ Quinn glanced at Doyle. ‘We know she was at home just before ten last night, but that was the last contact anyone had with her. We’ve checked the hospitals and the morgue, but then I got the phone call.’ He paused then for a moment. ‘Eva’s not just my wife, of course, she’s Sergeant Doyle’s niece.’
Calhoun cleared his throat. ‘Of course she is; I’d not forgotten that.’
‘Would you like to speak to him, sir?’
‘No, that’s all right. Tell him he has our support; tell him what I told you.’
‘I will.’
‘There’ll be no stone unturned, you have my word on that.’
‘There’s one other thing though, Commissioner.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I know I’m not supposed to be anywhere near the case, but you know - of course - I will be.’
Calhoun was silent.
‘There’s no way I’m sitting at home.’
‘What about your daughters?’
Quinn thought about that. ‘They’re at school, which right now is the best place for them. Don’t tell me to back off, Commissioner. Not when we’re talking about my wife.’
‘Moss,’ the commissioner said with a sigh, ‘all that matters is finding Eva safe and well. But tread carefully: we need objectivity, not emotion. I’ll let Frank Maguire be the judge of how to play it. I’ll field any questions that he can’t answer, and for what it’s worth, if this was my wife, I’d be sitting right where you are.’
The Gathering of Souls Page 7