Border Angels

by Anthony Quinn

  “As I said, I think you’re exaggerating the danger she’s in.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because your curiosity has been aroused by Ms. Novak. However, this has no business with the realities of detective work. If you had some hard evidence linking her with one of these crimes or proof her life is in imminent danger, then that would be a different matter. Then you could follow the laws of evidence and police procedure, but this has nothing to do with the technicalities of an investigation. This web of intrigue that you have created around this woman”—Boyd summoned his vitriol—“and her mysterious rag doll is a fantasy. One to keep you away from the frustrations and paperwork of ordinary police duties. Let me be clear on this, I want you to drop your search for her. We know she’s not injured or sick. We know that she has means and some sort of refuge. Our officers, the Garda, and the public have been given a description of her. We should wait and see what leads develop there.”

  “You’re right. My curiosity has been aroused, but that curiosity comes from training and experience.”

  Boyd stared hard at Daly. “I think I’m getting to know you now, Celcius Daly. What I see is a police officer with a photo of a missing woman and a hunch. A pretty woman, by all accounts. And the more you search for her, the more personal your motivation becomes.”

  Daly blinked. The criticism was also getting personal.

  “We can’t allocate resources to a photo and a hunch,” declared Boyd.

  “Is this because she’s a foreign national?”

  “Don’t play the racist card with me, Daly.” Boyd was being tough now. Gone was the practiced look of efficiency. It had been shredded with the rest of his prepared script.

  “You know what the press are like,” said Daly. “Any suggestion we’re ignoring the plight of this woman because of her race and they’ll be baying like hounds. They’ll turn on us and accuse us of racism.”

  “Her race is not an issue here. We simply don’t have the resources to indulge your curiosity. That’s the problem with this force, too much inefficiency and time-wasting. I have to account for and budget every action taken by my officers. I want a written report on this investigation so far, and a proposal as to why it should have more resources.”

  Daly frowned. It was not he who needed a dose of reality, but the commander. In his opinion, Boyd had succumbed to the idiocy of obsessive form filling and bean counting. It was a comfortable refuge for the mind, one where criminals were made of paper and the only transgressions were committed by numbers that did not add or boxes that could not be ticked.

  Boyd handed Daly several sheets of paper. They were the agenda for a meeting of the policing partnership. Due to attend were community leaders and local politicians.

  “This meeting’s tonight. Seven o’clock sharp,” said Boyd. “I want you there. Some concerns have been raised by Republican politicians about the nature of the investigation into Jack Fowler’s death.”

  Daly scanned down the list, picking off the names of former terrorists, who five years ago would have committed political suicide by attending such a meeting.

  “Good. I’ll see you there.”

  “A word of advice, Daly,” said Boyd as the detective turned to leave. “This woman may be in trouble, but it seems to me the trouble stems from the men who try to rescue her from her chosen line of business. The next time one of my officers encounters her and suspects she’s on the game, I want her arrested and charged for prostitution.”

  25

  Irwin sprang from his seat when Daly entered his office. He had a lukewarm cup of tea in his hand and deposited it beside Daly’s paperwork. He looked pleased with himself.

  “I thought you’d be back earlier,” said Irwin. “You might still get the good out of that cuppa.”

  Irwin was not a natural tea boy, and Daly suspected he was there purely out of professional curiosity. Glancing at his untidy desk, he wondered if Irwin had been going through his paperwork.

  “What did the commander have to say?”

  Daly paused. “A few suggestions about the direction of the investigation. That’s all. I think it’s time we reviewed Fowler’s drowning. Go through the evidence again to see if we missed anything.”

  “We’ve already examined everything.”

  Nevertheless, they spent an hour sorting through the case so far. They dug through Fowler’s life and business dealings, but found little to point to a murderer. Daly picked up the bag containing the opera CD. They had yet to identify the owner of the fingerprints left on the cover.

  “This was the music playing when he drowned,” said Daly. “It must have some sort of significance, sentimental or otherwise.”

  “For whom? If there was a killer there that morning, perhaps the fingerprints are his,” suggested Irwin.

  Daly studied the CD, thinking it was time to visit Mrs. Fowler again.

  “I almost forgot,” said Irwin as Daly was about to leave. “A call came through from Customs officers. They raided a farmhouse this morning close to Keady, after a tip-off about an illegal fuel-laundering plant.”

  “Did they find anything?”

  “The message was unclear. The tip-off claimed a man with a gun had abducted three Croatian women. The place was completely deserted by the time Customs got there. Not as much as a squeak from a rat, but they uncovered an operational fuel-laundering plant with several tankers, also set up for illegal alcohol bottling. They suspect the people working there did a runner across the border.”

  “Why didn’t they call us out to assist with the raid?”

  “They have to act immediately on this sort of intelligence and swoop; otherwise the evidence will be destroyed.”

  “Any more details about the women?”

  “Nothing as yet. All they have is the tip-off, and that’s secondhand. It’ll be impossible to get any witnesses. No one will want to incriminate himself.”

  “Get back to them and speak to the officers who carried out the raid,” said Daly. “Find out as much information as possible about what happened to those women.”

  “OK,” replied Irwin. “The officer in charge of the raid was someone called Dukes, at least that’s what I think the duty sergeant said.” But Daly had already left.

  Driving up to Fowler’s mansion, Daly noticed that little had changed since his last visit. There were no portents of the heartbreak that had occurred within its high walls. The solid mahogany doors and triple-glazed windows remained unperturbed by the destruction Fowler’s death had visited upon his family. The wind poured down the slopes of nearby Slieve Gullion as fresh as ever, and the cherry trees blossomed reassuringly, shedding fresh petals across the mown lawns.

  It was only in the silence and shadows of the rooms within that Daly detected evidence of the tragedy, and in the emaciated figure of Greta Fowler, who was waiting for him in the sitting room. The floor was pale marble, the walls covered in embossed paper. She sat on the same pale avocado sofa, her bare knees almost touching the mica top of the coffee table. The same wind whistled against the windowpane, and the same cut flowers stood in a tall porcelain vase, past their best now, looking as though the slightest of breezes might send them and the vase smashing to the floor. Greta Fowler looked just as fragile, and close to catastrophe, as though she had not moved from the sofa all week. Daly wondered if the questions he had to ask would sink in.

  She seemed to compose herself when he explained the reason behind his visit.

  “Is there anything unusual you can recall about the day before your husband died?” he asked. “Perhaps something that didn’t spring to mind during our last interview.”

  “Lots of things,” she replied with a sigh. “I did the shopping that day in Marks and Sparks. Then I read a magazine while waiting in the hairdresser’s. I had blond highlights put in that day. Little did I know the woman staring back at me in the mirror
was going to disappear forever that evening. But enough about my banal little life. I thought you came here to discuss the investigation into my husband’s death.”

  “What do you mean, disappear forever?”

  “When I went home that evening, Inspector Daly, I believed my dignity was intact and my marriage sound. I had no idea of the new existence awaiting me.” She paused. Tears welled in her eyes, but not a drop fell. “I found a message on the phone from that woman you’re searching for. When I replaced the receiver, I was replaced too. By a new version of myself. One freed from the normal day-to-day frustrations. I waited until Jack came home and then I replayed the message to him. He was stupefied. When I looked into his eyes, I saw they were burning with fear. Like a small boy surrounded by bullies.”

  “What did the message say?”

  “She said their relationship was over, and she wanted £10,000. It was blackmail. Very business-like and matter-of-fact. All along she’d been working for her Mafia boss, a man called Mikolajek. She said she’d some important financial documents of Jack’s, which she would return when she got the money.”

  “What did your husband do in response?”

  “Nothing. He was in shock. Baffled. He thought he’d treated this woman better than anyone else in his life. He had been deluded into believing he had rescued her from people traffickers.”

  “What about you? How did you react?”

  “I felt calm. Lightened. As though we’d been handed a reprieve.”

  Daly stared closely at her. He pushed the suicide hypothesis aside for a moment and entertained the idea of jealousy, the rage of a spurned wife tipped off by the woman who had casually seduced her husband and then set about blackmailing him. But would she have been rational and calculated enough to orchestrate her husband’s death to look like a suicide? He doubted it. The death scene was too contrived to have been a crime of passion, but the revelation that Lena may have tried to blackmail Fowler opened up new possibilities. He began to wonder whether their entire affair had been a trap. If so, who had set it?

  Greta caught Daly’s curious gaze, forced a smile, and said: “That woman did us a favor. I was getting suspicious about the hours he was keeping. The fear that he was having an affair left me sick to the stomach.”

  “Did you not think of kicking him out?”

  “No. Not at all. I believed I could salvage our marriage. In my circumstances, women prefer security to fidelity. I hated him for his stupidity, but I wasn’t prepared to run away from what we had created. Our family life together.”

  “What happened after you both listened to the message?”

  “It was an emotional few hours. He tried to plan a course of action, got upset, and rang her number. When he got no answer, he came to me. He was like a piece of rope in a tug-of-war. When I went to bed, he was burning papers in the study. I watched the flames light up his face. He looked crumpled. Broken.”

  “Enough to commit suicide.”

  “He didn’t mention anything that would give me that idea. He had other things on his mind. Financial worries. But then it was always hard to tell with Jack. When I get low, everyone knows about it. But when Jack was down, he would just go quiet and say he was tired.”

  “I’ll need to hear the message.”

  “Too late. I erased it.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “I thought it too dangerous. Especially if it was heard by the wrong person.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. It was her voice. The sound of her accent. Knowing it was still on the machine was too painful for me. And embarrassing.” She tried to change the subject. “Have you found her yet?”

  “No.”

  “She’s disappeared without a trace, hasn’t she? Only criminals can vanish like that. Organized criminals.”

  “That’s why I’m here. I need more information about her.”

  “Did she kill someone?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s what people are saying. I blame her for Jack’s death. She had a blank check to his heart, but that wasn’t enough for her. She should be hunted by the police like any other killer. What do you think?”

  Daly had learned from experience that there was little to be gained by arguing with a grieving widow. In any case, she had added some credence to his deepest concerns.

  “You may be right. Perhaps she is a killer, but that’s for the justice system to decide. And we are searching for her. But she’s being hunted by others. People who hunt to kill. We’re trying to make contact with her and encourage her to come in and talk to us. Her time for running and hiding is over.”

  Greta Fowler had nothing more to add. Daly produced the CD of La Traviata.

  “This was the CD playing on the morning of your husband’s death. A set of fingerprints was found on it. We haven’t been able to identify them.”

  Greta nodded. She was staring absentmindedly out at the pool.

  “The choice of CD must have some importance,” said Daly.

  She looked at him in surprise. “I could draw a number of conclusions from it.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  She shrugged. “I took Jack to see a performance of La Traviata by the Philharmonic Society before Christmas. He wasn’t a big opera buff, but he was taken by the story line. Afterward, he bought the CD and played it late at night. He said he found Violetta’s plight very moving.”

  Daly stared at the CD. From his basic knowledge of the opera, he recalled that Violetta was a high-class prostitute, the original whore with the heart of gold. The opera charted her relationship with her lover, which was jinxed by emotional blackmail. Perhaps it was a clue, a reference to Fowler’s relationship with Lena, thought Daly.

  “Thank you for your time,” he said. “You’ve been very helpful.”

  “Have I? I thought we were getting nowhere. But I’m glad if what I’ve told you brings you closer to tracking down that bitch.”

  She had a black-and-white view of Lena Novak, one that Daly envied.

  Before he left, she held out her hand. When he shook it, her fingers seemed to fumble in his as though she were about to lose her balance. He released them quickly.

  Afterward, he sat in his car and played through the conversation in his head. Her revelations were not going to dramatically alter the investigation. In fact, they confirmed his instinct all along. Fowler’s mysterious death was connected to Lena’s disappearance and the border brothel in which they must have met.

  26

  Daly drove home, his thoughts focused on the similarities that were emerging between La Traviata’s plotlines and Fowler’s doomed relation­ship with Lena Novak. It struck him how difficult it would be for a woman­ like Lena to build up a trusting relationship with a man, especially one whom she had met as a prostitute. Relationships change and evolve, and many romances are triggered by an act of betrayal, but how many love affairs begin with exploited sex? Not very many, he thought. Blackmail and revenge were more likely to be kindled by such a relationship, rather than new love, so he tried not to judge Lena too harshly.

  He pulled up at the cottage, switched off the engine, and broke away from his thoughts. He stared through the windshield and kept his grip on the steering wheel. He groaned. The policing partnership meeting. He had completely forgotten about it. He tried ringing Boyd on his mobile, but the commander had switched off his phone. He reversed and hurried to the venue, hoping that the meeting had started late.

  “Good evening, Inspector, we’ve been waiting for you,” murmured Commander Boyd, without bothering to look up from his notes. Across the table sat the rest of the policing partnership, made up of local community leaders, four from the Catholic community, four from the Protestant. Susie Brooke, the antiracism officer, was there too. She looked up at Daly with a benign flicker of her long eyelashes. The man sittin
g next to her waved a finger at Daly. It was Michael Mooney. The antiracism officer and the former IRA prisoner. Now that was a pairing Daly hadn’t expected. He sat down beside the chief, realizing he was going to have to take this meeting more seriously than he had intended.

  “Any more late-arriving stragglers?” said the chairman, Owen Higgins, the new Sinn Fein deputy leader, staring at Daly as though he were a scab on a difficult-to-heal wound. For some of the partnership members the monthly meetings were simply a chance to refresh their contempt for the new Police Service of Northern Ireland.

  Boyd began with an overview of the latest crime figures. He emphasized the police’s success in tackling property theft, which had escalated alarmingly since the downturn in the economy. The figures sounded good. A 38 percent increase in the number of detections in the past year. Boyd rattled through the numbers.

  “We haven’t come here to be bombarded by statistics,” interrupted Mooney. “At least the statistics you’ve successfully manipulated for public consumption.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What about missing person cases? From what I can gather, your detection rate there is as bad as South America’s in the seventies.”

  There were chortles from the other Republican politicians.

  “All missing person cases are taken very seriously,” said Boyd.

  “What if the missing person is a foreign national?”

  “I presume you’re talking about Lena Novak,” he replied. “Cases like hers are statistically very unusual. However, the coverage given to them by the media make them very important ones in the public’s perception. Inspector Daly has been assigned this particular investigation, along with his Special Branch colleague, Detective Derek Irwin.”

  Daly spoke up. “I can assure you we have been delving deep into this case, and that we are extremely anxious for this woman’s safety.”

  However, Mooney had a point to make. “According to reports, another three Croatian women were reported missing this week from an illegal alcohol-bottling plant near the border, but I’ve yet to see a police appeal about their whereabouts. Is it the case that police officers are indifferent to foreign nationals who go missing?”