I initially thought it was the heavy-set boy who ran, but in fact it was the youth in the puffed jacket and hooded top who had grabbed him and flung him towards the fire, before he began sprinting across the deserted remains of the factory floor towards the mounds of rubble at the far end.
Hendry was after him instantly, shouting into his radio for assistance as he did so.
The boy was running parallel to the roadway where the reconstruction was being held. As far as I could tell, there was only one entrance into the grounds, at the front gate, but I had not seen the bulk of them arriving that night, which meant they had entered the grounds from another spot.
Rather than follow Hendry I cut back out the front gates and followed the road alongside which the two of them were running. I rounded the corner in time to see the young man leaping from the roof of the post office and landing with a thud on the bonnet of one of the police cars parked in front of it. He rolled with the fall, landing on the ground, then picked himself up and began sprinting again.
I glanced up to see Hendry pull to a halt at the edge of the roof. For a second he seemed to be considering leaping as the boy had done, then instead he turned and began lowering himself over the edge, all the time gripping the roof. I left him there and took off after the boy.
I saw him cut left and begin running up the Melmount Road, the slight gradient of the street doing nothing to slow him but leaving me regretting I’d ever started smoking.
He glanced back and, for a second, lost his footing, sliding off the kerb and going over on his ankle. He lifted himself out of the gutter as quickly as he could and resumed his run, but his foot was bothering him and he kicked it out sideways a few times as he ran, as if trying to shake the injury he had incurred. I heard the siren behind me as a Land Rover joined our pursuit, presumably called by Hendry. It roared past me, its roof-mounted spotlight picking out the boy’s figure as he widened the gap between us. To his left now was a school, and he stopped, trying to pull himself over the fence surrounding it, but his leg seemed to prevent him giving himself the thrust he needed to clear the top. By now the Land Rover had squealed to a halt and officers were beginning to jump out. The boy panicked and started running again, further up the road; then he dived over a low wall to his left and vanished from our sight.
When I drew level with the spot, I realized he had dropped down into a graveyard, across the street from the area’s main church. Someone in the Land Rover was slowly sweeping the beam of the spotlight from side of side, running along the straight rows of the graves.
We moved into the graveyard, the PSNI officers splitting up and taking a row each. Further down the road I could see Hendry hobbling up towards us, finally having made it down from the roof of the post office.
I had not seen the boy as the spotlight made its broad sweep. At the far end of the final row, I noticed a small mechanical digger aside a mound of clay. Beside it, as the spotlight swept the grounds again, I caught a glimpse of the green baize that the gravediggers lay over an empty grave.
I slowed down a little to catch my breath, then called one of the uniformed PSNI officers. It was a young female officer who came across to me.
‘Sir?’
‘I need your torch. Come with me.’
We moved up through the row, trying not to step on any of the graves. I could hear the woman beside me singing a hushed tune to herself as we walked.
‘Not a fan of graveyards,’ she explained, as I glanced at her.
‘I think you’re in for a treat, then,’ I said.
As we approached the freshly dug grave, I thought I could smell the acrid stench of burning rubber.
We reached the mound of soil and I motioned to the PSNI woman to direct the torch beam onto the baize covering the grave. Then I reached down and lifted the corner of the green cloth, pulling it back.
The woman gasped as her torch beam illuminated the startled expression staring back up at us. Six feet below, the young man stood in his socks, a fluorescent green trainer in one hand while his other held a flaming lighter against the sole, attempting to burn off the evidence of Sean Cleary’s blood.
Hendry struggled across to us, holding his side.
‘Where is he?’ he managed, then glanced down at where the boy stood, patently unable to get himself back out again.
Hendry grunted, then winced and gripped his side again. ‘Let the wee shite stay in there until the morning; we’ll come back and get him then.’
Chapter Twenty
The interview room felt decidedly stuffy after the freshness of the outdoors. Despite Hendry’s misgivings, we had, after some pleading from the boy, handed him down a spade and instructed him to dig out footholds in the grave wall far enough up to give himself a boost and enable us to reach down and pull him the rest of the way.
After his initial panic at the thought of being left in a grave for the night, the boy had regained some of his hauteur once he’d warmed up in the station. He’d demanded a solicitor upon arrival and responded to every question since with ‘No comment’. It lasted only until a forensics officer arrived at the door of the interview room with the boy’s fluorescent green shoes in a clear-plastic evidence bag. The shoes had been taken from him before he was allowed up out of the grave, along with his name and age: Stephen Burke, 18. The forensics officer conferred a moment with Hendry who glanced at me and winked.
‘Well, Stephen,’ Hendry said, sitting opposite the boy again. ‘The bad news is that we weren’t able to get any evidence off this shoe.’ Hendry held aloft the shoe with the scorch marks on the sole. ‘Nothing usable.’
Burke tried hard not to smile. He ran his hand through the gelled tips of his hair. I noticed now, in the light of the station, that he’d had swirling Celtic designs shaved into his hair along the sides of his head.
‘That may have been because you burnt it,’ Hendry said. ‘But more likely it’s because this is the shoe which had Sean Cleary’s blood all over it.’ With that he held up the other, unburned shoe. ‘Plus, we’ve got your fingerprints all over the victim’s wallet.’
Burke glanced at his brief and licked his lips as he shifted in his seat.
‘Which means I can place you at the scene of a murder, so we’re done here. I’m arresting you for the murder of Sean Cleary . . .’ Hendry began, turning towards the door.
Burke stood up quickly, backing away from the table. His solicitor had also stood, surprised at the speed with which Hendry was concluding the interview.
‘I didn’t kill no one,’ Burke shouted. ‘I didn’t know he was dead. He looked drunk.’
‘What?’ Hendry stopped at the door of the room.
‘He was just lying there; I thought he was drunk.’
‘You’d best explain this to me,’ Hendry said, making a performance out of reconsidering and taking his seat again.
‘I was heading up to meet the lads and I saw him getting out of a taxi and going into the playground, but he never came back out. I thought maybe he was a queer, meeting someone in there. Then, when I was going home, I seen him lying on the bench, like he’d had a skinful. I went in to check on him and he was just lying there. I thought he was drunk. He was heavy breathing and that; just lying there. He wasn’t dead.’
‘And you didn’t notice the pool of blood lying under the seat?’
‘It was dark,’ he said.
‘Yet you were able to see him from the street,’ I said.
The boy prevaricated. ‘I’d had a skinful meself. I didn’t notice. I saw the blood on me shoe the next day and couldn’t remember how it got there. I thought I stood on something; a dead cat or something on the road, you know?’
‘So, why did you go over to him?’ I asked.
Burke squinted at me slightly, glanced across at his brief. ‘I wanted to check he was all right.’
‘So where’s his phone and the contents of his wallet?’
Burke smiled, then laughed affably. ‘Ah, come on,’ he said, holding out his hands, palm
s upward.
‘The contents of his wallet are missing, Stephen. Nor did he have a phone on him when we found him. Where are they?’
Burke glanced at his brief again and shrugged, as if we were abusing his sincerity.
‘We can go back to the murder charge if that helps,’ Hendry added.
‘I believe we’ve dealt with that,’ the solicitor managed, but Hendry was already moving on.
‘We could, of course, also search your house. Your mother’s house, I should say. Take it apart looking for stolen goods. And still go ahead with the murder rap, too.’
Burke coughed to clear his throat, shifting in his seat as he glanced from one of us to the other.
‘I binned his cards. He only had twenty quid in his wallet. Not even – it was euro. I spent it.’
‘What about the phone?’
Burke looked surprised. ‘I never saw a phone.’
‘Bullshit,’ Hendry said.
‘I swear. I never saw a phone. I was short some cash and I rolled a drunk for his wallet. I didn’t know he was dead. I swear on me ma.’
‘What about the taxi you say the man arrived in?’ I said. ‘What do you remember about that?’
Burke raised his chin a little, closing his eyes as if struggling to remember. ‘It was a red Audi,’ he said. ‘Bright red; too flash for the driver.’
‘Why?’
‘He was an old guy, kind of baldy.’
Hendry nodded impatiently. ‘I’m not hearing anything useful, Stephen,’ he said. ‘Nothing as compelling as the victim’s blood on your shoes.’
‘He had a southern plate,’ Burke added, snapping his fingers and pointing at Hendry. ‘“WW” in it.’
‘That’s very specific,’ Hendry said.
‘I remember it because it wasn’t “DL”, you know? I was trying to work out what “WW” stood for, but I was too pissed to remember all the counties.’
Registration plates in the Republic contain both the year of the car’s first registration and the initials of the county where it was registered. A new Donegal car will have a registration beginning ‘12 DL’. ‘WW’ meant the car had been bought in Wicklow. If it was a southern registration then it was probably a Donegal taxi company. It wouldn’t be impossible to contact each and ask if they had a red Wicklow-registered Audi driving for them. Particularly considering the physical description Burke had given us of the driver. It would, at least, tell us where Sean Cleary had been before arriving at the playground.
Burke could see that he had bought himself some slack. He snapped his fingers again and fell backwards into his seat, flicking his hand towards us. ‘That’s it. He dropped him off. Can I go now?’
‘We’ll be needing a statement,’ Hendry said. ‘Then we’ll have to decide what to charge you with.’
Tuesday, 30 October
Chapter Twenty-One
The kids were up early the following morning. It was the last day at school before their Halloween break and they were having a non-uniform day in Penny’s school. As a consequence, she spent forty minutes in the bathroom, trying on different outfits while Shane paced the floor outside, complaining that he needed to pee and refusing, on principle, the use of the en suite in our room.
When Penny finally appeared for breakfast, she was wearing the first outfit she had tried on, forty minutes previous.
‘Can I go to the bonfire tomorrow night over in Strabane?’ she asked, as she nibbled on a slice of toast.
‘I wanted to go to Derry for the fireworks,’ Shane complained.
‘Tough,’ Penny retorted. ‘I asked first.’
‘Tough for you,’ he spat back impotently.
‘I’m not fussed on the bonfire, sweetheart,’ I said. ‘There can be trouble there.’
‘I’m not a baby,’ Penny complained, then snapped as Shane stuck out his tongue triumphantly. ‘Shane’s sticking his tongue out at me,’ she whined, undermining her previous statement.
‘Don’t stick your tongue out at people,’ Debbie warned from the hall, where she was fixing her make-up.
Penny smirked at Shane. ‘Can I, Mum?’ she called. ‘I’ll be careful. All the girls are going.’
‘I saw your friend, Claire, over in Strabane last night,’ I said. ‘She’s keeping bad company. Stephen Burke?’
‘Oh, him,’ she said. ‘He just tags along sometimes. He’s a weirdo.’
‘I’m surprised Claire’s allowed over there on a school night.’
‘You didn’t say anything to her, did you?’ Penny asked, appalled.
Before I could answer, Debbie stuck her head around the door frame. ‘What do you think? Let her across for an hour or two, just.’
‘Thanks, Mum,’ Penny said, smiling, before I even had a chance to respond.
‘That’s not fair.’ Shane let his spoon clatter to the floor as he stomped away from the table.
‘We’ll go to Derry first,’ I said. ‘That way everyone will be happy.’
If the compromise placated him, he didn’t show it.
I was glad to get into the relative quiet of the station, and used the early start to follow up on what had happened in Christine Cashell’s home. I’d taken the details of the monitor from Christine’s machine the previous night and a quick Internet search provided me with a helpline number for the manufacturer.
‘Hello. Thank you for calling; how can I help you?’ The voice was English, upbeat.
It seemed too convoluted to explain the details of my enquiry, so instead I simply said, ‘Yes. We have a problem with the monitor. We can hear a baby crying in it.’
There was silence on the other end, as the girl perhaps wondered if this was a prank call.
‘Is that not what a baby monitor is meant to do, sir?’ She managed to sound cheery, though a little suspicious.
‘Of course. Yes, I’m sorry. I mean, we can hear someone else’s baby in the monitor.’
‘I see. And you’re sure it’s not your own baby, sir?’
‘Definitely not.’
‘I see,’ she repeated. ‘The most likely cause, then, is that one of your neighbours is using a monitor set at the same frequency as yours. That means that you might overhear their baby crying from time to time. And, of course, they’ll overhear yours.’
‘That explains it,’ I said. ‘Just as a matter of interest, how close by would they need to be for the monitor to pick it up.’
‘Is it clear?’
‘Fairly.’
‘It would need to be close, then; a neighbouring house. No further than maybe a few hundred yards.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘Thank you very much.’
‘Is there anything else I can help you with?’ she asked, her voice lilting.
‘No, thank you,’ I said. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’
I explained this to Christine Cashell an hour later while her partner sat in the chair opposite, a little sullen and more than a little hung-over. He scraped at the stubble along his jawline as he spoke.
‘So someone else around here is using a baby monitor like ours, Chrissie. See?’
She stared at him. If I had expected the revelation to bring her some comfort or relief I was to be disappointed.
‘No one on our estate has a baby that young,’ she said. ‘No one else here has babies.’
‘There must be some around here, Christine,’ I said. ‘The estate has a lot of young families in it; there’s bound to be at least one baby in the estate.’
‘But I be talking to the mothers in the shops and waiting at school; they’d have told me.’
I prevented myself from pointing out that they may not have done so, precisely because she had recently lost her own child. Still, the woman from the monitor company had said the house concerned would be a neighbouring property, and I doubted if Christine would have missed a pregnancy among one of her immediate neighbours.
‘What about the woman whose house you were at last night? Would she have a child?’
Dunne shrugged. ‘A l
ot of people live in and out of those unfinished houses. We don’t know who half of them are. The one she’s in was the show house for the estate, so it’s probably well finished inside. Better than ours anyhow.’
‘But the rest are incomplete?’
He nodded.
‘Why would they choose to live in an unfinished house?’
Dunne rolled his eyes. ‘They don’t actually live there; they’re using the address for benefits.’
For a number of years, the benefits system in the Republic had been markedly more generous than the system in the North. As a result, less scrupulous Northerners had ‘moved’, on paper, into properties in the south to exploit the fact that they could claim both in the North and in the Republic. Their child benefit would be paid in the North, while the south would top up the difference to bring it to Republic levels. That particular golden egg had cracked with the collapse of the economy and the subsequent bailout, though many of the registered addresses remained on the books. One impact of the scam was the disintegration of estates near the border where houses might be registered to a number of families without any of them actually living in them.
‘So you don’t know her name?’
Dunne shook his head. Christine looked at me and shook hers, too, once.
‘I can always ask.’
‘So what if she has a baby?’ Dunne said. ‘She’s not breaking the law.’
‘If she has one, we heard it being hit quite a smack last night. If she realizes that others can hear her, she might rein in her temper a little,’ I explained, more for Christine’s benefit than Dunne’s.
The house was unoccupied when I went across. I rang the bell a few times, then moved around to the side of the house and peered in the window. Inside was nicely finished; the ceilings were bordered with moulding and a small chandelier hung in the living room. The furniture in the room was perhaps a little large for the space, but even from where I stood it looked like good quality.
Brian McGilloway - The Nameless Dead (Inspector Devlin #5) Page 9