She nodded, but did nothing to conceal her scepticism.
Just after seven my mobile rang.
‘Inspector Devlin? Letterkenny station here. We’ve had reports of a disturbance on Gallows Lane. One injured. You’re to go out.’
‘Can some of the uniforms not do it?’
‘They’re all on duty on the bridge. There was an incident there earlier today,’ he replied dryly.
Gallows Lane was so named because, several hundred years ago, when Lifford was still the seat of judicial power for Donegal, criminals were led to the top of the lane and hung from one of the three huge chestnut trees which had stood there. Their corpses might remain hanging for days as a reminder of the particular type of summary justice which operated in the area.
I drove almost to the top of the lane before I found the source of the disturbance. A crowd had gathered on the roadway, encircling a figure lying prone on the ground in front of a car. The car’s engine was off and the doors open, though a teenage girl sat in the front passenger seat. I assumed, as I approached, that the car had struck someone crossing the road. Even when I pushed through the gathered crowd and saw, properly for the first time, the person lying on the roadway, I maintained that assumption.
Stephen Burke lay curled on the ground. His face was badly bloodied, one of his eyes swollen shut, the other bloodshot. Blood seeped from his nose, which was obviously broken.
I knelt beside him, careful not to move him.
‘Stephen? Can you hear me?’
He nodded. His clothes smelt strongly of body odour, as if they had not been changed in days. The crotch and upper legs of his trousers were dark with damp where he had voided his bladder.
‘You need to call an ambulance,’ someone said.
I glanced round at the group. ‘Who was the driver?’
A young lad, no more than eighteen stepped forward. ‘Me. He was just lying there.’
‘What happened?’
‘What I just said. We came up here for a bit of, a bit of peace, like,’ he said, nodding to where the young girl sat in the car. ‘I was driving up the lane and he was lying there like that. I stopped and checked on him, then called you.’
‘What speed were you doing?’
‘I didn’t hit him,’ the young fella said. ‘He was like that when I stopped. I swear.’
Burke’s injuries did not look to have been inflicted by a car.
‘Can you stand, Stephen?’ I asked.
Burke shook his head and muttered something.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘I pissed myself,’ he hissed. I realized that he was reluctant to stand in front of the crowd.
‘What happened to you?’
He muttered again.
‘I can’t hear you.’
‘Nothing. I’m all right.’
‘He needs an ambulance,’ someone repeated.
‘I’ll get something sorted,’ I said, standing up and moving back to my car, out of ear-shot of the group. I took out my phone, but it wasn’t to call an ambulance.
‘Devlin,’ Hendry said. ‘You haven’t caused another riot have you?’
‘I’ve found Burke,’ I whispered.
‘Okay,’ Hendry replied uncertainly.
‘He’s on my side. Is there a warrant out on him?’
‘Not yet. We need to question him first. The girl he assaulted was 16 years old and drunk; she remembers nothing. Plus he did nothing that left any evidence. We’re working on Penny’s assault.’
‘And?’
Hendry hesitated a second. ‘We can do something if we pick him up here, but I’m not sure the PPS will go to all the hassle of an extradition order for a charge that will probably result in a caution. He wouldn’t volunteer to come across and answer our questions, I take it?’
I shook my head, then realized Hendry couldn’t see me. ‘Unlikely.’
‘How did you find him?’
‘Lying in the middle of Gallows Lane. Much the worse for wear.’
‘Okay,’ he repeated. ‘Sure, release him at the bridge and we’ll wait to pick him up as he comes across.’
‘He’s not really in a fit state to walk across, to be honest.’
Hendry whistled softly down the line. ‘I see.’
‘I haven’t done anything to him. But he needs medical attention. If I call an ambulance for him here, he’ll be taken to Letterkenny. We can’t arrest him over here unless there’s a warrant out for him.’
‘I’ll meet you on the bridge.’
I managed, with the assistance of some of those assembled, to help Burke to his feet. He swayed a little, initially. I explained that the ambulances were on other calls and I would take him to hospital myself. Burke looked at me suspiciously through his one good eye, but said nothing.
I manoeuvred him into the back of my car and told him to lie on the seat if he felt dizzy. Instead he sat up, shifting his way across the seat until he was sitting behind the passenger seat, with a view of me. I realized that he thought he was being set up, that I was taking him somewhere to take revenge for his attack on Penny. I did nothing to reassure him on that count.
‘So who did this to you?’ I asked, once we got moving.
‘I don’t know,’ he muttered. I glanced in the rear-view and saw that he was watching me, gauging the authenticity of my question and perhaps wondering if I had, in fact, arranged the beating myself.
‘No idea?’
He shook his head, wincing as he did so.
‘You must have pissed someone off,’ I said.
‘You can let me out here,’ Burke said. ‘I’ll walk on across to Strabane.’
I shook my head. ‘I’d be failing in my duty of care, Mr Burke, if I didn’t see you handed over to the emergency services in the North.’
We travelled in silence for the duration of the journey, until I drove onto the bridge, having been waved through the garda checkpoint. I heard the change in the sound of the tar beneath the car wheels as we passed into the half-mile stretch that, though officially in the North, sat between our checkpoint at one end of the bridge and the PSNI one further along the road towards Strabane. A single PSNI car was parked on the bridge, Jim Hendry standing beside it, staring down at the river beneath.
‘I’m sorry about your daughter,’ Burke said, as I slowed the car to a stop. ‘I’d been drinking and that.’
‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Don’t try to excuse it.’
‘Fuck you, then,’ he said, spitting a globule of bloody saliva onto my seat, narrowly missing my shoulder.
The door beside Burke opened and Jim Hendry reached in and roughly pulled him from the car.
‘You do look a state, Stephen,’ Hendry said. ‘Let me get you seen to.’
With that he frogmarched him to his own squad car and helped him into the back seat with a shove.
‘He was like that when I found him,’ I said.
‘I’m sure,’ Hendry said, his eyes wrinkling against the glare of the streetlamps above. ‘I’ll let you know when he’s ready to talk.’
When I made it back to the house Shane was sitting on the bottom step of the stairs. He waited for me to come in, then stood and stared at me accusingly without speaking.
It took me a second to realize the cause of his anger.
‘The cinema. Shit,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry, Shane; something came up.’
He stared at me a moment longer, then turned and ran up the stairs to his room. I turned to where Debbie stood in the doorway to the living room.
‘He cried for twenty minutes,’ she said. ‘You promised him, Ben.’
I followed him up to his room. He had already turned out the light and was lying in bed, the duvet pulled up over his head, so that I could not see him.
‘Shane, I’m really sorry,’ I said. ‘I know I promised we’d go together but something unexpected happened that I couldn’t leave.’
‘You left me instead,’ he said, the duvet dulling his words, though doing nothing to blunt the s
harpness of his tone.
‘I had to deal with something.’
The shape on the bed shifted and an opening developed. Shane poked his head out. His face was slick with tears.
‘You always put work before us.’
‘That’s not true, Shane,’ I said. ‘Besides, this wasn’t work. This had to do with family.’
‘How?’ he demanded.
‘It was the boy who hit Penny.’
If I had thought the mention of his sister’s name might placate him, I was sorely misguided. Instead he scrammed under his duvet.
‘I knew you put her first,’ he spat, then tugged the duvet up over his head again, his body shaking as he cried.
I rubbed his back through the bedclothes, but he shrank from my touch.
‘Leave me alone!’ he shouted, the words muffled.
Eventually, when it became clear that he would not be comforted, I stood up.
‘We’ll go tomorrow night,’ I said. ‘I promise you, we’ll go tomorrow night.’
The duvet flung back and Shane stared at me angrily. ‘No we won’t,’ he said.
Saturday, 3 November
Chapter Forty-Four
Though Burke was brought to Strabane PSNI station before 10 p.m., his solicitor didn’t arrive until after midnight. Hendry phoned me when they were gearing up to start questioning. He had refused to allow me to sit in on the interview, for obvious reasons, the charge being that Burke had assaulted my child. However, he had given the go-ahead for me to watch the interview via a video link in the adjacent room.
Debbie’s anger at my letting down Shane had been lessened significantly by the knowledge that I had done so in order to get Burke across to the PSNI. When I told her the state in which I had found the boy, she had opened her mouth to ask something, then evidently had thought better of it and remained silent.
‘Make sure he doesn’t get away with what he did,’ she had warned me as I left, as if I might have some influence over how the PSNI would prosecute the case.
Burke slumped in the chair of the interview room. He wore an old blue boiler suit usually given to those whose clothes have been removed for forensic examination. In Burke’s case, I assumed it was because Hendry had taken pity on the boy and had allowed him to change out of his soiled trousers. One of his eyes was still badly swollen, the other carried a fresh purple bruise beneath it. The bridge of his nose had been stitched, as had his lip, which was puffy and red.
The lawyer who sat next to him was a middle-aged man, rheumy eyed and obviously irritated at being called into the station at midnight. Burke had contacted his parents first, apparently, to ask for their solicitor but his mother, aware of the incident being investigated by Hendry, had refused to help the boy.
‘Do you understand why we’d like you to make a statement?’ Hendry asked. ‘You’ve been identified as the perpetrator of a sexual assault on one teenage girl and the physical assault of a second. Coupled with the charges still hanging over you with the theft of money from the victim of a murder, you’re facing jail time.
‘These are two separate issues,’ the lawyer muttered. ‘Let’s stick with the assault.’
Hendry nodded. ‘We have a witness who saw you plying her friend with drink, then attempt to have sex with the teenager while she was incapable of giving consent. That’s tantamount to rape.’
‘But isn’t actually rape,’ the lawyer said. ‘And if the alleged victim was so drunk as to not be able to give consent, her evidence against Mr Burke must likewise be compromised and therefore unreliable.’
‘The evidence of her friend, her sober friend, who saw what happened and who was left with a black eye by Mr Burke is, however, extremely reliable.’
The lawyer stifled a yawn. ‘I do think we’re missing a bigger issue here, namely how Mr Burke came to be in custody in the first place. He claims he was in Donegal and—’
‘Where he had gone to escape charges following the assault,’ Hendry countered.
‘Inspector,’ the lawyer said. ‘Someone assaulted Mr Burke. Then a guard – the father, indeed, of one of the alleged victims – handed him over to the PSNI despite there being no warrant outstanding for his arrest in the Republic. That’s rendition, is it not?’
‘That’s a separate issue,’ Hendry corrected. ‘And one which we will investigate with full vigour. But it shouldn’t distract from the fact that Mr Burke assaulted two girls, one sexually. On top of all that has happened to date, we will be asking the PPS to push for a custodial sentence. There’s no way around that.’
‘It’ll never get to court after the way he was brought across to the North.’
‘The guard in question felt that Mr Burke would receive treatment quicker in Strabane than Letterkenny, which is much further away from Lifford. His bringing Mr Burke across was in your client’s best interests. I don’t believe the PPS will have a problem with that.’
Burke glanced at his lawyer to see what he might offer, but nothing was forthcoming. ‘I can get you the phone,’ Burke said suddenly.
‘What?’
‘The phone. Off the dead guy. I know where it is. I’ll get it for you, if you drop the charges.’
‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’ Hendry said incredulously. The lawyer, on the other hand, was suddenly interested, perhaps sensing a way to wrap things up more quickly than he had expected.
‘I’d like a moment with Mr Burke,’ he said.
Hendry came out of the room directly to where I was sitting. He grimaced when he saw me.
‘What do you think?’ he said.
‘He’s bluffing. The phone is long gone.’
‘Maybe,’ he agreed. ‘But just for sake of argument, let’s say he does have it. It could lead us to Sean Cleary’s killer. And Seamus O’Hara’s.’
‘He tried to rape someone. He punched my daughter in the face.’
‘I understand that, Ben,’ Hendry said. ‘But you know as well as I do that the PPS will probably pass on this anyway. The way he was found, the claims about his being smuggled across to the North; I know we had no choice, but it will muddy the waters.’
‘You can’t let him skate on the assault, Jim,’ I said. ‘He already walked on robbing Cleary.’
‘But if he helps us get Cleary’s killer, Ben, you know it makes sense; drop the smaller stuff to prosecute the bigger.’
He raised a hand of placation in advance of my inevitable argument. ‘I’m not suggesting that what happened to Penny was small, but this is a murder case he could help break. You said yourself that if we had Sean Cleary’s phone, we’d have the person he arranged to meet.’
‘Track the phone.’
‘We haven’t been able to,’ Hendry said. ‘And we can’t trace the calls. He must have had automatic network roaming on, because the phone seems to have kept shifting between different mobile providers north and south of the border. We’ve got records from his home network, but there are gaps all over the place.’
Burke’s ability to act with impunity infuriated me. I thought, once more, of Sean Cleary’s anger on learning his father’s death would not be investigated, even if his body were recovered.
‘I’ve no choice, Ben. If it wasn’t about Penny you’d agree with me on it.’
Fifteen minutes later, Burke left in a police car to locate the stolen phone. Hendry waited with me in the station canteen for his return.
‘We’ll be letting Jimmy Callan out today,’ he said as he tipped a third sachet of sugar into his coffee cup.
‘Nothing on him?’
He shook his head. ‘No evidence tying him to the scene, no evidence of his involvement except for the row he had with Cleary earlier that night, and your taxi man proved that Cleary was alive and well after that.’
‘So what next?’
‘We wait for Burke and this phone and see what it reveals.’
We sat in silence. Presumably Hendry could sense that I was angry at Burke’s release, but he made no apology. He would admit to punching Penny
and would be cautioned for it. The sexual-assault charges would be quietly dropped.
Eventually Hendry spoke. ‘So was Burke really like that when you found him?’
‘Are you asking did I smack him around a bit?’
Hendry raised his hands again. ‘You don’t have to tell me. I’m not judging you. If he’d done that to my wee girl, he’d have more than pissed his pants, trust me.’
‘I didn’t touch him,’ I muttered. Had I known at the time how things would pan out, I’m not sure I’d have made the same decision.
Burke and the lawyer arrived back soon after with the phone. He had removed the SIM card, which he had had to retrieve from the waste basket in the room of his hostel. The phone itself he had sold to a friend, who was convinced to return it only by the presence of three police officers on his doorstep at 3 a.m.
Wearing his gloves, Hendry reassembled the phone and card and powered it up. He scrolled through the calls list in the memory. There had been one or two calls to the phone on the day after Cleary’s death, presumably before those who knew him had learned of his killing. There were, however, three calls on the night of his murder. The first was a call received. It was a Donegal number. So too was the second number, though this was a call dialled. I phoned through to Letterkenny and had them run both numbers for me. The desk sergeant did not even need to check the second number; ‘That’s a taxi firm, isn’t it?’ he said.
Sure enough, it was the number for the taxi firm for which Bryant drove. The first number, unsurprisingly, was Seamus O’Hara’s. He must have called Cleary, which explained why he had been at O’Hara’s house. Cleary had then called a taxi which had taken him to town, while he rang the third number. By the time Letterkenny had given me the details of those two calls, Jim Hendry had identified the owner of the third number; Niall Martin.
Chapter Forty-Five
Martin’s housekeeper opened the door on the fifth knock. The sky was lightening, the stars fading at the imminent approach of dawn. A single gash of red bled along the horizon to the east. Early morning traffic trundled along the road outside, mostly larger freight lorries making deliveries.
Brian McGilloway - The Nameless Dead (Inspector Devlin #5) Page 18