Borderlands ibd-1

by Brian McGilloway

  "What was the row about Sadie?"

  "None of your business. It was about family stuff – nothing to do with what happened to her."

  "What about Angela and drugs, Sadie? Any chance Angela was taking drugs? Was the row about drugs?"

  "You lot are all the same. Always thinking the worst of people." But again, despite her indignation, it didn't have any conviction. "Kids'll be kids, Inspector. You know that. Or do your wee'uns not shite like the rest of us?"

  Muire was playing in the garden by herself as I was leaving. stopped and watched her. If she was aware of my presence, she did not show it.

  "What's your dolly called?" I asked.

  "Angela," she replied without looking up.

  "Angela was very special to you, wasn't she?" I sat on the edge of the chair where Sadie had been when I arrived. The girl nodded, hut still did not look up. "Did she take you to the pictures on Friday?"

  "Some scary thing. It was rotten!" She pulled a face, finally looking at me.

  "Where did you go after that?"

  "Home."

  "Angela too?"

  "No. She went to see her friend, I think."

  "Whitey?"

  "No."

  "Who, Muire? Think. It's really important."

  "I dunno. She never said."

  "Did she say where her friend lived?"

  A shake of the head.

  "Which direction did she go in when you came out of the cinema?"

  She bit her bottom lip and frowned in concentration, but again couldn't answer me. "The bus stop, just. We left her at the bus stop."

  "Good girl, Muire. That's going to be very helpful," I said trying to sound sincere. "One other thing, Muire, and then I'll go. Did Angela have a fight with someone the day before? On Thursday? Did she row with your Mum?"

  Muire shook her head, but would not look at me again and busied herself with her dolls.

  "Was it your dad she rowed with?" Again a shake of the head, but this time in pantomime fashion, as a child does when trying too hard to appear truthful; my own daughter had done just such a thing many times before. "What did she row about with your dad?" Nothing. I squatted down right beside her, pretending to play with her doll. "What happened, Muire? It's really important if I'm going to catch the man who hurt Angela."

  She looked up at me and tears began to well in her eyes. "Angela said Daddy was watching her."

  "Watching her?"

  She nodded solemnly. "In the house. Watching her when she went to bed." The tears began to run down her face but she did nothing to stop them.

  "Is that what you were going to tell me the last day?" I asked and she nodded at me shyly. Then her expression changed and her line of vision shifted to above and behind me.

  "Don't talk to strangers, Muire!" Sadie said. Shoving past me and grabbing the girl by the wrist, she pulled her to her feet. She slapped her sharply across the tops of her legs, the girl's dress cushioning most of the blow. "Now, get into the house."

  Sadie marched behind her and left me standing alone in the garden. I looked round to see the neighbour from earlier, still standing at the hedge, smiling over at me. "Can I help you, sir?" I asked.

  He shook his head, still smiling. "No. I'm just enjoying the entertainment."

  "Would you enjoy it more down the station?"

  " Piss off, prick," he said, then went into his own house.

  When I returned to the station, I learnt that Costello had assigned two uniformed officers to assist me full-time in the investigation, while others in the station could be co-opted when needed. This he explained to me while the two sat outside his office door. I knew both of them fairly well.

  The more senior was Sergeant Caroline Williams, a native of Lifford, who had been a Guard for eight years and had recently been promoted. Costello suggested that she might be useful if the case involved a sexual crime, which was looking increasingly likely liked Caroline. She was straight-talking and had a good manner with members of the public. Luckily none of those people had seen her,. as I had, baton into submission a six-foot-two rocker who had caused a public-order disturbance after he tried to break into his ex-girlfriend's house. He would probably have sued for GBH had it not entailed publicly admitting that a woman of five-foot-five had left him crying in a doorway with a broken nose.

  And yet, while Williams was meting out such punishments to woman-abusers and wife-beaters by day, she was herself, for many years, being beaten nightly by her husband, an insipid salesman frustrated in his life and content in venting his frustration on the woman who had borne him a son for whom he had little regard. Caroline Williams told no one about it, but one of the sergeants noticed bruising on her arms and neck and, in the bar some nights later, we put together the pieces. Foolishly, that same night, fuelled by the courage a few pints can bring, four of us visited her house and taught Simon Williams a salutary lesson in how Gardai stick up for each other and how it feels to be on the receiving end of things. The following morning, while we congratulated ourselves on our fraternal actions, Caroline Williams covered with make-up the two black eyes her husband had given her in the belief that she had set us upon him. We did not get involved in the affairs of the Williams family again.

  Then, one night Caroline and her young son, Peter, arrived in the station and slept in the holding cell to escape Simon's latest rage. Costello visited him the next morning and, though no one knows what passed between them, by the following weekend Simon Williams had left Lifford and moved to Galway.

  The second assignee was Jason Holmes, an officer who had moved to Letterkenny from Dublin about eighteen months earlier. In Dublin he had been involved with the drugs squad and had gained considerable kudos for helping bring down a dealer whose name was linked with the murder of a leading lawyer. Holmes moved from Dublin soon after, partly for his protection from reprisals and also, as he told me later, because he had grown sick of city living. It was a fair enough reason. Holmes was quiet, bringing a reputation from Dublin which circumstance had not allowed him to cement. Again, Costello had a reason for including Holmes: following the discovery of the tablet in Angela's stomach, his knowledge of drugs might be useful.

  Costello called the two of them into his office and asked me to bring them up to date on what we had gathered so far. It was useful to reconsider what we had learned as I jotted down key times and events on the small easel blackboard Costello had had placed in the corner of the room.

  "So, Angela is seen in the company of Whitey McKelvey, known petty criminal. On Thursday, she has an argument with her father, when she accuses him, I think, of spying on her getting undressed.

  She leaves home on Thursday, and stays somewhere overnight where she gets a change of clothes. Both those clothes and the clothes she wore on Thursday are still unaccounted for." Williams nodded.

  "Friday afternoon," I continued, "she takes her sisters to the cinema. Leaves just after four. Probably at the bus stop by 4.15 p.m., from where, I think, she is going to meet someone, possibly a boyfriend. At some point late that night, we think, she suffers a seizure and dies – possibly after taking drugs. Her body is dumped behind the cinema that night and is discovered the next morning. She is wearing only her underwear, inside out, and a gold ring which I suspect her family didn't know she owned. McKelvey has been linked with her, but I don't take him for a murderer. In his favour, so to speak, the drugs link would seem to suggest him, as would his size in terms of being small enough to kneel on her chest. On the other hand, if this was a sexual crime – which it seems to have been, to some extent – we know that her father, no stranger to our cells before this, might have had more than simple fatherly love for his girl."

  "Especially if she wasn't his girl," Costello said, nodding sagely, happy to have made a contribution. "Though I would never have taken Johnny Cashell for a paedophile."

  " A couple more months and he wouldn't have been though, technically, would he?" Holmes said, and smirked.

  I saw a flash of somethin
g in Caroline Williams's eyes, and then her face softened and became unreadable. "It's still his daughter, though. Biological or not."

  "So," I said, "the questions are: where did she spend Thursday night? Who was she with on Friday night? Who gave her the change of clothes? Where are they now? Who gave her the ring? I don't think she bought it; it looked very good quality, a family heirloom.

  Williams spoke first. "Might be worth checking pawn shops, local second-hand jewellers and so on to see if any of them sold it."

  "Check lists of stolen goods too," I replied. "This might have been part of a stash. Someone lifted it and gave it to her. It's a safe bet her boyfriend, whoever he was, didn't buy it for her."

  "The whole ring thing might be a little tenuous, Inspector," Costello suggested. "Might be best to follow up the drugs angle too."

  "What about clubs?" Holmes said. "If drugs were involved, she got them somewhere. She was spotted clubbing on Thursday night; chances are she was out again on Friday. Maybe we could find out who she was with."

  "Good," I said. "This is all good. If you each want to take your own suggestion and follow it. Caroline, ask Burgess on the front desk to pull you up lists of stolen goods for the past six months, say. Jason, start with the Strabane clubs and move onto Letterkenny. We meet everyday at 9.30 a.m. and 4.30 p.m. to review status. Okay?"

  Costello wished us success from behind his desk, and then we were dispatched to our new office. It was actually a storeroom whose contents – mostly cleaning products – had been removed. Two desks had been set facing each other, each furnished with a phone and a plastic chair. Behind one of the desks, a corkboard had been nailed. I was busying myself with pinning up crime-scene photographs and a timeline for the case when Burgess phoned through from the front desk, despite the fact that it was only fifty feet away.

  "Detective Devlin," he said, with a formality designed only to impress the public, "there's a lady here to see you."

  I stuck my head out the doorway of the office and saw, standing beyond Burgess's desk, Miriam Powell, wife of Thomas Powell Jr. I said earlier that I had known him when we were younger, but it was not the whole truth. I knew Powell because, when we were eighteen, he had started dating Miriam Kelly, unbeknown to me, despite the fact that I was her boyfriend at the time. In fact, they had been dating for four months before she told me.

  We were parked below the waterworks station, along the back road to Strabane, lying on the back seat of my father's car. She had returned from holiday and her skin was tanned. It seemed to radiate with heat and light, even in the darkness of the car, and I could smell and taste coconut off her shoulders and neck as I kissed them, pushing off her blouse and fumbling with the clasp of her bra until she reached back and opened it for me. She unbuttoned my shirt and ran her hand down my chest. Her breath fluttered in my ear and tickled against the soft skin at the back of my neck, which affected me in ways I could not express.

  Less than ten minutes later we were driving out onto the main road again. She did not look at me as I apologised for my lack of control. Nor, indeed, did she look at me as she smoked the cigarette that I gave her and told me why she did not wish to see me anymore and that she wanted me to run her home. As I watched her walk up the driveway to her father's house, I was disturbed by the notion that she had provided for me out of pity, a last charitable act which caused her no more thought than the cigarette butt she flicked onto the driveway.

  Three nights later, at a local dance that my brothers had forced me to attend, I watched her dance close to Thomas Powell with an ease that only intimacy can achieve. She pressed her stomach against him while they swayed under the flashing lights, and I watched her hand slide into his pocket as his slid onto her buttocks. She whispered something to Powell and he looked over at me watching them. Then, the two of them laughed at a shared secret, which I was sure involved me and the incident in the back seat of the car. Consequently, I can never meet Powell without seeing his smiling face in my memory. Likewise, I can never see his wife without the same, overshadowed by the memory of the urgency of her breath, hot against my neck, and the scent of coconut from sun-kissed skin.

  Burgess pointed to me and I watched her now walk down towards our storeroom office, deftly swaying from side to side to avoid the corners of desks and filing cabinets which cluttered up the main working area of the station. She wore a linen suit to accentuate a tan achieved despite the fact that it would be Christmas in two days. Her brown hair was cut short and slightly spiked. She held a small handbag under her arm and held out a perfectly manicured hand to me. Unsure whether to kiss it or shake it, I opted for the latter and invited her to sit. She did so and crossed her legs in a languid manner, straightening the right leg of her trousers to ensure the crease fell properly. She wore sandals even though it was freezing outside. I noticed she had a tiny gold ring on her little toe.

  "Benedict. Lovely to see you. How's… your wife?" Miriam had attended college with Debbie and they had lived together for a year, around the time when Debbie and I started dating. Although she still invited us for drinks every so often and sincerely promised to meet soon for dinner when we bumped into each other coming out of Mass on an occasional Sunday morning, we all knew that the polite invitations were just that, formalities which both sides hoped the other would not insist upon honouring. "Deborah, that's right."

  "Debbie's great, Miriam. It's good to see you, too. How can I help you?" I tried to avoid eye contact, but I believe that Miriam sensed my discomfort.

  "Thomas told me that he saw you at Mass yesterday. I believe he behaved deplorably towards you, Benedict, and I wish to apologise. He's very upset about his father, you see. Sometimes Thomas has difficulty in telling his friends from…" She faltered mid-sentence, flicking open her handbag as though it might contain the words she wanted.

  "His enemies?"

  She laughed gaily, dismissing the word with the slightest wave of her hand. "We're all terribly worried about Tommy Senior, Benedict. Especially after this scare, when he saw someone in his room."

  "What do you want from me, Miriam?"

  "Thomas is afraid that, after his behaviour yesterday, there might be some… animosity between you that would hamper your willingness to investigate what happened with his father. That's all." She paused, but when it became clear that I was not going to speak, she continued. "Tommy Senior did a lot for this county. He was a great TD in his time. A great advocate for this area. Thomas wants to ensure that his father is afforded the best treatment he can get. In all things."

  Tommy Powell Sr had indeed been a TD, a member of the Dail, the Irish government, right through the worst of the Troubles. He had remained resolutely independent, switching allegiances between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, depending on which promised him most for Donegal. He had secured a number of large textile lactones for the area, bringing with them several hundred jobs and a boost to the economy. On the negative side, most of them set up along rivers and pumped effluent into the water, leading to some high-profile environmental protests. In every case Tommy Powell Sr appeared in the local media and decried the types of liberals who would put fish before people and seaweed before food on the table. His earthy, common-man rhetoric made him immensely popular, and even those who personally disliked the man – and there were many – had to admire the charisma he brought to the job. He had retired two years earlier, after suffering a minor stroke, and rumours were circulating that, in the next election, Thomas Powell Jr would follow in his father's footsteps and enter the world of politics. Certainly he had the wealth and media savvy to undertake such a venture as a vanity project, regardless of his sincerity or likely success.

  "I'll see what I can do, Miriam," I said, and smiled, I hoped sincerely. She toyed with the top button of her linen jacket, perhaps inadvertently drawing my vision to the lace decorating the top of the white satin camisole she wore underneath. Perhaps. She looked down at it, then looked quickly at me, following my gaze away from it, a smile dancing on her lip
s.

  "We'd appreciate anything you can do, Benedict, what with this terrible business about the young girl. Say, why don't you and

  Debbie call for drinks over Christmas? We could catch up on old times; recall our wild youth." As she spoke, she widened her eyes in mock promise for a second and smiled lightly.

  I returned the smile. "Perhaps we will, Miriam, but with the baby and so on, it's difficult to get out."

  She stood. "Merry Christmas then," she said and leaned toward me, placing her hand lightly on my shoulder and offering her cheek, which I kissed awkwardly, feeling all the more clumsy as she kissed the air beside my own cheek. I caught the scent of coconut and it would linger in my memory almost as long as the sensation of her cheek on mine, her breath fluttering against my skin.

  I watched her as she walked back through the main room of the station and out past Burgess, noticing that a number of the other male staff in the room were doing likewise.

  Caroline Williams's face appeared in my line of vision. "Your wife is on the phone, sir. Shall I tell her you're busy?" she asked, and walked away before I could answer.

  Chapter Four

  Monday, 23rd December

  Strabane and Lifford straddle the banks of two rivers, the Finn and the Mourne, which join the Foyle midway between the town in the North and our village in the South, which are separated by a distance of half a mile. The Foyle then flows for miles through Derry and on to Lough Foyle, where it joins the Atlantic. A bridge spans the point where the three rivers meet and, traditionally, lies in unclaimed territory, several hundred yards from where the British Army checkpoint used to be during the Troubles and several hundred yards before the Irish customs post. It was in this area of the borderlands that Angela Cashell was found. Just at the customs hut, a sharp left turn brings you to Lifford Community Hospital and, tucked behind but separate from it, Finnside Nursing Home.

  I sat in my car, smoking. Overlooking the river, I could see, on the curve of the embankment further down, the crime-scene tape, still fluttering in the breeze. I wondered about the Cashell girl's death. And I wondered why, when that investigation was in need of much work, I was about to waste time on the ramblings of a senile old man. I told myself it was out of respect for all Powell had done for Donegal; I told myself it was to stop his son making public complaints about Garda disinterest; I told myself it wasn't because, in a strange way, it brought me back into the circle of Miriam Powell.