Borderlands ibd-1

by Brian McGilloway

  Costello returned to the station where he went to the toilet and washed himself several times and strained until he forced himself to urinate. He looked at himself in the mirror, water dripping off the fringes of his hair and off his nose and for a moment he thought he would vomit. But the wave of nausea passed, or he swallowed it down; he smoothed his hair back on his scalp, replaced his cap and walked home, allowing the breeze which was rising off the river to cool the redness in his cheeks.

  Costello woke the following morning early and sat at his kitchen table in silence while the air around him lightened. He took a walk into Lifford town just after 8.00 a.m. and bought fresh bread and orange juice and a bunch of cut flowers from a bucket outside the local supermarket. He made Emily breakfast in bed and laughed a little too loudly at her jokes. He studied her face carefully and reminded himself of all the things about her which he loved, all the reasons he had married her.

  Two weeks later, when he could stand no more, he sat in his car at the customs point and flicked through his notebook until he found Mary Knox's name and address. He wore plain clothes so he could cross the border. He sat outside her house on Canal View, watching the windows for what seemed an eternity. Finally, he went over and knocked on the door. Butterflies fluttered around his insides. A knot thick as a fist caught in the centre of his gut. The door was opened and she was looking at him, standing on her doorstep, his hair brushed, a bunch of flowers bought from the same bucket as his wife's clasped so tightly in his sweating hand that the green paper was staining his skin.

  Later, as he left the house, he placed a twenty pound note on the phone table in the hall, while she dressed quietly in the living room.

  Over the following months he visited Mary Knox with increasing frequency. Their routine did not change. He sat and waited in his car until she was ready for him. He stood at her door like a child approaching an adult, fear and excitement tightening inside him. He always brought her flowers, even when those from the night before were still fresh.

  At Christmas he bought Mary Knox a gold chain which cost more than the gift he bought for his wife. He bought the Knox children a train set and a doll, but was not allowed to present them personally. She bought him nothing and he thought she might give him a free turn, but as he crept out the front door that night she called him back and asked him had he forgotten something. He was so angry he swore he would never go back to her, but he returned four nights later.

  One night he saw a figure – another customer – emerge from her door, glancing furtively up and down the street, the orange lamplight glistening off his wedding ring. Costello could do nothing and Knox made no apology.

  On his way home he picked up a drunk who was staggering over the bridge towards Lifford and beat him so severely with his nightstick that when the man left the drunk-tank the following morning, his ribs and back were ribboned with purple and red welts, though he could not recall how he had received them.

  More and more often, Costello found himself waiting until a man left Mary Knox's house before he could enter. Finally, on one such night in May, as the evening freshened and the last blue faded from the sky, he hit on the idea of a trip to Donegal. He would take her away for the weekend, spend two whole days with her, with no distractions – no other men, no Emily, no twenty-pound payment. He could say he had to attend a conference. He could book under the name Smith, as he had seen it done in the movies. For the first time in months, he felt again the nauseating wave of nerves and excitement return.

  It took three weeks to convince Mary Knox. He promised to pay for everything if she would come. He promised to arrange it so no one would know. Finally he promised to buy her something to compensate for the loss of earnings she would suffer over one weekend. She smiled and allowed him to kiss her and agreed. She said she would leave her children with a neighbour; they had an understanding.

  It was on that trip that Costello bought Mary Knox the ring which I now held. And, he believed, it was that trip which had signalled the start of the end of their relationship: perhaps because Mary Knox realized how possessive he had become.

  As autumn darkened the nights around him, he saw her less frequently. Several nights her house stood in darkness all night. When he did see her, she seemed distant. Her clothes looked more expensive and, though she still wore his ring, it was supplemented now with other items of jewellery. One night when he called, he watched her going out of her house and getting into a black southern- registered car, driven by a Lifford man named Anthony Donaghey. He was tall and thin in an ungainly way, his hair shorn close to his scalp. He wore drainpipe jeans rolled up on his shins and high-laced Doctor Marten boots. Yet, he held the door open for Mary Knox as if he were her chauffeur, and she sat in the back while he drove.

  Without any regard for his dignity, Costello followed them back across the border and out to the Three Rivers Hotel that squatted on the Letterkenny Road. He sat in the shadows of the car park for three hours, running his car battery low by listening to the radio, waiting for Mary Knox to reappear. Shortly after one in the morning, she swayed drunkenly out through the front door. Donaghey got out of a waiting car, helped her in and drove her home.

  When Costello asked her about the incident several days later she told him he was pathetic, sitting in the darkness watching her. She told him she didn't need a jealous lover. She told him she had someone more important than a policeman to take care of her. He shouted at her so loudly her daughter upstairs began to cry. Mary Knox slapped him on the face and called him a lunatic. His face stung and burned where the print of her hand had already started to turn red. Blindly, he grabbed at the earthenware jug of flowers and threatened her with it. For the tiniest second something like fear flickered in her eyes, then she laughed at him, laughed so hard that tears began to leak down her face. Her laughter followed him out onto the street and all the way home.

  He did not see Mary Knox again. Several weeks later, on New Year's Eve, she and her children vanished.

  We were sitting now in the lay-by halfway across the bridge between Lifford and Strabane. Traffic drifted past us. Below, where the Foyle began its final journey to Lough Foyle and on to the Atlantic, a lone heron waded in the shallows, dipping its beak curiously into the murk, but was having no success finding food.

  "So, that's the whole story, Benedict. Why did I not tell you this before? Hardly my finest moment, was it?"

  I said nothing, but ground the cigarette I was smoking into the car ashtray. I wound down the window to let the smoke escape and watched as the heron gave up its search, stretched its wings and lifted itself from the water. "What has this got to do with Angela Cashell?" I asked finally.

  "I don't know, Benedict. Honestly. If I thought there was a connection, I'd have told you before now."

  "There, must be a connection," I said with irritation. "Ratsy

  Donaghey reports stolen the ring of a woman who disappeared twenty-odd years ago; Whitey McKelvey gets hold of it, tries to flog it, claims he sold it to a woman in a disco, and it ends up on the finger of an almost naked dead girl, the daughter of a local hood. Coincidence is one thing, sir, but this is just a little much."

  "I could call the NCIB in. Get some fresh minds on the case. Of course that means that everything will be in the open. Everything."

  Regardless of the implicit threat that my attack on Whitey McKelvey would surface once more, I was reluctant anyway to hand things over to the National Criminal Investigation Bureau. My handling of the case had hardly been exemplary, but I felt I was at last on the right track.

  "The first question is, how did Ratsy Donaghey end up with the ring?" I said, trying to ignore his comment.

  "Well, either Mary gave it to him or he took it from her," Costello said. "And she may not have cared for me, but she cared for that ring. It cost a fortune."

  I started the engine and indicated to turn back towards Lifford. "Where are we going?" Costello said.

  I looked at him but could not answer.


  Chapter Thirteen

  Monday, 30th December

  At 9.30 on Monday morning, I met Williams in our storeroom office. She and Holmes had secured an artist's impression of the girl with whom Terry Boyle had been spotted on the night he died. Unfortunately, for all that effort, the picture could have been of any teenaged girl: small, fair hair, attractive; no eye-colour, no distinctive tattoos or piercing. The e-fit would be released to the press, but even Williams admitted that she didn't hold out much hope. Holmes was continuing his suspension at home, watching daytime TV and phoning suspects whose names had been bandied about in connection with Boyle. It was a thankless task, but he was using a Garda cellphone, so it wasn't costing him anything.

  "She looks like somebody I know," I said, turning my head to one side, as though looking from a different angle might help me see more clearly.

  "She looks like anybody I know," Williams said. "That's the problem. How's the Cashell case moving?"

  I told her all that Costello had told me. When I finished she shook her head in disbelief, then said, "I guess you were right when you said the ring was a message. Do you think it was meant for Costello?"

  "Maybe. It's something we'll have to consider. First we figure out what Ratsy Donaghey had to do with all this. I have a feeling that, if he's involved, Mary Knox didn't voluntarily give that ring away."

  "Well, I have two bits of news," Williams said. "First off, I checked that video again. Bad news is there was no sign of Whitey McKelvey."

  "But we saw her going in with him."

  "No," she replied, raising a finger in the air in a way that reminded me of one of my old school teachers. "We saw someone going in with Cashell, whom we assumed to be Whitey. Remember, the guy with the short blond hair and jeans. White shirt?"

  "I remember," I said. "What about him?"

  "He appears again later. Going to the toilet. I had to go and check in the bar myself last night. He went into the girls' toilet. He was a she."

  "Are you sure?" I asked, though I knew it was a stupid question.

  "As best I can be. It's hard to tell. The white shirt is kind of baggy. A small-breasted woman, short hair? Yeah, could be a woman. Maybe Whitey McKelvey was telling the truth. He doesn't appear anywhere on the video."

  "If he was telling the truth about that, maybe he did sell the ring," I said.

  "Let's say he did. How did it end up on Cashell's finger? Unless someone bought the ring specifically for that purpose. Which would have meant tracking down Whitey. Which meant they knew the ring had been stolen. Or maybe Ratsy told them it had been stolen. Maybe that's why he had cigarette burns all over his arms. Maybe they tortured him until he told them about it. They trace it back to McKelvey and buy it from him," Williams added. "Then plant it on his girlfriend's body to make it look like he did it. But why?"

  "What if McKelvey wasn't the link. What if the message wasn't for McKelvey or Costello? What if it was meant for Johnny Cashell?"

  "It's possible. Should we go see him?" Williams suggested.

  "I guess we'd better," I said.

  We didn't get any further, though, for my own cellphone rang. It was Kathleen Boyle, Terry's mother, and she had received something unusual in the mail.

  "I don't usually open my husband's mail," she explained, sitting on the same sofa as she had the night her son had been murdered. "Only at Christmas. Well, some people don't realize we're separated, you see. They still send cards to both of us, but in his name. You know, Mr and Mrs Seamus Boyle. I open them and send his on to him."

  "No need to explain, Mrs Boyle," Williams said, impatient to find out what exactly had been sent.

  "Well, I knew this was a Christmas card when it arrived today. I just thought it was late. But the card was blank you see – no message, nothing. Just this inside…" She held out a photograph, its subject unclear as the light shimmered with the shaking of her hand across the glossy finish.

  When I took the picture from her, I was both surprised and strangely comforted to see the familiar image of Mary Knox, sitting on the steps, frozen in a moment that must have held significance for whoever had taken the photograph – or whoever was attaching it to murders twenty-odd years after her disappearance.

  Mrs Boyle caught the glance between myself and Williams. "Do you know who she is?" she asked.

  "The question is, do you?" I replied.

  "No idea. I've never seen her before. I just thought… Well, you said if I thought of anything unusual to get in touch."

  "You're sure you don't know her?" I asked again, desperate now to find the link, the relevance of this picture.

  "No, I've never set eyes on her, I swear."

  "The card was sent to your husband, Mrs Boyle. Would he know her?"

  "I… I don't know," she said, suddenly taken aback by the thought. "She might be one of his… women. But the picture looks so old."

  "Can we contact your husband, Mrs Boyle?" I asked. "To see if-"

  She nodded vigorously. "Oh, he'll be here later. For the funeral tomorrow." She looked from Williams to me and back, as if somewhere in the space between us she might find an explanation for the death of her son.

  After assuring Mrs Boyle that she had done the right thing in calling us, we sat in the car and discussed our progress. There was no discernable link between Ratsy Donaghey, Angela Cashell and Terry Boyle, yet someone had murdered the three of them, and Mary Knox's picture had turned up in connection with all three crimes. Ratsy Donaghey was the same generation as Johnny Cashell and, though I didn't know Seamus Boyle, Mary Knox's photograph had been sent to him, not his wife. I decided the only thing left to do was to confront Johnny Cashell and Seamus Boyle. Before we did, I called Hendry to see if he had found out anything more about Knox's disappearance. He had spent the morning going over case notes for me.

  "I told you yesterday. The main line of inquiry at the time was IRA involvement. Of course, that meant that it never went any further."

  "Does the name Ratsy Donaghey mean anything? Druggie from Letterkenny."

  "Tony?"

  "That's him."

  "Tony's name appeared once or twice. One of the neighbours said she had seen him a couple of times around the house before the girl vanished. Not just him, mind," he added.

  "No word on the kids yet?"

  "Nothing. My guess is if she's alive they're with her. Otherwise, one of her neighbours wasn't spotted for a few days after the disappearance. Went to Dublin to a sister, she said. She and Knox were very close; she looked after the kids, apparently, when Knox was working. Joanne Duffy her name was. Lives in Derry now, somewhere. Why do you ask about Tony Donaghey?"

  "His name's come up on this side."

  "What did you call him? Ratsy?" Hendry asked, and I explained.

  When Donaghey was a teenager he used to hunt and catch rats in the farms around Lifford. On summer days, when the weather was stiflingly hot, he went into Letterkenny and hung around by traffic lights, a live rat in the pocket of his coat. If a single female driver stopped at the lights, with her window down because of the heat, Donaghey would throw the live rat onto her lap. Generally, the driver's first reaction was to leap out of the idling car. Donaghey could then jump in and drive off. He did it six times before he was caught. Rumour also has it that the officer who caught him, who is now a superintendent, broke the bones of Donaghey's two hands with a truncheon as a salutary lesson in the summary justice of Donegal.

  "Fair enough," Hendry said. "He was a bad bastard by all accounts. Reading between the lines here, he was fairly in the frame for the Knox disappearance, and a few others. We had him down as a Provo, for a while anyway, until even they kicked him out. No evidence, though, so it was left in the wind. Sorry."

  I thanked him and hung up. Twice now he had mentioned the Provo connection. I couldn't see it. Still, I thought, it would do no harm to check. I picked up my car keys. Williams looked at me.

  "I think I need to go to confession," I said.

  Our local priest i
s an elderly man called Terry Brennan. He moved to Lifford four years ago after serving in one of the roughest areas of Derry for fourteen years and, while many assumed him to be a bumbling old relic from the golden age of Catholicism, few knew that he had mediated between the IRA and British government ministers for several years in the late '80s and early '90s. He had no affiliations with either group, yet managed to retain the respect, and, more importantly, the ear of both.

  The 10.30 a.m. Mass was not yet over, so we sat in the car park until the small number of woman parishioners exited into the morning sunlight, pulling on coats or fastening scarves around their heads against the cold. Then I went into the chapel.

  The sunlight from outside shone through the stained glass at such an angle that the spectrum of colours splashed across the white marble of the altar. Father Brennan was in the confessional; two elderly supplicants knelt at the pew directly outside. The door of the box clicked open and a child came out, holding the door open for a woman who was, presumably, his grandmother. Within less than a minute, she too came out and the man in front of me entered the box. From where I was sitting I could hear his soft murmuring, interspersed with the deeper, more guttural mutterings of Father Brennan. Then the man came out and left the confessional box door swinging in air heavy with the scent of incense.