The Good Turn

by Dervla McTiernan

  ‘I’ll confirm who we have by this afternoon. Meanwhile I want the action list tied down and I want to get moving on it, all right? Let’s not hang around on this one.’

  Cormac went back to his desk, focused his attention again on mapping out the lines of inquiry where he saw most potential. This was going to be a time-sensitive operation. He wanted to get ahead of rumour.

  At ten minutes to nine, Dave McCarthy appeared beside his desk.

  ‘Do you have a minute?’ Dave asked. Dave was a fixture at the station. He had a good ten or fifteen years on Cormac. One of those officers who knew his job well, had carved out a space for himself and wasn’t particularly interested in promotion. Dave could be an asset when he was interested in the job, if you were willing to accept the boundaries he created for himself. Cormac had found that Dave was worth a bit of flexibility. He had the experience, and he could be very effective.

  ‘I do,’ Cormac said.

  ‘In private,’ Dave said.

  Cormac followed Dave into one of the small meeting rooms, pushed the door closed behind him. Dave had a folded newspaper in one hand. He spread it open on the table. The headline took up two-thirds of the page: GARDA SHOOTING: ONE DEAD. The subhead was smaller: A CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY?

  Cormac picked up the newspaper and started to read. The piece was short and decidedly one-sided. The journalist had already spoken to Jason Kelly’s family. They claimed that Kelly had been fixing up the old boathouse, that he worked there during his free time, often at weekends and late into the evening. According to the piece, Kelly was a carpenter and handyman, unmarried but close to his older brother and younger sister, and a beloved uncle to his nieces and nephews. He had no criminal history whatsoever. It was unthinkable that he would have been involved in the abduction of a young girl, who had, after all, been found entirely unharmed miles from the scene. The piece claimed that little was known about the detective who had fired the shots, except that he was young and inexperienced. The garda press office had declined to comment when contacted by the journalist.

  Cormac put the paper down.

  ‘Christ,’ he said.

  McCarthy nodded. He reached out and took the paper, folded it up again, with the headline on the inside.

  ‘They got there awfully quickly,’ Cormac said.

  ‘That’s what I was thinking.’

  Cormac tried to read his expression. McCarthy was better connected in Galway than he was.

  ‘Am I missing something, Dave?’

  A slow shrug. ‘I don’t know,’ Dave said. ‘But it struck me as odd that the press office had nothing to say.’

  ‘It hasn’t even been forty-eight hours,’ Cormac said. ‘I doubt if Peggah’s family is speaking to the press.’

  He’d seen them at the hospital yesterday. They’d been happy, if a little confused and worried. They’d feared their daughter dead and she’d been handed back to them unharmed, at least physically. But they’d had no chance to process their own distress and trauma, and had been given no explanation for her abduction. Peggah had been shy, overwhelmed and mostly concerned about being reunited with her dog, who had shown up at a neighbour’s completely unscathed. No one had said anything about journalists.

  ‘Someone’s been speaking to the journo,’ McCarthy said. ‘They didn’t get the bit about Peggah being found unharmed from out of thin air.’

  ‘No.’

  There was silence in the small room. They could hear the chatter from the squad room, a sudden burst of laughter.

  ‘You were out with the task force,’ Cormac said. ‘On Saturday night.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ Cormac said. ‘It’s a win.’

  ‘Plenty of pats on the back to share around there,’ McCarthy said dryly.

  ‘So what’s the story now? You’re still assigned to the task force or are you back with general operations?’

  ‘I’d have thought you’d know more than I do about all that,’ McCarthy said.

  Cormac opened his hands in a helpless gesture.

  ‘Well, no one’s said anything officially,’ he went on. ‘Not yet, at least. But I wasn’t exactly an integrated member of the team. None of us were. They just wanted bodies out there, along the coast, watching the access routes. Now they’ve got their arrests, they’ve got the drugs. I heard they interviewed the suspects yesterday but the only people in the room were Healy and Murphy Junior. They’re using a couple of uniforms they brought with them from Dublin for support.’

  Cormac nodded. ‘Well, if you’re free I want you back on my team,’ he said. He gestured to the newspaper still in McCarthy’s hand. ‘We need to establish some facts. Get ahead of that.’

  ‘Fine,’ McCarthy said.

  ‘Right. I’ve got Russell and Mulcair already. Grab a couple of extra bodies and meet us upstairs in five minutes, all right?’

  McCarthy gave a wry smile. ‘So I’m your number two on this?’

  ‘If you want it,’ Cormac said.

  ‘Until we sort all of this out, and Peter comes back, and then I’m on the back burner again, right?’

  Cormac let out a breath in frustration. ‘Jesus, Dave, what—’

  ‘Forget it,’ McCarthy said. He moved towards the door.

  ‘No, look, wait. What are you saying to me?’ McCarthy gave him a look that said it shouldn’t need explaining. It didn’t. ‘You’re telling me you want more responsibility. That’s not a problem. I’ll be honest with you, Dave, I didn’t think you wanted it.’

  ‘I don’t have a problem with the way you run things. I’m just saying. I have seniority, that’s all. But when Fisher’s here, he’s your number two, whether I’m on the team or not. People notice. It gets awkward.’

  ‘Right,’ Cormac said. He was tempted to ask the other man to clarify if it was more responsibility he wanted, or the appearance of more responsibility. ‘I hear you. You’re number two on this operation all the way to the end, whether or not we get Fisher back. After that, if all’s gone well, I’ll make sure you get a fair crack.’

  ‘Can’t ask for more than that,’ McCarthy said.

  Ten minutes later, Cormac’s team, such as it was, had assembled in the case room. Greetings had been exchanged and they were settling in. Cormac plugged his laptop into the whiteboard, pulled up his slides. It wasn’t so much a presentation as a bullet-point list of the open questions in the case, the items he felt needed immediate attention.

  ‘I want to start with forensics,’ Cormac said. ‘We’re waiting on fibre reports from the boot of Kelly’s car, but unless we get very lucky, I’m not expecting to get anything there. I spoke with Peggah Abbassi last night. She told me that the boot was lined with a tarp when she was in it. There was no tarp in the car when it was examined at the boathouse. I expect that Kelly dumped it after he let Peggah go.’

  ‘Assuming she was in there in the first place,’ McCarthy said.

  ‘What?’ Deirdre Russell turned on McCarthy, face tight with disapproval.

  ‘I’m just saying, we shouldn’t assume anything. The girl doesn’t know whose car she was in.’

  ‘Jesus.’ Deirdre shook her head in obvious disgust. It was out of character for her. If anything, she was usually the peacemaker in the room.

  ‘We’re not assuming anything here,’ Cormac said. ‘We’ll be building this investigation from the ground up, going back over every decision, and pursuing every line of inquiry, wherever it takes us. But this is time sensitive. If there was a tarp, and if Kelly did dump it . . .’ Cormac leaned over and clicked on his laptop mouse. A map of the area around Ross Lake came up on the whiteboard. ‘This is the area we need to search to try to find the tarp. I estimate it’s at least twenty-five square kilometres. If we have to walk every metre of that it’ll take us months, but I think Kelly was under pressure. There’s a good chance he dumped it in a ditch at the side of a road.’

  Cormac took a red marker and drew an ‘X’ at a point on the whiteboard. ‘This is whe
re Peggah Abbassi was found, or at least it’s the house she made her way to after her release.’ He drew a red meandering line from the X to the laneway that led to Ross Lake. ‘Assuming Kelly was the one who took her, he could have let her go here, at Allanspark, and then continued on to the lake.’

  ‘That’s a lot of ground to cover,’ McCarthy said. ‘It’s what . . . ten kilometres?’

  ‘Give or take,’ Cormac said. ‘We—’

  ‘Excuse me.’

  Cormac was interrupted by a voice from the doorway. He turned to see a man he didn’t recognise, wearing the uniform of a garda inspector.

  ‘Can I help you?’ Cormac asked. The inspector was in his forties, with the haircut of an older man.

  ‘It would be better if we spoke outside.’ Cormac followed the man into the corridor. ‘Inspector Reynolds,’ the man said, by way of introduction. ‘GSOC. I’m taking over this investigation as of now.’

  ‘Sorry, you’re doing what?’ Cormac said.

  A group of four uniformed officers trooped up the stairs towards them. Reynolds nodded them towards the open door of the case room.

  ‘In there, boys,’ he said. Cormac opened his mouth to protest and Reynolds cut him off. ‘Your Super should have spoken to you. If he hasn’t, I suggest you speak to him now. But you’re off this case, Sergeant Reilly, as of now.’

  When Cormac reached Brian Murphy’s office, he found Peter Fisher waiting outside, looking very ill at ease.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Cormac asked. It came out like an accusation.

  ‘I . . . I got a phone call. Telling me to come in.’

  ‘Right.’

  Murphy’s aide was there. Cormac ignored her. He knocked once on the office door and entered, leaving Peter in the corridor. Murphy was alone, sitting behind his desk, a file open in front of him. He looked up briefly, gestured to the seat opposite him.

  ‘Reilly,’ he said.

  ‘Sir, my case room has just been taken over by an Inspector Reynolds from the Garda Ombudsman’s office. I’m assuming that you know why.’

  Murphy was cool. ‘Inspector Reynolds is here at my invitation. And if I hadn’t invited him, he would have come anyway.’

  ‘Sir, I—’

  ‘Please,’ Murphy said, holding up one hand. ‘Let’s not pretend we have anything here other than a screw-up of epic proportions, all right?’ He gestured towards the paperwork on his desk. Cormac glanced at it – loose pages spilling from a thin file. It looked like a statement transcript, maybe a scene report.

  ‘A girl disappears for an afternoon and is found hours later unharmed. She claims to have been abducted—’

  ‘We have a witness,’ Cormac interrupted.

  ‘Yes. A sick child who witnessed the alleged abduction from a distance after he’d spent hours playing highly suggestive video games. You can imagine what a lawyer would do with that. Regardless of whether the girl left voluntarily or was in fact taken, it is not in dispute that she was found completely unharmed a few hours later.’

  ‘There’s video footage of a black Volkswagen Passat car at the scene of the abduction. Our witness saw a man matching Kelly’s description assault Peggah Abbassi and bundle her into the boot of that car. The fact that he let her go does not—’

  ‘No,’ Murphy said.

  ‘Sir . . .’

  ‘No,’ Murphy said again. ‘Peter Fisher claims that there was video footage which showed a black Volkswagen Passat with a partial registration number that matched Jason Kelly’s. And every action he took after that flowed from that piece of evidence, which, and let me emphasise this for you, Sergeant, no one else has seen. As you know, the email he sent with the video attached was corrupted.’

  ‘The tablet?’ Cormac said.

  ‘Has been lost,’ Murphy said crisply. ‘It was sent to Dublin for review by the technical team and we cannot locate it. Until such time as the tablet is found, we have only Peter Fisher’s word that the partial registration number he was able to make out is as he reported it. No one else has seen it.’

  ‘I saw it,’ Cormac said. ‘I watched the video at the scene before the tablet went into the station. I saw the reg number. And I don’t understand how the video could have been lost completely. Even if it was lost in transit, surely the technical team here would have copied it before it was sent for transport.’

  ‘You saw it?’ Murphy said flatly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Convenient.’

  Cormac paused. ‘It’s just a matter of fact, sir.’

  ‘What is also a matter of fact is that a Section 91 investigation has been opened into the shooting dead of Jason Kelly by Detective Garda Peter Fisher. What remains to be determined is whether or not that investigation will in turn result in a Section 98 investigation.’

  Cormac took a breath, a sudden involuntary inhalation. He felt as if the solid ground beneath his feet had been removed, as if he was standing, swaying, at the top of a cliff and the wind was at his back.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

  Murphy, irritated, made a clicking sound with his tongue. ‘You should understand. None of this should be a surprise to you.’

  ‘It was a good shooting,’ Cormac said. ‘Fisher was in fear for his life. The driver of the car, Kelly, he drove at Fisher at speed. If Fisher hadn’t shot him, he’d be dead now himself, or seriously injured.’

  ‘We only have Peter Fisher’s word for that. There were no other witnesses, and the forensic evidence is inconclusive. What we do know is that on the thinnest of evidence – a partial plate number that we can’t even substantiate – Peter Fisher came up with a suspect, virtually on his own, and he pursued that suspect, without the consent or approval of his superior officer, and shot that man dead.’

  ‘Fisher was under immense pressure. We were ridiculously understaffed for the operation, which he couldn’t help but be aware of. He tried to contact me, on more than one occasion. He made the best decisions he could in the circumstances,’ Cormac said. ‘A criminal investigation into his actions, even if it doesn’t result in a prosecution, will destroy his career. He doesn’t deserve that. And it’s premature. If we prove that Kelly did take the girl—’

  ‘And that is precisely why this is no longer your investigation,’ Murphy said. He leaned across the table. ‘If it was left with you, you would bend the investigation to back Fisher up, wouldn’t you, Reilly? Suddenly everything would point to Jason Kelly, and Peter Fisher – and you yourself, of course – would come out smelling of roses.’

  ‘That is . . . I would never do that,’ Cormac said. ‘My investigation would be entirely above board. My record . . .’ Cormac let his voice trail off. He’d wanted to point to a spotless disciplinary record, argue that there’d never been the smallest suggestion that he ran things any way other than straight down the line. But he couldn’t claim that, could he? Not anymore.

  ‘I can’t and won’t cover for you, Reilly,’ Murphy said. ‘You left Fisher, an inexperienced officer, unsupervised. You could not be contacted for a prolonged period of time at a key point in the investigation. Peter Fisher has serious questions to answer, and so do you.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Cormac asked.

  ‘As of now, you’re suspended pending the outcome of this investigation,’ Murphy said.

  ‘And Fisher?’ Cormac said.

  Murphy paused. ‘It depends on the outcome of the Section 91 investigation. But the suggestion has been made that Peter Fisher was . . . led astray. With another superior officer, the outcome might have been very different.’

  For the three years Cormac had known Murphy, he’d known him to be a politician, a mediocre officer and an occasional clown. Lately he’d been something worse. But Murphy had never been one to give much away. His inner thoughts had always been well concealed behind a distant, professional mask. Now, as Cormac looked at him across the desk, he saw an unmissable fuck you in Murphy’s eyes.

  ‘Fisher will be offered a chance,’ Murph
y said. ‘It’s up to him whether he wants to take it.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Peter went home after the meeting with Murphy. He stopped at the off-licence on the way, picked up a six-pack of beer and a bottle of whiskey. The flat was empty and cold. He poured a beer into a pint glass, sat on his bed and stared into space while the beer in his hand went flat. Time went by. Time during which he thought about everything he had done and everything he hadn’t. Eventually, Aoife came home. He heard her footsteps outside the flat, her keys in the door. He thought about getting up and shutting his door but couldn’t seem to muster the energy, and then it was too late. She was in his doorway, leaning against the doorjamb, arms crossed.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  He told her everything.

  ‘Explain it to me again,’ she said.

  ‘God, Aoife, what else is there to say? I killed a man. If they think that I crossed the line, that the shooting was criminal, I can be prosecuted the same way as anyone else. Go to prison.’

  Peter was mildly surprised that he could say the words with no shake to his voice. When Murphy had delivered the news, that he was staring down the barrel of a possible criminal prosecution, it had been all he could do not to cry like a baby.

  ‘For fuck’s sake. That’s ridiculous. You were trying to save a little girl.’

  ‘Except that she was miles away at the time. And there’s no proof he took her in the first place.’

  ‘Well, he was going to kill you. He was driving his car straight at you.’

  ‘No proof of that either, it seems,’ Peter said. ‘The tyre markings are inconclusive.’

  ‘You were there. Isn’t your word enough?’

  Peter rolled his eyes. ‘Come on, Aoife. If it was anyone but me, you wouldn’t accept that for an instant. You’d be the first one kicking up, calling for an investigation.’

  That quietened her. She stood there and looked at him until it got uncomfortable. He got up, headed into the kitchen where he emptied the stale beer down the sink. She followed.

  ‘We should get you a lawyer,’ she said. ‘Someone good. Someone really vicious.’