Unti Lucy Black Novel #3

by Brian McGilloway

  “What? You’re kidding? How is she?” she said, then as she realized the purpose of Lucy’s visit, her expression darkened. “You think it was me?”

  “Whoever broke in had a key,” Lucy said. “I have to check with all the key holders.”

  “Who are all the key holders?”

  “You,” Lucy admitted. “I’d like to take your fingerprints.”

  “You bitch,” the girl spat suddenly. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Helen—­” Robbie began, raising his hand in placation.

  “No,” the girl retorted. “She thinks I did it. Don’t you?”

  Lucy held her stare. “I hope you didn’t. And Doreen doesn’t believe that you did either. But we’ll be taking prints from her room where the jewelry was taken. I know you were doing cleaning and that for Doreen, which means that your prints are going to be all over the place. I need to take a set for elimination purposes so that when your prints are pulled I can explain why they’re there. It’s not to try to prove that you did it. You’d be helping me catch whoever stole Doreen’s stuff.”

  The girl seemed somewhat mollified by the explanation, coming into the room and dropping onto the sofa. “How is she, anyway?”

  “She’s shaken,” Lucy said. “The sooner I can eliminate you, the sooner you can visit her. But I think you’ll need to wait until we can prove you didn’t take the jewelry that’s missing.”

  “Why would I steal from her? She’s my friend.”

  Lucy moved across and sat on the sofa next to her. The girl shifted her weight away from Lucy. “With what happened in the shop? You need to ask? I’m not accusing you, I’m just doing my job.”

  “Well it’s a shit one,” the girl retorted. “And you’re very good at it.” She glared across at her. “So what happens now? Are you going to ink me up?”

  “Robbie, can you get me a glass or something?”

  Robbie limped across to the kitchen, took a glass down from the unit and, lifting a drying cloth, wiped it thoroughly. He came across and handed it to her, holding its upper lip with the cloth.

  Lucy took it, gripping the lower end in an evidence bag she’d taken from her pocket. “Can you grip that tightly,” she said, offering the glass to the girl, who did so. Lucy then pulled the bag up over the glass, careful not to touch it herself.

  “This should be fine,” she said. “I didn’t want to have to start bringing you into the station.”

  “That was big of you,” Helen said.

  Lucy put the glass into her bag. “If we do get a hit, I’ll have to. The only reason I’m doing it this way is to keep you out of the station and off any records,” Lucy added. “Doreen doesn’t think for a minute that you did it. Nor do I. But can you think of anyone else who might have had a key? Meals on Wheels? Any relatives or home help?”

  Helen shook her head. “She doesn’t have relatives. The only person who helps her out is me.”

  Lucy nodded. “Anybody new about the house in the weeks before she went away?”

  “She had a bunch of guys doing the driveway,” Helen said.

  “When?”

  “The week before she went. She said the frost from a few winters back had destroyed her driveway. Some crowd came in and fixed it for her.”

  “Do you remember who they were?”

  Helen shook her head. “I’m sure Doreen will, though,” she said.

  Chapter Twenty-­Six

  LUCY WENT HOME to get a change of clothes, picked up a Chinese meal for them both, then drove to Robbie’s place to meet him once his shift had finished.

  She let herself in and unpacked the food in the kitchen. She could hear the shower running in the bathroom. He’d had to get a wide shower installed downstairs after his injury to save him having to go up and down stairs unnecessarily. After putting the food in the oven to keep it warm, she moved through into the bathroom herself, stripped off her clothes, and climbed into the shower with him.

  The skin on his leg had not healed well, the scarring puckered along its length from his ankle to his thigh. She washed the wound gently, massaging the muscles, her hands moving higher as she stood again and kissed him.

  THEY ATE IN bed, the tinfoil cartons of rice and noodles resting in the space between them.

  “I’ve not seen you in a week, you know,” Robbie said, angling his head to eat a fork-­load of chow mein.

  “Things have been busy,” Lucy said. “We pulled someone from the river the other night.”

  “I heard about that.”

  “He was already dead and embalmed. Someone else was cremated in his coffin.”

  Robbie nodded, though his interest had already waned. Lucy realized that she had shifted straight into her default conversation with him: work.

  “I hardly see you at all, what with work and that. For you and me.”

  “We’ve both been busy,” Lucy agreed. “Things’ll get better.”

  Robbie nodded. “Well, I thought one way that might happen, that we’d see one another more often, would be if . . . if you moved in here. Permanently.”

  Lucy felt her stomach twist. “You mean live together?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought we were doing okay as things are,” she said, deliberately picking through her sweet and sour chicken, not looking at Robbie.

  “We see one another once a fortnight sometimes,” Robbie said. “I’d like to see you more often than that.”

  “I’ve my own house to think about, too,” Lucy said. “What would I do with that?”

  “You’ve done nothing with it anyway,” Robbie said. “It’s been the exact same since your dad . . . since that all happened. It’s your father’s house, not yours.”

  The comment riled Lucy, not least because she knew it to be true. She’d not redecorated her father’s house because she still saw it as his house. Part of her, she reasoned, still believed that at some stage he’d return to it and would expect it to be as he’d left it, even as her rational side knew that this would never happen.

  “It’s a big change, Robbie,” Lucy said. “Let me think on it.”

  “It doesn’t need to be a big thing. You already have a key. Just see it as moving your stuff in here. You must get lonely sitting in that house every night on your own.”

  “I’m not lonely,” Lucy said.

  “Well I am,” Robbie countered, putting his dishes to one side. “If we’re together, we should be together. And if you don’t want that, then you need to say so.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying,” Lucy snapped. “I don’t want to be rushed into something. I said I’ll think about it and I will. Okay?”

  “Fine,” Robbie muttered, throwing back the covers and climbing out of bed. Lucy watched him limping toward the bathroom, the food suddenly tasteless in her mouth.

  THE NEXT MORNING, she’d showered again and, once dressed, sat at the breakfast bar in his small kitchen with him while they had coffee and toast. Despite being barely 8 a.m., the heat was oppressive, even with the window open, the air heavy. Lucy pulled at her polo shirt, tugging it away from her skin, which had remained damp from the shower. The discussion about her moving in had set the tone for the night and, though they had slept together, the distance between them was palpable.

  “What kind of a day have you today?” she asked.

  Robbie sipped at his coffee, his toast lying uneaten on the plate in front of him. “Okay. Helen will be in a mood after last night. I’ll have that to deal with.”

  Lucy nodded. “How’s your leg since?”

  “Sore,” he replied tersely.

  Lucy ate her toast, watching him. “I know you’re angry at me—­” she began.

  “Not everything’s about you,” he snapped, then raised a hand, almost as if to stop the words being heard. “My fucking leg is killing me. That’s what’s wrong.�
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  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “So you can blame yourself? Make it all your fault?”

  “Robbie, it was my fault. It was my car—­”

  “You see? I can’t even be sore without it becoming about you, Lucy.”

  Lucy put down her cup, tapped his hand lightly with her own. “I’m sorry you’re sore,” she said. “Do you need your painkillers?”

  “For all the good they do,” Robbie said, pushing back his stool and moving across to the cupboard to get them.

  He walked her to the door as she was leaving. Outside, the sky seemed to carry the sheen and hardness of ceramic, a few wisps of cloud overhead. To the east, though, the upper edge of a thick thunderhead bruised the sky just above the horizon. The air was moist, as if intensifying the heat in the expectation of the impending rain.

  “I promise I’ll think about what you asked,” Lucy said, but Robbie was staring above her, at the clouds gathering.

  “A change is coming,” he remarked.

  Friday, 20 July

  Chapter Twenty-­Seven

  SHE WAS ONE of the first in the incident room for Burns’s 9 a.m. briefing. The station was quiet, most of the Tactical Support Units having been diverted to Belfast where the rioting had continued through the night. Since Belfast City Council had voted not to fly the Union Jack above the City Hall every day of the year, in recognition of the conflicting national loyalties of the city’s inhabitants, it had been building to this. The Peace Process may have proved a salve to the wounds of the Troubles, but it had not proved as purgative as ­people had perhaps supposed, and many of the old animosities remained, just below the surface. In the wrong hands, or with the wrong words, any one of the issues was enough to bring ­people out to the streets, not to protest about the specific issue necessarily, but more to vent their frustrations at enforced compromises.

  As the team began to arrive, Mickey made coffee, complaining loudly enough for her to hear that Lucy had not done so despite being first in. Tony Clarke arrived not long after to bring the team up to speed on the findings in the old bank building.

  He came across to where Lucy stood. “I called with that old doll,” he said. “Took prints. I’ve not checked them yet because I had to do this for Burns. It looks like three distinct sets, though. Two sets all over the jewelry box, one very clean.”

  Lucy took the glass from her bag, still wrapped in plastic. “Can you check against these?”

  “If they’re the old doll’s, I don’t need them. I took an elimination set already,” Clarke said, sounding a little offended at the implication in Lucy’s actions. “I’m not stupid.”

  “They belong to a girl who does work for Doreen,” Lucy explained. “She was a key holder. I need to know if those are her prints on the box.” Their presence wouldn’t prove that she had stolen the jewelry, but she would have to explain why she’d been handling it if she was simply employed to do some light cleaning. More importantly, Lucy was hoping that the prints wouldn’t be hers at all and she could set both her own and Doreen’s minds at rest that Helen Dexter had not duped them a second time.

  “Right, folks,” Burns said, calling the room to attention. “Shall we begin? Tony?”

  The door to his left opened, causing everyone to turn to see who was arriving late. Lucy’s mother, Assistant Chief Constable Wilson stepped into the room, nodding to the assembly in general, but holding Lucy’s stare.

  “The blood we’ve taken from the scene is the same type as Krawiec’s,” Clarke explained, once the ACC had taken her seat. “We have taken DNA for comparison, but it will take some time. Based on our analysis though, the splatters are consistent with the injuries on the victim’s body. I would say with a fair degree of confidence that it is the locus for the man’s killing.”

  “We also have the car spotted by the barman, is that right?” Burns asked.

  Fleming nodded. “Terry Haynes’s car.”

  Burns pointed to an image of Terry Haynes, which had been pinned up on the board to his rear. Haynes was a heavyset man, with a head the size and shape of a cannonball. One of his ears carried injuries Lucy had only previously associated with rugby players.

  “Tara, you were to look into Haynes for me. Anything useful?”

  “He served time in the South for assault years back. He and another man beat up a bouncer who had thrown them out of a bar. They’d sat waiting for him to finish work and jumped him on the way home.”

  “They beat up a bouncer? That’s a turn-­up for the books,” Mickey asked, raising a ripple of laughter.

  “They attacked him with a bottle and a broken brick,” Tara said, trying hard to hide her annoyance at Mickey’s comment. “He ended up in hospital for a fortnight.”

  The laughter died down. “Haynes served eight months,” she said. “When he got out he was involved in a RTA a year after.”

  “Anyone injured?”

  “Just himself. He was drunk on a motorbike. He tried to go straight through a roundabout. The central reservation prevented him.”

  “Did he do time for it?”

  “The guards figured his injuries were enough of a lesson for him. He agreed to dry out.”

  “Which he did,” Fleming said, suddenly. Throughout the previous discussion he had been tapping his foot impatiently. “Terry Haynes has been working with the alcoholics in the city for years now. He turned himself around completely. He sponsors in the AA; he works in the late-­night soup kitchens. I’ve seen him going around in the winter handing out coats to the street drinkers that he bought for them in the charity shops in the city. He’s a good man.”

  Burns raised his hand. “I’m sure he is, Tom. And no one would know the work he’d done there better than you.” Lucy sensed Fleming tense almost imperceptibly beside her. She wondered herself whether Burns was referring to Fleming’s own work with the city’s alcoholics, or his spell as one himself. Her experience of the man suggested the former, but his comments had obviously annoyed Fleming.

  “Can someone open a window, please?” ACC Wilson said suddenly. “Let some air in.”

  The comment was enough to relieve the increasing fractiousness, as if the burgeoning heat had been contributing to the tensions in the room.

  “But, all his good work notwithstanding, we do know that he has a record for assault and that his car was spotted at the bins where we believe the deceased was dumped. And Haynes himself has been in the wind for a few days, is that right?”

  Fleming nodded. “I called around his friends last night, but no one has seen him recently. I don’t have a number for his neighbor; I’m going to call out there today.”

  “Physical description, Tara?”

  “Haynes is five foot eleven, and weighs eighteen stone, three pounds,” Tara said.

  “That would work,” Tony Clarke said. “The injuries on the vic suggested they were made by someone big, with a bit of weight behind him. Some of the splatter hit the wall five feet from where the body would have been lying, suggesting a fairly powerful follow through on the swing, considering the size of the weapon used on him.”

  “A ball-­peen hammer?” Lucy asked.

  Clarke nodded. “The other thing is, based on the splatter direction, I’d guess that there were probably two assailants. If one of our killers is Terry Haynes, he had help.”

  Burns nodded. “Terry Haynes is our priority. Locate the car, find out where he was last seen, any known associates. Tom and Lucy, I’d appreciate your help with that; we’re drifting into your territory here. Any further news on the body in the coffin, by the way?”

  “Ciaran Duffy has done a runner,” Lucy said. “The son of the undertaker. He lied about the times of his journey to Belfast. We believe he stopped somewhere and swapped the body.”

  “Any motive?”

  “Not yet. We’re watching his bank account and credit
cards.”

  “Any luck with an ID on the cremated remains?”

  “None,” Lucy conceded. “We believe the plate in his skull came from Beaumont Hospital. I’ve asked for them to send me through a list of names of those who received implants from the period they got the batch, but I’ve not been back in the office yet to see if it came through.”

  “Very good,” Burns said. “Keep at it. That’s all, folks. Keep me updated.”

  As they gathered themselves to leave, Wilson approached Lucy and Fleming. “Tom, are you okay with where this is going?” she asked, without preamble.

  “Fine, ma’am,” Fleming said.

  “I understand your feelings may be quite mixed. Would you rather not work the case?”

  “Quite the opposite, ma’am,” Fleming said. “I think it’s important that at least one person investigating Haynes should be working from a presumption of his innocence rather than guilt.”

  “Very good,” Wilson said. “Lucy, a quick word?”

  Chapter Twenty-­Eight

  SHE WAITED UNTIL the rest of the officers had filed out of the room, Tara staring back interrogatively at Lucy as she let the door swing closed behind her.

  “I visited your father last night,” her mother said.

  Wilson had left Lucy with her father when she was still a child. At the time, Lucy had believed that it was simply to allow her to focus on her burgeoning career in the police. More recently, she had discovered some things about her father that, while explaining her mother’s decision to leave, did not, to Lucy’s mind, vindicate her leaving Lucy with the man. Consequently, when Lucy had joined the PSNI, she had done so under her father’s name of Black rather than her mother’s name, Wilson, and none of her peers had made the connection between the two women. At one stage Lucy had seen her mother’s assigning her to the Public Protection Unit as an attempt to stymie Lucy’s career. Lately, she had come to appreciate having Tom Fleming, the only officer who knew of their maternal relationship, as her mentor and boss.