Unti Lucy Black Novel #3

by Brian McGilloway

  “But,” Lucy cautioned, “we found three sets of fingerprints on your stuff. One will be yours presumably. If the thief wore gloves, there are two other sets to account for. Even if he or she didn’t, that still leaves one set which might be Helen’s.”

  Doreen shook her head. “I told you before, I don’t believe she stole from me,” she said, her mouth tightening.

  “We’ll know soon enough,” Lucy said. “Helen did mention you had workmen here before you went on holidays. Is that right?”

  The woman raised her eyes to heaven. “Them!” she snorted.

  “Who were they?”

  “The man come round a month or so back. Just landed at the door. He said he’d been looking at the drive and pathway and it needed work.”

  “Did it?”

  “The frost a few years back had cracked the concrete at the back, but it would have done. He asked to come in and talk through my options.”

  “Did you let him?”

  “Of course not,” Doreen said. “I told him I was on my own and didn’t want strangers in the house.”

  “And?”

  “He said he understood. He said they could resurface the drive and the back path for me. He wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  “How?”

  “He said he knew by looking that the crack in the path would leak water into the foundations of the house. When it rained, it would run down and cause damp. He said it would cost tens of thousands to fix then. It would be too late.”

  Fleming glanced at Lucy. “How much did he charge you for doing the work?”

  “Two thousand pounds.”

  “Did he give you his name?”

  Doreen shook her head. “I can’t, I don’t remember what it was.”

  “But you said yes?” Lucy asked.

  “I wanted him to go away. He wouldn’t take no for an answer,” she explained again.

  “So what happened?”

  Doreen reddened. “They were meant to start on a Monday and they didn’t arrive until Wednesday afternoon. A squad of them pulled up in a blue van. I told him it needed to be finished for Friday because I was going away on holidays and wanted it done. They didn’t manage to get the path at the back fixed. I’m still waiting.”

  “You’ve not paid him, though?” Fleming asked.

  The pause before Doreen spoke was enough response. “He said he had to buy materials and pay the men,” she explained, as if trying to convince Fleming.

  “That’s okay, Doreen,” Lucy said, aware that Doreen felt foolish at admitting that she’d paid for the job before it was done. “That’s understandable. Did you pay the whole amount?”

  The woman nodded.

  “Cash?” Fleming asked.

  She nodded again. Fleming glanced at Lucy and shook his head. They would have no chance of recovering her money.

  “Do you remember what the company was called?” Lucy asked. “Maybe their name was on the van,” she added, thinking of Duffy the undertaker’s van.

  Doreen stared at her, her lips moving silently as if she was willing herself to speak the name but couldn’t. “I . . . I can’t . . . I’m not sure. It was blue, I think.”

  Lucy took the woman’s hand as tears welled in her eyes. “I’ve been made a fool of, haven’t I?” Doreen said.

  “Not at all,” Lucy replied softly, putting her arm around her and giving her a gentle squeeze. “Not at all.”

  “He scared me,” Doreen managed. “The man scared me. I wanted him to go. I want to see Helen.”

  “Give me a minute,” Lucy said. She stood and, taking out her phone, moved to the front of the house, as if to get a better signal. In the background she heard Fleming ask Doreen to describe the man who had called at the house.

  “Clarke.”

  “Tony? Lucy Black here. Any luck with the fingerprints from Doreen Jeffries?”

  “Jesus, Lucy,” Clarke said. “Give me a chance. I’ve not even got to the toilet yet today.”

  “I’d make that a priority,” Lucy joked. “We don’t want any accidents now, do we?”

  She heard Clarke laugh, then the rustle as he shifted the receiver from one ear to the other.

  “Let me check where it’s at,” he said. She heard the tap of his keyboard. “Right. Three sets. One belonged to the old doll herself. No surprises there.”

  “What about the glass I gave you? The prints on that?”

  “I’m checking,” he replied with exasperation.

  “They belong to a friend of the old doll,” Lucy said. “And she really wants to see her. I’d like to be able to eliminate her as a suspect.”

  “Consider her eliminated,” Clarke said. “No match.”

  “You’re sure?” Lucy asked.

  “Certain. I’m running the other two through the system now, but neither belong to her.”

  “Great,” Lucy said, preparing to end the call. “I owe you one for doing this so quickly for me.”

  “Jesus, that was quick,” Clarke said.

  “What?”

  “The results . . . Jesus,” Clarke repeated. “You’ll not believe this.”

  “Try me,” Lucy said.

  “We’ve a match on one of the sets of prints already. The bin man.”

  “Kamil Krawiec?”

  “That’s the one. Hit on the other set now, too,” Clarke added. “Aaron Moore. DOB 24.9.84.”

  “You’re sure about the first set?” Lucy asked, phone clasped between her shoulder and jaw as she jotted down the details Clarke had given her.

  “The computer is,” Clarke said. “That’s good enough for me.

  “And me,” Lucy agreed.

  She moved back into the living room. “Good news, Doreen. Helen’s in the clear. You can give her a call, if you like.”

  The woman’s restraint failed her and the tears ran brightly onto her cheeks.

  “Doreen was just giving me a description of the man who sold her the tarmac job. Big man, red-­haired, heavyset. Ear pierced on one side,” he said.

  “We have hits on the fingerprints,” Lucy said. “Kamil is one of them.”

  Fleming stared at her. “Krawiec?”

  Lucy nodded.

  “Give me a minute,” Fleming said, standing and going out to the car.

  “Doreen?” Lucy asked. “Is there anyone else with a spare key? Or did you give the workmen a key?”

  Doreen shook her head.

  “Have you a spare key anywhere in the house?”

  “There’s one in the back, under the garden gnome. I left it there for Helen in case she forgot her own.”

  “Is it still there?”

  “I don’t know,” Doreen said, rising. “I’ll check.”

  Lucy followed her through the kitchen and out the rear door. A small gnome pushing a wheelbarrow stood at the center of the main flowerbed.

  Lucy crossed and lifted it. The ground beneath held no key. At that moment, Fleming reappeared with the picture he had taken from Haynes’s house as well as an image of Kamil Krawiec.

  “Doreen,” he said, offering her both the pictures still in the frame. “Do you recognize either of these men?”

  Lucy could guess where he was going. Kamil had been living with Terry Haynes. Haynes was a big man himself. Both had been missing for some time. It seemed a reasonable question.

  Doreen took the pictures and, after wiping her eyes with the edge of her pinafore, studied the image of Krawiec first.

  “I know him,” she said. “He was one of the men working on the driveway. I remember him. He asked to use the toilet. He had an accent.”

  “He was Polish,” Fleming said. “What about the other picture? Do you recognize him?”

  “Which one?” she asked.

  Fleming pointed to Haynes.

  D
oreen angled her head, as if in thought. “No,” she said finally. “I don’t think so.”

  Fleming straightened, releasing the breath he’d held since she’d taken the picture from him. “He wasn’t the man who convinced you to get work done? The heavy man who called at your door?”

  She shook her head.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I can’t . . . I don’t think it’s him,” the woman offered, handing him back the picture.

  Chapter Thirty-­Two

  THEY RETURNED TO the Strand Road at the request of Burns.

  “And you were investigating a burglary because . . . ?” Burns asked, sitting behind his desk while Lucy and Tom Fleming stood before him, having offered neither a seat. He leant forward slightly, his hands restless on the wooden surface beneath them.

  Fleming moved across to where two chairs sat against the far wall and dragged one over for Lucy, then returned and brought a second for himself.

  “The woman whose house was targeted is a friend. She has given some light housework to a teenager from the care unit in the Waterside. They’d become quite close. She was afraid the child had stolen from her, but didn’t know whether she wanted to press charges. She asked me to look into it.”

  “That’s not PPU business,” Burns said irritably.

  “Anything involving children in care is very much our business,” Tom Fleming said. “Always has been.”

  “What about the body in the coffin? Has that reached a dead end?”

  Fleming chuckled lightly at Burns’s irritability, which just served to fuel it further. “We’re still working it.”

  “You might have been working it quicker if you’d not been chasing up burglaries.”

  “And following up phone tip-­offs in a murder investigation,” Fleming added. “As it’s transpired, all of them have crossed over anyway, so it’s a result all round.”

  Burns stared at Fleming.

  “Sir,” he added, finally.

  Satisfied with even such a small victory, Burns sat back. “So, what do we know?”

  “We know Kamil Krawiec was part of a gang that laid a drive, badly, a fortnight ago for Doreen Jeffries, got paid, and never came back to finish it. Based on fingerprints found at the scene we think that, at some stage during the past ten days, Kamil and another man called Aaron Moore accessed Doreen Jeffries’s house, probably knowing she was on holiday, and lifted all her jewelry. We suspect they used a spare key that the woman hid in the garden to get into the house; the key is now missing. We know that, toward the end of last week, Kamil was staying with Terry Haynes. We know that Kamil was also part of a gang, possibly the same one that laid the driveway for Doreen Jeffries, that was stripping copper from the empty bank building in Waterloo Place. He was murdered there, with hammers used by at least two assailants and his body dumped in the bin off Sackville Street. Terry Haynes’s car was seen leaving the vicinity of that bin in the middle of the night. Haynes has not been seen since the end of last week.”

  “So what’re the priorities?” Burns asked.

  “Finding Terry Haynes and Aaron Moore, I’d imagine,” Fleming said.

  “Doreen’s stuff was worth thousands, but Kamil had five quid in his wallet and was staying with someone with a history of providing free accommodation for recovering alcoholics.”

  “Was Terry Haynes running the driveway gang?”

  “Apparently not,” Fleming said. “We showed Doreen Jeffries a picture of him. She said she didn’t think it was him.”

  “Didn’t think? Is she an older woman?” Burns asked, skeptically.

  “She not only recognized Kamil, but she remembered he had an accent,” Lucy said. “She’s not doting.”

  “And you know Terry Haynes, is that right?” Burns asked, nodding to Fleming.

  “I think that’s common knowledge,” Fleming said.

  “So he could be running the driveway gang, but you’d prefer not to think that he is.”

  Fleming stared at him a moment. “I would prefer not to believe that he’s involved, yes,” he agreed. “I also believe that he’s not, having shown his picture to the one witness we have who has seen the person running the gang.”

  “A witness who happens to be a pensioner, looking at a picture of someone she saw a few weeks ago,” Burns said. “If you didn’t know Terry Haynes, would you be convinced he’s not involved in this in some way?”

  Fleming didn’t speak for a moment. Finally, he coughed lightly. “Probably not,” he said.

  “We’ll take it from here, then,” Burns said with a nod. “What’s the situation with the coffin body?”

  Lucy groaned. Again she’d not called at the unit to collect the list from Beaumont. It was such a long shot her heart sank at the prospect of having to work through the list. “Ciaran Duffy did a runner yesterday, but has lodged a request to empty his bank account at three o’clock this afternoon. A sum of money was deposited earlier in the week, just after the switch of bodies.”

  “You’ll be keeping an eye on the bank, Tom,” Burns said to Fleming. “Lucy, the ACC has asked that you accompany me to a meeting with the council this afternoon.”

  “Me?” Lucy asked, glancing at Fleming who was clearly smarting from being told to do a bank stake out.

  “Don’t ask me,” Burns said. “We all have to follow orders, whether we like them or not,” he added, looking at Fleming. “We’re meeting some guy Boyd who was responsible for boarding up the buildings around the town, including the bank where Krawiec was killed. ACC Wilson suspects that other buildings may have been targeted for piping and that, and wants us to encourage the council to start inspections. See if it throws up any other leads. We’ve not the men—­or women—­for it at the moment.”

  Lucy nodded. “I understand,” she said. She also knew that she wasn’t there to talk about boarded-­up buildings. Her mother was giving her the opportunity to meet John Boyd officially.

  “I can’t drive,” Fleming muttered angrily. “I can’t stake out the bank if I can’t drive.”

  “Ask someone in traffic branch to take you down,” Burns said. “In fact, I’d like a word, Tom,” Burns said. “I’ll see you here at two, Lucy,” he added, dismissing her from the room.

  Lucy waited outside the office for Fleming. While she couldn’t hear the exact content of the discussion, there was no doubting the acrimonious tone, not least when she discerned Tom Fleming’s raised voice tell Burns, “I don’t really care. Suspend me again.”

  When he appeared a moment later, he was flustered, his hands balled at his sides, his shoulders hunched.

  “Everything okay?” Lucy asked.

  “Chief Superintendent Burns has concerns about my respect for his authority.”

  “Really?” Lucy asked, struggling not to smile. “What gave it away?”

  Fleming glared at her momentarily, then broke into a smile himself. “Jumped-­up little shit. I have no respect for the rules of line management, apparently.”

  “Line management? What an arse!”

  “That’s what I thought. ‘What are our priorities?’ He’s the man in charge, what’s he asking us for?”

  “Maybe he was being democratic,” Lucy said.

  “Democratic? We’re the police ser­vice for God’s sake. Democracy never comes into it.”

  He walked down the hallway, out of the incident room, then stopped and waited for Lucy to catch up. The last time things had got on top of Fleming, he’d started drinking again. Lucy was acutely aware that, considering how important Terry Haynes had been in helping him back on his feet then, Haynes’s absence now meant a second slip might not be so swiftly reversed.

  “You’re not thinking of . . . leaving or anything like that are you?” she asked, as delicately as she could.

  “Leaving?” Fleming said incredulously. “I’m only starting to enjoy my wo
rk for the first time in years. Why would I leave?”

  Chapter Thirty-­Three

  THEY RETURNED TO Maydown, having stopped on the way to get milk for tea. While Fleming put on the kettle, Lucy went up to her office to check for the fax from Beaumont. She flicked through the various documents lying in the tray—­mostly Missing Persons Alerts sent out from other forces—­but there was nothing from the hospital. She phoned through and explained the reason for her call. The receptionist with whom she spoke asked her to hold and, a moment later, she was transferred through to a consultant who introduced himself as Niall Horan.

  “You’re looking for a list of our patients who received cranial implants,” he said. “There are all kinds of issues with that.”

  “I understand,” Lucy said. “We’re investigating what we believe to be a murder. A body was cremated in a coffin intended for someone else. There’s no record of who was in the coffin, but we recovered a metal skull plate and leg plate after the cremation process.”

  “I see,” Horan said. “How do you know the victim was treated through us?”

  “The skull plate had a batch number. I contacted USS and they said it went to you in October 2007.”

  Horan laughed briefly. “That was lucky. I remember that batch.”

  “You remember a specific batch of skull plates? Seriously?” Lucy asked, incredulously.

  “Well, not the plates, but the order they were part of. USS had just set up in Dublin. They treated a lot of the neurosurgeons to a conference in San Francisco, with our partners invited along. They took orders for implants from us at the end of a particularly wet dinner.”

  “I see,” Lucy said, neutrally.

  “That was the only batch I ordered from them. We took a thousand, I believe.”

  “So I understand,” Lucy said. “Which is why I wanted to get the list to start working through it.”

  “Look, there are issues with sharing patients’ confidential information, especially with a foreign police force,” Horan said. “What I will do is get one of the girls here to run a computer check and filter the names against leg injuries, too. We’ll see how many that leaves us with first. I’ll get back to you later.”