Unti Lucy Black Novel #3

by Brian McGilloway

  Chapter Fifty-­Five

  MOORE EDGED BACKWARDS, pressing himself against the wall, as if in so doing he might somehow be able to pass through it. His eyes were wide, his expression one of terror. Instinctively, he wielded the knife, swinging it in front of him to ward off Lucy’s moving any closer.

  “Mr. Moore? My name’s Lucy Black. I’m here to help you. Can you put down the knife?”

  Moore stared at her, then flicked his gaze over her shoulder, toward the blackness of the tunnel behind her.

  “It’s just us, Mr. Moore. Don’t be afraid,” Lucy said, offering her two hands, palms up, to show she was unarmed. “Your brother, Seamus, is up above. We’ve all been very worried about you. Will you give me the knife and come up with me?”

  At the mention of the weapon, it seemed to come to life again, his grip on it strengthening, its erratic movement back and forth increasing.

  “Please, Mr. Moore. Come up to your brother.”

  In the hush of the tunnel, she was sure she heard him snort derisively, but he did not speak. He moved forward a little, away from the wall, and shifted the knife to his other hand momentarily, before returning it to the right.

  “I saw your pictures on the wall out there,” Lucy said. “Is it a shrine?”

  Moore glanced again behind her.

  Lucy stood her ground, her hand still outstretched, though well clear of the arc of Moore’s knife. “There’s only us. You don’t have to be afraid. Is it a shrine?” she asked again, bringing his attention back to her. To her rear, she thought she could hear movement, though with the echo of the tunnels, it was impossible to say from how far back.

  Moore nodded. “Yes,” he managed, dryly, his lips smacking as he spoke.

  “You must have loved looking after those horses,” Lucy said, moving a step now toward him, slowly.

  Moore nodded, distracted both by her movement and by the sounds carrying along the tunnel from behind Lucy, growing clearer now. As she moved, Lucy became aware that her faint shadow was growing on the wall behind Moore. Someone was coming behind her with another torch.

  The shadow darkened as both she and Moore simultaneously heard Constable Frazer shout.

  “Put the knife down or I’ll shoot!”

  Lucy turned to see him standing a few yards behind her now, just past the curve of the tunnel, his gun raised, his torch clamped against it, both trained on Moore.

  “Don’t shoot!” Lucy snapped, twisting again to Moore.

  The man stood, one arm shielding his eyes, his knife still outstretched, its swinging increasing again, wilding moving back and forth, blindingly protecting himself.

  “Mr. Moore? Please put down the knife. No one wants to hurt you. We’re here to help.”

  “You said you were alone,” Moore said suddenly.

  “If my colleague goes again, will you put down the knife?” Lucy asked, ignoring the comments of refusal from Frazer behind her.

  “We’ll go out together,” Lucy said. “Put down the knife. My colleague will back down and you and I can go up together. You can tell me the names of the horses. Is Sefton one?”

  The name was the only one Lucy could recall having heard in connection with the attack.

  “Sefton lived. And Echo and Yeti,” Moore said, the knife lowering. “They’re dead now, too, though. They’re all gone.”

  “Show me their pictures,” Lucy said, moving closer to Moore, her hands out by her sides, both for his benefit and for Constable Frazer behind her.

  Moore shifted back slightly, but did not raise the knife again. Lucy stretched out her hand. “Just drop the knife, Mr. Moore. My name’s Lucy. I’m a friend,” she said, holding his gaze.

  She heard the clatter as the knife fell to the ground, then Moore seemed to slump, almost as if in defeat.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, the words bubbling on his lips.

  Recalling Seamus Moore’s comments about his brother’s mental age when she first met him, Lucy reached out to him, put her arms around his neck and embraced him, shushing him as one might do a child.

  “It’s okay now,” she said. “You’re safe now.”

  Sunday, 22 July

  Chapter Fifty-­Six

  WHILE SEAMUS MOORE at least sat on the same sofa with his brother as Aaron was being interviewed in the PPU, there remained, throughout, a gap between them. For the first half hour of the interview the following morning, Seamus made apparent his displeasure at his brother’s odor, a mixture of stale sweat and unwashed clothes that hung in the heat of the room.

  In daylight, Lucy could now better see Aaron Moore. His features were weathered, his skin leathery, the crow’s feet around his eyes deep, as if from constant squinting against the sun. His hair, straggled and unwashed, had once been brown but mousy gray now predominated. She noticed two of his teeth were missing toward the front of his mouth and his front tooth to the left had broken and was now little more than a shard of enamel. It was, however, the bruises that had caused most concern.

  After they’d found Moore the previous night, they’d taken him to the hospital to have him checked over. In addition to recommending lotions for lice and fleabites, the doctor had called Lucy in to show her the extent of the injuries which Aaron Moore had suffered to his torso, none of it visible when he was clothed.

  A series of bruises, at various stages of healing, crisscrossed his back and trunk. The most recent, about four inches wide and running almost the width of his back, ended just below the shoulder blade.

  “Look at the end of the bruise,” the doctor, Kevin Lynch, had said, pointing to the outer edges of the injury with the end of his pen. Sure enough, as Lucy leaned closer to examine it, she saw that the bruise seemed squared off, its shape defined.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  Lynch shook his head. “It looks like he was hit with a lump of cut wood; like something used as a rail on a wooden fence.”

  “How recent are the injuries?”

  “Some are probably weeks old. The most recent, a week or so. Nothing fresher than that.”

  Moore sat now, near his brother, staring around the room. When he’d first been brought in, to his brother’s annoyance, he’d headed straight for the bucket of toys which they kept to help entertain children, the most frequent occupants of this particular interview room. Moore had sifted through the contents before producing a small toy horse, triumphantly. He brought it across to the sofa and tried standing it on the armrest next to him. The legs, bandy with overuse, kept buckling, causing the toy to fall to the ground. Now Moore sat with it cupped in his hand as he waited for Lucy to start.

  “Mr. Moore? Do you recognize this man?” Lucy began, handing Moore a picture of Kamil Krawiec.

  Moore took the picture and looked at it for a moment, until Seamus Moore took it from him and examined it closely, as if the question had been directed at him.

  “That’s Crackers,” Aaron said. “He’s called Kamil, but everyone calls him Crackers,” he added with a smile, as if this was to be their secret.

  “How did you know him?”

  Moore glanced at his brother, looking for his permission to speak. Seamus Moore nodded lightly.

  “We worked together.”

  “Worked?”

  Moore nodded. “We were laying drives.”

  “Whom were you working for?”

  “The family,” Aaron Moore said simply, his hand closing tightly around the toy he held.

  “What family?”

  “The ones we worked for,” he said, as if explaining it to a child.

  “Do you know their name?” Lucy asked, trying to maintain her patience. She was pretty sure it would be Nash, but she didn’t want to be accused of leading Moore, especially if his brother decided against his being cooperative.

  “The son was called Padraig. The father might have been
called Roy.”

  Lucy nodded, biting her lip to stop her correcting him to “Rory.” “You don’t know for definite the names of the ­people you worked for?”

  “We had to call them ‘sir,’ ” Moore explained. Next to him, Seamus Moore shifted uncomfortably, lifting himself a little from the seat and pulling out the cushion from behind him, which he then set on the floor.

  “How did you end up working with them?” Lucy asked. “Take us back to where you first met.”

  “I went to the soup kitchen on Great James Street,” Moore began, earning a tut of disapproval from his brother. Lucy shot a warning glance at Seamus, who nodded lightly in acknowledgment.

  “You went to the soup kitchen . . .” Lucy began, encouragingly.

  “The father was there. Big man with red hair. He asked me if I’d ever done any building work. I told him I had, bits and pieces. He said he needed men for a job, if I wanted to earn some cash. He said I’d get £40 per day, and food and a bed.”

  “And you went with him?”

  “A ­couple of us did. Some of the other men got into the van so I thought it would be okay. I needed the money.”

  Again, Lucy sensed Seamus Moore tensing where he sat, but admirably restraining himself from speaking. Lucy assumed his annoyance at his brother masked his embarrassment at the fact that his sibling had felt he had to eat in soup kitchens and take building work from strangers rather than ask his own family for help.

  “So what happened?”

  “They took us to a place, by the river. We slept in a stable.” His grip tightened again on the horse in his hand.

  “A stable?” Lucy asked.

  Moore nodded, simply, turning over the horse in his hand. “There were maybe twenty of us in each room. We slept on the floor. There were bags of straw lying if you wanted to make yourself a bed.”

  “You slept on the floor?”

  Moore nodded.

  “How far away was this place?”

  Moore shrugged.

  “How long did it take to get there from the soup kitchen? Do you remember?”

  “Not long. Crackers lit a fag in the van when we got in and he was still smoking when we arrived. I remember because we were all glad to get out into the fresh air. Out of the smoke. I was in a room with Crackers and he smoked there, too.

  “So what did they ask you to do?”

  “We had to lay driveways.”

  “Did they pay you?”

  “I think so,” Moore said, dipping his head slightly, inclining it away from his brother almost as if in the expectation of a blow.

  “Did they give you money for your work, Aaron?” Lucy asked.

  Moore shrugged. “They said they would have to move our pay from their bank. They took my Post Office card to pay the money into it.”

  “You gave them your card?” Seamus Moore asked. “Where all your benefits are paid?”

  Aaron Moore nodded, his head dipped, his shoulders rounded as if in the expectation of being struck. “They said they couldn’t pay me otherwise. I’d no choice. Some of the others said no and they . . . they beat them.”

  “They hit them?” Lucy asked. “With what?”

  “Bit of wood,” Moore said, glancing at her. She was reminded of Dr. Lynch’s comments about the bruises on Moore’s body.

  “Did they hit you, Aaron?”

  Moore nodded, silently.

  “Did they feed you?”

  Moore nodded again, more animatedly. “Pot Noodles at night, bread and tea in the morning. They brought them on trays.”

  “How could you have stayed there?” Seamus Moore asked, suddenly. “Sleeping on straw? Like an animal?”

  Aaron Moore opened his mouth, as if in preparation to answer, but made no sound.

  “Why didn’t you leave?” his brother said.

  “That’s enough—­” Lucy said, but Aaron Moore raised his hand to stop her.

  “We did try,” Moore replied plaintively. “But they locked our rooms. This one night, though, the son brought food and, when he left, he didn’t do it right. Some of the men were able to open the door. They said we should go. Run away from them. I didn’t want to at first, because they had my Post Office card, but Crackers said it would be all right. We made it over the bridge, before the son caught us.”

  “Which bridge? The Foyle or Craigavon?” Lucy asked. If they could deduce the nearest bridge, they could perhaps pinpoint where the men had been held.

  “I don’t know. It was only short. Right beside where we stayed. We made it onto the path on the other side when they caught us.”

  “What happened?”

  “They beat us. Crackers said they broke his ribs. But he wasn’t the worst.”

  Lucy shifted forward where she sat. “Who was the worst?”

  Moore shook his head. “I’m not allowed to say.”

  “It’s okay, Aaron. No one is going to hurt you. I promise.”

  Moore lowered his head, staring at the horse toy, turning it over in his hand. He closed his fist around it. “The one who opened the door. The father came down. He was so angry. The man who opened the door, I don’t know his name, but they held him down. They kept hitting him and hitting him.” He tried to speak but his breath seemed to catch. “They made us help,” he managed, finally.

  “How?”

  “He was lying there, on the ground. They told us no one cared about us. No one had even noticed we were gone. We only had them to look after us, to feed us, to give us a bed.”

  “Straw on the floor,” Seamus Moore muttered, earning a glance of disapproval from Lucy.

  “Did you notice I’d gone?” Aaron Moore challenged him. “Did you look for me?”

  When his brother did not reply, Aaron continued. “They said we had to prove we were grateful. Some of the men started first, like they wanted the father to like them more. Then we all took turns,” he said, lowering his gaze to the horse in his hands. Lucy could see the dimples in the skin of his palm from where he had been gripping the toy so tightly. “We promised we’d never tell.”

  “But you’re telling now,” Lucy said. “You’re taking control of your own life again.”

  Moore shook his head, his eyes glistening at the memory. “It was the sound. Squelch and crunch. I can’t . . . Squelch and crunch, squelch and crunch. On and on. Just like it was with the horses when they tried to move after . . . after the . . .”

  Seamus Moore reached across and laid his hand on his brother’s, the gesture enough to bring Aaron’s attention back to his story. “They took him over the green and dumped him in the river,” Aaron said.

  A tear slipped down the side of his check and he rubbed at it with the back of his hand. Lucy wondered at “the green.” Was it Moore’s way of describing grass, or did it mean something more significant.

  “What’s the green?” she asked.

  “Outside,” Moore said. “The green. Outside.”

  “That’s okay, Aaron,” Seamus Moore said, laying a placatory hand on his brother’s arm.

  “So you went back?” Lucy said, moving on lest Seamus Moore called a halt to the interview in light of his brother’s distress.

  Moore nodded, his eyes wet. “We’d no choice.”

  “Did anyone else ever escape?”

  Moore shook his head. “Never.”

  “You did,” Lucy said. “Or did they let you go?”

  Moore glanced at his brother. “We were working on a house for a nice old woman. We were laying a drive and Crackers found a key for the house under a brick in the garden that we’d had to move. He kept it. He said she had loads of jewelry in her house. If we went and got it and sold it, we’d not need to stay with the family no more. If we could get away.”

  “How did you do it?”

  Moore stopped for the first time in the interview
and glanced again at his brother.

  “You don’t need to say anything,” Seamus Moore said. “Not if it’s going to get you into trouble.” He looked across at Lucy. “I was very clear about this.”

  Lucy nodded. “I just need to work out a timeline of events for now,” she said. “I’m only interested in what happened to Kamil Krawiec.”

  “We were working on a house just up the road from the old woman’s, a week after. Kamil had heard the old woman tell the father that she was going on holidays, so we knew the house would be empty. It was the son, Padraig, who was with us on the second job, keeping an eye. The owner brought him in for tea in the middle of the morning. Me and Kamil ran. We went in through the gardens, and out onto the fields that ran along the backs of them. We were able to find the old woman’s house from the spare tar we’d dumped over the back of her fence, into the field, when we’d finished the job.”

  Lucy nodded. “So, you went inside the house?”

  Moore blushed, lowering his head. When he spoke now, his words were soft, almost lost as they formed on his lips.

  “We let ourselves in and took her stuff. We took some food, too. We stayed there all day, until it was dark, until we knew that the rest of them would have left the other place. We found some money in one of her coats, a few pound just. There was a bus stop up the road. When it was dark, we went up and waited for the bus.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Kamil stayed at mine for the night. The next day, he went and sold the things and came back so we could split the money. He left then. Said he had a friend he could stay with. I didn’t see him after that. I’d not have taken it, but they had my card, you see?” He stared pleadingly at Lucy.

  “And you don’t know what happened to Kamil?” she asked, refusing to offer him the forgiveness he sought for the theft.

  Moore shook his head. “No. Why? Has something happened to him?”

  Chapter Fifty-­Seven

  “HOW MUCH CAN we believe?” ACC Wilson asked. They had gathered in the incident room in the Strand Road where Lucy and Fleming had shown the video of Moore’s interview to Burns and his team.